Sharpe 3-Book Collection 6: Sharpe's Honour, Sharpe's Regiment, Sharpe's Siege Read Free Page B

confidence made it hard to believe that he had started his career in the ranks. It made it even harder to believe that he would surrender his outnumbered men without a fight.
    ‘What are you staring at, Lieutenant?’
    ‘Nothing, sir.’ Trumper-Jones had thought Sharpe was watching the southern hills.
    Sharpe was, but he had become aware of the Lieutenant’s gaze, and he resented it. He hated being pointed out, being watched. He was comfortable these days only with his friends. He was also aware that he had sounded unnecessarily harsh to the young cavalry officer. He looked up at him. ‘We counted three guns. You agree?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘Four pounders?’
    ‘I think so, sir.’
    Sharpe grunted. He watched the crest. He hoped the two questions would make him appear friendlier to the officer, though in truth Sharpe did not feel friendly to any strangers these days. He had been oppressed since Christmas, swinging between violent guilt and savage despair because his wife had died in the snows at the Gateway of God. Unbidden into his mind came the sudden picture of the blood at her throat. He shook his head, as if to drive the picture away. He felt guilty that she had died, he felt guilty that he had been unfaithful to her, he felt guilty that her love had been so badly returned, he felt guilty that he had let his daughter become motherless.
    He had become poor through his guilt. His daughter, still not two years old, was growing up with her uncle and aunt, and Sharpe had taken all his savings, that he had stolen from the Spanish government in the first place, and given them to Antonia, his daughter. He had nothing left, except his sword, his rifle, his telescope, and the clothes on his back. He found himself resenting this young staff officer with his expensive horse and gilt scabbard furnishings and new leather boots.
    There was a murmur in the ranks behind him. The men had seen the small figures who suddenly appeared on the southern crest. Sharpe turned round. “Talion!‘ There was silence. ”Talion! ’Shun!‘
    The mens’ boots crashed on the wet rocks. They were in two ranks, stretched across the mouth of the small valley which carried the road northwards.
    Sharpe stared at them, knowing their nervousness. These were his men, of his Battalion, and he trusted them, even against this outnumbering enemy. ‘Sergeant Huck- field!’
    ‘Sir!’
    ‘Raise the Colours!’
    The men, Lieutenant Michael Trumper-Jones thought, grinned most unfittingly for such a solemn moment, then he saw why. The “Colours” were not the usual flags of a Battalion, instead they were scraps of cloth that had been tied to two stripped birch trunks. The rain made them hang limp and flat, so that from any distance it was impossible to see that the flags were nothing more than two cloaks tricked out with yellow facings torn from the jackets of the soldiers. At the head of the two staffs were wrapped more of the yellow cloth to resemble, at least at a distance, the crowns of England.
    Sharpe saw the staff officer’s surprise. ‘Half Battalions don’t carry Colours, Mr Trumper-Jones.’
    ‘No, sir.’
    ‘And the French know that.’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘So what will they think?’
    ‘That you have a full Battalion, sir?’
    ‘Exactly.’ Sharpe looked back to the south, leaving Michael Trumper-Jones curious as to why this deception was a necessary preliminary to surrender. He decided it was best not to ask. Major Sharpe’s face discouraged casual questions.
    And no wonder, for Major Richard Sharpe, as he stared at the southern ridge, was thinking that this river valley was a miserable, unfitting, and stupid place to die. He wondered, sometimes, if in death he would meet Teresa again, would see her thin, bright face that had always smiled a welcome; a face that, as her death receded, had lost the detail in his memory. He did not even have a picture of her, and his daughter, growing up in her Spanish family, had no picture of her