Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe's Revenge, Sharpe's Waterloo, Sharpe's Devil (71 page)

The newcomers grinned nervously towards the grim-faced officer who seemed oddly embarrassed by the tale.

‘The Portuguese never complained.’ Harper justified the barbarity.

‘Did you really do that?’ d’Alembord asked Sharpe very quietly.

‘Christ, no. It was some other Riflemen. The Portuguese had eaten their pet dog, so they decided to get even with them.’ Sharpe was surprised that the story was now ascribed to him, but he had noticed how men liked to attach outrageous stories to his exploits and it was hopeless to deny the more exotic feats.

‘We could do with some of them Portuguese tomorrow.’ Daniel Hagman lit his pipe with a glowing twig from the fire. ‘They were proper little fighters, they were.’ The admiration was genuine and earned muttered agreement from the veterans.

‘But we’ll be all right tomorrow, won’t we, Mr Sharpe?’ Charlie Weller asked with undisguised anxiety.

‘You’ll be all right, lads. Just remember. Kill their officers first, aim at the bellies of the infantry and at the horses of the cavalry.’ The answer was given for the benefit of the men at the outer reaches of Sharpe’s audience; the men who had not fought before and who needed simple rules to keep them confident in the chaos of battle.

Weller put a finger into the can of water and found it still lukewarm. He took a twist of dry kindling that he had stored deep in his clothes and put it onto the flames. Sharpe hoped the boy would survive, for Weller was different from the other men. He was a country boy who had joined the army out of a sense of patriotism and adventure. Those motives had helped make him a good soldier, though no better than most of the men who had taken the King’s shilling for altogether less honourable motives. Clayton was a thief, and probably would have been hanged if he had not donned the red coat, but his sly cunning made him a good skirmisher. Most of the other men around the fire were drunkards and criminals. They were the leavings of Britain, the unwanted men, the scum of the earth, but in battle they were as stubborn as mules. To Sharpe’s mind they were gutter fighters, and he would not have wanted them any other way. They were not impressive to look at; small, scarred, gap-toothed and dirty, but tomorrow they would show an emperor how a redcoat could fight, though tonight their main concern was when the rum ration would reach them.

‘The quartermaster has promised it by midnight,’ d’Alembord told the company.

‘Bastard wagon drivers,’ Clayton said. ‘Bastards are probably tucked up in bed.’

Sharpe and Harper stayed another half-hour and left the company discussing the chances of finding the French brothel among the enemy baggage. All British soldiers were convinced that the French travelled with such a brothel; a magical institution that they had never quite succeeded in capturing, but which occupied in their mythology the status of a golden prize of war.

‘They seem well enough,’ Sharpe said to d’Alembord. The two officers were walking towards the ridge top while Harper went to fetch the horses.

‘They are well enough,’ d‘Alembord confirmed. He was still in his dancing clothes which were now stained and ragged. His proper uniform was lost with the missing baggage. One of his dancing shoes had somehow lost its buckle and was only held in place by a piece of string knotted round d’Alembord’s instep. ‘They’re good lads,’ he said warmly.

‘And you, Dally?’

Peter d‘Alembord smiled ruefully. ‘I can’t shake off a rather ominous dread. Silly, I know, but there it is.’

‘I felt that way before Toulouse,’ Sharpe confessed. ‘It was bad. I lived, though.’

D‘Alembord, who would not have admitted his fears to anyone but a very close friend, walked a few paces in silence. ‘I can’t help thinking about the wheat on the roads. Have you noticed that wherever our supply wagons go the grain falls off and sprouts? It grows for a season, then just dies. It seems to me that’s rather a good image of soldiering. We pass by, we leave a trace, and then we die.’

Sharpe stared aghast at his friend. ‘My God, but you have got it bad!’

‘My Huguenot ancestry, I fear. I am bedevilled by a Calvinist guilt that I’m wasting my life. I tell myself that I’m here to help punish the French, but in truth it was the chance of a majority that kept me in uniform. I need the money, you see, but that seems a despicable motive now. I’ve behaved badly, don’t you see? And consequently I have a conviction that I’ll become nothing but dung for a Belgian rye field.’

Sharpe shook his head. ‘I’m only here for the money too, you silly bugger.’ They had reached the ridge top and could see the twisting trails of French cooking fires rising beyond the southern crest. ‘You’re going to live, Dally.’

‘So I keep telling myself, then I become convinced of the opposite.’ D‘Alembord paused before revealing the true depths of his dread. ‘For tuppence I’d ride away tonight and hide. I’ve been thinking of it all day.’

‘It happens to us all.’ Sharpe remembered his own terror before the battle at Toulouse. ‘The fear goes when the fighting starts, Dally. You know that.’

‘I’m not the only one, either.’ D‘Alembord ignored Sharpe’s encouragement. ‘CSM Huckfield has suddenly taken to reading his Bible. If I didn’t like him so much I’d accuse him of being a damned Methodist. He tells me he’s marked to die in this campaign, though he adds that he doesn’t mind because his soul is square with God. Major Vine says the same thing.’ D’Alembord shot a poisonous glance towards the hedge where Ford and his senior Major crouched against the rain. ‘They asked me whether I thought we should have divine service tomorrow morning. I told them it was a bloody ridiculous notion, but I’ve no doubt they’ll find some idiot chaplain to mumble inanities at us. Have you noticed how we’re getting so very pious? We weren’t pious in Spain, but suddenly there’s a streak of moral righteousness infecting senior officers. I’ll say my prayers in the morning, but I won’t need to make a display of it.’ He began scraping the mud from his fragile shoes against a tuft of grass, then abandoned the cleaning job as hopeless. ‘I apologize, Sharpe. I shouldn’t burden you with this.’

‘It’s not a burden.’

‘I was unconcerned till yesterday,’ d‘Alembord went on as though Sharpe had not spoken. ‘But those horsemen completely unnerved me. I was shaking like a child when they attacked us. Then there’s the Colonel, of course. I have no faith in Ford at all. And there’s Anne. I feel I don’t deserve her and that any man who is as fortunate as I is bound to be punished for it.’

‘Love makes us vulnerable,’ Sharpe admitted.

‘Doesn’t it just?’ d‘Alembord said warmly. ‘But virtue should give us confidence.’

‘Virtue?’ Sharpe wondered just what moral claims his friend was making for himself.

‘The virtue of our cause,’ d‘Alembord explained as though it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘The French have got to be beaten.’

Sharpe smiled. ‘They’re doubtless saying the same of us.’

D‘Alembord was silent for a few seconds, then spoke in a sudden and impassioned rush. ‘I don’t count Lucille, of course, and you mustn’t think I do, but it is a filthily evil nation, Sharpe. I cannot forget what they did to my family or to our co-religionists. And think of their revolution! All those poor dead innocent people. And Bonaparte’s no better. He just attacks and attacks, then steals from the countries he conquers, and all the time he talks of virtue and law and the glories of French civilization. Their virtue is all hypocrisy, their law applies only to benefit themselves, and their civilization is blood on the cobblestones.’

Sharpe had never suspected that such animosity lay beneath his friend’s elegant languor. ‘So it isn’t just the majority, Peter?’

D‘Alembord seemed embarrassed to have betrayed such feelings. ‘I’m sorry, I truly am. You must think me very rude. I heartily like Lucille, you know I do. I exaggerate, of course. It is not the French who are essentially evil, but their government.’ He stopped abruptly, evidently stifling yet more anti-French venom.

Sharpe smiled. ‘Where Lucille and I live they will tell you that France is blessed by God but cursed with Paris. They perceive Paris as an evil place inhabited by the most loathsome and grasping people.’

‘It sounds like London.’ D‘Alembord smiled wanly. ‘You won’t tell Lucille my thoughts? I would not like to offend her.’

‘Of course I won’t tell her.’

‘And perhaps you will do me one more favour?’

‘With pleasure.’

D‘Alembord took a creased and damp letter from his pocket. ‘If

I do become rye dung tomorrow, perhaps you’ll deliver this to Anne? And tell her I didn’t suffer? No tales of surgeon’s knives, Sharpe, and no descriptions of nasty wounds, just a clean bullet in the forehead will do for my end, however nasty the truth will probably be.’

‘I won’t need to deliver it, but I’ll keep it for you.’ Sharpe pushed the letter into a pocket, then turned as a spatter of musket fire sounded from the right of the line, about the château of Hougoumont.

A scatter of French infantry were running back from the orchard where British musket flames sparked bright in the dusk. Sharpe could see redcoats going forward among the trees south of the farm. The French must have sent a battalion to discover whether the farmstead was garrisoned, or else the enemy was merely foraging for firewood, but, whatever their mission, the blue-coated infantry had run into a savage firefight. More redcoats ran from the farm to take their bayonets into the woodland.

‘What angers me’, d‘Alembord was taking no notice of the sudden skirmish, ‘is not knowing how it will all end. If I die tomorrow, I’ll never know, will I?’

Sharpe shook his head in scornful dismissal of his friend’s fears. ‘By summer’s end, my friend, you and I will sit in a conquered Paris and drink wine. We probably won’t even remember a day’s fighting in Belgium! And you’ll go home and marry your Anne and be happy ever after.’

D‘Alembord laughed at the prophecy. ‘And you, Sharpe, what happens to you? Do you go back to Normandy?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the local people won’t mind that you fought against France?’

‘I don’t know.’ That worry was never far from Sharpe’s thoughts, nor indeed, from Lucille’s. ‘But I’d like to go back,’ Sharpe went on. ‘I’m happy there. I’m planning to make some calvados this year. The château used to make a lot, but it hasn’t produced any for twenty or more years. The local doctor wants to help us. He’s a good fellow.’ Sharpe suddenly thought of his meeting with Lord John and of the promissory note that, if it was honoured, would make so many things possible in Lucille’s château. ‘I met bloody Rossendale today. I took the promissory note off him direct. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Of course not,’ d’Alembord said.

‘Oddly enough,’ Sharpe said, ‘I rather liked him. I don’t know why. I think I felt sorry for him.’

“Love your enemies”,’ d’Alembord quoted mockingly,‘ “bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you”? I told you we were getting more pious, even you.’

‘But we’ll still slaughter the bloody French tomorrow.’ Sharpe smiled and held out his hand. ‘You’ll be safe, Peter. Tomorrow night we’ll laugh at these fears.’

They shook hands on the promise.

The musket-fire at Hougoumont died away as the French yielded possession of the woodland to the British. A roll of thunder sounded in the west and a spear of lightning glittered brief and stark on the horizon. Then the rain began to pelt down hard again.

The armies had gathered, and now waited for morning.

 

The lintel of every house in Waterloo’s street bore a chalked inscription, put there by the Quartermaster-General’s department to identify which general and staff officers would be billeted inside. The inn opposite the church bore the chalked words ‘His Grace the Duke of Wellington’, while three doors away a two storey house was inscribed ‘The Earl of Uxbridge’. Another substantially built house was marked ‘His Royal Highness the Prince William of Orange’. Thatched cottages with dungheaps hard under their windows were this night to be the homes for marquesses or earls, yet such men counted themselves fortunate to be sheltered at all, and not to be enduring the numbing cold misery of the rain that thrashed the ridge.

In the Earl of Uxbridge’s house the staff officers crammed themselves about a table to share the Earl’s supper of boiled beef and beans. It was an early supper, for the whole staff was on notice to rise long before dawn. In the centre of the table, propped against the single candelabra, was Lord John Rossendale’s broken sword. One of the staff officers had discovered the snapped blade after Lord John had tried to throw it away and had demanded to know just how the weapon had been broken. The truth was too painful, and so Lord John had invented a rather more flattering account.

‘It was after the rocket explosion,’ he explained to the assembled staff at supper. ‘The damned horse bolted on me.’

‘You should learn to ride, John.’

Lord John waited for the laughter to subside. ‘Damn thing ran me into a wood off to one side of the road, and damn me if there weren’t three Lancers lurking there.’

‘Green or red?’ The Earl of Uxbridge, just returned from a conference with the Duke of Wellington, had taken his place at the head of the supper table.

‘The green ones, Harry.’ That bit was easy for Lord John to invent, for he had watched the green-coated Lancers running from the attack of the Life Guards. ‘I shot one with the pistol, but had to throw it down to draw my sword. Damn shame, really, because it was an expensive gun.’

‘A Mortimer percussion pistol, with a rifled barrel.’ Christopher Manvell confirmed the value of the lost pistol. ‘A damn shame to lose it, John.’

Lord John shrugged as though to suggest the loss was nothing really. ‘The second fellow charged me, I got past his point and gave him the sword in the belly, then the third one damn nearly skewered me.’ He gave a modest smile. ‘Thought I was dead, to be honest. I slashed at the fellow, but he was damned fast. He drew a sabre and had a good hack at me, I parried, and that’s when my sword broke. Then, damn me, if the fellow didn’t just turn tail and run!’