Бернард Корнуэлл - Sharpe's Revenge

“Major!” General Calvet was standing in the ruins below.

“Go right!” Sharpe pointed to where they had broken through into the passage. “Hurry!”

“Englishman! Well done!”

Sharpe laughed at the compliment, then essayed an elaborate bow to the Frenchman. As he bowed, so’Harper screamed a sudden warning, and Sharpe abandoned his courtesy to fall ignominiously on his face as a small cannon split the dawn apart with its sudden noise. The ball thumped over Sharpe’s head.

“Ducos!” Frederickson had spotted the enemy.

Sharpe looked where Frederickson was pointing. Beyond this roof was another courtyard, this one intact, and on its far side Sharpe saw an open full-length window on an upper floor. The room had a balcony that billowed with smoke. Men moved in the lantern light behind the balcony, then the small wind shifted the obscuring smoke and Sharpe at last saw his enemy. He recognized the round lenses of the spectacles first, then he saw the thin face and he saw, too, with astonishment, that Ducqs was in the uniform of a French Marshal. For a second Ducos looked straight into Sharpe’s eyes, then he twisted away. Two other men took his place. Between them they carried a strange brass object which they stood in the window. For a second Sharpe thought it was a small misshapen table, but then Frederickson recognized the four-legged gun. “A bloody grasshopper!” he said scornfully, but he still dropped flat as the linstock touched fire to the charge. This time the small gun had been loaded with multiple shot that whistled harmlessly overhead.

A scream sounded below, and Sharpe knew Calvet’s men must have entered the second courtyard. The sound of musketry began again, rising in a snapping crescendo, but this time the deadly sound came from deep inside Ducos’s fastness. The dawn was already lightening the eastern sky with a pale silver wash and Sharpe knew this battle was half won, but still not complete. An enemy had to be trapped and taken alive. He loaded his rifle, wiped blood off his blade, and went back to the fight.

Sergeant Challon lay disarmed and unconscious on the roof, but Pierre Ducos could not know of his loyal Sergeant’s predicament. Instead he cursed the Sergeant for abandoning him, just as he cursed the hired men who now scrambled desperately from the villa to run away into the night’s remnant. Only a handful of Dragoons had stayed with Ducos, not out of loyalty, but with the demand that Ducos now open the great strongbox and let them flee with their plunder.

Their greed was interrupted by Calvet’s men who began storming the lower corridors. Women and children screamed as they tried to escape the vengeful Guardsmen, and the screams served to remind Ducos’s Dragoons of their predicament. They slammed doors shut to cut the strongbox off from the attackers, then axed loopholes in the doors so they could keep Calvet’s men at bay. The grasshopper gun fired once more at the far roof, but the three green uniformed men seemed to have gone and the gun was brought down into the curtained archway that faced towards the sea. From that position it could slaughter any enemy who tried to outflank the loopholed doors by crossing the paved and balustraded terrace. “If we just hold long enough,” Ducos urged his six remaining men, “I promise we’ll get help.”

Ducos loaded two gilt-chased pistols that had been gifts from the Czar of Russia to the Emperor of France before the two nations fell into enmity. He carried the pistols to the window facing the courtyard and fired them both at the place where he believed he had seen, Sharpe. No one could be seen on that far roof now, so Ducos merely shot at phantoms. He was trying to persuade himself that Sharpe’s appearance had been just that; a phantom sprung on him by his over-heated fears and made more palpable by the dawn’s bad light. Yet he could hear that the men in the corridors outside the locked doors were no phantoms; they were fellow Frenchmen, come for a treasure that Ducos would not surrender.

Some of the products of that treasure were now used to barricade the archway where the grasshopper gun stood. A celestial globe was heaped on top of a japanned chest of drawers. A green silk covered chaise-longue made a breastwork, while beneath it an ebony table with a surface of inlaid silver and ivory was stacked as a shield for enemy bullets. Cushions, curtains, rugs and bedclothes were crammed between chairs to make the barricade yet more formidable. Only the heavy green curtain which shielded the deep alcove where the strongbox was hidden was left in its place. Two men crewed the grasshopper gun in its cushioned embrasure, while the other four Dragoons took it in turns to fire through the two loopholed doors. Ducos, his gaudy uniform hanging from him like finery draped on a scarecrow, paced between the three positions and spun a fantasy of imminent Neapolitan rescue.

The two loopholed doors were old and tough. A musket bullet could not penetrate the wood. At first the fire from the corridors was frightening in its intensity, but the Dragoons soon learned they were safe, and soon discovered they could drive the attackers away by firing from the loopholes. They had made a fortress within the villa, and the only entrances into the fortress were through the two doors or across the terrace that would prove a killing ground for the small brass gun. The Dragoons missed Sergeant Challon’s reassuring presence, but they felt safe enough now and even found a grim enjoyment in their successful defiance. Ducos made himself useful by loading every spare musket, carbine and pistol so that any determined attack could be met by an unrelenting fire.

“Pity about the women,” one Dragoon muttered.

“They’ll come back.” His companion fired through one of the splintered loopholes and his bullet ricocheted down the dark corridor. The attackers had taken cover from the fire, and their answering shots were as ill-aimed as they were infrequent. The man who had fired stepped back and glanced scornfully at Ducos. “First time I’ve seen a Marshal of France loading a musket.”

“We’ll drive these bastards off,” his companion muttered, “then we’ll kill the little runt and take the money home.” It had only been Sergeant Challon’s stubborn loyalty that had prevented such a desirable solution before, but Challon was now gone. The man fired through the door again, stepped back, then glanced up as an odd sound attracted his attention. He gaped at the high ceiling, then grabbed a loaded musket which he pointed directly overhead and fired. The fortress within a fortress was not quite as safe as it might have seemed.

The musket bullet buried itself in a floorboard beneath Harper’s feet, but struck with such force that the heavy board seemed to quiver beneath him. Dust jarred up along the timber’s formidable length. Harper wrenched at a crack between the boards with his bayonet. “I need a bloody axe.”

“We haven’t got a bloody axe,” Frederickson said curtly, then jumped back as three more gunshots thumped into the floor. “Why don’t we just set the bloody place on fire?”

Neither Sharpe nor Harper answered. Both had stouter blades than Frederickson’s slim sword, and both were levering at the old thick timbers. They had made their way around the villa’s roof to find this dusty attic directly over the enemy’s inner sanctuary. Sharpe had knocked tiles from the roof to get into the dusty space where bat droppings lay thick on the floor.

“It’s moving!” Harper alerted Sharpe who went to the other side of the heavy floorboard. Sharpe slid his sword under the wood and levered. Both men were crouching back from their work. Bullets were slamming noisily into the underside of the floor, and Sharpe feared that one would strike the tip of his sword and break the steel. He stood upright, put his foot on the hilt, and shoved downwards so that the timber creaked and heaved along its whole length. The far end of the board was still held fast by ancient nails and the consequent tension threatened to snap the timber back like a spring until Frederickson jammed his rifle beneath to hold the raised end firm. Ducos’s men were shouting below. One musket bullet found the gap and smashed a tile not a foot from Frederickson’s head.