Sharpe's Rifles

CHAPTER 12

At night the men would sing around the fire in the courtyard. They did not sing the rumbustious marching songs which could make the miles melt beneath hard boots, but the soft, melancholic tunes of home. They sang of the girls left behind, of mothers, of children, of home.

Each night there was the flicker of campfires in the deep valley beneath the ramparts where Vivar’s volunteers made their encampment. The volunteers came from throughout the Mouromorto domains. They bivouacked where chestnuts grew beside the stream in a sheltered crook of the hill, and they made wood and turf huts. They were peasants who obeyed the ancient call to arms, just as their ancestors had shouldered a scythe blade and marched to face the Moors. Such men would not leave their womenfolk behind, and at night the skirted shapes flickered between the fires and the children cried from the turf huts. Sharpe heard Harper warn the Riflemen against the temptation of the women. “One touch,” he said, “and I’ll crack your skull open like a bloody egg.” There was no trouble, and Sharpe marvelled at the ease with which Harper had assumed his unwanted authority.

By day there was work. Hard work, urgent work, to fashion a victory from defeat. The priests drew a map of the city on which, in careful detail, Vivar plotted the French defences. News of the enemy preparations came daily, fetched to the hills by refugees who fled from the invader and told tales of arrests and killings.

The city was still bounded by the decayed walls of its mediaeval defences. Those walls were gone in places, and in others the houses had spilt outside to make suburbs, yet the French were basing their defence on the ancient line of ramparts. Where the stones had fallen they had made barricades. The defences were not fearsome; Santiago de Compostela was no frontier city, enwrapped in star-trace and ravelins, but the ramparts could still be a terrible obstacle to an infantry attack. “We attack just before dawn,” Vivar announced early in the week.

Sharpe grunted agreement. “What if they have picquets beyond the walls?”

“They will. We ignore them.”

Sharpe heard the first risk being taken, the first corner cut in this desperate lunge for an impossible victory. Vivar was relying on darkness and weariness to fuddle the wits of the French. Yet it would only take one soldier to stumble in the night, for his musket to spark and fire, and the whole attack would be betrayed. Vivar proposed attacking without loaded muskets. There would be time, he said, after the initial surprise for the men to load their guns. Sharpe, an infantryman who relied on his gun far more than a cavalryman like Vivar, hated the idea. Vivar pressed, but the most Sharpe would yield was that he would consider it.

The plans grew more detailed and, as they did, so Sharpe’s fears gathered like dark clouds looming on the skyline. It was easy to win a victory on paper. There were no dogs to bark, no stones to strip a man, no rain to soak powder, and the enemy performed as dozily as Vivar could wish; on paper. “They’ll know we’re coming?” Sharpe asked him.

“They’ll suspect we’re coming,” Vivar allowed. The French could hardly have failed to hear of the gathering in the hills, though they might well dismiss such a threat as negligible. They had, after all, broken the armies of Spain and Britain, so what did they have to fear from a few peasants? Yet the Count of Mouromorto and Colonel de l’Eclin would know exactly what ambition spurred Bias Vivar, and they were both in Santiago. The refugees confirmed it. Marshal Ney’s cavalry had taken the city and then ridden back to Corunna to join Marshal Soult, leaving two thousand French cavalrymen inside the circuit of broken walls.

They had not been left there to stop an ancient banner reaching a shrine, but rather to collect forage from the coastal valleys of Galicia. Having thrown the British out of Spain, Marshal Soult was now planning to march south. His officers, bragging in the taverns of Corunna, spoke openly of their plans, and those words were faithfully retailed to Vivar. The French, once their wounded and frostbitten ranks were mended, would turn south on Portugal. They would conquer that country and expel the British from Lisbon. The coast of Europe would thus be sealed against British trade, and the Emperor’s stranglehold would be complete.

Soult’s route south would lead through Santiago de Com-postela and thus he had ordered that the city become his forward supply base. His army would collect those supplies to fuel its southern attack. French cavalry was aggressively patrolling the countryside in search of the food and fodder which, the refugees told Vivar, was being stockpiled in houses about the cathedral’s plaza. “So you see,” Vivar said to Sharpe on a night later in the week when they met as usual to stare at the city’s map and hone their plan of assault, “you have a proper reason for attacking, Lieutenant.”

“Proper?”

“You can claim that you are not just humouring a mad Spaniard. You are protecting your Lisbon garrison by destroying French supplies. Is that not true?”

But Sharpe was in no mood for such reassurance. He stared at the city’s plan, imagining the French sentries staring into the night. “They’ll know we’re coming.” Sharpe could not rid himself of the fear of the enemy’s preparedness.

“But not where we’ll attack, nor when.”

“I wish de l’Eclin wasn’t there.”

Vivar scorned his fears. “You think Imperial Guards don’t sleep?”

Sharpe ignored the question. “He isn’t there to collect forage. His job is to take the gonfalon, and he knows we’ll bring it to him. Whatever we plan, Major, he’s already thought of. He’s waiting for us! He’s ready for us!”

“You’re frightened of him.” Vivar leaned against the wall of the tower room where the map was kept. Firelight flickered in the courtyard below where a Spaniard sang a slow, sad song.

“I’m frightened of him,” Sharpe confirmed, “because he’s good. Too good.”

“He’s only good in attack. He can’t defend! When you attacked his ambush, and I attacked him in the farmyard, he wasn’t so clever, was he?”

“No,” Sharpe allowed.

“And now he’s trying to defend a city! He’s a chasseur, a hunter like a Cazador, and he’s no good at defence.” Vivar would brook no defeatism. “Of course we’ll win! Thanks to your ideas, we’ll win.”

The praise was calculated to elicit enthusiasm from Sharpe who had suggested an inside-out stratagem for the assault. The attack would not try to take the city house by house, or street by street, but instead it would strike fast and hard for the city’s centre. Then, split into ten parties, one party for each of the roads that broke the circuit of the ancient defences, the attackers would drive the French outwards towards the open country.“‘Let them get away!” Sharpe had argued. “So long as you take the city.”

If they took the city, which Sharpe doubted, they could hope to hold it for no more than thirty-six hours. Soult’s infantry, marching from Corunna and reinforced with the superb French artillery, would soon make mincemeat of the Major’s men. “I only need a day,” Vivar hesitated. “We capture it at dawn, we find the traitors by noon, we destroy the supplies, and that night we unfurl the gonfalon. The next day we leave in glory.”

Sharpe went to the narrow window. Bats, woken from their winter’s sleep by the arrival of soldiers in the fortress, flickered in the red light. The hills were dark. Somewhere on those black slopes Sergeant Harper led a patrol of Riflemen on a long, looping march. The patrol was not just to search for a bivouacking French cavalry patrol, but also to keep the men hard and accustom them to the vagaries of marching at night. All of Vivar’s small force, including the half-trained volunteers, would have to make such a journey and, having seen what chaos a night march could inflict on troops, Sharpe flinched inwardly. He thought, too, of the dreadful odds. There were two thousand French cavalrymen in Santiago de Compostela. Not all would be there when Vivar attacked; some would be bivouacking in the farmlands which they pillaged, but there would still be a mighty preponderance of enemy.

Against whom would march fifty Riflemen, one hundred and fifty Cazadores of whom only a hundred had horses, and close to three hundred half-trained volunteers.

Madness. Sharpe turned on the Spaniard. “Why don’t you wait till the French have marched south?”

“Because to wait wouldn’t make a story which will be told in every Spanish tavern. Because I have a brother who must die. Because, if I wait, I will be thought as spineless as the other officers who’ve fled south. Because I’ve sworn to do it. Because I cannot believe in defeat. No. We go soon, we go very soon.” Vivar was almost speaking to himself, staring down at the charcoal marks which showed the French defences. “Just as soon as our volunteers are ready, we go-‘

Sharpe said nothing. The truth was that he now believed that the attack was madness, but it was a madness he had helped to plan and sworn to support.

Just as the innocent scrabbling of an unfledged owlet in an attic could be turned by a child’s dread into the night-steps of a fearful monster, so Sharpe let his fears feed and grow as the days passed.

He could tell no one of his certainty that the assault would end in disaster. He did not want to earn Vivar’s scorn by such an admission, and there was no one else in whom he could confide. Harper, like the Spanish Major, seemed imbued by a blithe confidence that the attack would work. “Mind you, sir, the Major will have to wait another week.”

The thought of postponement spurted hope into Sharpe. “He’ll have to wait?”

“Those volunteers, sir. They’re not ready, not ready at all.” Harper, who had taken on himself the job of training the volunteers in the art of platoon fire, sounded genuinely concerned.

“Have you told the Major?”

“He’s coming to inspect them in the morning, sir.”

“I’ll be there.“

And in the morning, in a rain which darkened the rocks and dripped from the trees, Sharpe went down to the valley where Lieutenant Davila and Sergeant Harper demonstrated to Bias Vivar the results of a week’s training.

It was a disaster. Vivar had asked merely that the three hundred men be taught the rudiments of musket drill; that, like a half Battalion, they could stand in three ranks and fire the rippling platoon volleys which could gut an attacking force.

But the volunteers could not hold the rigid, tight ranks which concentrated the musket fire into deadly channels. The trouble began as the men in the rear rank instinctively stepped backwards to give themselves adequate space in which to wield their long ramrods, while the centre rank also took a step back to distance itself from the men in front, and thus the whole formation was shaken ragged. Under fire, the instinct would be for that backward movement to continue and, in just a few volleys, the French would have these men running. Nor were they even training with ammunition, for there was not enough powder and shot for that. They merely went through the musket motions. How the front rank would react to the percussion of the rear ranks’ musket shots in their ears, Sharpe dared not think.

The ‘muskets’ were any gun that a man could contrive to bring. There were ancient fowling pieces, musketoons, horse-pistols, and even a matchlock. Some of the miners did not even have guns, carrying their picks instead. Doubtless such men would make fearsome fighters if they could first close on their enemy, but the French would never let them. They would make mincemeat of these men.

It was not that the volunteers lacked bravery; their very presence in this remote valley attested to their willingness to fight, but they could not be turned into soldiers. It took months to make an infantryman. It took a steel-hard discipline to enable a man to stand in the battle-line and face the massed drums and shining bayonets of a French attack. Natural bravery or a cocksure stubbornness were no substitutes for training; a fact the Emperor had proved again and again as his veterans had destroyed Europe’s ill-trained armies.

A French infantry attack was a thing of awe. French troops did not attack in line, but in vast columns. Rank after rank of men, massed tight, with bayonets glinting above their heads, marched to the beat of the boy drummers who were hidden in their midst. Men fell at the front and flanks as skirmishers bit at the column; sometimes a cannon ball flayed through the packed ranks, yet always the French closed up and marched forward. The sight was fearsome, the sense of power was terrifying, and even the bravest men could break at the mere sight unless months of training had taught them to stand hard.

“But we won’t be facing infantry.” Vivar tried to find a scrap of hope in the face of disaster. “Only cavalry.”

“No infantry?” Sharpe sounded doubtful.

“There’s a few to protect the French headquarters,” Vivar said dismissively.

“But if they shake out like that,” Sharpe gestured at the dispirited volunteers, “they’ll never stand against cavalry, let alone infantry.”

“The French cavalry are tired.” Vivar was clearly piqued by Sharpe’s insistent pessimism. “They’ve worn their horses to the bone.”

“We should wait,” Sharpe said. “Wait till they’ve marched south.”

“You think they won’t garrison Galicia?” Vivar was stubborn in his refusal to wait. He gestured for Davila and larper to join him. How long before the volunteers would >e hammered into shape?

Davila, no infantryman, looked at Harper. The Irishman hrugged. “It’s desperate, sir. Bloody desperate.”

Harper’s response was so unlike his usual cheerfulness hat it depressed even Vivar. The Spaniard only needed: hese volunteers brought to a minimum of efficiency before aunching his attack, but the Irishman’s gloom seemed to Dresage indefinite postponements, if not outright abandonment.

Harper cleared his throat. “But what I don’t understand, sir, is why you’re trying to turn them into soldiers at all.”

“To win a battle?” Sharpe suggested acidly.

“If it comes to a straight scrap between these lads and French Dragoons, we’re not going to win,” Harper paused, “begging your pardon, sir.” None of the officers spoke. His voice took on a note of authority, like a practical man demonstrating a simplicity to fools. “What’s the point in training them to fight an open battle when that’s not what you’re expecting? Why do they need to learn platoon fire? These lads have to fight in the streets, sir. That’s just gutter fighting, so it is, and I’ll wager they’re as good at that as any Frenchman. Get them into the city, then set them loose. I wouldn’t want to face the bastards.”

“Ten trained men can see off a rabble.” Sharpe, hearing his hopes of a postponement being dashed by Harper’s words, spoke harshly.

“Aye, but we’ve got two hundred trained men,” Harper said, “and we just push them to wherever there’s real trouble.”

“My God!” Vivar was suddenly elated. “Sergeant, you are right!”

“Nothing, sir.” Harper was obviously delighted at the praise.

“You are right!” Vivar slapped the Irishman’s shoulder. “I should have seen it. The people, not the army, will free Spain, so why turn the people into an army? And we forget, gentlemen, just what forces will be on our side in the city.

The citizens themselves! They’ll rise and fight for us, and we would never think of refusing their help because they’re not trained!“ Vivar’s optimism, released by Harper’s words, was in full flood. ”So, we can go soon. Gentlemen, we are ready!“

So now, Sharpe thought, even the training would be abandoned. An outnumbered rabble would march on a city. Vivar made it all sound so easy, like filling a pit with rats then letting in the terriers. Yet the pit was a city, and the rats were waiting.

Vivar’s volunteers might not be trained soldiers, but the Major insisted on swearing them into the service of the Spanish Crown. The priests conducted the ceremony, and each man’s name was solemnly recorded on paper as a duly sworn soldier of His Most Christian Majesty, Ferdinand VII. Now the French could have no excuse for treating Vivar’s volunteers as civilian criminals.

Yet soldiers needed uniforms, and there was no dyed cloth to make bright coats, nor any of the other accoutrements of a soldier like shakos, belts, pouches, or gaiters. But there was plenty of coarse brown homespun to be had, and from that humble material Vivar ordered simple tunics to be made. There was also some white linen, fetched from a nunnery twenty miles away, which was made into sashes. It was a very crude uniform, fastened with loops about bone buttons, but, if any rules of war could be applied to Vivar’s expedition, the brown tunics passed as soldiers’ coats.

The wives of the volunteers cut and sewed the brown tunics while Louisa Parker, high in the fortress, helped the Riflemen mend their green jackets. The coats were ragged, torn, threadbare and scorched, yet the girl proved to have an extraordinary skill with the needle. She took Sharpe’s green jacket and, in less than a day, made it seem almost new. “I even ironed out the bugs,” she said happily, and folded back a seam at the collar to prove that the lice had truly been exterminated by the stub of a broken sabre which she had used as a flatiron.

“Thank you.” Sharpe took the coat and saw how she had turned the collar, darned the sleeves, and patched the black facings. His trousers could not be restored to their original grey, so she had sewn patches of brown homespun over the worst rents. “You look like a harlequin, Lieutenant.”

“A fool?”

It was the evening of the day on which Harper had convinced Vivar of the uselessness of training the volunteers. Sharpe, as on previous evenings, walked the ramparts with Louisa. He prized these moments. As the fears of defeat grew on him, these snatched conversations were passages of hope. He liked to stare at the firelight reflected from her face, he liked the gentleness which sometimes softened her vivacity. She was gentle now as she leaned against the parapet. “Do you suppose my uncle and aunt are in Santiago?”

“Perhaps.”

Louisa was swathed in a Cazador’s scarlet cloak and wore a close fitting bonnet. “Perhaps my aunt won’t take me back. Perhaps she will be so scandalized by my terrible behaviour that I will be cast from chapel and home.”

“Is that likely?”

“I don’t know.” Louisa was wistful. “I sometimes suspect that’s what I want to happen.”

“Want?” Sharpe was surprised.

“To be cast adrift in the middle of the biggest adventure in the world? Why ever not?” Louisa laughed. “When I was a child, Lieutenant, I was told it was perilous to cross the village green in case the gypsies took me. And if soldiers ever appeared in the village—‘ she shook her head to demonstrate the enormity of such an occasion’s danger. ”Now I’m in the middle of a war and accompanied only by soldiers!“ She smiled at the predicament, then gave Sharpe a look which mingled curiosity and warmth. ”Don Bias says you’re the best soldier he’s ever known.“

Sharpe thought it odd that she used Vivar’s Christian name, then supposed it was the polite usage of an hidalgo. ‘He exaggerates.“

“What he actually said, ”Louisa spoke more slowly, and Sharpe sensed she was delivering a message to him, “was that if you had more confidence in yourself, you’d be the best. I suppose I shouldn’t have told you that?” He wondered if the criticism were true and Louisa, mistaking his silence for hurt, apologized.

“I’m sure it is true,” Sharpe said hastily.

“Do you like being a soldier?”

“I always dreamed of having a farm. God knows why, because I know nothing of the business. I’d probably plant the turnips upside down.” He stared at the campfires in the deep valley; tiny sparks of warmth and light in an immensity of cold darkness. “I imagined I’d have a couple of horses in a stable, a stream to fish,” he paused, shrugged, “children.”

Louisa smiled. “I used to dream of living in a great castle. There would be secret passages, dungeons, and mysterious horsemen bringing messages in the night. I think I should have preferred to have lived in the days of Queen Elizabeth. Catholic priests in the shrubbery and Spaniards in the channel? Except those old enemies are now our friends, aren’t they?”

“Even the priests?”

“They aren’t the ogres I thought they were.” She was silent for a second. “But if you’re brought up too firmly in one persuasion then you’re bound to be curious about the enemy, are you not? And we English were always taught to hate Catholics.”

“I wasn’t.”

“But you know what I mean. Aren’t you curious about the French?”

“Not really.”

Louisa frowned. “I find myself curious about the Catholics. I even find myself with a most unProtestant affection for them now. I’m sure Mr Bufford would be scandalized.”

“Will he ever know?” Sharpe asked.

Louisa shrugged. “I shall have to describe my adventures to him, shall I not? And I shall have to confess that the Inquisition didn’t torture me or try to burn me at the stake.” She stared into the night. “One day this will all seem like a dream?”

“Will it?”

“Not for you,” she said ruefully. “But one day I will find it hard to believe that any of this even happened. I will be Mrs Bufford of Godalming, a most respectably dull lady.”

“You could stay here,” Sharpe said, and felt immensely brave for saying it.

“Could I?” Louisa turned to him. There was a glow to their left where a Rifleman drew on his pipe, but they both ignored it. She turned away and traced some indeterminate pattern on the parapet. “Are you saying that the British army will stay in Portugal?”

The question surprised Sharpe, who thought he had broken through to a more intimate layer of conversation. “I don’t know.”

“I think the Lisbon garrison must have gone already,” Louisa said flatly. “And if not, what possible use would such a small garrison be when the French march south? No, Lieutenant, the Emperor has taught us a smart lesson, and I fear we’ll not dare risk our army again.”

Sharpe wondered where she had gained such firm opinions on strategy. “What I meant when I said you could stay here…“ he began clumsily.

“Forgive me, I know,” Louisa interrupted him quickly, and there was a very awkward silence between them until she spoke again. “I do know what you’re saying, and I am very sensible of the honour you do me, but I do not want you to ask anything of me.” The formal words were said in a very small voice.

Sharpe had wanted to say that he would offer her everything that was in his power. It might not be much; in terms of money it was nothing, yet in slavish adoration it was everything. He had not said that, yet Louisa, out of his incoherence, had understood everything and now he felt embarrassed and rejected.

Louisa must have sensed that embarrassment, and regretted causing it. “I don’t want you to ask anything of me yet, Lieutenant. Will you give me until the city’s captured?”

“Of course.” Hope flared again in Sharpe, to mingle with the shame left by his clumsy proposal. He supposed he had spoken too soon, and too impetuously, yet Louisa’s evident desire to stay in Spain and avoid the fate of matrimony to Mr Bufford had provoked his words.

The sentry paced further away from them, the smell of his tobacco drifting back along the ramparts. The fire in the courtyard blazed bright as a man threw a log onto it. Louisa turned to watch the sparks whirl up to the height of the tower’s crenellations. From somewhere deep in the fortress came the wailing noise of one of the Galician bagpipes that inevitably provoked cries of feigned horror from Sharpe’s men. She smiled at the sound of the dutiful protests, then frowned accusingly at Sharpe. “You don’t think Don Bias will succeed in taking the city, do you?”

“Of course I…“

“No,” she interrupted him. “I listen to you. You think there are too many Frenchmen in Santiago. And in private you say that this is Don Bias’s madness.”

Sharpe was somewhat disconcerted by the accusation. He had not admitted his real fears to Louisa, yet she had truly perceived them. “It is madness,” he said defensively. “Even Major Vivar says it is.”

“He says it is God’s madness, which is different,” Louisa said in gentle reproof. “But it would work better, wouldn’t it, if there were less Frenchmen in the city?”

“It would work better,” Sharpe said drily, “if I had four Battalions of good redcoats, two batteries of nine pounders, and two hundred more Rifles.”

“Suppose,” Louisa began, then checked her.words.

“Go on.”

“Suppose the French thought that you had marched to a hiding place near the city. A place where you planned to wait during the day so you could attack just after dark? And suppose,” she hurried on to prevent him interrupting, “that the French knew where you were hiding?”

Sharpe shrugged. “They’d send men out to slaughter us, of course.”

“And if you were in another place entirely,” Louisa spoke now with the same enthusiasm with which she had greeted the mystery of the strongbox, “you could attack while they were out of the city!”

“It’s all very complicated,” Sharpe said in muted criticism.

“But supposing I was to tell them that?”

Sharpe, astonished, said nothing. Then he shook his head abruptly. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

“No, truly! If I went to Santiago,” Louisa rode over his protest by raising her voice, “if I went there and said that’s what you were doing, they’d believe me! I’d say that you wouldn’t let me come with you, and that you insisted I had to go on my own to Portugal, but I preferred to find my aunt and uncle. They’d believe me!”

“Never!” Sharpe wanted to stop this outburst of nonsense. “Major Vivar’s already played that trick on them. He spread rumours that he’d travelled with me, which sent the French haring off south. They won’t fall for it again.” He regretted extinguishing such enthusiasm, but her idea was quite hopeless. “Even if you tell the French that we’re hiding somewhere, they won’t send cavalry out to find us until after dawn. And by then it will be too late to attack. If there was a way of stripping the garrison at night…“ He shrugged, intimating that there was no way.

“It was just a notion.” Louisa, chastened, stared at the bats which flickered past the ramparts in the night.

Tt was kind of you to want to help.“

“I do want to help.”

“Just by being here, you help.” Sharpe tried to sound gallant. The sentry turned at the rampart’s end and paced slowly back towards them. Sharpe sensed that the girl would retire to her room at any moment and, though he risked further embarrassment, he could not bear to let the moment pass without reinforcing his thin hopes. “Did I offend you earlier?” he asked clumsily.

“Don’t think such a thing. I am flattered.” Louisa stared at the lights in the deep valley.

“I can’t believe that we’re going to run away from Spain.” If that was Louisa’s objection to accepting him, then Sharpe would scotch it, not because he knew that the Lisbon garrison would stay in place, but because he could not accept that the British intervention had been defeated. “We’re going to stay. The Lisbon garrison will be reinforced, and we’ll attack again!” He paused, then plunged closer to the heart of the matter. “And there are officers’ wives with the army. Some live in Lisbon, some stay a day or so behind the army, but it isn’t unusual.”

“Mr Sharpe.” Louisa laid a gloved hand on his sleeve. “Give me time. I know you’d tell me that I should seize the moment, but I don’t know if that moment is now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“There is nothing to regret.” She gathered her cloak about her. “Will you let me retire? I am quite wearied by sewing.”

“Goodnight, miss.”

No man, Sharpe thought, felt as foolish as a man rejected, yet he persuaded himself that he had not been rejected, rather that she had promised an answer after Santiago de Compostela was taken. It was his impatience which demanded an answer sooner. It was an impatience that would obsess him, and drive him onto a city from which he would return, triumphant or defeated, to receive the answer he craved.

The next day was a Sunday. Mass was celebrated in the fort’s courtyard, and afterwards a group of horsemen arrived from the north. They were fierce-looking men, festooned with weapons, who treated Vivar with a wary courtesy. Later he told Sharpe that the men were rateros, highwaymen, who for the moment had turned their violence against the common enemy.

The rateros brought news of a French messenger, captured with his escort four days before, who had carried a coded despatch. The despatch was lost, but the gist of the message had been extracted from the French officer before he died. The Emperor was impatient. Soult had waited too long. Portugal must fall and the British, if they still lingered in Lisbon, must be expelled before February was done. Marshal Ney was to stay in the north and clear away all hostile forces from the mountains. So, even if Vivar waited till Soult was gone, there would still be French troops in Santiago de Compostela.

But if Vivar attacked now, while Soult was still twelve leagues to the north, and while the precious fodder was still stored in the city, then a double blow could be struck: the supplies could be destroyed, and the gonfalon unfurled.

Vivar thanked the horsemen, then went to the fortress chapel where, for an hour, he prayed alone.

When he emerged, he found Sharpe. “We march tomorrow.”

“Not today?” If haste was so desperately needed, why wait the extra twenty-four hours?

But Vivar was adamant. “Tomorrow. We march tomorrow morning.”

The next dawn, before he had shaved, and before he had even swallowed a mug of the hot bitter tea which the Riflemen loved so much, Sharpe discovered why Vivar had waited that extra day. The Spaniard was trying to deceive the French with another false trail, to which end, the previous night, he had sent Louisa from the fortress. Her room was empty, her bed lay cold, and she was gone.