Sharpe’s Company. Bernard Cornwell
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boots with the swan-neck spurs, jerk in the leather straps. The surgeon was sweating. The candles guttered in the draught and he turned a blood-spattered face. ‘Shut the bloody door!’
Sharpe closed it, cutting off the view of severed limbs, the waiting bodies. He wanted a drink. Things were changing. Lawford under the knife, Crauford dying upstairs, the New Year mocking them. He stood in the hallway, in dark shadow, and remembered the gas lighting he had seen in London’s Pall Mall just two months ago. A wonder of the world, he had been told, but he did not think so. Gas lighting, steam power, and stupid men in offices with dirty spectacles and neat files, the new denizens of England that would tie up the world in pipes, conduits, paper, and above all order. Neatness above all. England did not want to know about the war. A hero was a week-long wonder, so long as he was not untidily scarred like the beggars in the streets of London. There were men with only half a face, covered in suppurating sores, rodent ulcers, men with empty eye sockets, torn mouths, ragged stumps who had cried out for a penny for an old soldier. He had watched them being moved on so they did not sully the pristine, hissing light in Pall Mall. Sharpe had fought beside some of them, watched them drop on a battlefield, but their country did not care. There were the military hospitals, of course, at Chelsea and Kilmainham, but it was the soldiers who paid for those, not the country. The country wanted the soldiers out of the way.
Sharpe wanted a drink.
The door of the surgeon’s room banged open and Sharpe turned to see Lawford being carried on a canvas stretcher to the wide staircase. He hurried to the orderlies. ‘How is he?’
‘If the rot doesn’t get him, sir …’ The man left the sentence unfinished. His nose was dripping, but he could not wipe it because both hands were on the stretcher. He sniffed. ‘Friend of yours, sir?’
‘Yes.’
‘Nothing you can do tonight, sir. Come back tomorrow. We’ll look after him.’ He jerked his head upwards. ‘Lieutenant Colonels and above are on the second floor, sir. Bleeding luxury. Not like those in the cellar.’ Sharpe could imagine it, had seen it often enough, the dank cellars where the wounded were crammed on verminous pallets, one part of the ‘ward’ always left as a death room where the hopeless could simply rot. He let them go, and turned away.
Ciudad Rodrigo had fallen, the great fortress of the north, and the history books would record the fact and, for years to come, the victory would be remembered with pride. In just twelve days Wellington had surprised, surrounded, assaulted and taken a city. A victory. And no one would remember the names of the men who had died in the breach, who had struggled to silence the great, killing guns sunk in the wide wall. The English would celebrate. They liked victories, especially those far from home that fortified their sense of superiority over the French, but they did not want to know about this; the screams of the wounded, the thump of severed limbs, the slow drip of thick blood from the hallway ceiling.
Sharpe pushed into the cold street and hunched down inside his collar against a sudden flurry of snow. There was no joy for him in this victory; only a sense of loss, of loneliness, and of some unfinished task he must perform in a breach. It could all wait.
He went in search of drink.
CHAPTER FIVE
It had begun to snow again, a thin sprinkling that flecked the greatcoats of the collapsed drunks in the street. It was cold. Sharpe knew he should find somewhere warm, somewhere to clean the big sword properly before the rust pits began, somewhere to sleep, but he wanted a drink first.
The city was quieter. There were still shouts echoing down empty alleyways, an odd musket shot, and once, inexplicably, a muffled explosion. Sharpe did not care. He wanted drink to drive away the self-pity, the nagging thought that, without Lawford, he could be a Lieutenant again under the orders of a Captain ten years younger than himself, without experience, and his mood turned savage as he made his way towards the flickering lights of the plaza where the French spirit store had been broken open.
The French prisoners were still in the square’s centre, though without their officers who had given their parole and gone off to bed or to drink with their captors. The French soldiers sat shivering and weaponless. Their guards watched them with curious eyes, their hands thrust into pockets, their loaded and bayoneted muskets slung on cold shoulders. Other sentries guarded the houses, stopping the last looters who still staggered, drunk, in the light of the burning buildings. Sharpe was stopped at the liquor store by a nervous sentry. ‘Can’t go in there, sir.’
‘Why not?’
‘General’s orders, sir. Orders.’
Sharpe snarled at him. ‘The General sent me. He’s thirsty.’
The sentry grinned, but still brought his musket down across the doorway. ‘I’m sorry, sir. It’s orders, sir.’
‘What’s going on?’ A Sergeant appeared, a big man, walking slowly. ‘Trouble?’
Sharpe faced the Sergeant. ‘I’m going in there for drink. Do you want to stop me?’
The Sergeant shrugged. ‘Up to you, sir, but I’d advise against it. Bloody raw alcohol, that is, sir. It’s killed a couple of lads.’ He looked Sharpe up and down, saw the blood on the uniform. ‘In the breach, were you, sir?’
‘Yes.’
The Sergeant nodded and unslung a canteen from his neck. ‘Here you are, sir. Brandy. Took it off a prisoner. Compliments of the 83rd.’
Sharpe took it, made his thanks, and the Sergeant let out a long, slow breath as he watched the Rifleman walk away. ‘You know who that was, lad?’
‘No, Sarge.’
‘Sharpe. That’s who that was. Lucky I was here.’
‘Lucky, Sarge?’
‘Yes, lad. Otherwise you might have had to shoot a bleedin’ hero.’ The Sergeant shook his head. ‘Well, well, well, so he likes a drop, does he?’
Sharpe walked close to one of the burning houses where the heat of the fire had melted the snow into a glistening sheen on the cobbles. A broken table was tipped on its side and he perched on it, watching the prisoners in the snow, and wished he could get drunk. He knew he would not. As soon as the first, fierce brandy was in his throat he knew that he was being indulgent. He must find the Company, clean the sword, think of tomorrow, but not yet. It was warm by the burning house, the first warmth he had known in days, and he wanted to be alone for a while. Damn Lawford for walking into a breach where he had no business!
Hooves clattered on stones and a group of horsemen entered the plaza. They wore long, dark cloaks, broad-brimmed hats, and Sharpe could see the outlines of muskets and swords. Partisans. He felt an obscure, unfair anger. The Guerrilleros were the men and women of Spain who fought the ‘Guerrilla’, the ‘little war’, and they were achieving what the Spanish armies had failed to achieve; they were pinning down thousands and thousands of Napoleon’s troops, troops the British would not have to face, but somehow the presence of the Spanish horsemen in the plaza of Ciudad Rodrigo annoyed Sharpe. These partisans had not fought through a breach, had not faced the cannon, yet here they were, come to pick like vultures at a carcass they had done nothing to kill. The horsemen stopped. They stared at the French prisoners with a silent menace.
Sharpe turned away. He drank again and stared into the white-heat where the house had collapsed into a furnace-like intensity. He thought of Badajoz, waiting to the south, Badajoz the impregnable. Perhaps the pox-scarred Whitehall clerk could write the garrison a letter, telling them their presence was ‘irregular’, and Sharpe laughed at the thought. Damn the bloody clerk.
There was a shout behind him that made him turn round. A single rider had left the group of horsemen and was walking his horse along the front row of prisoners. The French squirmed back, fearing the revenge of the Spanish, and the British sentries tried ineffectually to force the horse