Vivar ignored the insult. “When my wife and children died, Lieutenant, I decided there was nothing to live for. I took to drink. I now thank God that a man cared enough for me to give me patronizing advice.” He picked up his tasselled hat. “If I have given you cause to hate me, Lieutenant, I regret it. It was not done purposefully; indeed you gave me to believe that I would not cause any bitterness between us.” It was as near as Vivar had come to a reference to Louisa. “Now all I ask is that you help me finish this job. There’s a hill to the west of the city which should be occupied. I shall put Davila under your command with a hundred Cazadores. I’ve reinforced the picquets to the south and west. And thank you for everything you have done so far. If you had not taken that first barricade, we would now be fleeing in the hills with lancers stabbing at our backsides.” Vivar stepped free of the bench. “Let me know when your defences are in place and I shall make an inspection.” He disdained any acknowledgement, but merely strode from the wineshop.
Sharpe picked up his winecup which was still full. He stared at it. He had threatened his own men with punishment if any became worse for drink, yet now he wished to God that he could drown his disappointment in an alcoholic haze. Instead he threw the cup away and stood. The girl, seeing her earnings lost, whimpered.
“Damn them all,” Sharpe said. He tore at two of the remaining silver buttons on his breeches, ripping a great swatch of the cloth away with the buttons which he dropped into the girl’s lap. “Damn them all.” He snatched up his weapons and left.
The tavern keeper looked at the girl who was re-lacing her bodice. He shrugged sympathetically. “The English, yes? Mad. All mad. Heretics. Mad.” He made the sign of the cross to defend himself from the heathen evil. “Like all soldiers,” the tavern keeper said. “Just mad.”
Sharpe walked with Sergeant Harper to the west of the city and forced himself to forget both Louisa and the shame of his behaviour in the tavern. Instead he tried to judge what approach the French might choose if they attacked Santiago de Compostela.
The Dragoons had gone to Padron, and the road from that small town approached Santiago from the south-west. That made an attack from the south or west the likeliest possibility. De l’Eclin could emulate Vivar and make an assault from the north, but Sharpe doubted if the chasseur would choose that approach because it needed surprise. The ground to the city’s east was broken, and the most easily defended. The land to the south was hedged and ditched, while the ground to the west, from where Vivar believed the attack would come, was open and inviting like an English common field.
The western open ground was flanked to the south by the low hill which Vivar wanted garrisoned and on which Sharpe’s Riflemen now waited for orders. The French, knowing the value of the hill, had chopped down most of the trees which had covered the high ground and made a crude fortification of brushwood jammed between the fallen trunks. Further west was dead ground where de l’Eclin’s Dragoons could assemble unseen. Sharpe stopped at the edge of that lower ground and stared back at the city. “We might have to hold the bloody place till after nightfall.”
Harper instinctively glanced to find the sun’s position. “It won’t be full dark for six hours,” he said pessimistically, “and it’ll be a slow dusk, sir. No damned clouds to hide us.”
“If God was on our side,” Sharpe essayed one of the stock jokes of the Regiment, “he’d have given the Baker rifle tits.”
Harper, recognizing from the feeble jest that Sharpe’s grim mood was passing, grinned dutifully. “Is it true about Miss Louisa, sir?” The question was asked very carelessly and without evident embarrassment, making Sharpe think that none of his men had suspected his attachment to the girl.
“It’s true.” Sharpe tried to sound as though he took little interest in the matter. “She’ll have to become a Catholic, of course.”
“There’s always room for another. Mind you,” Harper stared down into the dead ground as he spoke, “I never thought it was a good thing for a soldier to be married.”
“Why ever not?”
“You can’t dance if you’ve got one foot nailed to the bloody floor, can you now? But the Major isn’t a soldier like us, sir. Coming from that big castle!” Harper had clearly been mightily impressed by the wealth of Vivar’s family. “The Major’s a grand big fellow, so he is.”
“So what are we? The damned?”
“We’re that, sure enough, but we’re also Riflemen, sir. You and me, sir, we’re the best God-damned soldiers in the world.”
Sharpe laughed. Just weeks ago he had been bitterly at odds with his Riflemen, now they were on his side. He did not know how to acknowledge Harper’s compliment, so he resorted to a vague and meaningless cliche. “It’s a bloody odd world.”
“Difficult to do a good job in six days, sir,” Harper said wryly. “I’m sure God did his best, but where was the sense in putting Ireland plum next to England?”
“He probably knew you bastards needed smacking around.” Sharpe turned to look south. “But how the hell do we smack this French bastard back into his tracks?”
“If he attacks.”
“He’ll attack. He thinks he’s better than us, and he’s damned annoyed at being tricked again. He’ll attack.”
Sharpe walked to the southern edge of the common ground, then swivelled back to stare at the city. He was putting himself in de I’Eclin’s glossy boots, seeing what the Frenchman would see, trying to anticipate his plans.
Vivar was certain that de l’Eclin would come from the west, that the chasseur would wait till the setting sun was a blinding dazzle behind his charge, then launch his Dragoons across the open ground.
Yet, Sharpe reasoned, a cavalry charge was of dubious value to the French. It might sweep the Dragoons in glorious style to the city’s margin, but there the horses would baulk at walls and barricades, and the glory would be riven into blood and horror by the waiting muskets and rifles. De I’Eclin’s attack, just like Vivar’s, would best be done by infantry that could open the city to the cavalry’s fierce charge; and the best infantry approach was from the south.
Sharpe pointed to the south-western corner of the city. “That’s where he’ll make his attack.”
“After dark?”
“At dusk.” Sharpe frowned. “Maybe earlier.”
Harper followed him over a ditch and an embankment. The two Riflemen were walking towards a slew of buildings that straggled like a limb from the city’s south-western corner and which could shelter de I’Eclin’s men as they approached. “We’ll have to put men in the houses,” Harper said.
Sharpe seemed not to hear. “I don’t like it.”
“A thousand Dragoons? Who would?”
“De I’Eclin’s a clever bastard.” Sharpe was half-talking to himself. “A clever, clever bloody bastard. And he’s especially clever when he’s attacking.” He turned and stared at the city’s barricaded streets. The obstacles were manned by Cazadores and by the brown-coated volunteers who were piling brushwood into fires that could illuminate a night attack. They were doing, in fact, exactly what the French had done the night before, yet surely Colonel de l’Eclin would foresee all these preparations? So what would the Frenchman do? “He’s going to be bloody clever, Sergeant, and I don’t know how clever.”
“He can’t fly,” Harper said stoically, “and he doesn’t have time to dig a bloody tunnel, so he has to come in through one of the streets, doesn’t he?”
The stolid good sense made Sharpe suppose he was seeing danger where there was none. Better, he thought, to rely on his first instincts. “He’ll send his cavalry on a feint there,” he pointed to the smooth western ground, “and when he thinks we’re all staring that way, he’ll send dismounted men in from the south. They’ll be ordered to break that barricade,” he pointed to the street which led from the city to the church, “and his cavalry will swerve in behind them.”
Harper turned to judge for himself, and seemed to find Sharpe’s words convincing. “And so long as we’re on the hill or in those houses,” he nodded towards the straggling buildings that lay outside the defences, “we’ll murder the bastard.” The big Irishman picked up a sprig of laurel and twisted the pliant wood in his fingers. “But what really worries me, sir, is not holding the bastard off, but what happens when we withdraw? They’ll be flooding into those streets like devils on a spree, so they will.”
Sharpe was also worried about that moment of retreat. Once Vivar’s business in the cathedral was done,
