and he took one wrong turning and found himself in a blind alley of stone walls. He backtracked, found the right street again,' and emerged on the slope above the village where a crowd of wounded men waited for help.
They were too weak to climb the slope and some called out as Sharpe ran past.
He ignored them. Instead he climbed up the goat path beside the graveyard. A group of worried officers were standing beside the church and Sharpe shouted at them to see if any knew where General Spencer was. 'I've got a message!' he called.
'What is it?' a man called back. 'I'm his aide!'
'Williams wants reinforcements. Too many Frogs!'
The staff officer turned and ran towards the brigade that was waiting beyond the crest while Sharpe paused to catch his breath. His sword was in his hand and its blade was sticky with blood. He cleaned the steel on the edge of his jacket, then jumped in alarm as a bullet smacked hard into the stone wall beside him. He turned and saw a puff of musket smoke showing between some broken beams at the upper edge of the village and he realized the French had taken those houses and were now trying to cut off the defenders still inside Fuentes de Onoro. The greenjackets in the graveyard opened fire, their rifles cutting down any enemy foolish enough to show himself at a window or door for too long.
Sharpe sheathed his cleaned sword then went over the wall and crouched behind a slab of granite on which a rough cross had been chiselled. He loaded the rifle, then aimed it at the broken roof where he had seen the musket smoke. The flint had skewed in the doghead and he released the screw, adjusted the leather patch that gripped the flint, then tightened it down. He thumbed the cock back. He was bitterly thirsty, the usual fate of any man who had been biting into salty gunpowder cartridges. The air was foul with the stench of smoke.
A musket appeared between the beams and, a second later, a man's head showed. Sharpe fired first, but the rifle's smoke hid the bullet's mark. Harper slid down the graveyard's slope to land beside Sharpe. 'Jesus,' the Irishman said, 'Jesus.'
'Bad in there.' Sharpe nodded down to the village. He primed the rifle, then upended the weapon to charge the muzzle. He had left his ramrod conveniently propped against the grave.
'More of the buggers coming over the stream,' Harper said. He bit a bullet and was forced to silence until he could spit it into the rifle. 'That poor lieutenant. Died.'
'It was a chest wound,' Sharpe said, ramming the ball and charge hard down the barrel. 'Not many survive chest wounds.'
'I stayed with the poor bugger,' Harper said. 'His mother's a widow, he told me. She sold the family plate to buy his uniform and sword, then said he'd be as great a soldier as any there was.'
'He was good,' Sharpe said. 'He kept his nerve.' He cocked the rifle.
'I told him that. Gave him a prayer. Poor wee bugger. First battle, too.' Harper pulled the trigger. 'Got you, you bastard,' he said and immediately fished a new cartridge from his pouch while he pulled the hammer to half cock. More British defenders were emerging from between the houses, forced out of the village by the sheer weight of French numbers. 'They should send some more men down there,' Harper said.
'They're coming,' Sharpe said. He laid the rifle's barrel on the gravestone and looked for a target.
'Taking their time, though,' Harper said. On this occasion he did not spit the bullet into the rifle, but first wrapped it in the small patch of greased leather that would grip the barrel's rifling and so make the ball spin as it was fired. It took longer to load such a round, but it made the Baker rifle far more accurate. The Irishman grunted as he forced the patched bullet down the barrel that was caked with the deposits of gunpowder. 'There's some boiling water behind the church,' he said, telling Sharpe where to go if he needed to clean the fouled powder from his rifle's barrel.
'I'll piss down it if I have to.'
'If you've got any piss. I'm dry as a dead rat. Jesus, you bastard.' This was addressed at a bearded Frenchman who had appeared between two of the houses where he was beating down a greenjacket with a pioneer's axe. Sharpe, already loaded, took aim through the sudden spray of the dying rifleman's blood and pulled the trigger, but at least a dozen other greenjackets in the churchyard had seen the incident and the bearded Frenchman seemed to quiver as the bullets whipped home. 'That'll teach him,' Harper said, and laid his rifle on the stone. 'Where the hell are those reinforcements?'
'Takes time to get them ready,' Sharpe said.
'Lose a bloody battle just because they want straight ranks?' Harper asked scornfully. He looked for a target. 'Come on, someone, show yourself…»
More of Williams's men retreated out of the village. They tried to form ranks on the rough ground at the foot of the graveyard, but by abandoning the houses they had yielded the stone walls to the French who could hide as they loaded, fire, then duck back into hiding again. Some British were still fighting inside the village, but the musket smoke betrayed that their fight had shrunk to a small group of houses at the very top of the main street. One more push by the French, Sharpe thought, and the village would be lost, and then there would a bitter fight up through the graveyard for mastery of the church and the rock outcrop. Lose those two summits, he thought, and the battle was done.
The French drumming rose to a new fervour. There were Frenchmen coming out of the houses to form small squads that tried to outflank the retreating British. The riflemen in the graveyard fired at the daring sallies, but there were too many French and not enough rifles. One of the wounded men tried to crawl away from the advancing enemy and was bayoneted in the back for his trouble. Two Frenchmen ransacked his uniform, searching for the small hoard of coins most soldiers hid away. Sharpe fired at the plunderers, then turned his rifle on the French who were threatening to find cover behind the graveyard's lower wall. He loaded and fired, loaded and fired until his right shoulder felt like one massive bruise hammered into the bone by the rifle's brutal recoil, then suddenly, blessedly, there was a skirl of pipes and a rush of kilted men spilt over the crest of the ridge between the church and the rocks to charge down the main road into the village.
'Look at the bastards!' Harper said with pride. 'They'll give the Frogs a right beating.'
The Warwicks appeared to Sharpe's right and, like the Scots, just poured over the edge and scrambled down the steeper slope towards Fuentes de Onoro. The leading French attackers paused for a second to judge the weight of the counterattack, then hurried back into the cover of the houses. The Highlanders were already in the village where their war cries echoed between the walls, then the Warwicks went into the western alleyways and drove hard and deep into the tangle of houses.
Sharpe felt the tension drain out of him. He was thirsty, he ached, he was tired and his shoulder was agony. 'Jesus,' he said, 'and it wasn't even our fight.' The thirst was galling and he had left his canteen with the ammunition wagons, but he felt too tired and dispirited to go and find water. He watched the broken village, noting how the gunsmoke marked the British advance right back down to the stream's edge, but he felt little elation. It seemed to Sharpe that all his hopes had stalled. He faced disgrace. Worse, he felt a sense of failure. He had dared to hope that he could turn the
'Sir?' Harper asked, not having heard Sharpe.
'Never mind,' Sharpe said. He felt the loom of disgrace and the bite of regret. He was a captain on sufferance and he supposed he would never now make major. 'Bugger them all, Pat,' he said and wearily stood. 'Let's find something to drink.'
Down in the village a dying redcoat had found Harper's rag doll jammed into the niche of the wall and had shoved it into his mouth to stop himself crying out in his pain. Now he died and his blood welled and spilt from his gullet so that the small, damaged doll fell in a welter of red. The French had pulled back beyond the stream where they took cover behind the garden walls to open fire on the Highlanders and the Warwicks who hunted down the last groups of trapped French survivors in the village. A disconsolate line of French prisoners straggled up the slope under a mixed guard of riflemen and Highlanders. Colonel Williams had been wounded in the counterattack and was now carried by his riflemen to the church which had been turned into a hospital. The stork's nest on the bell tower was still an untidy tangle of twigs, but the adult birds had been driven out by the noise and smoke of the battle to leave their nestlings to starve. The sound of musketry crackled across the stream for a while, then died away as both sides took stock of the first attack.
