Sharpe’s Fury: The Battle of Barrosa, March 1811

‘He bloody was,’ Sharpe said hotly.

‘So I’m warning you, that’s all. If I were you I’d write my own report and muddy the water a little.’ Pullifer glanced up at the sails, found nothing to criticize, and shrugged. ‘We’ll catch a few mortar rounds going into Cadiz, but they haven’t hit us yet.’

In the afternoon the west wind turned soft so that the Thornside slowed and wallowed in the long Atlantic swells. Cadiz came slowly into sight, a city of gleaming white towers that seemed to float on the ocean. By dusk the wind had died to a whisper that did nothing except fret the frigate’s sails and Pullifer was content to wait till morning to make his approach. A big merchantman was much closer to land and she was ghosting into harbour on the last dying breaths of wind. Pullifer gazed at her through a big telescope. ‘She’s the Santa Catalina,’ he announced, ‘we saw her in the Azores a year ago.’ He collapsed the glass. ‘I hope she’s getting more wind than we are, otherwise she’ll never make the southern part of the harbour.’

‘Does it matter?’ Sharpe asked.

‘The bloody Frogs will use her for target practice.’

It seemed the captain was right for just after dark Sharpe heard the muffled sound of heavy guns like thunder far away. They were the French mortars firing from the mainland and Sharpe watched their monstrous flashes from the Thornside’s forecastle. Each flash was like sheet lightning, silhouetting a mile of shoreline, gone in a heartbeat, the sudden brilliance confused by the lingering smoke beneath the stars. A sailor was playing a sad tune on a fiddle and a small wash of lantern light showed from the aft cabin’s companionway where the brigadier was dining again with Captain Pullifer. ‘Were you not invited, sir?’ Harper asked. Sharpe’s riflemen and the Connaught Rangers were lounging around a long-barrelled nine-pounder on the forecastle.

‘I was invited,’ Sharpe said, ‘but the captain reckoned I might be happier eating with the wardroom.’

‘They made a plum duff up here,’ Harper said.

‘It was good,’ Harris added, ‘really good.’

‘We had the same.’

‘I sometimes think I should have joined the navy,’ Harper said.

‘You do?’ Sharpe was surprised.

‘Plum duff and rum.’

‘Not many women.’

‘That’s true.’

‘How’s your head, sir?’ Daniel Hagman asked.

‘Still there, Dan.’

‘Is it hurting?’

‘It hurts,’ Sharpe admitted.

‘Vinegar and brown paper, sir,’ Hagman said earnestly. ‘It always works.’

‘I had an uncle that was knocked on the head,’ Harper said. The Ulsterman had an endless supply of relatives who had suffered various misfortunes. ‘He was butted by a nanny goat, so he was, and you could have filled Lough Crockatrillen with his blood! Jesus, it was everywhere. My auntie thought he was dead!’

Sharpe, like the riflemen and rangers, waited. ‘So was he?’ he asked after a while.

‘Good God, no! He was milking the cows again that night, but the poor goat was never the same. So what do we do in Cadiz, sir?’

Sharpe shrugged. ‘We’ll get a boat to Lisbon. There must be dozens of boats going to Lisbon.’ He turned as two reports rumbled across the water, but there was nothing to see. The far flashes had already faded and the mortar shells gave no light when they landed. Intermittent lamplight glimmered across the city’s white walls, but otherwise the shoreline was dark. Black water lapped against the frigate’s flanks and the sails shivered in the small wind.

By dawn the wind had freshened and the Thornside stood southwest towards the entrance to the Bay of Cadiz. The city was closer now and Sharpe could see the massive grey ramparts above which the houses glowed white, their walls studded with squat watchtowers and church belfries through which smoke drifted. Lights flashed from the towers and at first Sharpe was puzzled by the glints, then he realized that they were the sun reflecting from the telescopes which watched the Thornside’s approach. A pilot boat cut across the frigate’s course, her captain waving his arms to show he had a pilot who was available to come aboard the frigate, but Pullifer had run this treacherous approach often enough to need no guide. Gulls wheeled about the frigate’s masts and sails as she slid past the heave and wash of broken water that marked the Diamante Rock and then the bay opened before her bows. The Thornside