“Back! Back!” Sir Thomas Graham was roaring. The bugle sounded again. Redcoats were streaming back from the camp, their work done. Some were being helped by comrades. At least the fort’s cannon fire had stopped, presumably because the gunners were watching the fireworks in the creek. Flaming scraps of wood whirled in the air, new pulses of fire pierced the night, and another cannon exploded. Sharpe stumbled on a Frenchman’s body half sunk at the creek’s edge.
“Count them in!” Major Gough shouted. “Count them in!”
“One, two, three!” Ensign Keogh was touching men on the shoulder as they clambered aboard. A sailor retrieved one of the oars snatched by the French. A crackle of musketry sounded from the marsh and a man of the 87th fell face forward in the mud. “Pick him up!” Keogh shouted. “Six, seven, eight, where’s your musket, you rogue?”
The Hampshire men were boarding the other lighter. General Graham, with his two aides and a group of engineers, was waiting to be the last aboard. The rafts were infernos now. They would never leave the creek. The smoke boiled hundreds of feet into the night sky, but there was enough flame feeding that smoke to illuminate the marsh, and the gunners of San Luis could see the redcoats grouped on the creek bank and they must have known the lighters were there, and suddenly the cannons started firing again. Now they used shell as well as round shot. One shell exploded on the far bank while another, the trail of its fuse a crazed streak of spinning red in the flame-shot night, plunged into the creek. A round shot crashed through the Hampshire’s ranks.
“All here!” Keogh shouted.
“Sir Thomas!” Major Gough yelled. An exploding shell threw up mud, reeds, and a French musket. An ancient cannon banged from the closest raft and Sharpe saw the ball skipping along the water. “Sir Thomas!” Major Gough bellowed again, but Sir Thomas was waiting to make sure all the Hampshires had embarked, and only then did he come to the lighter. A shell exploded just paces behind him, but miraculously the scraps of casing whistled harmlessly past him. Sailors thrust the lighter off the bank and the ebbing tide took it out toward the bay. The fire rafts were now a huge incandescent blaze beneath a thundercloud of smoke. The reflections of their flames rippled on the water, then were broken by a round shot that hurled up a great splash to soak men on the two lighters leaving the northern bank. The fifth lighter was in mid-creek, its sailors heaving on their oars to escape the gunfire.
“Row!” a naval officer shouted in Sharpe’s boat. “Row!”
Three guns fired at once from the San Luis and Sharpe heard a shot rumble overhead. Musket fire flickered in the marsh and some redcoats stood up in the belly of the lighter and fired back. “Hold your fire!” Gough shouted.
“Row!” the naval officer called again.
“Not quite the orderly withdrawal I anticipated,” Sir Thomas said. A shell, fuse whipping the dark with its thread of frantic red light, slapped into the creek. “Is that you, Sharpe?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re wet, man.”
“Fell in the water, sir.”
“You’ll catch your death! Strip off. Take my cloak. How’s your head? I forgot you were wounded. I should never have asked you to come.”
Two more guns fired, then two more from the San José Fort to the north, but every pull of the great oars took the lighters away from the flames and into the blackness of the bay. Wounded men moaned in the lighters’ holds. Other men talked excitedly, and Gough allowed it. “What’s your butcher’s bill, Hugh?” Sir Thomas asked the Irishman.
“Three men dead, sir,” Gough said, “and eight wounded.”
“But a good night’s work,” Sir Thomas said, “a very good night’s work.”
Because the fleet was safe and Sir Thomas, when the Spaniards were at last ready, could take his small army south.
SIR THOMAS Graham’s quarters in San Fernando were modest. He had commandeered a boat builder’s workshop that had whitewashed stone walls. He had furnished it with a bed, a table, and four chairs. The workshop had a great hearth in front of which Sharpe’s clothes were put to dry. Sharpe had put his rifle there too, with its lock plate removed so that the heat of the fire could reach the mainspring. He himself was swathed in a shirt and cloak that General Graham insisted on lending him. The general, meanwhile, was dictating his report. “Breakfast soon,” the general said in between sentences.
“I’m starving,” Lord William Russell observed.
“Be a good fellow, Willie, see what’s keeping it,” the general said, then dictated lavish praise of the men he had led to the creek. Dawn was outlining the inland hills, but still the glow of the burning rafts was vivid in the dark marshlands, while the plume of smoke must have been visible in Seville over sixty miles away. “You want me to mention your name, Sharpe,” Sir Thomas asked.
“No, sir,” Sharpe said. “I didn’t do anything, sir.”
Sir Thomas gave Sharpe a shrewd look. “If you say so, Sharpe. So what’s this favor I can do for you?”
“I want you to give me a dozen rounds of shell, sir. Twelve-pounders if you’ve got them, but nine-pounders will do.”
“I’ve got them. Major Duncan does, anyway. What happened to your jacket? Sword cut?”
“Bayonet, sir.”
“I’ll have my man sew it up while we have breakfast. Twelve rounds of shell, eh? What for?”
Sharpe hesitated. “Probably best you don’t know, sir.”
Sir Thomas snorted at that answer. “Write that up, Fowler,” he said to the clerk, dismissing him. He waited for the clerk to leave, then went to the fire and held his hands to its warmth. “Let me guess, Sharpe, let me guess. Here you are, orphaned from your battalion, and suddenly I’m commanded to keep you here rather than send you back where you belong. And meanwhile Henry Wellesley’s love letter is amusing the citizens of Cádiz. Would those two things be connected?”
“They would, sir.”
“There are more letters?” Sir Thomas asked shrewdly.
“There are plenty more, sir.”
“And the ambassador wants you to do what? Find them?”
“He wants to buy them back, sir, and if that doesn’t work he wants them stolen.”
“Stolen!” Sir Thomas gave Sharpe a skeptical look. “Had any experience in that business?”
“A bit, sir,” Sharpe said and, after a pause, realized the general wanted more. “It was in London, sir, when I was a child. I learned the business.”
Sir Thomas laughed. “I was once held up by a footpad in London. I knocked the fellow down. Wasn’t you, was it?”
“No, sir.”
“So Henry wants you to steal the letters and you want a dozen of my shells? Tell me why, Sharpe.”
“Because if the letters can’t be stolen, sir, they might be destroyed.”
“You’re going to explode my shells inside Cádiz?”
“I hope not, sir, but it might come to that.”
“And you’ll expect the Spanish to believe it was a French mortar bomb?”
“I hope the Spanish won’t know what to think, sir.”
“They’re not fools, Sharpe. The dons can be bloody uncooperative, but they’re not fools. If they discover you exploding shells in Cádiz they’ll have you in that pestilential prison of theirs before you can count to three.”
“Which is why it’s best you don’t know, sir.”
“Breakfast is coming,” Lord William Russell burst into the room. “Beefsteak, fried liver, and fresh eggs, sir. Well, almost fresh.”
“I suppose you’ll want the things delivered to the embassy?” Sir Thomas ignored Lord William and spoke to Sharpe.