Sharpe thought. He was required to test these rockets, test them thoroughly, and he had done that in four hard days work. They had started the rockets at their full range of two thousand yards and quickly brought the range down, down to just three hundred yards and still the missiles were hopelessly inaccurate. And yet! Sharpe smiled to himself. What was the effect on a man who had never been exposed to them? He looked at the sky. Midday. He had hoped for an easy afternoon before going to see the performance of Hamlet that the officers of the Light Division were staging in a barn outside the town, but perhaps there was just one test that he had forgotten. It need not take long.
An hour later, alone with Sergeant Harper, he watched Gilliland make his preparations six hundred yards away. Harper looked at Sharpe and shook his head. ‘We’re mad.’
‘You don’t have to stay.’
Harper sounded glum. ‘I promised your wife I’d look after you, sir. Here I am, keeping the promise.’
Teresa. Sharpe had met her two summers ago when his Company had fought alongside her band of Partisans. Teresa fought the French in her own way, with ambush and knife, with surprise and terror. They had been married eight months and in that time Sharpe doubted if he had spent more than ten weeks with her. Their daughter, Antonia, was nineteen months old now, a daughter he loved because she was his only blood relative, but a daughter he did not know and who would grow to speak a different language, but still his daughter. He grinned at Harper. ‘We’ll be all right. You know they always miss.’
‘Nearly always, sir.’
Maybe they were mad to try this test, yet Sharpe wanted to deal fairly with Gilliland’s enthusiasm. The rockets were inaccurate, so much so that they had become a joke to Sharpe’s men who loved to watch the veering, crashing and burning of Gilliland’s toys. Yet most of the rockets did travel towards the enemy, however curious their path, and perhaps Gilliland was right. Perhaps they would terrify and there was only one way to find out. To become the target himself.
Harper scratched his head. ‘If my Mother knew, sir, that I was standing against a wall with thirty bloody rockets aimed at me… ‘ He sighed, touched the crucifix around his neck. Sharpe knew the artillerymen were jointing the sticks. Each twelve pounder needed two lengths of stick. The first length was slotted into a metal tube on the side of the rocket head and then fixed in place by crimping the metal with pliers. A similar metal tube, similarly crimped, joined the two sticks into a ten-foot shaft that balanced the rocket head. The shaft had another use, a use that intrigued and impressed Sharpe. Each trooper in the Rocket Cavalry kept a lance-head in a special holster on his saddle. The lance-head could be hammered onto the jointed sticks and then carried into battle on horseback. Gilliland’s men were not trained to fight with the lance, any more than they were trained in the use of the sabres they all carried, but there was an ingenuity about the detached lance-head that pleased Sharpe. He had appalled Gilliland by insisting that the Rocket Troop rehearse cavalry charges.
‘Portfires alight!’ Harper seemed determined to keep up a commentary on his own death. Sharpe could see his own Company sitting by Gilliland’s rocket ‘cars’, his specially fitted supply wagons. `Oh, God!’ Harper crossed himself.
Sharpe knew the portfires were going down to touch the rocket fuses. ‘You said yourself they couldn’t hit a house at fifty yards.’
‘I’m a big target.’ Harper was six feet and four inches tall. There was a wisp of smoke far down the field. That one rocket would already be moving, burning the grass, leaping like quickfire above the soil, hammering in front of its fire and smoke. The others burst into life.
‘Oh, God,’ Harper groaned.
Sharpe grinned. ‘If they’re close, just jump over the wall.’
‘Anything you say, sir.’
For a second or two the rockets were curious twisting dots, haloed by fire, centred on their pulsing smoke trails. The trails weaved as the missiles climbed and wandered and then, so fast that Sharpe would have had no time to throw himself behind the low stone wall, the rockets seemed to leap towards the two men. The sound filled the valley, the fire blazed behind the spread of missiles, and then they were past, screaming above the wall and Sharpe found he had ducked even though the closest rocket had been thirty yards away.