And the tricolour flew above the Tormes.
It was Sergeant Coignet who found the wine, hundreds of bottles of it, all hidden behind the chipped plaster image of the Virgin Mary that stood in the small shrine across the bridge from the fort. “You want me to break the bottles, sir” He asked Pailleterie.
“Leave them be,” Pailleterie said. The wine would make a gift for General Herault. “But make sure no one takes any. If one man gets drunk Sergeant, I’ll geld him.”
“They’ll not touch it, sir,” Coignet promised. He was a short, tough man who had never known any life other than the army, and within the elite company his word was law. The wine was safe.
Pailleterie had taken three prisoners. Two were wounded redcoats, one of whom would probably die, while the third was a plump man in a blue uniform who claimed to be a Major of the Commissary service. His presence was explained by the hoard of French muskets that the hussars had discovered, muskets that would now go back to their proper owners. “You give me your word as a gentleman,” Pailleterie asked Tubbs in English, “that you will not try to escape?”
“Of course not,” Tubbs said.
“You won’t give me your word?”
“No, no! I won’t try to escape!” Tubbs backed away from the pigtailed Frenchman.
“Then you may keep your sword, monsieur, and do me the honour of staying inside the fortress.”
Not that any of the hussars had much choice in the matter, for whenever they spent too long outside the fort’s walls a rifleman would fire.
Coignet had narrowly escaped injury when he went to explore the shrine, and two men had been wounded when Pailleterie had tipped the wagon that had been half-blocking the bridge over the parapet and into the river.
Pailleterie regretted the wounding of those two men, but he needed the roadway to be clear for Herault, and so he had led twenty men out of the fort where they immediately came under fire from the farmhouse on the northern bank. Once the barricade was gone Pailleterie ordered his men to stay inside the fort’s walls, even though his Lieutenant, who had been watching the farmhouse from the parapet, swore that the riflemen there had now run away. But Pailleterie knew that if they stayed inside the fort his hussars and their horses were safe. The British might try to recapture the bridge, but Pailleterie was confident he could thwart them. He had forty of his men lined in the fort’s gateway, all armed with pistols, and if the British did run up the road and turn into the arch they would die in a blistering volley.
So the road from the south was open.
Herault and his small army was coming.
And all Pailleterie needed to do was wait.
“It was my fault,” Sharpe said bitterly.
“I shouldn’t have fired so soon,” Price admitted.
“I shouldn’t have put Pat Harper across the river,” Sharpe said. “I should have kept our men together.”
Ensign Hickey said nothing, but just looked heartbroken. He had not thought Captain Sharpe could be defeated.
“Bloody hell!” Sharpe swore uselessly. He had pulled his surviving men back to the village where they could shelter behind garden walls. The fort was a hundred paces away, and he had thought about making an attack on it, but he would have to lead his men round to the far side and then through the archway and he guessed the French would be expecting that approach.
The store-room door had been shut, and was doubtless barricaded. Every now and then a black fur hat showed on the parapet as an hussar peered over to make certain the British troops were not planning any mischief.
Daniel Hagman, keeping watch from the river bank, reported that the frogs had tipped the cart into the river. “I got one of the bastards, sir,” he said, “and Harris popped another.”
“Well done, Dan,” Sharpe said morosely, then wondered why the French would clear the barricade away. and the answer was depressingly obvious. Because they were expecting more men, that was why. Because the hussars were only holding the bridge long enough to let a flood of bloody Crapauds across the river. Because all hell was about to be loosed on the British supply lines, and Captain Richard Sharpe would be blamed. “Jesus!” Sharpe cursed.