the third was a plump man in a blue uniform who claimed to be a Major of the Commissary service. His presence was explained by the hoard of French muskets that the hussars had discovered, muskets that would now go back to their proper owners. 'You give me your word as a gentleman, ' Pailleterie asked Tubbs in English, 'that you will not try to escape?'
'Of course not, ' Tubbs said.
'You won't give me your word?'
'No, no! I won't try to escape! ' Tubbs backed away from the pigtailed Frenchman.
'Then you may keep your sword, monsieur, and do me the honour of staying inside the fortress.'
Not that any of the hussars had much choice in the matter, for whenever they spent too long outside the fort's walls a rifleman would fire.
Coignet had narrowly escaped injury when he went to explore the shrine, and two men had been wounded when Pailleterie had tipped the wagon that had been half-blocking the bridge over the parapet and into the river.
Pailleterie regretted the wounding of those two men, but he needed the roadway to be clear for Herault, and so he had led twenty men out of the fort where they immediately came under fire from the farmhouse on the northern bank. Once the barricade was gone Pailleterie ordered his men to stay inside the fort's walls, even though his Lieutenant, who had been watching the farmhouse from the parapet, swore that the riflemen there had now run away. But Pailleterie knew that if they stayed inside the fort his hussars and their horses were safe. The British might try to recapture the bridge, but Pailleterie was confident he could thwart them. He had forty of his men lined in the fort's gateway, all armed with pistols, and if the British did run up the road and turn into the arch they would die in a blistering volley.
So the road from the south was open.
Herault and his small army was coming.
And all Pailleterie needed to do was wait.
'It was my fault, ' Sharpe said bitterly.
'I shouldn't have fired so soon, ' Price admitted.
'I shouldn't have put Pat Harper across the river, ' Sharpe said. 'I should have kept our men together.'
Ensign Hickey said nothing, but just looked heartbroken. He had not thought Captain Sharpe could be defeated.
'Bloody hell! ' Sharpe swore uselessly. He had pulled his surviving men back to the village where they could shelter behind garden walls. The fort was a hundred paces away, and he had thought about making an attack on it, but he would have to lead his men round to the far side and then through the archway and he guessed the French would be expecting that approach.
The store-room door had been shut, and was doubtless barricaded. Every now and then a black fur hat showed on the parapet as an hussar peered over to make certain the British troops were not planning any mischief.
Daniel Hagman, keeping watch from the river bank, reported that the frogs had tipped the cart into the river. 'I got one of the bastards, sir, ' he said, 'and Harris popped another.'
'Well done, Dan, ' Sharpe said morosely, then wondered why the French would clear the barricade away. and the answer was depressingly obvious. Because they were expecting more men, that was why. Because the hussars were only holding the bridge long enough to let a flood of bloody Crapauds across the river. Because all hell was about to be loosed on the British supply lines, and Captain Richard Sharpe would be blamed. «Jesus!» Sharpe cursed.
'He doesn't seem to be on our side today, ' Hagman said.
The only good news was that Harper had brought his men safely back across the Tormes. He had led them a mile westwards and used a fisherman's skiff to ferry them over the river, and it was reassuring for Sharpe to have the big Irishman and the twenty rifleman back at his side, but he did not know what he could do with them. Have them killed in a forlorn attack on the fort's gate?
The Scotsman, MacKeon, came and squatted beside Sharpe. He was smoking a short foul pipe that he now pointed towards the fort. 'It reminds me, Captain, ' he said, 'of that terrible place in India.'
Sharpe wondered if MacKeon was drunk. The fort at San Miguel was nothing like Gawilghur. The Indian fort had been built on a clifftop, dizzyingly high above the Deccan plain, while San Miguel was a decaying ruin built beside a river. 'It don't look much like Gawilghur to me, ' Sharpe said.
'Mebbe not, ' MacKeon said, tapping the pipe out against a stone, 'but the pigtailed fellows reckon there's only one way in. And they're guarding that entrance, like as not, but there's always a back way, Captain, always a back way. And you were the laddie that found it at Gawilghur.' He pointed the stem of his pipe at the fort. 'See that great crack?'
MacKeon was pointing to a jagged fissure that began low on the shadowed western wall then zig-zagged up the stones almost to the parapet. For a moment Sharpe was wondering whether the Scotsman really expected the light company to climb the wall, then saw that, maybe a third of the way up, a whole section of stone had fallen away. The space looked like a small cave and was half hidden by ivy, but MacKeon was right. It was a back way in, and an agile man could squeeze through the gap, but to what? Sharpe could not remember seeing a hole inside the fort, so where did it lead?
'Sergeant Harper?'
'Sir?'
'If a frog shows his head above that parapet, shoot him.' The riflemen could keep the French out of sight, and if they were out of sight they could not see what mischief Sharpe planned. He unbuckled his sword belt, let the clumsy weapon drop, and then, with the rifle slung on his shoulder, ran across the waste ground to the fort's wall. No Frenchman saw him, for they were keeping their heads below the parapet. They might have captured the fort, but they had a healthy respect for the rifles.
It was a hard climb. Much worse than the cliff at Gawilghur, Sharpe reckoned. That had been steep, but not vertical, and there had been bushes to provide handholds. The crack in the fort wall gave plenty of handholds, but it sloped from left to right and Sharpe had to scrabble to find footholds in the old wall, but he hauled himself up, half expecting a pistol to bang above him, and then at last he could grab the ivy's thick trunk and that helped. One good lodgement for his foot and he could thrust himself up into the hole.
The hole was smaller than it had looked, but Sharpe turned sideways and squeezed between the stones. His rifle caught on the ivy, and his uniform snagged on the edge of the stones, but he untangled himself and pushed on until his head was inside the fort. A foul stench assailed him, and at first he could see nothing but darkness, then he saw chinks of light above him and heard footsteps on timber and realised that he had entered the space above the store-room's barrel-vaulted stone ceiling and the lowermost timber floor. He wriggled on until he was inside the wall and wondered what he had achieved. There was no way to mount an attack from here. It would take men far too long to climb the wall, and they could only enter one at a time and even when they were inside, what could they do? They would be trapped in a narrowing space between two floors, and as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom he saw that the floor beams were oddly ragged, and then he realised he was staring at thousand of bats hanging from the timbers. 'Bloody hell, ' he muttered, and he tried to forget the bats and looked about him and saw that the space was thick with supporting timbers, some quite small, but all placed to support the floors on the curved stone roof that was thick with bat dung. It was the dung that stank so high.
A rifle banged, then another. A Frenchman shouted in alarm high above Sharpe, then another laughed. Sharpe looked out of the cave-like opening and saw two puffs of smoke lingering by the buildings where his men were sheltering. He pushed back through the crack and pointed a finger at Perkins, the youngest and most agile of the riflemen.
Perkins ran through the grass and weeds to the base of the wall, and again no Frenchman saw the intruder for they were scared of the rifles. 'Can you hear me, Perkins?' Sharpe called, keeping his voice low, and when Perkins nodded Sharpe told him what he wanted, then watched as the boy ran back to the village. Sharpe could only wait now, so he settled inside the hole and listened to the French walking an inch or two above his head. He could smell their horses, smell tobacco smoke, and then he heard English being spoken. 'You were not in command here, Major?' A French accented voice asked.
'In overall command, yes, of course, ' Tubbs answered, 'but the defence of the fort, the military defence, was in the hands of a rifle officer. A man called Sharpe.'
