stopped as it dawned on him that most of the sixteen travellers would not have understood a word he had spoken. The Lieutenant blushed, then turned to a tall, scarred and dark-haired man who wore a faded uniform jacket of the British 95th Rifles. ‘Can you translate for me, sir?’
‘More mules are coming,’ the Rifleman said in laconic, but fluent Spanish. It had been nearly six years since the Rifleman had last used the language regularly, yet thirty-eight days on a Spanish ship had made him fluent again. He turned again to the Lieutenant. ‘Why can’t we walk to the house?’
‘It’s all of five miles, sir, uphill, and very steep.’ The Lieutenant pointed to the hillside above the trees where a narrow road could just be seen zig-zagging perilously up the flax-covered slope. ‘You really are best advised to wait for the mules, sir.’
The tall Rifle officer made a grunting noise, which the young Lieutenant took for acceptance of his wise advice. ‘Sir?’ The Lieutenant, emboldened by the grunting noise, took a step closer to the Rifleman.
‘What?’
‘I just wondered.’ The Lieutenant, overwhelmed by the Rifleman’s scowl, stepped back. ‘Nothing, sir. It doesn’t signify.’
‘For God’s sake, boy, speak up! I won’t bite you.’
‘It was my father, sir. He often spoke of you and I wondered if you might recall him? He was at Salamanca, sir. Hardacre? Captain Roland Hardacre?’
‘No.’
‘He died at San Sebastian?’ Lieutenant Hardacre added pathetically, as though that last detail might revive his father’s image in the Rifleman’s memory.
The scarred Rifleman made another grunting noise that might have been translated as sympathy, but was in fact the inadequate sound of a man who never knew how to react properly to such revelations. So many men had died, so many widows still wept and so many children would be for ever fatherless that the Rifleman doubted there would ever be sufficient pity for all the war’s doings. ‘I didn’t know him, Lieutenant, I’m sorry.’
‘It was truly an honour to meet you anyway, sir,’ Lieutenant Hardacre said, then stepped gingerly backwards as though he might yet be attacked by the tall man whose black hair bore a badger streak of white and whose dark face was slashed by a jagged scar. The Rifleman, who was wishing he could respond more easily and sympathetically to such appeals to his memory, was called Richard Sharpe. His uniform, that might have looked shabby on a beggar’s back, bore the faded insignia of a Major, though at the war’s end, when he had fought at the greatest widowmaking field of all, he had been a Lieutenant Colonel. Now, despite his uniform and the sword which hung at his side, he was just plain mister and a farmer.
Sharpe turned away from the embarrassed Lieutenant to stare morosely across the sun-glinting sea at the far ships which guarded this lonely, godforsaken coast. Sharpe’s scar gave him a sardonic and mocking look. His companion, on the other hand, had a cheerful and genial face. He was a very tall man, even taller than Sharpe himself, and was the only man among the sixteen travellers not wearing a uniform. Instead he was dressed in a brown wool coat and black breeches that were far too thick for this tropical heat and, in consequence, the tall man, who was also hugely fat, was sweating profusely. The discomfort had evidently not affected his cheerfulness, for he gazed happily about himself at the dark cliffs, at the banyan trees, at the slave huts, at the rain clouds swelling above the black volcanic peaks, at the sea, at the small town, and at last delivered himself of his considered verdict. ‘A rare old shitheap of a place, wouldn’t you say?’ The fat man, who was called Mister Patrick Harper and was Sharpe’s companion on this voyage, had expressed the exact same sentiment at dawn when, as their ship crept on a small wind to the island’s anchorage, the first light had revealed the unappealing landscape.
‘It’s more than the bastard deserves,’ Sharpe replied, but without much conviction; merely in the tone of a man making conversation to pass the time.
‘It’s still a shitheap. How in Christ’s name did they ever find the place? That’s what I want to know. God in his heaven, but we’re a million miles from anywhere on earth, so we are!’
‘I suppose a ship was off course and bumped into the bloody place.’
Harper fanned his face with the brim of his broad hat. ‘I wish they’d bring the bloody mules. I’m dying of the bloody heat, so I am. It must be a fair bit cooler up in them hills.’
‘If you weren’t so fat,’ Sharpe said mildly, ‘we could walk.’
‘Fat! I’m just well made, so I am.’ The response, immediate and indignant, was well practised, so that if any man had been listening he would have instantly realized that this was an old and oft-repeated altercation between the two men. ‘And what’s wrong with being properly made?’ Harper continued. ‘Mother of Christ, just because a man lives well there’s no need to make remarks about the evidence of his health! And look at yourself! The Holy Ghost has more beef on its bones than you do. If I boiled you down I wouldn’t get so much as a pound of lard for my trouble. You should eat like I do!’ Patrick Harper proudly thumped his chest, thus setting off a seismic quiver of his belly.
‘It isn’t the eating,’ Sharpe said. ‘It’s the beer.’
‘Stout can’t make you fat!’ Patrick Harper was deeply offended. He had been Sharpe’s sergeant for most of the French wars and now, as then, Sharpe could think of no one he would rather have beside him in a fight. But in the years since the wars the Irishman had run a hostelry in Dublin. ‘And a man has to be seen drinking his own wares,’ Harper would explain defensively, ‘because it gives folks a confidence in the quality of what a man sells, so it does. Besides, Isabella likes me to have a bit of flesh on my bones. It shows I’m healthy, she says.’
‘That must make you the healthiest bugger in Dublin!’ Sharpe said, but without malice. He had not seen his friend for over three years and had been shocked when Harper had arrived in France with a belly wobbling like a sack of live eels, a face as round as the full moon and legs as thick as howitzer barrels. Sharpe himself, five years after the battle of Waterloo, could still wear his old uniform. Indeed, this very morning, taking the uniform from his sea chest, he had been forced to stab a new hole in the belt of his trousers to save them from collapsing round his ankles. He wore another belt over his jacket, but this one merely to support his sword. It felt very strange to have the weapon hanging at his side again. He had spent most of his life as a soldier, from the age of sixteen until he was thirty-eight, but in the last few years he had become accustomed to a farmer’s life. From time to time he might carry a gun to scare the rooks out of Lucille’s orchard or to take a hare for the pot, but he had long abandoned the big sword to its decorative place over the fireplace in the château’s hall, where Sharpe had hoped it would stay forever.
Except now he was wearing the sword again, and the uniform, and he was once more in the company of soldiers. And also of sixteen mules because four more animals had at last been found and led to the waiting men who, trying to keep their dignity, clumsily straddled the mangy beasts. The black slaves tried not to show their amusement as Patrick Harper clambered onto an animal that looked only half his own size, yet which somehow sustained his weight.
An English Major, a choleric-looking man mounted on a black mare, led the way out of the small town and onto the narrow road which made its tortuous way up the towering mountainside towards the island’s interior. The slopes on either side of the road were green with tall flax plants. A lizard, iridescent in the sunlight, darted across Sharpe’s path and one of the slaves, who was following close behind the mounted men, darted after the animal.
‘I thought slavery had been abolished?’ commented Harper, who had evidently forgiven Sharpe for the remarks about his fatness.
‘In Britain, yes,’ Sharpe said, ‘but this isn’t British territory.’
‘It isn’t? What the hell is it then?’ Harper asked indignantly, and indeed, if the island did not belong to Britain then it seemed ridiculous for it to be so thickly inhabited with British troops. Off to their left was a barracks where three