The trumpet sounded the gallop. There was no other way to go through the flood of fugitives and the Hussars shouted, raised their sabres, and plunged into the fleeing army.
If Sharpe had not been so concerned for the fate of La Marquesa he would have remembered that ride for ever. The Hussars cut into the French retreat like men going into a dark river, and, just as in a river, the current took them downstream. The French, seeing their enemy coming, parted before the horses and only those who could not move fast enough were cut down by the curved blades.
They went like steeplechasers. They crossed a small stream, hooves shattering water silver in the air, scrambled up a field bank, jumped a stone wall, and the men whooped like maniacs and the French split before them. The hooves hurled mud higher than the guidon that was held aloft by the standard bearer.
There were guns everywhere, abandoned field guns with blackened muzzles, their wheels mired in the soft earth. The cavalry rode in the middle of their enemies and not a hand was lifted against them.
There were carts overturned, mules running free, wounded men crawling eastwards, and everywhere there were women. They called for their men, for their husbands or lovers, and their voices were forlorn and hopeless.
The Major, breaking free of the French rout, cut his men towards the wagons. Sharpe shouted at Harper and Angel, pulled left, and reined Carbine in. He had stopped by a dark blue carriage, its wheels sunk into soft turf, its varnished panels spattered with mud. He stared at the coat of arms that was painted on the carriage door. He knew it. He had seen it first on another carriage in Salamanca’s splendid square.
It was La Marquesa’s carriage, and it was empty.
The upholstery had been split open and the horses led away. One window was broken. He peered inside and saw no blood on the torn cushions of the seats. One silver trace chain was left in the mud.
He stared into the havoc of wagons and carriages. She could be anywhere in that chaos of shouting and theft, of musket shots and screams, or she could be gone.
Harper looked at the carriage and frowned, ‘Sir?’
‘Patrick?’
‘Would that be her Ladyship’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that why we’re here?’
‘Yes. I want to find her. God knows how.’
The Irishman stared at the baggage park. ‘You say there’s treasure here?’
‘A god-damned fortune.’
‘Seems a good place to start looking, sir.’
Sharpe urged his horse towards the wagons. He was looking for the great mane of golden hair amidst the chaos that had once been King Joseph’s baggage train. ‘Helene!’
A box of fine porcelain was spilt ahead of him, the plates smashed into a thousand gilded shards. A woman, blood streaming from her scalp, hurled a second dinner service out of its packing cases, looking for gold.
A French soldier lay dying, his throat half cut by a Spaniard who ripped with his knife at the man’s pockets.
He found a watch, a stolen masterpiece made by Breguet in Paris. He put it to his ear, heard no tick, and furiously smashed the crystal with the hilt of his knife.
‘Helene!’
Sharpe’s horse trampled on leather-bound books, books that had been made before the printing press had been invented, books made by patient men over months of work, with exquisitely painted capitals that were now ground into the mire.
A tapestry that had been made in Flanders when Queen Elizabeth was a child was torn by two women to make blankets. Another woman, wine bottle in hand, danced between the wagons with the gilded coat of a Royal Chamberlain on her shoulders. She wore nothing else. A French soldier, drunk on brandy, plucked the coat from her and tore at the gilt braid. The naked woman hit him with her bottle and snatched the coat back.
‘Helene!’
Silver Spanish dollars, each worth five English shillings, were strewn like pebbles between the wagons. No one wanted silver when there was so much gold.
‘Helene!’
Two men bent, twisted, and hacked apart a golden candelabra, one of a set of four that had been given to King Phillip II by Queen Mary of England when she had married the Spanish King.
‘Helene!’
Two Frenchwomen, abandoning their army and their children for the sake of a box of jewels, prised the stones from a reliquary that contained the shin-bone of John the Baptist. The jewels were glass, replacements for the real stones that had been stolen three centuries before. They dropped the shin-bone into the mud where it was snapped up by a dog.
One man shot another to get a wooden box that the victim had been dragging away. The murderer took it beneath a wagon, reloaded his musket, and blew the lock off. It contained horseshoes and nails.
‘Helene!’
It was hopeless. The wagons seethed with people. He could see nothing. Sharpe swore. A four year old child, abandoned by its mother, was trampled by a rush of men towards an untouched wagon. The child cried, unheard and unseen, its ribs broken.
‘Helene!’
A Frenchman ran at Sharpe, musket held like a club, and tried to knock the Rifleman from his horse. Sharpe snarled, chopped down with the sword, knocked the musket aside, and chopped again. The man screamed, the sword cut into his neck, shearing his ear off, and then Harper’s gun butt slammed into the other side of his head. The man fell, golden francs spilling from his pockets, and in an instant he was set on by a score of people who slashed with knives and scrambled in the mud for gold.
There were acres of wagons! Hundreds of them. Many as the plunderers were, there were still scores of untouched wagons.
‘Helene!’
He galloped down between a row of wagons, turned into the next row and galloped back. Silver dollars were beneath Carbine’s hooves. A woman tossed and unrolled a bolt of silk, scarlet in the failing sunlight, silk that arched and fell into the mud.
A man threw crates of silver cutlery off a wagon, spilling them into the mud, searching for gold.
‘Helene!’
A woman staggered towards Sharpe, blood flowing in a dozen rivulets down her head and matting her hair. She had found her box of gold, but a man had taken it from her. She cried, not from the pain, but from loss. She picked up some silver forks and thrust them into her dress.
‘Helene!’
A man, trousers at his knees, was on top of a woman by an overturned coach. Sharpe hit him with the flat of the sword, trying to see the woman’s face. She had none. It was just blood from a cut throat. The man tried to scramble away, but Sharpe sliced the sword in a backswing and cut the man’s throat as he’had cut his victim’s.
A pretty girl, incongruously dressed in tight French cavalry uniform, danced on top of a wagon and whirled a rope of pearls. A British cavalryman laughed with her, protecting her, and then bent to scoop more pearls from a box. A horde of people, seeing the treasure, scrambled like rats up to the wagon’s top.
‘Helene!’
Sharpe put his heels back, shouting at the plunderers to clear the way. A drunk, a bottle of priceless wine in each hand, staggered in Carbine’s path and the horse threw the man down. Sharpe held his balance, urged the horse on, and never noticed the painting that the hooves trampled. Van Dyck had worked long on the canvas which was pulled out of the mud by a man who needed a tarpaulin to cover a mule-load of plunder.
‘Helene!’
A box of Legion d’Honneur medals was tossed to the crowd. The Spaniards, laughing, attached the medals to hang beneath their horses’ tails. Angel caught one and laughed at the trophy.
A British cavalryman ripped a tarpaulin from a wagon to find pictures beneath. They had been cut from their frames. He pulled a Rubens from the top of the pile to see if it concealed gold. It did not, and he rode on, looking for better plunder.