‘Is that why we’re here?’
‘Yes. I want to find her. God knows how.’
The Irishman stared at the baggage park. ‘You say there’s treasure here?’
‘A god-damned fortune.’
‘Seems a good place to start looking, sir.’
Sharpe urged his horse towards the wagons. He was looking for the great mane of golden hair amidst the chaos that had once been King Joseph’s baggage train. ‘Helene!’
A box of fine porcelain was spilt ahead of him, the plates smashed into a thousand gilded shards. A woman, blood streaming from her scalp, hurled a second dinner service out of its packing cases, looking for gold.
A French soldier lay dying, his throat half cut by a Spaniard who ripped with his knife at the man’s pockets.
He found a watch, a stolen masterpiece made by Breguet in Paris. He put it to his ear, heard no tick, and furiously smashed the crystal with the hilt of his knife.
‘Helene!’
Sharpe’s horse trampled on leather-bound books, books that had been made before the printing press had been invented, books made by patient men over months of work, with exquisitely painted capitals that were now ground into the mire.
A tapestry that had been made in Flanders when Queen Elizabeth was a child was torn by two women to make blankets. Another woman, wine bottle in hand, danced between the wagons with the gilded coat of a Royal Chamberlain on her shoulders. She wore nothing else. A French soldier, drunk on brandy, plucked the coat from her and tore at the gilt braid. The naked woman hit him with her bottle and snatched the coat back.
‘Helene!’
Silver Spanish dollars, each worth five English shillings, were strewn like pebbles between the wagons. No one wanted silver when there was so much gold.
‘Helene!’
Two men bent, twisted, and hacked apart a golden candelabra, one of a set of four that had been given to King Phillip II by Queen Mary of England when she had married the Spanish King.
‘Helene!’
Two Frenchwomen, abandoning their army and their children for the sake of a box of jewels, prised the stones from a reliquary that contained the shin-bone of John the Baptist. The jewels were glass, replacements for the real stones that had been stolen three centuries before. They dropped the shin-bone into the mud where it was snapped up by a dog.
One man shot another to get a wooden box that the victim had been dragging away. The murderer took it beneath a wagon, reloaded his musket, and blew the lock off. It contained horseshoes and nails.
‘Helene!’
It was hopeless. The wagons seethed with people. He could see nothing. Sharpe swore. A four year old child, abandoned by its mother, was trampled by a rush of men towards an untouched wagon. The child cried, unheard and unseen, its ribs broken.
‘Helene!’
A Frenchman ran at Sharpe, musket held like a club, and tried to knock the Rifleman from his horse. Sharpe snarled, chopped down with the sword, knocked the musket aside, and chopped again. The man screamed, the sword cut into his neck, shearing his ear off, and then Harper’s gun butt slammed into the other side of his head. The man fell, golden francs spilling from his pockets, and in an instant he was set on by a score of people who slashed with knives and scrambled in the mud for gold.
There were acres of wagons! Hundreds of them. Many as the plunderers were, there were still scores of untouched wagons.
‘Helene!’
He galloped down between a row of wagons, turned into the next row and galloped back. Silver dollars were beneath Carbine’s hooves. A woman tossed and unrolled a bolt of silk, scarlet in the failing sunlight, silk that arched and fell into the mud.
A man threw crates of silver cutlery off a wagon, spilling them into the mud, searching for gold.
‘Helene!’
A woman staggered towards Sharpe, blood flowing in a dozen rivulets down her head and matting her hair. She had found her box of gold, but a man had taken it from her. She cried, not from the pain, but from loss. She picked up some silver forks and thrust them into her dress.
‘Helene!’
A man, trousers at his knees, was on top of a woman by an overturned coach. Sharpe hit him with the flat of the sword, trying to see the woman’s face. She had none. It was just blood from a cut throat. The man tried to scramble away, but Sharpe sliced the sword in a backswing and cut the man’s throat as he’had cut his victim’s.
A pretty girl, incongruously dressed in tight French cavalry uniform, danced on top of a wagon and whirled a rope of pearls. A British cavalryman laughed with her, protecting her, and then bent to scoop more pearls from a box. A horde of people, seeing the treasure, scrambled like rats up to the wagon’s top.
‘Helene!’
Sharpe put his heels back, shouting at the plunderers to clear the way. A drunk, a bottle of priceless wine in each hand, staggered in Carbine’s path and the horse threw the man down. Sharpe held his balance, urged the horse on, and never noticed the painting that the hooves trampled. Van Dyck had worked long on the canvas which was pulled out of the mud by a man who needed a tarpaulin to cover a mule-load of plunder.
‘Helene!’
A box
A British cavalryman ripped a tarpaulin from a wagon to find pictures beneath. They had been cut from their frames. He pulled a Rubens from the top of the pile to see if it concealed gold. It did not, and he rode on, looking for better plunder.
A golden clock, made in Augsburg three hundred years before, that showed the houses of the zodiac, the phases of the moon, as well as the time, was hacked apart by men with bayonets for the sake of its golden case. One of them, piercing his palm with the clock’s dragon hand, smashed at it with the butt of his musket. The brass and iron clockwork, that had been cared for over centuries, was scattered in the mud. Its jewelled astrolabe was carried off by a British sergeant.
‘Helene!’
They searched row after row of wagons until Sharpe felt the hopelessness rise in him. He reined in and looked at Harper. ‘It’s no good.’
The Irishman shrugged. He looked eastwards into the valley of the Pamplona Road that was thick with fugitives. ‘She’d have been foolish to stay around here, sir.’ That had been his private opinion ever since they began this frantic, useless galloping amongst the stranded wagons. He wondered just what had happened to Sharpe in the last weeks. Somehow he was not surprised that the golden-haired woman was involved; Sharpe always had been a fool for women.
Sharpe swore. He wiped his sword on his leg and sheathed it. A bare-footed British infantry Captain walked past. He carried his boots carefully, both boots filled to the top with gold twenty franc pieces. Three of his men cheerfully guarded him.
Another woman dressed in French cavalry uniform called to Sharpe for protection. Sharpe ignored her. He was staring about him, watching the plunderers tear at wagons. He tried to see La Marquesa’s golden hair. A British infantryman, one of the many who now swarmed into the baggage, grabbed the woman’s hand. She clung to him and went happily enough with her new guardian.
Harper edged his horse close to the nearest wagon. If Major Sharpe wanted to look for a woman, Harper might as well look for a marriage settlement. The wagon had words stencilled on its backboard. Domaine Exterieur de S.M. L’Empereur. He wondered what they meant, then drew his knife, slashed the tarpaulin, and started working at the first box.
