CHAPTER 10
There was small sleep to be had that night for either Riflemen or Marines. The dawn was cold; bitter cold. Wraiths of mist drifted above the meadows frosted crisply white.
Sharpe woke with a stinging headache behind his bandaged forehead. He sat with his back against a pollarded willow and felt a louse in his armpit that must have come from the Amelie, but he was too tired and too cold to hunt for it.
“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” Frederickson, teeth chattering with the cold, crouched by Sharpe. “Nothing passed yesterday.”
Dim in the mist, a hundred yards upstream, a handsome stone bridge with carved urns marking the limits of its balustrades, arched over the Leyre. Next to the bridge, and on the western bank down which Sharpe and his small force had marched last night, there stood a stone-built house from which a trickle of chimney smoke tantalized the senses with its promise of a warm fire.
“It’s a toll-house,” Frederickson said, “and the bugger wouldn’t give us coffee.”
No doubt, Sharpe reflected, the toll-keepers of France were as disobliging as their English counterparts. There was something about that job to bring out the surliness in a man. “If we had enough powder we could break that damn bridge.”
“We don’t,” Frederickson said unhelpfully.
Sharpe struggled to his feet. Frederickson had taken the last watch and his picquets were set double-strength about the margins of the water-meadow where the small force had bivouacked. It had been a miserable bivouac. Some of the Marines had sheltered beneath the scanty cover of the limbers, but most of Sharpe’s men had simply rolled themselves in greatcoats, pillowed their heads on packs, and shivered through the slow, small hours.
A cow, on the further bank, bellowed softly and watched the two men who walked beside the river. A cow at pasture in February suggested a softer climate than England, but it was still damned cold. A swan, beautiful and ghostly, appeared beneath the bridge, followed a moment later by its mate, and the two birds, disdaining the unnatural movement in the fields, glided gently downstream. “Luncheon,” Frederickson said.
“I never liked their taste,” Sharpe said, “like stringy water-weeds.” He flinched as a sudden stab of pain lanced in his head. He wondered if the naval surgeon had been wrong, and if his wound was more serious than the mere bloody scrape of a carbine ball. He seemed to remember that Johnny Pearson of the Buffs had taken such a wound at Busaco, sworn it was nothing, then dropped dead a week later.
A rickety wooden fence, untended and draped with frost-whitened thorn, barred the steep embankment that carried this High Road of France southwards. Sharpe climbed to the carriageway that was formed of a white, flinty stone which had been rammed hard to smoothness, but which was nevertheless rutted and puddled with ice. No weeds grew on the surface, which bespoke constant use. To the south, where the road disappeared in the mist, he could see the shapes of houses, a church, and tall, bare poplars. The river curved here, and doubtless that small town was where the old road crossed the river, while this bridge, newer and wider, had been built in the meadows outside the town so that the hurrying armies would not have to negotiate narrow, mediaeval streets on their urgent journeys to Spain. Down this carriageway, for the last six years, the guns and men and ammunition and horses and blades and saddles and all the countless trivia of war had been dragged to feed the French armies. And up this same road, Sharpe thought, those same armies would trudge in defeat. “What’s in the town?”
Frederickson knew Sharpe’s question meant what enemy forces might be in the town. “The toll-keeper says nothing.”
Sharpe turned to look north. “And up there?”
“A stand of beeches a quarter mile up and an excuse for a farm. It’ll do.”
Sharpe grunted. He trusted Frederickson absolutely, and if Frederickson said that the beeches and farm were the best site for an ambuscade, then Sharpe knew it would be pointless to look elsewhere.
A violent screech, a flapping of wings, and a sudden curse betrayed that the swans had been purloined for food. Captain Palmer, scratching his crotch and yawning, climbed the fence. “Morning, sir.”
“Morning, Palmer,” Sharpe said. “Cold enough for you?”
Palmer did not reply. The three officers walked towards the toll-house that was marked by a white barred gate across the road. A black and white painted board, just like those on the toll-houses of England, announced the crossing charges. There was a ford to the right of the bridge, but the ford had been half blocked with boulders so that no carriage or waggon could escape payment of the toll.
The toll-keeper, peg-legged and bald, stood truculently by his gate. He spoke to Frederickson, who, in turn, spoke to Sharpe. “If we haven’t got the laissez-passer then we have to pay six sous.”
“Lacy-passay?” Sharpe asked.
“I rather gave him to think we’re German troops fighting for Bonaparte,” Frederickson said. “The lacy-passay allows us to escape all tolls.”
“Tell him to go to hell.”
Frederickson conveyed Captain Sharpe’s compliments to the toll-keeper who answered by spitting at Sharpe’s feet. „Trots hommes,“ the man said, holding up three fingers in case these heathen German troops did not understand him, „six sous.”
“Bugger him.” Sharpe raised the black-painted metal latch that held the gate shut and, from above him, a click sounded and he looked up to see the toll-keeper’s wife leaning from an upper window. She was a woman of squat, startling ugliness, her hair bound with a muslin scarf, and, more to the immediate point, armed with a vast, brass-barrelled blunderbuss that covered the three officers.
„Six sous,“ said the toll-keeper stoically. Life held few surprises for toll-keepers, and strange troops were nothing new to him.
Captain Palmer, who held Major Richard Sharpe’s reputation in some awe, was now astonished to see the Rifleman grudgingly take out a ten-franc silver piece. A delay ensued while the toll-keeper went indoors, unlocked his iron-bound chest, found the right change, then gave Sharpe a written receipt which, Frederickson explained, would enable reimbursement to be made at the District Headquarters in Bordeaux.
“I can’t have that bugger charging for all of us,” Sharpe said. “Rather than disarm his Grenadier, William, we’ll march the men through the ford.”
“Yes, sir.” Frederickson was highly amused by the whole transaction.
“Shouldn’t we…?” Palmer began hesitantly.
“No,” Sharpe said. “We’re under orders not to agitate civilians, Captain. No stealing, no raping. If anyone breaks that order he’ll be hanged. By me. Instantly.” His headache had made him speak more sharply than he had intended.
“Yes, sir.” Palmer sounded subdued.
They walked to the stand of beeches that Frederickson had patrolled in the night. “It’s the right place,” Sharpe said grudgingly, “if anything travels today. Which I doubt.” Any sensible man would stay indoors on this cold day.
The beeches lay to the right of the road, the farm to the left. The farm was a miserable hovel of a place; merely a mud-walled cottage surrounded by frosted slush with two dilapidated outbuildings where chickens lived in filthy straw.
A pigsty lay beyond a low hedge. Sharpe broke a piece of cat-ice with his heel, then swivelled to look where the road passed between the beeches and the farm’s hedgerow. “We use your Marines there, Palmer. You stop them, and the Rifles will kill them.”
Palmer, not wanting to show any lack of understanding, nodded. Frederickson understood instantly. By using the Marines, with their heavy firepower of quick-loading muskets, as the stop in the bottle, Sharpe would force an enemy to scatter left and right to outflank the road-block. On those flanks they would run into the hidden Riflemen. It would be quick, bloody, and effective. “What if they come from the south?”
“Leave them.” Sharpe knew that any northward-bound convoy would be travelling empty.
It took two hours to set the trap. No one could be visible, and so Minver’s C
ompany of Riflemen and Palmer’s Marines were somehow crammed into the tiny farm buildings. Frederickson’s Company, drawing the short straw because Sharpe trusted their officer, were in the more exposed beech wood. Harper, with two of Frederickson’s Riflemen, was a half mile to the north as look-out.
The farmer, with his wife and daughter, crouched in a corner of their kitchen that was filled with big, stinking men armed with the heavy Sea-Service muskets. The daughter was waif-like and, beneath her stringy, dirty hair, pretty in a winsome and frightened way. The Marines, starved of women for months, eyed her hopefully.
“One flicker of trouble,” Sharpe warned Palmer, “and I’ll kill the man responsible.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sharpe visited the Riflemen in the small barn. The barn’s outside end wall, as in England, served as the countryman’s museum. A stoat was nailed to the wood, its old, dry fur pricked with frost. Ravens decayed there, and an otter skin hung empty. The Riflemen, despite their cold breakfast and shivering night, grinned at Sharpe.
He walked north along the hedgerow. He saw two men strolling down the road with a dog at their heels. A quarter of an hour later a woman drove a skeletal cow north, doubtless to sell the beast at market to raise enough cash to see the winter through. None of them saw the Rifleman.
It seemed extraordinary to Sharpe that he could be here, deep in France, unchallenged. Only the Navy, he supposed, could make such a thing possible. The French, bereft of a fleet, could never set such a trap on a Hampshire road. But Sharpe could come here, strike like a snake, and be gone by the next sundown, while Bampfylde’s flotilla, riding at the mouth of the Arcachon Channel, was as safe as if it was anchored in the River Hamble.
Sharpe turned back towards the farm. The cold weather and the emptiness of the road made him doubt whether any convoy would travel today. His head hurt foully and, safe from any man’s gaze, he flinched with the pain and rubbed a cautious hand over his bandaged forehead. Johnny Pearson, he remembered, had just pitched forward into a dish of hot tripe; no warning, no sound, just stone dead a few seconds after he had cheerfully said it was time to take the bandage off his scalp. Sharpe pressed his forehead to test whether the bone grated. It did not, but it hurt like the very devil.
Back in the farm hovel a cauldron boiled on the open fire and the Marines had pooled their tea to fill the small room with a homely smell. The girl, Sharpe noticed, was now giving the strangers shy smiles. She had catlike, green eyes, and she laughed when the men tried to talk to her.
“Take some tea to the barn,” Sharpe ordered.
“Twas our leaves,” a voice said from the back of the room.
Sharpe turned, but no one pressed the objection and the tea was taken out to the Riflemen.
The frost melted outside. The mist cleared somewhat, showing the poplars to the north where Harper lay hidden in a ditch. A grey heron, enemy of trout fishermen, sailed with slow, flapping wings towards the north.
Sharpe, as the morning wore on and as the Marines beguiled the green-eyed girl into giggling flirtation, decided the day was being wasted. Nothing would come. He crossed to Fredcrickson’s men to find them hidden deep beneath the thick drifts of dead leaves and told Sweet William that, if nothing appeared within two hours, they would start to withdraw. “We’ll, march-to Facture and billet the men warm tonight.” That would leave a short crisp distance for the morning march to Arcachon where Sharpe would insist that the.nonsense about taking Bordeaux be abandoned.
Frederickson was disappointed that this journey might be in vain. “You wouldn’t wait till dusk?”
“No.” Sharpe shivered inside his greatcoat. He was sure nothing would come now, though he partly suspected that he rather hoped nothing would come so that he could begin the homeward journey. Besides, his head was splitting fit to burst. He told himself he needed a doctor, but he dared not reveal the extent of his pain to Frederickson. Sharpe forced a rueful smile. “Nothing’s going to come, William. I feel it in my bones.“
“You have a reliable skeleton?”
“It’s never wrong,” Sharpe said. “
The enemy came at midday.
Harper and his two men brought news of it. Twenty cavalry, walking rather than riding their horses, led six canvas-covered wagons, two coaches, and five Companies of infantry. Sharpe, trying to ignore the searing stabs in his head, considered Harper’s report. The enemy was coming in strength, but Sharpe decided that surprise would nullify that advantage. He nodded to Palmer. “Go.” He ran to the barn and ordered Minver’s Riflemen to their hidden positions. “If I blow ”withdraw“,” he said, “you know where to go.”
“Over the bridge.” Minver drew his sword and licked his lips. “And cover the retreat.”
Sharpe doubled back, Harper with him, to where the Marines crouched behind the hedge. “You see the milestone?” Sharpe said to Palmer.
Palmer nodded. Fifty yards up the road was a milestone that had been first defaced of its number of miles, then re-inscribed with the strange kilometres that had recently been introduced in France. The stone recorded that it was 43 kilometres to Bordeaux, a distance that meant nothing to Sharpe. “We don’t move till they reach that stone, understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Palmer blanched to think of letting the enemy come that close, but raised no objection.
Normally all Sharpe’s presentiments, any gloom, would have vanished at the first sight of the enemy, but the pain in his skull was a terrible distraction. He wanted to lie down in a dark place, he wanted the oblivion of sleep, and he tried to will the pain away, but it was there, tormenting him, and he forced his attention past the stabbing ache to watch the cavalry appear from the last wisps of mist. Through his glass he could see that the cavalry horses were winter-thin. The British Army, in their tiny corner of France, had not even brought the cavalry over the Pyrenees, knowing that until the spring grass had fattened the horses the cavalry would be a burden rather than an advantage. But the French had always been more careless of their horses. “If a horse gets close to you,” Sharpe told the Marines who, he thought, might not have experienced cavalry before, “hit it in the bloody mouth.” The Marines, shivering in the lee of the hedge, grinned nervously.
Behind the cavalry, squealing as such waggons always squealed, the heavy transport waggons lumbered on the roadway. Each was hauled by eight oxen. Behind the waggons were the infantry, and behind the infantry the two carriages that had their windows and curtains tight closed against the cold.
Sharpe pushed his telescope back into his pocket. In the beech wood, he knew, Frederickson’s killers would be sliding loaded rifles forward. This was like shooting fish in a barrel, for the enemy, deep in their homeland, would be marching with unloaded muskets and absent minds. They would be thinking of sweethearts left behind, of the next night’s billet, and of the enemy waiting at the far, far end of the long road.
A French cavalry officer, brass helmet shielded with canvas and with a black cloak covering his gaudy uniform, suddenly swung up into his saddle. He spurred ahead of the convoy, doubtless drawn to the town beyond the river where wineshops would be open and fires burning in brick hearths.
“Damn.” Sharpe said it under his breath. The man could not help but see the ambush and he would spring it fifty yards too soon. But nothing went as planned in war, and the disadvantage must be taken, then ignored. “Deal with the bugger, Patrick. Wait till he sees us.”
“Yes, sir.” Harper thumbed back the cock of his rifle.
Sharpe looked at Palmer. “On my order we advance. Two files.”
“Yes, sir.”
“No shouting, no cheering.” French and Spanish troops cheered as they advanced, but the silence of a British attack was an eerie and unsettling thing. The Marines, white-faced, crouched low. One crossed himself, while another, his eyes shut, seemed to be praying silently.
The French officer kicked his horse into a trot. The man had a cigar which dribbled smoke, and his broad, open face looked cheerfully at the so
dden, misty countryside. He glanced at the farm, bent to pluck his cloak loose of his stirrup leather where it had wrapped itself as he mounted, then saw the red coats and white crossbelts where the Marines were concealed in the hedge-shadow that was still white with frost.
He was so astonished that he kept coming, mouth opening to shout an inquiry, and when he was still some fifteen yards short of the hedgerow, Harper shot him.
The rifle bullet struck a cuirass hidden by the cloak. The ball, squarely hitting the steel, punctured the armour and deflected upwards, through the Frenchman’s throat and into his brain. Blood, bright as dawn, fountained from the man’s open mouth.
“In line!” Sharpe bellowed. “Advance!”
The horse, terrified, reared.
The Frenchman, still incongruously holding his cigar, toppled backwards in the saddle. He was dead, but his knees still gripped the horse’s flanks and, when the beast plunged its forefeet back down, the corpse nodded forward in a grotesque obeisance to the Marines who were scrambling from the ditch to form a double-line across the road.
“Forward!”
The horse turned, eyes showing white, and the dead Frenchman seemed to grin a bloodshot grin at Sharpe before the horse whirled the ghastly face away. The body slumped to the left, fell, but the man’s boot was fast caught in the stirrup and the corpse was dragged, bouncing, behind the bolting horse.
“Hold your fire!” Sharpe cautioned the Marines. He wanted no nervous man to waste a musket shot. He drew his sword. “Double!”
The remaining cavalry had stopped, appalled. The waggons, with their vast weight, still trundled forward. The infantry seemed oblivious of the ambush’s opening shot.
The Marines, their breath misting, ran up the road that was marked with great splashes of blood. Sharpe’s boot crushed the dead cavalry officer’s fallen cigar.
Two cavalrymen hauled carbines from their saddle holsters. “Halt!” Sharpe shouted.
He stood to one side of the road. “Front rank kneel!” That was not entirely necessary, but a kneeling rank always steadied raw troops and Sharpe knew that these Marines, for all their willingness, had small experience in land fighting. “Captain Palmer? Fire low, if you please.”
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