"It's going to hurt like hell, Jorge," Sharpe warned, "but God knows if we can find you a doctor in this town today, so let Miss Fry do her best."
He straightened up and turned to Harper. "Can you jump that alley, Pat?"
"God save Ireland." Harper looked at the gap between the houses. "It's a terrible long way, sir."
"So make sure you don't fall," Sharpe said, then stood on the parapet where it made a right angle to the alleyway. He gave himself a few paces to build up speed, then ran and made a desperate leap across the void. He made it easily, clearing the far parapet and crashing into the roof tiles so that agony flared in his ribs. He scrambled aside and watched as Harper, bigger and less lithe, followed him. The Sergeant landed right across the parapet, winding himself as its edge drove into his belly, but Sharpe grabbed his jacket and hauled him over.
"I said it was a long way," Harper said.
"You eat too much."
"Jesus, in this army?" Harper said, then dusted himself off and followed Sharpe along the next gutter. They passed skylights and windows, but no one was inside to see them. In places the parapet had crumbled away and Sharpe scrambled up to the roof ridge because it gave them safer footing. They negotiated a dozen chimneys, then slid down to another alley and another jump. "This one's narrower," Sharpe said to encourage Harper.
"Where are we going, sir?"
"The warehouse," Sharpe said, pointing to its great stone gable.
Harper eyed the gap. "It would be easier to go through the sewer," he grumbled.
"If you want to, Pat. Meet me there."
"I've come this far," Harper said, and winced as Sharpe made the leap. He followed, arriving safely, and the two clambered up the next roof and along its ridge until they arrived at the street which divided the block of houses from the building Sharpe reckoned was the warehouse.
Sharpe slid down the tile slope to the gutter by the parapet, then peered over. He pulled back instantly. "Dragoons," he said.
"How many?"
"Dozen? Twenty?" He was sure it was the warehouse. He had seen the big double doors, one of them ajar, and from the roof ridge he had just seen the skylights on the warehouse which was slightly higher up the hill. The street was too wide to be jumped, so there was no way of reaching those skylights from this roof, but then Sharpe peered again and saw that the dragoons were not plundering. Every other Frenchman in the city seemed to have been let off the leash, but these dragoons were sitting on their horses, their swords drawn, and he realized they must have been posted to guard the warehouse. They were turning French infantrymen away, using the flat of their swords if any became too insistent. "They've got the bloody food, Pat."
"And they're welcome to it."
"No, they're bloody not," Sharpe said savagely.
"So how in Christ are we supposed to take it away from them?"
"I'm not sure," Sharpe said. He knew the food had to be taken away if the French were to be beaten, yet for a moment he was tempted to let the whole thing slide. To hell with it. The army had treated him badly, so why the hell should he care? Yet he did care, and he would be damned before Ferragus helped the French win the war. The noise in the city was getting louder, the noise of screaming, of disorder, of chaos let loose, and the frequent musket shots were startling hundreds of pigeons into the air. He peered a third time at the dragoons and saw how they had formed two lines to block the ends of the small street to keep the French infantry away from the warehouse. Scores of men were protesting to the dragoons and Sharpe guessed that the horsemen's presence had started a rumor that there was food in the street, and the infantry, who had become ever more hungry as they marched through a stripped land, were probably desperate with hunger. "I'm not sure," Sharpe said again, "but I've got an idea."
"An idea for what, sir?"
"To keep those bastards hungry," Sharpe said, which was what Wellington wanted, so Sharpe would give it to his lordship. He would keep the bastards hungry.
CHAPTER 9
The chief commissary came to inspect the food. He was a small man named Laurent Poquelin, short, stocky and bald as an egg, but with long mustaches that he twisted nervously whenever he was worried, and he had been much worried in the last few weeks, for l'Armee de Portugal had found itself in a land emptied of food and he was responsible for feeding sixty-five thousand men, seventeen thousand cavalry horses and another three thousand assorted horses and mules. It could not be done in a wasted land, in a place where every orchard had been stripped of fruit, where the larders had been emptied, the storehouses despoiled, the wells poisoned, the livestock driven away, the mills disassembled and the ovens broken. The Emperor himself could not do it! All the forces of heaven could not do it, yet Poquelin was expected to work the miracle, and his mustache tips were ragged with nerves. He had been ordered to carry three weeks of supplies with the army, and those supplies had existed in the depots of Spain, but there were not nearly enough draught animals to carry such an amount, and even though Massena had reluctantly cut each division's artillery from twelve guns to eight, and released those horses to haul wagons instead of cannon, Poquelin had still only managed to supply the army for a week. Then the hunger had set in. Dragoons and hussars had been sent miles away from the army's line of march to search for food, and each such foray had worn out more horses, and the cavalry moaned at him because there were no replacement horseshoes, and some cavalrymen died each time because the Portuguese peasantry ambushed them in the hills. It did not seem to matter how many such peasants were hanged or shot, because more came to harass the foraging parties, which meant more horsemen had to be sent to protect the foragers, and more horseshoes were needed, and there were no more horseshoes and Poquelin got the blame. And the foragers rarely did find food, and if they did they usually ate most of it themselves, and Poquelin got the blame for that too. He had begun to wish he had followed his mother's tearful advice and become a priest, anything would be better than serving in an army that was sucking on a dry teat and accusing him of inefficiency.
Yet now the miracle had happened. At a stroke, Poquelin's troubles were over.
There was food. Such food! Ferragus, a surly Portuguese merchant who made Poquelin shiver with fear, had provided a warehouse that was as crammed with supplies as any depot in France. There was barley, wheat, rice, biscuits, rum, cheese, maize, dried fish, lemons, beans, salt meat, enough to feed the army for a month! There were other valuables too. There were barrels of lamp oil, coils of twine, boxes of horseshoes, bags of nails, casks of gunpowder, a sack of horn buttons, stacks of candles and bolts of cloth, none of them as essential as food, but all profitable because, though Poquelin would issue the food, the other things he could sell for his own enrichment.
He explored the warehouse, followed by a trio of fourriers, quartermaster-corporals, who noted the list of supplies that Ferragus was selling. It was impossible to list all of it, for the food was in stacks that would take a score of men hours to dismantle, but Poquelin, a thorough man, did order the fourriers to remove grain sacks from the top of one pile to make certain that the center of the heap was not composed of bags of sand. He did the same with some barrels of salt beef and both times was assured that all was well, and as the estimates of the food rose, so Poquelin's spirits soared. There were even two wagons inside the warehouse and, for an army short of all wheeled transport, those two vehicles were almost as valuable as food.