‘I know.’
The French had left their lines to gape at the smoking ruins at the northern wall. There was nothing to stop the Company leaving, and they took the gold and went west, under the smoke, and back to the army. The war was not lost.
EPILOGUE
‘What happened, Richard?’
‘Nothing, sir.’
Hogan moved his horse forward to a patch of succulent grass. ‘I don’t believe you.’
Sharpe stirred in his saddle; he hated riding. ‘There was a girl.’
‘Is that all?’
‘All? She was special.’
The breeze from the sea was cool on his face; the water sparkled with a million flashes of light, like a giant army of lance-tips, and beating northwards towards the Channel a frigate laid its grey sails towards the land and left a streak of white in its path.
Hogan watched the ship. ‘Despatches.’
‘News of victory?’ Sharpe’s tone was ironic.
‘They won’t believe it. It’s a funny victory.’ Hogan stared at the distant horizon, miles out to sea from the hilltop where their horses stood. ‘Do you see the fleet out there? A convoy going home.’
Sharpe grunted, felt the twinge in his healing shoulder. ‘More money for the bloody merchants. Why couldn’t they have sent it here?’
Hogan smiled. ‘There’s never enough, Richard. Never.’
‘There had better be now. After what we did to get it here.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I told you, nothing.’ He stared a challenge at the gentle Irish Major. ‘We were sent to get it, we got it, and we brought it back.’
‘The General’s pleased.’ Hogan said it in a neutral tone.
‘He’d bloody better be pleased! For Christ’s sake!’
‘He thought you were lost.’ Hogan’s horse moved again, cropping the grass, and the Major took off his cocked hat and fanned his face. ‘Pity about Almeida.’
Sharpe made a face. ‘Pity about Almeida.’
Hogan sighed patiently. ‘We thought it was done for. We heard the explosion, of course, and there was no gold. Without the gold there was no chance.’
‘There was a little chance.’ Sharpe almost spat the words at him and Hogan shrugged.
‘No, not a chance you’d want, Richard.’
Sharpe let his anger sink; he thought of the girl, watched the frigate flap its sails and bend into its next tack. ‘Which would you rather have had, sir?’ His voice was very cold, very far away. ‘The gold, or Almeida?’
Hogan pulled his horse’s head up. ‘The gold, Richard. You know that.’
‘You’re sure?’
Hogan nodded. ‘Very sure. Thousands might have died without the gold.’
‘But we don’t know that.”
Hogan waved his arm at the landscape. ‘We do.’
It was a miracle, perhaps one of the greatest feats of military engineering, and it had taken up the gold. The gold had been needed, desperately needed, or the work would never have been finished and the ten thousand labourers, some of whom Sharpe could see, could have packed up their shovels and picks and simply waited for the French. Sharpe watched the giant scrapers, hauled by lines of men and oxen, shaping the hills.
‘What do you call it?’
‘The Lines of Torres Vedras.’
Three lines barred the Lisbon peninsula, three giant fortifications made with the hills themselves, fortifications that dwarfed the granite-works at Almeida. The first line, on which they rode, was twenty-six miles long, stretching from the Atlantic to the Tagus, and there were two others behind it. The hills had been steepened, crowned with gun batteries, and the lowland flooded. Behind the hillcrests sunken roads meant that the twenty-five thousand garrison troops could move unseen by the French, and the deep valleys, where they could not be filled, were blocked with thorn-trees, thousands of them, so that from the air it must have looked as if a giant’s child had shaped the landscape the way a boy played with a few square inches of wet soil by a stream.
Sharpe stared eastwards, at the unending line, and he found it hard to believe. So much work, so many escarpments made by hand, crowned with hundreds of guns cased in stone forts, their embrasures looking to the north, to the plain where Massena would be checked.
Hogan rode alongside him. ‘We can’t stop him, Richard, not till he gets here. And here he stays.’