Sharpe's Company

by Bernard Cornwell

  Forrest looked over his shoulder, at the parading Light Company. This is sad, Sharpe. Very sad.’

  Windham paraded them and the Sergeant Major called each man forward in turn to have pouches, haversack and pack emptied on to a groundsheet. Another Sergeant went through the packets. Sharpe turned away. He found it sad, too, and unnecessary. He would have paraded them and given them ten minutes to come up with the thief or face the consequences; if, that is, he really believed that one of the Company was the thief. Forrest shook his head. ‘He’s very thorough, Sharpe.’

  ‘Not really, sir.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Sharpe gave a tired smile. ‘When I was in the ranks, sir, we had packs with false bottoms. He’s not looking inside the shakoes. Anyway, a real thief won’t have the stuff anymore.’

  ‘He’s hardly had time to get rid of it.’

  ‘Sir. One of the women could have it by now, he could have sold it all to the Sutler for a few shillings and a bottle or two. It could be hidden. It won’t be found. We’re just wasting our time.’

  A horseman pulled up outside the sheepfold and saluted Forrest. ‘Sir?’

  Major Forrest peered through the rain. ‘Good Lord! Young Knowles! You’ve got a new horse!’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Robert Knowles slid from the saddle and grinned at Sharpe. ‘Now I’m not in your Company, I’m allowed to ride a horse. Do you like it?’

  Sharpe looked morosely at the beast. ‘Very nice, sir.’

  Knowles stiffened on the ‘sir’. He looked from Sharpe to Forrest. His smile went. ‘Your gazette?’ He stammered at Sharpe.

  ‘It was refused, sir. ‘

  ‘Stop it.’ Knowles was embarrassed. He had learned his trade from Sharpe, modeled himself on his old Captain, and now he had a Light Company of his own he tried to think, every hour, of how Sharpe would lead them. ‘It’s ridiculous!’

  Forrest nodded. ‘The world’s gone mad.’

  Knowles frowned, shook his head. ‘I don’t believe it!’

  Sharpe shrugged. ‘It’s true.’ He felt sorry for having embarrassed Knowles. ‘How’s the Company?’

  ‘Wet. They want to get on with the fighting.’ He shook his head again. ‘So who’s got your Company?’

  Forrest sighed. ‘A man called Rymer.’

  Knowles shrugged. ‘They’re mad. ‘ He looked at Sharpe. ‘It seems crazy! You underneath some Captain?’

  Forrest tut-tutted. ‘Oh, no. Mr. Sharpe has special duties.’

  Sharpe grinned. ‘I’m the Lieutenant in charge of women, pick-axes, mules, and baggage guard.’

  Knowles laughed. ‘I don’t bloody believe it!’ He suddenly noticed the strange parade beyond the circular, small sheepfold. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘A thief.’ Forrest sounded sad. ‘The Colonel thinks it might be someone in the Light Company.’

  ‘He’s mad!’ Knowles kept a fierce loyalty to his old Company. ‘They’re much too fly to be caught!’

  ‘I know.’ Sharpe watched the search. The men had all been processed, and nothing found, and now the Sergeants came forward. Hakeswill stood ramrod straight, his face twitching, as his pack was turned upside down. Nothing would be found, of course. The Sergeant gave Windham a snapping salute.

  Harper came forward, grinning with amusement that anyone should think him capable of such an act. Hakeswill first, then Harper, and Sharpe began running up the hillside because, of course, Hakeswill wanted Harper out of the way. Patrick Harper saw Sharpe coming and raised his eyebrows, taking the insult of the search with the same calm tolerance with which he met most of life’s indignities, and then the face registered shock.

  ‘Sir?’ The Sergeant Major was straightening up.

  Sharpe had realized what was happening, but too late. He should have got to Harper sooner. Before the parade.

  ‘Officer of the Day!’ Windham’s voice was harsh. Put the Sergeant under arrest. ‘

  They only found one thing, but it was enough. On top of the pack, not even hidden, was the silver frame that had enclosed the picture of Windham’s wife. The glass had been Smashed and the portrait was missing, razored from the filigree that had itself been bent. Windham held the frame, seemed to quiver with rage, and looked up at the huge Sergeant. ‘Where’s the picture?”

  ‘I know nothing about it, sir. Nothing. So help me, sir, I did not take it.’

  ‘I’ll flog you! By God! I will flog you!1 He turned on his heel.

  The Light Company stood frozen, the rain dripping from shako peaks, their uniforms soaked. They seemed shocked. The rest of the Battalion, crouched in their inadequate shelters, watched as the Officer of the Day assembled a guard and Harper was taken away. Sharpe did not move.

  The Company was dismissed. Fires were lit under the shelters in a vain attempt to drive out the dampness. Bullocks were slaughtered for the evening meal, the musket smoke lingering over the panicked survivors of the herd, and Sharpe let the rain chill his skin as he felt a terrible impotence. Knowles tried to move him. ‘Come and eat with us. Be my guest. Please.’

  Sharpe shook his head. ‘No. I must be here for the Court-Martial.’

  Knowles looked worried. ‘What’s happening to the Battalion, sir?’

  ‘Happening, Robert? Nothing.’

  He would kill Hakeswill one day, but now he needed proof or otherwise Harper could never be cleared. Sharpe did not know how to get the truth. Hakeswill was cunning and Sharpe knew that the truth could not be beaten out of him. He would laugh at a beating. But one day Sharpe would bury the sword in that belly and let the rottenness burst out like putrescent ooze. He would kill the bastard.

  The bugles sounded sunset, the end of the regulation day, the fourth day of Badajoz.

  Chapter 14

  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 counter-fire 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. F
rom the slope below came the chink of pick-axes 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 rumor 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.’

  ‘As long as we’re in the skirmish line, sir, I don’t mind.’ Harper drank more rum. ‘I must save some for the morning.’

  Sharpe sat up. ‘Hagman’s bribing the drummer boys.’

  ‘Never works.’ Harper was right. The drummer boys did the flogging and were usually bribed by the victim’s friends, but under the gaze of the officers they were forced to lay on with their full strength.

  Sharpe stared at the dark bulk of Badajoz, relieved by a few hazed lights. There was a fire burning in one of the castle’s many courtyards. The dull, brief bell of the Cathedral rang the half-hour. ‘If only she wasn’t there...’ He stopped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘If she wasn’t there.’ Harper’s Ulster accent was slow, as if he was treading very carefully. ‘You’d be tempted to bugger off. Is that right? Up to the hills? To fight with the Partisans?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You do. Do you think no one else has thought of it?’ Harper meant himself. ‘You’re not a fair weather soldier only.’

  ‘We’ll get desertions soon.’

  ‘Aye, if Hakeswill isn’t buried soon.’ No one had deserted from the Battalion for months. Other battalions were losing men, a handful each day who slipped across to Badajoz. There was traffic the other way, too, including, so Hogan had told Sharpe, a French Engineer Sergeant who brought with him the plans of the defences. The plans held few surprises, except confirmation that the western glacis was thickly mined.

  Sharpe changed the subject. ‘Know how many died today?’

  ‘Was it today?’ Harper sounded surprised. ‘It seems like last week.’

  ‘A hundred of us. They counted nearly three hundred French. And some of them drowned, too. Poor bastards.’

  ‘They always see double counting the French.’ Harper was scornful. ‘And the French are probably boasting they killed a thousand of us.’

  ‘They didn’t do much damage.’

  ‘No.’ The French had hoped to set the siege back by at least a week, by forcing the British to re-dig the whole parallel. A week gained would be an extra week during which a French field army might march to the garrison’s relief. Harper opened another canteen. The assault will be rough.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The rain hissed down, seething on the soaked ground, thudding monotonously on the canvas. It was bitterly cold. Harper offered Sharpe the new canteen. ‘I have an idea.’

  ‘Tell me.’ Sharpe yawned.

  ‘Am I keeping you up?’

  ‘What’s your idea?’

  ‘I’m volunteering for the Forlorn Hope.’

  Sharpe snorted. ‘Don’t be a bloody fool. You want to live, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m not being a fool, and I want to be a Sergeant again. Will you ask for me?’

  Sharpe shrugged. ‘They don’t listen to me any more.’

 
‘I said, will you ask?’ Harper’s voice was stubborn.

  Sharpe could not imagine Harper dead. He shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘You keeping it for yourself?’ The words were spoken harshly. Sharpe turned and looked at the huge man. There was no point in denial.

  ‘How did you know?’

  Harper laughed. ‘How long have I been with you? Mary, Mother of God, do you think I’m a fool? You lose your Captaincy and what will you do? You’ll go screaming up some bloody breach with your sword waving because you’d rather be dead than lose your bloody pride.’

  Sharpe knew it was true. ‘What about you?’

  I’d like the stripes back.’

  ‘Pride?’

  ‘Why not? They keep saying the Irish are fools, but I notice precious few laughing at me.’

  “That could be your size, not your stripes.’

  ‘Aye, maybe, but I’ll not have them saying I failed. So you’ve volunteered?’

  Sharpe nodded. ‘Yes. But they won’t choose anyone yet, not till the assault.’

  ‘And if they choose you, will you take me?’

  ‘Yes.’ He said the word with reluctance.

  The Irishman nodded. ‘Let’s hope they choose you, then.’

  ‘Pray for a miracle.’

  Harper laughed.’ You don’t want a miracle. They always turn out bad.’ He drank rum. ‘St Patrick turns out all the snakes from Ireland and what happens? We get so bored that we let the English in to take their place. The poor man must be turning in his grave. Snakes were better.’

  Sharpe shook his head. ‘If Ireland were five times bigger, and England five times smaller, then you’d be doing the same to us.’

  Harper laughed again. ‘Now that would be a miracle worth praying for.’

  Guns boomed to their right, across the river, as the cannon in the San Cristobel Fort fired over the Guadiana towards the parallel. The long, spitting fire was reflected in the dark water. The gunners on the city wall, not to be outdone, fired their pieces and the night was filled with the noise.