Sharpe 12 - Sharpe's Battle (5 page)

“Are they good for anything?”

“I'm sure they'll be decorative,” Hogan allowed dubiously.

“And decoration costs money,” Wellington said. “I suppose the King of Spain did not think to send his guard's pay chest?”

“No, my Lord.”

“Which means I'm paying them?” Wellington inquired dangerously, and, when

Hogan's only answer was a seraphic smile, the General swore. “God damn their eyes! I'm supposed to pay the bastards? While they stab me in the back? Is that what they're here for, Hogan?”

“I wouldn't know, my Lord. But I suspect as much.”

A gust of laughter sounded from a fatigue party that had just discovered some intimate drawings concealed in a dead Frenchman's coat tails. Wellington winced at the noise and edged his horse further away from the raucous group.

Some crows fought over a pile of offal that had once been a French skirmisher.

The General stared at the unpleasant sight, then grimaced. “So what do you know about this Irish guard, Hogan?”

"They're mostly Spanish these days, my Lord, though even the Spanish-born guards have to be descended from Irish exiles. Most of the guardsmen are recruited from the three Irish regiments in Spanish service, but a handful, I imagine, will be deserters from our own army. I'd suspect that most of them are patriotic to Spain and are probably willing to fight against the French, but undoubtedly a handful of them will be afrancesados, though in that regard

I'd suspect the officers before the men.“ An afrancesado was a Spaniard who supported the French and almost all such traitors came from the educated classes. Hogan slapped a horsefly that had settled on his horse's neck. ”It's all right, Jeremiah, just a hungry fly,“ he explained to his startled horse, then turned back to Wellington. ”I don't know why they've been sent here, my

Lord, but I am sure of two things. First, it will be a diplomatic impossibility to get rid of them, and second we have to assume that it's the

French who want them here. King Ferdinand, I've no doubt, was gulled into writing the letter. I hear he's not very clever, my Lord."

“But you are, Hogan. It's why I put up with you. So what do we do? Put them to latrine digging?”

Hogan shook his head. “If you employ the King of Spain's household guard on menial tasks, my Lord, it will be construed as an insult to our Spanish allies as well as to His Catholic Majesty.”

“Damn His Catholic Majesty,” Wellington growled, then stared balefully towards the trench-like grave where the French dead were now being unceremoniously laid in a long, white, naked row. “And the junta?” he asked. “What of the junta?”

The junta in Cadiz was the regency council that ruled unoccupied Spain in their King's absence. Of its patriotism there could be no doubt, but the same could not be said of its efficiency. The junta was notorious for its internal squabbles and touchy pride, and few matters had touched that pride more directly than the discreet request that Arthur Wellesley, Viscount Wellington, be made Generalisimo of all Spain's armies. Wellington was already the General

Marshal of Portugal's army and commander of the British forces in Portugal, and no man of sense denied he was the best general on the allied side, not least because he was the only one who consistently won battles, and no one denied that it made sense for all the armies opposing the French in Spain and

Portugal to be under a unified command, but nevertheless, despite the acknowledged sense of the proposal, the junta was reluctant to grant

Wellington any such powers. Spain's armies, they protested, must be led by a

Spaniard, and if no Spaniard had yet proved capable of winning a campaign against the French, then that was no matter; better a defeated Spaniard than a victorious foreigner.

“The junta, my Lord,” Hogan answered carefully, “will think this is the thin end of a very broad wedge. They'll think this is a British plot to take over the Spanish armies piecemeal, and they'll watch like hawks, my Lord, to see how you treat the Real Companïa Irlandesa.”

“The hawk,” Wellington said with a sour twist, “being Don Luis.”

“Precisely, my Lord,” Hogan said. General Don Luis Valverde was the junta's official observer with the British and Portuguese armies and the man whose recommendation was needed if the Spanish were ever to appoint Wellington as their Generalisimo. It was an approval that was highly unlikely, for General

Valverde was a man in whom all the junta's great pride and none of its small sense was concentrated.

“God damn it,” Wellington said, thinking of Valverde. “Well, Hogan? You're paid to advise me, so earn your damned pay.”

Hogan paused to collect his thoughts. “I fear we have to welcome Lord Kiely and his men,” he said after a few seconds, “even while we distrust them, and so it seems to me, my Lord, that we must do our best to make them uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that they either go back to Madrid or else march down to Cadiz.”

“We drive them out?” Wellington said. “How?”

"Partly, my Lord, by bivouacking them so close to the French that those guardsmen who wish to desert will find it easy. At the same time, my Lord, we say that we have put them in a place of danger as a compliment to their fighting reputation, despite which, my Lord, I think we must assume that the

Real Companïa Irlandesa, while undoubtedly skilled at guarding palace gates, will prove less skilled at the more mundane task of fighting the French. We should therefore insist that they submit to a period of strict training under the supervision of someone who can be trusted to make their life a living misery."

Wellington gave a grim smile. “Make these ceremonial soldiers stoop, eh? Make them chew on humble pie till it chokes them?”

"Exactly, my Lord. I have no doubt that they expect to be treated with respect and even privilege, so we must disappoint them. We'll have to give them a liaison officer, someone senior enough to smooth Lord Kiely's feathers and allay General Valverde's suspicions, but why not give them a drillmaster too?

A tyrant, but someone shrewd enough to smoke out their secrets."

Wellington smiled, then turned his horse back towards his aides. He knew exactly who Hogan had in mind. "I doubt our Lord Kiely will much like Mister

Sharpe," the General said.

“I cannot think they'll take to each other, my Lord, no.”

“Where is Sharpe?”

“He should be on his way to Vilar Formoso today, my Lord. He's an unhappy recruit to the Town Major's staff.”

“So he'll be glad to be cumbered with Kiely instead then, won't he? And who do we appoint as liaison officer?”

“Any emollient fool will do for that post, my Lord.”

“Very well, Hogan, I'll find the fool and you arrange the rest.” The General touched his heels to his horse's flank. His aides, seeing the General ready to move, gathered their reins, then Wellington paused. “What does a man want with a common milking stool, Hogan?”

“It keeps his arse dry during wet nights of sentry duty, my Lord.”

"Clever thought, Hogan. Can't think why I didn't come up with the idea myself.

Well done." Wellington wheeled his horse and spurred west away from the battle's litter.

Hogan watched the General go, then grimaced. The French, he was sure, had wished trouble on him and now, with God's good help, he would wish some evil back on them. He would welcome the Real Companïa Irlandesa with honeyed words and extravagant promises, then give the bastards Richard Sharpe.

The girl clung to Rifleman Perkins. She was hurt inside, she was bleeding and limping, but she had insisted on coming out of the hovel to watch the two

Frenchmen die. Indeed she taunted the two men, spitting and screaming at them, then laughed as one of the two captives dropped to his knees and lifted his bound hands towards Sharpe. “He says he wasn't raping the girl, sir,” Harris translated.

“So why were the bastard's trousers round his ankles?” Sharpe asked, then looked at his eight-man firing squad. Usually it was hard to find men willing to serve on firing squads, but there had been no difficulty this time.

“Present!” Sharpe called.

“Non, Monsieur, je vous prie! Monsieur!” the kneeling Frenchman called. Tears ran down his face.

Eight riflemen lined their sights on the two Frenchmen. The other captive spat his derision and kept his head high. He was a handsome man, though his face was bruised from Harris's ministrations. The first man, realizing that his begging was to go unanswered, dropped his head and sobbed uncontrollably.

“Maman,” he called pathetically, “Maman!” Brigadier General Loup, back in his fur-edged saddle, watched the executions from fifty yards away.

Sharpe knew he had no legal right to shoot prisoners. He knew he might even be endangering his career by this act, but then he thought of the small, blood- blackened bodies of the raped and murdered children. “Fire!” he called.

The eight rifles snapped. Smoke gusted to form an acrid, filthy-smelling cloud that obscured the skeins of blood splashing high on the hovel's stone wall as the two bodies were thrown hard back, then recoiled forward to flop onto the ground. One of the men twitched for a few seconds, then went still.

“You're a dead man, Sharpe!” Loup shouted.

Sharpe raised his two fingers to the Brigadier, but did not bother to turn round. “The bloody Frogs can bury those two,” he said of the executed prisoners, "but we'll collapse the houses on the Spanish dead. They are

Spanish, aren't they?" he asked Harris.

Harris nodded. “We're just inside Spain, sir. Maybe a mile or two. That's what the girl says.”

Sharpe looked at the girl. She was no older than Perkins, maybe sixteen, and had dank, dirty, long black hair, but clean her up, he thought, and she would be a pretty enough thing, and immediately Sharpe felt guilty for the thought.

The girl was in pain. She had watched her family slaughtered, then had been used by God knows how many men. Now, with her rag-like clothes held tight about her thin body, she was staring intently at the two dead soldiers. She spat at them, then buried her head in Perkins's shoulder. “She'll have to come with us, Perkins,” Sharpe said. “If she stays here she'll be slaughtered by those bastards.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So look after her, lad. Do you know her name?”

“Miranda, sir.”

“Look after Miranda then,” Sharpe said, then he crossed to where Harper was organizing the men who would demolish the houses on top of the dead bodies.

The smell of blood was as thick as the mass of flies buzzing inside the charnel houses. “The bastards will chase us,” Sharpe said, nodding towards the lurking French.

“They will too, sir,” the Sergeant agreed.

“So we'll keep to the hill tops,” Sharpe said. Cavalry could not get to the tops of steep hills, at least not in good order, and certainly not before their leaders had been picked off by Sharpe's best marksmen.

Harper glanced at the two dead Frenchmen. “Were you supposed to do that, sir?”

"You mean, am I allowed to execute prisoners of war under the King's

Regulations? No, of course I'm not. So don't tell anyone."

“Not a word, sir. Never saw a thing, sir, and I'll make sure the lads say the same.”

“And one day,” Sharpe said as he stared at the distant figure of Brigadier

General Loup, “I'll put him against a wall and shoot him.”

“Amen,” Harper said, “amen.” He turned and looked at the French horse that was still picketed in the settlement. “What do we do with the beast?”

“We can't take it with us,” Sharpe said. The hills were too steep, and he planned to keep to the rocky heights where dragoon horses could not follow.

“But I'll be damned before I give a serviceable cavalry horse back to the enemy.” He cocked his rifle. “I hate to do it.”

“You want me to do it, sir?”

“No,” Sharpe said, though he meant yes for he really did not want to shoot the horse. He did it anyway. The shot echoed back from the hills, fading and crackling while the horse thrashed in its bloody death throes.

The riflemen covered the Spanish dead with stones and thatch, but left the two

French soldiers for their own comrades to bury. Then they climbed high into the misty heights to work their way westwards. By nightfall, when they came down into the valley of the River Turones, there was no sign of any pursuit.

There was no stink of saddle-sore horses, no glint of grey light from grey steel, indeed there had been no sign nor smell of any pursuit all afternoon except just once, just as the light faded and as the first small candle flames flickered yellow in the cottages beside the river, when suddenly a wolf had howled its melancholy cry in the darkening hills.

Its howl was long and desolate, and the echo lingered.

And Sharpe shivered.

CHAPTER 2

The view from the castle in Ciudad Rodrigo looked across the River Agueda towards the hills where the British forces gathered, yet this night was so dark and wet that nothing was visible except the flicker of two torches burning deep inside an arched tunnel that burrowed through the city's enormous ramparts. The rain flickered silver-red past the flame light to make the cobbles slick. Every few moments a sentry would appear at the entrance of the tunnel and the fiery light would glint off the shining spike of his fixed bayonet, but otherwise there was no sign of life. The tricolour of France flew above the gate, but there was no light to show it flapping dispiritedly in the rain which was being gusted around the castle walls and sometimes even being driven into the deep embrasured window where a man leaned to watch the arch.

The flickering torchlight was reflected in the thick pebbled lenses of his wire-bound spectacles.

“Maybe he's not coming,” the woman said from the fireplace.

“If Loup says he will be here,” the man answered without turning round, “then he will be here.” The man had a remarkably deep voice that belied his appearance for he was slim, almost fragile-looking, with a thin scholarly face, myopic eyes and cheeks pocked with the scars of childhood smallpox. He wore a plain dark-blue uniform with no badges of rank, but Pierre Ducos needed no gaudy chains or stars, no tassels or epaulettes or aiguillettes to signify his authority. Major Ducos was Napoleon's man in Spain and everyone who mattered, from King Joseph downwards, knew it.

“Loup,” the woman said. “It means 'wolf', yes?”

This time Ducos did turn round. “Your countrymen call him El Lobo,” he said,

“and he frightens them.”

“Superstitious people frighten easily,” the woman said scornfully.

She was tall and thin, and had a face that was memorable rather than beautiful. A hard, clever and singular face, once seen never forgotten, with a full mouth, deep-set eyes and a scornful expression. She was maybe thirty years old, but it was hard to tell for her skin had been so darkened by the sun that it looked like a peasant woman's. Other well-born women took care to keep their skins as pale as chalk and soft as curds, but this woman did not care for fashionable looks nor for fashionable clothes. Her passion was hunting and when she followed her hounds she rode astride like a man and so she dressed like a man: in breeches, boots and spurs. This night she was uniformed as a French hussar with skintight sky-blue breeches that had an intricate pattern of Hungarian lace down the front of the thighs, a plum- coloured dolman with blue cuffs and plaited white-silk cordings and a scarlet pelisse edged with black fur. It was rumoured that Dona Juanita de Elia possessed a uniform from the regiment of every man she had ever slept with and that her wardrobe needed to be as large as most people's parlours. To Major

Ducos's eyes the Dona Juanita de Elia was nothing but a flamboyant whore and a soldier's plaything, and in Ducos's murky world flamboyance was a lethal liability, but in Juanita's own eyes she was an adventuress and an afrancesada, and any Spaniard willing to side with France in this war was useful to Pierre Ducos. And, he grudgingly allowed, this war-loving adventuress was willing to run great risks for France and so Ducos was willing to treat her with a respect he would not usually accord to women. “Tell me about El Lobo,” the Dona Juanita demanded.

“He's a brigadier of dragoons,” Ducos said, “who began his army career as a groom in the royal army. He's brave, he's demanding, he's successful and, above all, he is ruthless.” On the whole Ducos had little time for soldiers whom he considered to be romantic fools much given to posturing and gestures, but he approved of Loup. Loup was single-minded, fierce and utterly without illusions, qualities that Ducos himself possessed, and Ducos liked to think that had he ever been a proper soldier, he would have been like Loup. It was true that Loup, like Juanita de Elia, affected a certain flamboyance, but

Ducos forgave the Brigadier his wolf-fur pretensions because, quite simply, he was the best soldier Ducos had discovered in Spain and the Major was determined that Loup should be properly rewarded. “Loup will one day be a marshal of France,” Ducos said, “and the sooner the better.”

“But not if Marshal Masséna can help it?” Juanita asked.

Ducos grunted. He collected gossip more assiduously than any man, but he disliked confirming it, yet Marshal Masséna's dislike of Loup was so well known in the army that Ducos had no need to dissemble about it. “Soldiers are like stags, madame,” Ducos said. "They fight to prove they are the best in their tribe and they dislike their fiercest rivals far more than the beasts that offer them no competition. So I would suggest to you, madame, that the

Marshal's dislike of Brigadier Loup is confirmation of Loup's genuine abilities." It was also, Ducos thought, a typical piece of wasteful posturing.

No wonder the war in Spain was taking so long and proving so troublesome when a marshal of France wasted petulance on the best brigadier in the army.

He turned back to the window as the sound of hooves echoed in the fortress's entrance tunnel. Ducos listened as the challenge was given, then he heard the squeal of the gate hinges opening and a second later he saw a group of grey horsemen appear in the flamelit archway.

The Dona Juanita de Elia had come to stand beside Ducos. She was so close that he could smell the perfume on her gaudy uniform. “Which one is he?” she asked.

“The one in front,” Ducos replied.

“He rides well,” Juanita de Elia said with grudging respect.

“A natural horseman,” Ducos said. “Not fancy. He doesn't make his horse dance, he makes it fight.” He moved away from the woman. He disliked perfume as much as he disliked opinionated whores.

The two waited in silent awkwardness. Juanita de Elia had long sensed that her weapons did not work on Ducos. She believed he disliked women, but the truth was that Pierre Ducos was oblivious of them. Once in a while he would use a soldier's brothel, but only after a surgeon had provided him with the name of a clean girl. Most of the time he went without such distractions, preferring a monkish dedication to the Emperor's cause. Now he sat at his table and leafed through papers as he tried to ignore the woman's presence. Somewhere in the town a church clock struck nine, then a sergeant's voice echoed from an inner courtyard as a squad of men was marched towards the ramparts. The rain fell relentlessly. Then, at last, boots and spurs sounded loud on the stairway leading to Ducos's big chamber and the Dona Juanita looked up expectantly.

Brigadier Loup did not bother to knock on Ducos's door. He burst in, already fuming with anger. “I lost two men! God damn it! Two good men! Lost to riflemen, Ducos, to British riflemen. Executed! They were put against a wall and shot like vermin!” He had crossed to Ducos's table and helped himself from the decanter of brandy. "I want a price put on the head of their captain,

Ducos. I want the man's balls in my men's stewpot." He stopped suddenly, checked by the exotic sight of the uniformed woman standing beside the fire.

For a second Loup had thought the figure in cavalry uniform was an especially effeminate young man, one of the dandified Parisians who spent more money on their tailor than on their horse and weapons, but then he realized that the dandy was a woman and that the cascading black plume was her hair and not a helmet's embellishment. “Is she yours, Ducos?” Loup asked nastily.

“Monsieur,” Ducos said very formally, "allow me to name the Dona Juanita de

Elia. Madame? This is Brigadier General Guy Loup."

Brigadier Loup stared at the woman by the fire and what he saw, he liked, and the Dona Juanita de Elia returned the Dragoon General's stare and what she saw, she also liked. She saw a compact, one-eyed man with a brutal, weather- beaten face who wore his grey hair and beard short, and his grey, fur-trimmed uniform like an executioner's costume. The fur glinted with rainwater that had brought out the smell of the pelts, a smell that mingled with the heady aromas of saddles, tobacco, sweat, gun oil, powder and horses. “Brigadier,” she said politely.

“Madame,” Loup acknowledged her, then shamelessly looked up and down her skin- tight uniform, “or should it be Colonel?”

“Brigadier at least,” Juanita answered, “if not Maréchal.”

“Two men?” Ducos interrupted the flirtation. “How did you lose two men?”

Loup told the story of his day. He paced up and down the room as he spoke, biting into an apple he took from Ducos's desk. He told how he had taken a small group of men into the hills to find the fugitives from the village of

Fuentes de Onoro, and how, having taken his revenge on the Spaniards, he had been surprised by the arrival of the greenjackets. “They were led by a captain called Sharpe,” he said.

“Sharpe,” Ducos repeated, then leafed through an immense ledger in which he recorded every scrap of information about the Emperor's enemies. It was

Ducos's job to know about those enemies and to recommend how they could be destroyed, and his intelligence was as copious as his power. “Sharpe,” he said again as he found the entry he sought. “A rifleman, you say? I suspect he may be the same man who captured an eagle at Talavera. Was he with greenjackets only? Or did he have redcoats with him?”

“He had redcoats.”

“Then it is the same man. For a reason we have never discovered he serves in a red-jacketed battalion.” Ducos was adding to his notes in the book that contained similar entries on over five hundred enemy officers. Some of the entries were scored through with a single black line denoting that the men were dead and Ducos sometimes imagined a glorious day when all these enemy heroes, British, Portuguese and Spanish alike, would be black-lined by a rampaging French army. “Captain Sharpe,” Ducos now said, “is reckoned a famous man in Wellington's forces. He came up from the ranks, Brigadier, a rare feat in Britain.”

“I don't care if he came up from the jakes, Ducos, I want his scalp and I want his balls.”

Ducos disapproved of such private rivalries, fearing that they interfered with more important duties. He closed the ledger. “Would it not be better,” he suggested coldly, “if you allowed me to issue a formal complaint about the execution? Wellington will hardly approve.”

“No,” Loup said. “I don't need lawyers taking revenge for me.” Loup's anger was not caused by the death of his two men, for death was a risk all soldiers learned to abide, but rather by the manner of their death. Soldiers should die in battle or in bed, not against a wall like common criminals. Loup was also piqued that another soldier had got the better of him. “But if I can't kill him in the next few weeks, Ducos, you can write your damned letter.” The permission was grudging. “Soldiers are harder to kill than civilians,” Loup went on, “and we've been fighting civilians too long. Now my brigade will have to learn how to destroy uniformed enemies as well.”

“I thought most French soldiers would rather fight other regulars than fight guerrilleros,” the Dona Juanita said.

Loup nodded. “Most do, but not me, madame. I have specialized in fighting the guerrilla.”

“Tell me how,” she asked.

Loup glanced at Ducos as if seeking permission, and Ducos nodded. Ducos was annoyed by the attraction he sensed between these two. It was an attraction as elemental as the lust of a tomcat, a lust so palpable that Ducos almost wrinkled his nose at the stench of it. Leave these two alone for half a minute, he thought, and their uniforms would make a single heap on the floor.

It was not their lust that offended him, but rather the fact that it distracted them from their proper business. “Go on,” he told Loup.

Loup shrugged as though there was no real secret involved. “I've got the best- trained troops in the army. Better than the Imperial Guard. They fight well, they kill well and they're rewarded well. I keep them separate. They're not billeted with other troops, they don't mix with other troops, and that way no one knows where they are or what they're doing. If you send six hundred men marching from here to Madrid then I guarantee you that every guerrillero between here and Seville will know about it before they leave. But not with my men. We don't tell anyone what we're doing or where we're going, we just go there and do it. And we have our own places to live. I emptied a village of its inhabitants and made it my depot, but we don't just stay there. We travel where we will, sleep where we will, and if guerrilleros attack us they die, and not just them, but their mothers, their children, their priests and their grandchildren die with them. We horrify them, madame, just as they try to horrify us, and by now my wolf pack is more horrifying than the partisans.”

“Good,” Juanita said simply.

“Brigadier Loup's patrol area is remarkably free of partisans,” Ducos said in generous tribute.

“But not entirely free,” Loup added grimly. “El Castrador survives, but I'll use his own knife on him yet. Maybe the arrival of the British will encourage him to show his face again.”

“Which is why we are here,” Ducos said, taking command of the room. “Our job is to make certain that the British do not stay here, but are sent packing.”

And then, in his deep and almost hypnotic voice, he described the military situation as he comprehended it. Brigadier General Loup, who had spent the last year fighting to keep the passes through the frontier hills free of partisans and who had thus been spared the disasters that had afflicted

Marshal Masséna's army in Portugal, listened raptly as Ducos told the real story and not the patriotic lies that were peddled in the columns of the

Moniteur. “Wellington is clever,” Ducos admitted. “He's not brilliant, but he is clever and we under-estimated him.” The existence of the Lines of Torres

Vedras had been unknown to the French until they marched within cannon shot of the defences and there they had waited, ever hungrier, ever colder, through a long winter. Now the army was back on the Spanish frontier and waiting for

Wellington's assault.

It was an assault that would be hard and bloody because of the two massive fortresses that barred the only passable roads through the frontier mountains.