“Shut your teeth, Moss!” Ibbotson glared at him then turned to Sharpe; his hand moved the bayonet higher but it was only to emphasise his remarks. “We’re going to lose this war. Any fool can see that! There are more French armies than Britain could raise in a hundred years. Look at you!” His voice was filled with scorn. “You might beat one General, then another, but they’ll keep coming! And they’ll win! And do you know why? Because they have an idea. It’s called freedom, and justice, and equality!” He stopped abruptly, his eyes blazing.
“What are you, Ibbotson?” Sharpe asked.
“A man.”
Sharpe smiled at the dramatic challenge in the answer. The argument wasn’t new, Rifleman Tongue could be relied on to trot it out most nights, but Sharpe was curious why an educated man like Ibbotson should be in the ranks of the army and preaching the French shibboleths of freedom.
“You’re educated Ibbotson. Where are you from?”
Ibbotson did not answer. He stared at Sharpe, clutching his bayonet. There was silence. Behind him Sharpe heard Harper and Peters shuffle their feet on the hard earth floor. Moss cleared his throat and beckoned at Ibbotson. “E’s a vicar’s son, sir.” He said it as if it explained everything.
Sharpe looked at Ibbotson. The son of a vicarage? Perhaps the father had died or the family was too large, and penury could lie at the end of both those roads. But what fate had driven Ibbotson to join the army? To pit his puny strength against the drunks and hardened criminals who were the usual scrapings gathered by the recruiting parties? Ibbotson stared back at him and then, to Sharpe’s disgust, began to cry. He let go of the bayonet and buried his face in the crook of his left elbow, and Sharpe wondered if he were suddenly thinking of a vicarage garden beside a church and a long-lost mother baking bread in the ripeness of an English summer. He turned to Harper.
“They’re under arrest, Sergeant. You’ll have to carry those two.”
He stepped outside the hovel into the foetid alleyway. “Kirby?”
“Sir?”
“You can go.” The man ran off. Sharpe did not want him to face the four deserters whose arrest he had caused. “You others. Inside.”
He stared up between the narrowing walls at the patch of sky. Swallows flashed across the opening, the colours were deepening into night, and tomorrow there would be executions. But first there was Josefina. Harper came to the door. “We’re ready, sir.”
“Then let’s go.”
CHAPTER 13
Sharpe woke with a start, sat up, instinctively reached for a weapon and then, realising where he was, sank back on the pillow. He was covered with sweat though the night was cool and a small breeze stirred the edges of the curtains either side of the open window, through which he could see a full moon. Josefina sat beside the bed, watching him, a glass of wine in her hand. “You were dreaming.”
“Yes.”
“What about?”
“My first battle.” He did not say any more but in his dream he had been unable to load the Brown Bess, the bayonet would not fit the muzzle, and the French kept coming and laughing at the frightened boy on the wet plains of Flanders. Boxtel, it had been called, and he rarely thought of the messy fight in the damp field. He looked at the girl. “What about you?” He patted the bed. “Why are you up?”
She shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep.” She had put on some kind of dark robe, and only her face and the hand holding the glass were visible in the unlit room.
“Why couldn’t you sleep?”
“I was thinking. About what you said. ”
“It may not happen.”
She smiled at him. “No.”
Somewhere in the town a dog barked but there were no other sounds. Sharpe thought of the prisoners and won-dered if they were spending their last night awake and listening to the same dog. He thought back to the evening after he had come back from the guardroom and the long conversation with Josefina. She wanted to reach Madrid, was desperate to reach Madrid, and Sharpe had told her he thought it unlikely that the allies would get as far as Spain’s capital. Sharpe thought that Josefina had little idea why she wanted to reach Madrid; it was the dream city for her, the pot of gold at the end of a fading rainbow, and he was jealous of her desire to get there. “Why not go back to Lisbon?”