‘What’s funny?’
‘Nothing. You speak English?’
She shrugged and Kearsey looked at Sharpe. ‘Her father’s fluent; that’s what makes him so useful to us. They’ve picked up a bit, from him, from me. Good family, Sharpe.’
‘But do they know anything about Hardy? The gold?’
‘She doesn’t know a thing, Sharpe. She thinks the gold must still be in the hermitage, and she hasn’t seen Hardy.’ Kearsey was happy with the answer, confident that no Spaniard would lie to him.
‘So the next thing we must do, sir, is search the hermitage.’
Kearsey sighed. ‘If you insist, Sharpe. If you insist.’ He winced again and slid down from the edge of the gully. ‘But for now, Sharpe, watch for that patrol. It won’t be long.’
The Major was right, at least, about that. Three hundred lancers rode from the village, trotting their horses along a track that paralleled the broken stalks of barley, and Sharpe watched them come. They carried carbines instead of lances and he knew they intended to search the hillsides on foot. He turned to the gully and ordered silence, explained that a patrol was coming, and then turned back to see the Poles dismounting at the foot of the rock-strewn slope.
A fly landed on his cheek. He wanted to crush it but dared not, as the lancers had started their climb up the steep slope, their horses left with picquets below. They were stringing into a line, a crude skirmish order, and he could hear the distant voices grumbling at the heat and the exertion. There was a chance that they would miss the gully, that by climbing obliquely up the slope they would emerge on the crest near the pile of rocks and never suspect that a whole Company was in dead ground behind them. He breathed slowly, willed them to stay low on the slope, and watched the officers trying to force the line higher with the flat side of their drawn sabres.
He could hear Kelly’s breathing, someone else clearing his throat, and he flapped with his free hand for silence. A tall lancer, suntanned and with a black moustache, was climbing higher than the others. As he clawed his way up, carbine slung, Sharpe saw a tarnished gold band on the man’s sleeve. A Sergeant. He was a big man, almost as big as Harper, and his face was scarred from battlefields on the other side of Europe. Go down, Sharpe urged silently, go down, but the man kept coming on his lone, perverse climb. Sharpe moved his head slowly, saw the faces staring at him, and found Harper. He beckoned slowly, put a finger to his lips, pointed at the foot of the inner slope of the gully.
The Polish Sergeant stopped, looked up, wiped his face, and turned to look at his comrades. An officer shouted at him, waved his sabre to make the Sergeant join the line, which had gone ahead, but the Sergeant shook his head, shouted back, and gestured at the skyline, which was just a few, steep feet away. Sharpe cursed him, knew that if the Light Company were discovered they would be harried eastwards, away from the gold, from victory, and this one veteran was putting it all at risk. He was climbing just below Sharpe, who craned forward as far as he dared to see the yellow, square top of the headgear come closer and closer. He could hear the man grunting, the sound of his fingernails scraping on rock, the scrabble of his boots searching for a foothold, and then, as if in a nightmare, a large brown hand with bitten nails appeared right by Sharpe’s face and he summoned all his strength for a desperate act. He waited – it could only have been for a half-second, but it seemed forever – until the man’s face appeared. The eyes widened in surprise and Sharpe put out his right hand and gripped the Sergeant by the windpipe, his fingers closing like a man-trap on the throat. He thrust his left hand forward, found the belt, and, half turning on to his back, he pulled the lancer up and over the rim, holding the huge man in the air with a strength he hardly knew he possessed, and he threw him, arms and carbine flailing, to the tender mercy of Sergeant Harper. The Irishman kicked the lancer as he landed, had his seven-barrelled gun reversed and brought it down, sickeningly, on the man’s head. Sharpe whirled back to face the slope. The line was still advancing! No one had seen, no one had noticed, but it was still not over. The lancer was tough, and Harper’s blows, that would have killed a fair-sized bullock, seemed to have done nothing more than knock off the yellow and blue hat.