Sharpes Eagle   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

He looked up at the Cathedral, touched by the rising sun, and tried to pin down his apprehensions about the operation at Valdelacasa. It sounded simple. A day’s march to the bridge, a day for Hogan to destroy the already crumbling arches, and a day’s march back to Plasencia, where Wellesley was gathering his forces for the next stage of the advance into Spain. But there was something, some instinct as difficult to pin down as the grey shadows that receded in the dawn, that told him it would not be that easy. It was not the Spanish that worried him. Like Hogan he knew that their presence was a political imperative and a military farce. If they proved as useless as their reputation suggested, that should not matter; the South Essex was strong enough to cope with whatever was needed. And that was the problem. Simmerson had never met the enemy, and Sharpe had little faith in the Colonel’s ability to do the right thing. If there really were French on the south bank of the Tagus, and if the South Essex had to repel an attack on the bridge while Hogan laid his charges, then Sharpe would have preferred an old soldier to be making the decisions and not this Colonel of Militia whose head was stuffed with theories on battles and tactics learned on the safe fields of Essex.

But it was not just Simmerson. He looked at the road leading to the town where an indistinct group of women stood, the wives of the Battalion, and wondered whether the girl, Josefina Lacosta, was there. He had at least learned her name and seen her, a dozen times, mounted on the delicate black mare with a crowd of Simmerson’s Lieutenants laughing and joking with her. He had listened to the rumours about her; that she was the widow of a rich Portuguese officer, that she had run away from the Portuguese officer, no-one seemed sure, but what was certain was that she had met Gibbons at a ball in Lisbon’s American Hotel and, within hours, had decided to go to the war with him. It was said that they planned to marry once the army reached Madrid and that Gibbons had promised her a house and a life of dancing and gaiety. Whatever the truth of Josefina there was no denying her presence, entrancing the whole Battalion, flirting even with Sir Henry who responded with a heavy gallantry and told the officers that young men would be young men. “Christian needs his exercise, what?” Simmerson would repeat the joke and laugh each time. The Colonel’s indulgence reached to letting his nephew break his standing order and take a suite of rooms in the town, where he lived with the girl and entertained friends in the long, warm evenings.