“Sir!” Hagman said softly.
“I see them.” Then Sharpe was standing, turning, shout-lrig, for on the southern skyline, silhouetted against the dark clouds, were cavalry.
The French had caught up.
CHAPTER 8
It was a bad place to be caught; a stretch of open country where cavalry could manoeuvre almost at will. It was true that there were patches of bog at the edges of the fields which, like the road, were lined with low stone walls, but Sharpe knew he would be hard put to extricate his men from the enemy.
“You’re certain it’s the French?” Parker asked.
Sharpe did not even bother to answer. A soldier who could not recognize enemy silhouettes did not deserve to live, but neither did a soldier who hesitated. “Go! Go!” This was to the coachman who, jarred by Sharpe’s sudden anger, cracked his long whip at his lead pair. Traces jangled, splinter bars jerked with the strain, and the carriage lunged forward.
The Riflemen tore rags from their weapon locks. Sharpe said a silent prayer of thanks to whichever deity looked after soldiers that, on the day when they had been cut off from the army, these men had been issued with so much ammunition. They would need it, for they were horribly outnumbered and their only hope lay in the ability of the rifle to delay the enemy’s pursuit.
Sharpe estimated it would take the French horsemen ten minutes to reach the stand of pines which presently shrouded the Riflemen. There was no escape to east or west, where only empty fields lay; instead he needed to reach the southern crest where the farm stood and hope that, beyond the crest and by some miracle, he would find an obstacle impassable to horsemen. If there was no escape, then the farmhouse must be barricaded into a fortress. But ten minutes was not enough time to reach the farm, so Sharpe held back a dozen men at the pines. The rest, under Williams’s command, went with the coach.
Sharpe kept Hagman, for the old poacher had an uncanny skill with his rifle, and he retained Harper with his closest cronies, for Sharpe suspected that they were his best fighters. “We can’t hold them up for long,” he told the few men, “but we can buy some time. But when we do move, we’ll have to run like the devil.”
Harper crossed himself. “God save Ireland.” There were at least two hundred Dragoons now filing along the boggy road that had mired the coach an hour earlier.
The Riflemen lay at the edge of the trees. To the French, still half a mile off, they would be invisible. “Lie still,” Sharpe warned his men. “Aim at the horses. It’s going to be a very long shot.” He would have liked to have waited till the enemy was just two hundred yards away before opening fire, but that would let the horsemen come far too close. Instead he would be forced to fire at the very limit of the rifle’s killing range in the hope that the bullets created enough surprise and panic to check the French advance for a few precious moments.
Sharpe, concealed by the darkness beneath the pines, stood a few paces behind his men. He drew out his telescope and steadied its long barrel against a pine trunk.
He saw pale green coats, pink facings, and pigtails. The telescope foreshortened the advancing French column so that the lens seemed filled with men rising and falling in their saddles. Scabbards, carbines, pouches, and sabretaches Jiggled. At this distance the French faces, dark beneath their forage caps, were expressionless and menacing. There were curious bundles strapped behind the saddles which Sharpe realized were netfuls of fodder for the horses. The French halted.
Sharpe swore softly.
He panned the telescope left and right. The Dragoons had left the worst of the marshland behind and had spread lr» to a line that was now quite motionless. Horses lowered their heads to crop at the damp grass.
“Sir?” Hagman called. “On the road, sir? See the buggers?”
Sharpe jerked the telescope back to the centre of the enemy line. A group of officers had appeared there, their aiguillettes and epaulettes a dark gold in the wintry light, and in their midst were the chasseur in his red pelisse, and the civilian in his black coat and white boots. Sharpe wondered by what weird skill those two men followed his scent across the winter land.
The chasseur opened his own telescope and it seemed to Sharpe that the Frenchman stared directly into the betraying circle of his own lens. He kept his glass motionless until the other telescope was snapped shut. Then he watched as the chasseur gave an order to a Dragoon officer, apparently an aide, who galloped his horse westward.
The result of the order was that a small detachment of Dragoons lifted the heavy helmets which hung from their saddles’ pommels. The six men pulled the helmets onto their heads; a sure sign they had been ordered to advance. Sensible to the fact that the pines could hide an ambush, the chasseur was sending a picquet ahead. Sharpe had lost surprise, for even though the enemy did not know that he waited for them, they were prepared for trouble. He slammed his glass shut, and cursed the French commander’s caution that now imposed a delicate choice on him.
Sharpe could kill the six men, but would that stop the other Dragoons? Or would they, judging his strength from the paucity of shots fired, spur into an instant gallop that would bring the mass of horsemen into the trees long before the Riflemen could reach the southern crest? Instead often minutes, he might have five.
He hesitated. But if he had learned one thing as a soldier it was that any decision, even a bad one, was better than none. “We’re pulling back. Fast! Keep hidden!”
The Riflemen slithered backwards, stood when the trees shielded them from the French, then followed Sharpe onto the road. They ran.
“Jesus!” The imprecation came from Harper and was caused by the sight of the Parkers’ carriage which, just two hundred yards ahead, was stuck fast. The coachman, in his haste, had rammed a wheel against a stone wall at a bend in the road. Williams and his men were vainly trying to free the vehicle.
“Leave it!” Sharpe bellowed. “Leave it!”
Mrs Parker’s head appeared at the window of the coach to countermand his orders. “Push! Push!”
“Get out!” Sharpe floundered in the road’s mud. “Get out!” If the coach was to be rescued then the horses would have to be coaxed backwards, slewed, then whipped forward, and that would take time which he did not have, so it must be abandoned.
But Mrs Parker was in no mood to sacrifice the carriage’s comfort. She ignored Sharpe, instead leaning perilously from the opened window to threaten her coachman with a furled umbrella. “Whip them harder, you fool! Harder!”
Sharpe seized the door handle and tugged it down. “Get out! Out!”
Mrs Parker flailed the umbrella at him, knocking his mildewed shako over his eyes, but Sharpe seized her wrist, tugged, and heard her scream as she fell in the mud. “Sergeant Williams?”
“Sir?”
“Two men to get those packs off the roof!” They contained all Sharpe’s spare ammunition. Gataker and Dodd scrambled up, slashed at the ropes with their sword-bayonets, and tossed the heavy packs down to the waiting riflemen. George Parker tried to speak with Sharpe, but the officer had no time for his nervousness. “You’ll have to run, sir. To the farm!” Sharpe physically turned the tall man and pointed him towards the stone house and barn which were the only refuges left in this bare country.
There was nervous excitement in Louisa’s eyes, then the girl was pushed aside by Mrs Parker who, muddied by her fall and made incoherent by the loss of her carriage and luggage, tried to reach Sharpe, but he shouted at the family to start running. “You want to die, woman? Move! Sergeant Williams! Escort the ladies! Get into the farmhouse!” Mrs Parker screamed for her valise that Mr Parker, shaking like a leaf, rescued from inside the carriage. Then, surrounded by Riflemen, the family and their coachman fled uphill.
“Sir?” Harper checked Sharpe. “Block the road?” He gestured at the coach.
Sharpe did not have the time to be astonished at the Irishman’s sudden willingness. He did, however, recognize the value of the suggestion. If the road was blocked then the French would be forced to negotiate the stone walls which barred the fields on either side. It would not buy much time, but even a minute would help in this desperate plight. He nodded. “If we can.”
