Sharpe’s Enemy: The Defence of Portugal, Christmas 1812. Bernard Cornwell

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      The Colonel reined in. He seemed once to have had the jaundice, perhaps to have served in the Fever Islands, for his skin was yellow like old parchment. The face beneath the tasselled bicorne hat twitched in involuntary spasm. The blue eyes, startlingly blue, were unfriendly. ‘Button your bloody jackets.’

      The Captains put down their wine cups, buttoned their jackets and pulled their belts into place. One, a plump young man, frowned because the Colonel had shouted at them in front of the grinning privates.

      The Colonel let his horse walk two steps closer to the pair of Captains. ‘What are you doing here?’

      ‘Here, sir?’ The taller, thinner Captain smiled. ‘Just visiting, sir.’

      ‘Just visiting, eh?’ The face twitched again. The Colonel had a strangely long neck hidden by a cravat that he pinned high on his throat. ‘Just the two of you?’

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      ‘And Lady Farthingdale, sir,’ added the plump one.

      ‘And Lady Farthingdale, eh?’ The Colonel mimicked the Captain’s plummy voice, then he screamed at them in sudden vehemence. ‘You’re a bloody disgrace, that’s what you are! I hate you! Christ’s belly, I hate you!’

      The street was suddenly silent in the winter sunshine. The soldiers that had gathered either side of the Colonel’s horse grinned at the two Captains.

      The taller Captain wiped the spittle flung from the Colonel’s mouth off his red jacket. ‘I must protest, sir.’

      ‘Protest! You puking horror! Smithers!’

      ‘Colonel?’

      ‘Shoot him!’

      The plump Captain grinned, as if a joke had been made, but the other flung an arm up, flinched, and as Smithers, grinning, levelled and fired his musket so did the Colonel bring out an ornate chased pistol and shoot the plump Captain in the head. The shots echoed in the street, the smoke drifted in two distinct clouds above the fallen bodies, and the Colonel laughed before standing in his stirrups. ‘Now, lads, now!’

      They cleared the inn first, stepping over the corpses whose blood was spattered on the lintel of the door, and the muskets crashed in the building, bayonets hunted the men into corners and killed them, and the Colonel waved the hundred men who had been waiting at the eastern end of the village into the street. He had not wanted to start this quickly, he had wanted to get half his men up to the Convent first, but these bloody Captains had forced his hand and the Colonel screamed at them, urged them on, and led half his force towards the big, square, blank-walled Convent.

      The women in the Convent had not heard the shots fired five hundred yards to the east. The women were crowded in the upper cloister, waiting their turn to shuffle into the chapel on their knees, and the first they knew that the war had at last come in its horror to Adrados was when the red-coated men appeared in the gateway, bayonets levelled, and the screaming began.

      Other men were clearing the village houses, one by one, while yet more streamed across the valley towards the castle. The Spanish garrison had been drinking in the village, only a handful were at their posts, and they assumed that British uniforms belonged to their allies and further assumed that these British soldiers could explain the uproar in the village. The Spaniards watched the redcoats come across the rubble of the castle’s fallen east wall, shouted questions at them, and then the muskets fired, the bayonets came, and the garrison died in the mediaeval ramparts. One Lieutenant killed two of the redcoats. He fought with skill and fury, drove more of the invaders back, and he escaped over the fallen wall and ran through the thorn bushes to the watchtower on its hill to the east. He hoped he would find a handful of his men there, but he died in the thorns, shot by a hidden marksman, and the Spanish Lieutenant never knew that the men who had captured the watchtower were dressed not in British red, but in French blue. His body rolled under a thorn bush, crushing the old brittle bones of a raven left by a fox.

      There were screams in the street. Men died who tried to protect their homes, children screamed as their fathers died, as their homes were forced open. The musket shots dotted the breeze with small white clouds.

      More men came from the east, men in uniforms as varied as the Battalions that had fought for Portugal and Spain in the four years of war in the Peninsula. With the men came women and it was the women who killed children in the village, shooting them, knifing them, keeping only those who could work. The women squabbled over the cottages, arguing who would have what, sometimes crossing themselves as they passed a crucifix nailed on the low stone walls. It did not take long to destroy Adrados.

      In the Convent the screams had become constant as the English soldiers hunted through the two cloisters, the hall, the empty rooms, and the crammed chapel. The priest had run to the door, pushing his way through the women, and now he was held, quivering, as the redcoats sorted out their prize. Some women were pushed out of the building, the lucky ones, women too diseased or too old, and some were killed with the long bayonets. Inside the chapel the soldiers took the ornaments from the altar, picked through the gifts that were piled in the narrow space behind it, and then smashed open the cupboard that held the Mass vessels. One soldier was pulling on the white and gold finery the priest kept for Easter. He walked round the church blessing his comrades who pulled women onto the floor. The chapel sounded with sobs, screams, men’s laughter, and the tearing of cloth.

      The Colonel had ridden his horse into the upper cloister and waited, a grin on his face, and watched his men. He had sent two men he could trust into the chapel and they appeared now, holding a woman between them, and the Colonel looked at her, licked his lips, and his face twitched in its spasms.

      Everything about her was rich, from her clothes to her hair, a richness that spoke of money enhancing beauty. Her hair was black and full, falling in waves either side of a face that was generous and provocative. She had dark eyes that looked at him fearlessly, a mouth that seemed as if it smiled a lot, and her clothes were covered with a dark cloak trimmed in lavish silver СКАЧАТЬ