Sharpe's Fury

by Bernard Cornwell

  A shell struck the bridge’s far end. Sharpe decided the French gunners were trying to hold the British fugitives on the breaking bridge where they could be flayed by grapeshot. The French infantry had retreated to the eastern bank from where they fired musket volleys. Smoke was filling the valley. Water splashed across the pontoon where Sharpe and Harper clung. Then it shook again and the roadway splintered. Sharpe feared the remnants of the bridge would overturn. A bullet slammed into a plank by his side. Another shell exploded at the bridge’s far end, leaving a puff of dirty smoke that drifted upstream where white birds flew in panic.

  Then suddenly the bridge quivered and went still. The central portion of six pontoons had broken free and was drifting down the river. There was a tug as a last anchor chain snapped. Then the six pontoons were circling and floating as a barrel load of grapeshot churned the water just behind them. Sharpe could kneel now. He loaded the rifle, aimed at the French infantry, and fired. Harper slung his empty volley gun and shot with his rifle instead. Rifleman Slattery and Rifleman Harris came to join them and sent two more bullets, both aimed at the French officers on horseback, but when the rifle smoke cleared the officers were still mounted. The pontoons were traveling fast in the current, accompanied by broken and charred timbers. Brigadier Moon was lying on his back, trying to prop himself up on his elbows. “What happened?”

  “We’re floating free, sir,” Sharpe said. There were six men of the 88th on the makeshift raft and five of Sharpe’s riflemen from the South Essex. The rest of his company had either escaped the bridge before it broke or else were in the river. So now, with Sharpe and the brigadier, there were thirteen men floating downstream and over a hundred Frenchmen running down the bank, keeping level with them. Sharpe hoped that thirteen was not unlucky.

  “See if you can paddle to the western bank,” Moon ordered. Some British officers, using captured horses, were on that bank and were trying to catch up with the raft.

  Sharpe had the men use their rifle and musket butts as paddles, but the pontoons were monstrously heavy and their efforts were futile. The raft drifted on southward. A last shell plunged harmlessly into the river, its fuse extinguished instantly by the water. “Paddle, for God’s sake!” Moon snapped.

  “They’re doing their best, sir,” Sharpe said. “Broken leg, sir?”

  “Calf bone,” Moon said, wincing. “Heard it snap when the horse fell.”

  “We’ll straighten it up in a minute, sir,” Sharpe said soothingly.

  “You’ll do no such bloody thing, man! You’ll get me to a doctor.”

  Sharpe was not certain how he was going to get Moon anywhere except straight down the river, which was curving now about a great rock bluff on the Spanish bank. That bluff, at least, would check the French pursuit. He used his rifle as a paddle, but the raft defiantly took its own path. Once past the bluff the river widened, swung back to the west, and the current slowed a little.

  The French pursuers were left behind and the British were finding the going hard on the Portuguese bank. The French cannon were still firing, but they could no longer see the raft so they had to be shooting at the British forces on that western bank. Sharpe tried to steer with a length of scorched, broken plank, not because he thought it would do any good, but to prevent Moon complaining. The makeshift rudder had no effect. The raft stubbornly stayed close to the Spanish bank. Sharpe thought about Bullen and felt a pulse of pure anger at the way in which the lieutenant had been taken prisoner. “I’m going to kill that bastard,” he said aloud.

  “You’re going to do what?” Moon demanded.

  “I’m going to kill that bastard Frenchman, sir. Colonel Vandal.”

  “You’re going to get me to the other bank, Sharpe, that’s what you’re going to do, and you’re going to do it quickly.”

  At which point, with a shudder and a lurch, the pontoons ran aground.

  THE CRYPT lay beneath the cathedral. It was a labyrinth hacked from the rock on which Cádiz defied the sea, and in deeper holes beneath the crypt’s flagged floor, the dead bishops of Cádiz waited for the resurrection.

  Two flights of stone steps descended to the crypt, emerging into a large chapel that was a round chamber twice the height of a man and thirty paces wide. If a man stood in the chamber’s center and clapped his hands once, the noise would sound fifteen times. It was a crypt of echoes.

  Five caverns opened from the chapel. One led to a smaller round chapel at the farthest end of the labyrinth, while the other four flanked the big chamber. The four were deep and dark, and they were connected to one another by a hidden passageway that circled the whole crypt. None of the caverns was decorated. The cathedral above might glitter with candlelight and shine with marble and have painted saints and monstrances of silver and candlesticks of gold, but the crypt was plain stone. Only the altars had color. In the smaller chapel a virgin gazed sadly down the long passage to where, across the wider chamber, her son hung on a silver cross in never-ending pain.

  It was deep night. The cathedral was empty. The last priest had folded his scapular and gone home. The women who haunted the altars had been ushered out, the floor had been swept, and the doors locked. Candles still burned, and the red light of the eternal presence glowed under the scaffolding that ringed the crossing where the transept met the nave. The cathedral was unfinished. The sanctuary with its high altar had yet to be built, the dome was half made, and the bell towers not even started.

  Father Montseny had a key to one of the eastern doors. The key scraped in the lock and the door hinges squealed when he pushed it open. He came with six men. Two of them stayed close to the unlocked cathedral door. They stood in shadow, hidden, both with loaded muskets and with orders to use them only if things became desperate. “This is a night for knives,” Montseny told the men.

  “In the cathedral?” one of the men asked nervously.

  “I will give you absolution for any sins,” Montseny said, “and the men who must die here are heretics. They are Protestants, English. God will be gladdened by their deaths.”

  He took the remaining four men to the crypt and, once in the main chamber, he placed candles on the floor and lit them. The light flickered on the shallow-domed ceiling. He put two men in one of the chambers to the east while he, with the remaining pair, waited in the darkness of the chamber opposite. “No noise now!” he warned them. “We wait.”

  The English came early as Father Montseny had supposed they would. He heard the distant squeal of the hinges as they pushed open the unlocked door. He heard their footsteps coming down the cathedral’s long nave and he knew that the two men he had left by the door would have bolted it now and would be following the English toward the crypt.

  Three men appeared on the western steps. They came slowly, cautiously. One of them, the tallest, had a bag. That man peered into the big round chamber and saw no one. “Hello!” he shouted.

  Father Montseny tossed a packet into the chamber. It was a thick packet, tied with string. “What you will do,” he said in the English he had learned as a prisoner, “is bring the money, put it beside the letters, take the letters, and go.”

  The man looked at the black archways leading from the big candlelit chamber. He was trying to decide where Montseny’s voice had come from. “You think I’m a fool?” he asked. “I must see the letters first.” He was a big man, red-faced, with a bulbous nose and thick black eyebrows.

  “You may examine them, Captain,” Montseny said. He knew the man was called Plummer and that he had been a captain in the British army, and now he was a functionary in the British embassy. Plummer’s job was to make certain the embassy’s servants did not steal, that the gratings on the windows were secure, and that the shutters were locked at night. Plummer was, in Montseny’s opinion, a nonentity, a failed soldier, a man who now came anxiously into the ring of candles and squatted by the package. The string was tough and knotted tight and Plummer could not undo it. He felt in his pocket, presumably looking for a knife.

 
; “Show me the gold,” Montseny ordered.

  Plummer scowled at the peremptory tone, but obliged by opening the bag he had placed beside the package. He took out a cloth bag that he unlaced, then brought out a handful of golden guineas. “Three hundred,” he said, “as we agreed.” His voice echoed back and forth, confusing him.

  “Now,” Montseny said, and his men appeared from the dark with leveled muskets. The two men Plummer had left on the steps staggered forward as Montseny’s last two men came down the stairs behind them.

  “What the hell are you…” Plummer began, then saw the priest was carrying a pistol. “You’re a priest?”

  “I thought we should all examine the merchandise,” Montseny said, ignoring the question. He had the three men surrounded now. “You will lie flat while I count the coins.”

  “The devil I will,” Plummer said.

  “On the floor,” Montseny spoke in Spanish, and his men, all of whom had served in the Spanish navy and had muscles hardened by years of grueling work, easily subdued the three and put them facedown on the crypt floor. Montseny picked up the string-bound package and put it in his pocket, then pushed the gold aside with his foot. “Kill them,” he said.

  The two men accompanying Plummer were Spaniards themselves, embassy servants, and they protested when they heard Montseny’s order. Plummer resisted, heaving up from the floor, but Montseny killed him easily, sliding a knife up into his ribs and letting Plummer heave against the blade as it sought his heart. The other two died just as quickly. It was done with remarkably little noise.

  Montseny gave his men five golden guineas apiece, a generous reward. “The English,” he explained to them, “secretly plan to keep Cádiz for themselves. They call themselves our allies, but they will betray Spain. Tonight you have fought for your king, for your country, and for the holy church. The admiral will be pleased with you, and God will reward you.” He searched the bodies, found a few coins and a bone-handled knife. Plummer had a pistol under his cloak, but it was a crude, heavy weapon and Montseny let one of the sailors keep it.

  The three corpses were dragged up the steps, down the nave, and then carried to the nearby seawall. There Father Montseny said a prayer for their souls and his men heaved the dead over the stony edge. The bodies smacked down into the rocks where the Atlantic sucked and broke white. Father Montseny locked the cathedral and went home.

  The next day the blood was found in the crypt and on the stairs and in the nave, and at first no one could explain it until some of the women who prayed in the cathedral every day declared that it must be the blood of Saint Servando, one of Cádiz’s patron saints whose body had once lain in the city, but had been taken to Seville, which was now occupied by the French. The blood, the women insisted, was proof that the saint had miraculously spurned the French-held city and returned home, and the discovery of three bodies being buffeted by the waves on the rocks below the seawall would not dissuade them. It was a miracle, they said, and the rumor of the miracle spread.

  Captain Plummer was recognized and his body was carried to the embassy. There was a makeshift chapel inside and a hurried funeral service was read and the captain was then buried in the sands of the isthmus that connected Cádiz to the Isla de León. The next day Montseny wrote to the British ambassador, claiming that Plummer had tried to keep the gold and take the letters, and his regrettable death had thus been inevitable, but that the British could still have the letters back, only now they would cost a great deal more. He did not sign the letter, but enclosed one bloodstained guinea. It was an investment, he thought, that would bring back a fortune, and the fortune would pay for Father Montseny’s dreams: dreams of Spain, glorious again and free of foreigners. The English would pay for their own defeat.

  CHAPTER 2

  N OW WHAT?” BRIGADIER MOON demanded.

  “We’re stuck, sir.”

  “Good God incarnate, man, can’t you do anything right?”

  Sharpe said nothing. Instead he and Harper stripped off their cartridge boxes and jumped overboard to find themselves in four feet of water. They heaved on the pontoon, but it was like trying to push the Rock of Gibraltar. It was immovable and they were stranded fifty or sixty feet from the eastern bank on which the French pursued them, and over a hundred and fifty yards from the British-held bank. Sharpe ordered the other soldiers to get in the river and push, but it did no good. The big pontoons had grounded hard on a shingle bank and evidently intended to stay there.

  “If we can cut one of the buggers free, sir,” Harper suggested. It was a good suggestion. If one of the pontoons could be loosed from the others then they would have a boat light enough to be forced off the shingle, but the big barges were connected by ropes and by stout timber beams that had carried the plank roadway.

  “It’ll take us half a day to do it,” Sharpe said, “and I don’t think the Crapauds will be happy.”

  “What the devil are you doing, Sharpe?” Moon demanded from the raft.

  “Going ashore, sir,” Sharpe decided, “all of us.”

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “Because, sir,” Sharpe said, forcing himself to stay patient, “the French will be here in half an hour and if we’re in the river, sir, they’ll either shoot us down like dogs or else take us prisoner.”

  “So your intentions?”

  “Go up that hill, sir, hide there, and wait for the enemy to leave. And when they’ve gone, sir, we’ll cut one of the pontoons free.” Though how he would do that with no tools he was not sure, but he would have to try.

  Moon plainly wanted to suggest another course of action, but none came to his mind so he submitted to being carried ashore by Sergeant Harper. The rest of the men followed, carrying their weapons and cartridge boxes over their heads. Once ashore they made a makeshift stretcher from a pair of muskets threaded through the sleeves of two red coats, then Harris and Slattery carried the brigadier up the steep hill. Sharpe, before leaving the riverbank, collected a few short sticks and a scrappy piece of fishing net, all of which had been washed onto the rocks, then he followed the others up to the first crest and saw, looking to his left, that the French had climbed to the top of the bluff. They were nearly half a mile away, which did not stop one of them loosing off his musket. The ball must have fallen into the intervening valley and the report, when it came, was muffled.

  “This is far enough,” Moon announced. The jolting of the crude stretcher was giving him agony and he looked pale.

  “To the top,” Sharpe said, nodding to where rocks crowned the bare hill.

  “For God’s sake, man,” Moon began.

  “French are coming, sir,” Sharpe interrupted the brigadier. “If you want, sir, I can leave you for them, sir? They must have a surgeon in the fort.”

  Moon looked tempted for a few seconds, but understood that high-ranking prisoners were rarely exchanged. It was possible that a French brigadier might be captured soon and after prolonged negotiations would be exchanged for Moon, but it would take weeks if not months, and all the while his career would be stalled and other men promoted over him. “Up the hill if you must,” he said grudgingly, “but what are your plans after that?”

  “Wait for the French to go, sir, detach a pontoon, cross the river, get you home.”

  “And why the devil are you carrying firewood?”

  The brigadier discovered why at the top of the hill. Private Geoghegan, one of the men from the 88th, claimed his mother had been a bonesetter and said he had often helped her as a child. “What you do, sir,” he explained, “is pull the bone.”

  “Pull it?” Sharpe asked.

  “Give it a good swift tug, sir, and he’ll like as not squeal like a piglet, and I straightens it then and we bind it up. Would the gentleman be a Protestant, would he, sir?”

  “I should think so.”

  “Then we don’t need the holy water, sir, and we’ll do without the two prayers as well, but he’ll be straight enough when we’re done.”

  The brigadier pr
otested. Why not wait till they were across the river, he wanted to know, and blanched when Sharpe said that could be two days. “Soonest done, soonest mended, sir,” Private Geoghegan said, “and if we don’t mend it soon, sir, it’ll set crooked as can be. And I’ll have to cut your trouser off, sir, sorry, sir.”

  “You’ll not damned well cut them!” Moon protested hotly. “They’re Willoughby’s best! There isn’t a finer tailor in London.”

  “Then you’ll have to take them off yourself, sir, you will,” Geoghegan said. He looked as wild as any of the Connaught men, but had a soft, sympathetic voice and a confidence that somewhat allayed the brigadier’s apprehensions, yet even so it took twenty minutes to persuade Moon that he should allow his leg to be straightened. It was the thought that he would have to spend the rest of his life with a crooked limb that really convinced him. He saw himself limping into salons, unable to dance, awkward in the saddle, and his vanity at last overcame his fear. Sharpe, meanwhile, watched the French. Forty men had worked their way over the bluff and now they were walking toward the stranded pontoons.

  “Buggers are going to salvage them,” Harper said.

  “Take the riflemen halfway down the hill,” Sharpe said, “and stop them.”

  Harper left, taking Slattery, Harris, Hagman, and Perkins with him. They were the only men from Sharpe’s company stranded on the pontoons, but it was a consolation that they were all good riflemen. There was no better soldier than Sergeant Patrick Harper, the huge Ulsterman who hated the British rule of his homeland, but still fought like a hero. Slattery was from County Wicklow and was quiet, soft-spoken, and capable. Harris had been a schoolmaster once and was clever, well-read, and too fond of gin, which was why he was now a soldier, but he was amusing and loyal. Dan Hagman was the oldest, well over forty, and he had been a poacher in Cheshire before the law caught him and condemned him to the army’s ranks. There was no better marksman in any rifle company. Perkins was the youngest, young enough to be Hagman’s grandson, and he had been a street urchin in London as Sharpe had once been, but he was learning to be a good soldier. He was learning that discipline tied to savagery was unbeatable. They were all good men and Sharpe was glad to have them, and just then the brigadier gave a yelp that he managed to stifle, though he could not contain a long moan. Geoghegan had eased off the brigadier’s boots, which must have hurt like hell, and somehow managed to take down Moon’s trousers, and now he placed two of Sharpe’s sticks alongside the broken calf and wrapped one of the brigadier’s trouser legs about the limb so that it gripped the sticks. He tightened the pressure by winding the trouser leg as though he wrung water from the material. He tightened it until the brigadier gave a hiss of protest. Then Geoghegan grinned at Sharpe. “Would you help me, sir? Just take the general’s ankle, will you, sir? And when I tell you, sir, give it a good smart pull.”