Sharpe 3-Book Collection 2: Sharpe’s Havoc, Sharpe’s Eagle, Sharpe’s Gold (73 page)

‘Inside!’ Sharpe kicked at a door, Harper hit it, and the Rifles were inside the house. Someone fired at them, a pistol, but the bullet went wide and Sharpe was hacking with the sword. ‘Bayonets!’ The Riflemen formed line, snarled forward, and Sharpe saw they were in a hall which was officer country, the table littered with used bottles, stairs leading to bedrooms where men were waking to the sounds of battle.

Outside, in the courtyard, Lieutenant Knowles counted to himself, keeping the rhythm of the volleys, and at the same time looking desperately round to see where danger might threaten. He could see Hagman, kneeling to one side, the other Riflemen in his party loading for the small Cheshireman, and knew that any officer who showed his face on balcony or rooftop would be cut down by a rifle bullet. His own men, sweating in the firelight, advanced step by step, scouring the walls and windows, and it occurred to the Lieutenant that this was only his third real fight. He was pushing down the panic, the impulse to run for shelter, but his voice was calm and in the noise he hardly heard the carbine bullets that struck near him. He saw Redcoats falling, struck by enemy fire, saw Sergeant Read tending to them and then, with a ghastly realization, suddenly identified the bubbling and screaming noise that had been nagging at his eardrums for the last minute. He had stepped to one side, to avoid a fire, and saw, kicking in the flames, a French officer. The man seemed to be reaching for the Lieutenant, blackened hands curled like claws, and from his throat came the terrible noise. Knowles suddenly remembered the sword in his hand, the blade bought by his father, and with a grimace he stepped close to the man and shut his eyes as he pushed the tip at the dying man’s throat. He had stopped his orders, but the men neither noticed nor missed them. They fired their volleys into the shadows, and Knowles opened his eyes to see he had killed his first man with a sword, and then the voice of Sergeant Harper was dominating the courtyard. ‘In here, sir!’

Sharpe guessed a minute and a half had gone by since the Riflemen had first cleared the gate. He had counted, unconsciously, the volleys from the courtyard, reckoning that in this light the men would fire a shot every fifteen seconds. Now, in the main hallway of Moreno’s house, there was trouble. Officers at the top of the stairs had seen what was happening, found mattresses and the furniture they’d kept for their own use and thrown up a barricade. Sharpe needed firepower, quick and overpowering, to clear the stair’s top.

‘Sergeant!’

It would be suicide on the stairs. The huge Irishman took a pace towards the steps, but Sharpe stopped him. ‘Give me the gun!’

Harper looked at the seven-barrelled gun, grinned, and shook his head. Before Sharpe could stop him the Sergeant had leapt to the bottom step, pointed the fearful weapon upwards, and pulled the trigger. It was as if a small cannon had gone off in the room. It belched smoke and flame, stunned the eardrums, and to Sharpe’s horror the Sergeant fell backwards, thrown back, and he ran to him, fearing the worst.

Harper grinned. ‘Bloody kick!’

Sharpe took the stairs two at a time, the sword ahead, seeing where the blast had thrown back the barrier, smeared blood on a wall, and then an officer was aiming a pistol. There was nothing Sharpe could do. He saw the trigger pulled, the cock fall forward, and nothing happened. In his haste and panic the Frenchman had forgotten to prime the pan. It was a death sentence. The sword slammed down, cutting skull and brain, and Sharpe had seized the mattresses, thrown them aside, and the sword was beating at the slim sabres of the two men who had survived the seven-barrelled gun.

‘Rifles!’ Harper had shouted, was pounding up the stairs. Sharpe lunged, wounded a man, stepped aside as the other swung wildly, and then Harper was beside him, sword-bayonet stabbing upwards, and the landing was clear.

‘Kearsey!’ Sharpe yelled, forgetting niceties of rank. For God’s sake, where was the bastard? ‘Kearsey!’

‘Sharpe?’ The Major was standing in a doorway, buckling his trousers. ‘Sharpe?’

‘Get out of here, Major!’

‘My parole!’

‘You’re rescued!’ Damn his parole.

A door opened at the end of the passage, a rifle fired, the door shut. Kearsey suddenly seemed to wake up. ‘That way!’ He pointed at closed doors across the passage. ‘You drop outside the house.’

Sharpe nodded. The landing seemed safe. An officer had opened a door at the end of the passage, but a rifle bullet had dissuaded him from further risk. The Green Jackets were reloading, waiting for orders, and Sharpe went to the stairhead. Downstairs was chaos. The room was filled with musket smoke that was lanced, second by second, with flames as the Redcoats fired at windows, doors and passageways. Knowles had long stopped controlling the volleys. Now each man fired as fast as he could and the burning paper wads, spat after the musket balls, were setting fire to rush mats and hanging curtains. Sharpe cupped his hands. ‘Lieutenant! Up here!’

Knowles nodded and turned back to his men. Sharpe found Kearsey at his side, hopping on one leg as he pulled on a boot. ‘The rifles will cover them, Major! Take over!’

Kearsey nodded, showed no surprise at Sharpe’s peremptory commands, and the tall Rifleman turned to the closed doors. The first was not locked. The room was empty, the window invitingly open, and Harper went through to knock out the remaining glass and frame. Sharpe tried the other door, it resisted, and he hit it with his shoulder, the wood round the lock splintering easily, and he stopped.

On the bed, hands and feet tied to the four stubby posts, was a girl. Dark hair on a pillow, a white dress, a reminder of Josefina, and eyes that glared at him over a gag. She was jerking and writhing, struggling to free herself, and Sharpe was struck by the sudden beauty, the fierceness of the face. The shots still sounded downstairs, a sudden cry, the smell of flames catching wood, and he stepped to the bed and cut at the ropes with the unwieldy sword. She jerked her head sideways, towards the room’s shadowed corner, and Sharpe saw the movement, flung himself down, heard the explosion and felt the wind of the pistol ball as a man reared up from beside the bed. A Colonel, no less, in Hussar uniform, whose pleasure had been interrupted before it could begin. There was fear on the man’s face. Sharpe smiled, climbed on to the bed, watched as the Colonel tried to wriggle from the corner, and then, with cold determination, pinned him prisoner against the wall.

‘Sergeant!’

Harper came in, seven-barrelled gun in hand, and saw the girl. ‘God save Ireland.’

‘Cut her free!’

Sharpe heard Kearsey’s voice on the landing. ‘Steady now!’ He could hear Knowles downstairs, counting off the men, sending the wounded up first. The French Colonel was babbling at Sharpe, pointing at the girl, but the sword held him and Sharpe wished he had killed the man straightaway. This was no place to take prisoners and he was trapped, not knowing what was happening outside. The girl was free, rubbing her wrists, and Sharpe dropped the sword. ‘Watch him, Sergeant!’

He ran to the window, smashed panes with the sword, and saw the empty darkness outside. They could make it! The first Redcoats were at the head of the stairs, and then the French Colonel screamed, a terrible agony, and Sharpe whipped round to see that the slim, dark-haired girl had taken the Frenchman’s own sabre and plunged it, point first, into his groin. She was smiling, and she was beautiful enough to catch the breath.

Harper was staring aghast. Sharpe ignored the Frenchman. ‘Patrick!’

‘Sir?’

‘Get the men in here. Through the window! And next door!’

The girl spat at the Colonel, who had collapsed in his own blood, swore at him, and then looked at Sharpe with a glance that seemed to convey pure disdain because he had not killed the Frenchman himself. Sharpe was reeling from her, thrown off balance by her hawk-like beauty, hardly hearing the commands from the landing, the banging muskets. He snapped his attention back, despising himself, but the girl was faster. She had the Colonel’s sabre, her freedom, and she ran out the door, ignoring the fight, and turned right. Sharpe followed, caution gone, just the instinct left that some things, just one thing perhaps, could turn a man’s life inside out.

Knowles had done well. The hall was on fire but empty of the enemy, and the Redcoats backed up the stairs, still loading and firing their muskets, ignoring the fresh blood that made the steps slippery, and then the Riflemen took over, the Bakers spitting into the hallway below, and Major Kearsey, sabre in hand, was pushing the men into a bedroom, towards a window, and shouting, ‘Jump!’

‘Aim low! Aim low!’ Harper’s voice bellowed at the Riflemen. Hussars were coming into the hall, choking on the smoke. Redcoats were pouring from the first-floor windows, forming up in the field beneath, and only Sharpe was absent.

Knowles looked round. ‘Captain!’

‘He’s missing!’ Major Kearsey grabbed Knowles. ‘Get outside! There may be cavalry!’

The girl had run through a door and Sharpe followed, noticing, irrelevantly, a small statue of the Virgin Mary with a host of candles flickering at its base. He remembered the Catholics in the Company deciding that today—no, yesterday—was the fifteenth of August, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and he was grateful because the stairs beyond the door were pitch dark and he grabbed a candle and followed the fading footsteps. He hurried, heels sliding over steps, banging down the stairs. He cursed himself. His place was with his men, not chasing some girl because she had Josefina’s long black hair, a slim body, and a beauty that had overcome him. But this was not a night for sensible action; it was a mad darkness, a gambler’s last throw, and he reasoned that she had been kept a prisoner and that made her important to the enemy, and so important to him.

The rationalization lasted to the bottom of the stairs. The stairway was four-sided and he knew it had plunged below ground level, into the cellars, and he was still hurtling down, almost out of control, with the candle flame blown out, when a white arm shot out and her voice hushed him. They were by a door, light leaking through its gaping planks, but there was no point in pretending that anyone on the far side had not heard their feet on the stairway. Sharpe pushed it open, ignoring her caution, and in the cellar a lantern hung from a hook, and beneath it, fear across his face, was a lancer holding a musket and bayonet. He lunged at Sharpe, thinking perhaps that he could kill with a blade point more easily than by pulling a trigger, but Sharpe had cut his teeth on just such fighting. He let the bayonet come, stepped aside, and used his enemy’s own motion to run the sword blade into his stomach. Then Sharpe nearly gagged.

The cellar was spattered with blood, with bodies that showed death in a dozen horrid ways. Wine-racks stood by the walls, looted empty, but the floor was black with Spanish blood, strewn with mutilations obscene as nightmare. Young, old, men and women, all killed horribly. It struck Sharpe that these people must have died the day before, as he watched from the hilltop, killed as the French pretended the village was empty. He had lain in the gully, the sun warm on his back, and in the cellar the Spanish had died, slowly and with exquisite pain. The bodies lay in the crumpled way of the dead, their number impossible to count, or to tell the ways in which they had died. Some were too young even to have known what had happened, killed no doubt before their mothers’ eyes, and Sharpe felt an impotent rage as the girl stepped past him, searching the shambles, and from far away, as if across a whole town, Sharpe heard a volley of shots. They must get out! He grabbed the girl’s arm.

‘Come on!’

‘No!’

She was searching for one person, pulling at the bodies, oblivious of the horror. Why would there be a guard on dead men? Sharpe pushed past her, took the lantern, and then heard the moaning from the far, dark end of the old wine cellar. The girl heard, too.

‘Ramon!’

Sharpe stepped on dead flesh, flinched from a spider’s web, and then, dimly at first, he saw a man manacled to the far wall. He did not ask himself why a wine cellar should be equipped with manacles; there was no time. He took the lantern closer and saw that what he had thought were chains were blood trails. The man was not manacled but nailed to the stone wall, alive.

‘Ramon!’ The girl was past Sharpe, pulling ineffectively at the nails, and Sharpe put down the lantern and hammered at the nail-heads with his sword’s brass hilt. He knocked them left and right, hearing the thunder of hooves outside, shouts and a volley, and then the nail was loose, blood trickling afresh, and he pulled it out and started on the second hand. Another volley, more hooves, and he hammered desperately until the prisoner was free. He gave the girl his sword and heaved Ramon, if that were his name, on to his shoulder.

‘Go on!’

The girl led him past the doorway they had come through, past the welter of blood and bodies, to the far corner of the cellar. A trapdoor was revealed by the lantern she was holding and she gestured at it. Sharpe dropped his moaning burden, reached up, heaved, and a sudden breeze of welcome night air dispelled the foul stench of the blood and dead. He pulled himself up, surprised to find that the trapdoor emerged outside the house walls, and then realized it was so supplies could reach the house without being trampled through the courtyard and kitchens. He looked round and there was the Company, marching steadily in three ranks.

‘Sergeant!’

Harper turned, relief visible on his face in the light from the burning house. Sharpe dropped back into the cellar, heaved the wounded man on to the ground, leaped up himself, and reached down for the girl. She ignored him, pulled herself up, rolled into the grass, and Sharpe had a glimpse of long legs. There were cheers from the men and Sharpe realized they were for him. Harper was there, thumping his back, saying something unintelligible about thinking Sharpe was lost, and then the Sergeant had the wounded man and they were running towards the Company and Sharpe, for the first time, saw horsemen in the darkness. Harper gave the wounded man into the ranks. Knowles was grinning at Sharpe, Kearsey gesturing to the girl.

‘Are they loaded?’ Sharpe gestured at the muskets, screamed at Knowles over the sound of the burning house.

‘Most, sir.’

‘Keep going!’

Sharpe pushed Knowles on, driving the Company towards the barley field and the comforting darkness, and turned to face the house and see what the cavalry were doing. Harper was already there, running backwards, the seven-barrelled gun threatening any horsemen. Sharpe wondered how long it had been since they had burst through the gate. No more than seven or eight minutes, he decided. Enough time for his men to have fired seven or eight hundred shots into the astonished French, set fire to the house, rescued Kearsey, the girl and the prisoner, and he grinned in the darkness.

‘Watch right!’ Harper called. A dozen lancers, in line, with the wicked points held low so that they glittered by the ground were coming at a trot, to take the Company in the flank. But there was still time. ‘Right wheel!’

The Company turned, three ranks swivelling. ‘Halt!’ A ragged line, but it would do. ‘Rear rank about turn. Hold your fire!’ That looked after the rear. ‘Present! Aim at their stomachs; give them a bellyache! Fire!’

It was inevitable. The enemy became a turmoil of falling horses and tumbling lancers. ‘Right turn! Forward! Double!’ He had the small company in a column now. Running for the barley, for the unharvested crop that would give them a little cover. There were more hoof-beats behind, but not enough loaded muskets to fight off another charge. Time only to run. ‘Run!’

The Company ran, sprinting despite their burdens, and Sharpe heard a wounded man groan. Time later to count the wounded. Now he turned, saw lancers coming in desperate chase, one aiming at Harper, but the Irishman dashed the lance aside with the squat gun and reached up a huge hand that plucked the Pole clean out of the saddle. The Sergeant was screaming insults in his native Gaelic. He held the lancer effortlessly, his huge strength making the man seem to be weightless, and then threw him at the feet of an other horse. A rifle cracked behind Sharpe, another horse down, and Hagman’s voice came through the din. ‘Got him.’

‘Back!’ Harper was shouting, the other horses still yards away, and suddenly the barley was under Sharpe’s feet, and he ran into the field, and for a moment the trumpets meant nothing to him. He was just running, remembering the Indian with the razor point, the desperate and futile attempt to run from the lance, and then he heard Harper’s triumphant voice.

‘The recall! Bastards have had enough!’ Harper was grinning, laughing. ‘You did it, sir!’

Sharpe slowed down, let the breath heave in his chest. It was strangely quiet in the field, the hooves muted, the gunfire stopped, and he guessed that the French refused to believe that just fifty men had attacked the village. The sight of red jackets and crossbelts would have convinced them that more British troops would be out in the darkness and it would be madness to throw the lancers into the massed volley of a hidden regiment. He listened to the men panting, some moaning as they were carried, the excited mutterings of victorious troops. He wondered what the price would be and turned to Harper. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, sir. Yourself?’

‘Bruised. What’s the bill?’

‘Don’t know for certain, sir. Jim Kelly’s bad.’ Harper’s voice was sad and Sharpe remembered the wedding, only weeks ago, when the massive Pru Baxter had woven daisies into her hair to marry the small Irish Corporal. Harper went on. ‘Cresacre was bleeding, says he’s all right. We lost a couple, though. Saw them in the courtyard.’

‘Who?’ He should have known.

‘Don’t know, sir.’

They climbed, up into the hills, up where horses could not go, back to the gully, which they reached as the far hills were lined with the faintest grey of dawn. It was a time for sleep and the men crumpled like the bodies in the cellar. Some were posted as picquets at the gully’s rim, their eyes red with exhaustion, smeared with powder, grinning at Sharpe, who had brought them through. The girl sat with Kearsey, binding up his leg, while Knowles looked after the other wounded. Sharpe stood over him.

‘How bad?’

‘Kelly’s going, sir.’

The Corporal had a chest wound and Knowles had picked away the shreds of jacket to show a mangled horror of glistening ribs and bubbling blood. It was a wonder he had lived this long. Cresacre had been shot in the thigh, a clean wound, and he dressed it himself, swore he would be all right, and apologized to Sharpe as if he were making a nuisance of himself. Two others were badly wounded, both cut with sabres, but they would live, and there was hardly a man who did not have a scratch, a bruise, some memento of the night. Sharpe counted heads. Forty-eight men, three Sergeants, and two officers had left the gully. Four men had not come back. Sharpe felt the tiredness wash through him, tinged with relief. It was a smaller bill than he dared hope for. Once Kelly died, his body kept from the vultures by a shallow grave, he would have lost five men. The lancers must have lost three times that number. He went round the Company, to those who were awake, and praised them. The men seemed embarrassed by the thanks, shaking as the sweat dried on their bodies in the cold air, their heads jerking as some tried to stay awake and look, red-eyed, into the dawn.

‘Captain Sharpe!’ Kearsey was standing in a clear patch of the gully. ‘Captain!’

Sharpe went down the side of the gully. ‘Sir?’

Kearsey stared at him, his small eyes fierce. ‘Are you mad, Sharpe?’

For a second the meaning did not percolate into Sharpe’s head.

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘What were you doing?’

‘Doing, sir? Rescuing you.’ Sharpe had expected thanks.

Kearsey winced, whether from the pain of his leg or from Sharpe’s ingenuousness it was difficult to tell. The dawn was revealing the details of the gully: the collapsed men, the blood, the anger on Kearsey’s face. ‘You fool!’

Sharpe bit back his anger. ‘Sir?’

Kearsey waved at the wounded. ‘How do you get them back?’

‘We carry them, sir.’

‘Carry them, sir.’ Kearsey mimicked him. ‘Over twenty miles of country? You were only here to help carry the gold, Sharpe! Not fight a battle in the back of beyond!’

Sharpe took a deep breath, suppressing the urge to shout back. ‘Without you, sir, we would have had no chance of persuading El Católico to let us take the gold. That was my judgment.’

Kearsey looked at him, shook his head and pointed at Jim Kelly. ‘You think it was worth that?’

‘The General told me the gold was important, sir.’ Sharpe spoke quietly.

‘Important, Sharpe, only because it is a gesture to the Spanish.’

‘Yes, sir.’ It was no time for an argument.

‘At least you rescued them.’ The Major waved at the two Spaniards.

Sharpe looked at the girl’s dark beauty. ‘Them, sir?’

‘Moreno’s children. Teresa and Ramon. The French were holding them as bait, hoping Moreno or El Católico would try a rescue. At least we’ve earned their thanks and that’s probably more valuable than carrying the gold for them. Besides, I doubt if the gold is there.’

The sun split across the gully’s rim. Sharpe blinked. ‘Pardon, sir?’

‘What do you expect? The French are there. They probably have the gold. Or hadn’t that occurred to you?’

It had, but Sharpe was not in a mood to give Kearsey his thoughts. If the French had found the gold he suspected they would have ridden it straight to Ciudad Rodrigo, but doubtless Kearsey would not be convinced. Sharpe nodded. ‘Did they say anything about it to you, sir?’