Sharpe 3-Book Collection 6: Sharpe’s Honour, Sharpe’s Regiment, Sharpe’s Siege

He heard the bolts on his door shoot back, but did not turn round. ‘Bonjour, m’sieu!’ It was the cheerful young guard.

Sharpe turned slowly, his neck hurting. ‘Jesus.’

The guard laughed. ‘Non, m’sieu. C’est moi.’ He put the bowl on the table and mimed shaving. ‘Oui, m’sieu?’

‘Oui.’

Sharpe stood up. He staggered on aching legs, and wished he had stayed on the floor. He held a hand up to the guard. ‘A minute! Wait!’ He went to the wooden screen, held it, and vomited. ‘Jesus!’

‘M’sieu?’

‘All right! All right! What time is it?’

‘M’sieu?’

Sharpe tried to remember the word. He snapped the fingers of his left hand. ‘L’heure?’

‘Ah! C’est six heures, m’sieu.’

‘Cease?’

The soldier held up six fingers, Sharpe nodded, then spat through the window.

The young guard seemed happy to shave the English officer. He did it skilfully, chatting incomprehensibly and cheerfully as he lathered and scraped and washed and towelled. It occurred to Sharpe that he could elbow the boy in the belly, take his musket, shoot the man outside, and be in the courtyard within ten seconds. There had to be a damned horse there and, with luck, he could be through the gates and away before the guards knew what was happening.

On the other hand he did not feel up to morning mayhem, and it seemed distinctly churlish to attack a cheerful man who was shaving him with such skill. Besides, he needed breakfast. He needed it badly.

The boy patted Sharpe’s face dry and smiled. ‘Bonjour!’ He backed out of the door with the bowl and towel, came back a moment later for the musket he had left beside Sharpe. He waved farewell and shut the door, not bothering to bolt it.

The hammering still echoed in the room. He went to the window and saw, where the sentries paced their monotonous beats on the ramparts, that the guns which had defied Wellington last year were being destroyed. Their trunnions, the great knobs that held the barrels to the carriages, were being sawn through. When the hacksaws were halfway through, a man would give a great blow with a sledgehammer to shear the bronze clean. The blows rang dolorously through the courtyard. To make sure that the guns were far beyond repair they were being spiked as well, then heaved over the ramparts to fall onto the precipitous rocks below. The noise was shattering. He groaned. ‘Oh God!’

Sharpe lay on the bed. He would never drink again, never. On the other hand, of course, the hair of the dog that bit you was the only specific against rabies. Half the British army went to their rest drunk and could only face the next day by drinking the night’s dregs. He opened one eye and stared gloomily at an unopened bottle of champagne on the table.

He fetched it, frowned at it, then shrugged. He jammed it between his legs, and twisted the cork with his left hand. It popped boomingly. The sheer effort of pulling the cork seemed to have left him weaker then a kitten. The champagne foamed onto his overalls.

He tried it. It took the taste of vomit from his mouth. It even tasted good. He drank some more.

He lay back again, holding the champagne in his left hand, and remembered the parole on the table. He was supposed to sign it, then his escape would be engineered by those people in the French army who did not want peace with Spain. It all seemed so complicated this morning. He only knew that by signing the paper and then escaping he was sacrificing all honour.

The door opened again and he lay still as the breakfast, supplied by courtesy of General Verigny, was put onto the table. He knew what it would be. Hot chocolate, bread, butter, and cheese. ‘Mercy.’ At least, he thought, he was learning some French.

An hour later, with the breakfast and half the champagne inside him, he decided he was feeling distinctly better. The day, he thought, even had promise. He looked at the parole. He could not sign it, he told himself, because it would be unworthy of him. He would have to escape instead. He would have to go to Wellington with this news, but not by sacrificing his honour. Captain d’Alembord had said that honour was merely a word to hide a man’s sins, and La Marquesa had laughed at the word, but Sharpe knew what it meant. It meant he could never live with himself if he signed the paper and let Montbrun engineer his escape. Honour was conscience. He walked away from the table, from the temptation of the parole, and carried the champagne to the barred window.

He stared down, bottle in hand, at the piles of artillery shells that glistened faintly from the rain that had fallen in the night. An officer was checking the fuses. It would be a hell of a bang, Sharpe thought, and he wondered if he would get a view of it from the Great Road.

He could hear women’s voices. There were an extraordinary number of women with this army. What was it that Verigny had said yesterday? Sharpe frowned, then smiled. This army was a walking brothel.

He turned from the window and crossed to the table where the parole, splashed with red wine stains, still waited for his signature. He tried to make sense of the French words, but could not. Even so, he knew what it said. He promised not to escape, nor in any way assist the forces of Britain or her allies against the French armies until he was either exchanged or released from the bond.

He told himself he should sign it. Escape was impossible. He should sign it and refuse to accept La Marquesa’s offer of escape. He thought of travelling in her coach, the curtains drawn, and he remembered her saying that she loved him. He looked at the quill. Was it dishonour to sign the parole and then carry news of the secret treaty to Wellington? Did his country come before honour? Had Helene spoken the truth? Would she want him when the war was over, when he was a discarded soldier? She had spoken of three thousand guineas. He shut his eyes, imagining three thousand guineas. A man could live a whole life on three thousand guineas.

He picked up the quill. He dipped it in the ink and then, with quick strokes, scored it again and again through the paragraphs of the parole. He tipped the ink bottle onto the paper, obliterating the words, destroying the parole. He laughed and walked back to the window.

Beneath him, from a doorway, a cavalry officer emerged into the dawn light. The man was gorgeously uniformed, his white breeches as skin-tight as General Verigny’s. Sharpe wondered if such men greased their legs with oil or butter to achieve so tight a fit. He would not be surprised. Cavalry officers would do anything to look like palace flunkies.

The man straightened his pelisse, tilted his hat to a more rakish angle, then blew smoke into the air. He took a cigar from his mouth, inspected the sky to judge the weather, then strolled towards the keep. The weak light was reflected from his gold scabbard furnishings and from the gold wire that was looped and braided on his blue jacket. He walked slowly, forced to the pace by the tightness of his breeches, but looking languorous and confident. He avoided the puddles that still remained in the courtyard, jealous of the brilliant shine on his spurred boots.

Smoke dribbled back from the man’s cigar. He stepped over one of the fuses, then tapped ash onto a pile of shells. Sharpe watched, disbelieving. The cavalryman walked on, disdaining his surroundings. Another cloud of smoke drifted up from his cigar and then, with superb unconcern, the man tossed the cigar stub behind him onto the tangle of fuses. He disappeared into the keep.

No one seemed to have noticed. The Engineer officer who had been examining the fuses had gone. The sentries on the walls stared outwards. Two infantrymen who carried a great, steaming pot over the yard were busy with their own thoughts.

Sharpe looked back at the piles of shells. Was it his imagination, or was there a small wisp of smoke coming from where the cigar had landed?

It was just his imagination, he decided.

He noticed that, despite the wound, he was gripping the bars of the window with his right hand. He uncurled his fingers.

Some men walked beneath his window. They laughed loudly.

It was not his imagination. The cigar stub was burning through to the powder core of the fuses. Smoke drifted up more thickly.

Sharpe froze. If he gave the warning he would stay a prisoner. If he did not there would be death and chaos, quite possibly his own death. But if he risked that, then the chaos would be on his side. He could use it to escape, he could forget the parole, he would be free and his honour would be intact.

The smoke was thickening now, rising up to drift eastward. An artilleryman crossed the yard from a magazine against the far wall. He passed within ten feet of the smoke, but noticed nothing. He was eating a hunk of bread and staring up at the sky which threatened rain. There were men on the walls, on the keep’s roof, yet none of them saw a thing.

Sharpe bit his lip. His left hand gripped the champagne.

The smoke turned to fire. One moment there was a grey haze, the next there was the hiss of fuses and the sparks were shooting up from the fire that snaked along the white line.

The gunner, the bread held to his mouth, stopped. He stared unbelieving at the fire-snakes. One disappeared into a pile of shells, would be eating at the first shell’s fuse, and then the gunner shouted, pointed with his loaf, and started to run.

The shell exploded.

It lifted the other shells into the air, fuses spinning, and then a second exploded, a third, and suddenly the courtyard was a maelstrom of fire and shell casing, and men were bellowing at each other to run, and Sharpe went back from the window. There were fuses leading into the keep and he had just seen, through the smoke, a streak of bright fire dart into the massive stones.

He backed slowly away. There was no safety in leaving the room. The stairway led only to the courtyard where the shells exploded. He had to stay in the room and survive whatever happened.

He tipped the cot bed over, sheltering himself behind the straw mattress, and, just as he had done so, the hill of Burgos Castle moved.

Deep beneath the keep, in the cellars and in the mine shafts that had been dug to oppose the British mines of the year before, the powder had been stacked. Barrel after barrel was down there, packed in the rock, and now the fire found it.

It blew.

It did not shatter outwards. There was more than enough powder to scythe the hilltop bare, to obliterate the walls, church, bastions, guns, and gates, but the rock-bound cellars acted as a giant mortar and hurled the blast upwards into the air until the flame spikes touched and pierced the low cloud, and still it went on, hurling stones and shells high into the air beyond the cloud and following with the rumbling, billowing, dark cloud that was fed by new blasts and pierced through by new flames as more stacks of powder were reached by the fire that destroyed the keep and thundered the sound miles out into the countryside.

Sharpe huddled against the wall.

The bed seemed to thump on him, the air was like a great, warm fist that pounded all about him and left only silence where there had been nothing but sound.