Those horses were in screaming agony, blood dripping from hooves, and Sharpe looked at his redcoats, watching the ramrods go back into the musket hoops. “Present!” He shouted. The muskets came up again as a dragoon’s bullet whiplashed past Sharpe’s shako. “Fire!” He called, and this time the three leading horses went down, struck by the volley, and the bridge was blocked. Two of the horses died within seconds, but the third lay on its side and screamed as it beat its hooves against the glass that had defeated the charge.
Sharpe bulled through the ranks and ran up onto the bridge that was slippery with wine. The hussar was trapped beneath his horse, and grimacing because he had fallen among the broken glass, but he tried to lift the lance as Sharpe approached, but Sharpe knocked the lance blade aside, then grabbed the hussar by the collar of his brown coat and just dragged him clear of his horse. Glass crunched under Sharpe’s boots. The hussar screamed as his hip was pulled through the shattered bottles, then Sharpe tugged him clear and pulled the man’s pistol from its holster. He cocked it, aimed it, fired and the screaming horse gave a shudder and died. Then Sharpe pushed his prisoner back down the bridge. “Harry!” He shouted at Lieutenant Price. “Take the redcoats up to the dead horses.
That’s your barricade! Ensign?” He called for Hickey, because he knew the ensign spoke some French. “Ensign!”
“Dead, sir,” Harper said. “Hit by a dragoon.”
“God damn, another ensign gone.” Sharpe said. He tugged the lance off his prisoner, breaking the wrist-strap, then pulled out the Frenchman’s sabre.
“Harris? You speak frog. Find out what the hell these bastards are doing here. Give him a kicking if he won’t talk.”
Then there were more hooves, another trumpet, and Sharpe whipped round, but there were no French approaching the bridge and he turned back to see more horsemen in blue and yellow, only these were coming from the north. A whole regiment of horsemen galloping on the road from Salamanca, their horses white with sweat because they had ridden so hard, and Teresa was alongside the leading officer who raised a hand and grinned at Sharpe as he curbed his horse.
“Captain Lossow,” Sharpe said, reaching up to shake the German’s hand.
Captain Lossow of the King’s German Legion looked at the blood and wine on the bridge, and at the dragoons who were trudging back towards their horses, and then at the great mass of French cavalry who were stalled in the fields beyond. “There must be a thousand men over there, Richard.”
“You want to go and play with them? You’ll have to let me clear the bridge of glass first.”
“We shall wait here,” Lossow said, swinging down from his saddle. “We have a battalion of infantry coming and a battery of guns. But it looks as if you managed without us, Richard.”
“We coped,” Sharpe said, smiling up at Teresa. “We coped.”
Tubbs had been trapped in the burning fort and he was dead, and the captured French muskets were nothing but a twisted mass of melted metal.
Good for nothing, MacKeon said, but Sharpe knew he would never have won this scrap if it had not been for MacKeon. “I owe you,” he said.
“To hell and away,” the Scotsman said. “I just remembered how you managed at Gawilghur, Mister Sharpe, and reckoned you could manage again.”
Pierre Ducos appeared that evening, but Herault’s brave idea was defeated, and now a battery of British field guns and a line of redcoats defended the bridge beside the smoking fort. Herault himself was a prisoner, captured, Captain Pailleterie said, by a rifleman called Sharpe. Ducos spat. The fools! They had held the bridge! And lost it! The incompetent fools. “You will be punished for this, Pailleterie,” he promised, “punished!” And then he ordered General Michaud to turn his infantrymen about and march them away south, and he took out his small notebook and crossed out the recommendation for General Herault’s promotion, and added Pailleterie’s name with a cross beside it, and then the name of the British rifle officer who had cheated him of victory. Sharp, he wrote, not knowing there should be an ‘e’, then added a question mark. A name to remember, but then, Ducos forgot nothing.