Sharpe's Regiment (21 page)

Harper waited, scarcely breathing, his head tucked low so that his nostrils were almost touching the foul water. He wished the bastards would move further east, but instead, uncertain and beginning to panic, they clung stubbornly to the place where they were certain he had disappeared. Then, to Harper’s annoyance, he heard Girdwood’s voice and the chink of curb chains and the thump of hooves. He was undetected, but all the hunters were close, and he stayed still, utterly still, eyes closed, ears alert to the smallest night sound of the marsh, and prayed that Sharpe would strike soon.

 

 

Sharpe had waited till he could hear no footsteps of the men who patrolled the tent lines against Girdwood’s fear of mutiny. He had waited, too. until the canvas of the tent was as dark as it would become, yet still it was treacherously light. Then he moved.

‘What are you doing, Dick?’ It was Charlie Weller.

‘You stay here!’ Jenkinson growled the words, fearing punishment if one man of the squad broke the rules, but Sharpe ignored him, went to the back of the tent and pulled the canvas up from its small pegs. He was staring west, across twenty yards of open ground towards the closest drainage ditch.

‘Dick?’ Weller asked again.

‘Quiet. All of you!’ He rolled under the canvas, the tent throwing a shadow over him, and he stared north and south, seeing no one, then stood carefully between the taut guy ropes of the tent.

He waited. He could hear no patrols, yet he knew that if one was close then they would be hidden by the tent’s bulk. He listened, ignoring the snores and the sound of the wind on the silvered grass, then ran.

He dropped at the drainage ditch, rolling himself in the mud to fall into the water. Like Harper, he was seeking to hide in the mud with the help of the mud. He paused when he had fallen, feeling the ripples beat back from the ditch’s side against his body, and listened.

No one called out, no patrol ran towards him.

He worked his way northwards, hidden by the ditch that stank because it drained the officers’ latrines. Its smell haunted the tents each night, but now, as he crawled north towards the buildings of the camp’s administration, it was thickly foul in his face.

He saw a group of men standing on the embanked road. They stared further northwards, towards the empty marsh, and he thought nothing of it except to be grateful that they did not look back towards the ditch where, ten yards from the kitchens, he climbed into the moonlight and, like a great predator, slipped into the shadows of the buildings.

There were guards in the compound between the stables and offices and they too, Sharpe saw, stared northwards. Then, from that direction, he heard three shots, close together, their sounds flattened by the night, and the sound alarmed him. Had they taken Harper into the marsh to shoot him like a dog?

He crossed the space between the kitchens and the stores. He made himself ignore his fears, for to hurry was to court defeat, and to be defeated was to deny the South Essex their victory in this war. He flattened himself against the store wall, on its dark side, and waited.

He had chosen to make his ambush here for it was a favoured place with the men who wore the red coats and guarded the camp. He waited, hearing indistinct shouts from the northern marsh, then, much closer, he heard what he wanted to hear.

The footsteps came close and stopped just round the corner from Sharpe. There was the rustle of cloth as buttons were undone, a grunt, then the sound of liquid falling onto the ground.

Sharpe moved with the speed of a man who has fought in wars for close to twenty years, a man who knew that speed in a fight was the prelude to victory, and the edge of his right hand, travelling upwards as he cleared the corner, caught the soldier beneath the chin and Sharpe’s left hand, following the first blow, thumped onto the sentry’s chest to knock the breath from him and fill his heart with pain, and, before the man could call out or bring his hands up in defence, his collar was grabbed and he was hauled savagely into the shadows around the corner. The man grunted, then a knee dropped into his belly and two fingers, rigid and jabbing, pressed into the base of his eyeballs. ‘Where’s the big Irishman?’

‘Stop!’ The man’s eyes were hurting. Sharpe pressed harder.

‘Where is he?’

‘They’re hunting him!’ The man spoke in panic. ‘The marsh!’

‘How many of them?’

The man told him what he knew, which was not much, and, when Sharpe was certain there was no more to be had from his captive, he slowly, leaving the eyes undamaged, drew back his hand. He hit the frightened man, once, twice, and again, until he was sure the man was unconscious.

He stood, retrieving the soldier’s fallen shako, then, with difficulty, stripped the man of his jacket and weapons. Sharpe wiped the mud from his face, pulled the jacket on and strapped the bayonet and ammunition pouch about his waist. He slung the musket, checked that the man was still insensible, then walked boldly out into the moonlit compound between the Battalion’s buildings.

No one noticed anything strange as a sentry strolled from the makeshift latrine towards the stables. No officer or sergeant challenged Sharpe as he went into the darkness beyond the stable door. ‘Hello!’

No one answered. There was only a single horse left in the stable, and no saddle that Sharpe could see, but he did find an old bridle hanging on the wall. He put it onto the horse, his movements clumsy, but the beast seemed used to such unskilled treatment in this camp of infantrymen. Sharpe tied the reins to a hook by the door, then crouched down beside the straw of an empty stall.

He lifted the musket’s pan lid and found, as he had feared, that the weapon was loaded. He did not want to fire a shot at this moment, drawing attention to himself, and he cursed softly, for what he must do now would render the musket useless for the rest of the night, but time was passing and the problems that were to come would have to be faced without a weapon.

He took one cartridge from the captured pouch, bit the bullet free and spat it away. He tore the stiff wax-paper cylinder open and laid it carefully beside him on the stable floor.

He lifted the musket, raised the frizzen again, turned the weapon over and shook its priming onto the ground. If the flint fell now there was no powder to spark the charge in the barrel.

He needed the spark of the flint and the flare of the pan, but he had to stop the musket firing. He pinched a lump of earth from the stable entrance into his palm, spat on it, then worked it into a small ball of mud. He pressed the mud into the touch-hole of the musket, blocking it, then, with powder from the opened cartridge, he re-primed the pan. He spat onto the powder to retard its explosion, then, carefully, he twisted the rest of the cartridge into a paper spill that was filled with gunpowder.

He prayed that the mud would stop up the touch-hole, held the paper of the torn cartridge in his right hand, and pulled the trigger with his left.

The flint snapped down, struck sparks from the steel, but the powder did not catch. He swore, wondering if he had moistened the powder overmuch, and cocked the gun again. He pulled the trigger a second time and again it did not catch. He did it yet again, and this time, fizzing and sparking, the powder flared and Sharpe held the paper spill in the sudden seething fire and willed the flame to catch. For a second he thought it would not, then the powder wrapped in his paper caught the flame and burst brightly upwards. The horse, seeing the sudden fire, whinnied and shuffled sideways. Sharpe clicked his tongue, then pushed the burning paper deep into the straw of the stall. He stood, slinging the musket on his shoulder. It was useless as a firearm until its touch-hole was cleared, but he might yet need it as a club.

He had planned a fire whatever might happen tonight; a diversion to draw men away from Harper, The straw was smoking, small flames creeping up the stems, and to help it he broke apart and scattered more cartridges on the fire. Then, satisfied that the stable was doomed, he climbed clumsily onto the horse’s back, leaned forward to unloop the reins, and almost fell from the bareback horse as it started forward under the stable door. Sharpe ducked beneath the lintel, clung to the horse’s mane, and snatched at the slung musket as it fell down to his elbow.

God, but it was hard to ride bareback! He slipped left, corrected his balance, and almost fell from the horse’s right side. He wrenched the reins, driving it north between two buildings, and he heard the first shout of alarm as a man saw the leaping, fierce flames that now spread among the dry summer straw. No man thought it strange that a uniformed man should ride towards the marsh this night, nor was any man willing to challenge Sharpe, for, in an infantry Battalion, the men who rode horses were usually officers. Sharpe, unmolested and with the chaos about to begin, rode to join the hunt.

 

‘Quiet!’ Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood called for silence. The hunters were gathered in a perplexed knot where the two ditches met. ‘Sergeant Lynch?’

‘Sir!’

‘You’re sure it was here?’

‘Certain, sir.’

Girdwood sent the eight dismounted sergeants westward. ‘Form a line there! We’ll drive him towards you. Gentlemen!’ He beckoned at his horsemen. ‘Five yards apart! Go slowly!’

It took a few moments for Girdwood to be satisfied with the alignment of his men, then, dropping his sabre as if he gave a signal on a battlefield, he walked his horsemen forward. ‘Search every shadow!’

Captain Finch was the southernmost horseman, the one closest to the camp, and the man whose advance would bring him directly to Harper’s hiding place. Finch held his carbine with the reins in his left hand and the sword in his right. He probed with the long blade into every deep shadow and fingered the carbine’s trigger in case his sword should roust the fugitive out of hiding.

Harper, when the hunters had gathered to hear Girdwood’s orders, had slid a few feet further down the ditch. He waited now, knowing that the line was coming towards him, and knowing, too, that the swords and sabres that stabbed down were his danger. Thirty yards behind Harper, muskets loaded and primed, the sergeants waited.

Captain Finch spurred over a bare patch of grass and sliced his sword down into a shadow. As he did it, the shadow seemed to flicker and disappear, a new light challenged the moon, and he looked southwards and saw, to his horror, that the stables were exploding into flame. ‘Fire!’

Sergeant Bennet almost obeyed, his finger tightening convul sively on the trigger before he saw that the horsemen were staring at the camp and at the roiling smoke that billowed up from the burning wooden stables.

Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood, whose evening pleasure was already nightmarish enough, was trapped between his need to find the Irishman and his desperation to extinguish the sudden fire before it spread to the other buildings of his command. ‘Stay here, Finch! Come with me, Sergeant Major!’

Finch stared, appalled. He saw a horseman come out of the camp and trot towards the hunters, then the Colonel and Brightwell passed Finch, goading their horses into a canter on the treacherous ground. Finch, at the very edge of a small ditch that his sword would explore next, turned to shout orders to the remaining huntsmen when, inexplicably, his horse reared.

Finch leaned forward to soothe the horse, but still it rose, screaming in terror, then lurched sideways. The captain caught a glimpse of a man, black as the night, dripping and huge, who had erupted from the ditch to seize one of the horse’s forelegs and now, with massive strength, was tipping the beast over. Finch tried to hit the man with his carbine, but his hand was seized and he was pulled with dreadful force to fall at his attacker’s feet, while his frightened horse, released by Harper, skittered away.

‘Don’t move!’ Harper, stinking and filthy from the ditch, shouted at the sergeants. ‘I’ll kill him!’ They froze. The huge Irishman, dripping wet, had pulled the sword from Finch’s right hand and now held it at the officer’s throat.

Harper stripped the carbine from Finch, then pulled the ammunition pouch from the officer’s belt, breaking it free with a massive tug as if the two leather loops that held it were no stronger than rotted cotton. He looked up at the sergeants. ‘Step back! Step back!’ Then, from behind him, came the shout he had waited for.

‘Patrick! Patrick!’

Harper dropped the sword and dragged Finch backwards. He stumbled over the ditch, still watching the sergeants who, in turn, stared appalled as their prey, who had appeared from nowhere like an embodied shadow, dragged his hostage towards the lone horseman who came over the marsh.

Girdwood checked and turned his horse. He saw the Irishman dragging Finch backwards. He saw, too, the horseman who approached Harper’s rear and the Colonel supposed that the rider must be one of his own men. ‘Kill him! Kill him!’ But instead the rider dismounted beside the huge Irishman and Girdwood, frozen in indecision between the calamities on either hand, called out -to his sergeants. ‘Kill them!’

One of the sergeants raised his musket, but Harper hauled Finch to his feet and held the sword at the officer’s throat. ‘One bullet and he’s a dead man! Now step back!’

Sharpe jumped down from the horse. He knew that Harper, who had been reared to ride the wild ponies of the Donegal Moors, was a much better horseman than himself. ‘You take the horse, Patrick! Hold onto that bastard!’ Sharpe threw away the useless musket and took the carbine from Harper. He checked that the carbine was of the Heavy Dragoon pattern that took the same calibre bullet as those in his captured pouch, then, seeing that Harper was mounted with the unfortunate Finch draped over the horse in front of him, he started westwards.

Girdwood watched in horror. ‘Fire!’ He shouted it to the sergeants who were closest to Sharpe and Harper, but none dared fire for fear of hitting Captain Finch. Girdwood stood in his stirrups. ‘Stop them!’