Sharpe walked every rampart, spoke to every sentry, and the tiredness was like a pain in every part of his body. He wanted to be warm, he wanted to sleep, he wished that Harper’s huge and genial presence was in the Castle, but he knew, too, that he would have little sleep this night. An hour or two, perhaps, huddled in some cold corner. The room that Farthingdale had made his own, the room with the fireplace, had been given to the wounded, and no man in the valley had a worse night than them.
The wind was cold. The snow seemed almost luminous on the valley floor, a white sheet that would-betray an enemy movement. The sentries fought to stay awake on the ramparts, listened for their Sergeants’ footsteps, wondered what the dawn would bring from the east.
To the south there was a glow in the sky, a red suffusion that marked where Partisans were spending the dark hours. Somewhere, just once, a wolf gave a sobbing howl that was ghostlike in the high, dark night.
Sharpe’s final visit to the sentries was to the men who guarded the hole hacked in the southern side of the keep. He looked at the snow-covered thorns of the hill and knew that, should tomorrow they be overwhelmed, that was the escape route. Many would never take it, but would lie dying in the Castle, and he remembered the winter four years before when he had led the single Company of Riflemen, in weather worse than this, on a retreat that had been as desperate as tomorrow’s might be. Most of those men were dead now, killed by disease or by the enemy, and Harper had been one of the men who had struggled south in the Galician snows. Harper.
He went to the steps which led straight and broad down to the dungeons. Lightly wounded Fusiliers guarded the prisoners and they did so in a stench that was vile, a stench that rose from the crammed, foul bodies in the dark. The guards were nervous. There was no door to the dungeons, just the stairway, and they had made a barricade, chest high, at the bottom of the steps and lit it with flaming straw torches that showed the slick wetness of the nearest patch of floor. Each guard had three muskets, loaded and cocked, and the thought was that no prisoner would have time to clamber the barricade before a bullet would throw him back. The guards were pleased to see Sharpe. He sat with them on the steps. ‘How are they?’
‘Bleeding cold, sir.’
‘That’ll keep them quiet.’
‘Gives me the creeps, sir. You know that big bastard?’
‘Hakeswill?’
‘He got free.’
Sharpe looked into the darkness beyond the torches. He could see the half-naked bodies piled together for warmth, he could see some eyes glittering at him from the heap, but he could not see Hakeswill. ‘Where is he?’
‘He stays at the back, sir.’
‘Given you no trouble?’
‘No.’ The man spat a stream of tobacco juice over the unbalustraded edge of the stairs. ‘We told them if they came within ten feet of the barricade, we’d fire.’ He patted the butt of his musket, one captured from Pot-au-Feu’s men.
‘Good.’ He looked at the half-dozen men. ‘When are you relieved?’
‘Morning, sir.’ Their self-elected spokesman said.
‘What do you have to drink?’
They grinned, held up canteens. ‘Rum, sir.’
He walked down the steps and pushed at the barricade. It seemed firm enough, a mixture of stones and old timber, and he stared into the darkness and understood why this damp place would scare a man. It was called a dungeon, though in truth it was more like a huge, branching cellar, arched low with massive stones, but doubtless it had been a place where men had died through the ages. Like the men Hakeswill had killed here, like the Muslim prisoners who would have defended their faith by refusing to convert despite the Christian knives, racks, burning irons, and chains. He wondered if anyone had ever been happy in this place, had ever laughed.
This was a tomb for happiness, a place where no sunlight had reached for centuries, and he turned back to the stairs, glad to be leaving this place.