“You don’t understand,” he said stubbornly. “I could snatch a thousand French eagles and I’m still the bugger who came up from the ranks. I’m still an upstart. They can smell me a hundred yards off, and they’re just waiting, Teresa, just waiting for me to make a mistake. One mistake!
That’s all it takes.”
“Write a request now,” she said patiently, “and as soon as the first Frenchman shows, I will ride to Salamanca. As soon as we hear the first gunshot in the hills, I will ride. So then you will not have to hold for long, Richard.”
He thought about it, and knew she was right, and so he went down to the mess and lit a candle and then woke Ensign Hickey because the Ensign had gone to a proper school and would know what words to use, and then Sharpe penned the words in his clumsy handwriting. ‘I have reason to believe,’ he wrote, ‘that a French column is approaching this fort which I have the honour to command. My command being perilously small in numbers, I request reinforcements as quickly as may be possible. Richard Sharpe, Capt’.
“Shouldn’t I date it?” he asked, “put a time on it?”
“I will convince them you were in a hurry,” Teresa said.
Hickey, shy to be seen in front of Teresa in his undershirt, pulled a blanket over his bare legs. “Are the French really coming, sir?” He asked Sharpe.
“I reckon so. Why? Does that worry you?”
Hickey thought about it for a heartbeat, then nodded. “Yes, sir, it does,”
“It’s why you joined the army, isn’t it?”
“I joined the army, sir, because my father wanted me to.”
“He wanted you dead?”
“I pray not, sir.”
“I was an Ensign once, Hickey,” Sharpe said, “and I learned one lesson about being an Ensign.”
“And what lesson was that, sir?”
“That ensigns are expendable, Hickey, expendable. Now go to sleep.”
Sharpe and Teresa climbed back to the parapet. “You were cruel, Richard,”
she said.
“I was honest.”
“And were you expendable? As an ensign?”
“I climbed a cliff, love. I climbed a cliff. And they reckoned I would die, and none, I reckon, would have cared much if I had.”
And who would be climbing the cliff in the morning, he wondered, who? And where? And how? And what had he forgotten? And would the bastards come?
And could he stop them? And Jesus, he was nervous. He had listened to his instinct, and he was ready for the French, but it still felt all wrong. It felt like defeat, and it had not even started yet.
Teresa’s men, three miles south of San Miguel in the foothills of the Sierra de Gredos, roasted a hare over an open fire. They lit the fire in a grove of trees, deep in a rocky cleft, and were sure that its light could not be seen on the road which lay white beneath their position. If one Frenchman dared breathe on that road the partisans would fire their muskets and so warn the fort that the enemy was coming.
But Captain Pailleterie saw a gleam of their fire. It was tiny, merely a reflection of a leaping flame on a high rock, but only two kinds of men had fires in the hills; partisans or soldiers, and both kind were his enemies. He held up his hand and checked the company.
The gleam had been to the left of the road, at least he thought so, for he was still not in sight of the stretch of road that ran directly beneath the rocky bluff where he had seen the faint glimmer. Off to his right there was a dark valley and it seemed to him that it curled around to the north and so might offer a way to the river and the bridge which would be hidden from whoever had carelessly lit a fire in this dark night.
His men all had muffled scabbards so that the metal did not clash against a buckle or stirrup. Pailleterie could do little about the sound of their hooves, so that was a risk that must be taken. “We go slowly now,” he told his men, “slow and quiet.”