Sharpes command, p.14
Sharpe's Command, page 14
‘Mister Sharpe told me to stay here,’ Harper said, ‘until he gets back.’
‘He is not coming back! I told you that.’
So El Héroe had not seen Sharpe. He must have thought that the firing which came from the higher ground beyond the village was from one of Harper’s picquets and if he had any sense he would have sent men to look for those sentries. Let them look, Sharpe thought.
‘Mister Sharpe told me he’s coming back,’ Harper called, ‘and if he says he’s coming back then he will be back. He’s an officer of his word.’
‘So am I,’ El Héroe said, ‘and I tell you Major Sharpe is not coming.’
‘And I was told you’re a liar,’ Harper called.
‘He is in trouble! And now General Hill may not come at all because Major Sharpe betrayed himself to the French who are now ready for any attack. You are on your own, Sergeant! And soon the French will come to find what caused the firing this morning.’
‘We love killing Frenchmen!’ Harper retorted. ‘They’re as easy to kill as your monkeys.’
‘And they will bring cannon!’ El Héroe threatened.
Sharpe had crept behind Harper and now looked through the small opening. El Héroe was standing in the gate of the churchyard wall, flanked by a man holding the white flag. Sharpe was tempted to kill him, it was an easy shot for the rifle, but the churchyard wall was lined by El Héroe’s men, who could well start the fight again and by now Sharpe’s men had only their rifles. The muskets they had used to thicken their fire were mostly unloaded. The rifles would doubtless kill another dozen of El Héroe’s men, but Sharpe would also take losses and he already had one man to bury and that was one man too many.
‘You must leave, Sergeant!’ El Héroe called, evidently emboldened by the lack of response to his previous words, ‘and you will also leave what you stole from my house.’
‘His money,’ Sharpe muttered, amused.
‘We stole some wine,’ Harper called back, ‘but you probably didn’t want it because it tasted like goat’s piss. And we took some fine shirts! Thank you for those.’
‘You took the village’s poor box,’ El Héroe snapped back, ‘money to help us buy new flocks when the French leave.’
‘I’ll leave you the box,’ Harper said.
‘You will leave the money!’ El Héroe almost screamed the words, his agony at losing a fortune obvious.
‘I’ll do what Mister Sharpe tells me to do,’ Harper retorted.
‘I have told you already! Major Sharpe is not coming back, ever!’
‘Then we’ll wait for Miss Teresa, La Aguja.’
‘That puta! If that bitch comes, I will share her with my men!’
Sharpe snatched at Teresa’s arm, but she was too quick for him. She reached the door and dragged it fully open. She levelled one of her pistols and screamed at El Héroe so fast that Sharpe hardly understood a word, though it was obvious enough she was insulting his manhood and his courage. Then she pulled the trigger. The range was short enough, but pistols were notoriously inaccurate and the ball seared past El Héroe’s right ear. He ducked, turned and fled, pursued by Teresa’s curses.
Sharpe pulled her into the church’s darkness and kicked the door shut before any of El Héroe’s men fired back. ‘I will kill him,’ Teresa said.
‘Not today,’ Sharpe said, and turned to Harper. ‘Start loading muskets, Sergeant, we might need them.’
‘What’s the yellow bastard going to do?’
‘For now? He’ll go back to his house and lick his wounds, but he will be back. Though he might send to Miravete Castle and ask the Crapauds to help him.’
‘We could leave?’ Harper suggested.
‘He’s not a complete idiot. He’ll have men watching the church. If we go out into the fields, he’ll follow us.’
‘So we wait for the French?’
‘If they come,’ Sharpe said, ‘though it won’t be till late morning. If they come at all.’ Sharpe thought for a heartbeat. ‘But the shithead will be back. He wants his money.’
He left half his riflemen at their windows to keep watch, while the other half reloaded muskets. Once those weapons were stacked at the windows, he told half his men to sleep while the others kept watch. They could see to the west, north and south, but there was no window at the church’s eastern end where the gaudy altar stood, and it was at that end that Henderson finally heard a noise. ‘Something’s scrabbling there,’ he whispered to Sharpe.
‘Scrabbling, Joe?’
‘From up there, Mister Sharpe,’ Henderson pointed into the shadows of the high-beamed roof. ‘Listen, sir.’
Sharpe listened and heard a low thump, then a scraping sound. He thought the noise came from the high eastern wall. ‘Buggers are trying to get to the roof,’ he told Henderson, ‘wake the lads.’
Sharpe reckoned the thump he had heard was the sound of a ladder being placed at the church’s eastern end, which meant El Héroe had devised a plan to get to the high roof and fire down, though to do that he would need to remove some tiles. ‘Bring me five riflemen,’ he told Henderson, then waited as the men lined up just in front of the altar. ‘Quiet, lads,’ he warned them, then pointed to where the roof joined the stone gable. ‘Shoot up through the roof tiles,’ he told them quietly. The muskets could fire faster, but the rifles had more power to shatter through the thick tiles, ‘Not yet! Listen!’
They listened and heard shuffling noises. El Héroe’s men had climbed the ladder and were doing their best to be quiet, but they were also clinging to the steep roof’s ridge which offered their only security from the danger of falling. What El Héroe should have done, Sharpe thought, was have half his men fire from the churchyard’s perimeter to cover the noises from the roof, but the fool had not thought that far ahead. A scraping sound suggested that one of the men on the roof’s ridge was trying to remove a tile and Sharpe aimed his rifle, guessed where the sound had come from and pulled the trigger.
The shot shattered a tile and provoked a yelp of alarm. ‘Pepper them, boys,’ Sharpe said, and all six rifles fired. As the noise faded inside the smoke-filled church Sharpe heard a body scraping down the steep roof, then a thump as it landed in the churchyard. ‘Keep at them, lads.’ He reloaded his own rifle, tap-loading it because accuracy was unnecessary. All they needed to do was keep bullets pouring through the roof’s summit. Each shot cascaded broken tile into the church, but the bullets also drove El Héroe’s men off the roof in a panicked retreat. At least two of them could not wait their turn at the ladder and preferred to slide down the roof and risk the fall, but after a couple of minutes Sharpe was satisfied they had all gone. ‘Hold your fire! And well done.’ He walked to the altar and stared upwards, then aimed his rifle and shot at the easternmost tiles of the ridge. ‘You too, Dan.’
It took six shots to clear a large open patch through which the light showed. ‘If the buggers try using the ladder again,’ Sharpe told Hagman, ‘you’ll see them and kill them.’
‘That I will, Mister Sharpe,’ the old poacher said and squatted by the altar steps gazing upwards, which meant the back door that El Héroe had hoped to open into the church was closed.
A half hour later all the muskets were again loaded, the village was quiet and Sharpe, exhausted, slept.
‘Two days,’ Sharpe said.
He had slept for three or four hours and woken to a silent village. How long, Harper wanted to know, before General Hill arrived. ‘Two days,’ Sharpe said again.
‘And today’s Friday,’ Harper said, ‘I think.’
‘I think so too.’
‘So late Sunday or early Monday?’ Harper looked thoughtful. ‘The yellow bastard will try to get his money back before then.’
‘Like as not. It’s all he cares about. Without money he’s just a bloody deserter from the Spanish army, but with it he can pretend to be a gentleman.’
‘Gentleman!’ Teresa spat. ‘He’s a goat-turd.’
‘But a dangerous one,’ Sharpe said, ‘and he knows you’re here.’
‘So?’
‘So think how much the French will pay him if he gives them La Aguja!’
‘And like as not they’ll give you to the bastard,’ Pat put in, ‘and the villagers tell us he’s not kind to women. He likes to beat them up a little first.’
‘I’ll cut his cojones off,’ Teresa said, ‘if he has any.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t get the chance,’ Sharpe said. ‘We’re leaving.’
‘Leaving!’ Harper sounded surprised.
‘Running away?’ Teresa asked derisively.
‘Choosing a new battlefield,’ Sharpe said.
‘You think the Crapauds will come?’ Harper asked.
‘I know they’ll come!’ Sharpe said firmly. ‘The piece of shit will tell them La Aguja is here, and they won’t be able to resist that lure. They want Teresa and they want us, and they’ll think we’re waiting for them in the church, so they’ll bring a cannon to blast the place down.’
‘That wouldn’t be good,’ Harper said thoughtfully.
‘But you told the General that cannons can’t be moved in these hills,’ Teresa objected.
‘They can reach this village easily enough,’ Sharpe explained, ‘it’s the track from here to the river that’s the bugger. Besides, they’ll bring a small gun. They have old four-pounders.’ He turned and looked at Harper. ‘So we can’t stay here.’
‘Where do we go?’ Harper asked.
‘The old bridge,’ Sharpe said.
‘They trap us there too,’ Teresa said.
‘Or we trap them,’ Sharpe countered.
‘How?’
‘You’ll see.’ He was not entirely sure why he had chosen the old shattered bridge for his refuge, but an instinct had prompted the decision and he was still exploring that instinct. The drawback to the bridge was that it would be easy for the French to use the old main road to bring a cannon to the site, but he remembered from his previous visit that the main road ran for about three hundred paces from the bridge until it tipped over a small ridge, which meant the French would have to bring any cannon to within three hundred yards of the bridge and that was an easy killing distance for rifles. ‘I hope the buggers do bring a cannon,’ he said. ‘Our biggest problem is your horses,’ he told Teresa. ‘I can’t protect them from Crapaud fire.’
‘Juan can take them over the hill,’ she said. Juan was one of her most trusted men.
‘And if the Crapauds follow him?’
‘I give him permission to run away.’
Sharpe laughed. ‘They’ll only follow him if they think you’re with them.’
‘And I stay with you!’
‘Probably safest,’ Sharpe said, ‘but for the moment we wait here.’ It went against his instinct to do nothing while an enemy had the time to devise a new assault, but nor did he want to take his men out into the afternoon sunlight and give El Héroe’s men a chance to follow. If he did go he doubted he could find a better place than the church to defend, and for the moment his ambition was to keep his remaining men alive and so they would wait and hope that the French did not send a company under the command of an officer who knew his business.
‘Are you sure the Crapauds will come?’ Harper asked.
‘They’ll come,’ Sharpe said, ‘they might send a patrol first to discover what’s happening, but once they know we’re cornered they’ll send more men and if they’ve got a lick of sense they’ll send a four-pounder with them.’
‘Should we move now?’ Teresa asked.
‘Soon,’ Sharpe said, ‘but once we’re moving we won’t be able to see what’s coming after us.’ He turned and stared at the altar. ‘Pat, I want to see if that ladder’s still outside.’
The one drawback to the church was that it had no window facing east. There had been one once, the shape of it was clear on the limewashed eastern wall, but it had been bricked up which meant Sharpe could not see the castle at Miravete nor anyone approaching from the French positions there. He paused at the vestry door. ‘Anyone see the bastards?’ he called to the men watching from the windows.
‘Nothing, Mister Sharpe,’ Hagman answered, nor did any of the others see movement in the village.
‘Let’s go, Pat,’ Sharpe said, and went through the vestry and heaved aside the furniture blocking the door. He opened it and was relieved that no musket fired from the churchyard wall. It seemed that El Héroe’s men had all gone back to their house. Sharpe darted out, turned the corner and saw the ladder still propped against the eastern gable, the top of which was flecked dark with bloodstains. ‘We need it inside the church, Pat.’
Harper heaved the ladder over so it crashed down among the graves, then he and Sharpe struggled to carry it through the outer and inner doors. No one shot at them, nor did anyone call an alarm. ‘We’re fighting against choirboys,’ Sharpe said scornfully. ‘The buggers aren’t even watching us.’
Once in the church the ladder was put up against the eastern gable and Sharpe climbed so he was able to push his head through the ragged hole his rifles’ bullets had torn in the roof. He laid his telescope on a tile sticky with drying blood and gazed across the valley towards Miravete Castle. It took him a moment to focus the glass, and then he saw what he did not want to see: two companies of blue-coated infantry had just left Miravete and were marching down the track which would lead to the village. ‘The goat-turd has his reinforcements,’ Sharpe said. He could see upwards of one hundred and fifty men coming towards him and he reckoned they would fight a damn sight better than El Héroe’s feeble effort to capture the church. The only good news was that he could see no cannon accompanying the approaching French.
He slid down the ladder, landing with a thump on the tiles. ‘We’re out of here,’ he growled. He and Harper had retrieved the ladder without interference by leaving through the north door, so that was the route he would take again. ‘Loaded rifles, lads,’ he said, ‘and take a couple of muskets each. Are those barrels wine?’
‘Taken from the bastard’s house, sir,’ Harris confirmed.
‘Take them, and any food.’
This was not what he wanted, but the arrival of the French infantry would make the church a deathtrap. He handed Sergeant Latimer’s rifle and cartridge pouch to Teresa. ‘The goat-turd,’ he told her, ‘will have told the Crapauds that you’re here, which is probably why they’re coming. They want you.’
‘They want you too. We go to the bridge?’
‘We do,’ Sharpe said. He was still not sure why he had chosen the bridge, but instinct told him it was the one place where he could win the coming fight. To retreat over the hills was to invite a French pursuit with few if any places to set up a killing defence. Besides, he was ordered to destroy the French encampment at the base of the old bridge and this gave him another chance to examine the defences. ‘Let’s go!’
He led them at a smart pace down the hill from the village and then up to the ridge where the old road led to the broken bridge. He put Pat Harper at the rear of the small column with orders to watch for any pursuit, but they had gone over half the distance before Harper reported that a pair of horsemen were shadowing them. ‘Dan? They’re yours,’ Sharpe said.
The horsemen kept a long way off, but Hagman’s first shot persuaded them they were too close and both men turned and spurred away, though by now they must have realised where Sharpe was headed.
‘If we’re on the old bridge,’ Harper said to Sharpe, ‘there’ll only be two ways out. Either through the Frogs or drop into the river off the broken end.’
‘A short life and a merry one,’ Sharpe said.
‘God save Ireland!’
‘You’re too young to die, Pat, trust me.’ The only response to that was a sceptical grunt. ‘We just have to hold out for a couple of days,’ Sharpe explained, ‘and the Crapauds are going to be nervous of us. Every time they’ve challenged us we’ve hammered them hard, so they’ll be cautious.’
‘And we hammer them again?’
‘And El Héroe will be no bloody use to them,’ Sharpe went on. ‘He’ll stay as far away as possible.’
Harper nodded. ‘It’s not that I don’t trust you, sir,’ he said, ‘but the buggers do outnumber us.’
‘About ten to one, I reckon, but we’re the 95th Rifles. I feel sorry for the Crapauds. You still have pistol balls for the volley gun?’
‘Enough for three shots, sir. Miss Teresa gave me some of her pistol ammunition.’
‘You’ll only need one shot.’ Sharpe grinned. ‘You mark my words, the buggers will run.’
It was late afternoon when they reached the shattered bridge. Sharpe led them onto the roadway and to his relief saw that the baulks of sawn timber and stacks of cut masonry were still in place. He gestured at the heaps of masonry and stacked timbers that were intended to repair the broken span. ‘We make those into a barrier at the bridge’s end,’ he explained. ‘Build it across the roadway between the ends of the parapets, and let’s be quick!’
He used his telescope to see that the two French companies were still more than a mile away. They were coming slowly, he suspected because they had been in Miravete’s garrison and had not been regularly exercised. So he had a little time, enough he hoped to heap timber and stone into a makeshift wall that would block the broken roadway exactly where the bridge’s thick stone parapets ended. His men, seeing what he proposed, and seeing the approaching enemy, worked with alacrity, making a base of thick timbers on which they piled masonry blocks which Harris insisted could form crenellations. ‘Like an old castle, Mister Sharpe,’ he said proudly.
‘Do it,’ Sharpe said, ‘Dan?’
‘Mister Sharpe?’
‘With me. Elliott! Perkins! Come as well.’ He led the three riflemen to the crest where he assumed the French would have placed a cannon if they had brought one, and lay on the road staring at the approaching French. ‘Are the buggers in range?’
