Sharpe’s Sword: The Salamanca Campaign, June and July 1812

Sharpe overtook his men and led them along beside the two Cathedrals and into streets that were crowded with people ready to celebrate the city’s release from the French. Blankets had been hung from the poorer balconies, flags from the richer, while women leaned over window ledges and balustrades. ‘Vive Ingles!’

Harper bellowed back at them. ‘Viva Irlandes!’ Wine was pressed on them, flowers tossed to them, and the cheerful holiday crowd jostled the Riflemen as they moved towards the music and the city centre. Harper grinned at Sharpe. ‘The Lieutenant ought to be here!’

Sharpe’s Lieutenant, Harold Price, would have been inordinately jealous. The girls were beautiful, smiling, and Price would have been torn by indecision like a terrier not knowing which rat to take first. A woman, monstrously fat, jumped up and down to plant a kiss on Harper’s cheek and the Irishman swept her up in his arms, kissed her happily, and put her down. The crowd cheered, loving it, and a small child was handed to the Sergeant who took her, skinny legs flailing, and put her on his shoulders. She drummed on his shako top, beating with the band sound, and beamed at her friends. Today was holiday in Salamanca. The French were gone, either north with Marmont or else into their three cordoned fortresses, and Salamanca was free.

The street opened into a courtyard, gorgeously decorated with carvings, and Sharpe remembered the place from his last visit. Salamanca was a town like Oxford or Cambridge, a University town, and the courtyard was part of the University. The stones of the buildings had been carved as delicately as silver filigree, the workmanship of the masons breathtakingly skilled, and he saw his men staring in wonder at the riotous stone. There was nothing like this to be seen in England, perhaps anywhere in the world, yet Sharpe knew that the best of Salamanca was still to come.

Bells pealed from a dozen belfries, a cacophony of joy that clashed with the army band. Swallows in their hundreds were wheeling and swooping over the rooftops, the harbingers of evening, and he pushed on, nodding and smiling at the people, and he noticed in the next street how the doors still bore the chalk marks left by the French billeting officers. Tonight the Sixth Division would be in these houses, and welcomed more readily because the British paid for their rooms and for their food. The French had gone. And Sharpe smiled because Leroux was trapped in the forts, and then he wondered how it would be possible to arrange it so that he could be present when the Sixth Division assaulted the forts.

The street ended in a wide space and Sharpe saw the tips of bright bayonets bobbing rhythmically over the heads of the crowd towards an archway. Harper put the small girl down, releasing her to run and join the crowd lining the parade route, and the Light Company men followed Sharpe towards the archway. Like all the Riflemen in Sharpe’s Company, Harper had been here before, back in the winter of ’08, and he remembered the Plaza Mayor that lay beyond this archway. It was in the Plaza Mayor that the Sixth Division gathered for the formal parade to mark the British entry into Salamanca.

Sharpe stopped just short of the archway and looked at Harper. ‘I’m going to find Major Hogan. Keep the lads together, and meet me here at ten o’clock.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Sharpe looked at the men with Harper, rogues all of them. They were typical of the drunks, thieves, murderers and runaways who had somehow become the best infantry in the world. He grinned at them. ‘You can drink.’ They gave ironic cheers and Sharpe held up a hand. ‘But no fights. We’re not supposed to be here and the bloody Provosts would love to beat the hell out of you. So stay out of trouble, and keep your mates out of trouble, understand? Stick together. You can drink, but I’m not carrying anyone home tonight, so stay on your feet.’ Sharpe had reduced the army’s regulations to three simple rules. His men were expected to fight, as he did, with determination. They were not to steal, except from the enemy or unless they were starving. And they were never to get drunk without his permission. They grinned at him and held up wine that had been given them. They would have sore heads in the morning.

He left them and pushed his way through the crowds that lined the archway. He knew just what to expect, but still it took his breath away as he stood for a moment and just stared at what he thought was the most beautiful place he had seen in his life; Salamanca’s Plaza Mayor, the Great Plaza. It had been finished just thirty years before and had taken seventy years to build, but the time had been well spent. The square was formed of continuous houses, each of three storeys above the arched colonnade and every room facing the Plaza opened onto a wrought iron balcony. The severity of the buildings’ design was softened by decorated scrollwork, carved coats of arms, and a spire studded balustrade that edged the sky. The houses met at the north side of the Plaza in a splendid Palacio, higher than the houses and more ornate, and on the eastern side, full in the rays of the descending sun, was the Royal Pavilion. The stone of the whole Plaza was golden in the late afternoon, traced with a thousand, thousand shadows cast by balconies, shutters, carvings and spires. Swallows laced the air of the huge space. The Plaza was of royal dimensions. It spoke of grandeur, pride and magnificence, yet it was a public place and belonged to the citizens of Salamanca. The meanest person could walk and linger in its glory and imagine himself in the residence of a King.

Thousands of people were now crammed into the Plaza’s immensity. They lined the triple balconies and waved scarves and flags, cheered, and tossed blossoms into the paved square. Crowds were thick in the shadowed arcade beneath the colonnade’s eighty-eight arches, and their cheering threatened to drown the band that played beneath the Palacio to whose music the Sixth Division made their solemn and formal entry.

This was a moment to savour, a moment of glory, the moment when the British took hold of this city. The Plaza Mayor had sensed this moment, was making a celebration of it, yet in the very centre of the noise and colour sat a quiet man who looked, on his tall horse, to be almost drab. He wore no uniform. A plain blue coat, grey trousers, and unadorned bicorne hat sufficed Wellington. Before the General marched his troops, the men who had followed him from Portugal through the savage horrors of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz.

The first Battalion of the 11th Regiment, their jacket facings as deep a green as the valleys of North Devon from whence they came, were followed by the Shropshires, red facings on red jackets, their officers’ coats laced in gold. The swords swept up to salute the plain, hook-nosed man who stood quiet in the riot of noise. The 61st were there, a long way from Gloucestershire, and the sight of them made Sharpe remember Windham’s scornful comparison of the two Cathedral cities. The Colonel would have loved this. He would have tapped his riding crop in time with the music, have criticised the faded jackets of the Queen’s Royals, blue on red, second infantry of the line behind the Royal Scots, but he would not have been in earnest. The Cornishmen of the 32nd marched in, the 36th of Hereford, and all of them marched with colours uncased, colours that stirred in the small wind and showed off the musket and cannon scars of the smoke-tinged flags. The colours were surrounded by Sergeants’ halberds, the wide blades burnished to a brilliant silver.

Hooves sounded by the archway where Sharpe had entered and Lossow, his uniform miraculously brushed, led the first troop of King’s German Legion Light Dragoons into the Plaza. Their sabres were drawn, slashing light, and the officers wore fur edged pelisses casually draped over the gold-laced blue jackets. The Plaza seemed crammed with troops, yet still more came. The brown jackets of the Portuguese Cacadores, Light troops, whose green shako plumes nodded to the music’s tempo. There were Greenjackets too, not Riflemen of the 95th, Sharpe’s old Regiment, but men of the 60th, the Royal American Rifles. He watched them enter the square and he felt a small burst of pride at the sight of their faded, patched uniforms and the battered look of their Baker Rifles. The Rifles were the first onto any battlefield, and the last to leave it. They were the best. Sharpe was proud of his green jacket.

This was just one division, the Sixth, while beyond the city and shielding it from the French field army were the other Divisions of Wellington’s force. The First, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth, the Seventh, and the Light Divisions, forty-two thousand men of the infantry marched this summer. Sharpe smiled to himself. He remembered Rolica, just four years before, when the British infantry had numbered just thirteen and a half thousand men. No one had expected them to win. They had been sent to Portugal with a junior General, and now that General saluted his troops as they marched into Salamanca. At Rolica, Wellington had fought with eighteen guns, this summer’s battle would hear more than sixty British cannon. Two hundred cavalry had paraded at Rolica, now there were more than four thousand. The war was growing, spreading across the Peninsula, up into Europe, and there were rumours that the Americans were beating the drum against England while Napoleon, the ringmaster of it all, was looking north to the empty Russian maps.

Sharpe did not watch the whole parade. In one of the eight streets that led to the Plaza he found a wineshop and bought a skin of red wine that he decanted, carefully, into his round, wooden canteen. A gipsy woman watched him, her black eyes unreadable, one hand holding a baby high on her breast, the other plunged deep into her apron where she clutched the few coins she had begged during the day. Sharpe left a few mouthfuls in the skin and tossed it to her. She caught it and jetted the wine into the baby’s mouth. A stall beneath the Plaza archway was selling food and Sharpe took some tripe, cooked in a spiced sauce, and as he drank his wine, ate the food, he thought how lucky he was to be alive on this day, in this place, and he wished he could share this moment with Teresa. Then he thought of Windham’s body, blood smeared on the dry ground, and he hoped that the Frenchmen shut up in the forts were hearing the band and anticipating the siege. Leroux would die.

The parade finished, the soldiers were marched away or dismissed, yet the band played on, serenading the nightly ceremony in which the people of Salamanca played out a stately flirtation. The townspeople walked in the Plaza each evening. The men walked clockwise at the outer edge of the square, while the girls, giggling and arm in arm, walked counter-clockwise in an inner ring. British soldiers now joined the outer promenaders, eyeing the girls, calling out to them, while the Spanish men, jealous, watched coldly.

Sharpe did not join the circle. Instead he walked in the deep shadow of the arcade, past the shops that sold fine leathers, jewels, books, and silks. He walked slowly, licking the garlic from his fingers, and he was a strange figure in the holiday crowd. He had pushed his shako back, letting his black hair fall over the top of the long scar that ran, beside his left eye, to his cheek. It gave him a sardonic, mocking look when his face was at rest. Only laughter or a smile softened the rigour of the scar. His uniform was as tattered as any Rifleman’s. The scabbard of his long sword was battered. He looked what he was, a fighting soldier.

He was looking for Michael Hogan, the Irish Major who served on Wellington’s staff. Sharpe and Hogan had been friends for most of this war and the Irishman, Sharpe knew, would make good company on this night of celebration. Sharpe had another reason, too. Hogan was in charge of Wellington’s intelligence gathering, sifting through the reports which came from spies and Exploring Officers, and Sharpe hoped that the small, middle-aged Major could answer some questions about Colonel Philippe Leroux.

Sharpe stayed beneath the colonnade, heading towards the group of mounted officers who crowded about the General. The Rifleman stopped when he was close enough to hear their loud laughter and confident voices.

He could not see Hogan. He leaned against a pillar and watched the mounted men, gorgeous in their full dress uniforms, and he was unwilling to join the favour seeking group who crowded round the General. If Wellington picked his nose, Sharpe knew, there would be plenty of officers willing to suck his fingers clean if it brought them one more golden thread for their uniforms.

He tilted the canteen, shut his eyes, and let the raw wine scour his mouth. ‘Captain! Captain!’

He opened his eyes, but could not see who had shouted, and he presumed that it was not for him and then he saw the priest, Curtis, pushing his way out of the group of horsemen around Wellington. The damned Irishman was everywhere. Sharpe did not move except to cork his canteen.

Curtis walked towards him and stopped. ‘We meet again.’

‘As you said we would.’

‘You can always believe a man of God.’ The elderly priest smiled. ‘I was hoping you might be here.’

‘Me?’

Curtis gestured towards the mounted officers. ‘There’s someone who would be relieved, very relieved, to hear from you that Leroux is safely shut up in the fortresses. Would you be so kind as to confirm it?’ He gestured again, inviting Sharpe to walk with him, but the tall Rifleman did not move.

‘Don’t they believe you?’

The elderly priest smiled. ‘I’m a priest, Captain, a Professor of Astronomy and Natural History, and Rector of the Irish College here. Those aren’t suitable qualifications, I’m afraid, for these warlike matters. You, on the other hand, will be believed on this subject. Would you mind?’

‘You’re what?’ Sharpe had thought the man just an interfering priest.

Curtis smiled gently. ‘I’m eminent, dreadfully eminent, and I’m asking you to do me a kindness.’

Sharpe did not move, still unwilling to walk into the circle of elegant officers. ‘Who needs reassurance?’

‘An acquaintance. I don’t think you’ll regret the experience. Are you married?’

Sharpe nodded, not understanding. ‘Yes.’

‘By Mother Church, I hope?’

‘As it happens, yes.’

‘You surprise me, and please me.’ Sharpe was not sure whether Curtis was teasing him. The priest’s bushy eyebrows went up. ‘It does help, you see.’

‘Help?’

‘Temptations of the flesh, Captain. I am sometimes very grateful to God that he has allowed me to grow old and immune to them. Please come.’

Sharpe followed him, curious, and Curtis stopped suddenly. ‘I don’t have the pleasure of your name, Captain.’

‘Sharpe. Richard Sharpe.’

Curtis smiled. ‘Really? Sharpe? Well, well!’ He did not give Sharpe any time to react to his apparent recognition. ‘Come on then, Sharpe! And don’t go all jellified!’

With that mysterious injunction Curtis found a way through the horses and Sharpe followed him. There must have been two dozen officers, at least, but they were not, as Sharpe had first thought, crowded around Wellington. They were looking at an open carriage, pointing away from Sharpe, and it was to the side of the carriage that Curtis led him.

Someone, Sharpe thought, was indecently rich. Four white horses stood patiently in the carriage traces, a powdered-wigged driver sat on the bench, a footman, in the same livery, on a platform behind. The horses’ traces were of silver chain. The carriage itself was polished to a sheen that would have satisfied the most meticulous Sergeant Major. The lines of the carriage, which Sharpe supposed was a new-fangled barouche, were picked out in silver paint on dark blue. A coat of arms decorated the door, a shield so often quartered that the small devices contained in its many compartments were indistinguishable except at very close inspection. The occupant, though, would have stunned at full rifle range.

She was fair haired, unusual in Spain, and fair skinned, and she wore a dress of dazzling whiteness so that she seemed to be the brightest, most luminous object in the whole of Salamanca’s golden square. She was leaning back on the cushions, one white arm negligently laid on the carriage side, and her eyes seemed languid and amused, bored even, as though she were used to such daily and lavish adulation. She held a small parasol against the evening sun, a parasol of white lace that threw a filmy shadow on her face, but the shadow did nothing to hide the rich, full mouth; the big, intelligent eyes, or the slim, long neck that seemed, after the tanned, brown skin of the army and its followers, to be made of a substance that was of heavenly origin. Sharpe had seen many beautiful women. Teresa was beautiful, Jane Gibbons, whose brother had tried to kill him at Talavera, was beautiful, but this woman was in another realm. Curtis rapped the carriage door. Sharpe was hardly aware of any other person, not even of Wellington himself, and he watched the eyes come to him as she listened to Curtis’ introduction. ‘Captain Richard Sharpe, I have the honour to name you La Marquesa de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba.’

She looked at him. He half expected her to offer him a white-gloved hand, but she just smiled. ‘People never remember it.’

‘La Marquesa de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba.’ Sharpe marvelled that he had got the words out without stammering. He understood exactly what Curtis meant by jellification. She raised an eyebrow in mock surprise. Curtis was telling her, in Spanish, about Leroux. Sharpe heard the name mentioned, and saw her glance at him. Each glance was stupefying. Her beauty was like a physical force. Other women, Sharpe guessed, would hate her. Men would follow her like lap dogs. She had been born beautiful and every artifice that money could buy was enhancing that beauty. She was glorious, tantalising, and, he supposed, untouchable to anyone less than a full-blooded lord and, as he always did when he saw something that he wanted, but could not hope to have, he began to dislike it. Curtis stopped and she looked at Sharpe. Her voice sounded bored. ‘Leroux is in the forts?’

He wondered where she had learned English. ‘Yes, Ma’am.’

‘You’re certain?’