SHARPE’S
FURY
Richard Sharpe and the Battle
of Barrosa, March 1811
BERNARD CORNWELL
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006
Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2000
Map © Ken Lewis 2006
Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
EPub Edition © September 2011 ISBN: 978 0 00 733866 5
This novel is a work of fiction.
The incidents and some of the characters portrayed in it, while based on real historical events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.
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Version: 2017-05-06
Sharpe’s Fury is for Eric Sykes
‘The best thing to happen to military heroes since Hornblower’
Daily Express
Table of Contents
The SHARPE Series (in chronological order)
The SHARPE Series (in order of publication)
CHAPTER ONE
You were never far from the sea in Cadiz. The smell of it was always there, almost as powerful as the stink of sewage. On the city’s southern side, when the wind was high and from the south, the waves would shatter on the sea wall and spray would rattle on shuttered windows. After the battle of Trafalgar storms had battered the city for a week and the winds had carried the sea spray to the cathedral and torn down scaffolding about its unfinished dome. Waves had besieged Cadiz and pieces of broken ship had clattered on the stones, and then the corpses had come. But that had been almost six years ago and now Spain fought on the same side as Britain, though Cadiz was all that was left of Spain. The rest of the country was either ruled by France or had no government at all. Guerrilleros haunted the hills, poverty ruled the streets and Spain was sullen.
February, 1811. Night time. Another storm beat at the city and monstrous waves shattered white against the sea wall. In the dark the watching man could see the explosions of foam and they reminded him of the powder smoke blasted from cannons. There was the same uncertainty about the violence. Just when he thought the waves had done their worst another two or three would explode in sudden bursts and the white water would bloom above the wall like smoke, and the spray would be driven by the wind to spatter against the city’s white walls like grapeshot.
The man was a priest. Father Salvador Montseny was dressed in a cassock, a cloak and a wide black hat that he needed to hold against the wind’s buffeting. He was a tall man, in his thirties, a fierce preacher of saturnine good looks, who now waited in the small shelter of an archway. He was a long way from home. Home was in the north where he had grown up as the unloved son of a widower lawyer who had sent Salvador to a church school. He had become a priest because he did not know what else he should be, but now he wished he had been a soldier. He thought he would have been a good soldier, but fate had made him a sailor instead. He had been a chaplain on board