The perfectionist in the body-man was offended. He shrugged. “Their mates get ‘em, don’t they? I mean the Battalion, sir, does ’em a proper service, with a priest. That’s ‘em over there. Waitin’ for their interdment, sir.” He pointed to the stack.
“And if you don’t know who they are?”
“Sling ‘em, sir.”
“What happened to the bodies you got today?”
“Depends, sir. Some ‘ave gone, some are waiting, and some, like this ’ere gent‘, are bein’ attended to.” He invested the phrase with dignity.
Sharpe was in none of the coffins. Sergeant Huckfield levered the lids open, but the faces were all of strangers. Hogan sighed, looked up at the swallows, then down to Price. “He’s probably buried already. I don’t understand it. He’s not here, not in the wards.” Hogan did not believe his own words.
“Sir?” Huckfield was raking through the pile of uniforms that had been slit open, searched, and then tossed into a corner of the small courtyard. He held up Sharpe’s overalls, the distinctive green overalls that Sharpe had taken off a dead French officer of the Imperial Guard. Hogan, like Huckfield, recognised them instantly.
He turned back to the one-eyed man whose stitches, now that an officer was present, were smaller and neater. “Where are those clothes from?”
“The dead, sir.”
“You remember the man who wore those?”
The man squinted with his one eye. “We get ‘em naked, as often as not, an’ the clothes come after.” He sniffed. “Buggers have already searched ‘em. We just burn ’em.” He peered at the overalls. “Must ‘ave been a Frenchie.”
“Do you know which bodies are French?”
“Course we do, sir. Buggers tell us when they bring ‘em.”
Hogan turned to Huckfield and pointed at the pile of shrouded French dead. “Open them, Sergeant.” He noticed, almost for the first time, the huge bloodstain on the overalls.
It was vast. No man could have lived through that.
The body-men protested as Huckfield began slitting at the grey shrouds, but Hogan snapped at them to be quiet, and he and Price watched as face after face was revealed. None were Sharpe. Hogan turned back to the body-man. “Have any been buried yet?”
“Lord, yes. Two cart loads this afternoon, sir.”
So Sharpe was buried in a common grave with his enemies. Hogan felt the beginnings of a sob and he swallowed, stamped his feet as if it were cold, and looked at Price. “It’s your Company now, Lieutenant.”
“No, sir.”
Hogan’s voice was gentle. “Yes. You’d better march in the morning. You’ll find the Battalion at San Christobal. You’ll have to tell Major Forrest.”
Price shook his head obstinately. “Shouldn’t we find him, sir? I mean the least we can do is dig a decent grave.”
“You mean, dig up the French dead?”
“Yes, sir.”
Hogan shook his head. “Fire a volley over the grave tomorrow morning. That’ll do.”
It was all, Hogan thought as he walked slowly back to the Headquarters, that Sharpe might have wanted. No, that was not right. He did not know what Sharpe wanted, except success, and to prove that a man who came from the gutter could compete with anyone, be as good as the most privileged, and perhaps it was better that he should find peace now rather than strive after that remote dream, and then Hogan dismissed that thought as well. It was not better. Sharpe had been turbulent, ambitious, but one day, Hogan supposed, that restlessness would have found satisfaction. Then, curiously, Hogan found himself resenting Sharpe, resenting him because he had been killed and was thus denying his friendship to those who still lived. Hogan could not imagine being without Sharpe. Just when life seemed to reach an even keel the Rifleman could be relied on to upset things, stir them up, make excitement from dullness, and now it was all gone. A friend was dead.
Hogan wearily climbed the steps of the Headquarters and the officers were coming from the Dining Room as he went into the hallway. Wellington saw Hogan’s face and stopped. “Major?”
“Richard Sharpe’s dead, sir.”
“No.”
Hogan nodded. “I’m sorry, my lord.” He told what he knew.
Wellington listened in silence. He remembered Sharpe as a Sergeant. They had covered many miles together and much time. He saw the distress on Hogan’s face, understood it, but did not know what words to say. He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Hogan. I’m sorry.”
“Yes, sir.” It suddenly struck Hogan that life hereafter would seem anti-climactic, inadequate, and dull. Richard Sharpe was dead.
CHAPTER 14
The surgeons had not lied to Major Hogan. They remembered Patrick Harper, stunned cold by the fall, and they had probed and palpated and found nothing broken and so he had been put into a ward where he could snore until he recovered consciousness.
There was another man involved in the fight on the upper cloister. When he reached the surgeon he was still breathing, but shallowly, and unconsciousness had blessedly released him from his pain. An orderly had stripped off the empty scabbard and sword belt, slit the shirt from the man’s back, and seen the old flogging scars. The body was lifted onto the stained table.
The surgeon, spattered with fresh blood that gleamed over the clotted, coagulated stains from the week’s operations, caught at Sharpe’s overalls, split them down with huge shears, and saw the wound low and right in Sharpe’s abdomen. He shook his head and swore. The blood welled up in the small bullet hole, spilt and pulsed onto the wounded man’s thigh and waist, and the surgeon did not even bother to pick up a knife. He leaned close to the muscled chest and noted that the breathing was shallow, so shallow as to be almost inaudible, and then he picked up the wrist. For a moment he could not find the pulse, was about to give up, and then he felt it; a thready, weak throb of a tiny heartbeat. He nodded at the orderly, then at the wound. “Close it.”
There was not much he could do, except stop the man bleeding to death and sometimes he thought that would be a mercy with this kind of wound. One orderly grasped Sharpe’s feet, held them tight, the second pinched the skin over the wound, pushing the flesh, blood and driven uniform threads together, and keeping his fingers clear of the welling hole. The surgeon crossed to the brazier, took out the poker, and cauterized the puncture. The wounded man jerked, gasped and moaned, but unconsciousness held him, and the bleeding stopped. Smoke hung over the bloody abdomen, the stink of burned flesh was in the surgeon’s nostrils. „put a bandage on. Take him away.“
The orderly who had closed the wound nodded. “No hope, sir?”
“No.” The bullet was inside. The surgeon could take a leg off in ninety seconds, he could probe for a bullet and pluck it from next to a thighbone in sixty, he could set broken limbs, he could even take a bullet from a man’s chest if it had not pierced a lung, but no one on earth, not even Napoleon’s famous Surgeon-General Larrey, could take out a bullet that had lodged in the lower right abdomen. This was a dead man. Already the breathing was shallow, the skin palloring, and the pulse going. The sooner he died, the better, for the rest of his life would be pain. It would be a short life. The wound would abscess, the rot would set in, and he would be buried within the week. The surgeon, irritated with himself for his thoroughness, heaved up Sharpe’s side and saw that there was no exit wound. Instead he saw the flogging scars. A troublemaker come to a bad end. “Take him downstairs. Next!”
They bandaged him, stripped him naked, and his clothes, such as they were, were tossed into a corner where they could be searched at leisure. Many men hid coins in the seams of their clothes and the orderlies reaped a tidy reward for their work. One of them looked at the pale face. “Who is he?”
“Dunno. French, I suppose.” Sharpe’s overalls were French.
“Don’t be stupid. French don’t flog their buggers.”
„They do!“
„They bloody don’t!“
“Doesn’t bloody matter. He’s dying. Give ‘im to Con
nelley. That’s what the doctor said. ”
Sergeant Harper could have told them that Sharpe was a British officer, but Sergeant Harper was unconscious in a ward, and Sharpe had borne no marks of rank, just the scars of a flogging that had been given him by Obadiah Hakeswill in an Indian village years before. He looked like a private, he was treated as a private, and he was carried down the damp steps to the cellar where the doctors left their hopeless cases to die. The death room.
Sergeant Michael Connelley, dying himself of alcoholic poisoning, heard the steps and turned his huge, fatty bulk round. “What you got?”
“Dunno, Sarge. Could be a frog, could be one of ours, but he ain’t saying.”
Connelley looked at the face, at the bandage, and tapped a quick sign of the cross on his chest. “Poor sod. At least he’s quiet. All right, boys, down the far end. We’ve some wee space left.” Connelley sat down on his bench, tipped the rum bottle to his face, and watched as the new man was carried into the darkness of the dank, bricked cellar. “Any money on him?”
“No, sarge. Poor as a bloody Irishman.”
“You watch yourself!” Connelley growled. He spat on the floor. They should have put me with the officers upstairs. There’s some rare money up there.“ He drank again.
They pushed Sharpe into the wall, laying him on a thin, lumpy straw palliasse, and his head was in the low space where the brick arch met the floor. There was a pile of dirty blankets under the single window, a small grating at the very top of the arch, and the orderly spread one on the naked body that had curled its legs into the foetal position. There you are, Sarge, all yours.“
“And in good hands he is, too.” Connelley was not an unkind man. Few would want his job, yet he did not mind. He tried to make the last hours of his dying charges as gentle as he could, yet even in death he expected men to have standards. Especially if there were Frenchmen dying in his room. Then he would lecture the wounded British, admonish them to die like men, not to disgrace themselves in front of the enemy. “You’ll be getting a proper funeral, will you not?” he would say, “with the whole regiment and reversed arms, the proper honours, and you’re making a noise like a wee girl. Shame on you, man, and will you not die well?”
He gestured to the other end of the room and spoke to the orderlies. “There is a dead one up there.”
It was cold in the death room. Connelley drank steadily. Some men breathed noisily, some moaned, and some talked. The big Sergeant prowled the central aisle from time to time, carrying a water bucket and ladle, and he would feel the feet of the patients to see if they had died. He came to Sharpe and crouched beside him. The breathing was shallow, moaning slightly in his throat, and Connelley put a hand on the naked shoulder and it was cold. “Ah, you poor man. You’ll catch your death!” He lumbered to the window, found another blanket, shook it as if he could free it of the lice that infested its seams, and spread it on top of the other blanket. A man at the far end cried out, caught in sudden pain, and Connelley screwed himself round. “Whoa there, lad! Whoa! Gentle now! Die well, die well.”
A Frenchman cried and Connelley squatted beside him, took the man’s hand, and talked of Ireland. He told the uncomprehending Frenchman of Connaught’s beauty, of its women, of fields so fat that a lamb was full grown in a week, of rivers so thick that the fish begged to be caught, and the Frenchman quieted and Connelley patted his hair and told him he was brave, and he was proud of him, and beyond the small grating the sky darkened into dusk and the orderlies came down again and dragged the Frenchman, who had died, head-bumping up the steps.
The pain was like a dream in Sharpe, and sometimes he floated up through the layers of pain and he cried out and at other times he was deep in its suffocating folds and the dream writhed inside him, separate from him, but part of him, pinned to him like the lance held in the Indian soldier’s hands that had pinned him to the tree outside Seringapatam, except this was dark, dark, and he cried out, sobbing because of the pain.
“Whoa there, lad!” Connelley paused with his bottle half way to his lips. “You’re a brave one now, sure you are. Be brave, lad.”
Sharpe was lying on his side. He was a child again, being beaten, tied to the bench in the foundling home and the arm was crashing down and crashing down and the birch was splintering inside him and the face of the supervisor changed to Wellington’s face and the face was laughing at him.
He dreamed. Teresa was there, but he did not remember that dream, and he did not know that he dreamed of La Marquesa, and the dusk turned to darkness, night in Salamanca, and it should have been his last night in the wide black-curtained bed and he moaned on the palliasse and Connelley, half drunk, called in his sing-song voice for him to die well.
He slept. He dreamed that the rats were chewing the flour and water paste that was caked onto a soldier’s hair. Recruits were forced to grow their hair long and when it was long enough it was pulled back and twisted round a leather queue, pulled so hard that some recruits screamed as the hair was yanked and twisted. The skeined hair was formed into the queue, five inches long, a solid pigtail, and it was caked with flour and water paste so that it was stiff and white and sometimes, in the night, the rats chewed at the queue. Then, surfacing into the pain, he remembered that he had not had his hair powdered and pasted for a dozen years, that the army had dropped the fashion, and that the rats were real, scuffling along the cellar’s edge, and he coughed at them, spat weakly, and the pain shrivelled him and he cried out.
“Die well, lad, die well.” Connelley had woken up. He should have been relieved hours ago, but he rarely was. They left him to drink peaceably with the dying men. The Irish Sergeant stood up, groaned as the pain hit him, and called again to Sharpe. “It’s only the rats, lad, they won’t touch you if you’re living.”
Sharpe knew then that the pain was real, that this was not a dream, and he wished he were dreaming again, but could not. He opened his eyes into the dank darkness and the pain was pulsing in him, making him sob, and he forced his knees up and tensed himself, but the pain was terrible and encompassing.
The rush light on the stairs flickered on the cellar wall. The bricks gleamed damply, darkly, curving down to Sharpe’s head and he knew he was in this place to die. He remembered Leroux, La Marquesa, and he knew he had been so confident and now it was all over. He had come so far, from the foundling home to being a Captain in Britain’s army, yet now he was as helpless as that small child strapped to the bench while the birch thrashed at it. He was going to die, and he was helpless, childlike, and he sobbed to himself and the pain was like flesh-hooks ripping him apart, and he dreamed again.
The Irish priest was mocking him, was stabbing him in the side with a long spear, and Sharpe knew he was being sent to hell. He dreamed he was in a vast building, so high that the roof was misty, and he was pinned by the long spear to the very centre of the floor, and he was tiny, and the great space echoed with laughter, insane laughter that boomed and banged its way in the huge building, and he knew that in a second the floor would open and he would fall endlessly, fall, down to the pits of hell, and he struggled out of that dream back to the pain. He would not go to hell, he would not, and he would not die, but the pain made him want to sleep or to scream.
The bricks glistened above his face. Cold water dripped slowly onto the palliasse. He knew it was the night’s middle, death’s kingdom, and the rats scuttled against the wall. He tried to talk, forcing words from the pain’s grip, and his voice was like wind stirring thistles. “Where am I?”
Connelley was drunk, asleep, and there was no answer.
There was no Harper. Sharpe remembered the body on the stairs, his friend, and the blood that puddled on the step, and Sharpe cried because he was alone, and was dying, and no one was there. There was no one. No Harper, no Teresa, no mother, no family, just a damp cellar of rats, cold in death’s kingdom, and all the glory of Colours carried into battle-smoke, of a soldier’s pride, of the bayonets rippling in sun and the boots going forward acr
oss the sparks towards victory ended here. In a death room. No Harper. No slow grin, no shared thoughts without words, no more laughter.
He sobbed, and in his sobs he swore he would not die.
The pain was all over so he forced his right hand down and found his naked legs, and then he moved his left hand and found the bandage and he felt round the bandage, round to his lower stomach, and the pain screamed up inside him in a vast red swell of breaking agony that drove him into unconsciousness again.
He dreamed his sword was broken, splintered grey shards, useless. He dreamed.
A man screamed in the room, a high-pitched quavering scream that startled the rats and woke Connelley. “Whoa there, lad! It’s all right, so it is, and sure I’m here. Hey lad, lad! Gentle now. Die well!”
“Where am I?” Sharpe’s voice was unheard in the noise. He knew, though. He had seen death rooms before.
The man who had screamed was crying now, small yelps that peaked in pathetic gulps, and Sergeant Connelley swiftly swallowed some rum, thrust the bottle in a gaping pocket, and lumbered down the room with his bucket of water. Other men were stirring, crying for water, for their mothers, for light, for help, and Connelley called out to them all. “I’m here, lads, I’m here, and you’re brave boys, are you not? Now be brave! We have the French, so we do, and would you want them to think that we’re weak?”
Sharpe breathed in short, shallow gasps, and he swore he would not die. He tried to blank the pain out, but he could not, and he tried to remember men who had come out of the death room alive. He could not. He could only think of his enemy, Sergeant Hakeswill, who had lived through a hanging, and Sharpe swore he would not die.
Connelley shushed the men with his rough tenderness. He walked down the room, pausing by some, finding some dead, comforting others. Sharpe drifted in the pain; it was like a live thing, trapping him, and he struggled with it. Connelley knelt by him, talked to him, and Sharpe heard the Irish voice.
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