“None.”
“Now?”
“Two.”
“The Sweeps can count,” McCann said. “I’m impressed.” The Sweeps were the Riflemen, so called because their dark green uniforms often looked black as a chimney sweep’s rags. “Can you walk?” McCann asked and Sharpe managed a few paces before a gust of wind lurched the frigate and drove him back to the hammock netting. “You’re walking well enough,” McCann said. “Are you in pain?”
“It’s getting better,” Sharpe lied.
“You’re a lucky bastard, Mister Sharpe, if you’ll forgive me. Lucky as hell. You were hit by a musket ball. Glancing shot, which is why you’re still here, but it depressed a piece of your skull. I fished it back into place.” McCann grinned proudly.
“Fished it back into place?” Sharpe asked.
“Oh, it’s not difficult,” the surgeon said airily, “no more difficult than scarfing a sliver of wood.” In truth it had been appallingly difficult. It had taken the doctor an hour and a half’s work under inadequate lantern light as he teased at the wedge of bone with probe and forceps. His fingers had kept slipping in blood and slime, and he had thought he would never manage to free the bone without tearing the brain tissue, but at last he had succeeded in gripping the splintered edge and pulling the sliver back into place. “And here you are,” McCann went on, “sprightly as a two-year-old. And the good news is that you’ve got a brain.” He saw Sharpe’s puzzlement and nodded vigorously. “You do! Honest! I saw it with my own eyes, thus disproving the navy’s stubborn contention that soldiers have nothing whatsoever inside their skulls. I shall write a paper for the Review. I’ll be famous! Brain discovered in a soldier.”
Sharpe tried to smile in the pretense that he was amused, but only succeeded in a grimace. He touched the bandage. “Will the pain go?”
“We know almost nothing about head wounds,” McCann said,
“except that they bleed a lot, but in my professional opinion, Mister Sharpe, you’ll either drop down dead or be right as rain.”
“That is a comfort,” Sharpe said. He perched on a cannon and stared at the distant land beneath the far clouds. “How long till we reach Lisbon?”
“Lisbon? We’re sailing to Cadiz!”
“Cadiz?”
“That’s our station,” McCann said, “but you’ll find a boat going to Lisbon quick enough. Ah! Captain Pullifer’s on deck. Straighten up.”
The captain was a thin, narrow-faced, and grim-looking man, a scarecrow figure who, Sharpe noticed, was barefooted. Indeed, if it had not been for his coat with its salt-encrusted gilt, Sharpe might have mistaken Pullifer for an ordinary seaman. The captain spoke briefly with the brigadier, then strode down the deck and introduced himself to Sharpe. “Glad you’re on your feet,” he said morosely. He had a broad Devon accent.
“So am I, sir.”
“We’ll have you in Cadiz soon enough and a proper doctor can look at your skull. McCann, if you want to steal my coffee you’ll find it on the cabin table.”
“Aye aye, sir,” the doctor said. McCann was evidently amused by his captain’s insult, which suggested to Sharpe that Pullifer was not the grim beast he appeared to be. “Can you walk, Sharpe?” Captain Pullifer asked gruffly.
“I seem to be all right, sir,” Sharpe said, and Pullifer jerked his head, indicating that the rifleman should go with him to the stern rail. Moon watched Sharpe pass by.
“Had supper with your brigadier last night,” Pullifer said when he was alone with Sharpe beneath the great mizzen sail. He paused, but Sharpe said nothing. “And I spoke with your sergeant this morning,” Pullifer went on. “It’s strange, isn’t it, how stories differ?”
“Differ, sir?”
Pullifer, who had been staring at the Thornside’s wake, turned to look at Sharpe. “Moon says it was all your fault.”
“He says what?” Sharpe was not certain he had heard right. His head was filled with a pulsing pain. He tried closing his eyes, but it did not help so he opened them again.
“He says you were ordered to blow a bridge, but you hid the powder under women’s luggage, which is against the rules of war, and then you dillydallied and the frogs took advantage, and he finishes up with a dead horse, a broken leg, and no saber. And the saber was Bennett’s best, he tells me.”
Sharpe said nothing, just stared at a white bird skimming the broken sea.
“You broke the rules of war,” Pullifer said sourly, “but as far as I know the only rule in bloody war is to win. You broke the bridge, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But you lost one of Bennett’s best sabers”—Pullifer sounded amused—“so your brigadier borrowed pen and paper off me this morning to write a report for Lord Wellington. It’s going to be poisonous about you. Do you wonder why I’m telling you?”
“I’m glad you’re telling me,” Sharpe said.
“Because you’re like me, Sharpe. You came up the hawse hole. I started as a pressed man. I was fifteen and had spent eight years catching mackerel off Dawlish. That was thirty years ago. I couldn’t read, couldn’t write, and didn’t know a sextant from an arsehole, but now I’m a captain.”
“Up the hawse hole,” Sharpe said, relishing the navy’s slang for a man promoted from the ranks into the officer’s mess. “But they never let you forget, do they?”
“It’s not so bad in the navy,” Pullifer said grudgingly. “They value seamanship more than gentle birth. But thirty years at sea teaches you a thing or two about men, and I have a notion that your sergeant was telling the truth.”
“He bloody was,” Sharpe said hotly.
“So I’m warning you, that’s all. If I were you I’d write my own report and muddy the water a little.” Pullifer glanced up at the sails, found nothing to criticize, and shrugged. “We’ll catch a few mortar rounds going into Cadiz, but they haven’t hit us yet.”
In the afternoon the west wind turned soft so that the Thornside slowed and wallowed in the long Atlantic swells. Cadiz came slowly into sight, a city of gleaming white towers that seemed to float on the ocean. By dusk the wind had died to a whisper that did nothing except fret the frigate’s sails and Pullifer was content to wait till morning to make his approach. A big merchantman was much closer to land and she was ghosting into harbor on the last dying breaths of wind. Pullifer gazed at her through a big telescope. “She’s the Santa Catalina,” he announced. “We saw her in the Azores a year ago.” He collapsed the glass. “I hope she’s getting more wind than we are. Otherwise she’ll never make the southern part of the harbor.”
“Does it matter?” Sharpe asked.
“The bloody frogs will use her for target practice.”
It seemed the captain was right for just after dark Sharpe heard the muffled sound of heavy guns like thunder far away. They were the French mortars firing from the mainland and Sharpe watched their monstrous flashes from the Thornside’s forecastle. Each flash was like sheet lightning, silhouetting a mile of shoreline, gone in a heartbeat, the sudden brilliance confused by the lingering smoke beneath the stars. A sailor was playing a sad tune on a fiddle and a small wash of lantern light showed from the aft cabin’s companionway where the brigadier was dining again with Captain Pullifer. “Were you not invited, sir?” Harper asked. Sharpe’s riflemen and the Connaught Rangers were lounging around a long-barreled nine-pounder on the forecastle.
“I was invited,” Sharpe said, “but the captain reckoned I might be happier eating with the wardroom.”
“They made a plum duff up here,” Harper said.
“It was good,” Harris added, “really good.”
“We had the same.”
“I sometimes think I should have joined the navy,” Harper said.
“You do?” Sharpe was surprised.
“Plum duff and rum.”
“Not many women.”
