Sharpe 11 Sharpe's fury by Bernard Cornwell

Author:Bernard Cornwell
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

S HARPE SCRAMBLED UP THE ladder. A musket fired from the nave, its sound magnified by the cathedral walls. He heard the ball crack on stone and whine off into the transept. Then an enormous crash prompted a shout of alarm from his pursuers. Harper had thrown a block of building stone into the crossing and the limestone shattered there, skittering shards across the floor.

"Another ladder, sir!" Harper called from above and Sharpe saw the second ladder climbing into the upper gloom. Each of the massive pillars at the corners of the crossing supported a tower of scaffolding, but once the four flimsy towers reached the arches spanning the pillars the scaffolding branched and joined to encompass the walls climbing to the base of the dome. Another musket fired and the ball buried itself in a plank, starting dust that half choked Sharpe as he climbed the second ladder that swayed alarmingly. "Here, sir!" Harper reached out a hand. The Irishman and Lord Pumphrey were on the wide stone ledge of the tambour, a decorative shelf running around the middle of the pillar. Sharpe guessed he was forty feet above the cathedral floor now, and the pillar climbed that far again before the scaffolding spread out beneath the dome. There was a window high in the gloom. He could not see it, but he remembered it.

"What have you done?" Lord Pumphrey asked angrily. "We should have negotiated! We didn't even see the letters!"

"You can see them now," Sharpe said, and he thrust the packet into Pumphrey's hands.

"Do you know what offense this will cause the Spaniards?" Lord Pumphrey's anger was unassuaged by the gift of the packet. "This is a cathedral! They'll have soldiers here at any moment!"

Sharpe gave his opinion of that statement, then peered over the tambour's edge as he reloaded the rifle. They were safe enough for the moment because the stone ledge was wide and it protected them from any shots fired from the crossing's floor, but he guessed their enemies would soon try to climb the scaffold and attack them from the flanks. He could hear men talking below, but he could also hear something odd, something that sounded like battle. It was a booming sound like cannon fire. It crackled, rose, and fell, and Sharpe realized it was the wind tearing at the tarpaulins covering the unfinished roof. A louder grumble overlaid the booming, and that was thunder. Any noise of guns in the cathedral would be drowned by the storm and besides, Montseny had bolted the doors. The priest would send for no soldiers. He wanted the gold.

A volley of musketry cracked and echoed and the balls spattered all around the tambour. Sharpe guessed the shots must have been fired to protect someone climbing a ladder. He looked, saw the shadow on the opposite pillar, aimed the rifle, and pulled the trigger. The man was hurled sideways off the rungs and fell to the floor before crawling into the nave's choir stalls and so out of sight.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.