Sharpe wanted to kill the man on the spot, to blot out those offensive eyes, still for ever the twitch and the teeth-grinding, the cackle and the grin. Many men had tried to kill Obadiah Hakeswill. The scar on his neck with its fiery red folds of skin had been put there when he was just twelve years old. He had been sentenced to death by hanging for stealing a lamb. He had been innocent of the charge. His real offence was that he had forced the vicar’s daughter to undress for him by holding a viper at her neck, its tongue flickering, and she had fumbled off her clothes and screamed as the boy attacked her. Her father had rescued the girl and it had been simpler to accuse the boy of stealing a lamb, more certain to end in death, and the deal had been struck with the Justices. No one, even then, had wanted Obadiah Hakeswill to live except, perhaps, his mother, and the vicar, if he could have thought of a way, would have gladly strung her alongside her foul son.
He had lived somehow. They had strung him up, but he was still alive, with the stretched, scrawny neck and its livid scar to prove he had once been hanged. He had found his way into the army and into a way of life that suited him. He put up a hand and rubbed the scar below his left ear. ‘Be all right, sir, now that I’m here.’
Sharpe knew what he meant. There was a legend that Hakeswill the indestructible man, the survivor of a judicial execution, could not be killed and the legend did not diminish with time. Sharpe had seen two files of men blown away by grapeshot, yet Hakeswill, standing immediately to their front, had not been touched.
Hakeswill’s face twitched, hiding the laugh that was prompted by Sharpe’s unexpressed hatred. The twitch stopped. ‘I’m glad I’m here, sir. Proud of you, I am, proud. My best recruit.’ He had spoken loudly, letting the courtyard know of their joint history; and there was a challenge, too, as unspoken as their hatred, which announced that Hakeswill would not submit easily to the discipline of a man he had once drilled and tyrannized.
‘How’s Captain Morris, Hakeswill?’
The Sergeant grinned, then cackled into Sharpe’s face so that the officer caught the foul breath. ‘Remember him, sir, do you? He’s a Major now, sir, so I hear. In Dublin. Mind you, sir, you was a naughty boy, you’ll pardon an old soldier for saying so.’
There was silence in the courtyard. Every man was listening to the words, aware of the hostility between the two men. Sharpe dropped his voice, so no one but Hakeswill could hear. ‘If you lay a finger on any man in this Company, Sergeant, I’ll bloody kill you.’ Hakeswill grinned, was about to reply, but Sharpe was faster. ‘Shun!’ Hakeswill snapped upright, his face suddenly clouded with anger because he had been denied his reply. ‘About turn!’
Sharpe left him there, facing a wall. God damn it! Hakeswill! The scars were on Sharpe’s back because of Hakeswill and Morris, and Sharpe had sworn on that far-off day that he would inflict as much pain on them as they had on him. Hakeswill had beaten a Private into bloody insensibility; the man had recovered his consciousness, but never his senses, and Sharpe had been a witness. He had tried to stop the hammering and, for his efforts, was accused by Morris and Hakeswill of the beating. He had been tied to a cart’s wheel and flogged.
Now, suddenly face to face with his enemy after all these years, he felt an uneasy sense of helplessness. Hakeswill seemed untouchable. He had the confidence of a man who simply did not care what happened to him, because he knew he was indestructible. The Sergeant went through life with a suppurating hatred of other men, and, from behind his mask of military conformity, spread poison and fear throughout the companies he served. Hakeswill, Sharpe knew, would not have changed, any more than his appearance had changed. The same great belly, perhaps a few inches bigger, a few more lines on the face, another tooth or two missing, yet still the same yellow skin and the mad stare, and Sharpe remembered, uncomfortably, that once Hakeswill had told him they were alike. Both on the run, both without family, and the only way to survive, the Sergeant said, was to hit hard and hit first.
He looked at the recruits. They were wary, as well they might be, cautious of this new Company. Sharpe, though they could not know it, shared their unease. Hakeswill, of all people, in his Company? Then he remembered the gazette, and knew that the Company might not be his, and he felt his thoughts begin their profitless descent into gloom so he snapped them away. ‘Sergeant Harper?’
‘Sir?’
‘What’s happening today?’
‘Football, sir. Grenadier Company playing the Portuguese. Heavy casualties expected.’
Sharpe knew that Harper was trying to cheer up the newcomers and so he dutifully smiled. ‘A light day, then, for your first day. Enjoy it. Tomorrow we work.’ Tomorrow he would be without Teresa, tomorrow would be a day nearer Badajoz and tomorrow he might be a Lieutenant. He realized the recruits, some of whom he had found himself, were waiting for him to continue. He forced another smile. ‘Welcome to the South Essex. I’m glad you’re here. This is a good Company and I’m sure it will stay that way.’ The words sounded incredibly lame, even to himself, as if he knew they were untrue.
He nodded at Harper. ‘Carry on, Sergeant.’
The Irishman’s eyes flicked towards Hakeswill, still facing the wall, and Sharpe pretended not to see. Damn Hakeswill, he could stay there, but then he relented. ‘Sergeant Hakeswill!’
‘Sir!’
‘Dismiss!’
Sharpe walked into the street, wanting to be alone, but Leroy was leaning on the gatepost and the American lifted an amused eyebrow. ‘Is that how the Hero of the Field of Talavera welcomes recruits? No calls to glory? No bugles?’
‘They’re lucky to get a welcome at all.’
Leroy drew on his cigar and fell into step beside Sharpe. ‘I suppose this unhappiness is caused by your lady leaving us?’
Sharpe shrugged. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Then shall I share other news?’
Leroy had stopped and his dark eyes seemed to be amused.
‘Napoleon’s dead?’
‘Alas, no. Our Colonel arrives today. You don’t seem surprised?’
Sharpe waited for a priest, mounted on a drooping mule, to go past. ‘Should I be surprised?’
‘No.’ Leroy grinned at him. ‘But the usual reaction is to say “who, why, what, how do you know?” Then I give you all the answers, and that’s called a conversation.’
Sharpe’s depression was dissipated by Leroy. ‘So tell me.’
The thin, laconic American looked surprised. ‘I never thought you would ask. Who is he? His name is Brian Windham. I’ve never liked the name Brian, it’s the sort of name a woman gives to a boy in the hope he will grow up honest.’ He tapped ash on to the roadway. ‘Why? I think there is no answer to that. What is he? He is a mighty hunter of foxes. Do you hunt, Sharpe?’
‘You know I don’t.’
‘Then your future may be gloomy, as mine may be. And how do I know?’
He paused.
‘How do you know?’
‘Because our good Colonel, honest Brian Windham, has a forerunner, a messenger, a John the Baptist to his coming, a Paul Revere, no less.’
‘Who?’
Leroy sighed; he was being unusually loquacious. ‘You’ve never heard of Paul Revere?’
‘No.’
‘Lucky man, Sharpe. He called my father a traitor, and our family called Revere a traitor, and I rather think we lost the argument. The point is, my dear Sharpe, that he was a forerunner, an agent of warning, and our good Colonel has sent such a warning of his arrival in the shape of a new Major.’
Sharpe looked at Leroy, the American’s expression had not changed. ‘I’m sorry, Leroy. I’m sorry.’
Leroy shrugged. As the senior Captain he had been hoping for the vacant Majority in the Battalion. ‘One should expect nothing in this army. His name is Collett, Jack Collett, another honest name and another foxhunter.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Leroy began walking again. ‘There is something else.’
‘What?’
Leroy pointe
d with his cigar into the courtyard of the house where the officers were billeted and Sharpe looked through the archway and, for the second time that morning, he had a sudden, unwelcome shock. A young man, in his middle twenties, stood next to a pile of luggage that his servant was unstrapping. Sharpe had never seen the officer before but the uniform was only too familiar. It was the uniform of the South Essex, complete even to the silver badge of the Eagle that Sharpe had captured, but it was a uniform only one man could wear. It had a curved sabre, slung on chains, and a silver whistle holstered on the crossbelt. The insignias of rank, denoting a Captain, were not epaulettes, but wings made from chains and decorated with a bugle horn. Sharpe was looking at a man dressed as the Captain of the South Essex Light Company. He swore.
Leroy laughed. ‘Join the downtrodden.’
No one had the guts to tell him, except Leroy! The bastards had brought in a new man, over his head, and he had never been told! He felt a huge anger, a depression, and a helplessness in the face of the army’s cumbersome machinery. He could not believe it. Hakeswill, Teresa going, and now this?
Major Forrest appeared in the archway, saw Sharpe, and came towards him. ‘Sharpe?’
‘Sir.’
‘Don’t jump to conclusions.’ The Major sounded miserable.
‘Conclusions, sir?’
‘About Captain Rymer.’ Forrest nodded towards the new Captain who, at that moment, turned and caught Sharpe’s eye. He bowed briefly, a polite acknowledgement, and Sharpe forced himself to respond. He looked back to Forrest.
‘What happened?’
Forrest shrugged. ‘He bought Lennox’s commission.’
Lennox? Sharpe’s predecessor had died two and a half years before. ‘But that was…’
‘I know, Sharpe. His will was in the courts. The estate has only just released the commission for sale.’
‘I didn’t even know it was for sale!’ Not, Sharpe thought, that he could have afforded the fifteen hundred pounds.
Leroy lit a new cigar from the butt of his old. ‘I doubt if anyone knew it was for sale. Right, Major?’
Forrest nodded miserably. An open sale meant that the legal price had to be paid. It was far more likely that Captain Rymer was a friend of one of the lawyers who had cut out the competition, sold it to Rymer, and in return received a higher price. The Major spread his hands. ‘I’m sorry, Sharpe.’
‘So what happens?’ Sharpe’s voice was hard.
‘Nothing.’ Forrest tried to sound hopeful. ‘Major Collett, you haven’t met him, Sharpe, agrees with me. It’s a mix up. So you stay in command till Colonel Windham arrives.’
‘Later today, sir.’
Forrest nodded. ‘Everything will be all right, Sharpe. You’ll see. Everything.’
Sharpe saw Teresa walk through the courtyard, carrying her saddle, but she did not see him. He turned away and stared over the rooftops of Elvas, pink in the sunlight, and saw that a cloudbank, riding the north wind, had bisected the landscape with its shadow. Spain lay in shadow and Badajoz was a dark citadel far away. He swore again, foully and at length, as if the curses might fight for him against the ill fortune. He knew it was fanciful, stupid even, but it seemed as if the fortress that barred the eastern road, its walls high over the Guadiana, was at the centre of the evil, spreading a baleful fate over all who came near. Hakeswill, Rymer, Teresa going, all things changing, and what else, he wondered, would go wrong before they lanced the evil in Badajoz?
CHAPTER 9
Everything about Obadiah Hakeswill was graceless and repulsive to the point of fascination. The body was huge, but any man who mistook the belly for a sign of weakness would be caught by the arms and legs that had massive strength. He was clumsy, except when performing a drill movement, though even when he was marching there was a hint that, at any moment, he might become some snarling, shambling beast; half wild, half man. His skin was yellowish, a legacy of the Fever Islands. His hair was blond, going grey, and stretched thinly over his scarred scalp, falling lank to the stretched, tensed, obscenely mutilated neck.
Some time in the past, even before the hanging, he had known he would never be liked and so, instead, determined to be feared. He had one advantage. Obadiah Hakeswill was afraid of nothing. When other men complained of hunger or cold, dampness or disease, the Sergeant simply cackled and knew that it would end. He did not care how much he was hurt in a fight; wounds mended, bruises disappeared, and he could not die. He had known that from the moment he had dangled on the rope’s end; he could not die because he was protected by a magic, his mother’s magic, and he was proud of the foul scar, the symbol of his invulnerability, and knew that it frightened other men. Officers did not cross Obadiah Hakeswill. They feared the consequences of his anger, the foulness of his looks, and so they humoured him, knowing that in return he would stick to the letter of the regulations and would support their authority against the men. Within those limits he was free to take his revenge on a world that had made him ugly, lumpen, and friendless, a world that had tried to kill him and which now, above all, feared him.
He hated Sharpe. To Hakeswill officers were officers, born, like John Morris, to their exalted station and the purveyors of reward and privilege. But Sharpe was an upstart. He came from the same gutters as Hakeswill, and the Sergeant had once tried to break him and failed. He would not fail again. Now, sitting in the stable behind the officers’ house, stripping a hambone with his fingernails and cramming the scraps into an open, churning mouth, he took pleasure at remembering their meeting. Hakeswill had recognized the officer’s embarrassment and chalked it up as a small victory to be followed and exploited. There was the Sergeant too, the Irishman who would be worth baiting, and he cackled as he stuffed the food into his mouth and scratched the flea-bites in his armpit. There was profit in fear, none in harmony. Hakeswill had made himself comfortable by reducing companies into divided camps; those for him and those against. Those he disliked would be forced to pay money, or services, so that the Sergeant’s life would be bearable. Hakeswill had a shrewd idea that Patrick Harper would not allow it to happen easily, nor Sharpe, but he laughed out loud. He had not re-enlisted in an active service battalion, one that would lead to the rich pickings of a war, to be thwarted by those two.
He fished in his ammunition pouch and came up with a handful of coins. It was not much, a few shillings, but all he had managed to steal in the chaos of the arrival. He had come to the stable to count his gains and to hide them deep in his pack. He preferred services to money. Soon he would discover which soldiers in the Light Company were married, and which had the prettiest wives. Those were the ones to go for, the ones who would be reduced to quaking misery by Hakeswill’s battery of weapons till they would offer anything for a release from his torment. Their wives were his usual price. He knew that, on average, two or three would give in; would bring their women in tears to some straw-filled stable like this and, after a while, the women surrendered. Some came drunk, but he never minded that, and one had tried to rip him with a bayonet and he had killed her, and blamed the husband for her death, and he laughed as he remembered the man’s execution, hung from a high tree. It would take time to become comfortable in this new battalion, to root around in it like a beast settling in its lair, but he would do it. And, just like an animal slumping into rest, he would first claw out the rocks that would be uncomfortable beneath his yellow hide, rocks like Sharpe and Harper.
He had the stable to himself. A horse moved in the stall behind him, light chinked between the thick, curved roof tiles, and the Sergeant was glad of the time to be alone, to think. Stealing equipment was a good beginning. Pick your men, steal from them, then report the loss and have them charged, hoping that the new Colonel was a flogging man. It was extraordinary what a man would do to avoid a flogging, and what a woman would give to save her man from the lashes! It was so easy, and he laughed again. Two or three savage floggings and the Company would be eating out of his hand! There was even a rumour, that had flashed through the
Battalion like wildfire, that Sharpe had lost the Company. That was good news; it removed an obstacle, and Hakeswill had judged that Price would be no great problem. The new Ensign, Matthews, was a mere boy, and the only problem was Patrick Harper. His fault was probably excessive honesty, and Hakeswill grinned. It was so easy!
The door of the stable opened and Hakeswill froze. He liked to stay unseen; to watch without being watched. One person entered, he could tell by the footsteps, and walked to the row of stalls behind Hakeswill as the big, wooden door closed under its own ponderous weight. The newcomer was hidden from him and he moved, infinitely slowly, timing his movements so that the rustle of straw should seem like the stirrings of a draught and then, thankfully, a horse staled noisily and the splashing covered the sound of him kneeling up to peer through a chink in the boards.
He almost crowed with delight. It was a girl; a girl with the kind of beauty a man might dream of, but know he could never possess. She was a native, too, he could see that by the clothes and by her dark skin and hair, and native girls were always fair game. He tensed himself. He wanted this girl. He forgot everything; Sharpe, Harper, his plans, everything, for he was suddenly swamped with lust for this girl and he began to edge the bayonet from its scabbard.
Teresa heaved the saddle on to her horse, pulled the blanket straight beneath the leather, and pulled the girth through its thick buckle. She spoke to the horse in Spanish, murmuring to it, and heard nothing strange in the stable. She did not want to leave Sharpe, to return to the Anfrancesados, the French-lovers, in the city, but Antonia was there, and ill, and Teresa had to go back to protect her child through the siege. After that, pray God, the child would be well enough to be moved.
And marriage? She sighed and looked up to the roof. It was not right that Antonia should be a bastard, yet Teresa could not see herself following this army like a puppy behind a pack, and she knew Richard Sharpe would not leave to live in Casatejada. Marry anyway? At least the baby would have a name, a good name, and there was no shame for a child to carry the name of an unknown, absent father. She sighed again. It would all have to wait until the siege was done, or the child better, and suddenly, like a dark cloud, she wondered what might happen if Sharpe died in the siege. She shrugged. She would tell everyone that he had married her before the siege, and no one would be any the wiser.