Sharpe's Eagle (2 page)

The Sergeant collected the pieces of his rifle lock as if he was about to leave but Hogan held
up his hand. "Stay on, Patrick. I have a treat for you; one that even a heathen from Donegal
might like." He took a dark bottle out of his haversack and raised an eyebrow to Sharpe. "You
don't mind?"

Sharpe shook his head. Harper was a good man, good at everything he did, and in their three
years' acquaintance-ship Sharpe and Harper had become friends, or at least as friendly as an
officer and a Sergeant could be. Sharpe could not imagine fighting without the huge Irishman
beside him, the Irishman dreaded fighting without Sharpe, and together they were as formidable a
pair as Hogan had ever seen on a battlefield. The Captain set the bottle on the table and pulled
the cork. "Brandy. French brandy from Marshal Soult's own cellars and captured at Oporto. With
the compliments of the General."

"From Wellesley?" Sharpe asked.

"The man himself. He asked after you, Sharpe, and I said you were being doctored or would have
been with me."

Sharpe said nothing. Hogan paused in his careful pouring of the liquid. "Don't be unfair,
Sharpe! He's fond of you. Do you think he's forgotten Assaye?"

Assaye. Sharpe remembered all right. The field of dead outside the Indian village where he had
been commis-sioned on the battlefield. Hogan pushed a tin cup of brandy across the table to him.
"You know he can't make you into a Captain of the 95th. He doesn't have the power!"

"I know." Sharpe smiled and raised the cup to his lips. But Wellesley did have the power to
send him home where promotion might be had. He pushed the thought away, knowing the nagging
insult of his rank would soon come back, and was envious of Hogan who, being an Engineer, could
only gain promotion by seniority. It meant that Hogan was still only a Captain, even in his
fifties, but at least there was no jealousy and injustice because no man could buy his way up the
ladder of promotion. He leaned forward. "So? Any news? Are we still with you?"

"You are. And we have a job." Hogan's eyes twinkled. "And a wonderful job it is,
too."

Patrick Harper grinned. "That means a powerful big bang."

Hogan nodded. "You are right, Sergeant. A big bridge to be blown." He took a map out of his
pocket and unfolded it onto the table. Sharpe watched a callused finger trace the River Tagus
from the sea at Lisbon, past Abrantes where they now sat, and on into Spain to stop where the
river made a huge southwards loop. "Valdelacasa," Hogan said. "There's an old bridge there, a
Roman one. The General doesn't like it."

Sharpe could see why. The army would march on the north bank of the Tagus towards Madrid and
the river would guard their right flank. There were few bridges where the French might cross and
harass their supply lines and those bridges were in towns, like Alcantara, where the Spanish kept
garrisons to protect the crossings. Valdelacasa was not even marked. If there was no town there
would be no garrison, and a French force could cross and play havoc in the British rear. Harper
leaned over and looked at the map.

"Why isn't it marked, sir?"

Hogan made a contemptuous noise. "I'm surprised the map even marks Madrid, let alone
Valdelacasa." He was right. The infamous old Tomas Lopez map, the only one available to the
armies in Spain, was a wondrous work of the Spanish imagination. Hogan stabbed his finger down
onto the map. "The bridge is hardly used, it's in bad repair. We're told you can hardly put a
cart across, let alone a gun, but it could be repaired and we could have "old trousers" up our
backsides in no time." Sharpe smiled. 'Old trousers' was the Rifle's strange nickname for the
French, and Hogan had adopted the phrase with relish. The Engineer lowered his voice
conspiratorially. "It's a strange place, I'm told, just a ruined convent and the bridge. They
call it El Puente de los Malditos." He nodded as if he had made his point.

Sharpe waited a few seconds and sighed. "All right. What does it mean?"

Hogan smiled triumphantly. "I'm surprised you need to ask! It means "The Bridge of the
Accursed". It seems that, years ago, all the nuns were taken out of the convent and massacred by
the Moors. It's haunted, Sharpe, stalked by the spirits of the dead!"

Sharpe leaned forward to peer more closely at the map. Give or take the width of Hogan's
finger the bridge must be sixty miles beyond the border and they were that far from Spain
already. "When do we leave?"

"Now there's a problem." Hogan folded the map careful-ly. "We can leave for the frontier
tomorrow but we can't cross until we're formally invited by the Spanish." He leaned back with his
cup of brandy. "And we have to wait for our escort."

"Escort!" Sharpe bridled. "We're your escort."

Hogan shook his head. "Oh, no. This is politics. The Spanish will let us blow up their bridge
but only if a Spanish Regiment goes along with us. It's a question of pride,
apparently."

"Pride!" Sharpe's anger was obvious. "If you have a whole Regiment of Spaniards then why the
hell do you need us?"

Hogan smiled placatingly. "Oh, I need you. There's more, you see." He was interrupted by
Harper. The Sergeant was standing at the window, oblivious of their conversation, and staring
into the small square.

"That is nice. Oh, sir, that can clean my rifle any day of the week."

Sharpe looked through the small window. Outside, on a black mare, sat a girl dressed in black;
black breeches, black jacket, and a wide-brimmed hat that shadowed her face but in no way
obscured a beauty that was startling. Sharpe saw a wide mouth, dark eyes, coiled hair the colour
of fine powder, and then she became aware of their scrutiny. She half smiled at them and turned
away, snapped an order at a servant holding the halter of a mule, and stared at the road leading
from the plaza towards the centre of Abrantes. Hogan made a small, contented noise. "That is
special. They don't come out like that very often. I wonder who she is?"

"Officer's wife?" Sharpe suggested.

Harper shook his head. "No ring, sir. But she's waiting for someone, lucky bastard."

And a rich bastard, thought Sharpe. The army was collecting its customary tail of women and
children who followed the Regiments to war. Each Battalion was allowed to take sixty soldiers'
wives to an overseas war but no-one could stop other women joining the `official' wives; local
girls, prostitutes, seamstresses and washerwomen, all making their living from the army. This
girl looked different. There was the smell of money and privilege about her, as if she had run
away from a rich Lisbon home. Sharpe presumed she was the lover of a rich officer, one of the
breed who would regard his woman as much a part of his equipment as his thoroughbred horses, his
Manton pistols, his silver dinnerware for camp meals, and the hounds that would trot obediently
at his horse's tail. There were plenty of girls like her, Sharpe knew, girls who cost a lot of
money, and he felt the old envy rise in him.

"My God." Harper, still staring out the window, had spoken again.

"What is it?" Sharpe leaned forward and, like his Ser-geant, he could hardly believe his eyes.
A Battalion of British Infantry was marching steadily into the square but a Battalion the like of
which Sharpe had not seen for more than twelve months. A year in Portugal had turned the army
into a Drill-Sergeant's nightmare: the soldiers' uniforms had faded and been patched with the
ubiquitous brown cloth of the Portuguese peasants, their hair had grown long, the polish had long
disappeared from buttons and badges. Sir Arthur Wellesley did not mind; he only cared that a
soldier had sixty rounds of ammunition and a clear head, and if his trousers were brown instead
of white then it made no difference to the outcome of a fight. But this Battalion was fresh from
England. Their coats were a brilliant scarlet, their crossbelts pipeclayed white, their boots a
mirror-surfaced black. Each man wore tightly-buttoned gaiters and, even more surprising, they
still wore the infamous stocks; four inches of stiffly varnished black leather that constricted
the neck and was supposed to keep a man's chin high and back straight. Sharpe could not remember
when he had last seen a stock; once on campaign the men `lost' them, and with them went the
running sores where the rigid leather dug into the soft flesh beneath the jawbone.

"They've taken the wrong turning for Windsor Castle," Harper said.

Sharpe shook his head. "They're unbelievable!" Whoever commanded this Battalion must have made
the men's lives hell to keep them looking so immaculate despite the voyage from England in
cramped and foul ships and the long march from Lisbon in the summer heat. Their weapons shone,
their equipment was pristine and regular, while their faces bulged red from the constricting
stocks and the unaccustomed sun. At the head of each company rode the officers, all, Sharpe
noted, mounted superbly. The colours were cased in polished leather and guarded by Sergeants
whose halberd blades had been burnished to a brilliant, glittering sheen. The men marched in
perfect step, looking neither right nor left, for all the world, as Harper had said, as if they
were marching for the Royal duty at Windsor.

"Who are they?" Sharpe was trying to think of the Regiments who had yellow facings on their
uniforms but this looked like none of the Regiments he knew.

"The South Essex," Hogan said.

"The who?"

"The South Essex. They're new, very new. Just raised by Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry
Simmerson, a cousin of General Sir Banestre Tarleton."

Sharpe whistled softly. Tarleton had fought in the American war and now sat in Parliament as
Wellesley's bitterest military opponent. Sharpe had heard said that Tarleton wanted the command
of the army in Portugal for himself and bitterly resented the younger man's prefer-ment. Tarleton
was a man of influence, a dangerous enemy for Wellesley, and Sharpe knew enough about the
politics of high command to realise that the presence of Tarleton's cousin in the army would not
be welcomed by Wellesley.

"Is that him?" He pointed to a portly man riding a grey horse in the centre of the
Battalion.

Hogan nodded. "That is Sir Henry Simmerson, whom God preserve or preferably not."

Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry Simmerson had a red face lined with purple veins and pendulous
with jowls. His eyes, at the distance Sharpe was seeing them, seemed small and red, and on either
side of the suspicious, questing face there sprung prominent ears that looked like the
protrud-ing trunnions either side of a cannon barrel. He looked, Sharpe thought, like a pig on
horseback. "I've not heard of the man."

"That's not surprising. He's done nothing." Hogan was scornful. "Landed money, in Parliament
for Paglesham, justice of the peace and, God help us, a Militia Colonel." Hogan seemed surprised
by his own lack of charity. "He means well. He won't be content till those lads are the best
damned Battalion in the army but I think the man has a terrible shock coming when he finds the
difference be-tween us and the Militia."

Like other Regular officers Hogan had little time for the Militia, Britain's second army. It
was used exclusively within Britain itself, never had to fight, never went hungry, never slept in
an open field beneath a cloudburst, yet it paraded with a glorious pomp and
self-importance.

Hogan laughed. "Mustn't complain. We're lucky to have Sir Henry."

"Lucky?" Sharpe looked at the greying Engineer.

"Oh, yes. Sir Henry only arrived in Abrantes yesterday but he tells us he's a great expert on
war. The man's not yet seen a Frenchman but he's lectured the General on how to beat them!" Hogan
laughed and shook his head. "Maybe he'll learn. One battle could take the starch out of
him."

Sharpe looked at the companies marching steadily through the square like automatons. The brass
badges on their shakoes reflected the sun but the faces beneath the brilliance were
expressionless. Sharpe loved the army, it was his home, the refuge that an orphan had needed
sixteen years before, but he liked it most of all because it gave him, in a clumsy way, the
opportunity to prove again and again that he was valued. He could chafe against the rich and the
privileged but he acknowledged that the army had taken him from the gutter and put an officer's
sash round his waist and Sharpe could think of no other job that would offer a low-born bastard
on the run from the law the chance of rank and responsibility. But Sharpe had also been lucky. In
sixteen years he had rarely stopped fighting, and it had been his fortune that the battles in
Flanders, India and Portugal had called for men like himself who reacted to danger the way a
gambler reacted to a deck of cards. Sharpe suspected he would hate the peacetime army, with its
church parades and pointless drills, its petty jealousies and endless polish, and in the South
Essex he saw the peacetime army he did not want. "I suppose he's a flogger?"

Hogan grimaced. "Floggings, punishment parades, extra drills. You name it and Sir Henry uses
it. He will have, he says, only the best. And they are. What do you think of them?"

Sharpe laughed grimly. "God keep me from the South Essex. That's not too much to ask, is
it?"

Hogan smiled. "I'm afraid it is."

Sharpe looked at him, a sinking feeling in his stomach. Hogan shrugged. "I told you there was
more. If a Spanish Regiment marches to Valdelacasa then Sir Arthur feels, for the sake of
diplomacy, that a British one should go as well. Show the flag; that kind of thing." He glanced
at the polished ranks and back to Sharpe. "Sir Henry Simmerson and his fine men are going with
us."

Sharpe groaned. "You mean we have to take orders from him?"

Hogan pursed his lips. "Not exactly. Strictly speaking you will take your orders from me." He
had spoken primly, like a lawyer, and Sharpe glanced at him curiously. There could be only one
reason why Wellesley had subordinated Sharpe and his Riflemen to Hogan, instead of to Simmerson,
and that was because the General did not trust Sir Henry. Sharpe still wondered why he was
needed; after all Hogan could expect the protection of two whole Battalions, at least fifteen
hundred men. "Does the General expect there to be a fight?"