Sharpe’s Eagle: The Talavera Campaign, July 1809. Bernard Cornwell
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was hanging loose, held by a single nail, and the animal must have suffered agonies on the heat of the stony road. Sharpe nodded at the hind foot. ‘Why didn’t you take the shoe off?’
Her voice was surprisingly soft. ‘Can you do it?’ She smiled at him, the anger going from her face, and for a second Sharpe said nothing. He guessed she was in her early twenties but she carried her looks with the assurance of someone who knew that beauty could be a better inheritance than money or land. She seemed amused at his hesitation, as though she was accustomed to her effect on men, and she raised a mocking eyebrow. ‘Can you?’
Sharpe nodded and moved to the horse’s rear. He pulled the hoof towards him, holding the pastern firmly, and the mare trembled but stayed still. The shoe would have fallen off within a few paces and he pulled it clear with the slightest tug and let the leg go. He held the shoe out to the girl. ‘You’re lucky.’
Her eyes were huge and dark. ‘Why?’
‘It can probably be put back on, I don’t know.’ He felt clumsy and awkward in her presence, aware of her beauty, suddenly tongue-tied because he wanted her very much. She made no move to take the shoe so he pushed it under the strap of a bulging saddlebag. ‘Someone will know how to shoe a horse up there.’ He nodded up the road. ‘There’s a Battalion camped up there.’
‘The South Essex?’ Her English was good, tinged with a Portuguese accent.
‘Yes.’
She nodded. ‘Good. I was following them when the shoe came off.’ She looked at her servant and smiled. ‘Poor Agostino. He’s frightened of horses.’
‘And you, ma’am?’ Sharpe wanted to keep her talking. It was not unusual for women to follow the army; already Sir Arthur Wellesley’s troops had collected English, Irish, Spanish and Portuguese wives, mistresses, and whores, but it was unusual to see a beautiful girl, well horsed, attended by a servant, and Sharpe’s curiosity was aroused. More than his curiosity. He wanted this girl. It was a reaction to her beauty as much as a reaction to the knowledge that a girl with this kind of looks did not need a shabby Lieutenant without a private fortune. She could take her pick of the rich officers, but that did not stop Sharpe looking at her and desiring her. She seemed to read his thoughts.
‘You think I should be afraid?’
Sharpe shrugged, glancing up the road where the Battalion’s smoke drifted into the evening. ‘Soldiers aren’t delicate, ma’am.’
‘Thank you for warning me.’ She was mocking him. She looked down at his faded red sash. ‘Lieutenant?’
‘Lieutenant Sharpe, ma’am.’
‘Lieutenant Sharpe.’ She smiled again, spitting him with her beauty. ‘You must know Christian Gibbons?’
He nodded, knowing the unfairness of life. Money could buy anything: a commission, promotion, a sword fashioned to a man’s height and strength, even a woman like this. ‘I know him.’
‘And you don’t like him!’ She laughed, knowing that her instinct was right. ‘But I do.’ She clicked her tongue at the horse and gathered up the reins. ‘I expect we will meet again. I am going with you to Madrid.’
Sharpe did not want her to go. ‘You’re a long way from home.’
She turned back, mocking him with a smile. ‘So are you, Lieutenant, so are you.’
She led the limping mare, followed by the mute servant, towards the stand of trees and the first drifts of blue smoke where the cooking fires were being blown into life. Sharpe watched her go, let his eyes see her slim figure beneath the man’s clothes, and felt the envy and heaviness of his desire. He walked back into the olive grove as if by leaving the road he could wipe her from his memory and regain the peace of the afternoon. Damn Gibbons and his money, damn all the officers who could pay for the beauties who rode their thoroughbred mares behind the army. He encouraged his sour thoughts, swirled them round his head to try to convince himself that he did not want her, but as he walked between the trees he felt the horse-shoe nail still held in his right palm. He looked at it, a short, bent nail, and tucked it carefully into his ammunition pouch. He told himself it would come in useful; he needed a nail to jam the main-spring of the rifle when he stripped the lock for cleaning, but better nails were plentiful and he knew he was keeping it because it had been hers. Angrily he fished among the fat cartridges and threw the nail far away.
From the Battalion there came the sound of musket fire and he knew that two bullocks had been slaughtered for the evening meal. There would be wine with the stew, and Hogan’s brandy after it, and stories about old friends and forgotten campaigns. He had been looking forward to the meal, to the evening, but suddenly everything was changed. The girl was in the camp, her laughter would invade the peace, and he thought, as he walked back by the stream, that he did not even know her name.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Regimiento de la Santa Maria would have conquered the world if words and display had been enough. But punctuality was not among their more obvious military virtues.
The South Essex had marched hard for four days to reach the rendezvous at Plasencia but the town was empty of Spanish troops. Storks flapped lazily from their nests among the steep roofs that climbed to the ancient cathedral which dominated both the town and the circling plain, but of the Santa Maria there was no sign. The Battalion waited. Simmerson had bivouacked outside the walls and the men watched jealously as other units arrived and marched into the tantalising streets with their wine-shops and women. Three men disobeyed the standing order to stay away from the town and were caught, helplessly drunk, by the Provost-Marshal and received a flogging as the Battalion paraded beside the River Jerte.
Finally, two days late, the Spanish Regiment arrived and the South Essex mustered at five in the morning to begin their march south to Valdelacasa. There was a chill in the air which the rising sun would disperse but as five thirty, the hour set for departure, came and went there was still no sign of the Santa Maria and the men stamped their feet and rubbed their hands to ward off the cold. The hour of six chimed from the bells in the town. The children who were waiting with their mothers to see the Battalion depart grew bored and ran through the ranks despite all the shouting that began with Simmerson and worked its way down to the Sergeants and Corporals. The Battalion was paraded beside the Roman bridge that spanned the river and Sharpe followed a grumbling Captain Hogan on to the ancient arches and stared into the water that tumbled round the vast granite boulders which had been left in the river-bed in some long-ago upheaval of the earth. Hogan was impatient. ‘Damn them! Why can’t we just march and let the beggars catch us up?’ He knew well why it was impossible. The answer was called diplomacy and part of the price of cooperation with the touchy Spanish forces was that the native Regiment must march first. Sharpe said nothing. He stared into the water at the long weeds which waved sinuously in the current. He shivered in the dawn breeze. He shared Hogan’s impatience and it was alloyed with frustrations that stirred inside him like the slow-moving river weed. He looked up at the cathedral, touched by the rising sun, and tried to pin down his apprehensions about the operation at Valdelacasa. It sounded simple. A day’s march to the bridge, a day for Hogan to destroy the already crumbling arches, and a day’s march back to Plasencia where Wellesley was gathering his forces for the next stage of the advance into Spain. But there was something, some instinct as difficult to pin down as the grey shadows that receded in the dawn, that told him it would not be that easy. It was not the Spanish that worried him. Like Hogan he knew that their presence was a political imperative and a military farce. If they proved as useless as their reputation suggested that should not matter, the South Essex was strong enough to cope with whatever was needed. And that was the problem. Simmerson had never met the enemy and Sharpe had little faith in the Colonel’s ability to do the right thing. If there really were French on the south bank of the Tagus, and if the South Essex had to repel an attack on the bridge while Hogan laid his charges, then Sharpe would have preferred an old soldier to be making the decisions