The handcart was made of splintered, fragile wood that was held to uncertain unity by bent, rusted nails and with lashings of thin, frayed, black twine. Some of the wheel-spokes were broken.
Sharpe pulled the handcart out of the cattle byre and listened to the ghastly screech of the wooden axle that ran through two ungreased wooden blocks. He supposed that the cart was used to take hay from these meadows into the village, or perhaps bedding straw to the fort, but it had been abandoned through the frost months to lie in this byre where the spiders had made thick webs on its spokes and handles. ‘It could work.’ Sharpe tested the small bed of the cart and it seemed solid enough. ‘Except we don’t speak French.’
‘Sweet William does, sir,’ Harper said, then, seeing Sharpe’s face, corrected himself. ‘Captain Frederickson croaks Frog, sir.’
A group of armed men, approaching a fort, invited hostility, but two men, pushing a wounded comrade on a handcart, posed no threat.
‘Jesus.’ Frederickson’s voice was awed when, arriving at the cattle byre, he heard Sharpe’s plan. ‘We’re supposed to walk up and ask for a bloody sawbones?’
‘You suggested knocking on the front door,’ Sharpe said. ‘So why not?’
The Riflemen still drifted down the gentle slope. They came in scattered groups, spread out in the chain formation they would use in battle, and no alarm had been raised at the sight. Sharpe doubted whether any Frenchman had even seen the dark shapes flit down the slope. Once on the lower ground, over the tiny stream and hidden by the ditches that were edged by straggling blackthorn hedges, the Riflemen were invisible. The fort still thundered its huge noise.
‘What we need,’ Sharpe said, ‘is blood.’ He was reckoning that the fort would not refuse entry to a mortally wounded man, but mortal wounds were usually foul with blood and, in search of it, both officers looked instinctively to Patrick Harper.
Who stared back with a slow and horrified understanding. ‘No! Holy Mother, no!’
‘It has to come out, Patrick.’ Sharpe spoke in a voice of sweet reason.
‘You’re not a surgeon, sir. Besides!’ Harper’s swollen face suddenly looked cheerful. ‘There’s no pincers, remember?’
Sweet William unbuckled his pouch. ‘The barber-surgeons of London, my dear Sergeant, will pay six shillings and six pence for a ten-ounce bag of sound teeth taken from corpses. You’d be surprised how many fashionable London ladies wear false teeth taken from dead Frogs.’ Frederickson flourished a vile-looking pair of pincers. ‘They’re also useful for a spot of looting.’
‘God save Ireland.’ Harper stared at the pincers.
Captain Frederickson smiled. ‘You’ll be doing it for England, Sergeant Harper, for your beloved King.’
‘Christ, no, sir!’
‘Strip to the waist,’ Sharpe ordered.
‘Strip?’ Harper had backed into the corner of the filthy byre.
‘We need to have your chest soaked in blood,’ Sharpe said as though this was the most normal procedure in the world. ‘As soon as the tooth’s pulled, Patrick, let the blood drip on to your skin. It won’t take long.’
‘Oh, Christ in his heaven!’ Harper crossed himself.
‘It doesn’t hurt, man!’ Frederickson took out his two false teeth and grinned at Harper. ‘See?’
‘That was done with a sword, sir. Not bloody pincers!’
‘We could do it with a sword.’ Sharpe said it helpfully.
‘Oh, Mary mother of God! Christ!’ Harper, seeing nothing but evil intent on his officers’ faces, knew that he must mutiny or suffer. ‘You’d be giving me a wee drink first?’
‘Brandy?’ Frederickson held out his canteen.
Harper seized the canteen, uncorked it, and tipped it to his mouth.
‘Not too much,’ Frederickson said.
‘It’s not your bloody tooth. With respect, sir.’
Frederickson looked at Sharpe. ‘Do you wish to play the surgeon, sir?’
‘I’ve never actually drawn a tooth.’ Sharpe, in front of the curious Riflemen who had gathered to watch Harper’s discomfiture, kept his voice very formal.
Frederickson shrugged. ‘We should have a screw-claw, of course, but the pincers work well enough on corpses. Mind you, there is a knack to it.’
‘A knack?’
‘You don’t pull.’ Frederickson demonstrated his words with graphic movements of the rusted pincers. ‘You push the tooth towards the jawbone, twist one way, the other, then slide it out. It’s really not hard.’
‘Jesus!’ The big Irish sergeant had gone pale as rifle-cartridge paper.
‘I think,’ Sharpe said ,it with some misgivings, ‘that as Sergeant Harper and I have been together so long, I ought to do the deed. Push, twist, and pull?’
‘Precisely, sir.’
It took five minutes to persuade and prepare Harper. The Irishman showed no fear in battle; he had gone grim-faced into the carnage of a dozen battlefields and come out victorious, but now, faced with the little business of having a tooth pulled, he sat terrified and shaking. He clung to Frederickson’s brandy as if it alone could console him in this dreadful ordeal.
‘Show me the tooth.’ Sharpe spoke solicitously.
Harper eventually opened his mouth and pointed to an upper tooth that was surrounded by inflamed gum. ‘There.’
Sharpe used a handle of the pincers and, as gently as he could, tapped the tooth. ‘That one?’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Harper bellowed and jerked away. ‘Bloody kill me, you will!’
‘Language, Sergeant!’ Frederickson was trying not to laugh while the other Riflemen were grinning with keen enjoyment.
Sharpe reversed the pincers. The jaws, somewhat battered and rusted, were saw-toothed for better purchase. It was a handy instrument for burglary and doubtless ideal for the procurement of false teeth from mangled corpses, but whether it was truly suitable for a surgical operation Sharpe could not yet say. ‘It can’t be worse than having a baby,’ he said to Harper. ‘And Isabella didn’t make this fuss.’
‘Women don’t mind pain,’ the Irishman said. ‘I do.’
‘Don’t grip the fang too hard,’ Frederickson observed helpfully, ‘or you might smash it, sir. It’s the devil of a job to fetch out the remnants of a broken tooth. I saw it happen to Jock Callaway before Salamanca and it quite spoilt Jock’s battle. You remember Jock, sir?’
‘The 6 ist?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Died of the fever next winter, poor fellow.’ Frederickson stooped to see what was happening.
The word ‘fever’ shot through Sharpe’s head like a death-knell, but this was no time for such thoughts. ’Open your mouth, Sergeant.‘
‘You’ll be gentle?’ Harper’s voice was sullen and mutinous.
‘I will be as gentle as a new-born lamb . Now open your bloody gob.’
The huge mouth with its yellowed teeth opened. The Irishman’s eyes were wary and a faint groan, half a moan, escaped as Sharpe brought the pincers up.
Slowly, very slowly, doing his utmost not to jar the offending tooth, Sharpe closed the vicious jaws on that part of the tooth not hidden by the swollen gum-tissue. ‘That’s not too bad, is it?’ he asked soothingly. He gripped the handles tight, but not too tight, and felt a faint tremor run through the huge man. ‘Ready?’
He pushed upwards. He could smell Harper’s breath and feel the rank fear from the man. He sympathized with it. Sharpe had once had a tooth pulled in India and he remembered the pain as vividly as any wound taken in battle. He pushed harder. The tooth did not move, though Harper quivered as he loyally tried to push against Sharpe’s pressure.
‘Harder,’ Frederickson muttered.
Sharpe pushed harder, the metal jaws slipped up into the swollen gums, and the pincers were wrenched away as Harper bellowed and flailed to one side. ‘Jesus and his bloody saints! Christ!’ The sergeant had his hands to his mouth that was trickling blood. ‘God in heaven!’ He was keening with the sudden agony.
‘It slipped,’
Sharpe said in apologetic explanation.
‘Bloody near killed me!’ Harper swallowed more brandy, then spat a potent mixture of blood and alcohol on to the ground. ‘Jesus!’
‘Perhaps I should try,’ Frederickson offered. Lieutenant Minver, like his men, grinned.
‘God damn all officers! All!’ Harper was in a blaze of anger now. ‘Bloody murdering bastards!’ He picked up the pincers, opened his mouth, and probed with a finger.
He flinched.
Sharpe drew back. The Riflemen, no longer laughing, watched as the huge, bare-chested man put the pincers over his own tooth. The big hand closed and Harper’s blue eyes seemed to grow wider. He pushed and Sharpe heard a distinct crack, like gristle snapping, then the pincers were being twisted right and left, Harper was moaning, and again there were the tiny sounds of tissue parting or bone grating.
Sharpe held his breath. No one moved. A French child of ten could have taken these prize troops captive at this moment as the bare-chested Harper, shaking with the pain and cold, began to pull.
The Irishman’s hand trembled. A bead of blood pulsed at his lower lip, another, then in a great groan and a gush of pus and blood, the huge tooth tore free. Scraps of flesh were attached to its branching roots, but blood, bright red blood was pouring on to Harper’s chest in great rivulets that steamed in the cold air.
‘Get him on to the wagon!’ Sharpe ordered.
‘Christ in his heaven!’ The pain had brought tears to Harper’s eyes. He stood, coughing blood, a fearful sight. He was weeping now, not out of weakness, but in anger and pain. He was blood smothered; steaming with warm blood, coughing blood, his face and chest soaked in blood.
‘You shouldn’t go,’ Frederickson said to Sharpe, meaning that it was foolish for the two senior officers to risk themselves at the same time.
Sharpe ignored the well-meant advice. ‘Lieutenant Minver. As soon as we have the gate open, you charge! Swords fitted!’
‘Sir.’ The lieutenant, a thin dark man, smiled nervously. Harper lay on the cart, shivering.
‘Take your men to the edge of the sand,’ Sharpe said as he took off his pack, his officer’s sash, snake-buckled belt, his Rifleman’s jacket, and his shako. Frederickson was doing the same. ‘Sergeant Rossner? You bring this equipment.’
‘Sir!’
Harper’s seven-barrelled gun, loaded and primed, was put beside the Irishman’s bloodstained right hand. His rifle was on the left side of the cart where Sharpe’s sword, drawn from the scabbard, lay easily to hand. Sharpe wanted to give the impression of three men bringing the victim of an accident from the ambush party. Yet success depended on the French guards seeing only the dreadful blood on Patrick Harper.
Harper, lying belly up on the cart, was in danger of choking on his own blood. He spat a thick gob, turned his head, and spat again. ‘Spit onto your chest! Don’t waste it!’ Sharpe said. Harper growled in mutiny, then spat a satisfying lump of blood down to his navel. Sharpe took one handle of the cart, Frederickson the other, and Sharpe nodded. ‘Move.’
The firing from the fort had stopped which meant, Sharpe knew, that either the frigate was out of range or else was sinking. There was no sound from the ambush site.
The cart screeched foully on the rough track that led past scrawny alders towards the Teste de Buch. Far away, over the houses and beyond the dunes, Sharpe saw a shiver of white which he knew must be the frigate’s topsails, then heard a bellow of thunder and saw a blossom of smoke which told him Grant had opened fire again. Captain Grant, at least, was doing his duty. Even at the cost of his ship and men he was drawing the fort’s fire, and his success was measured by the sudden clap of thunder as the huge fortress guns opened their own fire again.
The cart axle screeched fit to wake the dead, bounced on the uneven road, and Harper groaned. His right hand, streaked with bloody rivulets, groped for his seven-barrelled gun and Sharpe, seeing the movement, knew the huge Irishman was recovering. ‘Well done, Sergeant.’
‘Didn’t mean to be rude to you, sir.’ Harper choked on blood as he said the words.
‘Yes, you did,’ Frederickson cheerfully answered for Sharpe. ‘So would any man. Now shut up. You’re supposed to be dying.’
Patrick Harper said nothing more as the cart slewed round a corner, over a muddy rut, and up on to the harder track that led straight to the bridge over the fort’s inner ditch. The wind gusted, bringing the stench of powder smoke in its cold touch. No sound came from the south and Sharpe knew the Marines were still far from Arcachon. If the Scylla was to be saved from further punishment, then the Rifles would have to do the job.
They were already within cannon-range of the fort, but no gunners stared from the deep embrasures. ‘Run,’ Sharpe said. ‘Run as if he’s dying.’
‘He is,’ Harper groaned.
Sharpe had to push hard to keep up with Frederickson’s pace and he saw a head appear on the fortress wall, he saw the tricolour lift to the smoke-fouled wind, then Sweet William, beside him, was shouting in breathless French and Sharpe knew that it was madness for three men to take on one of the coastal forts of mainland France, but he was committed now, inside musket range, and all they could do was push on, pray, then fight like the soldiers that they were; the best.
CHAPTER 7
They stopped ignominiously on the sand-gritted planks of the drawbridge.
The gates did not open, they could go no further, and Sharpe and Frederickson, chests heaving and breath misting into great plumes from the effort of pushing the obstinate cart with Harper’s weight, could only stare up at a puzzled face which appeared on the ramparts.
Frederickson shouted to the sentry in French, an answer was made, and Harper, fearing a sudden musket blast from above, groaned horribly on the cart. The blood on his huge chest was drying to a cracked crust.
‘He wants to know,’ Frederickson spoke to Sharpe with astonishment in his voice, ‘whether we’re the Americans.’
‘Yes!’ Sharpe shouted. ‘Yes, yes!’
‘Attendez!‘ The guard’s head disappeared.
Sharpe turned to look through the notch made where the approach road cut through the glacis. He stared at the place where the villagers stood by the trees and where he had dimly discerned the shape of a gun’s limber among the pines. ‘The Americans are manning those guns?’ He too sounded astonished.
Frederickson shrugged. ‘Must be.’
Sharpe turned back, his boots making a hollow sound on the thick planks of the drawbridge. To right and left the flooded inner ditch stretched. The ditch water, fed by a rivulet from the millstream, seemed shallow enough, but it would still be a cloying obstacle to men trying to assault the gaunt, rough-faced wall of the fort’s enceinte.
The fortress guns bellowed to Sharpe’s left, jetting smoke and flame towards the frigate that was now beyond Cap Ferrat. The battle had become a long-range duel as Grant teased the fort and, doubtless, cursed the land force for their late arrival.
‘What’s the crapaud bastard doing?’ Harper growled softly.
‘Gone to fetch the officer of the guard?’ Sharpe guessed. Harper shivered. The light was dying in the west, a cold evening promised frost in the night, and the huge Irishman was stripped to the waist. ‘Not long now,’ Sharpe said, the words spoken more in nervousness than for comfort.
Suddenly a bolt clanged, scraped, then a bar thudded to the ground from its brackets.
‘Christ!’ Frederickson’s voice betrayed relief that their ruse, so quickly devised and then made possible by Harper’s pain, was working.
‘Wait for my word.’ Sharpe said it softly as he saw Harper’s muscles, beneath their crazed and shivering quilt of dried blood, suddenly tense.
The hinges of the gate squealed like a tormented soul. Lieutenant Minver, two hundred yards away, would see the huge door leafing open and should already be moving. ‘Now,’ Sharpe said.
The French guard was eager to help the wounded man. The guard himself was injured, his leg setting in plaster
, and he gestured at the cast as if to explain the slowness with which he tugged the huge, iron-studded gate open.
Harper, rolling from the cart, did not see the thick plaster on the man’s leg, nor did he see the welcoming, reassuring smile; he only saw a man in an enemy jacket, a man who barred a door that must be opened, and Harper came up from the roadway with a sword-bayonet in his right hand and the Frenchman gave a horrid, pathetic sigh as the twenty-three inch blade, held like a long dagger, ripped into his belly. Sharpe saw the blood spilling like water on the cobbles of the archway as he pushed his full weight on to the half-opened gate.
Harper twisted the bayonet free and left the guard bleeding and twitching on the drawbridge. He kicked the man’s musket into the ditch, then fetched his rifle and seven-barrelled gun from the cart. Frederickson, sword in hand, dragged the empty handcart into the tunnel that pierced the ramparts. No one had seen them, no one raised the alarm; they had taken the garrison utterly by surprise.
Sharpe bolted both doors open. His rifle was slung, his sword naked, and at any second he expected a shout of alarm or a musket shot, but the three Riflemen were undetected. They smiled at each other, made nervous by success, then their ears were punched by the shattering pulse of air as the fortress guns fired towards the Scylla. Harper hefted his seven-barrelled gun. ‘I’ll teach those bastards how to fire guns.’
‘Sergeant!’ Sharpe called, but Harper was already running, gun cocked, towards the courtyard.
A shout sounded from the sand-dunes and, at the same instant, two muskets coughed above Sharpe. He realized there must be other guards on the gate’s roof, men who could see Minver’s assault approaching, and Sharpe looked for a route that would take him to the ramparts. A low, arched doorway lay to his right and he ducked through it.
He found himself in a guardroom. A wooden musket rack, varnished and polished, held eight muskets upright. A table was littered with playing cards before a black-leaded pot-bellied stove that silted smoke from an ill-fitting chimney pipe. Stairs climbed through an arch on the far side of the room and, exchanging his sword for the rifle, Sharpe took the steps at a rush.
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 6: Sharpe's Honour, Sharpe's Regiment, Sharpe's Siege Page 73