'Not so funny here, eh?' Sharpe found himself feeling relieved that the rockets had gone. Even at thirty yards the noise and fire was alarming.
Harper grinned. 'Wouldn't you say our duty was done, sir?'
'Just the big ones, then it's done.'
'For what we are about to receive.'
The next volley was not to be ground fired, but to be aimed upwards in firing tubes supported by a tripod. Gilliland, Sharpe knew, would be working at the mathematics of the trajectory. Sharpe had always supposed mathematics to be the most exact of all the sciences and he did not clearly see how it could be applied to the inexact nature of rocketry, but Gilliland would be busy with angles and equations. The wind had to be ascertained, for if a breeze was blowing across the rockets' path then they had a perverse habit of turning into the wind. That, Gilliland had explained, was because the wind put more pressure on the long stick than on the cylinder head, and so the tubes had to be aimed down-wind for an upwind target. Another calculation was the stick length, a longer stick giving more height and a longer flight, and at six hundred yards Sharpe knew the artillerymen would be sawing off a length of each rocket's tail. A third imponderable was the angle of launch. A rocket travelled relatively slowly as it left the firing tube and so the head fell towards the ground in the first few feet of flight and the angle of launch had to be increased to compensate. Modern science at war.
'Hold your hat, sir.'
The smoke and flames were easily visible beneath the firing tubes, even at six hundred yards, and then, with appalling suddenness, the missiles leaped into the air. These were eighteen-pounder rockets, a dozen of them, and they sliced the air above the lingering smoke trails of the first volley, climbing, climbing, and Sharpe saw one slam off to the left, hopelessly off course, while the others seemed to have coalesced into a living flame-shot cloud that grew silently over the valley.
'Oh, God.' Harper was holding the crucifix. The rockets, strangely, seemed not to be moving. The cloud grew, the flame surrounded dots were still and hovering, and Sharpe knew it'was an illusion caused by the trajectory bringing the missiles in a curve pointing straight at the two of them. Then a single dot dropped from the cloud, fire at its edges, smoke dark against the clear sky behind. The noise burst on them; a screaming roar, flame-born, and the dot grew larger. 'Down!'
'Christ!' Harper dived right, Sharpe left, and Sharpe clung to the soil by the wall and the noise hammered at him, growing, seeming to make the stones of the wall shake, and the air was throbbing with the noise that came closer and closer and filled their whole world with terror as the rocket slammed into the wall.
'Jesus.' Sharpe rolled over and sat up. The rocket, the most accurate of the week, had demolished the stone wall where he and Harper had been standing. The broken stick toppled slowly off the wreckage. The cylinder smoked innocently in the next field. Smoke drifted over the burned grass.
They started laughing, beating the dirt off their uniforms, and suddenly it seemed hilarious to Sharpe so that he rolled onto his side, helpless with laughter. 'Holy Jesus!'
'You'd better thank Him. If that had been a shell instead of roundshot.' Harper left the thought unfinished. He was standing and staring at the ruins of the wall.
Sharpe sat up again. 'Is that frightening?'
Harper grinned. 'You'd regret having a full belly, that's for sure, sir.' He bent down and picked up his shako.
'So maybe there is something to the mad Colonel's invention.'
'Aye, sir.'
'And think if you could fire a whole volley at fifty paces.'
Harper nodded. 'True, but there's a lot of maybes and ifs there, sir.' He grinned. 'You're fond of them, aren't you? You fancy trying them out, yes?' He laughed. 'Toys for Christmas.'
A figure in blue uniform, leading a second horse, was riding towards them from the firing point. Harper pulled his battered shako low over his eyes and nodded towards the galloping man. 'I think he's worried he's murdered us, sir.'
Clods of earth flew up behind the galloping horses. Sharpe shook his head. 'That's not Gilliland.' He could see a cavalryman's pelisse across the blue uniform shoulders.
The cavalryman skirted a burning rocket wreck, urged his horse on, waved as he came close. His shout was urgent. 'Major Sharpe?'
'Yes.'
'Lieutenant Rogers, sir. Headquarters. Major General Nairn's compliments, sir, and would you report at once.'
Sharpe took the reins of the spare horse from Rogers, looped them over the horse's head. 'What's it about?'
'About, sir? Haven't you heard?' Rogers was impatient, his horse fretful. Sharpe put his left foot in the stirrup, reached for the saddle, and Harper helped by heaving him upwards. Rogers waited as the Sergeant retrieved Sharpe's shako. 'There's been a massacre, sir, at some place called Adrados.'
'Massacre?'
'God knows, sir. All hell's loose. Ready?'
'Lead on.'
Sergeant Patrick Harper watched Sharpe lurch as his horse took off after the Lieutenant. So the rumour was true and Harper smiled in satisfaction. Not a satisfaction because he had been proved right, but because Sharpe had been summoned and where Sharpe went, Harper followed. So what if Sharpe was a Major now, supposedly detached from the South Essex? He would still take Harper, as he always took Harper, and the giant Irishman wanted to help take revenge on the men who had offended his decency and his religion. He began walking back towards the Company, whistling as he went, the prospect of a fight pleasant in his soul.
Chapter 3
'Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.' Major General Nairn, still in a dressing gown, still with a cold, stared out of the window. He turned as Lieutenant Rogers, having announced Sharpe, left the room. The eyes, under the straggling eyebrows, looked at Sharpe. 'Damn.'
'Sir.'
'Cold as a parson's bloody heart.'
'Sir?'
'This room, Sharpe.' It was an office, one table smothered in maps which, in turn, were littered with empty cups and plates, snuff boxes, two half eaten pieces of cold toast, a single spur and a marble bust of Napoleon on which someone, presumably Nairn, had inked embellishments which made the Emperor of the French look like a simpering weakling. The Major General crossed to the table and lowered himself into a leather chair. 'So what have you heard about this bloody massacre, Major? Cheer an old man up and tell me you've heard nothing.'
'I'm afraid I have, sir.'
'Well what, man?'
Sharpe told him what had been preached in the church that morning and Nairn listened with fingers steepled in front of his closed eyes. When Sharpe finished Nairn groaned. 'God in his heaven, Major, it couldn't be bloody worse, could it?' Nairn swivelled in the chair and stared across the roofs of the town. 'We're unpopular enough as it is with the Spanish. They don't forget the seventeenth century, blast their eyes, and the fact that we're fighting for their bloody country doesn't make us any better. Now the priests are preaching that the heathen British are raping anything that's Catholic with a skirt on. God! If the Portuguese are believing it, what the hell are they believing over the border? They'll be petitioning the Pope to declare war on us next.' He turned back to the desk, leaned back and closed his eyes. 'We need the co-operation of the Spanish people and we are hardly likely to get it if they believe this story. Come!' This last word was to a clerk who had knocked timidly on the door. He handed Nairn a sheet of paper which the Scotsman looked through, grunting approval. 'I need a dozen, Simmons.’Yes, sir.'
When the clerk had gone Nairn smiled slyly at Sharpe. 'Be sure your sins will find you out, eh? I burn a letter from that great and good man, the bloody Chaplain General, and today I have to write to every Bishop and Archbishop inside spitting distance.' He mimicked a cringing voice. 'The story is not true, your Grace, the men were not from our army, your Holiness, but nevertheless we will apprehend the bastards and turn them inside out. Slowly.’
’Not true, sir?'
Nairn flashed a look of annoyance at Sharpe. 'Of course
it's not bloody true!' He leaned forward and picked up the bust of Napoleon, staring it between its cold eyes. 'You'd like to believe it, wouldn't you? Splash it all over your bloody Moniteur. How the savage English treat Spanish women. That would take your mind of all those good men you left in Russia.' He slammed the bust onto the table. 'Damn.' He blew his nose noisily.
Sharpe waited. He was alone with Nairn, but he had seen much coming and going as he entered the Headquarters. The rumour, whatever its truth, had stirred Frenada into activity. Sharpe was part of it, or else Nairn would not have sent for him, but the Rifleman was content to wait until he was told. The moment had evidently come, for Nairn waved Sharpe into a chair by the small fireplace and took the chair opposite. 'I have a problem, Major Sharpe. In brief it is this. I have a nasty mess on my doorstep, a mess I must clear up, but I don't have the troops to do it.' He held up a hand tostop an interruption. 'Oh yes, I know. I have a whole bloody army, but that's under Beresford's control.' Beresford was in nominal command of the Army while Wellington politicked in the south. 'Beresford's up north, with his Portuguese, and I don't have time to write a ‘please, sir’ note to him. If I ask for help from one of the Divisions then every General inside ten miles is going to want a finger in this pie. I'm in charge of this Headquarters. My job is to pass the papers and make sure the cooks don't piss in the soup. However, I do have you, and I do have the so-called garrison battalion of Frenada, and if you're willing then we might put the lid on this peculiarly nasty pot of snakes.'
'Willing, sir?'
'You will be a volunteer, Sharpe. That's an order.' He grinned. 'Tell me what you know of Pot-au-Feu. Marshal Pot-au-Feu.'
Sharpe shook his head. 'Nothing.'
'An army of deserters?'
That did ring faint bells. Sharpe remembered a night on the retreat from Burgos, a night when the wind flung rain at the roofless barn where four hundred wet, miserable and hungry soldiers had sheltered. There had been talk there of a haven for soldiers, an army of deserters who were defying the French and the English, but Sharpe had dismissed the stories. They were like other rumours that went through the army. He frowned. 'Is that true?'
Nairn nodded. 'Yes.' He told the story that he had gleaned that morning from Hogan's papers, from the priest of Adrados, and from a Partisan who had brought the priest to Frenada. It was a story so incredible that Sharpe, at times, stopped Nairn simply to ask for confirmation. Some of the wildest rumours, it seemed, turned out to be fact.
For a year now, perhaps a few months longer, there had been an organized band of deserters, calling themselves an army, living in the mountains of southern Galicia. Their leader was a Frenchman whose real name was unknown, an ex-Sergeant who now styled himself as Marshal Pot-au-Feu. Nairn grinned. 'Stockpot, I suppose that translates. There's a story that he was once a cook.' Under Pot-au-Feu the ‘army’ had prospered. They lived in territory that was unimportant to the French Marshals or to Wellington, they subsisted by terrorizing the countryside, taking what they wanted, and their numbers grew as deserters from every army in the Peninsula heard of their existence. French, British, Portuguese and Spanish, all were in Pot-au-Feu's ranks.
'How many, sir?'
Nairn shrugged. 'We don't know. Numbers vary between four hundred and two thousand. I'd guess six or seven hundred.'
Sharpe raised his eyebrows. That could be a formidable force. 'Why have they come south, sir?'
'That's a question.' Nairn blew his nose into the huge wrinkled handkerchief. 'It seems that the Frogs are being pretty lively in Galicia. I don't know, bloody rumour again, but there's a whisper that they might try a winter attack on Braganza then on to Oporto. I don't believe it for a second, but there's a school of thought which maintains that Napoleon is in need of some victory, any victory, after the Russian catastrophe. If they capture the north of Portugal then they can trumpet that as some kind of achievement.' Nairn shrugged. 'I can't think why, but we're told to take the possibility seriously and certainly there's a lot of Frog cavalry lumbering about in Galicia and our belief is that they drove our friend Pot-au-Feu towards us. And he promptly sends his British deserters to attack a village called Adrados where they murder a small Spanish garrison and go on to make themselves free with all the ladies. Now half of bloody Spain thinks that the Protestant English are reverting to the Wars of Religion. That, Sharpe, is the story in its rancid little nutshell.'
'So we go up there and turn the bastards inside out?'
Nairn smiled. 'Not yet, Sharpe, not yet. We have a problem.' He got to his feet, crossed to the table, rummaged through the mess of papers and litter, and returned with a small, black leather-bound book. He tossed the book to Sharpe. 'Did you see a tall, thin man when you arrived here? Silver hair? Elegant?'
Sharpe nodded. He had noticed the man because of the flawless uniform, the look of bored distinction, and the obvious wealth of the man's spurs, sword and other ornaments. 'I did.'
'That's him.' Nairn pointed at the book.
Sharpe opened it. It was new, the covers stiff, and on the title page he read 'Practical Instructions to the Young Officer in the Art of Warfare with Special Reference to the Engagements now Proceeding in Spain'. The author was named as Colonel Sir Augustus Farthingdale. The book cost five shillings, published by Richard Phillips, and was printed by Joyce Gold of Shoe Lane
in London. The pages were mostly uncut, but Sharpe's eye was caught by a sentence that ran over a page and so he took out his pen-knife and slit the next two pages apart. He finished the sentence and smiled. Nairn saw the smile. 'Read it to me.'
' ‘The men, during the march, should keep their files, and no indecent language or noise be allowed’.'
'God! I missed that one.' Nairn grinned. 'You will note that the book has an introduction by my friend the Chaplain General. He recommends frequent divine service to keep the men quiet and ordered.'
Sharpe closed the book. 'So why is he a problem?'
'Because Colonel Sir Augustus Farthingdale has taken himself a wife. A Portuguese wife. Some filly of a good family, it seems, but a Papist. God knows what the Chaplain General would say to that! Anyway, this spring flower of Sir Augustus' autumn wants to go to Adrados to pray at some bloody shrine where miracles are two a penny and guess who meets her there. Pot-au-Feu. Lady Farthingdale is now a hostage. If any troops go within five miles of Adrados they'll turn her over to the rapists and murderers who make up their ranks. On the other hand, Sir Augustus can have her back on payment of five hundred guineas.'
Sharpe whistled, Nairn grinned. 'Aye, it's a pretty price for a pair of legs to wrap round you in bed. Anyway, Sir Augustus swears the price is fair, that he will do anything, anything to bring his bride safe home. God, Sharpe, there's nothing so disgusting as the sight of an old man in love with a woman forty years younger.' Sharpe wondered if there was some jealousy in Nairn's words.
'Why would they want to ransom her, sir, if she's their insurance against attack?'
'You're not a fool, are you. God knows the answer to that. They have deemed to send us a letter and the letter informs us that we may send the money on a certain date, at a certain time, and so on and so on. I want you to go.’
’Alone?'
'You can take one other man, that's all.’
’The money?'
'Sir Augustus will provide it. He claims his lady wife is a pearl beyond price so he's busy writing notes of hand to get her back.'
'And if they won't release her?'
Nairn smiled. He was huddled back in his dressing gown. 'I don't believe they will. They just want the money, that's all. Sir Augustus made a half-hearted offer to deliver it, but I turned him down much to his relief. I suppose two hostages are better than one and a Knight of the Realm makes a useful bargaining piece. Anyway, I need a soldier to go up there.' Sharpe raised the book. 'He's a soldier.’He's a bloody author, Sharpe, all words and wind. No, you go, man. Take a look at their defences. Even if you don't bring the filly back you'll know how to go and get h
er.'
Sharpe smiled. 'A rescue?'
Nairn nodded. 'A rescue. Sir Augustus Farthingdale, Major, is our government's military representative to the Portuguese government which means, between you and me, damn all except that he gets to eat a lot of dinners and meet pretty young ladies. How he stays so thin, God only knows. He is, however, popular in Lisbon. The government likes him. His wife, moreover, is supposed to be from some high-up family and we're not going to get letters of thanks if we casually allow her to be raped by a gang of scum in the mountains. We have got to get her out. Once that's done our hands are free and we can cook Pot-au-Feu in a very hot cauldron. You're happy to go?'
Sharpe looked through the window. A score of smoke trails rose vertically from the chimneys of Frenada, smoke fading into a flawless cold sky. Of course he would go. Nairn had not let Sir Augustus go because the Colonel might become a hostage himself, but Nairn had not expressed any such fear about Sharpe. He smiled at the Major General. 'I assume I'm expendable, sir.'
'You're a soldier, aren't you? Of course you're expendable!'
Sharpe was still smiling. He was a soldier, and a lady needed rescuing, and was that not what soldiers throughout history had done? The smile became wider. 'Of course I'll go, sir. With pleasure.'
In the churches of Spain they were praying for revenge on the perpetrators of Adrados's misery. The prayers were being answered.
Chapter 4
La Entrada de Dios.
The Gateway of God.
It looked it, too, from two hundred feet below on a bright winter morning as Sharpe and Harper walked their patient horses up the track which wound between rocks whose shadows still harboured the night's frost. Adrados lay just beyond the saddle of the pass, but the pass was the Gateway of God.
To left and right were rocky peaks, a nightmare landscape, savage and sharp. In front of them was the smooth grass of the road through the Sierra. Guarding that road was the Gateway.
To the right of the pass was the castle. The Castillo de la Virgen. El Cid himself had known that castle, had stood on its ramparts before riding out against the curved scimitars of Islam. Legend said that three Muslim Kings had died in the dungeons beneath the Castle of the Virgin, died refusing to profess Christianity, and their ghosts were said to wander wraith-like in the Gateway of God. The castle had stood years beyond number, built before the Wars of God were won, but when the Muslims had been thrown back across the sea, the castle had begun to decay. The Spanish had moved from the high places of refuge, back down the passes into the softer plains. Yet the castle still stood, a refuge for foxes and ravens, its keep and gatehouse still holding the southern edge of the Gateway of God.