Sharpe 3-Book Collection 4. Bernard Cornwell
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do the rats get in?’ Sarah asked after a while.
‘Those little bastards can get through gaps as small as your little finger,’ Harper said. ‘You can’t keep a good rat out, not if he wants to get in.’
‘So where do they get in?’ she persisted.
‘Round the edge of the trapdoor,’ Sharpe guessed, ‘where we can’t get out.’
They sat in gloomy silence. The flies settled back on the corpses. ‘If we fired our guns,’ Vicente said, ‘someone might hear?’
‘Not down here, they won’t,’ Sharpe said, preferring to keep all his firepower for the moment when Ferragus came for them. He leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes, trying to think. The ceiling? Bricks and stones. Hundreds of the buggers. He imagined himself breaking through, then he was suddenly in a field, bright with flowers, a bullet came past him, then another and he was struck on the leg and he woke suddenly, realizing that someone had tapped his right calf. ‘Was I asleep?’ he asked.
‘We all were,’ Harper said. ‘God knows what time it is.’
‘Jesus.’ Sharpe stretched himself, feeling the pain in his arms and legs that had come from working inside the cramped stairway. ‘Jesus,’ he said angrily. ‘We can’t afford to sleep. Not with those bastards coming for us.’
Harper did not answer. Sharpe could hear the Irishman moving, apparently stretching on the floor. He supposed the Irishman wanted to sleep again, and he did not approve, but he could not think of anything more useful Harper could do and so he said nothing.
‘I can hear something,’ Harper spoke after a while. His voice came from the centre of the cellar, from the floor.
‘Where?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Put your ear on the stone, sir.’
Sharpe stretched out and put his right ear against the floor. His hearing was not what it was. Too many years of muskets and rifles had dulled it, but he held his breath, listened hard, and heard the faintest hint of water running. ‘Water?’
‘There’s a stream down there,’ Harper said.
‘Like the Fleet,’ Sharpe said.
‘The what?’ Vicente asked.
‘It’s a river in London,’ Sharpe said, ‘and for a long way it flows underground. No one knows it’s there, but it is. They built the city on top of it.’
‘They’ve done the same here,’ Harper said.
Sharpe tapped the floor with the hilt of his sword, but was not rewarded with a hollow sound, yet he was fairly certain the noise of water was there, and Sarah, whose hearing had not been dulled by battle, was quite certain of it. ‘Right, Pat,’ Sharpe said, his spirits restored and the pain in his ribs even seeming less biting. ‘We’ll lift a bloody stone.’
That was easier said than done. They used their weapons again, scraping away at the edges of a big flagstone to work down between the slab and its neighbours, and Harper found a place where a chip the size of his little finger was missing from the stone’s edge, and he delved down there, working the sword bayonet into the foundations. ‘It’s rubble down there,’ he said.
‘Let’s just hope the bloody thing isn’t mortared into place,’ Sharpe said.
‘No,’ Harper said scornfully. ‘Why would you mortar a slab? You just lay the buggers on gravel and stamp them down. Move back, sir.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m going to lift the sod.’
‘Why don’t we lever it up?’
‘Because you’ll break your sword, sir, and that’ll put you in a really bad mood. Just give me space. And be ready to hold it when I’ve got the bastard up.’
Sharpe moved, Harper straddled the stone, got two fingers underneath its edge and heaved. It did not move. He swore, braced himself again, and used all his vast strength and there was a grinding sound and Sharpe, touching the stone’s edge with his fingers, felt it move a trifle upwards. Harper grunted, managed to get a third finger underneath and gave another giant pull and suddenly the stone was lifted and Sharpe rammed the muzzle of his rifle under the exposed edge to hold it up. ‘You can let go now.’
‘God save Ireland!’ Harper said, straightening. The stone was resting on the rifle muzzle and they left it there while Harper caught his breath. ‘We can both do it now, sir,’ the Irishman said. ‘You on the other side? We’ll just turn the bugger over. Sorry, miss.’
‘I’m getting used to it,’ Sarah said in a resigned voice.
Sharpe got his hands under the edge. ‘Ready?’
‘Now, sir.’
They heaved and the stone came up, and kept going to turn on its end so that it fell smack on the nearer corpse with a wet, squashing sound that released a gust of noxious vapour along with an unseen cloud of flies. Sarah gave a noise of disgust, Sharpe and Harper were laughing.
Now they could feel a square patch of rubble, a space of broken bricks, stones and sand, and they used their hands to scoop it out, sometimes loosening the packed rubble first with a blade. Vicente used his right hand to help and Sarah pushed the excavated material aside.
‘There’s no end to the bloody stuff,’ Harper said, and the more they pulled out, the more fell in from the sides. They went down two feet and then, at last, the rubble ended as Sharpe’s battered and bleeding hands found a curved surface that felt like tiles stacked on edge. They went on scooping until they had bared two or three square feet of the arched surface.
Vicente used his right hand to probe what Sharpe thought were tiles. ‘Roman bricks,’ Vicente guessed. ‘The Romans made their bricks very thin, like tiles.’ He felt for a while longer, exploring the arched shape. ‘It’s the top of a tunnel.’
‘A tunnel?’ Sharpe asked.
‘The stream,’ Sarah said. ‘The Romans must have channelled it.’
‘And we’re going to break into it,’ Sharpe said. He could hear the trickle far more clearly now. So there was water there, and the water flowed to the river through a tunnel, and that thought filled him with a fierce hope.
He knelt at the edge of the hole, balancing on a slab that was unsteady because of the rubble that had fallen from beneath it, and began hammering down with the brass butt of a rifle.
‘What you’re doing,’ Vicente said, judging what was happening by the dull sound of the stock striking the bricks, ‘is hitting at the top of the arch. That will only wedge the bricks tighter.’
‘What I’m doing,’ Sharpe said, ‘is breaking the bugger.’ He thought Vicente was probably right, but he was too frustrated to work patiently on the old bricks. ‘And I hope I’m doing it with your rifle,’ he added. The butt hammered down again, then Harper joined in from the other side and the two rifles cracked and banged on the bricks and Sharpe could hear scraps dropping into the water, then Harper gave an almighty blow and a whole chunk of the ancient brickwork fell away and suddenly, if it was possible, the cellar was filled with an even worse smell, a stink from the foulest depths of hell.
‘Oh, shit!’ Harper said, recoiling.
‘That’s what it is,’ Vicente said in a faint voice. The smell was so bad that it was hard to breathe.
‘A sewer?’ Sharpe asked in disbelief.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Harper said, after trying to fill his lungs. Sarah sighed.
‘It comes from the upper town,’ Vicente explained. ‘Most of the lower town just use pits in their cellars. It’s a Roman sewer. They called it a cloaca.’
‘I call it our way out,’ Sharpe said and hammered the rifle down again, and the bricks