Sharpe 3-Book Collection 4: Sharpe's Escape, Sharpe's Fury, Sharpe's Battle

by Bernard Cornwell

  “I think so.”

  “Try,” Sharpe said. Vicente looked appalled, then understood the sense in the order and, flinching with pain, managed to raise his left arm, which suggested the shoulder joint was not mangled. “You’re going to be right as rain, Jorge,” Sharpe said, “so long as we keep that wound clean.” He glanced at Harper. “Maggots?”

  “Not now, sir,” Harper said, “only if the wound goes bad.”

  “Maggots?” Vicente asked faintly. “Did you say maggots?”

  “Nothing better, sir,” Harper said enthusiastically. “Best thing for a dirty wound. Put the little buggers in, they clean it up, leave the good flesh, and you’re good as new.” He patted his haversack. “I always carry a half-dozen. Much better than going to a surgeon because all those bastards ever want to do is cut you up.”

  “I hate surgeons,” Sharpe said.

  “He hates lawyers,” Vicente said to Sarah, “and now he hates surgeons. Is there anyone he likes?”

  “Women,” Sharpe said, “I do like women.” He was looking over the city, listening to screams and shots, and he knew from the noise that French discipline had crumbled. Coimbra was in chaos, given over to lust, hate and fire. Three plumes of smoke were already boiling from the narrow streets to obscure the clear morning sky and he suspected more would soon join them. “They’re firing houses,” he said, “and we’ve got work to do.” He bent down and scooped up some pigeon dung that he pushed into the barrels of Harper’s volley gun. He used the stickiest he could find, carefully placing a small amount into each muzzle. “Ram it down, Pat,” he said. The dung would act as wadding to hold the balls in place when the barrels were tipped downwards, and what he planned would mean pointing the gun straight down. “Do many of the houses here have student quarters?” he asked Vicente.

  “A lot, yes.”

  “Like this one?” He gestured at the roof beside them. “With rooms stretching through the attic?”

  “It’s very common,” Vicente said, “they are called repúblicas, some are whole houses, others are just parts of houses. Each one has its own government. Every member has a vote, and when I was here they…”

  “It’s all right, Jorge, tell me later,” Sharpe said. “I just hope the houses opposite the warehouse are a república.” He should have looked when he was there, but he had not thought of it. “And what we need now,” he went on, “are uniforms.”

  “Uniforms?” Vicente asked.

  “Frog uniforms, Jorge. Then we can join the carnival. How are you feeling?”

  “Weak.”

  “You can rest here for a few minutes,” Sharpe said, “while Pat and I get some new clothes.”

  Sharpe and Harper edged back down the gutter and climbed through the open window into the deserted attic. “My ribs bloody hurt,” Sharpe complained as he straightened up.

  “Did you wrap them?” Harper asked. “Never get better unless you wrap them up.”

  “Didn’t want to see the angel of death,” Sharpe grumbled. The angel of death was the battalion doctor, a Scotsman whose ministrations were known as the last rites.

  “I’ll wrap the buggers for you,” Harper said, “when we’ve a minute.” He went to the doorway and listened to voices below. Sharpe followed him down the stairs, which they took slowly, careful not to make too much noise. A girl began screaming on the next floor. She stopped suddenly as if she had been hit, then started again. Harper reached the landing and moved towards the door where the screaming came from.

  “No blood,” Sharpe whispered to him. A uniform jacket sheeted with new blood would make them too distinctive. Men’s voices came from the lower floor, but they were taking no interest in the girl above. “Make it fast,” Sharpe said, edging past the Irishman, “and brutal as you like.”

  Sharpe pushed the door open and kept moving, seeing three men in the room. Two were holding the girl on the floor while the third, a big man who had stripped off his jacket and lowered his breeches to his ankles, was just getting down on his knees when Sharpe’s rifle butt took him in the base of his skull. It was a vicious blow, hard enough to throw the man forward onto the girl’s naked belly. Sharpe reckoned the man had to be out of the fight, drew the rifle back and hit the left-hand man on the jaw and he heard the bone crack and saw the whole jaw twist awry. He sensed the third man going down to Harper’s blow and finished off the man with the broken jaw by another slam of the brass-sheathed butt to the side of his skull. By the feel of the blow he had fractured the man’s skull, then he was gripped around the legs by the first man who had somehow survived the initial assault. The man, hampered by his lowered breeches, clawed at Sharpe’s groin, unbalancing him, then the heavy butt of the volley gun slammed into the back of his skull and he slid down, groaning. Harper gave him a last tap as a keepsake.

  The girl, stripped naked, stared up in horror and was about to scream again as Harper snatched up her clothes, but then he put his finger to his lips. She held her breath, gazing up at him, and Harper smiled at her, then gave her the clothes. “Get dressed, sweetheart,” he said.

  “Inglês?” she asked, pulling the torn dress over her head.

  Harper looked horrified. “I’m Irish, darling,” he said.

  “For God’s sake, lover boy,” Sharpe said, “get the hell up the stairs and fetch the other two down.”

  “Yes, sir,” Harper said and went to the door. The girl, seeing him go, gave a small cry of alarm. The Irishman looked back at her, winked at her, and the girl snatched up the rest of her clothes and followed him, leaving Sharpe with the three men. The big man, who had taken such a beating, showed signs of recovery, lifting his head and scrabbling on the floor with a calloused hand, so Sharpe drew the man’s own bayonet and slid it up between his ribs. There was very little blood. The man gave a heave, opened his eyes once to look at Sharpe, then there was a rattling noise in his throat and his head dropped. He lay still.

  The other two men, both very young, were unconscious. Sharpe reckoned the one whose jaw he had broken and dislocated would probably die from the blow on the skull. He was white-faced and blood was trickling from his ear, and he gave no sign of consciousness as Sharpe stripped off his clothes. The second, whom Harper had hit, groaned as he was stripped, and Sharpe thumped him into silence. Then he peeled off his own jacket and pulled on a blue one. It fitted him well enough. It buttoned to one side of the broad white facing that blazoned the front and which ended at his waist, though a pair of tails hung down behind. The tails had white turnbacks decorated with pairs of red flaming grenades, which meant the jacket’s true owner was from a grenadier company. The high stiff collar was red and the shoulders had brief red epaulettes. He pulled on the soldier’s white crossbelt that was fastened at the left shoulder by the epaulette’s strap, and from which hung the bayonet. He decided against taking the man’s white trousers. He already wore the overalls of a French cavalry officer, and though the mix of coat and overalls was unusual, few soldiers were uniformed properly after they had been on campaign for a few weeks. He strapped his own sword belt beneath the coat tails and knew that was a risk, for no ordinary soldier would carry a sword, but he assumed men would think he had plundered the weapon. He hung his rifle on his shoulder, knowing that to any casual glance the weapon resembled a musket. He emptied the man’s oxhide pack and put in his own jacket and shako, then pulled on the soldier’s shako, a confection of red and black blazoned on the front with a brass plate showing an eagle above the number 19, making Sharpe a new recruit to the 19th Infantry of the Line. The cartridge box, which hung beneath the bayonet at the end of the crossbelt, had a brass badge of a grenade mounted on its lid.

  Harper came back and looked startled for a second at the sight of Sharpe in enemy blue, then he grinned. “Suits you, sir.” Vicente and the two girls followed. Sharpe saw that the Portuguese girl was young, perhaps fifteen, with bright eyes and long dark hair. She saw the trace of blood on the shirt of the man who had been about to rape her, then spat on him and, before a
nyone could stop her, she snatched up a bayonet and stabbed the neck of one of the other two, making blood spurt high up the wall. Vicente opened his mouth to protest, then fell silent. Eighteen months before, when Sharpe had first met him, Vicente’s legal mind had balked at such summary punishment of rapists. Now he said nothing as the girl spat on the man she had killed, then went to the second, who was lying on his back and breathing with a hoarse sound from his broken jaw. She stood over him, poising the bayonet above his twisted mouth.

  “I never did like rapists,” Sharpe said mildly.

  “Scum,” Harper agreed, “pure bloody scum.”

  Sarah watched, not wanting to watch, but unable to take her eyes off the bayonet that the girl held two-handed. The girl paused, reveling in the moment, then stabbed down. “Get yourselves dressed,” Sharpe told Vicente and Harper. The dying man gurgled behind him and his heels briefly drummed against the floor. “Ask her name,” Sharpe told Sarah.

  “She’s called Joana Jacinto,” Sarah said after a short conversation. “She lives here. Her father worked on the river, but she doesn’t know where he is now. And she says to thank you.”

  “Pretty name, Joana,” Harper said, dressed now as a French sergeant, “and she’s a useful sort of girl, eh? Knows how to use a bayonet.”

  Sharpe helped Vicente put on the blue jacket, letting it hang from the left shoulder rather than force Vicente’s arm into the sleeve. “She says,” Sarah had held another conversation with Joana “that she wants to stay with us.”

  “Of course she must,” Harper said before Sharpe could offer an opinion. Joana’s dark brown dress had been torn at the breasts when the soldiers stripped her, and the remnants had been splashed with blood when she killed the second soldier, and so she buttoned one of the dead men’s shirts over it, then picked up a musket. Sarah, not wanting to appear less belligerent, shouldered another.

  It was not much of a force. Two riflemen, two women and a wounded Portuguese cazador. But Sharpe reckoned it should be enough to break a French dream.

  So he slung his rifle, hitched the sword belt higher, and led them downstairs.

  MOST OF THE FRENCH INFANTRY in Coimbra were from the 8th Corps, a newly raised unit of young men fresh from the depots of France, and they were half trained, ill disciplined, resentful of an Emperor who had marched them to a war they mostly did not understand and, above all, hungry. Hundreds broke ranks to explore the university, but, finding little that they wanted, they took out their frustration by smashing, mangling and shattering whatever could be broken. Coimbra was renowned for its work on optics, but microscopes were of small use to soldiers and so they hammered the beautiful instruments with muskets, then wrenched apart the fine sextants. A handful of telescopes were saved, for such things were valued, but the larger instruments, too long to carry, were destroyed, while an unparalleled set of finely ground lenses, cushioned by velvet in a cabinet of wide, shallow drawers, was systematically broken. One room was filled with chronometers, all being tested, and they were reduced to bent springs, cogwheels and shattered cases. A fine assembly of fossils was pounded to shards and a collection of minerals, a lifetime’s work carefully catalogued into quartzes and spars and ores, was scattered from a window. Fine porcelain was shattered, pictures torn from their frames and if most of the library was spared that was only because there were too many volumes to be destroyed. Some men nevertheless tried, pulling rare books from the shelves and tearing them apart, but they soon got bored and contented themselves with smashing some fine Roman vases that stood on gilded pediments. There was no sense in it, except the anger that the soldiers felt. They hated the Portuguese and so they took their revenge on what their enemy valued.

  Coimbra’s Old Cathedral had been built by two Frenchmen in the twelfth century and now other Frenchmen whooped with delight because so many women had taken shelter close to its altars. A handful of men tried to protect their wives and daughters, but the muskets fired, the men died and the screaming began. Other soldiers shot at the gilded high altar, aiming at the carved saints guarding the sad-faced Virgin. A six-year-old child tried to pull a soldier off his mother and had his throat cut, and when a woman would not stop screaming a sergeant cut her throat as well. In the New Cathedral, up the hill, voltigeurs took it in turns to piss into the baptismal font and, when it was full, they christened the girls they had captured in the building, giving them all the same name, Putain, which meant whore. A sergeant then auctioned the weeping girls, whose hair dripped with urine.

  In the church of Santa Cruz, which was older than the Old Cathedral, the troops found the tombs of Portugal’s first two kings. The beautifully sculpted sepulchers were wrenched apart, the coffins shattered and the bones of Alfonso the Conqueror, who had liberated Lisbon from the Muslims in the twelfth century, were hauled from their winding cloth and thrown across the floor. His son, Sancho I, had been buried in a white linen shift edged with cloth of gold, and an artilleryman ripped the shroud away and draped it about his shoulders before dancing on the remnants of the corpse. There was a gold cross studded with jewels in Sancho’s tomb and three soldiers fought over it. One died, and the other two hacked the cross apart and shared it. There were more women in Santa Cruz and they suffered as the other women were suffering, while their men were taken into the Cloisters of Silence and shot.

  Mostly the soldiers wanted food. They broke into houses, kicked open cellars and searched for anything they could eat. There was plenty, for the city had never been properly stripped of foodstuffs, but there were too many soldiers, and anger grew when some men ate and others stayed hungry, and the anger turned into fury when it was fuelled by the lavish supplies of wine discovered in the taverns. A rumor spread that there was a great stock of food in a warehouse in the lower town, and hundreds of men converged on it, only to find the hoard guarded by dragoons. Some stayed, hoping the dragoons would go away, while others went to find women or plunder.

  A few men tried to prevent the destruction. An officer attempted to pull two artillerymen off a woman and was kicked to the ground, then stabbed with a sword. A pious sergeant, offended at what went on in the Old Cathedral, was shot. Most officers, knowing it was hopeless to try and stop the orgy of destruction, barricaded themselves in houses and waited for the madness to subside, while others simply joined in.

  Marshal Masséna, escorted by hussars and accompanied by his aides and by his mistress, who was fetchingly dressed in a sky-blue hussar’s uniform, found a billet in the Archbishop’s palace. Two infantry colonels came to the palace and complained of the troops’ behavior, but they got small sympathy from the Marshal. “They deserve a little respite,” he said. “It’s been a hard march, a hard march. And they’re like horses. They go better if you ease the curb rein from time to time. So let them play, gentlemen, let them play.” He made certain Henriette was comfortable in the Archbishop’s bedroom. She disliked the crucifixes hanging on the walls so Masséna jettisoned them through the window, then asked what she would like to eat. “Grapes and wine,” she said, and Masséna ordered one of his servants to ransack the palace kitchens and find both.

  “And if there are none, sir?” the servant asked.

  “Of course there are grapes and wine!” Masséna snapped. “Good Christ Almighty, can nothing be done without questions in this army? Find the damned grapes, find the damned wine, and take them to mademoiselle!” He went back to the palace’s dining room where maps had been spread on the Archbishop’s table. They were poor maps, inspired more by imagination than by topography, but one of Masséna’s aides thought better ones might exist in the university, and he was right, though by the time he found them they had been reduced to ashes.

  The army’s Generals assembled in the dining room where Masséna planned the next stage of the campaign. He had been rebuffed at Bussaco, but that defeat had not prevented him turning the enemy’s left flank and thus chasing the British and Portuguese out of central Portugal. Masséna’s army was now on the Mondego and the enemy was re
treating towards Lisbon, but that still left the Marshal with other enemies. Hunger assailed his troops, as did the Portuguese irregulars who closed behind his forces like wolves following a flock of sheep. General Junot suggested it was time for a pause. “The British are taking to their ships,” he said, “so let them go. Then send a corps to retake the roads back to Almeida.”

  Almeida was the Portuguese frontier fortress where the invasion had begun, and it lay over a hundred miles eastwards at the end of the monstrously difficult roads across which the French army had struggled. “To what end?” Masséna asked.

  “So supplies can get through,” Junot declared, “supplies and reinforcements.”

  “What reinforcements?” The question was sarcastic.

  “Drouet’s corps?” Junot suggested.

  “They won’t move,” Masséna said sourly, “they won’t be permitted to move.” The Emperor had ordered that Masséna was to be given 130,000 men for the invasion, but less than half that number had assembled on the frontier and when Masséna had pleaded for more men, the Emperor had sent a message that his present forces were adequate, that the enemy was risible and the task of invading Portugal easy. Yet the Emperor was not here. The Emperor did not command an army of half-starved men whose shoes were falling apart, an army whose supply lines were non-existent because the damned Portuguese peasants controlled the roads winding through the hills to Almeida. Marshal Masséna did not want to return to those hills. Get to Lisbon, he thought, get to Lisbon. “The roads from here to Lisbon,” he asked, “are better than those we’ve traveled?”

  “A hundred times better,” one of his Portuguese aides answered.

  The Marshal went to a window and stared at the smoke rising from buildings burning in the city. “Are we sure the British are making for the sea?”

  “Where else can they go?” a general retorted.