Sharpe's Battle

by Bernard Cornwell

  "What did he say?"

  Donaju shrugged. "What do you think? He's an aristocrat, he has pride. He told me to go to hell."

  "And tomorrow," Sharpe said, "we all might do just that." Because tomorrow the

  French would attack and he would once again see those vast blue columns drummed forward beneath their eagles and listen to the skull-splitting sound of massed French batteries pounding away. He shuddered at the thought, then turned to watch his greenjackets march past. "Perkins," he suddenly shouted,

  "come here!"

  Perkins had been trying to hide on the far side of the column, but now, sheepishly, he came to stand in front of Sharpe. Harper came with him. "It isn't his fault, sir," Harper said hurriedly.

  "Shut up," Sharpe said, and looked down at Perkins. "Where, Perkins, is your green jacket?"

  "Stolen, sir." Perkins was in shirt, boots and trousers over which his equipment was belted. "It got wet, sir, when I was carrying water round to the lads so I hung it out to dry and it was stolen, sir."

  "That lady was not so far away, sir, from where he hung it," Harper said meaningfully.

  "Why would she steal a rifleman's jacket?" Sharpe asked, but sensed a blush beginning. He was glad it was dark.

  "Why would anyone want Perkins's jacket, sir?" Harper asked, "It was a threadbare thing at best, so it was, and too small to fit most men. But I reckon it was stolen, sir, and I don't reckon Perkins should pay for it.

  "Twasn't his fault."

  "Go away, Perkins," Sharpe said.

  "Yes, sir, thank you, sir."

  Harper watched the boy run back to his file. "And why would the Lady Juanita steal a jacket? That puzzles me, sir, truly does, for I can't think it was anyone else who took it."

  "She didn't steal it," Sharpe said, "the lying bitch earned it. Now keep on going. We've a way to go yet, Pat." Though whether the road led anywhere good, he no longer knew, for he was a scapegoat and he faced the foregone conclusions of a court of inquiry and in the dark, following his men west, he shivered.

  There were only two sentries at the door to the house which served as

  Wellington's headquarters. Other generals might conclude that their dignity demanded a whole company of soldiers, or even a whole battalion, but

  Wellington never wanted more than two men and they were only there to keep away the town's children and to control the more importunate petitioners who believed the General could solve their problems with a stroke of his quill pen. Merchants came seeking contracts to supply the army with fouled beef or with bolts of linen stored too long in moth-infested warehouses, officers came seeking redress against imagined slights, and priests arrived to complain that

  Protestant British soldiers mocked the holy church, and in the midst of these distractions the General tried to solve his own problems: the lack of entrenching tools, the paucity of heavy guns that could grind down a fortress's defences and the ever-pressing duty of convincing a nervous ministry in London that his campaign was not doomed.

  So Lord Kiely was not a welcome visitor following the General's customary early dinner of roast saddle of mutton with vinegar sauce. Nor did it help that Kiely had plainly fortified himself with brandy for this confrontation with Wellington who, early in his career, had decided that an over-indulgence in alcohol hurt a man's abilities as a soldier. "One man in this army had better stay sober," he liked to say of himself, and now, seated behind a table in the room that served as his office, parlour and bedroom, he looked dourly at the flushed, excited Kiely who had arrived with an urgent request. Urgent to Kiely, if not to anyone else.

  Candles flickered on the table that was spread with maps. A galloper had come from Hogan reporting that the French were out and marching on the southern road that led through Fuentes de Onoro. That news was not unexpected, but it meant that the General's plans were now to be subjected to the test of cannon fire and musket volleys. "I am busy, Kiely," Wellington said icily.

  "I ask only that my unit be allowed to take the forefront of the battle line,"

  Kiely said with the careful dignity of a man who knows that liquor might otherwise slur his words.

  "No," Wellington said. The General's aide, standing in the window, gestured towards the door, but Kiely ignored the invitation to leave.

  "We have been ill used, my Lord," he said unwisely. "We came here at the request of my sovereign in good faith, expecting to be properly employed, and instead you have ignored us, denied us our supplies-"

  "No!" The loudness of the word was such that the sentries at the house's front step were visibly startled. Then they looked at each other and grinned. The

  General had a temper, though it was rarely seen, but when Wellington did choose to unleash the full fury of his personality it was an awesome thing.

  The General stared up at his visitor. His voice dropped to a conversational level, but it still reeked of scorn. "You came here, sir, ill prepared, unwanted, unfunded, and expected me, sir, to provide both your men's livelihoods and their accoutrements, and in return, sir, you have offered me insolence and, worse, betrayal. You did not come at His Majesty's bidding, but because the enemy desired you to come, and it is now my desire that you should go. And you shall go, sir, with honour because it is unthinkable that we should send away King Ferdinand's household troops in any other condition, but that honour, sir, has been earned at the expense of other men. Your troops, sir, shall serve in the battle, for there will be no opportunity to remove them before the French arrive, but they shall serve as guards on my ammunition park. You may choose to command them or to sulk in your tent. Good day to you, my Lord."

  "My Lord?" The aide addressed Kiely tactfully, stepping towards the door.

  But Lord Kiely was blind to tact. "Insolence?" He pounced on the word. "My

  God, but I command King Ferdinand's guard and-"

  "And King Ferdinand, sir, is a prisoner!" Wellington snapped. "Which does not speak, sir, for the efficacy of his guard. You came here, sir, with your adulterous whore, flaunting her like a prinked bitch, and the whore, sir, is a traitor! The whore, sir, has been doing her best to destroy this army and the only providence that has saved this army from her ministrations is that her best, thank God, is no better than your own! Your request is denied, good day."

  Wellington looked down to his papers. Kiely had other complaints to make, chief of them the way in which he had been manhandled and insulted by Captain

  Sharpe, but now he stood insulted by Wellington too. Lord Kiely was just summoning his last reserves of courage to protest this treatment when the aide took firm hold of his elbow and pulled him towards the door and Kiely found himself powerless to resist. "Perhaps your Lordship requires some refreshment?" the aide inquired emolliently as he steered the furious Kiely out into the hallway where a group of curious officers looked with pity at the disgraced man. Kiely shook the aide's hand away, seized his hat and sword from the hall table, and stalked out of the front door without another word. He ignored the two sentries as they presented arms.

  "Nosey saw him off fast enough," one of the sentries said, then snapped to attention again as Edward Pakenham, the Adjutant General, climbed the steps.

  Kiely seemed oblivious of Pakenham's cheerful greeting. Instead he walked down the street in a blind rage, passing long lines of guns that were slowly negotiating the town's narrow lanes, but he saw nothing and understood nothing except that he had failed. Just as he had failed at everything, he told himself, but none of the failure was his fault. The cards had run against him, and that was how he had lost what small fortune his mother had left to him after she had squandered her wealth on the damned church and on the damned

  Irish rebels who always managed to end up on British gallows, and the same bad luck explained why he had failed to win the hand of at least two Madrid heiresses who had preferred to marry Spaniards of the blood rather than a peer without a country. Kiely's self-pity welled up at the memories of their rejections. In Madrid he was a second-class citizen bec
ause he could not trace his lineage back to some medieval brute who had fought against the Moors, while in this army, he decided, he was an outcast because he was Irish.

  Yet the worst insult of all was Juanita's betrayal. Juanita the wild, unconventional, clever and seductive woman whom Kiely had imagined himself marrying. She had money, she had noble blood and other men had looked enviously at Kiely when Juanita was at his side. Yet all along, he supposed, she had been deceiving him. She had given herself to Loup. She had lain in

  Loup's arms and Kiely presumed she had told all his secrets to Loup, and he imagined their laughter as they lay entangled in their bed and once again the anger and the pity swelled inside him. There were tears in his eyes as he realized he would be the laughing stock of all Madrid and all this army.

  He entered a church. Not because he wanted to pray, but because he could think of nowhere else to go. He could not face going back to his quarters in General

  Valverde's lodgings where everyone would look at him and whisper that he was a cuckold.

  The church was crowded with dark-shawled women waiting to make their confessions. Phalanxes of candles glimmered in front of statues, altars and paintings. The small lights glittered off the gilded pillars and from the massive silver cross on the high altar that still had its white Easter frontal.

  Kiely went to the altar steps. His sword clattered on the marble as he knelt and stared at the rood. He was being crucified too, he told himself, and by smaller men who did not understand his noble aims. He took a flask from his pocket and tipped it to his lips, sucking at the fierce Spanish brandy as though it would save his life.

  "Are you well, my son?" A priest had come soft-footed to Kiely's side.

  "Go away," Kiely said.

  "The hat, my son," the priest said nervously. "This is God's house."

  Kiely snatched the plumed hat from his head. "Go away," he said again.

  "God preserve you," the priest said and walked back into the shadows. The women waiting to make their confessions glanced nervously at the finely uniformed officer and wondered if he was praying for victory over the approaching French. Everyone knew the blue-coated enemy was coming again and householders were burying their valuables in their gardens in case Masséna's dreaded veterans beat the British aside and came back to sack the town.

  Kiely finished the flask. His head spun with liquor, shame and anger. Behind the silver rood in a niche above the high altar was a statue of Our Lady. She wore a diadem of stars, a blue robe, and carried lilies in her hands. It had been a long time since Kiely had stared at such an image. His mother had loved such things. She had forced him to confession and to the sacrament, and had chided him for failing her. She had used to pray to the Virgin, claiming a special kinship with Our Lady as another disappointed woman who had known a mother's sadness. "Bitch," Kiely said aloud, staring at the blue-robed statue,

  "bitch!" He had hated his mother, just as he hated the church. Juanita had shared Kiely's contempt for the church, but Juanita was another man's lover.

  Maybe she had always been another man's lover. She had lain with Loup and God knows how many other men and all the while Kiely had been planning to make her a countess and to show off her beauty in all the great capitals of Europe.

  Tears trickled down his cheeks as he thought of her betrayal and as he remembered his humiliation at the hands of Captain Sharpe. That last memory filled him with a sudden fury. "Bitch!" he shouted at the Virgin Mary. He stood up and hurled the empty flask at her statue behind the altar. "Whore bitch!" he cried as the flask bounced harmlessly off the Virgin's blue robe.

  The women screamed. The priest ran towards his Lordship, then stopped in terror because Kiely had drawn the pistol from his holster. The click of the gun's lock echoed loud in the cavernous church as Kiely thumbed back the heavy hammer.

  "Bitch!" Kiely spat the word at the statue. "Lying, whoring, thieving, two- faced, leprous bitch!" Tears poured down his cheeks as he aimed the pistol.

  "No!" the priest implored as the women's shrieks filled the church. "Please!

  No! Think of the blessed Virgin, please!"

  Kiely turned on the man. "Call her a virgin, do you? You think she'd be a virgin after the Legions had hammered through Galilee?" He laughed wildly, then turned back to the statue. "You whore bitch!" he shouted as he trained the pistol again. "You filthy whore bitch!"

  "No!" the priest cried despairingly.

  Kiely pulled the trigger.

  The heavy bullet smashed through his palate and punched out a palm-sized patch of his skull as it exited. Blood and brain splashed as high as the Virgin's diadem of stars, but none landed on Our Lady. Instead the gore spattered across the sanctuary steps, doused a handful of candles, then trickled down to the nave. Kiely's dead body fell back, his head a mangled horror of blood, brain and bone.

  The screams in the church slowly died to be replaced by the rumble of wheels in the street as more guns were dragged towards the east.

  And towards the French. Who were coming to reclaim Portugal and break the insolent British at a narrow bridge across the Coa.

  Part Two

  CHAPTER 7

  The Real Companïa Irlandesa bivouacked on the plateau north and west of

  Fuentes de Onoro. The village lay astride the southernmost road leading from

  Ciudad Rodrigo to Almeida and in the night Wellington's army had closed about the village that now threatened to become a battlefield. The dawn mist hid the eastern countryside where the French army readied itself, while up on the plateau Wellington's forces were a smoke-obscured chaos of troops, horses and wagons. Guns were parked on the plateau's eastern crest, their barrels pointing across the Dos Casas stream that marked the army's forward line.

  Donaju discovered Sharpe squinting sideways into a scrap of mirror in an attempt to cut his own hair. The sides and the front were easy enough to trim, the difficulty always lay in the rear. "Just like soldiering," Sharpe said.

  "You've heard about Kiely?" Donaju, suddenly in command of the Real Companïa

  Irlandesa, ignored Sharpe's gnomic comment.

  Sharpe snipped, frowned, then tried to repair the damage by snipping again, but it only made things worse. "Blew his head off, I heard."

  Donaju flinched at Sharpe's callousness, but made no protest. "I can't believe he would do such a thing," he said instead.

  "Too much pride, not enough sense. Sounds like most bloody aristocrats to me.

  These damn scissors are blunt."

  Donaju frowned. "Why don't you have a servant?"

  "Can't afford one. Besides, I've always looked after myself."

  "And cut your own hair?"

  "There's a pretty girl among the battalion wives who usually cuts it," Sharpe said. But Sally Clayton, like the rest of the South Essex, was far away. The

  South Essex was too shrunken by war to serve in the battle line and now was doing guard duty on the army's Portuguese depots and thus would be spared

  Marshal Masséna's battle to relieve Almeida and cut the British retreat across the Goa.

  "Father Sarsfield is burying Kiely tomorrow," Donaju said.

  "Father Sarsfield might be burying a lot of us tomorrow," Sharpe said. "If they bury us at all. Have you ever seen a battlefield a year after the fighting? It's like a boneyard. Skulls lying about like boulders, and fox- chewed bones everywhere. Bugger this," he said savagely as he gave his hair a last forlorn chop.

  "Kiely can't even be buried in a churchyard"-Donaju did not want to think about battlefields on this ominous morning-"because it was suicide."

  "There aren't many soldiers who get a proper grave," Sharpe said, "so I wouldn't grieve for Kiely. We'll be lucky if any of us get a proper hole, let alone a stone on top. Dan!" he shouted to Hagman.

  "Sir?"

  "Your bloody scissors are blunt."

  "Sharpened them last night, sir," Hagman said stoically. "It's like my father always said, sir, only a bad workman blames his tools, sir."


  Sharpe tossed the scissors across to Hagman, then brushed the cut strands of hair from his shirt. "You're better off without Kiely," he told Donaju.

  "To guard the ammunition park?" Donaju said bitterly. "We would have done better to stay in Madrid."

  "To be thought of as traitors?" Sharpe asked as he pulled on his jacket.

  "Listen, Donaju, you're alive and Kiely isn't. You've got yourself a good company to command. So what if you're guarding the ammunition? You think that isn't important? What happens if the Crapauds break through?"

  Donaju did not seem cheered by Sharpe's opinions. "We're orphans," he said self-pityingly. "No one cares what happens to us."

  "Why do you want someone to care?" Sharpe asked bluntly. "You're a soldier,