From the Battalion there came the sound of musket fire, and he knew that bullocks had been slaughtered for the evening meal. There would be wine with the stew, and Hogan’s brandy after it, and stories about old friends and half-forgotten campaigns. He had been looking forward to the meal, to the evening, but suddenly everything was changed. The girl was in the camp, her laughter would invade the peace, and he thought, as he walked back by the stream, that he did not even know her name.
CHAPTER 5
The Regimienta de la Santa Maria would have conquered the world if words and display had been enough. But punctuality was not among their more obvious military virtues.
The South Essex had marched hard for four days to reach the rendezvous at Plasencia, but the town was empty of Spanish troops. Storks flapped lazily from their nests among the steep roofs that climbed to the ancient cathe-dral which dominated both the town and the circling plain, but of the Santa Maria there was no sign. The Battalion waited. Simmerson had bivouacked outside the walls, and the men watched jealously as other units arrived and marched into the tantalising streets with their wine shops and women. Three men disobeyed the standing order to stay away from the town and were caught, helplessly drunk, by the Provost-Marshal and received a flogging as the Battalion paraded beside the River Jerte.
Finally, two days late, the Spanish Regiment arrived and the South Essex mustered at five in the morning to begin their march south to Valdelacasa. There was a chill in the air which the rising sun would disperse, but as five thirty, the hour set for departure, came and went there was still no sign of the Santa Maria and the men stamped their feet and rubbed their hands to ward off the cold. The hour of six chimed from the bells in the town. The children who were waiting with their mothers to see the Battalion depart grew bored and ran through the ranks despite all the shouting that began with Simmerson and worked its way down to the Sergeants and Corporals. The Battalion was paraded beside the Roman bridge that spanned the river, and Sharpe followed a grumbling Captain Hogan onto the ancient arches and stared into the water that tumbled round the vast granite boulders which had been left in the river-bed in some long-ago upheaval of the earth. Hogan was impatient. “Damn them! Why can’t we just march and let the beggars catch us up?” He knew well why it was impossible. The answer was called diplomacy, and part of the price of cooperation with the touchy Spanish forces was that the native Regiment must march first. Sharpe said nothing. He stared into the water at the long weeds which waved sinuously in the current. He shivered in the dawn breeze. He shared Hogan’s impatience, and it was alloyed with frustrations that stirred inside him like the slow-moving river weed. He looked up at the Cathedral, touched by the rising sun, and tried to pin down his apprehensions about the operation at Valdelacasa. It sounded simple. A day’s march to the bridge, a day for Hogan to destroy the already crumbling arches, and a day’s march back to Plasencia, where Wellesley was gather-ing his forces for the next stage of the advance into Spain. But there was something, some instinct as difficult to pin down as the grey shadows that receded in the dawn, that told him it would not be that easy. It was not the Spanish that worried him. Like Hogan he knew that their presence was a political imperative and a military farce. If they proved as useless as their reputation suggested, that should not matter; the South Essex was strong enough to cope with whatever was needed. And that was the prob-lem. Simmerson had never met the enemy, and Sharpe had little faith in the Colonel’s ability to do the right thing. If there really were French on the south bank of the Tagus, and if the South Essex had to repel an attack on the bridge while Hogan laid his charges, then Sharpe would have preferred an old soldier to be making the decisions and not this Colonel of Militia whose head was stuffed with theories on battles and tactics learned on the safe fields of Essex.