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Sharpe’s Enemy: The Defence of Portugal, Christmas 1812
Bernard Cornwell
Major Sharpe, in the bitter winter, must attempt a desperate rescue and face his most implacable enemy.Newly promoted, he is given the task of rescuing a group of well-born women, held hostage high in the mountains by a rabble of deserters. And one of the renegades is Sergeant Hakeswill, Sharpe’s bitter enemy.Sharpe has only the support of his own company and the new Rocket Troop – the last word in military incompetence – but he cannot afford to contemplate defeat. For to surrender or to fail would mean the end of the war for the Allied armies…Soldier, hero, rogue – Sharpe is the man you always want on your side. Born in poverty, he joined the army to escape jail and climbed the ranks by sheer brutal courage. He knows no other family than the regiment of the 95th Rifles whose green jacket he proudly wears.
SHARPE’S
ENEMY
Richard Sharpe and the Defence
of Portugal, Christmas 1812
BERNARD CORNWELL
Copyright
This novel is a work of fiction. The incidents and some of the characters portrayed in it, while based on real historical events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1984
Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1985
Copyright © Rifleman Productions Ltd 1984
Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780006170136
Ebook Edition © March 2012 ISBN: 9780007346790
Version: 2017-06-07
For my daughter,
with love
‘No one is better than Bernard Cornwell in describing battles large and small, howitzer fire, cavalry charges or bayonet attacks’
Evening Standard
‘… this system is yet in its infancy … much has been accomplished in a short time and there is every reason to believe that the accuracy of the Rocket may be actually brought upon a par with that of other artillery ammunition for all the important purposes of the field service.’
COLONEL SIR WILLIAM CONGREVE, 1814.
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u1f696ec5-4df0-5c77-a0df-f8b71ab9bb79)
Dedication (#u3f3189aa-62d9-5ca8-8616-3b4b4d14391c)
Copyright (#u03e67c42-5bfa-5c13-81d6-16dc79228749)
Epigraph (#u32847dd3-4cf2-541d-83bf-19ce7d2fcdfb)
Map (#ue8d34bcd-51fd-5903-b129-4f2b8efe23d5)
Prologue (#uffcadb72-2478-5068-8829-85c60b53faf9)
Chapter One (#u56814152-6401-5b01-8233-c61a904b0846)
Chapter Two (#ue94f0ad6-2b57-5acf-ae2f-7789b0bf6bdd)
Chapter Three (#u0036edcb-e1e5-56bf-9355-d02b8ee1e530)
Chapter Four (#u79f5bd0c-00c3-5989-afa5-6ff3b8d15de2)
Chapter Five (#u8289d477-a503-5c18-adde-85e25162171c)
Chapter Six (#u20526352-e1b5-512e-855f-99f19e673a39)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Historical Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Sharpe’s Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
The SHARPE Series (in chronological order) (#litres_trial_promo)
The SHARPE Series (in order of publication) (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Bernard Cornwell (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE
On December 8th, 1812, the English soldiers first came to Adrados.
The village had escaped the war. It lay in that part of Spain east of the northern Portuguese border and, though it was close to the frontier, few soldiers had passed through its single street.
The French had come once, three years before, but they had been running from the English Lord Wellington and running so fast that they scarcely had time to stop and loot.
Then in May of 1812 the Spanish soldiers had come, the Garrison of Adrados, but the villagers had not minded. There were only fifty soldiers, with four cannon, and once the guns had been placed in the old Castle and Watchtower outside the village the soldiers seemed to think their war was done. They drank in the village inn, flirted with the women at the stream where the flat stones made laundry easy, and two village girls married gunners in the summer. By some confusion in the Spanish Army the ‘garrison’ had been sent a powder convoy intended for Ciudad Rodrigo and the soldiers boasted that they had more powder, and fewer guns, than any other Artillery troop in Europe. They made crude fireworks for the weddings and the villagers admired the explosions that flashed and echoed in their remote valley. In the autumn some of the Spanish soldiers deserted, bored with guarding the valley where no soldiers came, eager to go back to their own villages and their own women.
Then the English soldiers came. And on that day of all days!
Adrados was not a place of great importance. It grew, the priest said, sheep and thorns, and the priest told the villagers that made the village a holy place because Christ’s life began with the shepherds’ visit and ended with a crown of thorns. Yet the villagers did not need the priest to tell them that Adrados was sacred because only one thing brought visitors to Adrados, and that was on the Feast on December 8th.
Years before, no one knew how many, not even the priest, but in those far-off days when the Christians fought the Muslims in Spain, the Holy Mother had come to Adrados. Everyone knew the story. Christian Knights were falling back through the valley, hard pressed, and their leader had stopped to pray beside a granite boulder that was poised on the edge of the pass which fell off to the west, towards Portugal, and then it had happened. She had appeared! She stood on the granite boulder, Her face pale as ice, Her eyes like mountain pools, and She told the Knight that the pursuing Muslims would soon stop to pray themselves, to face east towards their heathen home, and that if he turned his tired troop about, if they drew their battered swords, then they would bring glory to the cross.
Two thousand Muslim heads dropped that day. More! No one knew how many and each year the figure grew with the story’s telling. Carved Muslim heads decorated the archway of the Convent that was built around the place where She had appeared. In the Convent chapel, at the top of the altar steps, was a small patch of polished granite; the place of the Holy Footfall.
And each year on December 8th, the Day of the Miracle, women came to Adrados. It was a woman’s day, not a man’s, and the men would go to the village inn once they had carried the statue of the Virgin, its jewels swaying beneath the gilded canopy, round the village bounds and back to the Convent.
The Nuns had left the Convent two hundred years before, attracted to plumper houses in the plains, unable to compete with the towns where the Holy Mother had been more generous in her appearance, yet the buildings were still good. The chapel became the village church, the upper cloister was a store-place, and one day a year the Convent was still a place for miracles.
The women entered the chapel on their knees. They shuffled awkwardly across the flagstones, their hands busy with beads, their voices muttering urgent prayers, and their knees would take them to the top of the steps. The priest intoned his Latin. The women bent and kissed the smooth dark granite. There was a hole in the stone and legend said that if you kissed in that place and the tip of your tongue could reach the very bottom of the hole, then the baby would be a boy.
The women cried as they kissed the stone; not with sorrow, but with a kind of ecstasy. Some had to be helped away.
Some prayed for deliverance from illness. They brought their tumours, their disfigurements, their crippled children. Some came to pray for a child and a year later they would return and give thanks to the Holy Mother for now they shared Her secret. They prayed to the Virgin who had given birth and they knew, as no man could know, that a woman brought forth her children in sorrow, yet still they prayed to be mothers and their tongues stretched down the hole. They prayed in the candled glory of the Convent Chapel of Adrados and the priest piled their gifts behind the altar; the harvest of each year.
December 8th, 1812. The English came.
They were not the first visitors. Women had been arriving in the village since dawn, women who had walked twenty miles or more. Some came from Portugal, most from the villages that were hidden in the same hills as Adrados. Then two English officers came, mounted on big horses, and with them was a girl. The officers had loud braying voices. They helped the girl from her horse outside the Convent then rode to the village where they paid their respects to the Spanish Commandant over cups of the region’s harsh red wine that was served in the inn. The men in the inn were good humoured. They knew that many of the women were praying for a child and they would be called on to help the Holy Mother in the prayer’s fulfilment.
The other British soldiers came from the east which was strange because there should have been no British soldiers to the east, but no one remarked on the fact. There was no alarm. The British had not been to Adrados, but the villagers had heard that these heathen soldiers were respectful. Their General had ordered them to stand to attention when the Host was carried through the streets to a deathbed, and to remove their hats, and that was good. Yet these English soldiers were not like the Spanish garrison. These red-coated men were foul looking, villainous, unkempt, their faces full of crudity and hatred.
A hundred of them waited at the eastern end of the village, sitting by the washing place next to the road and smoking short clay pipes. A hundred other men filed through the village led by a big man on horseback whose red coat was lavishly looped with gold. A Spanish soldier, coming from the castle to the inn, saluted the Colonel and was surprised when the English officer smiled at him, bowed ironically, and his mouth was almost toothless.
The Spaniard must have said something in the inn for the two British officers, jackets unbuttoned, came into the roadway and watched the last of the soldiers file by towards the Convent. One of the officers frowned. ‘Who the devil are you?’
The soldier he had spoken to grinned. ‘Smithers, sir.’
The Captain’s eyes flicked up the line of soldiers. ‘What Battalion?’
‘Third, sir.’
‘What bloody Regiment, you fool?’
‘The Colonel’ll tell you, sir.’ Smithers stepped into the centre of the street, put a hand to his mouth. ‘Colonel!’
The big man turned his horse, paused, then spurred towards the inn. The two Captains pulled themselves upright and saluted.
