Sharpe’s Enemy: The Defence of Portugal, Christmas 1812

Harper sounded glum. ‘I promised your wife I’d look after you, sir. Here I am, keeping the promise.’

Teresa. Sharpe had met her two summers ago when his Company had fought alongside her band of Partisans. Teresa fought the French in her own way, with ambush and knife, with surprise and terror. They had been married eight months and in that time Sharpe doubted if he had spent more than ten weeks with her. Their daughter, Antonia, was nineteen months old now, a daughter he loved because she was his only blood relative, but a daughter he did not know and who would grow to speak a different language, but still his daughter. He grinned at Harper. ‘We’ll be all right. You know they always miss.’

‘Nearly always, sir.’

Maybe they were mad to try this test, yet Sharpe wanted to deal fairly with Gilliland’s enthusiasm. The rockets were inaccurate, so much so that they had become a joke to Sharpe’s men who loved to watch the veering, crashing and burning of Gilliland’s toys. Yet most of the rockets did travel towards the enemy, however curious their path, and perhaps Gilliland was right. Perhaps they would terrify and there was only one way to find out. To become the target himself.

Harper scratched his head. ‘If my Mother knew, sir, that I was standing against a wall with thirty bloody rockets aimed at me …’ He sighed, touched the crucifix around his neck.

Sharpe knew the artillerymen were jointing the sticks. Each twelve pounder needed two lengths of stick. The first length was slotted into a metal tube on the side of the rocket head and then fixed in place by crimping the metal with pliers. A similar metal tube, similarly crimped, joined the two sticks into a ten-foot shaft that balanced the rocket head. The shaft had another use, a use that intrigued and impressed Sharpe. Each trooper in the Rocket Cavalry kept a lance-head in a special holster on his saddle. The lance-head could be hammered onto the jointed sticks and then carried into battle on horseback. Gilliland’s men were not trained to fight with the lance, any more than they were trained in the use of the sabres they all carried, but there was an ingenuity about the detached lance-head that pleased Sharpe. He had appalled Gilliland by insisting that the Rocket Troop rehearse cavalry charges.

‘Portfires alight!’ Harper seemed determined to keep up a commentary on his own death. Sharpe could see his own Company sitting by Gilliland’s rocket ‘cars’, his specially fitted supply wagons. ‘Oh, God!’ Harper crossed himself.

Sharpe knew the portfires were going down to touch the rocket fuses. ‘You said yourself they couldn’t hit a house at fifty yards.’

‘I’m a big target.’ Harper was six feet and four inches tall.

There was a wisp of smoke far down the field. That one rocket would already be moving, burning the grass, leaping like quickfire above the soil, hammering in front of its fire and smoke. The others burst into life.

‘Oh, God,’ Harper groaned.

Sharpe grinned. ‘If they’re close, just jump over the wall.’

‘Anything you say, sir.’

For a second or two the rockets were curious twisting dots, haloed by fire, centred on their pulsing smoke trails. The trails weaved as the missiles climbed and wandered and then, so fast that Sharpe would have had no time to throw himself behind the low stone wall, the rockets seemed to leap towards the two men. The sound filled the valley, the fire blazed behind the spread of missiles, and then they were past, screaming above the wall and Sharpe found he had ducked even though the closest rocket had been thirty yards away.

Harper swore, looked at Sharpe.

‘Not so funny here, eh?’ Sharpe found himself feeling relieved that the rockets had gone. Even at thirty yards the noise and fire was alarming.

Harper grinned. ‘Wouldn’t you say our duty was done, sir?’

‘Just the big ones, then it’s done.’

‘For what we are about to receive.’

The next volley was not to be ground fired, but to be aimed upwards in firing tubes supported by a tripod. Gilliland, Sharpe knew, would be working at the mathematics of the trajectory. Sharpe had always supposed mathematics to be the most exact of all the sciences and he did not clearly see how it could be applied to the inexact nature of rocketry, but Gilliland would be busy with angles and equations. The wind had to be ascertained, for if a breeze was blowing across the rockets’ path then they had a perverse habit of turning into the wind. That, Gilliland had explained, was because the wind put more pressure on the long stick than on the cylinder head, and so the tubes had to be aimed down-wind for an upwind target. Another calculation was the stick length, a longer stick giving more height and a longer flight, and at six hundred yards Sharpe knew the artillerymen would be sawing off a length of each rocket’s tail. A third imponderable was the angle of launch. A rocket travelled relatively slowly as it left the firing tube and so the head fell towards the ground in the first few feet of flight and the angle of launch had to be increased to compensate. Modern science at war.

‘Hold your hat, sir.’

The smoke and flames were easily visible beneath the firing tubes, even at six hundred yards, and then, with appalling suddenness, the missiles leaped into the air. These were eighteen-pounder rockets, a dozen of them, and they sliced the air above the lingering smoke trails of the first volley, climbing, climbing, and Sharpe saw one slam off to the left, hopelessly off course, while the others seemed to have coalesced into a living flame-shot cloud that grew silently over the valley.

‘Oh, God.’ Harper was holding the crucifix.

The rockets, strangely, seemed not to be moving. The cloud grew, the flame surrounded dots were still and hovering, and Sharpe knew it was an illusion caused by the trajectory bringing the missiles in a curve pointing straight at the two of them. Then a single dot dropped from the cloud, fire at its edges, smoke dark against the clear sky behind. The noise burst on them; a screaming roar, flame-born, and the dot grew larger. ‘Down!’

‘Christ!’ Harper dived right, Sharpe left, and Sharpe clung to the soil by the wall and the noise hammered at him, growing, seeming to make the stones of the wall shake, and the air was throbbing with the noise that came closer and closer and filled their whole world with terror as the rocket slammed into the wall.

‘Jesus.’ Sharpe rolled over and sat up. The rocket, the most accurate of the week, had demolished the stone wall where he and Harper had been standing. The broken stick toppled slowly off the wreckage. The cylinder smoked innocently in the next field. Smoke drifted over the burned grass.

They started laughing, beating the dirt off their uniforms, and suddenly it seemed hilarious to Sharpe so that he rolled onto his side, helpless with laughter. ‘Holy Jesus!’

‘You’d better thank Him. If that had been a shell instead of roundshot.’ Harper left the thought unfinished. He was standing and staring at the ruins of the wall.

Sharpe sat up again. ‘Is that frightening?’

Harper grinned. ‘You’d regret having a full belly, that’s for sure, sir.’ He bent down and picked up his shako.

‘So maybe there is something to the mad Colonel’s invention.’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘And think if you could fire a whole volley at fifty paces.’

Harper nodded. ‘True, but there’s a lot of maybes and ifs there, sir.’ He grinned. ‘You’re fond of them, aren’t you? You fancy trying them out, yes?’ He laughed. ‘Toys for Christmas.’

A figure in blue uniform, leading a second horse, was riding towards them from the firing point. Harper pulled his battered shako low over his eyes and nodded towards the galloping man. ‘I think he’s worried he’s murdered us, sir.’

Clods of earth flew up behind the galloping horses. Sharpe shook his head. ‘That’s not Gilliland.’ He could see a cavalryman’s pelisse across the blue uniform shoulders.

The cavalryman skirted a burning rocket wreck, urged his horse on, waved as he came close. His shout was urgent. ‘Major Sharpe?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lieutenant Rogers, sir. Headquarters. Major General Nairn’s compliments, sir, and would you report at once.’

Sharpe took the reins of the spare horse from Rogers, looped them over the horse’s head. ‘What’s it about?’

‘About, sir? Haven’t you heard?’ Rogers was impatient, his horse fretful. Sharpe put his left foot in the stirrup, reached for the saddle, and Harper helped by heaving him upwards. Rogers waited as the Sergeant retrieved Sharpe’s shako. ‘There’s been a massacre, sir, at some place called Adrados.’

‘Massacre?’

‘God knows, sir. All hell’s loose. Ready?’

‘Lead on.’

Sergeant Patrick Harper watched Sharpe lurch as his horse took off after the Lieutenant. So the rumour was true and Harper smiled in satisfaction. Not a satisfaction because he had been proved right, but because Sharpe had been summoned and where Sharpe went, Harper followed. So what if Sharpe was a Major now, supposedly detached from the South Essex? He would still take Harper, as he always took Harper, and the giant Irishman wanted to help take revenge on the men who had offended his decency and his religion. He began walking back towards the Company, whistling as he went, the prospect of a fight pleasant in his soul.

CHAPTER THREE

‘Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.’ Major General Nairn, still in a dressing gown, still with a cold, stared out of the window. He turned as Lieutenant Rogers, having announced Sharpe, left the room. The eyes, under the straggling eyebrows, looked at Sharpe. ‘Damn.’

‘Sir.’

‘Cold as a parson’s bloody heart.’

‘Sir?’