"Fire."

The two rifles spat toward the shadows. Sharpe had no idea if either bullet struck. All he knew was that the French were trying to take the lighters, they were perilously close to the creek, and the shots would have raised the alarm. He hoped the marine captain would have had the initiative to order the boats upstream. "Come on," he said, and they ran clumsily, half-tripping on tussocks, and he sensed that the French had cast caution away and were running to his right. "Move the boats!" Sharpe shouted at the marine picquet. "Move the boats!" His head was all pain, but he had to ignore it. French muskets crashed in the night. A bullet thumped into mud close to Harper's feet just as the marines fired a ragged volley into the dark.

The sudden outburst of musketry had alerted the sailors and they had cut the lines to the boarding grapnels they were using as anchors and then shoved the lighters away from the bank, but the ponderous boats moved painfully slowly. The one farthest from Sharpe made better progress, but the nearer one seemed to be half-grounded. More French muskets banged, coughing out smoke in which Sharpe saw the glint of bayonets. The outnumbered marines scrambled aboard the nearest lighter as the French reached the bank. A marine fired and a blue-coated Frenchman was hurled back and two others closed on the lighter and rammed their bayonets at sailors who were trying to pole the lighter off the bank with their oars. The attackers grabbed the oars. The French prisoners who had been under the guard were free now and, though unarmed, were also trying to board the lighter. A pistol fired, its report crisper than a musket. Then a dozen heavier crashes sounded and Sharpe guessed the sailors had been issued with the heavy pistols used by boarding parties. They had been issued with cutla.s.ses too, though doubtless none had expected to use them, but now the sailors were hacking at men scrambling over the lighter's gunwale.

Sharpe was twenty yards away, crouching at the creek's edge. He told himself that this was not his fight, that his responsibility was back in the city whose lights shimmered across the wide bay. But he had six smoke b.a.l.l.s aboard that threatened lighter and he wanted them, and besides, if the French took even one lighter then it would make Sir Thomas's withdrawal almost impossible. "We're going to have to drive the b.u.g.g.e.rs away from the boat," Sharpe said.

"There must be fifty of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, sir. More."

"Plenty of our lads still fighting," Sharpe said. "We'll just scare the b.u.g.g.e.rs. Maybe they'll run." He stood, slung the unloaded rifle on his back, and drew his sword.

"G.o.d save Ireland," Harper said.

Army regulations decreed that Sharpe, as a skirmishing officer, should be armed with a cavalry saber, but he had never liked the weapon. The saber's curve made it good for slashing, but in truth most officers wore the blades as mere decoration. He much preferred the heavy cavalry trooper's sword that was one of the longest manufactured. The blade was straight, almost a yard of Birmingham steel. The cavalry complained constantly of the weapon. It did not keep an edge, it was too heavy in the blade, and the asymmetrical point made it ineffective. Sharpe had ground down the back blade to make the point symmetrical and he liked the weapon's weight that made the sword into an effective club. He and Harper splashed into the creek's shallows and came at the French from their left. The blue-coated men were not expecting an attack and may even have thought the two dark-uniformed men were French, for none turned to oppose them. These men were the French laggards, those unwilling to plunge into the creek and fight against the marines and sailors, and none wanted a fight. Some were reloading their muskets, but most just watched the struggle for the lighter as Sharpe and Harper hit them. Sharpe lunged the sword at a throat and the man fell away, his ramrod clattering in his musket's barrel. Sharpe struck again. Harper was thrusting the sword bayonet and bellowing in Gaelic. A French bayonet glinted to Sharpe's right and he swung the sword hard, thumping its blunt edge against a man's skull, and suddenly there was no immediate enemy in front, just a stretch of water and a knot of Frenchmen trying to board the lighter's bows that was being defended by marines with cutla.s.ses and bayonets. Sharpe waded into the creek and thrust the sword at a man's spine, and knew he had taken too big a chance because the men a.s.sailing the lighter turned on him ferociously. A bayonet slashed into his jacket and became entangled there. He cut sideways just as Harper arrived beside him.

Harper was screaming incoherently now. He drove his rifle b.u.t.t into a man's face, but more Frenchmen were coming and Sharpe dragged Harper back from their blades. Four men were attacking them and these were not the laggards. These were men who wanted to kill and he could see their bared teeth and their long blades. He swept the sword in a ma.s.sive haymaking blow that deflected two bayonet thrusts, then stepped back again. Harper was beside him, and the Frenchmen pressed hard, thinking they had easy victims. At least, Sharpe thought, the enemy had no loaded muskets. Just then a gun went off and the muzzle flash blinded him and thick smoke engulfed him. But the bullet went G.o.d knows where, and Sharpe instinctively twitched from it and fell sideways into the creek. The French must have thought he was dead because they ignored him and lunged at Harper who thrust his sword bayonet hard into a man's eyes just as the Irish struck.

Major Gough had brought his company back to the creek and the first Sharpe knew of their coming was a volley that drowned the marsh in noise. After that came the screams of the attacking redcoats. They came with bayonets and fury. "Faugh a ballagh!" they shouted, and the French obeyed. The attack on the lighter shredded under the a.s.sault of the 87th. A Frenchman stooped to Sharpe, thinking him dead and presumably wanting his sword, and Sharpe punched the man in the face, then came out of the water, sword swinging, and he slashed it across the man's face. The Frenchman ran. Sharpe could see Ensign Keogh cutting his straight sword at a much bigger enemy who flailed at the thin officer with his musket. Then the big Sergeant Masterson drove his bayonet into the man's ribs. The Frenchman went down under Masterson's weight. Keogh sliced his sword at the fallen man and wanted more. He was screaming a high-pitched scream and he saw the two dark figures in the creek's shallows and turned to attack, shouting at his men to follow.

"Faugh a ballagh!" Harper roared.

"It's you!" Keogh stopped at the water's edge. He grinned suddenly. "That was a proper fight."

"It was b.l.o.o.d.y desperate," Harper muttered.

Major Gough was shouting at his men to form line and face south. Sergeants pulled redcoats away from the enemy corpses they were plundering. The surviving marines were clubbing the few remaining Frenchmen off the lighter, but Captain Collins, a cutla.s.s in his hand, was dead. "He should have moved the b.l.o.o.d.y boats, sir," a marine sergeant said as he greeted Sharpe. The sergeant spat a dark stream of tobacco juice onto a French corpse. "You're soaked through, sir," he added. "Did you fall in?"

"I fell in," Sharpe said, and the first explosion split the darkness.

The explosion came from one of the five fire rafts. A spire of flame, brilliantly white, shot into the sky, then red light followed, flashing outward in a ring that flattened the marsh gra.s.s. The night was flooded with fire. Later it was decided that an errant spark from a fire in one of the captured French camps had somehow ignited a quickfuse. The charges had already been laid and the engineers were stringing the last of the fuses when one saw the bright fizz of a burning quick match. He shouted a warning, then jumped off the raft just as the first powder keg exploded. All across the rafts now the fuses sparked and smoked like wriggling snakes of fire.

The white spire twisted and dimmed. The rumble of the explosion faded across the marshland as a bugle sounded, ordering the British troops back to the lighters. The bugle was still calling when the next charges exploded, one after the other, their fire pounding toward the clouds and their noise punching across the marshes where the reeds and gra.s.ses bent again to the warm and unexpected winds. Smoke began to boil from the rafts where the French-laid incendiaries caught the fire and their flames illuminated the French troops who had retreated from the lighters. "Fire!" Major Gough roared, and his company of the 87th loosed a volley, and still the charges exploded and the rafts burned. The cannons at the rafts' perimeters began to fire, the b.a.l.l.s and grapeshot whistling across the creek and marsh.

"Back! Back!" Sir Thomas Graham was roaring. The bugle sounded again. Redcoats were streaming back from the camp, their work done. Some were being helped by comrades. At least the fort's cannon fire had stopped, presumably because the gunners were watching the fireworks in the creek. Flaming sc.r.a.ps of wood whirled in the air, new pulses of fire pierced the night, and another cannon exploded. Sharpe stumbled on a Frenchman's body half sunk at the creek's edge.

"Count them in!" Major Gough shouted. "Count them in!"

"One, two, three!" Ensign Keogh was touching men on the shoulder as they clambered aboard. A sailor retrieved one of the oars s.n.a.t.c.hed by the French. A crackle of musketry sounded from the marsh and a man of the 87th fell face forward in the mud. "Pick him up!" Keogh shouted. "Six, seven, eight, where's your musket, you rogue?"

The Hampshire men were boarding the other lighter. General Graham, with his two aides and a group of engineers, was waiting to be the last aboard. The rafts were infernos now. They would never leave the creek. The smoke boiled hundreds of feet into the night sky, but there was enough flame feeding that smoke to illuminate the marsh, and the gunners of San Luis could see the redcoats grouped on the creek bank and they must have known the lighters were there, and suddenly the cannons started firing again. Now they used sh.e.l.l as well as round shot. One sh.e.l.l exploded on the far bank while another, the trail of its fuse a crazed streak of spinning red in the flame-shot night, plunged into the creek. A round shot crashed through the Hampshire's ranks.

"All here!" Keogh shouted.

"Sir Thomas!" Major Gough yelled. An exploding sh.e.l.l threw up mud, reeds, and a French musket. An ancient cannon banged from the closest raft and Sharpe saw the ball skipping along the water. "Sir Thomas!" Major Gough bellowed again, but Sir Thomas was waiting to make sure all the Hampshires had embarked, and only then did he come to the lighter. A sh.e.l.l exploded just paces behind him, but miraculously the sc.r.a.ps of casing whistled harmlessly past him. Sailors thrust the lighter off the bank and the ebbing tide took it out toward the bay. The fire rafts were now a huge incandescent blaze beneath a thundercloud of smoke. The reflections of their flames rippled on the water, then were broken by a round shot that hurled up a great splash to soak men on the two lighters leaving the northern bank. The fifth lighter was in mid-creek, its sailors heaving on their oars to escape the gunfire.

"Row!" a naval officer shouted in Sharpe's boat. "Row!"

Three guns fired at once from the San Luis and Sharpe heard a shot rumble overhead. Musket fire flickered in the marsh and some redcoats stood up in the belly of the lighter and fired back. "Hold your fire!" Gough shouted.

"Row!" the naval officer called again.

"Not quite the orderly withdrawal I antic.i.p.ated," Sir Thomas said. A sh.e.l.l, fuse whipping the dark with its thread of frantic red light, slapped into the creek. "Is that you, Sharpe?"

"Yes, sir."

"You're wet, man."

"Fell in the water, sir."

"You'll catch your death! Strip off. Take my cloak. How's your head? I forgot you were wounded. I should never have asked you to come."

Two more guns fired, then two more from the San Jose Fort to the north, but every pull of the great oars took the lighters away from the flames and into the blackness of the bay. Wounded men moaned in the lighters' holds. Other men talked excitedly, and Gough allowed it. "What's your butcher's bill, Hugh?" Sir Thomas asked the Irishman.

"Three men dead, sir," Gough said, "and eight wounded."

"But a good night's work," Sir Thomas said, "a very good night's work."

Because the fleet was safe and Sir Thomas, when the Spaniards were at last ready, could take his small army south.

SIR T THOMAS Graham's quarters in San Fernando were modest. He had commandeered a boat builder's workshop that had whitewashed stone walls. He had furnished it with a bed, a table, and four chairs. The workshop had a great hearth in front of which Sharpe's clothes were put to dry. Sharpe had put his rifle there too, with its lock plate removed so that the heat of the fire could reach the mainspring. He himself was swathed in a shirt and cloak that General Graham insisted on lending him. The general, meanwhile, was dictating his report. "Breakfast soon," the general said in between sentences. Graham's quarters in San Fernando were modest. He had commandeered a boat builder's workshop that had whitewashed stone walls. He had furnished it with a bed, a table, and four chairs. The workshop had a great hearth in front of which Sharpe's clothes were put to dry. Sharpe had put his rifle there too, with its lock plate removed so that the heat of the fire could reach the mainspring. He himself was swathed in a shirt and cloak that General Graham insisted on lending him. The general, meanwhile, was dictating his report. "Breakfast soon," the general said in between sentences.

"I'm starving," Lord William Russell observed.

"Be a good fellow, Willie, see what's keeping it," the general said, then dictated lavish praise of the men he had led to the creek. Dawn was outlining the inland hills, but still the glow of the burning rafts was vivid in the dark marshlands, while the plume of smoke must have been visible in Seville over sixty miles away. "You want me to mention your name, Sharpe," Sir Thomas asked.

"No, sir," Sharpe said. "I didn't do anything, sir."

Sir Thomas gave Sharpe a shrewd look. "If you say so, Sharpe. So what's this favor I can do for you?"

"I want you to give me a dozen rounds of sh.e.l.l, sir. Twelve-pounders if you've got them, but nine-pounders will do."

"I've got them. Major Duncan does, anyway. What happened to your jacket? Sword cut?"

"Bayonet, sir."

"I'll have my man sew it up while we have breakfast. Twelve rounds of sh.e.l.l, eh? What for?"

Sharpe hesitated. "Probably best you don't know, sir."

Sir Thomas snorted at that answer. "Write that up, Fowler," he said to the clerk, dismissing him. He waited for the clerk to leave, then went to the fire and held his hands to its warmth. "Let me guess, Sharpe, let me guess. Here you are, orphaned from your battalion, and suddenly I'm commanded to keep you here rather than send you back where you belong. And meanwhile Henry Wellesley's love letter is amusing the citizens of Cadiz. Would those two things be connected?"

"They would, sir."

"There are more letters?" Sir Thomas asked shrewdly.

"There are plenty more, sir."

"And the amba.s.sador wants you to do what? Find them?"

"He wants to buy them back, sir, and if that doesn't work he wants them stolen."

"Stolen!" Sir Thomas gave Sharpe a skeptical look. "Had any experience in that business?"

"A bit, sir," Sharpe said and, after a pause, realized the general wanted more. "It was in London, sir, when I was a child. I learned the business."

Sir Thomas laughed. "I was once held up by a footpad in London. I knocked the fellow down. Wasn't you, was it?"

"No, sir."

"So Henry wants you to steal the letters and you want a dozen of my sh.e.l.ls? Tell me why, Sharpe."

"Because if the letters can't be stolen, sir, they might be destroyed."

"You're going to explode my sh.e.l.ls inside Cadiz?"

"I hope not, sir, but it might come to that."

"And you'll expect the Spanish to believe it was a French mortar bomb?"

"I hope the Spanish won't know what to think, sir."

"They're not fools, Sharpe. The dons can be b.l.o.o.d.y uncooperative, but they're not fools. If they discover you exploding sh.e.l.ls in Cadiz they'll have you in that pestilential prison of theirs before you can count to three."

"Which is why it's best you don't know, sir."

"Breakfast is coming," Lord William Russell burst into the room. "Beefsteak, fried liver, and fresh eggs, sir. Well, almost fresh."

"I suppose you'll want the things delivered to the emba.s.sy?" Sir Thomas ignored Lord William and spoke to Sharpe.

"If it's possible, sir, and addressed to Lord Pumphrey."

Sir Thomas grunted. "Come and sit down, Sharpe. You're partial to fried liver?"

"Yes, sir."

"I'll have the things boxed up and delivered today," Sir Thomas said, then shot Lord William a reproving look. "No good looking curious, Willie. Mister Sharpe and I are discussing secret matters."

"I can be the very soul of discretion," Lord William said.

"You can be," Sir Thomas agreed, "but you very rarely are."

Sharpe's coat was taken away to be mended. Then he sat to a breakfast of beefsteak, liver, kidneys, ham, fried eggs, bread, b.u.t.ter, and strong coffee. Sharpe, though he was only half dressed, enjoyed it. It struck him, halfway through the meal, that one table companion was the son of a duke and the other a wealthy Scottish landowner, yet he felt oddly comfortable. There was no guile in Lord William, while it was plain Sir Thomas simply liked soldiers. "I never thought I'd be a soldier," he confessed to Sharpe.

"Why not, sir?"

"Because I was happy as I was, Sharpe, happy as I was. I hunted, I traveled, I read, I played cricket, and I had the best wife in the world. Then my Mary died. I brooded for a time and it occurred to me that the French were an evil presence. They preach liberty and equality, but what are they? They are degraded, barbarous, and inhuman, and it was borne upon me that my duty was to fight them. So I put on a uniform, Sharpe. I was forty-six years old when I first donned the red coat, and that was seventeen years ago. And on the whole, I must say, they have been happy years."

"Sir Thomas," Lord William remarked as he savaged the bread with a blunt knife, "did not just put on a uniform. He raised the 90th Foot at his own expense."

"And a d.a.m.ned expense it was too!" Sir Thomas said. "Their hats alone cost me four hundred and thirty-six pounds, sixteen shillings, and fourpence. I always wondered what the fourpence was for. And here I am, Sharpe, still fighting the French. Have you had enough to eat?"

"Yes, sir, thank you, sir."

Sir Thomas made a point of walking Sharpe to the stables. Just before they reached the building the general stopped Sharpe. "Play cricket, do you, Sharpe?"

"We used to play at Shorncliffe, sir," Sharpe said cautiously, referring to the barracks where the riflemen were trained.

"I need cricketers," the general said, then frowned in thought.

"Henry Wellesley's a d.a.m.ned fool," he said, abruptly changing the subject, "but he's a decent d.a.m.ned fool. Know what I mean?"

"I think so, sir."

"He's a very good man. He deals well with the Spanish. They can be infuriating. They promise the world and deliver sc.r.a.ps, but Wellesley has the patience to treat with them, and the sensible Spaniards know they can trust him. He's a good diplomat and we need him as amba.s.sador."

"I liked him, sir."

"But he made a b.l.o.o.d.y fool of himself over that woman. Does she have the letters?"

"I think she has some, sir."

"So you're looking for her?"

"I am, sir."

"You're not going to blow her up with my sh.e.l.ls, are you?"

"No, sir."

"I hope not, because she's a pretty wee thing. I saw her with him once and Henry looked like a tomcat that had found a bowl of cream. She looked happy too. I'm surprised she betrayed him."

"Lord Pumphrey says it was her pimp, sir."

"And what do you think?"

"I think she saw gold, sir."

"Of course the thing about Henry Wellesley," Sir Thomas said, apparently ignoring Sharpe's words, "is that he's a forgiving sort of man. Wouldn't surprise me if he's still sweet on her. Ah well, I'm probably just blathering. I enjoyed your company last night, Mister Sharpe. If you finish your business quickly enough, then I hope you'll give us a game or two. I've a clerk who's a ferocious bowler, but the wretched man has sprained his ankle. And I trust you'll do me the honor of sailing south with us. We can bowl a few quick ones at Marshal Victor, eh?"

"I'd like that, sir," Sharpe said, though he knew there was no hope of it coming true.

He went to find Harper and the other riflemen. He found a slop shop in San Fernando and, with the emba.s.sy's money, bought his men civilian clothes and then, beneath the smoke of the burning rafts that hung above Cadiz like a great dark cloud, they went to the city.

In the afternoon the cloud was still there, and twelve common sh.e.l.ls, boxed up and labeled as cabbages, had arrived at the emba.s.sy.