Sharpe 14 - Sharpe's Sword (8 page)

“No, Major! Jack will do it. He has the manners of a servant, don’t you Jack?”

“I’m a slave to you, Helena.” Spears took the bottle happily, while Hogan brought Sharpe a glass. Sharpe’s horse had moved some feet away from the carriage in search of greener grass and Sharpe was glad to be out of La Marquesa’s earshot. He drank the wine quickly, finding himself to be parched, and discovered Hogan at his elbow. The Irishman smiled sympathetically.

“She’s got you in full retreat, Richard. What’s the matter?”

“It’s not my place, sir, is it? That’s my place.” He nodded down the hill to where the South Essex relaxed on their knoll. The French were not moving.

“She’s just a woman, trying to be friendly.”

“Yes.” Sharpe thought of his wife, the dark haired beauty who would despise this aristocratic luxury. He glanced at La Marquesa. “Why does she speak such good English?”

“Helena?” Even Hogan, Sharpe noted, seemed to know her well enough to use her Christian name. “She’s half English. Spanish father, English mother, and raised in France.” Hogan drank his own wine. “Her parents were killed in the Terror, very nasty, and Helena managed to escape to an Uncle in Spain, in Saragossa. Then she married the Marques de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba, and became as rich as the hills. Houses all over Spain, a couple of castles, and a very good friend to us, Richard.”

“What are you talking about?” Her voice carried to them and Hogan turned his horse.

“Business, Ma’am, just business.”

“This is a pique-nique, not an Officers’ Mess. Come here!”

She made Spears give Sharpe more wine that he drank just as fast as the first glass. The crystal goblet was ridiculously small.

“You’re thirsty, Captain?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“I have plenty of bottles. Some chicken?”

“No, Ma’am.”

She sighed. “You’re so hard to please, Captain. Ah! There’s Arthur!”

Wellington was, indeed, returning westward along the track behind the ridge.

Spears twisted in his saddle to look at the General. “Ten to one he comes up here to see you, Helena?”

“I’d be surprised if he didn’t.”

“Sharpe!” Spears grinned at him. “Two guineas he won’t come?”

“I don’t gamble.”

“I do! Christ! Half the bloody estate’s gone.”

“Half of it?” La Marquesa laughed. “All of it, Jack. All of it, and a lot more. What will you leave your heir?”

“I’m not married, Helena, thus none of my bastards can be described as an heir.” He blew her a kiss. “If only your dear husband would die I would be on my knees to you. I think we’d make a handsome couple.”

“And how long would my fortune last?”

“Your beauty is your fortune, Helena, and that is safe for ever.”

“How pretty, Jack, and how untrue.”

“The words were said by Captain Sharpe, my dear, I just repeated them.”

The huge blue eyes looked at Sharpe. “How pretty, Captain Sharpe.”

He was blushing because of Spears’ lie and he hid it by wrenching the reins harshly about and staring at the quiescent French. Lord Spears followed him and spoke softly. “You fancy her, don’t you?”

“She’s a beautiful woman.”

“My dear Sharpe.” Spears leaned over and led the Rifleman’s horse forward a few paces. “If you want her, try her.” He laughed. “Don’t worry about me. She won’t look at me. She’s very discreet, our Helena, and she’s not going to endure Jack Spears boasting round the city that he tucked his feet in her bed. You should mount an attack, Sharpe!”

Sharpe was angry. “You mean lovers from the servant’s hall keep quiet, because they’re so grateful?”

“Your words, friend, not mine.”

“True.”

“And if you must know, you may be right.” Spears was still friendly, but his words were low and forceful. “Some people think the meat in the servant’s hall is better than the thin stuff served in the banquet hall.”

Sharpe looked at the handsome face. “La Marquesa?”

“She gets what she wants, you get what I want.” He grinned. “I’m doing you a favour.”

“I’m married.”

“God help me! Do you say your prayers every night?” Spears laughed aloud, then turned for hoofbeats presaged Wellington’s arrival at the head of his staff. The General reined in, doffed his bicorne hat, then cast a cold glance at Spears and Sharpe.

“You’re well escorted, Helena!”

“Dear Arthur!” She offered him her hand. “You have disappointed me!”

“I? How?”

“I came for a battle!”

“So did we all. If you have any complaints you must address them to Marmont. The fellow absolutely refuses to attack!”

She pouted at him. “But I so hoped to see a battle!”

“You will, you will.” He patted his horse’s neck. „I’ll lay you odds that the French will sneak away tonight. I gave them their chance and they turned it down, so tomorrow I’ll take those forts.“

“The forts! I can watch from the Palacio!”

“Then pray Marmont sneaks away tonight, Helena, for if he does I’ll lay on a full assault for you. All the battle you could wish!”

She clapped her hands. “Then I will give a reception tomorrow night. To celebrate your victory. You’ll come?”

“To celebrate my victory?” Wellington seemed positively skittish in her presence. “Of course I’ll come!”

She waved a hand round all the horsemen gathered about the elegant barouche. “You must all come! Even you, Captain Sharpe! You must come!”

Wellington’s eyes met Sharpe. The General gave a thin smile. “Captain Sharpe will be busy tomorrow night.”

“Then he will come when his business is finished. We shall dance till dawn, Captain.”

Sharpe felt, though he did not know if it was meant, a subtle mockery in the eyes that watched him. Tomorrow. Tomorrow he would face Leroux, tomorrow he would fight that sword, and Sharpe felt the desire to fight. He would beat Leroux, this Colonel who had put a chill of fear into the British, he would face him, fight him, and he would drag him captive from the wasteland. Tomorrow he would fight, and these foppish aristocrats would watch from La Marquesa’s Palacio and suddenly Sharpe knew what reward he wanted for facing Colonel Philippe Leroux. Not just the sword. He would have that anyway as the spoils of war, but something else. He would have the woman. He smiled at her for the first time, and nodded. “Tomorrow.”

CHAPTER 7

Tired cavalry scouts came back to the city in the early Tuesday hours. Marmont’s army had gone north in the night. The French had abandoned the garrison of the forts in the city, they would bide their time now and hope that at some point in the summer they would catch Wellington flat-footed and fight a battle more on their own terms.

The fortresses served no purpose now for Wellington. They had failed to bring Marmont to battle for their rescue, and they stopped his supply trains using the long Roman bridge, so the fortresses would be destroyed. La Marquesa would get her battle, and Sharpe would have to seek Leroux among the prisoners.

If there were prisoners. It had seemed a light thing for the General to promise La Marquesa an assault of the three buildings, but Sharpe could see that the defenders would not easily give in. He had stared long and hard at the buildings, marooned in their waste ground, and the more he looked, the less he liked.

The waste ground was split by a deep gorge that ran southwards towards the river. On the right of the gorge was the largest of the French forts, the San Vincente, while to the left were the forts of La Merced and San Cayetano. An attack on any one of the three forts would be savaged by gunfire from the others.

The three buildings had been convents until the French evicted the nuns and turned this corner of the city into a stronghold. For nearly a week now the convents had been under fire from British guns, yet the artillery had done remarkably little damage. The French had prepared the buildings well.

Out of the levelled houses that had surrounded the convents they had made a crude glacis that bounced the round-shot up and over the defensive works. They had buttressed walls behind the deep ditch which surrounded each convent and over their gun emplacements and troop shelters they had made huge, thick roofs. Each roof was like a massive box filled with earth, designed to soak up the British howitzer shells that fell with fluttering smoke from the sky. The French garrisons were surrounded, trapped, but it would be hard for the British to break in.

Sharpe paraded his Company, not entirely by chance, outside the Palacio Casares. The huge gates stood open, revealing the central courtyard in the middle of which a fountain splashed into a raised pool. The courtyard was paved, filled with flowers in ornate tubs, and Sharpe stared through the shadows of the archway at the great door above the formal steps. The house seemed deserted. Thickly woven straw mats had been lowered over the windows, blotting the sun, and the water in the fountain was the only sign of movement in the great, rich house.

Above the gateway, on the tall, blank, outer wall, the coat of arms that decorated the barouche door was carved in pale gold stone. Above that, high above, Sharpe could see plants growing at the wall’s top, evidence perhaps of a balcony or even roof garden and it was there, he knew, that La Marquesa would get her view, above the rooftops, of the wasteland and the forts. Not that she would see much. The attack would be made at last light. Sharpe would have preferred a night attack, but Wellington distrusted them, remembering the closeness of disaster to success that the night had brought in Seringapatam so long ago.

He turned away from the house, to his Company, and he knew that he had become obsessed with this woman. It seemed to him to be ridiculous, to be an ambition of impossible proportions, but now he was snagged on it. His job was to kill Leroux, to protect the unknown figure of El Mirador, yet his mind stayed with La Marquesa.

“Sir?” Harper came to formal attention. “Company ready for inspection, sir!”

“Lieutenant Price!”

“Sir?”

“Weapons, please.” Sharpe trusted his men. None would go into battle with unserviceable weapons. Price could look at them, tug at screwed flints, feel bayonet edges, but he would find nothing. Sharpe could hear the assault troops being paraded. They were all Light troops, the best of their Battalions, and they were assembling way back from the wasteland, hoping that the sudden eruption of the attack would take the French by surprise. The siege guns still fired. Four eighteen pounders had been dragged across the fords and brought to the city and the huge, iron guns hammered at the forts.

“Listen to me.” He spoke quietly. “We’re not here for heroics. It’s not our job to capture the forts, understand?” They nodded. Some grinned. “The other Light companies do that. Our job is to find one man, the man we captured. So we stay behind the attack. If we can we move to one side, out of the firing line. I don’t want casualties. Keep your heads down. It’s skirmish order all the way. If we capture the forts, then our job is to search the prisoners. Normal squads. I don’t want anyone going off on their own. There’s no bloody reward so don’t go in for heroics. And remember. This bastard killed young McDonald and he killed Colonel Windham. He’s dangerous. If you find him, or if you think you’ve found him, tie the sod up. And I’m paying ten guineas for his sword.”

“What if it’s worth more, sir?” It was Batten’s voice; the whining, grumbling, never satisfied Batten. Harper started towards him, but Sharpe held up a hand.

“It is worth more, Batten, probably twenty times more, but if you sell it to anyone else but me I’ll have you digging latrines for the rest of the bloody war. Clear?”

The others grinned. A private soldier could hardly expect to sell a valuable sword on the open market. He would be accused of stealing it, and the penalty for theft could be hanging. Some Sergeants would pay more, but not much more, and make their profit in Lisbon. Ten guineas was a big sum, more than a year’s wages after deductions and the Company knew it was a fair offer. Sharpe raised his voice again. “No bayonets. Load, but flints down. We don’t want them knowing we’re coming. One musket banging off and they’ll be giving us canister for supper.” He nodded at Harper. “Right turn, you know where we’re going.”

Harper kept his voice low. “Right turn!”

“Captain Sharpe!” It was Major Hogan, hurrying towards the main battery where the eighteen pounders sounded.

“Sir!” Sharpe snapped to attention, saluted. In front of the Company they were formal, correct.

“Good luck!” Hogan grinned at the men. They knew him well, the Riflemen had spent weeks with him before they were forcibly joined to the South Essex, the redcoats remembered him from Badajoz or nights when he had come to seek Sharpe’s companionship. The Irish Major looked at Sharpe, turned his back to the men, and made a resigned gesture. “Good luck to you.”

“Not good?”

“No.” Hogan sniffed. “Some idiot messed up the ammunition supply. We’ve got about fifteen rounds for each gun! What the hell use is that?”

Sharpe knew he meant the big eighteen pounders. “What about the howitzers?”

Hogan had taken out his snuff box and Sharpe waited while the Major inhaled his usual huge pinch. He sneezed. “God and his Angels!” He sneezed again. “Bloody howitzers! They’re not denting the bloody place! A hundred and sixty rounds for six guns. It’s no way to run a war!”

“You’re not hopeful.”

“Hopeful?” Hogan waited as an eighteen pounder fired one of its precious, dwindling ammunition stock. “No. But we’ve persuaded the Peer to attack just the centre fort. We’re firing at that.”

“The San Cayetano?”

Hogan nodded. “If we can grab that, then we can build our own batteries there and hammer the others.” He shrugged. “Surprise is everything, Richard. If they don’t expect us…‘ He shrugged again.

“Leroux may not be in the San Cayetano.”

“He probably isn’t. He’s probably in the big one. But you never know. They may all surrender if the middle one falls.”

Sharpe reflected that it could be a long night. If the other forts did decide that resistance was futile then the surrender negotiations could take hours. There were, he guessed, a thousand men in the three garrisons and they would be difficult to search in the darkness. He glanced ruefully at the Palacio Casares behind him. There was a chance, a good chance, that he would never manage to arrive on time. Hogan caught the glance. “You invited?”

“To the celebration? Yes.”

“So’s the whole damned town. I just hope there’s something to celebrate.”

Sharpe grinned. “We’ll surprise them.” He looked round to see his Company being marched into an alleyway and he gestured at their backs. “I must go.”

Three hundred and fifty men, the Light Companies of two brigades of the Sixth Division, were crammed into a street that ran behind the houses facing the wasteland. It was the closest cover to the centre fort, the San Cayetano, but no one, apart from a handful of officers, was allowed to look at the ground they had to cover. Surprise was everything. There were twenty ladders, each surrounded by its carrying party, and they would be the first to rush the two hundred yards towards the fort’s ditch. They would jump into the excavation and then put the ladders against the palisade.

Sharpe could hear the crack of rifles, startling the swallows who flew in the dusk. Riflemen had surrounded the forts for the six days since the army had entered Salamanca, living uncomfortably in shallow pits of the waste ground, sniping at the French embrasures. The evening sounded normal. The French could not have detected anything unusual in the rhythm of the siege. The big guns fired intermittently, the rifles cracked, and as the light faded so did the sound of the firing. It would seem, Sharpe hoped, a peaceful night in the three forts built on the hill above the slow-sliding river Tormes.

A big Sergeant with a scarred face tugged at a rung of one of the ladders. It bent, fractured, and the Sergeant spat moodily against a wall. “Bloody green wood!”

Harper was loading his seven-barrelled gun, carefully measuring powder from his Rifleman’s horn. He grinned up at Sharpe. “Met that Irish priest while you were chatting with the Major, sir. Wished us luck.”

“Curtis? How the hell does he know? I thought this was secret.”

Harper shrugged, then tapped the butt of the huge gun on the ground. “Probably saw this lot march in, sir.” He jerked his head at the Light Companies. “Don’t exactly look as if they’ve come for a Regimental dance.”

Sharpe sat and waited, head back against the wall, the loaded rifle between his knees. It seemed strange, on this perfect summer’s evening, the light fading into translucent grey, to think of the vast, secret war that shadowed the war of guns and swords. How had the priest known this attack was to take place tonight? Were there French spies in Salamanca who also knew? Who might have already warned the fortresses? Sharpe supposed there might be. It was possible that the French were ready, eagerly awaiting the first attack that they would shred with canister.

Sharpe had only seen one French spy. He had been a small Spaniard, jolly and generous, who had purported to be a lemonade seller outside Fuentes d’Onoro. He proved to be a Corporal in one of the Spanish Regiments that fought for the French and Sharpe had watched the man hung. He had died with dignity, a smile on his lips, and Sharpe wondered what bravery it took to be such a man. El Mirador, Sharpe supposed, had that bravery. He had lived in Salamanca, under French occupation, and still he had sent his stream of intelligence towards the British forces in Portugal. Tonight Sharpe was fighting for that brave man, for El Mirador, and he looked up at the fading light and knew that the attack must come soon.

“Sharpe?” A senior officer was looking at him. Sharpe struggled to his feet and saluted.

“Sir?”

“Brigadier General Bowes. I’m in command tonight, but I gather you have your own orders?” Sharpe nodded. Bowes looked curiously at the strange figure, dressed half as an officer and half as a Rifleman. The Brigadier seemed satisfied. “Glad you’re with us, Sharpe.”

“Thank you, sir. I hope we can be useful.”

Bowes gestured abruptly towards the hidden fort. “There’s a crude trench for the first seventy yards. That’ll cover us. After that it’s up to God.” He looked with frank admiration at the wreath on Sharpe’s sleeve. “You’ve done this sort of thing before.”

“Badajoz, sir.”

“This won’t be as bad.” Bowes moved on. The attackers were standing up, straightening their jackets, obsessively checking the last few details before the fight. Some touched their private talismans, some crossed themselves, and most wore the look of forced cheerfulness that hid the fear.

Bowes clapped his hands. He was a short man, built strongly and he climbed on a mounting block set beside one of the houses. “Remember, lads! Quiet! Quiet! Quiet!” This was the Sixth Division’s first battle in Spain and the men listened eagerly, wanting to impress the rest of the army. “Ladders first. After me!”

Sharpe cautioned his own men to wait. Harper would lead the first squad, then Lieutenant Price, while Sergeant McGovern and Sergeant Huckfield had the others. He grinned at them. Huckfield was new to the Company, since Badajoz, promoted from one of the other companies. Sharpe remembered when, as a private, Huckfield had tried to lead the mutiny before Talavera. Huckfield owed his life to Sharpe, but the bargain had been good. He was a conscientious, solid man, good with figures and the Company books, and the memory of that distant day, three years before, when Huckfield had nearly led the Battalion into mutiny was faded and unreal.

The street emptied, the attackers filing into the wasteland, and Sharpe still waited. He did not want his Company mixed with the others. He almost held his breath, listening for the first shot, but the night was silent. “All right, lads. Keep yourselves quiet.”

He went first, through the passage between the houses, and the ground dropped into a steep pit that had been made when the sappers threw up one of the flanking batteries. The nine-pounders were silent behind their fascines.

He could see the other companies ahead, crammed into the shallow trench. It had not been made for the attack, instead it was the remnants of a small street and it gave cover because the destroyed houses either side were banks of rubble. He dared not raise his head to look at the San Cayetano. There was a hope that the French were dozing, not expecting trouble, but he had no reason to suppose that their sentries would be any the less watchful because the night was quiet.