Sharpe's Escape

He stressed those last few words. The point of the exercise was merely to discover what lay behind the enemy hill, not to win a victory that would have the Parisian mob cheering. There was no victory to be won here, merely information to gather, and the longer his troops stayed in the low ground the longer they would be exposed to ca

Ahead of him was a brigade of skirmishers, a misted valley, an unsuspecting enemy and, for the moment, silence.

Lieutenant Jack Bullen was a decent young man who came from a decent family. His father was a judge and both his elder brothers were barristers, but young Jack had never shone at school and though his schoolmasters had tried to whip Latin and Greek into his skull, his skull had won the battle and stayed i

"He's queer, sir," Sergeant Read said respectfully.

"He's queer," Bullen repeated tonelessly.

"Queer, sir," Read confirmed. To be queer was to be ill, but Read really meant that Captain Slingsby was drunk, but as a sergeant he could not say as much.

"How queer?" Bullen asked. He could have walked the twenty paces to discover for himself, but he was in charge of the sentries who lined the stream just outside the crumbling barn, and he did not really want to face Slingsby.

"Very queer, sir," Read said gravely. "He's talking about his wife, sir. He's saying bad things about her."

Bullen wanted to know what things were being said, but he knew the Methodist Sergeant would never tell him, so he just grunted in acknowledgment.

"It's upsetting the men, sir," Read said. "Such things shouldn't be said about women. Not about wives."

Bullen suspected Slingsby's outburst was amusing the men rather than upsetting them, and that was bad. An officer, however friendly, had to keep a certain dignity. "Can he walk?"

"Barely, sir," Read said, then amended the answer. "No, sir."

"Oh, dear God," Bullen said and saw Read flinch at the mild blasphemy. "Where did he get the liquor?"

Read sniffed. "His servant, sir. Got a pack filled with canteens and the Captain's been drinking all night, sir."

Bullen wondered what he should do. He could hardly send Slingsby back to battalion, for Bullen did not see it as his job to destroy his commanding officer's reputation. That would be a disloyal act. "Keep an eye on him, Sergeant," Bullen said helplessly. "Maybe he'll recover."

"But I can't take his orders, sir, not in the state he's in."

"Is he giving you orders?"

"He told me to put Slattery under arrest, sir."

"The charge?"

"Looking fu

"Oh dear. Ignore his orders, Sergeant, and that's an order. Tell him I said so."

Read nodded. "You're taking over, sir?"

Bullen hesitated, knowing the question was important. If he said yes then he was formally acknowledging that Slingsby was not fit to command, and that would inevitably result in an enquiry. "I'm taking over until the Captain has recovered," he said, which seemed a decent compromise.

"Very good, sir." Read saluted and turned away.

"And Sergeant?" Bullen waited till Read turned back. "Don't look fu

"No, sir," Read said solemnly, "of course not, sir. I wouldn't do such a thing, sir."

Bullen sipped his mug of tea and found it had gone cold. He put it down on a stone and walked to the stream. The mist had thickened slightly, he thought, so that he could only see some sixty or seventy yards, though, perversely, the hilltops a quarter-mile away were clear enough, which proved that the mist was merely a low-lying layer blanketing the damp earth. It would clear. He remembered marvelous winter mornings in Essex when the mist would drift away to show the hunting field spread out in glorious pursuit. He liked hunting. He smiled to himself, remembering his father's great black gelding, a tremendous hunter, that always screwed left when it landed on the far side of a hedge and every time his father would shout, "Order in court! Order in court!" It was a family joke, one of the many that made the Bullen house a happy one.

"Mister Bullen, sir?" It was Daniel Hagman, the oldest man in the company, who called from a dozen paces upstream.

Bullen, who had been thinking how they would be readying the horses for the cubbing season at home, walked to the rifleman. "Hagman?

"Thought I saw something, sir." Hagman pointed through the mist. "Nothing there now."

Bullen peered and saw nothing. "This mist will burn off soon enough."

"Be clear as a bell in an hour, sir. It'll be nice to have some sunshine."

"Won't it just?"

Then the shooting started.

Sharpe had feared that the Ferreira brothers would set up an ambush in the bushes at the top of the river bank and so he had asked Braithwaite to take the jolly boat downstream of the brothers' abandoned boat to a place where the river's edge was bare of trees. He had told Sarah and Joana to stay in the boat, but they had ignored him, scrambling ashore behind the three men. Vicente was worried by their presence. "They shouldn't be here."

"We shouldn't be here, Jorge," Sharpe said. He was gazing across the marshland, then saw the Ferreira brothers and their three companions in the mist. The five men were walking inland, looking as though they did not have a care in the world. "We shouldn't be here," Sharpe went on, "but we are, and so are they. So let's finish this." He unslung the rifle and made sure the priming was still in the pan. "Should have fired and reloaded on board the Squirrel," he told Harper.