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Sharpe’s Honour: The Vitoria Campaign, February to June 1813
Bernard Cornwell
Major Sharpe finds himself a fugitive, hunted by enemy and ally alike.Major Richard Sharpe awaits the opening shots of the army’s campaign with grim expectancy. For victory depends on the increasingly fragile alliance between Britain and Spain – an alliance that must be maintained at any cost.Pierre Ducos, the wily French intelligence officer, sees a chance both to destroy the alliance and to achieve a personal revenge on Richard Sharpe. And when the lovely spy, La Marquesa, takes a hand in the game, Sharpe finds himself enmeshed in a web of political intrigue for which his military expertise has left him fatally unprepared.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
HONOUR
Richard Sharpe and the Vitoria Campaign, February to June 1813
BERNARD CORNWELL
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1986
Reprinted seven times
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1985
Copyright © Rifleman Productions Ltd 1985
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
Ebook Edition © July 2009 ISBN: 9780007338696
Version: 2017-05-06
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.
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.
Sharpe’s Honour is for Jasper Partington
and Shona Crawford Poole,
who marched from the very start
We’ll search every room for to find rich treasure,
And when we have got it we’ll spend it at leisure.
We’ll card it, we’ll dice it, we’ll spend without measure,
And when it’s all gone, bid adieu to all pleasure.
From: The Grenadier’s March (Anon), Quoted in THE RAMBLING SOLDIER, edited by Roy Palmer, Penguin Books, 1977.
‘Men huddled on hillsides, anxiously surveying the enemy guns trained against them and steeling themselves for some kind of counter-attack. They are beautifully observed and, in their evocation of quiet heroism, pulse with rare humanity’
Sunday Telegraph
Table of Contents
Title Page (#ud5efb689-9a3c-5de5-8e13-11b2d15ee050)
Copyright (#u9d679a32-4c84-5b56-b41a-468e24eb8db6)
Dedication (#u1ebfaed1-ad7c-56dd-8107-a6a0d8dc0aec)
Epigraph (#ud535f2d2-f87b-50f4-89a7-9f9eebb9c94d)
Map (#u9180c54d-2eca-5e42-89ec-88697be24b44)
Prologue (#u20fca203-947f-5dcc-acba-3bbca06b3742)
Chapter One (#u98bbbad4-a5db-5124-8d59-f3ec7e689c19)
Chapter Two (#ub71fe8b2-399e-561d-8d87-1d4902623d4f)
Chapter Three (#uf3468933-70ce-59d8-b626-097cfcc61ccf)
Chapter Four (#ua707c15a-e546-5002-906a-6a23f60f2043)
Chapter Five (#u1d23662c-cce0-5b2e-874d-b433343e7bd3)
Chapter Six (#u037166ce-bdb2-56ae-9112-b2f7a8a5bbe2)
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)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Historical Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Sharpe’s Story (#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
There was a secret that would win the war for France. Not a secret weapon, nor some surprise strategy that would send the enemies of France reeling in defeat, but a sleight of politics that would drive the British from Spain without a musket being fired. It was a secret that must be kept, and must be paid for.
To which end, on a pitiless winter’s day in 1813, two men climbed into the northern hills of Spain. Whenever the road forked they took the lesser path. They climbed by frost-hardened tracks, going ever higher into a place of rocks, eagles, wind, and cruelty, until at last, at a place where the far sea could be seen glittering beneath a February sun, they came to a hidden valley that smelt of blood.
There were sentries at the valley’s head; men wrapped in rags and pelts, men with muzzle-blackened muskets. They stopped the travellers, challenged them, then incongruously knelt to one of the horsemen, who, with a gloved hand, made a blessing over their heads. The two men rode on.
The smaller of the two travellers, the keeper of this secret of secrets, had a thin, sallow face that was pock-marked by the old scars of smallpox. He wore spectacles that chafed the skin behind his ears. He stopped his horse above a rock amphitheatre that had been made when this valley was mined for iron. He looked with his cold eyes at the scene below him. ‘I thought you didn’t fight the bulls in winter.’
It was a crude bullfight, nothing like the splendour of the entertainment provided in the barricaded plazas of the big cities to the south. Perhaps a hundred men cheered from the sides of the rock pit, while, beneath them, two men tormented a black, angry bull that was slick with the blood drawn from its weakened neck muscles. The animal was weak anyway, ill fed through the winter, and its charges were pitiful, easily evaded, and its end swift. It was not killed with the traditional sword, nor with the small knife plunged between its vertebrae, but by a pole-axe.
A huge man, clothed in leather beneath a cloak of wolf’s fur, performed the act. He swung the great axe, its blade glittering in the weak sun, and the animal tried to swerve from the blow, failed, and it bellowed one last useless challenge at the sky as the axe took its life and cut down, through bone and pipes and sinews and muscles, and the men about the rock pit cheered.
The small man, whose face showed distaste for what he saw, gestured at the axeman. ‘That’s him?’
‘That’s him, Major.’ The big priest watched the small, bespectacled man as if enjoying his reaction. ‘That’s El Matarife.’ The nickname meant ‘the Slaughterman’.
El Matarife was a frightening sight. He was big, he was strong, but it was his face that caused fear. He was bearded so thickly that his face seemed half man and half beast. The beard grew to his cheekbones, so that his eyes, small and cunning, appeared in a slit between beard and hair. It was a bestial face that now looked up, over the dead bull, to see the two horsemen above him. El Matarife bowed mockingly to them. The priest raised a hand in reply.
The men about the rock pit. Partisans who followed the Slaughterman, were calling for a prisoner. The carcass of the bull was being dragged up the rocks, going to join the three other dead animals that had left their blood on the white-frosted stone.
The small man frowned. ‘A prisoner?’
‘You can hardly expect El Matarife not to have a welcome for you, Major? After all it’s not every day that a Frenchman comes here.’ The priest was enjoying the small Frenchman’s discomfiture. ‘And it might be wise to watch, Major? To refuse would be seen as an insult to his hospitality.’
‘God damn his hospitality,’ the small man said, but he stayed nonetheless.
He was not impressive to look at, this small Frenchman whose glasses chafed his skin, yet the appearance was deceptive. Pierre Ducos was called Major, though whether that was his real rank, or whether he held any rank in the French army at all, no one knew. He called no man ‘sir’, unless it was the Emperor. He was part spy, part policeman, and wholly politician. It was Pierre Ducos who had suggested the secret to his Emperor, and it was Pierre Ducos who must make the secret come true and thus win the war for France.
A fair-headed man, dressed only in a shirt and trousers, was pushed past the bulls’ carcasses. His hands were tied behind his back. He was blinking as though he had been brought from a dark place into the sudden daylight.
‘Who is he?’ Ducos asked.
‘One of the men he took at Salinas.’
Ducos grunted. El Matarife was a Partisan leader, one of the many who infested the northern hills, and he had lately surprised a French convoy and taken a dozen prisoners. Ducos pushed at the earpiece of his spectacles. ‘He took two women.’
‘He did,’ the priest said.
‘What happened to them?’
‘You care very much, Major?’
‘No.’ Ducos’s voice was sour. ‘They were whores.’
‘French whores.’
‘But still whores.’ He said it with dislike. ‘What happened to them?’
‘They ply their trade, Major, but their payment is life instead of cash.’
The fair-headed man had been taken to the base of the rock pit and there his arms were cut free. He flexed his fingers in the raw, cold air, wondering what was to happen to him in this place that stank of blood. There was a mood of expectant enjoyment among the spectators. They were quiet, but they grinned because they knew what was to happen.
A chain was tossed to the pit’s floor.
