Read Online Sharpe's Fury - 11 by Bernard Cornwell - Free Book Online Page B

pond, full of brown leaves and stagnant water, and then an avenue of statues. The statues were all of saints writhing in their death agonies. Sebastian clutched at the stub of an arrow piercing his ribs, Agnes stared serenely heavenward despite the sword in her throat, while next to her Andrew hung upside down on his cross. There were men being burned, women being disemboweled, and all of them preserved in white marble streaked with lichen and bird droppings. The ragged soldiers stared wide-eyed and the Catholics among them made the sign of the cross while Sharpe looked for any sign of life in the house. The windows remained shuttered, but smoke still drifted from a chimney, and then the big door that opened onto a balustraded terrace was thrown open and a man, dressed in black, stepped into the sunlight and waited as though he had been expecting them. “We had best observe the proprieties,” Moon said.
    “Sir?” Sharpe asked.
    “For God’s sake, Sharpe, gentry live here! They don’t want their drawing room filled with common soldiers, do they? You and I can go in, but the men have to find the servants’ quarters.”
    “Do they drop your stretcher outside, sir?” Sharpe asked innocently, and thought he heard a slight snort from Harper.
    “Don’t be ridiculous, Sharpe,” the brigadier said. “They can carry me in first.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Sharpe left the men on the terrace as he accompanied the brigadier into a vast room filled with dark furniture and hung with gloomy pictures, most showing scenes of martyrdom. More saints burned here, or else gazed in rapture as soldiers skewered them, while over the mantel was a life-size painting of the crucifixion. Christ’s pale body was laced with blood while behind him a great thunderstorm unleashed lightning on a cowering city. A crucifix made of a wood so dark it was almost black hung at the other end of the room and beneath it was a private shrine draped in black on which a saber lay between two unlit candles.
    The man who had greeted them was a servant who informed the brigadier that the Marquesa would join him very soon, and was there anything that his guests needed? Sharpe did his best to translate, using more Portuguese with the servant than Spanish. “Tell him I need breakfast, Sharpe,” the brigadier commanded, “and a doctor.”
    Sharpe passed on the requests, then added that his men needed food and water. The servant bowed and said he would take the soldiers to the kitchen. He left Sharpe alone with Moon who was now lying on a couch. “Damned uncomfortable furniture,” the brigadier said. He grimaced from a stab of pain in his leg, then looked up at the paintings. “How do they live with this gloom?”
    “I suppose they’re religious, sir.”
    “We’re all bloody religious, man, but that doesn’t mean we hang paintings of torture on our walls! Good God incarnate. Nothing wrong with a few decent landscapes and some family portraits. Did he say there was a Marquesa here?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Well let’s hope she’s easier on the eye than her damned paintings, eh?”
    “I think I ought to make sure the men are properly settled, sir,” Sharpe said.
    “Good idea,” Moon said, subtly insinuating that Sharpe would be happier in the servants’ quarters. “Do take your time, Sharpe. That fellow understood I need a doctor?”
    “He did, sir.”
    “And food?”
    “He knows that too, sir.”
    “Pray God he gets both here before sundown. Oh, and Sharpe, send that bright young fellow, the one who speaks the languages, to translate for me. But tell him to smarten himself up first.” The brigadier jerked his head, dismissing Sharpe who went back onto the terrace and found his way through an alley, across the stable yard, and so to a whitewashed kitchen hung with hams and smelling of wood smoke, cheese, and baking bread. A crucifix hung above the huge fireplace where two cooks were busy at a blackened stove. A third woman pounded a mass of dough on a