Bernard Cornwell – 1807 09 Sharpe’s Prey

He told himself he had endured hunger before and so he struck inland again. The rain fell harder as night descended, but it hid him as he walked and walked, always keeping the smell of the town and its scatter of dim lights on his right-hand side. He crossed a major road, followed a track northward, then crossed more fields. His boots were clogged with mud, his clothes were soaked and the pack was biting into the small of his back and his shoulders. He walked till he could not endure another pace, then he slept in a wood where he was woken by a heavy rain that thrashed the trees just before dawn. His belly ached and he was shivering. He remembered the bedroom he had shared with Grace, its fireplace and the wide windows that led to a balcony. He had been careless, he now knew, in thinking that idyll could last forever. He had sold his Indian jewels and used the money to make a haven while the lawyers bickered over her dead husband’s will, but then Grace died and the same lawyers pounced like weasels on the property Sharpe had bought. He had put the house in Grace’s name, saying that she needed the safety of her own home while he soldiered abroad, and that quixotic gallantry had lost him everything. Worse, he had lost her. Grace, he thought, Grace, and the self-pity swept over him so that he tipped his face to the rain as if it could wash away his tears.

Bloody fool, he told himself. Be useful. Pull yourself together. The woman is dead and you do not help her memory by collapsing. Get up, he told himself, walk. Sniveling and feeling sorry for himself would do nothing. Be useful. He got up, pulled on the pack and went to the wood’s edge.

And there his fortune changed. A farm lay just a hundred yards away. It had a long low white-painted house, two barns, a windmill and a dairy. It looked prosperous and busy. Two men were driving a big herd of cattle toward the dairy while a dozen laborers gathered in the yard. All had haversacks slung on their shoulders and Sharpe reckoned that was dinner; bread and cheese, perhaps. He watched from the wood’s edge. The rain eased. Most of the men went westward with a small cart laden with spades and forks, but three vanished inside the smaller of the two barns. Sharpe waited, hunger biting. The bigger barn had wide-open doors. Get inside there, he reckoned, and he could scout the rest of the farm, maybe even sneak into the kitchen or dairy to steal food. He never once thought of the guineas in his pack. He could have bought food, but his instinct was not to show himself. Live as he had learned to live before he met Grace.

The dairy herd was driven back to pasture and then no one moved in the farm for a while until two children, school bags swinging, walked down the lane. When they had gone from sight Sharpe broke cover and ran across the damp pasture, crossed a ditch and sprinted the last few yards into the big barn. He half expected a shout of protest or a dog to start barking, but he was unseen. He slipped through the doors to find a vast wagon loaded high with hay. A haversack, like the ones the laborers had been carrying, lay discarded on the wagon’s seat and Sharpe scooped it up as he climbed the vehicle’s high side which was a wooden grille designed to keep the hay in place. He scrabbled a hole for himself in the hay, took off his pack and greatcoat, then opened the stolen haversack to find bread, cheese, a big piece of ham, a sausage and a stone bottle which, uncorked, proved to hold ale.

He ate half the bread and all the cheese. He reckoned he could stay here for hours, but it was more important to reach Copenhagen and find Skovgaard. He was about to clamber out of the wagon when a strange clatter sounded beneath him. He went still. The clattering was loud, wood against stone. The sound puzzled Sharpe until he recognized it as footsteps. Wooden shoes, Sharpe finally realized, banging on the barn’s flagstones. Then a man’s voice shouted a protest, presumably for his stolen dinner, another man laughed, and Sharpe heard the heavy sound of hooves and the clink of chains. A team was being hitched to the hay-wain. The voices went on, and a woman said something soothing that provoked more laughter. It all seemed to take forever. Sharpe stayed where he was, half buried in the wagon’s high load.

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