Sharpes Siege   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

“I suppose,” Frederickson said, “we’re going to have to endure it for a while.”

“I imagine so.” But the powder laboratory was threatened, as was the surgeon’s room, and Sharpe shouted for Lieutenant Minver to make up a work-party to remove both to safer places deep in the stone galleries.

Six men ran with fouled water from the well and handed their buckets into the offices where other men fought the fire. Two Marines carried the wounded man towards the surgery, while a Rifleman dragged the dead man to the side of the yard. Sharpe saw, with approval, how the dead man’s ammunition was rescued.

Two more guns fired, this time with a different sound, and Sharpe whipped round to see that two of the enemy’s twelve-pounder guns, Napoleon’s ‘beautiful daughters’, were successfully embrasured in the scorched watermill. They were firing heavy canister, presumably to scour the defenders from the ramparts, and the heavy balls thudded on stone or whispered overhead. “Rifles! Watch those bastards!” The gunners, five hundred yards away to the south-east, just might show themselves in a window of the mill, though the smoke of their guns provided a sheltering screen against the Rifles’ aim. Then, in a shattering beat of sound, the six other twelve-pounders, some inside the mill and the others sheltered by a stone wall that ran alongside the stream-race, opened fire.

A howitzer shell screamed down, this one exploding five yards above the courtyard’s cobbles, and a fragment of its casing took the skulltop from one of the men who had crouched for shelter behind the furnace. Bullet-making had been interrupted by the attack and molten lead, tipped by the shell’s blast, poured slow and obscene on to the dead face.

Another shell landed on the eastern ramparts and tossed a Rifleman down into the courtyard. The next shell overshot, cracking apart in the dry northern ditch, while the last of this second volley, its fuse damp, bounced, span, smoked, and Patrick Harper, magnificently casual as he emerged from a powder gallery, checked the spin with his boot, licked forefinger and thumb, then bent down and plucked the burning fuse free. “Good morning, sir!”

“Good morning, RSM. Thank you for last night.”

Harper cocked an ear to the morning’s sounds. “Doesn’t seem to have discouraged the bastards, sir.”

Sharpe left just a dozen men in the shelter of the citadels, mostly Riflemen, and the rest were put deep in the safe galleries of the fort. The offices would have to burn.