Sharpe gave his opinion of that statement, then peered over the tambour’s edge as he reloaded the rifle. They were safe enough for the moment because the stone ledge was wide and it protected them from any shots fired from the crossing’s floor, but he guessed their enemies would soon try to climb the scaffold and attack them from the flanks. He could hear men talking below, but he could also hear something odd, something that sounded like battle. It was a booming sound like cannon fire. It crackled, rose, and fell, and Sharpe realized it was the wind tearing at the tarpaulins covering the unfinished roof. A louder grumble overlaid the booming, and that was thunder. Any noise of guns in the cathedral would be drowned by the storm and besides, Montseny had bolted the doors. The priest would send for no soldiers. He wanted the gold.
A volley of musketry cracked and echoed and the balls spattered all around the tambour. Sharpe guessed the shots must have been fired to protect someone climbing a ladder. He looked, saw the shadow on the opposite pillar, aimed the rifle, and pulled the trigger. The man was hurled sideways off the rungs and fell to the floor before crawling into the nave’s choir stalls and so out of sight.
“You have a knife?” Pumphrey asked.
Sharpe gave him his pocketknife. He heard the string being cut, then the rustle of papers. “You want Sergeant Harper to strike a light?” he offered.
“No need,” Pumphrey said sadly. He unfolded a large sheet of paper. Even in the semidarkness above the tambour, Sharpe could see the package had not contained letters, but a newspaper. Presumably El Correo de Cádiz. “You were right, Sharpe,” Pumphrey said.
“Fifteen hundred beans,” Sharpe said, “one thousand five hundred and seventy-five pounds. A man could retire on that. You and me, Pat, we could take the money”—Sharpe paused to bite off the end of a cartridge—“we could sail off to America, open a tavern, live well forever.”
“Wouldn’t need a tavern, sir, not with fifteen hundred guineas.”
“Be nice though, wouldn’t it?” Sharpe said. “A tavern in a town by the sea? We could call it the Lord Pumphrey.” He took a leather patch from his cartridge pouch, wrapped the bullet, and rammed it down the barrel. “But they don’t have lords in America, do they?”
“They don’t,” Lord Pumphrey said.
“So maybe we’ll call it the Ambassador and the Whore instead,” Sharpe said, sliding the ramrod back into place beneath the barrel. He primed and cocked the rifle. No one was moving below, which suggested Montseny was considering his tactics. He and his men had learned to fear the firepower above them, but that would not deter them for long, not when there were fifteen hundred golden English guineas to be won.
“You wouldn’t do that, Sharpe, would you?” Pumphrey asked nervously. “I mean, you’re not planning on taking the money?”
“For some reason, my lord, I’m a loyal bastard. God knows why. But Sergeant Harper is Irish. He’s got plenty of cause to hate us English. One shot from that volley gun and you and I are dead meat. Fifteen hundred guineas, Pat. You could do a lot with that.”
“I could, sir.”
“But what we have to do now,” Sharpe said, “is go to our left. We climb to that window.” He pointed. His eyes had adjusted to the gloom and he could see a slight sheen betraying the window beneath the dome. “We break through. There’s scaffolding on the outer wall. We go down that and we’re off into the city like rats into a hole.”
To get there they would have to climb the scaffold above the tambour, then cross a narrow plank and climb another ladder, which led to a rickety platform just beneath the window. The ladders, like the scaffolding poles, were tied in place with rope. It was not a long journey, no more than thirty feet upward, the same across, and half as much up again, but to make it they must expose themselves to the men below. Sharpe guessed there were eight or nine men there, all with muskets, and even a musket could hit at that distance. Once they left the shelter of the wide stone ledge, then one of them would surely be struck by a bullet. “What we have to do,” he said, “is distract the bastards. Pity we don’t have those other smoke balls.”
“They worked fine, didn’t they?” Harper said happily. Smoke was leaking out of the crypt stairways and spreading on the crossing floor, but there was not enough to obscure the high dome.
Sharpe crouched on the tambour, staring at the scaffolding all about the crossing. Montseny and his men were just out of sight in the nave. They were doubtless waiting for Sharpe to move off the safety of the stone ledge. Then they would fire a volley. So distract them, he thought, confuse them, but how? “You got any more stone, Pat?”
“There’s a dozen blocks here, sir.”
“Throw them down. Just to keep them happy.”
“Can I use the volley gun, sir?”
“Only if you see two or three of them.” The volley gun was a vicious thing, but took so long to reload that it was useless once it was fired.
“What about you, sir?”
“I’ve got an idea,” Sharpe said. It was a desperate idea, but Sharpe had seen the long rope that was tied to the base of the scaffold opposite. It climbed into the gloom, vanishing somewhere in the dome, then reappeared closer to him. There was a great iron hook on its end and that hook was tied to the scaffold to his right and on the next platform down. The rope was used to hoist the masonry blocks to the dome. “Give me back the knife,” he said to Pumphrey. “Now, Pat!” he said, and Harper heaved a block of limestone into the transept. When it crashed onto the floor, Sharpe dropped down the ladder. He did not use the rungs, but went down it like a seaman using a companionway, hands and feet on the outer edge, and he swore as a splinter drove into his right hand. He hit the plank platform hard and felt it shake. A second stone banged onto the cathedral floor, and Montseny must have thought they were hurling the masonry because they had run out of ammunition, for he and three other men stepped out with muskets.
“God bless you,” Harper said, and fired the volley gun. The sound was deafening, a massive explosion that reverberated around the cathedral as the seven bullets flayed the space between the choir stalls. A man cursed below as Sharpe reached the hook. A musket fired at him, but the shot came from the far transept and the ball missed by a yard. He seized the heavy hook and sawed through the rope lashing it in place, then carried the hook and its heavy line back along the plank, up the ladder, and onto the tambour just as another two shots cracked bright in the gloom below. He gave the hook to Harper. “Pull on it,” he said. “Don’t jerk it, just pull as hard as you can.” He did not want the men below to understand what was happening, so the tension on the rope had to be gradual.
A faint squeal from the upper darkness betrayed that the rope went through a sheave up there. Sharpe saw the line tighten and heard Harper grunt. A shadow moved below and Sharpe snatched up his rifle, aimed too quickly, and fired. The shadow vanished. Harper was pulling with all his huge strength as Sharpe took out another cartridge.
“It’s not moving,” Harper said.
Sharpe finished reloading, then gave the rifle and his pistol to Lord Pumphrey. “Keep them amused, my lord,” he said. Then he crouched by Harper and both of them heaved on the rope. It did not budge an inch. The bitter end was tied to a scaffold pole and the pole seemed immovable. The knot had slid up to where a second pole was tied crosswise and it would move no farther. The angle was all wrong, too acute, but if Sharpe could just move that pole he might have his distraction.
Lord Pumphrey fired one of his dueling pistols, then the second one, and Sharpe heard a yelp from the nave. “Well done, my lord,” he said. He decided to abandon caution now. “Jerk it,” Sharpe told Harper, and they gave the rope a series of hard pulls. Sharpe thought the pole moved slightly, just a shudder, and the men below must have realized what they were doing for one of them ran out of the nave with a knife in his hand. Lord Pumphrey fired a sea-service pistol and the ball struck the flagstone floor and whipped away down the nave. The man had reached the scaffold and was climbing to cut the rope. “Pull!” Sharpe said, and he and Harper gave a huge heave. The scaffold pole bent outward. The scaffolding was old. It had been in place for almost twenty years and the lashings were frayed. Masonry blocks were piled on its platforms and some of them shifted. Once they began to move, they would not stop. “Pull!” Sharpe said again, and they tugged on the rope once more. This time the far scaffold pole snapped clean away from the rest of the structure. Stones began to crash through the planking. The man with the knife jumped for his life, and just then the rest of the scaffolding on the crossing’s far side collapsed in a welter of noise and dust.