'You heard it?

'Isabella heard it! Harper's eyes, beneath the sandy-brown eyebrows, were belligerent. His indignation had thickened the Ulster accent. 'Your man is hardly going to lie in his own pulpit! What's the point of that?

Sharpe shook his head. He had fought with Harper on a dozen battlefields, he would count the Sergeant as a friend, yet he was not used to this bitterness. Harper had the calm confidence of a strong man. He had an unconquerable humour that saw him through battlefields, bivouacs, and the malevolent fate that had forced him, an Irishman, into England's army. Yet Donegal was never far from Harper's mind and there was something in this rumour that had touched the patriotic nerve that smarted whenever Harper thought of how England had treated Ireland. Protestants raping and killing Catholics, a holy place defiled, the ingredients were seething in Harper's head. Sharpe grinned. 'Do you really believe, Sergeant, that some of our lads went to a village and killed a Spanish garrison and raped all the women? Truly! Does that sound right to you?

Harper shrugged, thought reluctantly. 'I give you it's the first time, I give you that. But it happened!

'For God's sake why would they do it?

'Because they're Protestant, sir! Go a hundred miles just to kill a Catholic, so they will. It's in the blood!

Sergeant Huckfield, a Protestant from the English shires, spat a blade of grass from his lips. 'Harps! And what about your bloody lot? The Inquisition? You never heard of the Inquisition in your country? Christ! You talk about killing! We learned it all from bloody Rome!

'Enough! Sharpe had endured this argument too often and certainly did not want it aired when Harper was filled with anger. He saw the huge Irishman about to utter again and he stopped it before tempers flared. 'I said enough! He twisted round to see if Gilliland's troop had finished their seemingly interminable preparations and vented his anger on their slowness.