“I wish I could say “yes”.” Wellesley sipped his wine. “The Spanish have failed us in every promise. It was not easy to leave our wounded to their care but we have no choice, gentlemen, no choice.”
Hill shook his head. “The retreat will not be received well in England.”
“Damn England!” Wellesley spoke with asperity, his eyes suddenly alive with anger. “I know what England will say; that once again we have been driven from Spain, and so we have, gentlemen, so we have!” He leaned back in his chair and Sharpe could see the tiredness on his face. The other officers were still, listening intently, and like Sharpe they could see in Wellesley’s face the difficulty of the decision he had taken. “But this time-, the General ran his finger round the wine glass so that it rang-,this time we have been driven out, not by the French, but by our allies.” He let the sarcasm come through on the word. “A starving army, gentlemen, is worse than no army. If our allies cannot feed us then we must go where we can feed ourselves and we will come back, I promise you that, but we will come back on our terms and not on the Spanish terms.” There were murmurs of agreement round the table. Wellesley sipped his wine. “The Spanish have failed us everywhere. They promised us food and delivered none. They prom-ised to shield us from Soult’s northern army, and now I find that they did not. Soult, gentlemen, is behind us and unless we move now we will find ourselves a surrounded and starving army simply because we believed General Cuesta and his promises. Now he has promised to look after our wounded.” Wellesley shook his head. “I know what will happen. He will insist on advancing to meet the French, he will be thrashed, and the town will be aban-doned to the enemy.” He shrugged. “I am convinced, gentlemen, that they will treat our wounded better than our allies.”
There was silence round the table. The candles flickered and shimmered their reflections on the polished wood. From somewhere, far away, there came the sound of music but it faded with the breeze beyond the heavy curtains. And what happens to Josefina now? Sharpe filled his glass with wine and passed the bottle to Hill. If Wellesley was right, and he was, then in a matter of days the French would be masters of Talavera and the British army would be well on its way back to Portugal and probably to Lisbon.
Sharpe knew that he wanted her still and wondered what would happen if the swirling currents of war brought them together again.
A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts and he watched as a Staff Captain entered and gave Wellesley a sealed paper. The officers talked, inventing topics of conversation so that Wellesley could open the paper and talk to the Captain in some privacy. Hill was telling Sharpe about the Drury Lane Theatre. Did he know it had been burned down in February? Sharpe nodded and smiled, made the right noises, but he looked round the table, at the three Generals, at the aristocrats, and he thought of the foundling home and prisons he had known as a child. He remembered the foetid barracks where two men shared a cot, the vicious beatings, the unprincipled struggle just to stay alive. And now this? The candles danced in the draught, the red wine was rich and deep, and he wondered where the road they must take in tomorrow’s cold dawn would lead. If Bonaparte was to be defeated, then tomor-row’s march could last for years before it ended at the gates of Paris.
The Captain left and Wellesley tapped the table. The conversation tailed away and they looked at their hook-nosed General, who lifted the paper into the air. “The Austrians have made peace with Bonaparte.” He waited for the exclamations to die down. “Effectively, gentlemen, we are on our own. We can expect more French troops, maybe even Napoleon himself, and even more enemies at home.” Sharpe thought of Simmerson, already on the way home, planning to conspire in Parliament and in the smoking rooms of London against Wellesley and the British army in the Peninsula. “But, gentlemen, we have beaten three Marshals this year so let the rest come on!”