She pushed a generous pile across the table. “You are a fool, Captain Sharpe.”
“Probably. Yes.”
And somewhere to the south two armies were marching. And Sharpe reckoned there was a chance he might be able to join them, and gold would be no good to him there, but the memory of a woman was always a comfort. “Let’s take the money upstairs,” he suggested.
So they did.
ONE OF General Lapena’s aides had seen the dragoons. He was watching them file out of the far olive grove toward the troops waiting at the causeway’s far end. General Lapena borrowed a telescope and made an aide stand his horse beside him so he could rest the barrel on the aide’s shoulder. “Dragons,” he said balefully.
“Not many of them,” Sir Thomas said brusquely, “and a damned long way off. Good God, can’t they shift that gun?”
They could not. The cannon, a nine-pounder with a six-foot-long barrel, was stuck fast. Most of the gun was underwater so that only the tip of its left wheel and the top of the breech were visible. One horse was flailing as a gunner tried to keep its head above water. The riflemen posted to guard the causeway’s edges were holding the other horses, but the beasts were getting increasingly fearful and the panicking horse threatened to jar both gun and limber farther down the flooded embankment. “Detach the limber, man!” Sir Thomas roared and, when his injunction failed to have an immediate effect, he spurred his horse onto the causeway. “I want a dozen more fellows!” he shouted at the nearest infantry.
A squad of Portuguese infantrymen followed Sir Thomas who curbed his horse beside the stricken cannon. “What’s the problem?” he asked brusquely.
“There seems to be a culvert down here, sir,” a lieutenant said. He was clinging to the drowned wheel and plainly feared the whole heavy weapon would tip onto him. “The wheel’s caught in the culvert, sir,” the lieutenant added. A sergeant and three gunners were heaving at the gun, attempting to lift the trail-plate eye that attached the cannon to its limber, and every heave jarred the cannon slightly deeper, but at last they succeeded in raising the eye free of the pin so that the limber shot out onto the road in a flurry of splashing hooves. The gun stayed behind but lurched dangerously, and the lieutenant’s eyes widened in fear before the weapon settled, though now the breech was entirely submerged.
Sir Thomas unbuckled his sword belt and threw it with his scabbard and pouches to Lord William who had dutifully followed his master onto the causeway. Sir Thomas gave the aide his cocked hat too, so that the small wind stirred his white hair. Then he slid from the saddle, plunging up to his chest into the gray water. “Not nearly as cold as the River Tay,” he said. “Come on, boys.”
The water was now up to Sir Thomas’s armpits. He put his shoulder to the wheel while grinning riflemen and Portuguese privates joined him. Lord William wondered why Sir Thomas had allowed the gun to be released from its horse team, then understood that the general did not want the freed gun to leap ahead and crush a man under its wheel. Slow and steady would do this job.
“Put your backs into it!” the general shouted to the men around him. “Heave on it! Come on now!”
The gun moved. The breech reappeared, then the top of its right wheel showed above water. A rifleman lost his footing, slipped under, flailed his way back, and hauled on a wheel spoke. The gunners on the road had attached a strap to the trail and were pulling like men in a tug-of-war.
“Here she comes!” Sir Thomas shouted triumphantly, and the cannon lurched up the verge and rolled onto the causeway. “Hook her up!” Sir Thomas said. “And let’s get moving!” He wiped his hands on his drenched jacket as the trail-plate eye was reconnected. There was the crack of a whip and the gun was on its way again. A Portuguese sergeant, seeing that the general was having trouble mounting his horse because of the weight of his wet clothes, hurried to help and heaved Sir Thomas upward. “Obliged to you, obliged,” Sir Thomas said, giving the man a coin before settling himself in the saddle. “That’s the way to do it, Willie.”
“You’ll catch your death, sir,” Lord William said with genuine concern.
“Aye, well, if I do, Major Hope knows what to do with my corpse,” Sir Thomas said. He was wet through, but grinning broadly. “That water was cold, Willie! Damned cold! Make sure those infantrymen get a change of clothes.” He laughed suddenly. “When I was a lad, Willie, we chased a fox into the Tay. I was just a boy and the hounds were doing nothing except bark at the thing, so I drove my horse into the river and caught the beast with my bare hands. I thought I was a hero! My uncle gave me a whipping for that. Never do the hounds’ work, he told me, but sometimes you have to, sometimes you just have to.”
The dragoons had swerved northward, never coming within a mile of the troops crossing the causeway, and when the light cavalry of the King’s German Legion trotted toward them the dragoons galloped fast away. The rest of the Spanish infantry crossed, still going with painful slowness, so that it was dusk before Sir Thomas’s two brigades came across the causeway, and full dark before the army marched again. The road climbed steadily and undramatically toward the lights of Vejer that flickered and twinkled on the hilltop beneath the stars. The army marched north of the town, following a road that led to a midnight bivouac in a spread of olive groves where Sir Thomas at last rid himself of his damp clothes and crouched over a fire to get warm.
Foraging parties went out the next day, returning with a herd of skinny bullocks and a flock of pregnant ewes and fractious goats. Sir Thomas fretted, eager to be moving, and, for want of other activity, he rode with a squadron of German cavalry to find that the hills north and east were lively with enemy horsemen. A troop of Spanish cavalry cantered down a stream bank to join Sir Thomas’s men. Their commander was a captain who wore yellow breeches, a yellow waistcoat, and a blue jacket with red facings. He touched his hat to Sir Thomas. “They’re watching us,” he spoke in French, assuming that Sir Thomas could not speak Spanish.
“That’s their job,” Sir Thomas answered in Spanish. He had taken care to learn the language when he was first posted to Cadiz.
“Captain Sarasa.” The Spaniard named himself, then took a cigar from his saddlebag. One of his men struck a light with a tinderbox and Sarasa bent over the flame until the cigar was drawing properly. “I have orders,” he said, “not to engage the enemy.”
Sir Thomas heard the sullen tone and understood that Sarasa was frustrated. He wanted to take his men up to the crests of the low hills and match them against the French vedettes. “You have orders?” Sir Thomas inquired tonelessly.
“General Lapena’s orders. We are to protect the forage parties, no more.”
“You would rather fight?”
“Is that not why we are here?” Sarasa asked truculently.
Sir Thomas liked Sarasa. He was a young man, probably not yet thirty, and he had a belligerence that encouraged Sir Thomas, who believed that the Spaniards would fight like devils if they were given a chance and, perhaps, some leadership. At Bailen, three years before, a Spanish force had outfought a whole French corps and forced a surrender. They had even taken an eagle so they could fight well enough and, if Captain Sarasa was an example, they wanted to fight, but for once Sir Thomas found himself agreeing with Lapena. “What’s across the hill, Captain?” he asked.
Sarasa stared at the nearest crest where two vedettes were visible. A vedette was a sentry post of cavalrymen who were posted to watch an enemy. There were twelve men in the two vedettes while Sir Thomas, reinforced now by Sarasa’s swordsmen, had more than sixty. “We don’t know, Sir Thomas,” he admitted.
“There’s probably nothing across the hill,” Sir Thomas said, “and we could chase those fellows off, and if we did we’d see them on a farther hill and we’d think there’s no harm in chasing them off that, and so it would go on until we’re five miles north of here and the forage parties are dead.”
Sarasa drew on his cigar. “They offend me,” he said vehemently.
“They disgust me,” Sir Thomas said, “but we fight them where we choose or where we must, not always when we want.”
Sarasa gave a quick smile as if to say he had learned his lesson. He tapped ash from his cigar. “The rest of my regiment, Sir Thomas,” he said, “is ordered to reconnoiter the road to Conil.” He spoke very flatly.
“Conil?” Sir Thomas asked and Sarasa nodded. The Spaniard was still watching the distant dragoons, but he was very aware as Sir Thomas took a folded map from his saddlebag. It was a bad map, but it did show Gibraltar and Cadiz, and between them it marked Medina Sidonia and Vejer, the town which lay just to the south. Sir Thomas drew a finger westward from Vejer until he reached the Atlantic coast.
