“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t you “yes sir” me.” Sharpe saw Wellesley watching with an amused eye. Crauford pushed a bottle of red wine towards Sharpe. “You lost damn near half your company! If you hadn’t come back with the Eagle you would have deserved to have been broken right back to private again. Aren’t I right?”
Sharpe inclined his head. “You are, sir.”
Crauford leaned back, satisfied, and raised his glass to the Rifleman. “But it was damn well done, all the same.”
There was laughter round the table. Lawford, a confec-tion of silver and lace, and confirmed, at least temporarily, as Commanding Officer of the South Essex, leaned back and put two more opened bottles on the table. “How’s the excellent Sergeant Harper?”
Sharpe smiled. “Recovering, sir.”
“Was he wounded badly?” Hill leaned forward into the candlelight, his round, farmer’s face suffused with con-cern. Sharpe shook his head. “No, sir. The Sergeant’s mess of the First Battalion were kind enough to celebrate with him. I believe he proposed the theory that one man from Donegal could drink as much as any three Englishmen.”
Hogan slapped the table. The Irish Engineer was cheerfully drunk and he raised his glass to Wellesley. “We Irishmen are never beaten. Isn’t that so, sir?”
Wellesley raised his eyebrows. He had drunk even less than Sharpe. “I never count myself an Irishman, Captain Hogan, though perhaps I share that characteristic with them.”
“Damn that, sir,” Crauford growled. “I’ve heard you say that just because a man is born in a stable it doesn’t make him into a horse!”
There was more laughter. Sharpe leaned back and listened to the talk round the table and let the meal rest heavy in his stomach. The servants were bringing in brandy and cigars, which meant that the evening would soon be over, but he had enjoyed it. He was never comfortable at formal dinners; he had not been born to them, had been to few of them, but these men had made him feel at home and pretended not to notice when he waited for them to pick up their cutlery so that he would know which was the correct pair to use for each course. He had told once more the story of how he and Patrick Harper had hacked their way through the enemy line, of the death of Denny, and how they had been swept along with the fugitives before hacking their way clear with sword and axe.
He sipped his wine, wriggled his toes in the new shoes, and reflected again on his fortune. He remembered his despondency before the battle, of feeling that the promises could not be kept, yet it had all happened. Perhaps he really was lucky, as his men said, but he wished he knew how to preserve that luck. He remembered Gibbons’ falling body, the bayonet deep in his back, and the sight of Harper back from his bird-watching just in time to stop the sabre stabbing down into Sharpe. The next day all traces of the crime had been burned away. The dead, Gibbons among them, had been stacked in naked piles, and the living had thrust wooden faggots deep into the corpses and set fire to them. There had been far too many for burial, and for two days the fires were fed with more wood and the stench hung over the town until the ashes were scattered across the Portina valley and the only signs of the battle were the discarded equipment no-one could be bothered to retrieve and the scorched grass where the flames had roasted the wounded.
“Sharpe?”
He started. Someone had spoken his name, and he had missed what was said. “Sir? I’m sorry.”
Wellesley was smiling at him. “Captain Hogan was saying that you’ve been improving Anglo-Portuguese relations?”
Sharpe glanced at Hogan, who raised his eyebrows impishly. All week the Irishman had been determinedly cheerful about Josefina, and Sharpe, with three Generals watching him, had no option but to smile and give a modest shrug.
“Fortune favours the brave, eh, Sharpe?” Hill grinned.
“Yes, sir.”
He leaned back and let the conversation flow on. He missed her. It was only just over two weeks since the night he had followed her from the inn courtyard into the darkness by the stream, and since then he had spent only five nights with her. And now there would be no more. He had known as soon as he had reached Talavera, on the morning after the battle, and she had kissed him and smiled at him while in the background Agostino packed the leather saddlebags and folded up the dresses he had not had time to see her wear. She had walked with him through the town, clinging onto his elbow, looking up into his face as though she were a child. “It would never have lasted, Richard.”