Sharpes Battle   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

"It's Sharpe, isn't it? Come to help us?" Williams was a genial Welshman from the 60th Rifles. "Don't know you," he said to Harper.

"Sergeant Harper, sir."

"You look handy to have in a scrap, Sergeant," Williams said. "Damned noisy today, eh?" he added in mild complaint of the cannonade. He was standing on a bench that gave him a view over the garden wall and the roofs of the lower houses. "So what brings you here, Sharpe?"

"I'm just making sure we know where to deliver ammunition, sir."

Williams offered Sharpe an owlish gaze of surprise. "Got you fetching and carrying, have they? Seems a waste of time for a man of your talents, Sharpe. And I don't think you'll find much custom here. My boys are all well supplied. Eighty rounds a man, two thousand men, and as many cartridges again stacked up in the church. Sweet Jesus!" This last imprecation was caused by a round-shot that must have gone within two feet of the Colonel's head, forcing him to duck hard down. It crashed into a house, there was a tumble of falling stone and then, quite suddenly, silence.

Sharpe tensed. The silence, after the crash of the guns and the splintering thunder of the roundshots' destructive impacts, was unnerving. Maybe, he thought, it was just a strange pause, like the sudden coincidental silence that could descend on a room of lively talkers during that moment when an angel was said to be passing over the room, and maybe an angel had flickered across the gunsmoke and all the French cannon had found themselves momentarily unloaded. Sharpe almost found himself praying for the guns to start again, but the silence stretched and stretched, threatening to be replaced by something much worse than a cannonade. Somewhere in the village a man coughed and a musket lock clicked. A horse whinnied up on the ridge where the pipes played. Rubble fell in a house where a wounded man whimpered. Out in the street a spent French cannon ball rolled gently downhill, then lodged against a fallen beam.

"I suspect we'll have company soon, gentlemen," Williams said. He climbed down from the bench and brushed white dust from his faded green jacket. "Very soon. Can't see a thing from here. Gunsmoke, you see. Worse than fog." He was talking to fill the ominous silence. "Down to the stream, I think. Not that we can hold them there, not enough loopholes, but once they're in the village they'll find life a bit difficult. At least I hope so." He nodded agreeably to Sharpe, then ducked out of the door. His staff ran after him.

"We're not staying here, are we, sir?" Harper asked.

"Might as well see what's happening," Sharpe said. "Got nothing better to do. Are you loaded?"

"Just the rifle.