Sharpe 3-Book Collection 5: Sharpe’s Company, Sharpe’s Sword, Sharpe’s Enemy

It rained all night; Sharpe knew, for he was awake most of it, listening to the ceaseless water, the wind, and the sporadic shot from the French cannon that tried to disturb the digging of the batteries. There was no counterfire from the British; the siege guns, still wrapped in straw and sacking, were waiting for a break in the weather so that the carts could be dragged over the hill and the massive guns put into their emplacements.

Sharpe sat with Harper at the top of the hill and stared down at the dull lights inside the city. They looked far away, blurred by the weather, and Sharpe tried to distinguish the Cathedral and thought of the sick child nearby.

Harper should not have been with him. He was under guard, sentenced to be flogged and reduced to the ranks, but Sharpe had simply told the sentries to look the other way while he and Harper climbed to the hilltop. Sharpe glanced at the Irishman. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Nothing to be sorry for, sir. You did all you could.’

Which had amounted to very little. Sharpe had pleaded, begged almost, but the filigree frame was proof enough for the Regimental Court Martial. Sharpe had testified that Harper had been with him all afternoon, fighting the French attack, and that his own telescope had disappeared in that time so the Sergeant could not have been responsible. Windham had been implacable. The telescope, he said, must have been stolen by another thief. Harper was guilty, broken down to a Private, and sentenced to a flogging.

Harper was thinking of the morning. The Donegal voice was soft. ‘A hundred strokes, eh? Could be worse.’ Twelve hundred lashes was the maximum sentence.

Sharpe handed a bottle to him. Both men were swathed in lengths of tarred canvas on which the rain drummed. ‘I got two hundred.’

‘The army’s going soft, so it is.’ Harper laughed. ‘And back to a bloody Private, too! They don’t even call me a Rifleman in this bloody Regiment. Private bloody Harper.’ He drank. ‘And when do they think I stole the bloody things?’

‘Tuesday.’

‘God save Ireland! St Patrick’s Day?’

‘You were missing from the lines.’

‘Jesus! I was with you. Drinking.’

‘I know. I told them.’

There was silence between them, a companionable misery. From the slope below came the chink of pickaxes as the batteries were sunk below the topsoil. At least, Sharpe reflected, the two of them had plenty of drink. The Light Company had pooled their resources, scrounged and stolen more, and beneath the canvas shelters there were at least a dozen canteens of rum or wine. ‘I’m sorry, Patrick.’

‘Save your breath, sir. It’ll not hurt.’ He knew he was lying. ‘I’ll kill that bastard!’

‘After me.’ They sat and thought about the comforting idea of killing Hakeswill. The Sergeant was taking precautions. He had pitched his shelter just yards from the officers’ crude, canvas tents, and Sharpe knew that there was no hope, this night, of their successfully spiriting Hakeswill away to some silent, lonely place.

The Irishman chuckled softly and Sharpe looked at him. ‘What?’

‘I was thinking of the Colonel. What was on the bloody portrait?’

‘His wife.’

‘She must be a rare beauty.’

‘No.’ Sharpe uncorked another canteen. ‘She looked a sour bitch, but you can never tell with paintings. Anyway, our Colonel approves of marriage. He thinks it keeps a man out of trouble.’

‘It’s probably true.’ Harper sounded unconvinced. ‘I hear a rumour that you and Miss Teresa are married. How the hell did that get started?’

‘I told the Colonel.’

‘You did!’ Harper laughed. ‘Mind you, you should marry her. Make an honest woman of her.’

‘And what about Jane Gibbons?’

Harper grinned. He had met the blonde girl, the sister of the man he had killed, and he shook his head. ‘She’ll not have you. You have to be born in a big house to marry that kind; lots of money and all that. You’re just a foot soldier, like the rest of us. A fancy red sash won’t get you into her bed. At least, not for keeps.’

Sharpe chuckled. ‘You think I should marry Teresa?’

‘Why not? She’s a skinny thing, so she is, but you could put some meat on her bones.’ Harper profoundly disapproved of Sharpe’s taste for slim women.

They sat silent again, listening to the rain pelt on the canvas, and sharing a friendship that rarely had a chance to be expressed or defined. Sharpe had a reputation, with those who did not know him well, of being a man short on words and it was true, he thought, except with a handful of friends. Harper and Hogan; Lossow, the German cavalryman, and that was about all. Exiles to a man, cut off from their own countries and fighting with a strange army. Sharpe was an exile, too, a stranger in the Officers’ Mess. ‘You know what the General says?’

Harper shook his head. ‘Tell me what the General says.’

‘He says that no one ever promoted from the ranks turns out well.’

‘Does he now?’

‘He says they turn to drink.’

‘In this army, who wouldn’t?’ Harper pushed a canteen at Sharpe. ‘Here, get yourself drunk.’

Some fool opened the door of a lantern in the parallel and the French gunners, ever alert, saw the light and suddenly the ramparts of Badajoz blossomed flame and shot. There were shouts from the workings, the light disappeared, but then there was the sick thud of the shots striking home and the screams from the trench. Harper spat. ‘We’ll never take this bloody town.’

‘We can’t stay here for ever.’

‘That’s what you said when you first went to Ireland.’

Sharpe grinned. ‘It’s the welcome you give us. We don’t want to leave. Anyway, we like the weather.’

‘You can keep it.’ Harper squinted up into the darkness. ‘Christ! I wish the rain would stop!’

‘I thought the Irish liked rain.’

‘We love rain, so we do, but this isn’t rain.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s the flood, the deluge, the end of the whole sodden world.’

Sharpe leaned back on a wicker gabion, abandoned by a working party, and stared up. ‘I haven’t seen the stars in a week. Longer.’

‘That’s true.’

‘I like stars.’

‘That’s nice for them.’ Harper was amused; he did not often hear Sharpe’s tongue loosened by drink.

‘No, really. You like birds, I like stars.’

‘Birds do things. They fly, make nests. You can watch them.’

Sharpe said nothing. He remembered the nights lying in fields, head on haversack, body inside the sewn blanket, and legs thrust into the arms of the jacket which was buttoned upside down on his stomach. It was the soldier’s way of sleeping, but on some nights he would simply lie there and watch the great smear in the sky that was like the camp fires of an unimaginably huge army. Legion upon incomprehensible legion, up there in the sky, and he knew that they were coming nearer, night by night, and the picture was confused in his head by the strange, drunken preachers who had come to the foundling home when he was a child. The stars were mixed up with the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the last trump, the second coming, the raising of the dead, and the lights in the night were the army of the world’s end. ‘The world won’t end in a flood. It’ll be bayonets and battalions. A bloody great battle.’