Sharpe's Fury - 11 (26 page)

“He’ll probably pay more,” he said, then kissed her nose.

“So what do you want?” she asked.

“Whatever you want to give me.”

“Oh, that,” she said.

T
HE FLEET
left, all except the Spanish feluccas that could not beat against the monstrous waves that were the remnant of the storm, so they returned to the bay, pursued by the futile splashes of the French mortar shells. The larger British ships drove through the heavy seas and then went south, a host of sail skirting Cádiz to disappear beyond Cape Trafalgar. The wind stayed in the west and the next day the Spaniards found kinder seas and followed.

San Fernando was empty with most of the army gone. There were still battalions on the Isla de León, but they were manning the long defense works on the marshy creek that protected the island and the city from Marshal Victor’s army, though that army left their siege lines two days after the Spanish feluccas sailed. Marshal Victor knew full well what the allies planned. General Lapeña and General Graham would sail their troops south and then, after landing close to Gibraltar, would march north to attack the French siege works. Victor had no intention of allowing his lines to be assailed from the rear. He took most of his army south, looking for a place where he could intercept the British and Spanish forces. He left some men to guard the French lines, just as the British had left some to protect their own batteries. Cádiz waited.

The wind turned north and cold. The Bay of Cádiz was mostly deserted of shipping, except for the small fishing craft and the mastless prison hulks. The French forts on the Trocadero fired desultory mortar shells, but with Marshal Victor gone the garrisons seemed bereft of enthusiasm. The wind stayed obstinately north so that no ships could sail for Lisbon. Sharpe, back on the Isla de León, waited.

A week after the last of the allied ships had sailed, and a day after Marshal Victor had marched away from the siege works, Sharpe borrowed two horses from Sir Thomas Graham’s stable and rode south along the island’s coast where the sea broke white on endless sand. He had been invited to ride to the beach’s end and he was accompanied by Caterina. “Put your heels down,” she told him. “Put your heels down and hold your back straight. You ride like a peasant.”

“I am a peasant. I hate horses.”

“I love them,” she said. She rode like a man, straddling the horse, the way she had been taught in Spanish America. “I hate riding sidesaddle,” she told him. She wore breeches, a jacket, and a wide-brimmed hat that was held in place by a scarf. “I cannot abide the sun,” she said. “It makes your skin like leather. You should see the women in Florida! They look like alligators. If I didn’t wear a hat I’d have a face like yours.”

“Are you saying I’m ugly?”

She laughed at that, then touched her spurs to the mare’s flanks and turned into the sea’s fretted edge. The hooves splashed white where the waves seethed up the beach. She circled back to Sharpe, her eyes bright. She had arrived in San Fernando the day before. She had come in a coach hired from the stables just outside the city, close to the Royal Observatory, and behind the coach three ostlers led packhorses piled with her clothes, cosmetics, and wigs. Caterina had greeted Sharpe with a demure kiss, then gestured at the coachmen and ostlers. “They need paying,” she said airily before stepping into the house Sharpe had rented. There were plenty of empty houses now that the army was gone. Sharpe had paid the men, then looked ruefully at the few coins he had left.

“Is the ambassador unhappy with you?” Sharpe had asked Caterina when he joined her in the house.

“Henry is quiet. He always goes quiet when he’s unhappy. But I told him I was frightened to stay in Cádiz. This is a sweet house!”

“Henry wanted you to stay?”

“Of course he wanted me to stay. But I insisted.”

“And Lord Pumphrey?”

“He said he would bring the money.” She had given him a dazzling smile. “Twelve hundred guineas!”

Sergeant Harper had watched Caterina’s arrival with an expressionless face. “On the strength is she now, sir?”

“She’ll stay with us awhile,” Sharpe said.

“Isn’t that a surprise.”

“And if that bloody priest shows his face, kill him.”

Sharpe doubted Montseny would come near the Isla de León. The priest had been beaten and if the man had any sense he would give up the fight. The best hope for his faction now was that Marshal Victor would beat the allied army, for then Cádiz must inevitably fall and the politicians in its walls would want to make peace with France before that disaster occurred.

That was other men’s business. Sharpe was riding on a long sea-beaten beach. To his east were sand dunes and, beyond them, the marshes. To his west was the Atlantic and to the south, where the beach ended at a river’s mouth, were Spanish soldiers in their sky blue uniforms. From far off across the marshes came the grumble of gunfire, the sound of French cannons bombarding the British batteries guarding the Isla de León. The sound was fitful and faint as distant thunder.

“You look happy,” Caterina said.

“I am.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s clean here,” Sharpe said. “I didn’t like Cádiz. Too many alleys, too much darkness, too much treachery.”

“Poor Captain Sharpe.” She mocked him with a brilliant smile. “You don’t like cities?”

“I don’t like politicians. All those bloody lawyers taking bribes and making pompous speeches. What’s going to win the war is that.” He nodded ahead to where the blue-coated soldiers labored in the shallow water. Two feluccas were anchored in the river’s mouth and longboats were ferrying soldiers to the beach beyond. The feluccas were loaded to the gunwales with baulks of timber, anchors and chains, and piles of planks, the materials needed to make a bridge of boats. There were no proper pontoons, but the longboats would serve, and the resultant bridge would be narrow, though if it was properly anchored it would be safe enough.

Captain Galiana was among the officers. It was Galiana who had invited Sharpe to the beach’s end and he now rode out to greet the rifleman. “How is your head, Captain?”

“It’s getting better. It doesn’t hurt so much as it did. It’s vinegar that cures it. May I present the Señorita Caterina Blazquez? Captain Fernando Galiana.”

If Galiana was surprised that a young woman would have no chaperone he hid it, bowing instead and giving Caterina a welcoming smile. “What we’re doing,” he said in answer to her first question, “is making a bridge and protecting it by building a fort on the other bank.”

“Why?” Caterina asked.

“Because if General Lapeña and Sir Thomas fail to reach the French siege works, señorita, they will need a bridge back to the city. I trust the bridge will not be needed, but General Lapeña thought it prudent to make it.” Galiana gave Sharpe a rueful look as though he deplored such defeatism.

Caterina thought about Galiana’s answer. “But if you can build a bridge, Captain,” she asked, “why take the army south on boats? Why not cross here and attack the French?”

“Because, señorita, this is no place to fight. Cross the bridge here and there is nothing but beach in front of you and a creek to your left. Cross here and the French would trap us on the beach. It would be a slaughter.”

“They sailed south,” Sharpe told her, “so they can march inland and take the French from the rear.”

“And you wish you were with them?” Caterina asked Sharpe. She had heard envy in his voice.

“I wish I was,” Sharpe said.

“Me too,” Galiana put in.

“There’s a regiment in the French army,” Sharpe said, “that I’ve got a quarrel with. The 8th of the line. I want to meet them again.”

“Perhaps you will,” Galiana said.

“No, I’m in the wrong place,” Sharpe said sourly.

“But the army will advance from over there”—Galiana pointed inland—“and the French will march to meet them. I think a determined man could ride around the French army and join our forces. A determined man, say, who knows the country.”

“Which is you,” Sharpe said, “not me.”

“I do know the country,” Galiana said, “but whoever commands the fort here will have orders to stop unauthorized Spanish troops from crossing the bridge.” He paused, looking at Sharpe. “But they will have no orders to stop Englishmen.”

“How many days before they get here?” Sharpe asked.

“Three? Four?”

“I’m under orders to take a ship to Lisbon.”

“No ships will be sailing for Lisbon now,” Galiana said confidently.

“The wind might turn,” Sharpe said.

“It’s nothing to do with the wind,” Galiana said, “but with the possibility that General Lapeña is defeated.”

From what Sharpe had heard, everyone expected Lapeña, Doña Manolito, to be thrashed by Victor. “And if he is defeated?” he asked tonelessly.

“Then they will want every available ship ready to evacuate the city,” Galiana said, “which is why no ship will be permitted to leave until the thing is decided.”

“And you expect defeat?” Sharpe asked brutally.

“What I expect,” Galiana said, “is that you will repay the favor you owe me.”

“Get you across the bridge?”

Galiana smiled. “That is the favor, Captain Sharpe. Get me across the bridge.”

And Sharpe thought he might yet meet Colonel Vandal again.

P
ART
T
HREE

T
HE
B
ATTLE

CHAPTER 9

I
T WAS CHAOS.
B
LOODY
chaos. It was infuriating. “It is,” Lord William Russell said calmly, “entirely to be expected.”

“God damn it!” Sir Thomas Graham exploded.

“In each and every particular,” Lord William said, sounding far wiser than his twenty-one years, “precisely what we expected.”

“And damn you too,” Sir Thomas said. His horse pricked back its ears at its master’s vehemence. “Bloody man!” Sir Thomas said, slapping his right boot with his whip. “Not you, Willie, him. Him! That bloody man!”

“What bloody man is that?” Major John Hope, Sir Thomas’s nephew and senior aide, asked solemnly.

Sir Thomas recognized the line from
Macbeth,
but was in too much of a temper to acknowledge it. Instead he put spurs to his horse, beckoned to his aides, and started toward the head of the column where General Lapeña had called yet another halt.

It should all have been so simple. So damned simple. Land at Tarifa and there meet the British troops sent from the Gibraltar garrison, and that had happened as planned, at which point the whole army was supposed to march north. Except they could not leave Tarifa because the Spanish had not arrived, and so Sir Thomas waited two days, two days of consuming rations that were supposed to be reserved for the march. And when Lapeña’s troops did arrive, their boats would not risk crossing the surf on the beach, so the Spanish troops had been forced to wade ashore. They landed soaking, shivering, and starving, in no condition to march, and so another day was wasted.

Yet still it should have been easy. There were just fifty miles to march, which, even with the guns and baggage, should not have taken more than four days. The road went northward, following a river beneath the Sierra de Fates. Then, once out of those hills, they should have crossed the plain by a good road that led to Medina Sidonia where the allied army would turn west to attack the French siege lines that were anchored on the town of Chiclana. That is what should have happened, but it did not. The Spaniards led the march and they were slow, painfully slow. Sir Thomas, riding at the head of the British troops, which formed the rearguard, noted the boots that had torn themselves to pieces and been discarded beside the road. Some weary Spaniards had fallen out of their ranks, joining the broken boots, and they just watched the red-coated and green-jacketed men march by. And maybe that would not have mattered if enough Spaniards, barefoot or not, had reached Medina Sidonia to chase out whatever garrison the French had placed in the town.

General Lapeña had seemed as eager as Sir Thomas when the march started. He understood the necessity of hurrying north and turning west before Marshal Victor could find a place to make a stand. The allied army was supposed to erupt like a storm on the unprotected rear of the French siege lines. Sir Thomas envisaged his men rampaging through the French camps, ravaging the artillery parks, exploding the magazines, and harrying the broken army out of its earthworks and onto the guns of the British line protecting the Isla de León. All it needed was speed, speed, speed, but then, on the second day, Lapeña had decided to rest his footsore troops and instead march through the next night. And even that might have served, except that the Spanish guides had become lost and the army wandered in a great circle under the hard brightness of the stars. “God damn it!” Sir Thomas had exclaimed. “Can’t they see the North Star?”

“There are marshes, Sir Thomas,” the Spanish liaison officer had pleaded.

“God damn it! Just follow the road!”

But the road had not been followed and the army wandered, then halted, and men sat in fields where some tried to sleep. The ground was damp and the night surprisingly cold, so very few managed any rest. The British lit short clay pipes and the officers’ servants walked their masters’ horses up and down while the guides argued until finally some gypsies, woken from their encampment in a grove of cork oaks, pointed the way to Medina Sedonia. The troops had marched for twelve hours and, by the time they bivouacked at midday, had covered only six miles, though at least the King’s German Legion cavalry, who served under Sir Thomas’s command, had managed to surprise a half battalion of foraging French infantry and had killed a dozen enemy and captured twice as many.

General Lapeña, in a fit of energy, had then proposed marching again that same afternoon, but the men were exhausted from a wasted night and the rations were still being distributed. So he had agreed with Sir Thomas to wait until the men were fed, and then he decided they should sleep before they marched at dawn, yet at dawn Lapeña himself was not ready. It seemed that a French officer, one of those captured by the German cavalry, had revealed that Marshal Victor had reinforced the garrison in Medina Sidonia so that now it numbered more than three thousand men. “We cannot go there,” Lapeña had declared. He was a lugubrious man, slightly stooped, with nervous eyes that were rarely still. “Three thousand men! We can beat them, but at what cost? Delay, Sir Thomas, delay. They will hold us up while Victor maneuvers around us!” His hands had made extravagant gestures describing an encirclement, and finished by crushing together. “We shall go to Vejer. Today!” He made the decision with a fine forcefulness. “From Vejer we can assail Chiclana from the south.”

And that was a viable plan. The captured French officer, a bespectacled captain called Brouard, drank too much of General Lapeña’s wine and cheerfully revealed that there was no garrison in Vejer. Sir Thomas knew that a road went north from the town, which meant the allied army could come at the French siege works from the south, rather than from the east, and though he was not happy with the decision, he recognized the sense in it.

So, by the time the orders had been changed, it was almost midday before they marched and now the army was in chaos. It was infuriating. It was incompetence.

Vejer was visible across the plain, a town of white houses atop a sudden hill on the northwestern horizon, yet the guides had begun by marching the army southeast. Sir Thomas had ridden to Lapeña and, at his most diplomatic, had indicated the town and suggested it would be better to head in that direction. After a long consultation, Lapeña had agreed, and so the army had reversed itself, and that took time because the Spanish vanguard had to march back along a road crowded with stalled troops. But at last they had been going in the right direction and now they had stopped again. Just stopped. No one moved. No messages came back down the column explaining the halt. The Spanish soldiers fell out and lit their paper rolls of damp tobacco.

“Bloody man!” Sir Thomas said again as he rode to find General Lapeña. When the halt occurred he had been at the rear of the column because he liked to ride up and down his troops. He could tell a lot about his men from the way they marched, and he was pleased with his small force. They knew they were being ill led, they knew they were in chaos, but their spirits were high. The Cauliflowers were last in the column, more formally known as the second battalion of the 47th Regiment of the line. Their red coats were faced with the white patches that gave them their nickname, though the Cauliflowers’ officers preferred to call the Lancashire men “Wolfe’s Own” to remember the day they had turned the French out of Canada. The Cauliflowers, a staunch battalion from the Cádiz garrison, were reinforced by two companies of the Sweeps, green-jacketed men from the third battalion of the 95th. Sir Thomas raised his hat to the officers, then again to the men of the two Portuguese battalions who had sailed from Cádiz. They grinned at him, and he doffed his hat again and again. He noted approvingly that the Portuguese cacadores, light infantry, were in fine spirits. One of their chaplains, a man in a mud-stained cassock with a musket and a crucifix slung about his neck, demanded to know when they could start killing Frenchmen. “Soon!” Sir Thomas promised, hoping that was true. “Very soon!”

Ahead of the Portuguese was the Gibraltar Flanker battalion. That was a makeshift unit, formed by the light companies and grenadier companies of three battalions from the Gibraltar garrison. Prime troops, all of them. Two companies from the 28th, a Gloucestershire regiment, two from the 82nd, which was from Lancashire, and the two flank companies of the 9th, Norfolk lads and known as the Holy Boys because their shako plates, decorated with a picture of Britannia, was taken by the Spanish as an image of the Virgin Mary. Wherever the Holy Boys marched in Spain, women would genuflect and make the sign of the cross. Beyond the Gibraltar Flankers were the Faughs, the 87th, and Sir Thomas touched his hat in response to Major Gough’s greeting. “It’s chaos, Hugh, chaos,” Sir Thomas admitted.

“We’ll make sense of it, Sir Thomas.”

“Aye, that we will, that we will.”

Ahead of the 87th was the second battalion of the 67th, men from Hampshire, newly come from England, and unblooded until the night they had assailed the fire rafts. A good regiment, Sir Thomas reckoned, as were the remaining eight companies of the 28th who waited in front of them. The 28th was another solid county regiment from the shires. They had come from the Gibraltar garrison and Sir Thomas was pleased to see them because he remembered the men of Gloucestershire from Corunna. They had fought hard that day and had died hard too, belying their nicknames, the Dandies or the Silver Tails. Their officers insisted on wearing extra long tails to their coats, and the coattails were lavishly embroidered with silver. The 28th preferred to be known as the Slashers in solemn memory of the day they had sliced off the ears of an irritating French lawyer in Canada. The Slasher’s lieutenant colonel was talking with Colonel Wheatley, who commanded all the troops on the road behind and Wheatley, seeing Sir Thomas ride by, called for his horse.

Major Duncan and his two batteries of artillery, five guns in each, waited on the road ahead of the Silver Tails. Duncan, resting against a limber, raised his eyebrows as Sir Thomas passed and was rewarded with a quick shrug. “We’ll untangle the mess!” Sir Thomas called, and again hoped he was right.

In front of the guns was his first brigade, and he knew how fortunate he was to have such a unit under his command. It was only two battalions, but each was strong. The rearmost was another composite battalion, this one made up of two companies of Coldstreamers, two more of riflemen, and three companies of the Third Foot Guards. Scotsmen! The only Scottish infantry under his command and Sir Thomas took his hat off to them. With Scotsmen, he reckoned, he could break down the gates of hell, and he had a lump in his throat as he passed the blue-faced redcoats. Sir Thomas was a sentimental man. He loved soldiers. He had once thought all men who wore the red coat were rogues and thieves, the scourings of the gutter, and since he had joined the army he had discovered he was right, but he had also learned to love them. He loved their patience, their ferocity, their endurance, and their bravery. If he should die prematurely, Sir Thomas often thought, and join his Mary in her Scottish heaven, then he wanted to die among these men as Sir John Moore, another Scotsman, had died at Corunna. Sir Thomas kept Moore’s red sash as a memento of that day, the weave stained dark with his hero’s blood. A soldier’s death, he thought, was a happy one, because a man, even in the throes of awful pain, would die in the best company in the world. He twisted in the saddle to look for his nephew. “When I die, John,” he said, “make sure you take my body back to join your Aunt Mary.”

“You won’t be dying, sir.”

“Bury me at Balgowan,” Sir Thomas said, and touched the wedding ring he still wore. “There’s money to pay for the costs of moving my corpse home. You’ll find there’s money enough.” He had to swallow as he rode past the Scotsmen to where the second battalion of the First Foot Guards led his column. The First Footguards! They were called the Coal Heavers because, years before, they had carried coal to warm their officers in a freezing London winter, and the Coal Heavers were as fine a battalion as any that marched the earth. All the Guardsmen were led by Brigadier General Dilkes who touched the tip of his cocked hat and joined Colonel Wheatley to follow Sir Thomas past the Spanish troops to where General Lapeña sat, disconsolate and helpless, in his saddle.

Lapeña looked heavily at Sir Thomas. He sighed as though he had expected the Scotsman’s arrival and thought it a nuisance. He gestured toward distant Vejer, which glowed white on its hill. “
Inundación,
” Lapeña said slowly and distinctly, then made circling gestures with his hand as if to suggest that all was hopeless. Nothing could be done. Failure had been decreed by fate. It was over.

“The road, Sir Thomas,” the liaison officer translated unnecessarily, “is flooded. The general regrets it, but it is so.” The Spanish general had expressed no such regrets, but the liaison officer thought it prudent to suggest as much. “It is sad, Sir Thomas. Sad.”

General Lapeña stared mournfully at Sir Thomas, something in his expression seeming to suggest it was all the Scotsman’s fault. “
Inundación,
” he said again, shrugging.

“The road,” Sir Thomas agreed in Spanish, “is indeed flooded.” The drowned stretch was where the road crossed a marsh bordering a lake and, though the road was built on a causeway, the heavy rains had raised the water level so that now the marsh, the causeway, and a quarter mile of the road were underwater. “It is flooded,” Sir Thomas said patiently, “but I dare say, señor, that we shall find it passable.” He did not wait for Lapeña’s response, but spurred his horse onto the causeway. The horse splashed, then waded as the water rose. It grew nervous, tossing its head and rolling its eyes white, but Sir Thomas kept firm control as he followed the line of withies stuck into the causeway’s verges. He curbed the horse halfway through the flood, by which time the water was over his stirrups, and shouted back to the eastern bank in a voice honed by hallooing across windy Scottish hunting fields. “We should keep going! You hear me? Press on!”

“The guns cannot make it,” Lapeña said, “and they cannot go around the flood.” He gestured sadly to the north where marshes stretched beyond the flood’s margin.