Sharpe's Sword Part 29

"Yes, sir."

Harper stepped on the foot of the man who had hit him with a musket. Hogan saw the man's face flinch in agony, Harper leaned harder, then the Sergeant stepped away with a surprised look on his face. "Sorry." He looked at Hogan. "Should we go and look for him, sir?"

Hogan had seen the lump and the blood on Harper's head. He gestured at it. "How is it?"

"b.l.o.o.d.y terrible, sir. Feels as if some b.a.s.t.a.r.d sc.r.a.ped my brains out. I'll live." Harper set off up the street.

Hogan caught up with him. "Don't be too hopeful, Patrick." He did not like saying it, but it had to be said. "He was shot, and the surgeons didn't see him." Hogan had to hurry to keep up with the huge Sergeant. "He's probably buried with the British, Patrick."

Harper shook his head. "He's not buried at all, sir. He's probably sitting up in bed screaming for his breakfast. He always did have a terrible tongue in his head in the morning."

Hogan shook his head. "You didn't hear me. They didn't treat a British officer with a bullet wound." He hated puncturing Harper's hopes, yet still the Irish Sergeant seemed unmoved.

"You searched, sir?"

"Yes. Officers' wards, surgery, the dead in the courtyard."

"Other ranks' wards?"

Hogan shrugged. "Sergeant Huckfield looked for you, he didn't see Sharpe. Why should Sharpe be there?"

Harper screwed his face up with the pain of his head. "They didn't treat an officer?"

Hogan felt sorry for Harper. At last the truth had sunk in. "I'm sorry, Patrick. They didn't."

"Like as not. The b.u.g.g.e.r wasn't wearing his jacket, and doubtless they saw the scars on his back."

"He what?" Hogan dodged round a water-seller who was waving his leather spout hoping the Major would buy.

Harper shrugged. "He left his jacket with the Lieutenant, didn't he? It was so d.a.m.ned hot out there. Then the surgeons must have seen his back. Like mine." Both Sharpe and Harper had been flogged and the scars never went.

Hogan swore at the absent Lieutenant Price who had never thought to mention Sharpe's jacket. He began to run, the hope suddenly giddy inside him, and they took the steps of the college in two leaps. The hope stayed with him as they went into the mens' wards. Hogan imagined Sharpe's face when he saw them, the relief, the joking that he had been mistaken for a Private, even a Frenchman, but there was no Sharpe there. They searched each room, twice, and the faces on the floor stayed the same. Harper shrugged. "Perhaps he woke up, told them who he was?"

The orderlies said no. They had seen no officers, no patient complaining about being in the ward. There was no Sharpe. The hope went. Even Harper seemed to be resigned. "I can dig up the British, sir."

"No, Patrick."

One of the orderlies had become involved in their search. He still wandered, hopeful, among the crammed wounded. He looked at Hogan and seemed reluctant to speak. "Was he shot bad, sir?"

Hogan nodded. "Yes."

"Connelley's kingdom, sir?"

"What?" The orderly pointed out of the window to a small door at the far side of the courtyard. "The death room, sir. The cellar."

They crossed the gra.s.s, beneath the awnings that were still rigged round the wellhead, and Harper pulled open the door. ;A stench came up into the sunlight, a stench of pus, blood, vomit, foulness and death. There was a light at the bottom of the steps, a feeble, flickering rushlight, and a great bulk of a man peered up in its illumination.

"Who's that?"

"Friends. Who are you?"

"Connelley, your honour. Sergeant. Would you be relieving me, of your kindness?"

"We would not." Harper went down the steps, treading carefully because they were slippery, and the stink of disease and death grew worse. The room was filled with moaning, with small cries, but the bodies lay utterly still as if, in the darkness, they were rehearsing for the grave. "We're looking for a man with a scarred face, and scarred back. He was shot yesterday."

Connelley swayed slightly, the drink rank on his breath. "Would you be Irish?"

"I would. Now do you know the man?"

"A scar, you say? They all have scars. They're soldiers, not milkmaids." Connelley groaned and sat heavily on his bench. He waved a hand towards the small barred window. "We had an Irish lad in yesterday, shot he was. Patrick he calls himself. He was alive an hour ago, but he won't last. They never do." Hogan had come down the stairs and the fat, drunken Sergeant peered at the officer's uniform. "Oh, my G.o.d, and it's an officer, to be sure." He lumbered to his feet and his hand wavered to a salute. The salute turned into an expansive wave round the room. "Ah, and they're all good lads. They know how to die like men, so they do, and there's no call for you to be officering them, sir, they're doing their duty."

Harper pushed Connelley gently back onto his bench. He took the torch from its bracket and set off to search the room. Hogan watched him and felt the hope inside him shrivel to nothingness. The bodies were so still, so hopeless. The room was like a grave.

Harper crouched under the brick ceiling and held the torch over the bodies. He went left first, into the darkest part of the cellar, and the faces he saw were pale. Some slept, some were dead, and some watched the light go past and there was a terrible hope in their eyes that the torch presaged some help, some miracle. Many s.h.i.+vered beneath their blankets. Fever would kill them if their wounds did not.

Harper could not imagine a man being in this room and living, but this was the death room and they were here to die. The big Sergeant, Connelley, seemed decent enough. Some death-room attendants simply stifled their charges, or slipped a dagger between their ribs, because they could not endure the endless crying, the moans, the helpless, childlike ways of the dying. Harper turned at the end wall and carried the torch down the far side. He stopped a few times and pulled damp blankets away from hidden faces, and he saw the fever and smelt their deaths. He went past the stairs where Hogan stood by Connelley's bench. "Anything, Sergeant?" Hogan's whisper was an expression of worry. Harper did not reply.

He stopped beside another man whose face was hidden, whose legs were drawn up, and Harper pulled back the blanket that lay right up to the dark hair. There was a second blanket beneath and the man was clutching it, hiding his face, and Harper had to prise the fingers open so he could pull it down.

The eyes were red. Already the cheeks seemed sunken. The face was pale, the hair soaking with sweat and water. Harper could not detect any breath, yet the fingers had not been cold, and the huge Irishman put a single finger onto the long scar. The eyes did not move. They were staring into blankness, into the s.p.a.ce where the rats had been in the night. Harper's voice was very soft. "You silly b.u.g.g.e.r. What are you doing here?"

Sharpe's eyes moved, slowly, up to the face that flickered in the light of the torch. "Patrick?" There was no strength in the voice.

"Yes." Harper looked round at Hogan. "He's here, sir."

"Alive?" Hogan's voice was just above a whisper.

"Yes, sir." But only just, Harper thought, by the thickness of the merest thread, but alive.

CHAPTER 16.

Marmont had marched north, away from the River Tonnes, forty miles to the valley of the River Douro. The dust of the French retreat spiralled high from the wheels, boots and hooves of the army; dust that plumed in the sun over the wheatfields. It was like the thin smoke trail of an unimaginably large gra.s.s fire. It faded, carried eastwards by a breeze from the far Atlantic, and the plains of Leon were left empty except for the hovering hawks, the lizards, and the poppies and cornflowers that smeared colour on a bleached land.

On Monday, June 29th, the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, the British army was swallowed up in the haze of the immense plain. They went north, following Marmont, and all that came back were rumours. One day the people of Salamanca said that there had been a great battle, that the sky had lit up with the flashes of the great guns, but it wasjust a summer storm sheeting the dark horizon with silver and the next day there was another rumour. It was said Wellington was beaten, his head cut off, and then it was the French who had lost, who had soaked the Douro red with their blood, dammed it with their corpses. They were just rumours.

The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary came and went, then St. Martin's Day, and a peasant girl in BarbadillO said an angel had appeared to her in a dream. The angel had been armoured in gold and carried a scarlet sword with two blades. The angel had said that the last battle would be fought in Salamanca, that the armies of the north would harrow the city, pour blood in its streets, desecrate the Cathedrals, trample the host, until, in desperation, the earth would open up and swallow the evil and righteous alike. Her village priest, a lazy and sensible man, had her locked away. There was trouble enough in the world without hysterical women, but the rumour spread, and the peasants looked at their young olives and wondered if they would live to see an autumn harvest.

In the north, beyond the Douro, beyond Galicia, across the Pyrenees and France itself, and still further north, a small man led a vast army into Russia. It was an army the like of which the world had not seen since the hooves of the Barbarians came out of the dawn. The war had become unimaginable, so vast that the dreams of a Barbadillo peasant girl were not so far removed from the fears of sober statesmen. Across the Atlantic, beyond the shredded wave crests, the Americans prepared their forces to invade British Canada. It was a world war now, fought from the Great Lakes to the Indian Ocean, from the Russian steppes to the plains of Leon.

Sharpe was alive. A message went north to the South Ess.e.x, and another went further north to La Aguja, "the needle', and it told of her husband's injury and urged her to come south. Hogan was not hopeful that his messenger could reach Teresa; the journey was long and the Partisans used secret paths and hiding places.

Sharpe was moved upstairs. He had his own room, small and bare, and Harper and Isabella curtained offone half and lived with him. The doctors said Sharpe would die. The pain, they said, would stay with him, even increase, and the wound would abscess into constant blood and pus. Most of what they said came true. Hogan had ordered Harper to stay, an unnecessary order, but the big Irish Sergeant sometimes found it hard to endure the pain, the smell, the helplessness of his Captain. He and Isabella washed Sharpe, cleaned away the pus, dressed the wound, and listened to the rumours that came back to the small British force left in the city.

A letter came from the Battalion, written by Major Forrest and signed with scores of names. The Light Company wrote their own, penned by Lieutenant Price, decorated by the crosses and signatures of the men, and sometimes Sharpe was lucid and he was pleased with the letters.

Somehow he hung on. Each morning Harper expected to find his Captain dead, but he lived, and even the doctors shrugged and conceded that sometimes, very rarely, a man recovered from that wound. Then Sharpe took the fever. The wound was still abscessed, its dressing changed twice a day, but now Harper and Isabella had to wipe the sweat that poured from Sharpe and listen to the ravings that he muttered day and night.