Sharpe's Battle

Sharpe smiled. "You're a bad loser, General."

"And you're not?"

Sharpe walked away. "I've never lost," he called back across his shoulder, "so I wouldn't know."

"Your death warrant, Sharpe!" Loup called.

Sharpe lifted two fingers. He had heard that the English bowmen at Agincourt, threatened by the French with the loss of their bowstring fingers at the battle's end, had first won the battle and then invented the taunting gesture to show the overweening bastards just who were the better soldiers. Now Sharpe used it again.

Then went to kill the wolfman's men.

Major Michael Hogan discovered Wellington inspecting a bridge over the River Turones where a force of three French battalions had tried to hold off the advancing British. The resulting battle had been swift and brutal, and now a trail of French and British dead told the skirmish's tale. An initial tide line of bodies marked where the sides had clashed, a dreadful smear of bloodied turf showed where two British ca

"I sometimes wonder, my Lord, whether anyone has built a bridge in Portugal or Spain since the Romans." Hogan, swathed in a cloak because of the day's damp chill, nodded amicably to his Lordship's three aides, then handed the General a sealed letter. The seal, which showed the royal Spanish coat of arms, had been lifted. "I took the precaution of reading the letter, my Lord," Hogan explained.

"Trouble?" Wellington asked.

"I wouldn't have bothered you otherwise, my Lord," Hogan answered gloomily.

Wellington frowned as he read the letter. The General was a handsome man, forty-two years old, but as fit as any in his army. And, Hogan thought, wiser than most. The British army, Hogan knew, had an unca

The General read the letter again, this time glancing at a translation Hogan had thoughtfully provided. Hogan meanwhile looked about the battlefield where fatigue parties were clearing up the remnants of the skirmish. To the east of the bridge, where the road came delicately down the mountainside in a series of sweeping curves, a dozen work parties were searching the bushes for bodies and abandoned supplies. The French dead were being stripped naked and stacked like cordwood next to a long, shallow grave that a group of diggers was trying to extend. Other men were piling French muskets or else hurling canteens, cartridge boxes, boots and blankets into a cart. Some of the plunder was even more exotic, for the retreating French had weighed themselves down with the loot of a thousand Portuguese villages and Wellington's men were now recovering church vestments, candlesticks and silver plate. "Astonishing what a soldier will carry on a retreat," the General remarked to Hogan. "We found one dead man with a milking stool. A common milking stool! What was he thinking of? Taking it back to France?" He held the letter out to Hogan. "Damn," he said mildly, then, more strongly, "God damn!" He waved his aides away, leaving him alone with Hogan. "The more I learn about His Most Catholic Majesty King Ferdinand VII, Hogan, the more I become convinced that he should have been drowned at birth."

Hogan smiled. "The recognized method, my Lord, is smothering."

"Is it indeed?"

"It is indeed, my Lord, and no one's ever the wiser. The mother simply explains how she rolled over in her sleep and trapped the blessed little creature beneath her body and thus, the holy church explains, another precious angel is born."

"In my family," the General said, "unwanted children get posted into the army."

"It has much the same effect, my Lord, except in the matter of angels."

Wellington gave a brief laugh, then gestured with the letter. "So how did this reach us?"

"The usual way, my Lord. Smuggled out of Valenзay by Ferdinand's servants and brought south to the Pyrenees where it was given to partisans for forwarding to us."

"With a copy to London, eh? Any chance of intercepting the London copy?"

"Alas, sir, gone these two weeks. Probably there already."

"Hell, damn and hell again. Damn!" Wellington stared gloomily at the bridge where a sling cart was salvaging the fallen barrel of a dismounted French ca

The problem was simple enough. The letter, copied to the Prince Regent in London, had come from the exiled King Ferdinand of Spain who was now a prisoner of Napoleon in the French chвteau at Valenзay. The letter was pleased to a

"And they've already arrived," Hogan said mildly.

"They've what?" Wellington's question could be heard a hundred yards away where a dog, thinking it was being reproved, slunk away from some fly-blackened guts that trailed from the eviscerated body of a French artillery officer. "Where are they?" Wellington asked fiercely.

"Somewhere on the Tagus, my Lord, being barged towards us."

"How the hell did they get here?"

"According to my correspondent, my Lord, by ship. Our ships." Hogan put a pinch of snuff on his left hand, then sniffed the powder up each nostril. He paused for a second, his eyes suddenly streaming, then sneezed. His horse's ears flicked back at the noise. "The commander of the Real Companпa Irlandesa claims he marched his men to Spain's east coast, my Lord," Hogan went on, "then took ship to Menorca where our Royal Navy collected them."

Wellington snorted his derision. "And the French just let that happen? King Joseph just watched half the royal guard march away?" Joseph was Bonaparte's brother and had been elevated to the throne of Spain, though it was taking three hundred thousand French bayonets to keep him there.

"A fifth of the royal guard, my Lord," Hogan gently corrected the General. "And yes, that's exactly what Lord Kiely says. Kiely, of course, being their comandante."

"Kiely?"

"Irish peer, my Lord."

"Damn it, Hogan, I know the Irish peerage. Kiely. Earl of Kiely. An exile, right? And his mother, I remember, gave money to Tone back in the nineties." Wolfe Tone had been an Irish patriot who had tried to raise money and men in Europe and America to lead a rebellion against the British in his native Ireland. The rebellion had flared into open war in 1798 when Tone had invaded Donegal with a small French army that had been roundly defeated and Tone himself had committed suicide in his Dublin prison rather than hang from a British rope. "I don't suppose Kiely's any better than his mother," Wellington said grimly, "and she's a witch who should have been smothered at birth. Is his Lordship to be trusted, Hogan?"