Sharpe found himself resenting the progress of the trench that was being dug in the ravine. He knew that once the excavation reached the midpoint between the San Vincente and San Cayetano forts then the second assault was imminent. The second assault could hardly fail. The ammunition supply to the heavy guns had been restored, cart after cart came across the San Marta ford and screeched into the city and each cart was loaded with the huge roundshot. The guns fired incessantly, grinding at the defences, and to make it worse for the French the gunners heated the shot to a red heat so that the balls lodged in the old timbers of the convents and started fires that the French tried desperately to control.
For four nights Sharpe watched the bombardment, each night from the mirador, and the red-hot shot seared in the darkness and crashed into the crumbling forts. The fires blazed, were damped down, then blazed again and only the small hours of the morning brought a respite for the defenders. Some nights it seemed to Sharpe as if no one could live through the battering of the forts. The shot streaked over the wasteland while, high overhead, the fuses of the howitzer shells spun and smoked then plunged down to explode in flowering dark flame and thunder. The crackle of the flames rivalled the cracks of the Riflemen, creeping nearer, and each morning showed more damage; more embrasures opened wide, their guns unseated, smashed, useless. Wellington was in a hurry. He wanted the forts taken so that he could march north in pursuit of Marmont.
When the forts fell Sharpe knew he would go north. The Light Company would rejoin the regiment and he would leave Salamanca, leave La Marquesa, leave El Mirador, and each moment, marked by the slow extension of the attacker’s trench, was precious to him. He left the Palacio each morning, going out by the secret staircase that led into an alleyway beside the stables, and he went back each afternoon when the only disturbance of Salamanca’s siesta was the sound of the gunners crumbling at the forts.
The Light Company were puzzled, Patrick Harper most of all, but Sharpe said nothing and they could only speculate where their Captain disappeared each day and night. On the first morning he came back to them he had bathed, his uniform had been cleaned, mended and pressed, but he offered no explanation. Each morning he exercised the Company, marching them into the countryside and going through the evolutions of skirmishing. He drove them hard, not wanting them to become soft because of their stay in this soft city. Each afternoon he released them to their freedom while he went, secretly and cautiously, to the small door in the stable alley. Behind the door the stairs led to the private, top floor where only La Marquesa’s most trusted servants were allowed and where, almost to Sharpe’s disbelief, he found himself deep in a passionate affair.
He had lost his fear of her. She was no longer La Marquesa, now she was El Mirador, and though she was still a flawless woman she was also a person to whom he listened avidly. She spoke of her life, talking bitterly of the death of her parents. “They were not even French, but they took them. They killed them. The scum.” Her hatred of the revolution was total. Sharpe had worked out her age from the tales she told him. She had been ten when the mob came to take her parents, so now she was twenty eight, and in the years between she had studied the forces of a world that had taken her parents’ lives. She spoke to him of politics, of ambitions, and she showed him letters from Germany that spoke of Napoleon gathering a vast army that she said was destined for Russia. She had news too from across the Atlantic, news that spoke of an imminent American invasion of Canada, and Sharpe, sitting in the mirador, had the sense of watching a whole world drawn into a maelstrom of flame and shot like that which hammered, unceasing, below.
Above all Helena spoke of Leroux, of his famed savagery, and of the fear she had that he would escape. Sharpe smiled. “He can’t escape.”
“Why not?”
He had gestured at the wasteland. “It’s ringed, totally. No one can get through, not even a rat!”
That was his one certainty, that the Light troops which surrounded the beleaguered forts were too vigilant, too thick on the ground, for Leroux to slip past. Leroux, as Hogan had said, would try to escape in the chaos of the successful assault. Sharpe’s problem would be to make sense of that chaos and to recognise the tall Frenchman.
Helena had shrugged. “He’ll disguise himself.”
“I know. But he can’t hide his height, and he has a weakness.”
“A weakness?” She had been surprised.
“The sword.” Sharpe smiled, knowing he was right. “He won’t lose that sword, it’s part of him. If I see a tall man with that sword then I won’t care if he’s dressed as a British General of Division. That’s him.”
“You sound very sure.”
“I am.” He sipped at the cool, white wine and thought of the joy of owning that sword. The Kligenthal would be his, within a week, but with it would come the loss of this woman.
The loss would be secret, as it had to be, yet there were times when he wanted to shout his present joy from the rooftops, and times when it was hard to disguise. He walked towards the Company billets one dawn, crossing the great Plaza, and there was a shout from one of the upper balconies. “Sharpe! You rogue! Stay there!”
Lord Spears waved at him, turned into the building and reappeared a moment later in one of the doorways of the arcade. He walked, yawning, into the dawn light and then stopped. “By God, Richard! You look almost human! What have you done to yourself?”
“Just cleaned the uniform.”
“Just cleaned the uniform!” Lord Spears mimicked him, then prowled round the Rifleman, peering at him. “You’ve been putting your boots under someone’s bed, haven’t you? Sweet Christ, Richard, you think I can’t spot a sin at a thousand paces? Who is she?”
“No one.” Sharpe grinned in embarrassment.
“And you’re damned cheerful for the early morning. Who is it?”
“I told you, no one. You’re up early.”
“Up early? I haven’t been to bloody bed. I’ve been at the bloody cards again. I’ve just lost the Irish lands to some boring man.”
“Truly?”
Spears laughed. “Truly. It’s not bloody funny, I know, but Christ!” He shrugged. “Mother’s going to be upset. Sorry, Mother.”
“Have you got anything left?”
“The dower house. Few acres in Hertfordshire. A horse. Sabre. The family name.” He laughed again, then linked his good arm into Sharpe’s and led him across the Plaza. His voice was serious, pleading. “Who have you been with? Someone. You weren’t home last night and that frighten-ingly enormous Sergeant of yours didn’t know where you were. Where were you?”
“Just out.”
“You think we Spears are foolish? That we don’t know? That we can’t be sympathetic to a fellow sinner?” He stop-ped, pulled his arm free, and clicked his fingers. “Helena! You bastard! You’ve been with Helena!”
“Don’t be so ridiculous!”
“Ridiculous? Nonsense. She never appeared at that party of hers, she was said to be ill, and she hasn’t been seen since. Nor have you. Good God! You lucky bastard! Admit it!”
“It is not true.” Even to Sharpe it sounded lame.
“It is true.” Spears was grinning with delight. “All right, if it ain’t true, who were you with?”
“I’ve told you, no one.”
Spears took a deep breath and bellowed at the shuttered windows of the Plaza. “Good morning Salamanca! I have an announcement to make!” He grinned at Sharpe. „I’ll tell them, Richard, unless you admit the truth to me.“ He took another deep breath.
Sharpe interrupted him. “Dolores.”
“Dolores?” Spears’ grin grew wider.
“She’s a cobbler’s daughter. She likes Riflemen.”
Spears laughed. “You don’t say! Dolores, the cobbler’s daughter? Are you going to introduce me?”
“She’s shy.”
“Oh! Shy. How the hell did you meet her, then?”
“I helped her in the street.”
“Of course!” Spears pretended total belief. “You were on your way to feed the stray dogs or help the orphans, right? And you just helped her. Dropped her cobbles, had she?”
“Don’t mock. She’s only got one leg. Some bastard sawed off the bottom two inches of her peg.”
“A one-legged cobbler’s daughter? Saves her father a decent bit of money, no doubt. You’re a liar, Richard Sharpe.”
“I swear it.”
Spears took a huge breath and bellowed again. “Richard Sharpe has rogered Dolores! The cobbler’s hopping daughter!” He roared with laughter at his own joke and bowed to some astonished labourers who were dismantling the barri-cades that had been used for the previous day’s bullfight. He linked his arm with Sharpe again and dropped his voice. “How is La Marquesa?”
“How would I know? I haven’t seen her since we were at San Christobal.”
“Richard! Richard! You’re too clever for me. I wish you’d admit it, even if it isn’t true, it would be a perfectly delicious scandal.”
“I can’t see that stopping you spreading it.”
“True, but no one believes me!” Spears sighed, then suddenly became serious. “Let me ask you one more question.”
“Go on.”
“Have you heard of ”El Mirador“?”
“El Mirador?” In his surprise, Sharpe checked.
Spears stopped as well. “You have, haven’t you?”
“Only as a name.” Sharpe wished he had not betrayed his surprise.
“A name? What connection?”
Sharpe paused to think of an answer. It crossed his mind that this could be some kind of a test, arranged by La Marquesa, to see if he was really trustworthy. It brought home to him, as if he had forgotten, the total secrecy that had to surround her. He shrugged. “No connection. Is he one of the Guerilla leaders?”
“Like El Empecinado?” Spears shook his head. “No, he’s not a Partisan, he’s a spy here in Salamanca.”
“Ours or theirs?”
“Ours.” Spears bit his lip, then turned fiercely on Sharpe. “Think! Try to remember! Where did you hear it?”
Sharpe was taken aback by the sudden passion, then had an inspiration. “You remember Major Kearsey? I think he mentioned it, but I can’t remember why. It was two years ago.”
Spears swore. Kearsey had been, like Lord Spears, an Exploring Officer, but he was dead, swept off the ramparts of Almeida when Sharpe blew up the magazine.
“How do you know about him?” Sharpe asked.
Spears shrugged. “You hear rumours as an Exploring Officer.”
“Why is it so important now?”
“It’s not, but I’d like to know.” He jerked the arm in its sling. “When this is healed I’ll be back to work and I’ll need friends everywhere.”
Sharpe began walking again. “Hardly in Salamanca. The French have gone.”
Spears matched Sharpe’s stride. “Only for the moment, Richard. We have to defeat Marmont first, otherwise we’ll be scuttling back to Portugal with our tails between our legs.” He looked at Sharpe. “If you hear anything, will you tell me?”
“About El Mirador?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you ask Hogan?”
Spears yawned. “Maybe I will, maybe I will.”
At midday Sharpe went to the main battery and watched the gunners heating the solid shot in their portable furnaces. The assault, he knew, had to be close, even the next day, and it would mark the end of his visits to the Palacio Casares. He wished the gunners were not so industrious. He watched them slaving at the bellows fixed to one end of the forge while other men shovelled the coal from the bunker at the far end. In the centre was the cast iron furnace, roaring in the noon heat, the flames escaping at the bottom of the casing, and he marvelled that men could work with that heat, under the sun. It took fifteen minutes to heat each eighteen pounder shot until the red glow had gone deep into the iron and the ball could be dragged from the crucible with long tongs and rolled carefully onto the metal cradle, carried by two men, that took the shot to the gun. The barrel was loaded with powder, then with a thick wad of soaking cloth that stopped the heated shot from igniting the charge. It was rammed home swiftly, the men eager to preserve the red-heat, and then the gun bellowed and the shot left the smallest, finest trace of smoke in its flat trajectory into the demolished French defences. Hardly an enemy gun replied now. The next assault, Sharpe knew, would meet small resistance. He wondered if Leroux was already dead, the body laid out with the others killed in the siege, and that thus these gunners would already have done Sharpe’s work.
He found La Marquesa writing at a small desk in her dressing room. She smiled at him. “How is it progressing?”
“Tomorrow.”
“For certain?”
“No.” He could hardly hide the regret in his voice, but he sensed that she shared it, and he wondered at that. “The Peer will make the decision tomorrow, but he won’t need to wait. It’ll be tomorrow.”
She laid the pen down, stood up, and kissed him swiftly on the cheek. “So tomorrow you’ll take him?”
“Unless he’s dead already.”
She walked onto the mirador and pushed open one of the lattice doors. The San Vincente showed two fires, pale in the strong sun, and the San Cayetano smoked where a fire had been extinguished by the defenders. She turned back to him. “What will you do with him?”
“If he doesn’t resist, then he’s a prisoner.”
“Will you parole him?”
“No, not again. He’ll be shackled. He broke parole. He won’t be exchanged, he won’t be treated well, he’ll just be sent to England, to a prison, and he’ll be held there until the war ends.” He shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe he can be tried for murder because he killed men when he was on parole.”.
“So tomorrow I’m safe?”
“Until they send another one to find you.”
She nodded. He was used to her now, to her gestures, to her sudden dazzling smiles, and he had forgotten the coquettish, teasing woman he had met at San Christobal. That was the public face, she told him, while he saw the private and he wondered if he would see her again, in the future, and he would see the public face surrounded by fawning officers and he would feel a terrible, keen jealousy. She smiled at him. “What happens to you when it’s done?”
“We’ll join the army.”
“Tomorrow?”
“No. Sunday perhaps.” The day after tomorrow. “We’ll march north and bring Marmont to battle.”
“And then?”
“Who knows? Madrid perhaps.”
She smiled again. “We have a house in Madrid.”
“A house?”
“It’s very small. No more than sixty rooms.” She laughed at him. “You’ll be very welcome though, alas, it has no secret entrance.” It was unreal, Sharpe knew. They never talked of her husband, or of Teresa. They were secret lovers, Sharpe and a lady, and they would have to stay secret. They had been given these few days, these nights, but fate was going to take them apart; he to a battle, she to the secret war of letters and codes. They had this night, tomorrow’s battle, and then, if they were lucky, just one more night, the last night, and then they were in fate’s hands. She turned to look once more at the fortresses. “Will you fight tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“I can watch you.” She gestured at the telescope on its heavy tripod. “I will watch you.”
“I’ll try not to be tempted into anything rash because of that.”
She smiled. “Don’t be rash. I want you tomorrow.”
“I can bring you Leroux in chains.”
She laughed, a touch of sadness in the sound. “Don’t do that. Remember he may not know who El Mirador is, yet. He might guess, and then he might escape.”
“He won’t escape.”
“No.” She reached out for his hand and led him into the shade of the Palacio. He lowered a wooden-slatted blind against the sunlight and turned to see her on the black-curtained bed. She looked beautiful, pale against the darkness, as fragile as alabaster. She smiled. “You can take your boots off, Captain Sharpe. Siesta time.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Later that afternoon he held her as she slept and she seemed to jump each time the big guns sounded. He kissed her forehead, pushing back the golden hair from her skin, and she opened her eyes sleepily, pushed her body closer to his, and murmured to him. She was only half awake. „I’ll miss you, Richard, I’ll miss you.“
He soothed her, as he would a child, and knew that he would miss her too, but fate was inexorable. Outside, beyond the blind, beyond the lattice, the guns hastened their fate, and they clung to each other as if the press of their bodies might be imprinted on their memories for ever.
“Where the hell have you been?” Hogan was truculent, sweating in the heat.
“Here, sir.”
“I looked for you last night. Damn it, Richard! You could at least let people know where you are! Suppose it was important!”
“Was it, sir?”
“As it happens, no.” Hogan conceded it grudgingly. “Patrick Harper said he’d heard you were with some cobbler’s daughter. Doris or something, and that she didn’t have any legs.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hogan opened his snuff box. “Damn it, Richard, your marriage is your affair, but you’re damned lucky to have Teresa.” He sniffed violently, to cover his feelings. Sharpe waited for the sneeze, it came, and Hogan shook his head. “God’s Blood! I won’t say anything.”
“Nothing to say, sir.”
“I hope not, Richard, I hope not.” Hogan paused, listening to the sizzling sound as a red hot shot was rammed onto the soaked wadding. The gun fired, bellowing noise at the houses, drifting the bitter smoke back where the two officers talked. “Have you heard from Teresa, Richard?”
“Not for a month, sir.”
“She’s chasing Caffarelli’s men. Ramon wrote me.” Ramon was her brother. “Your child’s fine and bonny, in Casate-jada.”
“That’s good, sir.” Sharpe was not certain whether Hogan was trying to make him feel guilty. Perhaps he should feel guilty, yet he did not. He and La Marquesa were so temporary, their loving doomed to be of such a short time, that somehow it did not affect his long term plans. And he could not feel guilty about protecting El Mirador. It was his job.
Hogan glanced at Sharpe’s Company, paraded in the street, and grunted that they looked good. Sharpe agreed, “The rest has suited them, sir.”
“You know what to do?”
“Yes, sir.”
Hogan wiped his forehead. The noonday sun was searing the city. He repeated his orders despite Sharpe’s answer. “Go behind the assault, Richard. And no one’s to leave, understand? No one, unless you’ve seen their face, and when you’ve found the bastard, bring him to me. If I’m not here, I’ll be at Headquarters.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Company filed into the new trench that led, in safety, down the gorge towards the Tormes. Overhead the shot still rumbled, still crashed into the fortresses, and the attacking troops were cheerful and confident. This time they could not fail. The San Cayetano had been so battered that one wall was virtually gone and that was the first fort which was to be attacked. It would be a daylight attack, hard on the echoes of the siege guns, and the troops were happy because the French guns were mostly silent. A Rifle Lieutenant was to lead the Forlorn Hope, but neither he nor his men wore the strained and hopeless look of other Forlorn Hopes. A Forlorn Hope expected to die. Their job was to draw the enemy’s fire, to empty the defending guns before the main attack erupted into the breach. The volunteers grinned at Sharpe. They recognised him and envied the laurel wreath badge on his arm. “Won’t be like Badajoz, sir.”
“No, you’ll be fine.”
Sharpe could see at the far end of the ravine the silver waters of the Tormes sliding quietly towards the far off sea. His men had fished the waters in their long, restful afternoons and they would miss the trout. Sharpe saw Harper staring at the water. “Sergeant?”
“Sir?”
“What’s this I hear about Doris? Something you said to Major Hogan?”
“Doris, sir?” Harper looked innocent, then gauged that Sharpe was not upset. “You mean Dolores, sir. I might have said something.”
“How did you hear about it?”
Harper pulled back the flint of his seven-barrelled gun. “Me, sir? I think Lord Spears was looking for you one day. He might have mentioned it.” He grinned at Sharpe conspiratorialy. “Legless, I hear, sir.”
“You hear wrong. It’s not true.”
“No, sir. Course not, sir.” Harper whistled tunelessly and stared up at the cloudless sky.
There was a stirring in the trench, groans as men got to their feet and fixed long bayonets onto muskets, and Sharpe realised that the cannonade had stopped. This was the moment of attack, yet it had none of the tension of the previous attack, when these same Battalions had been shredded by the French guns. Today it would be easy, instinct told them that, easy because the vicious heated shot from the great guns had turned the fortresses into hell for their garrisons. The Rifle Lieutenant drew his sabre, waved at his Forlorn Hope, and climbed the side of the trench. At the summit, with no fire coming from the enemy, he halted. He gestured his men down. “Stop! Stop!”
“What the devil?” A Lieutenant Colonel pushed his way down the trench. His neck was constricted by a tight, leather stock, and his face was red and glistening in the heat. “Go on, man!”
“They’re surrendering, sir! A white flag!”
“Good God!” The Colonel clambered up the trench side and stared at the San Cayetano, then at the San Vincente. “Good God!”
The British troops in the trench jeered at the French and shouted insults. “Fight, you buggers! Are you afraid?”
The Colonel bellowed at them. “Quiet! Quiet!”
Only the San Cayetano showed a white flag, the other forts were silent, no defenders apparent in their casements. Sharpe wondered if this were a trick, some convoluted plot by Leroux to gain his freedom, but he could not understand it if it was. Whether they were defeated by bayonets, or simply surrendered, the French garrisons would still be at the mercy of their captors and Sharpe would still be able to search their ranks for the tall, cold-eyed man with the long Kligenthal sword. The Company settled down in the trench. Rumours worked their way up and down the excavation, that the French merely wanted to send out their wounded, then that the enemy wanted time to negotiate their surrender. Some of the men slept, snoring gently, and the quiet of the afternoon, without the gunfire, seemed remarkably peaceful to Sharpe. He looked to his left and could see, over the roofs, the dark lattice of the mirador. There was a square black hole that showed where La Marquesa would be watching through her telescope. He wanted this afternoon done, the prisoners paraded, and Leroux safely chained at Headquarters. Then he could go back to the small doorway, climb the stone stairway, and have the last Salamantine night in the Palacio Casares.
A French-speaking officer took a speaking trumpet onto the trench parapet and shouted at the San Cayetano. Rough translations were passed in the trench. The French wanted to get orders from the fortress commander in the San Vincente, but Wellington was denying them the chance. The British would attack in five minutes and the garrison had a choice. Fight or surrender. As if to reinforce the message the eighteen pounders fired a last volley and Sharpe heard flames roar and crackle behind him as the San Vincente laught fire again. The San Cayetano officer shouted at the British, the French-speaking British officer shouted back, and then another messenger came down the trench and shouted up at the man with the speaking trumpet. The order was plainly heard in the trench. The enemy had wasted enough time in argument. They were to remove the white flag because the assault was now coming. The command was passed on in French, the Lieutenant Colonel drew his sword, turned to the packed trench, and shouted for them to go.
They cheered. Their bayonets were fixed, they wanted revenge, and the men hurled themselves up the side of the ravine, ignoring the Forlorn Hope that was now just part of the main attack, and Sharpe went with them. No guns fired from the French embrasures. The San Vincente, when Sharpe turned to look at it, was blazing fiercely. The gunners in the biggest French fort were fighting the flames, not serving the guns, and the assault was untroubled by canister. The white flag had gone from the San Cayetano, withdrawn into the shattered defences, and in its place was a rank of French infantrymen. The enemy were filthy, smeared by smoke and dust, and they levelled their muskets at the attack. They glanced at each other, not certain if they had surrendered or not, but the sight of the attackers, swarming in loose order over the rubble, decided them. They fired.
It was a small volley, hardly effective, and it only served to wound a handful of men and goad the others on. There was a ragged cheer, the first redcoats were in the ditch that was half filled with fallen masonry, and then they climbed the crude breach towards the fort.
The French had no fight in them. The infantrymen threw down their muskets before the attackers reached them. They were ignored, shoved aside, and the troops poured into the convent’s interior. The building still smoked, showing where the fires had been, and now it filled with cheering British, intent on loot, and Sharpe stopped at the glacis lip ahd looked behind him. Sergeant McGovern’s squad were there, where they should be, and Sharpe cupped his hands. “Stop anyone leaving! Understand!”
“Yes, sir!”
Sharpe grinned at Harper. “Let’s go hunting.” He drew his sword, wondering if this would be the last time he ever used this sword, and jumped into the ditch. The climb onto the defences was easy, thanks to the collapse of the convent wall into the ditch, and Sharpe ran up the stones, hoping against hope that Leroux would be in this first building. He could be in any of the three. The French had not been able to leave the forts, thanks to the ring of Light Companies, but there had been no way of stopping them moving between the buildings in the dark of night.
“God save Ireland!” Harper paused at the top. The San Cayetano resembled a charnel house whose corpses had been crushed and burned. The unwounded prisoners were gathering in the central courtyard, but they left on the ramparts, on firesteps, beside guns, a grisly remnant of the garrison. The eagerness of the attackers for revenge was checked by the horror. The redcoats were kneeling by the wounded, giving them water, and every soldier could imagine what life had been like, these last few burning hours, under the close bombardment of the guns. One man was close to the breach, on a stretcher where Sharpe presumed he had been laid so he could be taken swiftly to the hospital, and the screaming, horrid figure seemed to sum up the garrison’s suffering. He was an artillery officer and the plain, blue uniform reminded Sharpe of the man he had killed at Badajoz. This man would not live long. His face was half masked in blood, a shapeless mass where one eye had been, and his belly appeared to have been torn open by a splinter of wood or shattering iron that had left his guts, blue-sheened between thick blood, open to the sky and flies. He heaved, he screamed, he shouted for help, and even the men who were used to suffering and sudden death found the agony unbearable and gave the horrid wound a wide berth. Between screams the man panted, moaned, and cried. Two French infantrymen, unwounded, squatted fearfully beside the officer. One held his hand. The other tried to contain the terrible blue-red wound that had smeared the uniform with blood where it had not been scorched with fire. Sharpe looked at the artillery officer. “Be quicker to shoot him.”
“And a dozen others, sir.” Harper nodded at other men, some almost as badly wounded, some burned beyond a human face any more, and Sharpe climbed back to the breach top and shouted at McGovern. “The wounded will come out! Let them up!”
Carts were already waiting at the trench head, beside the main battery, to take the French to the hospital. Sharpe checked them out, one by one, and then looked at the prisoners in the courtyard. Leroux was not there. Somehow Sharpe was not surprised. He expected Leroux to be in the main fort, the San Vincente, and he hurried as he began to search the San Cayetano for he knew that the assault on the other forts must begin soon. He raced up stairs inside the convent, throwing doors open onto empty rooms, coughing when he had to dash down a smoke filled corridor to explore rooms threatened by flame, but the fort was deserted. The French were prisoners, downstairs, and the only men in the upper rooms were British soldiers rifling the possessions of their erstwhile enemies. Even those men Sharpe looked at carefully for it was not beyond a possibility that Leroux would have disguised himself in British uniform, but Leroux was not there.
A shout came from below and Sharpe ran to the last room he had not searched. It was empty as the others, except for a telescope, mounted like La Marquesa’s on a tripod, that a small Welsh soldier was struggling to lift. “Leave it!”
The man looked offended. “Sorry, sir.”
Sharpe could see the tripod marks on the wooden floor and he carefully aligned the telescope again on the old marks. He guessed that perhaps it had been used for receiving telegraph messages, when the French army had been close to the city, but he could not be sure. He peered through the glass, saw open sky, and tilted the tube downwards. The glass pointed through a tiny window. Anyone using it from the tripod marks could see scarce a thing through that tiny space. A patch of sky and then, the glass steadied, and Sharpe saw the dark square, and saw the circle of light that he knew was the brass-bound lens of La Marquesa’s glass. He grinned. Someone had tried to watch La Marquesa on her mirador and he could not blame them, for it must have been hell to be pinned in this tiny fort and an officer had set up the glass, far enough back so that it would not reflect any betraying light, and he must have prayed and hoped for a glimpse of that perfect beauty to relieve the perfect hell that sliced apart a man’s intestines. He stayed for a moment, hoping he would see her, but there was no sign of her. He remembered the shout from below and gestured at the glass. “You can have it, soldier.”
He ran down the stairs, joining Harper who had searched the rooms again, and the shout proved to be the discovery of the French magazine. The building smouldered and, beneath their feet, the powder barrels waited that could blow them into fine scraps. A British officer had organised a chain of men and the barrels were heaved up, passed through the courtyard, to be piled in the ditch. Sharpe pushed past the chain, ignoring their protests, but Leroux was not in the cellar.
The other two forts had still not surrendered, yet the British walked quite openly and unconcerned in the space outside the San Cayetano. No French guns fired, no canister riddled the air. Sergeant Huckfield had brought his squad to join McGovern’s, and the two Sergeants saluted as Sharpe came out of the breach. McGovern shook his head dourly. “No sign of him, sir?”
“No.” Sharpe sheathed his sword. Lieutenant Price was waiting in the trench, ready to go to the San Vincente, and Sharpe thought of the long afternoon ahead. He wanted to get back to La Marquesa, he wanted this chore done, and he began to resent the long search in the heat. He looked at Huckfield. “Take your men to La Merced. Wait for me there.” He did not expect Leroux to be in the smallest fort, but it had to be covered. He switched to McGovern. “Let four of your men stay here, just in case he’s hiding. The rest to the big one.”
“Sir. I’d be happier with six.”
“Six it is.” He thought what might happen if Leroux had found a hiding place in the smoking ruins. “And you stay, too, Mac.”
“Sir.” McGovern nodded gravely.
God, but it was hot. Sharpe took off his shako and wiped his face. His jacket was undone, swinging free. He clambered down the ravine side, staring up at the San Vincente, and as he watched he saw the Portuguese troops begin their climb towards the big, blazing fortress. Let the bastards surrender quickly, he thought, and he hurried, the sweat soaking the new, fine linen shirt that La Marquesa had given him. He would have to bathe in the Palacio, he thought, and he remembered the unbelievable luxury of the huge tub, filled by a relay of servants, and the strange sensation of being immersed in hot water. He smiled at the memory and Patrick Harper wondered what his Captain was thinking.
The Portuguese were not resisted. The small figures j jumped into the ditch, clambered through the cannon emplacements, and no muskets fired. The French had had enough. Sharpe looked at his squads. “Come on!”
The air was stifling. Close to the big fort, it was even hotter, fuelled by the fires that blazed unchecked in the building. Some Frenchmen, ignored by the Portuguese, were already leaping from the defences and Price led his squad to cut off their flight. Sharpe hurried up the crude glacis, the heat burning at him, and then he led Harper’s squad into the big defences to find the same picture they had seen before. The wounded needed attention, the living surrendered, the dead stank in the collapsed stones and timber. The Portuguese were already pulling the powder barrels from the cellars, rolling the kegs to safety, while others herded prisoners and looted French packs. There was no sign of Leroux. Three huge Frenchmen were pulled out of the ranks and Sharpe stared at them, trying to fit their faces to his mental image, but none was Leroux. One had a hare lip, and he could not imagine the Imperial Guard Colonel faking that disfigurement, one was too old, and the third seemed some kind of simpleton who grinned with feeble good-will at the Rifle Officer. It was not Leroux. Sharpe looked at the burning buildings, then at Harper. “We’ll have to search.”
They searched. They looked in every room that could be entered and tried to look even in those where no human could stay alive. Once Sharpe teetered on the brink of a broken floor, staring hopelessly into a roaring fire that swept upwards, white hot, and he heard the fall of great timbers and knew that no man could live in that. He put a hand on his ammunition pouch and the leather was almost too hot to touch and he went back, suddenly fearing that the rifle ammunition would explode, and he felt the first stirrings of doubt, of frustration. He was soaked with sweat, begrimed, and still the sun burned down on the furnace building, the prisoners milled outside and Sharpe cursed Leroux.
Price panted in the heat. “I haven’t seen him, sir.”
Sharpe pointed at a separate group. “Who are they?”
“Wounded, sir.”
He looked at the wounded. He even made one man take off a dirty bandage from his head, and wished he had not. The man was terribly burned and he was not Leroux. Sharpe looked at the scene on the glacis. “How many prisoners?”
“Four hundred here, sir. At least.”
“Search them again!” They marched up the ranks, stopping at each man, and the French prisoners looked at them dully. Some were tall, and those were pushed out of the ranks into a separate group, but it was hopeless. Some had no teeth, others were the wrong age, some were similar but not Leroux.
“Patrick!”
“Sir?”
“Find that officer who spoke French. Ask him to see me.”
The officer came and gladly helped. He asked prisoners if they knew of the tall Colonel Leroux or else of Captain Delmas, and most shrugged, but one or two volunteered help and said they remembered a Captain Delmas who had fought so well at Austerlitz, and one remembered a Leroux who had been in the town guard at Pau, and the sun smashed down, bounced off the broken stones, and the sweat trickled into Sharpe’s eyes, stinging them, and it was as if Leroux had vanished from the face of the earth.
“Sir?” Harper pointed across the ravine. “The little one’s surrendered.”
They crossed the ravine again and, now that the third fort had surrendered, the wounded who had been taken from the San Cayetano and the San Vincente were allowed up the trench. Sharpe wondered how many had died as they waited in the burning sun. The artillery officer whose guts had been laid open by a flying splinter still lived, his face with the bloody mess where there had been an eye rocked back and forth, and Sharpe saw Harper touch his crucifix as the Sergeant watched the stretcher being carried towards the waiting carts. There but for the grace of God, thought Sharpe, and then they climbed up the ravine and headed towards La Merced.
Leroux was not there. Leroux was in none of the forts and Sharpe and Harper walked the wide, burning wasteland again to the San Vincente and once again they searched the prisoners on the glacis. Leroux was not there. Pray as Sharpe might, he could not make one face fit the French Colonel. He looked at the French-speaking officer in frustration. “Someone must know!”
The Lieutenant Colonel was impatient. He wanted the prisoners moved, to release his men from guarding them in the afternoon heat, but Sharpe stubbornly went down the ranks again. He wiped the sweat from his eyes, searched the faces, but he knew it was no good. He nodded reluctantly to the Colonel. “I’m through, sir.”
He was not through. He searched the burning convent again, went down into the coolness of the huge cellar that had been the magazine, but there were no signs of the fugitive. It was Harper who finally admitted what Sharpe did not want to admit. “He’s not here, sir.”
“No.” But he would not give up. If Leroux had escaped, and for the life of him he could not see how, then La Marquesa was in danger. It might take the Frenchman days, or weeks, or just hours before he made his move and Sharpe thought of her body in that man’s hands and he hacked with his sword at an open cupboard as if it might conceal a false compartment. He let the rage subside. “Search the dead.” It was quite possible that Leroux was among the dead, but Sharpe suspected the tall, clever Colonel would not have exposed himself to the artillery fire. Yet Sharpe must search the corpses.
The dead stank. Some had been dead for two days, unburied in the heat, and Sharpe raked the bodies off the pile and, the nearer the bottom he reached, the more he knew that Leroux was not here. He went out again, onto the glacis, and stared at the other two forts. La Merced was empty, its garrison marching away into captivity, and only McGovern with his small picquet stood guard on the San Cayetano.. Sharpe looked at Harper’s squad. They were tired, worn out, and he gestured at them to sit down. He took off his jacket and gave it to Lieutenant Price. “I’m going for one more look at the San Cayetano.”
“Yes, sir.” Price was coated with sweat-streaked dust.
Harper came with Sharpe, but no one else, and for the fourth time they climbed the ravine and the two tall Riflemen walked slowly towards the first fort to fall. Sergeant McGovern had seen nothing. His men had searched the building again, but he swore it was empty, and Sharpe nodded. “Go back to Lieutenant Price, Mac. Send a man to bring Sergeant Huckfield back.”
La Merced had received very little of the bombardment and there were no corpses in the smallest fort, so the only hope left was the dead in the San Cayetano. Sharpe and Harper went slowly into the ghastly courtyard and looked at the grisly pile. There was nothing for it but to search.
The corpses lolled unnaturally after they had been raked down from the stack. Sharpe looked at each face, and each was a stranger, and then he went up to one of the less damaged parapets and stared with Harper across the river. The clean, green hills were pale in the sunlight. He looked at his hands, stained with the dirt and blood of death, and swore long and foully.
Harper offered his canteen and said nothing. He knew what Sharpe was thinking; that the Light Company had pulled an easy duty, a detachment that had given them days by the river and nights in wine shops, and in return they had failed in the one thing they had been asked to do.
Huckfield’s men filed beneath the parapet and the Sergeant looked up at Sharpe and offered help. Sharpe shook his head. “There’s nothing here! Go on. We’ll join you in a minute.”
“What now, sir?” Harper sat on the parapet.
“I don’t know.” He glanced at the small fort, La Merced, and wondered if he should search it again, but he knew it was empty. He could wait for the fires to burn down in the San Vincente and then rake through the ashes looking for a body. By God! He would do it! And he would pull the damned convents down, stone by bloody stone, until he had found the Frenchman. His new shirt was stained and stinking, glued to his chest with sweat. He thought of La Marquesa, of the coolness of her rooms, of the bath that waited for him and the chilled wine on the mirador. He shook his head. „He can’t have escaped. He can’t!“
“He did before.” Harper offered cold comfort.
Sharpe thought of La Marquesa’s silk smooth skin ripped from her body, inch by inch, and the thought of Leroux torturing her made him shut his eyes.
Harper swilled his mouth with water and spat it into the ditch. “We can search again, sir.”
“No, Patrick. It’s no damned good.” He stood up and walked wearily down the steps into the courtyard. He hated to admit failure, but he did not think another search would reveal anything. He stopped, waiting for Harper, and stared at a French corpse that had been disembowelled. The man was naked, his wound had laid him open so that his spine was visible through his stomach, but Sharpe was not seeing anything. He was just staring, his thoughts hammering at him. Harper saw the stare and looked himself at the corpse.
“Funny, that.”
“What?” Sharpe was startled from his reverie.
Harper nodded at the corpse. “That other poor bugger was gutted, just like that. Except the other one lived.”
“Yes.” Sharpe shrugged. “Funny things, wounds. Remember Major Collett? Not a mark on him. Other poor bastards live with half their stuffing taken out.” He was making conversation, trying to hide his disappointment. He moved away, but Harper still stared at the corpse. “You coming? Patrick?”
Harper crouched and batted at the flies with a hand. “Sir?” His voice was worried. “Would you say this one had his full kit, sir? I know he’s a bloody mess, so he is, but…‘
“Oh God in heaven! Christ!” Sharpe knew that the corpse’s guts could have been lost in an explosion, they could have been tossed to the stray dogs that scavenged the wasteland at night, or they could have been scooped out to make the perfect disguise. “Oh Christ!”
They began running.
They ran, forcing themselves over the stones, stumbling in the debris of the ruined houses, taking the shortest route to the city. The cordon of Light troops, still in place, watched in astonishment as the two huge men, one in a stained and damp shirt and wielding a huge blade, the other carrying a seven-barrelled gun, charged at them. A man levelled a musket and gave an uncertain challenge.
“Out the bloody way!” Sharpe’s bellow convinced the picquets that the two were British.
Sharpe led the way into the alleyway from which the abortive attack, four days before, had been launched. Civilians were crammed in the streets, hoping for a glimpse of the excitement in the wasteland, but they parted hurriedly before the armed men. Thank God, Sharpe thought, it was downhill to the Irish College where the wounded were taken.
Yet the man who must, surely, have piled the guts of another man onto his stomach, who had smeared himself in blood and soot, who had sought his disguise in a wound so terrible that no one would think he could survive or think he was worth troubling over, had such a lead on them. Thirty minutes, forty even, and Sharpe felt a blind rage at his own stupidity. Trust nothing, and trust no one! Search everyone, and yet the sight of the disembowelled artillery officer had made him turn away in horror and pity. It had been the first officer he had seen inside the first fort and now he was convinced it had to be Leroux. Who could now be free inside the city.
They turned left, their breath coming in humid gasps, and Sharpe saw that they still had a chance. It was not much, but it drove him on. The crowds were holding up the wagons carrying the wounded, jeering at the enemy, and British troops were holding the people back with muskets. Sharpe pushed and forced his way to the nearest cart and shouted up at the driver. “Is this the first batch?”
“No, mate. Haifa dozen have gone already. Gawd knows ‘ow they’ll get through.”
The driver had mistaken Sharpe for a private. He had seen the rifle slung on the shoulder and, without his jacket or sash, Sharpe had no badge of rank except the sword. He looked for Harper. “Come on!”
He bellowed at the crowd, pushed at them, and they broke free of the crush around the wounded and ran on, down the hill, and ahead of them Sharpe could see the other carts standing empty at the steps of the College. Sentries barred the door, ignoring the pleas of civilians who seemed to want to get in to finish off what the British bombardment had begun. Apart from the civilians, young men mostly with long, slim knives, there was no excitement at the college. No shouts, no chase, no sign that a wounded man had suddenly sprung to full life and hacked his way to a dubious freedom among the vengeful Salamantine streets.
Sharpe took the steps two at a time and pushed into the crowd that filled the small terrace in front of the great gate. A sentry challenged him, saw the sword and rifle, and made a space for the two men to push through. They hammered on the gate.
Harper looked blown. He shook his head, pounded the studded wood again, and looked at Sharpe. “I hope you’re bloody right, sir.” The Company had been left at the San Vincente, ignorant of where their Captain and senior Sergeant had gone.
Sharpe hammered with the steel guard of his sword. “Open up!”
A wicket door opened in the gate and a face peered out. “Who is it?”
Sharpe did not answer. He pushed through, stooping through the small entrance, and a courtyard opened up before him. It would have been a beautiful place, a haven of peace in a peaceful city, a well surrounded by a lawn which, in turn, was surrounded by two storeys of carved cloisters. Today, though, it was the collecting place for the dying, the courtyard filled with the first French wounded who had come to join the men they had wounded four nights before. The courtyard was choked with bleeding men, with orderlies, and Sharpe paused at the archway and looked desperately for the artillery officer who had seemed so terribly wounded.
“What do you want?” A truculent Sergeant came from the gate lodge. “Who are you?”
„French officer, wounded. Where is he?“ Sharpe’s tone told the Sergeant he was speaking to an officer.
The Sergeant shrugged. “Surgeons are straight ahead, sir, across the yard. Officers’ wards upstairs. What does he look like?”
“Had his lights hanging out. On a stretcher.”
“Try the surgeons, sir.”
Sharpe glanced at the top cloister. It was in deep shadow, but he could see two or three bored British guards, muskets slung, and doubtless there were wounded officer prisoners in the shadows. He looked at Harper with his huge gun. “Try upstairs, Patrick. And be careful. Get one of those guards to help you.”
Harper grinned and hefted the huge gun. “I don’t think your man will try anything stupid.” He crossed to one of the curved staircases that led to the officers’ wards. Sharpe threaded his way through the wounded towards the sound of screams that indicated where the surgeons worked.
Awnings had been rigged over patches of the lawn to keep the sun from roasting the wounded. A constant trickle of men drew water from the well, ladling from the bucket that was suspended by an intricate iron cage. Sharpe zig-zagged, looking at the men on stretchers, searching the faces of men in the deeper shadow of the cloisters, and going to the unshaded patch of lawn where the first dead, failures from the scalpel or men who died before they could reach the blood-stained table, had been laid out. His instinct told him that Leroux was in this place, yet he could not be sure, and he half expected to find the wounded artillery officer lying in the courtyard. Sharpe could not find him and turned, instead, to the surgeons’ rooms.
Colonel Leroux waited on the upper cloister. He needed now only two things, a horse and a long plain cloak to hide the charnel house appearance of his uniform, and both were due to be waiting for him at three o’clock in the alley behind the Irish College. He wished he had asked for them earlier, but he had never suspected that the surrender negotiations would be cut short by the British, and now he peered through the stone pillars of the balustrade and recognised the tall figure of the dark-haired Rifle Officer. Sharpe had no jacket, yet still he was easily identified because of the long sword and the slung rifle. Leroux had heard a clock in the town strike the half hour, he guessed it was now ten minutes short of the hour, and he would have to risk that the horse and cloak had been brought early. So far, at least, things had worked well. It had been a nuisance to be trapped in the forts instead of being with one of his agents in the city, but the escape had been planned with meticulous care, and it had worked thus far. He had been one of the first to enter the hospital and the surgeon waiting in the courtyard had hardly glanced at him. The man had gestured upstairs because it was obvious that no surgeon could save the desperately wounded artillery officer. He could be left to die in the shade of the upper cloister where the officers’ wards waited. Leroux watched Sharpe go into the surgeons’ rooms and smiled to himself; he had a few moments.
He was uncomfortable. He had piled a dead man’s intestines on his stomach and had tucked the entrails into the waistband of the borrowed uniform so that the gleaming, wet, jellied mass would stay in place. He had splashed himself with gore, soaked his blond hair in blood until it was matted and stiff, and then put an unrecognisable lump of flesh over his left eye. He had burned patches of the uniform. The Kligenthal was beneath him, unsheathed, and he prayed that Sharpe would be delayed in the surgeons’ rooms. Every minute now was precious. Then he heard the friendly challenge from the sentry at the curved stair’s head. “Sarge, can I help you?”
Leroux heard the newcomer silence the sentry and his instinct told him that this was danger so he moaned, rolled onto his side, and let the guts slide off him. The flies protested. He dug with his hand and twitched the cold entrails free, then reached up and wiped his left eye. It seemed glued shut and he had to spit on his hand, rub again, and then he could see properly. It was time to move.
It all happened terribly quickly. One moment a man seemed to be dying, moaning feebly, and the next he was rising to his feet and in his hand was a long grey blade. He was like something from the pit, something that had rolled and nuzzled and lapped in blood, and he freed the stiffness from his arm with a scythe of the sword and loosed his voice with a great war cry. In the Name of the Emperor!
Harper was looking the other way. He heard the shout, he turned, and the sentry was between him and the demonic figure. Harper shouted at the man to move, tried to force him aside with the squat barrels of the big gun, but the sentry lunged feebly with his bayonet at the ghastly figure and the Kligenthal drove it aside and came back to carve a line diagonally up the sentry’s face. The man screamed, fell backwards, and he fell on the seven barrelled gun and the impact made Harper’s finger pull on the trigger and the huge gun fired. The bullets hammered uselessly on the flagstones, ricocheted into the balustrade, and the recoil of the huge gun, a recoil that could throw a man clear from the fighting top of a battleship, slewed Harper round and backwards.
The Sergeant fought for balance. There was only the staircase behind him and he stood at the very top at the inside of the curve where the steps were steepest. He was falling and his right hand flailed for support and the sentry, screaming because he could not see, fell at Harper’s feet and scrambled for safety and his arm went to the back of the huge Sergeant’s ankles and Harper was falling.
Harper’s hand caught the balustrade, he heaved on it with all his huge strength, and then he saw the French officer coming for him and the sword was reaching for Harper’s chest and the blade seemed to speed up as the Frenchman’s strength went into the lunge.
The blade caught him. The point slammed between the tiny carved thighs on Harper’s crucifix. He let go of the balustrade, shouting in alarm and warning, and his legs were trapped by the sentry, and he lashed uselessly with his arm for balance and then he fell away from the blade. He toppled.
His head hit the eighth stair down. The sound of it could be heard throughout the courtyard and it was a dull crack. The head seemed to bounce up, light brown hair flapping, the blood already dripping, and then the head slumped down again and Harper’s body slipped until it was caught on the stair’s bend and he lay, spreadeagled and bloody, head downwards, on the scrubbed stone stairway.
Leroux turned away and shouted at the French wounded to stay out of his way. He ran to his left, the shortest route to the rear of the college, and two sentries, startled, came together and levelled their muskets. One knelt, pulling back his flint, and Leroux checked. They were too far away for him to charge. The one man fired and the ball went harmlessly past the Frenchman, but the other held his fire, waited, and Leroux turned away. He would go the long way round, hoping no sentries waited, and the sword felt marvellous in his hand, like a live thing, and he laughed at the pleasure of it.
Sharpe was inside the surgeons’ rooms when he heard the bellowing echo of the seven-barrelled gun and he turned and was running, leaping the bodies laid out on the grass, and he saw Harper fall, saw the huge body bounce on the steps, and Sharpe was shouting with an inchoate anger that cleared the hospital orderlies from his path. He took the curved stairway three steps at a time and he jumped Harper’s body from which blood trickled to puddle on the next step down. The Sergeant was silent and still.
Sharpe reached the head of the stairs as Leroux came back past the place where he had lunged at Harper. Sharpe felt an immense anger. He did not know if Harper was alive or dead, but he knew he was hurt, and Harper was a man who would have given his life for Sharpe, a friend, and Sharpe now faced the man who had wounded Harper. The Rifle Captain came up the last curved steps, his face terrifying in its rage, and his long sword sounded in the air as he swept it backhanded at the Frenchman and Leroux parried. Leroux’s left hand was grasping his right wrist and all his own strength was in the Kligenthal, and the blades clashed.
Sharpe felt the blow of steel on steel like a sledgehammer strike numbing his right arm. He was rigid with the effort of the blow and the recoil of the blades checked his rush, threatened to topple him backwards, but Leroux too had been stopped, jarred by the two swords meeting, and the French Colonel was astonished at the force of the attack, by the strength that had come at him and still threatened him.
The Kligenthal lunged while the echo of the first clangorous strike still came back from the far side of the courtyard. Sharpe parried the lunge, point downwards, and then turned his own heavy blade with such speed that Leroux jumped back and the tip of Sharpe’s blade missed the Frenchman’s face by less than a half inch. Again, and again, and Sharpe felt the surge of joy because he had the speed of this man, and the strength, and Leroux was parrying desperately, going backwards, and the Kligenthal could only block the attacks of the old cavalry sword. Then Leroux’s back heel touched stone, he was against the wall, and there was no escape from Sharpe. The Frenchman glanced to his right, saw the way he had to go, and then he saw Sharpe’s face screwed up with the effort of one last hacking swing that would cut him in half. He brought up the Kligenthal, swinging too, a cut that owed nothing to the science of fencing, just a killing swing in his last defence, and the blades sang in the air, the Kligenthal went past Sharpe and the Rifleman’s swing was parried.
The blades met, edge to edge, and again the shock jarred into their arms, shook their bodies, and the sound of it was not a clang, no harsh music, and Sharpe was falling because the sound was dull and his blade, that had been on every battlefield for four years, broke on the impact of the beautiful, silken, grey steel of the Kligenthal. Sharpe felt it go, felt the jarring shock turn into a lurching fall, and he saw the top half of his blade break and tumble as if the steel was no more than baked sugar. It broke, grey and splintered, and the tip fell, harsh onto the flagstones, and Sharpe was left with a handle and a jagged vicious stump. He hit the stones, rolled towards Leroux and stabbed upwards with the stump at the Frenchman’s groin, but Leroux laughed in his relief, stepped away, and brought up his sword, point downwards, for the stabbing, killing blow.
The sentry who had not fired his gun pounded around the corner of the cloister, elbowed aside two wounded French officers, and shouted at the blood-stained man whose sword was poised. The sentry jerked up his musket, Leroux saw it, and the Frenchman abandoned Sharpe and ran. The Rifleman hurled the useless sword fragment, missed, and rolled to his feet with his rifle coming off his shoulder.
“Hey!” The sentry’s protest was lost as his musket fired. He jerked the barrel up as the flint sparked and he just managed to avoid Sharpe who had erupted into his line of fire. The ball thumped past Sharpe, the pressure of it on his cheek, past Leroux, and flattened itself against the far wall. Leroux was running, no enemies before him, and the Kligenthal was long in his hand.
Sharpe’s arm was slow, numbed by the blade-shock, and he fumbled with the rifle flint. Leroux had reached a door at the far end and he tugged at the handle, then beat at the door with his fist. It stayed shut. He was trapped again.
Sharpe stood up. The flint came back and the feeling of the heavy spring compressing was satisfying. It clicked into place, the rifle was ready, and he walked towards Leroux who still hammered at the door just twenty paces from Sharpe. Sharpe jerked with the barrel. “Still!”
The Frenchman reached down to his boot and as he did the door opened. Sharpe saw the hand come up and in it was a pistol, the barrel octagonal, and he knew Leroux had a duelling pistol. He shouted, began running, and then the Irish priest, Curtis, was standing in the doorway and Leroux pushed the old man aside, went through, and Sharpe shouted at the old man to get out of the way and the door was closing and Sharpe had no time to aim, but just pulled the trigger and the Rifle bullet drove a long splinter from the door’s edge. He had missed.
Leroux pulled the door open again and his right hand I, came up slowly, the pistol barrel foreshortened, and then he I smiled, lowered the hand so that the pistol was aimed low at Sharpe and the Rifleman saw the flame in the pan, threw himself sideways, saw the smoke blossom in front of Leroux, and he felt a great blow shudder on his body. Then it seemed as if everything was happening at only half the speed of ordained time. The door closed on his enemy. Sharpe was still running, the rifle falling, clattering, bouncing, and the pain was filling all the world, yet still he tried to run. There was a scream of pure agony, a scream that slashed round the I courtyard, and Sharpe did not know it was his own scream, but he was still trying to run and then a knee struck the flagstones, and still he tried, and his hands clutched at warm fresh blood, bright red, and he was screaming, falling, and he slid on the stones, scrabbling still, and the blood spurted behind him, was fanned and smeared by his flailing legs, and the scream still went on.
He slid to a stop at the foot of the door, curled up, clenched against a world of pain that he could never have imagined, and he pumped the scream futilely, and the blood welled between his fingers that clutched into his stomach as if they could reach inside him and pluck the horror that tore at him. Then, blessedly, he stopped screaming and was still.
The Cathedral clock struck three.
Private Batten was annoyed, and let the rest of the Company know it. “Doesn’t give a bugger, does he? Know what I mean?” No one answered. They waited on the glacis of the San Vincente fort and Lieutenant Price looked at his watch and kept glancing at the empty San Cayetano fort. Batten waited for a response. He scratched his armpit. “Used to be a bleedin‘ private, he did, and that’s what he bloody should be now. Keeping us waiting.” Still no one answered and Batten was encouraged by their silence. “Always buggering off, have you noticed? Our company’s not good enough for him, no, not Mr. Bloody Sharpe. Know what I mean?” He looked round for support.
Sergeant Huckfield had gone to look for Sharpe. The men could see his red coat climbing up the ravine’s side towards the San Cayetano. One or two of the men slept. Price sat down on a huge masonry block and folded Sharpe’s coat beside him. He was worried.
Private Batten picked his nose and licked the result off his fingernail. “We could sit here all bleedin‘ night for all he bleedin’ cares.”
Daniel Hagman opened one eye. “He kept you from swinging by your bloody neck two years ago. He shouldn’t have bothered.”
Batten laughed. “They couldn’t have hung me. I was innocent. He don’t care, Sharpe. He’s forgotten us, till he bleedin‘ needs us again. He’s probably sitting with Harps getting drunk. T’ain’t fair.”
Sergeant McGovern, slow and Scottish, stood up and stretched his arms. He marched formally to Private Batten and kicked his ankles. “On your feet.”
“What for?” Batten dropped into the aggrieved tone of surprise that was his main defence against an aggravating world.
“Because I’m going to smash your bloody face in.”
Batten edged away from the Scotsman and looked at Lieutenant Price’s back. “Hey! Lieutenant, sir!”
Price did not look round. “Carry on, Sergeant.”
The men laughed. Batten looked up at McGovern. “Sarge?”
“Shut your bloody face.”
“But, Sarge?”
“Shut it, or get up.”
Batten subsided into what he considered injured but righteous dignity. He busied himself with his right nostril, keeping his remarks just out of the Company’s hearing. Sergeant McGovern crossed to the Lieutenant and stood formally at attention. Price looked up. “Sergeant?”
“It’s a bit strange, sir.”
“Yes.” They both watched Huckfield cross the ditch of the central fort. Price suddenly realised that McGovern, formal always, was still at attention. “Stand easy, Sergeant. Stand easy.”
“Sir!” McGovern let his shoulders drop an eighth of an inch. “Thank you, sir.”
Price looked at his watch. A quarter to four. He did not know what to do and felt helpless without Sharpe or Harper to guide him. He knew that the Scottish Sergeant was hinting that a decision ought to be made and he knew McGovern was right. He stared at the San Cayetano, saw Huckfield’s red jacket appear on a parapet, then disappear, and after a long wait Huckfield came to the top of the crude breach and spread his hands emptily. Price sighed. “We wait till five, Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir.”
Major Hogan had waited for Sharpe, first at the ravine’s head, then at Headquarters, but the fate of Colonel Leroux was not the Irishman’s only concern. Wellington, now that the forts were taken, was eager to be out of the city. He wanted reports from the north, from the east, and Hogan worked late through the afternoon.
It was not till half past six that Lieutenant Price, awed by approaching Headquarters on his own responsibility, entered Hogan’s room. The Major looked up, smelt trouble, and frowned. “Lieutenant?”
“It’s Sharpe, sir.”
“Captain Sharpe?”
Price nodded miserably. “We’ve lost him, sir.”
“No Leroux?” Hogan had almost forgotten Leroux. He had assumed that it was now Sharpe’s problem while he could concentrate on discovering what fresh levies of troops were joining Marmont. Price shook his head.
“No Leroux, sir.” Price sketched in the afternoon’s events.
“What have you done since?”
It did not add up to much. Lieutenant Price had searched the San Cayetano again, then La Merced, and afterwards taken the Company back to their billets in the hope that Sharpe might have turned up. There was no Sharpe, no Harper, just a lost Lieutenant Price. Hogan looked at his watch. “Good God! You’ve lost him for four hours?” Price nodded. Hogan shouted. “Corporal!”
A head came round the door. “Sir?”
“Daily reports, are they in?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anything odd, apart from the forts. Quick, man!”
It did not take long. A shooting and a fight at the hospital, one Frenchman had escaped and the town guard had been alerted, but there was no sign of the fugitive.
“Come on, man!” Hogan pulled on his jacket, snatched his hat, and led Lieutenant Price down to the Irish College.
Sergeant Huckfield, who had gone with Price as far as Headquarter’s front door, joined them and it was he who pounded on the gate that was still shut against the revenge of the townspeople. It did not take long to hear the story from the guards in the gate-lodge. There had been a chase. One man was wounded, probably in the wards, as to the other? The guards shrugged. “Dunno, sir.”
Hogan pointed at Price. “Officers’ wards. Search them. Sergeant?”
Huckfield stiffened. “Sir?”
“Other ranks’ wards. Find Sergeant Harper. Go!”
Leroux at liberty. The thought haunted Hogan. He could not believe that Sharpe had failed, he needed to find the Rifleman because, he thought, surely Sharpe could throw light on the episode. It was impossible that Leroux was free!
The surgeons were still at work, dealing now with the less wounded men, taking out scraps of stone that the bombardment had splintered and driven into French defenders. Hogan went from room to room and none could remember a Rifle Captain. One remembered Sergeant Harper. “Out of his senses, sir.”
“You mean mad?”
“No. In a faint. God knows when he’ll recover.”
“And his officer?”
“I didn’t see an officer, sir.”
Was Sharpe still on Leroux’s trail? It was a hope, at least, and Hogan clung to it. Sergeant Huckfield had found Harper, had shaken the huge Irishman’s shoulder, but Harper was still dead to the world, still snoring, still unable to say a thing.
Lieutenant Price came down the curving stairs. He was blinking, almost unable to speak. Hogan was impatient. “What is it?”
“He’s not there, sir.”
“You’re sure?”
Price nodded, took a deep breath. “But he was shot, sir. Really bad, sir.”
Hogan felt a chill spread through him. There was a silence for a few seconds. “Shot?”
“Bad, sir. And he’s not in the wards.”
“Oh, God.” Huckfield shook his head, unwilling to believe it.
Hogan had held to a live Sharpe, a Sharpe chasing Leroux, a Sharpe who could help him, and he could not adjust to the new information. If Sharpe had been shot, and was not in the officers’ wards, then he was… „Who saw it?“
“A dozen French wounded, sir. They told the British officers. And the priest.”
“Priest?”
“Upstairs, sir.”
Hogan ran, the same path that Sharpe had run, and he took the stairs two at a time, his sword rapping the stone, and he ran to Curtis’ rooms. It seemed to Price and Huckfield, left outside, that he was in the rooms a long time.
Curtis told his story, what there was of it, of how he had opened the door and found a French officer. “Terribly wounded, he looked. Blood from top to toe. He pushed me in, turned and fired, and then he closed the door. He went out the window.” He gestured to the tall window that opened onto the back street. “There was a man there, with a spare horse, and a cloak.”
“So he’s gone.”
“Clean away.”
“And Sharpe?”
Curtis clasped his hands, then extended the fingers as if in prayer. “He screamed, screamed terribly. Then he stopped. I opened the door again.” He shrugged.
Hogan dared hardly use the word. “Dead?”
Curtis shrugged. “I don’t know.” There was not much hope in the old man’s voice.
Hogan insisted on going back over the story, harrying it, as if some detail might emerge that would somehow change the ending, but it was with a harsh expression that he left Curtis’ door and walked, slowly, down the curved staircase. He offered no explanations to Price, but just went back to the surgeons. He bullied them, ordered them, used all the weight of Headquarters, but still no news emerged. One of them had treated an officer with a bullet wound and the man had survived, a Lieutenant in the Portuguese Army, but they were quite sure they had seen no bullet-wounded British officers. “We had a few privates.”
“Ye Gods! A Rifle Officer! Captain Sharpe!”
“Him?” The last surgeon shrugged. “We’d have been told about him. What happened?”
“He was shot.” Hogan kept his patience.
The surgeon shook his head. His breath smelt of the wine he had been drinking through the long afternoon. “If he was shot here, sir, we’d have seen him. The only explanation is that he never got this far.” The man shrugged. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“You mean dead?”
The surgeon shrugged again. “You’ve looked in the wards? He’s not here?” Hogan shook his head. The surgeon gestured over the courtyard with his bloody knife. “Try the body-men.”
At the side of the college was a small yard where the servants had lived in the better times when the Irish College had been full of students training for the English-banned Irish priesthood. In the yard Hogan found the body-men. They were working, nailing up crude coffins, sewing rough shrouds for the French dead, and they did not remember Sharpe. The smell in the small courtyard was overpowering. Bodies lay where they had been dumped, the body-men seemed to live on a diet of rum and Hogan found the soberest man he could discover. “Tell me what you do here.”
“Sir?” The man had only one eye, part of a cheek missing, but he was understandable. He seemed proud that an officer should be interested. “We burys ‘em, sir.”
“I know. I want to know what happens.” If Hogan could at least find Sharpe’s body then the worst question would be answered.
The man sniffed. He had a needle and coarse thread in his hand. “We shrouds the frogs, sir, ’less they’re officers, of course, an‘ they get a coffin. Nice coffin, sir.“
“And the British?”
“Oh, a coffin, sir, of course, sir, if we got enough, if not they get sewn up like this. Unless we ain’t got shrouds, sir, then we just stick ‘em and bury ’em.”
“Stick them?”
The man winked with his good eye, he was warming to his explanation. By his knees was a French soldier, the face already waxen in death, and the shroud was half closed with big, crude stitches. The man took the needle and plunged it through the Frenchman’s nose. “See, sir? Don’t bleed. Means ‘is not alive, if you follow me, sir, and if he were then ’e’d like as not give a twitch. We ‘ad one four days ago.” He looked at one of his ghoulish mates. “Four days ago, Charlie? That Shropshire sat up an’ bloody puked?” He looked back at Hogan. “Not nice to be buried alive, sir.” He gestured at the needle. “Sort of comfort, really, to know we’re ‘ere, sir, looking after you and makin’ sure you’re really gone.”
Hogan’s gratitude seemed less than heartfelt. He pointed at a stack of rough-cut coffins. “Do you bury them?”
“Lord love you, no, sir. The Frenchies, now, we might sling ‘em in the pit, or at least the burial detail does, sir. I mean there’s no point in making a folderol about them, sir, not seein’ as ‘ow they’ve been trying to do us, sir, if you follow me. Their officers, now, they’re different. They might get the…’
Hogan cut him off. “The British, you fool! What happens to them?”
The perfectionist in the body-man was offended. He shrugged. “Their mates get ‘em, don’t they? I mean the Battalion, sir, does ’em a proper service, with a priest. That’s ‘em over there. Waitin’ for their interdment, sir.” He pointed to the stack.
“And if you don’t know who they are?”
“Sling ‘em, sir.”
“What happened to the bodies you got today?”
“Depends, sir. Some ‘ave gone, some are waiting, and some, like this ’ere gent‘, are bein’ attended to.” He invested the phrase with dignity.
Sharpe was in none of the coffins. Sergeant Huckfield levered the lids open, but the faces were all of strangers. Hogan sighed, looked up at the swallows, then down to Price. “He’s probably buried already. I don’t understand it. He’s not here, not in the wards.” Hogan did not believe his own words.
“Sir?” Huckfield was raking through the pile of uniforms that had been slit open, searched, and then tossed into a corner of the small courtyard. He held up Sharpe’s overalls, the distinctive green overalls that Sharpe had taken off a dead French officer of the Imperial Guard. Hogan, like Huckfield, recognised them instantly.
He turned back to the one-eyed man whose stitches, now that an officer was present, were smaller and neater. “Where are those clothes from?”
“The dead, sir.”
“You remember the man who wore those?”
The man squinted with his one eye. “We get ‘em naked, as often as not, an’ the clothes come after.” He sniffed. “Buggers have already searched ‘em. We just burn ’em.” He peered at the overalls. “Must ‘ave been a Frenchie.”
“Do you know which bodies are French?”
“Course we do, sir. Buggers tell us when they bring ‘em.”
Hogan turned to Huckfield and pointed at the pile of shrouded French dead. “Open them, Sergeant.” He noticed, almost for the first time, the huge bloodstain on the overalls.
It was vast. No man could have lived through that.
The body-men protested as Huckfield began slitting at the grey shrouds, but Hogan snapped at them to be quiet, and he and Price watched as face after face was revealed. None were Sharpe. Hogan turned back to the body-man. “Have any been buried yet?”
“Lord, yes. Two cart loads this afternoon, sir.”
So Sharpe was buried in a common grave with his enemies. Hogan felt the beginnings of a sob and he swallowed, stamped his feet as if it were cold, and looked at Price. “It’s your Company now, Lieutenant.”
“No, sir.”
Hogan’s voice was gentle. “Yes. You’d better march in the morning. You’ll find the Battalion at San Christobal. You’ll have to tell Major Forrest.”
Price shook his head obstinately. “Shouldn’t we find him, sir? I mean the least we can do is dig a decent grave.”
“You mean, dig up the French dead?”
“Yes, sir.”
Hogan shook his head. “Fire a volley over the grave tomorrow morning. That’ll do.”
It was all, Hogan thought as he walked slowly back to the Headquarters, that Sharpe might have wanted. No, that was not right. He did not know what Sharpe wanted, except success, and to prove that a man who came from the gutter could compete with anyone, be as good as the most privileged, and perhaps it was better that he should find peace now rather than strive after that remote dream, and then Hogan dismissed that thought as well. It was not better. Sharpe had been turbulent, ambitious, but one day, Hogan supposed, that restlessness would have found satisfaction. Then, curiously, Hogan found himself resenting Sharpe, resenting him because he had been killed and was thus denying his friendship to those who still lived. Hogan could not imagine being without Sharpe. Just when life seemed to reach an even keel the Rifleman could be relied on to upset things, stir them up, make excitement from dullness, and now it was all gone. A friend was dead.
Hogan wearily climbed the steps of the Headquarters and the officers were coming from the Dining Room as he went into the hallway. Wellington saw Hogan’s face and stopped. “Major?”
“Richard Sharpe’s dead, sir.”
“No.”
Hogan nodded. “I’m sorry, my lord.” He told what he knew.
Wellington listened in silence. He remembered Sharpe as a Sergeant. They had covered many miles together and much time. He saw the distress on Hogan’s face, understood it, but did not know what words to say. He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Hogan. I’m sorry.”
“Yes, sir.” It suddenly struck Hogan that life hereafter would seem anti-climactic, inadequate, and dull. Richard Sharpe was dead.
The surgeons had not lied to Major Hogan. They remembered Patrick Harper, stunned cold by the fall, and they had probed and palpated and found nothing broken and so he had been put into a ward where he could snore until he recovered consciousness.
There was another man involved in the fight on the upper cloister. When he reached the surgeon he was still breathing, but shallowly, and unconsciousness had blessedly released him from his pain. An orderly had stripped off the empty scabbard and sword belt, slit the shirt from the man’s back, and seen the old flogging scars. The body was lifted onto the stained table.
The surgeon, spattered with fresh blood that gleamed over the clotted, coagulated stains from the week’s operations, caught at Sharpe’s overalls, split them down with huge shears, and saw the wound low and right in Sharpe’s abdomen. He shook his head and swore. The blood welled up in the small bullet hole, spilt and pulsed onto the wounded man’s thigh and waist, and the surgeon did not even bother to pick up a knife. He leaned close to the muscled chest and noted that the breathing was shallow, so shallow as to be almost inaudible, and then he picked up the wrist. For a moment he could not find the pulse, was about to give up, and then he felt it; a thready, weak throb of a tiny heartbeat. He nodded at the orderly, then at the wound. “Close it.”
There was not much he could do, except stop the man bleeding to death and sometimes he thought that would be a mercy with this kind of wound. One orderly grasped Sharpe’s feet, held them tight, the second pinched the skin over the wound, pushing the flesh, blood and driven uniform threads together, and keeping his fingers clear of the welling hole. The surgeon crossed to the brazier, took out the poker, and cauterized the puncture. The wounded man jerked, gasped and moaned, but unconsciousness held him, and the bleeding stopped. Smoke hung over the bloody abdomen, the stink of burned flesh was in the surgeon’s nostrils. „put a bandage on. Take him away.“
The orderly who had closed the wound nodded. “No hope, sir?”
“No.” The bullet was inside. The surgeon could take a leg off in ninety seconds, he could probe for a bullet and pluck it from next to a thighbone in sixty, he could set broken limbs, he could even take a bullet from a man’s chest if it had not pierced a lung, but no one on earth, not even Napoleon’s famous Surgeon-General Larrey, could take out a bullet that had lodged in the lower right abdomen. This was a dead man. Already the breathing was shallow, the skin palloring, and the pulse going. The sooner he died, the better, for the rest of his life would be pain. It would be a short life. The wound would abscess, the rot would set in, and he would be buried within the week. The surgeon, irritated with himself for his thoroughness, heaved up Sharpe’s side and saw that there was no exit wound. Instead he saw the flogging scars. A troublemaker come to a bad end. “Take him downstairs. Next!”
They bandaged him, stripped him naked, and his clothes, such as they were, were tossed into a corner where they could be searched at leisure. Many men hid coins in the seams of their clothes and the orderlies reaped a tidy reward for their work. One of them looked at the pale face. “Who is he?”
“Dunno. French, I suppose.” Sharpe’s overalls were French.
“Don’t be stupid. French don’t flog their buggers.”
„They do!“
„They bloody don’t!“
“Doesn’t bloody matter. He’s dying. Give ‘im to Connelley. That’s what the doctor said. ”
Sergeant Harper could have told them that Sharpe was a British officer, but Sergeant Harper was unconscious in a ward, and Sharpe had borne no marks of rank, just the scars of a flogging that had been given him by Obadiah Hakeswill in an Indian village years before. He looked like a private, he was treated as a private, and he was carried down the damp steps to the cellar where the doctors left their hopeless cases to die. The death room.
Sergeant Michael Connelley, dying himself of alcoholic poisoning, heard the steps and turned his huge, fatty bulk round. “What you got?”
“Dunno, Sarge. Could be a frog, could be one of ours, but he ain’t saying.”
Connelley looked at the face, at the bandage, and tapped a quick sign of the cross on his chest. “Poor sod. At least he’s quiet. All right, boys, down the far end. We’ve some wee space left.” Connelley sat down on his bench, tipped the rum bottle to his face, and watched as the new man was carried into the darkness of the dank, bricked cellar. “Any money on him?”
“No, sarge. Poor as a bloody Irishman.”
“You watch yourself!” Connelley growled. He spat on the floor. They should have put me with the officers upstairs. There’s some rare money up there.“ He drank again.
They pushed Sharpe into the wall, laying him on a thin, lumpy straw palliasse, and his head was in the low space where the brick arch met the floor. There was a pile of dirty blankets under the single window, a small grating at the very top of the arch, and the orderly spread one on the naked body that had curled its legs into the foetal position. There you are, Sarge, all yours.“
“And in good hands he is, too.” Connelley was not an unkind man. Few would want his job, yet he did not mind. He tried to make the last hours of his dying charges as gentle as he could, yet even in death he expected men to have standards. Especially if there were Frenchmen dying in his room. Then he would lecture the wounded British, admonish them to die like men, not to disgrace themselves in front of the enemy. “You’ll be getting a proper funeral, will you not?” he would say, “with the whole regiment and reversed arms, the proper honours, and you’re making a noise like a wee girl. Shame on you, man, and will you not die well?”
He gestured to the other end of the room and spoke to the orderlies. “There is a dead one up there.”
It was cold in the death room. Connelley drank steadily. Some men breathed noisily, some moaned, and some talked. The big Sergeant prowled the central aisle from time to time, carrying a water bucket and ladle, and he would feel the feet of the patients to see if they had died. He came to Sharpe and crouched beside him. The breathing was shallow, moaning slightly in his throat, and Connelley put a hand on the naked shoulder and it was cold. “Ah, you poor man. You’ll catch your death!” He lumbered to the window, found another blanket, shook it as if he could free it of the lice that infested its seams, and spread it on top of the other blanket. A man at the far end cried out, caught in sudden pain, and Connelley screwed himself round. “Whoa there, lad! Whoa! Gentle now! Die well, die well.”
A Frenchman cried and Connelley squatted beside him, took the man’s hand, and talked of Ireland. He told the uncomprehending Frenchman of Connaught’s beauty, of its women, of fields so fat that a lamb was full grown in a week, of rivers so thick that the fish begged to be caught, and the Frenchman quieted and Connelley patted his hair and told him he was brave, and he was proud of him, and beyond the small grating the sky darkened into dusk and the orderlies came down again and dragged the Frenchman, who had died, head-bumping up the steps.
The pain was like a dream in Sharpe, and sometimes he floated up through the layers of pain and he cried out and at other times he was deep in its suffocating folds and the dream writhed inside him, separate from him, but part of him, pinned to him like the lance held in the Indian soldier’s hands that had pinned him to the tree outside Seringapatam, except this was dark, dark, and he cried out, sobbing because of the pain.
“Whoa there, lad!” Connelley paused with his bottle half way to his lips. “You’re a brave one now, sure you are. Be brave, lad.”
Sharpe was lying on his side. He was a child again, being beaten, tied to the bench in the foundling home and the arm was crashing down and crashing down and the birch was splintering inside him and the face of the supervisor changed to Wellington’s face and the face was laughing at him.
He dreamed. Teresa was there, but he did not remember that dream, and he did not know that he dreamed of La Marquesa, and the dusk turned to darkness, night in Salamanca, and it should have been his last night in the wide black-curtained bed and he moaned on the palliasse and Connelley, half drunk, called in his sing-song voice for him to die well.
He slept. He dreamed that the rats were chewing the flour and water paste that was caked onto a soldier’s hair. Recruits were forced to grow their hair long and when it was long enough it was pulled back and twisted round a leather queue, pulled so hard that some recruits screamed as the hair was yanked and twisted. The skeined hair was formed into the queue, five inches long, a solid pigtail, and it was caked with flour and water paste so that it was stiff and white and sometimes, in the night, the rats chewed at the queue. Then, surfacing into the pain, he remembered that he had not had his hair powdered and pasted for a dozen years, that the army had dropped the fashion, and that the rats were real, scuffling along the cellar’s edge, and he coughed at them, spat weakly, and the pain shrivelled him and he cried out.
“Die well, lad, die well.” Connelley had woken up. He should have been relieved hours ago, but he rarely was. They left him to drink peaceably with the dying men. The Irish Sergeant stood up, groaned as the pain hit him, and called again to Sharpe. “It’s only the rats, lad, they won’t touch you if you’re living.”
Sharpe knew then that the pain was real, that this was not a dream, and he wished he were dreaming again, but could not. He opened his eyes into the dank darkness and the pain was pulsing in him, making him sob, and he forced his knees up and tensed himself, but the pain was terrible and encompassing.
The rush light on the stairs flickered on the cellar wall. The bricks gleamed damply, darkly, curving down to Sharpe’s head and he knew he was in this place to die. He remembered Leroux, La Marquesa, and he knew he had been so confident and now it was all over. He had come so far, from the foundling home to being a Captain in Britain’s army, yet now he was as helpless as that small child strapped to the bench while the birch thrashed at it. He was going to die, and he was helpless, childlike, and he sobbed to himself and the pain was like flesh-hooks ripping him apart, and he dreamed again.
The Irish priest was mocking him, was stabbing him in the side with a long spear, and Sharpe knew he was being sent to hell. He dreamed he was in a vast building, so high that the roof was misty, and he was pinned by the long spear to the very centre of the floor, and he was tiny, and the great space echoed with laughter, insane laughter that boomed and banged its way in the huge building, and he knew that in a second the floor would open and he would fall endlessly, fall, down to the pits of hell, and he struggled out of that dream back to the pain. He would not go to hell, he would not, and he would not die, but the pain made him want to sleep or to scream.
The bricks glistened above his face. Cold water dripped slowly onto the palliasse. He knew it was the night’s middle, death’s kingdom, and the rats scuttled against the wall. He tried to talk, forcing words from the pain’s grip, and his voice was like wind stirring thistles. “Where am I?”
Connelley was drunk, asleep, and there was no answer.
There was no Harper. Sharpe remembered the body on the stairs, his friend, and the blood that puddled on the step, and Sharpe cried because he was alone, and was dying, and no one was there. There was no one. No Harper, no Teresa, no mother, no family, just a damp cellar of rats, cold in death’s kingdom, and all the glory of Colours carried into battle-smoke, of a soldier’s pride, of the bayonets rippling in sun and the boots going forward across the sparks towards victory ended here. In a death room. No Harper. No slow grin, no shared thoughts without words, no more laughter.
He sobbed, and in his sobs he swore he would not die.
The pain was all over so he forced his right hand down and found his naked legs, and then he moved his left hand and found the bandage and he felt round the bandage, round to his lower stomach, and the pain screamed up inside him in a vast red swell of breaking agony that drove him into unconsciousness again.
He dreamed his sword was broken, splintered grey shards, useless. He dreamed.
A man screamed in the room, a high-pitched quavering scream that startled the rats and woke Connelley. “Whoa there, lad! It’s all right, so it is, and sure I’m here. Hey lad, lad! Gentle now. Die well!”
“Where am I?” Sharpe’s voice was unheard in the noise. He knew, though. He had seen death rooms before.
The man who had screamed was crying now, small yelps that peaked in pathetic gulps, and Sergeant Connelley swiftly swallowed some rum, thrust the bottle in a gaping pocket, and lumbered down the room with his bucket of water. Other men were stirring, crying for water, for their mothers, for light, for help, and Connelley called out to them all. “I’m here, lads, I’m here, and you’re brave boys, are you not? Now be brave! We have the French, so we do, and would you want them to think that we’re weak?”
Sharpe breathed in short, shallow gasps, and he swore he would not die. He tried to blank the pain out, but he could not, and he tried to remember men who had come out of the death room alive. He could not. He could only think of his enemy, Sergeant Hakeswill, who had lived through a hanging, and Sharpe swore he would not die.
Connelley shushed the men with his rough tenderness. He walked down the room, pausing by some, finding some dead, comforting others. Sharpe drifted in the pain; it was like a live thing, trapping him, and he struggled with it. Connelley knelt by him, talked to him, and Sharpe heard the Irish voice.
“Patrick?”
“Are you called Patrick now? And us thinking you was a Frenchie.” Connelley stroked the dark hair.
“Patrick?”
“And a good name it is, lad. Connelley’s my name, and Kilkieran Bay’s my country, and you and I will walk on the cliffs there.”
“Dying.” Sharpe had meant it as a question, but the word came as a statement.
“And sure you’re not! You’ll be chasing the women yet, Paddy, so you will.” Connelley took his rum bottle, lifted Sharpe’s head gently, and poured the smallest amount between the lips. “You sleep now, Paddy, you hear me?”
“I’m not going to die.” Each word was soft, each almost edged with a sob.
“Sure you’re not!” Connelley lowered the head. “They can’t kill us Irish.” He backed into the aisle and stood up. The room was quieter now, but Connelley knew that the noise could break cut-again. They were like puppies the dying. Once one was excited, the whole litter began yelping, and a man deserved some quiet to drink and die in. He sang to them, walking up and down the aisle, and he sang the Corporal’s Song that told of the soldier’s life and he repeated the refrain over and over again as if he wanted to sing them softly into a soldier’s death. “It’s a very merry, hey down deny, sort of life enough. A very merry, hey down deny, sort of life enough.”
The next morning Lieutenant Price marched the Company to the field, west of the city, where a common grave had been dug for the French. The Company were shocked, unbelieving. They stopped by the pit. Price stared into the hole. It looked as if dogs had been clawing at the part where the shrouded bodies had been already covered with earth. A sentry shrugged. “We caught some bloody madman here this morning, sir. He was trying to dig up the bodies.”
They were in two ranks. Price nodded at McGovern. “Carry on, Sergeant.”
It seemed terribly inadequate. The commands were given, the muskets and rifles went into the shoulders, the volley echoed back from the houses. It all seemed so flat, so wrong, so inadequate.
As the volley and its echo died away there came a sudden burst of bells from the city, pealing bells, victorious and joyful, and the Company marched away from them, going north, leaving a small cloud of smoke that hung over the grave.
Hogan heard the volley, very distantly, and then came the bells clamouring and he straightened his uniform, took off his bicorne hat, and went into the Cathedral. It was Sunday. A Te Deum was to be sung for the liberation of Salamanca, for the destruction of the forts, yet it was a half-hearted celebration. The Cathedral was full, packed with gaudy uniforms, sombre citizens, and robed priests, and the organ thundered in the great space, yet Hogan knew nothing but an immense sadness. The congregation sang and responded, went through the motions, yet they knew that Salamanca was only temporarily freed, that the army of Marmont still had to be destroyed, and some of them, the better informed, knew that four other French armies were in Spain and that no city would be free till all had been defeated. And the price would be high. Already a great part of Salamanca had been destroyed to clear a space around the fortresses. The city had lost cloisters, courts, colleges, and houses; all ground to rubble.
After the service, Wellington stood beneath the fantastic carvings of the great western doors, opposite the Bishop’s palace, and acknowledged the applause of the crowd. He pushed through them, nodding and smiling, sometimes waving with his plain hat, but his eyes flicked over the faces looking for someone. He saw Hogan, and the hat gestured at the Irishman.
“My lord?”
“Is it done?”
“Yes, my lord.”
Wellington nodded. “We march tonight.”
Hogan was left behind by the General’s progress. What had been done was to put a discreet guard on El Mirador. It had not been an easy decision. To guard El Mirador meant telling the chosen guard who their ward was and why he was important, yet with Leroux at liberty it was the only course left. Lord Spears, his arm mending, but not yet fully fit for normal duties, had been given the task. At first he had been reluctant, but when told that El Mirador was not to be close-guarded at home, only out in public places, he relented. He would still have time, it seemed, for his relentless gambling. Then he was told El Mirador’s identity and he shook his head, disbelieving. “Bless my soul, sir! One would never have guessed!” No one at Headquarters, apart from Wellington himself and Hogan, knew what Lord Spears’ new duties were. Hogan was mindful that Leroux had a source within the British Headquarters.
All had been done, then, that could be done, and it had been done heavily, reluctantly, because Hogan still had not fully understood that Sharpe was dead. Twice that morning he had seen Rifle Officers walking in the streets and both times his heart had leapt because he thought he saw Sharpe, and then he remembered. Richard Sharpe was dead, and the army would march on without him, and Hogan let the crowds disperse and walked slowly, disconsolately through the streets.
“Sir! Sir!” The voice shouted at him from down the hill. “Major Hogan!”
Hogan looked down the steep street he had been passing. A group of chained prisoners were being led by Provosts, one of whom clubbed with reversed musket at a shackled man. Hogan had recognised the voice. He ran. “Stop it! Stop it!”
The Provosts turned round. They were the police force of the army, universally disliked, and they watched Hogan’s approach with silent truculence. Sergeant Harper, who had shouted, was still on the ground. He looked up at Hogan. “Would you be telling this scum to let me go, sir?”
Hogan felt an immense relief when he saw Patrick Harper. There was something intensely reassuring about his fellow Irishman, and Harper was so inseparable from Sharpe that Hogan felt a sudden, crazy hope that if Harper lived, then Sharpe must, too. He crouched beside the Sergeant who was rubbing his shoulder where the Provost had clubbed him. “I thought you were in the hospital.”
“So I was. I got the hell out.” Harper was angry. He spat on the ground. “I woke up this morning, sir, early, with a head like the very devil. I went to look for the Captain.”
Hogan wondered if Harper did not know yet. He wondered how the big Sergeant came to be arrested. The Provosts stirred sullenly and one suggested to the other that he go and find their own Captain. The man left. Hogan sighed. “I think he’s dead, Patrick.”
Harper shook his head stubbornly. “He’s not, sir.” The chains clinked as he held up a hand to silence Hogan. “The guard on the gate told me he was, he said that he’d been buried with the French.”
“That’s right.” Hogan had told the gate Sergeant at the Irish College. “I’m sorry, Patrick.”
Harper shook his head again. “He’s not there, sir.”
“What do you mean?”
“I looked. He’s not there.”
“You looked?” Hogan noticed for the first time that Harper’s trousers were stained with earth.
Harper stood up, towering over the other prisoners. “I slit up more than twenty shrouds, sir, right down to the ones that stank. He wasn’t there.” He shrugged. “I thought at the very least the man should have a proper burial.”
“You mean?” Hogan stopped. The hope fluttered in him, and he pushed it down. He turned to the Provost. “Set him free.”
“Can’t do that, sir. Regulations.”
Hogan was a small man, usually mild, but he could be roused to a wrath that was awesome. He released it on the Provost, threatened him with the same shackles, threatened him with punishment Battalions in the Fever Isles, and the Provost, wilting under the onslaught, knocked the bolts out of the manacles. Harper rubbed his wrists as the other Provost, with his Captain, came back. The Captain took one look at the freed prisoner, saluted Hogan, and launched into an explanation. “The prisoner was found this morning, sir, desecrating the dead…‘
“Quiet.” Hogan’s voice cracked with anger. He looked at Harper. “Where are your weapons?”
Harper jerked his head at the Provosts. “These bastards have them, sir.”
Hogan looked at the Captain. “Sergeant Harper’s weapons are to be delivered to me, Major Hogan, at Army Headquarters, within one hour. They are to be cleaned, polished, and oiled. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Harper stepped on the foot of the man who had hit him with a musket. Hogan saw the man’s face flinch in agony, Harper leaned harder, then the Sergeant stepped away with a surprised look on his face. “Sorry.” He looked at Hogan. “Should we go and look for him, sir?”
Hogan had seen the lump and the blood on Harper’s head. He gestured at it. “How is it?”
“Bloody terrible, sir. Feels as if some bastard scraped my brains out. I’ll live.” Harper set off up the street.
Hogan caught up with him. “Don’t be too hopeful, Patrick.” He did not like saying it, but it had to be said. “He was shot, and the surgeons didn’t see him.” Hogan had to hurry to keep up with the huge Sergeant. “He’s probably buried with the British, Patrick.”
Harper shook his head. “He’s not buried at all, sir. He’s probably sitting up in bed screaming for his breakfast. He always did have a terrible tongue in his head in the morning.”
Hogan shook his head. “You didn’t hear me. They didn’t treat a British officer with a bullet wound.” He hated puncturing Harper’s hopes, yet still the Irish Sergeant seemed unmoved.
“You searched, sir?”
“Yes. Officers’ wards, surgery, the dead in the courtyard.”
“Other ranks’ wards?”
Hogan shrugged. “Sergeant Huckfield looked for you, he didn’t see Sharpe. Why should Sharpe be there?”
Harper screwed his face up with the pain of his head. “They didn’t treat an officer?”
Hogan felt sorry for Harper. At last the truth had sunk in. “I’m sorry, Patrick. They didn’t.”
“Like as not. The bugger wasn’t wearing his jacket, and doubtless they saw the scars on his back.”
“He what?” Hogan dodged round a water-seller who was waving his leather spout hoping the Major would buy.
Harper shrugged. “He left his jacket with the Lieutenant, didn’t he? It was so damned hot out there. Then the surgeons must have seen his back. Like mine.” Both Sharpe and Harper had been flogged and the scars never went.
Hogan swore at the absent Lieutenant Price who had never thought to mention Sharpe’s jacket. He began to run, the hope suddenly giddy inside him, and they took the steps of the college in two leaps. The hope stayed with him as they went into the mens’ wards. Hogan imagined Sharpe’s face when he saw them, the relief, the joking that he had been mistaken for a Private, even a Frenchman, but there was no Sharpe there. They searched each room, twice, and the faces on the floor stayed the same. Harper shrugged. “Perhaps he woke up, told them who he was?”
The orderlies said no. They had seen no officers, no patient complaining about being in the ward. There was no Sharpe. The hope went. Even Harper seemed to be resigned. “I can dig up the British, sir.”
“No, Patrick.”
One of the orderlies had become involved in their search. He still wandered, hopeful, among the crammed wounded. He looked at Hogan and seemed reluctant to speak. “Was he shot bad, sir?”
Hogan nodded. “Yes.”
“Connelley’s kingdom, sir?”
“What?” The orderly pointed out of the window to a small door at the far side of the courtyard. “The death room, sir. The cellar.”
They crossed the grass, beneath the awnings that were still rigged round the wellhead, and Harper pulled open the door.;A stench came up into the sunlight, a stench of pus, blood, vomit, foulness and death. There was a light at the bottom of the steps, a feeble, flickering rushlight, and a great bulk of a man peered up in its illumination.
“Who’s that?”
“Friends. Who are you?”
“Connelley, your honour. Sergeant. Would you be relieving me, of your kindness?”
“We would not.” Harper went down the steps, treading carefully because they were slippery, and the stink of disease and death grew worse. The room was filled with moaning, with small cries, but the bodies lay utterly still as if, in the darkness, they were rehearsing for the grave. “We’re looking for a man with a scarred face, and scarred back. He was shot yesterday.”
Connelley swayed slightly, the drink rank on his breath. “Would you be Irish?”
“I would. Now do you know the man?”
“A scar, you say? They all have scars. They’re soldiers, not milkmaids.” Connelley groaned and sat heavily on his bench. He waved a hand towards the small barred window. “We had an Irish lad in yesterday, shot he was. Patrick he calls himself. He was alive an hour ago, but he won’t last. They never do.” Hogan had come down the stairs and the fat, drunken Sergeant peered at the officer’s uniform. “Oh, my God, and it’s an officer, to be sure.” He lumbered to his feet and his hand wavered to a salute. The salute turned into an expansive wave round the room. “Ah, and they’re all good lads. They know how to die like men, so they do, and there’s no call for you to be officering them, sir, they’re doing their duty.”
Harper pushed Connelley gently back onto his bench. He took the torch from its bracket and set off to search the room. Hogan watched him and felt the hope inside him shrivel to nothingness. The bodies were so still, so hopeless. The room was like a grave.
Harper crouched under the brick ceiling and held the torch over the bodies. He went left first, into the darkest part of the cellar, and the faces he saw were pale. Some slept, some were dead, and some watched the light go past and there was a terrible hope in their eyes that the torch presaged some help, some miracle. Many shivered beneath their blankets. Fever would kill them if their wounds did not.
Harper could not imagine a man being in this room and living, but this was the death room and they were here to die. The big Sergeant, Connelley, seemed decent enough. Some death-room attendants simply stifled their charges, or slipped a dagger between their ribs, because they could not endure the endless crying, the moans, the helpless, childlike ways of the dying. Harper turned at the end wall and carried the torch down the far side. He stopped a few times and pulled damp blankets away from hidden faces, and he saw the fever and smelt their deaths. He went past the stairs where Hogan stood by Connelley’s bench. “Anything, Sergeant?” Hogan’s whisper was an expression of worry. Harper did not reply.
He stopped beside another man whose face was hidden, whose legs were drawn up, and Harper pulled back the blanket that lay right up to the dark hair. There was a second blanket beneath and the man was clutching it, hiding his face, and Harper had to prise the fingers open so he could pull it down.
The eyes were red. Already the cheeks seemed sunken. The face was pale, the hair soaking with sweat and water. Harper could not detect any breath, yet the fingers had not been cold, and the huge Irishman put a single finger onto the long scar. The eyes did not move. They were staring into blankness, into the space where the rats had been in the night. Harper’s voice was very soft. “You silly bugger. What are you doing here?”
Sharpe’s eyes moved, slowly, up to the face that flickered in the light of the torch. “Patrick?” There was no strength in the voice.
“Yes.” Harper looked round at Hogan. “He’s here, sir.”
“Alive?” Hogan’s voice was just above a whisper.
“Yes, sir.” But only just, Harper thought, by the thickness of the merest thread, but alive.
Marmont had marched north, away from the River Tonnes, forty miles to the valley of the River Douro. The dust of the French retreat spiralled high from the wheels, boots and hooves of the army; dust that plumed in the sun over the wheatfields. It was like the thin smoke trail of an unimaginably large grass fire. It faded, carried eastwards by a breeze from the far Atlantic, and the plains of Leon were left empty except for the hovering hawks, the lizards, and the poppies and cornflowers that smeared colour on a bleached land.
On Monday, June 29th, the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, the British army was swallowed up in the haze of the immense plain. They went north, following Marmont, and all that came back were rumours. One day the people of Salamanca said that there had been a great battle, that the sky had lit up with the flashes of the great guns, but it wasjust a summer storm sheeting the dark horizon with silver and the next day there was another rumour. It was said Wellington was beaten, his head cut off, and then it was the French who had lost, who had soaked the Douro red with their blood, dammed it with their corpses. They were just rumours.
The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary came and went, then St. Martin’s Day, and a peasant girl in BarbadillO said an angel had appeared to her in a dream. The angel had been armoured in gold and carried a scarlet sword with two blades. The angel had said that the last battle would be fought in Salamanca, that the armies of the north would harrow the city, pour blood in its streets, desecrate the Cathedrals, trample the host, until, in desperation, the earth would open up and swallow the evil and righteous alike. Her village priest, a lazy and sensible man, had her locked away. There was trouble enough in the world without hysterical women, but the rumour spread, and the peasants looked at their young olives and wondered if they would live to see an autumn harvest.
In the north, beyond the Douro, beyond Galicia, across the Pyrenees and France itself, and still further north, a small man led a vast army into Russia. It was an army the like of which the world had not seen since the hooves of the Barbarians came out of the dawn. The war had become unimaginable, so vast that the dreams of a Barbadillo peasant girl were not so far removed from the fears of sober statesmen. Across the Atlantic, beyond the shredded wave crests, the Americans prepared their forces to invade British Canada. It was a world war now, fought from the Great Lakes to the Indian Ocean, from the Russian steppes to the plains of Leon.
Sharpe was alive. A message went north to the South Essex, and another went further north to La Aguja, “the needle‘, and it told of her husband’s injury and urged her to come south. Hogan was not hopeful that his messenger could reach Teresa; the journey was long and the Partisans used secret paths and hiding places.
Sharpe was moved upstairs. He had his own room, small and bare, and Harper and Isabella curtained offone half and lived with him. The doctors said Sharpe would die. The pain, they said, would stay with him, even increase, and the wound would abscess into constant blood and pus. Most of what they said came true. Hogan had ordered Harper to stay, an unnecessary order, but the big Irish Sergeant sometimes found it hard to endure the pain, the smell, the helplessness of his Captain. He and Isabella washed Sharpe, cleaned away the pus, dressed the wound, and listened to the rumours that came back to the small British force left in the city.
A letter came from the Battalion, written by Major Forrest and signed with scores of names. The Light Company wrote their own, penned by Lieutenant Price, decorated by the crosses and signatures of the men, and sometimes Sharpe was lucid and he was pleased with the letters.
Somehow he hung on. Each morning Harper expected to find his Captain dead, but he lived, and even the doctors shrugged and conceded that sometimes, very rarely, a man recovered from that wound. Then Sharpe took the fever. The wound was still abscessed, its dressing changed twice a day, but now Harper and Isabella had to wipe the sweat that poured from Sharpe and listen to the ravings that he muttered day and night.
Isabella found some Rifleman’s trousers, taken from a dead man who was as tall as Sharpe, and she hung them on the wall beneath the jacket and above Sharpe’s boots that Harper had found discarded in the small courtyard. The uniform waited for him, but the doctors had again given up hope. The fever would kill him. Harper wanted to know how they would treat a fever and the doctors tried to fob him off, but the Irishman had heard of some miracle cure, a new cure, something to do with the bark of a South American tree. The doctors had very little of the substance, but Harper frightened them and they yielded it up, grudgingly, and Harper gave it to Sharpe. It seemed to help, yet the doctors had very little of the precious substance. It had only reached them the previous year, it was expensive, and they made it go further by mixing the powdered quinine with black pepper. When the quinine ran out they gave Sharpe quassia bark instead, but still the fever raged, and even the Navy’s remedy, suggested by Lord Spears, which consisted of gunpowder mixed with brandy, did not work.
There was an army remedy and Harper decided on that.
He carried Sharpe downstairs one morning, stripped him naked, and laid him on the grass of the courtyard just beside the cloister. The Sergeant had already drawn bucket after bucket of well water and carried them to the top cloister where he had filled two rain barrels. He would have preferred to be higher, three floors at least, but the upper cloister was the best he could do. He looked down on the shivering naked body and poured the first barrel in a glittering cold shock that exploded on Sharpe. He cried out, jack-knifed, and the second barrel followed in a cascade that flattened Sharpe, choked him, and then Harper ran downstairs, wrapped Sharpe in a dry blanket, and carried the emaciated body back to the cot. The doctors said that Harper had certainly killed Sharpe with that treatment, yet that night the fever went down and Harper came back from the Cathedral to find Sharpe lucid again.
“How are you feeling, sir?”
“Bloody.” He looked it, too. His eyes were sunk in a pale face.
Harper grinned at him. “You’ll be up soon.”
Harper and Isabella took it in turns to pray. She used the chapel of the Irish College, close and beautiful, but Harper thought God might be nearer to the big Cathedral and he climbed the hill twice a day and he prayed with a childlike intensity. His broad, strong face would screw up in concentration as though the very force of his thoughts could drive the prayer up, past the statues, past the glorious ceiling, and up to a heaven where so many other prayers were clamouring for answers. He lit candles to St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes, and he prayed to him, pleaded with him, and once again the doctors began to cautiously suggest that there was a chance; that sometimes men recovered from the wound, and Harper prayed on. Yet he knew something was nüssing. They gave Sharpe medicines when they could, prayers that they did not tell him about, and Harper knew there was something else; something that might persuade Sharpe to live. Something was missing.
Sharpe’s weapons were missing. The Rifle had been stolen in the hospital, the sword broken by Leroux. It took Harper three days, a bribe, but in the end a storekeeper with the Town Major opened up a small warehouse and rummaged through the racks. “Swords,” he muttered to himself, “swords. You can have this one.” He offered Harper a sabre.
“That’s bloody rubbish. It’s got bloody woodworm. I want a Heavy sword, not that bent rubbish.”
The Corporal storekeeper sniffed. He found another sword, this one straight. “Twenty pounds?”
“You want me to try it on you? I’ve paid already.”
The Corporal shrugged. “I have to account for this lot.”
“You poor wee man. And how do you account for the stuff you steal?” Harper went to the racks himself, raked through the weapons, and found a plain, sturdy, Heavy Cavalry blade. „I’ll take this one. Where are your rifles?“
“Rifles? You didn’t say nothing about any rifles.”
“Well I am now.” The huge Sergeant pushed past the storekeeper. “Well?”
The Corporal glanced at the open door. “More than my bloody job’s worth.”
“Your job’s worth cowdung. Now where are the rifles?”
The Corporal reluctantly opened a box. “That’s all we’ve got. Don’t get many.”
Harper picked one up. It was new, beautiful, the lock greased, but it would not do. “Are they all like this?”
“Yes.” The Corporal was nervous.
“You can keep it.” Harper put it back. He would have liked one for himself, let alone Sharpe, but these were the new rifles with the carbine bore, smaller than the old rifles, and he knew that they would never be able to get a reliable source of ammunition. The rifle would have to wait. He grinned at the storekeeper. “Now a scabbard.”
The man shook his head. “Scabbards is difficult.”
Harper pointed the blade at the storekeeper’s throat.
“You’ve got two dollars of mine. That says scabbards are easy. Now give.”
He gave. The sword was not like Sharpe’s old sword. This one had not been looked after, it was dull, but it was a Heavy Cavalry sword and Harper set to work on it. The first day he remade the sword’s guard. The guard was slim at the pommel and then it broadened so that it would cover a man’s fist and it ended in a broad circle that guarded against an enemy’s blade sliding down the sword and slicing into a cavalryman’s hand. It was a comfortable guard if a man spent his life in the saddle, but the heavy, steel circle cut into a man’s ribs if he wore the sword as Sharpe would wear it. It was too long a blade to hang comfortably at the waist. The slings of the scabbard would have to be shortened so that the handle and guard of the sword would lie at the bottom of Sharpe’s left rib cage. Harper borrowed a hacksaw, some files, and he worked on the guard. He cut the right hand side of the circle back, past the small holes that could be tasselled for display, right down to within an inch of the blade. He made an edge that was crude, mis-shapen, and ugly, but he filed it obsessively until the shape of the new guard was smooth and easy on the eye. Then he polished the steel until it looked as if it was fresh from the Birmingham factory of Woolley & Deakin.
The handle of the sword was tight on the blade’s tang, but the wooden grip was rough to the palm. Harper took off the backpiece and filed the grip, and then he varnished it with oil and beeswax until the handle was dark brown and shining.
On the second day he remade the blade. The back edge of the sword was straight and the point was made by curving the fore edge back to meet it. That was not the point Sharpe liked. The rifleman liked a blade with two edges, both sharp, and a point that was symmetrical. Harper raked through the workshops of the College and found the wheel the gardeners used to sharpen their scythes. He oiled the wheel, treadled it, and then put the blade onto the stone so that it rang, it shrieked, and the sparks flowed like live-fire from the steel. He worked the back edge, curving the sword’s last two inches until the fore and back edges were the same. He had made a balanced point. Then he polished the sword, holding the blade up to the light to make sure the stone marks were even. The steel gleamed.
Finally, as the afternoon wore on, he sharpened the blade. He gave Sharpe an edge that the Captain had never had, and he worked at it, and worked, and the perfectionist in him would not give up until the fore edge, and the top seven inches of the back, were razor sharp. He let the wheel slow to a stop.
He took a rag and poured olive oil onto the sword. He polished it again, oiled it, and the sword was unrecognisable from the blade he had taken from the storekeeper. It was no Kligenthal, but it was no ordinary sword. He had remade Sharpe’s sword, done it with care and friendship, and he had put into his work all the Celtic magic that he could muster. It was as if in working on the sword he was working on Sharpe himself, and he held the finished blade up to the westering sun and it blazed white light in a dazzling burst. It was made.
He took the sword upstairs, looked forward to Sharpe’s face, and Isabella met him. She was running down the cloister and at first Harper was alarmed, and then he saw the look on her face and she threw herself at him, talked so fast that he had to slow her down, and she gabbled her news. A woman had come, and such a woman! Hair like gold and a coach with four horses! She had visited the hospital and she had given gifts to the wounded men and then — Isabella’s eyes still sparkled at the memory — the woman had come to Sharpe’s room and she had visited the Captain and she had been angry.
Harper slowed her down. “Angry?” The Captain was a hero, wasn’t he? La Marquesa had shouted at the doctors, had told them it was disgusting that a hero should live in such a place and tomorrow La Marquesa was sending a carriage that was to take Sharpe to a house outside the town, a house fey the river, and the best of it was, and here Isabella jumped up and down beside her huge Irishman, clutching at his jacket in her excitement, that the aristocrat had talked to her, Isabella! She and Harper were to go with the Captain. They would have servants, cooks, and Isabella twirled in the cloister and said that La Marquesa had been kind to her, grateful to her, and by the way the Captain was feeling better.
Harper grinned because of her infectious delight. “Say that all again.”
She said it again, and this time she wanted to know where he had been. He had missed La Marquesa, the most gracious person Isabella had ever met, a Queen! Well, almost a Queen, and Harper missed her, and tomorrow they were all moving to a house by the river and they were to have servants! And by the way the Captain is much better.
“What do you mean, better?”
“I changed the bandage, si? She was here! I thought she might visit us. She visit everyone. So I change the bandage and no muck? Patrick! No muck!”
“No pus?”
“No nothing. No muck, no blood.”
“Where is he now?”
She opened her eyes wide because her tale was dramatic. “He sit up in bed, si? Up! He very happy that La Marquesa see him!.” She punched Harper. “And you do not see her! Four horses! And your friend was here.”
“My friend?”
“The English Lord. Lord Spears.” She sighed. “He has a blue and silver uniform, all shining, and no arm any more! The bandage is off!”
“You mean his arm is out of the sling?”
“That’s what I say.” She smiled at him. “You would look good in blue and silver.”
“Aye. It would make a change from black and blue.” He grinned at her. “Would you stay here, woman? I want to talk to him.”
He pushed open the door of Sharpe’s room and, as Isabella had said, Sharpe was sitting up. There was an expression of wonderment on Sharpe’s face as if he expected the clenching pain to come back at any moment. He looked up at Harper and smiled. “It’s better than it was. I don’t understand it.”
“The doctors said it might happen.”
“The doctors said I would die.” He saw the sword in Harper’s hand. “What’s that?”
“Just an old sword, sir.” Harper tried to keep his voice matter of fact, but he could not hide his grin. He shrugged. “I thought you might be wanting it.”
“Show me.” Sharpe held out a hand and Harper saw how desperately thin his Captain’s wrist was. Harper reversed the sword, held it out, and Sharpe grasped the handle. Harper pulled the scabbard away, the sword was in Sharpe’s hand, and the weight pulled it down, almost to the floor, and Sharpe had to use all his feeble strength to bring the long, clumsy blade up again. It shone in the small light from the window. Sharpe’s eyes stayed on the blade and his face was all that Harper could want. The blade turned over, slowly, the arm horribly weak as it rehearsed the twist that the sword needed as it lunged into an enemy. Sharpe looked up at Harper. “You did it?”
“Aye, well, you know, sir. Not much to do, sir. Passed the time, so it did.”
Sharpe twisted the blade back and the light ran down the steel. “It’s beautiful.”
“Just the old ‘96 pattern, sir. Standard issue. Nothing special. I took the odd nick out the edge, sir. Would it be’true, sir, that we’re moving tomorrow? To higher circles, I hear?”
Sharpe nodded, but he was not listening to Harper’s words properly. He was looking at the blade, letting his gaze go up and down the steel, from the new point on the sword to the place where the steel buried itself into the reshaped guard. The weight was too much for him and it sank, slowly, until the tip rested on the rush matting. He looked up at Harper. “Thank you.”
“For nothing, sir. Thought you might need it.”
„I’ll kill the bastard with it.“ Sharpe grimaced with the effort, but the blade came up again. „I’ll slaughter the bastard.”
Patrick Harper grinned. Richard Sharpe was going to live.