forward and fondled the horse’s ears. ‘Not everything Irish is to be disparaged, Cornelius.’
‘Sergeant Harper, sir, does not show sufficient respect for His Majesty’s commission,’ Slingsby said.
‘Sergeant Harper,’ Forrest put in, ‘helped capture the Eagle at Talavera, Captain. Before you joined us.’
‘I don’t doubt he can fight, sir,’ Slingsby said. ‘It’s in their blood, isn’t it? Like pugdogs, they are. Ignorant and brutal, sir. I had enough of them in the 55th to know.’ He looked back to Lawford. ‘But I have to worry about the internal economy of the light company. It has to be straightened and smartened, sir. Doesn’t do to have men being impertinent.’
‘What is it you want?’ Lawford asked with a touch of asperity.
‘Sergeant Harper returned to me, sir, where he belongs, and made to knuckle down to some proper soldiering.’
‘It will be your duty to see that he does when he returns,’ Lawford said grandly.
‘Very good, sir,’ Slingsby said, threw another salute, about-turned and marched back towards his company.
‘He’s very enthusiastic,’ Lawford said.
‘I had never noticed,’ Forrest said, ‘any lack of enthusiasm or, indeed, absence of efficiency in our light company.’
‘Oh, they’re fine fellows!’ Lawford said. ‘Fine fellows indeed, but the best hounds sometimes hunt better with a change of master. New ways, Forrest, dig out old habits. Don’t you agree? Perhaps you’ll take supper with me tonight?’
‘That would be kind, sir.’
‘And it’s an early start in the morning. Farewell to Coimbra, eh? And may the French have mercy on it.’
Twenty miles to the north the first French troops reached the main road. They had brushed aside the Portuguese militia who had blocked the track looping north around Bussaco’s ridge, and now their cavalry patrols galloped into undefended and deserted farmland. The army turned south. Coimbra was next, then Lisbon, and with that would come victory.
Because the Eagles were marching south.
The first idea was to break through the trapdoor and then work on whatever had been piled above. ‘Go through the edge of the hatch,’ Vicente suggested, ‘then perhaps we can break through the box above? Take everything out of the box? Then wriggle through?’
Sharpe could think of nothing else that might free them, so he and Harper set to work. They tried raising the trapdoor first, crouching beneath it and heaving up, but the wood did not move a fraction of an inch, and so they started to carve away at the timbers. Vicente, with his wounded shoulder, could not help, so he and Sarah sat in the cellar as far from the two decaying bodies as they could and listened as Sharpe and Harper attacked the trapdoor. Harper used his sword bayonet and, because that was a shorter blade than Sharpe’s sword, worked further up the steps. Sharpe took off his jacket, stripped off his shirt and wrapped the linen round the blade so he could grip the edge without being cut. He told Harper what he was doing and suggested he might want to protect his own hands. ‘Pity, though,’ Sharpe said, ‘this is a new shirt.’
‘A present from a certain seamstress in Lisbon?’ Harper asked.
‘It was, yes.’
Harper chuckled, then stabbed the blade upwards.
Sharpe did the same with his sword and they worked in silence mostly, gouging in the dark, splintering and levering out scraps of tough, ancient wood. Once in a while a blade would encounter a nail and they would swear.
‘It’s a real language lesson,’ Sarah said after a while.
‘I’m sorry, miss,’ Sharpe said.
‘You sort of don’t notice when you’re in the army,’ Harper explained.
‘Do all soldiers swear?’
‘All of them,’ Sharpe said, ‘all of the time. Except for Daddy Hill.’
‘General Hill, miss,’ Harper explained, ‘who’s noted for his very clean mouth.’
‘And Sergeant Read,’ Sharpe added, ‘he never swears. He’s a Methodist, miss.’
‘I’ve heard him swear,’ Harper said, ‘when bloody Batten stole eight pages from his Bible to use as…’ He stopped suddenly, deciding Sarah did not want to know what use Batten had made of the book of Deuteronomy, then gave a grunt as a great splinter cracked away. ‘Be through this in no bloody time,’ he said cheerfully.
The timbers of the trapdoor were at least three inches thick, and reinforced by two sturdy beams on their underside. For the moment Sharpe and Harper were ignoring the beam on their side, reckoning it was best to break through the trapdoor before worrying how to remove the bigger piece of timber. The wood was hard, but they learned to weaken its grain by repeated stabbing, then they scraped and gouged and prised the loosened timber away. The broken wood came in thimblefuls, in dust, scrap by scrap, and the cramped area under the steps gave them little space. They had to rest just to stretch their muscles from time to time, and at other times it seemed that no amount of stabbing and scraping would loosen another piece, for the two weapons were ill suited to the work. The steel was too slender, so could not be used for brutal leverage for fear the blades would snap. Sharpe used his knife for a time, the sawdust sifting down into his eyes, then he rammed the sword up again, his linen-wrapped hand near the tip to brace the steel. And even when they broke through, he thought, they would only have a small hole. God knows how they were to enlarge it, but all battles had to be fought one step at a time. No point in worrying about the future if there was to be no future, so he and Harper worked patiently away. Sweat poured down Sharpe’s naked chest, flies crawled on him, the dust was thick in his mouth, and his ribs were hurting.
Time meant nothing in the dark. They could have worked an hour or ten hours, Sharpe did not know, though he sensed that night must have fallen outside in the world that now seemed so far away. He worked doggedly, trying not to think about the passing time, and slowly he chipped and gouged, rammed and scraped, until at last he thrust the sword hard up and the blow jarred down his arm because the tip had hit something more solid than wood. He did it again, then swore viciously. ‘Sorry, miss.’
‘What is it?’ Vicente asked. He had been asleep and sounded alarmed.
Sharpe did not answer. Instead he used his knife, gnawing at the small hole he had made in the upper part of the broken timber and, when he had widened the hole sufficiently, he probed with the knife blade to scratch at whatever lay immediately above the trapdoor and then swore again. ‘The bastards have put paving slabs up there,’ he said. He had broken through, but only to meet immovable stone. ‘Bastards!’
‘Mister Sharpe,’ Sarah said, though tiredly, as if she knew she was fighting a losing battle.
‘They probably are bastards, miss,’ Harper said, then rammed his sword bayonet up into the splintered hole he had made and was rewarded with the same sound of steel against stone. He uttered his opinion, apologized to Sarah, then slumped down.
‘They’ve done what?’ Vicente asked.
‘They’ve put stones on top,’ Sharpe said, ‘and other stuff on top of the stones. The bastards aren’t as daft as they look.’ He edged down the steps and sat with his back against the wall. He felt used up, exhausted and it hurt just to breathe.
‘We can’t get through the trapdoor?’ Vicente asked.
‘Not a bloody chance,’ Sharpe said.
‘So?’ Vicente asked tentatively.
‘So we bloody think,’ Sharpe said, but he could not think of anything else