Sharpe's Battle Part 14

Father Sarsfield put a companionable arm across Sharpe's shoulder and steered him towards the gatehouse. A cold wind blew over the bare mountains as night fell and the first cooking fires curled their blue smoke into the sky. Wolves howled in the hills. There were wolves throughout Spain and Portugal and in winter they would sometimes come right up to the picquet line in the hope of s.n.a.t.c.hing a meal from an unwary soldier, but this night the wolves reminded

Sharpe of the grey-uniformed Frenchmen in Loup's brigade. Sharpe supped with the chaplain and afterwards, under a star-shining sky, he toured the ramparts with Harper. Beneath them the Real Compania Irlandesa grumbled about their accommodations and about the fate that had stranded them on this inhospitable border between Spain and Portugal, but Sharpe, who had orders to make them miserable, wondered if instead he could make them into real soldiers who would follow him over the hills and far into Spain to where a wolf needed to be hunted, trapped and slaughtered.

Pierre Ducos waited nervously for news of the Real Compania Irlandesa's arrival in Wellington's army. The Frenchman's greatest fear was that the unit would be positioned so far behind the fighting front that it would be useless for his purposes, but that was a risk Ducos was forced to run. Ever since

French intelligence had intercepted Lord Kiely's letter requesting King

Ferdinand's permission to take the Real Compania Irlandesa to war on the allied side, Ducos had known that the success of his scheme depended as much on the allies' unwitting cooperation as on his own cleverness. Yet Ducos's cleverness would achieve nothing if the Irishmen failed to arrive, and so he waited with mounting impatience.

Little news came from behind the British lines. There had been a time when

Loup's men could ride with impunity on either side of the frontier, but now the British and Portuguese armies were firmly clamped along the border and

Loup had to depend for his intelligence on the unreliable and minuscule handful of civilians willing to sell information to the hated French, on interrogations of deserters and on educated guesses formed from the observations of his own men as they peered through spygla.s.ses across the mountainous border.

And it was one of those scouts who first brought Loup news of the Real

Compania Irlandesa. A troop of grey dragoons had gone to one of the lonely hill tops which offered a long view into Portugal, and from where, with luck, a patrol might see some evidence of a British concentration of forces that could signal a new advance. The lookout post dominated a wide, barren valley where a stream glittered before the land rose to the rocky ridge on which the long-abandoned fort of San Isidro stood. The fort was of little military value for the road it guarded had long fallen into disuse and a century of neglect had eroded its ramparts and ditches into mockeries of their former strength so that now the San Isidro was home to ravens, foxes, bats, wandering shepherds, lawless men, and the occasional patrol of Loup's grey dragoons who might spend a night in one of the cavernous barracks rooms to stay out of the rain.

Yet now there were men in the fort, and the patrol leader brought Loup news of them. The new garrison was not a full battalion, he said, just a couple of hundred men. The fort itself, as Loup well knew, would need at least a thousand men to man its crumbling walls, so a mere two hundred hardly const.i.tuted a garrison, yet strangely the newcomers had brought their wives and children with them. The dragoons' troop leader, a Captain Braudel, thought the men were British. "They're wearing red coats," he said, "but not the usual stovepipe hats." He meant shakoes. "They've got bicornes."

"Infantry, you say?"

"Yes, sir."

"No cavalry? Any artillery?"

"Didn't see any."

Loup picked at his teeth with a sliver of wood. "So what were they doing?"

"Doing drill," Braudel said. Loup grunted. He was not much interested in a group of strange soldiers taking up residence in San Isidro. The fort did not threaten him and if the newcomers were content to sit tight and make themselves comfortable then Loup would not stir them into wakefulness. Then

Captain Braudel stirred Loup himself into wakefulness. "But some of them were unblocking a well," the Captain said, "only they weren't redcoats. They were wearing green."

Loup stared at him. "Dark green?"

"Yes, sir."

Riflemen. d.a.m.ned riflemen. And Loup remembered the insolent face of the man who had insulted him, the man who had once insulted all France by taking an eagle touched by the Emperor himself. Maybe Sharpe was in the San Isidro Fort?

Ducos had denigrated Loup's thirst for vengeance, calling it unworthy of a great soldier, but Loup believed that a soldier made his reputation by picking his fights and winning them famously. Sharpe had defied Loup, the first man to openly defy him in many a long month, and Sharpe was a champion among France's enemies, so Loup's vengeance was not just personal, but would send ripples throughout the armies that waited to fight the battle that would decide whether Britain lunged into Spain or was sent reeling back into Portugal.

So that afternoon Loup himself visited the hill top, taking his finest spygla.s.s which he trained on the old fort with its weed-grown walls and half- filled dry moat. Two flags hung limply in the windless air. One flag was

British, but Loup could not tell what the second was. Beyond the flags the red-coated soldiers were doing musket drill, but Loup did not watch them long, instead he inched the telescope southwards until, at last, he saw two men in green coats strolling along the deserted ramparts. He could not see their faces at this distance, but he could tell that one of the men was wearing a long straight sword and Loup knew that British light infantry officers wore curved sabres. "Sharpe," he said aloud as he collapsed the telescope.

A scuffle behind made him turn round. Four of his wolf-grey men were guarding a pair of prisoners. One captive was in a gaudily trimmed red coat while the other was presumably the man's wife or lover. "Found them hiding in the rocks down there," said the Sergeant who was holding one of the soldier's arms.

"He says he's a deserter, sir," Captain Braudel added, "and that's his wife."

Braudel spat a stream of tobacco juice onto a rock.

Loup scrambled down from the ridge. The soldier's uniform, he now saw, was not

British. The waistcoat and sash, the half boots and the plumed bicorne were all too fancy for British taste, indeed they were so fancy that for a second

Loup wondered if the captive was an officer, then he realized that Braudel would never have treated a captured officer with such disdain. Braudel clearly liked the woman who now raised shy eyes to stare at Loup. She was dark-haired, attractive and probably, Loup guessed, about fifteen or sixteen. Loup had heard that the Spanish and Portuguese peasants sold such daughters as wives to allied soldiers for a hundred francs apiece, the cost of a good meal in Paris.

The French army, on the other hand, just took their girls for nothing. "What's your name?" Loup asked the deserter in Spanish.

"Grogan, sir. Sean Grogan."

"Your unit, Grogan?"

"Real Compania Irlandesa, senor." Guardsman Grogan was plainly willing to cooperate with his captors and so Loup signalled the Sergeant to release him.

Loup questioned Grogan for ten minutes, hearing how the Real Compania

Irlandesa had travelled by sea from Valencia, and how the men had been happy enough with the idea of joining the rest of the Spanish army at Cadiz, but how they resented being forced to serve with the British. Many of the men, the fugitive claimed, had fled from British servitude, and they had not enlisted with the King of Spain just to return to King George's tyranny.

Loup cut short the protests. "When did you run?" he asked.

"Last night, sir. Half a dozen of us did. And a good many ran the night before."

"There is an Englishman in the fort, a rifle officer. You know him?"

Grogan frowned, as though he found the question odd, but then he nodded.

"Captain Sharpe, sir. He's supposed to be training us."

"To do what?"

"To fight, sir," Grogan said nervously. He found this one-eyed, calm-spoken

Frenchman very disconcerting. "But we know how to fight already," he added defiantly.

"I'm sure you do," Loup said sympathetically. He poked at his teeth for a second, then spat the makeshift toothpick away. "So you ran away, soldier, because you didn't want to serve King George, is that it?"

"Yes, sir."

"But you'd certainly fight for His Majesty the Emperor?"

Grogan hesitated. "I would, sir," he finally said, but without any conviction.

"Is that why you deserted?" Loup asked. "To fight for the Emperor? Or were you hoping to get back to your comfortable barracks in the Escorial?"

Grogan shrugged. "We were going to her family's house in Madrid, sir." He jerked his head towards his wife. "Her father's a cobbler, and I'm not such a bad hand with a needle and thread myself. I thought I'd learn the trade."