He was going slowly, carefully, scared of each step. Below him he could hear the thumping as musket butts hammered at the door. It could not hold. Then one of his wounded screamed horribly and Sharpe remembered a glimpse of a shattered thigh-bone sticking clean from the torn flesh and he knew the man was being dragged up the steps. Poor bastard, Christmas Day 1812, and the thought gave him such anger that he abandoned his caution and ran up the steps, shouting, and he burst into a spacious room where men, far more frightened than he, waited to see what came out of the doorway. They did not know if it would be friend or foe and they hesitated long enough for the sword to take one and the other two ran back to an open door that looked onto the northern ramparts. Sharpe slammed the door shut, barred it, then turned to look at their refuge.
It was a large, rectangular chamber lit by two arrow slits that looked out at the valley. Two huge and broken windlasses were in the room, long decayed, and a rusted pulley on the ceiling showed where once a portcullis had been raised and lowered by guards in this room. Another circular staircase led upwards from a doorway and Sharpe knew it must lead to the turret’s top from which Pot-au-Feu’s men had fired on the attack.
Harper was loading his seven-barrelled gun, a long process, while the Fusiliers dragged the wounded into the chamber. Sharpe grabbed the Sergeant’s tunic. ‘Two men for each doorway, muskets loaded.’ He looked at the windlasses. The great drums were still there, the wood rotten and dusty. ‘Try and block the stairway with one of them.’
A shot echoed up the stairway, then another, then a splintering crash as the door was pounded down. Sharpe grinned at the Sergeant. ‘Don’t worry. They’ll be cautious coming up here.’
Two Fusiliers tugged at the nearest windlass, snapping bits of wood from its decrepit frame, but achieving nothing. Harper gave one his seven-barrelled gun and a handful of the pistol cartridges he fed it with. ‘Load that, son. Just like a bloody musket. Now stand back.’
He wrapped the huge arms about the vast wooden drum, tested his strength tentatively against the force of the anchors that held the axle to the huge beam beneath, and then the arms tightened, the legs pushed, his face was distorted with the effort, and still the drum would not move. One of the men guarding the staircase primed his musket, hastily levelled it, and fired down into the winding stair. A shout from below. That would slow them.
Harper tugged at the drum, swore at it, jerked it rhythmically so that his muscles tore at the ancient brackets. He pulled again, sinews like the ropes that had once raised the portcullis through the slit in the floor, and Sharpe saw a rusted angle-iron snap, heard the splintering of dry wood, and Harper’s legs straightened as the drum rose ponderously clear, shedding old dust, and the Irishman carried it, gait as clumsy as a dancing bear, the burden looking like a hogshead of beer in his grasp and he grunted at the two guards to stand aside. He let it go into the stairway, it fell, crashing and bouncing, and then jammed itself into the bend. He wiped his hands and grinned. ‘A present from the Irish. They’ll have to burn the bastard out of there.’ He went back to his seven-barrelled gun, finished the loading, and grinned at Sharpe. ‘Next floor, sir?’
‘Did I ever tell you you’re a useful man to have around?’
‘Tell my Ma, sir. She wanted to throw me back. I was so little.’ One of the Fusiliers laughed almost hysterically. His jacket was fresh and bright, a recruit, and Harper grinned at him. ‘Don’t worry, lad, they’re far more scared of you than you are of them.’ The boy was guarding the door onto the northern rampart, a rampart that had been clear of the enemy for no attack threatened from that side.
Sharpe went to the doorway that led to the turret’s top and peered cautiously inside. An empty stair going up. A voice swore in the other staircase, a bayonet scraped on the wood of the blockage, but Sharpe had no fears now of an attack from below. He was frightened of this stairway, though. The men at the top would know by now that there was an enemy below. He was tempted to leave them there, but he knew that he could defend the summit of the gate-tower far more easily than this room. ‘I’ll go first.’