SIXTY-SEVEN

WE’RE POSING AS servants,” Rosa told me.

The noblewoman’s palace was half a day’s journey from the city.

“French guards will watch the palace. Only servants will be able to move freely, and even we will be scrutinized. Their mistress is known for her . . . projets d’amours, as the French say.”

“She likes to bed men?” I asked.

Rosa growled something unintelligible but disparaging.

These Spanish noblewomen must be lusty wenches, I thought to myself. I had already bedded one of them in the colony, though she was of French blood. Could it be the same woman? I asked Rosa the name of the woman whose palace we were going to.

“That’s not your concern.”

I didn’t argue the point. For certain, the woman I’d met was not a Spanish patriot.

“You’ll be working as a wine steward,” Rosa said. “Late in the evening, you’ll carry brandy to her bedchamber and remain there in an adjoining room. She will entertain General Habert privately. She’ll slip a sleeping powder into his brandy and call you when it’s taken effect. You’ll remove the campaign plan from the attaché case, quickly copy it, and put it back.” She grinned at me. “It’s a very simple plan.”

I smiled and nodded, as if I were artless enough to believe her. I was to steal a military plan from a French general surrounded by French officers. A simple plan? My feelings about the plan could be expressed by a single word: gallows!

For one thing the plan presumed that the French were fools. I didn’t assume that French generals who had conquered most of Europe were incontrollable cretins.

“The French officers will be gambling and whoring.” Rosa eyed me narrowly. “Unless you want me to cut out your apple, you will behave yourself.”

What is it about me that made this woman’s bloodlust boil over one minute and her passion ignite the next? I had incited many señoritas to amorous feats and peaks, but this was the first woman whose lust for me was intrinsically homicidal.

The noblewoman’s home was palatial. It would have humiliated the viceroy’s palace in Méjico City almost as badly as a servant’s uniform humiliated me. It didn’t fit.

“It’s not my size,” I told Rosa. The jacket was too small, the breeches too tight and short.

She stared down at my male parts bulging in the crouch. “Can’t you hide that thing?”

“It’s being strangled.”

“Keep it under control, or I’ll cut it off.”

There she went again, wanting to turn me into a castrato, a church choirboy who has had his cojones cut off to ensure he will never lose his sweet soprano voice. Women were not permitted to sing in church choirs, so the church turned men into women. Perhaps she desired men who sang with a voice higher-pitched than mine?

“Take this tray of wine goblets into the great hall,” she said.

As I came into the huge room, a French officer brushed by me as if I were invisible, arrogantly bumping my tray, spilling the wine. He walked away—no, strutted—without acknowledging his discourtesy.

Rosa was immediately in my face, hissing like a snake. “Stay in character, you fool. You look ready to challenge him to a duel.”

She was right; I should be looking for an escape route, not preparing to fight the French army. I put a blank-eyed smile on my face, hoping it would make me look harmless and stupid, and circulated.

What a life the conquerors had: fine food, fine wines, and the best-looking putas I’d ever seen. In one of the rooms, card tables had been set up. I noticed that most of the bets were placed with jewelry, gems that had obviously belonged to Spanish households. One officer, a captain of cavalry, announced as he threw a ring on the table that it was still bloodied from the finger he’d cut it off. The table erupted with laughter.

To the victors go the spoils, no? But from the way the guerrillas fought back, many of these arrogant bastardos would soon dine with the devil.

I was on my third tray of goblets and humility when the roomful of officers parted like the Red Sea and a woman of inexpressible beauty floated across the room toward me. Honey-hued hair down to her waist, dazzlingly bejeweled, eyes that scintillated like sin itself, she was exquisitely accoutered in a silver gown of sheer pongee silk fit for a queen . . . or a countess.

The earth vanished beneath my feet. I stared into my open grave, certain my hell-forged soul had vacated my body.

“Keep moving with that wine,” Camilla, Countess de Valls, snapped at me. She stared at me, with that noble eye that sees through servants but doesn’t acknowledge that they’re human.

Swaying on my feet, I had difficulty breathing. Rosa was suddenly in my face again. “You heard the countess: keep the wine moving.!”

Two women in the room who wanted to flog, castrate, and kill me. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I had convinced myself it wasn’t possible that it could be the same woman.

The countess’s eyes, of course, flickered no hint of recognition. Was it possible that she didn’t recognize me as the intruder who searched her room in the colony, then ravished her senseless? With due modesty, she might not remember the face of the man with whom she wrestled in the dark . . . but would she forget the finest loins on two continents? Yes, she might conceivably not recall my much-abused face, but she could never forget the love hammer that pounded her passionflower into a fiery frenzy of lewd lascivious lust. ¡Ay! Much to my embarrassment, my cañon rose obscenely against the taut seams of my too-tight servant’s trousers.

Perhaps she knew exactly who I was and didn’t want to give me away to the French. What had Casio said about the countess? The French thought she was on their side? She had been spying for the French in the colony, that was a certainty. Or was she? She could have been a double agent, only pretending to spy for the French while she ferreted out Spanish traitors. And using poor Carlos as her tool. Or, perhaps, like Carlos, the French atrocities committed against the Spanish people turned her against the Bonapartes.

Or perhaps I had walked into a trap, and by morning the general would gibbet me in front of the Barcelona fortress and the buzzards would breakfast on my eyeballs.

Rosa was suddenly in my face again. “Stop thinking about your pene and serve wine.”

“Did you know the countess is a French spy?”

“She’s a patriot. Now start serving.”

A patriot, yes. But for which country?

By late evening, I was tired and sick of serving French officers. Finally Rosa ordered me upstairs with bottles of the best wine and brandy from the countess’s cellar. I went up the steps that led to the countess’s chambers. Rosa came up behind me and served common wine and a good meal of beef and potatoes to the guards at the corridor. The guards hardly looked at me as I passed by with the spirits for the countess and her special guest, General Habert. The top two buttons on Rosa’s blouse were undone, and the guards were busy staring. I ogled her, too. Men are swine.

I had seen the general arrive earlier and was not impressed with his bearing. His stomach ballooned over his belt, but I suppose that as a general he had little need for physical fitness.

However, I was impressed with his attaché case. Hand-crafted leather elaborately embossed with a gold coat of arms, it never left his side, according to Casio. He carried it himself rather than have the aide at his heels handle it. He disappeared upstairs soon after arriving. The countess went up shortly after him. The plan was for her to divert the general, drug his drink, then let me into the room to copy the papers by candlelight. But, like I said, something about their scheme bothered me. And now that the countess turned out to be my old nemesis, my thoughts were even bleaker.

By the time I mounted the stairs, the French officers were drunk, many had passed out, others were carousing with whores or playing cards in a smoke-filled room.

Following Rosa’s instructions, I waited outside the countess’s chambers by a side door that led into a private alcove. Rosa told me I was to wait in the alcove and out of fear that I would snore, to not fall asleep. Of course I wouldn’t snore; I would be too busy spying on the countess and looking for an escape route.

I had never been tempted to take a whip to a woman . . . until I tangled with Rosa.

Kneeling at the keyhole did not give me a good view of the countess’s bedroom. The bed was too far off to the left for me to see anything but its foot. The room was not dark but dimly lit, shadowy, half of the candles extinguished. I quietly opened the door just enough to poke my head in. I heard the telltale heavy breathing and guttural grunts of lovemaking but still didn’t have a view of her bed. Keeping low, I snaked across the floor on my belly to a table and peeked around it.

The countess was mounted atop the general. She was bare-ass naked, and even in the dim light I recognized her bountiful bottom, the concupiscent curve of her breasts, and knew it was she. General Habert was flat on his back, with his behemoth belly ballooning up like a hairy beast. She was the only one working, pumping and groaning, as if his manhood filled her with blind passions and insane cravings. From experience, I recognized her ecstatic gasps as false cries by a fulsome whore to fool vain men into believing they have garranchas of steel.

The prized attaché case was on the table next to the bed.

A strange sound came from the bed. I strained to listen. It was a sound that I recognized yet could not place. Then it hit me: the general was snoring!

The countess’s mendacious moans subsided. Finally she stopped her sexual charade and stared down at the general’s flaccid features.

“Général?” she asked in French.

He responded with a painfully stentorian snore. She gently slapped his face and called his name again.

“Did you drug him well?” I asked.

“Akkkk!” She swung around, the twin muzzles of her magnificent melons targeting me like artillery pieces.

“Shhhh. The guards are outside.”

She careened off the snoring walrus. As I suspected, the brandy and drugs had spiked and crumpled his cañon. I wondered how long it had been that way.

“You aren’t very good at obeying orders, are you?” she hissed.

I shrugged. “When did you stop spying for the French and start whoring for the Spanish?”

She didn’t hide her nakedness from me, not even a modest hand over her breasts. Nor had I tried to hide the fact that I desired her. The burgeoning bulge in my breeches amply attested to that reality.

“I watch which way the winds blow. Right now, it’s blowing the Spanish crown off Joseph Bonaparte’s head.”

She opened the attaché case, exposing a thick ream of papers, and pulled out a one-page document. “Copy this.” She indicated a quill and a pot of ink on a table.

I sat down and hurriedly skimmed the document. It contained instructions to three different commands concerning troop movement. The instructions were brief and to the point and in simple enough wording even for my limited grasp of written French. It gave the name of the commander and the exact movement the unit was to make. It gave routes, dates, and troop strength in a few concise paragraphs.

“Just copy it,” she said. “The information means nothing to you, you lépero scum, but the guerrillas will make good use of it.”

Rosa entered just as I was finishing the copy. The two never spoke to each other. Both hung over me until I had written the last word.

“Go now,” the countess said. “Leave this way.”

I followed her across the room. She opened a secret door that led into another alcove. Across the alcove was another door. I knew immediately what it was: a way for her lovers to make their way in and out of the bedchamber without being seen.

“Take the stairway behind that door to the ground level and leave through the door to the garden. A horse is saddled and waiting. The French guards at the front gates have been told to expect a messenger. See that the war plans get to the hands of our people immediately. They’ll be waiting for you by the forest road.”

I felt like saluting the French woman cracking the orders but merely gave her a “Oui, madame.”

I rushed through the door, my boots banging on the steps. I paused at the bottom, but instead of going out to the garden where a saddled horse awaited, I silently crept back up the stairs.

Many things bothered me, the most humiliating of which was that Rosa and the countess treated me as if I were inconceivably stupid, a naïve colonial bumpkin, at best. While my education was mostly in the saddle, as Casio pointed out, I had had the agility of a cat in adversity.

I was told the countess wouldn’t copy the war document because she feared that the handwriting would expose her as a Spanish spy if the messenger was caught. Ay, that rang true enough, I suppose. But how did she know exactly where the document was in the attaché case? She reached in and grabbed it without even searching for it.

A high-ranking officer would be carrying more in his attaché case than a single piece of paper. In fact, I saw a thick stack of papers when she opened the case. Yet she blindly pulled out the exact sheet we needed. The only way she would have known its exact location was if she had been shown where to find it. Or if she had planted it in the case herself.

And what had she said about the guards at the gate? They would be expecting a messenger to ride through. Who had the authority to give them such an order? Only a high-ranking French officer.

My final suspicion had been the way Rosa entered the room. Rosa was at best a daughter of the working class. The countess was high nobility. But their body language, their silent acceptance of each other’s presence, not a word between them . . . their actions connoted to my dense colonial mind an informality, even a familiarity I found paradoxical for two women worlds apart on the social and financial scale

Back upstairs, I listened at the door but heard nothing. I quietly opened the door a crack and listened again. Once again I heard the sounds of a woman in sexual ecstasy. Had the general awoken? I wondered. I could not get a view of the bed from the doorway. I crawled back into the dimly lit room. As I came around the corner of a chest, I stopped and stared, stunned.

It wasn’t the countess and the general making the love noises; it was the two women. The countess was lying on her back on the bed, naked. Her legs were spread, and Rosa knelt between them, her face palpating the countess’s undulating passionflower.

“What are you doing?” I snarled out loud.

My question cracked in the room like a pistol shot. Both women looked at me, startled. Rosa recovered first. She flew off the bed with the speed of a jungle cat, grabbing her dagger from a pile of her clothes on the floor.

She came at me in a low crouch to stick the blade up between my legs. I stepped sideways and hit her. I had never hit a woman before, but Rosa was no mere woman, she was a wild she-demon exploding out of hell.

My roundhouse punch, thrown off a pivot, hammered her temple. She went down like a thunder-smitten oak and would not rise for a while.

The bathroom door suddenly opened up, and General Habert, as naked as the two women, appeared in the doorway. I rushed him. As I grappled with him, the other she-devil assaulted me, leaping on my back and clawing at my eyes. Normally I wouldn’t find it offensive to have a naked woman clawing at me, but the momentary distraction gave the general the opportunity to hit me in the nose. He made a dash to get around me as I staggered back. I flipped the countess over my shoulders, slamming him to the floor with her body. While they both floundered on the floor, I kicked the general in his Adam’s apple. The countess bolted like a banshee and ran screaming for the bedroom door.

While the general rolled on his back, gagging and clutching his throat, I ran back toward the lover’s alcove and grabbed the attaché case, knocking over a table and lamp as I rushed by. I swatted another oil lamp with the attaché case, sending it flying into the drapes before I went through the secret doorway.

Coming off the steps and into the garden, the saddled horse was waiting for me. With hell detonating in my wake—screams, flames, and a barrage of boots thundering down the stairway—I swung into the saddle and wheeled the horse around, sending it back toward the door to the stairway. As a guard came out the door, I hammered him in the head with the attaché case.

I raced for the front gate at a high lope. To the rear, flames shot out of the windows of the countess’s upper-level bedchambers. As I galloped at the guards lining up at the gate, I yelled, “We’re under attack! I’m going for reinforcements!”

I rode by them but one of them, brighter or deafer than the rest, fired his musket. The shot missed, but a mounted patrol was quickly on my tail. I had to stay on the road because of the darkness. I rode faster than I should have, any pothole could have sent the animal head over heels with me crushed under him.

The patrol was closing the gap, almost on my heels, when I rode into a blaze of musket fire, and my horse went down.