Sharpes Sword   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

Harper could not imagine a man being in this room and living, but this was the death room and they were here to die. The big Sergeant, Connelley, seemed decent enough. Some death-room attendants simply stifled their charges, or slipped a dagger between their ribs, because they could not endure the endless crying, the moans, the helpless, childlike ways of the dying. Harper turned at the end wall and carried the torch down the far side. He stopped a few times and pulled damp blankets away from hidden faces, and he saw the fever and smelt their deaths. He went past the stairs where Hogan stood by Connelley’s bench. “Anything, Sergeant?” Hogan’s whisper was an expression of worry. Harper did not reply.

He stopped beside another man whose face was hidden, whose legs were drawn up, and Harper pulled back the blanket that lay right up to the dark hair. There was a second blanket beneath and the man was clutching it, hiding his face, and Harper had to prise the fingers open so he could pull it down.

The eyes were red. Already the cheeks seemed sunken. The face was pale, the hair soaking with sweat and water. Harper could not detect any breath, yet the fingers had not been cold, and the huge Irishman put a single finger onto the long scar. The eyes did not move. They were staring into blankness, into the space where the rats had been in the night. Harper’s voice was very soft. “You silly bugger. What are you doing here?”

Sharpe’s eyes moved, slowly, up to the face that flickered in the light of the torch. “Patrick?” There was no strength in the voice.

“Yes.” Harper looked round at Hogan. “He’s here, sir.”

“Alive?” Hogan’s voice was just above a whisper.

“Yes, sir.” But only just, Harper thought, by the thickness of the merest thread, but alive.



CHAPTER 16



Marmont had marched north, away from the River Tonnes, forty miles to the valley of the River Douro. The dust of the French retreat spiralled high from the wheels, boots and hooves of the army; dust that plumed in the sun over the wheatfields. It was like the thin smoke trail of an unimaginably large grass fire. It faded, carried eastwards by a breeze from the far Atlantic, and the plains of Leon were left empty except for the hovering hawks, the lizards, and the poppies and cornflowers that smeared colour on a bleached land.

On Monday, June 29th, the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, the British army was swallowed up in the haze of the immense plain. They went north, following Marmont, and all that came back were rumours.