Read Sharpe 16 - Sharpe's Honour for Free Online Page B

Sharpe suspected that Harper would be marrying before the year's end.
    The huge Irishman pushed his shako back and scratched at his sandy hair. `Did your dago find you, sir?'
    `Dago?'
    `Officer; a real ribbon-merchant. He was sniffing about this morning, so he was. Looked as if he'd lost his purse. Grim as a bloody judge.'
    `I was here.'
    Harper shrugged. `Probably wasn't important.'
    But Sharpe was frowning. He did not know why, but his instinct, that kept him alive on. the battlefield, was suddenly warning him of trouble. The warning was sufficient to destroy the small moment of happiness that insulting the tents had given him. It was as if, on a day of hope and peace, he had suddenly smelt French cavalry. `What time was he here?'
    `Sunrise.' Harper sensed the sudden alertness. `He was just a young fellow.'
    Sharpe could think of no reason why a Spanish officer should want to see him, and when something had no reason, it was liable to be dangerous. He gave the tents a parting kick. `Let me know if you see him again.'
    `Aye, sir.' Harper watched Sharpe walk towards the Battalion's headquarters. He wondered why the mention of the gaudy-uniformed Spaniard had plunged Sharpe into such sudden tenseness. Perhaps, he thought, it was just more of Sharpe's guilt and grief.
    Harper could understand grief, but he sensed that Sharpe's mood was not simple grief. It seemed to the big Irishman that his friend had begun to hate himself, perhaps blaming himself for his wife's death and the abandonment of his child. Whatever it was, Harper thought, he hoped that soon the army would march against the French. By that bridge, when the infantrymen had not a shot between them, Harper had seen the old energy and enthusiasm. Whatever Sharpe's sadness was, it had not stopped his ability to fight.
    `He needs a good battle,' he said to'Isabella that night.
    She made a scornful sound. `He needs another wife.'
    Harper laughed. `That's all you women think about. Marriage, marriage, marriage!' He had been drinking with the other Sergeants of the Battalion and had come back late to find the food she had cooked for him spoilt.
    She pushed the burnt eggs about the pan as if hoping that by rearranging them she would improve their looks. `And what's wrong with marriage?'
    Harper, who could sense marriage on his own horizon, decided that discretion was the best part of valour. `Nothing at all. Have you got any bread?'
    `You know I have. You fetch it.'
    There were limits to discretion, though. A man's job was not to fetch bread, or be on time for a meal, and Harper sat silent as Isabella grumbled about the billet and as she complained to him about the landlady, and about Sergeant Pierce's wife who had stolen a bucket of water, and told him that he should see a priest before the campaign began so as to make a good confession. Harper half listened to it all. `I smell trouble ahead.'
    `You're right.' Isabella scooped the eggs onto a tin plate.
    `Big trouble if you don't fetch the bread.' When she spoke English she did it with a northern Irish accent.
    `Fetch it yourself, woman.'
    She said something that Harper's Spanish was not good enough to understand, but went to the corner of the room and unearthed the hidden loaf. `What kind of trouble, Patrick?'
    `He's bored.'
    `The Major?'
    `Aye.' Harper deigned to cut the loaf with his rifle's bayonet. `He's bored, my love, and when he's bored he gets into trouble.'
    Isabella poured the ration wine. `Rainbows?'
    Harper laughed. He was fond of saying that Major Sharpe was always chasing the pot of gold that lay at the end of every rainbow. He found the pots often enough, but, according to Harper, he always discarded them because the pots were the wrong shape. `Aye. The bugger's chasing rainbows again.'
    `He should get married.'
    Harper kept a diplomatic silence, but his instinct, like Sharpe's, suddenly sensed danger. He was remembering Sharpe's sudden change of mood that day when he had mentioned the ribbon-merchant, and