Sharpe nodded wearily. “What you’re saying is that pressure will be applied for me to be sacrificed so that Simmerson can survive?”
Lawford nodded. “I’m afraid so. And Sir Arthur’s defence of you will be seen as mere party politics.”
“But for God’s sake! I was in no way responsible!”
“I know, I know.” Lawford spoke soothingly. “It makes no difference. He has chosen you as his scapegoat.”
Sharpe knew he spoke the truth. For a few weeks he was safe, safe while Wellesley marched further into Spain and brought the French to battle, but after that a letter would come from the Horse Guards, a short and simple letter that would mean the end of his career in the army. He was sure he would be looked after. Wellesley himself might need an estate manager or would recommend him to someone who did. But he would still eke out his years under a cloud as the man named officially responsible for losing Simmerson’s colour. He thought of his last conversation with Lennox. Had the Scotsman foreseen it all?
“There is another way.” He spoke quietly.
Lawford looked at him. “What?”
“When I saw the colour being lost, I made a resolution. I also made a promise to a dying man.” It sounded desperately melodramatic but it was the truth. “I promised to replace that colour with an Eagle.”
There was a moment of silence. Lawford whistled softly. “It’s never been done.”
“There’s no difference between that and them taking a colour.” That was easily said, but he knew that the French would not make the job as easy for him as Simmerson had for them. In the last six years the French had appeared on the battlefield with new standards. In place of the old colours they now carried gilded eagles mounted on poles. It was said that each Eagle was personally presented to the Regiment by the Emperor himself, and the standards were therefore more than just a symbol of the Regiment, they were a symbol of all France’s pride in their new order. To take an Eagle was to make Bonaparte wince in person. Sharpe felt the anger rise in him.
“I don’t mind replacing Simmerson’s flag with an Eagle. But I’m bloody angry that I have to carve my way through a company of French Grenadiers just to stay in the army.”
Lawford said nothing. He knew that Sharpe spoke the truth; the only thing that could stop the officials in Whitehall singling out Sharpe for punishment was if the Rifleman performed a deed of such undoubted merit that they would look foolish to make him a scapegoat. Privately Lawford thought Sharpe had done more than enough, he had regained a colour, captured a gun, but the account of his deeds would be muddied in London by Simmerson’s telling. No, he had to do more, go further, risk his life in an attempt to keep his job.
Sharpe laughed ironically. He slapped his empty scabbard. “Someone once said that in this job you’re only as good as your last battle.” He paused. “Unless of course you have money or influence.”
“Yes, Richard, unless you have money or influence.”
Sharpe grinned. “Thank you, sir. I’ll go and join the happy throng. I presume my Riflemen come with me?”
Lawford nodded. “Good luck.” He watched Sharpe go. If any man could pluck an Eagle from the French, he thought that the newly made Captain, Richard Sharpe, was that man. Lawford stood in the window and looked down into the street. He saw Sharpe step into the sunlight and put the battered shako on his head; a huge Sergeant was waiting in the shade, the kind of man Lawford would happily wager a hundred guineas on in a bare-fisted prize fight, and he watched as the Sergeant walked up to Sharpe. The two men talked for a moment, and then the big Sergeant clapped the officer’s back and uttered a whoop of joy that Lawford could hear two floors above.
“Lawford!”
“Sir?” Lawford crossed to the other room and took the despatch from Wellesley’s hand. The General rattled the quill in the ink-pot.
“Did you explain to him?”
“Yes, sir.”
Wellesley shook his head. “Poor devil. What did he say?”
“He said he’d take his chance, sir.”
Wellesley grunted. “We all have to do that.” He picked up another piece of paper. “My God! They’ve sent us four cases of gum ammoniac, three of Glauber’s salts, and two hundred assorted stump-caps! They think I’m running a bloody hospital instead of an army!”
Chapter 11
The boots of the Coldstream Guards rang on the flagstones, echoing hollowly in the darkness, fading down the steep street to be replaced by the leading companies of the 3rd Guards. They were followed by the first Battalion of the 61st, the second of the 83rd, and then by four full Battalions of the crack King’s German Legion. Sharpe, standing in a church porch, watched the Germans march past.
“They’re good troops, sir.”
Forrest, shivering despite a greatcoat, peered into the darkness. “What are they?”
“King’s German Legion.”
Forrest thrust his hands deeper into his pockets. “I’ve not seen them before.”
“You wouldn’t have, sir.” The Germans were a foreign corps of the army, and the law said they were allowed no nearer the British mainland than the Isle of Wight. Overhead the church clock struck three times. Three o’clock on the morning of Monday, 17th July, 1809, and the British army was leaving Plasencia. A company of the 60th went past, another German unit, with the incongruous title of the Royal American Rifles. Forrest saw Sharpe staring ruefully at the marching Riflemen with their green jackets and black belts.
“Homesick, Sharpe?”
Sharpe grinned in the darkness. “I’d rather it was the other Rifle Regiment, sir.” He yearned for the sanity of the 95th rather than the worsening suspicion and moroseness that was infecting Simmerson’s Battalion.
Forrest shook his head. “I’m sorry, Sharpe.”
“Don’t be, sir. I’m a Captain at last.”
Forrest ignored the statement. “He showed me the letter, you know.” Sharpe knew. Forrest kept apologising and had mentioned the letter twice already. Dereliction of duty, gross disobedience, even the word ‘treason’ had found its place into Simmerson’s scathing account of Sharpe’s actions at Valdelacasa; but none of that was surprising. What had disturbed Sharpe was Simmerson’s final request: that Sharpe be posted, as a Lieutenant, to a Battalion in the West Indies. No one ever purchased a commission in one of those Battalions, even though promotion was quicker there than anywhere else in the army, and Sharpe had even known men resign rather than go to the sun-drenched islands with their lazy garrison duty.
“It may not happen, Sharpe.” Forrest’s tone betrayed that he thought Sharpe’s fate was sealed.
“No, sir.” Not if I can help it, thought Sharpe, and he imagined an Eagle in his hands. Only an Eagle could save him from the islands where fever reduced a man’s life expectancy to less than a year, from the dreadful, sweating disease that made Simmerson’s request into a virtual death warrant unless Sharpe resigned his hard-won commission.
Almost every unit marched before them. Five Regiments of Dragoons and the Hussars of the King’s German Legion, over three thousand cavalry in all, followed by an army of mules carrying fodder for the precious horses. The cumbersome artillery with their guns, limbers, and portable forges added even more mules, more supplies, but mostly it was infantry who disturbed the quiet streets. Twenty-five Battalions of unglamorous infantry, with stained uniforms and worn boots, the men who had to stand and face the world’s best artillerymen and cavalry; and with them marched even more mules mixed up with the Battalions’ women and children.
The Battalion finally took the road across the river well after sunrise, and if the previous days had been hot, it now seemed as if nature was intent on baking the landscape into one solid expanse of terracotta. The army crept across the vast, arid plain and stirred up a fine dust that hung in the air and lined the mouths and throats of the parched infantry. There was no trace of wind, just the dust, the heat and glare, the sweat that stung the eyes, and the endless sound of boots hitting the w
hite road. In one village there was a pool that had been trampled into foul sticky mud by the cavalry, but even that was welcomed by the men, who had long before emptied their canteens and now skimmed the sour water from the surface of the glutinous mud.
There was not much else to be grateful for. The rest of the army shunned the new Battalion of Detachments as if the men were harbouring a repulsive disease. The loss of the colour had stained the reputation of the whole army, and when the Battalion bivouacked on the first night they were turned away from a capacious farm by a Colonel of Dragoons who wanted nothing to do with a Regiment which had failed so shamefully. The Battalion’s morale was not helped by a shortage of food. The herd of cattle which had left Portugal had long been slaughtered and eaten, the supplies promised by the Spanish had not appeared, and the men were hungry, sullen, and cowed by Simmerson’s brutality. He had found his own reasons for the loss of the colour, the behaviour of Sharpe and the actions of his own men, and if he could not punish the first it was well within his practised power to punish the second. Only the Light Company retained some vestiges of pride. The men were proud of their new Captain. Throughout the Battalion Sharpe was now believed to be a magic man, a lucky one, a man whom enemy swords and bullets could not touch. The Light Company believed, in the way of soldiers, that Sharpe would bring them luck in battle, would keep them alive, and pointed to the action at the bridge as proof. Sharpe’s Riflemen agreed, they had always known their officer was lucky, and they revelled in his new promotion. Sharpe had been embarrassed by their pleasure, blushed when they offered him drinks from hoarded bottles of Spanish brandy, and covered his confusion by pretending to have duties elsewhere. On the first night of the march from Plasencia he lay in a field, wrapped in his greatcoat, and thought of the boy who had fearfully joined the army sixteen years before. What would that terrified sixteen-year-old, running from justice, have thought if he knew he would one day be a Captain?
On the second night the Battalion was more fortunate. They bivouacked near another nameless village, and the woods were filled with soldiers hacking at branches to build the fires on which they could boil the tea-leaves they carried loose in their pockets. Provosts guarded the olive groves; nothing made the army so unpopular as the French habit of cutting down a village’s olive trees and denying them harvests for years to come, and Wellesley had issued strict orders that the olives were not to be touched. The officers of the South Essex—the Battalion still thought of itself as that—were billeted in the village inn. It was a large building, evidently a way station between Plasencia and Talavera, and behind it was a courtyard with big cypress trees beneath which were tables and benches. The three-sided yard opened onto a stream, and on the far bank the men of the Battalion made fires and beds in a grove of cork trees. There had been pigs in the grove, and as Sharpe stripped off his uniform to search the seams for lice he could smell pork cooking on the myriad small fires that showed through the foliage. Such looting was punishable by instant hanging, but nothing could stop it. The officers, the provosts, everyone was short of food, and the surreptitious offer of some stolen pork would ensure that the provosts would take no action.
The courtyard gradually filled with officers from the dozen Battalions bivouacked in the village. The heat of the day mellowed into a warm, clear evening, and the stars came out like the camp fires of a limitless army seen far away. From the main room of the inn came the sound of music and cheering as the officers egged on the Spanish dancers to twitch their skirts higher.
Sharpe pushed his way through the crowded room and glimpsed Simmerson and his cronies sitting playing cards at a corner table. Gibbons was there, he was now permanently attached to Simmerson’s staff, and the unpleasant Lieutenant Berry. For a second Sharpe thought about the girl. He had seen her once or twice since the return from the bridge and felt a surge of jealousy. He pushed the thought away; the officers of the Battalion were split enough as it was. There were Simmerson’s supporters, who toadied to the Colonel and assured him that the loss of the colour had been no fault of his, and there were those who had publicly supported Sharpe. It was an uncomfortable situation but there was nothing to be done about it. He passed out of the room into the courtyard and found Forrest, Leroy, and a group of Subalterns sitting beneath one of the cypress trees. Forrest made room for him on the bench.
“Don’t you ever take that rifle off?”
“And have it stolen?” Sharpe asked. “I’d be charged for it.”
Forrest smiled. “Have you paid for the stocks yet?”
“Not yet.” Sharpe grimaced. “But now I’m officially on the Battalion’s payroll, I suppose it will be deducted from my pay, whenever that arrives.”
Forrest pushed a wine bottle towards him. “Don’t let it worry you. Tonight the wine’s on me.”
There was an ironic cheer from the officers round the table. Unconsciously Sharpe felt the leather bag round his neck. It was heavier by six gold pieces, thanks to the dead on the field at Valdelacasa. He drank some wine.
“It’s filthy!”
“There’s a rumour,” Leroy said drily. “I hear that when they tread the grapes they don’t bother to get out of the wine-press to relieve themselves.”
There was a moment’s silence and then a chorus of disgusted voices. Forrest looked dubiously into his cup. “I don’t believe it.”
“In India,” Sharpe said, “some natives believe it very healthy to drink their own urine.”
Forrest looked owlishly at him. “That cannot be true.”
Leroy intervened. “Perfectly true, Major, I’ve seen them do it. A cupful a day. Cheers!”
Everyone round the table protested but Sharpe and Leroy stuck to their story. The conversation stayed with India, of battles and sieges, of strange animals, of the palaces that contained unimaginable wealth. More wine was ordered and food brought from the kitchens, not the pork that smelt so tantalisingly from the lines but a stew that seemed to consist mainly of vegetables. It still felt good to be sitting there. Sharpe stretched his legs under the table and leaned back against the cypress trunk letting the tiredness of the day flow through him. Over the sound of talk and laughter he could hear the thousands of insects that chattered and clicked through the Spanish night. Later he would walk over the stream and visit his company, and he let his thoughts wander, not too many miles away, to where he knew a group of French officers would be sitting just like this and where their men would be cooking on fires like the ones across the stream. And somewhere, perhaps propped in the corner of a room in an inn just like this one, would be the Eagle. A hand hit him on the back.
“So they’ve made you a Captain! This army has no standards!” It was Hogan. Sharpe had not seen him since the day they marched back from the bridge. He stood up and took the Engineer’s hand. Hogan beamed at him. “I’m delighted! Shocked, of course, but delighted. Congratulations!”
Sharpe blushed and shrugged. “Where have you been?”
“Oh, looking at things.” Sharpe knew that Hogan had been reconnoitring for Wellesley, coming back with news of which bridges could take the weight of heavy artillery, which roads were wide enough for the army to use. The Captain had obviously been forward to Oropesa and perhaps beyond. Forrest invited him to sit and asked for news.
“The French are up the valley. A lot of them.” Hogan poured himself some wine. “I reckon there’ll be a battle within a week.”
“A week!” Forrest sounded surprised.
“Aye, Major. They’re swarming all over a place called Talavera.” Hogan pronounced it ‘Tally-verra’, making it sound like some Irish hamlet. “But once you join with Cuesta’s army you’ll far outnumber them.”
“You’ve seen Cuesta’s troops?” Sharpe asked.
“Aye.” The Irishman grinned. “They’re no better than the Santa Maria. The cavalry may be better, but the infantry… „ Hogan left the sentence unfinished. He turned back to Sharpe and beamed again. ”The last time I saw you, you were under arrest! Now look at
you. How’s good Sir Henry?“ There was a laugh round the table. Hogan did not wait for an answer but dropped his voice. ”I saw Sir Arthur.“
“I know. Thank you.”
“For telling the truth? So what happens now?“
”I don’t know.“ Sharpe spoke quietly. Only Hogan could hear him. ”Simmerson has written home. I’m told that he has the power to stop the Horse Guards ratifying the gazette, so in six weeks I’ll be a Lieutenant again, probably for ever, and almost certainly transferred to the Fever Islands, or out of the army altogether.“ Hogan looked intently at him.
”You’re serious?“
“Yes. One of Sir Arthur’s staff virtually told me as much.”Because of Simmerson?“ Hogan frowned in disbelief. Sharpe sighed. ”It has to do with Simmerson keeping his credibility in Parliament with the people who oppose Wellesley. I’m the sacrifice. Don’t ask me, it’s way over my head. What about you? You were under arrest too.“
Hogan shrugged. “Sir Henry forgave me. He doesn’t take me seriously, I’m just an Engineer. No, it’s you he’s after. You’re an upstart, a Rifleman, you’re not a Gentleman but you’re a better soldier than he’ll ever be, so.” He squeezed his thumb and forefinger together. “He wants rid of you. Listen.” Hogan leaned even nearer. “There’ll be a battle soon, has to be. The idiot will probably make as big a mess as he did before. They can’t protect him for ever. It’s a terrible thing, God knows, but you should pray he makes as big a mistake again.”
Sharpe smiled. “I doubt if we need to pray.” From one of the upper windows that looked onto the balconies that ran round the courtyard there came a woman’s scream, terrifying and intense, stopping all conversation beneath the trees. Men froze with their cups half lifted to their mouths and stared at the dark doorways that led to the bedrooms. Sharpe got to his feet and reached instinctively for his rifle. Forrest put a hand on his arm. “It’s not our business, Sharpe.”