Sharpe ran from the boathouse, gun, ammunition and bundle all held in his arms, and his shoes slipped in the treacherous mud as he turned towards Harper. A man shouted behind, a bullet cracked and whined off the brickwork to Sharpe’s left while another drove a fountain of bright water up to his right. He heard the militia officer order his men forward. Some had dismounted to come down into the creek bed, others spurred their horses to its far bank.
She was to marry Girdwood? She was to be put with that tar-faced fool? A bullet crackled in the reeds to Sharpe’s right, he slipped again as yet another shot thumped wetly into a rill of mud by his feet, then he was by the punt. ‘Here!’ He threw the carbine to Harper, then the ammunition pouch, and tossed Jane’s bundle into the punt. ‘Ill drag it! You hold the bastards off! And Patrick!
‘Sir?’ Harper was finding cover as Sharpe hauled the punt on towards the river.
‘Don’t kill any of them. They’re on our side, remember?”
‘I don’t think they know that, sir.’ Harper grinned. If anything he was fractionally faster than Sharpe with a gun. British infantry could fire four shots a minute, while the best of the French could only manage three, yet Sharpe and Harper could both fire five shots in a minute from a clean musket on a dry day. Harper grinned and buckled on the belt with its ammunition pouch. The militia were about to discover what it was to fight against the best.
Sharpe dragged the heavy punt, struggling and cursing, forcing his tired legs to push through the mud, water and clinging roots. A bullet clattered through the reeds beside him, another struck the punt with a thump that ran up Sharpe’s arm, then, mercifully, the creek turned, hiding him from his pursuers, and there was enough water in the half cleared bed to ease the punt’s progress. Sharpe wondered, with a sudden, terrible fear, whether a stray bullet might have ricocheted into the boathouse. Marry Girdwood? By God he would break that vicious fool!
Patrick Harper knelt at the bend in the creek. He thumbed the cock of Captain Finch’s carbine back, saw that the dismounted cavalrymen were closer than their mounted comrades, and fired.
He rolled to one side, clearing his own smoke, and took a cartridge from the captured pouch. He was doing his job now, albeit with a short carbine instead of a rifle, and his second shot hammered down the creek bed within twelve seconds of his first and he saw the cavalrymen, who had never faced an enemy who fired real bullets, dive into cover.
He reloaded again. He saw a mass of men dark in the reeds to the left of the creek and he put a bullet into the ground ahead of them, and then a horseman on the bank was bellowing orders for the dismounted cavalry to spread out, to fire back, and Harper lay down as the volley cut into the reeds about him. ‘Forward!’ The cavalry officer shouted. ‘Forward!’ And there was something in that arrogant voice that touched a nerve in Harper. He knelt up, his face grim, and he put a bullet into the man who led the rush up the creek’s wet bed. ‘That’s from Ireland.’ He said it under his breath, and already the next cartridge was in his hand, the bullet in his mouth, and the wounded cavalryman was screaming and thrashing and his comrades were stunned because real blood had come into this night, their blood, and Harper was already moving right to snap off his next shot.
He was enjoying himself. It was only an officer like Sharpe, he decided, who would give an Irishman a chance like this, and though his first shots had been aimed only to warn and to wound, and though Sharpe had told him not to kill, the militia officer’s voice, and the proximity of the last volley, had got his Irish blood roused. He was talking to himself, muttering in Gaelic, watching for the officer who had stayed safely on the bank and shouted at his men to hurry into danger. ‘Forward!’ the man shouted. ‘Spread left! Hurry now!’