Sharpe's Regiment (19 page)

‘Hold your fire! Don’t shoot!’

Harper was stumbling through the shallow river margin, shouting his order again at Sergeant Lynch. Harper had shouted because he had seen Lynch bring his reloaded musket into his shoulder, and the musket, Harper knew, could just as easily strike Sharpe as Marriott. ‘Hold your fire!’

Lynch glanced at the huge man, ignored him for the moment, then looked back down the length of the musket’s browned barrel.

Sharpe had let go of Marriott and a whorl of the clashing currents had swept the boy away from him, carrying Marriott close to the western bank where, shin deep in the muddy water, Sergeant Lynch waited.

‘Don’t fire!’ Harper was still shouting, still too far from the Sergeant to do anything but shout, and the obstinate river current brought Marriott closer still to the bank. The boy thrust with his feet on the river bed, pushing himself towards the wider Crouch and, as Harper shouted his futile order yet once more, Lynch fired.

The bullet smashed Marriott’s skull. Blood spurted eighteen inches into the air, fell to redden the river, spurted again, then mercifully the head rolled the wound beneath the water to hide the obscene, heart-pumped fountain. Marriott’s hands splashed once, as if, from beneath the water, he tried to haul himself from its grasp, then he was still, floating calm in a great swirl of blood that drifted with the muddy water towards the sea. Charlie Weller, who had seen much blood on his father’s farm, had never seen a man shot. He vomited, and Lynch laughed as he splashed back from the shallows.

Harper had checked at the shot. His temper, slow to rouse, but dreadful once it had been goaded, made his voice loud and terrible. ‘You murderous bastard! You traitorous, murderous bastard!’ He moved towards the Sergeant, the other recruits shrinking back as Lynch reversed the musket to strike at the huge man, when a new voice made them all turn.

‘Sergeant!’ It was Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood. He was spurring his horse over the marsh, picking his way carefully. ‘You got him, Sergeant?’ Sir Henry Simmerson was close behind, his horse following Girdwood’s path.

Sharpe was hauling the body to the bank. He thought he tasted Marriott’s blood in the water, then huge hands reached for him, hands that pulled the weight of Marriott from him. Harper, turning away from Lynch, had plunged to his waist in the river and now dragged both Sharpe and the corpse to the bank. Sharpe, spitting water and blood, did not see the horsemen.

‘Mud.’ Harper hissed it. Sharpe did not seem to understand. ‘Sir!’ The Irishman hoped that word would attract Sharpe’s attention, but still Sharpe had not seen Sir Henry, so Harper, in desperation, scooped up a handful of the sticky, black mud and, his action hidden from Lynch and the officers by his body, slapped it onto Sharpe’s face. He smeared more on his own.

‘Well done!’ a voice said. Sharpe knew that voice. As his vision cleared he saw two horses ahead of him and on one of them, the closer one, he saw Sir Henry Simmerson. Sir Henry glanced at Sharpe, then peered down at the body. ‘Well done, Sergeant! A head shot!’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Lynch was reloading the musket.

Sir Henry barked at Sharpe. ‘Stand back, man! Let me look!’

‘Stand back, filth!’ Lynch echoed. Sharpe stepped back, keeping his head low, but Sergeant Lynch shouted again. ‘Look smart now, there’s an officer present! Head up, man! Attention!’

Sharpe obeyed, hoping that Harper’s quick thinking with the mud would suffice. He found Sir Henry staring at him.

Sharpe had won battles by letting the enemy see what they expected to see, by lulling them to false security. He had once hoisted old rags onto two bare staffs and, because the enemy expected to see a full Battalion with Colours flying, they saw in the ragged symbols of Sharpe’s rain-obscured garments evidence of an overpowering force instead of the ammunitionless half Battalion which, in reality, was all that barred their escape. He had once let his Riflemen lie in the open, without support, close to an overwhelming enemy, but, because the French expected to see dead men where the crumpled bodies lay, they gave the Riflemen no thought until the bullets tore their gun-team apart and gave the victory to Sharpe.

Men see what they expect to see, and though his niece had recognised Sharpe, Sir Henry did not. The mud clung to Sharpe’s face, he let his mouth loll open and Sir Henry, who had spent a whole summer locked into a mutual dislike with Sharpe, and who now stared with distaste at his old enemy, saw only what he expected to see; a muddy, gawping recruit. Jane Gibbons, perhaps because she had thought of Sharpe as frequently as he of her, had recognised him instantly, while Sir Henry, who had been assured by Lord Fenner that Major Sharpe had been killed in London and thus prevented from carrying on with his inconvenient search for replacements, did not expect to see Sharpe and so did not. ‘You’re filthy, man. Clean yourself up!’

Sir Henry tugged at his reins and, as he turned away, Sharpe heard him complain querulously to Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood that this business had delayed his journey to London. ‘Still, it’s over! Bury him, Girdwood! Where he is!’

Girdwood wished Sir Henry a safe journey then, when Simmerson was on his way back to the house and out of earshot, he looked down on Sergeant Lynch. ‘How in God’s name did it happen, Sergeant?’

Sergeant Lynch was standing rigid, his trousers muddied to his thighs. ‘My belief is that he had help, sir. O’Keefe!‘ The mention of the Irish name was sufficient to cause Girdwood to make the odd, growling sound in his throat.

‘Help, Sergeant?’

‘O’Keefe tried to stop me apprehending the filth, sir! Tried to hit me, sir!‘

‘Hit you?’ Girdwood repeated the words with disbelief.

Lynch smiled with satisfaction. ‘Tried to strike me, sir. Assault, sir.’ He stared at Harper, knowing that he had said enough to ensure a terrible revenge for Harper’s defiance.

Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood urged his horse closer to Harper. He looked down with hatred, staring at the huge, drenched man as if he saw a foul beast that had lurched up from the mud of the river bank. ‘You thought to hit a Sergeant, did you, filth?’

‘Because he’s a murdering bastard, sir.’ Harper, all caution gone to the wind, said it scornfully. ‘A murdering, traitorous bastard!’

For a second Sharpe thought that Girdwood would strike Harper with the cane, and he feared that Harper would strike back, and Sharpe was planning how to seize the musket from Corporal Mason before Harper was shot. The other recruits stood in frozen fear, the wind lifting their hair and stirring the pale grasses about Marriott’s still body. Girdwood stared down at the huge Irishman, and perhaps it was Harper’s size, or perhaps it was the implacable look of dangerous ferocity on the huge man’s face that made the Lieutenant Colonel tuck the silver-topped cane into his armpit. ‘This filth is under arrest, Sergeant Lynch.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And bury that scum!’ Girdwood tugged at his reins, gave one last malevolent glance at Harper, then spurred his horse after the far figure of Sir Henry Simmerson.

They buried Marriott in the marsh, using the tools with which the squad had half cleared Sir Henry’s creek, burying him without benefit of prayer or clergy, as though he was a criminal. Doubtless, Sharpe thought as they forced the body into the wet, gurgling hole in which Marriott floated obscenely until they had forced mud onto his corpse, Girdwood would claim in his records, that the boy had drowned and been swept to sea. No one knew of the Foulness Camp, no one cared what happened here. No one ever would care unless Sharpe and Harper managed to escape from this place to take their story to the authorities.

Yet escape, that Sharpe had planned for tonight, seemed hopeless now. Harper was under arrest, guarded first by Lynch and his two corporals, and soon by a further squad of redcoats who took the huge Irishman back to the camp where, locked in a foul small building that had once been a pigsty, the Irishman waited for the justice that ruled in Foulness and which had already killed one man this summer’s day.

 

‘They killed him!’ Charlie Weller still seemed unable to believe that Marriott was dead.

‘Served him right.’ Jenkinson, one of the convicts freed to Sergeant Havercamp by Grantham’s magistrates, was scrubbing at the mud on his trousers. The evening inspection was imminent. ‘He was a whining bastard.’

‘He would have made a good soldier.’ Sharpe said it mildly. Oddly, it was true. If Marriott had been in the Rifles, where the discipline was expected to come from within a man rather than without, the boy might have made a fine skirmisher.

Jenkinson said nothing. He was wary of Sharpe, as he had been of Harper, for the two had early stopped the bullying tactics of the released convicts, who, thinking themselves to have found easy victims in the other recruits, had tried to make them into servants.

Weller slapped at the dried mud on his fatigue jacket. ‘What will they do to Paddy?’

‘Flog him.’ Sharpe looked to the east where, black against the pale dusk, the geese coasted down to the mudflats. He was wondering how, this night, he was to both rescue Harper and escape. If Jane Gibbons - and the thought of her made his heart give a strange, small leap of warmth - put the food and money he needed into the boathouse then it was unlikely, he conceded, that it would remain hidden all the next day. Tonight. He must escape tonight, not just to save Harper from punishment, but because, with the secret of the Foulness camp uncovered, he was impatient to end Girdwood’s crime and return to Spain.

The bugle sounded for inspection. The squad lined up in front of the tent and listened to the shouts of the sergeants and corporals. ‘Christ!’ Charlie Weller muttered. ‘It’s the bloody Colonel tonight.’ Girdwood’s inspections were always more burdensome than those of the other officers.

‘Silence!’ Corporal Mason shouted from behind.

Sharpe stood to attention. He had noticed, as he fetched cleaning water, how a whole block of the tents was empty this evening and he presumed that the two Companies whose auction he had seen on Sir Henry’s lawn had already marched to their new regiments. The thought of his own men, left in Pasajes, being thus denied the reinforcements they needed, made him suddenly angry as Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood paced in front of Sergeant Lynch’s squad.

The Colonel looked each man up and down. There had not been time to clean all the mud from their uniforms and Girdwood’s eyes showed his disgust. ‘Filthy! Filthy! You’re supposed to be soldiers, not pigs! What’s that?’ He pointed with his cane at a forlorn pile of kit that lay at the tent door.

Sergeant Lynch, immaculate once more, stiffened. ‘Private Marriott’s Necessaries, sir!’

‘Marriott?’ Girdwood frowned. ‘Who’s Marriott?’

‘The deserter, sir!’ Lynch’s eyes flickered towards the kit, then back to the Colonel. ‘Being returned to stores tonight, sir!’

‘You can add the Irishman’s too.’ Girdwood said it with a smile, as though the thought had suddenly cheered him.

‘Sir! Private Vaughn! Fetch the Irish filth’s Necessaries!’

Sharpe frowned, as though not understanding. ‘Sergeant?’

Lynch took one crisp pace forward and pushed his moustached face up to Sharpe’s. ‘Fetch O’Keefe’s kit, Vaughn, and do it now!‘

Sharpe obeyed, rolling Harper’s few spare clothes into the blanket, then carrying them outside.

‘Put them there, filth!’ Lynch pointed with his pacing stick at Marriott’s pile. ‘Smartly!’

Sharpe knew he should say nothing, but the thought that Harper might be, like Marriott, dead, or might be dead before the night was done, was too much to keep him silent. He dropped the blanket roll, stood to attention, and looked respectfully towards the Lieutenant Colonel. ‘Is he not coming back, sir?’

Girdwood straightened. He had been rapping the guy ropes of the tent, ensuring they were taut, for in Foulness no guy ropes were allowed to be slack, even in rain. It meant broken tents, but ensured the neatness that Girdwood loved. The Colonel looked towards Sergeant Lynch. ‘Did the filth speak, Sergeant?’

‘He spoke, sir!’

Girdwood stood in front of Sharpe. ‘You spoke?’

Sharpe looked into the white face. The Colonel’s moustache was breaking through its mould of tar; small hairs struggling free between the cracked pitch. Sharpe made his voice as military and toneless as he could. ‘Private O’Keefe, sir. I wondered if he’d gone, sir.‘

‘Does it matter?’ Girdwood smiled.

‘Friend, sir!’ Sharpe was staring now at the brilliantly polished badge on Girdwood’s shako, a badge which showed the chained Eagle that Sharpe and Harper had captured.

‘You do not, filth, speak unless you are spoken to. You do not, filth, address yourself to an officer!’ Girdwood’s voice was rising, the only sound in the great camp. ‘You do not, filth, concern yourself with matters beyond your competence. You are insolent!’ This last was almost screamed. It was followed by a silence in which Girdwood, who could not remember a man daring to ask him a question during an inspection, drew back his cane. ‘Filth!’ The cane whistled savagely, striking Sharpe’s left cheek. ‘Filth!’ Girdwood back-handed the weapon, drawing blood on Sharpe’s right cheek. ‘What are you?’

Sharpe could feel the blood on his face. He dropped his eyes to Girdwood‘s, meeting the Colonel’s gaze. He was tempted to smile, to show that the blows had not hurt, but this was not a time to mire himself in further difficulties. ’Filth, sir. Sorry, sir.‘

Girdwood stepped back, his eyes fascinated by the blood that was trickling down to Sharpe’s jawbone. He gained a strange pleasure from so hurting and humiliating a taller, stronger man whose sudden, dark gaze had given him a second’s alarm. ‘You will watch this man, Sergeant Lynch!’

‘I always do, sir!’

The blows seemed to have vented an anger in the Colonel so that he did not care, suddenly, that the squad’s uniforms still showed the effects of their day in the marsh. He straightened his shoulders, tucked the cane beneath his arm, returned Lynch’s salute, and walked on to the next squad.