Sharpe's Skirmish by Bernard Cornwell Read Free Book Online

aware that his men were shouting angrily out on the bridge.
    He hurried back. Most of his troopers had not needed to dismount and cross the barricade, and those men now milled about at the bridge's southern end. And there they were suffering because a steady fire was coming from a white farmhouse just a couple of hundred paces down the road. Horses were whinnying in pain, men were on the ground, and the damn fire kept coming and it struck Pailleterie that he had seen green jackets, which meant riflemen, and if he did not shelter his men soon then the damned rifles would kill every last one of them.
    "Sergeant! Move the wagon! Move it!"
    A dozen men heaved the wagon up, thrusting one pair of its wheels onto the bridge's parapet, and the horses at last had an escape route across the bridge. "Into the fort!" Pailleterie shouted, "into the fort!" A corporal had rescued the Captain's own horse, and Pailleterie led the beast into the courtyard where it was safe from the rifle fire. Then he opened a saddlebag and took out a tricolour. He gave the flag to Coignet. "Hang it on the battlements, Sergeant."
    Hagman and his riflemen had gone down the ladder stairs and now bolted out of the door leading to the storeroom. The French found that entrance a moment too late, but it did not matter. They had seized San Miguel, they had secured the river crossing, and Herault was coming to spread panic along the British supply lines.
    And the tricolour flew above the Tormes.
    It was Sergeant Coignet who found the wine, hundreds of bottles of it, all hidden behind the chipped plaster image of the Virgin Mary that stood in the small shrine across the bridge from the fort. "You want me to break the bottles, sir" He asked Pailleterie.
    "Leave them be," Pailleterie said. The wine would make a gift for General Herault. "But make sure no one takes any. If one man gets drunk Sergeant, I'll geld him."
    "They'll not touch it, sir," Coignet promised. He was a short, tough man who had never known any life other than the army, and within the elite company his word was law. The wine was safe.
    Pailleterie had taken three prisoners. Two were wounded redcoats, one of whom would probably die, while the third was a plump man in a blue uniform who claimed to be a Major of the Commissary service. His presence was explained by the hoard of French muskets that the hussars had discovered, muskets that would now go back to their proper owners. "You give me your word as a gentleman," Pailleterie asked Tubbs in English, "that you will not try to escape?"
    "Of course not," Tubbs said.
    "You won't give me your word?"
    "No, no! I won't try to escape!" Tubbs backed away from the pigtailed Frenchman.
    "Then you may keep your sword, monsieur, and do me the honour of staying inside the fortress."
    Not that any of the hussars had much choice in the matter, for whenever they spent too long outside the fort's walls a rifleman would fire.
    Coignet had narrowly escaped injury when he went to explore the shrine, and two men had been wounded when Pailleterie had tipped the wagon that had been half-blocking the bridge over the parapet and into the river.
    Pailleterie regretted the wounding of those two men, but he needed the roadway to be clear for Herault, and so he had led twenty men out of the fort where they immediately came under fire from the farmhouse on the northern bank. Once the barricade was gone Pailleterie ordered his men to stay inside the fort's walls, even though his Lieutenant, who had been watching the farmhouse from the parapet, swore that the riflemen there had now run away. But Pailleterie knew that if they stayed inside the fort his hussars and their horses were safe. The British might try to recapture the bridge, but Pailleterie was confident he could thwart them. He had forty of his men lined in the fort's gateway, all armed with pistols, and if the British did run up the road and turn into the arch they would die in a blistering volley.
    So the road from the south