Bernard Cornwell - Sharpe’s Fury - The Battle of Barrosa, March 1811

The door opened. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Harper asked cheerfully.

‘I want to go on deck.’

‘The surgeon says you must rest.’

Sharpe told Harper what the surgeon could do. ‘Help me dress,’ he said. He did not bother with boots or sword, just pulled on his French cavalry overalls and his ragged green coat, then held onto Harper’s strong arm as they walked out of the cabin. The sergeant then hauled Sharpe up a steep companionway to the frigate’s deck where he clung to the hammock netting.

A brisk wind was blowing and it felt good. Sharpe saw that the frigate was sliding past a low dull coast dotted with watchtowers. ‘I’ll get you a chair, sir,’ Harper said.

‘Don’t need a chair,’ Sharpe said. ‘Where are the men?’

‘We’re all snug up front, sir.’

‘You’re improperly dressed, Sharpe,’ a voice interrupted and Sharpe turned his head to see Brigadier Moon enthroned near the frigate’s wheel. He was sitting in a chair with his splinted leg propped on a cannon. ‘You haven’t got boots on,’ the brigadier observed.

‘Much better to go barefoot on deck,’ a cheerful voice said, ‘and what are you doing on your bare feet anyway? I gave orders that you were to stay below.’ A plump, cheerful man in civilian clothes smiled at Sharpe. ‘I’m Jethro McCann, surgeon to this scow,’ he introduced himself, and held up a closed fist. ‘How many fingers am I showing you?’

‘None.’

‘Now?’

‘Two.’

‘The Sweeps can count,’ McCann said, ‘I’m impressed.’ The Sweeps were the riflemen, so called because their dark-green uniforms often looked black as a chimneysweep’s rags. ‘Can you walk?’ McCann asked and Sharpe managed a few paces before a gust of wind made the frigate lurch and drove him back to the hammock netting. ‘You’re walking well enough,’ McCann said. ‘Are you in pain?’

‘It’s getting better,’ Sharpe lied.

‘You’re a lucky bastard, Mister Sharpe, if you’ll forgive me. Lucky as hell. You were hit by a musket ball. Glancing shot, which is why you’re still here, but it depressed a piece of your skull. I fished it back into place.’ McCann grinned proudly.

‘Fished it back into place?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Oh, it’s not difficult,’ the surgeon said airily, ‘no more difficult than scarfing a sliver of wood.’ In truth it had been appallingly difficult. It had taken the doctor an hour and a half’s work under inadequate lantern light as he teased at the wedge of bone with probe and forceps. His fingers had kept slipping in blood and slime, and he had thought he would never manage to free the bone without tearing the brain tissue, but at last he had succeeded in gripping the splintered edge and pulling the sliver back into place. ‘And here you are,’ McCann went on, ‘sprightly as a two-year-old. And the good news is that you’ve got a brain.’ He saw Sharpe’s puzzlement and nodded vigorously. ‘You do! Honest! I saw it with my own eyes, thus disproving the navy’s stubborn contention that soldiers have nothing whatsoever inside their skulls. I shall write a paper for the Review . I’ll be famous! Brain discovered in a soldier.’

Sharpe tried to smile in the pretence that he was amused, but only succeeded in a grimace. He touched the bandage. ‘Will the pain go?’

‘We know almost nothing about head wounds,’ McCann said, ‘except that they bleed a lot, but in my professional opinion, Mister Sharpe, you’ll either drop down dead or be right as rain.’

‘That is a comfort,’ Sharpe said. He perched on a cannon and stared at the distant land beneath the far clouds. ‘How long till we reach Lisbon?’

‘Lisbon? We’re sailing to Cadiz!’

‘Cadiz?’

‘That’s our station,’ McCann said, ‘but you’ll find a boat going to Lisbon quick enough. Ah! Captain Pullifer’s on deck. Straighten up.’

The captain was a thin, narrow-faced and grim-looking man. A scarecrow figure who, Sharpe noticed, was barefoot. Indeed, if it had not been for his coat with its salt-encrusted gilt, Sharpe might have mistaken Pullifer for an ordinary seaman. The captain spoke briefly with the brigadier, then strode down the deck and introduced himself to Sharpe. ‘Glad you’re on your feet,’ he said morosely. He had a broad Devon accent.

‘So am I, sir.’

‘We’ll have you in Cadiz soon enough and a proper doctor can look at your skull. McCann, if you want to steal my coffee you’ll find it on the cabin table.’

‘Aye aye, sir,’ the doctor said. McCann was evidently amused by his captain’s insult, which suggested to Sharpe that Pullifer was not the grim beast he appeared to be. ‘Can you walk, Sharpe?’ Captain Pullifer asked gruffly.

‘I seem to be all right, sir,’ Sharpe said, and Pullifer jerked his head, indicating that the rifleman should go with him to the stern rail. Moon watched Sharpe pass by.

‘Had supper with your brigadier last night,’ Pullifer said when he was alone with Sharpe beneath the great mizzen sail. He paused, but Sharpe said nothing. ‘And I spoke with your sergeant this morning,’ Pullifer went on. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it, how stories differ?’

‘Differ, sir?’

Pullifer, who had been staring at the Thornside ’s wake, turned to look at Sharpe. ‘Moon says it was all your fault.’

‘He says what?’ Sharpe was not certain he had heard right. His head was filled with a pulsing pain. He tried closing his eyes, but it did not help so he opened them again.

‘He says you were ordered to blow a bridge, but you hid the powder under women’s luggage, which is against the rules of war, and then you dilly-dallied and the Frogs took advantage, and he finishes up with a dead horse, a broken leg and no sabre. And the sabre was Bennett’s best, he tells me.’

Sharpe said nothing, just stared at a white bird skimming the broken sea.

‘You broke the rules of war,’ Pullifer said sourly, ‘but as far as I know the only rule in bloody war is to win. You broke the bridge, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But you lost one of Bennett’s best sabres,’ Pullifer sounded amused, ‘so your brigadier borrowed pen and paper off me this morning to write a report for Lord Wellington. It’s going to be poisonous about you. Do you wonder why I’m telling you?’

‘I’m glad you’re telling me,’ Sharpe said.

‘Because you’re like me, Sharpe. You came up the hawsehole. I started as a pressed man. I was fifteen and had spent eight years catching mackerel off Dawlish. That was thirty years ago. I couldn’t read, couldn’t write and didn’t know a sextant from an arsehole, but now I’m a captain.’

‘Up the hawsehole,’ Sharpe said, relishing the navy’s slang for a man promoted from the ranks into the officers’ mess. ‘But they never let you forget, do they?’

‘It’s not so bad in the navy,’ Pullifer said grudgingly, ‘they value seamanship more than gentle birth. But thirty years at sea teaches you a thing or two about men, and I have a notion that your sergeant was telling the truth.’

‘He bloody was,’ Sharpe said hotly.

‘So I’m warning you, that’s all. If I were you I’d write my own report and muddy the water a little.’ Pullifer glanced up at the sails, found nothing to criticize, and shrugged. ‘We’ll catch a few mortar rounds going into Cadiz, but they haven’t hit us yet.’

In the afternoon the west wind turned soft so that the Thornside slowed and wallowed in the long Atlantic swells. Cadiz came slowly into sight, a city of gleaming white towers that seemed to float on the ocean. By dusk the wind had died to a whisper that did nothing except fret the frigate’s sails and Pullifer was content to wait till morning to make his approach. A big merchantman was much closer to land and she was ghosting into harbour on the last dying breaths of wind. Pullifer gazed at her through a big telescope. ‘She’s the Santa Catalina ,’ he announced, ‘we saw her in the Azores a year ago.’ He collapsed the glass. ‘I hope she’s getting more wind than we are, otherwise she’ll never make the southern part of the harbour.’