Free Sharpe 3-Book Collection 5: Sharpe's Company, Sharpe's Sword, Sharpe's Enemy by Bernard Cornwell

Battalion, marching at the rear with their children, brought small presents to Sharpe and Teresa. A blanket, a pair of baby’s mittens knitted from an unravelled sock, a carved rattle. Sharpe was surprised, touched and embarrassed by the pleasure the news had caused.
    The men themselves were confident, looking forward to Badajoz because the casualties at Ciudad Rodrigo had been blessedly light. The South Essex, like the rest of the army, thought that if they could storm the breaches at Ciudad Rodrigo for only sixty dead, then they would slice through the defences of Badajoz for a similarly light loss. Teresa listened to them and had shaken her head. ‘They don’t know Badajoz.’ Perhaps, Sharpe thought, it was as well that they did not.
    ‘Where are we going?’
    ‘Badajoz!’
     
    They stopped three days in Portalegre, letting a rainstorm hammer overhead that had made the roads treacherous and a river crossing impassable. They were the only battalion in town, living in comfort, but Sharpe could see from the doorposts of the houses how frequently the army had used this road. The Commissary marked the doors with chalk; thus SE/L/6 meant that six men of the South Essex’s Light Company were to be billeted in that particular house, but each house had a jumble of such fading marks that spoke of the years of this war. The marks told of English Regiments, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, German, Portuguese, and there were even strange markings left by the French battalions. Only when Badajoz was taken would the war move again into Spain and leave Portalegre to its customary peace.
    Sharpe and Teresa slept in an inn, the Battalion’s headquarters, and for Sharpe the three days were a period of contentment, perhaps his last before they would meet again, if they did, inside high, dark fortress walls. Teresa was leaving soon, riding on ahead to Badajoz, to the small, sick baby. She had to leave before the British arrived at the city and its gates were shut.
    ‘Why Badajoz?’ Sharpe asked the question again, lying in the Portalegre attic as the afternoon rained itself into a soaking night.
    ‘I had family there. I didn’t want her born at home.’
    He knew why! Because his daughter was a bastard, with the mark of shame on her. ‘But they know, don’t they?’
    She shrugged. ‘They know, but they don’t see what they know, so they pretend they do not know.’ She shrugged again. ‘And my father’s brother is a rich man, they’re childless, and they look after her well.’
    Antonia was ill. Teresa did not know what was the matter, nor indeed did the doctors, but the child was small, did not hold her food, and the sisters in the convent had said that the child would die.
    Teresa shook her head. ‘She will not.’ It was said with grim determination; no child of hers would give up easily its hold on life.
    ‘And she has black hair?’ Sharpe was enthralled by any scrap of information.
    ‘You know she has, I have told you a hundred times. Long, black hair, and she was born with it, then it all fell out, and now it is coming back. And she has a little nose. Not like mine, and not bent like yours.’
    ‘Perhaps she isn’t mine.’
    She hit him, laughing. ‘She’s yours. She scowls, like this.’ And she screwed up her face in imitation of Sharpe and growled at him so that he pulled her down on to the bed and they lay in silence, the rain slapping at the window, and he wondered what lay ahead on the greasy, stony road.
    ‘Perhaps we should marry?’
    She did not reply at first. She lay beside him and listened to the rain, to voices downstairs, and then the clatter of hooves in the stableyard. ‘Someone’s travelling.’
    He said nothing.
    She traced the scar on his cheek. ‘Would you live in Casatejada?’
    He still lay silent. To be a stranger in a strange land? To be Teresa’s man, dependant on her for survival? He sighed. ‘Maybe. After the war.’
    She smiled, knowing the answer to be meaningless. This was the fourth