Sharpe 3-Book Collection 6: Sharpe's Honour, Sharpe's Regiment, Sharpe's Siege (15 page)

Sharpe looked at Hogan. ‘You’ve brought my sword?’

‘Yes.’

‘And more ammunition?’ Hogan had sent him north with only his rifle.

‘Yes.’

‘So what do I do with your horse and Angel?’

‘You go and solve my mystery.’ Hogan put snuff onto his hand, sniffed it, paused, then sneezed. For once he did not swear after the sneeze. ‘I could have sent one of my own people, but you have one advantage.’

‘Which is?’

Hogan looked at Sharpe, ‘You know Helene. I just hope to God she’ll want to see you again, and that she’ll talk to you. Find her, curl up with her, find out what the hell is happening, and save your miserable career.’

Frederickson laughed. Sharpe squirted wine from the skin into his mouth.

Hogan nodded at Angel. ‘Angel’s your spy. Don’t worry that he looks young, he’s been working for me since he was thirteen. He can go where you can’t go. And you have one other advantage. Helene is rather noticeable. If the two of you get within twenty miles of her, you’ll hear about it. You know what the Spanish call her?’

‘La Puta Dorada.’
Sharpe said it softly It was a just enough nickname, yet its use always offended him. ‘Will the Partisans help me?’

‘Who knows? They think you’re dead, so use another name.’ He smiled mockingly. ‘Don’t call yourself Major Hogan, please? I suppose you’ll have to look for the Partisans, but they don’t have any love for the Marquesa. Still, they might help you.’

‘Where would you start looking?’

‘Burgos or Vitoria,’ Hogan said decisively. ‘Burgos because it’s the crossroads of the French armies and if she’s in Spain then she’ll have passed through, and Vitoria because that’s where the Inquisitor comes from. It’s not much, God knows, but it’s. better than nothing.’ Hogan frowned up at the sky, as if angry with the rain. ‘There’s one other thing.’

Sharpe grinned. ‘You’re saving the bad news till last?’

‘If the French capture you, Richard, they’ll crow their victory from every housetop in Europe. They’ll prove that we cheated the Spanish with an execution, they’ll parade you like a captive bear to prove Britain’s perfidy. Or, if they don’t do that, they’ll simply kill you. You’re officially dead, after all, so they’ve nothing to lose.’ He stared at the Rifleman. ‘So don’t get captured.’ Hogan said it with a seething intensity and, to drive the message home, repeated the words. ‘Don’t get captured.’

That was Hogan’s fear. It had been Wellington’s fear, too, when Hogan had suggested that Sharpe be sent to solve the mystery. The General had bristled at Sharpe’s name. ‘What if the fool gets caught, Hogan? Good God! The French will make hay of us! No. It won’t do, It won’t do.’

‘He won’t get caught, my Lord.’ Hogan had already sent Sharpe to the Gateway of God, and was praying that no stray enemy cavalry patrol had already found the Rifleman.

It had taken Hogan two days to persuade the General, his only argument that no one but Sharpe could safely approach La Marquesa. The General had reluctantly agreed. He had wanted to send Sharpe back to England with orders never to show his face in the army again. ‘If this goes wrong, Hogan, it’ll be your hide as well as his.’

‘It won’t go wrong, my Lord, I promise you.’

Wellington had looked mockingly at his chief of intelligence. ‘One man against an army?’

‘Yes, my Lord.’ And that man would win, Hogan fervently believed, because losing was not part of Richard Sharpe’s world.

He watched Sharpe now, his face lit by the flames in the Gateway of God, and he wondered if Sharpe would live to come back to the army. He was sending him with just one boy deep behind the enemy lines, to find a woman who was as treacherous as she was beautiful, yet Hogan had no choice. This summer the General planned a campaign that could destroy French power in Spain, but the French knew how potent was the threat and they would be fighting back, using every weapon of treachery and subtlety that came to hand. Hogan, with an instinct for trouble far off, had fought to let Sharpe go into enemy territory. There was a mystery to be solved, and only Sharpe knew the woman whose letter had revealed that mystery. And the only hope of success was in Sharpe’s belief, that Hogan knew could be utterly false, that La Marquesa had become fond of the Rifleman when they were lovers.

Yet, Hogan thought, Sharpe could be right. The Rifleman provoked great loyalty from all sorts of men and women. From generals and whores to sergeants and frightened recruits. He was a soldier’s soldier, but his friends and lovers saw the vulnerability in him and it made them fond of him. Yet Hogan wondered how much fondness the Golden Whore had in her soul.

The wind gusted, shrieking like a tormented soul in the shattered cloister, and bringing a slapping, rattling burden of rain to lash the broken tiles and seethe in the embers. Hogan shivered beneath his cloak. This was a place of ghosts, the unseen Shee were riding the winds of storm, and he was sending a friend into the unknown to fight an unequal battle.

Richard Sharpe lay on thin, wiry grass and propped his telescope on his pack. He slid the brass shutter aside from the eyepiece, adjusted the tubes, and stared in awed amazement.

He watched an army marching.

He had seen the smear of dust in the sky, rising higher as the morning moved towards midday’s heat, and the dust had looked like the haze of a great grass fire in the far south.

He had ridden towards the haze, going slowly for fear of enemy cavalry patrols, and now, in the early afternoon, he. lay on the low summit of a small hill and stared at the men and animals that had smudged the great plume of dust across the heavens.

The French were marching eastwards. They were marching towards Burgos, towards France.

The road itself was left for the heavy traffic, for the wagons and the guns and the carriages of the generals. Beside the road, trampling the scanty crops, marched the infantry. He moved the telescope right, the far uniforms a blur of colour in his eye, and steadied it where the road came from a small village. Tumbrils and caissons, limbers and ambulances, wagons and more wagons, the horses and oxen dipping their heads with the effort of hauling their loads under the hot Spanish sun. In the village was the tower of an old castle, its grey stone broken by spreading ivy, and Sharpe saw white smoke rising from the tower, mingling with the dust, and knew that the French had looted and now burned the tower. They were abandoning this countryside, going eastward, retreating.

He pushed the telescope left, turning it to look as far to the east as he could see, to where, like a tiny grey blur on the horizon the topmost stones of Burgos’ fortress showed above some trees, and everywhere the road was crammed with men and horses. The infantry moved slowly, like men who hated to retreat. Their women and children slogged along beside them. Cavalry walked beside their steeds, under orders to save their horses’ strength, while only a few squadrons, lancers mostly, whose pennants were stained white with dust, trotted on the flanks of the huge column to protect it against Spanish sharpshooters.

Sharpe rested the telescope. Without the benefit of the fine glass the French army looked like a black snake winding across the valley. He knew he saw a retreat, but he did not know why the enemy retreated. He had heard no guns like thunder in the distance that would have told him of a great battle that Wellington had won. He just watched the great beast snake in the valley, smearing the sky white, and he had no idea why it was here, or where it went, or where his own forces were.

He wriggled back from the skyline, snapped the telescope shut, and turned to the horse which he had tethered to a stone field marker. Hogan had lent him a fine, strong, patient stallion called Carbine, who now watched Sharpe and twitched his long, black, undocked tail. He was a lucky horse, Sharpe thought, because the rule in the British army was that all horses should have their tails cut short, but Carbine had been left his intact so that, at a distance, he would seem to the French to be one of their own. He had been corn fed too, strengthened through the winter to carry one of Hogan’s men who would spy deep behind French lines. Now he carried Sharpe to find a lady.

Though if the Marquesa was in Burgos, Sharpe reflected as he walked towards Carbine, she would be impossible to reach. The French army was falling back on the city, and by tonight Burgos would be surrounded by the enemy. He could only hope that Angel was safe.

The boy was sixteen. His father, a cooper, had died trying to save his wife from the attentions of French Dragoons. Angel had watched his parents die, had seen his house and his father’s workshop burned to cinders, and that same night, armed only with a knife, he had killed his first Frenchman. He had been lucky to escape. He had twisted into the darkness on his young legs as the bullets of the French sentries thrashed about him in the growing rye. He had told Sharpe the story diffidently. ‘I put the knife in my parents’ grave,
señor.’
He had buried his parents himself, then gone to find the Partisans. He had been just thirteen.

Instead of Partisans he had met one of Hogan’s Exploring Officers, the men who, in full uniform, galloped their swift horses deep in enemy country. That officer had passed the boy back to Hogan and, in the last three years, Angel had carried messages between the British and the Partisans. ‘I’m getting old for that now.’

Sharpe had chuckled. ‘Old? At sixteen?’

‘Now the French see I am a man. They think I might be an enemy.’ Angel had shrugged. ‘Before that I was just a boy, they took no notice of me.’

This day, as Sharpe had lain and watched the French army trudge towards Burgos, Angel had gone into the city. His horse, a gift from Hogan, had been left with Sharpe, together with the rifle that the boy carried. He refused wages from Major Hogan, wanting only his food, shelter when he was with the British, and the ‘gun that kills’. He had been offered a smoothbore musket, and had scathingly rejected it. He wanted only a Baker Rifle and, now that one was his, he looked after it lovingly, polishing its woodwork and meticulously cleaning its lock. He claimed that he and the rifle had killed two Frenchmen for every year of his life.

He was incurious about his task with Sharpe. The Golden Whore meant nothing to him, and he did not care if the Marqués de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba was dead. Such things were boring to Angel. He cared only that he had been told that this job was important, that success would hurt his enemies, and that the search for the Marquesa would take him where there were more Frenchmen to be killed. He was glad to be working for Sharpe. He had heard that Sharpe had killed many Frenchmen. Sharpe had smiled. ‘There’s more to life than killing Frenchmen.’

‘I know,
señor.
’

‘You do?’

Angel had nodded. ‘But I do not wish to marry yet.’ He had looked up from the fire into Sharpe’s eyes. ‘You think you will chase the French over the mountains? Back to France?’

Sharpe had nodded. ‘Probably.’

‘I shall join your Rifles then.’ He smiled. ‘I shall march into Paris and remember my parents.’

Angel would not be the first Spanish youth to join the British Rifles; indeed some companies had a dozen Spaniards who had begged to be allowed into the elite ranks. ‘Sweet William’ Frederickson said the only problem with the Spanish recruits was getting them to stop fighting. ’They want to win the war in a day.‘ Sharpe, listening to Angel talk of his parents, understood the zeal with which they fought.

Sharpe rode back to the wooded valley where he would wait for Angel to return from the city. He unsaddled Carbine and tethered him to a pine trunk. He dutifully inspected the horse’s hooves, wishing that Angel, who was so much more efficient at looking after the horses, was here to help, then he carried the saddle up to the small clearing that was their rendezvous.

Sharpe waited. Dusk stretched shadows among the pine trunks and a wind rattled the branches overhead. He scouted the margins of the valley in the twilight, looking for humans, but seeing only a vixen and her cubs who played a snarling game at the foot of a sandy bank. He went back to the horses, put his rifle beside him, and waited for Angel’s return.

The boy came in the dawn, a grey shadow in the trees, bringing with him a cheese wrapped in vine leaves, a new loaf, and his news. Before he would say a word to Sharpe about La Marquesa he insisted on retrieving his rifle and inspecting it in the half-light as though one night’s separation would have somehow changed the weapon. Satisfied, he looked up at the Rifle officer. ‘She’s disappeared.’

Sharpe felt a plunging of his hopes. For these four days since he had parted from Hogan he had feared that Helene would have gone back to France. ‘Disappeared-?’

Angel told the story. She had left the city in a carriage and, though the carriage had come back, La Marquesa had not returned. ‘The French were angry. They had cavalry searching everywhere. They looked in all the villages, they offered a reward of gold, but nothing. They increased the reward, but nothing. She’s gone.’

Sharpe swore, and the boy grinned.

‘You don’t trust me, eh?’ He laughed. He was a start lingly handsome boy, curly haired and strong faced. His dark eyes shone in the light of the fire that Sharpe had lit as dawn came. ‘I know where she is,
señor.’

‘Where?’

‘The Convent of the Heavens, Santa Monica.’ Angel held up a hand to ward off Sharpe’s question. ‘I think.’

‘You think?’

Angel took the wine flask and drank. ‘The priests took her, yes? They and the monks. Everyone knows it, but no one talks. They say the Inquisition was here.’ He crossed himself, and Sharpe thought of the Inquisitor who had come with the letter for the Marqués, Angel smiled. ‘They don’t know where they took her, but I do.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I am Angel, yes?’ The boy laughed. ‘I saw a man who knows me. He tells the Partisans what troops are marching towards the hills. I trust him.’ The words should have sounded odd coming from a sixteen year old, but they did not seem strange coming from this boy who had risked his life since he was thirteen. Angel took some loose tobacco from a pocket, a scrap of paper, and, in Spanish fashion, rolled a makeshift cigar. He leaned forward and the tip of the cigar flared as he sucked on a flame of the fire. ‘This man says that he has heard that the woman was taken to Santa Monica, to the convent. He heard from the Partisans.’ Angel blew smoke into the air. ‘The Partisans are guarding the convent.’