Corporals stood on the embanked road that was raised two feet above the lowland. Their job was to cut off the southwards escape of the fugitive as well as to watch his every movement. Harper was dressed in a white shirt and light grey trousers which, though filthy, showed easily in the bright moonlight.
‘One minute!’ Girdwood called out. Next to him Captain Finch drew his sword, the steel scraping on the scabbard’s throat with a soft, sinister hiss.
In the marsh Harper ran desperately, stumbling on the soft patches, tripping on tussocks, going towards the tall pole that was his mark. He had counted sixteen hunters, could see, far off on the island’s northern rim, the shapes of more men, but already, as a good Rifleman should, he was planning his battle. He ran as fast as he could, needing space in which to manoeuvre, but watching the ditches and tussocks like a hawk. He jumped the water clumsily, stumbled on a soft patch, then looked behind to see if his pursuers yet moved.
Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood laughed when the big man stumbled. ‘He won’t put up much of a fight, Finch.’
‘We can hope, sir.’ Finch, of an age with Girdwood, had the face of a drunkard. There was rum on his breath, but most of the men who would hunt the marsh this night carried liquor in their canteens.
‘No.’ Girdwood was in high spirits. ‘I know the Irish, Finch. They’re cowards. They’re happy to brawl, but they can’t fight.’ Girdwood looked at his watch, snapped the lid shut, and thrust it into a pocket. ‘Time, gentlemen! Good hunting!’ The horsemen whooped and spurred forward, while the Sergeants on foot, muskets loaded, went in a line to the west of the marsh. The hunt had started.
Harper heard the cries of the hunters and broke to his left. He knew he would not be friendless this night, but he knew, too, that his survival did not depend on Sharpe. Nor did Harper believe that, if he should reach the stake in the marsh, his life would be spared. These men smelt of death, but he grinned as he thought that they fought a Rifleman from Donegal. The bastards would suffer.
He saw the horsemen making a line to the east, the sergeants on foot going west, and he saw how they would make a great rectangle in the marsh, its other two sides formed by the guards to north and south. He turned abruptly back, aiming at a place he had spotted a moment before, and, reaching it, he fell flat.
‘Mark him!’ Girdwood shouted. The big Irishman, three hundred yards from his nearest pursuers, had disappeared in the deep, moon-cast shadows. ‘Watch that place! Drive him! Drive him!’
The shout was to the sergeants who, on foot, must now flush the fugitive from his hiding place towards the horsemen. The sergeants stared at the place where Harper had disappeared, hurried to flank it, then, in pairs for protection and with their muskets held ready, they cautiously advanced.
‘It was near here.’ Sergeant Bennet spoke to Lynch as both men stepped over one of the smaller ditches.
‘Careful now. He’s a big bugger.’
Two larger ditches met here, forming a V in the wetland that almost, but not quite, pierced to the smaller ditch and was separated from it by a gleaming patch of bare mud on which the two sergeants now stood. The water of the angled ditches was slickly silvered beneath the high grasses at their banks. The sergeants stared at the ground inch by inch, knowing that it was just yards beyond the V’s apex that the big man had gone to cover, but they could see no sign of him.
‘Come on! Hurry!’ Girdwood’s petulant voice carried far over the flatland.
Lynch, in charge of the beaters this night, licked his lips. Extraordinarily he could see no sign of the big man. The marsh, lit silver and black by the moon in the cloudless night, seemed empty and innocent.
‘You have him?’ Girdwood shouted impatiently.
‘Bugger’s gone!’ Bennet said.
‘Charlie! John! Flush him out!’ Lynch shouted. ‘You too, Bill.’
Sergeant Bennet, like the other two sergeants, aimed his musket into a patch of shadow. He fired. Normally such a volley would startle a man from his paltry cover even though the bullets went nowhere near him, but this time the shots died into silence and the smoke drifted over a marsh that still revealed no fugitive. ‘He’s bloody gone!’