Chapter 10

Fat drops of rain battered a clump of ferns at the base of a pine tree. Sergeant Harper regarded the quivering greenery for a moment and then turned to look out at the thunderheads which menaced the hilltops. The change in the weather, promised for weeks, had finally resulted in a deluge; the rain gusting in sheets across the open ground that separated the wooded hillside from the fortress.

Harper leaned against the tree trunk to reload his rifle, humming snatches of Ladies of Spain under his breath. The men of the 95th had provided covering fire for their comrades, but the French had pursued them for only a short time and without enthusiasm, most of them returning to safety within the castle walls.

"No sign of Major Sharpe, then?" Harris asked, as he took shelter beside the Sergeant. The dense foliage shielded them from the worst of the weather; nevertheless, Harris took care to protect his rifle and ammunition from any drizzle that might slip through the dark canopy.

"Not yet, no."

Both men peered beneath a low-hanging branch to where the Castillo rose in the distance, its yellow-gold walls seeming to glow in the eerie sulphurous light.

"He went after Major Hewlin, didn't he?"

Harper nodded. "That he did. He'll be all right, though. Major Sharpe has the luck of the Irish."

"But he isn't Irish," Harris said mildly.

"I've lent him mine for the duration. Not that he needs it," Harper said lightly. Harris wasn't fooled by the Sergeant's tone. Major Sharpe might have a cat's nine lives, but Major Hewlin was crafty and ruthless. Harper turned his face to the bivouac fire that burned fitfully a few feet away and stared into the flames.

Dobbs emerged from the unseasonable gloom, one hand on the shoulder of a small boy. He halted before Sergeant Harper, rain dripping from his shako and prodded the child into taking a reluctant step forward.

"What's this then, Dobbs? Are we taking in waifs and strays?" Harper winked at the boy, who drew back, large-eyed.

"Flushed 'im out when we made camp, sir, "Dobbs offered, adding pointedly in a lower tone, " Says 'e's from the village." 

"Is that right?" Harper beckoned to the boy. "Come here, son. I don't think you should be running about in the dark on your own, do you?"

Struggling to control a quivering lower lip, the boy shook his head and stared at the ground. Finally he looked up and met Harper's gaze, and following another ungentle prod from Dobbs, suffered himself to be seated beside the fire.    

Sharpe stared straight ahead, angered by the flutter of anxiety that rose in his throat, that primitive fear of the dark. He put a hand to his eyes, feeling his pupils expanding achingly to their limits in a vain attempt to perceive even the faintest glimmer of light.

Hewlin chuckled. "Painful, isn't it? Enough to make your eyes pop clean out of their sockets. No chance of natural light reaching us down here, old man. Never has been."

Sharpe closed his eyes and leant back against the rock wall and allowed the silence to stretch between them. While the candle lived, minutes could be counted off as the wax pooled around its base, but without it, time had become elastic, seconds expanding into hours, hours into days.

Sharpe started at an insistent tug on the rope around his waist. "What?" he growled, turning toward the spot where he remembered Hewlin to be.

"Oh, nothing," Hewlin's voice floated back. "Just making sure you were still there."

For one moment, Sharpe imagined that Hewlin's voice was coming from a different part of the cavern, but then dismissed it as being a peculiarity of the chamber's construction.  "Where else would I be?"

"Where indeed?" Hewlin's breath caught in his throat.

The blanketing silence descended once more. Sharpe's head drooped onto his chest, the stale air in the cavern dragging him toward unconsciousness.

"I suppose you've always thought you'd die in battle, eh, Sharpe? Never pictured yourself gasping your last at home, in bed, surrounded by grandchildren?"

Hewlin paused expectantly, but as Sharpe said nothing, he continued, his voice cracking. "No, of course you didn't. Soldiers never think of it at all, do they? That would only tempt Fate. It's a good thing you got all your heroics out of the way early on."

Hewlin gave a satisfied grunt as if his comment had goaded Sharpe into responding. "Oh yes, I heard all about your taking an eagle at Talavera, though I doubt Lord Wellington was first with his congratulations. He's always said there's no room in his army for gallant officers. But then you're not really an officer, are you, Sharpe? You'll always be a common soldier at heart, in spite of the red sash and that brutish cavalry sword."

Sharpe jerked awake, the sudden movement dispelling a confusion of images that swam behind his eyelids. He breathed slowly, taking a perverse pleasure in keeping silent, and allowed Hewlin's barbs to fall into empty space. He heard the sound of boot heels scrabbling against rock. Hewlin was trying to make himself more comfortable with no small effort. A painfully indrawn breath hissed in the darkness.

"Personally, I never imagined that I would make old bones," Hewlin rasped. "Unlike my brother whom I fully expect to depart this life at a ripe old age in flagrante delicto with a comely kitchen maid. If ever a man was determined to die in the saddle, it's good old Robert. I always fancied I would die on the gallows," he finished, sounding wistful.

Sharpe noted that Hewlin had given his brother's name its French pronunciation, all pretence at Englishness now abandoned. He flinched as Hewlin suddenly smacked the ground with the flat of his hand.

"Dammit Sharpe! You shouldn't have to spend your last hours with a miserable old pessimist like me for company. You should be out there on a battlefield, gutting a Frenchman, or being gutted yourself. Death or glory!"

Sharpe leant forward, pinching the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb. He felt thick headed, as if he'd been trapped for hours in some lonely tavern and forced to listen to a maundering drunkard.

"Thought you had me dying at home, in bed," he muttered.

Hewlin continued as if Sharpe had not spoken. "But on the other hand, it's being a miserable old pessimist that's kept me alive in this dangerous game. And believe me, it's every bit as dangerous as bayoneting a… frog." Hewlin enunciated this last carefully. The word hung in the air. Sharpe said nothing.

Hewlin sighed, and then resumed his explanation. "The trick is to place a grain of truth inside each lie. Acts as an anchor. Something to come back to." He let out a careful breath. "Even so, I expected to be discovered every minute of every day. Discovered and disgraced. The General examining the papers I'd brought him for just that moment too long. A fellow officer looking right into me, as if he could see the real man behind the mask."

"Jackson saw through you, didn't he?" Sharpe demanded. "That's why you killed him. What was it gave you away?"

"Oh, it was a trifle. Such a little thing," Hewlin replied, absently. "It's always the little things." He let out a careful breath. "I intended to kill him outright, you know. I didn't mean for him to linger the way he did."

Coming from anyone else, the comment might have suggested a degree of compassion, but Sharpe knew that Hewlin's concern was only for himself. A Jackson who survived to identify his attacker would have been a danger. The Major must have sweated until the wounded man drew his last breath.

Sharpe heard Hewlin's boot scuff the floor again, then the faint click of metal on stone. He tensed instinctively. Was Hewlin armed after all? He waited, expecting – what? To be attacked by a wounded man when neither of them could see a hand in front of their face? He sank back again.

After some time, Hewlin broke the silence. "You fight well."

"I fight dirty," Sharpe muttered.

"And you would be missed, I think."

Sharpe gave a derisive snort. Hewlin must be delirious. Who would mark his passing? His daughter? She was too young to remember him. What would Teresa's relatives have told her about her father? What could they tell her?

Patrick Harper, then. He'd drink to his memory. Sharpe nodded, satisfied by the notion of the Chosen Men 'waking' him, in some Spanish tavern. Felicia's home brew would fit the bill. One jugful of that and they'd all be passed out in the gutter. He smiled at the thought. The real world seemed very far away and insignificant.

Hewlin let out a long shuddering gasp.

Sharpe felt his muscles beginning to stiffen as the chill from the stone at his back seeped into his body. He stirred at another disturbance from Hewlin's direction, struggling to identify the sound, frustrated by a brain that had become similarly dulled by cold. He was certain that there was a good reason for not remaining in this cavern, but he was damned if he could remember what it was.

He leant back and closed his eyes, fully expecting Hewlin to continue his irritating monologue, but the wretch had fallen obstinately silent. Sharpe cursed his contradictory need for the sound of a human voice, even Hewlin's, hearing only the rhythmic dripping of water from somewhere in the darkness.

One… two… three… four drops, then a pause, then three drops. Another pause. Four drops, pause, three drops, pause. Over and over again. It was enough to drive a man insane. What was it?

Ah, he remembered now. There was an immense column of rock suspended from the roof of the cavern, its surface slick with moisture. Water was dripping from its tip onto an answering stone pedestal. The plinth's bowl-like depression had reminded him of a birdbath.

The image of that marble garden ornament on its cushion of bright green lawn shimmered tantalizingly behind his eyelids. Sharpe could almost believe himself back in Oporto, standing by French windows that looked out onto a formal garden. He had been ordered to escort a wine merchant's wife and daughter to safety before the city fell to the French. It had seemed a straightforward task, but unfortunately, the daughter had had other ideas about where her future lay.

Opening his eyes again to this oppressive blackness was to slam into an invisible wall. Sharpe gasped, painfully alert again.

"Hewlin?"

No answer.

He waited. Perhaps Hewlin was asleep. Or unconscious.

"Hewlin!"

Sharpe struggled to his knees, ignoring the protests from stiffening muscles. His hand brushed against a rent in his trousers. He traced the line of ragged cloth and found blood oozing from a sword cut to his thigh; so numbed by cold, he hadn't even been aware of the injury.

Tentatively, he reached out and began to crawl across the floor, his hands grazing the uneven surface. He winced as his fingers closed around some jagged fragment – bone, perhaps? – swore when he collided painfully with a stalagmite.

He had almost forgotten about the rope until his wrist brushed against its rough strands. He grasped it gratefully, and then sat back on his heels, suspicion forming cold and hard in the pit of his stomach.

Slowly, Sharpe traced the rope's path across the floor. For some reason it seemed important that it remain undisturbed, forming as it did, a compass point for Hewlin's last known position.

The end of the rope lay coiled at the base of the rock wall that contained the ice water of the black pool. The frayed strands were damp beneath his hand. Until this moment, a small part of him had clung to the hope that Hewlin was still here, somewhere in the darkness, but he knew now that he was alone.

He took a deep breath and blindly explored the stone ledge. Only a fanciful man, which Sharpe told himself he was not, would conjure an ice-cold hand, emerging from the depths to pull him into the pool's lethal embrace. But despite this, the discovery of some unidentifiable object made him snatch his hand back in alarm.

Sharpe cursed himself for his nervousness, his voice sounding loud in the enveloping silence. He reached out again, his hand eventually closing over the sharp angles of something small, cold and metallic.

Hewlin's snuffbox.

Sharpe turned the box over in his hand, feeling the smooth surface of its enamelled lid under his fingers. Had it been left behind for him to find? A contemptuous farewell gift, or just an oversight on Hewlin's part? He shrugged and slipped the box inside his jacket.

He turned to sit with his back to the rock ledge, trying to recall the precise geography of the cavern, glimpsed during those precious moments while the candle still burned. The pedestal, which he thought of as the birdbath, must now be to his right, a matter of yards away, and beyond that, the three tunnels that Hewlin had studied so intently.

Sharpe listened for the sound of dripping water, intent on making his way toward its source. Finally, after what seemed like hours of crawling on all fours, he arrived at the base of the pedestal. He reached up, feeling for the lip of the birdbath, and then hauled himself painfully to his feet.

He frowned. Something had changed. The maddeningly rhythmic dripping had ceased, to be replaced by the hiss of a constant stream of water. He held out his cupped hand and gasped as a surge of ice water drilled into his palm. The skin on the back of his neck prickled. Though the significance of the increased flow of water escaped him, he had the feeling that it was a bad omen. He had to get out of this place.

Sharpe sank to his knees again and continued his crawling progress, sweating and shivering by turns. A wall rose suddenly in front of him. He got to his feet again slowly, reaching out on either side to touch the rock face. He could feel cold air on his face, some degrees lower than that in the chamber itself. He might be poised at the beginning of an escape route, or on the edge of a gaping abyss.

In a flash, Sharpe recalled Hewlin standing, as he was now, framed in the blackness of a tunnel entrance earlier in their journey, his shadow looming grotesquely on the wall. He'd thought at the time that Hewlin was merely pausing for effect, to seem as if actively recalling the route, preserving the mystery of his navigation, but perhaps there had been a reason.

Sharpe slid his hand slowly across the rock, stopping as the fingers of his right hand sank into a shallow depression at roughly shoulder height. The groove was regular, vertical, and man-made. He explored the furrow carefully, discovering two further channels on either side that sloped downward at an angle. If he could have seen the symbol, Sharpe would have described it as an arrowhead – pointing toward a way out.

After a time-consuming and laborious examination of the remaining tunnel entrances, Sharpe was certain. He felt for the arrowhead again to reassure himself that it existed, and then reluctantly, dropped to his knees. There really was no other option. He would have to leave behind the familiarity of the chamber and venture into the unknown.

At his back, had he been able to see it, water was now pouring continuously from the point of the massive stalactite. It spattered into the overflowing birdbath, and spilt over the rim, coursing down the sides of the pedestal and soaking the floor around its base.

Sharpe took a deep breath. The rest of his journey would be much like the first part, he told himself. A winding passage, narrow in places, no doubt. All he need do was search for the arrowheads that marked the route.

Laughter bubbled in his throat with an edge of hysteria. His head throbbed and he felt dizzy and sick. What was he thinking? What possible chance did he have of escaping this place? Hard enough when he could see where he was going, but blind like this, when a wrong step could have him tumbling into a crevasse, or a dark pool like the one behind him. Hewlin was right. This would be his tomb.

The thought of Hewlin's mocking tone was enough to spur him into action. He stretched out both hands to find that the tunnel walls stood little more than shoulder width apart. The stone, clammy to the touch, sloped inward. He followed its contours until his hand discovered a jagged cleft in the rock, and his fingers closed around something that at first he struggled to identify.

Candles. Impossible, but it was so. Candles and what felt like a tinderbox tied together with string. Sharpe drew the bundle carefully from its hiding place, his amazement at finding such a thing almost immediately blotted out by impotent rage at Hewlin's deception. It made sense, of course. The Major would have made sure he had an adequate supply of candles. He'd already walked the route with Felipe and had every intention of bringing Sharpe in to face Ducos.  

His fingers stiff with cold, Sharpe opened the tinderbox, relieved to find both flint and steel inside. Sparks flew and he bent his head to blow on the scrap of charred linen, coaxing the tiny flame into life. He lit one of the candles and turned to take one last look at the chamber.

The floor around the birdbath glistened in the candlelight. Frowning, he held the candle aloft and leaned in. The walls of the cavern gleamed wetly. Large puddles had formed around the clusters of stalagmites, and beneath the overhang of rock, water from the dark pool glided across the ledge and slid to the ground.

Sharpe tore his gaze away and stumbled into the tunnel.

Where did they come from? Sergeant Harper had asked himself. He knew where the French had ended their journey, rising up as if by magic in the heart of the Castillo, but where had it begun? The villagers had known, obviously, but there remained not a one who could tell them.

Harper looked out at the darkened landscape; the lowering sky seeming almost to graze the Castillo's battlements. Raindrops drummed on the branches overhead and pitted the ground, turning the previously hard-packed earth into a slippery, sucking morass.

But wait. The boy was from the village.

And so Sergeant Harper had roused himself and gone in search of the child.

After much cajoling, no small amount of bribery, and Harper's swearing that he would not tell a living soul, in particular his mother about where he had spent the past few nights, the boy was finally persuaded that the big Irishman could be trusted. Harper winced at this last. This lad, Juan, knew nothing of his family's fate. He would have to be told, of course, later. But for now, they needed his help.

Sergeant Harper hunched his shoulders and peered into the gathering darkness, trusting to Juan's assurances that he could find his way through these hills blindfold. One rocky outcrop looked much like another to Harper, even in broad daylight. The mountain track was running with water. A shower of small stones, dislodged by the current, bounced and skipped across his path.

The storm had lasted for the better part of the day as sheet lightning shocked the mountains into sharp relief while thunder rolled across the leaden skies. Now, in late afternoon, as Harper and his men followed Juan along the dirt track which was fast becoming a river, the heavens continued to pour gallons of water over the already saturated land, and most particularly, down the back of the big Irishman's neck.

Harper turned his face to the wind that howled through the narrow pass and concentrated on keeping his footing. He skidded as the gravel shifted under his boot and he stumbled, cursing. As they rounded a bend in the track, Harris grabbed Harper's shoulder and leaned in close.

"The shrine." Harris pointed toward the niche that sheltered the statuette of the Virgin.

Harper nodded grimly and steered the boy to the opposite side of the track, even though whatever remained of the villagers' floral offerings had obviously been washed away down the hillside, leaving the niche bare. The boy's gaze strayed toward the shrine. The Sergeant lengthened his stride to block his view. Water was gushing from the cleft in the rock and cascading into the trough beneath, where the statuette lay broken in two.

"So you've been coming up here since you were a wee lad, then," Harper said, his tone overly cheerful. The boy eyed him, puzzling. He had already explained as much as he thought necessary to this giant of a man with the strange accent. Juan understood the Sergeant's need to find this Major Sharpe, but he also knew that his mother would be very angry if she discovered where he had spent the past few days. Scarcely taller than a child herself, she could nevertheless quell any argument from the men of the family with one look.

Juan had wanted to accompany Felipe when he led the Englishmen, the 'exploring officers' into the mountains, but Felipe had refused, smiling and ruffling the younger boy's hair in imitation of his father. Juan had sulked and wheedled by turns, but Felipe was adamant. It was far too dangerous for children, he'd said and in this he had been correct, because now Felipe was dead. Juan had eavesdropped the search parties' conversation as they returned, grim-faced and guessed his cousin's fate.

He turned to the smaller man, Harris and told him that the entrance to the cave lay around the next bend and some fifty yards from the track, and then waited while the information was translated for the benefit of the burly Sergeant.

Harper nodded at the news and clapped Juan heartily on the back, almost knocking him off his feet. "Good lad."

Sergeant Harper was determined do whatever was needed to find Major Sharpe, but nevertheless, the thought of crawling into a dank, dark cave, with all those tons of rock pressing down on him was enough to bring him out in a cold sweat. "I'm more your outdoor sort," he said with a sideways glance at Harris. "Holes in the ground are for rabbits."

Harris saw the apprehension in Harper's eyes. The same thought had crossed his mind. He squared his shoulders and offered the Irishman a cheery grin. "Look on the bright side, sir. At least we'll be out of the rain."

Harper shot him a look. They trudged on in silence.