Sharpe’s Gold by Bernard Cornwell
Sharpe still kept silent. After Talavera the Spanish had forfeited Wellington's support by failing to provide the food and supplies they had promised. A starving British army was of no use to Spain. Ciudad Rodrigo? Five weeks ago the Spanish fortress town had surrendered, after an heroic defence, and Wellington had sent no help. The town had been an obstacle to Massena's advance, Almeida was the next, and Sharpe had heard savage criticism that the British had let their allies down, but Sharpe was no strategist. He let the Major go on.
'We must prove something to them, Sharpe, that we can help, that we can be useful, or else we must forfeit their support. Do you understand?' He turned his fierce gaze on Sharpe.
'Yes, sir.'
The jauntiness and confidence crept back into the Major's voice. 'Of course, we lose the war if we don't have the Spanish! That's what Wellington has come to understand, eh, Sharpe? Better late than never!' He gave his laugh. 'That's why Wellington wants us to bring the gold, so that the British are seen to deliver it to Cadiz. It proves a point, Sharpe, shows that we made an honest effort. Helps to cover up the betrayal at Ciudad Rodrigo! Ah, politics, politics!' He said the last two words much as an indulgent father might talk about the rowdy games of his children. 'Do you understand?'
'Yes, sir.'
It was no time to argue, even though Sharpe disbelieved every word Kearsey had uttered. Of course the Spanish were important, but so were the British to the Spanish, and delivering a few bags of gold would not restore the amity and trust that had been shattered by Spanish inefficiency the year before. Yet it was important that Kearsey believed Wellington's motives to be honest. The small Major, Sharpe knew, was passionately engaged on the Spanish side, as if, after a lifetime of soldiering, he had found in the harsh hills and white houses of the Spaniards a warmth and trust he had found nowhere else.
Sharpe turned and nodded at Teresa and Ramon. 'Do they know anything about the gold? About Captain Hardy?'
'They say not.' Kearsey shrugged. 'Perhaps El Catolico moved the gold and Hardy went with it. I ordered him to stay with it.'
'Then surely the girl would know?'
Kearsey turned and spoke in staccato Spanish to her. Sharpe listened to the reply; her voice was deep and husky, and even if he could not understand the language he was glad to look at her. She had long, dark hair, as black as Josefina's, but there the resemblance ended. The Portuguese girl had been a lover of comfort, of wine drunk by candlelight, of soft sheets, while this girl reminded Sharpe of a wild beast with eyes that were deep, wary, and set either side of a hawk-like nose. She was young. Kearsey had told him twenty-three, but at either side of her mouth were curved lines. Sharpe remembered that her mother had died at the hands of the French, God knows what she herself had suffered, and he remembered the smile after she had skewered the Colonel with his own sabre. She had aimed low, he recalled, and he laughed at the remembrance. She looked at Sharpe as if she would have liked to claw out his eyes with her long fingers.
'What's funny?'
'Nothing. You speak English?'
She shrugged and Kearsey looked at Sharpe. 'Her father's fluent; that's what makes him so useful to us. They've picked up a bit, from him, from me. Good family, Sharpe.'
'But do they know anything about Hardy? The gold?'
'She doesn't know a thing, Sharpe. She thinks the gold must still be in the hermitage, and she hasn't seen Hardy.' Kearsey was happy with the answer, confident that no Spaniard would lie to him.
'So the next thing we must do, sir, is search the hermitage.'
Kearsey sighed. 'If you insist, Sharpe. If you insist.' He winced again and slid down from the edge of the gully. 'But for now, Sharpe, watch for that patrol. It won't be long.'
The Major was right, at least, about that. Three hundred lancers rode from the village, trotting their horses along a track that paralleled the broken stalks of barley, and Sharpe watched them come. They carried carbines instead of lances and he knew they intended to search the hillsides on foot. He turned to the gully and ordered silence, explained that a patrol was coming, and then turned back to see the Poles dismounting at the foot of the rock-strewn slope.
A fly landed on his cheek. He wanted to crush it but dared not, as the lancers had started their climb up the steep slope, their horses left with picquets below. They were stringing into a line, a crude skirmish order, and he could hear the distant voices grumbling at the heat and the exertion. There was a chance that they would miss the gully, that by climbing obliquely up the slope they would emerge on the crest near the pile of rocks and never suspect that a whole Company was in dead ground behind them. He breathed slowly, willed them to stay low on the slope, and watched the officers trying to force the line higher with the flat side of their drawn sabres.
He could hear Kelly's breathing, someone else clearing his throat, and he flapped with his free hand for silence. A tall lancer, suntanned and with a black moustache, was climbing higher than the others. As he clawed his way up, carbine slung, Sharpe saw a tarnished gold band on the man's sleeve. A Sergeant. He was a big man, almost as big as Harper, and his face was scarred from battlefields on the other side of Europe. Go down, Sharpe urged silently, go down, but the man kept coming on his lone, perverse climb. Sharpe moved his head slowly, saw the faces staring at him, and found Harper. He beckoned slowly, put a finger to his lips, pointed at the foot of the inner slope of the gully.
The Polish Sergeant stopped, looked up, wiped his face, and turned to look at his comrades. An officer shouted at him, waved his sabre to make the Sergeant join the line, which had gone ahead, but the Sergeant shook his head, shouted back, and gestured at the skyline, which was just a few, steep feet away. Sharpe cursed him, knew that if the Light Company were discovered they would be harried eastwards, away from the gold, from victory, and this one veteran was putting it all at risk. He was climbing just below Sharpe, who craned forward as far as he dared to see the yellow, square top of the headgear come closer and closer. He could hear the man grunting, the sound of his fingernails scraping on rock, the scrabble of his boots searching for a foothold, and then, as if in a nightmare, a large brown hand with bitten nails appeared right by Sharpe's face and he summoned all his strength for a desperate act. He waited – it could only have been for a half-second, but it seemed forever - until the man's face appeared. The eyes widened in surprise and Sharpe put out his right hand and gripped the Sergeant by the windpipe, his fingers closing like a man-trap on the throat. He thrust his left hand forward, found the belt, and, half turning on to his back, he pulled the lancer up and over the rim, holding the huge man in the air with a strength he hardly knew he possessed, and he threw him, arms and carbine flailing, to the tender mercy of Sergeant Harper. The Irishman kicked the lancer as he landed, had his seven-barrelled gun reversed and brought it down, sickeningly, on the man's head. Sharpe whirled back to face the slope. The line was still advancing! No one had seen, no one had noticed, but it was still not over. The lancer was tough, and Harper's blows, that would have killed a fair-sized bullock, seemed to have done nothing more than knock off the yellow and blue hat.
The enemy Sergeant had Harper round the waist, was squeezing, and the Irishman was trying to twist the other man's head clean off his shoulders. The Pole's teeth were gritted; he should have shouted, but he must have been dazed, and all he could think of was trying to stand up, to face his opponent, and use his own massive fists to beat at Harper. The men in the gully were frozen, appalled by the enemy who had suddenly landed in their midst, and it was Teresa who reacted. She picked up a musket, turned it, took four steps and swung its brass-tipped butt into the man's forehead. He slumped, tried to rise, but she swung again and Sharpe saw the fierce joy on her face as the weapon felled the Sergeant, his face bloodied, and suddenly it was quiet again in the gully.
Harper shook his head. 'God save Ireland.'
The girl gave Harper the kind of pitying look that Sharpe thought she had reserved only for him, and then, without so much as a glanc
The search-line had sat down, glad of the rest, but the officer still called to the missing Sergeant. He was climbing the hill in short, erratic bursts, uncertain what to do and annoyed by those of his men who shouted with him. He had no choice, though; he would have to come and look for his Sergeant, and Sharpe, the sweat pouring off his face, could not imagine what one girl could do that would deflect the lancers from the search.
A scream startled him, piercing, and was cut off and repeated. He slid down the rocks a few inches and turned his face up the ridge where the sound had come from. Harper looked at him, puzzled. It had to be the girl. Sharpe peered over the edge again and saw the lancers pointing up the slope. Teresa screamed again, a terrifying sound, and Sharpe's men looked at each other, then up at Sharpe, as if to ask him what they could do to rescue her. Sharpe watched the lancers, saw their uncertainty, and then he heard them shout and point up the slope. He looked to see what had excited them, and his men, watching him, were reassured by a smile that seemed to Harper to be the biggest he had ever seen on Sharpe's face. None of them down in the gully could see what was happening, but Sharpe, up on the rim, picked up the telescope and gave up caring if anyone saw the flash of light or not.
Not that anyone would be watching, not while a naked girl ran wildly along the ridge, stopping to turn and hurl stones at an imagined pursuer on the slope hidden from the lancers. Drink or women, Sharpe thought, the bait for soldiers, and Teresa was leading the lancers in a mad rush ever further from the gully. He had her in the glass, shamelessly, and he could hear the excited shouts of the lancers who would be lost to the control of the strung-out officers. They would assume that the Sergeant had found the girl, stripped her, let her get away, and was now pursuing her. Sharpe acknowledged her cleverness and bravery, but for the moment he had time only for the slim, muscled body, for a beauty that he wanted.
Kearsey had limped to the edge of the gully's floor and was looking up at Sharpe. 'What's happening?'
'She's leading them away, sir.' He talked normally, the lancers were way beyond earshot.
Kearsey nodded, as if he had expected the answer. Harper still looked curious. 'How, sir?'
The girl had disappeared behind the summit, and the lancers, all discipline shredded, were panting up the slope a good fifty yards behind. Sharpe grinned at his Sergeant. 'She took her clothes off.'
Kearsey whipped round, aghast. 'You looked!'
'Only to see if I could help, sir.'
'What kind of a man are you, Sharpe?' Kearsey was furious, but Sharpe turned away. What kind of a man was it that would not have looked?
Harper still stood over the unconscious lancer and he sounded aggrieved. 'You might have told me, sir.'
Sharpe turned back. Kearsey had limped away. 'I promised your mother I'd keep you out of trouble. Sorry.' He grinned at the Sergeant again. 'If I'd told you, then the whole damn Company would have wanted a look. Yes? And by now we'd be back in the war instead of being safe.'
Harper grinned. 'Privilege of rank, eh, sir?'
'Something like that.' He thought of the beauty, the shadowed body with its hard stomach, long thighs, and the challenges of the disinterested, almost antagonistic glances that she had given him.
It was two hours before she returned, as silently as she had left, and wearing her white dress. She had done her work well, for the lancers had been recalled, the Sergeant given up, and Casatejada was thronged with Frenchmen. Sharpe guessed that the village had been the centre of a huge operation to clear the Partisans from Massena's supply areas. Kearsey agreed, and the two men watched as other cavalry units came from the north to join the Polish lancers. Dragoons, chasseurs, the uniforms of empire, stirring a dust cloud that would have befitted a whole army, and all spent on chasing Partisans through dry hills.
The girl came up the rim and watched, silently, as the cavalry left her village. Their weapons flashed needles of light through the brown haze of the dust; the ranks seemed endless, the glorious might of France that had ridden down the best cavalry in Europe but could not defeat the Guerrilleros. Sharpe looked at the girl, at Kearsey, who talked with her, and was glad once more that he did not have to fight the Partisans. The only way to win was to kill them all, every one, young and old, and even that, as the French were finding, did not work. He thought of the bodies in the blood of the basement. It was not the war of Talavera.
They spent the night in the gully, cautious lest the French should still be watching, and some time in the small hours the bubbles stopped in Kelly's throat. Pru Kelly, though she did not know it, was a widow again, and Sharpe remembered the small Corporal's smile, his willingness. They buried him at dawn, in a grave scratched from the soil, and they heaped it with rocks that would be forced apart by a fox and perched on by the vultures who would tear his chest further apart.
Kearsey said the words, from memory, and the men stood round the heaped stones awkwardly. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, and in a few weeks, Sharpe thought, Pru Kelly would marry again because that was the way with the women who marched with soldiers. The Polish Sergeant, tied up with musket slings, watched the burial and, for a few moments, stopped his struggles. The new day came, still hot, the rain still keeping away, and the Light Company marched into the empty valley to find their gold.
Chapter 9
It was a sweet smell, sticky-sweet, that left a foul deposit somewhere at the top of the nostrils, yet it was impossible to describe why it was so unpleasant. Sharpe had smelt it often enough, so had most of the Company, and they knew it fifty yards from the village. It was not so much a smell, Sharpe thought, as a state of the air, like an invisible mist. It seemed, like a mist, to thicken the air, make breathing difficult, yet all the time to have that sweet promise, as if the corpses the French had left behind were made of sugar and honey.
Not even the dogs had been left alive. A few cats, too difficult to catch, had survived the French, but the dogs, like their owners, had been killed, splayed open with desperate savagery, as if the French thought that death by itself was not enough and a body must be turned inside out if it was not to come magically alive to ambush them again. Only one man lived in the village, one of Sharpe's men left behind in the attack, and the French, true to the curious honour that prevailed between the armies, had left John Rorden propped on a mattress, with bread and water to hand and a bullet somewhere in his pelvis that would kill him before this new day was done.
Ramon, in slow English, told Sharpe that four dozen people had been left in the village, mostly the old or the very young, but they had all died. Sharpe stared at the wrecked houses, the blood splashed on low, white walls.
'Why were they caught?'
Ramon shrugged, waved a bandaged hand. 'They were good.'
'Good?'
'Francese.' He was lost for a word and Sharpe helped.
'Clever?'
The young man nodded. He had his sister's nose, the same dark eyes, but there was a friendliness to him that Sharpe had not seen in Teresa. Ramon shook his head hopelessly. 'They were not all Guerrilleros, yes?' Each group of words was a question, as if he wanted assurance that his English was adequate. Sharpe kept nodding. 'They want peace? But now.' He spoke two quick sentences in Spanish, his tone bitter, and Sharpe knew that those people of the uplands who had tried to stay aloof from the w
'Surrounded?'
'Si.' He looked down at his right hand, at the fingers that poked from the grey bandage, and Sharpe saw the index finger moving as if it were pulling a trigger. Ramon would fight again.
The bodies were not just in the cellar. Some, perhaps for the amusement of the lancers, had been taken to the hermitage to meet their bitter end, and on the steps of the building Sharpe found Isaiah Tongue, the admirer of Napoleon, throwing up the dry bread that had been his breakfast. The Company waited by the hermitage. The prisoner, tall and proud, stood by Sergeant McGovern, and Sharpe stopped by the Scotsman.
'Look after him, Sergeant.'
'Aye, sir. They'll not touch him.' The sturdy face was twisted as if in pain. McGovern, like Tongue, had looked inside the hermitage. 'Savages, sir, that's what they are. Savages!'
'I know.'
There was nothing to say that would reach McGovern's pain, the hurt of a father far from his children who had just seen small, dead bodies. The stench was thick by the hermitage, buzzing with flies, and Sharpe paused by the steps. There was almost a reluctance to go inside, not just because of the bodies, but because of what the hermitage might not contain. The gold. So close, so near to the war's survival, and instead of a feeling of triumph he felt stained, touched by a horror that brought an anger against his job. He climbed the steps, his face a mask, and wondered what his men would do if they found themselves, as they probably would, in a place where the rules no longer counted. He remembered the uncontrollable savagery that followed a siege, the sheer, exploding rage that he had felt after death had touched him a score of times in one small breach and he knew, as the cold air of the hermitage struck him, that this war in Spain, if it should go on, would not be won until British infantry had been fed into the narrow meat grinder of a small gap in a city wall.