Sharpe's Skirmish (4 page)

Herault summoned the commander of the elite company to his side and gestured back down the struggling column. "You see?"

Captain Pailleterie, his blond pigtails and moustache looking almost white in the moonlight, nodded. "I see, my General, yes."

"So you know what to do."

Pailleterie drew his sabre and saluted Herault. "When can we expect you, my general?"

"Midday."

"I shall have a hot meal ready," Pailleterie said.

Herault leaned across and embraced the Captain, who was only a year younger than himself. "Bonne chance, mon brave!"

"Who needs luck against a company of dozy Spaniards, eh?" Pailleterie asked, and then he pointed his sabre forward and the elite company rode on alone. And God help them, Herault thought, if any partisans still lingered on the road. "I wish I was going with you," he called after the company, but they had already vanished. The best of the best, Herault's elite, was riding to snatch victory. "Onwards!" Herault ordered the rest of the cavalry, "onwards!"

The lucky ones of the three hundred infantrymen were dead. The unlucky had been captured. Some would be roasted over slow fires, some would be skinned alive, some would suffer still worse, and the only mercy for them was that, eventually, they would all die. Herault regretted their fate, but they had served their purpose, for the cavalry were loose in the hills and the partisans were far away.

And the remaining French infantry, all three thousand seven hundred of them, were following fast. The ruse had worked, and the back door of Castile lay ahead.

The moon touched the walls of the farmhouse beyond the river ghostly white. Sharpe had twenty riflemen behind those walls, put there to hold up any French advance down the road. The riflemen could probably stop an attacking column for ten minutes and after that Harper would have to bring them running back to the river where the rest of Sharpe's riflemen and all his redcoats manned the fort's parapet or were lined behind the cart which served as a barricade. Sharpe had been tempted to add to the barricade by taking carts and furniture from the villagers, but he had resisted the temptation. The villagers had suffered enough from the war, and they had been welcoming to his men by shyly bringing gifts of olives, eggs and freshly caught fish. The single cart would have to suffice.

"Why would the French come here?" Teresa asked. They were standing on the fort's parapet.

"If they can retake Salamanca," Sharpe said, "they cut Wellington off from his supplies. They don't even need to take the city to do that! Just sit on the road to Ciudad Rodrigo. In a couple of days the supplies will dry up, and Nosey will have to turn round and come back to deal with the buggers. He won't be best pleased."

"So we must stop them?"

Sharpe nodded.

"So why don't you send for reinforcements?"

Sharpe shrugged.

"Because you're not sure they're coming?" Teresa asked.

"I can't be sure," he said.

"And you're frightened of looking like a fool?"

"If I raise an alarm," Sharpe said, "and no crapauds come, they'll string my guts out and hang their washing on them. I'll be a quartermaster for the rest of my days! They'll never trust me again."

Teresa shook her head. "Richard, you took a French eagle! You crossed the breach at Badajoz! You have pride to spare! So write a request now," she said.

"You don't understand," he said stubbornly. "I could snatch a thousand French eagles and I'm still the bugger who came up from the ranks. I'm still an upstart. They can smell me a hundred yards off, and they're just waiting, Teresa, just waiting for me to make a mistake. One mistake!

That's all it takes."

"Write a request now," she said patiently, "and as soon as the first Frenchman shows, I will ride to Salamanca. As soon as we hear the first gunshot in the hills, I will ride. So then you will not have to hold for long, Richard."

He thought about it, and knew she was right, and so he went down to the mess and lit a candle and then woke Ensign Hickey because the Ensign had gone to a proper school and would know what words to use, and then Sharpe penned the words in his clumsy handwriting. 'I have reason to believe,' he wrote, 'that a French column is approaching this fort which I have the honour to command. My command being perilously small in numbers, I request reinforcements as quickly as may be possible. Richard Sharpe, Capt'.

"Shouldn't I date it?" he asked, "put a time on it?"

"I will convince them you were in a hurry," Teresa said.

Hickey, shy to be seen in front of Teresa in his undershirt, pulled a blanket over his bare legs. "Are the French really coming, sir?" He asked Sharpe.

"I reckon so. Why? Does that worry you?"

Hickey thought about it for a heartbeat, then nodded. "Yes, sir, it does,"

"It's why you joined the army, isn't it?"

"I joined the army, sir, because my father wanted me to."

"He wanted you dead?"

"I pray not, sir."

"I was an Ensign once, Hickey," Sharpe said, "and I learned one lesson about being an Ensign."

"And what lesson was that, sir?"

"That ensigns are expendable, Hickey, expendable. Now go to sleep."

Sharpe and Teresa climbed back to the parapet. "You were cruel, Richard,"

she said.

"I was honest."

"And were you expendable? As an ensign?"

"I climbed a cliff, love. I climbed a cliff. And they reckoned I would die, and none, I reckon, would have cared much if I had."

And who would be climbing the cliff in the morning, he wondered, who? And where? And how? And what had he forgotten? And would the bastards come?

And could he stop them? And Jesus, he was nervous. He had listened to his instinct, and he was ready for the French, but it still felt all wrong. It felt like defeat, and it had not even started yet.

Teresa's men, three miles south of San Miguel in the foothills of the Sierra de Gredos, roasted a hare over an open fire. They lit the fire in a grove of trees, deep in a rocky cleft, and were sure that its light could not be seen on the road which lay white beneath their position. If one Frenchman dared breathe on that road the partisans would fire their muskets and so warn the fort that the enemy was coming.

But Captain Pailleterie saw a gleam of their fire. It was tiny, merely a reflection of a leaping flame on a high rock, but only two kinds of men had fires in the hills; partisans or soldiers, and both kind were his enemies. He held up his hand and checked the company.

The gleam had been to the left of the road, at least he thought so, for he was still not in sight of the stretch of road that ran directly beneath the rocky bluff where he had seen the faint glimmer. Off to his right there was a dark valley and it seemed to him that it curled around to the north and so might offer a way to the river and the bridge which would be hidden from whoever had carelessly lit a fire in this dark night.

His men all had muffled scabbards so that the metal did not clash against a buckle or stirrup. Pailleterie could do little about the sound of their hooves, so that was a risk that must be taken. "We go slowly now," he told his men, "slow and quiet."

They swerved off to the right, walking their tired horses through the gentle grassy valley that did indeed turn to the north. Then the land rose to a crest and Pailleterie sweated as he led the hundred horsemen up to that skyline for it would be a perfect place for an ambush, and the saddle of moonlit land was scattered with grey rocks that could hide a hundred partisans, but no musket fired.

He curbed his horse just south of the crest, gave its reins to a sergeant, then dismounted and walked uphill until he could just see over the hill's top.

Peace. That was all he could see, peace. A wide, moonlit land, though the moon was paling now as dawn came around the world, and in the grey white light of night's ending he could see the sheen of a river, and black trees, and then the white streak of the road and the black square shape of the fort. No fires there, and for a moment Pailleterie dared to hope that San Miguel would be unguarded, but he put that hope aside as he moved forward another few paces and realised there was a god after all. There was a god, and He was a Frenchman, for a spur of hill jutted out to hide his men all the way from the crest down to the plain, and once there they would be hidden from San Miguel's garrison by the olive groves. He edged back from the crest, straightened and walked down his column. "Load your pistols now, but don't cock them. You hear me? Load, but don't cock them.

If anyone fires before we reach the bridge I will personally drown that man! But I will geld him first! You hear me? I will geld him!" He watched as his men loaded the long-barrelled pistols. The weapons were not accurate, but at close quarters they were as deadly as any musket. "We shall ride slowly down the hill. Very slowly! We shall move like a morning mist, and then we shall stay among the trees. We go slowly, you hear me?

And none of you will sneeze! If you sneeze, I will geld you with a blunt knife. And we do not charge till the last minute, and when we reach the bridge you will kill whoever you find there. Kill and kill! And if you fail? I shall geld you with my own teeth. With my own blunt teeth!"

The hussars grinned. They liked Pailleterie, for he looked after them, he was brave and he gave them victory.

And he was about to give them another.

It was almost dawn and no warning shots had been fired from the hills.

Sharpe felt an immense weariness. It's nerves, he thought. Nerves as tight as a snare drum, and what kind of a soldier was it who got nervous? Damn it, he thought, but maybe he could not be trusted with command.

He walked to the western side of the parapet and leaned over to stare down at the barricade on the bridge. He had all his men awake, all on guard, for it was coming up to dawn and that was the most dangerous time. "Are you alert down there?" He shouted.

"Bright as buttercups, sir," Lieutenant Price answered. "Can you see anything, sir?"

"Bugger all, Harry."

"That's a relief, sir."

PART THREE

Sharpe went back to the northern parapet and gazed up the road. Nothing moved there. Quiet as the damn grave. A few last bats still flew around the tower, and earlier he had seen an owl come flapping in to a hole in the fort's decaying stonework. Otherwise it was still. The river slid silent beneath a smokelike layer of mist. The bridge's three arches were dark. Sergeant Harper reckoned he had seen some large trout under those arches, but Sharpe had given him no time to try and catch them. It was nerves, he thought again. Jumpy as hell, and he had made everyone else nervous.

Teresa came up the ladder stairs from the living quarters. She yawned, then put her arm into Sharpe's elbow. "All quiet?"

"All quiet." There were four riflemen up on the parapet. Sharpe had thought to put some redcoats up here, but their smoothbore muskets were so inaccurate that they could do little good from this height and so he had merely kept his remaining riflemen here. He moved away from them so they would not overhear him. "I'm thinking I panicked yesterday," he said to Teresa.

"I didn't see you panic."

"Seeing enemies where there aren't any," he admitted.

She squeezed his arm. "At least you are ready for them if they come."

He grimaced. "But they're not out there, are they? They're bloody miles away, tucked up in their beds and I've had a sleepless night because of it."

"You can sleep today," Teresa said. The eastern sky was ablaze now, banded with clouds that reflected the first sunlight. The olive groves, still in night's shadows, were dark, but in another few minutes the sun would rise over the hills and Sharpe would stand the company down. Give them an easy day, he thought, for they deserved it. A make and mend day in which they could sew up their uniforms, or just sleep, or perhaps fish in the river.

"Perhaps I will go back to Salamanca today," Teresa said.

"Leaving me?"

"Just for the day. To visit Antonia."

Antonia was their daughter, a baby, but she might as well have been an orphan, Sharpe reckoned, her parents were both so busy killing frogs. "If the weather stays nice," he said, "and the frogs don't come, you can bring her out here?"

"Why not?" Teresa asked.

The sun slipped above the hills and Sharpe flinched from its dazzling light. The shadows of trees and hedgerows stretched long across the road where no Frenchmen stirred. Mister MacKeon strolled out from the fort and went to the riverbank where he unbuttoned his trousers and pissed into the Tormes. "All that good wine," Teresa said softly.

Then there was a shout from the bridge, and Sharpe turned, and he heard the hooves and he was unslinging his rifle, but he could not see a damn thing because the sun was so low and it was filling the eastern sky with dazzling light, but coming from the heart of the blinding light were horsemen.

Not from the road, but from the east, from among the gnarled olive trees that had hidden them, and Sharpe shouted a warning, but it was already too late. "Mister Price!"

"Sir!"

"Let them get close!"

But Price misheard, or else panicked, and shouted at the redcoats to fire and the muskets flamed towards the olive groves, but at much too long a range. Then the first rifles fired from the parapet, jetting smoke a dozen feet from the stonework. Sharpe aimed at a horseman close to the bank, pulled the trigger and his target was immediately hidden by smoke as the rifle hammered back into his shoulder. "Teresa," he shouted, but Teresa was already running down the courtyard stairs to fetch her horse. Sharpe began to reload the rifle and heard the sound of hooves on the bridge stone. Christ, he thought, I'm in the wrong place. Can't do a damn thing up here! "Daniel!" he shouted at Hagman, the senior rifleman on the parapet.

"Sir?" Hagman was ramming his rifle.

"I'm going down! Don't get trapped up here!"

"We'll be all right, sir," Hagman said stoically. The old poacher had a face like a grave-digger and hair down to his shoulder blades, but he was the best man Sharpe and Harper had.

Sharpe took the stairs four at a time. He had been right all along, but he had also been wrong. He had expected the damned French to come straight down the road, straight into his rifles like lambs to the slaughter, and the buggers had fooled him. The buggers had fooled him!

Muskets banged on the bridge, then other guns sounded. Pistols, Sharpe thought, recognising the crisper tone of the smaller weapons. Someone screamed. Men were shouting. Sharpe landed heavily at the foot of the stairs and ran through the arch.

And saw instantly that the fort was lost. He had failed.

Captain Pailleterie had not even reckoned on the sun's help, but the God of War was on his side that morning and just before the hussar captain released his men from the concealment of the olive trees the sun slid across the horizon to slash its blinding light into the defenders' faces.

"Charge!" Pailleterie shouted, and rowelled back his spurs to drive his big black horse straight for the bridge that was now less than a quarter mile away. One last effort from the horse, that was all he wanted, and he spurred her again and saw puffs of smoke appear at the fort's high parapet, then more smoke showed at the bridge. Bullets flecked the turf, hitting no one. A wagon made a crude barricade on the bridge itself.

Behind the wagon were redcoats. British! Not Spanish, but Pailleterie did not care. They were all enemies of France, all better dead. "Charge!" He drew the word out, using it as a war cry, and a flickering thought went through his mind that there was nothing, nothing in the world, not even a woman, who could give a joy like this. A horse at full gallop, an enemy surprised, death at your side and a sabre drawn.

More smoke, this time from the left, from a farmhouse, and Pailleterie was dimly aware of one of his troopers tumbling, of a horse screaming and a sabre skidding along the ground, but then he swerved into the lingering smoke that hung above the bridge's roadway and swung out of the saddle even before his horse had come to a halt. A single musket banged, spewing stinging smoke into Pailleterie's eyes. He stumbled as he dismounted, crashed into the wagon that had been slewed sideways on the bridge, then pulled himself up onto its bed. He was screaming like a madman, expecting a bullet in his belly at any second, but the redcoats were still reloading. He jumped down at them, sabre swinging, and Sergeant Coignet was beside him, and then a swarm of pigtailed hussars was jumping over the wagon with pistols flaming and sabres reflecting the dazzling sun. A redcoat was on his knees, hands at his face and blood seeping between his fingers. Another was dead, slumped on the bridge parapet, and the others were going backwards. They did not even have bayonets fixed, and Pailleterie swept a musket aside with his heavy sabre and chopped down at the redcoat, and the man span away, his cheek laid open, and then the other redcoats broke and ran.

"Into the fort!" Pailleterie shouted at his excited men, "into the fort!"

The redcoats could wait. The fort must be taken and held until Herault arrived, and he saw there were no gates in the big arch and he ran inside and saw a tall man in a green jacket disappearing though a door. "Up!" He shouted, pointing his men at the courtyard staircase, "up!" A gun banged from the sky and a bullet flattened itself on the stones beside Pailleterie who looked up and saw another green jacketed man silhouetted against the sky, then that man vanished as the hussars ran up the stairs.

Pailleterie hauled a watch from a small pocket of his dolman jacket. Six hours till Herault arrive, maybe less. He closed the watch's lid, put it away, and bent over, hands on his knees, suddenly tired. My God, though, he had done it! The tip of his sabre was red, and he wiped it on a handful of straw, then was aware that his men were shouting angrily out on the bridge.

He hurried back. Most of his troopers had not needed to dismount and cross the barricade, and those men now milled about at the bridge's southern end. And there they were suffering because a steady fire was coming from a white farmhouse just a couple of hundred paces down the road. Horses were whinnying in pain, men were on the ground, and the damn fire kept coming and it struck Pailleterie that he had seen green jackets, which meant riflemen, and if he did not shelter his men soon then the damned rifles would kill every last one of them.

"Sergeant! Move the wagon! Move it!"

A dozen men heaved the wagon up, thrusting one pair of its wheels onto the bridge's parapet, and the horses at last had an escape route across the bridge. "Into the fort!" Pailleterie shouted, "into the fort!" A corporal had rescued the Captain's own horse, and Pailleterie led the beast into the courtyard where it was safe from the rifle fire. Then he opened a saddlebag and took out a tricolour. He gave the flag to Coignet. "Hang it on the battlements, Sergeant."

Hagman and his riflemen had gone down the ladder stairs and now bolted out of the door leading to the storeroom. The French found that entrance a moment too late, but it did not matter. They had seized San Miguel, they had secured the river crossing, and Herault was coming to spread panic along the British supply lines.

And the tricolour flew above the Tormes.

It was Sergeant Coignet who found the wine, hundreds of bottles of it, all hidden behind the chipped plaster image of the Virgin Mary that stood in the small shrine across the bridge from the fort. "You want me to break the bottles, sir" He asked Pailleterie.

"Leave them be," Pailleterie said. The wine would make a gift for General Herault. "But make sure no one takes any. If one man gets drunk Sergeant, I'll geld him."

"They'll not touch it, sir," Coignet promised. He was a short, tough man who had never known any life other than the army, and within the elite company his word was law. The wine was safe.

Pailleterie had taken three prisoners. Two were wounded redcoats, one of whom would probably die, while the third was a plump man in a blue uniform who claimed to be a Major of the Commissary service. His presence was explained by the hoard of French muskets that the hussars had discovered, muskets that would now go back to their proper owners. "You give me your word as a gentleman," Pailleterie asked Tubbs in English, "that you will not try to escape?"

"Of course not," Tubbs said.

"You won't give me your word?"

"No, no! I won't try to escape!" Tubbs backed away from the pigtailed Frenchman.

"Then you may keep your sword, monsieur, and do me the honour of staying inside the fortress."

Not that any of the hussars had much choice in the matter, for whenever they spent too long outside the fort's walls a rifleman would fire.

Coignet had narrowly escaped injury when he went to explore the shrine, and two men had been wounded when Pailleterie had tipped the wagon that had been half-blocking the bridge over the parapet and into the river.

Pailleterie regretted the wounding of those two men, but he needed the roadway to be clear for Herault, and so he had led twenty men out of the fort where they immediately came under fire from the farmhouse on the northern bank. Once the barricade was gone Pailleterie ordered his men to stay inside the fort's walls, even though his Lieutenant, who had been watching the farmhouse from the parapet, swore that the riflemen there had now run away. But Pailleterie knew that if they stayed inside the fort his hussars and their horses were safe. The British might try to recapture the bridge, but Pailleterie was confident he could thwart them. He had forty of his men lined in the fort's gateway, all armed with pistols, and if the British did run up the road and turn into the arch they would die in a blistering volley.

So the road from the south was open.

Herault and his small army was coming.

And all Pailleterie needed to do was wait.

"It was my fault," Sharpe said bitterly.

"I shouldn't have fired so soon," Price admitted.

"I shouldn't have put Pat Harper across the river," Sharpe said. "I should have kept our men together."

Ensign Hickey said nothing, but just looked heartbroken. He had not thought Captain Sharpe could be defeated.

"Bloody hell!" Sharpe swore uselessly. He had pulled his surviving men back to the village where they could shelter behind garden walls. The fort was a hundred paces away, and he had thought about making an attack on it, but he would have to lead his men round to the far side and then through the archway and he guessed the French would be expecting that approach.

The store-room door had been shut, and was doubtless barricaded. Every now and then a black fur hat showed on the parapet as an hussar peered over to make certain the British troops were not planning any mischief.

Daniel Hagman, keeping watch from the river bank, reported that the frogs had tipped the cart into the river. "I got one of the bastards, sir," he said, "and Harris popped another."

"Well done, Dan," Sharpe said morosely, then wondered why the French would clear the barricade away. and the answer was depressingly obvious. Because they were expecting more men, that was why. Because the hussars were only holding the bridge long enough to let a flood of bloody Crapauds across the river. Because all hell was about to be loosed on the British supply lines, and Captain Richard Sharpe would be blamed. "Jesus!" Sharpe cursed.

"He doesn't seem to be on our side today," Hagman said.

The only good news was that Harper had brought his men safely back across the Tormes. He had led them a mile westwards and used a fisherman's skiff to ferry them over the river, and it was reassuring for Sharpe to have the big Irishman and the twenty rifleman back at his side, but he did not know what he could do with them. Have them killed in a forlorn attack on the fort's gate?

The Scotsman, MacKeon, came and squatted beside Sharpe. He was smoking a short foul pipe that he now pointed towards the fort. "It reminds me, Captain," he said, "of that terrible place in India."

Sharpe wondered if MacKeon was drunk. The fort at San Miguel was nothing like Gawilghur. The Indian fort had been built on a clifftop, dizzyingly high above the Deccan plain, while San Miguel was a decaying ruin built beside a river. "It don't look much like Gawilghur to me," Sharpe said.