‘Sir?’ Private Bee asked nervously.
‘Never mind. Talking to myself.’ Then Sharpe flinched as the French cannon fired and he saw the centre of Kippen’s line reduced to mangled men. The Prussians closed ranks and kept coming as the right-hand end of Lanier’s line stood and aimed muskets.
Then the Riflemen started firing from the upper storey, and the gunners went down. The Prussians were cheering and running. More fell as Lanier’s men fired into their ranks, but Kippen’s Prussians, their bayonets fixed, stormed through the two-deep line and had reached the warehouse where his men were streaming through the big doors. Kippen and his Prussians had done well, but Sharpe’s battalion were still far from the house, sheltering among the bullet-riddled vines. ‘The kipper will be trapped in there,’ Sharpe said. It was shameful. His men were cowering, while the Prussians had captured the warehouse, only to be faced by a company of Lanier’s superbly trained men who now blocked the warehouse’s single entrance. Sharpe was reloading the rifle, this time using a leather patch, and it hurt like hell to ram the bullet down the barrel. And Lanier now knew an enemy was behind him, because he was already sending a company into the house.
‘God save Ireland.’ Harper found Sharpe and was looking down onto the forecourt. He raised the volley gun to fire down at the men jostling to get under the entrance portico, but Sharpe touched the Irishman’s elbow. ‘Save it, Pat. Back to the stairs, use it there.’
Because Sharpe was also trapped. He had brought his men upstairs so they could look down on the fight, but now Lanier’s men were filling the hallway below and firing up the stairway to where a dozen redcoats of the Light Company shot back. ‘Have you seen McGurk?’ Sharpe asked Harper.
‘He’s here somewhere, sir.’
‘Find him. Harry!’
‘Sir?’ Price’s voice called from the end of the long passageway that ran the width of the house.
‘Bring all your men here! And hurry!’
Because there was a stairway to defend and a monster to kill. And Sharpe was trapped.
CHAPTER 13
More men were gathering in the hallway, firing their muskets up the stairway, while Harry Price was ordering furniture to be dragged from the bedrooms to make a barricade at the top of the flight of stairs. Sharpe was reloading his rifle when McGurk appeared with the last four rockets. ‘Lieutenant Anderson says he’s no more ammunition …’ he began.
‘Just break off the sticks,’ Sharpe said, ‘and give them to me. And McGurk, how did you get here?’ McGurk could not have used the main stairs that were blocked by the French troops in the hallway.
‘Back stairs, Mister Sharpe,’ McGurk said.
There were always back stairs in a house like this, stairs for the servants to use, and Lanier would know where they were, which meant that a squad of his devils could already be climbing. ‘Harry!’
‘Sir?’
‘McGurk will show you the back stairs! Take half a dozen men and block them. Take these!’ He tossed two of the rockets to Price. ‘And hurry!’
‘Sir!’
Butler and O’Farrell had discovered some heavy vases that they were now tossing over the upper balustrade. The vases crashed down into the crowd of men below, each crash greeted with cheers from the redcoats, who revelled in destruction. They began throwing furniture as well, and a chest of drawers appeared to crush two Frenchmen, which provoked a concerted charge up the stairwell.
‘Make way!’ Harper bellowed, aiming the volley gun and pulling the trigger. The leading Frenchmen were snatched backwards and blood streaked up to spatter the stairwell’s wall. A chamber pot followed, hurled by Butler, which struck a French officer on the head. The sound of the volley gun, let alone the destruction it had caused, prompted a moment’s stunned silence from the enemy, then the muskets started firing upwards again.
Sharpe was kneeling behind the crude barricade. He took out his short knife and cut the fuses of the rockets as short as he dared, then opened his tinderbox. He struck the steel with the flint, blew on the charred linen to encourage a flame, and lit the first fuse. He waited a heartbeat, then tossed the rocket’s carcass over the balustrade down into the hallway. The rocket ignited halfway down, but without its long stick it had no guidance. Instead it spun crazily, bouncing off men and walls, searing a four-foot tail of flame, and then exploded.
Sharpe reckoned there had been at least thirty men in the lower hallway, but now there were only a dozen still standing, and two of those fled back through the front door. An officer shouted at a Sergeant to lock the door, and the man threw the two heavy bolts before a rifle shot took him down. The stone floor glittered with blood. Sharpe fired his rifle down into the smoke-wreathed horror, then heard a crash of musketry coming from somewhere inside the house. ‘Pat! Find out what’s happening!’
Before Harper could leave, Rifleman McGurk returned and knelt beside Sharpe who was crouching behind the upper balustrade. ‘Mister Price has blocked the back stairs, sir.’
‘Does he need help?’
‘He says not, sir. He stuffed a bed down the stairwell. No one can get up now.’
Or get down, Sharpe thought, and cursed himself. He had led his men upstairs so they could look down on the fight outside, and now he could not see a way out. More of Lanier’s men had come to reinforce the men in the lower hallway, and Sharpe reckoned there was the best part of a company summoning the courage to assault up the staircase. Kippen, as far as Sharpe knew, was in the warehouse, but he too was trapped there by the companies out on the forecourt, and the one man who could destroy those companies was bloody Morris, who would not fight.
There was no sign of Lanier, and Sharpe assumed the Frenchman was on the forecourt where his men were dominating the fight with their disciplined musketry. And that was where Sharpe should have been. If his Light Company had attacked Lanier’s men from the rear, using the rockets to create chaos and their muskets and rifles to kill as many as possible, then the rest of the battalion could have advanced up through the vineyard while Lanier’s men were distracted. If Morris would have led them, Sharpe thought, but surely even Morris would see the opportunity? None of that had happened because Sharpe had climbed the stairs so his Riflemen could deal with the two cannon. And now he was trapped.
Long ago he had suffered a recurrent nightmare. It had started after the battle at Fuentes de O?oro, which had been a nasty fight in a small village on the Spanish frontier, a fight in tight alleyways where men had clawed at each other like animals, screamed like devils and died like beasts.
In the dream, which often left him awake, sweating and shaking, he had been trapped in a narrow alleyway. Behind him and to either side were high stone walls, while in front was a mass of French soldiers. He had told Lucille of the dream and she had smiled. ‘Dreams mean things, Richard,’ she had said.