‘Nothing can move here, Sharpe, nothing, without the Partisans knowing. The French have to escort every messenger with four hundred men. Imagine that? Four hundred sabres to protect one despatch and sometimes even that’s not enough.’
Sharpe could imagine it, and even pity the French for it. Wellington paid hard cash for every captured despatch; sometimes they came to his headquarters with the crusted blood of the dead messenger still crisp on the paper. The messenger who died clean in such a fight was lucky. The wounded were taken not for the information but for revenge, and the war in the hills between French and Spanish was a terrible tale of ghastly pain. Kearsey was riffling the pages of his unseen Bible as he talked.
‘By day the men are shepherds, farmers, millers, but by night they’re killers. For every Frenchman we kill, they kill two. Think what it’s like for the French, Sharpe. Every man, every woman, every child, is an enemy in the countryside. Even the catechism has changed.’
‘Are the French true believers?’
‘No, they are the devil’s spawn, doing his work, and must be eradicated.”‘ He gave his barking laugh.
Knowles stretched his legs. ‘Do the women fight, sir?’
‘They fight, Lieutenant, like the men. Moreno’s daughter, Teresa, is as good as any man. She knows how to ambush, to pursue. I’ve seen her kill.’
Sharpe looked up and saw the mist silvering overhead as the dawn leaked across the hills. ‘Is she the one who’s to marry El Catolico?’
Kearsey laughed. ‘Yes.’ He was silent for a second. ‘They’re not all good, of course. Some are just brigands, looting their own people.’ He was silent again. Knowles picked up his uncertainty.
‘Do you mean El Catolico, sir?’
‘No.’ Kearsey still seemed uncertain. ‘But he’s a hard man. I’ve seen him skin a Frenchman alive, inch by inch, and praying over him at the same time.’ Knowles made a sound of disgust, but Kearsey, visible now, shook his head. ‘You must understand, Lieutenant, how much they hate. Teresa’s mother was killed by the French and she did not die well.’ He peered down at the Bible, trying to read the print, then looked up at the lightening mist. ‘We must move. Casatejada’s a two-hour march.’ He stood up. ‘You’ll find it best to tie your boots round your neck as we cross the river.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Sharpe said it patiently. He had probably crossed a thousand rivers in his years as a soldier, but Kearsey insisted on treating them all as pure amateurs.
Once over the Agueda, waist-high and cold, they were beyond the farthest British patrols. From now on there was no hope of any friendly cavalry, no Captain Lossow with his German sabres, to help out in trouble. This was French territory, and Kearsey rode ahead, searching the landscape for signs of the enemy. The hills were the French hunting-ground, the scene of countless small and bloody encounters between cavalrymen and Partisans, and Kearsey led the Light Company on paths high up the slopes so that should an enemy patrol appear they could scramble quickly into the high rocks where horsemen could not follow. The Company seemed excited, glad to be near the enemy, and they grinned at Sharpe as he watched them file past on the goat track.
He had only twenty Riflemen now, including himself and Harper, out of the thirty-one survivors he had led from the horror of the retreat to Corunna. They were good men, the Green Jackets, the best in the army, and he was proud of them. Daniel Hagman, the old poacher, who was the best marksman. Parry Jenkins, five feet and four inches of Welsh loquaciousness, who could tease fish out of the most reluctant water. Jenkins, in battle, partnered Isaiah Tongue, educated in books and alcohol, who believed Napoleon was an enlightened genius, England a foul tyranny, but nevertheless fought with the cool deliberation of a good Rifleman. Tongue wrote letters for the other men in the Company, read their infrequent mail when it arrived, and dearly wanted to argue his levelling ideas with Sharpe, but dared not. They were good men.
The other thirty-three were all Redcoats, armed with the smoothbore Brown Bess musket, but they had proved themselves at Talavera and in the tedious winter patrols. Lieutenant Knowles, still awed by Sharpe, but a good officer, decisive and fair. Sharpe nodded at James Kelly, an Irish Corporal, who had stunned the Battalion by marrying Pru Baxter, a widow who was a foot taller and two stones heavier than the skinny Kelly, but the Irishman had hardly stopped smiling in the three months since the marriage. Sergeant Read, the Methodist, who worried about the souls of the Company, and so he should. Most were criminals, avoiding justice by enlisting, and nearly all were drunks, but they were in Sharpe’s Company and he would defend them, even the useless ones like Private Batten or Private Roach, who pimped his wife for a shilling a time.