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

by Bernard Cornwell

  Candles flickered on the table that was spread with maps. A galloper had come from Hogan reporting that the French were out and marching on the southern road that led through Fuentes de Oñoro. That news was not unexpected, but it meant that the general’s plans were now to be subjected to the test of cannon fire and musket volleys. “I am busy, Kiely,” Wellington said icily.

  “I ask only that my unit be allowed to take the forefront of the battle line,” Kiely said with the careful dignity of a man who knows that liquor might otherwise slur his words.

  “No,” Wellington said. The general’s aide, standing in the window, gestured toward the door, but Kiely ignored the invitation to leave.

  “We have been ill used, my lord,” he said unwisely. “We came here at the request of my sovereign in good faith, expecting to be properly employed, and instead you have ignored us, denied us our supplies—”

  “No!” The loudness of the word was such that the sentries at the house’s front step were visibly startled. Then they looked at each other and grinned. The general had a temper, though it was rarely seen, but when Wellington did choose to unleash the full fury of his personality it was an awesome thing.

  The general stared up at his visitor. His voice dropped to a conversational level, but it still reeked of scorn. “You came here, sir, ill prepared, unwanted, unfunded, and expected me, sir, to provide both your men’s livelihoods and their accoutrements, and in return, sir, you have offered me insolence and, worse, betrayal. You did not come at His Majesty’s bidding, but because the enemy desired you to come, and it is now my desire that you should go. And you shall go, sir, with honor because it is unthinkable that we should send away King Ferdinand’s household troops in any other condition, but that honor, sir, has been earned at the expense of other men. Your troops, sir, shall serve in the battle, for there will be no opportunity to remove them before the French arrive, but they shall serve as guards on my ammunition park. You may choose to command them or to sulk in your tent. Good day to you, my lord.”

  “My lord?” The aide addressed Kiely tactfully, stepping toward the door.

  But Lord Kiely was blind to tact. “Insolence?” He pounced on the word. “My God, but I command King Ferdinand’s guard and—”

  “And King Ferdinand, sir, is a prisoner!” Wellington snapped. “Which does not speak, sir, for the efficacy of his guard. You came here, sir, with your adulterous whore, flaunting her like a prinked bitch, and the whore, sir, is a traitor! The whore, sir, has been doing her best to destroy this army and the only providence that has saved this army from her ministrations is that her best, thank God, is no better than your own! Your request is denied, good day.”

  Wellington looked down to his papers. Kiely had other complaints to make, chief of them the way in which he had been manhandled and insulted by Captain Sharpe, but now he stood insulted by Wellington too. Lord Kiely was just summoning his last reserves of courage to protest this treatment when the aide took firm hold of his elbow and pulled him toward the door and Kiely found himself powerless to resist. “Perhaps your lordship requires some refreshment?” the aide inquired emolliently as he steered the furious Kiely out into the hallway where a group of curious officers looked with pity at the disgraced man. Kiely shook the aide’s hand away, seized his hat and sword from the hall table, and stalked out of the front door without another word. He ignored the two sentries as they presented arms.

  “Nosey saw him off fast enough,” one of the sentries said, then snapped to attention again as Edward Pakenham, the Adjutant General, climbed the steps.

  Kiely seemed oblivious of Pakenham’s cheerful greeting. Instead he walked down the street in a blind rage, passing long lines of guns that were slowly negotiating the town’s narrow lanes, but he saw nothing and understood nothing except that he had failed. Just as he had failed at everything, he told himself, but none of the failure was his fault. The cards had run against him, and that was how he had lost what small fortune his mother had left to him after she had squandered her wealth on the damned church and on the damned Irish rebels who always managed to end up on British gallows, and the same bad luck explained why he had failed to win the hand of at least two Madrid heiresses who had preferred to marry Spaniards of the blood rather than a peer without a country. Kiely’s self-pity welled up at the memories of their rejections. In Madrid he was a second-class citizen because he could not trace his lineage back to some medieval brute who had fought against the Moors, while in this army, he decided, he was an outcast because he was Irish.

  Yet the worst insult of all was Juanita’s betrayal. Juanita the wild, unconventional, clever and seductive woman whom Kiely had imagined himself marrying. She had money, she had noble blood and other men had looked enviously at Kiely when Juanita was at his side. Yet all along, he supposed, she had been deceiving him. She had given herself to Loup. She had lain in Loup’s arms and Kiely presumed she had told all his secrets to Loup, and he imagined their laughter as they lay entangled in their bed and once again the anger and the pity swelled inside him. There were tears in his eyes as he realized he would be the laughingstock of all Madrid and all this army.

  He entered a church. Not because he wanted to pray, but because he could think of nowhere else to go. He could not face going back to his quarters in General Valverde’s lodgings where everyone would look at him and whisper that he was a cuckold.

  The church was crowded with dark-shawled women waiting to make their confessions. Phalanxes of candles glimmered in front of statues, altars and paintings. The small lights glittered off the gilded pillars and from the massive silver cross on the high altar that still had its white Easter frontal.

  Kiely went to the altar steps. His sword clattered on the marble as he knelt and stared at the rood. He was being crucified too, he told himself, and by smaller men who did not understand his noble aims. He took a flask from his pocket and tipped it to his lips, sucking at the fierce Spanish brandy as though it would save his life.

  “Are you well, my son?” A priest had come soft-footed to Kiely’s side.

  “Go away,” Kiely said.

  “The hat, my son,” the priest said nervously. “This is God’s house.”

  Kiely snatched the plumed hat from his head. “Go away,” he said again.

  “God preserve you,” the priest said and walked back into the shadows. The women waiting to make their confessions glanced nervously at the finely uniformed officer and wondered if he was praying for victory over the approaching French. Everyone knew the blue-coated enemy was coming again and householders were burying their valuables in their gardens in case Masséna’s dreaded veterans beat the British aside and came back to sack the town.

  Kiely finished the flask. His head spun with liquor, shame and anger. Behind the silver rood in a niche above the high altar was a statue of Our Lady. She wore a diadem of stars, a blue robe, and carried lilies in her hands. It had been a long time since Kiely had stared at such an image. His mother had loved such things. She had forced him to confession and to the sacrament, and had chided him for failing her. She had used to pray to the Virgin, claiming a special kinship with Our Lady as another disappointed woman who had known a mother’s sadness. “Bitch,” Kiely said aloud, staring at the blue-robed statue, “bitch!” He had hated his mother, just as he hated the church. Juanita had shared Kiely’s contempt for the church, but Juanita was another man’s lover. Maybe she had always been another man’s lover. She had lain with Loup and God knows how many other men and all the while Kiely had been planning to make her a countess and to show off her beauty in all the great capitals of Europe. Tears trickled down his cheeks as he thought of her betrayal and as he remembered his humiliation at the hands of Captain Sharpe. That last memory filled him with a sudden fury. “Bitch!” he shouted at the Virgin Mary. He stood up and hurled the empty flask at her statue behind the altar. “Whore bitch!” he cried as the flask bounced harmlessly off the Virgin’s blue robe.

  The women screamed. The pri
est ran toward his lordship, then stopped in terror because Kiely had drawn the pistol from his holster. The click of the gun’s lock echoed loud in the cavernous church as Kiely thumbed back the heavy hammer.

  “Bitch!” Kiely spat the word at the statue. “Lying, whoring, thieving, two-faced, leprous bitch!” Tears poured down his cheeks as he aimed the pistol.

  “No!” the priest implored as the women’s shrieks filled the church. “Please! No! Think of the blessed Virgin, please!”

  Kiely turned on the man. “Call her a virgin, do you? You think she’d be a virgin after the Legions had hammered through Galilee?” He laughed wildly, then turned back to the statue. “You whore bitch!” he shouted as he trained the pistol again. “You filthy whore bitch!”

  “No!” the priest cried despairingly.

  Kiely pulled the trigger.

  The heavy bullet smashed through his palate and punched out a palm-sized patch of his skull as it exited. Blood and brain splashed as high as the Virgin’s diadem of stars, but none landed on Our Lady. Instead the gore spattered across the sanctuary steps, doused a handful of candles, then trickled down to the nave. Kiely’s dead body fell back, his head a mangled horror of blood, brain and bone.

  The screams in the church slowly died to be replaced by the rumble of wheels in the street as more guns were dragged toward the east.

  And toward the French. Who were coming to reclaim Portugal and break the insolent British at a narrow bridge across the Coa.

  PART II

  CHAPTER 7

  The Real Compañía Irlandesa bivouacked on the plateau north and west of Fuentes de Oñoro. The village lay astride the southernmost road leading from Ciudad Rodrigo to Almeida and in the night Wellington’s army had closed about the village that now threatened to become a battlefield. The dawn mist hid the eastern countryside where the French army readied itself, while up on the plateau Wellington’s forces were a smoke-obscured chaos of troops, horses and wagons. Guns were parked on the plateau’s eastern crest, their barrels pointing across the Dos Casas stream that marked the army’s forward line.

  Donaju discovered Sharpe squinting sideways into a scrap of mirror in an attempt to cut his own hair. The sides and the front were easy enough to trim, the difficulty always lay in the rear. “Just like soldiering,” Sharpe said.

  “You’ve heard about Kiely?” Donaju, suddenly in command of the Real Compañía Irlandesa, ignored Sharpe’s gnomic comment.

  Sharpe snipped, frowned, then tried to repair the damage by snipping again, but it only made things worse. “Blew his head off, I heard.”

  Donaju flinched at Sharpe’s callousness, but made no protest. “I can’t believe he would do such a thing,” he said instead.

  “Too much pride, not enough sense. Sounds like most bloody aristocrats to me. These damn scissors are blunt.”

  Donaju frowned. “Why don’t you have a servant?”

  “Can’t afford one. Besides, I’ve always looked after myself.”

  “And cut your own hair?”

  “There’s a pretty girl among the battalion wives who usually cuts it,” Sharpe said. But Sally Clayton, like the rest of the South Essex, was far away. The South Essex was too shrunken by war to serve in the battle line and now was doing guard duty on the army’s Portuguese depots and thus would be spared Marshal Masséna’s battle to relieve Almeida and cut the British retreat across the Coa.

  “Father Sarsfield is burying Kiely tomorrow,” Donaju said.

  “Father Sarsfield might be burying a lot of us tomorrow,” Sharpe said. “If they bury us at all. Have you ever seen a battlefield a year after the fighting? It’s like a boneyard. Skulls lying about like boulders, and fox-chewed bones everywhere. Bugger this,” he said savagely as he gave his hair a last forlorn chop.

  “Kiely can’t even be buried in a churchyard”—Donaju did not want to think about battlefields on this ominous morning—“because it was suicide.”

  “There aren’t many soldiers who get a proper grave,” Sharpe said, “so I wouldn’t grieve for Kiely. We’ll be lucky if any of us get a proper hole, let alone a stone on top. Dan!” he shouted to Hagman.

  “Sir?”

  “Your bloody scissors are blunt.”

  “Sharpened them last night, sir,” Hagman said stoically. “It’s like my father always said, sir, only a bad workman blames his tools, sir.”

  Sharpe tossed the scissors across to Hagman, then brushed the cut strands of hair from his shirt. “You’re better off without Kiely,” he told Donaju.

  “To guard the ammunition park?” Donaju said bitterly. “We would have done better to stay in Madrid.”

  “To be thought of as traitors?” Sharpe asked as he pulled on his jacket. “Listen, Donaju, you’re alive and Kiely isn’t. You’ve got yourself a good company to command. So what if you’re guarding the ammunition? You think that isn’t important? What happens if the Crapauds break through?”

  Donaju did not seem cheered by Sharpe’s opinions. “We’re orphans,” he said self-pityingly. “No one cares what happens to us.”

  “Why do you want someone to care?” Sharpe asked bluntly. “You’re a soldier, Donaju, not a child. They issued you with a sword and a gun so you could take care of yourself, not have others take care of you. But as it happens, they do care. They care enough to send the whole lot of you to Cadiz, and I care enough to tell you that you’ve got two choices. You can go to Cadiz whipped and with your men knowing they’ve been whipped, or you can go back with your pride intact. It’s up to you, but I know which one I’d choose.”

  This was the first Donaju had heard of the Real Compañía Irlandesa’s proposed move to Cadiz and he frowned as he tried to work out whether Sharpe was being serious. “You’re sure about Cadiz?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” Sharpe said. “General Valverde’s been pulling strings. He doesn’t think you should be here at all, so now you’re off to join the rest of the Spanish army.”

  Donaju digested the news for a few seconds, then nodded approval. “Good,” he said enthusiastically. “They should have sent us there in the first place.” He sipped his mug of tea and made a wry face at the taste. “What happens to you now?”

  “I’m ordered to stay with you till someone tells me to go somewhere else,” Sharpe said. He did not want to admit that he was facing a court of inquiry, not because he was ashamed of his conduct, but because he did not want other men’s sympathies. The court was a battle that he would have to face when the time came.

  “You’re guarding the ammunition?” Donaju seemed surprised.

  “Someone has to,” Sharpe said. “But don’t worry, Donaju, they’ll take me away from you before you go to Cadiz. Valverde doesn’t want me there.”

  “So what do we do today?” Donaju asked nervously.

  “Today,” Sharpe said, “we do our duty. And there are fifty thousand Frogs doing theirs, and somewhere over that hill, Donaju, their duty and our duty will get bloody contradictory.”

  “It will be bad,” Donaju said, not quite as a statement and not quite as a question either.

  Sharpe heard the nervousness. Donaju had never been in a major battle and any man, however brave, was right to be nervous at the prospect. “It’ll be bad,” Sharpe said. “The noise is the worst, that and the powder fog, but always remember one thing: it’s just as bad for the French. And I’ll tell you another thing. I don’t know why, and maybe it’s just my imagination, but the Frogs always seem to break before we do. Just when you think you can’t hold on for a minute longer, count to ten and by the time you reach six the bloody Frogs will have turned tail and buggered off. Now watch out, here’s trouble.”

  The trouble was manifested by the approach of a thin, tall and bespectacled major in the blue coat of the Royal Artillery. He was carrying a sheaf of papers that kept coming loose as he tried to find one particular sheet among the rest. The errant sheets were being fielded by two nervous red-coated privates, one of whom had his arm in a dirty sling while the o
ther was struggling along on a crutch. The major waved at Sharpe and Donaju, thus releasing another flutter of paper. “The thing is,” the major said without any attempt to introduce himself, “that the divisions have their own ammunition parks. One or the other, I said, make up your mind! But no! Divisions will be independent! Which leaves us, you understand, with the central reserve. They call it that, though God knows it’s rarely in the center and, of course, in the very nature of things, we are never told what stocks the divisions themselves hold. They demand more, we yield, and suddenly there is none. It is a problem. Let us hope and pray the French do things worse. Is that tea?” The major, who had a broad Scottish accent, peered hopefully at the mug in Donaju’s hand.

  “It is, sir,” Donaju said, “but foul.”

  “Let me taste it, I beg you. Thank you. Pick up that paper, Magog, the day’s battle may depend upon it. Gog and Magog,” he introduced the two hapless privates. “Gog is bereft one arm, Magog one leg, and both the rogues are Welsh. Together they are a Welshman and a half, and the three of us, or two and a half if I am to be exact, comprise the entire staff complement of the central reserve.” The major smiled suddenly. “Alexander Tarrant,” he introduced himself. “Major in the artillery but seconded to the quartermaster general’s staff. I think of myself as the assistant-assistant-assistant quartermaster general, and you, I suspect, are the new assistant-assistant-assistant-assistant quartermaster general? Which means that Gog and Magog are now assistant-assistant-assistant-assistant-assistant quartermaster generals. Demoted, by God! Will their careers ever recover? This tea is delicious, though tepid. You must be Captain Sharpe?”