The Parkers sat on rugs beside their carriage. Mrs Parker would not look at Sharpe since his outburst beside the stream, but Louisa gave him a happy and conspiratorial smile that caused Sharpe instant embarrassment for he feared his men would see it and jump to the correct and unavoidable conclusion that the Lieutenant was smitten. To avoid betraying his feelings, Sharpe walked from beneath the stand of pines to where a single picquet squatted beside the road.
“Anything?” he asked.
“Nothing, sir.” It was Hagman, the oldest Rifleman, and one of the very few not to have drunk himself insensible during the night. He was chewing tobacco and his eyes never left the northern skyline. “It’s going to rain again.”
“You think so?”
“Know so.”
Sharpe squatted. The clouds seemed endless, black and grey, rolling from the invisible sea. “Why did you join the army?” he asked.
Hagman, whose toothless mouth gave his already ugly face a nutcracker profile, grinned. “Caught poaching, sir. Magistrate gave me a choice, sir. Clink or the ranks.”
“Married?”
“That’s why I chose the ranks, sir.” Hagman laughed, then spat a stream of yellow spittle into a puddle. “God-damned sawny-mouthed bitch of a sodding witch she was, sir.”
Sharpe laughed, then went utterly still.
“Sir!” Hagman said softly.
“I see them.” Then Sharpe was standing, turning, shout-lrig, for on the southern skyline, silhouetted against the dark clouds, were cavalry.
The French had caught up.
CHAPTER 8
It was a bad place to be caught; a stretch of open country where cavalry could manoeuvre almost at will. It was true that there were patches of bog at the edges of the fields which, like the road, were lined with low stone walls, but Sharpe knew he would be hard put to extricate his men from the enemy.
“You’re certain it’s the French?” Parker asked.
Sharpe did not even bother to answer. A soldier who could not recognize enemy silhouettes did not deserve to live, but neither did a soldier who hesitated. “Go! Go!” This was to the coachman who, jarred by Sharpe’s sudden anger, cracked his long whip at his lead pair. Traces jangled, splinter bars jerked with the strain, and the carriage lunged forward.
The Riflemen tore rags from their weapon locks. Sharpe said a silent prayer of thanks to whichever deity looked after soldiers that, on the day when they had been cut off from the army, these men had been issued with so much ammunition. They would need it, for they were horribly outnumbered and their only hope lay in the ability of the rifle to delay the enemy’s pursuit.
Sharpe estimated it would take the French horsemen ten minutes to reach the stand of pines which presently shrouded the Riflemen. There was no escape to east or west, where only empty fields lay; instead he needed to reach the southern crest where the farm stood and hope that, beyond the crest and by some miracle, he would find an obstacle impassable to horsemen. If there was no escape, then the farmhouse must be barricaded into a fortress. But ten minutes was not enough time to reach the farm, so Sharpe held back a dozen men at the pines. The rest, under Williams’s command, went with the coach.
Sharpe kept Hagman, for the old poacher had an uncanny skill with his rifle, and he retained Harper with his closest cronies, for Sharpe suspected that they were his best fighters. “We can’t hold them up for long,” he told the few men, “but we can buy some time. But when we do move, we’ll have to run like the devil.”
Harper crossed himself. “God save Ireland.” There were at least two hundred Dragoons now filing along the boggy road that had mired the coach an hour earlier.
The Riflemen lay at the edge of the trees. To the French, still half a mile off, they would be invisible. “Lie still,” Sharpe warned his men. “Aim at the horses. It’s going to be a very long shot.” He would have liked to have waited till the enemy was just two hundred yards away before opening fire, but that would let the horsemen come far too close. Instead he would be forced to fire at the very limit of the rifle’s killing range in the hope that the bullets created enough surprise and panic to check the French advance for a few precious moments.