“Doling it out when we need it, are you? I can respect that.”
“Has anyone ever suggested that you are too—”
“Handsome? Cunning? Strong?”
“I was going to say ‘cavalier.’ ” There was laughter in her voice. It was becoming more and more difficult to hide it.
“If that is what you think, perhaps a different story would better represent how very rigid and exacting I am.”
“No, no—Spanish dungeon,” she insisted. “Out with it.”
“Alright, escape from the dungeon. So, this would be Spain. Again.”
He glanced at her and she nodded.
“It was 1811,” he added. “You would have been a child.”
“I would have been one and twenty,” she corrected. Before she could stop herself, she asked, “And how old were you?”
“Well, older than one and twenty obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“Probably—seven and twenty? I was already working for the Foreign Office by this time. I’d been reassigned to Spain to spy on a wealthy merchant who was believed to be secretly provisioning French troops with food and weapons.
“In my role as foreign agent, my duty was to the mission. I wasn’t in the Peninsula to be a solider. But I’d followed a lead to Ciudad Rodrigo and was quartering with British troops because one of the officers wasa friend from school. When a skirmish broke out—the conflict that would come to be known as the Battle of Albuera—I was . . . at the right place at the right time.”
“Meaning you joined the fray?”
“Ah, that is one way to put it. The end result was, I was ultimately captured as a prisoner of war and locked in aseventeenth-century dungeon with about fifty other British troops.”
“No,” she whispered, captivated. She turned to face him, leaning an elbow on the railing.
He nodded. “Putrid, crumbling Spanish dungeons are a rung above dying on the battlefield, but only barely. The torch smoke alone nearly killed us. There was no water or food. Even the vermin were sick, and the catacombs were crawling with rats. None of us would survive captivity if we did not escape.”
“And you...” she guessed, “trained the rats to steal the keys to your cell?”
“No. I lay in wait for the lone, sleepy guard to look in on us in the middle of the night. Then I knocked him unconscious with a rock.”
“Of course you did. And then you stole the keys?”
He shook his head. “No, the man was not in possession of the keys. There was only one set, and these remained well above dungeon level. So we undressed the guard through the bars of the cell. I then put on his uniform, and we dragged him to the farthest corner.”
“But he was still on the outside of your cell?”
“Everything was done through the cell bars. I told each prisoner to remove a nonregimental article of clothing—something dirty and forgettable, like a sock—and we arranged them over him in a heap. When we had obscured his body and I was wearing his uniform, we lay in wait.
“Eventually they sent a second guard to determine what had become of the first. I was ready, and before his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Ipretendedto be the first guard, now captured by the prisoners. I shouted for help, claiming I’d been overpowered and locked in the cell with the British soldiers. I ranted in hysterical French; I shrank away from the raucous mob of prisoners in the cell, all of whom clambered to tear me limb from limb. In panicked diatribe, I ordered the second guard to fetch the keys and release me at once.”
“But how could this work?” she laughed. “Did the second guard not recognize you? Did it not occur to him that locked prisoners have no way to pull a guard inside their cell?”
He shook his head. “The guard staff were a hastily convened mix of Italians and Frenchmen. I’d been careful to obscure my face and pretended to fight off fellow prisoners as I ranted. And all those years of detested French lessons served me remarkably well. It’s amazing what you can pull off with a faux prison riot percolating behind you. The second guard didn’t consider the implausibility of it. He allowed the shock and fear to carry him away. He rushed to get the keys and returned with reinforcements, but we were ready. There were more than fifty of us, and the moment they unlocked the door to recover me, we overpowered them.
“Our motivation to escape was greater than their will to fight us to the death. We dispatched them, but we did it veryquietly. This allowed us to creep up, to surround and subdue other guards along the way.
“When, finally, we reached the outside, I led the men to a cache of provisions that I’d discovered in pursuitof the merchant traitor. We ate and drank and stole as much as we could, and then we set fire to the rest.”
“Oh lovely,” she said, smiling at him. “An escape and sabotage. All in one night.”
