Sharpes Escape   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

The big British and Portuguese guns were hammering at the second big column, the one that had arrived just after the first had been defeated. That column was fighting at the top of the ridge and the two fresh columns, both smaller than the first pair, were climbing behind. Another bullet from the voltigeurs in their rocky nest whipped past Sharpe and he angled away from them.

"You still have my horse, Sharpe?" Slingsby demanded.

"Not here," Sharpe said, and Harper made a choking sound which he turned into a cough.

"You said something, Sergeant Harper?" Slingsby demanded crisply.

"Smoke in my throat, sir," Harper said. "It catches something dreadful, sir. I was always a sickly child, sir, on account of the peat smoke in our cottage. My mother made me sleep outside, God rest her soul, until the wolves came for me."

"Wolves?" Slingsby sounded cautious.

"Three of them, sir, big as you'd like, with slobbery great tongues the color of your coat, sir, and I had to sleep inside after that, and I just coughed my way through the nights. It was all that smoke, see?"

"Your parents should have built a chimney," Slingsby said disapprovingly.

"Now why didn't we think of that?" Harper enquired innocently and Sharpe laughed aloud, earning a vicious look from the Lieutenant.

The rest of the light company was close now and Ensign Iliffe was among them. Sharpe saw the boy's saber was red at the tip. Sharpe nodded at it. "Well done, Mister Iliffe."

"He just came at me, sir." The boy had suddenly found his voice. "A big man!"

"He was a sergeant," Harris explained, "and he was going to stick Mister Iliffe, sir."

"He was!" Iliffe was excited.

"But Mister Iliffe stepped past him neat as a squirrel, sir, and gave him steel in the belly. It was a good stroke, Mister Iliffe," Harris said, and the Ensign just blushed.

Sharpe tried to recall the first time he had been in a fight, steel against steel, but the trouble was he had been brought up in London and almost born to that kind of savagery. But for Mister Iliffe, son of an impoverished Essex gentleman, there had to be a shock in realizing that some great brute of a Frenchman was trying to kill him and Sharpe, remembering how sick the boy had been, reckoned he had done very well. He grinned at Iliffe. "Only the one Crapaud, Mister Iliffe?"

"Only one, sir."

"And you an officer, eh? You're supposed to kill two a day!"

The men laughed. Iliffe just looked pleased with himself.

"Enough chatter!" Slingsby took command of the company.