He hurried back. Most of his troopers had not needed to dismount and cross the barricade, and those men now milled about at the bridge's southern end. And there they were suffering because a steady fire was coming from a white farmhouse just a couple of hundred paces down the road. Horses were whinnying in pain, men were on the ground, and the damn fire kept coming and it struck Pailleterie that he had seen green jackets, which meant riflemen, and if he did not shelter his men soon then the damned rifles would kill every last one of them.
"Sergeant! Move the wagon! Move it!»
A dozen men heaved the wagon up, thrusting one pair of its wheels onto the bridge's parapet, and the horses at last had an escape route across the bridge. "Into the fort! " Pailleterie shouted, "into the fort! " A corporal had rescued the Captain's own horse, and Pailleterie led the beast into the courtyard where it was safe from the rifle fire. Then he opened a saddlebag and took out a tricolour. He gave the flag to Coignet. "Hang it on the battlements, Sergeant."
Hagman and his riflemen had gone down the ladder stairs and now bolted out of the door leading to the storeroom. The French found that entrance a moment too late, but it did not matter. They had seized San Miguel, they had secured the river crossing, and Herault was coming to spread panic along the British supply lines.
And the tricolour flew above the Tormes.
It was Sergeant Coignet who found the wine, hundreds of bottles of it, all hidden behind the chipped plaster image of the Virgin Mary that stood in the small shrine across the bridge from the fort. "You want me to break the bottles, sir" He asked Pailleterie.
"Leave them be, " Pailleterie said. The wine would make a gift for General Herault. "But make sure no one takes any. If one man gets drunk Sergeant, I'll geld him."
"They'll not touch it, sir, " Coignet promised. He was a short, tough man who had never known any life other than the army, and within the elite company his word was law. The wine was safe.
Pailleterie had taken three prisoners. Two were wounded redcoats, one of whom would probably die, while the third was a plump man in a blue uniform who claimed to be a Major of the Commissary service. His presence was explained by the hoard of French muskets that the hussars had discovered, muskets that would now go back to their proper owners. "You give me your word as a gentleman, " Pailleterie asked Tubbs in English, "that you will not try to escape?"
"Of course not, " Tubbs said.
"You won't give me your word?"
"No, no! I won't try to escape! " Tubbs backed away from the pigtailed Frenchman.
"Then you may keep your sword, monsieur, and do me the honour of staying inside the fortress."
Not that any of the hussars had much choice in the matter, for whenever they spent too long outside the fort's walls a rifleman would fire.
Coignet had narrowly escaped injury when he went to explore the shrine, and two men had been wounded when Pailleterie had tipped the wagon that had been half-blocking the bridge over the parapet and into the river.
Pailleterie regretted the wounding of those two men, but he needed the roadway to be clear for Herault, and so he had led twenty men out of the fort where they immediately came under fire from the farmhouse on the northern bank. Once the barricade was gone Pailleterie ordered his men to stay inside the fort's walls, even though his Lieutenant, who had been watching the farmhouse from the parapet, swore that the riflemen there had now run away. But Pailleterie knew that if they stayed inside the fort his hussars and their horses were safe. The British might try to recapture the bridge, but Pailleterie was confident he could thwart them. He had forty of his men lined in the fort's gateway, all armed with pistols, and if the British did run up the road and turn into the arch they would die in a blistering volley.
So the road from the south was open.
Herault and his small army was coming.
And all Pailleterie needed to do was wait.
"It was my fault, " Sharpe said bitterly.
"I shouldn't have fired so soon, " Price admitted.
"I shouldn't have put Pat Harper across the river, " Sharpe said. "I should have kept our men together."
Ensign Hickey said nothing, but just looked heartbroken. He had not thought Captain Sharpe could be defeated.
"Bloody hell! " Sharpe swore uselessly. He had pulled his surviving men back to the village where they could shelter behind garden walls. The fort was a hundred paces away, and he had thought about making an attack on it, but he would have to lead his men round to the far side and then through the archway and he guessed the French would be expecting that approach.
The store-room door had been shut, and was doubtless barricaded. Every now and then a black fur hat showed on the parapet as an hussar peered over to make certain the British troops were not planning any mischief.
Daniel Hagman, keeping watch from the river bank, reported that the frogs had tipped the cart into the river. "I got one of the bastards, sir, " he said, "and Harris popped another."
"Well done, Dan, " Sharpe said morosely, then wondered why the French would clear the barricade away. and the answer was depressingly obvious. Because they were expecting more men, that was why. Because the hussars were only holding the bridge long enough to let a flood of bloody Crapauds across the river. Because all hell was about to be loosed on the British supply lines, and Captain Richard Sharpe would be blamed. «Jesus!» Sharpe cursed.
"He doesn't seem to be on our side today, " Hagman said.
The only good news was that Harper had brought his men safely back across the Tormes. He had led them a mile westwards and used a fisherman's skiff to ferry them over the river, and it was reassuring for Sharpe to have the big Irishman and the twenty rifleman back at his side, but he did not know what he could do with them. Have them killed in a forlorn attack on the fort's gate?
The Scotsman, MacKeon, came and squatted beside Sharpe. He was smoking a short foul pipe that he now pointed towards the fort. "It reminds me, Captain, " he said, "of that terrible place in India."
Sharpe wondered if MacKeon was drunk. The fort at San Miguel was nothing like Gawilghur. The Indian fort had been built on a clifftop, dizzyingly high above the Deccan plain, while San Miguel was a decaying ruin built beside a river. "It don't look much like Gawilghur to me, " Sharpe said.
"Mebbe not, " MacKeon said, tapping the pipe out against a stone, "but the pigtailed fellows reckon there's only one way in. And they're guarding that entrance, like as not, but there's always a back way, Captain, always a back way. And you were the laddie that found it at Gawilghur." He pointed the stem of his pipe at the fort. "See that great crack?"
MacKeon was pointing to a jagged fissure that began low on the shadowed western wall then zig-zagged up the stones almost to the parapet. For a moment Sharpe was wondering whether the Scotsman really expected the light company to climb the wall, then saw that, maybe a third of the way up, a whole section of stone had fallen away. The space looked like a small cave and was half hidden by ivy, but MacKeon was right. It was a back way in, and an agile man could squeeze through the gap, but to what? Sharpe could not remember seeing a hole inside the fort, so where did it lead?
"Sergeant Harper?"
"Sir?"
"If a frog shows his head above that parapet, shoot him." The riflemen could keep the French out of sight, and if they were out of sight they could not see what mischief Sharpe planned. He unbuckled his sword belt, let the clumsy weapon drop, and then, with the rifle slung on his shoulder, ran across the waste ground to the fort's wall. No Frenchman saw him, for they were keeping their heads below the parapet. They might have captured the fort, but they had a healthy respect for the rifles.