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‘Let them go.’ Sharpe turned back to the fight. ‘Come on.’
They trudged up beside the parapet, the rain sweeping across them and down on to the dead in the trench. Broken spades and shattered muskets littered the slope. The sound of the fight, the sound of men clawing each other to death in the mud, was muffled by the rain. A French officer had organized a small group with spades and was trying to fill in the parallel. Sharpe began to hurry, the ground treacherous, and he turned to see his men strung out as they followed him, but Harper was beside him and the French turned and saw them coming. It was the turn of the French to use spades. A huge man swung at them, forced them back, parried Harper’s thrust and Sharpe flailed his sword at the brute, cutting through the spade-handle, and still the Frenchman came at them. Harper bayoneted him, and still he came on, and Sharpe cut at the back of the man’s neck until he finally collapsed. ‘Come on!’
There was a stinging pain in his back, he whipped round and the French officer, white-faced, was going back from the sword lunge. ‘You bastard!’ Sharpe went forward, blade level, and the Frenchman came at him. The blades rattled, Sharpe twisted his wrist so that the heavy sword went from the Frenchman’s left to his right, under his guard, and Sharpe stamped his right foot forward, ignored his opponent’s blade and caught him in the ribs. The French officer tried to back away, slipped on blood and mud but Sharpe kept on going forward, feeling the steel scrape on ribs. His men swept past him with their bayonets held out, their captured bayonets, and Sharpe watched them drive the enemy back.
Bugles called the French back to the city and, within seconds, the hillside was a mass of retreating enemy carrying their wounded and bundles of captured shovels and picks. They were heading straight for the city as if frightened of cavalry pursuit and Sharpe watched as men waded into the floodwater rather than go the long way round by the dam. For ten, twenty yards it was fine, the water came up to their thighs and then, with horrid suddenness, the bottom dropped away. French officers shouted at their men, ordered them away from the water, shepherded them to the Rivillas dam. The sortie was over.
The French cannon opened fire, the roundshot ploughing into mud-soaked red, and the British leaped for the damaged trench. Harper looked at Sharpe’s drawn and gory sword. ‘Like old times, sir.’
Sharpe looked round his small group. All his Riflemen were there, grinning at him, and a good number of the rest of the Light Company. He grinned at them, then picked up a piece of wet sacking and wiped the sword blade. ‘You’d better get back to the Company.’
‘Rather stay here, sir.’ Sharpe could not see who had spoken. He looked at Harper.
‘Take them back, Sergeant.’
‘Sir.’ Harper grinned at him. ‘And thank you, sir.’
‘For nothing.’ He was left alone. Small groups wandered the area of fighting and picked up the wounded and stacked the dead. There were a lot of bodies, more, he guessed, than had been in the breach at Ciudad Rodrigo. A spade brought down on a man’s head is a vicious instrument and the British troops had been frustrated and ready for a fight, for a savage brawl in the mud. A dead Frenchman was curled at Sharpe’s feet and the Rifleman crouched and ran his hands through the corpse’s pockets and pouches. There was nothing worth taking. A letter folded into quarters which smeared as soon as Sharpe pulled it into the rain, a copper coin, and a loose musket ball that may have been the dead man’s talisman. Round the neck, thick with blood, was a cheap metal crucifix. He had tried to grow a moustache, to look like a veteran, but the hairs were wispy and thin. He was hardly more than a boy. One of his boot soles had come loose, was hanging free and vibrating fitfully as the rain struck it. Had that killed him? Had the sole come loose in the fight and, as his comrades ran, had he limped, or stumbled, and had a British bayonet sliced into his neck? The ink washed off the letter, ran into the mud, but Sharpe could see the last word on the page that was written larger than the rest. ‘Maman.’
He looked at the city, now fringed again with the long flames as the guns hammered the threnody that would not cease till the siege was over. Teresa was there. He looked at the Cathedral tower, squat and arched with bell windows, and thought how close the bell must sound to her. The Cathedral only seemed to have the one bell, a harsh bell whose note died almost as soon as it was struck on the hour and its quarters. He wondered, quite suddenly, if she ever sang to the child? And what was mother in Spanish? Maman? Like the French?
‘Sir! Sir!’ It was Ensign Matthews, blinking through the rain. ‘Sir? Is that you, sir? Captain Sharpe?’
‘It’s me.’ Sharpe did not correct the Captain to Lieutenant.
‘You’d better come, sir.’
‘What is it?’
‘The officers’ baggage, sir. It’s been rifled.’
‘Rifled?’ He was scrambling out of the trench.
‘The Colonel’s lost some silver, sir. Everyone’s lost something, sir.’
Sharpe swore. He had been in charge of the baggage and, instead of guarding it, he had been brawling in the mud. He swore again and began to run.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘God damn it!’ Colonel Windham paced up and down in the tiny sheepfold. He was carrying a riding crop and he cut with it in his fury, slashing at the pile of baggage. When he bent his head to look at the rifled baggage, water cascaded from his bicorne hat. ‘God damn it!’
‘When did it happen?’ Sharpe asked Major Forrest.
‘We don’t know.’ Forrest smiled nervously at the Rifleman.
Windham swivelled. ‘Happen? When? This Goddamned afternoon, Sharpe, when you were supposed to be in Goddamned command!’ There were another dozen officers crowded back against the walls of the sheepfold and they looked to Sharpe with accusing faces. They were all wary of the Colonel’s anger.
‘Do we know it was this afternoon?’ Sharpe insisted.
Windham looked as if he would like to whip Sharpe with his riding crop. Instead he swore again, and turned away. It was not the officers’ day-to-day baggage that had been burgled, but their valuables which had been stored in leather mule-bags. None of the baggage, as far as Sharpe knew, had been touched for three days. It contained the kind of things that a man would only unpack if he were in comfortable quarters for a long period; silverware, crystal, the luxuries that reminded them of home comforts. Windham growled at Major Collett. ‘What’s missing?’
It was not a long list. Forrest had lost a money draft, but it had been found screwed up and thrown away in the mud. Whoever had slit the bags had not known what to do with the paper. There was a pair of snuffboxes gone, a gold chain that Sharpe suspected had been looted from Ciudad Rodrigo; certainly the officer who reported that loss had been voluble about his poverty before the siege and remarkably silent afterwards. There was a set of gold scabbard furniture, too valuable to wear in battle, a pair of silver spurs and a pair of jewelled ear-rings that an embarrassed Lieutenant claimed was a present for his mother. Major Collett had lost a shaving mirror with a silver lid and a watch that he said was worth a small fortune. Most important of all was the Colonel’s loss; the silver-filigree-framed portrait of his wife, the chinless, stern Jessica. The Colonel, rumour had it, was particularly fond of his wife; she had brought him a small fortune and the hunting rights for half of Leicestershire, and Colonel Windham was furious at the loss. Sharpe remembered the portrait sitting on the low table in Elvas.
Windham pointed the whip at Sharpe. ‘Did you lose anything?’
Sharpe shook his head. ‘I’ve nothing here, sir.’ Everything he owned he carried on his back, except for the Patriotic Fund sword and the gold stolen at Almeida which were with his London agents.
‘Where’s your pack?’
‘With