“I thought they gave it to us, sir.”
“Aye, so they did, by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, but they were raw damn fools to sign that piece of paper and well they know it. So enough of them hate us, and now the French are spreading rumors that we’ll annex Cádiz as well! God knows that isn’t true, but the Spanish are willing to credit it. And there are men in Spain who fervently believe a French alliance would serve their country better than a British friendship, and I’m not sure they’re wrong. But here we are, Sharpe, allies whether we like it or not. And there are plenty of Spaniards who hate the French more than they dislike us, so there’s hope.”
“There’s always hope,” Lord William Russell said cheerfully.
“Aye, Willie, maybe,” Sir Thomas said, “but when Spain is reduced to Cádiz and Lord Wellington only holds the patch of land around Lisbon, it’s hard to see how we’ll drive the damn French back to their pigsties. If Napoleon had a scrap of sense he’d offer the Spanish their king back and make peace. Then we’d be properly cooked.”
“At least the Portuguese are on our side,” Sharpe said.
“True! And fine fellows they are. I’ve got two thousand of them here.”
“If they’ll fight,” Lord William said dubiously.
“They’ll fight,” Sharpe said. “I was at Bussaco. They fought.”
“So what happened?” Sir Thomas asked, and the telling of that story carried the lighter close to the reed-thick shore of the Trocadero Peninsula. The Fort of San Luis was close now. It stood two or three hundred paces inland, where the marshes gave way to ground firm enough to support the massive ramparts. Beyond the fort’s flooded ditch Sharpe could just see a small glow of light above the glacis. That was a mistake by the French. Sharpe suspected that the sentries had braziers burning on the firestep to keep themselves warm, and even the small light of the coals would make it difficult for them to see anything moving in the black shallows. Yet the greater danger was not the fort’s sentries, but guard boats, and Sir Thomas whispered that they were to keep a good lookout. “Listen for their oars,” he suggested.
The French evidently possessed a dozen guard boats. They had been seen in the dusk as they patrolled the Trocadero’s low coast, but there was no sign of them now. Either they were deeper in the bay or, more likely, their crews had been driven back to the creek by the chill wind. Sir Thomas suspected the crews of the boats were soldiers rather than sailors. “Bastards are shirking, aren’t they?” he whispered.
A hand touched Sharpe’s shoulder. “It’s Major Gough,” a voice said from the darkness, “and this is Ensign Keogh. Stay with him, Sharpe, and I’ll warrant we won’t shoot you.”
“We probably won’t.” Ensign Keogh corrected the major.
“He probably won’t shoot you.” Major Gough accepted the correction.
There was light ahead now, just enough for Sharpe to see that Ensign Keogh was absurdly young with a thin and eager face. The light came from campfires that burned perhaps a quarter mile ahead. The five boats were turning into the creek, creeping through the water to avoid the withies that marked the shallow channel, and the campfires burned where the French sentries guarded the fire rafts. The lighters’ black oars scarce touched the water now. The naval officer who led the boats had timed the expedition to arrive just as the tide finished its flood and so the rising water carried the lighters against the river’s small current. By the time the raid was over the tide should have turned and the ebb would hurry the British away. Still no Frenchman saw the boats, though the sentries were certainly on duty, for Sharpe could see a blue uniform with white crossbelts beside one of the fires. “I hate them,” Sir Thomas said softly, “God, how I do hate them.”
Sharpe could see the dim trace of light leaking over the glacis of Fort San Jose. It looked about half a mile away. Long cannon shot, he thought, especially if the French used canister, but the southernmost fort, San Luis, was much closer, close enough to shred the creek with rounds of canister, which were missiles of musket balls encased in tin cylinders that burst apart at the cannon’s muzzle. The balls, hundreds of them, spread like duck shot. Sharpe hated canister. All infantrymen did. “Buggers are asleep,” Lord William murmured.
Sharpe was suddenly struck by guilt. He had arranged to meet Lord Pumphrey at midday to discover whether the blackmailers had sent any message, and though he doubted there would be any word he knew his place was in Cádiz, not here. His duty was to Henry Wellesley, not to General Graham, yet here he was and he could only pray that he was not gutted by canister fired in the night. He touched his sword hilt and wished he could have sharpened the blade before he came. He liked to go into battle with a sharpened blade. Then he touched his rifle. Not many officers carried a longarm, but Sharpe was not like most officers. He was gutter-born, gutter-bred, and a gutter fighter.
Then the lighter’s bows ran softly onto the mud.
“Let’s kill some bastards,” Sir Thomas said vengefully.
And the first troops went ashore.
CHAPTER 5
S HARPE JUMPED FROM THE lighter into water that came over his boot tops. He waded ashore, following Ensign Keogh whose cocked hat looked as though it had belonged to his grandfather. It had exaggeratedly hooked points from which hung skimpy tassels and at its crown was a massive blue plume that matched the facings of the 87th’s red coats. “Follow, follow, follow,” Keogh hissed, not at Sharpe, but at a big sergeant and a score of men who were evidently his responsibility this night. The sergeant had become entangled in a wicker fish trap and was cursing as he tried to kick it free of his boots. “Do you need help, Sergeant Masterson?” Keogh asked.
“Jesus no, sir,” Masterson said, trampling on the trap’s remnants. “Bloody thing, sir.”
“Fix bayonets, boys!” Keogh said. “Do it quietly now!”
It seemed extraordinary to Sharpe that four or five hundred men could disembark so close to the twin encampments on the creek’s banks and not be noticed, but the French were still oblivious of the attackers. Sharpe could see small tents in the firelight, and among the tents were crude shelters made of branches thatched with reeds. A stand of muskets stood outside one sagging tent and Sharpe wondered why in God’s name the French had provided tents. The men were supposed to be guarding the rafts, not sleeping, but at least a few of the sentries were still awake. Two men wandered slowly across the encampment, muskets slung, suspecting nothing as a second lighter disgorged another company of redcoats alongside the men of the 87th. Two more companies were wading ashore on the northern bank.
“For a balla, boys,” Major Gough appeared to say softly and urgently just behind Keogh’s men, “for a balla!”
“For a what?” Sharpe whispered to Harper.
“Faugh a ballagh, sir. Clear the way, it means. Get out of our path because the Irish are coming.” Harper had drawn his sword bayonet. He was evidently reserving the seven bullets in the volley gun for later in the fight. “We bloody well are coming too,” he said, and clicked the sword’s brass hilt over his rifle’s muzzle so that the barrel now held twenty-three inches of murderous steel.
“Forward now!” Major Gough reverted to English, but still spoke quietly. “And slaughter the bastards. But do it softly, boys. Don’t wake the little darlings till you have to.”
The 87th started forward, their bayonets glinting in the small light of the fires. Clicks sounded as men cocked their muskets and Sharpe was certain the French must hear that noise, but the enemy stayed silent. It was a sentry on the northern bank who first realized the danger. Perhaps he saw the dark shape of the lighters in the creek, or else he glimpsed the glimmering blades coming from the west, but whatever alarmed him prompted a strangled cry of astonishment followed by a bang as he fired his musket.
“Faugh a ballagh!” Major Gough yelled. “Faugh a ballagh! Hard at them, boys, hard at them!” Gough, now that surprise was lost, had no intention of keeping his advance slow and disciplined. Sharpe remembered the battalion from Talavera, and
he knew them to be a steady unit, but Gough wanted speed and savagery now. “Run, you rogues!” he shouted. “Take them fast! And give tongue! Give tongue!”
The men responded to this hunting command by screaming like banshees. They began running through the marsh, stumbling on tussocks, and jumping small ditches. Ensign Keogh, lithe and young, ran ahead with his slender-bladed infantry officer’s sword held aloft. “Faugh a ballagh!” he shouted. “Faugh a ballagh!” Then he leaped a ditch, all sprawling legs and flapping scabbard, while his left hand clutched at his oversized hat to keep it from falling off. He stumbled, but Sergeant Masterson, who was almost as big as Harper, snatched the frail-looking ensign back to his feet. “Kill them!” Keogh screamed. “Kill them!” Muskets sparked among the campfires, but Sharpe neither heard a ball pass nor saw anyone fall. The French, scattered and dozy, were scrambling out of their tents and shelters. An officer, his sword reflecting the firelight, tried to rally his troops, but the screams of the attacking Irish were enough to drive the newly woken men into the farther darkness. There was a smattering of musket fire from Gough’s Irishmen, but most of the work was done by the mere threat of their seventeen-inch bayonets. A woman, bare-legged, scooped up her bedding and sprinted after her man. Two dogs were running in circles, barking. Sharpe saw a pair of mounted men vanishing into the darkness behind him. He whirled, rifle raised, but the horsemen had galloped past the Irish flank into the dark toward the place where the lighters had grounded. Keogh had vanished ahead, followed by his men, but Sharpe held Harper back. “We’ve got green coats, Pat,” he warned. “Someone will mistake us for Crapauds if we’re not careful.”
He was right. A half dozen men with yellow facings on their red jackets suddenly appeared among the fires and Sharpe saw a musket swing toward him. “Ninety-fifth!” he shouted. “Ninety-fifth! Hold your fire! Who are you?”
“Sixty-seventh!” a voice shouted back. The 67th was a Hampshire regiment and they had advanced more slowly than the Irishmen, but kept closer order. A captain now took them east and south to guard the captured camp’s inland perimeter, while Major Gough was shouting at his Irishmen to move back through the tents and make a similar cordon on the bay side. Sharpe was thrusting his sword into the small tents as he and Harper walked toward Gough, and one such thrust elicited a yelp. Sharpe pulled the canvas flaps aside and saw two Frenchmen cowering inside. “Out!” he snarled. They crawled out and waited at his feet, shaking. “I don’t even know if we’re taking prisoners,” Sharpe said.
“We can’t just kill them, sir,” Harper said.
“I’m not going to kill them,” Sharpe snarled. “Get up!” He prodded the men with his sword, then drove them toward another band of prisoners being escorted by the Hampshire redcoats. One of those Hampshires was stooping by a French boy who did not look more than fourteen or fifteen. He had taken a bullet in his chest and was choking to death, his heels beating a horrid tattoo on the ground. “Be easy, boy,” the Hampshire man said as he stroked the dying boy’s cheek. “Be easy.” The far bank sparked with a sudden flurry of musket shots that died away as quickly as they had risen, and it was evident that the redcoats there had been just as successful as the men on the southern shore.
“Is that you, Sharpe?” It was Major Gough’s voice.
“It is, sir.”
“That was damnably quick,” Gough said, sounding disappointed. “The fellows just ran! Didn’t put up a fight at all. Will you do me the honor of reporting to General Graham that this bank is secure and that there’s no counterattack in sight? You should find the general by the rafts.”
“A pleasure, sir,” Sharpe said. He led Harper back through the captured encampment.
“I thought we’d get some fighting,” Harper said, sounding as disappointed as Gough.
“Buggers were asleep, weren’t they?”
“I come all this way just to watch a bunch of Dubliners wake up some Crapauds?”
“Are Gough’s men from Dublin?”
“That’s where the regiment’s raised, sir.” Harper spotted a discarded French pack, scooped it up, and filleted inside. “Bugger all,” he said and threw it away. “So how long do we stay here?”
“Long as it takes. An hour?”
“That long!”
“Engineers have a lot of work to do, Pat,” Sharpe said, and suddenly thought of poor Sturridge who had trusted that Sharpe would keep him alive on the Guadiana.
They found General Graham on the bank where the fire rafts were moored. The fifth lighter, the one containing the engineers, had tied up on the nearest raft where two Frenchmen lay dead.
Each of the five rafts was a great square platform of timber with a short mast to which a scrap of sail could be attached. The French had been waiting for a dark night, a north wind, and an incoming tide to drive the rafts down onto the fleet waiting to take the army south. Volunteer crews would have manned the ponderous rafts, guiding them to within a quarter mile or so of the anchorage. Then they would have lit the slow matches and taken to their rowing boats to escape the inferno. If the rafts had ever succeeded in getting among the British and Spanish shipping they would have caused panic. Ships would have cut their anchor cables rather than be set afire and the wind would have driven the anchorless ships crashing into one another or onto the marshy shore of the Isla de León, and meanwhile the monster fire rafts would drift on, causing more chaos. Each was crammed with barrels of incendiaries and with baulks of firewood, and they were armed with ancient cannons at their perimeters. The cannons’ touchholes were connected to the incendiary-filled barrels with slow matches. The cannons, some of which looked two hundred years old, were all small, but Sharpe supposed they were loaded with grapeshot, round shot, and anything else the French could cram into their muzzles so that the blazing rafts would spit balls and shells and death as they lumbered into the tightly packed anchorage.
The engineers were setting their charges and running quick fuse to the southern bank where General Graham stood with his aides. Sharpe gave him Gough’s message and Sir Thomas nodded an acknowledgment. “Evil bloody things, aren’t they?” he said, nodding at the nearest raft.
“Balgowan!” a voice hailed from the northern bank. “Balgowan!”
“Perthshire!” Sir Thomas bellowed back.
“All secure on this side, sir!” the voice shouted back.
“Good man!”
“Balgowan, sir?” Sharpe asked.
“Password,” Sir Thomas said. “Should have told you that. Balgowan is where I grew up, Sharpe. Finest place on God’s earth.” He was frowning as he spoke, staring south toward the San Luis fort. “It’s all been too easy,” he said, worried. Sharpe said nothing because Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Graham did not need his comments. “Bad troops.” Sir Thomas spoke of the French who had supposedly been guarding the rafts. “That’s what it is. Battalion level, that’s where the rot starts. I’ll wager your year’s wages against mine, Sharpe, that the senior battalion officers are sleeping in the forts. They’ve got warm beds, fires in the hearth, and dairymaids between the sheets while their men suffer out here.”
“I’ll not take your wager, sir.”
“You’d be a fool if you did,” Sir Thomas said. In the light of the dying French campfires the general could see ranks of redcoats facing the fort. Those men would be silhouetted against the fires and thus be prime targets for the fort’s artillery. “Willie,” he said, “tell Hugh and Johnny to lay their men down.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Lord William said, dropping into naval jargon. He ran southward and Sir Thomas slopped through the mud and clambered on board the nearest raft.
“Come and have a look, Sharpe!” he invited.
Sharpe and Harper followed the general who used his heavy-bladed claymore to prize open the nearest barrel. The top came off to reveal a half dozen pale balls, each about the size of a nine-pounder round shot. “What the devil are those?” Sir Thomas asked. “They look like haggis.”
“Smoke balls, sir,” an
engineer lieutenant said after taking a quick look at the balls. He and an engineer sergeant were replacing the slow matches in the cannons with quick match.
Sir Thomas lifted one smoke ball and prodded the mixture beneath it. “What’s in the rest of the barrel?” he asked.
“Mostly saltpeter, sir,” the lieutenant said, “probably mixed with sulfur, antimony, and pitch. It’ll burn like hell.”
Sir Thomas hefted the smoke ball. The case was pierced by a dozen holes and, when Sir Thomas tapped it, sounded hollow. “Papier-mâché?” the general guessed.
“That’s it, sir. Papier-mâché filled with powder, antimony, and coal dust. Don’t see many of those these days. Naval equipment. You’re supposed to light them and hurl them through the enemy gunports, sir, where they choke the gunners. Of course you’ll probably die doing it, but they can be nasty little chaps in confined spaces.”
“So why are they here?” Sir Thomas asked.
“I suppose the frogs hoped they’d churn out a cloud of smoke that would drift ahead of the rafts to hide them, sir. Now, if you’ll excuse me, sir.”
“Of course, man.” The general stepped out of the lieutenant’s way. He put the smoke ball back in the barrel and was about to replace the lid when Sharpe reached for the balls.
“Can I have those, sir?”
“You want them?” Sir Thomas asked, surprised.
“With your permission, sir.”
Sir Thomas looked as though he thought Sharpe very strange, then shrugged. “Whatever you want, Sharpe.”
Sharpe sent Harper to find a French haversack. He was thinking of the cathedral’s crypt, and about the caverns and passages around the low chamber, and about men lurking in the dark with muskets and blades. He filled the haversack with the smoke balls and gave it to Harper. “Look after it, Pat. It could save our lives.”
General Graham had jumped onto the next raft where a squad of engineers was putting new fuses to the loaded cannon and planting powder charges in the raft’s center. “More smoke balls here, Sharpe,” he called back.