Sharpe's Rifles

CHAPTER 16

For Lieutenant Richard Sharpe to aspire to Miss Louisa Parker was, in its way, as daring as Vivar’s plan to capture an enemy-held city. She came from a respectable family which, though it sometimes trembled on the edges of genteel poverty, was far above Sharpe’s ignoble station. He was a peasant by birth, an officer by accident, and a pauper by profession.

And what, Sharpe asked himself, had he expected of the girl? Did he imagine that Louisa would willingly tramp behind the campaigning army, or find some squalid home near the barracks and eke out his inadequate pay on scraps of meat and day-old bread? Was she to have abandoned silk dresses for woollen shifts? Or would he have expected her to follow him to the West Indian garrison where the yellow fever wiped out whole Regiments? He told himself that his hopes of the girl had ever been as stupid as they were unrealistic, yet that did not heal the sudden hurt. He told himself that he acted childishly for even feeling the hurt, but that did not make it any easier to bear.

He plunged from the plaza’s wintry sunshine into the foetid reek of an alley where, beneath an arcade, he found a wineshop. Sharpe had no money to pay for the wine, but his demeanour and the hammer of his hand on the counter persuaded the tavern keeper to fill a big flask from the barrel. Sharpe took the flask and a tin cup to an alcove at the back of the room. The few customers, huddled round the fire and seeing his bitter face, ignored him; all but for a whore who, at the tavern keeper’s bidding, edged onto the bench beside the foreign soldier. For a second Sharpe was tempted to push her away, but instead he beckoned for a second mug.

The tavern keeper wiped the mug on his apron and set it on the table. A sacking curtain was looped back over the alcove’s arch and he took hold of it and raised an interrogatory eyebrow.

“Yes,” Sharpe said harshly. ”Si.“

The curtain dropped, plunging Sharpe and the girl into dark shadow. She giggled, put her arms about his neck, and whispered some Spanish endearment until he silenced her with a kiss.

The curtain was snatched back, making the girl squeal in alarm.

Bias Vivar stood in the archway. “It’s very simple to follow a foreigner through Spanish streets. Did you hope to hide from me, Lieutenant?”

Sharpe put his left arm around the whore and pulled her towards him so that her head leaned on his shoulder. He moved his handle cup her breast. “I’m busy, sir.”

Vivar ignored the provocation, sitting instead on the bench opposite Sharpe. He rolled a cigar across the table. “By now,” he said, “Colonel de l’Eclin must have realized that Miss Parker lied to him?”

“I’m sure,” Sharpe said carelessly.

“He will be returning. Soon he will meet a fugitive from the city and he will learn the extent of his mistake.”

“Yes.” Sharpe tugged at the laces of the whore’s bodice. The girl made a desultory effort to stop him, but he insisted, and succeeded in pulling her dress apart.

Vivar’s voice was very patient. “So I would expect de l’Eclin to attack us, wouldn’t you?”

“I suppose he will.” Sharpe put his hand beneath the girl’s unlaced dress and dared Bias Vivar to make a protest.

“The defence is ready?” Vivar asked in a tone of gentle reasonableness. The tavern whore might not have existed for all the notice he took of her.

Sharpe did not answer at once. He poured himself wine with his free hand, drank the cupful, and poured more. “Why in Christ’s name don’t you just get your damned nonsense over with, Vivar? We’re lingering in this bloody deathtrap of a city just so you can work a conjuring trick in the cathedral. So do what you have to do quickly, then get the hell out!”

Vivar nodded as though Sharpe’s words made sense. “Let me see now. I’ve sent Cazadores on patrol north and south. It will take me two hours to recall them, maybe longer. We have yet to find every man in the city who has cooperated with the French, but the searches go on and may take another hour. Are all the supplies destroyed?”

“There are no bloody supplies. The bloody crapauds took them all into the palace yesterday.”

Vivar flinched at the news. “I feared as much. I saw great piles of grain and hay when I looked into the cellars of the palace. That is a pity.”

“So do your miracle, and run.”

Vivar shrugged. “I’m waiting for some churchmen to arrive, and I’ve sent men to destroy the nearest bridges over the Ulla, which cannot be completed till late this afternoon. I don’t really see that haste is so very feasible. We should be ready in the cathedral by sundown, and we can certainly leave tonight rather than tomorrow, but I do think we must be ready to defend the city against de l’Eclin, don’t you?”

Sharpe tipped the whore’s face to his own and kissed her. He knew he was behaving boorishly, yet the hurt was strong and the jealousy like a fever.

Vivar sighed. “If Colonel de l’Eclin has failed to take the city back by nightfall, then he will be blinded by the darkness and we shall simply walk away. That’s why I think it best to wait till nightfall before we leave, don’t you?”

“Or is it so you can unfurl your magic banner in the dark? Miracles are best done in darkness, aren’t they? So that no one can see the bloody trickery.”

Vivar smiled. “I know my magic banner is not as important to you, Lieutenant, as it is to me, but that is why I am here. And when it is unfurled I want as many witnesses as can be assembled. The news must travel out from this city; it must go to every town and village in all of Spain. Even in the far south they must know that Santiago has stirred in his tomb and that the sword is drawn again.”

Sharpe, despite all his scepticism, shuddered.

Vivar, if he saw Sharpe’s betrayal of emotion, pretended not to notice. “I estimate that Colonel de I’Eclin will be here within the next two hours. He will approach from the south of the city, but I suspect he will attack from the west in hope that the setting sun dazzles us. Will you undertake to conduct the defence?”

“Suddenly you need the bloody English, do you?” Sharpe’s jealousy flared vivid. “You think the British are running away, don’t you? That we’ll abandon Lisbon. That your precious Spain will have to beat the French without us. Then bloody well do it without me!”

For a second Vivar’s immobility suggested a proud fury that might snap like Sharpe’s temper. The whore shrank back, expecting violence, but when Vivar did move it was only to reach across the table to pick up Sharpe’s flask of wine. His voice was very controlled and very placid. “You once told me, Lieutenant, that no one expected officers who had risen from the ranks of Britain’s army to be successful. What was it you said? That the drink destroyed them?” He paused, but Sharpe made no answer. “I think you could become a soldier of great repute, Lieutenant. You understand battle. You become calm when other men become frightened. Your men, even when they disliked you, followed you because they understood you would give them victory. You’re good. But perhaps you’re not good enough. Perhaps you’re so full of self-pity that you’ll destroy yourself with drink or,” Vivar at last deigned to notice the straggly-haired girl who leaned against the Rifleman, “with the pox.”

Throughout this lecture, Sharpe had stared at the Spaniard as if wishing to draw the big sword and slash across the table.

Vivar stood and tipped the wine flask to pour what was left of its contents onto the floor rushes. Then he dropped it contemptuously.

“Bastard,” Sharpe said.

“Does that make me as good as you?” Vivar again paused to let Sharpe reply, and again Sharpe kept silent. The Spaniard shrugged. “You feel sorry for yourself, Lieutenant, because you were not born to the officer class. But have you ever thought that those of us who were so fortunate sometimes regret it? Do you think we’re not frightened by the tough, bitter men from the rookeries and hovels? Do you think we don’t look at men like you and feel envy?”

“You patronizing bastard.”

Vivar ignored the insult. “When my wife and children died, Lieutenant, I decided there was nothing to live for. I took to drink. I now thank God that a man cared enough for me to give me patronizing advice.” He picked up his tasselled hat. “If I have given you cause to hate me, Lieutenant, I regret it. It was not done purposefully; indeed you gave me to believe that I would not cause any bitterness between us.” It was as near as Vivar had come to a reference to Louisa. “Now all I ask is that you help me finish this job. There’s a hill to the west of the city which should be occupied. I shall put Davila under your command with a hundred Cazadores. I’ve reinforced the picquets to the south and west. And thank you for everything you have done so far. If you had not taken that first barricade, we would now be fleeing in the hills with lancers stabbing at our backsides.” Vivar stepped free of the bench. “Let me know when your defences are in place and I shall make an inspection.” He disdained any acknowledgement, but merely strode from the wineshop.

Sharpe picked up his winecup which was still full. He stared at it. He had threatened his own men with punishment if any became worse for drink, yet now he wished to God that he could drown his disappointment in an alcoholic haze. Instead he threw the cup away and stood. The girl, seeing her earnings lost, whimpered.

“Damn them all,” Sharpe said. He tore at two of the remaining silver buttons on his breeches, ripping a great swatch of the cloth away with the buttons which he dropped into the girl’s lap. “Damn them all.” He snatched up his weapons and left.

The tavern keeper looked at the girl who was re-lacing her bodice. He shrugged sympathetically. “The English, yes? Mad. All mad. Heretics. Mad.” He made the sign of the cross to defend himself from the heathen evil. “Like all soldiers,” the tavern keeper said. “Just mad.”

Sharpe walked with Sergeant Harper to the west of the city and forced himself to forget both Louisa and the shame of his behaviour in the tavern. Instead he tried to judge what approach the French might choose if they attacked Santiago de Compostela.

The Dragoons had gone to Padron, and the road from that small town approached Santiago from the south-west. That made an attack from the south or west the likeliest possibility. De l’Eclin could emulate Vivar and make an assault from the north, but Sharpe doubted if the chasseur would choose that approach because it needed surprise. The ground to the city’s east was broken, and the most easily defended. The land to the south was hedged and ditched, while the ground to the west, from where Vivar believed the attack would come, was open and inviting like an English common field.

The western open ground was flanked to the south by the low hill which Vivar wanted garrisoned and on which Sharpe’s Riflemen now waited for orders. The French, knowing the value of the hill, had chopped down most of the trees which had covered the high ground and made a crude fortification of brushwood jammed between the fallen trunks. Further west was dead ground where de l’Eclin’s Dragoons could assemble unseen. Sharpe stopped at the edge of that lower ground and stared back at the city. “We might have to hold the bloody place till after nightfall.”

Harper instinctively glanced to find the sun’s position. “It won’t be full dark for six hours,” he said pessimistically, “and it’ll be a slow dusk, sir. No damned clouds to hide us.”

“If God was on our side,” Sharpe essayed one of the stock jokes of the Regiment, “he’d have given the Baker rifle tits.”

Harper, recognizing from the feeble jest that Sharpe’s grim mood was passing, grinned dutifully. “Is it true about Miss Louisa, sir?” The question was asked very carelessly and without evident embarrassment, making Sharpe think that none of his men had suspected his attachment to the girl.

“It’s true.” Sharpe tried to sound as though he took little interest in the matter. “She’ll have to become a Catholic, of course.”

“There’s always room for another. Mind you,” Harper stared down into the dead ground as he spoke, “I never thought it was a good thing for a soldier to be married.”

“Why ever not?”

“You can’t dance if you’ve got one foot nailed to the bloody floor, can you now? But the Major isn’t a soldier like us, sir. Coming from that big castle!” Harper had clearly been mightily impressed by the wealth of Vivar’s family. “The Major’s a grand big fellow, so he is.”

“So what are we? The damned?”

“We’re that, sure enough, but we’re also Riflemen, sir. You and me, sir, we’re the best God-damned soldiers in the world.”

Sharpe laughed. Just weeks ago he had been bitterly at odds with his Riflemen, now they were on his side. He did not know how to acknowledge Harper’s compliment, so he resorted to a vague and meaningless cliche. “It’s a bloody odd world.”

“Difficult to do a good job in six days, sir,” Harper said wryly. “I’m sure God did his best, but where was the sense in putting Ireland plum next to England?”

“He probably knew you bastards needed smacking around.” Sharpe turned to look south. “But how the hell do we smack this French bastard back into his tracks?”

“If he attacks.”

“He’ll attack. He thinks he’s better than us, and he’s damned annoyed at being tricked again. He’ll attack.”

Sharpe walked to the southern edge of the common ground, then swivelled back to stare at the city. He was putting himself in de I’Eclin’s glossy boots, seeing what the Frenchman would see, trying to anticipate his plans.

Vivar was certain that de l’Eclin would come from the west, that the chasseur would wait till the setting sun was a blinding dazzle behind his charge, then launch his Dragoons across the open ground.

Yet, Sharpe reasoned, a cavalry charge was of dubious value to the French. It might sweep the Dragoons in glorious style to the city’s margin, but there the horses would baulk at walls and barricades, and the glory would be riven into blood and horror by the waiting muskets and rifles. De I’Eclin’s attack, just like Vivar’s, would best be done by infantry that could open the city to the cavalry’s fierce charge; and the best infantry approach was from the south.

Sharpe pointed to the south-western corner of the city. “That’s where he’ll make his attack.”

“After dark?”

“At dusk.” Sharpe frowned. “Maybe earlier.”

Harper followed him over a ditch and an embankment. The two Riflemen were walking towards a slew of buildings that straggled like a limb from the city’s south-western corner and which could shelter de I’Eclin’s men as they approached. “We’ll have to put men in the houses,” Harper said.

Sharpe seemed not to hear. “I don’t like it.”

“A thousand Dragoons? Who would?”

“De I’Eclin’s a clever bastard.” Sharpe was half-talking to himself. “A clever, clever bloody bastard. And he’s especially clever when he’s attacking.” He turned and stared at the city’s barricaded streets. The obstacles were manned by Cazadores and by the brown-coated volunteers who were piling brushwood into fires that could illuminate a night attack. They were doing, in fact, exactly what the French had done the night before, yet surely Colonel de l’Eclin would foresee all these preparations? So what would the Frenchman do? “He’s going to be bloody clever, Sergeant, and I don’t know how clever.”

“He can’t fly,” Harper said stoically, “and he doesn’t have time to dig a bloody tunnel, so he has to come in through one of the streets, doesn’t he?”

The stolid good sense made Sharpe suppose he was seeing danger where there was none. Better, he thought, to rely on his first instincts. “He’ll send his cavalry on a feint there,” he pointed to the smooth western ground, “and when he thinks we’re all staring that way, he’ll send dismounted men in from the south. They’ll be ordered to break that barricade,” he pointed to the street which led from the city to the church, “and his cavalry will swerve in behind them.”

Harper turned to judge for himself, and seemed to find Sharpe’s words convincing. “And so long as we’re on the hill or in those houses,” he nodded towards the straggling buildings that lay outside the defences, “we’ll murder the bastard.” The big Irishman picked up a sprig of laurel and twisted the pliant wood in his fingers. “But what really worries me, sir, is not holding the bastard off, but what happens when we withdraw? They’ll be flooding into those streets like devils on a spree, so they will.”

Sharpe was also worried about that moment of retreat. Once Vivar’s business in the cathedral was done, the signal would be given and a great mass of people would flee eastwards. There would be volunteers, Riflemen, Cazadores, priests, and whatever townspeople no longer cared to stay under French occupation; all jostling and running into the darkness. Vivar had planned to have his cavalry protect the retreat, but Sharpe knew what savage chaos could overtake his men in the streets when the French Dragoons realized that barricades had been abandoned. He shrugged. “We’ll just have to run like hell.”

“And that’s the truth,” Harper said gloomily. He tossed away the crumpled twig.

Sharpe stared at the twisted scrap of laurel. “Good God!”

“What have I done now?”

“Jesus wept!” Sharpe clicked his fingers. “I want half the men in those houses,” he pointed at the line of buildings which led from the south-western barricade, and enfiladed the southern approach to the city, “and the rest on the hill.” He began running towards the city. Til be back, Sergeant!“

“What’s up with him?” Hagman asked when the Sergeant returned to the hilltop.

“The doxie turned him down,” Harper said with evident satisfaction, “so you owes me a shilling, Dan. She’s marrying the Major, so she is.”

“I thought she was soft as lights on Mr Sharpe!” Hagman said ruefully.

“She’s got more sense than to marry him. He ain’t ready for a chain and shackle, is he? She needs someone a bit steady, she does.”

“But he was sotted on her.”

“He would be, wouldn’t he? He’ll fall in love with anything in a petticoat. I’ve seen his type before. Got the sense of a half-witted sheep when it comes to women.” Harper spat. “It’s a good job he’s got me to look after him now.”

“You!”

“I can handle him, Dan. Just as I can handle you lot. Right, you Protestant scum! The French are coming for supper, so let’s be getting ready for the bastards!”

Newly cleaned rifles pointed south and west. The green-jackets were waiting for the dusk and for the coming of a chasseur.

The idea buzzed in Sharpe’s head as he ran uphill towards the city centre. Colonel de l’Eclin could be clever, but so could the defenders. He stopped in the main plaza and asked a Cazador where Major Vivar might be. The cavalryman pointed to the smaller northern plaza beyond the bridge which joined the bishop’s palace to the cathedral. That plaza was still crammed with people, though instead of yelling defiance at the trapped Frenchmen, the crowd was now eerily quiet. Even the bells had fallen silent.

Sharpe elbowed his way through the crush and saw Vivar standing on a flight of steps which led to the cathedral’s northern transept. Louisa was with him. Sharpe wished she was not there. The memory of his boorish behaviour with the Spaniard embarrassed him, and he knew he should apologize, but the girl’s presence inhibited any such public repentance. Instead he shouted his idea as he forced his way up the crowded steps. “Caltrops!”

“Caltrops?” Vivar asked. Louisa, unable to translate the unfamiliar word, shrugged.

Sharpe had picked up two wisps of straw as he ran through the city and now, just as Harper had unwittingly twisted the laurel twig, Sharpe twisted the straw. “Caltrops! But we haven’t got much time! Can we get the blacksmiths working?”

Vivar stared at the straw, then swore for not thinking of the idea himself. “They’ll work!” He ran down the steps.

Louisa, left with Sharpe, looked at the twisted straw which still meant nothing to her. “Caltrops?”

Sharpe scooped some damp mud from the instep of his left boot and rolled it into a ball. He snapped the straw into four lengths, each about three inches long, and he stuck three of them into the mud ball to form a three-pointed star. He laid the star on the flat of his hand and pushed the fourth spike into the mud ball so that it stood vertically. “A caltrop,” he said.

Louisa shook her head. “I still don’t understand.”

“A medieval weapon made of iron. The cleverness of it is that, whatever way it falls, there’s always a spike sticking upwards.” He demonstrated by turning the caltrop, and Louisa saw how one of the spikes, which had first formed part of the three-pointed star, now jutted upwards.

She understood then. “Oh, no!”

“Oh, yes!”

“Poor horses!”

“Poor us, if the horses catch us.” Sharpe crumpled the straw and mud into a ball that he tossed away. Proper caltrops, made from iron nails which would be fused and hammered in the fire, should be scattered thick on the roadways behind the retreating Riflemen. The spikes would easily pierce the soft frog tissue inside a horse’s hoof walls, and the beasts would rear, twist, plunge, and panic. “But the horses recover,” he assured Louisa, who seemed upset by the simple nastiness of the weapon.

“How did you know about them?” she asked.

“They were used against us in India…“ Sharpe’s voice faded away because, for the first time since he had climbed the cathedral steps, he saw why the crowd was packed so silently in the plaza.

A rough platform had been constructed at its centre; a platform of wooden planks laid across wine vats. On it was a high-backed chair which Sharpe at first took to be a throne.

The impression of royal ceremony was heightened by the strange procession which, flanked by red-uniformed Cazadores, approached the platform. The men in the procession were robed in sulphurous yellow and capped with red conical hats. Each carried a scrap of paper in his clasped hands. “The paper,” Louisa said quietly, “is a confession of faith. They’ve been forgiven, you see, but they must still die.”

Sharpe understood then. The tall chair, far from being a throne, was a garotte. On its high back was a metal implement, a collar and screw, that was Spain’s preferred method of execution. It was the first such machine he had seen in Spain.

Priests accompanied the doomed men. “They’re all anfran-cesadosj Louisa said. ”Some served as guides to French cavalry, others betrayed partisans.“

“You intend to watch?” Sharpe sounded shocked. If Louisa blanched at the thought of pricking a horse’s hoof, how was she to bear watching a man’s neck being broken?

“I’ve never seen an execution.”

Sharpe glanced down at her. “And you want to?”

“I suspect I shall be forced to see many unfamiliar things in the next years, don’t you?”

The first man was pushed up to the platform where he was forced into the chair. The iron collar was prised around his neck. The sacrist, Father Alzaga, stood beside the executioner. ”Pax et misericordia et tranquillitas! ” He shouted the words into the victim’s ear as the executioner went behind the chair, and shouted them again as the lever which turned the screw was snatched tight. The screw constricted the collar with impressive speed so that, almost before the second Latin injunction was over, the body in the chair jerked up and slumped back. The crowd seemed to sigh.

Louisa turned away. “I wish…“ she began, but could not finish.

“It was very quick,” Sharpe said in wonderment.

There was a thump as the dead body was pushed off the chair, then a scraping sound as it was dragged off the platform. Louisa, no longer watching, did not speak till after the next shout from Father Alzaga signified that another traitor had met his end. “Do you think badly of me, Lieutenant?”

“For watching an execution?” Sharpe waited till the second body was released from the collar. “Why on earth should I? There are usually more women at a public hanging than men.”

“I don’t mean that.”

He looked down at her and was instantly embarrassed. “I would not think badly of you.”

“It was that night in the fortress.” There was a plea in Louisa’s voice, as if she desperately needed Sharpe to understand what had happened. “You remember? When Don Bias showed us the gonfalon and told us the tale of the last battle? I think I was trapped then.”

“Trapped?”

“I like his nonsense. I was brought up to hate Catholics; to despise them for their ignorance and fear them for their malevolence, but no one ever told me of their glory!”

“Glory?”

“I’m bored with plain chapels.” Louisa watched the executions as she spoke, though Sharpe doubted whether she was even aware that men died on the crude scaffold. “I’m bored with being told I’m a sinner and that my salvation depends only on my own dogged repentance. I want, just once, to see the hand of God come in all its glory to touch us. I want a miracle, Lieutenant. I want to feel so very small in front of that miracle, and that doesn’t make any sense to you at all, does it?”

Sharpe watched a man die. “You want the gonfalon.”

“No!” Louisa was almost scornful. “I do not believe for one small second, Lieutenant, that Santiago fetched that flag from heaven. I believe the gonfalon is merely an old banner that one of Don Bias’s ancestors carried into battle. The miracle lies in what the gonfalon does, not in what it is! If we survive today, Lieutenant, then we will have achieved a miracle. But we would not have done it, nor even tried to do it, without the gonfalon!” She paused, wanting some confirmation from Sharpe, but he said nothing. She shrugged ruefully. “You still think it’s all a nonsense, don’t you?”

Still Sharpe said nothing. For him the gonfalon, whether nonsensical or not, was an irrelevance. He had not come to Santiago de Compostela for the gonfalon. He had thought it was for this girl, but that dream was dead. Yet there was something else that had fetched him to this city. He had come to prove that a whoreson Sergeant, patted on the head by a patronizing army and made into a Quartermaster, could be as good, as God-damned bloody good, as any born officer. And that could not be proved without the help of the men in green jackets who waited for the enemy, and Sharpe was suddenly swept with an affection for those Riflemen. It was an affection he had not felt since he had been a Sergeant and had held the power of life and death over a company of redcoats.

A scream jerked his attention back to the plaza where a recalcitrant prisoner fought against the hands which pushed him up to the platform. The man’s fight was useless. He was forced to the garotte and strapped into the chair. The iron was bent around his neck and the collar’s tongue inserted into the slot where the screw would draw it tight. Alzaga made the sign of the cross. ‘Pax et misericordia et tranquillitasr

The prisoner’s yellow-frocked body jerked in a spasm as the collar gripped his neck to break his spine and choke the breath from him. His thin hands scrabbled at the arms of the chair, then the body slumped down. Sharpe supposed that swift death would have been the Count of Mouromorto’s fate if he had not stayed safe inside the French-held palace. “Why,” he asked Louisa suddenly, “did the Count stay in the city?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

Sharpe shrugged. “I’ve never seen him apart from de l’Eclin before. And that Colonel is a very clever man.”

“You’re clever, too,” Louisa said warmly. “How many soldiers know about caltrops?”

Vivar pushed through the crowd and climbed the steps. “The forges are being heated. By six o’clock you’ll have a few hundred of the things. Where do you want them?”

“Just send them to me,” Sharpe said.

“When you hear the bells next ring, you’ll know the gonfalon is unfurled. That’s when you can withdraw.”

“Make it soon!”

“Shortly after six,” Vivar said. “It can’t be sooner. Have you seen what the French did to the cathedral?”

“No.” But nor did Sharpe care. He only cared about a clever French Colonel, a chasseur of the Imperial Guard, then a single rifle shot sounded from the south-west, and he ran.