Бернард Корнуэлл - Sharpe's Honour

‘Aye, sir.’ Harper watched Sharpe walk towards the Battalion’s headquarters. He wondered why the mention of the gaudy-uniformed Spaniard had plunged Sharpe into such sudden tenseness. Perhaps, he thought, it was just more of Sharpe’s guilt and grief.

Harper could understand grief, but he sensed that Sharpe’s mood was not simple grief. It seemed to the big Irishman that his friend had begun to hate himself, perhaps blaming himself for his wife’s death and the abandonment of his child. Whatever it was, Harper thought, he hoped that soon the army would march against the French. By that bridge, when the infantrymen had not a shot between them, Harper had seen the old energy and enthusiasm. Whatever Sharpe’s sadness was, it had not stopped his ability to fight.

‘He needs a good battle,’ he said to’Isabella that night.

She made a scornful sound. ‘He needs another wife.’

Harper laughed. ‘That’s all you women think about. Marriage, marriage, marriage!’ He had been drinking with the other Sergeants of the Battalion and had come back late to find the food she had cooked for him spoilt.

She pushed the burnt eggs about the pan as if hoping that by rearranging them she would improve their looks. ‘And what’s wrong with marriage?’

Harper, who could sense marriage on his own horizon, decided that discretion was the best part of valour. ‘Nothing at all. Have you got any bread?’

‘You know I have. You fetch it.’

There were limits to discretion, though. A man’s job was not to fetch bread, or be on time for a meal, and Harper sat silent as Isabella grumbled about the billet and as she complained to him about the landlady, and about Sergeant Pierce’s wife who had stolen a bucket of water, and told him that he should see a priest before the campaign began so as to make a good confession. Harper half listened to it all. ‘I smell trouble ahead.’

‘You’re right.’ Isabella scooped the eggs onto a tin plate.

‘Big trouble if you don’t fetch the bread.’ When she spoke English she did it with a northern Irish accent.

‘Fetch it yourself, woman.’

She said something that Harper’s Spanish was not good enough to understand, but went to the corner of the room and unearthed the hidden loaf. ‘What kind of trouble, Patrick?’

‘He’s bored.’

‘The Major?’

‘Aye.’ Harper deigned to cut the loaf with his rifle’s bayonet. ‘He’s bored, my love, and when he’s bored he gets into trouble.’

Isabella poured the ration wine. ‘Rainbows?’

Harper laughed. He was fond of saying that Major Sharpe was always chasing the pot of gold that lay at the end of every rainbow. He found the pots often enough, but, according to Harper, he always discarded them because the pots were the wrong shape. ‘Aye. The bugger’s chasing rainbows again.’

‘He should get married.’

Harper kept a diplomatic silence, but his instinct, like Sharpe’s, suddenly sensed danger. He was remembering Sharpe’s sudden change of mood that day when he had mentioned the ribbon-merchant, and Harper feared because he knew Richard Sharpe was capable of chasing rainbows into hell itself. He looked at his woman, who waited for a word of praise, and smiled at her. ‘You’re right. He needs a woman.’

‘Marriage,’ she said tartly, but he could see she was pleased. She pointed her spoon at him. ‘You look after him, Patrick.’

‘He’s big enough to look after himself.’

‘I know big men who can’t fetch bread.’

‘You’re a lucky woman, so you are.’ He grinned at her, but inside he was wondering just what it was that had alarmed Sharpe. Like the prospect of marriage that he sensed for himself, he sensed trouble coming for his friend.

‘Ah, Sharpe! No problems? Good!’ Lieutenant Colonel Leroy was pulling on thin kid-leather gloves. He had been a Major till a few weeks before, but now the loyalist American had achieved his ambition to command the Battalion. The glove on his right hand hid the terrible burn scars that he had earned a year before at Badajoz. Nothing could hide the awful, puckered, distorting scar that wrenched the right side of his face. He looked into the morning sky. ‘No rain today.’

‘Let’s hope not.’

‘Tent mules coming today?’

‘So I’m told, sir.’

‘God knows why we need tents.’ Leroy stooped to light a long, thin cigar from a candle that, on his orders, was kept alight in Battalion headquarters for just this purpose. ‘Tents will just soften the men. We might as well march to war with milkmaids. Can you lose the bloody things?’

‘I’ll try, sir.’

Leroy put on his bicorne hat, pulling the front low to shadow his thin, terrible face. ‘What else today?’

‘Mahoney’s taking Two and Three on a march. Firing practice for the new draft. Parade at two.’

‘Parade?’ Leroy, whose voice still held the flat intonation of his native New England, scowled at his only Major. Joseph Forrest, the Battalion’s other Major, had been posted to the Lisbon Staff to help organize the stores that poured into that port. ‘Parade?’ Leroy asked. ‘What goddamned parade?’

‘Your orders, sir. Church parade.’

‘Christ, I’d forgotten.’ Leroy blew smoke towards Sharpe and grinned. ‘You take it, Richard, it’ll be good for you.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Well, I’m off.’ Leroy sounded pleased. He had been invited to Brigade headquarters for the day and was anticipating equal measures of wine and gossip. He picked up his riding crop. ‘Make sure the parson gives the buggers a rousing sermon. Nothing like a good sermon to put men in a frog-killing mood. I hear there was a ribbon-merchant looking for you?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did he want?’

‘He never found me.’

‘Well tell him ‘no’, whatever he wants, and borrow money off him.’

‘Money?’

Leroy turned in the doorway. ‘The adjutant tells me you owe the Mess sixteen guineas. True?’ Sharpe nodded and Leroy pointed the riding crop at him. ‘Pay it, Richard. Don’t want you dying and owing the god-damn Mess money.’ He walked into the street to his waiting horse, and Sharpe turned to the table of paperwork that waited for him.

‘What the devil are you grinning at?’

Paddock, the Battalion clerk, shook his head. ‘Nothing, sir.

Sharpe sat to the pile of work. Paddock, he knew, was grinning because Leroy had told Sharpe to pay his debts, but Sharpe could not pay them. He owed the laundry-woman five shillings, the sutler two pounds, and Leroy, quite rightly, was demanding that Sharpe buy a horse. As a Captain, Sharpe had not wanted a horse, preferring to stay on his boots like his men, but as a Major the added height would be useful on a battlefield, as would the added speed. But a good horse was not to be had for under a hundred and thirty pounds and he did not know where the funds were to come from. He sighed. ‘Can’t you forge my bloody signature?’

‘Yes, sir, but only on pay forms. Tea, Major?’

‘Any breakfast left?’

‘I’ll go and look, sir.’

Sharpe worked through the papers. Equipment reports and weekly reports and new standing orders from Brigade and Army. There was the usual warning from the Chaplain-General to keep an eye on subversive Methodists that Sharpe threw away, and a General Order from Wellington that reminded officers that it was mandatory to remove the hat when the Host was being carried by a priest through a street to a dying man. Do not upset the Spanish was the message of that order and Sharpe noted its receipt and wondered again who the ribbon-merchant was.

He signed his name three dozen times, abandoned the rest of the paper-work, and went out into the spring sunlight to check the picquets and watch the recruits, shipped out from England, fire three rounds of musket fire. He listened to the officer of the day’s usual complaint about the ration beef and dodged round the back of the houses to avoid the Portuguese sutler who was looking for his debtors. The sutler sold tobacco, tea, needles, thread, buttons, and the other small necessities of a soldier’s life. The South Essex’s sutler, who had a small stable of ugly whores, was the richest man with the Battalion.