style="font-size:15px;"> ‘Smoke in my throat, sir,’ Harper said. ‘It catches something dreadful, sir. I was always a sickly child, sir, on account of the peat smoke in our cottage. My mother made me sleep outside, God rest her soul, until the wolves came for me.’
‘Wolves?’ Slingsby sounded cautious.
‘Three of them, sir, big as you’d like, with slobbery great tongues the colour of your coat, sir, and I had to sleep inside after that, and I just coughed my way through the nights. It was all that smoke, see?’
‘Your parents should have built a chimney,’ Slingsby said disapprovingly.
‘Now why didn’t we think of that?’ Harper enquired innocently and Sharpe laughed aloud, earning a vicious look from the Lieutenant.
The rest of the light company was close now and Ensign Iliffe was among them. Sharpe saw the boy’s sabre was red at the tip. Sharpe nodded at it. ‘Well done, Mister Iliffe.’
‘He just came at me, sir.’ The boy had suddenly found his voice. ‘A big man!’
‘He was a sergeant,’ Harris explained, ‘and he was going to stick Mister Iliffe, sir.’
‘He was!’ Iliffe was excited.
‘But Mister Iliffe stepped past him neat as a squirrel, sir, and gave him steel in the belly. It was a good stroke, Mister Iliffe,’ Harris said, and the Ensign just blushed.
Sharpe tried to recall the first time he had been in a fight, steel against steel, but the trouble was he had been brought up in London and almost born to that kind of savagery. But for Mister Iliffe, son of an impoverished Essex gentleman, there had to be a shock in realizing that some great brute of a Frenchman was trying to kill him and Sharpe, remembering how sick the boy had been, reckoned he had done very well. He grinned at Iliffe. ‘Only the one Crapaud, Mister Iliffe?’
‘Only one, sir.’
‘And you an officer, eh? You’re supposed to kill two a day!’
The men laughed. Iliffe just looked pleased with himself.
‘Enough chatter!’ Slingsby took command of the company. ‘Hurry up!’ The South Essex colours had moved south along the ridge top, evidently going towards the fight with the second leading column, and the light company slanted that way. The French shells had stopped their futile harassment of the slope and were instead firing at the ridge top now, their fuses leaving small pencil traces in the sky above the light company. The sound of the second column was loud now, a cacophony of drums, war cries and the stutter of the skirmishers’ muskets.
Sharpe went with the light company to the ridge top where he reluctantly let Slingsby take them again while he looked for Lawford. The fog, which had cleared almost to the valley bottom, was thickening again now, a great billow of it hiding the two smaller columns and rolling southwards to where, by the rough track that climbed the ridge, the second French column was advancing. That second column, larger than the first, had climbed more slowly, and had been given an easier time than their defeated comrades for they had been able to follow the track that twisted its way up the ridge’s slope, and the track gave them a guide in the fog so that when they erupted into the sunlight they had managed to keep their ranks. Eight thousand men, driven by one hundred and sixty-three drummers, closed on the crest and there, under the flail of fire, they stopped.
The first battalion of the 74th Highlanders had been waiting and beside them was a whole brigade of Portuguese and on their right flank were two batteries of nine-pounders. The guns struck first, flaying the column with round shot and canister, making the heather slick with blood, and then the Highlanders opened fire. The range was very long, more suited for riflemen than redcoats, but the bullets slapped home and then the Portuguese opened fire and the column, like a bull confused by an unexpected attack by terriers, stalled. Columns were again meeting lines and, though the column outnumbered the line, the line would always outshoot the column. Only the men at the front of the column and a handful along the edge could use their muskets, but every man in the British and Portuguese line could fire his weapon and the column was being driven in, turned red, hammered, yet it did not retreat. The voltigeurs, who had chased away the Scottish and Portuguese skirmishers, retreated to the column’s front rank which now tried to return the musket fire. French officers shouted at the men to march, the drummers persisted with the pas de charge, but the front ranks would not press up into the relentless pelting of the musket balls. Instead, feebly, they returned the fire, but the men in the column’s front rank were dying every second, and then more Portuguese cannons came to the right flank of the 74th. The guns slewed round, their horses were taken back out of musket range, and the gunners rammed canister over round shot. The new guns crashed back and the leading left corner of the column began to resemble the devil’s butcher’s shop. It was a sodden tangle of broken bodies, blood and screaming men. And still the guns recoiled, jetting a spew of smoke with every discharge, their barrels depressed to fire down into the crowded mass of Frenchmen. Every round shot had to be wedged in the barrel with a circle of rope to stop the ball trickling down the barrel, and the rope loops burned in the air like crazed fireballs as they spun in mad whorls. More allied troops were coming to the fight, marching along the newly made road from the southern end of the long ridge. That southern end was quiet, apparently under no threat from the French, and the arriving men formed south of the guns and added their own musket fire.
The column shuddered under the onslaught of the merciless guns and then began to edge northwards. The French officers could see there was an empty space on the ridge beyond the Portuguese brigade and they shouted at their men to go right. A voltigeur officer sent a company ahead to occupy the skyline as, behind them, the cumbersome mass edged its way towards the opening, leaving a right-angled line of bodies, the remnants of their left flank and front lines, thick on the rocky slope.
Lieutenant Colonel Lawford saw the column approaching and, more urgently, the voltigeurs running to claim the open ground. ‘Mister Slingsby!’ Lawford called. ‘You will deploy the light company! Send those miscreants back where they belong. Battalion! Battalion will move to the right!’ Lawford was marching the South Essex into the open space, going to seal it off, and Slingsby had the job of throwing back the enemy skirmishers. Sharpe, back on Slingsby’s horse which had been rescued by Major Forrest, rode behind the colour party and counted the Eagles in the shuffling column. He could see fifteen. The noise of splintering dominated the air, the sound of muskets like dry thorns burning, and the incessant crackling was echoing from the distant side of the valley. The powder smoke drifted above the fog which had crept back up the slope almost to the ridge’s top. Every now and then the great white vaporous mass twitched as a French round shot or shell punched through. The hillside was dotted with bodies, all blue-coated. A man crawled downhill, trailing a broken leg. A dog ran to and fro, barking, trying to rouse its dead master. A French officer, sword discarded, held his hands to his face as blood oozed between his fingers. The cannons hammered and bucked, and then came the distinctive crack of the rifles as Sharpe’s company went into action. He hated just watching them, but he also admired them. They were good. They had taken the enemy voltigeurs by surprise and the riflemen had already put down two officers and now the muskets took up the fight.
Slingsby, holding his sabre scabbard clear of the rough ground, strutted up and down behind them. He was doubtless snapping his orders and Sharpe felt a surge of hatred for the man. The bastard was going to take his job and all because he had married Lawford’s sister-in-law. The hatred was like bile and Sharpe instinctively reached for his rifle, took it from his shoulder and pulled the flint to half cock. He used his thumb to push the strike plate forward and the frizzen leaped away on its spring. He felt in the pan, making certain the priming was still there after his tumble from the horse. He confirmed the powder was there, gritty under his dirty thumb and, staring all the while at Slingsby, he
