He had become poor through his guilt. His daughter, still not two years old, was growing up with her uncle and aunt, and Sharpe had taken all his savings, that he had stolen from the Spanish government in the first place, and given them to Antonia, his daughter. He had nothing left, except his sword, his rifle, his telescope, and the clothes on his back. He found himself resenting this young staff officer with his expensive horse and gilt scabbard furnishings and new leather boots.
There was a murmur in the ranks behind him. The men had seen the small figures who suddenly appeared on the southern crest. Sharpe turned round.
`Talion!’ There was silence. `Talion! ‘Shun!’
The mens’ boots crashed on the wet rocks. They were in two ranks, stretched across the mouth of the small Valley which carried the road northwards.
Sharpe stared at them, knowing their nervousness. These were his men, of his Battalion, and he trusted them, even against this outnumbering enemy. `Sergeant Huckfield!’
`Sir!’
`Raise the Colours!’
The men, Lieutenant Michael Trumper-Jones thought, grinned most unfittingly for` such a solemn moment, then he saw why. The `Colours’ were not the usual flags of a Battalion, instead they were scraps of cloth that had been tied to two stripped birch trunks. The rain made them hang limp and flat, so that from any distance it was impossible to see that the flags were nothing more than two cloaks tricked out with yellow facings torn from the jackets of the soldiers. At the head of the two staffs were wrapped more of the yellow cloth to resemble, at least at a distance, the crowns of England.
Sharpe saw the staff officer’s surprise. `Half Battalions don’t carry Colours, Mr Trumper-Jones.’
`No, sir.’
`And the French know that.’
`Yes, sir.’
`So what will they think?’
`That you have a full Battalion, sir?’
`Exactly.’ Sharpe looked back to the south, leaving Michael Trumper-Jones curious as to why this deception was a necessary preliminary to surrender. He decided it was best not to ask. Major Sharpe’s face discouraged casual questions.
And no wonder, for Major Richard Sharpe, as he stared at the southern ridge, was thinking that this river valley was a miserable, unfitting, and stupid place to die. He wondered, sometimes, if in death he would meet Teresa again, would see her thin, bright face that had always smiled a welcome; a face that, as her death receded, had lost the detail in his memory. He did not even have a picture of her, and his daughter, growing up in her Spanish family, had no picture of her mother or her father.
The army, Sharpe knew, would march away from Spain one day, and he would march with it, and his daughter would be left to life, just as he had been left orphaned as a small child. Misery begets misery, he thought, and then he remembered the consolation that Antonia’s uncle and aunt were better, more loving parents than he could have been.
A gust of wind slapped rain over the valley, obscuring the view and hissing on the stones of the bridge. Sharpe looked up at the mounted staff officer. `What do you see, Lieutenant?’
`Six horsemen, sir.’
`They haven’t got cavalry?’
`Not that we saw, sir.’
`That’s their infantry officers then. Buggers will be planning our deaths now.’ He smiled sourly. He wished this weather would end, that the sun would warm the land and push the memory of winter far behind him.
Then the skyline, where it was crossed by the road, was suddenly thick with the blue uniforms of the French. Sharpe counted the companies as they marched towards him. Six. They were the vanguard, the men who would be ordered to rush the bridge, but not till the French guns had been fetched into place.
That morning Sharpe had borrowed Captain Peter d’Alembord’s horse and had ridden the French approach route a dozen times. He had put himself into the place of the opposing commander and had argued with himself until he was certain what the enemy would do. Now, as he watched, they were doing it.
The French knew that a large British force was behind them. They dared not leave the road, abandoning their guns to take to the hills, for then they would be meat for the Partisans. They would want to blast away this road-block swiftly, and their tools for the job would be their guns.