But Sharpe had not cut at de l’Eclin’s horse. Instead, with a speed to match the chasseur’s own, he had raised the strong blade above his head and held it there like a quarterstaff to take the sabre’s impact. That impact drove Sharpe down, almost to his knees, but not before his right hand released the sword’s hilt and snatched for the chasseur’s sword arm. Sharpe’s sword thumped on his own shoulder, driven by the deflected sabre-blade, but his fingers had seized de l’Eclin’s wrist strap. He released the sword blade from his left hand and hooked his fingers about the Frenchman’s wrist.
It took de l’Eclin a second to realize what had happened. Sharpe was clinging on like a hound that had sunk its teeth into a boar’s neck. He was being dragged along the boggy ground. The horse twisted and tried to bite the Rifleman. The chasseur hammered at him with his free hand, but Sharpe hung on, tugged, and tried to find a purchase on the soggy ground. His naked right leg was smeared with mud and blood. The horse tried to shake him loose, just as Sharpe tried to drag the Frenchman out of the saddle. The sabre’s wrist strap was cutting like wire into his fingers.
De I’Eclin tried to unholster a pistol with his right hand. Harper and a group of greenjackets ran to help. “Leave him! Don’t touch him!” Sharpe shouted.
“Bugger him!” Harper slammed his rifle butt at the black horse’s mouth and it reared so that de I’Eclin lost his balance and, with Sharpe’s weight pulling him backwards, fell from the saddle.
Sword-bayonets rose to slash down at the Frenchman. “No!” Sharpe screamed desperately. “No! No!” He had fallen with de I’Eclin and, thumping onto the ground, had lost his grip on his wrist. The Frenchman twisted away from Sharpe, staggered to his feet, and slashed his sabre at the Riflemen who surrounded him. Sharpe’s sword was lost. De I’Eclin glanced to find his horse, then lunged to kill Sharpe.
Harper fired his rifle.
“No!” Sharpe’s protest was drowned by the hammer of the gun’s report.
The bullet took de I’Eclin clean in the mouth. His head jerked back as though yanked by an invisible string. The Frenchman fell, the blood fountaining up into the darkening sky, then his body flopped onto the mud, jerked once more like a newly landed fish, and was still.
“No?” Harper said indignantly. “The bastard was going to fillet you!”
“It’s all right.” Sharpe was flexing the fingers of his right hand. “It’s all right. I just didn’t want a hole in his overalls.” He looked at the dead man’s leather-reinforced overalls and tall, beautifully made boots. They were items of great value, and now they were Sharpe’s. “All right, lads. Get his bloody trousers off, and his boots.” The Riflemen stared at Sharpe as though he was mad. “Get his bloody trousers off! I want them. And his boots! Why do you think we came here? Hurry!” Sharpe, though Louisa and a dozen other women watched, stripped off his ojd boots and trousers where he stood. The last of the light was draining from the sky. The remnants of Dragoons had fled. The wounded moaned and scrabbled at the damp grass, while the victors moved among the dead in search of plunder. One of the Riflemen offered Sharpe the glorious pelisse, but he declined it. He did not need such frippery, but he had desperately wanted the red-striped overalls which fitted him as though they had been tailored just for him. And with the overalls came the most precious of all things to any infantryman: good boots. Tall boots of good leather that could march across a country, boots to resist rain, snow, and spirit-haunted streams, good boots that fitted Sharpe as if the cobbler had known this Rifleman would one day need such luxuries. Sharpe prised away the razor-edged spurs, tugged the boots up his calves, then stamped his heels in satisfaction. He buttoned his green jacket and strapped on his sword again. He smiled. An old flag, made new, flaunted a miracle of victory, a red pelisse lay in the mud, and Sharpe had found himself some boots and trousers.
The old gonfalon, Louisa told Sharpe, was sewn into the new. She had done the work in secret, in the high fortress, before she had left Santiago de Compostela. It had been Major Vivar’s idea, and the task had brought the Spaniard close to the English girl.
“The Sergeant’s stripes,” she said, “are made from the same silk.”
Sharpe looked at Harper who walked ahead with the Riflemen. “Don’t tell him, for God’s sake, or he’ll think he’s a miracle worker.”
“You’re all miracle workers,” Louisa said warmly.
“We’re just Rifles.”
Louisa laughed at the modesty which betrayed such a monstrous pride. “But the gonfalon worked a miracle,” she said chidingly. “It wasn’t such nonsense, was it?”
“It wasn’t nonsense,” Sharpe confessed. He walked beside her horse, ahead of Major Vivar and his Spaniards. “What happens to the gonfalon now?”
“It goes to Seville or Cadiz; wherever it will be safest. And one day it will be returned to a Spanish King in Madrid.” Already, in the small villages and towns through which the Riflemen marched, the story of the gonfalon was being told. The news raced like a fire in parched grass; telling of a French defeat and a Spanish victory, and of a saint keeping an ancient promise to defend his people.
“And where do you go now?” Sharpe asked Louisa.
“I go where Don Bias goes, which is wherever there are Frenchmen to be killed.”
“Not Godalming?”
She laughed. “I do hope not.”
“And you’ll be a Countess,” Sharpe said in wonderment.
“I think that’s better than being Mrs Bufford, though it’s uncommonly nasty of me to say so. And my aunt will never forgive me for becoming a Catholic, so you see some good has come from all this.”
Sharpe smiled. They had come south, and now they must part. The French were left behind, the snow had melted, and they had come to a shallow valley above which the February wind blew cold. They halted at the valley’s rim. The far crest was in Portugual, and on that foreign skyline Sharpe could see a group of blue-uniformed men. Those men watched the strangers who had come from the Spanish hills.
Bias Vivar, Count of Mouromorto, dismounted. He thanked the Riflemen one by one, ending with Sharpe whom, to Sharpe’s acute embarrassment, he embraced. “Are you sure you won’t stay, Lieutenant?”
“I’m tempted, sir, but,” Sharpe shrugged.
“You wish to show off your new trousers and boots to the British army. I hope they let you keep them.”
“They won’t if I’m sent back to Britain.”
“Which I fear you will be,” Vivar said. “While we are left to fight the French. But one day, Lieutenant, when the last Frenchman is dead, you will come back to Spain and celebrate with the Count and Countess of Mouromorto.”
“I shall, sir.”
“And I doubt you will still be a Lieutenant?”
“I imagine I will, sir.” Sharpe looked up at Louisa, and he saw a happiness in her that he could not wish away. He smiled and touched his pouch. “I have your letter.” She had written to her aunt and uncle, telling them they had lost her to the church of Rome and to a Spanish soldier. Sharpe looked back at Vivar. “Thank you, sir.”
Vivar smiled. “You are an insubordinate bastard, a heathen, and an Englishman. But also my friend. Remember that.”
“Yes, sir.”