better to do, Pat?’
‘We can come with you,’ Vicente said.
‘Better if you stay here, Jorge,’ Sharpe said, then took out his pocket knife and unfolded the blade. ‘Have you ever looked after wounds?’ he asked Sarah.
She shook her head.
‘Time to learn,’ Sharpe said. ‘Take the bandage off Jorge’s shoulder and find the bullet. Take it out. Take out any scraps of his shirt or jacket. If he tells you to stop because it’s hurting, dig harder. Be ruthless. Dig out the bullet and anything else, then clean up the wound. Use this.’ He gave her his canteen that still had a little water in it. ‘Then make a new bandage,’ he went on, before laying Vicente’s loaded rifle beside her, ‘and if a Frog comes out here, shoot him. Pat and I will hear and we’ll come back.’ Sharpe doubted that he or Harper could recognize a rifle’s bark amidst all the other shots, but he reckoned Sarah might need the reassurance. ‘Think you can do all that?’
She hesitated, then nodded. ‘I can.’
‘It’s going to hurt like hell, Jorge,’ Sharpe warned, ‘but God knows if we can find you a doctor in this town today, so let Miss Fry do her best.’ He straightened up and turned to Harper. ‘Can you jump that alley, Pat?’
‘God save Ireland.’ Harper looked at the gap between the houses. ‘It’s a terrible long way, sir.’
‘So make sure you don’t fall,’ Sharpe said, then stood on the parapet where it made a right angle to the alleyway. He gave himself a few paces to build up speed, then ran and made a desperate leap across the void. He made it easily, clearing the far parapet and crashing into the roof tiles so that agony flared in his ribs. He scrambled aside and watched as Harper, bigger and less lithe, followed him. The Sergeant landed right across the parapet, winding himself as its edge drove into his belly, but Sharpe grabbed his jacket and hauled him over.
‘I said it was a long way,’ Harper said.
‘You eat too much.’
‘Jesus, in this army?’ Harper said, then dusted himself off and followed Sharpe along the next gutter. They passed skylights and windows, but no one was inside to see them. In places the parapet had crumbled away and Sharpe scrambled up to the roof ridge because it gave them safer footing. They negotiated a dozen chimneys, then slid down to another alley and another jump. ‘This one’s narrower,’ Sharpe said to encourage Harper.
‘Where are we going, sir?’
‘The warehouse,’ Sharpe said, pointing to its great stone gable.
Harper eyed the gap. ‘It would be easier to go through the sewer,’ he grumbled.
‘If you want to, Pat. Meet me there.’
‘I’ve come this far,’ Harper said, and winced as Sharpe made the leap. He followed, arriving safely, and the two clambered up the next roof and along its ridge until they arrived at the street which divided the block of houses from the building Sharpe reckoned was the warehouse.
Sharpe slid down the tile slope to the gutter by the parapet, then peered over. He pulled back instantly. ‘Dragoons,’ he said.
‘How many?’
‘Dozen? Twenty?’ He was sure it was the warehouse. He had seen the big double doors, one of them ajar, and from the roof ridge he had just seen the skylights on the warehouse which was slightly higher up the hill. The street was too wide to be jumped, so there was no way of reaching those skylights from this roof, but then Sharpe peered again and saw that the dragoons were not plundering. Every other Frenchman in the city seemed to have been let off the leash, but these dragoons were sitting on their horses, their swords drawn, and he realized they must have been posted to guard the warehouse. They were turning French infantrymen away, using the flat of their swords if any became too insistent. ‘They’ve got the bloody food, Pat.’
‘And they’re welcome to it.’
‘No, they’re bloody not,’ Sharpe said savagely.
‘So how in Christ are we supposed to take it away from them?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Sharpe said. He knew the food had to be taken away if the French were to be beaten, yet for a moment he was tempted to let the whole thing slide. To hell with it. The army had treated him badly, so why the hell should he care? Yet he did care, and he would be damned before Ferragus helped the French win the war. The noise in the city was getting louder, the noise of screaming, of disorder, of chaos let loose, and the frequent musket shots were startling hundreds of pigeons into the air. He peered a third time at the dragoons and saw how they had formed two lines to block the ends of the small street to keep the French infantry away from the warehouse. Scores of men were protesting to the dragoons and Sharpe guessed that the horsemen’s presence had started a rumour that there was food in the street, and the infantry, who had become ever more hungry as they marched through a stripped land, were probably desperate with hunger. ‘I’m not sure,’ Sharpe said again, ‘but I’ve got an idea.’
‘An idea for what, sir?’
‘To keep those bastards hungry,’ Sharpe said, which was what Wellington wanted, so Sharpe would give it to his lordship. He would keep the bastards hungry.
A chief commissary came to inspect the food. He was a small man named Laurent Poquelin, short, stocky and bald as an egg, but with long moustaches that he twisted nervously whenever he was worried, and he had been much worried in the last few weeks, for l’Armée de Portugal had found itself in a land emptied of food and he was responsible for feeding sixty-five thousand men, seventeen thousand cavalry horses and another three thousand assorted horses and mules. It could not be done in a wasted land, in a place where every orchard had been stripped of fruit, where the larders had been emptied, the storehouses despoiled, the wells poisoned, the livestock driven away, the mills disassembled and the ovens broken. The Emperor himself could not do it! All the forces of heaven could not do it, yet Poquelin was expected to work the miracle, and his moustache tips were ragged with nerves. He had been ordered to carry three weeks of supplies with the army, and those supplies had existed in the depots of Spain, but there were not nearly enough draught animals to carry such an amount, and even though Masséna had reluctantly cut each division’s artillery from twelve guns to eight, and released those horses to haul wagons instead of cannon, Poquelin had still only managed to supply the army for a week. Then the hunger had set in. Dragoons and hussars had been sent miles away from the army’s line of march to search for food, and each such foray had worn out more horses, and the cavalry moaned at him because there were no replacement horseshoes, and some cavalrymen died each time because the Portuguese peasantry ambushed them in the hills. It did not seem to matter how many such peasants were hanged or shot, because more came to harass the foraging parties, which meant more horsemen had to be sent to protect the foragers, and more horseshoes were needed, and there were no more horseshoes and Poquelin got the blame. And the foragers rarely did find food, and if they did they usually ate most of it themselves, and Poquelin got the blame for that too. He had begun to wish he had followed his mother’s tearful advice and become a priest, anything would be better than serving in an army that was sucking on a dry teat and accusing him of inefficiency.
Yet now the miracle had happened. At a stroke, Poquelin’s troubles were over.
There
