“The 10th then. Excellent. Should give you time to find a new horse.”

They took their leave of each other. The gig—the soldier at the reins, Captain Wood starting a cigar—turned in the courtyard, turned slowly at the gate, and was gone.

The housekeeper and Lacroix stood on the steps to the house. She looked at him, the side of his face. She meant to ask him whether he would eat now—he had not had any dinner—but asked instead if Captain Wood was a friend.

“Eh?”

“A friend.”

“Wood?”

“Yes.”

“Not of mine,” he said, and went back into the house.

* * *

That night he stayed up in the room on his own. Two candles burning—one on the mantelpiece, one by the bed. It was a clear night, the temperature dropping sharply. The fire, lit late, did little to take the chill from the air.

He was drinking brandy, pouring double mouthfuls into a glass that had somehow survived from his grandfather’s time, the glass tinged green and bubbled with the air of the old century. He had gone on drinking since the bottle of port with Wood (who, in Salamanca, fell backwards off his horse after a mess dinner) but instead of the brandy dispersing him, giving him some lightness, it had concentrated him, mind and body, like an iron peg hammered into dry earth. Now and then he spoke to the air, sentences beginning “I . . . ” But they did not progress beyond a word or two.

The trunk was where they had set it down, next to the bed. He had not touched it. There was nothing in it he thought he wished to see again. He tried to remember when he had lost contact with it. Lugo? Bembibre? It had been with the baggage train but the baggage train was God knows where. Ahead of them, behind them. It had become a common sight to see wagons pushed on to the side of the road and set alight. Nothing could be allowed to hold up the retreat. Yet out of this—out of the chaos of it—his trunk had returned!

He looked at it, looked away, glanced back. Then, as though the effort of ignoring it was greater than any shock it might produce, he emptied his glass, placed it carefully on the mantelpiece, took the candle that was burning there, went to the trunk and began to tug at the straps. The steel catch was bent outwards—you could see where someone had slid a bar behind it, some manner of jemmy—and he assumed that anything of any value would have been taken, but when he swung up the lid the trunk looked full, quite as full as he remembered it.