“A lot, sir.” Sharpe winced as his sore shoulder gave a stab of pain. “I’m not rich, sir, so I can’t buy a captaincy, let alone a majority, so I have to survive by merit. And a soldier’s only as good as his last battle, sir, and my last battle was San Isidro. I have to wipe that out.”
Donaju frowned. “It was my only battle,” he said softly and to no one but himself.
Tarrant scorned Sharpe’s pessimism. “Are you saying, Sharpe, that you have to perform some ridiculous act of heroism to survive?”
“Yes, sir. Exactly that, sir. So if you’ve got some horrid errand tomorrow then I want it.”
“Good God, man.” Tarrant was appalled. “Good God! Send you to your death? I can’t do that!”
Sharpe smiled. “What were you doing seventeen years ago, sir?”
Tarrant thought for a second or two. “’Ninety-four? Let’s see now…” He counted off on his fingers for another few seconds. “I was still at school. Construing Horace in a gloomy schoolroom beneath the walls of Stirling Castle and being beaten every time I made an error.”
“I was fighting the French, sir,” Sharpe said. “And I’ve been fighting one bugger or another ever since, so don’t you worry about me.”
“Even so, Sharpe, even so.” Tarrant frowned and shook his head. “Do you like kidney?”
“Love it, sir.”
“It’s all yours.” Tarrant handed his plate to Sharpe. “Get your strength up, Sharpe, it seems you might need it.” He twisted around to look at the red flame glow that lit the night above the fires of the French encampments. “Unless they don’t attack,” he said wistfully.
“The buggers aren’t going away, sir, until we drive them away,” Sharpe said. “Today was just a skirmish. The real battle hasn’t started yet, so the Crapauds will be back, sir, they’ll be back.”
They slept close to the ammunition wagons. Sharpe woke once as a small shower hissed in the embers of the fire, then slept again until an hour before dawn. He awoke to see a small mist clinging to the plateau and blurring the gray shapes of soldiers tending their fires. Sharpe shared a pot of hot shaving water with Major Tarrant, then pulled on his jacket and weapons and walked westward in search of a cavalry regiment. He found an encampment of hussars from the king’s German Legion and exchanged a half-pint of issue rum for an edge on his sword. The German armorer bent over his wheel as the sparks flew and when he was done the edge of Sharpe’s heavy cavalry sword was glinting in the dawn’s small light. Sharpe slid the blade carefully into its scabbard and walked slowly back toward the gaunt silhouetted shapes of the wagon park.
The sun rose through a cloud of French cooking smoke. The enemy on the stream’s eastern bank greeted the new day with a fusillade of musketry that rattled among Fuentes de Oñoro’s houses, but died away as no shots were returned. On the British ridge the gunners cut new fuses and piled their ready magazines with case shot, but no French infantry advanced from the distant trees to be the beneficiaries of their work. A large force of French cavalry rode southward across the marshy plain where they were shadowed by horsemen from the king’s German legion, but as the sun rose higher and the last pockets of mist evaporated from the lowland fields it dawned on the waiting British that Masséna was not planning any immediate attack.
Two hours after dawn a French voltigeur picket on the stream’s eastern bank called out a tentative greeting to the British sentry he knew was hidden behind a broken wall on the west bank. He could not see the British soldier, but he could see the blue haze of his pipe smoke. “Goddamn!” he called, using the French nickname for all British troops. “Goddamn!”
“Crapaud?”
A pair of empty hands appeared above the French-held wall. No one fired and, a moment later, an anxious mustached face appeared. The Frenchman produced an unlit cigar and mimed that he would like a light.
The greenjacket picket emerged from hiding just as warily, but when no enemy fired at him he walked out onto the clapper bridge that had lost one of its stone slabs in the previous day’s fighting. He held his clay pipe out over the gap. “Come on, Frenchie.”
The voltigeur walked onto the bridge and leaned over for the pipe that he used to light his cigar. Then he returned the pipe with a short length of garlic sausage. The two men smoked companionably, enjoying the spring sunshine. Other voltigeurs stretched and stood, just as the greenjackets relaxed in their positions. Some men took off their boots and dangled their feet in the stream.
In Fuentes de Oñoro itself the British were struggling to remove the dead and the wounded from the crammed alleys. Men wrapped cloth strips about their mouths to drag the blood-black and heat-swollen bodies from the piles that marked where the fighting had been fiercest. Other men fetched water from the stream to relieve the thirst of the wounded. By midmorning the truce across the stream was official and a company of unarmed French infantry arrived to carry their own casualties back across the bridge that had been patched with a plank taken from the watermill on the British bank. French ambulances waited at the ford to carry their men to the surgeons. The vehicles had been specially constructed for carrying wounded men and had springs as lavish as any city grandee’s coach. The British army preferred to use farm carts that jolted the wounded foully.
A French major sat drinking wine and playing chess with a greenjacket captain in the inn’s garden. Outside the inn a work party loaded an ox-drawn wagon with the dead who would be carried up to the ridge and buried in a common grave. The chessplayers frowned when a burst of raucous laughter sounded loud and the British captain, annoyed that the laughter was not fading away, went to the gate and snapped at a sergeant for an explanation. “It was Mallory, sir,” the sergeant said, pointing to a shamefaced British rifleman who was the butt of French and British amusement. “Bugger fell asleep, sir, and the Frogs was loading him up with the dead ’uns.”
The French major took one of the Englishman’s castles and remarked that he had once almost buried a living man. “We were already throwing earth in his grave when he sneezed. That was in Italy. He’s a sergeant now.”
The rifle captain might have been losing the game of chess, but he was determined not to be outdone in stories. “I’ve met two men who survived hangings in England,” he remarked. “They were pulled off the scaffold too soon and their bodies sold to the surgeons. The doctors pay five guineas a corpse, I’m told, so they can demonstrate their damned techniques to their apprentices. I’m told the corpses revive far more often than you’d think. There’s always an unseemly scramble round the gallows as the man’s family tries to cut the body down before the doctors get their wretched hands on it, and there doesn’t seem anyone in authority to make sure the villain’s properly dead before he’s unstrung.” He moved a bishop. “I suppose the authorities are being bribed.”
“The guillotine makes no such mistakes,” the major said as he advanced a pawn. “Death by science. Very quick and certain. I do believe that is checkmate.”
“Damn me,” the Englishman said, “so it is.”
The French major stowed away his chess set. His pawns were musket balls, half limewashed and half left plain, the court pieces were carved from wood and the board was a square of painted canvas that he wrapped carefully about the chessmen. “It seems our lives have been spared this day,” he said, glancing up at the sun that was already past the meridian. “Maybe we shall fight tomorrow instead?”
Up on the ridge the British watched as French troops marched south. It was clear that Masséna would now be trying to turn the British right flank and so Wellington ordered the Seventh Division to deploy southward and thus reinforce a strong force of Spanish partisans who were blocking the roads the French needed to advance artillery as part of their flanking maneuver. Wellington’s army was now in two parts; the largest on the plateau behind Fuentes de Oñoro was blocking the approach to Almeida while the smaller part was two and a half miles south astride the road along which the British would need to retreat if they were defeated. Masséna put a t
elescope to his one eye to watch as the small British division moved south. He kept expecting the division to stop before it left the protective artillery range of the plateau, but the troops kept marching and marching. “He’s made a bollocks of it,” he told an aide as the Seventh Division finally marched way beyond the range of the strong British artillery. Masséna collapsed the telescope. “Monsieur Wellington has made a bollocks of it,” he said.
André Masséna had begun his military career as a private in the ranks of Louis XVI’s army and now he was a marshal of France, the Duke of Rivoli and the Prince of Essling. Men called him “Your Majesty,” yet once he had been a half-starved wharf rat in the small town of Nice. He had also once possessed two eyes, but the emperor had shot one of the eyeballs away in a hunting accident. Napoleon would never acknowledge the responsibility, but nor would Marshal Masséna ever dream of blaming his beloved emperor for the eye’s loss, for he owed both his royal status and his high military rank to Napoleon, who had recognized the wharf rat’s skills as a soldier. Those skills had made André Masséna famous inside the empire and feared outside. He had trampled through Italy winning victory after victory, he had smashed the Russians on the borders of Switzerland and rammed bloody defeat down Austrian throats before Marengo. Marshal André Masséna, Duke of Rivoli and Prince of Essling, was not a pretty soldier, but by God he knew how to fight, which was why, at fifty-two years old, he had been sent to retrieve the disasters besetting the emperor’s armies in Spain and Portugal.
Now the wharf rat turned prince watched in disbelief as the gap between the two parts of the British army opened still wider. For a few seconds he even toyed with the idea that perhaps the four or five thousand red-coated infantrymen marching southward were the Irish regiments that Major Ducos had promised would mutiny before the battle, but Masséna had never put much hope in Ducos’s stratagem and the fact that these nine battalions were flying their flags as they marched suggested that they were hardly in revolt. Instead, miraculously, it seemed that the British were offering them up as a sacrifice by isolating them out in the southern plain where they would be far from any help. Masséna watched as the enemy regiments finally stopped just short of a village far to the south. According to his map the village was called Nave de Haver and it lay nearly five miles from Fuentes de Oñoro. “Is Wellington tricking us?” Masséna asked an aide.
The aide was just as incredulous as his master. “Perhaps he believes he can beat us without keeping to the rules?” he suggested.
“Then in the morning we will teach him about the rules of war. I expected better of this Englishman! Tomorrow night, Jean, we shall have his whores as our own. Does Wellington have whores?”
“I don’t know, Your Majesty.”
“Then find out. And make sure I get the pick of the bunch before some filthy grenadier gives her the clap, you hear me?”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” the aide said. His master’s passion for women was as tiresome as his appetite for victory was inspiring, and tomorrow, it seemed, both hungers would be satisfied.
By midafternoon it was plain that the French were not coming that day. The pickets were doubled, and every battalion kept at least three companies under arms, but the other companies were released to more usual duties. Cattle were herded onto the plateau and slaughtered for the evening meal, bread was fetched from Vilar Formoso and the rum ration distributed.
Captain Donaju sought and received Tarrant’s permission to take a score of men to attend Lord Kiely’s burial, which was taking place four miles behind Fuentes de Oñoro. Hogan also insisted that Sharpe attend and Harper wanted to come as well. Sharpe felt awkward in Hogan’s company, especially as the Irishman seemed blithely unaware of Sharpe’s bitterness over the court of inquiry. “I invited Runciman,” Hogan told Sharpe as they walked along the dusty road west from Vilar Formoso, “but he didn’t really want to come. Poor fellow.”
“In a bad way, is he?” Sharpe asked.
“Heartbroken,” Hogan said callously. “Keeps claiming that nothing was his fault. He doesn’t seem to grasp that isn’t the point.”
“It isn’t, is it? The point is that you’d prefer to keep bloody Valverde happy.”
Hogan shook his head. “I’d prefer to bury Valverde, and preferably alive, but what I really want is for Wellington to be Generalisimo.”
“And you’ll sacrifice me for that?”
“Of course! Every soldier knows you must lose some valuable men if you want to win a great prize. Besides, what does it matter if you do lose your commission? You’ll just go off and join Teresa and become a famous partisan: El Fusilero!” Hogan smiled cheerfully, then turned to Harper. “Sergeant? Would you do me a great service and give me a moment’s privacy with Captain Sharpe?”
Harper obligingly walked on ahead where he tried to overhear the conversation between the two officers, but Hogan kept his voice low and Sharpe’s exclamations of surprise offered Harper no clue. Nor did he have any chance to question Sharpe before the three British officers turned a corner to see Lord Kiely’s servants and Captain Donaju’s twenty men standing awkwardly beside a grave that had been recently dug in an orchard next to a graveyard. Father Sarsfield had paid the village grave diggers to dig the hole just feet away from consecrated ground for, though the laws of the church insisted that Lord Kiely’s sins must keep him from burial in holy ground, Sarsfield would nevertheless place the body as near as he could to consecrated soil so that on Judgment Day the exiled Irishman’s soul would not be utterly bereft of Christian company.
The body had been stitched into a dirty white canvas shroud. Four men of the Real Compañía Irlandesa lowered the corpse into the deep grave, then Hogan, Sharpe and Harper took off their hats as Father Sarsfield said the prayers in Latin and afterward spoke in English to the twenty guardsmen. Lord Kiely, the priest said, had suffered from the sin of pride and that pride had not let him endure disappointment. Yet all Irishmen, Sarsfield said, must learn to live with disappointment for it was given to their heritage as surely as the sparks flew upward. Yet, he went on, the proper response to disappointment was not to abandon hope and reject God’s gift of life, but to keep the hope glowing bright. “We have no homes, you and I,” he said to the somber guardsmen, “but one day we shall all inherit our earthly home, and if it is not given to us then it will come to our children or to our children’s children.” The priest fell silent and stared down into the grave. “Nor must you worry that his lordship committed suicide,” he finally continued. “Suicide is a sin, but sometimes life is so unbearable that we must risk the sin rather than face the horror. Wolfe Tone made that choice thirteen years ago.” The mention of the Irish patriot rebel made one or two of the guardsmen glance at Sharpe, then they looked back to the priest, who went on in his gentle, persuasive voice to tell how Wolfe Tone had been held captive in a British dungeon and how, rather than face the enemy’s gallows, he had slit his own throat with a penknife. “Lord Kiely’s motives might not have been so pure as Tone’s,” Sarsfield said, “but we don’t know what sadness drove him to his sin and in our ignorance we must therefore pray for his soul and forgive him.” There were tears in the priest’s eyes as he took a small phial of holy water from the haversack at his side and sprinkled its drops on the lonely grave. He offered the benediction in Latin, then stepped back as the guardsmen raised their muskets to fire a ragged volley over the open grave. Birds panicked up from the orchard’s trees, then circled and flew back as the smoke dissipated among the branches.
Hogan took charge as soon as the volley had been fired. He insisted that there was still some danger of a French attack at dusk and that the soldiers should all return to the ridge. “I’ll follow soon,” he told Sharpe, then he ordered Kiely’s servants back to his lordship’s quarters.
The soldiers and servants left, the sound of their boots fading in the late afternoon air. It was sultry in the orchard where the two grave diggers waited patiently for the signal to fill up the grave beside which Hogan now stood, ha
t in hand, staring down at the shrouded corpse. “For a long time,” he said to Father Sarsfield, “I’ve carried a pillbox with some Irish earth inside so that if I should die I would rest with a little bit of Ireland all through eternity. I seem to have mislaid it, Father, which is a pity for I’d have liked to sprinkle a wee bit of Ireland’s soil onto Lord Kiely’s grave.”
“A generous thought, Major,” Sarsfield said.
Hogan stared down at Kiely’s shroud. “The poor man. I hear he was hoping to marry the Lady Juanita?”
“They spoke of it,” Sarsfield said dryly, his tone implying his disapproval of the match.
“The lady’s doubtless in mourning,” Hogan said, then put his hat back on. “Or maybe she’s not mourning at all? You’ve heard that she’s gone back to the French? Captain Sharpe let her go. He’s a fool for women, that man, but the Lady Juanita can easily make a fool of men. She did of poor Kiely here, did she not?” Hogan paused as a sneeze gathered and exploded. “Bless me,” he said, wiping his nose and eyes with a vast red handkerchief. “And what a terrible woman she was,” he went on. “Saying she was going to marry Kiely, and all the while she was committing adultery and fornication with Brigadier Guy Loup. Is fornication a mere venial sin these days?”
“Fornication, Major, is a mortal sin.” Sarsfield smiled. “As I suspect you know only too well.”
“Crying out to heaven for revenge, is it?” Hogan returned the smile, then looked back to the grave. Bees hummed in the orchard blossoms above Hogan’s head. “But what about fornicating with the enemy, Father?” he asked. “Isn’t that a worse sin?”
Sarsfield took the scapular from around his neck, kissed it, then carefully folded the strip of cloth. “Why are you so worried for the Doña Juanita’s soul, Major?” he asked.
Hogan still looked down at the dead man’s coarse shroud. “I’d rather worry about his poor soul. Do you think it was discovering that his lady was humping a Frog that killed him?”