Sharpe watched the British infantry come like children into this wonderland of treasure. He thought of La Marquesa’s wagons and wondered if they too were being stripped and if she was trying to protect them from the muskets and bayonets. He stood in his stirrups. God damn it! Her carriage was here, she must be close by; and then he supposed that she must have fled eastwards and abandoned her wealth. Or perhaps Ducos had taken her. He swore again. He wished he would meet Ducos in this chaos for one brief moment, a moment long enough to use the heavy sword.
‘God in his Irish heaven! Jesus! Mary, Mother of God, would you be looking at this. God save Ireland!’
Sharpe turned. Harper held up a diamond necklace. The Irishman looked at Sharpe with pure delight. ‘Open your haversack, sir.’
‘Patrick?’
‘For Christ’s sake, open your haversack!’ Sharpe frowned. He was thinking of La Marquesa. ‘Mr Sharpe, sir!’
‘What?’ He snapped the word, still trying to see the golden mane of hair in the failing light.
‘Give us your bloody haversack!’ Harper shouted it as if he was addressing a particularly stupid recruit. ‘Give it to me!’ Sharpe obeyed, hardly knowing what he was doing. Harper called to Angel to help him. They tethered their horses to the wagon and stood on the load to lever open the locked chests. Harper was emptying the first- chest of small leather boxes, each lined with white silk. He tossed the leather boxes away, keeping the jewels that they contained. He worked fast, knowing as a soldier to take swift advantage of good luck. He opened leather box after leather box, taking out necklaces, tiaras, bracelets, earrings, drops, brooches, scabbard furniture, enamelled decorations studded with stones, enough pieces for Sharpe’s haversack, his own, and Angel’s pockets. He buckled Sharpe’s haversack and tossed it to his officer. ‘A welcome home present, sir.’
Sharpe slung the haversack on his shoulder. ‘Where the hell is she?’
‘Jesus knows.’ Harper wrenched open another box and swore. The box had velvet napkins folded carefully between tissues. Harper spilt it onto the ground and worked his knife beneath a new lid. ‘God in his heaven!’ The box had gold altar furniture in it; ewers, cups, candlesticks, a jewelled monstrance, and a great golden crucifix. He took the smaller items. Angel had found a set of duelling pistols, their butts chased with gold. He pushed them into his belt.
‘Patrick!’ Sharpe’s voice was urgent.
‘Sir?’
‘Follow me!’
Sharpe had put Carbine into a gallop, disappearing into the chaos. Harper had caught a glimpse of his officer’s face, and he thought that never had he seen Sharpe look so grim and savage. The Irishman looked at Angel. ‘Come on, lad.’
Harper mounted his horse. He had made himself rich beyond the wildest dreams of the wildest Irishman that ever marched to war, and, like a true friend, he had made Sharpe rich too. Of course the Englishman had not noticed, but that was Mr Sharpe. Mr Sharpe was thinking of someone else, of another treasure. Harper looked into the seething mass of plunderers. ‘Where the hell is he?’
Sharpe had disappeared. Harper stood in his stirrups and stared about the seething mass of people who swarmed around the half-stripped wagons. The setting sun bathed the whole scene in a vivid, blood-red light. There was laughter and tears all about him. ‘Where the hell is he?’
‘There, senor’ Angel was still standing on the wagon. He pointed south. ‘El Matarifel’
‘What?’
The boy was pointing at a band of horsemen. In their lead was a man who looked half-beast, a hulking brute with a face of thick hair, a man who had a woman held on her belly over his saddle. The woman, Harper saw, had hair the colour of fine gold.
Harper urged his horse through the crowd. He saw how many armed men were with the bearded man. He saw too, that Sharpe was riding alone towards them and he knew that Sharpe, in this savage mood, would think nothing of taking on all those horsemen with his sword. Only one thing puzzled Harper and that was the presence, in Sharpe’s left hand, of a great length of silver chain. Harper cocked his seven-barrelled gun and rode, a rich man, to the fight.
CHAPTER 27
Sharpe had seen El Matarife. The Partisan, with a group of his men, was stripping one of the French wagons that had brought the defeated army’s arrears of pay. Some of his men unloaded the gold twenty franc pieces, the rest kept other looters away. El Matarife had La Marquesa over his saddle.
Sharpe knew he could not defeat all of them. There were twenty muskets there that would snatch him from the saddle and leave her to the mercy of the bearded man. Yet El Matarife, Sharpe knew, would not be able to resist a challenge to his manhood. There was one way, and one way only, that this fight must be fought.
He swerved Carbine towards La Marquesa’s abandoned carriage. He drew his sword and, reaching the vehicle, he leaned down, grasped the last trace chain, and hacked with his sword at the leather strap which held it to the splinter-bar.
He looped the chain in his left hand, and turned towards his enemy.
Weeks before, he thought, he had been foolish enough to accept a challenge to a duel. Now he would issue the challenge.
He rode towards the wagon, and the men who ripped at the chests stopped when they saw him coming. They called to their leader and El Matarife, who had been told that this man was dead, crossed himself and stared at the tall Rifleman who came out of the scarlet lit chaos. ‘Shoot him!’
But no one moved. The Rifleman had tossed a silver chain onto the ground into the mud that was thick with unwanted silver dollars, and he stared with savage loathing at the bearded man. ‘Are you a coward, Matarife? Do you only fight women?’
Still none of them moved. Those who had been scooping handfuls of gold from the broken chests stared at the tall Englishman who, slowly, his eyes on El Matarife, dismounted. Sharpe unbuckled his sword. He laid it, with his haversack, beside the wheel of the wagon.
El Matarife looked down at the chain, then back to Sharpe as the Rifleman looped the silver links about his upper left arm. Sharpe left a length of the chain to swing free from his arm. ‘Are you a coward, Matarife?’
El Matarife’s answer was to swing himself from his saddle. He dragged La Marquesa down and pushed her towards his men, shouting at them to hold her and keep her. She cried out as she stumbled, as a man reached down and seized her golden hair and held her against the flank of his horse, and as she turned and saw Sharpe standing in the wheel-churned mud and silver.
‘Richard!’ Her eyes were huge, staring in disbelief. Like her captor, in a half-forgotten gesture from her past, she touched her face, her belly, and her breasts in the sign of the cross. ‘Richard?’
‘Helene.’ He smiled at her, seeing her fear, her astonishment, her beauty. Even here the sight of that unfair loveliness struck into his soul like a dagger.
Behind Sharpe, Harper curbed his horse. He took Carbine’s rein, then leaned down and retrieved Sharpe’s sword and haversack. ‘Behind you, sir!’
‘Watch the bastards, Patrick! Put a bullet into them if they take her away!’ Sharpe had spoken in Spanish, a language that Harper had learned from Isabella.
‘Consider it done, sir.’
The Partisans were awed by the huge man who sat on his horse with his two guns, one of them larger than any gun they had ever seen held by a man. Beside Harper was Angel with his rifle in his practised hands. Angel was staring at the woman he thought more beautiful than lust.
The sky was darkening towards night, the west reddened with the sun’s setting. Skeins of smoke, dark blue-grey.against the cloudless sky, stretched above the field of plunder in delicate rills. They were the gun’s detritus, the drifting remnants of the battle that had been and gone on Vitoria’s plain.
El Matanfe shrugged off his heavy cloak. ‘You can ride away, Englishman, You will live.’
Sharpe laughed. ‘I shall count the ways of your death, coward.’
