Sharpes Escape   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

Sharpe thumped the man in the groin for a remembrance, then led his companions past the bodies of two men, both Portuguese, who lay on the cobbles. One had been eviscerated and his blood trickled ten feet down the gutter from his corpse which was being sniffed by a three-legged dog. A window broke above them, showering them with glittering shards. A woman screamed, and the bells in one of the churches began a terrible cacophony. None of the French soldiers took any notice of them other than to ask if they had finished with the two girls, and only Sarah and Vicente understood those questions. The street became more crowded as they went uphill and got closer to where, rumor said, there was food enough for a multitude. Sharpe and Harper used their size to bully past soldiers, then, reaching the houses that stood opposite Ferragus's warehouse, Sharpe went into the first door and climbed the stairs. A woman, blood on her face and clutching a baby, shrank from them on the landing, then Sharpe was up the last flight of stairs and discovered, to his relief, that the attic here was like the first, a long room that overlaid the separate houses beneath. There had been a score of students living up here, now their beds were overturned, all except one on which a French soldier slept. He woke as their footsteps sounded loud on the boards and, seeing the two women, rolled off the bed. Sharpe was opening a window onto the roof and turned as the man held out his hands to Sarah who smiled at him and then, with surprising force, rammed the muzzle of her French musket into his belly. The man let out his breath in a gasp, bent over, and Joana hit him with the stock of her musket, swinging it in a haymaker's blow to crack the butt onto his forehead, and the man, without a sound, collapsed backwards. Sarah grinned, discovering abilities she had not suspected.

"Stay here with the women," Sharpe told Vicente, "and be ready to run like hell." He was going to attack the dragoons from above, and he reckoned the cavalrymen would come after their assailants by using the stairs closest to the warehouse, ignorant that the attic gave access to four separate stairwells in the four houses. Sharpe planned to go back the way he had come, and by the time the dragoons reached the attic he would be long gone. "Come on, Pat."

They clambered out onto the roof, the same roof that they had reconnoitered earlier, and, by following the gutter behind the parapet, they reached the gable end from which, leaning over, Sharpe could again see the horsemen three floors below him. He took the volley gun from Harper. "There's an officer down there, Pat," he said. "He's on the left, mounted on a gray horse. When I give the word, shoot him.