Yet, Hogan thought, Sharpe could be right. The Rifleman provoked great loyalty from all sorts of men and women. From generals and whores to sergeants and frightened recruits. He was a soldier’s soldier, but his friends and lovers saw the vulnerability in him and it made them fond of him. Yet Hogan wondered how much fondness the Golden Whore had in her soul.
The wind gusted, shrieking like a tormented soul in the shattered cloister, and bringing a slapping, rattling burden of rain to lash the broken tiles and seethe in the embers. Hogan shivered beneath his cloak. This was a place of ghosts, the unseen Shee were riding the winds of storm, and he was sending a friend into the unknown to fight an unequal battle.
Richard Sharpe lay on thin, wiry grass and propped his telescope on his pack. He slid the brass shutter aside from the eyepiece, adjusted the tubes, and stared in awed amazement.
He watched an army marching.
He had seen the smear of dust in the sky, rising higher as the morning moved towards midday’s heat, and the dust had looked like the haze of a great grass fire in the far south.
He had ridden towards the haze, going slowly for fear of enemy cavalry patrols, and now, in the early afternoon, he lay on the low summit of a small hill and stared at the men and animals that had smudged the great plume of dust across the heavens.
The French were marching eastwards. They were marching towards Burgos, towards France.
The road itself was left for the heavy traffic, for the wagons and the guns and the carriages of the generals. Beside the road, trampling the scanty crops, marched the infantry. He moved the telescope right, the far uniforms a blur of colour in his eye, and steadied it where the road came from a small village. Tumbrils and caissons, limbers and ambulances, wagons and more wagons, the horses and oxen dipping their heads with the effort of hauling their loads under the hot Spanish sun. In the village was the tower of an old castle, its grey stone broken by spreading ivy, and Sharpe saw white smoke rising from the tower, mingling with the dust, and knew that the French had looted and now burned the tower. They were abandoning this countryside, going eastward, retreating.
He pushed the telescope left, turning it to look as far to the east as he could see, to where, like a tiny grey blur on the horizon the topmost stones of Burgos’s fortress showed above some trees, and everywhere the road was crammed with men and horses. The infantry moved slowly, like men who hated to retreat. Their women and children slogged along beside them. Cavalry walked beside their steeds, under orders to save their horses’ strength, while only a few squadrons, lancers mostly, whose pennants were stained white with dust, trotted on the flanks of the huge column to protect it against Spanish sharpshooters.
Sharpe rested the telescope. Without the benefit of the fine glass the French army looked like a black snake winding across the valley. He knew he saw a retreat, but he did not know why the enemy retreated. He had heard no guns like thunder in the distance that would have told him of a great battle that Wellington had won. He just watched the great beast snake in the valley, smearing the sky white, and he had no idea why it was here, or where it went, or where his own forces were.
He wriggled back from the skyline, snapped the telescope shut, and turned to the horse which he had tethered to a stone field marker. Hogan had lent him a fine, strong, patient stallion called Carbine, who now watched Sharpe and twitched his long, black, undocked tail. He was a lucky horse, Sharpe thought, because the rule in the British army was that all horses should have their tails cut short, but Carbine had been left his intact so that, at a distance, he would seem to the French to be one of their own. He had been corn fed too, strengthened through the winter to carry one of Hogan’s men who would spy deep behind French lines. Now he carried Sharpe to find a lady.
Though if the Marquesa was in Burgos, Sharpe reflected as he walked towards Carbine, she would be impossible to reach. The French army was falling back on the city, and by tonight Burgos would be surrounded by the enemy. He could only hope that Angel was safe.
The boy was sixteen. His father, a cooper, had died trying to save his wife from the attentions of French Dragoons. Angel had watched his parents die, had seen his house and his father’s workshop burned to cinders, and that same night, armed only with a knife, he had killed his first Frenchman. He had been lucky to escape. He had twisted into the darkness on his young legs as the bullets of the French sentries thrashed about him in the growing rye. He had told Sharpe the story diffidently. ‘I put the knife in my parents’ grave, señor.’ He had buried his parents himself, then gone to find the Partisans. He had been just thirteen.
Instead of Partisans he had met one of Hogan’s Exploring Officers, the men who, in full uniform, galloped their swift horses deep in enemy country. That officer had passed the boy back to Hogan and, in the last three years, Angel had carried messages between the British and the Partisans. ‘I’m getting old for that now.’
Sharpe had chuckled. ‘Old? At sixteen?’
‘Now the French see I am a man. They think I might be an enemy.’ Angel had shrugged. ‘Before that I was just a boy, they took no notice of me.’
This day, as Sharpe had lain and watched the French army trudge towards Burgos, Angel had gone into the city. His horse, a gift from Hogan, had been left with Sharpe, together with the rifle that the boy carried. He refused wages from Major Hogan, wanting only his food, shelter when he was with the British, and the ‘gun that kills’. He had been offered a smoothbore musket, and had scathingly rejected it. He wanted only a Baker Rifle and, now that one was his, he looked after it lovingly, polishing its woodwork and meticulously cleaning its lock. He claimed that he and the rifle had killed two Frenchmen for every year of his life.
He was incurious about his task with Sharpe. The Golden Whore meant nothing to him, and he did not care if the Marqués de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba was dead. Such things were boring to Angel. He cared only that he had been told that this job was important, that success would hurt his enemies, and that the search for the Marquesa would take him where there were more Frenchmen to be killed. He was glad to be working for Sharpe. He had heard that Sharpe had killed many Frenchmen. Sharpe had smiled. ‘There’s more to life than killing Frenchmen.’
‘I know, señor.’
‘You do?’
Angel had nodded. ‘But I do not wish to marry yet.’ He had looked up from the fire into Sharpe’s eyes. ‘You think you will chase the French over the mountains? Back to France?’
Sharpe had nodded. ‘Probably.’
‘I shall join your Rifles then.’ He smiled. ‘I shall march into Paris and remember my parents.’
Angel would not be the first Spanish youth to join the British Rifles; indeed some companies had a dozen Spaniards who had begged to be allowed into the elite ranks. ‘Sweet William’ Frederickson said the only problem with the Spanish recruits was getting them to stop fighting. ‘They want to win the war in a day.’ Sharpe, listening to Angel talk of his parents, understood the zeal with which they fought.
Sharpe rode back to the wooded valley where he would wait for Angel to return from the city. He unsaddled Carbine and tethered him to a pine trunk. He dutifully inspected the horse’s hooves, wishing that Angel, who was so much more efficient at looking after the horses, was here to help, then he carried the saddle up to the small clearing that was their rendezvous.
Sharpe waited. Dusk stretched shadows among the pine trunks and a wind rattled the branches overhead. He scouted the margins of the valley in the twilight, looking for humans, but seeing only a vixen and her cubs who played a snarling game at the foot of a sandy bank. He went back to the horses, put his rifle beside him, and waited for Angel’s return.
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