‘You think the war is not lost, Captain?’
Sharpe wondered if he detected a trace of worry in the Spaniard. He shrugged. ‘It’s not lost.’
‘You’re wrong.’ If the Spaniard had been worried, it was gone now. He spoke loudly, almost sneeringly. ‘You’ve lost, Captain. Only a miracle can save the British now.”
Sharpe copied the sneering tone. ‘We’re all bloody Christians, aren’t we? We believe in miracles.’
Kearsey’s protest was stopped by a peal of laughter. It checked them all, swung them round, to see Teresa, her arm through her father’s, standing at the hermitage door. The laugh stopped, the face became stern again, but for the first time, Sharpe thought, he had seen that she was not completely bound to the tall, grey-cloaked Spaniard. She even nodded to the Rifleman, in agreement, before turning away. Miracles, Sharpe decided, were beginning to happen.
CHAPTER 11
The elation had worn thin. Failure, like a hangover, imposed its mocking price of depression and regret as Sharpe marched westward from Casatejada towards the two rivers that barred the Light Company from a doomed British army. Sharpe felt sour, disappointed, and cheated. There had been little friendliness in the farewells. Ramon had embraced him, Spanish fashion, with a garlic kiss on both cheeks, and the young man had seemed genuinely sad to be parting from the Light Company. ‘Remember your promise, Captain. A rifle.’
Sharpe had made the promise, but he wondered, gloomily, how it was to be kept. Almeida must soon be under siege, the French would dominate the land between the rivers, and the British would be retreating westward towards the sea, to final defeat. And all that stood between survival and a silent, bitter embarkation was his suspicion that the gold was still in Casatejada, hidden as subtly as the Partisans hid their food and their weapons. He remembered Wellington’s words. ‘Must, do you hear? Must’
There had to be more gold, Sharpe thought: gold in the cellars of London, in the merchant banks, the counting-houses, in the bellies of merchant ships. So why this gold? The question could not be answered and the threat of defeat, like the rain-clouds that still built in the north, accompanied the Light Company on its empty march towards the river Agueda.
The Partisans were also going westward and for the first hour Sharpe had watched the horsemen as they rode on the spine of a low chain of hills to the south. El Catolico had talked of ambushing the French convoys that would be lumbering with ammunition towards Almeida. But, often as Sharpe saw Kearsey’s blue coat among the horsemen, he could not see El Catolico’s grey cloak. He had asked Jose, one of El Catolico’s Lieutenants and the leader of the Company’s escort, where the Partisan leader was, but Jose shrugged.
‘Went ahead.’ The Spaniard spurred his horse away.
Patrick Harper caught up with Sharpe, glanced at his Captain’s face. ‘Permission to speak, sir?’
Sharpe looked at him sourly. ‘You don’t usually ask. What is it?’
Harper gestured at the escorting horsemen. ‘What do they remind you of, sir?’
Sharpe looked at the long black cloaks, wide hats, and long-stirruped saddlery. He shrugged. ‘So tell me.’
Harper looked up at the northern sky, at the heavy clouds. ‘I remember, sir, when I was a recruit. It was like this, so it was, marching from Derry.’ Sharpe was used to the Sergeant’s circumlocutions. If there were a way of imparting information by a story, then the Irishman preferred to use it, and Sharpe, who had learned that it was worth listening, did not interrupt. ‘And they gave us an escort, sir, just like this. Horsemen before, beside, behind, and all the way round, so that not one mother’s son would get the hell off the road. It was like being a prisoner, sir, so it was, and all the way! Locked up at night, we were, in a barn near Maghera, and on their side, we were!’
The Sergeant’s face had the fleeting look of sadness that sometimes came when he talked of home, his beloved Ulster, of a place so poor that he had ended up in the army of its enemy. The look passed and he grinned again. ‘Do you see what I’m telling you, sir? This is a bloody escort for prisoners. They’re seeing us off their own land, so they are.’