“Yes, sir, thank you, sir.”
The brigadier hoped they would find a town. They needed food and he wanted to find a doctor who could look at his broken leg that throbbed like the devil. “Row!” he snarled at the men, but they made a poor job of it. The painted blades clashed with every stroke, and the more they rowed, the less headway they seemed to make, and the brigadier realized that they were fighting an incoming tide. They must be miles from the sea, yet the tide was flooding against them and there was still no town or village anywhere in sight.
“Your honor!” Sergeant Noolan shouted from the bows, and the brigadier saw another boat had appeared about a bend in the wide river. She was a rowing boat, about the size of his own commandeered launch, and she was crammed with men who knew how to use their oars, and she had other men with muskets, and the brigadier hauled on the tiller to point the boat toward the Portuguese bank. “Row!” he shouted, then cursed as the oars tangled again. “Dear God,” he said, because the strange boat was coming fast. She was expertly manned and being carried on the flooding tide, and Brigadier Moon cursed a second time just before the man commanding the approaching boat stood and hailed him.
The shout was in English. The officer commanding the boat wore naval blue and had come from a British sloop that patrolled the Guadiana’s long tidal reach. The sloop rescued them, lifted Sharpe from the bottom boards, fed them, and then carried them out to sea where they were rowed to HMS Thornside, a thirty-six-gun frigate, and Sharpe knew none of it. There was just pain.
Pain and darkness, and a creaking sound so that Sharpe dreamed he was back on HMS Pucelle, sailing endlessly across the Indian Ocean, and Lady Grace was with him, and in his delirium he was happy again, but then he would half wake and know she was dead and he wanted to weep for that. The creaking went on and the world swayed and there was pain and darkness and a sudden flash of agonizing brilliance, then darkness again.
“I think he blinked,” a voice said.
Sharpe opened his eyes and the pain in his skull was like white-hot embers. “Sweet Jesus,” he hissed.
“No, it’s just me, sir, Patrick Harper, sir.” The sergeant loomed over him. There was a wooden ceiling partially lit by narrow shafts of sunlight that stabbed through a small grating. Sharpe closed his eyes. “Are you still there, sir?” Harper asked.
“Where am I?”
“HMS Thornside, sir. A frigate, sir.”
“Jesus Christ,” Sharpe groaned.
“He’s had a few prayers this last day and a half, so he has.”
“Here,” another voice said and a hand went beneath Sharpe’s shoulders to lift him so that the pain stabbed into his skull and he gasped. “Drink this,” the voice said.
The liquid was bitter and Sharpe half choked on it, but whatever it was made him sleep and he dreamed again, and woke again, and this time it was night and a lantern in the passageway outside his diminutive cabin swung with the ship’s motion so that the shadows careered all over the canvas walls and dizzied him.
He slept again, half aware of the sounds of a ship, of the bare feet on the planking overhead, the creak of a thousand timbers, the rush of water, and the intermittent clangor of the bell. Soon after dawn he woke and discovered his head was swathed in thick bandages. The pain was still gouging his skull, but it was no longer intense and so he swung his feet out of the cot and was immediately dizzy. He sat on the cot’s swaying edge with his head in his hands. He wanted to vomit except there was nothing but bile in his stomach. His boots were on the floor, while his uniform, rifle, and sword were swaying from a wooden peg on the door. He closed his eyes. He remembered Colonel Vandal firing the musket. He thought of Jack Bullen, poor Jack Bullen.
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 on to 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 chimney sweep’s rags. “Can you walk?” McCann asked and Sharpe managed a few paces before a gust of wind lurched the frigate 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 pretense 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 Cádiz!”
“Cádiz?”
“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 barefooted. 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.