Sharpe's Gold (8 page)

'So there's hope, sir?'

The Major looked bitter, waved at Kelly. 'Tell him that.'

'Yes, sir.'

Kearsey sighed. 'I'm sorry, Sharpe. Undeserved.' He seemed to think for a moment. 'You
do know, though, don't you, that they'll be after us today?'

'The French, sir?'

The Major nodded. 'Who else? You'd better sleep, Sharpe. In a couple of hours you'll
have to defend this place.'

'Yes, sir.'

He turned away, and as he did he caught Teresa's eyes. She looked at him without
interest, without recognition, as if the rescue and the two shared killings meant
nothing. El Catolico, he thought, is a lucky man. He slept.

Casatejada was like a shattered ants' nest. All morning the patrols left, searched the
valley, then galloped in their dust clouds back to the houses and the thin spires of smoke
that were the only signs left of the night's activity. Others rounded up stray horses,
circling the valley floor, reminding Harper of the pony drives on his native Donegal
moors. In the gully the men moved slowly, quietly, as if their sound could carry to the
village, but in truth the elation of the attack had given way to weariness and sadness.
Kelly's breath bubbled through the morning, a constant pink froth at the corner of his
mouth, and the men avoided him as if death were contagious. Sharpe woke up, told Harper to
sleep, replaced the picquets, and struggled to scrape the clotted blood from his sword with
a handful of wiry grass. They dared not light a fire to heat the water that could scour out
their muskets, so the men used the battlefield expedient, urinating into the barrels,
and grinned self-consciously at the girl as they sloshed the liquid around to loosen the
caked powder deposits of the night. The girl did not react, her face seemed unmovable, and
she sat holding her brother's hand, talking quietly to him and giving him sips of tepid
water from a wooden canteen. The heat bounced from the rocky sides of the gully, attacked
from all sides, roasting the living and the dying alike.

Kearsey climbed up to lie alongside Sharpe and took the telescope so that he could spy
down on the French. 'They're packing up.'

'Sir?'

Kearsey nodded at the village. 'Mules, Sharpe. String of them.'

Sharpe took his telescope back and found the village street. Kearsey was right, a string
of mules with men lashing ropes over their burdens, but it was impossible to tell whether
there was gold or just forage in the packs.

'Perhaps they won't look for us.'

The Major had calmed down since dawn. 'Bound to. Look at the track we left.' Running
across the barley field, like a giant signpost, was the trampled spoor of the Light
Company's retreat. 'They'll want to look over the ridge, just to make sure you've gone.'

Sharpe looked at the bare rocks and turf of the hillside. 'Should we move?'

Another shake of the head. 'Best hiding place for miles, this gully. You can't see it
from any side; even from above it's difficult. Keep your heads down and you'll be all
right.'

Sharpe thought it strange that Kearsey should talk of 'you', as if the Major himself were
not part of the British army, or as if the survival of Sharpe in enemy territory were not
his concern. He said nothing. The Major nibbled nervously at a strand of his moustache;
he seemed to be deep in thought, and when he spoke he sounded as if he had come to the end of
long deliberation.

'You must understand why it's important.'

'Sir?' Sharpe was puzzled.

'The gold, Sharpe.' He stopped and Sharpe waited. The small man flicked at his moustache.
'The Spanish have been let down badly, Sharpe, very badly. Think what happened after
Talavera, eh? And Ciudad Rodrigo. A shameful business, Sharpe, shameful.'

Sharpe still kept silent. After Talavera the Spanish had forfeited Wellington's
support by failing to provide the food and supplies they had promised. A starving British
army was of no use to Spain. Ciudad Rodrigo? Five weeks ago the Spanish fortress town had
surrendered, after an heroic defence, and Wellington had sent no help. The town had been
an obstacle to Massena's advance, Almeida was the next, and Sharpe had heard savage
criticism that the British had let their allies down, but Sharpe was no strategist. He let
the Major go on.

'We must prove something to them, Sharpe, that we can help, that we can be useful, or else
we must forfeit their support. Do you understand?' He turned his fierce gaze on Sharpe.

'Yes, sir.'

The jauntiness and confidence crept back into the Major's voice. 'Of course, we lose
the war if we don't have the Spanish! That's what Wellington has come to understand, eh,
Sharpe? Better late than never!' He gave his laugh. 'That's why Wellington wants us to bring
the gold, so that the British are seen to deliver it to Cadiz. It proves a point, Sharpe,
shows that we made an honest effort. Helps to cover up the betrayal at Ciudad Rodrigo!
Ah, politics, politics!' He said the last two words much as an indulgent father might talk
about the rowdy games of his children. 'Do you understand?'

'Yes, sir.'

It was no time to argue, even though Sharpe disbelieved every word Kearsey had uttered.
Of course the Spanish were important, but so were the British to the Spanish, and
delivering a few bags of gold would not restore the amity and trust that had been
shattered by Spanish inefficiency the year before. Yet it was important that Kearsey
believed Wellington's motives to be honest. The small Major, Sharpe knew, was
passionately engaged on the Spanish side, as if, after a lifetime of soldiering, he
had found in the harsh hills and white houses of the Spaniards a warmth and trust he had found
nowhere else.

Sharpe turned and nodded at Teresa and Ramon. 'Do they know anything about the gold?
About Captain Hardy?'

'They say not.' Kearsey shrugged. 'Perhaps El Catolico moved the gold and Hardy went with
it. I ordered him to stay with it.'

'Then surely the girl would know?'

Kearsey turned and spoke in staccato Spanish to her. Sharpe listened to the reply; her
voice was deep and husky, and even if he could not understand the language he was glad to
look at her. She had long, dark hair, as black as Josefina's, but there the resemblance
ended. The Portuguese girl had been a lover of comfort, of wine drunk by candlelight, of
soft sheets, while this girl reminded Sharpe of a wild beast with eyes that were deep, wary,
and set either side of a hawk-like nose. She was young. Kearsey had told him twenty-three,
but at either side of her mouth were curved lines. Sharpe remembered that her mother had
died at the hands of the French, God knows what she herself had suffered, and he remembered
the smile after she had skewered the Colonel with his own sabre. She had aimed low, he
recalled, and he laughed at the remembrance. She looked at Sharpe as if she would have liked
to claw out his eyes with her long fingers.

'What's funny?'

'Nothing. You speak English?'

She shrugged and Kearsey looked at Sharpe. 'Her father's fluent; that's what makes him so
useful to us. They've picked up a bit, from him, from me. Good family, Sharpe.'

'But do they know anything about Hardy? The gold?'

'She doesn't know a thing, Sharpe. She thinks the gold must still be in the hermitage, and
she hasn't seen Hardy.' Kearsey was happy with the answer, confident that no Spaniard would
lie to him.

'So the next thing we must do, sir, is search the hermitage.'

Kearsey sighed. 'If you insist, Sharpe. If you insist.' He winced again and slid down from
the edge of the gully. 'But for now, Sharpe, watch for that patrol. It won't be long.'

The Major was right, at least, about that. Three hundred lancers rode from the village,
trotting their horses along a track that paralleled the broken stalks of barley, and
Sharpe watched them come. They carried carbines instead of lances and he knew they
intended to search the hillsides on foot. He turned to the gully and ordered silence,
explained that a patrol was coming, and then turned back to see the Poles dismounting at
the foot of the rock-strewn slope.

A fly landed on his cheek. He wanted to crush it but dared not, as the lancers had
started their climb up the steep slope, their horses left with picquets below. They were
stringing into a line, a crude skirmish order, and he could hear the distant voices
grumbling at the heat and the exertion. There was a chance that they would miss the gully,
that by climbing obliquely up the slope they would emerge on the crest near the pile of rocks
and never suspect that a whole Company was in dead ground behind them. He breathed
slowly, willed them to stay low on the slope, and watched the officers trying to force the
line higher with the flat side of their drawn sabres.

He could hear Kelly's breathing, someone else clearing his throat, and he flapped with
his free hand for silence. A tall lancer, suntanned and with a black moustache, was
climbing higher than the others. As he clawed his way up, carbine slung, Sharpe saw a
tarnished gold band on the man's sleeve. A Sergeant. He was a big man, almost as big as
Harper, and his face was scarred from battlefields on the other side of Europe. Go down,
Sharpe urged silently, go down, but the man kept coming on his lone, perverse climb. Sharpe
moved his head slowly, saw the faces staring at him, and found Harper. He beckoned slowly,
put a finger to his lips, pointed at the foot of the inner slope of the gully.

The Polish Sergeant stopped, looked up, wiped his face, and turned to look at his
comrades. An officer shouted at him, waved his sabre to make the Sergeant join the line,
which had gone ahead, but the Sergeant shook his head, shouted back, and gestured at the
skyline, which was just a few, steep feet away. Sharpe cursed him, knew that if the Light
Company were discovered they would be harried eastwards, away from the gold, from
victory, and this one veteran was putting it all at risk. He was climbing just below
Sharpe, who craned forward as far as he dared to see the yellow, square top of the headgear
come closer and closer. He could hear the man grunting, the sound of his fingernails
scraping on rock, the scrabble of his boots searching for a foothold, and then, as if in a
nightmare, a large brown hand with bitten nails appeared right by Sharpe's face and he
summoned all his strength for a desperate act. He waited – it could only have been for a
half-second, but it seemed forever - until the man's face appeared. The eyes widened in
surprise and Sharpe put out his right hand and gripped the Sergeant by the windpipe, his
fingers closing like a man-trap on the throat. He thrust his left hand forward, found the
belt, and, half turning on to his back, he pulled the lancer up and over the rim, holding the
huge man in the air with a strength he hardly knew he possessed, and he threw him, arms and
carbine flailing, to the tender mercy of Sergeant Harper. The Irishman kicked the lancer
as he landed, had his seven-barrelled gun reversed and brought it down, sickeningly, on
the man's head. Sharpe whirled back to face the slope. The line was still advancing! No one
had seen, no one had noticed, but it was still not over. The lancer was tough, and Harper's
blows, that would have killed a fair-sized bullock, seemed to have done nothing more than
knock off the yellow and blue hat.

The enemy Sergeant had Harper round the waist, was squeezing, and the Irishman was
trying to twist the other man's head clean off his shoulders. The Pole's teeth were
gritted; he should have shouted, but he must have been dazed, and all he could think of was
trying to stand up, to face his opponent, and use his own massive fists to beat at Harper.
The men in the gully were frozen, appalled by the enemy who had suddenly landed in their
midst, and it was Teresa who reacted. She picked up a musket, turned it, took four steps
and swung its brass-tipped butt into the man's forehead. He slumped, tried to rise, but she
swung again and Sharpe saw the fierce joy on her face as the weapon felled the Sergeant, his
face bloodied, and suddenly it was quiet again in the gully.

Harper shook his head. 'God save Ireland.'

The girl gave Harper the kind of pitying look that Sharpe thought she had reserved only
for him, and then, without so much as a glance at Sharpe, she scrambled up the slope to lie
beside him and peer at the enemy. They had at last missed the Sergeant. Men from the top of
the line stopped and bunched uncertainly, called down to their officer, waiting as he
cupped his hands and shouted up the slope. The voice echoed and faded. He called again,
stopped the rest of the line, and Sharpe knew that in a few moments they would be
discovered. Damn the Sergeant! He looked round, wondering if there were cover to be had on
the far slope beyond the gully, knowing it was hopeless, and then he saw the girl was
moving, crossing the gully and climbing out the far side. His face must have betrayed his
alarm, for Kearsey, sitting by Ramon, shook his head. 'She'll manage.' The whisper just
reached Sharpe.

The search-line had sat down, glad of the rest, but the officer still called to the
missing Sergeant. He was climbing the hill in short, erratic bursts, uncertain what to do
and annoyed by those of his men who shouted with him. He had no choice, though; he would have
to come and look for his Sergeant, and Sharpe, the sweat pouring off his face, could not
imagine what one girl could do that would deflect the lancers from the search.

A scream startled him, piercing, and was cut off and repeated. He slid down the rocks a
few inches and turned his face up the ridge where the sound had come from. Harper looked at
him, puzzled. It had to be the girl. Sharpe peered over the edge again and saw the lancers
pointing up the slope. Teresa screamed again, a terrifying sound, and Sharpe's men looked
at each other, then up at Sharpe, as if to ask him what they could do to rescue her. Sharpe
watched the lancers, saw their uncertainty, and then he heard them shout and point up the
slope. He looked to see what had excited them, and his men, watching him, were reassured
by a smile that seemed to Harper to be the biggest he had ever seen on Sharpe's face. None of
them down in the gully could see what was happening, but Sharpe, up on the rim, picked up
the telescope and gave up caring if anyone saw the flash of light or not.

Not that anyone would be watching, not while a naked girl ran wildly along the ridge,
stopping to turn and hurl stones at an imagined pursuer on the slope hidden from the
lancers. Drink or women, Sharpe thought, the bait for soldiers, and Teresa was leading the
lancers in a mad rush ever further from the gully. He had her in the glass, shamelessly,
and he could hear the excited shouts of the lancers who would be lost to the control of the
strung-out officers. They would assume that the Sergeant had found the girl, stripped her,
let her get away, and was now pursuing her. Sharpe acknowledged her cleverness and
bravery, but for the moment he had time only for the slim, muscled body, for a beauty that
he wanted.