Sharpe’s Enemy: The Defence of Portugal, Christmas 1812. Bernard Cornwell
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relatively slowly as it left the firing tube and so the head fell towards the ground in the first few feet of flight and the angle of launch had to be increased to compensate. Modern science at war.
‘Hold your hat, sir.’
The smoke and flames were easily visible beneath the firing tubes, even at six hundred yards, and then, with appalling suddenness, the missiles leaped into the air. These were eighteen-pounder rockets, a dozen of them, and they sliced the air above the lingering smoke trails of the first volley, climbing, climbing, and Sharpe saw one slam off to the left, hopelessly off course, while the others seemed to have coalesced into a living flame-shot cloud that grew silently over the valley.
‘Oh, God.’ Harper was holding the crucifix.
The rockets, strangely, seemed not to be moving. The cloud grew, the flame surrounded dots were still and hovering, and Sharpe knew it was an illusion caused by the trajectory bringing the missiles in a curve pointing straight at the two of them. Then a single dot dropped from the cloud, fire at its edges, smoke dark against the clear sky behind. The noise burst on them; a screaming roar, flame-born, and the dot grew larger. ‘Down!’
‘Christ!’ Harper dived right, Sharpe left, and Sharpe clung to the soil by the wall and the noise hammered at him, growing, seeming to make the stones of the wall shake, and the air was throbbing with the noise that came closer and closer and filled their whole world with terror as the rocket slammed into the wall.
‘Jesus.’ Sharpe rolled over and sat up. The rocket, the most accurate of the week, had demolished the stone wall where he and Harper had been standing. The broken stick toppled slowly off the wreckage. The cylinder smoked innocently in the next field. Smoke drifted over the burned grass.
They started laughing, beating the dirt off their uniforms, and suddenly it seemed hilarious to Sharpe so that he rolled onto his side, helpless with laughter. ‘Holy Jesus!’
‘You’d better thank Him. If that had been a shell instead of roundshot.’ Harper left the thought unfinished. He was standing and staring at the ruins of the wall.
Sharpe sat up again. ‘Is that frightening?’
Harper grinned. ‘You’d regret having a full belly, that’s for sure, sir.’ He bent down and picked up his shako.
‘So maybe there is something to the mad Colonel’s invention.’
‘Aye, sir.’
‘And think if you could fire a whole volley at fifty paces.’
Harper nodded. ‘True, but there’s a lot of maybes and ifs there, sir.’ He grinned. ‘You’re fond of them, aren’t you? You fancy trying them out, yes?’ He laughed. ‘Toys for Christmas.’
A figure in blue uniform, leading a second horse, was riding towards them from the firing point. Harper pulled his battered shako low over his eyes and nodded towards the galloping man. ‘I think he’s worried he’s murdered us, sir.’
Clods of earth flew up behind the galloping horses. Sharpe shook his head. ‘That’s not Gilliland.’ He could see a cavalryman’s pelisse across the blue uniform shoulders.
The cavalryman skirted a burning rocket wreck, urged his horse on, waved as he came close. His shout was urgent. ‘Major Sharpe?’
‘Yes.’
‘Lieutenant Rogers, sir. Headquarters. Major General Nairn’s compliments, sir, and would you report at once.’
Sharpe took the reins of the spare horse from Rogers, looped them over the horse’s head. ‘What’s it about?’
‘About, sir? Haven’t you heard?’ Rogers was impatient, his horse fretful. Sharpe put his left foot in the stirrup, reached for the saddle, and Harper helped by heaving him upwards. Rogers waited as the Sergeant retrieved Sharpe’s shako. ‘There’s been a massacre, sir, at some place called Adrados.’
‘Massacre?’
‘God knows, sir. All hell’s loose. Ready?’
‘Lead on.’
Sergeant Patrick Harper watched Sharpe lurch as his horse took off after the Lieutenant. So the rumour was true and Harper smiled in satisfaction. Not a satisfaction because he had been proved right, but because Sharpe had been summoned and where Sharpe went, Harper followed. So what if Sharpe was a Major now, supposedly detached from the South Essex? He would still take Harper, as he always took Harper, and the giant Irishman wanted to help take revenge on the men who had offended his decency and his religion. He began walking back towards the Company, whistling as he went, the prospect of a fight pleasant in his soul.
CHAPTER THREE
‘Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.’ Major General Nairn, still in a dressing gown, still with a cold, stared out of the window. He turned as Lieutenant Rogers, having announced Sharpe, left the room. The eyes, under the straggling eyebrows, looked at Sharpe. ‘Damn.’
‘Sir.’
‘Cold as a parson’s bloody heart.’
‘Sir?’
‘This room, Sharpe.’ It was an office, one table smothered in maps which, in turn, were littered with empty cups and plates, snuff boxes, two half eaten pieces of cold toast, a single spur and a marble bust of Napoleon on which someone, presumably Nairn, had inked embellishments which made the Emperor of the French look like a simpering weakling. The Major General crossed to the table and lowered himself into a leather chair. ‘So what have you heard about this bloody massacre, Major? Cheer an old man up and tell me you’ve heard nothing.’
‘I’m afraid I have, sir.’
‘Well what, man?’
Sharpe told him what had been preached in the church that morning and Nairn listened with fingers steepled in front of his closed eyes. When Sharpe finished Nairn groaned. ‘God in his heaven, Major, it couldn’t be bloody worse, could it?’ Nairn swivelled in the chair and stared across the roofs of the town. ‘We’re unpopular enough as it is with the Spanish. They don’t forget the seventeenth century, blast their eyes, and the fact that we’re fighting for their bloody country doesn’t make us any better. Now the priests are preaching that the heathen British are raping anything that’s Catholic with a skirt on. God! If the Portuguese are believing it, what the hell are they believing over the border? They’ll be petitioning the Pope to declare war on us next.’ He turned back to the desk, leaned back and closed his eyes. ‘We need the co-operation of the Spanish people and we are hardly likely to get it if they believe this story. Come!’ This last word was to a clerk who had knocked timidly on the door. He handed Nairn a sheet of paper which the Scotsman looked through, grunting approval. ‘I need a dozen, Simmons.’
‘Yes, sir.’
When the clerk had gone Nairn smiled slyly at Sharpe. ‘Be sure your sins will find you out, eh? I burn a letter from that great and good man, the bloody Chaplain General, and today I have to write to every Bishop and Archbishop inside spitting distance.’ He mimicked a cringing voice. ‘The story is not true, your Grace, the men were not from our army, your Holiness, but nevertheless we will apprehend the bastards and turn them inside out. Slowly.’
‘Not true, sir?’
Nairn flashed a look of annoyance at Sharpe. ‘Of course it’s not bloody true!’ He leaned forward and picked up the bust of Napoleon, staring it between its cold eyes. ‘You’d like to believe it, wouldn’t you? Splash it all over your bloody Moniteur. How the savage English treat Spanish women. That would take your mind off all those good men you left in Russia.’ He slammed the bust onto the table. ‘Damn.’ He blew his nose noisily.
Sharpe waited. He was alone with Nairn, but he had seen much coming and going as he entered the