also watched the French. ‘What happens if they bring a mortar?’ he asked.
‘We’re buggered,’ Sharpe said, ‘but a lot can happen before a mortar gets here.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sharpe said irritably. He really did not know, any more than he knew what to do. Christopher had been very persuasive and it was only a streak of stubbornness in Sharpe that made him so certain the Colonel was lying. That and the look in Major Dulong’s eyes. ‘Maybe I’m wrong, Pat, maybe I’m wrong. Trouble is I like it here.’
Harper smiled. ‘You like it here?’
‘I like being away from the army. Captain Hogan’s all right, but the rest? I can’t stand the rest.’
‘Jack puddings,’ Harper said flatly, meaning officers.
‘I’m better on my own,’ Sharpe said, ‘and out here I’m on my own. So we’re staying.’
‘Aye,’ Harper said, ‘and I think you’re right.’
‘You do?’ Sharpe sounded surprised.
‘I do,’ Harper said, ‘mind you, my mother never reckoned I was any good at thinking.’
Sharpe laughed. ‘Go and clean your rifle, Pat.’
Cooper had boiled a can of water and some of the riflemen used it to swill out their weapons’ barrels. Every shot left a little layer of caked powder that would eventually build up and make the rifle unusable, but hot water dissolved the residue. Some riflemen preferred to piss down the barrel. Hagman used the boiling water, then scraped at his barrel with his ramrod. ‘You want me to clean yours, sir?’ he asked Sharpe.
‘It’ll wait, Dan,’ Sharpe said, then saw Sergeant Macedo and his men come back and he wondered where his own gravediggers were and so he went to the northernmost redoubt from where he could see Harris and Dodd stamping the earth down over Donnelly’s body while Williamson leaned on the spade. ‘Aren’t you finished?’ Sharpe shouted at them. ‘Hurry!’
‘Coming, sir!’ Harris called, and he and Dodd picked up their jackets and started up the hill. Williamson hefted the spade, looked as if he was about to follow and then, quite suddenly, turned and ran down the hill.
‘Jesus!’ Harper appeared beside Sharpe and raised his rifle.
Sharpe pushed it down. He was not trying to save Williamson’s life, but there was a truce on the hill and even a single rifle shot could be construed as breaking the truce and the howitzer could answer the shot while Dodd and Harris were still on the open slope.
‘The bastard!’ Hagman watched Williamson run recklessly down the hill as though he was trying to outrun the expected bullet. Sharpe felt a terrible sense of failure. He had not liked Williamson, but even so it was the officer who had failed when a man ran. The officer would not get punished, of course, and the man, if he were ever caught, would be shot, but Sharpe knew that this was his failure. It was a reproof to his command.
Harper saw the stricken look on Sharpe’s face and did not understand it. ‘We’re best off without the bastard, sir,’ he said.
Dodd and Harris looked dumbfounded and Harris even turned as if he wanted to chase Williamson until Sharpe called him back. ‘I should never have sent Williamson to do that job,’ he said bitterly.
‘Why not?’ Harper said. ‘You weren’t to know he’d run.’
‘I don’t like losing men,’ Sharpe said bitterly.
‘It’s not your fault!’ Harper protested.
‘Then whose is it?’ Sharpe asked angrily. Williamson had vanished into the French ranks, presumably to join Christopher, and the only small consolation was that he had not been able to take his rifle with him. But it was still failure, and Sharpe knew it. ‘Best get under cover,’ he told Harper. ‘Because they’ll start that damn gun again soon.’
The howitzer fired ten minutes before the hour was up, though as no one on the hilltop possessed a watch they did not realize it. The shell struck a boulder just below the lowest redoubt and ricocheted up into the sky where it exploded in a gout of grey smoke, flame and whistling shards of shattered casing. One scrap of hot iron buried itself in the stock of Dodd’s rifle, the rest rattled on rocks.
Sharpe, still reproaching himself for Williamson’s desertion, was watching the main road in the far valley. There was dust there and he could just make out horsemen riding from the north west, from the Oporto road. Was it a mortar coming? If it was, he thought, then he would have to think about making an escape. Maybe, if they went fast, they could break through the dragoon cordon to the west and get into the high ground where the rocky terrain would make things hard for horsemen, but it would likely prove a bloody passage for the first half-mile. Unless he could try it at night? But if that was a mortar approaching then it would be in action long before nightfall. He stared at the distant road, cursing the shortcomings of Christopher’s telescope, and persuaded himself that he could see no kind of vehicle, whether gun carriage or mortar wagon, among the horsemen, but they were very far off and he could not be certain.
‘Mister Sharpe, sir?’ It was Dan Hagman. ‘Can I have a go at the bastards?’
Sharpe was still brooding over his failure and his first instinct was to tell the old poacher not to waste his time. Then he became aware of the odd atmosphere on the hill. His men were embarrassed because of Williamson. Many of them probably feared that Sharpe, in his anger, would punish them all for one man’s sin, and others, very few, might have wanted to follow Williamson, but most probably felt that the desertion was a reproach to them all. They were a unit, they were friends, they were proud of each other, and one of them had deliberately thrown that comradeship away. Yet now Hagman was offering to restore some of that pride and Sharpe nodded. ‘Go on, Dan,’ he said, ‘but only you. Only Hagman!’ he called to the other riflemen. He knew that they would all love to blaze away at the gun crew, but the distance was prodigious, right at the very end of a rifle’s range, and only Hagman had the skill to even come close.
Sharpe looked again at the distant dust cloud, but the horses had turned onto the smaller track that led to Vila Real de Zedes and, head on, he could not see whether they escorted any vehicle so he trained the glass on the howitzer’s crew and saw they were ramming a new shell down the stubby barrel. ‘Get under cover!’
Hagman alone stayed in the open. He was loading his rifle, first pouring powder from his horn into the barrel. Most of the time he would have used a cartridge which had powder and ball conveniently wrapped in waxed paper, but for this kind of shot, at seven hundred yards, he would use the high-quality powder carried in the horn. He used slightly more than was provided in a cartridge and, when the barrel was charged, he laid the weapon aside and took out the handful of loose bullets that nestled among the tea leaves at the bottom of his cartridge pouch. The enemy shell went just wide of the watchtower and exploded harmlessly over the steep western slope and, though the noise buffeted the eardrums and the broken casing rattled angrily against the stones, Hagman did not even look up. He was using the middle finger of his right hand to roll the bullets one by one in the palm of his left hand, and when he was sure he had found the most perfectly shaped ball, he put the others away and picked up his rifle again. At the back of the stock there was a small cavity covered with a brass lid. The cavity had two compartments; the larger held the rifle’s cleaning tools while the smaller was filled with patches made of thin and flexible leather that had been smeared with
