“So am I, sir.”
“We’ll have you in Cádiz 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 dillydallied and the frogs took advantage, and he finishes up with a dead horse, a broken leg, and no saber. And the saber 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 sabers”—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 hawse hole. 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 hawse hole,” Sharpe said, relishing the navy’s slang for a man promoted from the ranks into the officer’s 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 Cádiz, 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. Cádiz 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 harbor 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 harbor.”
“Does it matter?” Sharpe asked.
“The bloody frogs will use her for target practice.”
It seemed the captain was right for just after dark Sharpe heard the muffled sound of heavy guns like thunder far away. They were the French mortars firing from the mainland and Sharpe watched their monstrous flashes from the Thornside’s forecastle. Each flash was like sheet lightning, silhouetting a mile of shoreline, gone in a heartbeat, the sudden brilliance confused by the lingering smoke beneath the stars. A sailor was playing a sad tune on a fiddle and a small wash of lantern light showed from the aft cabin’s companionway where the brigadier was dining again with Captain Pullifer. “Were you not invited, sir?” Harper asked. Sharpe’s riflemen and the Connaught Rangers were lounging around a long-barreled nine-pounder on the forecastle.
“I was invited,” Sharpe said, “but the captain reckoned I might be happier eating with the wardroom.”
“They made a plum duff up here,” Harper said.
“It was good,” Harris added, “really good.”
“We had the same.”
“I sometimes think I should have joined the navy,” Harper said.
“You do?” Sharpe was surprised.
“Plum duff and rum.”
“Not many women.”
“That’s true.
“How’s your head, sir?” Daniel Hagman asked.
“Still there, Dan.”
“Is it hurting?”
“It hurts,” Sharpe admitted.
“Vinegar and brown paper, sir,” Hagman said earnestly. “It always works.”
“I had an uncle that was knocked on the head,” Harper said. The Ulsterman had an endless supply of relatives who had suffered various misfortunes. “He was butted by a nanny goat, so he was, and you could have filled Lough Crockatrillen with his blood! Jesus, it was everywhere. My auntie thought he was dead!”
Sharpe, like the Riflemen and Rangers, waited. “So was he?” he asked after a while.
“Good God, no! He was milking the cows again that night, but the poor goat was never the same. So what do we do in Cádiz, sir?”
Sharpe shrugged. “We’ll get a boat to Lisbon. There must be dozens of boats going to Lisbon.” He turned as two reports rumbled across the water, but there was nothing to see. The far flashes had already faded and the mortar shells gave no light when they landed. Intermittent lamplight glimmered across the city’s white walls, but otherwise the shoreline was dark. Black water lapped against the frigate’s flanks and the sails shivered in the small wind.
By dawn the wind had freshened and the Thornside stood southwest toward the entrance to the Bay of Cádiz. The city was closer now and Sharpe could see the massive gray ramparts above which the houses glowed white, their walls studded with squat watchtowers and church belfries through which smoke drifted. Lights flashed from the towers and at first Sharpe was puzzled by the glints. Then he realized that they were the sun reflecting from the telescopes that watched the Thornside’s approach. A pilot boat cut across the frigate’s course, her captain waving his arms to show he had a pilot who was available to come aboard the frigate, but Pullifer had run this treacherous approach often enough to need no guide. Gulls wheeled about the frigate’s masts and sails as she slid past the heave and wash of broken water that marked the Diamante Rock and then the bay opened before her bows. The Thornside turned due south, heading into the bay and watched by a crowd on the city ramparts. It was evident now that the smoke above the city was not just from cooking fires, but mostly from a merchantman that burned in the harbor. It was the Santa Catalina, her hull crammed with tobacco and sugar. A French mortar shell had plunged between her foremast and mainmast, pierced a hatch cover, and exploded a few feet below the deck. The crew had rigged a pump and poured water onto the fire. It seemed they must have mastered the blaze, but somewhere an ember had lodged deep among the bales and it grew sullenly. The hidden fire spread secretly, its smoke disguised by the steam from the pump’s water. Then, just aft of the mainmast, the deck burst into new flames, sudden and bright, and the blaze caught the tarred rigging so that the whole intricate web of halliards, masts, and sheets was outlined in fire. Smoke boiled across the city’s skyline above which the white gulls keened and the dark smoke drifted.