Chapter 11
Sharpe collapsed onto a slab of rock. He knew he should stay on his feet, but every bone in his body ached, and the stone seat beckoned. He would rest for just a moment.
He had forced himself onward, approaching each division of the cave system, heart in mouth, in case his belief that the way was signposted proved to be no more than wishful thinking. But though he feared the worst, the candle flame revealed an arrowhead, and he moved on.
The sound of running water was constant now, the rough walls seeming almost to weep as moisture welled up and trickled down to puddle at his feet. A gust of cold air blew through the tunnel as if the ancient rocks were exhaling a last icy breath. Sharpe shivered.
He felt the snuffbox shift inside his jacket and drew it out. Tilting the candle, he studied the enamelled lid. Voltaire, rheumy-eyed, regarded him from the miniature frame with an expression of acute distaste. "Dobbs was right," Sharpe murmured. "You are a miserable looking bugger." The candle flame guttered. Voltaire's scowl deepened.
Sharpe turned the box over in his hand. There was an inscription in French on its plain silver back, a poem perhaps, now worn smooth by its years in a waistcoat pocket. He peered at the arcane scratches, angling the box toward the light. A monogram had been inscribed beneath the verse; the third letter, an 'H' needed no explanation, but what of the other two?
Sharpe guessed at several possibilities, leaning back on his stone perch to gaze at the low ceiling. Water dribbled down the back of his neck. He shook himself out of his reverie and staggered to his feet.
The candle had almost burned down. He lit another from his dwindling supply and tossed aside the stub. Dear God, how much longer would it be before he reached the surface and saw daylight again? He stumbled on some loose stones and grabbed at the wall for support. Ice water trickled over his hand, numbing it instantly.
The caves threw up a new challenge around the next bend. Sharpe found himself faced by twin pools; a narrow causeway separating their ink-dark waters. This chamber was high ceilinged and the pools much larger than the one in which Hewlin had drowned.
Sharpe placed one foot gingerly on the ridge of rock, but his boot skidded on the slick surface. He withdrew hastily, buttoning his jacket to the neck. With the candles and snuffbox thus secured, he dropped to his knees and began a slow crawl along the causeway.
The water on either side lay eerily silent and still. Sharpe edged forward carefully, desperately fighting the urge to scramble to safety. If he should slip, he would be lost forever in fathomless black.
At long last, he was able to stretch up and claw at an overhanging rock. Hauling himself onto safe ground, Sharpe glanced over his shoulder to find that in the short time it had taken to cross it, the causeway was already submerged by the black tide's stealthy advance. He stared, a cold sweat beading his forehead. A few more minutes spent looking at that damned snuffbox and he'd have been stranded.
Sharpe drew out the snuffbox and weighed it in his hand for a moment; Hewlin's taunts echoing in his head. He was sorely tempted to send it after its owner, but perhaps it would be better kept as a reminder never to undertake a fool mission such as this ever again. He settled for directing some pithy comment toward Voltaire and returned the box to his jacket.
Sharpe turned to step into a new tunnel and felt a cool breeze on his face. He frowned. This was not the stale underground atmosphere of the caves, but fresh air. The thought of being close to freedom spurred him on. Recklessly, he plunged into the darkness and ran straight into solid rock. The tunnel was a dead end. His luck had finally run out.
Sharpe staggered backward. It couldn't be; to have come so far, only to be trapped by a rock fall. And yet he could still feel the breeze. He lifted the candle higher and began to climb the pile of boulders. If the breeze could find its way in, then he would find a way out.
Gasping for breath, Sharpe reached up into the darkness, and then yelped as his hand was enclosed in a firm grasp. He tried to pull free, but found himself gripped even more tightly.
"Easy now, sir, or you'll have me down there with you."
"Harper?"
"The very same," the Irishman replied, his cheery grin lit by the flickering candle. He leaned in to haul Sharpe over the jagged rock that reached almost to the roof of the tunnel. "The trouble we've had tracking you down, sir. 'Merry dance' doesn't even begin to describe it."
Sharpe shivered inside the borrowed greatcoat and stared into the flames of a small campfire. Sergeant Harper handed him a mug of tea, which he accepted gratefully. Even after the long march back to camp, he was still chilled to the bone and shaking so hard that the rim of the mug rattled against his teeth when he lifted it to his lips. He gulped down the scalding tea and coughed.
"What's the butcher's bill, do we know?"
Harper shrugged. In the aftermath of their frantic evacuation of the Castillo it had been almost impossible to discover who had been killed, wounded or had escaped but run in the wrong direction and become lost in the surrounding forest. "Thought we'd mislaid Hagman for a time, but he's turned up at last with young Simpson. Dobbs is over there with Harris." He gestured toward a knot of men, sitting huddled around another small fire. Sharpe nodded, relieved, and began to gnaw on a chunk of some unidentifiable meat.
Harper poked at a stray piece of kindling with the toe of his boot and glanced at Sharpe with apprehension. "The Colonel's worried about the women."
"So he bloody well should be," Sharpe growled. "If he's got any sense he'll keep them well back behind the piquet lines. He was a fool to bring the pair of them along in the first place. "
The Sergeant noted that Sharpe seemed not to include the lady doctor in his criticism, and wondered at the omission. He risked a sideways glance at his commanding officer, but found him venting his spleen on the meat, tearing at it ferociously between mouthfuls of tea.
Harper sighed and wondered at his lot in life as the bringer of bad tidings. Noting the Irishman's hesitation, Sharpe turned his head, eyeing him with suspicion.
"They're not here," Harper said quietly. "We think they're still in the castle."
Sharpe flung the half-eaten food aside and leapt to his feet. "Bloody hell, Harper!"
Sharpe paced back and forth, ranting. Why hadn't Harper tried to find her? Anything could have happened! The Castillo would be crawling with French by now. Had he thought what would happen when they found her?
Ah. 'Her,' Harper thought. So that was the way of it. "I'm sure they'll be fine, sir," he offered, but without conviction.
"The way things were 'fine' after Badajoz?"
"This is different."
Sharpe stopped pacing and swung round to face Harper. "Different! In what way is it different?"
Harper looked up and met Sharpe's murderous look evenly. For a moment it seemed that the Major might actually expect an answer. Sharpe sighed and sat down again. "I'm sorry, Pat." Harper accepted the apology equably.
"I didn't give it a thought either," Sharpe conceded, staring morosely at the ground. "Just went straight after that bastard Hewlin."
"You were doing your job," Harper said. "You were ordered to catch a spy, so you did. Rescuing womenfolk isn't your job."
Sharpe raised his head to look across to where the Castillo loomed, its dark bulk blotting out the stars. "Whose job is it then?"
Sharpe made his way through the trees some distance from the river. A thin drizzle had continued overnight but a rising wind just after dawn had blown it southward. Now everything wept rainwater; the ground a slippery mess, strewn with branches torn off by the previous day's gales. Sharpe skirted the blackened remains of an oak, the target of a lightning strike, and looked around.
To his left, he saw one of the drummer boys leading a pair of horses away from a tent that had been erected in haste a few hours earlier. Already Sharpe could see that the guy ropes had slackened as the pegs shifted in the soft earth, causing the tent to droop in the middle. The beasts walked with heads lowered, their breath wreathing like smoke in the damp air.
"They've been ridden hard," Sharpe said, as the boy drew nearer.
"Two days, without stopping," the boy replied. "So Mr O'Dwyer said."
Sharpe raised an eyebrow while mentally subtracting a day. The quartermaster was obviously continuing to embroider whatever rumours came his way.
"Anyone we know?" Sharpe asked lightly.
"You knew, didn't you?"
Major Hogan unbent from his inspection of a battered map as the tent flap was thrust roughly aside to admit a blast of cold air and a wild-eyed scarecrow of a Rifleman.
"On my life, Richard, I did not." Hogan said, unconsciously placing one hand over his heart as he spoke.
Sharpe's gaze followed the movement. Hogan read contempt in the other's eyes and dropped the hand to his side.
"You knew, though." Sharpe had turned and was addressing the man who stood opposite Hogan and who seemed neither surprised by the Rifleman's abrupt entry, nor his accusation.
"Did you kill him, Sharpe?" Major Nairn asked, without looking up.
With difficulty, Sharpe controlled his temper.
"No, sir."
No, he hadn't. But by God, he'd wanted to.
"He is dead, though," Sharpe said. "Drowned. In the caves under the Castillo."
Nairn merely nodded, his attention still on the map.
Once more, Sharpe was reminded of the black pool of ice water, but this time, it was his own body that he imagined sinking slowly into its depths, eyes wide and unseeing, lungs filling with water. With effort, he dragged himself back to reality. Nairn was eyeing him quizzically.
Sharpe looked down to find that he was gripping the corner of the table, his knuckles white.
"Sorry, sir. What did you say?"
"I said I'm pleased to hear it."
Sharpe fixed his gaze on the tent wall behind Nairn's shoulder. "When do we attack, sir?"
Nairn and Hogan exchanged glances. Sharpe caught the look. "We are going to take it back, aren't we?"
He watched Nairn's index finger as it idly traced the path of the Esla, a thick line of ink that meandered across the crudely drawn map.
"We haven't the men, Richard," Hogan said behind him.
"Lord Wellington has men," Sharpe countered.
"And he intends to keep them," Nairn said dryly. "That skirmish at the Esla was one thing, the losses in the village were… regrettable, but His Grace won't stand to be disadvantaged again."
Sharpe bit back a retort. Couldn't Nairn see that the men would willingly attack the Castillo for precisely this reason? It would be madness for them to slink away, tails between their legs while the French gloated from the battlements. Wellington would understand.
"Perhaps if Lord Wellington were to be offered proof that the cause of our present trouble was no longer with us…" Hogan murmured, looking toward Sharpe.
Nairn regarded the hard-eyed Rifleman expectantly.
In response, Sharpe reached inside his jacket, retrieved the snuffbox and tossed it onto the table. The silver box tumbled across the map and came to rest between Nairn's hands.
"It was Hewlin's," Sharpe said. "The 'little thing' that gave him away. He told me he'd looted it from a Frenchman on some battlefield, but Jackson saw it…"
"And guessed the truth." Nairn finished. He took the box between thumb and forefinger and examined it closely, frowning at the initials engraved on the base. "J-P…H. Jean-Paul? Jean-Pierre?" He looked up. "What d'you think, Sharpe?"
Nairn smiled at Sharpe's stony expression as he opened the snuffbox and tilted it this way and that. "Hewlin's mother was English, father French. Divided loyalties. Who should he side with? Both?"
"Neither," Sharpe growled, recalling Hewlin's contempt for both Wellington and Bonaparte. Indeed, now that he thought about it, Hewlin had seemed amused by conflict of any kind, on any continent. He had craved intrigue, not material gain.
Finding the snuffbox empty, Nairn laid it aside. Sharpe wondered what he had hoped to find, if anything.
"Will you take it to Lord Wellington, or should I give it to him myself?" Sharpe asked, nodding toward the tiny silver box.
Nairn smiled thinly. "Leave it with me, Sharpe."
"Difficult, certainly, but not impossible," Hogan said as he collapsed the telescope and returned it to Sharpe. "Not unlike your journey through the caves," he continued, casting a sly glance toward his dour companion. Sharpe ignored the look and turned up the collar of his greatcoat. The storm had brought summer to an abrupt end so that now, two hours after midnight, there was a distinct chill in the air.
The Major's 'wee adventure' as Sergeant Harper was pleased to call it, was a sore point with Sharpe, for while following Hewlin along the narrow tunnels a niggling doubt had lodged in the back of his mind. It had something to do with their way through the rock, he knew, but the need to press on and escape had banished the thought temporarily. It was not until he was leaning against a boulder, and drawing fresh mountain air into his lungs that he realised what had been gnawing at him.
The French had never been there, Sharpe had decided, and said as much to a puzzled Harper. He described the narrow passageways, the tunnel's frequent divisions, the rock falls and slime underfoot; the grotto with its domed ceiling clustered with stalactites. He told of the black pool's lethally hypnotic effect on Hewlin, which had eventually persuaded him to slip into its icy depths. No one, Sharpe said, not even a mad Frenchman, would have sent his men into those dank caves.
Alerted by the English major's exasperated tone, Juan had tugged at Harris's sleeve, requesting a translation. Harris obliged and the boy's eyes had widened in amazement as Sharpe's tortuous journey through the tunnels was relayed to him. Juan gaped in open admiration. The Major would surely have earned Felipe's grudging respect. But why, he wondered, hadn't the Senor taken the short cut?
Sharpe sank deeper into the greatcoat's folds, still smarting from the knowledge that Hewlin had duped him. But if the situation had been reversed, wouldn't he, Sharpe, have done the same, exaggerating their difficulty so as to maintain the upper hand? Sharpe permitted himself a grim smile.
He turned at a faint rustling off to his left. Sergeant Harper was returning from his reconnaissance of the Castillo's outer defences. The Irishman was able to move with a catlike grace that belied his height and bulk, an attribute that had been the saving of them both on several occasions.
"Well, Sergeant, what'll we need to get inside the place?" Hogan asked as Harper settled himself in the shallow depression where Sharpe and the Engineer had taken shelter.
"We'll need to be insane, sir," Harper replied, his expression bland.
"Oh, I think that goes without saying," Hogan remarked, digging into a pocket for his snuffbox. Sharpe eyed him dubiously. One thunderous sneeze from Hogan would surely attract the attention of the sentries posted on the battlements. They might just as well stand up and offer themselves for target practice. Hogan noted Sharpe's sidelong glance and abandoned the search.
"It'll be a bugger, sir," Harper continued, jerking his head toward the Castillo's looming presence.
"'Difficult, but not impossible' Major Hogan said," Sharpe offered.
"And I'm sure you're right, sir," Harper said, smiling.
On this night, the three of them had been studying the Castillo closely, noting the glow of campfires along the ramparts. The French had dug themselves in with unexpected thoroughness, Sharpe thought. He had spent some considerable time working his way around the Castillo's perimeter, but against his will, found his gaze straying to the fortress's topmost reaches to find them black, impenetrable. He told himself he was a fool. Had he really expected to see some sign of life? The glow of a candle in one of the narrow embrasures? A cloaked figure silhouetted against the sky?
Hogan cast a glance over his shoulder. "This would have been an impregnable fortress until the fourteenth century."
Sharpe considered ignoring Hogan's schoolmaster's tone, but then decided to humour him. They had nothing else to do for the moment. He folded his arms and heaved a sigh. "Go on, then. What happened in the fourteenth century?"
"Cannon happened, Richard. Cannon and gunpowder." Hogan leant back to gaze into the starlit sky. "Before that it would have been catapults and battering rams." He waved a hand toward the battlements at their back. "Those walls would have been surrounded by archers and knights in shining armour. There'd have been the thunder of hooves, trumpets blaring, banners flying. Truly a sight to behold. Not that the likes of us would have been knights, of course. We'd have been your lowly vassals, run ragged with all the fetching and carrying."
Sharpe grunted. "Some of us still are."
"Good Lord, Richard! Don't tell me the army's finally cured you of that troublesome romantic streak?" Hogan enquired, innocently. Sharpe looked away. Though he might only admit it under torture, Major Sharpe's romantic streak was buried deep, and it would take more than the vicissitudes of a soldier's life and Sergeant Harper's sly digs to prise it from him.
"Sergeant Major Armstrong says it reminds him of some castle up North, so it does."
Sharpe turned at Harper's interruption. "Yes, and he also said Ciudad Rodrigo reminded him of Scarborough."
Harper grinned. The Sergeant Major had discovered unexpected and frequently incomprehensible similarities to his homeland throughout the Peninsular. "Seriously, sir, he says it's a big bastard of a castle by the sea, and that when you're stood down on the beach, all you can see are these bloody great walls rising up from the cliffs. There's nowhere to put up a ladder and nowhere to put your cannon," Harper added, with a mischievous glance at Hogan.
"And if you did manage to get up close, the defenders would have been ready to pour boiling oil on you, or more likely scorching hot sand," Hogan said.
"Sand?" Harper asked, grimacing at the thought of bucketfuls of fiery grains trickling into every nook and cranny.
"Well, if you were on the coast, you'd use what was to hand." Hogan turned to Sharpe. "Well, you've examined their defences, lad. Did you find the weak spot?"
Sharpe frowned. The Castillo's location seemed ideal, perched on the rocky promontory it dominated the countryside for miles around. There was still the question of the encroaching forest, which obstructed the line of sight in places. Would he rather be defending the Castillo or attacking it? "There's a small hill, close to the South gate," he ventured.
"Yes, and that's where you'd place your cannon, my boy."
"If we had any," Sharpe replied tersely. It was three days since his bad-tempered interview with Nairn. Three days with no suggestion that Wellington had even been informed of Hewlin's death, let alone the arrival of reinforcements. Sharpe knew he was a fool to imagine that he wielded any influence at all. Who knew what the General had in mind?
"But you do have rifles, Richard." Hogan stretched and yawned. "Dawn will break soon enough. We ought to be on our way." Harper followed the Engineer as he moved off. Sharpe cast one last glance up at the Castillo before slipping away after them into the dense forest.
Major Nairn regarded Lord Wellington's hawk like nose, which was presented to him at this moment in profile. The General, standing in the tent's doorway, was surveying his troops' activities with eyes narrowed against the evening sun that slanted across the low hills to turn the sloping grassland a fiery gold.
Nairn knew well the General's habit of husbanding his forces when the gains might be small, only to throw everything within arm's reach at a besieged fortress or city. It would seem that Il Castillo de Benavento was to be afforded the latter option.
"You think this a wasteful endeavour," Wellington said suddenly.
Nairn flinched, and was about to respond when he realised that the General was looking past him toward Major Hogan. The Engineer, standing beside a trestle table, and about to pour a cup of coffee, returned Wellington's gaze equably. "Do I, sir?"
"The Castillo serves no useful purpose, and we should cut our losses and move on. That is your opinion, is it not?"
Hogan studied his reflection in the polished surface of the silver coffee pot. "We have here a somewhat delicate situation."
"Delicate!" Wellington snorted. "It's a confounded nuisance." He wheeled around to face Nairn. "If we do nothing, then the French will dine out on this incident for months, and in years to come old soldiers will tell tales around the fireside, of how they outwitted and then beat the English so badly that they abandoned the Castillo without a fight."
Hogan listened intently and wondered whom the General was trying to convince, since Nairn's resigned countenance suggested a familiarity with the argument now put forth.
"Napoleon thought to drive us out of Portugal, but he was sadly mistaken. And he stands to be mistaken once more." Wellington exhaled slowly and straightened his coat. "I gather Sharpe had an extremely narrow escape," he said in a lighter tone, turning to Hogan.
The Engineer shrugged. "It's the only kind he knows, sir."
"And the kind he prefers," Nairn remarked dryly.
Wellington permitted himself a faint smile and returned his attention to the preparations being made outside.