Kearsey had limped to the edge of the gully’s floor and was looking up at Sharpe. ‘What’s happening?’
‘She’s leading them away, sir.’ He talked normally, the lancers were way beyond earshot.
Kearsey nodded, as if he had expected the answer. Harper still looked curious. ‘How, sir?’
The girl had disappeared behind the summit, and the lancers, all discipline shredded, were panting up the slope a good fifty yards behind. Sharpe grinned at his Sergeant. ‘She took her clothes off.’
Kearsey whipped round, aghast. ‘You looked!’
‘Only to see if I could help, sir.’
‘What kind of a man are you, Sharpe?’ Kearsey was furious, but Sharpe turned away. What kind of a man was it that would not have looked?
Harper still stood over the unconscious lancer and he sounded aggrieved. ‘You might have told me, sir.’
Sharpe turned back. Kearsey had limped away. ‘I promised your mother I’d keep you out of trouble. Sorry.’ He grinned at the Sergeant again. ‘If I’d told you, then the whole damn Company would have wanted a look. Yes? And by now we’d be back in the war instead of being safe.’
Harper grinned. ‘Privilege of rank, eh, sir?’
‘Something like that.’ He thought of the beauty, the shadowed body with its hard stomach, long thighs, and the challenges of the disinterested, almost antagonistic glances that she had given him.
It was two hours before she returned, as silently as she had left, and wearing her white dress. She had done her work well, for the lancers had been recalled, the Sergeant given up, and Casatejada was thronged with Frenchmen. Sharpe guessed that the village had been the centre of a huge operation to clear the Partisans from Massena’s supply areas. Kearsey agreed, and the two men watched as other cavalry units came from the north to join the Polish lancers. Dragoons, chasseurs, the uniforms of empire, stirring a dust cloud that would have befitted a whole army, and all spent on chasing Partisans through dry hills.
The girl came up the rim and watched, silently, as the cavalry left her village. Their weapons flashed needles of light through the brown haze of the dust; the ranks seemed endless, the glorious might of France that had ridden down the best cavalry in Europe but could not defeat the Guerrilleros. Sharpe looked at the girl, at Kearsey, who talked with her, and was glad once more that he did not have to fight the Partisans. The only way to win was to kill them all, every one, young and old, and even that, as the French were finding, did not work. He thought of the bodies in the blood of the basement. It was not the war of Talavera.
They spent the night in the gully, cautious lest the French should still be watching, and some time in the small hours the bubbles stopped in Kelly’s throat. Pru Kelly, though she did not know it, was a widow again, and Sharpe remembered the small Corporal’s smile, his willingness. They buried him at dawn, in a grave scratched from the soil, and they heaped it with rocks that would be forced apart by a fox and perched on by the vultures who would tear his chest further apart.
Kearsey said the words, from memory, and the men stood round the heaped stones awkwardly. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, and in a few weeks, Sharpe thought, Pru Kelly would marry again because that was the way with the women who marched with soldiers. The Polish Sergeant, tied up with musket slings, watched the burial and, for a few moments, stopped his struggles. The new day came, still hot, the rain still keeping away, and the Light Company marched into the empty valley to find their gold.
CHAPTER 9
It was a sweet smell, sticky-sweet, that left a foul deposit somewhere at the top of the nostrils, yet it was impossible to describe why it was so unpleasant. Sharpe had smelt it often enough, so had most of the Company, and they knew it fifty yards from the village. It was not so much a smell, Sharpe thought, as a state of the air, like an invisible mist. It seemed, like a mist, to thicken the air, make breathing difficult, yet all the time to have that sweet promise, as if the corpses the French had left behind were made of sugar and honey.