LITMIR.BIZ

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of blood and red mist, and the sergeant was hurled backwards, the fuse still smoked, then the world exploded.

      The worm of fire had eaten into Sturridge’s charge and the powder blew. The sky filled with noise, turned dark. Flame, smoke and timbers erupted into the air, though the chief effect of the exploding powder was to drive the pontoon down into the river. The roadway buckled under the strain, planks snapping free. The French were thrown back, some dead, some burned, some stunned, and then the shattered pontoon reared violently up from the water and its anchor chains snapped from the recoil. The bridge jerked downstream, throwing Harper off his feet. He and Sharpe clung to the planks. The bridge was juddering now, the river foaming and pushing at the broken gap as scraps of burning timber flamed on the roadway. Sharpe had been half dazed by the explosion and now found it hard to stand, but he staggered towards the British held shore and then the pontoon anchor chains began to snap, one after the other, and the more that parted, the more pressure was put on the remaining chains. The French cannon fired again and the air was filled with screaming grapeshot and one of the men carrying Brigadier Moon jerked forward with blood staining the back of his red coat. The man vomited blood and the brigadier bellowed in agony as he was dropped. The bridge began to shake like a bough in the wind and Sharpe had to fall to his knees and hold onto a plank to stop being thrown into the water. Musket balls were coming from the French company, but the range was too long for accuracy. The brigadier’s wounded horse was in the river, blood swirling as it struggled against the inevitable drowning.

      A shell struck the bridge’s far end. Sharpe decided the French gunners were trying to hold the British fugitives on the breaking bridge where they could be flayed by grapeshot. The French infantry had retreated to the eastern bank from where they fired musket volleys. Smoke was filling the valley. Water splashed across the pontoon where Sharpe and Harper clung, then it shook again and the roadway splintered and Sharpe feared the remnants of the bridge would overturn. A bullet slammed into a plank by his side. Another shell exploded at the bridge’s far end, leaving a puff of dirty smoke that drifted upstream where white birds flew in panic.

      Then suddenly the bridge quivered and went still. The central portion of six pontoons had broken free and was drifting down the river. There was a tug as a last anchor chain snapped, then the six pontoons were circling and floating as a barrel-load of grapeshot churned the water just behind them. Sharpe could kneel now. He loaded the rifle, aimed at the French infantry, and fired. Harper slung his empty volley gun and shot with his rifle instead. Rifleman Slattery and Rifleman Harris came to join them and sent two more bullets, both aimed at the French officers on horseback, but when the rifle smoke cleared the officers were still mounted. The pontoons were travelling fast in the current, accompanied by broken and charred timbers. Brigadier Moon was lying on his back, trying to prop himself up on his elbows. ‘What happened?’

      ‘We’re floating free, sir,’ Sharpe said. There were six men of the 88th on the makeshift raft and five of Sharpe’s riflemen from the South Essex. The rest of his company had either escaped the bridge before it broke or else were in the river. So now, with Sharpe and the brigadier, there were thirteen men floating downstream and over a hundred Frenchmen running down the bank, keeping level with them. Sharpe hoped that thirteen was not unlucky.

      ‘See if you can paddle to the western bank,’ Moon ordered. Some British officers, using captured horses, were on that bank and were trying to catch up with the raft.

      Sharpe had the men use their rifle and musket butts as paddles, but the pontoons were monstrously heavy and their efforts were futile. The raft drifted on southwards. A last shell plunged harmlessly into the river, its fuse extinguished instantly by the water. ‘Paddle, for God’s sake!’ Moon snapped.

      ‘They’re doing their best, sir,’ Sharpe said. ‘Broken leg, sir?’

      ‘Calf bone,’ Moon said, wincing, ‘heard it snap when the horse fell.’

      ‘We’ll straighten it up in a minute, sir,’ Sharpe said soothingly.

      ‘You’ll do no such bloody thing, man! You’ll get me to a doctor.’

      Sharpe was not certain how he was going to get Moon anywhere except straight down the river which was curving now about a great rock bluff on the Spanish bank. That bluff, at least, would check the French pursuit. He used his rifle as a paddle, but the raft defiantly took its own path. Once past the bluff the river widened, swung back to the west and the current slowed a little.

      The French pursuers were left behind and the British were finding the going hard on the Portuguese bank. The French cannon were still firing, but they could no longer see the raft so they had to be shooting at the British forces on that western bank. Sharpe tried to steer with a length of scorched, broken plank, not because he thought it would do any good, but to prevent Moon complaining. The makeshift rudder had no effect. The raft stubbornly stayed close to the Spanish bank. Sharpe thought about Bullen and felt a pulse of pure anger at the way in which the lieutenant had been taken prisoner. ‘I’m going to kill that bastard,’ he said aloud.

      ‘You’re going to do what?’ Moon demanded.

      ‘I’m going to kill that bastard Frenchman, sir. Colonel Vandal.’

      ‘You’re going to get me to the other bank, Sharpe, that’s what you’re going to do, and you’re going to do it quickly.’

      At which point, with a shudder and a lurch, the pontoons ran aground.

      The crypt lay beneath the cathedral. It was a labyrinth hacked from the rock on which Cadiz defied the sea, and in deeper holes beneath the crypt’s flagged floor the dead bishops of Cadiz waited for the resurrection.

      Two flights of stone steps descended to the crypt, emerging into a large chapel that was a round chamber twice the height of a man and thirty paces wide. If a man stood in the chamber’s centre and clapped his hands once the noise would sound fifteen times. It was a crypt of echoes.

      Five caverns opened from the chapel. One led to a smaller round chapel at the furthest end of the labyrinth, while the other four flanked the big chamber. The four were deep and dark, and they were connected to each other by a hidden passageway that circled the whole crypt. None of the caverns was decorated. The cathedral above might glitter with candlelight and shine with marble and have painted saints and monstrances of silver and candlesticks of gold, but the crypt was plain stone. Only the altars had colour. In the smaller chapel a Virgin gazed sadly down the long passage to where, across the wider chamber, her son hung on a silver cross in never-ending pain.

      It was deep night. The cathedral was empty. The last priest had folded his scapular and gone home. The women who haunted the altars had been ushered out, the floor had been swept and the doors locked. Candles still burned, and the red light of the eternal presence glowed under the scaffolding which ringed the crossing where the transept met the nave. The cathedral was unfinished. The sanctuary with its high altar had yet to be built, the dome was half made and the bell towers not even started.

      Father Montseny had a key to one of the eastern doors. The key scraped in the lock and the hinges squealed when he pushed the door open. He came with six men. Two of them stayed close to the unlocked cathedral door. They stood in shadow, hidden, both with loaded muskets and orders to use them only if things became desperate. ‘This is a night for knives,’ Montseny told the men.

      ‘In the cathedral?’ one of the men asked nervously.

      ‘I will give you absolution for any sins,’ Montseny said, ‘and the men who must die here are heretics. They are Protestants, English. God will be gladdened by their deaths.’

      He took the remaining four men to the crypt and, once in the main chamber, he placed candles on the floor and lit them. The light flickered on the shallow-domed ceiling. He put two men in one of the chambers to the east while he, with the remaining pair, waited in the darkness of the chamber opposite. ‘No noise, now!’ he warned them. ‘We wait.’

      The English came early as Father Montseny had supposed they would. He heard the distant squeal of the hinges as they pushed open the unlocked door. He heard their footsteps coming down the cathedral’s long nave and he knew that the two men he had left

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