“Yes, sir.”

The acrid powder smoke made Sir Henry’s horse twitch its head, and the Colonel reached forward to quiet it. Sharpe watched the gesture and knew that he had made a fool of the Colonel in front of his own men, and he knew, too, that it had been a mistake. Sharpe had won a small victory but in doing so he had made an enemy who had both power and influence. The Colonel edged his horse closer to Sharpe and his voice was surprisingly quiet. “This is my Battalion, Mr Sharpe. My Battalion. Remember that!” He looked for a moment as if his anger would erupt, but he controlled it and shouted at Forrest to follow him instead. Sharpe turned away. Harper was grinning at him, the men looked pleased, and only Sharpe felt a foreboding of menace like an unseen but encircling enemy. He shook it off. There were muskets to clean, rations to issue, and, beyond the border hills, enemies enough for anyone.

CHAPTER 4

Patrick Harper marched with a long easy stride, happy to feel the road beneath his feet, happy they had at last crossed the unmarked frontier and were going somewhere, anywhere. They had left in the small, dark hours so that the bulk of the march would be done before the sun was at its hottest, and he looked forward to an afternoon of inactivity and hoped that the bivouac Major Forrest had ridden ahead to find would be near a stream where he could drift a line down the water with one of his maggots impaled on the hook. The South Essex were somewhere behind them; Sharpe had started the day’s march at the Rifle Regiment’s fast pace, three steps walking, three running, and Harper was glad that they were free of the suspicious atmosphere of the Battalion. He grinned as he remembered the stocks. There was a sobering rumour that the Colonel had ordered Sharpe to pay for every one of the seventy-nine ruined collars, and that, to Harper’s mind, was a terrible price to pay. He had not asked Sharpe the truth of the rumour; if he had he would have been told to mind his own business, though, for Patrick Harper, Sharpe was his business. The Lieutenant might be moody, irritable, and liable to snap at the Sergeant as a means of venting frustration, but Harper, if pressed, would have described Sharpe as a friend. It was not a word that a Sergeant could use of an officer, but Harper could have thought of no other. Sharpe was the best soldier the Irishman had seen on a battlefield, with a countryman’s eye for ground and a hunter’s instinct for using it, but Sharpe looked for advice to only one man in a battle, Sergeant Harper. It was an easy relationship, of trust and respect, and Patrick Harper saw his business as keeping Richard Sharpe alive and amused.

He enjoyed being a soldier, even in the army of the nation that had taken his family’s land and trampled on their religion. He had been reared on the tales of the great Irish heroes, he could recite by heart the story of Cuchulain single-handedly defeating the forces of Connaught, and who did the English have to put beside the great hero? But Ireland was Ireland and hunger drove men to strange places. If Harper had followed his heart he would be fighting against the English, not for them, but like so many of his countrymen he had found a refuge from poverty and persecution in the ranks of the enemy. He never forgot home. He carried in his head a picture of Donegal, a county of twisted rock and thin soil, of mountains, lakes, wide bogs and the small holdings where families scratched a thin living. And what families! Harper was the fourth of his mother’s eleven children who survived infancy and she always said that she never knew how she had come to bear such ‘a big wee one’. “To feed Patrick is like feeding three of the others’ she would say, and he would more often than not go hungry. Then came the day when he left to seek his own fortune. He had walked from the Blue Stack mountains to the walled streets of Derry and there got drunk, and found himself enlisted. Now, eight years later and twenty-four years old, he was a Sergeant. They would never believe that in Tangaveane!

It was hard now to think of the English as enemies. Familiarity had bred too many friendships. The army was one place where strong men could do well, and Patrick Harper liked the responsibility he had earned and enjoyed the respect of other tough men, like Sharpe. He remembered the stories of his countrymen who had fought the redcoats in the hills and fields of Ireland, and sometimes he wondered what his future would be if he were to go back and live in Donegal again. That problem of loyalty was too difficult, and he kept it in the back of his mind, hidden away with the vestiges of his religion. Perhaps the war would go on for ever, or perhaps St Patrick would return and convert the English to the true faith? Who could tell? But for the moment he was content to be a soldier and took his pleasure where it could be found. Yesterday he had seen a peregrine falcon, high over the road, and Patrick Harper’s soul had soared to meet it. He knew every bird in Ulster, loved them, and as he walked he searched the land and sky for new birds because the Sergeant never tired of watching them. In the hills north of Oporto he had caught a quick glimpse of a strange magpie with a long blue tail, unlike anything he had seen before, and he wanted to see another. The expectation and the waiting were part of his content and his pleasure.

A hare started up in a field next to the road. A voice shouted „Mine,“ and they all paused while the man knelt, took quick aim, and fired. He missed and Riflemen jeered as the hare twisted and disappeared in the rocks. Daniel Hagman did not miss often, he had learned to shoot from his poacher father, and all the Riflemen were secretly proud of the Cheshire-man’s ability with the rifle. As he reloaded he shook his head sorrowfully. ”Sorry, sir. Getting too old.“

Sharpe laughed. Hagman was forty but he could still out-shoot the rest of the company. The hare had been running at two hundred yards, and it would have been a miracle if it had ended up in the evening’s cooking pots.

“We’ll take a rest,” Sharpe said. “Ten minutes.” He set two men as sentries. The French were miles away, there were British cavalry ahead of them on the road, but soldiers stayed alive by taking precautions and this was strange country, so Sharpe kept a watch and the men marched with loaded weapons. He took off his pack and pouches, glad to be rid of the eighty pounds of weight, and sat beside Harper, who was leaning back and staring into the clear sky. “A hot day for a march, Sergeant.”

“It will be, sir, so it will. But better than that damned cold last winter.”

Sharpe grinned. “You managed to keep warm enough.”

“We did what we could, sir, we did what we could. You remember the Holy Father in the Friary?” Sharpe nodded but there was no way to stop Patrick Harper once he was launched into a good story. “He told us there was no drink in the place! No drink, and we were as cold as the sea in winter! It was a terrible thing to hear a man of God lie so.”

“You taught him a lesson,“ Sarge Pendleton, the baby of the company, just seventeen and a thief from the streets of Bristol, grinned over the road at the Irishman. Harper nodded. ”We did, lad. You remember? No priest runs out of drink and we found it. My God, a barrel big enough to drown an army’s thirst and it did us that night. And we tipped the Holy Father head first into the wine to teach him that lying is a mortal sin.“ He laughed at the memory. ”I could do with a drop right now.“ He looked innocently round the men resting on the verges. ”Would anyone have a drop?“

There was silence. Sharpe leaned back and hid his smile. He knew what Harper was doing and he could guess what would happen next. The Rifles were one of the few Regiments that could pick and choose its recruits, rejecting all but the best, but even so it suffered from the besetting sin of the whole army: drunkenness. Sharpe guessed there were at least half a dozen bottles of wine within a few paces, and Harper was going to find them. He heard the Sergeant get to his feet. “Right! Inspection.”