Sharpe's Regiment (22 page)

Yet not one of Girdwood’s men wanted to be a hero this night, not in such an ignoble cause and not when they knew that the two fugitives merely fled towards the waiting picquet at the bridge. Beyond the bridge the militia cavalry waited, and so Girdwood’s men, happy that others should rescue Captain Finch and apprehend the armed deserters, followed the fugitives without enthusiasm. Girdwood spurred his horse towards the laggard sergeants. ‘Go on! Go on! Go on!’

Sharpe heard the shout, turned, and brought the carbine into his shoulder. Girdwood could just spur these men into action and Sharpe knew they must be discouraged. He aimed at Girdwood’s horse, closed his eye against the flash of powder, and fired.

Girdwood’s horse swerved away, startled by the bullet, and Sharpe heard the sergeants swear. He reloaded, his hands swift in the old actions, and he astonished his pursuers by sending a second bullet to flutter the air just seconds after the first. He turned and sprinted after Harper and heard a single musket fire in reply. The ball went wide. No one now, not Girdwood, not his officers, and not one of the sergeants, wanted to hurry the pursuit into the face of such deadly skill. They let Sharpe and Harper stretch their lead and were confident that the militia or the picquet at the bridge would end this nonsense.

Sharpe caught up with Harper. ‘All well?’

‘Bastard’s quiet, sir!’ Harper had found a pistol in Finch’s belt and had rapped the captain on the skull with its butt. ‘Where to?’

‘This way!’ Sharpe, running hard, turned off the road and led Harper back to the marsh. They were still on Foulness, still pursued, and there were enemies ahead, but they were Riflemen, hardened by war, and they would use their skills in this night of moonshine and madness. They would fight.

That morning, when Sergeant Lynch had marched them off the island, Sharpe had noted a drainage ditch that angled north west from the road and pointed, like a straight line on a map, towards Sir Henry’s house. It was beside that ditch that he and Harper now went. ‘We’re going to the creek! You go ahead!’ Sharpe reloaded the carbine, watching to see if the pursuers pressed close, but his earlier shots had taken what small courage they had and destroyed it. He felt a moment’s shame that these men wore the uniform of the South Essex, then turned and ran after Harper.

The Sergeant had stopped beside the creek which edged the island. ‘Can we lose this bastard, sir?’ He plucked at Finch’s jacket tails.

‘Drop him!’ The pursuit was too far behind for them to need a hostage now, and Harper hit Finch again, to keep him quiet, then tipped the officer into the mud. He coaxed the horse forward to the water. ‘Give me the gun, sir!’

Sharpe handed up the carbine and his belt with its ammunition pouch. The tide was low, the water scarcely up to his knees, but if he tripped and soaked the cartridges they would be defenceless. The horse, nervous in the water, eagerly climbed up to the great reed bed that banked the creek. Sharpe followed, his shoes sticking in the thick mud.

‘Another river, sir!’ Harper called out and Sharpe, to his consternation, saw that they had succeeded in leaving Foulness only to gain the dubious refuge of this smaller island, scarcely more than a great stand of reeds among the water. This next crossing was wider and looked deeper, the moon-sheened water swirling menacingly as it swept seawards. ‘Take the bridle for me, sir!’

Sharpe led the horse into the deeper water and the current snatched at him. He supposed this must be the Roach, where Marriott had so nearly drowned him, and then he was half swimming, half being dragged by the panicked horse, until, with relief, he felt the beast heaving itself up the far bank and dragging him with it. He let go of the bridle, shook the water from his hair, then saw Sir Henry’s house and, running straight towards it, the path on the sea wall that they had trodden that morning.

‘Sir!’

‘What is it?’

‘Cavalry.’ It was odd, suddenly, but it felt like Spain. Harper slid from the horse, his right hand feeling in the carbine pan to check that it was loaded. ‘Skirmish line of the bastards, sir. Half a mile.’ He pointed west. ‘Haven’t seen us yet, but they will if we’re mounted.’

‘Moving?’

‘No.’ Harper grinned in the moonlight. ‘Dozy bastards.’

It was a fine decision that had to be made. If Sharpe or Harper rode the horse, and the other ran alongside grasping the stirrup to keep up, they would be seen in this flat land by the searching cavalry. Their journey would be faster, but the militia, unencumbered by double-mounting or stirruping, would be faster still. If they went on foot they would be hidden, but the journey from here to the creek would take twice as long; twice as much time in which they might be found. It was visibility and speed against deception. Sharpe looked back the way they had come, but he could see no one and hear nothing. Finch must still be stunned by the blow Harper had given him.

Sharpe took the gun and ammunition. ‘Hobble the horse. We walk.’

‘We bloody run.’ Harper was unbuckling the bridle. He tied the horse’s front feet together. It whinnied nervously, and the Irishman soothed it. ‘I’m ready.’

They crouched low. The embankment, on which the path ran so clear and straight towards Sir Henry’s house, gave them cover. They were bent over, tripping sometimes on the tussocks, cursing as they stumbled, but always pushing on in the bank’s shadow. Sharpe stopped only once to peer through the grass at the embankment’s top. He could see the moonlight shining on the sabres and helmets of the cavalry, who, strung in a long line, searched the shadows and reed beds a quarter mile away. Sharpe caught Harper up. ‘The buggers are closer, but they won’t catch us.’

‘Where are we going anyway?’

‘We’re stealing one of Sir Henry’s punts. We’ll cross the river.’ He stopped, crouching by nettles that bordered the road before Sir Henry’s house. The road was white in the moonlight, as was the pointing of the bricks in the high wall that fronted the garden. Sharpe tapped Harper’s shoulder. ‘You first.’

The big Irishman slithered over the road, showing the scarcest profile, and moved fast into the ditch at the far side. No cavalry trumpet sounded, no shout echoed on the flat land. ‘Patrick!’

Sharpe threw the carbine across the road, then the ammunition. He looked behind once, saw the cavalry still far away, then half ran, half rolled over the dry road into the ditch. ‘Come on!’

It was simple now to slip into the shadows of the half-cleared creek bed. The three duck-shooting punts, that Sharpe and Marriott had hauled onto the eastern bank just that morning, still lay in their tangle of awnings and hoops. ‘Break the bottoms of two of them, Patrick, get paddles, take the third to the river. I’ll join you.’

‘Sir!’

Mercifully the barred gate of the boathouse was still unlocked. If Jane Gibbons had left the food and money then it could only take an instant to find them, and Sharpe groped along the brick ledge that ran the length of the tunnel. It was pitch black under the arched roof. His hands explored the empty walkway, finding nothing. There was no bundle, no food, no money. He heard the splinter of boards behind him as Harper pushed his foot through the bottom of one of the punts.

‘Major Sharpe?’

He jumped, scared by the sudden voice, and then a cloth bundle was pushed at him and he saw, dim in the darkness, a hooded shape. ‘Miss Gibbons? Is that you?’

‘Yes! I have to talk to you!’

Sharpe climbed onto the ledge. He saw Harper look nervously southwards as he stove in the second punt. Sharpe was holding the bundle while Jane Gibbons’ gloved hand, in an unconscious gesture of nervousness, rested on his arm. She was silent now, staring past Sharpe at the huge man who wrestled to turn the third punt over.

He smiled. ‘Thank you for this.’

She shook her head. ‘I wanted to help. Are the militia out?’

‘Yes.’

‘They’ll come here. They always warn us.’ She took her hand from his arm. She was standing on the platform that was built at the end of the tunnel, the stage from which someone could step down into the boats. ‘You are going to stop them?’

‘The auctions? Yes.’

‘What happens to my uncle?’

Somehow the question surprised him; he had thought of her as an ally, a conspirator, but suddenly he saw what he had not seen all day, that the disgrace of her uncle would reflect upon this household. ‘I don’t know.’ It was a feeble answer. He was tempted to tell her of the men who waited in Pasajes, of the disgrace they would suffer if their pride was to be laid up and they were to be denied a victory for which they had suffered and endured these long years.

‘And Colonel Girdwood? Will he be finished?’

There was a hollow knocking of wood as Harper tossed two paddles into the punt, then began to drag it towards the far marker that showed where this creek joined the River Crouch. Sharpe nodded. ‘He’ll be finished. Disgraced.’

‘Good!’ She hissed the word, revelling in it. For a moment she was silent. The boathouse was in shadow, but her eyes glistened with the pale reflection of moonlight. She stared at Sharpe almost defiantly. ‘They want me to marry him.’

It was like the moment when, on a clear day, a twelve pounder enemy shot thumps the air close by, astonishing and sudden, threatening and unexpected. Sharpe only gaped. ‘They what?’

‘We’re supposed to marry!’

‘Him?’

‘My uncle demands it,’ she paused, her eyes bright in her shadowed face, ‘but if he’s in disgrace ...’

‘He’ll be finished.’ Sharpe heard a clinking sound, the fall of a hoof on the road. At the same moment came the call of a nightjar, soft and insistent. ‘Cu-ick, cu-ick, cu-ick.’ Sharpe had never heard a nightjar in marshland. It was Harper sounding a warning. ‘I have to go!’ For a second, a mad second, he wanted to take her with him. ‘I shall come back. You understand?’

She nodded, then there was a sudden braying of a trumpet, a whoop like that of a huntsman, and he pulled away from her. ‘I’ll come back!’ The first carbine shots cracked down the creekbed.

The militia was like a second British army, but a privileged one. A man who joined the militia could never be asked to serve abroad and his wife, unlike the wife of a regular soldier, received an allowance while he was away from home. It was a pampered, soft, well-trained, and useless army. It had been raised to resist an invasion that had never come, while now, nine years later, it starved the regular army of good men. Some militia men transferred to the regulars, attracted by the bounty and wanting, after their training, to do some real fighting, but most preferred to avoid the dangers of real soldiering.

The militia cavalry of South Essex, whose honorary Colonel was Sir Henry Simmerson, kept a troop quartered close to Foulness. Their task was to patrol the creeks against smuggling, guard the Foulness Camp, and protect Sir Henry’s big brick house. When a man ran from Foulness, the militia cavalry went eagerly into a practised routine, because they had been offered a bounty should they ever succeed in stopping a deserter. Now, like a gift from heaven, the troops saw the big man who hauled the punt north towards the Crouch. Their first bullets drove him into the cover of the reeds.

Sharpe ran from the boathouse, gun, ammunition and bundle all held in his arms, and his shoes slipped in the treacherous mud as he turned towards Harper. A man shouted behind, a bullet cracked and whined off the brickwork to Sharpe’s left while another drove a fountain of bright water up to his right. He heard the militia officer order his men forward. Some had dismounted to come down into the creek bed, others spurred their horses to its far bank.

She was to marry Girdwood? She was to be put with that tar-faced fool? A bullet crackled in the reeds to Sharpe’s right, he slipped again as yet another shot thumped wetly into a rill of mud by his feet, then he was by the punt. ‘Here!’ He threw the carbine to Harper, then the ammunition pouch, and tossed Jane’s bundle into the punt. ‘I’ll drag it! You hold the bastards off! And Patrick!’

‘Sir?’ Harper was finding cover as Sharpe hauled the punt on towards the river.

‘Don’t kill any of them. They’re on our side, remember?’

‘I don’t think they know that, sir.’ Harper grinned. If anything he was fractionally faster than Sharpe with a gun. British infantry could fire four shots a minute, while the best of the French could only manage three, yet Sharpe and Harper could both fire five shots in a minute from a clean musket on a dry day. Harper grinned and buckled on the belt with its ammunition pouch. The militia were about to discover what it was to fight against the best.

Sharpe dragged the heavy punt, struggling and cursing, forcing his tired legs to push through the mud, water and clinging roots. A bullet clattered through the reeds beside him, another struck the punt with a thump that ran up Sharpe’s arm, then, mercifully, the creek turned, hiding him from his pursuers, and there was enough water in the half cleared bed to ease the punt’s progress. Sharpe wondered, with a sudden, terrible fear, whether a stray bullet might have ricocheted into the boathouse. Marry Girdwood? By God he would break that vicious fool!

Patrick Harper knelt at the bend in the creek. He thumbed the cock of Captain Finch’s carbine back, saw that the dismounted cavalrymen were closer than their mounted comrades, and fired.

He rolled to one side, clearing his own smoke, and took a cartridge from the captured pouch. He was doing his job now, albeit with a short carbine instead of a rifle, and his second shot hammered down the creek bed within twelve seconds of his first and he saw the cavalrymen, who had never faced an enemy who fired real bullets, dive into cover.

He reloaded again. He saw a mass of men dark in the reeds to the left of the creek and he put a bullet into the ground ahead of them, and then a horseman on the bank was bellowing orders for the dismounted cavalry to spread out, to fire back, and Harper lay down as the volley cut into the reeds about him. ‘Forward!’ The cavalry officer shouted. ‘Forward!’ And there was something in that arrogant voice that touched a nerve in Harper. He knelt up, his face grim, and he put a bullet into the man who led the rush up the creek’s wet bed. ‘That’s from Ireland.’ He said it under his breath, and already the next cartridge was in his hand, the bullet in his mouth, and the wounded cavalryman was screaming and thrashing and his comrades were stunned because real blood had come into this night, their blood, and Harper was already moving right to snap off his next shot.