Sharpe's Rifles (18 page)

“Run!” Sharpe shouted.

The Rifles ran as if the devil was on their heels. The French had foreseen that volley,
guarded against it, and now were in the open and hullooing forward like hunters smelling blood.
Ahead of Sharpe the other Riflemen were angling towards the farm. Louisa, he saw was carrying the
wounded Cameron’s pack and pulling the man along by his hand.

“Bastards on the right!” Hagman called the warning and Sharpe twisted to see that the horsemen
to the east were on the firmest ground and thus the likeliest to catch his small group. The
Dragoons were riding like steeple chasers, victory in their nostrils, and a gap in a stone wall
lent them speed, just as it made them bunch together like men racing for a turn. Sharpe saw the
water spray up from their hooves as the cavalry charged through a damp patch, then,
extraordinarily, he saw red blood appear on two of the horses, a sword circle through the air,
then he saw a man twisting in the saddle, falling, and being dragged by a screaming, frightened
horse. Only then did Sharpe hear the crack of the rifles ahead.

Harper had abandoned Mrs Parker and formed a line of Riflemen at the edge of the farm’s outer
wall. Their volley had scattered the easternmost cavalry to give Sharpe’s group a ghost of a
chance. “Run! Run!”

The men slung their rifles and ran. Sharpe could hear the enemy hooves behind. He could hear
the creak of the saddles and the shout of the officers and Sergeants. More rifle bullets flicked
past, firing from the farm to give him cover. Louisa stared, eyes wide.

“Left, sir!” A man shouted. “Left!” Cavalrymen were coming from the west; men who had ridden
around the roadblock and who now put their beasts to jump the stone wall that edged the road. One
man, his horse in midflight, was hit by a bullet and slewed sideways. The others came on
unscathed and Sharpe knew his squad would be trapped. He dragged the big sword free, planted his
feet, and let the first Frenchman ride at him. “Run on!” he shouted at his men. “Run on!”

The first Frenchman was a Dragoon officer who leaned low in his saddle and speared his sword
forward so that, like a lance, it would rip into Sharpe’s belly. The Rifleman backswung his own
sword, left to right, in a two-handed blow that was aimed at the horse’s mouth. It struck home on
bone and teeth, the animal wrenched aside, and Sharpe threw himself against its body so that the
Frenchman’s sword went past and outside him. He tried to reach up to drag the rider from the
saddle, missed, and his shako went flying as the forage net thumped him down on to the road. The
horse’s rear leg struck his hip, then the Dragoon was gone and Sharpe scrambled to his
feet.

“Down!” It was Harper’s voice and he instinctively dropped flat as another volley crashed
overhead. A horse screamed, then slid and fell in the road’s muck. One of the beast’s flailing
hooves missed Sharpe’s skull by an inch.

“Run!” Harper bellowed.

Sharpe caught a glimpse of the carnage on the road. Harper’s volley, aimed at the congestion
formed by the constriction of the stone walls, had stopped the horsemen dead. Sharpe ran through
the farm gate. There was an open pasture to cross before he was safe. Riflemen were already
filing into the farmhouse and he saw the first shutter pushed aside by a rifle barrel.

“Behind you!” Hooves again, this time from the left, and Sharpe snarled as he turned. His
sword swung towards the horse which swerved away and forced its rider to try the dificult
cross-cut down and across his own body. Lunging, the Rifleman felt his own sword pierce the
Dragoon’s left thigh. The impetus of man and horse dragged the rider free of the blade. More
rifles fired, one bullet going so close to Sharpe that he felt its passage like a thump of
wind.

“Run!” Harper called again.

Sharpe ran. He reached the farmhouse just as the last Rifleman scrambled over its threshold.
Harper was ready to shut the door and jam it tight with a chest, “Thank you!” Sharpe gasped as he
cannoned through the door. Harper ignored him.

Sharpe found himself in a passage which ran clean through the farmhouse from north to south.
Doors barred the passage’s outer entrances, while two other doors led into the house itself. He
chose the door on the left which opened into a spacious kitchen where, quivering with fright, a
man and a woman crouched beside the hearth in which, suspended from a pothook, a seething
cauldron stank of lye. The Parkers’ coachman offered the couple urgent explanation, then began
loading a huge horse-pistol. Louisa was trying to prise a small ivory-hilted pistol from its
snug-fitting case.

“Where’s your aunt?” Sharpe asked.

“There.” She pointed to a door at the back of the kitchen.

“Get in there.”

“But…“

“I said get in there!” Sharpe closed the pistol case and, despite Louisa’s indignation, pushed
her towards the scullery where her aunt and uncle crouched among tall stone jars. He limped to
the closest window and saw the Dragoons milling about just beyond the small barn. His men were
firing at them. A horse reared, a Frenchman clapped a hand to a wounded arm, and a trumpet
screamed.

The Dragoons scattered. They did not go far; only to find shelter behind the stone barn or the
field walls, and Sharpe knew it would only be seconds before, dismounted, they began to rattle
the farmhouse with their carbine fire. “How many windows are there, Sergeant?”

“Dunno, sir.” Williams was panting from the effort of running uphill.

A bullet lashed through the kitchen from outside. It struck a high beam above Sharpe. “Keep
your bloody heads down! And fire back!”

There were three rooms downstairs; the large kitchen which had a window facing north and
another south. The small scullery where the Parkers crouched had no windows. Beyond the passage
was a much larger, windowless room, this one a byre for the animals. Two pigs and a dozen scared
chickens were its only occupants.

A ladder from the kitchen led upstairs where there was a single room for sleeping. The farm’s
relative prosperity was witnessed by a massive bed and a chest of drawers. The room had two
windows, also facing north and south. Sharpe put Riflemen in both windows, then ordered
Sergeant

Williams to take charge of the upstairs room and to make loopholes in the eastern and western
walls. “And break through the roof.”

“The roof?” Williams gaped up at the thick beams and the timbers which hid the
tiles.

“To keep watch east and west,” Sharpe ordered. Until he could see to his flanks then he was
vulnerable to French surprise.

Downstairs again, Sharpe ordered a loophole to be hacked next to the chimney breast. The
Spanish farmer, understanding what needed to be done, produced a pickaxe and began to pound at
his wall. A crucifix, hanging on the limewashed stone, juddered with the force of the man’s
blows.

“Bastards right!” Harper shouted from the window. Rifles cracked. The greenjackets who fired
ducked back, letting others take their places. Some dismounted Dragoons had tried to rush the
farm, but three of them now lay in a puddle; two scrambled up and limped to safety, the third was
still. Sharpe saw the splash of rain in the blood-rippled water.

Then, for a few moments, there was relative peace.

None of Sharpe’s men was wounded. They were breathless and damp, but safe. They stayed
crouched low under the threat of carbine fire that flayed at the windows, but the bullets did no
harm except to the house. Sharpe, peering out, saw that the enemy was hidden in ditches or behind
the dunghill. The farmer’s wife was nervously offering sliced sausage to the
greenjackets.

George Parker crept on hands and knees from the scullery. He nervously waited for Sharpe’s
attention which, once gained, he used to enquire what course of action Lieutenant Sharpe planned
to follow.

Lieutenant Sharpe informed Mr Parker that he intended to wait for darkness to fall.

Parker swallowed. “That could be hours!”

“Five at the most, sir.” Sharpe was reloading his rifle, “unless God makes the sun stand
still.”

Parker ignored Sharpe’s levity. “And then?”

“Break out, sir. Not till it’s dead of night. Hit the bastards when they’re not expecting it.
Kill a few of them, and hope the others get confused.” Sharpe righted the rifle and primed its
pan. “They can’t do much damage to us so long as we stay low.”

“But…“ Parker flinched as a bullet smacked into the wall above his head. ”My dear wife,
Lieutenant, wishes your assurance that our carriage will be retrieved?“

“Afraid not, sir.” Sharpe knelt up, saw a flicker of a shadow beyond the dunghill, and fired
his rifle. Smoke billowed from the weapon, and a wad of burning paper smoked on the floor. “There
won’t be time, sir.” He crouched, took a cartridge from his pouch, and bit the bullet
away.

“But my testaments!”

Sharpe did not like to reveal that the testaments, when last seen, had been strewn in the
Spanish mud. He spat the bullet into his rifle’s muzzle. “Your testaments, sir, are now in the
hands of Napoleon’s army.” He rammed ball, wadding and powder down his rifle barrel. The
saltpetre from the powder was rank and dry in his mouth.

“But…“ Again Parker was silenced by a carbine bullet. This one clanged against a saucepan that
hung from a beam. The bullet punched a hole in the metal, hit the next beam, and dropped at
Sharpe’s feet. He picked it up, juggling it because of its heat, then smelt it. Parker frowned in
perplexity.

“There’s a rumour that the Frogs poison their bullets, sir.” Sharpe said it loud enough so
that his men, some of whom half-believed the story, could hear. “It ain’t true.”

“It isn’t?”

“No, sir.” Sharpe put the bullet into his mouth, grinned, then swallowed it. His men laughed
at the expression on George Parker’s face. Sharpe turned to see how the farmer was progressing
with the loophole. The walls of the farm were hugely thick and, though the man’s pick had pierced
a foot into the centre rubble, he still had not reached day-‘ight.

A volley of carbine shots crashed through the rear window.

The Riflemen, unharmed, jeered their defiance, but it was a defiance that the grey-haired
Parker could not share. “You’re doomed, Lieutenant!”

“Sir, if you’ve nothing better…“

“Lieutenant! We are civilians! I see no reason why we should stay here and share your death!”
George Parker had found courage under fire; the courage to assert his timorous soul and demand
surrender.

Sharpe primed his rifle. “You want to walk out there, sir?”

“A flag of truce, man!” Parker flinched as another carbine bullet ricocheted over his
head.

“If that’s what you want, sir…“ But before Sharpe could finish his sentence, there was a
panicked shout from Sergeant Williams upstairs, then a rattling crash as a massive enemy volley
flogged the front of the house. A Rifleman was jerked back from the window with blood spurting
from his head. Two rifles fired, more shot from upstairs, then the northern window was darkened
as French Dragoons, who had charged about the blind western angle of the house, filled the frame.
Sharpe and several other men fired; but the Dragoons were dragging at the chairs which blocked
the window. They were repulsed only when the farmer’s wife, screaming with despair and using a
strength that seemed remarkable in so scrawny a woman, snatched the cauldron from the pothook and
threw it at the enemy. The scalding lye snatched the French back as though a cannon had fired at
them.

“Sir!” Harper was by the kitchen door. A crash sounded in the passage as the French broke down
the southern door which the Irishman had not blocked as securely as the northern. A group of
Dragoons had taken advantage of the larger attack to make a charge at the other side of the house
and were now within the central passage. Harper fired his rifle through the kitchen door, which
instantly splintered in two places as the French replied. Both bullets struck the table.

The kitchen filled with powder smoke. Men were taking turns to fire through the windows, then
reloading with frantic haste. The coachman emptied his huge pistol through the door and was
rewarded with a shout of pain.

“Open it!” Sharpe said.

Harper obeyed. An astonished Frenchman, levelling his carbine, found himself facing Sharpe’s
sword which skewered forward so savagely that the blade’s tip jarred against the far wall of the
passage after it had gone clean through the Dragoon’s body. Harper, screaming his weird
battle-shouts, followed Sharpe with an axe he had plucked from the kitchen wall. He hacked down
at another man, making the passage slithery with blood.

Sharpe gouged and twisted his sword free. A Frenchman’s blade scraped up his forearm,
springing warm blood, and he threw himself onto the man, forcing him against the passage wall and
hammering the sword hilt at his face. A rifle exploded beside his head to throw another Dragoon
back from the door. The pigs squealed in terror, while Sharpe tripped over a crawling Frenchman
who was bleeding from the belly. Another rifle hammered in the passage, then Harper shouted that
the enemy was gone.

A carbine bullet slammed into the passage, ricocheted from the walls, and buried itself in the
far door. Sharpe pushed into the room where the animals were kept and saw a wooden trough that
would serve as some kind of barricade in the passage. He dragged it out, and the pigs took the
opportunity to escape before he could slam the damaged outer door closed and ram the trough under
its cross-members. “Lucky bloody French,” Harper said. “Pork for supper.”

The action lulled again. Dreadful squeals announced the death of the pigs; squeals which
momentarily stilled .the fusillade of carbine shots which raked the farmhouse. No more Frenchmen
appeared as targets. One Rifleman was dead in the kitchen, another wounded. Sharpe went to the
ladder. “Sergeant Williams?”

There was no answer.

“Sergeant Williams! How are those loopholes?”