Sharpe thought of the fight in the casement. He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Two maybe, three?’
She looked up at him again and grinned. ‘Not enough. Did you miss me?’
He had forgotten how she would mock him. He nodded, embarrassed. ‘Yes.’
‘I missed you.’ The statement was said matter-of-factly, almost flatly, that gave it a ring of absolute truth. She pulled away from him. ‘Listen.’ She jerked her head at the other horsemen. ‘They are impatient. Are you going to Badajoz?’
He was confused by her sudden question. ‘Badajoz?’ He nodded. It was an open secret. Nothing had been said to the army, but every man knew that both fortresses must be “taken. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘Good. Then I’m staying. I must tell my people.’ She turned to her horse.
‘You’re what?’
‘You don’t want me to?’ She was mocking him again, and laughed. ‘I will explain, Richard, later. Do we have somewhere to stay?’
‘No. ‘
‘We’ll find somewhere.’ She swung herself on to the horse and nodded again towards the Partisans. ‘They want to be on their way. I’ll tell them they can go. Will you wait here?’
He saluted her. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘That’s better.’ She smiled at him, dazzling him with her beauty, with the joy on her face, and then she spurred back across the slush.
He grinned and turned back to the fire, facing its warmth, and felt a vast relief that she had come. He wished she would never go. Then he wondered at her words, hearing, distantly in his mind, the faint alarm at the very mention of the name. Badajoz. Tonight was a victory, but it led only to one place, to the place where the British, the French, the Spanish; to where the gunners and the infantry, the cavalry and the Engineers, all marched.
And now, it seemed, the lovers were marching too. To Badajoz.
They found a house, hard by the walls, that had been used by French gunners. There was food in the kitchen, hard bread and cold tongue, and Sharpe lit a fire and watched Teresa as she stabbed the loaf with her bayonet and ripped the blade downwards. He laughed. She glared at him. ‘What’s funny?’ ‘I don’t see you as a housewife.’
She pointed the blade at him. ‘Listen, Englishman, I can keep a house, but not for a man who laughs at me.’ She shrugged. ‘What happens when the war ends?’ He laughed again. ‘You go back to your kitchen, woman.’ She nodded, sad at the thought. She carried a gun, as other Spanish women carried guns, because too many men had shirked the role, but when peace came the men would be brave again and push the women back to the stoves. Sharpe saw the wistfulness on her face. ‘So what must we talk about?’ ‘Later.’ She brought the plate over to the fire and laughed at the unsavory lumps of food. ‘Eat first.’
They were both ravenous. They washed the food down with watered brandy and then, beneath blankets that had once graced the backs of French cavalry horses, they made love by the fire and Sharpe wished he could trap the moment, make it last for ever. The quietness of a small house in a captured city; the only noises the calls of sentries on the wall, the barking of a dog, the dying crackle of the small fire. She would not stay, he knew that, to be a camp follower. Teresa wanted to fight the French, to revenge herself on a nation that had raped and murdered her mother. Perhaps, he thought, he could not expect, could never expect this happiness to be for ever. All happiness is fleeting and his mind shied away from the thought of Lawford lying in the Convent. Teresa would go back to the hills, to the ambushes and torture, the harried French in the rock landscape. If he had not been a soldier, Sharpe thought, if he had been a gamekeeper or a coachman, or any one of the other jobs he might have found, then he might have found, too, a settled existence. But not like this, never as a soldier.
Teresa’s hand pushed over the skin of his chest, then round to his back, and her fingers were light on the thick, ridged “scars. ‘Did you find the men who flogged you?”