Sharpe 10 Sharpe's Escape by Bernard Cornwell

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

Chapter 8

THE FIRST IDEA was to break through the trapdoor and then work on whatever had been piled above. "Go through the edge of the hatch," Vicente suggested, "then perhaps we can break through the box above? Take everything out of the box? Then wriggle through?"

Sharpe could think of nothing else that might free them, so he and Harper set to work. They tried raising the trapdoor first, crouching beneath it and heaving up, but the wood did not move a fraction of an inch, and so they started to carve away at the timbers. Vicente, with his wounded shoulder, could not help, so he and Sarah sat in the cellar as far from the two decaying bodies as they could and listened as Sharpe and Harper attacked the trapdoor. Harper used his sword bayonet and, because that was a shorter blade than Sharpe's sword, worked farther up the steps. Sharpe took off his jacket, stripped off his shirt and wrapped the linen round the blade so he could grip the edge without being cut. He told Harper what he was doing and suggested he might want to protect his own hands. "Pity, though," Sharpe said, "this is a new shirt."

"A present from a certain seamstress in Lisbon?" Harper asked.

"It was, yes."

Harper chuckled, then stabbed the blade upwards. Sharpe did the same with his sword and they worked in silence mostly, gouging in the dark, splintering and levering out scraps of tough, ancient wood. Once in a while a blade would encounter a nail and they would swear.

"It's a real language lesson," Sarah said after a while.

"I'm sorry, miss," Sharpe said.

"You sort of don't notice when you're in the army," Harper explained.

"Do all soldiers swear?"

"All of them," Sharpe said, "all of the time. Except for Daddy Hill."

"General Hill, miss," Harper explained, "who's noted for his very clean mouth."

"And Sergeant Read," Sharpe added, "he never swears. He's a Methodist, miss."

"I've heard him swear," Harper said, "when bloody Batten stole eight pages from his Bible to use as…" He stopped suddenly, deciding Sarah did not want to know what use Batten had made of the book of Deuteronomy, then gave a grunt as a great splinter cracked away. "Be through this in no bloody time," he said cheerfully.

The timbers of the trapdoor were at least three inches thick, and reinforced by two sturdy beams on their underside. For the moment Sharpe and Harper were ignoring the beam on their side, reckoning it was best to break through the trapdoor before worrying how to remove the bigger piece of timber. The wood was hard, but they learned to weaken its grain by repeated stabbing, then they scraped and gouged and prised the loosened timber away. The broken wood came in thimblefuls, in dust, scrap by scrap, and the cramped area under the steps gave them little space. They had to rest just to stretch their muscles from time to time, and at other times it seemed that no amount of stabbing and scraping would loosen another piece, for the two weapons were ill suited to the work.

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