“Forgive me, I know,” Louisa interrupted him quickly, and there was a very awkward silence between them until she spoke again. “I do know what you’re saying, and I am very sensible of the honour you do me, but I do not want you to ask anything of me.” The formal words were said in a very small voice.
Sharpe had wanted to say that he would offer her everything that was in his power. It might not be much; in terms of money it was nothing, yet in slavish adoration it was everything. He had not said that, yet Louisa, out of his incoherence, had understood everything and now he felt embarrassed and rejected.
Louisa must have sensed that embarrassment, and regretted causing it. “I don’t want you to ask anything of me yet, Lieutenant. Will you give me until the city’s captured?”
“Of course.” Hope flared again in Sharpe, to mingle with the shame left by his clumsy proposal. He supposed he had spoken too soon, and too impetuously, yet Louisa’s evident desire to stay in Spain and avoid the fate of matrimony to Mr Bufford had provoked his words.
The sentry paced further away from them, the smell of his tobacco drifting back along the ramparts. The fire in the courtyard blazed bright as a man threw a log onto it. Louisa turned to watch the sparks whirl up to the height of the tower’s crenellations. From somewhere deep in the fortress came the wailing noise of one of the Galician bagpipes that inevitably provoked cries of feigned horror from Sharpe’s men. She smiled at the sound of the dutiful protests, then frowned accusingly at Sharpe. “You don’t think Don Bias will succeed in taking the city, do you?”
“Of course I…“
“No,” she interrupted him. “I listen to you. You think there are too many Frenchmen in Santiago. And in private you say that this is Don Bias’s madness.”
Sharpe was somewhat disconcerted by the accusation. He had not admitted his real fears to Louisa, yet she had truly perceived them. “It is madness,” he said defensively. “Even Major Vivar says it is.”
“He says it is God’s madness, which is different,” Louisa said in gentle reproof. “But it would work better, wouldn’t it, if there were less Frenchmen in the city?”
“It would work better,” Sharpe said drily, “if I had four Battalions of good redcoats, two batteries of nine pounders, and two hundred more Rifles.”
“Suppose,” Louisa began, then checked her.words.
“Go on.”
“Suppose the French thought that you had marched to a hiding place near the city. A place where you planned to wait during the day so you could attack just after dark? And suppose,” she hurried on to prevent him interrupting, “that the French knew where you were hiding?”
Sharpe shrugged. “They’d send men out to slaughter us, of course.”
“And if you were in another place entirely,” Louisa spoke now with the same enthusiasm with which she had greeted the mystery of the strongbox, “you could attack while they were out of the city!”
“It’s all very complicated,” Sharpe said in muted criticism.
“But supposing I was to tell them that?”
Sharpe, astonished, said nothing. Then he shook his head abruptly. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
“No, truly! If I went to Santiago,” Louisa rode over his protest by raising her voice, “if I went there and said that’s what you were doing, they’d believe me! I’d say that you wouldn’t let me come with you, and that you insisted I had to go on my own to Portugal, but I preferred to find my aunt and uncle. They’d believe me!”
“Never!” Sharpe wanted to stop this outburst of nonsense. “Major Vivar’s already played that trick on them. He spread rumours that he’d travelled with me, which sent the French haring off south. They won’t fall for it again.” He regretted extinguishing such enthusiasm, but her idea was quite hopeless. “Even if you tell the French that we’re hiding somewhere, they won’t send cavalry out to find us until after dawn. And by then it will be too late to attack. If there was a way of stripping the garrison at night…“ He shrugged, intimating that there was no way.