was just wishing it had been you, Lily.’
She shrieked with laughter. ‘Any time, Cap’n, you just ask.’
Sharpe laughed, walked away from her. He admired the wives, and he liked them. They endured all the discomforts of the campaign; the nights under pouring rain, the hard rations, the long marches, yet they never gave up. They watched their men go into battle and afterwards they searched the field for a corpse or a wounded husband, and all the while they brought up their children and looked after their men. Sharpe had seen Lily carrying two of her children up a hard road, her husband’s musket, and the family’s few belongings as well. They were tough.
And they were not ladies; three years in the Peninsula had made sure of that. Some dressed in old uniforms, most were garbed in voluminous, filthy skirts with tattered shawls and scarves around their heads. They were tanned dark brown, with calloused hands and feet, and most could strip a corpse bare in ten seconds, a house in thirty. They were foul-mouthed, loud, and utterly immodest. No women could live with a battalion and be anything else. They slept with their men, often enough, in open fields with nothing but a tree or hedge to give an illusion of privacy. The women washed themselves, relieved themselves, made love, gave birth, and all in plain sight of a thousand eyes. To a fastidious observer they were a fearful sight, yet Sharpe liked them. They were tough, loyal, kind and uncomplaining.
Major Collett bawled an order for the Battalion to make ready, and Sharpe turned to his command; the baggage. It was chaos. Two children had succeeded in cutting the pannier from one of the Sutler’s mules, and the Sutler, a Spaniard who was a kind of travelling shop-keeper with the Battalion, was screaming at the children, but not daring to let go of the straw halter that tethered his other mules.
Sharpe yelled at them. ‘Make ready!’ They took no notice. The Sutler’s assistants caught the children, snatched back the bottles, but then the mothers, sensing loot, attacked the assistants for beating the children. It was pandemonium, his new command.
‘Richard!’ Sharpe twisted back. Major Hogan was behind him.
‘Sir.’
Hogan grinned down from his horse. ‘We’re very formal today.’
‘We’re very responsible. Look.’ Sharpe waved at the baggage train. ‘My new Company.’
‘I heard.’ Hogan slipped from his horse, stretched, and then turned as there were sudden shouts from the bridge. An officer’s horse had become frightened by the sliding, grey water. It was nervously backing in short, jerking steps towards the infantry company behind. The Captain, panicking, was whipping the beast, increasing its terror, and the horse began to rear fitfully.
‘Get off!’ Hogan shouted. He had a surprisingly loud voice. ‘Fool! Get off! Dismount!’
The officer lashed down at the horse, wrenched the reins, and the horse put all its force into bucking the rider off its back. It succeeded. The horse slammed up, screaming, and the officer tumbled from the saddle, bounced once on the roadway’s edge, and disappeared downstream into the river. ‘Stupid bastard!’ Hogan was angry. A Sergeant threw a length of timber into the water, but it fell short, and Sharpe could see the Captain flailing the river, struggling against the freezing current that took him away from the bridge. ‘He’s had it.’
No one dived in to save the officer. By the time a man had stripped himself of pack, haversack, ammunition pouch, weapons and boots the Captain would be long gone. The horse, free of its burden, stood shivering on the bridge and a Private soothed it, then led it calmly to the southern bank. The Captain had disappeared.
‘There’s a vacancy.’ Sharpe laughed.
‘Bitter?’
‘Bitter, sir? No, sir. Being a Lieutenant is very satisfying.’
Hogan gave a sad smile. ‘I hear you were drunk.’
‘No.’ He had been drunk three times since the day Teresa left, the day he had lost the Company. Sharpe shrugged. ‘You know that gazette was refused in January? No one dared tell me. Then the new man arrives so someone has to tell me. So I look after the baggage while some half-cooked youngster destroys my Company.’
‘Is he that bad?’
‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’ Sharpe’s anger had taken himself by surprise.
‘Do you want me to talk to the General?’
‘No!’ Pride would stop Sharpe bleating for help, but then he turned back. ‘Yes, you can talk to the General. Tell him I’ll lead the Forlorn Hope for him at Badajoz.’
Hogan paused with a pinch of snuff half-way to his nostrils. He put it back in the box, carefully, and snapped the lid shut. ‘Are you serious?’
‘I’m serious.’
Hogan shook his head. ‘You don’t need it, Richard. God! There’ll be promotion by the graveload! Don’t you understand? You’ll be a Captain within a month.’
Sharpe shook his head. He understood, but his pride was hurt. ‘I want the Hope, sir, I want it. Ask for me.’
Hogan took Sharpe’s elbow and turned him so they were both looking eastwards along the river towards the city. ‘Do you know what it’s like, Richard? It’s bloody impossible!’ He pointed to the great stone bridge that carried the road to the city. ‘We can’t attack there. Anyone trying to cross that bridge will be shredded. So, try the east wall. They’ve damned the stream and it’s one bloody great lake. We’d need the navy to cross that, unless we can blow up the dam and they’ve built a fort to stop us doing that. There’s the castle, of course.’ Hogan’s words were urgent, almost bitter. ‘If you feel like climbing a hundred feet of rock and then scaling a forty-foot wall, and all the time dodging the grapeshot, you’re welcome.’ He pointed again. ‘So there’s the west wall. Looks easy enough, doesn’t it?’ It did not look easy. Even at four miles Sharpe could see the huge bastions, jutting like miniature castles, that protected the wall. Hogan’s accent was becoming more pronounced as it always did when the Engineer spoke with passion. ‘It looks too easy! They want us to attack there. Why? My guess is that it’s mined. There’s more bloody powder under that glacis than Guy Fawkes dreamed of. We attack there and we give St Peter his busiest day since Agincourt!’ He was really angry now, seeing with his Engineer’s eye the problems, turning the problems into blood. ‘That leaves the south wall. We have to take at least one outlying fort, perhaps two, and then get through the walls. Do you know how thick they are? What was the distance from the brink of the ditch to the back of the walls at Ciudad Rodrigo?’
Sharpe thought back. ‘Thirty yards? Fifty in some places.’
‘Aye.’ Hogan pointed back to Badajoz. ‘A hundred yards, at least, and more in some places. And that ditch is a bastard, Richard, a real bastard. It’ll take a minute to cross it, at least, and they have all the flank fire they’ll ever need, and more. That wall, Richard, is big. Big! You could put Ciudad Rodrigo’s wall in that ditch and you wouldn’t even see it. Don’t you understand? It is a killer.’ He said the words distinctly, trying to convince Sharpe. Hogan sighed. ‘Jesus! We can starve them out. We can hope they die laughing, we can hope they get the plague, but I tell you, Richard, I don’t know if we can get through a breach.’
Sharpe stared at the great fortress in the slanting, hissing rain. ‘We’ll have to.’
‘And
