And there was light. It was a glow, hazed in the air, made by fires in the valley. The glow had been invisible from the gully, but as Sharpe led his force south, stumbling on the rough broken ground, the crest of the valley’s northern edge was limned by the flame-glow in the air. He could see the slight dip in that crest which he had marked as his target, and he sensed the path that led left and right and then on towards the flames of Adrados’ valley.
They carried only their weapons and ammunition. Their packs, haversacks, blankets and canteens were left in the gully. That equipment could be fetched in the morning, but this night they would fight unladen. The Riflemen would discard their greatcoats before the attack, revealing their dark-green uniforms which would be their distinguishing mark this night. Goodwill to sinful men.
Sharpe stopped, hearing noise ahead, and for a fraction of a second he feared that the enemy had a picquet line at the valley’s rim. He listened, relaxed. It was the sound of revelry, cheers and laughter, the roar of mens’ voices. Christmas Eve.
A bloody night to be born, Sharpe thought. Midwinter, when food was scarce and wolves prowled close to the hill villages. Perhaps it was warmer in Palestine, and perhaps the shepherds who saw the angels did not have to worry about wolves, but winter was still winter everywhere. Sharpe had always thought Spain a hot country and so it was in the summer when the sun baked the plains into dust, but in winter it could still be freezing and he thought of being born in a stable where the wind sliced like a knife between the cracks of the timber. He led them on again towards the Gateway of God, a dark line of men bringing blades in the night.
He dropped flat at the valley’s rim. Thorn trees were dark on the slope before him, the valley was lit by the fires in Castle, Convent, watchtower and village, and, glory to God in the highest, there was a path leading at an angle down through the thorns.
The sound of laughter came from the Convent. Sharpe could see other men silhouetted by the fires in the Castle’s big yard. It was cold.
He turned his head round and hissed at his men. ‘Count!’
‘One.’ Harper.
‘Two.’ A German Sergeant called Rossner.
‘Three.’ Thomas Taylor.
Frederickson dropped beside Sharpe, but stayed silent as the men counted themselves off in the darkness. All were present. Sharpe pointed to the foot of the slope where the dark path between the thorns debouched onto a rough pasture land that was stippled red and black by the firelight. ‘Wait at the tree-line.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Frederickson’s men would have only fifty yards to cover from the edge of the bushes to the door of the Convent. They would come when they heard the boom of the seven-barrelled gun, or if they heard a volley of musketry, but they would ignore a single musket shot. On a night like this, a night of drinking and celebration, the odd single shot would be nothing unusual. If Frederickson heard nothing while he counted off fifteen minutes, then he was to come anyway. Sharpe looked at the Captain whose black patch gave his face a spectral look in the darkness. He was beginning to like this man. ‘Your men are all right?’
‘Anticipating the pleasure, sir.’ Goodwill to sinful men.
Sharpe took his own group forward. He looked once to his right. Far off, in Portugal, a speck of light throbbed like a red star. A fire in the border hills.
The path was steep. The drizzle had made it slick and treacherous, causing one of Sharpe’s men to slip and crash into a tangle of thorn branches. Everyone froze. Spines of thorn snapped and tore as the man pulled himself free.
Sharpe could see the great arched door of the Convent, a single slit of light showing where the doors were slightly ajar. Shouts and laughter came from the building, and once a crash of glass and loud jeers. There were womens’ voices among the mens‘. He went slowly, testing each foothold, feeling the excitement because he was so close to revenging himself for the insults of his last visit.
The door opened. He stopped, the men behind him stopped without orders, and two figures were silhouetted in the archway of the Convent. One man, with a musket on his shoulder, clapped the shoulder of the second man and pushed him out into the roadway. Clear over the sounds of revelry was the noise of the second man retching. Christmas was working its magic in the Convent. The first man, presumably the sentry, laughed from the archway. He stamped his feet, blew on his hands, and Sharpe heard him shout for the sick man to come inside. The door closed on them.
The slope was gentler now and Sharpe risked a glance behind and was shocked by how naked and visible his men appeared to be. Surely they must be seen! Yet no one had shouted an alarm from the valley, no shot had stabbed the night, and then he was at the edge of the bushes and he brought his men to a halt. ‘Taylor and Bell?’
‘Sir?’
‘Good luck to you.’
The two Riflemen, greatcoats hiding their uniforms, went forward towards the Convent. Sharpe would have liked to have done this piece of work, but there was a danger that the sentry might recognize him or Harper. He must wait.
He had chosen both men carefully, for to kill a man silently with a bare blade was no job for a keen beginner. Bell had learned his skills in the London streets, Taylor across the other side of the world, but both men were confident. Their job was simply to kill the sentry or sentries in the entranceway.
They made no attempt to hide their approach. Their feet dragged on the roadway, their voices slurred as if with drink, and Sharpe heard foul oaths from Bell as the Rifleman stepped in the vomit at the foot of the steps. The door opened, and the sentry looked out. The door was pushed wider open and a second man stood there, musket slung. ‘Come on! It’s bloody cold!’ A brazier flamed behind them.
Taylor sat down on the bottom step and began singing. He held a bottle up that had been provided by Sharpe. ‘Got a present for you.’ He sang the words over and over, laughing at the same time.
Bell bowed to them. ‘A present!’
‘Christ! Come on!’
Bell gestured at Taylor. ‘He can’t walk.’
The bottle was still held up. The two sentries came down the steps good-naturedly and one reached for the bottle and never saw the right hand pull the honed blade from inside the greatcoat, swing, and the sentry’s right hand was touching the bottle as Taylor’s blade went in under the armpit, travelling slightly upwards, straight to the tangle of heart and arteries. Taylor still held the bottle, but now he supported the dead weight of the man as well.
Bell grinned at the second sentry just as alarm touched his face and the Londoner was still grinning as his blade cut any shout from the man’s throat. Sharpe saw the body lurch, saw it held, saw the two Riflemen taking the corpses into the shadows. ‘Come!’
He took the rest of his men forward. Frederickson was at the foot of the slope now, beginning the slow count towards fifteen minutes or the sound of the shot that would signal vengeance for Adrados.
The Convent steps were messy with the blood of Bell’s victim and Sharpe’s boots made dark footprints in the entrance tunnel beside the brazier. He walked alone into the upper cloister, stepping into the shadows of the arched walkway, and the cloister seemed to be deserted. The shouts, the laughter, both came from the inner cloister, but as he waited, his eyes searching the courtyard, he heard moans and small voices from the darkness. The tunnel ahead of him, the passage through which he and Dubreton had been escorted to see the woman branded with the word‘puta’was empty, the door and grille open. He held out his left hand and clicked his fingers and then led his men under the dark of the cloister’s walkway, going slowly. Their boots seemed to be loud on the stones. The brazier touched light on the tiles about the raised pool.
The chapel door was open and, as Sharpe passed, a hand shot out and grasped his left shoulder. He swung on the hand, right fist already moving, then stopped. A woman stood there, swaying and blinking, and behind her there were candles beyond the open door in the grille. ‘Coming in, darling?’ She smiled at Sharpe, then staggered against
the door.
‘Go and sleep it off.’
A man’s voice, speaking in French, called from inside the chapel. The woman shook her head. ‘He’s no bloody good, darling. Brandy, brandy, brandy.’ A child, not three years old, came and stood beside her mother and peered up solemnly at Sharpe, sucking its thumb. The woman squinted at Sharpe. ‘Who are you?’
‘Lord Wellington.’ The French voice shouted again and there was the sound of movement. Sharpe pushed the woman inside the door. ‘Go on, love. He’s feeling better now.’
‘A chance would be a fine thing. Come back, yes?’
‘We’ll be back.’
He led his men, grinning broadly, round the further corner and down to the passageway that led to the inner cloister. Footsteps echoed in it as he approached and then a child burst from the archway, pursued by another child, and they ran into the upper cloister and shrieked with laughter and excitement. A voice yelled at them from a storeroom. The drunks seemed to be sleeping it off in this upper level.
Sharpe motioned his men to wait in the passageway and walked out onto the upper cloister level where he had stood and talked with Madame Dubreton. He stayed in the shadows and he stared down into the eye of chaos. This was the anarchy that Wellington feared, the short step from order, the abandonment of hope and discipline.
Flames lit the deep cloister. A great fire burned on the broken stones, above the wreckage of the delicate canals, and the fire was fed by thorn trees and by planks that had been torn from the great windows of the hall on the northern side of the cloister. The windows ran from the ground level, past the upper walkway, to delicate arches beneath the gallery, and now that the protective planks had been prised from the stonework the window spaces gave free entrance between courtyard and hall. Their glass was long gone. Men and women came and went between the two areas and Sharpe watched from above.
He had run from the Foundling Home before his tenth birthday and he had gone into the dark close alleys of London’s slums. There was work there for a nimble child. It was a world of thieves, body-snatchers, murderers; of drunkards, cripples, and of whores who had sold themselves into disease and ugliness. Hope meant nothing to the inhabitants of St Giles. For many their longest journey in this world was a mile and a half along the length of Oxford Street, due west, to the three-sided gibbet at Tyburn. The countryside, just two miles north up the Tottenham Court Road, was as remote as paradise. St Giles was a place of disease, starvation, and a future so dark that a man measured it in hours and took his pleasures accordingly. The gin-shops, the gutter, the floors of the common lodging houses were the places where men and women dissolved their desperation in drink, coupling, and finally in death that tipped most into the open sewer along with the night’s harvest of dead babies. Without hope there was nothing but desperation
And these people were desperate. They must have known that revenge was coming, perhaps in the spring when the armies stirred from winter torpor, and until it came they numbed their desperation. ,They had drunk and were still drinking. Food lay on the broken stones, men lay with women, children picked their way through the couples to find bones that still had chewable meat or wineskins whose spigots they would suck on desperately. Close to the fire some of the bodies were naked, asleep, while further away they were covered in blankets and clothes. Some moved. One man was dead, blood black on his opened stomach. The noise was not from here, but from the hall and Sharpe could not see what was prompting the sound. He thought of the minutes ticking by, of Frederickson counting in the cold thorns.
He turned to the passageway and kept his voice low. ‘We’re going round the cloister, lads. Walk slowly. Go in twos and threes. There’s a view you’ll like as you go round.’
Harper walked just behind Sharpe, both men clinging to the shadows by the wall. The huge Irishman watched the couples by the fire and his voice was cheerful. ‘Just like the officers’ mess on a Friday night, eh?’
‘Every night, Patrick, every night.’
And what, he wondered, was to stop his own men going to join those in the courtyard? To be offered drink and women instead of work and discipline was the avowed dream of every soldier, so why did they not just go now? Kill him and Harper and take their freedom? He did not know the answer. He just knew that he trusted them. And where, more importantly, were the hostages kept? He pushed open the doors that he passed, but the rooms were either empty or inhabited by sleeping people. None were guarded. Once a man growled in protest from the darkness and two women giggled. Sharpe closed the door. The flames of the great fire were warm on the left side of his face.
He turned the corner and now he could see into the great hall. A hundred men and as many women crowded the floor. There was a kind of platform at the far end, a raised dais, and a staircase went from the dais to a gallery above that spanned the width of the hall. Sharpe could see two doorways leading from the gallery into corridors or rooms behind. There was easy access to the gallery through the tall, empty windows. A man could simply step from the cloister onto the gallery.
The men and the women were shouting, the shouting orchestrated from the dais. There sat Hakeswill. He had a chair that rose high above his head, like a throne, a chair with decorated armrests. He was dressed in the priest’s finery, the robes too short for him so that his boots were visible almost to his knees. Beside him, leaning on the armrest, Hakeswill’s hand about her waist, was a small, thin girl. She was dressed in brilliant red, a white scarf about her waist, long black hair falling below the scarf.
A woman stood on the dais. She was grinning. She was dressed in a shift over which she wore a vest and a shirt. She had a dress in her right hand and, to the crowd’s roar, she hurled the dress towards a man in the crowd who caught it and waved. Hakeswill held up his hand. The face twitched. ‘Shirt! Come on, then! How much? Shilling?’
It was an auction. She had sold the dress, presumably, and Sharpe saw two small grinning children picking up coins from the floor beneath the dais and carry them to an upturned shako. The shouts came from the hall, two shillings, three, and Hakeswill whipped them up and his eyes looked into the hat to see the takings.
They cheered and screamed as the shirt came off.
The vest went for four shillings. The coins rattled on the stones. Sharpe wondered how many minutes had passed.
The yellow face grinned. The hand jerked up and down on the small girl’s ribcage. ‘Her shift! Make it good. Ten shillings?’ No one answered. ‘You lousy bleeders! You think she’s not as pretty as Sally? Christ! You paid her two quid, now come on!’ He beat them up, higher and higher, and to a great cheer and thrown coins she peeled herself naked for one pound and eighteen shillings. She stood there grinning, hand on hip, and Hakeswill lurched upright and sidled towards her, his gold and white robes ridiculous in the flamelight, and his blue bright eyes leered at the people in the hall as he slid his right arm across the woman’s shoulders. ‘Now then. Who wants her? You’re going to pay! Half to her, half to us, so come on!’
Bids came and to some the woman stuck out her tongue, others she laughed, and Hakeswill egged them on. A consortium of Frenchmen bought her in the end, their price four pounds, and they came to fetch her and the crowd cheered louder as one of them carried the woman sitting on his shoulders towards the fire in the courtyard.
Hakeswill calmed them with long arms. ‘Who’s next?’
Names were shouted, women pushed forward by their men. Hakeswill drank from a bottle, his face twitched on its long neck, and the small girl still clung solemnly to him. A group of men began chanting. ‘A prisoner! A prisoner!’ The chant was taken up, shortened. ‘Prisoner! Prisoner! Prisoner!’
‘Now, lads, now! You know what the Marshal says!’
‘Prisoner! Prisoner! Prisoner!’ The women were screaming with the men, spitting the words like bile from their mouths. ‘Prisoner! Prisoner! Prisoner!’
Hakeswill let them chant, his eyes knowing on them. He raised a hand. ‘You know what the Marshal says! They’re o
ur precious little ones, the prisoners! We can’t touch them, oh no! That’s the Marshal’s orders. Now! If the bastards come! Ah. Then you can have them, I promise.’ The crowd roared at him, protesting, and he let them roar before he held up the hand again. The thin girl clung to him, her left hand tight on the embroidered vestment. ‘But!’ the crowd silenced slowly. ‘But! As it’s Christmas we might have a look at one. Yes? Just one? Not to touch! No, no! Just to check she’s all there? Yes.’
They roared their approval and the yellow face with its lank, grey hair twitched at them while the toothless mouth gaped in silent laughter. People drifted in from the courtyard, attracted by the new noise. Sharpe turned and saw the faces of his men pale in the cloister, anxious, and he wondered how long they had been. It must be near the quarter hour.
Hakeswill’s left hand was twined in the long black hair of the girl. He twisted it and pointed at a man. ‘Go and tell Johnny to fetch one.’ The man started towards the staircase that led from the dais, but Hakeswill stopped him as he was climbing onto the platform. He turned to his audience, his face grinning. ‘Which one do you want?’
The crowd erupted again, but Sharpe had seen enough. The hostages were behind one of the two doorways that led from the gallery. He turned to his men and his voice was urgent, drowned to all but them by the cacophony in the hall. ‘We go to the gallery. We walk as far as the windows. Drop your coats here.’ His own greatcoat was unbuttoned. ‘Even numbers go into the right doorway, odd numbers go into the left. Sergeant Rossner?’
‘Sir?’
‘Take two men and keep the bastards from the stairs. First man to find the hostages, shout! Now enjoy this, lads.’
Sharpe walked down the northern side of the cloister, sure that he must be visible because the windows into the hall made it seem as if the pavement was suspended in mid-air. He put one hand on Harper’s sleeve. ‘Fire as we go in, Patrick. Straight into the bloody hall.’
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 5: Sharpe's Company, Sharpe's Sword, Sharpe's Enemy Page 67