Free Whose Business Is to Die by Adrian Goldsworthy Page A

staggered and then sank to its knees, throwing the rider, who tumbled into the grass and fell, cap rolling away and long fair hair shaken loose. The other man glanced back, but only for a moment.
    ‘Prisonnier!’ he shouted. ‘I surrender. I am prisoner!’ The words were clear even if the accent was strong.
    ‘Stop, man!’ Hanley yelled at a light dragoon who was lifting his sabre ready to cut. ‘He is surrendering.’
    The Frenchman reined in beside him. Hanley struggled to stop his own horse, and the gelding went round one side of the engineer officer’s mount and halted behind him. He smiled. ‘I accept your surrender, sir,’ he told the man, repeating the words in French.
    ‘Merci, monsieur, je suis Major Bertrand et je …’
    Something hummed past inches from Hanley’s ear and he heard the crack of a shot a moment later. The left lens of Bertrand’s glasses shattered, his eye vanished in a smear of red as his head jerked back and the man went limp. Some of his blood flicked on to Hanley’s cheek.
    There was a little cloud of dirty smoke in front of the kneeling figure of the man in the green jacket.
    ‘Get him!’ Hanley yelled at the nearest light dragoons, pointing at the man on foot. ‘Kill the bugger! Kill him! You two, stay with me,’ he added to the hussars. ‘Come on.’
    ‘Mister Hanley.’ A familiar voice called out to him, but not a voice he would expect here. Bertrand’s name rang a bell, but for the moment he could not place it. Dalmas and Sinclair were fleeing as more and more light dragoons headed for them. The man on foot was running, but his horse had decided to trot away. ‘Kill him!’ Hanley yelled again, for he knew who the man was.
    ‘Mister Hanley.’
    The man in green threw his rifle away – the sharper noise could only have come from a rifle – and ran, grabbing the reinsand scrambling on to his horse with a light dragoon only a few yards away.
    ‘Bloody hell, Mister Hanley, have you got cloth ears?’
    He looked down, and there was Jenny Dobson looking up at him with her big brown eyes, dyed blond hair dishevelled and loose from the fall. The turquoise hussar uniform clung to her, so tightly tailored that it cannot have been easy to put on. Even with her sash and hessian boots there was nothing remotely military or masculine about her looks.
    ‘Well I’m damned,’ he said, wondering why he had not recognised what and who she was more quickly.
    ‘If you like,’ the girl said, and winked. Only Jenny would wink in the middle of a battle.
    ‘Jenny,’ he said, still not quite believing his own eyes.
    The girl reached back to rub her behind. ‘Bugger me, I’m sore,’ she said.
    It was definitely Jenny, daughter of Sergeant Dobson from the Grenadier Company of the 106th, who had fled from the army to the enemy to become a whore and then a mistress. That was why he knew Major Bertrand of the engineers, for he was the girl’s keeper, and last winter she had stolen secrets from him and sold them to the Allies.
    Yet there was no time to linger with reunions. ‘We’ll talk later, Jenny,’ he said. ‘Corporal, give the lady the major’s horse and look after her. Take her back to that wagon. I will meet you there. If you can, stop it from being looted.
    ‘Private,’ he said to the other hussar, and wished that he had taken the trouble to learn the man’s name. ‘You follow me.’
    ‘Lady,’ he heard Jenny say softly as he bullied his horse into running again.

6
    I t was more than a mile before Hanley and the hussar caught up. There were not many French fugitives still running along the road to Badajoz. The slow ones had been caught and were cut down or captured. The gamblers had split off to the side, giving the pursuers more chance of catching them for a minute or two until they got out of the way. Only the determined ones on the best horses were still there, some fifty or sixty dragoons and a dozen or so from the convoy. Hanley doubted there were even a