Sharpe's Eagle Read Free Page A

collecting its customary tail of women and

children who followed the Regiments to war. Each Battalion was allowed to take sixty soldiers'

wives to an overseas war but no-one could stop other women joining the `official' wives; local

girls, prostitutes, seamstresses and washerwomen, all making their living from the army. This

girl looked different. There was the smell of money and privilege about her, as if she had run

away from a rich Lisbon home. Sharpe presumed she was the lover of a rich officer, one of the

breed who would regard his woman as much a part of his equipment as his thoroughbred horses, his

Manton pistols, his silver dinnerware for camp meals, and the hounds that would trot obediently

at his horse's tail. There were plenty of girls like her, Sharpe knew, girls who cost a lot of

money, and he felt the old envy rise in him.
    "My God." Harper, still staring out the window, had spoken again.
    "What is it?" Sharpe leaned forward and, like his Ser-geant, he could hardly believe his eyes.

A Battalion of British Infantry was marching steadily into the square but a Battalion the like of

which Sharpe had not seen for more than twelve months. A year in Portugal had turned the army

into a Drill-Sergeant's nightmare: the soldiers' uniforms had faded and been patched with the

ubiquitous brown cloth of the Portuguese peasants, their hair had grown long, the polish had long

disappeared from buttons and badges. Sir Arthur Wellesley did not mind; he only cared that a

soldier had sixty rounds of ammunition and a clear head, and if his trousers were brown instead

of white then it made no difference to the outcome of a fight. But this Battalion was fresh from

England. Their coats were a brilliant scarlet, their crossbelts pipeclayed white, their boots a

mirror-surfaced black. Each man wore tightly-buttoned gaiters and, even more surprising, they

still wore the infamous stocks; four inches of stiffly varnished black leather that constricted

the neck and was supposed to keep a man's chin high and back straight. Sharpe could not remember

when he had last seen a stock; once on campaign the men `lost' them, and with them went the

running sores where the rigid leather dug into the soft flesh beneath the jawbone.
    "They've taken the wrong turning for Windsor Castle," Harper said.
    Sharpe shook his head. "They're unbelievable!" Whoever commanded this Battalion must have made

the men's lives hell to keep them looking so immaculate despite the voyage from England in

cramped and foul ships and the long march from Lisbon in the summer heat. Their weapons shone,

their equipment was pristine and regular, while their faces bulged red from the constricting

stocks and the unaccustomed sun. At the head of each company rode the officers, all, Sharpe

noted, mounted superbly. The colours were cased in polished leather and guarded by Sergeants

whose halberd blades had been burnished to a brilliant, glittering sheen. The men marched in

perfect step, looking neither right nor left, for all the world, as Harper had said, as if they

were marching for the Royal duty at Windsor.
    "Who are they?" Sharpe was trying to think of the Regiments who had yellow facings on their

uniforms but this looked like none of the Regiments he knew.
    "The South Essex," Hogan said.
    "The who?"
    "The South Essex. They're new, very new. Just raised by Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry

Simmerson, a cousin of General Sir Banestre Tarleton."
    Sharpe whistled softly. Tarleton had fought in the American war and now sat in Parliament as

Wellesley's bitterest military opponent. Sharpe had heard said that Tarleton wanted the command

of the army in Portugal for himself and bitterly resented the younger man's prefer-ment. Tarleton

was a man of influence, a dangerous enemy for Wellesley, and Sharpe knew enough about the

politics of high command to realise that the presence of Tarleton's cousin in the army would not

be