By day there was work. Hard work, urgent work, to fashion a victory from defeat. The priests drew a map of the city on which, in careful detail, Vivar plotted the French defences. News of the enemy preparations came daily, fetched to the hills by refugees who fled from the invader and told tales of arrests and killings.
The city was still bounded by the decayed walls of its mediaeval defences. Those walls were gone in places, and in others the houses had spilt outside to make suburbs, yet the French were basing their defence on the ancient line of ramparts. Where the stones had fallen they had made barricades. The defences were not fearsome; Santiago de Compostela was no frontier city, enwrapped in star-trace and ravelins, but the ramparts could still be a terrible obstacle to an infantry attack. “We attack just before dawn,” Vivar announced early in the week.
Sharpe grunted agreement. “What if they have picquets beyond the walls?”
“They will. We ignore them.”
Sharpe heard the first risk being taken, the first corner cut in this desperate lunge for an impossible victory. Vivar was relying on darkness and weariness to fuddle the wits of the French. Yet it would only take one soldier to stumble in the night, for his musket to spark and fire, and the whole attack would be betrayed. Vivar proposed attacking without loaded muskets. There would be time, he said, after the initial surprise for the men to load their guns. Sharpe, an infantryman who relied on his gun far more than a cavalryman like Vivar, hated the idea. Vivar pressed, but the most Sharpe would yield was that he would consider it.
The plans grew more detailed and, as they did, so Sharpe’s fears gathered like dark clouds looming on the skyline. It was easy to win a victory on paper. There were no dogs to bark, no stones to strip a man, no rain to soak powder, and the enemy performed as dozily as Vivar could wish; on paper. “They’ll know we’re coming?” Sharpe asked him.
“They’ll suspect we’re coming,” Vivar allowed. The French could hardly have failed to hear of the gathering in the hills, though they might well dismiss such a threat as negligible. They had, after all, broken the armies of Spain and Britain, so what did they have to fear from a few peasants? Yet the Count of Mouromorto and Colonel de l’Eclin would know exactly what ambition spurred Bias Vivar, and they were both in Santiago. The refugees confirmed it. Marshal Ney’s cavalry had taken the city and then ridden back to Corunna to join Marshal Soult, leaving two thousand French cavalrymen inside the circuit of broken walls.
They had not been left there to stop an ancient banner reaching a shrine, but rather to collect forage from the coastal valleys of Galicia. Having thrown the British out of Spain, Marshal Soult was now planning to march south. His officers, bragging in the taverns of Corunna, spoke openly of their plans, and those words were faithfully retailed to Vivar. The French, once their wounded and frostbitten ranks were mended, would turn south on Portugal. They would conquer that country and expel the British from Lisbon. The coast of Europe would thus be sealed against British trade, and the Emperor’s stranglehold would be complete.
Soult’s route south would lead through Santiago de Com-postela and thus he had ordered that the city become his forward supply base. His army would collect those supplies to fuel its southern attack. French cavalry was aggressively patrolling the countryside in search of the food and fodder which, the refugees told Vivar, was being stockpiled in houses about the cathedral’s plaza. “So you see,” Vivar said to Sharpe on a night later in the week when they met as usual to stare at the city’s map and hone their plan of assault, “you have a proper reason for attacking, Lieutenant.”
“Proper?”
“You can claim that you are not just humouring a mad Spaniard. You are protecting your Lisbon garrison by destroying French supplies. Is that not true?”
But Sharpe was in no mood for such reassurance. He stared at the city’s plan, imagining the French sentries staring into the night. “They’ll know we’re coming.” Sharpe could not rid himself of the fear of the enemy’s preparedness.