holes and four other handspikes levered the traverses about until the iron wheel was flush with the white-line marked with the numeral three, then the pins were dropped into new holes and the guns, despite the fog of war, hammered their shot with deadly accuracy.
„Two!“
The shout told Lassan that the target was moving and he guessed, correctly, that the frigate was bearing away. He walked southwards, away from his gunsmoke, to see the two-decked Vengeance raise her gunports. That battleship was beyond Cap Ferrat and far beyond range. He watched. The great slab-side, chequered black and white, disappeared in one great clap of smoke, but, as Lassan had suspected, the broadside fell uselessly into the sea. “Keep firing!”
“One!” the sergeant shouted from the roof and the crews levered at the vast guns as the boys ran up the stone ramp with more charges. A ball from the frigate rumbled overhead, another struck the stone of the embrasure nearest Lassan with a crack that made his heart pulse warm fear through his chest, but most of the frigate’s shots were uselessly striking the sea wall or glancing off the southern glacis.
“She’s gone!” the sergeant shouted.
“Cease fire!” Lassan shouted, and the thunder ended suddenly. The smoke cleared with painful slowness to show that the frigate, sorely wounded, had gone south beyond the arc of the big guns. Lassan contemplated manning some of the twenty-four pounders on his southern ramparts, then saw the shot-torn foresails fill with air again and knew that the British captain, under orders to keep the fort’s gunners busy, was heading back into the channel. The sight of those torn sails and flying severed cables made Lassan think that some of his shots had been going high.
“Lower the barrels, Lieutenant!” Lassan wanted to pump his shots into that fragile hull.
The Scylla’s guns were run out, ready to fire when the frigate wore, but the bow-chasers, long-nines, barked defiance. The balls cracked on the bastion’s stone, doing no damage, then the sergeant on the barrack roof again had the enemy in his line of aim. “One!” the sergeant shouted.
“Fire!” Gerard bellowed. The great barrels jerked back and up, the wheels rumbled as they rolled back down the slide, and the smoke, that stank like rotten eggs, pumped again into the cold air. Lassan’s garrison might have been stripped to the bone, he might not even have crews for every gun, but he would do his duty and he would show the British that an under-manned fort could still hurt them and still, by the grace of the good God and in the service of the French Emperor, win battles.
The handcart was made of splintered, fragile wood that was held to uncertain unity by bent, rusted nails and with lashings of thin, frayed, black twine. Some of the wheel-spokes were broken.
Sharpe pulled the handcart out of the cattle byre and listened to the ghastly screech of the wooden axle that ran through two ungreased wooden blocks. He supposed that the cart was used to take hay from these meadows into the village, or perhaps bedding straw to the fort, but it had been abandoned through the frost months to lie in this byre where the spiders had made thick webs on its spokes and handles. “It could work.” Sharpe tested the small bed of the cart and it seemed solid enough. “Except we don’t speak French.”
“Sweet William does, sir,” Harper said, then, seeing Sharpe’s face, corrected himself. “Captain Frederickson croaks Frog, sir.”
A group of armed men, approaching a fort, invited hostility, but two men, pushing a wounded comrade on a handcart, posed no threat.
“Jesus.” Frederickson’s voice was awed when, arriving at the cattle byre, he heard Sharpe’s plan. “We’re supposed to walk up and ask for a bloody sawbones?”
“You suggested knocking on the front door,” Sharpe said. “So why not?”
The Riflemen still drifted down the gentle slope. They came in scattered groups, spread out in the chain formation they would use in battle, and no alarm had been raised at the sight. Sharpe doubted whether any Frenchman had even seen the dark shapes flit down the slope. Once on the lower ground, over the tiny stream and hidden by the ditches that were edged by straggling blackthorn hedges, the Riflemen were invisible. The fort still thundered its huge noise.
“What we need,” Sharpe said, “is blood.” He was reckoning that the fort would not refuse entry to a mortally wounded man, but mortal wounds were usually foul with blood and, in search of it, both officers looked instinctively to Patrick Harper.
Who stared back with a slow and horrified understanding. “No! Holy Mother, no!”
“It has to come out, Patrick.” Sharpe spoke in a voice of sweet reason.
“You’re not a surgeon, sir. Besides!” Harper’s swollen face suddenly looked cheerful. “There’s no pincers, remember?”
Sweet William unbuckled his pouch. “The barber-surgeons of London, my dear Sergeant, will pay six shillings and six pence for a ten-ounce bag of sound teeth taken from corpses. You’d be surprised how many fashionable London ladies wear false teeth taken from dead Frogs.” Frederickson flourished a vile-looking pair of pincers. “They’re also useful for a spot of looting.”
“God save Ireland.” Harper stared at the pincers.
Captain Frederickson smiled. “You’ll be doing it for England, Sergeant Harper, for your beloved King.”
“Christ, no, sir!”
“Strip to the waist,” Sharpe ordered^
“Strip?” Harper had backed into the corner of the filthy byre.
“We need to have your chest soaked in blood,” Sharpe said as though this was the most normal procedure in the world. “As soon as the tooth’s pulled, Patrick, let the blood drip on to your skin. It won’t take long.”
“Oh, Christ in his heaven!” Harper crossed himself.
“It doesn’t hurt, man!” Frederickson took out his two false teeth and grinned at Harper. “See?”
“That was done with a sword, sir. Not bloody pincers!”
“We could do it with a sword.” Sharpe said it helpfully.
“Oh, Mary mother of God! Christ!” Harper, seeing nothing but evil intent on his officers’ faces, knew that he must mutiny or suffer. “You’d be giving me a wee drink first?”
“Brandy?” Frederickson held out his canteen.
Harper seized the canteen, uncorked it, and tipped it to his mouth.
“Not too much,” Frederickson said.
“It’s not your bloody tooth. With respect, sir.”
Frederickson looked at Sharpe. “Do you wish to play the surgeon, sir?”
“I’ve never actually drawn a tooth.” Sharpe, in front of the curious Riflemen who had gathered to watch Harper’s discomfiture, kept his voice very formal.
Frederickson shrugged. “We should have a screw-claw, of course, but the pincers work well enough on corpses. Mind you, there is a knack to it.”
“A knack?”
“You don’t pull.” Frederickson demonstrated his words with graphic movements of the rusted pincers. “You push the tooth towards the jawbone, twist one way, the other, then slide it out. It’s really not hard.”
“Jesus!” The big Irish sergeant had gone pale as rifle-cartridge paper.
“I think,” Sharpe said it with some misgivings, “that as Sergeant Harper and I have been together so long, I ought to do the deed. Push, twist, and pull?”
“Precisely, sir.”
It took five minutes to persuade and prepare Harper. The Irishman showed no fear in battle; he had gone grim-faced into the carnage of a dozen battlefields and come out victorious, but now, faced with the little business of having a tooth pulled, he sat terrified and shaking. He clung to Frederickson’s brandy as if it alone could console him in this dreadful ordeal.
“Show me the tooth.” Sharpe spoke solicitously.
Harper eventually opened his mouth and pointed to an upper tooth that was surrounded by inflamed gum. “There.”
Sharpe used a handle of the pincers and, as gently as he could, tapped the tooth. “That one?”
“Jesus Christ!” Harper bellowed and jerked away. “Bloody kill me, you will!”
“Language, Sergeant!” Frederickson was trying not to laugh while the other Riflemen were grinning with keen enjoyment.
