Sharpe's Skirmish (7 page)

That's your barricade! Ensign?" He called for Hickey, because he knew the ensign spoke some French. "Ensign!"

"Dead, sir," Harper said. "Hit by a dragoon."

"God damn, another ensign gone." Sharpe said. He tugged the lance off his prisoner, breaking the wrist-strap, then pulled out the Frenchman's sabre.

"Harris? You speak frog. Find out what the hell these bastards are doing here. Give him a kicking if he won't talk."

Then there were more hooves, another trumpet, and Sharpe whipped round, but there were no French approaching the bridge and he turned back to see more horsemen in blue and yellow, only these were coming from the north. A whole regiment of horsemen galloping on the road from Salamanca, their horses white with sweat because they had ridden so hard, and Teresa was alongside the leading officer who raised a hand and grinned at Sharpe as he curbed his horse.

"Captain Lossow," Sharpe said, reaching up to shake the German's hand.

Captain Lossow of the King's German Legion looked at the blood and wine on the bridge, and at the dragoons who were trudging back towards their horses, and then at the great mass of French cavalry who were stalled in the fields beyond. "There must be a thousand men over there, Richard."

"You want to go and play with them? You'll have to let me clear the bridge of glass first."

"We shall wait here," Lossow said, swinging down from his saddle. "We have a battalion of infantry coming and a battery of guns. But it looks as if you managed without us, Richard."

"We coped," Sharpe said, smiling up at Teresa. "We coped."

Tubbs had been trapped in the burning fort and he was dead, and the captured French muskets were nothing but a twisted mass of melted metal.

Good for nothing, MacKeon said, but Sharpe knew he would never have won this scrap if it had not been for MacKeon. "I owe you," he said.

"To hell and away," the Scotsman said. "I just remembered how you managed at Gawilghur, Mister Sharpe, and reckoned you could manage again."

Pierre Ducos appeared that evening, but Herault's brave idea was defeated, and now a battery of British field guns and a line of redcoats defended the bridge beside the smoking fort. Herault himself was a prisoner, captured, Captain Pailleterie said, by a rifleman called Sharpe. Ducos spat. The fools! They had held the bridge! And lost it! The incompetent fools. "You will be punished for this, Pailleterie," he promised, "punished!" And then he ordered General Michaud to turn his infantrymen about and march them away south, and he took out his small notebook and crossed out the recommendation for General Herault's promotion, and added Pailleterie's name with a cross beside it, and then the name of the British rifle officer who had cheated him of victory. Sharp, he wrote, not knowing there should be an 'e', then added a question mark. A name to remember, but then, Ducos forgot nothing.

Sharpe watched the enemy leave. He stood with Teresa on the crest of the bridge at San Miguel de Tormes, and watched the French retreat. And it was his company that had turned them back. "I was lucky," he said softly.

"Didn't deserve to win."

"Of course you deserved to win," Teresa said.

"It was MacKeon." Sharpe said. "He reminded me of what we did at Gawilghur. And then it was Pat Harper, disobeying orders as usual."

"There was a battle," Teresa said, "in Spain. We won."

"No," Sharpe said, putting an arm about her shoulders. "It weren't a battle, love. Just a skirmish." Just a skirmish, but the French had lost and their general was Sharpe's prisoner. And too many men had died, and that was Sharpe's fault, but the army would only remember that Captain Sharpe had stopped the frogs and so, for the moment, his career was safe and the French would abandon Madrid and Wellington could keep marching north. And all because Sharpe had fought a skirmish and he had won. It was Sharpe's skirmish.

The End

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

   Bernard Cornwell was born in London in 1944 - a 'warbaby' - whose father was a Canadian airman and mother in Britain's Women's Auxiliary Air Force. He was adopted by a family in Essex who belonged to a religious sect called the Peculiar People (and they were), but escaped to London University and, after a stint as a teacher, he joined BBC Television where he worked for the next 10 years. He began as a researcher on the Nationwide programme and ended as Head of Current Affairs Television for the BBC in Northern Ireland. It was while working in Belfast that he met Judy, a visiting American, and fell in love. Judy was unable to move to Britain for family reasons so Bernard went to the States where he was refused a Green Card. He decided to earn a living by writing, a job that did not need a permit from the US government - and for some years he had been wanting to write the adventures of a British soldier in the Napoleonic wars - and so the Sharpe series was born. Bernard and Judy married in 1980, are still married, still live in the States and he is still writing Sharpe.

Table of Contents

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR