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

‘Congratulations, sir.’

‘What? Oh, thank you. That’s generous of you.’ Moon did seem touched by Sharpe’s praise. ‘It went better than I dared hope. There’s tea on the boil over there. Let your lads have some.’

The French prisoners were sitting in the fort’s centre. A dozen horses had been found in the stables and they were now being saddled, presumably because Moon, who had marched from the Tagus, reckoned he had earned the privilege of riding back. A captured officer was standing beside the well, disconsolately watching the victorious British troops who were gleefully searching the French packs captured in the barracks. ‘Fresh bread!’ Major Gillespie, one of Moon’s aides, tossed Sharpe a loaf. ‘Still warm. The bastards live well, don’t they?’

‘I thought they were supposed to be starving?’

‘Not here they’re not. Land of milk and honey, this place.’

Moon climbed to the eastern firestep which faced the bridge and began looking into the ready magazines beside the guns. The artillerymen in Fort Josephine saw his red coat and opened fire. They were using canister and their shots rattled on the parapet and whistled overhead. Moon ignored the balls. ‘Sharpe!’ he called, then waited as the rifleman climbed to the rampart. ‘Time you earned your wages, Sharpe,’ he said. Sharpe said nothing, just watched as the brigadier peered into a magazine. ‘Round shot,’ Moon announced, ‘common shell and grapeshot.’

‘Not canister, sir?’

‘Grapeshot, definitely grapeshot. Naval stores, I suspect. Bastards haven’t got any ships left so they’ve sent their grapeshot here.’ He let the magazine lid drop and stared down at the bridge. ‘Common shell won’t break that brute, will it? There are a score of women down below. In the barracks. Have some of your fellows escort them over the bridge, will you? Deliver them to the French with my compliments. The rest of your men can help Sturridge. He’ll have to blow the far end.’

Lieutenant Sturridge was a Royal Engineer whose job was to destroy the bridge. He was a nervous young man who seemed terrified of Moon. ‘The far end?’ Sharpe asked, wanting to be sure he had heard correctly.

Moon looked exasperated. ‘If we break the bridge at this end, Sharpe,’ he explained with exaggerated patience as though he were speaking to a young and not very bright child, ‘the damn thing will float downstream, but will still be attached to the far bank. The French can then salvage the pontoons. Not much point in coming all this way and leaving the French with a serviceable pontoon bridge that they can rebuild, is there? But if we break it at the Spanish end the pontoons should end up on this bank and we can burn them.’ A barrel-load of canister or grapeshot hissed overhead and the brigadier threw Fort Josephine an irritated glance. ‘Get on with it,’ he said to Sharpe, ‘I want to be away by tomorrow’s dawn.’

A picquet from the 74th’s light company guarded the eighteen women. Six were officers’ wives and they stood apart from the rest, trying to look brave. ‘You’ll take them over,’ Sharpe told Jack Bullen.

‘I will, sir?’

‘You like women, don’t you?’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘And you speak some of their horrible language, don’t you?’

‘Incredibly well, sir.’

‘So take the ladies over the bridge and up to that other fort.’

While Lieutenant Bullen persuaded the women that no harm would come to them and that they must gather their luggage and be ready to cross the river, Sharpe looked for Sturridge and found the engineer in the fort’s main magazine. ‘Powder,’ Sturridge greeted Sharpe. He had prised the lid from a barrel and now tasted the gunpowder. ‘Bloody awful powder.’ He spat it out with a grimace. ‘Bloody French powder. Nothing but bloody dust. Damp, too.’

‘Will it work?’

‘It should go bang,’ Sturridge said gloomily.

‘I’m taking you over the bridge,’ Sharpe told him.

‘There’s a handcart outside,’ Sturridge said, ‘and we’ll need it. Five barrels should be enough, even of this rubbish.’

‘You’ve got fuse?’

Sturridge unbuttoned his blue jacket and showed that he had several yards of slow match coiled around his waist. ‘You just thought I was portly, didn’t you? Why doesn’t he just blow the bridge at this end? Or in the middle?’

‘So the French can’t rebuild it.’

‘They couldn’t anyway. Takes a lot of skill to make one of those bridges. Doesn’t take much to undo one, but making a pontoon bridge isn’t a job for amateurs.’ Sturridge hammered the lid back onto the opened powder barrel. ‘The French aren’t going to like us being over there, are they?’

‘I wouldn’t think so.’

‘So is this where I die for England?’

‘That’s why I’m there. To make sure you don’t.’

‘That is a consolation,’ Sturridge said. He glanced across at Sharpe who was leaning, arms folded, against the wall. Sharpe’s face was shadowed by his shako’s peak, but his eyes were bright in the shadow. The face was scarred, hard, watchful and thin. ‘Actually it is a consolation,’ Sturridge said, then flinched because the brigadier was bellowing in the courtyard, demanding to know where Sturridge was and why the damned bridge was still intact. ‘Bloody man,’ Sturridge said.

Sharpe went back to the sunlight where Moon was exercising a captured horse, showing off to the French wives who had gathered by the eastern gate where Jack Bullen had commandeered the handcart for their luggage. Sharpe ordered the bags off and the cart to the main magazine where Harper and a half-dozen men loaded it with gunpowder. Then the women’s luggage was placed on top. ‘It’ll disguise the powder barrels,’ Sharpe explained to Harper.

‘Disguise it, sir?’

‘If the Crapauds see us crossing the bridge with powder, what do you think they’ll do?’

‘They won’t be happy, sir.’

‘No, Pat, they won’t. They’ll use us for target practice.’

It was mid-morning before everything was ready. The French in Fort Josephine had abandoned their desultory cannon fire. Sharpe had half expected the enemy to send an envoy across the river to enquire about the women, but none had come. ‘Three of the officers’ wives are from the 8th, sir,’ Jack Bullen told Sharpe.

‘They’re what?’ Sharpe asked.

‘French regiment, sir. The 8th. They’ve been at Cadiz, but they were sent to reinforce the troops besieging Badajoz. They’re across the river, sir, but some of the officers and their wives slept here last night. Better quarters, see?’ Bullen paused, evidently expecting some reaction from Sharpe. ‘Don’t you see, sir? There’s a whole French battalion over there. The 8th. Not just the garrison, but a fighting battalion. Oh, dear God.’ This last was because two women had detached themselves from the rest and were haranguing him in Spanish. Bullen calmed them with a smile. ‘They say they’re Spanish, sir,’ he explained to Sharpe, ‘and say they don’t want to go to the other fort.’

‘What are they doing here in the first place?’

The women talked to Sharpe, both at the same time, both urgently, and he thought he understood that they were claiming to have been captured by the French and forced to live with a pair of soldiers. That might be true, he thought. ‘So where do you want to go?’ he asked them in bad Spanish.

They both spoke again, pointing across the river and southwards, claiming that was where they had come from. Sharpe hushed them. ‘They can go wherever they bloody like, Jack.’

The fort’s gate was thrown open and Bullen led the way through, holding his arms wide to show the French across the river that he meant no harm. The women followed. The track down to the river was rough and stony and the women went slowly until they reached the wooden roadway laid across the pontoons. Sharpe and his men brought up the rear. Harper, his seven-barrelled gun slung next to his rifle, nodded across the river. ‘There’s a reception party, sir,’ he said, referring to three mounted French officers who had just appeared outside Fort Josephine. They were waiting there, watching the approaching women and soldiers.

A dozen of Sharpe’s men were manhandling the cart. Lieutenant Sturridge, the engineer, was with them and he kept flinching because the cart had a skewed axle and constantly lurched to the left. It went more smoothly once they were on the bridge, though the women were nervous of crossing because the whole roadway of planked chesses was vibrating from the pressure of the winter-swollen river as it forced its way between the barge-like pontoons. Dead branches and flotsam were jammed on the upstream side, increasing the pressure and making the water break white about the bluff bows. Each of the big pontoons was held against the current by a pair of thick anchor chains and Sharpe hoped that five barrels of damp powder would prove sufficient to shatter the massive construction. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ Harper asked.

‘Porto?’

‘All those poor bastards,’ Harper said, remembering the awful moment when the pontoon bridge across the Douro had snapped. The roadway had been crowded with folk fleeing the invading French, and hundreds of them had drowned. Sharpe still saw the children in his dreams.

The three French officers were riding down to the bridge’s far end now. They waited there and Sharpe hurried past the women. ‘Jack?’ he called to Bullen. ‘I need you to translate.’

Sharpe and Bullen led the way to the Spanish bank. The women followed hesitantly. The three French officers waited and, as Sharpe drew near, one of them took off his cocked hat in salute. ‘My name is Lecroix,’ he introduced himself. He spoke in English. Lecroix was a young man, exquisitely uniformed, with a lean handsome face and very white teeth. ‘Captain Lecroix of the 8th,’ he added.

‘Captain Sharpe.’

Lecroix’s eyes widened slightly, perhaps because Sharpe did not look like a captain. His uniform was torn and dirty and, though he wore a sword, as officers did, the blade was a heavy cavalry trooper’s weapon, which was a huge and unwieldy blade better suited for butchering. He carried a rifle too, and officers did not usually carry longarms. Then there was his face, tanned and scarred, a face you might meet in some foetid alley, not in a salon. It was a frightening face and Lecroix, who was no coward, almost recoiled from the hostility in Sharpe’s eyes. ‘Colonel Vandal,’ he said, putting the stress on the name’s second syllable, ‘sends his compliments, monsieur, and requests that you permit us to recover our wounded,’ he paused, glancing at the handcart that had been stripped of the women’s luggage, thus revealing the powder kegs, ‘before you attempt to destroy the bridge.’

‘Attempt?’ Sharpe asked.