Sharpe ran. He reached the farmhouse just as the last Rifleman scrambled over its threshold. Harper was ready to shut the door and jam it tight with a chest, “Thank you!” Sharpe gasped as he cannoned through the door. Harper ignored him.
Sharpe found himself in a passage which ran clean through the farmhouse from north to south. Doors barred the passage’s outer entrances, while two other doors led into the house itself. He chose the door on the left which opened into a spacious kitchen where, quivering with fright, a man and a woman crouched beside the hearth in which, suspended from a pothook, a seething cauldron stank of lye. The Parkers’ coachman offered the couple urgent explanation, then began loading a huge horse-pistol. Louisa was trying to prise a small ivory-hilted pistol from its snug-fitting case.
“Where’s your aunt?” Sharpe asked.
“There.” She pointed to a door at the back of the kitchen.
“Get in there.”
“But…“
“I said get in there!” Sharpe closed the pistol case and, despite Louisa’s indignation, pushed her towards the scullery where her aunt and uncle crouched among tall stone jars. He limped to the closest window and saw the Dragoons milling about just beyond the small barn. His men were firing at them. A horse reared, a Frenchman clapped a hand to a wounded arm, and a trumpet screamed.
The Dragoons scattered. They did not go far; only to find shelter behind the stone barn or the field walls, and Sharpe knew it would only be seconds before, dismounted, they began to rattle the farmhouse with their carbine fire. “How many windows are there, Sergeant?”
“Dunno, sir.” Williams was panting from the effort of running uphill.
A bullet lashed through the kitchen from outside. It struck a high beam above Sharpe. “Keep your bloody heads down! And fire back!”
There were three rooms downstairs; the large kitchen which had a window facing north and another south. The small scullery where the Parkers crouched had no windows. Beyond the passage was a much larger, windowless room, this one a byre for the animals. Two pigs and a dozen scared chickens were its only occupants.
A ladder from the kitchen led upstairs where there was a single room for sleeping. The farm’s relative prosperity was witnessed by a massive bed and a chest of drawers. The room had two windows, also facing north and south. Sharpe put Riflemen in both windows, then ordered Sergeant
Williams to take charge of the upstairs room and to make loopholes in the eastern and western walls. “And break through the roof.”
“The roof?” Williams gaped up at the thick beams and the timbers which hid the tiles.
“To keep watch east and west,” Sharpe ordered. Until he could see to his flanks then he was vulnerable to French surprise.
Downstairs again, Sharpe ordered a loophole to be hacked next to the chimney breast. The Spanish farmer, understanding what needed to be done, produced a pickaxe and began to pound at his wall. A crucifix, hanging on the limewashed stone, juddered with the force of the man’s blows.
“Bastards right!” Harper shouted from the window. Rifles cracked. The greenjackets who fired ducked back, letting others take their places. Some dismounted Dragoons had tried to rush the farm, but three of them now lay in a puddle; two scrambled up and limped to safety, the third was still. Sharpe saw the splash of rain in the blood-rippled water.
Then, for a few moments, there was relative peace.
None of Sharpe’s men was wounded. They were breathless and damp, but safe. They stayed crouched low under the threat of carbine fire that flayed at the windows, but the bullets did no harm except to the house. Sharpe, peering out, saw that the enemy was hidden in ditches or behind the dunghill. The farmer’s wife was nervously offering sliced sausage to the greenjackets.
George Parker crept on hands and knees from the scullery. He nervously waited for Sharpe’s attention which, once gained, he used to enquire what course of action Lieutenant Sharpe planned to follow.
Lieutenant Sharpe informed Mr Parker that he intended to wait for darkness to fall.
Parker swallowed. “That could be hours!”
“Five at the most, sir.” Sharpe was reloading his rifle, “unless God makes the sun stand still.”
Parker ignored Sharpe’s levity. “And then?”
“Break out, sir. Not till it’s dead of night. Hit the bastards when they’re not expecting it. Kill a few of them, and hope the others get confused.” Sharpe righted the rifle and primed its pan. “They can’t do much damage to us so long as we stay low.”
“But…“ Parker flinched as a bullet smacked into the wall above his head. ”My dear wife, Lieutenant, wishes your assurance that our carriage will be retrieved?“
“Afraid not, sir.” Sharpe knelt up, saw a flicker of a shadow beyond the dunghill, and fired his rifle. Smoke billowed from the weapon, and a wad of burning paper smoked on the floor. “There won’t be time, sir.” He crouched, took a cartridge from his pouch, and bit the bullet away.
“But my testaments!”
Sharpe did not like to reveal that the testaments, when last seen, had been strewn in the Spanish mud. He spat the bullet into his rifle’s muzzle. “Your testaments, sir, are now in the hands of Napoleon’s army.” He rammed ball, wadding and powder down his rifle barrel. The saltpetre from the powder was rank and dry in his mouth.
“But…“ Again Parker was silenced by a carbine bullet. This one clanged against a saucepan that hung from a beam. The bullet punched a hole in the metal, hit the next beam, and dropped at Sharpe’s feet. He picked it up, juggling it because of its heat, then smelt it. Parker frowned in perplexity.
“There’s a rumour that the Frogs poison their bullets, sir.” Sharpe said it loud enough so that his men, some of whom half-believed the story, could hear. “It ain’t true.”
“It isn’t?”
“No, sir.” Sharpe put the bullet into his mouth, grinned, then swallowed it. His men laughed at the expression on George Parker’s face. Sharpe turned to see how the farmer was progressing with the loophole. The walls of the farm were hugely thick and, though the man’s pick had pierced a foot into the centre rubble, he still had not reached day-‘ight.
A volley of carbine shots crashed through the rear window.
The Riflemen, unharmed, jeered their defiance, but it was a defiance that the grey-haired Parker could not share. “You’re doomed, Lieutenant!”
“Sir, if you’ve nothing better…“
“Lieutenant! We are civilians! I see no reason why we should stay here and share your death!” George Parker had found courage under fire; the courage to assert his timorous soul and demand surrender.
Sharpe primed his rifle. “You want to walk out there, sir?”
“A flag of truce, man!” Parker flinched as another carbine bullet ricocheted over his head.
“If that’s what you want, sir…“ But before Sharpe could finish his sentence, there was a panicked shout from Sergeant Williams upstairs, then a rattling crash as a massive enemy volley flogged the front of the house. A Rifleman was jerked back from the window with blood spurting from his head. Two rifles fired, more shot from upstairs, then the northern window was darkened as French Dragoons, who had charged about the blind western angle of the house, filled the frame. Sharpe and several other men fired; but the Dragoons were dragging at the chairs which blocked the window. They were repulsed only when the farmer’s wife, screaming with despair and using a strength that seemed remarkable in so scrawny a woman, snatched the cauldron from the pothook and threw it at the enemy. The scalding lye snatched the French back as though a cannon had fired at them.
“Sir!” Harper was by the kitchen door. A crash sounded in the passage as the French broke down the southern door which the Irishman had not blocked as securely as the northern. A group of Dragoons had taken advantage of the larger attack to make a charge at the other side of the house and were now within the central passage. Harper fired his rifle through the kitchen door, which instantly splintered in two places as the French replied. Both bullets struck the table.
The kitchen filled with powder smoke. Men were taking turns to fire through the windows, then reloading with frantic haste. The coachman emptied his huge pistol through the door and was rewarded with a shout of
