Sharpe picked up the top piece and dangled it in front of the plump Commissary officer. “Put laces in it and you could march on it.” The Lieutenant smiled; he had heard it all before. Sharpe took another piece of gristle from the keg. “It’s uneatable! How many kegs?”
The Lieutenant waved at the mules. “All this, sir.”
Sharpe looked out of the courtyard into the bright street. Another mule stood patiently in the late afternoon sunlight. “What’s that?”
“A mule, sir.” The Lieutenant smiled brightly. He saw Sharpe’s face. “Sorry, sir. My little joke.” He became serious. “That’s the supplies for the castle, sir. Sir Arthur’s. You understand.”
“I do?” Sharpe walked under the arch towards the mule, the Lieutenant alongside, and waved the muleteer away. “I happened to see the supplies delivered to the castle this morning, Lieutenant, and nothing was missing.”
The Lieutenant smiled helplessly. Sharpe was lying, they both knew that, but then so was the Lieutenant, and they both knew that, too. Sharpe pulled the cover off the nearest keg. “Now that, Lieutenant, is beef. I’ll have both these kegs instead of two of the others.”
“But, sir! This is for… „
“Your dinner, Lieutenant? And you and your fellow officers will sell the rest. Right? I’ll take it.”
The Lieutenant recovered the keg. “Why don’t you let me give you a fine chicken we just happened to find, Captain, as a gift, of course.”
Sharpe put his hand on the mule. “You want me to sign, Lieutenant? I think I’ll weigh the beef first.”
The Lieutenant was beaten. He smiled brightly and gave Sharpe the list. “I wouldn’t want you to go to the trouble, sir. Let’s just say you’ll take all the kegs, these included?”
Sharpe nodded. The day’s bargaining was over and his own working party unloaded the mules and took the beef down to the outskirts of Oropesa, where the men of the Battalion were quartered. The supply situation was hopeless and getting worse. The Spanish army had been waiting at Oropesa and they had long eaten any spare food from the surrounding countryside. The town’s steep streets were filled with troops, Spanish, British and Germans from the Legion, and there was already friction between the allies. British and German patrols had ambushed
Spanish supply wagons, even killing their guards, to get hold of the food Cuesta had promised to Wellesley but never delivered. The army’s hopes of reaching Madrid by the middle of August had faded when they saw the waiting Spanish troops. The Regimienta de la Santa Maria was at Oropesa parading beneath two huge new colours, and Sharpe wondered whether General Cuesta kept a limitless supply to replace the trophies that ended up in Paris. As he walked down the steep street he watched two officers with their long swords tucked, in the strange Spanish fashion, under their armpits, and nothing about them, from their splendid uniforms to their thin cigars, gave the Rifleman any comfort about the army of Spain.
He felt his own hunger as he walked down the street. Josefina’s servant had found food, at a price, and at least tonight he would eat, and every mouthful was almost a day’s pay. The two rooms she had found were costing a fortnight’s pay every night but, he thought, the hell with it. If the worst came to pass and he was forced to choose between a West Indies commission and civilian life, then damn the money and enjoy it. Rent the rooms, pay through the nose for a scrawny chicken that would boil into grey scraps, and carry into the fever ward the remembrance of Josefina’s body and the extraordinary luxury of a wide, shared bed. So far there was only the memory of the one night at the inn, and then she had ridden ahead, grudgingly escorted by Hogan, while Sharpe spent two days marching through the dust and heat with the Battalion. He had seen her briefly at midday, been dazzled by a smile of welcome, and now there was a whole evening, a long night, and no march tomorrow.
“Sir!”
Sharpe turned. Sergeant Harper was running towards him; another man, one of the South Essex’s Light Company, with him. “Sir!”
“What is it?” Sharpe noticed that Harper was looking agitated and worried, an unusual sight, but he felt a twinge of impatience as he returned their salutes. Damn them! He wanted to be with Josefina. “Well?”
“It’s the deserters, sir.” Harper was almost wriggling in embarrassment.
“Deserters?”
“You know, sir. The ones who escaped at Castelo?”
The day they had met up with the South Essex. Sharpe remembered the men being flogged because four deserters had slipped past the guard at night. He looked hard at Harper. “How do you know?”
“Kirby’s a mate of theirs, sir.” He pointed to the man standing next to him. Sharpe looked at him. He was a small man who had lost most of his teeth. “Well, Kirby?”
“Dunno, sir.”
“You want to be flogged, Kirby?”
The man’s eyes jerked up to his, astonished. “What, sir?”
“If you don’t tell me I’ll have to presume you are helping them to escape.”
Harper and Kirby were silent. Finally the Sergeant looked at Sharpe. “Kirby saw one of them in the street, sir. He went back with him. Two of them are wounded, sir. Kirby came to see me.”
“And in turn you came to see me.” Sharpe kept his voice harsh. “And what do you expect me to do?”
Again they said nothing. Sharpe knew that they hoped he could work a miracle; that somehow lucky Captain Sharpe could find a way to save the four men from the savage punishment the army gave to deserters. He felt an unreasonable anger mount inside him, alloyed with impatience. What did they think he was? “Fetch six men, Sergeant. Three Riflemen and three others. Meet me here in five minutes. Kirby, stay here.”
Harper stood to attention. “But, sir… „
“Go!”
There was a translucent quality to the air, that quality of light just before dusk when the sun seems suspended in coloured liquid. A gnat buzzed irritatingly round Sharpe’s face, and he slapped at it. The church bells rang the Angélus, a woman hurrying down the street crossed herself, and Sharpe cursed inside because he had promised Josefina to join her just after six o’clock. Damn the deserters! Damn Harper for expecting a miracle! Did the Sergeant really think that Sharpe would condone desertion? Behind him, frightened and nervous, Kirby fidgeted in the roadway, and Sharpe thought gloomily of what this could mean to the Battalion. The whole army was frustrated but at least they could look forward with a mixture of fear and eagerness to the inevitable battle that gave their present discomforts some purpose. The South Essex did not share the anticipation. It had been disgraced at Valdelacasa, its colour shamefully lost, and the men of the Battalion had no stomach for another fight. The South Essex was sullen and bitter. Every man in it would wish the deserters well.
Harper reappeared with his men, all of them armed, all of them looking apprehensively at Sharpe. One of them asked nervously if the deserters would be shot.
“I don’t know,” Sharpe snapped. “Lead on, Kirby.”
They walked down the hill into the poorest section of the town, into a tangle of alleyways where half-dressed children played in the filth that was hurled from the night-buckets into the roadway. Washing hung between the high balconies, obscuring the light, and the closeness of the walls seemed to heighten the stench. It was a smell the men had first encountered in Lisbon, and they had become accustomed to it even though its source made walking through the streets after dark a risky and nauseating business. The men were silent and resentful, following Sharpe reluctantly to a duty they had no wish to perform.
“Here, sir.” Kirby pointed to a building that was little more than a hovel. It had partly collapsed, and the rest looked as if it could fall at any moment. Sharpe turned to the men. “You wait here. Sergeant, Peters, come with me.”
Peters was from the South Essex. Sharpe had noted him as a sensible man, older than most, and he needed someone from the deserters’ own Battalion so that no-one could think that the green-jacketed Riflemen had ganged up on the South Essex.