Sharpe's Sword Part 4

"What?" Sharpe had only been half listening. He had been thinking of Delmas. The Frenchman had murdered Windham, and probably murdered McDonald too. A man who killed while still on parole was a murderer.

"I said it's not a bad wee city.'

"I heard you, Patrick." Sharpe looked at the Sergeant, remembering the fight. "Thank you."

"For what? Do you think we should join the lads?"

"Yes."

They scrambled down the hill to join the few Riflemen who, like themselves, were marooned on the northern bank of the river. One of them had retrieved Sharpe's rifle and carried it all the way across the bridge. He gave it back to his Captain. "What do we do now, sir?"

"Now?" Sharpe listened. Faintly he could hear a rhythmic booming, a sound overlaid with a slight, tinny melody. "Hear that?"

They listened. Parry Jenkins grinned. "It's a band!"

Sharpe slung his rifle. "I think we should join in." He guessed that the Sixth Division was making their formal entry into the city; bands playing and colours flying, and he pointed down the river bank to the east. "That way, lads, then up into the city." The route would take them far from the French cannons pointing across the wasted south-western corner of the city. "And listen, lads!" They looked at him. "Just stay together, you understand? We're not supposed to be here and the b.l.o.o.d.y Provosts would just love a chance to put a real soldier in chains." They grinned at him. "Come on!"

He was wiping the blood from his big sword as he led them along the river bank and then up into a steep alleyway which pointed towards the two Cathedrals on the hilltop. They were behind the houses from which the Spanish civilians had fired at Delmas, where the priest had checked their fire, and Sharpe thought he recognised the tall, grey-haired figure that climbed ahead of him.

He quickened his pace, leaving his Riflemen behind, and the noise of his boots on the cobbled street made the priest turn. He was a tall, elderly man whose face seemed filled with amus.e.m.e.nt and charity. He smiled at Sharpe and glanced at the sword. "You look as if you want to kill me, my son."

Sharpe had not known exactly why he had pursued the priest, except to vent his anger at the man's interference with the afternoon's fight. The priest's perfect English took him by surprise, and the man's cool tone annoyed him. "I kill the King's enemies."

The priest smiled at Sharpe's dramatic tone. "You're angry with me, my son. Is it because I stopped the civilians shooting? Yes?" He did not wait for an answer, but went on placatingly. "Do you know what the French will do to them if they get a chance? Do you? Have you seen civilians put against a wall and shot like sick dogs?"

Sharpe's anger spilt into his voice. "For Christ's sake! We're here now, not the b.l.o.o.d.y French!"

"I doubt if it's for His sake, my son." The priest irritated Sharpe by continuing to smile. "And for how long are you here? If you don't defeat the main French armies then you'll be running back to Portugal and we can expect those Frenchmen to be in our streets again."

Sharpe frowned. "Are you English?"

"Praise the Lord, no!" For the first time the priest sounded shocked by something Sharpe had said. "I'm Irish, my son. My name is Father Patrick Curtis, though the Salamantines call me Don Patricio Cortes." Curtis stopped as Harper shepherded the curious Riflemen past the two men. Harper took them on up the street. Curtis smiled again at Sharpe. "Salamanca is my city now, and these people are my people. I understand their hatred of the French, but I must protect them if the French ever rule here again. That man you were chasing. Do you know what he would do to them?"

"Delmas?What?"

Curtis frowned. He had a strong face, deeply lined, dominated by enormous, busy grey eyebrows. "Delmas? No! Leroux!"

It was Sharpe's turn to be puzzled. "I was chasing a man in a bra.s.s helmet. A man with a limp."

"That's right! Leroux." He saw Sharpe's surprise. "He's a full Colonel in Napoleon's Imperial Guard. Philippe Leroux. He's ruthless, my son, especially against civilians."

The priest's calm, informative voice had not mollified Sharpe, who kept his voice hostile. "You know a lot about him."

Curtis laughed. "Of course! I'm Irish! We're always interested in other people's business. In my case, of course, it's also G.o.d's business to know about people. Even people like Colonel Leroux."

"And it was my business to kill him."

"As the centurion said on Golgotha."

"What?"

"Nothing, my son. A comment in poor taste. Well, Captain?" Curtis made the rank a question, and Sharpe nodded. The priest smiled. "It's my pleasant duty to welcome you to Salamanca, even if you are English. Consider yourself duly welcomed.

"You don't like the English?" Sharpe was determined not to like the elderly priest.

"Why should I?" Curtis still smiled. "Does the worm like the plough?"

"I suppose you'd prefer the French?" Sharpe was still convinced that Curtis had stopped the firing to spare the man who had called himself Delmas.

Curtis sighed. "Dear, oh dear! This conversation, if you'll forgive me, Captain, is getting tiresome. I'll bid you good-day, my son. I expect we'll meet again soon. Salamanca's a small enough town." He turned and walked ahead of Sharpe, leaving the Rifle Officer annoyed. Sharpe knew he had been bested by the priest, that Curtis's calmness had easily deflected his anger. Well, d.a.m.n the priest, and d.a.m.n Colonel Philippe Leroux. Sharpe walked on, hurrying past Curtis without acknowledging him, and his head was busy with his need for revenge. Leroux. The man who had murdered Windham, had murdered McDonald, had broken his parole, had escaped Sharpe, and who possessed a sword fit for a great fighter. Colonel Leroux; a worthy enemy for this summer of war and heat.

CHAPTER 3.

Sharpe overtook his men and led them along beside the two Cathedrals and into streets that were crowded with people ready to celebrate the city's release from the French. Blankets had been hung from the poorer balconies, flags from the richer, while women leaned over window ledges and bal.u.s.trades. "Vive Ingles!"

Harper bellowed back at them. "Viva Irlandes!" Wine was pressed on them, flowers tossed to them, and the cheerful holiday crowd jostled the Riflemen as they moved towards the music and the city centre. Harper grinned at Sharpe. "The Lieutenant ought to be here!"

Sharpe's Lieutenant, Harold Price, would have been inordinately jealous. The girls were beautiful, smiling, and Price would have been torn by indecision like a terrier not knowing which rat to take first. A woman, monstrously fat, jumped up and down to plant a kiss on Harper's cheek and the Irishman swept her up in his arms, kissed her happily, and put her down. The crowd cheered, loving it, and a small child was handed to the Sergeant who took her, skinny legs flailing, and put her on his shoulders. She drummed on his shako top, beating with the band sound, and beamed at her friends. Today was holiday in Salamanca. The French were gone, either north with Marmont or else into their three cordoned fortresses, and Salamanca was free.

The street opened into a courtyard, gorgeously decorated with carvings, and Sharpe remembered the place from his last visit. Salamanca was a town like Oxford or Cambridge, a University town, and the courtyard was part of the University. The stones of the buildings had been carved as delicately as silver filigree, the workmanship of the masons breath-takingly skilled, and he saw his men staring in wonder at the riotous stone. There was nothing like this to be seen in England, perhaps anywhere in the world, yet Sharpe knew that the best of Salamanca was still to come.

Bells pealed from a dozen belfries, a cacophony of joy that clashed with the army band. Swallows in their hundreds were wheeling and swooping over the rooftops, the harbingers of evening, and he pushed on, nodding and smiling at the people, and he noticed in the next street how the doors still bore the chalk marks left by the French billeting officers. Tonight the Sixth Division would be in these houses, and welcomed more readily because the British paid for their rooms and for their food. The French had gone. And Sharpe smiled because Leroux was trapped in the forts, and then he wondered how it would be possible to arrange it so that he could be present when the Sixth Division a.s.saulted the forts.

The street ended in a wide s.p.a.ce and Sharpe saw the tips of bright bayonets bobbing rhythmically over the heads of the crowd towards an archway. Harper put the small girl down, releasing her to run and join the crowd lining the parade route, and the Light Company men followed Sharpe towards the archway. Like all the Riflemen in Sharpe's Company, Harper had been here before, back in the winter of '08, and he remembered the Plaza Mayor that lay beyond this archway. It was in the Plaza Mayor that the Sixth Division gathered for the formal parade to mark the British entry into Salamanca.

Sharpe stopped just sort of the archway and looked at Harper. "I'm going to find Major Hogan. Keep the lads together, and meet me here at ten o'clock."

"Yes, sir."

Sharpe looked at the men with Harper, rogues all of them. They were typical of the drunks, thieves, murderers and runaways who had somehow become the best infantry in the world. He grinned at them. "You can drink." They gave ironic cheers and Sharpe held up a hand. "But no fights. We're not supposed to be here and the b.l.o.o.d.y Provosts would love to beat the h.e.l.l out of you. So stay out of trouble, and keep your mates out of trouble, understand? Stick together. You can drink, but I'm not carrying anyone home tonight, so stay on your feet." Sharpe had reduced the army's regulations to three simple rules. His men were expected to fight, as he did, with determination. They were not to steal, except from the enemy or unless they were starving. And they were never to get drunk without his permission. They grinned at him and held up wine that had been given them. They would have sore heads in the morning.

He left them and pushed his way through the crowds that lined the archway. He knew just what to expect, but still it took his breath away as he stood for a moment and just stared at what he thought was the most beautiful place he had seen in his life; Salamanca's Plaza Mayor, the Great Plaza. It had been finished just thirty years before and had taken seventy years to build, but the time had been well spent. The square was formed of continuous houses, each of three storeys above the arched colonnade and every room facing the Plaza opened onto a wrought iron balcony. The severity of the buildings' design was softened by decorated scrollwork, carved coats of arms, and a spire studded bal.u.s.trade that edged the sky. The houses met at the north side of the Plaza in a splendid Palacio, higher than the houses and more ornate, and on the eastern side, full in the rays of the descending sun, was the Royal Pavilion. The stone of the whole Plaza was golden in the late afternoon, traced with a thousand, thousand shadows cast by balconies, shutters, carvings and spires. Swallows laced the air of the huge s.p.a.ce. The Plaza was of royal dimensions. It spoke of grandeur, pride and magnificence, yet it was a public place and belonged to the citizens of Salamanca. The meanest person could walk and linger in its glory and imagine himself in the residence of a King.

Thousands of people were now crammed into the Plaza's immensity. They lined the triple balconies and waved scarves and flags, cheered, and tossed blossoms into the paved square. Crowds were thick in the shadowed arcade beneath the colonnade's eighty-eight arches, and their cheering threatened to drown the band that played beneath the Palacio to whose music the Sixth Division made their solemn and formal entry.

This was a moment to savour, a moment of glory, the moment when the British took hold of this city. The Plaza Mayor had sensed this moment, was making a celebration of it, yet in the very centre of the noise and colour sat a quiet man who looked, on his tall horse, to be almost drab. He wore no uniform. A plain blue coat, grey trousers, and unadorned bicorne hat sufficed Wellington. Before the General marched his troops, the men who had followed him from Portugal through the savage horrors of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz.

The first Battalion of the 89nth Regiment, their jacket facings as deep a green as the valleys of North Devon from whence they came, were followed by the Shropshires, red facings on red jackets, their officers' coats laced in gold. The swords swept up to salute the plain, hook-nosed man who stood quiet in the riot of noise. The Gist were there, a long way from Gloucestershire, and the sight of them made Sharpe remember Windham's scornful comparison of the two Cathedral cities. The Colonel would have loved this. He would have tapped his riding crop in time with the music, have criticised the faded jackets of the Queen's Royals, blue on red, second infantry of the line behind the Royal Scots, but he would not have been in earnest. The Cornishmen of the 32nd marched in, the 36th of Hereford, and all of them marched with colours uncased, colours that stirred in the small wind and showed off the musket and cannon scars of the smoke-tinged flags. The colours were surrounded by Sergeants' halberds, the wide blades burnished to a brilliant silver.

Hooves sounded by the archway where Sharpe had entered and Lossow, his uniform miraculously brushed, led the first troop of King's German Legion Light Dragoons into the Plaza. Their sabres were drawn, slashing light, and the officers wore fur edged pelisses casually draped over the gold-laced blue jackets. The Plaza seemed crammed with troops, yet still more came. The brown jackets of the Portuguese Cacadores, Light troops, whose green shako plumes nodded to the music's tempo. There were Greenjackets too, not Riflemen of the 95th, Sharpe's old Regiment, but men of the Goth, the Royal American Rifles. He watched them enter the square and he felt a small burst of pride at the sight of their faded, patched uniforms and the battered look of their Baker Rifles. The Rifles were the first onto any battlefield, and the last to leave it. They were the best. Sharpe was proud of his green jacket.

This was just one division, the Sixth, while beyond the city and shielding it from the French field army were the other Divisions of Wellington's force. The First, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth, the Seventh, and the Light Divisions, forty-two thousand men of the infantry marched this summer. Sharpe smiled to himself. He remembered Rolica, just four years before, when the British infantry had numbered just thirteen and a half thousand men. No one had expected them to win. They had been sent to Portugal with a junior General, and now that General saluted his troops as they marched into Salamanca. At Rolica, Wellington had fought with eighteen guns, this summer's battle would hear more than sixty British cannon. Two hundred cavalry had paraded at Rolica, now there were more than four thousand. The war was growing, spreading across the Peninsula, up into Europe, and there were rumours that the Americans were beating the drum against England while Napoleon, the ringmaster of it all, was looking north to the empty Russian maps.

Sharpe did not watch the whole parade. In one of the eight streets that led to the Plaza he found a wineshop and bought a skin of red wine that he decanted, carefully, into his round, wooden canteen. A gipsy woman watched him, her black eyes unreadable, one hand holding a baby high on her breast, the other plunged deep into her ap.r.o.n where she clutched the few coins she had begged during the day. Sharpe left a few mouthfuls in the skin and tossed it to her. She caught it and jetted the wine into the baby's mouth. A stall beneath the Plaza archway was selling food and Sharpe took some tripe, cooked in a spiced sauce, and as he drank his wine, ate the food, he thought how lucky he was to be alive on this day, in this place, and he wished he could share this moment with Teresa. Then he thought of Windham's body, blood smeared on the dry ground, and he hoped that the Frenchmen shut up in the forts were hearing the band and antic.i.p.ating the siege. Leroux would die.

The parade finished, the soldiers were marched away or dismissed, yet the band played on, serenading the nightly ceremony in which the people of Salamanca played out a stately flirtation. The townspeople walked in the Plaza each evening. The men walked clockwise at the outer edge of the square, while the girls, giggling and arm in arm, walked counter-clockwise in an inner ring. British soldiers now joined the outer promenaders, eyeing the girls, calling out to them, while the Spanish men, jealous, watched coldly.

Sharpe did not join the circle. Instead he walked in the deep shadow of the arcade, past the shops that sold fine leathers, jewels, books, and silks. He walked slowly, licking the garlic from his fingers, and he was a strange figure in the holiday crowd. He had pushed his shako back, letting his black hair fall over the top of the long scar that ran, beside his left eye, to his cheek. It gave him a sardonic, mocking look when his face was at rest. Only laughter or a smile softened the rigour of the scar. His uniform was as tattered as any Rifleman's. The scabbard of his long sword was battered. He looked what he was, a fighting soldier.