Sharpe's Battle

by Bernard Cornwell

  Haver and it lay nearly five miles from Fuentes de Onoro. "Is Wellington tricking us?" Masséna asked an aide.

  The aide was just as incredulous as his master. "Perhaps he believes he can beat us without keeping to the rules?" he suggested.

  "Then in the morning we will teach him about the rules of war. I expected better of this Englishman! Tomorrow night, Jean, we shall have his whores as our own. Does Wellington have whores?"

  "I don't know, Your Majesty."

  "Then find out. And make sure I get the pick of the bunch before some filthy grenadier gives her the clap, you hear me?"

  "Yes, Your Majesty," the aide said. His master's passion for women was as tiresome as his appetite for victory was inspiring, and tomorrow, it seemed, both hungers would be satisfied.

  By mid-afternoon it was plain that the French were not coming that day. The picquets were doubled, and every battalion kept at least three companies under arms, but the other companies were released to more usual duties. Cattle were herded onto the plateau and slaughtered for the evening meal, bread was fetched from Vilar Formoso and the rum ration distributed.

  Captain Donaju sought and received Tarrant's permission to take a score of men to attend Lord Kiely's burial which was taking place four miles behind Fuentes de Onoro. Hogan also insisted that Sharpe attend and Harper wanted to come as well. Sharpe felt awkward in Hogan's company, especially as the Irishman seemed blithely unaware of Sharpe's bitterness over the court of inquiry. "I invited Runciman," Hogan told Sharpe as they walked along the dusty road west from Vilar Formoso, "but he didn't really want to come. Poor fellow."

  "In a bad way, is he?" Sharpe asked.

  "Heartbroken," Hogan said callously. "Keeps claiming that nothing was his fault. He doesn't seem to grasp that isn't the point."

  "It isn't, is it? The point is that you'd prefer to keep bloody Valverde happy."

  Hogan shook his head. "I'd prefer to bury Valverde, and preferably alive, but what I really want is for Wellington to be Generalisimo."

  "And you'll sacrifice me for that?"

  "Of course! Every soldier knows you must lose some valuable men if you want to win a great prize. Besides, what does it matter if you do lose your commission? You'll just go off and join Teresa and become a famous partisan:

  El Fusilero!" Hogan smiled cheerfully, then turned to Harper. "Sergeant? Would you do me a great service and give me a moment's privacy with Captain Sharpe?"

  Harper obligingly walked on ahead where he tried to overhear the conversation between the two officers, but Hogan kept his voice low and Sharpe's exclamations of surprise offered Harper no clue. Nor did he have any chance to question Sharpe before the three British officers turned a corner to see Lord

  Kiely's servants and Captain Donaju's twenty men standing awkwardly beside a grave that had been recently dug in an orchard next to a graveyard. Father

  Sarsfield had paid the village gravediggers to dig the hole just feet away from consecrated ground for, though the laws of the church insisted that Lord

  Kiely's sins must keep him from burial in holy ground, Sarsfield would nevertheless place the body as near as he could to consecrated soil so that on

  Judgment Day the exiled Irishman's soul would not be utterly bereft of

  Christian company. The body had been stitched into a dirty white canvas shroud. Four men of the Real Companïa Irlandesa lowered the corpse into the deep grave, then Hogan, Sharpe and Harper took off their hats as Father

  Sarsfield said the prayers in Latin and afterwards spoke in English to the twenty guardsmen. Lord Kiely, the priest said, had suffered from the sin of pride and that pride had not let him endure disappointment. Yet all Irishmen,

  Sarsfield said, must learn to live with disappointment for it was given to their heritage as surely as the sparks flew upwards. Yet, he went on, the proper response to disappointment was not to abandon hope and reject God's gift of life, but to keep the hope glowing bright. "We have no homes, you and

  I," he said to the sombre guardsmen, "but one day we shall all inherit our earthly home, and if it is not given to us then it will come to our children or to our children's children." The priest fell silent and stared down into the grave. "Nor must you worry that his Lordship committed suicide," he finally continued. "Suicide is a sin, but sometimes life is so unbearable that we must risk the sin rather than face the horror. Wolfe Tone made that choice thirteen years ago." The mention of the Irish patriot rebel made one or two of the guardsmen glance at Sharpe, then they looked back to the priest who went on in his gentle, persuasive voice to tell how Wolfe Tone had been held captive in a British dungeon and how, rather than face the enemy's gallows, he had slit his own throat with a penknife. "Lord Kiely's motives might not have been so pure as Tone's," Sarsfield said, "but we don't know what sadness drove him to his sin and in our ignorance we must therefore pray for his soul and forgive him." There were tears in the priest's eyes as he took a small phial of holy water from the haversack at his side and sprinkled its drops on the lonely grave. He offered the benediction in Latin, then stepped back as the guardsmen raised their muskets to fire a ragged volley over the open grave.

  Birds panicked up from the orchard's trees, then circled and flew back as the smoke dissipated among the branches.

  Hogan took charge as soon as the volley had been fired. He insisted that there was still some danger of a French attack at dusk and that the soldiers should all return to the ridge. "I'll follow soon," he told Sharpe, then he ordered

  Kiely's servants back to his Lordship's quarters.

  The soldiers and servants left, the sound of their boots fading in the late afternoon air. It was sultry in the orchard where the two gravediggers waited patiently for the signal to fill up the grave beside which Hogan now stood, hat in hand, staring down at the shrouded corpse. "For a long time," he said to Father Sarsfield, "I've carried a pillbox with some Irish earth inside so that if I should die I would rest with a little bit of Ireland all through eternity. I seem to have mislaid it, Father, which is a pity for I'd have liked to sprinkle a wee bit of Ireland's soil onto Lord Kiely's grave."

  "A generous thought, Major," Sarsfield said.

  Hogan stared down at Kiely's shroud. "The poor man. I hear he was hoping to marry the Lady Juanita?"

  "They spoke of it," Sarsfield said drily, his tone implying his disapproval of the match.

  "The lady's doubtless in mourning," Hogan said, then put his hat back on. "Or maybe she's not mourning at all? You've heard that she's gone back to the

  French? Captain Sharpe let her go. He's a fool for women, that man, but the

  Lady Juanita can easily make a fool of men. She did of poor Kiely here, did she not?" Hogan paused as a sneeze gathered and exploded. "Bless me," he said, wiping his nose and eyes with a vast red handkerchief. "And what a terrible woman she was," he went on. "Saying she was going to marry Kiely, and all the while she was committing adultery and fornication with Brigadier Guy Loup. Is fornication a mere venial sin these days?"

  "Fornication, Major, is a mortal sin." Sarsfield smiled. "As I suspect you know only too well."

  "Crying out to heaven for revenge, is it?" Hogan returned the smile, then looked back to the grave. Bees hummed in the orchard blossoms above Hogan's head. "But what about fornicating with the enemy, Father?" he asked. "Isn't that a worse sin?"

  Sarsfield took the scapular from around his neck, kissed it, then carefully folded the strip of cloth. "Why are you so worried for the Dona Juanita's soul, Major?" he asked.

  Hogan still looked down at the dead man's coarse shroud. "I'd rather worry about his poor soul. Do you think it was discovering that his lady was humping a Frog that killed him?"

  Sarsfield flinched at Hogan's crudity. "If he did discover that, Major, then it could hardly have added to his happiness. But he was not a man who knew much happiness, and he rejected the hand of the church."

  "And what could the church have done? Changed the whore's nature?" Hogan asked. "And don't
tell me that Dona Juanita de Elia is not a spy, Father, for

  I know she is and you know the selfsame thing."

  "I do?" Sarsfield frowned in puzzlement.

  "You do, Father, you do, and God forgive you for it. Juanita is a whore and a spy, and a better whore, I think, than she is a spy. But she was the only person available for you, isn't that so? Doubtless you'd have preferred someone less flamboyant, but what choice did you have? Or was it Major Ducos who made the choice? But it was a bad choice, a very bad choice. Juanita failed you, Father. We found her when she was trying to bring you a whole lot of these." Hogan reached into his tail pocket and produced one of the counterfeit newspapers that Sharpe had discovered in San Cristobal. "They were wrapped in sheets of sacred music, Father, and I thought to myself, why would they do that? Why church music? Why not other newspapers? But, of course, if she was stopped and given a cursory search then who would think it odd that she was carrying a pile of psalms to a man of God?"

  Sarsfield glanced at the newspaper, but did not take it. "I think, maybe," he said carefully, "that grief has deranged your mind."

  Hogan laughed. "Grief for Kiely? Hardly, Father. What might have deranged me is all the work I've been having to do in these last few days. I've been reading my correspondence, Father, and it comes from all sorts of strange places. Some from Madrid, some from Paris, some even from London. Would you like to hear what I've learned?"

  Father Sarsfield was fidgeting with the scapular, folding and refolding the embroidered strip of cloth. "If you insist," he said guardedly.

  Hogan smiled. "Oh, I do, Father. For I've been thinking about this fellow,

  Ducos, and how clever everyone says he is, but what really worries me is that he's put another clever fellow behind our lines, and I've been hurting my mind wondering just who that new clever fellow might be. And I was also wondering, you see, just why it was that the first newspapers to arrive in the Irish regiments were supposed to be from Philadelphia. Very odd choice that. Am I losing you?"

  "Go on," Sarsfield said. The scapular had come loose and he was meticulously folding it again.

  "I've never been to Philadelphia," Hogan said, "though I hear it's a fine city. Would you like a pinch of snuff, Father?"

  Sarsfield did not answer. He just watched Hogan and went on folding the cloth.

  "Why Philadelphia?" Hogan asked. "Then I remembered! Actually I didn't remember at all; a man in London sent me a reminder. They remember these things in London. They have them all written down in a great big book, and one of the things written in that great big book is that it was in Philadelphia that Wolfe Tone got his letter of introduction to the French government. And it was there, too, that he met a passionate priest called Father Mallon.

  Mallon was more of a soldier than a priest and he was doing his best to raise a regiment of volunteers to fight the British, but he wasn't having a whole lot of success so he threw his lot in with Tone instead. Tone was a

  Protestant, wasn't he? And he never did have much fondness for priests, but he liked Mallon well enough because Mallon was an Irish patriot before he was a priest. And I think Mallon became Tone's friend as well, for he stayed with

  Tone every step of the way after that first meeting in Philadelphia. He went to Paris with Tone, raised the volunteers with Tone, then sailed to Ireland with Tone. Sailed all the way into Lough Swilly. That was in 1798, Father, in case you'd forgotten, and no one has seen Mallon from that day to this. Poor

  Tone was captured and the redcoats were all over Ireland looking for Father

  Mallon, but there's not been a sight nor smell of the man. Are you sure you won't have a pinch of snuff? It's Irish Blackguard and hard to come by."

  "I would rather have a cigar, if you have one," Sarsfield said calmly.

  "I don't, Father, but you should try the snuff one day. It's a grand specific against the fever, or so my mother always said. Now where was I? Oh yes, with poor Father Mallon on the run from the British. It's my belief he got back to

  France, and I think from there he was sent to Spain. The French couldn't use him against the English, at least not until the English had forgotten the events of '98, but Mallon must have been useful in Spain. I suspect he met the old Lady Kiely in Madrid. I hear she was a fierce old witch! Lived for the church and for Ireland, even though she saw too much of the one and had never seen the other. D'you think Mallon used her patronage as he spied on the

  Spanish for Bonaparte? I suspect so, but then the French took over the Spanish throne and someone must have been wondering where Father Mallon could be more usefully employed, and I suspect Father Mallon pleaded with his French masters to be employed against the real enemy. After all, who among the British would remember Father Mallon from '98? His hair will be white by now, he'll be a changed man. Maybe he's put on weight like me." Hogan patted his belly and smiled.

  Father Sarsfield frowned at the scapular. He seemed surprised that he was still holding the vestment and so he carefully stowed it in the haversack slung from his shoulder, then just as carefully brought out a small pistol.

  "Father Mallon might be a changed man," he said as he opened the frizzen to check that the gun was primed, "but I would like to think that if he was still alive he would be a patriot."

  "I imagine he is," Hogan said, apparently unworried by the pistol. "A man like

  Mallon? His loyalty won't change as much as his hair and belly."

  Sarsfield frowned at Hogan. "And you're not a patriot, Major?"

  "I like to think so."

  "Yet you fight for Britain."

  Hogan shrugged. The priest's pistol was loaded and primed, but for the moment it hung loose in Sarsfield's hand. Hogan had played a game with the priest, a game he had expected to win, but this proof of his victory was not giving the

  Major any pleasure. Indeed, as the realization of his triumph sank in, Hogan's mood became ever bleaker. "I worry about allegiance," Hogan said, "I surely do. I lie awake sometimes and wonder whether I'm right in thinking that what's best for Ireland is to be a part of Britain, but I do know one thing, Father, which is that I don't want to be ruled by Bonaparte. I think maybe I'm not so brave a man as Wolfe Tone, but nor did I ever agree with his ideas. You do,

  Father, and I salute you for it, but that isn't why you're going to have to die. " The reason you're going to have to die, Father, is not because you fight for Ireland, but because you fight for Napoleon. The distinction is fatal."

  Sarsfield smiled. "I shall have to die?" he asked in wry amusement. He cocked the pistol, then raised it towards Hogan's head.

  The sound of the shot pounded across the orchard. The two gravediggers jumped in terror as smoke drifted out from the hedge where the killer had been concealed just twenty paces from where Hogan and Sarsfield had been standing.

  The priest was now lying on the mound of excavated soil where his body jerked twice and then, with a sigh, lay still.

  Sharpe stood up from behind the hedge and crossed to the grave to see that his bullet had gone plumb where he had aimed it, straight through the dead man's heart. He stared down at the, priest, noting how dark the blood looked on the soutane's cloth. A fly had already settled there. "I liked him," he told

  Hogan.

  "It's allowed, Richard," Hogan said. The Major was upset and pale, so pale that for a moment he looked as if he might be sick. "One of mankind's higher authorities enjoins us to love our enemies and He said nothing about them ceasing to be enemies just because we love them. Nor can I recall any specific injunction in Holy Scripture against shooting our enemies through the heart."

  Hogan paused and suddenly all his usual flippancy seemed to drain out of him.

  "I liked him too," he said simply.

  "But he was going to shoot you," Sharpe said. Hogan, talking privately with

  Sharpe on their way to the burial, had warned the rifleman what might happen and Sharpe, disbelieving the prediction, had nevertheless watched it happen and then done his part.


  "He deserved a better death," Hogan said, then he pushed the corpse with his foot and thus toppled it into the grave. The priest's body landed awkwardly so that it seemed as if he was sitting on the shrouded head of Kiely's corpse.

  Hogan tossed the counterfeit newspaper after the body, then took a small round box from his pocket. "Shooting Sarsfield doesn't fetch you any favours,

  Richard," Hogan said sternly as he prised the lid off the box. "Let's just say