‘It’s a funny way to get married.’
They’re all funny ways, whichever way you do it.’ Hogan beckoned to the servant who was holding Antonia, made the girl hold the baby up and he trickled red wine into its mouth. ‘There, my love. It’s not every wee girl who gets to go to her parents’ wedding.’
At least the child was well. The illness, whatever it was, had gone and the doctors, thanking God because they had done nothing, said it was a malady that went with growing. They had shrugged, pocketed their fee, and wondered why God spared the bastards.
They left the city that afternoon, an armed group that could defend itself against the violence that still ravaged Badajoz. The dead lay on the streets. They climbed out through the Santa Maria breach and the ditch was still full, thick with bodies, so thick that heat came from the hundreds and hundreds of dead. Some men searched in the carnage, looking for brothers, sons, or friends. Others stood at the ditch’s edge and wept for an army, as Wellington had wept when he stood on the glacis, and the great heap steamed in the April chill. Teresa, seeing the breaches for the first time, muttered in Spanish and Sharpe saw her eyes go up to the walls, to the silent guns, and he knew she was imagining their power.
Colonel Windham was on the glacis, staring down to where his friend Collett had died, and he turned as Sharpe and his party climbed the ladders from the ditch. ‘Sharpe?’
‘Sir?’
Windham saluted him, strangely formal amongst so much death. ‘You’re a brave man, Sharpe.’
Sharpe was embarrassed. He shrugged. ‘Thank you. And you, sir. I saw the attack.’ He stopped, out of words, and then remembered the portrait. He took it from inside his jacket and handed over the wrinkled, stained picture of the Colonel’s wife. ‘I thought you’d like this, sir.’
Windham looked at it, turned it over, back again, and then looked at Sharpe. ‘How on earth did you find it?”
‘It was in the hat, sir, of a man called Obadiah Hakeswill, who stole it. He also stole my telescope.’ The glass had been in Hakeswill’s haversack, and was now in Sharpe’s. He jerked a head towards Harper, standing with Isabella. ‘Sergeant Harper, sir, did not steal a thing.;
Windham nodded. The breeze tugged at the tassel on his hat. ‘You’ve given him back his Sergeantcy?’ The Colonel smiled in resignation.
‘Yes, sir. And I’ll give him his rifle and green jacket next. If you have no objection.’
‘No, Sharpe. The Company is yours.’ Windham smiled briefly at Sharpe, perhaps remembering the conversations about humility, then looked at Harper. ‘Sergeant!’
‘Sir?’ Harper stepped forward, stood to attention.
‘I owe you an apology.’ Windham was obviously embarrassed deeply by the need to speak so to a Sergeant.
‘No apology needed, sir!’ Harper’s face was straight, his bearing formal. ‘A striped back is very attractive to the ladies, sir.’
‘Blood and hounds!’ Windham was relieved to be off the hook. He nodded at Sharpe. ‘Carry on, Captain Sharpe.’
They walked back to the camp, leaving the stench of the dead behind them, and the sounds of the city faded as they walked. They passed the trenches and the batteries, and Sharpe saw where a gunner had planted spring flowers on a parapet. The weather was turning, warming to a dry summer, and he knew that the army would be marching soon, north and east, going into the heart of Spain.
Badajoz was done.
That night, two miles down the Seville road, a twitching figure scrabbled down beneath a field marker, muttering to himself, knowing he could not be killed, and pulled out the oilcloth bundle of stolen goods. Hakeswill was deserting. He knew he could not go back. There was a witness to the death of Knowles, the portrait had been in the Sergeant’s hat, and he understood that only a firing squad awaited him. He sniffed the night air and was not worried. He would go somewhere and find something, as he always did, and this was not the first night that he had been utterly alone, homeless, and his dark shape loped into the night, seeking mischief.