Sharpe 12 - Sharpe's Battle (31 page)

Wellington has made a bollocks of it," he said.

André Massena had begun his military career as a private in the ranks of Louis

XVI's army and now he was a marshal of France, the Duke of Rivoli and the

Prince of Essling. Men called him “Your Majesty”, yet once he had been a half- starved wharf rat in the small town of Nice. He had also once possessed two eyes, but the Emperor had shot one of the eyeballs away in a hunting accident.

Napoleon would never acknowledge the responsibility, but nor would Marshal

Masséna ever dream of blaming his beloved Emperor for the eye's loss, for he owed both his royal status and his high military rank to Napoleon who had recognized the wharf rat's skills as a soldier. Those skills had made André

Masséna famous inside the Empire and feared outside. He had trampled through

Italy winning victory after victory, he had smashed the Russians on the borders of Switzerland and rammed bloody defeat down Austrian throats before

Marengo. Marshal André Masséna, Duke of Rivoli and Prince of Essling, was not a pretty soldier, but by God he knew how to fight, which was why, at fifty-two years old, he had been sent to retrieve the disasters besetting the Emperor's armies in Spain and Portugal.

Now the wharf rat turned prince watched in disbelief as the gap between the two parts of the British army opened still wider. For a few seconds he even toyed with the idea that perhaps the four or five thousand red-coated infantrymen marching southwards were the Irish regiments that Major Ducos had promised would mutiny before the battle, but Masséna had never put much hope in Ducos's stratagem and the fact that these nine battalions were flying their flags as they marched suggested that they were hardly in revolt. Instead, miraculously, it seemed that the British were offering them up as a sacrifice by isolating them out in the southern plain where they would be far from any help. Masséna watched as the enemy regiments finally stopped just short of a village far to the south. According to his map the village was called Nave de

Haver and it lay nearly five miles from Fuentes de Onoro. “Is Wellington tricking us?” Masséna asked an aide.

The aide was just as incredulous as his master. “Perhaps he believes he can beat us without keeping to the rules?” he suggested.

“Then in the morning we will teach him about the rules of war. I expected better of this Englishman! Tomorrow night, Jean, we shall have his whores as our own. Does Wellington have whores?”

“I don't know, Your Majesty.”

“Then find out. And make sure I get the pick of the bunch before some filthy grenadier gives her the clap, you hear me?”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” the aide said. His master's passion for women was as tiresome as his appetite for victory was inspiring, and tomorrow, it seemed, both hungers would be satisfied.

By mid-afternoon it was plain that the French were not coming that day. The picquets were doubled, and every battalion kept at least three companies under arms, but the other companies were released to more usual duties. Cattle were herded onto the plateau and slaughtered for the evening meal, bread was fetched from Vilar Formoso and the rum ration distributed.

Captain Donaju sought and received Tarrant's permission to take a score of men to attend Lord Kiely's burial which was taking place four miles behind Fuentes de Onoro. Hogan also insisted that Sharpe attend and Harper wanted to come as well. Sharpe felt awkward in Hogan's company, especially as the Irishman seemed blithely unaware of Sharpe's bitterness over the court of inquiry. “I invited Runciman,” Hogan told Sharpe as they walked along the dusty road west from Vilar Formoso, “but he didn't really want to come. Poor fellow.”

“In a bad way, is he?” Sharpe asked.

“Heartbroken,” Hogan said callously. “Keeps claiming that nothing was his fault. He doesn't seem to grasp that isn't the point.”

“It isn't, is it? The point is that you'd prefer to keep bloody Valverde happy.”

Hogan shook his head. “I'd prefer to bury Valverde, and preferably alive, but what I really want is for Wellington to be Generalisimo.”

“And you'll sacrifice me for that?”

"Of course! Every soldier knows you must lose some valuable men if you want to win a great prize. Besides, what does it matter if you do lose your commission? You'll just go off and join Teresa and become a famous partisan:

El Fusilero!“ Hogan smiled cheerfully, then turned to Harper. ”Sergeant? Would you do me a great service and give me a moment's privacy with Captain Sharpe?"

Harper obligingly walked on ahead where he tried to overhear the conversation between the two officers, but Hogan kept his voice low and Sharpe's exclamations of surprise offered Harper no clue. Nor did he have any chance to question Sharpe before the three British officers turned a corner to see Lord

Kiely's servants and Captain Donaju's twenty men standing awkwardly beside a grave that had been recently dug in an orchard next to a graveyard. Father

Sarsfield had paid the village gravediggers to dig the hole just feet away from consecrated ground for, though the laws of the church insisted that Lord

Kiely's sins must keep him from burial in holy ground, Sarsfield would nevertheless place the body as near as he could to consecrated soil so that on

Judgment Day the exiled Irishman's soul would not be utterly bereft of

Christian company. The body had been stitched into a dirty white canvas shroud. Four men of the Real Companïa Irlandesa lowered the corpse into the deep grave, then Hogan, Sharpe and Harper took off their hats as Father

Sarsfield said the prayers in Latin and afterwards spoke in English to the twenty guardsmen. Lord Kiely, the priest said, had suffered from the sin of pride and that pride had not let him endure disappointment. Yet all Irishmen,

Sarsfield said, must learn to live with disappointment for it was given to their heritage as surely as the sparks flew upwards. Yet, he went on, the proper response to disappointment was not to abandon hope and reject God's gift of life, but to keep the hope glowing bright. "We have no homes, you and

I,“ he said to the sombre guardsmen, ”but one day we shall all inherit our earthly home, and if it is not given to us then it will come to our children or to our children's children.“ The priest fell silent and stared down into the grave. ”Nor must you worry that his Lordship committed suicide,“ he finally continued. ”Suicide is a sin, but sometimes life is so unbearable that we must risk the sin rather than face the horror. Wolfe Tone made that choice thirteen years ago.“ The mention of the Irish patriot rebel made one or two of the guardsmen glance at Sharpe, then they looked back to the priest who went on in his gentle, persuasive voice to tell how Wolfe Tone had been held captive in a British dungeon and how, rather than face the enemy's gallows, he had slit his own throat with a penknife. ”Lord Kiely's motives might not have been so pure as Tone's,“ Sarsfield said, ”but we don't know what sadness drove him to his sin and in our ignorance we must therefore pray for his soul and forgive him." There were tears in the priest's eyes as he took a small phial of holy water from the haversack at his side and sprinkled its drops on the lonely grave. He offered the benediction in Latin, then stepped back as the guardsmen raised their muskets to fire a ragged volley over the open grave.

Birds panicked up from the orchard's trees, then circled and flew back as the smoke dissipated among the branches.

Hogan took charge as soon as the volley had been fired. He insisted that there was still some danger of a French attack at dusk and that the soldiers should all return to the ridge. “I'll follow soon,” he told Sharpe, then he ordered

Kiely's servants back to his Lordship's quarters.

The soldiers and servants left, the sound of their boots fading in the late afternoon air. It was sultry in the orchard where the two gravediggers waited patiently for the signal to fill up the grave beside which Hogan now stood, hat in hand, staring down at the shrouded corpse. “For a long time,” he said to Father Sarsfield, “I've carried a pillbox with some Irish earth inside so that if I should die I would rest with a little bit of Ireland all through eternity. I seem to have mislaid it, Father, which is a pity for I'd have liked to sprinkle a wee bit of Ireland's soil onto Lord Kiely's grave.”

“A generous thought, Major,” Sarsfield said.

Hogan stared down at Kiely's shroud. “The poor man. I hear he was hoping to marry the Lady Juanita?”

“They spoke of it,” Sarsfield said drily, his tone implying his disapproval of the match.

“The lady's doubtless in mourning,” Hogan said, then put his hat back on. "Or maybe she's not mourning at all? You've heard that she's gone back to the

French? Captain Sharpe let her go. He's a fool for women, that man, but the

Lady Juanita can easily make a fool of men. She did of poor Kiely here, did she not?“ Hogan paused as a sneeze gathered and exploded. ”Bless me,“ he said, wiping his nose and eyes with a vast red handkerchief. ”And what a terrible woman she was,“ he went on. ”Saying she was going to marry Kiely, and all the while she was committing adultery and fornication with Brigadier Guy Loup. Is fornication a mere venial sin these days?"

“Fornication, Major, is a mortal sin.” Sarsfield smiled. “As I suspect you know only too well.”

“Crying out to heaven for revenge, is it?” Hogan returned the smile, then looked back to the grave. Bees hummed in the orchard blossoms above Hogan's head. “But what about fornicating with the enemy, Father?” he asked. “Isn't that a worse sin?”

Sarsfield took the scapular from around his neck, kissed it, then carefully folded the strip of cloth. “Why are you so worried for the Dona Juanita's soul, Major?” he asked.

Hogan still looked down at the dead man's coarse shroud. “I'd rather worry about his poor soul. Do you think it was discovering that his lady was humping a Frog that killed him?”

Sarsfield flinched at Hogan's crudity. “If he did discover that, Major, then it could hardly have added to his happiness. But he was not a man who knew much happiness, and he rejected the hand of the church.”

“And what could the church have done? Changed the whore's nature?” Hogan asked. "And don't tell me that Dona Juanita de Elia is not a spy, Father, for

I know she is and you know the selfsame thing."

“I do?” Sarsfield frowned in puzzlement.

“You do, Father, you do, and God forgive you for it. Juanita is a whore and a spy, and a better whore, I think, than she is a spy. But she was the only person available for you, isn't that so? Doubtless you'd have preferred someone less flamboyant, but what choice did you have? Or was it Major Ducos who made the choice? But it was a bad choice, a very bad choice. Juanita failed you, Father. We found her when she was trying to bring you a whole lot of these.” Hogan reached into his tail pocket and produced one of the counterfeit newspapers that Sharpe had discovered in San Cristobal. “They were wrapped in sheets of sacred music, Father, and I thought to myself, why would they do that? Why church music? Why not other newspapers? But, of course, if she was stopped and given a cursory search then who would think it odd that she was carrying a pile of psalms to a man of God?”

Sarsfield glanced at the newspaper, but did not take it. “I think, maybe,” he said carefully, “that grief has deranged your mind.”

Hogan laughed. “Grief for Kiely? Hardly, Father. What might have deranged me is all the work I've been having to do in these last few days. I've been reading my correspondence, Father, and it comes from all sorts of strange places. Some from Madrid, some from Paris, some even from London. Would you like to hear what I've learned?”

Father Sarsfield was fidgeting with the scapular, folding and refolding the embroidered strip of cloth. “If you insist,” he said guardedly.

Hogan smiled. "Oh, I do, Father. For I've been thinking about this fellow,

Ducos, and how clever everyone says he is, but what really worries me is that he's put another clever fellow behind our lines, and I've been hurting my mind wondering just who that new clever fellow might be. And I was also wondering, you see, just why it was that the first newspapers to arrive in the Irish regiments were supposed to be from Philadelphia. Very odd choice that. Am I losing you?"

“Go on,” Sarsfield said. The scapular had come loose and he was meticulously folding it again.

“I've never been to Philadelphia,” Hogan said, “though I hear it's a fine city. Would you like a pinch of snuff, Father?”

Sarsfield did not answer. He just watched Hogan and went on folding the cloth.

“Why Philadelphia?” Hogan asked. "Then I remembered! Actually I didn't remember at all; a man in London sent me a reminder. They remember these things in London. They have them all written down in a great big book, and one of the things written in that great big book is that it was in Philadelphia that Wolfe Tone got his letter of introduction to the French government. And it was there, too, that he met a passionate priest called Father Mallon.

Mallon was more of a soldier than a priest and he was doing his best to raise a regiment of volunteers to fight the British, but he wasn't having a whole lot of success so he threw his lot in with Tone instead. Tone was a

Protestant, wasn't he? And he never did have much fondness for priests, but he liked Mallon well enough because Mallon was an Irish patriot before he was a priest. And I think Mallon became Tone's friend as well, for he stayed with

Tone every step of the way after that first meeting in Philadelphia. He went to Paris with Tone, raised the volunteers with Tone, then sailed to Ireland with Tone. Sailed all the way into Lough Swilly. That was in 1798, Father, in case you'd forgotten, and no one has seen Mallon from that day to this. Poor

Tone was captured and the redcoats were all over Ireland looking for Father

Mallon, but there's not been a sight nor smell of the man. Are you sure you won't have a pinch of snuff? It's Irish Blackguard and hard to come by."

“I would rather have a cigar, if you have one,” Sarsfield said calmly.

"I don't, Father, but you should try the snuff one day. It's a grand specific against the fever, or so my mother always said. Now where was I? Oh yes, with poor Father Mallon on the run from the British. It's my belief he got back to