“You could surrender the seals of office to your deputy, General?” Sharpe suggested.
“Never! Never let it be said that a Runciman evaded his duty, Sharpe. Never!” The colonel glanced anxiously out of his quarters to see how his cook was proceeding with a hare shot by Daniel Hagman. Runciman’s lethargy meant that the colonel was quite content to let Sharpe deal with the Real Compañía Irlandesa, but even for a man of Runciman’s idle nonchalance, nineteen deserters in two nights was cause to worry. “Damn it, man”—he leaned back after inspecting the cook’s progress—“it reflects on our efficiency, don’t you see? We must do something, Sharpe! In another fortnight we won’t have a soul left!”
Which, Sharpe reflected silently, was exactly what Hogan wanted. The Real Compañía Irlandesa was supposed to self-destruct, yet Richard Sharpe had been put in command of their training and there was a stubborn streak in Sharpe’s soul that would not let him permit a unit for which he was responsible to slide into ruin. Damn it, he would make the guards into soldiers whether Hogan wanted him to or not.
Sharpe doubted he would get much help from Lord Kiely. Each morning his lordship woke in a foul ill-temper that lasted until his steady intake of alcohol gave him a burst of high spirits that would usually stretch into the evening, but then be replaced by a morose sullenness aggravated by his losses at cards. Then he would sleep till late in the morning and so begin the cycle again. “How in hell,” Sharpe asked Kiely’s second-in-command, Captain Donaju, “did he get command of the guard?”
“Birth,” Donaju said. He was a pale, thin man with a worried face who looked more like an impoverished student than a soldier, but of all the officers in the Real Compañía Irlandesa he seemed the most promising. “You can’t have a royal guard commanded by a commoner, Sharpe,” Donaju said with a touch of sarcasm, “but when Kiely’s sober he can be quite impressive.” The last sentence contained no sarcasm at all.
“Impressive?” Sharpe asked dubiously.
“He’s a good swordsman,” Donaju replied. “He detests the French, and in his heart he would like to be a good man.”
“Kiely detests the French?” Sharpe asked without bothering to disguise his skepticism.
“The French, Sharpe, are destroying Kiely’s privileged world,” Donaju explained. “He’s from the ancien régime, so of course he hates them. He has no money, but under the ancien régime that didn’t matter because birth and title were enough to get a man a royal appointment and exemption from taxes. But the French preach equality and advancement on merit, and that threatens Kiely’s world, so he escapes the threat by drinking, whoring and gambling. The flesh is very weak, Sharpe, and it’s especially feeble if you’re bored, underemployed and also suspect that you’re a relic of a bygone world.” Donaju shrugged, as though ashamed of having offered Sharpe such a long and high-minded sermon. The captain was a modest man, but efficient, and it was on Donaju’s slender shoulders that the day-to-day running of the guard had devolved. He now told Sharpe how he would attempt to stem the desertions by doubling the sentries and using only men he believed were reliable as pickets, but at the same time he blamed the British for his men’s predicament. “Why did they put us in this godforsaken place?” Donaju asked. “It’s almost as if your general wants our men to run.”
That was a shrewd thrust and Sharpe had no real answer. Instead he mumbled something about the fort being a strategic outpost and needing a garrison, but he was unconvincing and Donaju’s only response was to politely ignore the fiction.
For the San Isidro Fort was indeed a godforsaken place. It might have had strategic value once, but now the main road between Spain and Portugal ran leagues to the south and so the once huge fastness had been abandoned to decay. Weeds grew thick in the dry moat that had been eroded by rainfall so that the once formidable obstacle had become little more than a shallow ditch. Frost had crumbled the walls, toppling their stones into the ditch to make countless bridges to what was left of the glacis. A white owl roosted in the remains of the chapel’s bell tower while the once-tended graves of the garrison’s officers had become nothing but shallow declivities in a stony meadow. The only serviceable parts of San Isidro were the old barracks buildings that had been kept in a state of crude repair thanks to the infrequent visits of Portuguese regiments which had been stationed there in times of political crisis. During those crises the men would block the holes in the barracks walls to protect themselves from the cold winds, while the officers took up quarters in the twin-towered gatehouse that had somehow survived the years of neglect. There were even gates that Runciman solemnly ordered closed and barred each night, though employing such a precaution against desertion was like stopping up one earth of a mighty rabbit warren.
Yet, for all its decay, the fort still held a moldering grandeur. The impressive twin-towered gateway was embellished with royal escutcheons and approached by a four-arched causeway that spanned the only section of the dry moat still capable of checking an assault. The chapel ruins were laced with delicate carved stonework while the gun platforms were still hugely massive. Most impressive of all was the fort’s location, for its ramparts offered sky-born views deep across shadowy peaks to horizons unimaginable distances away. The eastern walls looked deep into Spain and it was on those eastern battlements, beneath the flags of Spain and Britain, that Lord Kiely discovered Sharpe on the third morning of the guard’s stay in the fort. It seemed that even Kiely had become worried about the rate of desertion. “We didn’t come here to be destroyed by desertion,” Kiely snapped at Sharpe. The wind quivered the waxed tips of his mustaches.
Sharpe fought back the comment that Kiely was responsible for his men, not Sharpe, and instead asked his lordship just why he had come to join the British forces.
And, to Sharpe’s surprise, the young Lord Kiely took the question seriously. “I want to fight, Sharpe. That’s why I wrote to His Majesty.”
“So you’re in the right place, my lord,” Sharpe said sourly. “The Crapauds are just the other side of that valley.” He gestured toward the deep, bare glen that separated the San Isidro from the nearest hills. Sharpe suspected that French scouts must be active on the valley’s far side and would already have seen the movement in the old fort.
“We’re not in the right place, Sharpe,” Kiely said. “I asked King Ferdinand to order us to Cadiz, to be in our own army and among our own kind, but he sent us to Wellington instead. We don’t want to be here, but we have royal orders and we obey those orders.”
“Then give your men a royal order not to desert,” Sharpe said glibly.
“They’re bored! They’re worried! They feel betrayed!” Kiely shuddered, not with emotion, but because he had just risen from his bed and was still trying to shake off his morning hangover. “They didn’t come here to be trained, Sharpe,” he snarled, “but to fight! They’re proud men, a bodyguard, not a pack of raw recruits. Their job is to fight for the king, to show Europe that Ferdinand still has teeth.”
Sharpe pointed east. “See that track, my lord? The one that climbs to that saddle in the hills? March your men up there, keep them marching for half a day and I’ll guarantee you a fight. The French will love it. It’ll be easier for them than fighting choirboys. Half your men don’t even have working muskets! And the other half can’t use them. You tell me they’re trained? I’ve seen militia companies better trained in Britain! And all those plump militia bastards do is parade in the marketplace once a week and then beat a retreat to the nearest bloody tavern. Your men aren’t trained, my lord, whatever you might think, but you give them to me for a month and I’ll have them sharper than a bloody razor.”
“They’re merely out of practice,” Kiely said loftily. His immense pride would not let him concede that Sharpe was right and that his vaunted palace guards were a shambles. He turned and gazed at his men, who were being drilled on the weed-thick flagstones of the fort’s plaza. Beyond the company, hard by the gatehouse towers, grooms were bringing saddled horses ready for the off
icers’ midday exercises in horsemanship, while just inside the gate, on a stretch of smooth flagstones, Father Sarsfield was teaching the catechism to some of the company’s children. The learning process evidently involved a deal of laughter; indeed, Sharpe had noticed, wherever the chaplain went, good humor followed. “If they were just given an opportunity,” Kiely said of his men, “they’d fight.”
“I’m sure they would,” Sharpe said, “and they’d lose. What do you want of them? Suicide?”
“If necessary,” Kiely said seriously. He had been staring east into enemy-held country, but now looked Sharpe in the eye. “If necessary,” he said again, “yes.”
Sharpe gazed at the dissolute, ravaged young face. “You’re mad, my lord.”
Kiely did not take offense at the accusation. “Would you call Roland’s defense of Roncesvalles the suicide of a madman? Did Leonidas’s Spartans do nothing but throw away their lives in a fit of imbecility? What about your own Sir Richard Grenville? Was he just mad? Sometimes, Sharpe, a great name and undying fame can only come from a grand gesture.” He pointed at the far hills. “There are three hundred thousand Frenchmen over there, and how many British here? Thirty thousand? The war is lost, Sharpe, it is lost. A great Christian kingdom is going down to mediocrity, and all because of a Corsican upstart. All the glory and the valor and the splendor of a royal world are about to become commonplace and tawdry. All the nasty, mean things—republicanism, democracy, equality—are crawling into the light and claiming that they can replace a lineage of great kings. We are seeing the end of history, Sharpe, and the beginnings of chaos, but maybe, just maybe, King Ferdinand’s household guard can bring the curtain down with one last act of shining glory.” For a few seconds the drunken Kiely had betrayed his younger, nobler self. “That’s why we’re here, Sharpe, to make a story that will still be told when men have forgotten the very name of Bonaparte.”
“Christ,” Sharpe said, “no wonder your boys are deserting. Jesus! I would too. If I take a man into battle, my lord, I like to offer him a better than evens chance that he’ll march away with his skin intact. If I wanted to kill the buggers I’d just strangle them in their sleep. It’s kinder.” He turned and watched the Real Compañía Irlandesa. The men were taking it in turns to use the forty or so serviceable muskets and, with a handful of exceptions, they were virtually useless. A good soldier could shoot a smoothbore musket every twenty seconds, but these men were lucky to get a shot away every forty seconds. The guards had spent too long wearing powdered wigs and standing outside gilded doors, and not long enough learning the simple habits of priming, ramming, firing and loading. “But I’ll train them,” Sharpe said when the echo of another straggling volley had faded across the fort, “and I’ll stop the buggers deserting.” He knew he was undermining Hogan’s stratagem, but Sharpe liked the rank and file of the Real Compañía Irlandesa. They were soldiers like any others, not so well trained maybe, and with more confused loyalties than most, but the majority of the men were willing enough. There was no mischief there, and it cut against Sharpe’s grain to betray good men. He wanted to train them. He wanted to make the company into a unit of which any army could be proud.
“So how will you stop them deserting?” Kiely asked.
“By my own method,” Sharpe said, “and you don’t want to know what it is, my lord, because it isn’t a method Roland would have much liked.”
Lord Kiely did not respond to Sharpe’s taunt. Instead he was staring eastward at something that had just claimed his attention. He took a small telescope from his uniform pocket, snapped it open and trained it across the wide bare valley to where Sharpe, staring into the morning sun, could just make out the figure of a lone horseman picking his way down the track which zigzagged from the saddle. Kiely turned. “Gentlemen!” he shouted at his officers. “To horse!” His lordship, energized by a sudden excitement, ran down one of the ammunition ramps and shouted for a groom to bring his big black stallion.
Sharpe turned back east and took out his own telescope. It took him a moment or two to train the cumbersome instrument, then he managed to trap the distant rider in the lens. The horseman was in the uniform of the Real Compañía Irlandesa and he was also in trouble. Till now the man had been following the course of the steep track as it twisted down the valley’s side, but now he abandoned the track and put his horse to the precipitous slope and slashed back with his whip to drive the beast down that dangerous descent. Half a dozen dogs raced ahead of the horseman, but Sharpe was more interested in what had prompted the man’s sudden, dangerous plunge down the mountainside and so he raised the telescope to the skyline and there, silhouetted against the cloudless sky’s hard brilliance, he saw dragoons. French dragoons. The lone horseman was a fugitive and the French were close behind.
“Are you coming, Sharpe?” Colonel Runciman, mounted on his carthorse-like mare, had thoughtfully provided his spare horse for Sharpe. Runciman was relying more and more on Sharpe as a companion to stave off the necessity of dealing with the sardonic Lord Kiely, whose tart comments constantly dispirited Runciman. “D’you know what’s happening, Sharpe?” Runciman asked as his nemesis led a ragged procession of mounted officers out of the fort’s imposing entranceway. “Is it an attack?” The colonel’s uncommon display of energy was doubtless caused by fear rather than curiosity.
“There’s a fellow in company uniform coming toward us, General, with a pack of Frogs on his tail.”
“My word!” Runciman looked alarmed. As wagon master general he had been given few opportunities to see the enemy and he was not certain he wanted to remedy that lack now, but he could hardly display timidity in front of the guards and so he spurred his horse into a lumbering walk. “You’ll stay close to me, Sharpe! As an aide, you understand?”
“Of course, General.” Sharpe, uncomfortable as ever on horseback, followed Runciman across the entrance bridge. Sergeant Harper, curious about the excitement that had stirred the fort into sudden activity, led the Real Compañía Irlandesa onto the ramparts, ostensibly to stand guard, but in reality so they could watch whatever event had prompted this sudden exodus of officers from San Isidro.
By the time Sharpe had negotiated the causeway over the half-filled dry moat and had persuaded his horse to turn east off the road, the adventure seemed over. The fugitive had already crossed the stream and was now closer to Lord Kiely’s rescue party than to his French pursuers, and as Kiely was attended by a dozen officers and there were only half a dozen dragoons, the horseman was clearly safe. Sharpe watched the fugitive’s dogs lope excitedly round the rescue party, then he saw that the pursuing Frenchmen were dressed in the mysterious gray coats of Brigadier General Loup’s brigade. “That fellow had a lucky escape, General,” Sharpe said, “those are Loup’s dragoons.”
“Loop?” Runciman asked.
“Brigadier Loup, General. He’s a nasty Frog who dresses his men in wolf fur and likes to cut off his enemies’ balls before they die.”
“Oh, my word.” Runciman paled. “Are you sure?”
“I’ve met him, General. He threatened to geld me.”
Runciman was driven to fortify himself by taking a handful of sugared almonds from a pocket and putting them one by one into his mouth. “I do sometimes wonder if my dear father was not right,” he said between mouthfuls, “and that perhaps I should have chosen a churchman’s career. I would have made a very serviceable bishop, I think, though perhaps a bishop’s life might not have proved full enough for a man of my energies. There’s little real work to do as a prelate, Sharpe. One preaches the odd sermon, of course, and makes oneself pleasant to the better sort of people in the county, and from time to time a fellow has to whip the lesser clergy into line, but there’s not much else to the job. It’s hardly a demanding life, Sharpe, and, quite frankly, most episcopal palaces are inhabited by very mediocre men. My dear father excepted, of course. Oh, my word, what’s happening?”
Lord Kiely had ridden ahead to greet the fugitive, but, after stretching o
ut a hand and offering a hasty word, his lordship had spurred on toward the French pursuers who, recognizing that their quarry had escaped, had already reined in their horses. But now Kiely crossed the stream, drew his sword and shouted a challenge to the Frenchmen.
Every man in the valley knew what Kiely intended. He was challenging an enemy officer to a duel. Men of sense, like infantrymen or anyone given half a set of wits, disapproved of the practice, but cavalrymen could rarely resist the challenge. To take part in such a combat required pride and bravery, but to win such a fight was to forge a name as a warrior and every cavalry regiment in every army had officers whose fame went back to just such a fight: one man against one man, single sword against single sword, a duel between strangers that invited fame or death. “Kiely’s trying to get himself killed, General,” Sharpe told Runciman. Sharpe sounded sour, yet he could not deny a reluctant admiration for Kiely who, for this moment at least, had thrown off his hangover and his morose bitterness to become what he was in his own daydreams: the perfect knight and king’s champion. “Kiely’s got a fancy to die famous,” Sharpe said. “He wants to be Roland or that Spartan fellow who thumped the Persians.”
“Leonidas, Sharpe, King Leonidas,” Runciman said. “Mind you, Sharpe, Kiely’s a fine swordsman. I’ve watched him at practice, and the drink scarcely slows him a beat! Not that we’ll see any evidence of that today,” Runciman said as Kiely turned away from the unmoving Frenchmen. “None of them will fight!” Runciman sounded surprised, but also a little relieved that he would not have to witness any bloodshed.
“Kiely hardly gave them time to accept,” Sharpe said. And Kiely had indeed stayed only a few seconds, almost as though he had wanted to make the defiant gesture, but was scared lest any of the enemy might accept his challenge.