Sharpe 3-Book Collection 2: Sharpe’s Havoc, Sharpe’s Eagle, Sharpe’s Gold (25 page)

“I think it’s empty, sir,” Harris said, though he sounded nervous.

“I reckon you’re right,” Sharpe agreed and he turned and walked on down the drive. The gravel crunched under his boots so he moved to the verge and signaled that his men should do the same. The day was hot and still, even the birds were silent.

And then he smelt it. And immediately he thought of India and even imagined, for a wild second, that he was back in that mysterious country for it was there that he had experienced this smell so often. It was thick and rank and somehow honey-sweet. A smell that almost made him want to vomit, then that urge passed, but he saw that Perkins, almost as young as Pendleton, was looking sickly. “Take a deep breath,” Sharpe told him. “You’re going to need it.”

Vicente, looking as nervous as Perkins, glanced at Sharpe. “Is it…” he began.

“Yes,” Sharpe said.

It was death.

Vila Real de Zedes had never been a large or a famous village. No pilgrims came to worship in its church. Saint Joseph might be revered locally, but his influence had never extended beyond the vineyards, yet for all its insignificance it had not been a bad village in which to raise children. There was always work in the Savage vineyards, the soil was fertile and even the poorest house had a vegetable patch. Some of the villagers had possessed cows, most kept hens and a few reared pigs, though there was no livestock left now. There had been little authority to persecute the villagers. Father Josefa had been the most important person in Vila Real de Zedes, other than the English in the Quinta, and the priest had sometimes been irascible, but he had also taught the children their letters. He had never been unkind.

And now he was dead. His body, unrecognizable, was in the ashes of the church where other bodies, shrunken by heat, lay among the charred and fallen rafters. A dead dog was in the street, a trickle of dried blood extending from its mouth and a cloud of flies buzzing above the wound in its flank. More flies sounded inside the biggest of the two taverns and Sharpe pushed open the door with the butt of his rifle and gave an involuntary shudder. Maria, the girl Harper had liked, was spread naked on the only table left unbroken in the taproom. She had been pinned to the table by knives thrust through her hands and now the flies crawled across her bloody belly and breasts. Every wine barrel had been splintered, every pot smashed and every piece of furniture other than the single table torn apart. Sharpe slung his rifle and tugged the knives from Maria’s palms so that her white arms flapped as the blades came free. Perkins stared aghast from the door. “Don’t just stand there,” Sharpe snapped, “find a blanket, anything, and cover her.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sharpe went back to the street. Vicente had tears in his eyes. There were bodies in half a dozen houses, blood in every house, but no living folk. Any survivors of Vila Real de Zedes had fled the village, chased out by the casual brutality of their conquerors. “We should have stayed here,” Vicente said angrily.

“And died with them?” Sharpe asked.

“They had no one to fight for them!” Vicente said.

“They had Lopes,” Sharpe said, “and he didn’t know how to fight, and if he had then he wouldn’t have stayed. And if we’d fought for them we’d be dead now and these folk would be just as dead.”

“We should have stayed,” Vicente insisted.

Sharpe ignored him. “Cooper? Sims?” The two men cocked their rifles. Cooper shot first, Sharpe counted to ten and then Sims pulled his trigger, Sharpe counted to ten again and then he fired into the air. It was a signal that Harper could lead the others down from the hilltop. “Look for spades,” Sharpe said to Vicente.

“Spades?”

“We’re going to bury them.”

The graveyard was a walled enclosure just north of the village and there was a small hut with sextons’ shovels that Sharpe gave to his men. “Deep enough so the animals don’t scratch them up,” he ordered, “but not too deep.”

“Why not too deep?” Vicente bridled, thinking that a shallow grave was a callous insult to the dead.

“Because when the villagers come back,” Sharpe said, “they’ll dig them up to find their relatives.” He found a large piece of sacking in the shed and he used it to collect the charred bodies from the church, dragging them one by one to the graveyard. The left arm came off Father Josefa’s body when Sharpe tried to pull the priest free of the charred cross, but Sims saw what was happening and came to help roll the shrunken, blackened corpse onto the sacking.

“I’ll take it, sir,” Sims said, seizing hold of the sacking.

“You don’t have to.”

Sims looked embarrassed. “We’re not going to run, sir,” he blurted out, then looked fearful as if he expected to get the rough edge of Sharpe’s tongue.

Sharpe looked at him and saw another thief, another drunk, another failure, another rifleman. Then Sharpe smiled. “Thank you, Sims. Tell Pat Harper to give you some of his holy water.”

“Holy water?” Sims asked.

“The brandy he keeps in his second canteen. The one he thinks I don’t know about.”

Afterward, when the men who had come down from the hilltop were helping to bury the dead, Sharpe went back to the church where Harper found him. “Picquets are set, sir.”

“Good.”

“And Sims says I was to give him some brandy.”

“I hope you did.”

“I did, sir, I did. And Mister Vicente, sir, he’s wanting to say a prayer or two.”

“I hope God’s listening.”

“You want to be there?”

“No, Pat.”

“Didn’t think you would.” The big Irishman picked his way through the ashes. Some of the wreckage still smoked where the altar had stood, but he pushed a hand into the blackened tangle and pulled out a twisted, black crucifix. It was only four inches high and he laid it on his left palm and made the sign of the cross. “Mister Vicente’s not happy, sir.”

“I know.”

“He thinks we should have defended the village, but I told him, sir, I told him you don’t catch the rabbit by killing the dog.”

Sharpe stared into the smoke. “Maybe we should have stayed here.”

“Now you’re talking like an Irishman, sir,” Harper said, “because there’s nothing we don’t know about lost causes. Sure and we’d all have died. And if you see that the trigger guard on Gataker’s rifle is hanging loose then don’t give him hell about it. The screws are worn to buggery.”

Sharpe smiled at Harper’s effort to divert him. “I know we did the right thing, Pat. I just wish Lieutenant Vicente could see it.”

“He’s a lawyer, sir, can’t see a bloody thing straight. And he’s young. He’d sell his cow for a drink of milk.”

“We did the right thing,” Sharpe insisted, “but what do we do now?”

Harper tried to straighten the crucifix. “When I was a wee child,” he said, “I got lost. I was no more then seven, eight maybe. No bigger then
Perkins, anyway. There were soldiers near the village, your lot in red, and to this day I don’t know what the bastards were doing there, but I ran away from them. They didn’t chase me, but I ran all the same because that’s what you did when the red bastards showed themselves. I ran and I ran, I did, and I ran until I didn’t know where the hell I was.”

“So what did you do?”

“I followed a stream,” Harper said, “and came to these two wee houses and my aunty lived in one and she took me home.”

Sharpe started to laugh and, though it was not really funny, could not stop.

“Maire,” Harper said, “Aunty Maire, rest her soul.” He put the crucifix into a pocket.

“I wish your Aunty Maire was here, Pat. But we’re not lost.”

“No?”

“We go south. Find a boat. Cross the river. Keep going south.”

“And if the army’s gone from Lisbon?”

“Walk to Gibraltar,” Sharpe said, knowing it would never come to that. If there was peace then he would be found by someone in authority and sent to the nearest port, and if there was war then he would find someone to fight. Simple, really, he thought. “But we march at night, Pat.”

“So we’re still at war, you think?”

“Oh, we’re at war, Pat,” Sharpe said, looking at the wreckage and thinking of Christopher, “we’re bloody well at war.”

Vicente was staring at the new graves. He nodded when Sharpe said he proposed marching south during the night, but he did not speak until they were outside the cemetery gates. “I am going to Porto,” he said.

“You believe there’s been a peace treaty?”

“No,” Vicente said, then shrugged. “Maybe? I don’t know. But I do know Colonel Christopher and Brigadier Vuillard are probably there. I didn’t fight them here, so I must pursue them there.”

“So you’ll go to Oporto,” Sharpe said, “and die?”

“Maybe,” Vicente said grandly, “but a man cannot hide from evil.”

“No,” Sharpe said, “but if you fight it, fight it clever.”

“I’m learning how to fight,” Vicente said, “but I already know how to kill.”

That was a recipe for suicide, Sharpe thought, but he did not argue. “What I’m planning,” he said instead, “is to go back the way we came. I can find the way easy enough. And once I’m at Barca d’Avintas I’ll look for a boat. There has to be something that will float.”

“I’m sure there is.”

“So come with me that far,” Sharpe suggested, “because it’s close to Oporto.”

Vicente agreed and his men fell in behind Sharpe’s when they left the village, and Sharpe was glad of it for the night was pitch black again and despite his confidence that he could find the way he would have become hopelessly lost if Vicente had not been there. As it was they made painfully slow progress and eventually rested in the darkest heart of the night and made better time when the wolf light edged the eastern horizon.

Sharpe was in two minds about going back to Barca d’Avintas. There was a risk, for the village was perilously close to Oporto, but on the other hand he knew it was a place where the river was safe to cross, and he reckoned he should be able to find some wreckage from the huts and houses that his men could fashion into a raft. Vicente agreed, saying that much of the rest of the Douro valley was a rocky ravine and that Sharpe would face difficulty in either approaching the river or finding a crossing place. A larger risk was that the French would be guarding Barca d’Avintas, but Sharpe suspected they would be content with having destroyed all the boats in the village.

Dawn found them in some wooded hills. They stopped by a stream and made a breakfast of stale bread and smoked meat so tough that the men joked about re-soling their boots, then grumbled because Sharpe would not let them light a fire and so make tea. Sharpe carried a crust to the summit of a nearby hill and searched the landscape with the small telescope. He saw no enemy, indeed he saw no one at all. A deserted
cottage lay further up the valley where the stream ran and there was a church bell tower a mile or so to the south, but there were no people. Vicente joined him. “You think there might be French here?”

“I always think that,” Sharpe said.

“And do you think the British have gone home?” Vicente asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Sharpe shrugged. “If we wanted to go home,” he said, “we’d have gone after Sir John Moore’s retreat.”

Vicente stared south. “I know we could not have defended the village,” he said.

“I wish we could have done.”

“It is just that they are my people.” Vicente shrugged.

“I know,” Sharpe said, and he tried to imagine the French army in the dales of Yorkshire or in the streets of London. He tried to imagine the cottages burning, the alehouses sacked and the women screaming, but he could not envisage that horror. It seemed oddly impossible. Harper could doubtless imagine his home being violated, could probably recall it, but Sharpe could not.

“Why do they do it?” Vicente asked with a genuine note of anguish.

Sharpe collapsed the telescope then scuffed the earth with the toe of his right boot. On the day after they had climbed to the watchtower he had dried the rain-soaked boots in front of the fire, but he had left them too close and the leather had cracked. “There are no rules in war,” he said uncomfortably.

“There are rules,” Vicente insisted.

Sharpe ignored the protest. “Most soldiers aren’t saints. They’re drunks, thieves, rogues. They’ve failed at everything, so they join the army or else they’re forced to join by some bastard of a magistrate. Then they’re given a weapon and told to kill. Back home they’d be hanged for it, but in the army they’re praised for it, and if you don’t hold them hard then they think any killing is permitted. Those lads,”—he nodded down the hill to the men grouped under the cork oaks—“know damn
well they’ll be punished if they step out of line. But if I let them off the leash? They’d run this country ragged, then make a mess of Spain and they’d never stop till someone killed them.” He paused, knowing he had been unfair to his men. “Mind you, I like them,” he went on. “They’re not the worst, not really, just unlucky, and they’re damn fine soldiers. I don’t know.” He frowned, embarrassed. “But the Frogs? They don’t have any choice. It’s called conscription. Some poor bastard is working as a baker or a wheelwright one day and the next he’s in uniform and being marched half a continent away. They resent it, and the French don’t flog their soldiers so there’s no way of holding them.”

“Do you flog?”

“Not me.” He thought about telling Vicente that he had been flogged once, long ago, on a hot parade ground in India, then decided it would sound like boasting. “I just take them behind a wall and beat them up,” he said instead. “It’s quicker.”

Vicente smiled. “I could not do that.”

“You could always give them a writ instead,” Sharpe said. “I’d rather be beaten up than get tangled by a lawyer.” Maybe, he thought, if he had beaten Williamson the man might have settled to authority. Maybe not. “So how far is the river?” he asked.

“Three hours? Not much longer.”

“Bugger all happening here, we might as well keep going.”

“But the French?” Vicente suggested nervously.

“None here, none there.” Sharpe nodded to the south. “No smoke, no birds coming out of trees like a cat was after them. And you can smell French dragoons a mile off. Their horses all have saddle sores, they stink like a cesspit.”