Sharpe 3-Book Collection 5: Sharpe's Company, Sharpe's Sword, Sharpe's Enemy (92 page)

‘Fire!’

The smoke drifted towards the convent, drifted slowly with the falling snow, and now the flakes hissed as they hit the hot barrels, and again the guns bucked back, wheels bouncing, and again the teams dragged them round, rammed them, primed them, fired them, and the gates of the Convent had already gone.

‘Fire!’

And each volley seemed to tinge the drifting cloud with red so that the sky was grey-black, the valley white, and the northern edge a place of redness. ‘Fire!’

The noise echoed from the hills, jarred snow from the eaves of the village houses, tinkled the glasses in the inn’s kitchen.

‘Fire!’

A length of wall collapsed, dust looking like smoke, and the next roundshot smashed through an interior wall, breaking plaster and old stone, and the guns smashed back again, their crews hot and sweating despite the cold, and the gunner Colonel grinned in pleasure for his men.

‘Fire!’

The upper cloister was open to the valley now, the closed Convent torn apart by the close range gunnery, and the first acrid smoke of the early volleys was drifting between broken pillars and fallen carvings.

‘Fire!’

The hornbeam was struck on the trunk, it seemed to fly in the air, roots tearing up tiles and snow, and the buttons and ribbons that had decorated it were thrown to the ground with the falling tree.

‘Fire!’

The cat that had walked so delicately on the Christmas morning tiles now hissed, claws outstretched, in the cellar. The fur on its back was upright. The building seemed to shake around it.

‘Fire!’

A Rifleman on the gatehouse pointed. ‘Sir?’

The French Battalion were moving along the northern fringe of the valley, their blue coats dark in the gloom where the smoke rolled over the snow.

‘Fire!’

The last volley, crashing down a carved archway, bringing tiles slipping in an avalanche of clay and snow from the roof, and the Voltigeurs cheered, ran clumsily on the snow, and the first muskets fired at the Convent.

‘Now.’ Sharpe said. ‘Now!’

‘Sir?’

‘Nothing.’ It was nearly dark, so much so that his eyes played tricks in the gloom.

The Convent’s defenders, sheltered in the inner cloister, ran as they had been ordered to run. Up the stairs, up the ramp of the cloister furthest from the guns, and then to their places. One volley, muskets and rifles pricking the dusk, and then they jumped. Some went down rubble into the upper cloister, clambered over the wreckage of the wall, and sprinted towards the Castle. Others jumped from the roof, falling clumsily on the snow covered slope, and they too ran for the safety of the ramparts. Sharpe looked up the valley. There was no cavalry, there was no need to send out the three Companies of Fusiliers to cover the retreat.

The French saw them go, cheered, fired a hasty farewell volley and then the Battalion scrambled over the wreckage made by the guns, and French cheers sounded in the valley for they had their first victory.

‘Limber up!’ The Colonel wanted the guns moved swiftly to the Convent. The howitzers, which had not fired, were already hitched to their horses.

The Battalion spread through the Convent, finding the barrels of liquor that Sharpe had left them, barrels he hoped would make them drunk and helpless. The officers saw them too, levelled pistols, and blew the strakes from the bottom so the liquor flowed into the snow. ‘Move! Move! Move!’ A passage had to be cleared for the guns.

The Convent’s defenders came in through the archway of the Castle. One man limped, his ankle sprained by the fall, another cursed because a French musket bullet was lodged in his buttocks. Laughter greeted his pained announcement. Sharpe leaned over the turret into the courtyard. ‘Call the roll!’

The Fusiliers reported first. ‘All present!’

Cross’s Riflemen. ‘Present!’

‘Lieutenant Price?’

The Lieutenant’s face was white as he looked up. ‘Harps is missing, sir!’ There was disbelief in his voice. Around him the men of Sharpe’s Company stared up at the turret and on their faces was a hope that Sharpe could bring off a miracle.

Lieutenant Price’s voice was anguished. ‘Did you hear me, sir?’

‘I heard you. Block the gate.’

There was a gasp from below. ‘Sir?’

‘I said block the gate!’ Anger in Sharpe’s voice.

He turned and the snow drifted gentle in the dusk, drifted past the ramparts to settle on the graves, drifted down the long pass where help must come, settled on the shattered east wall of the Convent.

Harper had said that the Irish do not need luck. Sharpe flinched as musket shots sounded deep within the Convent from which only Sergeant Patrick Harper had not escaped.

Lieutenant Price was on the turret, panting from his swift climb up the winding stair. ‘He was with us, sir! I didn’t see anything happen to him!’

‘Don’t worry, Harry.’

‘We can go back in the night, sir!’ Price was eager.

‘I said don’t worry, Harry.’ Sharpe stared northwards into the smoking twilight.

Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden, Einen bess‘ren futdst du nicht.

In war, as in love, few campaigns go exactly as planned, and the French General remade his plans before the fire at the inn. ‘The object is still the same, gentlemen, to draw the British north. If we cannot make Vila Nova, then we can still make Barca de Alva. It will have the same effect.’ He turned to the gunner Colonel. ‘How long before your guns are in place?’

‘Midnight, sir.’ The guns had to be manhandled into the Convent, embrasures made in the southern wall, but the work was going fast. They had feared that the British might send Riflemen to harry the progress, but none had come.

‘Good. Sunrise, someone?’

‘Twenty-one minutes past seven.’Ducos was always exact about these things.

‘These long nights! Still, we knew of them when we started.’ The General sipped muddy coffee, looked back to the gunner. ‘Howitzers, Louis. I don’t want a man to be able to move in that courtyard tomorrow.’

The Colonel grinned. ‘Sir. I can put two more in there.’

‘Do it.’ The General smiled at Dubreton.
‘Merci,
Alexandre.’ He took the offered cigar, rolled it between finger and thumb, and accepted a light. ‘When can we open fire?’

The gunner shrugged. ‘When you want, sir.’

‘Seven? And we put two more batteries on the southern edge of the village to fire straight across the breach, yes?’ The Colonel nodded. The General smiled. ‘Canister, Louis. That will stop their damned rockets. I don’t want a man living if they leave the shelter of the walls.’

‘They won’t, sir.‘

‘But your gunners will be in range of those damned Riflemen on the hill.’ The General spoke slowly, thinking aloud. ‘I think we must keep them busy. Do you believe this report they have rockets?’ He had turned to Dubreton.

‘No, sir. I can’t see how they could fire them through the thorns.’

‘Nor me. So. We’ll send a Battalion up the hill, eh? They can keep the Riflemen busy.’

‘Just one, sir?’

The fire crackled in the hearth, sparks spitting onto the boots that dried before the flames, and the plans were meticulously made. A battalion, reinforced by Voltigeurs, would assault the watchtower while two twelve-pounders, instead of going into the Convent, would soak the thorns with canister to kill the hidden Greenjackets. The howitzers in the Convent would make the Castle courtyard into a place of shell-born death, while guns south of the village would rake the rubble and earthworks so no rockets could be carried to their launchers. And the infantry would attack again in mid-morning, an infantry that would be protected by the guns, that would take their bayonets to a shattered, demoralized garrison. Then the French could march on to the bridge at Barca de Alva, to victory. The General raised a glass of brandy. ‘To victory in the Emperor’s name.’

They murmured the toast, drank it, and only Dubreton muttered a doubt. ‘They gave the Convent up pretty easily.’

‘They had few men there, Alexandre.’

‘True.’

‘And my guns had softened them.’ The Colonel of Artillery smiled.

‘True.’

The General raised his glass again. ‘And tomorrow we win.’

‘True.’

The breeze drifted the snow into piles inside the Castle courtyard. The flakes hissed in the fire, melted on the backs of the Rocket Troop horses who were huddled inside the keep’s courtyard, settled wet and cold on the greatcoats of the men who stared into the night and feared a screaming attack from the darkness. Rags were wrapped round the locks of muskets and rifles, rags to stop the wetness reaching the powder in the pans. Fires had been lit in the Convent and the flames showed where French soldiers struggled at the old gateway, heaving and hammering stones into a crude ramp up which the guns could be pushed. Occasionally a rifle shot cracked in the valley and its bullet would chip stone by the French or throw a man down, cursing and wounded, but then the French protected the place with an empty ammunition caisson, and the Riflemen saved their ammunition. Other Riflemen, from Frederickson’s Company, patrolled into the valley. Their orders were to keep the French awake, to fire at lights, shadows, to wear on the night-time nerves of the enemy, while on the hill the Fusiliers cursed and swore and wondered what kind of maniac would order to them to search by night for rabbit holes. Rabbit holes!

Men slept uneasily, their uniforms half dried by the fires, their muskets always within reach. Some woke in the darkness, wondering for an instant where they were, and when they remembered the chill fear would come back. They were in a bad place.

Major Richard Sharpe seemed distracted. He was polite, attentive to every detail, secretive about tomorrow’s plans. He stayed on the gatehouse turret till midnight, till the snow stopped falling, and then he had joined his Company for a thin meal of boiled dried beef. Daniel Hagman had assured Sharpe that Harper would survive, but there had been little conviction in the old poacher’s voice and Sharpe had just smiled at him. ‘I know, Dan. I know.’ There had been little conviction in Sharpe’s voice as well.

Sharpe walked every rampart, spoke to every sentry, and the tiredness was like a pain in every part of his body. He wanted to be warm, he wanted to sleep, he wished that Harper’s huge and genial presence was in the Castle, but he knew, too, that he would have little sleep this night. An hour or two, perhaps, huddled in some cold comer. The room that Farthingdale had made his own, the room with the fireplace, had been given to the wounded, and no man in the valley had a worse night than them.

The wind was cold. The snow seemed almost luminous on the valley floor, a white sheet that would.betray an enemy movement. The sentries fought to stay awake on the ramparts, listened for their Sergeants’ footsteps, wondered what the dawn would bring from the east.

To the south there was a glow in the sky, a red suffusion that marked where Partisans were spending the dark hours. Somewhere, just once, a wolf gave a sobbing howl that was ghostlike in the high, dark night.

Sharpe’s final visit to the sentries was to the men who guarded the hole hacked in the southern side of the keep. He looked at the snow-covered thorns of the hill and knew that, should tomorrow they be overwhelmed, that was the escape route. Many would never take it, but would lie dying in the Castle, and he remembered the winter four years before when he had led the single Company of Riflemen, in weather worse than this, on a retreat that had been as desperate as tomorrow’s might be. Most of those men were dead now, killed by disease or by the enemy, and Harper had been one of the men who had struggled south in the Galician snows. Harper.

He went to the steps which led straight and broad down to the dungeons. Lightly wounded Fusiliers guarded the prisoners and they did so in a stench that was vile, a stench that rose from the crammed, foul bodies in the dark. The guards were nervous. There was no door to the dungeons, just the stairway, and they had made a barricade, chest high, at the bottom of the steps and lit it with flaming straw torches that showed the slick wetness of the nearest patch of floor. Each guard had three muskets, loaded and cocked, and the thought was that no prisoner would have time to clamber the barricade before a bullet would throw him back. The guards were pleased to see Sharpe. He sat with them on the steps. ‘How are they?’

‘Bleeding cold, sir.’

‘That’ll keep them quiet.’

‘Gives me the creeps, sir. You know that big bastard?’

‘Hakeswill?’

‘He got free.’

Sharpe looked into the darkness beyond the torches. He could see the half-naked bodies piled together for warmth, he could see some eyes glittering at him from the heap, but he could not see Hakeswill. ‘Where is he?’

‘He stays at the back, sir.’

‘Given you no trouble?’

‘No.’ The man spat a stream of tobacco juice over the unbalustraded edge of the stairs. ‘We told them if they came within ten feet of the barricade, we’d fire.’ He patted the butt of his musket, one captured from Pot-au-Feu’s men.

‘Good.’ He looked at the half-dozen men. ‘When are you relieved?’

‘Morning, sir.’ Their self-elected spokesman said.

‘What do you have to drink?’

They grinned, held up canteens. ‘Rum, sir.’

He walked down the steps and pushed at the barricade. It seemed firm enough, a mixture of stones and old timber, and he stared into the darkness and understood why this damp place would scare a man. It was called a dungeon, though in truth it was more like a huge, branching cellar, arched low with massive stones, but doubtless it had been a place where men had died through the ages. Like the men Hakeswill had killed here, like the Muslim prisoners who would have defended their faith by refusing to convert despite the Christian knives, racks, burning irons, and chains. He wondered if anyone had ever been happy in this place, had ever laughed. This was a tomb for happiness, a place where no sunlight had reached for centuries, and he turned back to the stairs, glad to be leaving this place.

‘Sharpy! Little Dick Sharpy!’ The voice was behind him now, a voice Sharpe knew too well. He ignored Hakeswill, began climbing the steps, but the cackle came, mocking and knowing. ‘Running away, are we, Sharpy?’