Sharpe 3-Book Collection 4: Sharpe's Escape, Sharpe's Fury, Sharpe's Battle

by Bernard Cornwell

  "My negotiations never fail," Lord Pumphrey averred grandly.

  "I'll still have a look at the newspaper," Sharpe insisted, and so he had left in the early morning and, though he had been given careful directions, was soon lost. Cádiz was a maze of narrow dark alleys and high buildings. No one could use a carriage here for few streets were wide enough so the wealthy either rode, were carried in sedan chairs, or walked.

  The sun had not yet risen and the city was asleep. The few folk awake had probably not yet gone to bed or else were servants sweeping courtyards or carrying firewood. A cat writhed about Sharpe's ankles and he stooped to pet it, then headed down another cobbled alleyway at the end of which he found what he wanted outside a church. A beggar slept on the steps, and he woke the man and gave him a whole guinea along with Plummer's cloak and hat. In return he got the beggar's cloak and wide-brimmed hat. Both were greasy and matted with filth.

  He walked toward his few glimpses of the dawn and found himself on the city rampart. Its outer face fell steeply to the harbor wharves, but the firestep was almost on the same level as the city's streets. He walked along the wide top where dark cannons hunched behind embrasures. A spark of light showed across the water on the Trocadero Peninsula where the French had their giant mortars. A company of Spanish soldiers was posted on the wall, but at least half were snoring. Dogs foraged along the rampart's edge.

  The whole world, like the city, seemed asleep, but then an explosion of light ripped the eastern horizon in two. The light spread flat, like a disk, sudden and white to silhouette the few ships anchored near the wharves, and then the light faded, the last of it writhing in a great blossom of smoke that billowed above one of the French forts, and then the noise came. A thunder rolled over the bay, startling sleeping sentries awake as the shell landed just across the ramparts, a quarter mile ahead of Sharpe. There was a brief silence before the missile exploded. A wavering trace of smoke, left by the burning fuse, hung in the first daylight. The shell had blown itself apart inside a small grove of orange trees and Sharpe, when he reached the spot, could smell the powder smoke. He kicked a shard of broken casing that skittered down the rampart. Then he jumped down to the scorched grass and crossed the grove into a dark street. The house walls were a dirty white now as dawn glowed in the east.

  He was lost, but he was at the city's northern edge where he wanted to be. By exploring the narrow streets he at last found the church with the red-painted crucifix on its outer wall. Lord Pumphrey had told him the crucifix had been brought from Venezuela and it was believed that on the Feast of Saint Vincent the red paint turned to blood. Sharpe wondered when the saint's feast day was. He would like to see paint turn to blood.

  He squatted on the bottom step of the church entrance. The filthy cloak swathed him and the wide hat hid his face. The street here was just five paces wide, and almost opposite him was a four-storied house marked by a stone scallop shell cemented into the white facade. An alley ran down the side of the house that had an ornate front door flanked by two windows. The windows were shuttered on the inside while outside the glass were thick black-painted grilles. The upper floors had three windows apiece facing onto narrow balconies. This, Pumphrey had assured him, was where El Correo de Cádiz was printed. "The house belongs to a man called Nuñez, who owns the newspaper. He lives above the printing premises."

  No one stirred in the Nuñez house. Sharpe squatted, unmoving, with a wooden bowl taken from the embassy kitchen beside him on the step. He had put a handful of coins in the bowl, remembering that that was the way to encourage generosity, though as the street stayed empty there was no generosity to encourage. He thought about the beggars of his childhood. Blind Michael, who could see like a hawk, and Ragged Kate, who hired babies for tuppence an hour and plucked at the shawls of well-dressed women in the Strand. She had carried a hat pin to make the babies cry and on a good day she had sometimes made two or three pounds that she would drink away in an evening. There had been Stinking Moses who claimed to have been a parson before he fell into debt. He would tell folks' fortunes for a shilling. "Always tell them they'll be lucky in love, boy," he had advised Sharpe, "'cuz they'd rather be lucky in bed than get to heaven."

  It was oddly restful. Sharpe squatted and, when the first pedestrians appeared, he mumbled the words Pumphrey had suggested. "Por favor, Madre de Dios." He said the words over and over, occasionally muttering thanks when a copper coin rattled into the bowl. And all the time he watched the house with the scallop shell, and he noted that the big front door was never used and that the shutters behind the heavy window grilles were never opened even though the other houses in the street opened their shutters to take advantage of what small light found its way between the high buildings. Six men came to the house and all used a side door down the alley. Late in the morning Sharpe moved there, muttering his incantation as he went, and he squatted again, this time just inside the alley's mouth, and watched a man go to the side door and knock. A hatch slid open, a question was asked, it was evidently answered satisfactorily, and the door opened. In the next hour three porters delivered crates and a woman brought a bundle of laundry. The same hatch was slid open each time before the visitors were allowed inside. The laundress dropped a coin in Sharpe's bowl. "Gracias," he said.

  Around midmorning a priest came out of the alley door. He was tall and lantern-jawed. He dropped a coin in Sharpe's bowl and at the same time gave a command that Sharpe did not understand, but the priest pointed to the church and Sharpe assumed he had been ordered to move out of the alleyway. He picked up his bowl and shuffled toward the church, and there saw trouble waiting.

  Three beggars had taken his place on the steps. All were men. At least half the male beggars in Cádiz were cripples, survivors of battles against the British or the French. They were limbless, scarred, and ulcerous. Some wore placards with the names of the battles where they had been wounded, while others proudly wore the remnants of their uniforms, but none of the three waiting men was crippled or wore uniforms, and all three were watching Sharpe.

  He had trespassed. The beggars in London were as organized as any battalion. If a man took post where other beggars had their usual pitches, then the man would be warned, and if he did not heed the warning, the beggar-lords would be summoned from their lairs. Stinking Moses had always worked the church of St. Martins in the Fields, and he had once been robbed by two sailors who had kicked him across the street to the door of the workhouse, where they had taken his coins, then taken his place on the church steps. Next morning Stinking Moses was back at the church and two corpses were found in Moons Yard.

  These three men were on a similar mission. They said nothing as Sharpe emerged from the alley, but just surrounded him. One took his bowl and the remaining two held his elbows and hurried him westward until they reached a shadowed archway. "Madre de Dios," Sharpe mumbled. He was still crouching as though he had a wounded spine.

  The man holding the bowl demanded to know who Sharpe was. Sharpe did not understand the man's fast and colloquial Spanish, but guessed that was what the man wanted to know, just as he guessed what was coming next. It was a knife that came from under the man's ragged cloak and flashed up toward Sharpe's throat. At that moment the apparently crippled beggar turned into a soldier. Sharpe seized the man's wrist and kept the knife moving upward, but now toward its owner, and Sharpe was smiling as the blade slid easily into the soft flesh under the man's chin. He gave the wrist one last jerk so that the knife went through the man's tongue into his palate. The man made a mewling noise as blood spilled from his lips. Sharpe, who had easily freed his right arm, now pulled his left free as the man on that side launched a massive kick and Sharpe seized the boot and pushed it upward so that the man flew back, to fall hard on the cobbles, his skull making a sound like a musket butt dropped on stone. Sharpe elbowed the third man between the eyes. It had taken seconds. The first man was staring with wide eyes at Sharpe, who now drew his pistol. The man who had fallen was now on his knees, groggy. The
second man had blood pouring from his nose and the pistol was pointing at the leader's groin. Sharpe cocked the gun and, in the archway, the sound was ominous.

  The man, with his own knife still pinning his mouth shut, put down the bowl. He held his hands out as if to ward off trouble. "Bugger off," Sharpe said in English and, though they did not understand, they obeyed. They backed away slowly until Sharpe leveled the pistol, and then they ran.

  "Bugger," Sharpe said. His head was throbbing. He touched the bandage and flinched from the pain. He crouched and scooped up the coins. When he stood, there was a heartbeat and he felt faint, so he leaned at the archway's side and looked up, because that seemed to alleviate the pain. There was a cross incised into the keystone of the arch. He stared at it until the pain receded. He put away the pistol, which, carelessly, he was still holding, though the arch was deep enough to hide him from the few pedestrians who passed. He noticed weeds growing at the foot of the gates, which were secured by a big old-fashioned ball padlock, like the one that had guarded the Marquesa's boathouse. This padlock was rusted. He went out into the street and saw that the building's windows were shuttered and barred. A watchtower rose above the building, and more weeds grew between the tower's stones. The building was abandoned and no more than forty paces from Nuñez's house. "Perfect," he said aloud, and a woman leading a goat on a length of rope made the sign of the cross because she thought he was mad.

  It was close to midday. He spent a long time searching the streets for the merchant he wanted, and had to bundle the filthy cloak and hat under his arm before going into the shop, where he bought a new padlock. The lock had been made in Britain and had wards inside the steel case to protect the levers from picks. The shopkeeper charged him too much, probably because his customer was English, but Sharpe did not argue. The money was not his, but had been given him by Lord Pumphrey from the embassy's cash box.

  He went back to the miraculous crucifix and settled on the steps under its stone canopy. He knew the three men would be back, or two of them would be back, but not until they had rousted up reinforcements, and he reckoned that gave him an hour or two. A dog investigated the interesting smells of his borrowed cloak, then pissed against the wall. Women came and went to the church and most dropped small coins into his bowl. Another beggar, a woman, whined at the far side of the steps. She tried to engage Sharpe in conversation, but all he would say was "Mother of God," and she abandoned her attempts. He just watched the house and wondered how he could ever hope to steal anything from inside, if indeed, the letters were even there. The place was plainly well guarded, and he suspected that the front door and the ground-floor windows had been blocked. A monk had been calling house to house, probably collecting for charity, and the man had hammered unavailingly on the door until the lantern-jawed priest had appeared from the alleyway. He shouted at the monk to go away. So the front door could not be opened, and that suggested it had been barricaded, as had the two barred windows. The French mortars fired twice more, but neither of the shells came anywhere near the street where Sharpe was waiting. He sat on the steps until the streets emptied as folk went for their siesta, then he shuffled back to the abandoned building where the three men had tried to rob him. He cracked the ball padlock with a loose cobblestone, unthreaded the chain, and went inside.

  He found himself in a small cloistered courtyard. One part of the cloisters had collapsed and the stonework of the rest was scorched. There was a small chapel to one side and something had plunged through its roof and burned everything inside. A French mortar shell? Except, as far as Sharpe could see, the big French mortars did not have the range to reach this far into the city and, besides, this damage was old. There was mold growing on the scorch marks and weeds between the flagstones of the chapel floor.

  He climbed the watchtower steps. The city's skyline was punctuated by the towers, close to two hundred of them, and Sharpe supposed they had been built so merchants could watch for their ships beating in from the Atlantic. Or perhaps the first of them had been built when Cádiz was young, when the Romans had garrisoned the peninsula and watched for Carthaginian pirates. Then the Moors had taken Cádiz and they had watched for Christian raiders, and when the Spaniards at last took the city for themselves they had watched for English buccaneers. They had called Sir Francis Drake el Draco, and the dragon had come to Cádiz and burned most of the old city, and so the towers had been rebuilt, tower after tower, because Cádiz was never short of enemies.

  This tower was six stories high. The top floor was a roofed platform with a stone balustrade and Sharpe eased his head over the parapet very slowly so that no one watching would see a sudden movement. He peered eastward and saw he had been right and that this was the perfect place to watch Nuñez's house, which was just fifty paces away and joined to the abandoned building by other houses, all with flat roofs. Most of the city's houses had flat roofs, places to enjoy the sun that rarely reached into the deep, narrow, balcony-blocked ravines of the streets. The chimneys cast black shadows and it was in one of those shadows that Sharpe saw the sentinel on Nuñez's house: one man, dark cloaked, sitting with a musket across his knees.

  Sharpe watched for the best part of an hour during which the man hardly moved. The French mortars had stopped firing, but far off to the south and east there was the bloom of gunsmoke beyond the marshes where the French besiegers faced the small British army that protected Cádiz's isthmus. The sound of the guns was muted, a mere grumble of distant thunder, and then that too died away.

  Sharpe went back to the street where he closed the gates, put the chain back, and used his new padlock to secure it. He thrust the key into a pocket and walked east and south, away from Nuñez's house. He kept the ocean on his right, knowing that would bring him to the cathedral where he was to meet Lord Pumphrey. He thought about Jack Bullen as he walked. Poor Jack, a prisoner, and he remembered the burst of smoke from Vandal's musket. There was a revenge waiting. His head hurt. Sometimes a stab of pain blackened the sight in his right eye, which was odd, because the wound was on the left side of his scalp. He arrived early at the cathedral, so he sat on the seawall and watched the great rollers come from the Atlantic to break on the rocks and suck back white. A small band of men was negotiating the jagged reef that extended west from the city and ended in a lighthouse. He could see they were carrying burdens, presumably fuel for the fire that was lit nightly on the lighthouse platform. They hesitated between rocks, jumping only when the sea drew back and the white foam drained from the stones.

  A clock struck five and he walked to the cathedral, which, even unfinished, loomed massively above the smaller houses. Its roof was half covered in tarpaulins so it was hard to tell what it would look like when it was complete, but for now it looked ugly, a brutal mass of gray-brown stone broken by few windows and spidery with scaffolding. The entrance, which fronted onto a narrow street piled with masonry, was approached by a fine flight of stairs where Lord Pumphrey waited, fending off the beggars with an ivory-tipped cane. "Good God, Richard," His Lordship said as he greeted Sharpe, "where did you get that cloak?"

  "Off a beggar."

  Lord Pumphrey was soberly dressed, though a smell of lavenders wafted from his dark coat and long black cloak. "Have you had a useful day?" he asked lightly, as he used the cane to part the beggars and reach the door.

  "Maybe. All depends, doesn't it, whether the letters are in that newspaper place?"

  "I trust it doesn't come to that," Lord Pumphrey said. "I trust our blackmailers will contact me."

  "They haven't yet?"

  "Not yet," Pumphrey said. He dipped a forefinger in the stoup of holy water and wafted it across his forehead. "I'm no papist, of course, but it does no harm to pretend, does it? The message hinted that our opponents are willing to sell us the letters, but only for a great deal of money. Isn't it ghastly?" This last question referred to the cathedral interior, which did not seem ghastly to Sharpe, just splendid and ornate and huge. He was staring down a long nave flanked by clust
ers of pillars. Off the side aisles were rows of chapels bright with painted statues, gilded altars, and candles lit by the faithful. "They've been building it for ninety-something years," Lord Pumphrey said, "and work has now more or less stopped because of the war. I suppose they'll finish it all one day. Hat off."

  Sharpe snatched off his hat. "Did you write to Sir Thomas?"

  "I did." Lord Pumphrey had promised to write a note requesting that Sharpe's riflemen be kept on the Isla de León rather than be put on a ship heading north to Lisbon. The wind had gone southerly during the day and some ships had already headed north.

  "I'll fetch my men tonight," Sharpe said.

  "They'll have to be quartered in the stables," Pumphrey said, "and pretend to be embassy servants. We are going to the crossing."

  "The crossing?"

  "The place where the transept crosses the nave. There's a crypt beneath it."

  "Where Plummer died?"

  "Where Plummer died. Isn't that what you wanted to see?"

  The farther end of the cathedral was still unbuilt. A plain brick wall rose where, one day, the sanctuary and high altar would stand. The crossing, just in front of the plain wall, was an airy high space with soaring pillars at each corner. Above Sharpe now was the unfinished dome where a few men worked on scaffolding that climbed each cluster of pillars and then spread about the base of the dome. A makeshift crane was fixed high in the dome's scaffolding and two men were hauling up a wooden platform loaded with masonry. "I thought you said they'd stopped building," Sharpe said.

  "I suppose they must do repairs," Lord Pumphrey said airily. He led Sharpe past a pulpit behind which an archway had been built into one of the massive pillars. A flight of steps disappeared downward. "Captain Plummer met his end down there." Lord Pumphrey gestured at the steps. "I try to feel sorrow at his passing, but I must say he was a most obnoxious man. You wish to descend?"