SHARPE’S
WATERLOO
Richard Sharpe and the Waterloo Campaign, 15 June to 18 June 1815
BERNARD CORNWELL

Copyright

This novel is a work of fiction. The incidents and some of the characters portrayed in it, while based on real events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 1990

Copyright © Rifleman Productions 1990

Foreword © Bernard Cornwell 2015

Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007452903

Ebook Edition © JULY 2009 ISBN: 9780007338764

Version: 2017-04-25

Sharpe’s Waterloo is for Judy, with all my love

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Foreword

Maps

The First Day: Thursday, 15 June 1815

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

The Second Day: Friday, 16 June 1815

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

The Third Day: Saturday, 17 June 1815

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

The Fourth Day: Sunday, 18 June 1815

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Epilogue

Historical Note

Sharpe’s Story

Keep Reading

About the Author

The SHARPE Series (in chronological order)

The SHARPE Series (in order of publication)

Also by Bernard Cornwell

About the Publisher

‘A brilliantly imaginative novel which sweeps you along at breakneck speed’

Mary Wesley

FOREWORD

I wrote Sharpe’s Waterloo in 1990 and found it a most frustrating book. I had devised a plot (much of it revolving around Lord John Rossendale, Sharpe and Jane), but quickly discovered that no plot of mine could compete with the dramatic story of the battle itself. The whole story, from the first shots of the campaign to the collapse of Napoleon’s army, took place in just four days, and those four days saw four battles (Ligny, Quatre Bras, Wavre and Waterloo). There was to be more fighting as the allies advanced on Paris, but essentially Napoleon’s ambitions and the hopes of France collapsed on the ridge of Mont St Jean on the evening of 18 June 1815.

The two leading characters of Waterloo are as compelling as the battle itself. By 1815 no one would have denied that the two greatest soldiers of the age were Napoleon and Wellington. Napoleon had engulfed Europe in war, leading his eagles from Madrid to Moscow, shattering armies, toppling thrones and gaining such great triumphs as Friedland and Austerlitz. His armies moved fast, he had a talent for spotting and exploiting an enemy’s weakness, he was an inspiration to his men, and his presence on the battlefield, the Duke of Wellington reckoned, was worth 40,000 men. He was extraordinarily hard-working, had a genius for administration, and his legislative accomplishments still command much of Europe, but above all else he was a warlord. He gave France what she craved, la gloire! His ambitions were gargantuan, leading to such spectacular failures as the Russian campaign of 1812, but no one doubted his talents. In 1814, as the allies gradually tightened their noose about Paris, he dazzled them with his lightning marches and sudden assaults. He was, as his enemy Czar Alexander called him, ‘the world’s Conqueror’.

But Czar Alexander also called Wellington ‘the Conqueror of the world’s Conqueror’. The Duke was not flamboyant like the Emperor, he did not rouse fervent adulation from his men, he even had a reputation as a cautious general, but he was a general who, unlike Napoleon, had never lost a battle. He had a wealth of common sense, a talent for reading ground, and a care for his troops which they rewarded with dogged loyalty. His enemies scorned him as a defensive general, and it is true that a quick way to lose any battle was to attack the Duke in a position he had decided to defend, but at Assaye, Salamanca and Vittoria he had shown he could attack with a panache and daring the equal of Napoleon’s. He and the Emperor were both forty-six years old in 1815, and both men had been fighting for their entire adult lives, yet they had never met in battle. No one doubted they were the two greatest generals of the era, but if they met, who would prove the greater? That drama is also part of the story of Waterloo, and made more dramatic by the knowledge that each man knew the reputation of the other. They were fighting for posterity’s judgement as well as the fate of nations.

And the battle has a cliff-hanger of an ending. Waterloo was, as the Duke often admitted, a very close-run thing. ‘It was the most desperate business I was ever in,’ he wrote to his brother William after the battle. ‘I never took so much trouble about any battle, and was never so near to being beat.’ Since late morning the French had assaulted the Duke’s position, attack after attack, each one wearing the thin red line ever thinner, until at last, around 7.30 p.m. on the evening of 18 June, the Emperor launched his Imperial Guard against Wellington’s right flank. The Imperial Guard! They were the elite of Napoleon’s army, deeply experienced, proven brave, fervently loyal and protecting the reputation of being unbeatable. When in trouble Napoleon sent in the Guard and again and again they had won his battles. They were the famous ‘immortals’, and as the sun went lower across a battlefield heated by the great guns, shrouded by smoke and littered with corpses, the Imperial Guard was sent to break the Duke’s army. What happened next is one of the great passages of arms and the culmination of that most desperate business.

So it is a magnificent story, but I would be the first to admit that the version told in the novel Sharpe’s Waterloo is skewed by Sharpe’s point of view. He is fiercely protective of the British army and, like many of the battle’s British survivors, is scornful of his allies (with the exception of the King’s German Legion which was regarded as every bit as good as the British army). The Prussians are acknowledged as helpful, but blamed for being late. Waterloo, then, is depicted as a British victory. I knew, when I wrote the novel, that this was a distortion but Sharpe would have shared the prejudices of the rest of the army. Then, two years ago, I wrote Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles, a non-fiction account of the events described in the novel and, of course, the viewpoint is very different (The ‘Three Battles’ in the title are Ligny, Quatre Bras and Waterloo as the book more or less ignored the battle of Wavre altogether). The truth is that Waterloo was essentially an allied victory. Wellington would never have defended the ridge at Mont St Jean if he had not been totally confident that the Prussians were coming to his aid, and Blücher would never have marched to Mont St Jean if he had not believed that Wellington would stay and fight. For both men the decisions were brave and difficult, and if either had mistrusted the other then the campaign would have been lost. Yes, it is true that the Prussians took longer to arrive than either Wellington or Blücher had hoped, but that late arrival, though it stretched Wellington’s resources perilously thin, also doomed the French because, by the time the Prussians attacked, Napoleon’s army was wholly committed to the attack on Wellington’s position and had no chance of disengaging. A defeat turned into a rout.

Waterloo ended the long world war which had seen both Washington and Moscow burned. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were the culmination of fifty years of intense rivalry between Britain and France and the war’s outcome was a British triumph, so it is not unsurprising that Waterloo was depicted by the British as their triumph rather than as an allied victory. Nowhere illustrates that better than the fight at Hougoumont. The château was garrisoned by Dutch and British troops. The Dutch were posted ahead of the château, guarding the wood which lay between Hougoumont and the French position so, naturally, they were the first to go into action when the French attacked. They were hugely outnum-bered and forced to retreat. They could not enter the château on its northern side (which faced the French) because all the gateways had been blockaded so they ran around the edges of the compound to join the defenders inside the walls. The British saw them running and must have believed they were fleeing. One British Guard’s officer wrote scornfully, ‘the Dutch instantly gave way and fled’. Another Guard’s officer recalled, ‘after the first hour there was not one of them to be seen, they had all vanished.’ That testimony seems fairly clear, the Dutch had fled in panic, but Dutch accounts tell a very different story! A Dutch officer said that his men defended the château and were reinforced by some British Guards who came to ‘support the battalion under my command’, which suggests that the British played a secondary role! Other Dutch accounts confirm that their troops were in the fighting that raged all afternoon and into the evening, but British accounts of the battle rarely gave them any credit. The nineteenth century was to be Britain’s era, she ruled the world, and the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo were seen as justification for her pre-eminence so the British were loath to share any of the credit for those victories.

It was not Sharpe’s business to be fair to his allies, that would be asking too much of him, and like all the other men who survived that terrible day, his memory was shaky. Men saw little of the battle. Smoke hung thick across the field. For much of the day the allied infantry was sheltered on the reverse slope, unable to see into the valley where the killing took place. And what they did see was often confusing and terrifying. One British infantry officer said he hardly saw a Frenchman all day, just thick skeins of smoke being lit by musket flashes, so his men fired at the flashes. ‘I am endeavouring to do an impossibility,’ one young British officer wrote to his father just afterwards, ‘to describe a battle’. Captain Powell of the 1st Foot Guards was sure his battalion was attacked by 6,000 men of the Imperial Guard, but there could not have been more than 2,000 attackers. Ensign Leeke of the 52nd, who was engaged in the same fight against the Chasseurs, confidently believed they numbered about 10,000. This is not to criticize the men who were there, they were brave and they achieved greatness at Mont St Jean, but their recollections are not always accurate.

Waterloo is a magnificent and terrible story, but it is not just the story of a great British triumph. It is the tale of an allied victory in which the British played a crucial part. When the Duke finally waved his line forward at the end of the day Von Müffling, the Duke’s Prussian liaison officer, recalled, ‘when the line of infantry moved forward small masses of only some hundred men, at great intervals, were seen everywhere advancing. The position in which the infantry had fought was marked, as far as the eye could see, by a red line caused by the red uniforms of the numerous killed and wounded who lay there.’

That is a terrible image, a tideline of dead and dying men.

No one knows how many died at Waterloo, or died of their injuries in the days that followed. A conservative estimate would be that about 12,000 men lay dead as night fell on 18 June, and some 30,000 to 40,000 wounded. Many of those wounded were doomed. The 32nd, a British regiment, had twenty-eight men killed in the battle and 146 wounded, but forty-four of those wounded subsequently died. The Prussians took ghastly casualties at Plancenoit, while the French probably suffered worst of all. They began the battle with close to 77,000 men, but a week or so later the musters showed only 44,000 still with the colours. Many of those missing men had deserted, of course, but far too many were dead or dying.

Harry Smith, the Rifleman hero of the Peninsular Wars, wrote afterwards:

I had been over many a field of battle, but with the exception of one spot at New Orleans and the breach of Badajos, I had never seen anything to compare with what I saw. At Waterloo the whole field from right to left was a mass of dead bodies. In one spot, to the right of La Haye Sainte, the French Cuirassiers were literally piled on each other; many soldiers not wounded lying under their horses; others, fearfully wounded, occasionally with their horses struggling on their wounded bodies. The sight was sickening … All over the field you saw officers, and as many soldiers as were permitted to leave the ranks, leaning and weeping over some dead or dying brother or comrade. The battle was fought on a Sunday, the 18th June, and I repeated to myself a verse from the Psalms of that day – 91st Psalm, 7th verse; ‘A thousand shall fall beside thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.’

They were all brave men; Prussians, Hanoverians, Dutch, British and French. It was a terrible day, an awful battle, and no wonder that afterwards the Duke of Wellington was to say ‘I pray to God I have fought my last battle’.

He had. And in winning his last, most desperate, battle he bequeathed us a magnificent story. The one you’re about to read is not inaccurate, merely one-sided. Sharpe and his companions fought desperately, that tideline of red uniforms was mute witness to their bravery, but so did the Dutch, the Hanoverians, the Prussians and the French.

Waterloo was an allied victory. And a terrific story.

Bernard Cornwell

April 2015

THE FIRST DAY

CHAPTER ONE

It was dawn on the northern frontier of France; a border marked only by a shallow stream which ran between the stunted trunks of pollarded willows. A paved high road forded the stream. The road led north from France into the Dutch province of Belgium, but there was neither guardpost nor gate to show where the road left the French Empire to enter the Kingdom of the Netherlands. There was just the summer-shrunken stream from which a pale mist drifted to lie in shadowy skeins across the plump fields of wheat and rye and barley.

The rising sun appeared like a swollen red ball suspended low in the tenuous mist. The sky was still dark in the west. An owl flew over the ford, banked into a beechwood and gave a last hollow call, which was lost in the dawn’s loud chorus that seemed to presage a bright hot summer’s day in this rich and placid countryside. The cloudless sky promised a day for haymaking, or a day for lovers to stroll through heavy-leafed woods to rest beside the green cool of a streambank. It was a perfect midsummer’s dawn on the northern border of France and for a moment, for a last heart-aching moment, the world was at peace.

Then hundreds of hooves crashed through the ford, spattering water bright into the mist. Uniformed men, long swords in their hands, rode north out of France. The men were Dragoons who wore brass helmets covered with drab cloth so the rising sun would not reflect from the shining metal to betray their position. The horsemen had short-barrelled muskets thrust into bucket holsters on their saddles.

The Dragoons were the vanguard of an army. A hundred and twenty-five thousand men were marching north on every road that led to the river-crossing at Charleroi. This was invasion; an army flooding across an unguarded frontier with wagons and coaches and ambulances and three hundred and forty-four guns and thirty thousand horses and portable forges and pontoon bridges and whores and wives and colours and lances and muskets and sabres and all the hopes of France. This was the Emperor Napoleon’s Army of the North and it marched towards the waiting Dutch, British and Prussian forces.

The French Dragoons crossed the frontier with drawn swords, but the weapons served no purpose other than to dignify the moment with a suitable melodrama, for there was not so much as a single Dutch customs officer to oppose the invasion. There were just the mist and the empty roads, and the far-off crowing of cockerels in the dawn. A few dogs barked as the invading cavalrymen captured the first Dutch villages unopposed. The Dragoons hammered their sword hilts against doors and window shutters, demanding to know whether any British or Prussian soldiers were billeted within.

‘They’re all to the north. They hardly ever show themselves here!’ The villagers spoke French; indeed, they thought of themselves as French citizens and consequently welcomed the helmeted Dragoons with cups of wine and offers of food. To these reluctant Dutchmen the invasion was a liberation, and even the weather matched their joy; the sun was climbing into a cloudless sky and beginning to burn off the mist which still clung in the leafy valleys.

On the main highway leading to Charleroi and Brussels the Dragoons were clattering along at a fine pace, almost as if this was an exercise in Provence instead of war. A lieutenant of Dragoons was so dismissive of any danger that he was eagerly telling his Sergeant how the new science of phrenology measured human aptitudes from the shape of a man’s skull. The Lieutenant opined that when the science was properly understood all promotion in the army would be based on careful skull measurements. ‘We’ll be able to measure courage and decisiveness, common sense and honesty, and all with a pair of calipers and a measuring tape!’

The Sergeant did not respond. He and his officer rode at the head of their squadron, and were thus at the very tip of the advancing French army. In truth the Sergeant was not really listening to the Lieutenant’s enthusiastic explanation; instead he was partly anticipating the Belgian girls and partly worrying when this headlong advance would run into the enemy picquets. Surely the British and Prussians had not fled?

The Lieutenant was somewhat piqued by his Sergeant’s apparent lack of interest in phrenology, though the Sergeant’s low and scowling brow ridge undoubtedly betrayed the scientific reason for his inability to accept new ideas. The Lieutenant nevertheless persisted in trying to enlighten the veteran soldier. ‘They’ve done studies on the criminal classes in Paris, Sergeant, and have discovered a remarkable correlation between –’

The remarkable correlation remained a mystery, because the hedgerow thirty yards ahead of the two horsemen exploded with musket-fire and the Lieutenant’s horse collapsed, shot in the chest. The horse screamed. Blood frothed at its teeth as it lashed frantically with its hooves. The Lieutenant, thrown from the saddle, was kicked in the pelvis by a thrashing hoof. He screamed as loudly as his horse that was now blocking the high road with its flailing death throes. The astonished Dragoons could hear the enemy ramrods rattling in their musket barrels. The Sergeant looked back at the troopers. ‘One of you kill that bloody horse!’

More shots hammered from the hedge. The ambushers were good. They had allowed the French horsemen to come very close before they opened fire. The Dragoons sheathed their long swords and drew their carbines, but their aim from horseback was uncertain and the short-barrelled carbine was a weapon of notorious inaccuracy. The Lieutenant’s horse still lashed and kicked on the road. The Sergeant was shouting for his men to advance. A trumpet called behind, ordering another troop to file right into a field of growing wheat. A trooper shot the Lieutenant’s horse, leaning from his saddle to put the bullet plumb into the beast’s skull. Another horse fell, this one with a leg bone shattered by a musket-ball. A Dragoon was lying in the ditch, his helmet fallen into a nettle patch. Horses crashed past the wounded Lieutenant, their hooves spurting mud and road-flints into the air. The Sergeant’s long sword shone silver.

More shots, but this time the gouts of white smoke were scattered more thinly along the hedgerow. ‘They’re retreating, sir!’ the Sergeant shouted to an officer far behind him, then, not waiting for any orders, spurred his horse forward. ‘Charge!’

The French Dragoons swept past the line of the hedge. They could see no enemy in the long-shadowed landscape, but they knew the ambushers had to be close. The Sergeant, suspecting that the enemy infantry was hiding in the mist-skeined wheat field, turned his horse off the lane, forced it through a ditch and so up into the wheat. He saw movement at the far side of the field, close by a dark-leafed wood. The movement resolved into men running towards the trees. The men wore dark blue uniform coats and had black shakos with silver rims. Prussian infantry. ‘There they are!’ The Sergeant pointed at the enemy with his sword. ‘After the bastards!’

Thirty Dragoons followed the Sergeant. They thrust their carbines into the bucket holsters on their saddles and dragged out their long straight-bladed swords. Prussian muskets pricked flame from the wood’s edge, but the shooting was at too long a range and only one French horse tumbled into the wheat. The remaining Dragoons swept on. The enemy picquet that had ambushed the French vanguard was hurrying to the shelter of the wood, but some of them had left their retreat too late and the Dragoons caught them. The Sergeant galloped past a man and cut back with a savage slash of his sword.

The Prussian infantryman clapped his hands to his sword-whipped face, trying to cram his eyes back into their sockets. Another man, ridden down by two Dragoons, choked on blood. ‘Charge!’ The Sergeant was carrying his sword to the infantry among the trees. He could see Prussian soldiers running away in the undergrowth and he felt the fierce exultation of a cavalryman given a helpless enemy to slaughter, but he did not see the battery of guns concealed in the deep shadows at the edge of the wood, nor the Prussian artillery officer who shouted, ‘Fire!’

One moment the Sergeant was screaming at his men to charge hard home, and the next he and his horse were hit by the metal gale of an exploding canister. Horse and man died instantly. Behind the Sergeant the Dragoons splayed left and right, but three other horses and four more men died. Two of the men were French and two were Prussian infantry who had left their retreat too late.

The Prussian gunner officer saw another troop of Dragoons threatening to outflank his position. He looked back to the road where yet more French cavalry had appeared, and he knew it could not be long before the first French eight-pounder cannon arrived. ‘Limber up!’

The Prussian guns galloped northwards, their retreat guarded by black-uniformed Hussars who wore skull and crossbone badges on their shakos. The French Dragoons did not follow immediately; instead they spurred into the abandoned wood where they found the Prussian camp-fires still burning. A plate of sausages had been spilt onto the ground beside one of the fires. ‘Tastes like German shit.’ A trooper disgustedly spat a mouthful of the meat into the fire.

A wounded horse limped in the wheat, trying to catch up with the other cavalry horses. In the trees two Prussian prisoners were being stripped of weapons, food, cash and drink. The other Prussians had disappeared northwards. The French, advancing to the northern edge of the captured wood, watched the enemy’s withdrawal. The last of the mist had burned away. The wheels of the retreating Prussian guns had carved lanes of crushed barley through the northern fields.

Ten miles to the south, and still in France, the Emperor’s heavy carriage waited at the roadside. Staff officers informed His Majesty that the Dutch frontier had been successfully crossed. They reported very light resistance, which had been brushed aside.

The Emperor grunted acknowledgement of the news then let the leather curtain fall to plunge the carriage’s interior into darkness. It was just one hundred and seven days since, sailing from exile in Elba with a mere thousand men, he had landed on an empty beach in southern France. It was just eighty-eight days since he had recaptured his capital of Paris, yet in those few days he had shown the world how an emperor made armies. Two hundred thousand veterans had been recalled to the Eagles, the half-pay officers had been restored to their battalions, and the arsenals of France had been filled. Now that new army marched against the scum of Britain and the hirelings of Prussia. It was a midsummer’s dawn, and the Emperor was attacking.

The coachman cracked his whip, the Emperor’s carriage lurched forward, and the battle for Europe had begun.

CHAPTER TWO

An hour after the French Dragoon Sergeant and his horse had been broken and flensed by the canister another cavalryman rode into the bright midsummer sunshine.

This man was in Brussels, forty miles north of where the Emperor invaded Belgium. He was a tall good-looking officer in the scarlet and blue finery of the British Life Guards. He rode a tall black horse, superbly groomed and evidently expensive. The rider wore a gilded Grecian helmet that was crested with black and red wool and plumed with a white tuft. His bleached buckskin breeches were still damp, for to achieve a thigh-hugging fit they were best donned wet and allowed to shrink. His straight heavy sword hung in a gilded scabbard by his royal blue saddle-cloth that was embroidered with the King’s cipher. The officer’s black boots were knee-high, his spurs were gilded steel, his sabretache was bright with sequins and with gold embroidery, his short scarlet jacket was girdled with a gold sash, and his tall stiff collar encrusted with bright lace. His saddle was sheathed in lamb’s fleece and the horse’s curb chains were of pure silver, yet, for all that gaudy finery, it was the British officer’s face that caught the attention.

He was a most handsome young man, and this early morning he was made even more attractive by his expression of pure happiness. It was plain to every milkmaid and street sweeper in the rue Royale that this British officer was glad to be alive, delighted to be in Belgium, and that he expected everyone in Brussels to share his evident enjoyment of life, health and happiness.

He touched the black enamelled visor of his helmet in answer to the salute of the red-coated sentry who stood outside an expensive front door, then cantered on through Brussels’ fashionable streets until he reached a large house on the rue de la Blanchisserie. It was still early, yet the courtyard of the house was busy with tradesmen and carts that delivered chairs, music stands, food and wine. An ostler took the cavalryman’s horse while a liveried footman relieved him of his helmet and cumbersome sword. The cavalry officer pushed a hand through his long golden hair as he ran up the house steps.

He did not wait for the servants to open the doors, but just pushed through into the entrance hall, and then into the great ballroom where a score of painters and upholsterers were finishing a long night’s work during which they had transformed the ballroom into a silk-hung fantasy. Shiny swathes of gold, scarlet and black fabric had been draped from the ceiling, while between the gaudy bolts a brand-new wallpaper of rose-covered trellis disguised the damp patches of the ballroom’s plaster. The room’s huge chandeliers had been lowered to floor level where servants laboriously slotted hundreds of white candles into the newly cleaned silver and crystal holders. More workers were twining vines of ivy around pillars newly painted orange, while an elderly woman was strewing the floor with French chalk so that the dancing shoes would not slip on the polished parquet.

The cavalry officer, clearly delighted with the elaborate preparations, strode through the room. ‘Bristow! Bristow!’ His tall boots left prints in the newly scattered chalk. ‘Bristow! You rogue! Where are you?’

A black coated, white-haired man, who bore the harassed look of the functionary in charge of the ball’s preparations, stepped from the supper room at the peremptory summons. His look of annoyance abruptly changed to a delighted smile when he recognized the young cavalry officer. He bowed deeply. ‘My lord!’

‘Good day to you, Bristow! It’s a positive delight to see you.’

‘As it is a delight to see your lordship again. I had not heard your lordship was in Brussels?’

‘I arrived yesterday. Last night.’ The cavalryman, who was called Lord John Rossendale, was staring at the sumptuous decorations in the supper room where the long tables were draped in white linen and thickly set with silver and fine china. ‘Couldn’t sleep,’ he explained his early appearance. ‘How many are you seating tonight?’

‘We have distributed four hundred and forty tickets, my lord.’

‘Four hundred and forty-two.’ Lord John Rossendale grinned at Bristow, then, as if he were a magician, produced a letter that he flourished in the elderly servant’s face. ‘Two tickets, if you would be so kind.’

Bristow took the letter, unfolded and read it. The letter was from Her Grace’s private secretary and gladly agreed that Lord John Rossendale should be given a ticket for the ball. One ticket, the letter said, and Bristow gently pointed to the instruction. ‘It says just one ticket, my lord.’

‘Two, Bristow. Two, two, two. Pretend you cannot read. I insist upon two. It has to be two! Or do you want me to wreak havoc on the supper tables?’

Bristow smiled. ‘I’m sure we can manage two, my lord.’ Bristow was butler to the Duke of Richmond whose wife was giving the ball in this large rented house. Competition to attend was keen. Much of London society had moved to Brussels for the summer, there were army officers who would be mortified if they were not invited, and there was the local aristocracy who had to be entertained. The Duchess’s answer to the eagerness of so many to attend her ball had been to have tickets of admission printed, yet, even so, Bristow expected there to be at least as many interlopers as ticket holders. It was not two days since the Duchess had issued instructions that no more tickets were to be given away, but it was hardly likely that such a prohibition would apply to Lord John Rossendale whose mother was an intimate friend of the Duchess of Richmond.

‘Her Grace is already having breakfast. Would you care to join her?’ Bristow asked Lord John.

Lord John followed the butler into the private rooms where, in a small sunlit salon, the Duchess nibbled toast. ‘I never do sleep before a ball,’ she greeted Lord John, then blinked with astonishment at him. ‘What are you doing here?’

Lord John kissed the Duchess’s hand. She was in a Chinese silk robe and had her hair gathered under a mob-cap. She was a quick-tempered woman of remarkable good looks.

‘I came to collect tickets for your ball, of course,’ Lord John said airily. ‘I assume you’re giving it to celebrate my arrival in Brussels?’

‘What are you doing in Brussels?’ The Duchess ignored Lord John’s raillery.

‘I’ve been posted here,’ Lord John explained. ‘I arrived last night. I would have been here sooner but one of our carriage horses slung a shoe and it took four hours to find a smith. I couldn’t sleep either. It’s just too exciting.’ He smiled happily, expecting the Duchess to share his joy.

‘You’re with the army?’

‘Of course.’ Lord John plucked at his uniform coat as though that proved his credentials. ‘Harry Paget asked for me, I begged Prinny’s permission, and he finally relented.’ Lord John, though a cavalry officer, had never been permitted to serve with the army. He was an aide to the Prince Regent who had resolutely refused to lose his services, but Henry Paget, Earl of Uxbridge, who was another crony of the Prince and who also commanded Britain’s cavalry, had successfully persuaded the Prince to give Lord John his chance. Lord John laughed as he went to the sideboard where he helped himself to toast, ham and coffee. ‘Prinny’s damned jealous. He thinks he should be here to fight Napoleon. Talking of whom, is there any news?’

‘Arthur doesn’t expect any nonsense from him till July. We think he may have left Paris, but no one’s really very sure.’ Arthur was the Duke of Wellington. ‘I asked Arthur whether we were quite safe having our ball tonight, and he assured me we are. He’s giving a ball himself next week.’

‘I must say war is an ordeal,’ Lord John smiled at the Duchess from the sideboard.

The Duchess shrugged off his flippancy, and instead offered the elegant young man a most suspicious stare. ‘Have you come alone?’

Lord John smiled winningly as he returned to the table. ‘Bristow is very kindly finding me two tickets.’

‘I suppose it’s that woman?’

Lord John hesitated, then nodded. ‘It is Jane, indeed.’

‘Damn you, Johnny.’

The Duchess had sworn in a very mild tone, but her words still made Lord John bridle. Nevertheless he was too much in awe of the older woman to make any voluble protest.

The Duchess supposed she would have to write to Lord John’s mother and confess that the silly boy had brought his paramour to Brussels. She blamed the example of Harry Paget who had run off with the wife of Wellington’s younger brother. Such an open display of adultery was suddenly the fashionable sport among cavalrymen, but it could too easily turn into a blood sport and the Duchess feared for Lord John’s life. She was also offended that a young man as charming and eligible as Lord John should flaunt his foolishness. ‘If it was London, Johnny, I wouldn’t dream of letting her come to a ball, but I suppose Brussels is different. There’s really no saying who half these people are. But don’t present this girl to me, John, because I won’t receive her, I really won’t! Do you understand?’

‘Jane’s very charming –’ Lord John commenced a defence of his slighted lover.

‘I don’t care if she’s as beautiful as Titania and as charming as Cordelia; she’s still another man’s wife. Doesn’t her husband worry you?’

‘He would if he were here, but he isn’t. At the end of the last war he found himself some French creature and went to live with her, and so far as we know, he’s still in France.’ Lord John chuckled. ‘The poor fool’s probably been imprisoned by Napoleon.’

‘You think he’s in France?’ The Duchess sounded aghast.

‘He certainly isn’t with the army, I made sure of that.’

‘Oh, my dear Johnny.’ The Duchess lowered her cup of coffee and gave her young friend a compassionate look. ‘Didn’t you think to check the Dutch army list?’

Lord John Rossendale said nothing. He just stared at the Duchess.

She grimaced. ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe is on Slender Billy’s staff, Johnny.’

Rossendale blanched. For a second it seemed that he would be unable to respond, but then he found his voice. ‘He’s with the Prince of Orange? Here?’

‘Not in Brussels, but very close. Slender Billy wanted some British staff officers because he’s commanding British troops.’

Rossendale swallowed. ‘And he’s got Sharpe?’

‘Indeed he has.’

‘Oh, my God.’ Rossendale’s face had paled to the colour of paper. ‘Is Sharpe coming tonight?’ he asked in sudden panic.

‘I certainly haven’t invited him, but I had to give Slender Billy a score of tickets, so who knows who he might bring?’ The Duchess saw the fear on her young friend’s face. ‘Perhaps you’d better go home, Johnny.’

‘I can’t do that.’ For Lord John to run away would be seen as the most shameful of acts, yet he was terrified of staying. He had not only cuckolded Richard Sharpe, but in the process he had effectively stolen Sharpe’s fortune, and now he discovered that his enemy was not lost in France, but alive and close to Brussels.

‘Poor Johnny,’ the Duchess said mockingly. ‘Still, come and dance tonight. Colonel Sharpe won’t dare kill you in my ballroom, because I won’t let him. But if I were you I’d give him his wife back and find yourself someone more suitable. What about the Huntley girl? She’s got a decent fortune, and she’s not really ugly.’ The Duchess mentioned another half-dozen girls, all eligible and nobly born, but Lord John was not listening. He was thinking of a dark-haired and scarred soldier whom he had cuckolded and impoverished, a soldier who had sworn to kill him in revenge.

Forty miles to the south, the Dragoon Lieutenant who had been kicked by his dying horse haemorrhaged in the nettles beside the ditch. He died before any surgeons could reach him. The Lieutenant’s servant rifled the dead man’s possessions. He kept the officer’s coins, the locket from about his neck, and his boots, but threw away the book on phrenology. The first French infantry butchered the Lieutenant’s dead horse with their bayonets and marched into Belgium with the bleeding joints of meat hanging from their belts. An hour later the Emperor’s coach passed the corpse, disturbing the flies which had been crawling over the dead Lieutenant’s face and laying their eggs in his blood-filled mouth and nostrils.

The campaign was four hours old.

The Prussian guns withdrew north of Charleroi. The artillery officer wondered why no one had thought to blow up the bridge which crossed the River Sambre in the centre of the town, but he supposed there must be fords close to Charleroi which would have made the destruction of the fine stone bridge into a futile and even petulant gesture. Once the guns had gone, the black-uniformed Prussian cavalry waited in the town north of the river, reinforcing the brigade of infantry that ransacked the houses near the bridge for furniture, which they rather half-heartedly made into a barricade at the bridge’s northern end. The townspeople sensibly stayed indoors and closed their shutters. Many of them took their carefully stored tricolours from their hiding places. Belgium had been a part of France till just a year before, and many folk in this part of the province resented being made a part of the Netherlands.

The French approached Charleroi on all the southern roads. The inevitable green-coated Dragoons reached the town first, followed by Cuirassiers and Red Lancers. None of the horsemen tried to force a passage across the barricaded bridge. Instead the Red Lancers, many of whom were Belgians, trotted eastwards in search of a ford. On the river’s northern bank a troop of black-uniformed Prussian Hussars shadowed the Red Lancers, and it was those Hussars who, rounding a bend in the Sambre Valley, discovered a party of French engineers floating a pontoon bridge off the southern bank. Six of the engineers had swum to the northern bank where they were fastening a rope to a great elm tree. The Hussars drew their sabres to drive the unarmed men back into the river, but French artillery had already closed on the southern bank and, as soon as the Hussars went into the trot, the first roundshot slammed across the water. It bounced a few yards ahead of the Hussars’ advance, then slammed into a wood where it tore and crashed through the thickly leaved branches.

The Hussar Captain called his men back. He could see red uniforms further up the river bank, evidence that the Lancers had found a place to cross. He led his men back to Charleroi where a desultory musket fight was flickering across the river. The French Dragoons had taken up positions in the southern houses, while the Prussian infantry in their dark blue coats and black shakos lined the barricade. The Hussar Captain reported to a Prussian brigade commander that the town was already outflanked, which news was sufficient to send most of the Prussian infantry marching briskly northwards. A last derisive French volley smashed splinters from the furniture barricade, then the town fell silent. The Prussian Hussars, left with a battalion of infantry to garrison the northern half of Charleroi, waited as French infantry reached the town and garrisoned the houses on the river’s southern bank. Glass crashed onto cobbles as soldiers bashed out window-panes to make crude loopholes for muskets.

A half-mile south of the bridge the first French staff officers were rifling the mail in Charleroi’s post office in search of letters which might have been posted by allied officers and thus provide clues of British or Prussian plans. Such clues would add to the embarrassing riches of intelligence which had recently flooded in to Napoleon’s headquarters from Belgians who desperately wanted to be part of France again. The bright tricolours hanging from the upper floors of Charleroi’s newly liberated houses were evidence of that longing.

A French General of Dragoons found a bespectacled infantry Colonel inside a tavern close to the river and angrily demanded to know why the barricaded bridge had not been captured. The Colonel explained that he was still waiting for orders, and the General swore like the trooper he had once been and said that a French officer did not need orders when the enemy was in plain sight. ‘Attack now, you damned fool, unless you want to resign from the Emperor’s service.’

The Colonel, trained in the proper management of war, diagnosed the General’s crude enthusiasm as excitement and gently tried to calm the old man by explaining that the sensible course was to wait until the artillery reached the town, and only then to mount an attack on the infantry who guarded the barricaded bridge. ‘Two volleys of cannon-fire will clear them away,’ the Colonel explained, ‘and there’ll be no need for our side to suffer any casualties. I think that’s the prudent course, don’t you?’ The Colonel offered the General a patronizing smile. ‘Perhaps the General would care to take a cup of coffee?’

‘Bugger your coffee. And bugger you.’ The Dragoon General seized the Colonel’s uniform jacket and dragged the man close so that he could smell the General’s garlic and brandy flavoured breath. ‘I’m attacking the bridge now,’ the General said, ‘and if I take it, I’m coming back here and I’m going to tear your prudent bloody balls off and give your regiment to a real man.’

He let the Colonel go, then ducked out of the tavern door into the street. A Prussian musket bullet fluttered overhead to smack against a house wall that was smothered with posters advertising a fair, which was to be held on the feast day of St Peter and Paul. Someone had limewashed a slogan huge across the rash of posters: ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

‘You!’ The General shouted at an infantry lieutenant who was sheltering in an alley from the desultory Prussian fire. ‘Bring your men! Follow me. Bugler! Sound the assemble!’ The General beckoned to his orderly to bring his horse forward and, ignoring the Prussian musketry, he pulled himself into his saddle and drew his sword. ‘Frenchmen!’ he shouted to gather in whatever men were within earshot. ‘Bayonets! Sabres!’

The General knew that the town had to be taken and the momentum of the day’s advance kept swift, and so he would lead a rag-taggle charge against the Prussian infantrymen who lined the crude barricade. He fancied he could see a lower section at one end of the piled furniture where a horse might be able to jump the obstruction. He kicked his horse into a trot and the hooves kicked up sparks from the cobbles.

The General knew he would probably die, for infantry took pleasure in killing cavalry and he would be the leading horseman in the attack on the bridge, but the General was a soldier and he had long learned that a soldier’s real enemy is the fear of death. Beat that fear and victory was certain, and victory brought glory and fame and medals and money and, best of all, sweetest of all, most glorious and wondrous of all, the modest teasing grin of a short black-haired Emperor who would pat the Dragoon General as though he was a faithful dog, and the thought of that Imperial favour made the General quicken his horse and raise his battered sword. ‘Charge!’ Behind him, spurred on by his example, a ragged mass of dismounted Dragoons and sweating infantry flooded towards the bridge. The General, his white moustache stained with tobacco juice, spurred on to the bridge.

The Prussian infantry levelled their muskets over the furniture barricade.

The General saw the glitter of sunlight flashing from the brass decorations of the muskets. ‘Kill the bastards! Kill the bastards!’ he screamed to persuade himself that he was not frightened, and suddenly the barricade dissolved in an explosion of smoke through which the musket flames stabbed like shivers of light and the General’s long white moustache was whipped by a bullet that went on to tear away his left ear-lobe, but that was the only injury he took for he had always been a lucky man, and he caught a glimpse of long weeds shivering under the silvery water beneath the bridge, then he kicked his heels hard back, and his awkward ugly horse clumsily jumped the heaped chairs at the right-hand end of the barricade. The horse soared through the foul-smelling smoke and the General saw a bayonet reach towards the animal’s belly, but he slashed down with the sword, knocking the bayonet aside, and suddenly the horse had landed safely beyond the furniture and was running free of the smoke. The Prussian Hussars, who had waited fifty yards from the bridge to give themselves room to charge any attacker who broke through the infantry, spurred forward, but the General ignored them. He wheeled his horse back to the barricade and drove the animal hard at the frightened infantrymen.

‘Bastards! Bastards!’ He killed a Prussian soldier, slicing the sword hard into the man’s neck above the stiff black collar. The remaining infantrymen were running. There had not been many Prussians at the bridge, for at best they had only been supposed to delay the French advance. Flames stabbed across the furniture from the French side, and the General shouted at his men to hold their damned fire and to pull the barricade down instead.

The Prussian infantry was running north. The cavalry, seeing that the French had captured the bridge with an insolent ease, turned to follow the foot soldiers. The French General, knowing he had earned his pat on the head from the Emperor, shouted derision at their retreat. ‘You lily-livered bastards! You boy-lovers! You lap-dogs! Stay and fight, you scum!’ He spat, then sheathed his sword. Blood from his torn ear was soaking his left epaulette with its tarnished chains and gilded eagle.

French infantry began to dismantle the barricade. The single dead Prussian infantryman, his uniform already looted of food and coins, lay by the bridge. A Dragoon sergeant hauled the body aside as more cavalrymen poured across the bridge. A woman ran from one of the houses on the northern bank and was almost knocked down by a clattering troop of Dragoons. The woman carried a bouquet of dried violets, their petals faded almost to lilac. She went to the French General’s stirrup and held the pathetic bouquet up to the grim-faced man. ‘Is he coming?’ she asked.

There was no need for her to say who ‘he’ was; her eager face was enough.

The bloodied General smiled. ‘He’s coming, ma poule.’

‘These are for you.’ She offered the General the drooping flowers. Throughout Napoleon’s exile the violet had been the symbol of the Bonapartistes, for the violet was the flower which, like the deposed Emperor, would return in the spring.

The General reached down and took the little bouquet. He fixed the fragile blossoms in a buttonhole of his braided uniform, then leaned down and kissed the woman. Like her, the General had prayed and hoped for the violet’s return, and now it had come and it would surely blossom more gloriously than ever before. France was on the march, Charleroi had fallen, and there were no more rivers between the Emperor and Brussels. The General, scenting victory, turned his horse to search for the infantry Colonel who had refused to attack the bridge and whose military career was therefore finished. France had no need of prudence, only of audacity and victory and of the small dark-haired man who knew how to make glory bright as the sun and as sweet as the violet. Vive l’Empereur.

CHAPTER THREE

A single horseman approached Charleroi from the west. He rode on the Sambre’s northern bank, drawn towards the town by the sound of musketry which had been loud an hour before, but which now had faded into silence.

The man rode a big docile horse. He did not like horses and rode badly.

He was a tall man with a weathered face on which a blade had slashed a cruel scar. The scar gave his face a mocking, sardonic cast except when he smiled. His hair was black, but with a badger’s streak of white. Behind his horse a dog loped obediently. The dog suited the man, for it was big, fierce, and unkempt.

The man wore French cavalry boots, much patched, but still supple and tight about his calves. Above the scarred boots he wore French cavalry overalls that had been reinforced with leather where the crutch and inside legs took the saddle’s chafing. The red stripes on the overalls’ outer seams had long faded to a dull purple. Outside the overalls he wore a faded green jacket that was decorated with the remnants of black piping. The jacket was the uniform of Britain’s 95th Rifles, though it was now so threadbare and patched that it might have belonged to a tramp. The man’s brown tricorne hat had come from neither the French nor the British army, but had been bought at the market in the Norman town of Caen. The scarlet, gold and black cockade of the Netherlands was gaudy on the hat.

In a holster on the man’s saddle was a British-made Baker rifle. Stuck into his snake-clasped belt was a long-barrelled German pistol, while at his left hip was a battered metal scabbard in which there hung a British heavy cavalry sword. The man was a mockery of a soldier, tattered in a medley of a uniform, and sitting his horse with the grace of a sack of meal.

His name was Sharpe, Richard Sharpe, and he was a British soldier. He came from the gutter, the child of a whore, and he had only escaped the gallows by taking the King’s shilling and enlisting as a private in the 33rd Regiment of Foot. He became a sergeant and later, because of an act of suicidal bravery, became one of the few men promoted from the ranks to become an officer. He had joined the 95th Rifles and later commanded the red-coated Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers. He had fought in Flanders, in India, in Portugal, in Spain and in France. He had been a soldier for almost all his life, but of late he had been a farmer in Normandy, drawn to the land of his enemies by a woman met by chance in the chaos of peace. Now, by the chaos of war, and because the exiled Napoleon had returned to France and thrust a new period of battle on Europe, Sharpe was a lieutenant-colonel in the 5th Belgian Light Dragoons, a regiment he had never met, had no wish to meet, and would not have recognized if it had formed line and charged him. The promotion was nothing more than a device to give Richard Sharpe some status on the Prince of Orange’s staff, but so far as Sharpe himself was concerned he was still a Rifleman.

The rising sun, lancing down the Sambre Valley, dazzled Sharpe. He pulled the tricorne hat low over his eyes. The land he rode was marshy, forcing him to weave an intricate course past the more treacherous patches. He kept glancing north to make certain no enemy troops appeared to pin him against the river. Not that he believed that the firing he had heard had been caused by the French. They were not expected to advance till July, and were certainly not expected in this part of Belgium, so Sharpe suspected that the musketry had been caused by Prussian troops at firing practice, yet a long acquaintance with war’s surprises had spurred Sharpe to investigate the sound.

His horse put up waterfowl and once disturbed a whole field of rabbits that scampered in panic towards the hedgerows. His dog, scenting breakfast, took off in pursuit. ‘Nosey, you bastard! Heel!’ The dog had been named Nosey on the grounds that the Duke of Wellington, ‘Nosey’ to his men, had spent twenty years giving Sharpe orders, so, when Sharpe had found the dog in peacetime, he had decided to return the compliment.

Nosey reluctantly slunk back to Sharpe, then saw something across the river and gave a bark of warning. Sharpe saw horsemen. For a second he supposed them to be Prussian, then recognized the shape of the cloth-covered helmets. Dragoons. French. His heart quickened. He had thought, after the battle of Toulouse, that his fighting days were over, that an emperor exiled to Elba spelt a Europe at peace, but now, fourteen months later, the old enemy was in sight again.

He spurred the horse into a canter. So the French had ridden into Belgium. Maybe it was nothing but a cavalry raid. The enemy Dragoons had seen Sharpe and ridden to the water’s edge, but none tried to cross the deep river. Two of the green-coated horsemen unholstered their carbines and took aim at Sharpe, but their officer shouted at the troopers to hold their fire. The Rifleman was too far away for the short-barrelled, smooth-bore guns to be effective.

Sharpe angled away from the river, guiding the horse beside a field of rye which had grown as tall as a man. The field path led uphill, then, after picking a delicate path through a tangled copse where tree roots gave treacherous footing for the horse, Sharpe slid down an earthen bank on to a rutted road where he was shadowed and hidden from the Dragoons by the trees that arched overhead. From his saddlebag he took out a frayed and crease-torn map. He unfolded it carefully, took a stub of pencil from his ammunition pouch, and marked a cross where he had seen the enemy cavalry. The position was approximate, for he was still not certain how far he was from Charleroi.

He pushed the map away, uncorked his canteen, and took a drink of cold tea. Then he took off his hat which left the mark of its rim indented in his unwashed hair. He rubbed his face, yawned, then crammed the hat back onto his head. He clicked his tongue, urging the horse to the end of the embanked cutting from where there was a distant view across the low hills north of Charleroi. Dust was pluming from a road in the centre of that landscape, but, even with the help of the battered old telescope, Sharpe could not tell what traffic made the dust rise, or in what direction it travelled.

There could have been an innocent explanation for the dust cloud: it could have been caused by a herd of cows being driven to market, by a Prussian regiment on exercise, or even by a work gang hammering cobbles into the highway’s bed of chalk and flint, yet the musket-fire Sharpe had heard earlier, and the presence of the enemy Dragoons on the southern bank of the Sambre suggested a more sinister cause.

Invasion? For days now there had been no news from France, evidence that the Emperor had forbidden all traffic over the border, but that silence did not necessarily suggest an immediate invasion, but rather the concealment of exactly where the French forces concentrated. The best allied intelligence insisted that the French would not be ready till July, and that their attack would advance through Mons, not Charleroi. The Mons road offered the shortest route to Brussels, and if Brussels fell the Emperor would have succeeded in driving the British back to the North Sea and the Prussians back across the Rhine. Brussels, to the French, spelt victory.

Sharpe urged his horse down the rutted lane that dropped into a shallow valley before climbing between two unhedged pastures. He veered to his right, not wanting to betray his presence with dust from the dry mud of the lane. The mare was breathing hard as she trotted up the pastureland. She was accustomed to exercise for, each morning for the past two weeks, Sharpe had saddled her at three o’clock, then ridden her south to watch the dawn break over the Sambre Valley, but this morning, hearing the crackle of musketry to the east, he had ridden the mare much further than usual. The day also threatened to be the hottest of the summer, but Sharpe’s fears of the enemy’s mysterious appearance made him force the beast onwards.

If this was the French invasion then the news of it must reach the allied headquarters quickly. The British, Dutch and Prussian armies guarded eighty miles of vulnerable Dutch frontier; the Prussians to the east and the British and Dutch to the west. The allied forces were spread like a net to trap an emperor, but as soon as the Emperor touched the net it was supposed to contract and entangle him. That was the stratagem, but the Emperor was as aware of those allied hopes as any British or Prussian officer and he would be planning to slash the net into two pieces and separately tear them apart. Shape’s urgent duty was to discover whether this was the Emperor’s slashing stroke, or merely a cavalry raid launched deep into the Belgian province.

From the crest of the next hill he saw more French Dragoons. They were half a mile away, but on Sharpe’s side of the river and barring his approach to Charleroi. They saw him and kicked their horses forward so Sharpe turned his tired mare northwards, and spurred her into a gallop. He crossed the road, thumped across a pasture, then dropped into a small valley where a tangle of thorns grew either side of a trickling brook. Sharpe forced his horse through the bushes, then turned east again. He could see a wood far ahead of him. If he could make the shelter of the trees he thought there might be a chance of watching the high road from the wood’s far side.

The French Dragoons, content with having chased the lone horseman away, did not follow him. Sharpe slapped the mare’s neck which was wet with sweat. ‘Come on, girl! Come on!’ She was a six-year-old hunter, docile and strong; one of the horses that Sharpe’s friend Patrick Harper had fetched from Ireland.

It was cooler and very quiet in the wood that was tangled with old huge trees. Nosey trotted close at the mare’s heels. Sharpe went slowly, threading the horse between the ancient trunks and past fallen, moss-covered logs. Long before he reached the edge of the wood he knew this was no mere cavalry raid. He knew because he heard the distinctive, never-forgotten thump and jangle of artillery on the move.

He curbed the horse, dismounted, and tied her reins to a low branch of oak. From his saddlebag he took a length of rope that he knotted as a leash round Nosey’s neck, then he drew his rifle out of the saddle holster, cocked it, and went silently forward. He held the dog’s rope in his left hand, the rifle in his right.

The wood ended at a wheat field that sloped downhill to the unhedged road from which the dust was rising to hang in the hot air. Sharpe, his telescope open, stared down at the old, familiar enemy.

French infantry, in their blue coats, were marching in the trampled wheat either side of the road so as to leave the harder road surface for the artillery. The guns were twelve-pounders. Every few minutes the guns would halt as some obstruction worked its way down the long column. Staff officers galloped fine horses down the road’s wide verges. On the far slope of the valley a troop of Red Lancers cantered through a wheat field, each horse leaving a straight trail of crushed plants.

Sharpe had no watch, but he estimated that he stayed at the edge of the wood for two hours during which time he counted twenty-two guns and forty-eight supply wagons. He also saw two carriages that might have been carrying senior officers, and he flirted with the idea that one of the carriages might have belonged to the Emperor himself. Sharpe had fought the French for over twenty years, yet he had never seen the Emperor and, all unbidden, a sudden and childish image of a man with cloven tail, sharp horns and demonic fangs stalked Sharpe’s fears that were made worse by the Emperor’s real reputation as a soldier of genius whose presence on a battlefield was worth a whole corps of men.

Still the French marched north. Sharpe counted eighteen infantry battalions and four squadrons of cavalry, one of which, composed of Dragoons, rode very close to his hiding place at the wood’s edge, but none of the French troopers glanced left to see where the Englishman and his dog lay in the shadows. The French horsemen were close enough for Sharpe to see their cadenettes, the pigtails which framed each man’s face as a mark of distinction. Their equipment looked good and new, and their horses were well fed. In Spain the French had whipped and ridden their horses to destruction, but these troops were freshly mounted on strong and healthy animals.

Newly mounted cavalry, eighteen battalions of infantry and twenty-two cannon did not constitute an army, but they certainly added up to a threat. Sharpe knew he was seeing much more than a cavalry raid, though he was not certain whether this was the real invasion. It was possible that these men were nothing but a strong feint designed to draw the Allies towards Charleroi while the real French thrust, fuelled by the Emperor’s presence, attacked twenty-five miles to the west at Mons.

Sharpe slithered back from the treeline and climbed wearily into the saddle. His job now was to let the allied headquarters know what he had seen: that the French had crossed the frontier and that the campaign had therefore begun. Sharpe remembered that Lucille, who had loyally left France to stay at his side, had been invited to some fashionable and expensive ball that was supposed to take place in Brussels this night. The expense would all go for nothing now because the Emperor had just rewritten the social calendar. Sharpe, who hated dancing, smiled at the thought, then turned and spurred the horse towards home.

Two miles away, in the streets of Charleroi, the Emperor sat outside the Belle Vue inn. His coach had been parked out of sight while his white saddle horse had been tethered to a post at the roadside so that the passing soldiers would think their Emperor was riding to war instead of being carried in upholstered comfort. The men cheered their monarch as they marched past him. ‘Vive l’Empereur! Vive l’Empereur!’ The drummers, tediously beating the rhythm of the march, broke into joyous flurries when they realized their Emperor was so close. The troops could not reach their idol, for he was protected by bear-skinned guardsmen, but some men broke ranks to kiss the Emperor’s pale horse.

Napoleon showed no reaction to his men’s adulation. He sat motionless, swathed in a greatcoat despite the day’s oppressive heat, and with his face concealed by the peak of his hat that he had turned fore and aft to shadow his eyes. He sat in the low chair with his head bowed, looking for all the world like a genius deep in contemplation, though in fact he was fast asleep.

Beyond the captured bridge a French gunner officer kicked the body of the dead Prussian infantryman into the River Sambre. For a few moments the corpse was trapped on a half-sunken log, then an eddy loosed the dead man and carried him westwards.

And the campaign was six hours old.

Sharpe emerged from the wood and turned the mare north-west. The tired horse faced a journey of at least twenty miles across heavy country so he kept her at a sedate trot. The sun was high and as harsh as on any day Sharpe remembered from the long campaigns in Spain. The dog, seemingly tireless, roamed eagerly ahead.

It was a good five minutes before Sharpe noticed the French Dragoons who followed him. The enemy horsemen were silhouetted on the southern skyline and Sharpe suspected they must have been trailing him ever since he had emerged from the trees. He cursed himself for his carelessness, and dug his heels back to speed the weary mare. He hoped the Frenchmen would be content to drive him away from the high road rather than pursue and capture him, but as he quickened the mare’s pace, so the Frenchmen spurred their own horses.

Sharpe turned westwards away from the Brussels road which he supposed the Dragoons were guarding. For thirty minutes he pressed the horse hard, always hoping that his flight would persuade the Dragoons to abandon their pursuit, but the Frenchmen were stubborn, or else the chase was a welcome break in their day’s tedium. Their horses were fresher, and gradually closed on Sharpe who, to spare the mare’s strength, tried to avoid the worst hills, but he eventually found himself trapped in a long valley and was forced to put the mare at a steep grass slope which led to a bare skyline.

The mare plunged gallantly at the hillside, but even the long rest in the dark cool wood had not restored her full strength. Sharpe spurred her into a clumsy gallop that made his heavy sword flap in its slings and crash its disc hilt painfully onto his left thigh. The Dragoons were bunched like steeplechasers as they reached the foot of the slope. One Frenchman had taken his carbine from his holster and now tried a long shot at Sharpe, but the bullet fluttered harmlessly overhead.

The mare’s breath was roaring as she reached the crest. She wanted to check, but Sharpe pushed her through a gap in a straggling hedgerow and spurred her across an undulating pasture which, years before, had been under the plough and old furrows still formed corrugations that faced Sharpe like waves of pale grass. Sharpe was riding across the grassy waves and the mare took the hard, uneven ground heavily, jarring him with every step. Nosey raced ahead, circled back, barked happily, then ran alongside the labouring horse. Sharpe twisted to look behind and saw the first Dragoons reach the skyline. They had spread out and were racing to capture him. The ridged pasture was falling away in front of Sharpe, sloping down to a long dark oak wood from which a cart track ran north towards a big stone-walled farm that looked like a miniature fort. Sharpe looked behind again and saw the closest Dragoons were now just fifty yards away. Their long swords were drawn and their horses’ teeth bared. Sharpe tried to draw his own sword, but the moment he took his right hand off the reins he almost fell and the mare immediately tried to check. ‘Go on!’ he shouted at the mare and scraped his spurs hard down her flanks. ‘Go on!’

He glanced right and saw another half-dozen Dragoons racing to cut him off from the cart track. He swore viciously, turned the mare a touch westward again, but that merely gave the pursuers a better angle to close on him. The wood was only a hundred paces away, but the sweat-streaked mare was blown and slowing. Even if she reached the trees, the Dragoons would soon ride Sharpe down in the tangle of undergrowth. He swore silently. If he lived he would be doomed to spend the war as a prisoner.

Then a distant trumpet blared a challenge, making Sharpe turn with astonishment to see black-coated horsemen streaming pell-mell from the fortress-like farm buildings. There must have been at least twenty cavalrymen rowelling their horses down the cart track. Sharpe recognized the cavalry as Prussians. Dust spurted and drifted from their hooves and the bright sun flashed cruel and beautiful from their drawn sabres.

The Dragoons closest to the Prussians immediately turned and galloped back up the slope towards their comrades. Sharpe gave the mare a last despairing hack with his heels, then ducked his head as she crashed through a stand of ferns and thus into the wood’s cool margin. She would go no further, but just pulled up under the trees, shivering and sweating and blowing. Sharpe dragged the big sword free.

Two green-uniformed Dragoons followed Sharpe into the trees. They came at full speed, the leading man aiming to Sharpe’s left, the other pulling to his right. Sharpe had his back to the attackers and the mare was too exhausted and too obstinate to turn. He slashed across his body to parry the attack of the man on the left. The Frenchman’s blade rang like a bell on Sharpe’s sword, then scraped down the steel to be stopped by the heavy disc hilt. Sharpe threw the Dragoon’s blade off then desperately backswung the long sword to meet the second man’s charge. The swing was so wild that it unbalanced Sharpe, but it also terrified the second Dragoon who swerved frantically away from the blade’s hissing reach. Sharpe grabbed a handful of his mare’s mane to haul himself back upright. Both Dragoons had galloped past Sharpe and were now trying to turn their horses for a second attack.

In the pasture behind Sharpe the Prussian horsemen were making a line to face the remaining Dragoons who, outnumbered, had cautiously pulled back towards the skyline. That confrontation was none of Sharpe’s business; his concern was with the two horsemen who now faced him in the wood. They glanced past Sharpe, judging how best to rejoin their comrades, though it was clear they wanted Sharpe’s life first.

One of them began to tug his carbine out of its holster. ‘Get him, Nosey!’ Sharpe shouted, and at the same time he raked his spurs back so savagely that the exhausted and astonished mare jerked forward, almost spilling Sharpe out of his tall Hussar’s saddle. He was screaming at the two men, trying to frighten them. The dog leaped at the closest man who, encumbered with carbine and sword, could not cut down at the beast, then Sharpe’s mare slammed into the Frenchman’s horse and the big sword slashed down at the Dragoon. The blade hit the peak of the man’s cloth-covered helmet, ringing his ears like the knell of doom. The beleaguered Frenchman screamed desperately for help from his comrade who was trying to circle behind Sharpe to get a clear thrust at the Englishman’s back.

Sharpe hacked again, this time landing a blow on the back of the helmet. The sword ripped the canvas cover to reveal a flash of scarred brass. The Dragoon dropped the carbine and fumbled for his sword which hung from its wrist strap. He was clumsy and could not make his grip. Sharpe lunged, but Nosey had frightened the Frenchman’s horse which twisted away and so carried the Dragoon out of Sharpe’s reach. Sweat was stinging Sharpe’s eyes. Everything seemed awkward. He spurred forward, sword raised, then a shout from his rear made him twist in the saddle. He saw two German troopers spurring at the second Frenchman. There was the clash of sword on sabre and a scream that was abruptly silenced. Sharpe looked again for his own enemy, but the first Dragoon had taken enough and was holding out his sword in meek surrender.

‘Nosey! Down! Leave him!’

The second Dragoon was dead, his throat sliced by a Hussar’s sabre. His killer, a toothless Prussian sergeant, grinned at Sharpe, then cleaned his curved blade by running it through a handful of his horse’s mane. The Sergeant wore a silver skull and crossbones on his black shako, a sight that made Sharpe’s prisoner even more nervous. The other Frenchmen were retreating up the slope, unwilling to give battle to the greater number of black-uniformed Hussars. The Hussar officer was ahead of his men, taunting the French officer to a duel, but the Frenchman was too canny to risk his life for such vain heroics.

Sharpe reached over and took the reins of the Dragoon’s horse. ‘Get down,’ he spoke to the man in French.

‘The dog, monsieur!’

‘Get down! Hurry!’

The prisoner dismounted, then stumbled out of the wood. When he took off his dented helmet he proved to have bristly fair hair above a snub-nosed face. He reminded Sharpe of Jules, the miller’s son from Seleglise, who used to help Sharpe with Lucille’s flock of sheep and who had been so excited when Napoleon returned to France. The captured Dragoon shivered as the German cavalry surrounded him.

The Prussian Captain spoke angrily to Sharpe in German. Sharpe shook his head. ‘You speak English?’

‘Nein. Français, peut-être?’

They spoke in French. The Hussar Captain’s anger had been prompted by the French refusal to fight him. ‘No one is allowed to fight today! We were ordered out of Charleroi. Why do we even come to the Netherlands? Why don’t we just give Napoleon the keys to Berlin and have done with it? Who are you, monsieur?’

‘My name is Sharpe.’

‘A Britisher, eh? My name’s Ziegler. Do you know what the hell is happening?’

Ziegler and his men had been driven westwards by a whole regiment of Red Lancers. Like the Dragoons on the pasture, Ziegler had retreated rather than face unequal odds. He and his men had been resting in the farm when they saw Sharpe’s ignominious flight. ‘At least we killed one of the bastards.’

Sharpe told Ziegler what he knew, which merely confirmed what the Prussian Captain had already discovered for himself. A French force was advancing northwards from Charleroi, probably aiming at the gap between the British and Prussian armies. Ziegler was now cut off on the wrong side of the Brussels road, but that predicament did not worry him. ‘We’ll just ride north till there are no more damned French, then go east.’ He turned baleful eyes on the captured Dragoon. ‘Do you want the prisoner?’ he asked Sharpe.

‘I’ll take his horse.’

The terrified young Frenchman tried to answer Sharpe’s questions, but either he knew very little or else he was cleverly hiding what he did know. He said he believed the Emperor was with the troops on the Brussels road, but he had not personally seen him. He knew nothing of any advance further to the west near Mons.

Ziegler did not want to be slowed down by the prisoner, so he ordered the Frenchman to strip off his boots and coat, then ordered his Sergeant to cut the man’s overall straps. ‘Go! Be grateful I didn’t kill you!’ The Frenchman, in bare feet and clutching his overalls, hurried southwards.

Ziegler gave Sharpe a length of cold sausage, a hard-boiled egg, and a piece of black bread. ‘Good luck, Englishman!’

Sharpe thanked him. He had mounted the Dragoon’s horse and was leading the tired mare by her reins. He assumed that by now the allied Generals must be aware of the French advance, but it was still his duty to report what he had seen and so he kicked back his heels, waved farewell to the Prussians, and rode on.

CHAPTER FOUR

Clouds were showing in the west. The vapour, rising over the North Sea, drifted slowly eastwards to heap white and grey thunderheads above the coast. The farmers feared heavy rain that would crush their ripening crops.

No such worries crossed the mind of the Prussian Major who had been sent to Brussels with news of the French advance and details of the Prussian response. The despatch told how the Prussian garrison at Charleroi was falling back, not on Brussels, but north-east to where the main Prussian army was assembling. The Major’s news was vital if the British and Dutch troops were to join the Prussians.

The Major faced a journey of thirty-two miles. It was a sunny and very hot day, and he was tired and monstrously fat. The exertions of the first five miles when he had thought the Dragoons might burst from behind every hedgerow or farmhouse had exhausted both the Major and his horse, so once he felt safe he sensibly slowed to a contemplative and restoring walk. After an hour he came to a small roadside inn that stood on the crest of a shallow hill and, twisting in his saddle, he saw that the inn gave him a good view of the road right to the horizon so that he would see any French pursuit long before it represented any danger. Nothing moved on the road now except for a man driving eight cows from one pasture to another.

The Major eased himself out of the saddle, slid heavily to the ground, and tied his horse to the inn’s signpost. He spoke passably good French and enjoyed discussing food with the pretty young serving girl who came out to the table by the roadside, which the Major had adopted as his vantage point. He decided on roast chicken and vegetables, with apple pie and cheese to follow. He requested a bottle of red wine, but not of the common kind.

The sun shone on the long road to the south. Haymakers scythed steadily in a meadow a half-mile away, while much further off, far beyond the blur of fields and woods, dust whitened the sky. That was the artificial cloud kicked up by an army, but no troops threatened the Major’s peaceful rest and so he saw no reason to make undue haste, especially as the roast chicken proved to be excellent. The chicken’s skin was crisped nicely and its yellow flesh was succulent. When the girl brought the Major his pie, she asked him if Napoleon was coming.

‘Don’t you worry, my dear! Don’t you worry.’

Far to the Major’s north, in Brussels, a detachment of Highland soldiers had been ordered to the Duke of Richmond’s house, where they were shown into the dazzling ballroom hung with the Belgian colours. Before supper was served the Highlanders would offer the guests a display of their dancing.

The Highlander Lieutenant asked that one of the unlit chandeliers be raised from floor level so he could make certain there would be adequate room for his dancers’ crossed swords. The Duchess, intent that every particular of her ball should be arranged to perfection, insisted on a demonstration. ‘You are bringing pipers tonight?’ the Duchess demanded.

‘Indeed, Your Grace.’

Which only gave the Duchess a new detail to worry over: how would the orchestra leader know when to stop his men playing so that the pipers could begin?

Her husband averred that doubtless the orchestra and the pipers would arrange things to their own satisfaction, and further opined that the Duchess should leave the ball’s arrangements to those who were paid to worry about the details, but the Duchess was insistent on voicing her concerns this afternoon. She earnestly asked her husband whether she should request the Prince of Orange not to bring Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe?

‘Who’s Sharpe?’ the Duke asked from behind his copy of The Times.

‘He’s the husband of Johnny Rossendale’s girl. She’s coming, I’m afraid. I tried to stop him bringing her, but he’s clearly besotted.’

‘And this Sharpe is her husband?’

‘I just told you that, Charles. He’s also an aide to Slender Billy.’

The Duke grunted. ‘Sharpe’s clearly a fool if he lets an idiot like Johnny Rossendale cuckold him.’

‘That’s precisely why I think I should talk to the Prince. I’m told this Sharpe is an extremely uncouth man and is more than likely to fillet Johnny.’

‘If he’s uncouth, my dear, then doubtless he won’t wish to attend your ball. And I certainly wouldn’t mention the matter to Orange. That bloody young fool will only bring Sharpe if he thinks it’ll cause trouble. It’s a sleeping dog, my dear, so let it lie.’

But it was not in the Duchess’s nature to let anything remain undisturbed if it was amenable to her interference. ‘Perhaps I should mention it to Arthur?’

The Duke snapped his newspaper down to the table. ‘You will not trouble Wellington about two damned fools and their silly strumpet.’

‘If you say so, Charles.’

‘I do say so.’ The rampart of newspaper was thrown up, inviting silence.

The other English Duke in Brussels, Wellington, would have been grateful had he known that Richmond had spared him the Duchess’s worries, for the Commander-in-Chief of the British and Dutch armies already had more than enough worries of his own. One of those worries, the smallest of them, was the prospect of hunger. Wellington knew from bitter experience that he would be required to make so much conversation at the Duchess’s ball that his supper would inevitably congeal on its plate. He therefore ordered an early dinner of roast mutton to be served in his quarters at three o’clock that afternoon.

Then, noting that clouds were building to the west, he took his afternoon walk about the fashionable quarter of Brussels. He took care to appear blithely unworried as he strolled with his staff, for he knew only too well how the French sympathizers in the city were looking for any sign of allied defeatism that they could turn into an argument to demoralize the Dutch-Belgian troops.

The quality of those troops was at the heart of the Duke’s real worries. On paper his army was ninety thousand strong, but only half of that paper force was reliable.

The core of the Duke’s army was his infantry. He had thirty battalions of redcoats, but only half of those had fought in his Spanish campaigns and the quality of the other half was unknown. He had some excellent infantry battalions of the King’s German Legion, and some enthusiastic troops from Hanover, but together the German and British infantry totalled less than forty thousand men. To make up the numbers he had the Dutch-Belgian army, over thirty thousand infantrymen in all, which he did not trust at all. Most of the Dutch-Belgians had fought for the Emperor and still wore the Emperor’s uniforms. The Duke was assured by the King of the Netherlands that the Belgians would fight, but, Wellington wondered, for whom?

The Duke had cavalry too, but the Duke had no faith in horsemen, whether Dutch or English. His German cavalry was first class, but sadly few in numbers, while the Duke’s English cavalrymen were mere fools on horseback; expensive and touchy, prone to insanity, and utter strangers to discipline. The Dutch-Belgian horsemen, for all the Duke cared, could have packed their bags and ridden home right now.

He had ninety thousand men, of whom half might fight well, and he knew he would likely face a hundred thousand of Napoleon’s veterans. The Emperor’s veterans, fretting against the injustices of Bourbon France, had welcomed Napoleon’s return and flocked to the Eagles. The French army, which the Duke still thought was massing south of the border, was probably the finest instrument that Napoleon had ever commanded. Every man in it had fought before, it was freshly equipped, and it sought vengeance against the countries that had humbled France in 1814. The Duke had cause for worry, yet as he strolled down the rue Royale he was forced to put a brave face on the desperate odds lest his enemies took courage from his despair. The Duke could also cling to one strong hope, namely that his scratch army would not fight Napoleon alone, but alongside Prince Blücher’s Prussians. So long as the British and Prussian armies joined forces, they must win; separately, the Duke feared, they must be destroyed.

Yet twenty-five miles to the south the French were already pushing the Prussian forces eastwards, away from the British. No one in Brussels knew that the French had invaded; instead they prepared for a duchess’s ball while a fat Prussian major paid for his roast chicken, finished his wine, then ambled slowly northwards.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, eight hours after the first shots had been fired south of Charleroi, Sharpe met more cavalrymen; this time a patrol in red-faced dark blue coats who thundered eagerly across a pasture to surround Sharpe and his two horses. They were men from Hanover, exiles who formed the King’s German Legion that had fought so hard and well in Spain. Now the German soldiers stared suspiciously at Sharpe’s strange uniform until one of the troopers saw the Imperial ‘N’ on the horse’s saddle-cloth and the sabres rasped out of their metal scabbards as the horsemen shouted at Sharpe to surrender.

‘Bugger off,’ Sharpe snarled.

‘You’re English?’ the KGL Captain asked in that language. He was mounted on a fine black gelding, glossy coated and fresh. His saddle-cloth bore the British royal cipher, a reminder that England’s King was also Hanover’s monarch.

‘I’m Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe, of the Prince of Orange’s staff.’

‘You must forgive us, sir.’ The Captain, who introduced himself as Hans Blasendorf, sheathed his sabre. He told Sharpe his patrol was one of the many that daily scouted south to the French border and beyond; this particular troop had been ordered to explore the villages south and east of Mons down as far as the Sambre, but not to encroach on Prussian territory.

‘The French are already in Charleroi,’ Sharpe told the German.

Blasendorf gaped at Sharpe in shocked silence for a moment. ‘For certain?’

‘For certain!’ Tiredness made Sharpe indignant. ‘I’ve just been there! I took this horse off a French Dragoon north of the town.’

The German understood the desperate urgency of Sharpe’s news. He tore a page from his notebook, offered it with a pencil to Sharpe, then volunteered his own patrol to take the despatch to General Dornberg’s headquarters in Mons. Dornberg was the General in charge of these cavalry patrols which watched the French frontier, and finding one of his officers had been a stroke of luck for Sharpe; by pure accident he had come across the very men whose job was to alert the allies of any French advance.

Sharpe borrowed a shako from one of the troopers and used its flat round top as a writing desk. He did not write well because he had learned his letters late in life and, though Lucille had made him into a much better reader, he was still clumsy with a pen or pencil. Nevertheless, as clearly as he could, he wrote down what he had observed – that a large French force of infantry, cavalry and artillery was marching north out of Charleroi on the Brussels road. A prisoner had been taken who reported a possibility that the Emperor was with those forces, but the prisoner had not been certain of that fact. Sharpe knew it was important for Dornberg to know where the Emperor was, for where Napoleon rode, that was the main French attack.

He signed the despatch with his name and rank, then handed it to Blasendorf who promised it would be delivered as swiftly as his horses could cross country.

‘And ask General Dornberg to tell the Prince’s Chief of Staff that I’m watching the Charleroi road,’ Sharpe added.

Blasendorf nodded an acknowledgement as he turned his horse away, then, realizing what Sharpe had said, he looked anxiously back. ‘You’re going back to the road, sir?’

‘I’m going back.’

Sharpe, his message in safe hands, was free to return and watch the French. In truth he did not want to go, for he was tired and saddle-sore, but this day the allies needed accurate news of the enemy so that their response could be certain, fast and lethal. Besides, the appearance of the French had spurred Sharpe’s old excitement. He had thought that living in Normandy would make him ambivalent towards his old enemy, but he had spent too many years fighting the Crapauds suddenly to relinquish the need to see them beaten.

So out of habit as much as out of duty, he turned his captured horse and rode again towards the enemy. While to the north Brussels slept.

Major General Sir William Dornberg received the pencil-written despatch in the town hall at Mons which he had made into his headquarters, and where he had transformed the ancient council chamber into his map room. The panelled room, hung with dusty coats of arms, suited his self-esteem, for Dornberg was a very proud man who was convinced that Europe did not properly appreciate his military genius. He had once fought for the French, but they had not promoted him beyond the rank of colonel, so he had deserted to the British who had rewarded his defection with a knighthood and a generalship, but even so, he still felt slighted. He had been given command of a cavalry brigade, a mere twelve hundred sabres, while men he thought less talented than himself commanded whole divisions. Indeed, the Prince of Orange, a callow boy, commanded a corps!

‘Who was this man?’ he asked Captain Blasendorf.

‘An Englishman, sir. A lieutenant-colonel.’

‘On a French horse, you say?’

‘He says he captured the horse, sir.’

Dornberg frowned at the message, so ill-written in clumsy pencilled capitals that it could have been scrawled by a child. ‘What unit was this Englishman, Sharpe? Is that his name? Sharpe?’

‘If he’s the Sharpe I think he is, sir, then he’s quite a celebrated soldier. I remember in Spain –’

‘Spain! Spain! All I hear about is Spain!’ Dornberg slapped the table with the palm of his hand, then glared with protruding eyes at the unfortunate Blasendorf. ‘To listen to some officers in this army one would think that no other war had ever been fought but in Spain! I asked you, Captain, what unit this Sharpe belonged to.’

‘Hard to say, sir.’ The KGL Captain frowned as he tried to remember Sharpe’s uniform. ‘Green jacket, nondescript hat, and Chasseur overalls. He said he was on the Prince of Orange’s staff. In fact he asked that you tell the Prince’s headquarters that he’s gone back towards Charleroi.’

Dornberg ignored the last sentences, seizing on something far more important. ‘Chasseur overalls? You mean French overalls?’

Blasendorf paused, then nodded. ‘Looked like it, sir.’

‘You’re an idiot! An idiot! What are you?’

Blasendorf paused, then, in the face of Dornberg’s overwhelming scorn, sheepishly admitted he was an idiot.

‘He was French, you idiot!’ Dornberg shouted. ‘They seek to mislead us. Have you learned nothing of war? They want us to think they will advance through Charleroi, while all the time they will come towards us here! They will come to Mons! To Mons! To Mons!’ He slammed a clenched fist onto the map with every reiteration of the name, then dismissively waved Sharpe’s despatch in Captain Blasendorf’s face. ‘You might as well have wiped your arse with this. You’re an idiot! God save me from idiots! Now go back to where you were ordered. Go! Go! Go!’

General Dornberg tore up the despatch. The Emperor had touched the net spread to contain him, but the British half of the trap was unaware of its catch, and so the French marched on.

South-west of Brussels, in the village of Braine-le-Comte, His Royal Highness the Prince William, Prince of Orange, heir to the throne of the Netherlands, and Duke, Earl, Lord, Stadtholder, Margrave and Count of more towns and provinces than even he could remember, leaned forward in his chair, fixed his gaze at the mirror which stood on the dressing-table and, with exquisite care, squeezed a blackhead on his chin. It popped most satisfyingly. He squeezed another, this time provoking a small spurt of blood. ‘Damn. Damn, damn, damn.’ The bloody ones always left a livid mark on his sallow skin, and Slender Billy particularly wanted to look his best at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball.

‘Eau de citron,’ the girl on his bed said lazily.

‘You’re mumbling, Charlotte.’

‘Eau de citron. It dries the skin and shrivels away the spots.’ She spoke in French. ‘You should use it.’

‘Shit,’ the Prince said as another blackhead burst bloodily. ‘Shit and damn and bugger!’

He had been educated at Eton College so had an excellent command of English. After Eton he had gone to Oxford, then served on Wellington’s staff in Spain. The appointment had been purely political, for Wellington had not wanted him, and the exiled Prince had consequently been kept well away from any fighting, though the experience had nevertheless convinced the young man that he had a fine talent for soldiering. His education had also left him with a love for all things English. Indeed, apart from his Chief of Staff and a handful of aides, all his closest friends were English. He wished the girl on the bed were English, but instead she was Belgian and he hated the Belgians; to the Prince they were a common, ox-like race of peasants. ‘I hate you, Charlotte.’ He spoke to the girl in English. Her name was Paulette, but the Prince called all such girls Charlotte, after the English Princess who had first agreed to marry him, then inexplicably broken off the engagement.

‘What are you saying?’ Paulette spoke no English.

‘You stink like a sow,’ the Prince continued in English. ‘you’ve got thighs like a grenadier, your tits are greasy, and in short you are a typical Belgian and I hate you.’ He smiled fondly at the girl as he spoke, and Paulette, who in truth was very pretty, blew him a kiss before lying back on the pillows. She was a whore fetched from Brussels and paid ten English guineas a day to bed the Prince, and in her opinion she earned every ounce of the precious gold. Paulette thought the Prince disgustingly ugly: he was obnoxiously thin, with a bulbous round head on a ridiculously long neck. His skin was sallow and pitted, his eyes bulged, and his mouth was a slobbering frog-like slit. He was drunk as often as he was sober and in either condition held an inflated opinion of his abilities, both in bed and on the battlefield. He was now twenty-three years old and commander of the First Corps of the Duke of Wellington’s army. Those who liked the Prince called him Slender Billy, while his detractors called him the Young Frog. His father, King William, was known as the Old Frog.

No one of any sense had wanted the Young Frog to be given a command in the Duke’s army, but the Old Frog would not hear of the Netherlands joining the coalition unless his son held high command, and thus the politicians in London had forced the Duke of Wellington to concede. The Old Frog had further insisted that his son command British troops, on which point the Duke had also been forced to yield, though only on condition that reliable British officers were appointed to serve on the Young Frog’s staff.

The Duke provided a list of suitable, sober and solid men, but the Young Frog had simply scrawled out their names and replaced them with friends he had made at Eton and, when some of those friends declined the honour, he found other congenial officers who knew how to leaven war’s rigours with riotous enjoyment. The Prince also demanded a few officers who were experienced in battle and who would exemplify his own ideas of how wars should be fought. ‘Find me the most audacious of men!’ he ordered his Chief of Staff who, a few weeks later, diffidently informed the Prince that the notorious Major Sharpe was on the half-pay list and evidently unemployed. The Young Frog had immediately demanded Sharpe and sweetened the demand with a promotion. He flattered himself that he would discover a twin soul in the famous Rifleman.

Yet somehow, and despite the Prince’s easy nature, no such friendship had developed. The Prince found something subtly annoying about Sharpe’s sardonic face, and he even suspected that the Englishman was deliberately trying to annoy him. He must have asked Sharpe a score of times to dress in Dutch uniform, yet still the Rifleman appeared in his ancient, tattered green coat. That was when Sharpe bothered to show himself at the Prince’s headquarters at all; he evidently preferred to spend his days riding the French frontier which was a job that properly belonged to the pompous General Dornberg, which thought reminded the Prince that Dornberg’s noon report should have arrived. That report had a special importance this day for, if any trouble threatened, the Prince knew he could not afford to go dancing in Brussels. He summoned his Chief of Staff.

The Baron Jean de Constant Rebecque informed His Highness that Dornberg’s report had indeed arrived and contained nothing alarming. No French troops troubled the road to Mons; it seemed that the Belgian countryside slept under its summer heat.

The relieved Prince grunted an acknowledgement, then leaned forward to gaze critically in the mirror. He twisted his head left and right before looking anxiously at Rebecque. ‘Am I losing too much hair?’

Rebecque pretended to make a careful inspection, then shook his head reassuringly. ‘I can’t see that you’re losing any, sir.’

‘I thought I’d wear British uniform tonight.’

‘A very apt choice, sir.’ Rebecque spoke in English because the Prince preferred that language.

The Prince glanced at a clock. It would take his coach at least two hours to reach Brussels, and he needed a good hour to change into the scarlet and gold finery of a British major-general. He would allow himself another three hours to enjoy a private supper before going to the Duchess’s ball where, he knew, the food would be cold and inedible. ‘Has Sharpe returned yet?’ he asked Rebecque.

‘No, sir.’

The Prince frowned. ‘Damn. If he gets back, tell him I expect his attendance at the ball.’

Rebecque could not hide his astonishment. ‘Sharpe? At the Duchess’s ball?’ Sharpe had been promised that his duties to the Prince were not social, but only to provide advice during battle.

The Prince did not care what promises had been made to the Englishman; forcing Sharpe to dance would demonstrate to the Rifleman that the Prince commanded this headquarters. ‘He told me that he hates dancing! I shall nevertheless oblige him to dance for his own good. Everyone should enjoy dancing. I do!’ The Prince laughingly trod some capering steps about the bedroom. ‘We shall make Colonel Sharpe enjoy dancing! Are you sure you don’t want to dance tonight, Rebecque?’

‘I shall be Your Highness’s eyes and ears here.’

‘Quite right.’ The Prince, reminded that he had military responsibilities, suddenly looked grave, but he had an irrepressibly high-spirited nature and could not help laughing again. ‘I imagine Sharpe dances like a Belgian heifer! Thump, thump, thump, and all the time with that gloomy expression on his face. We shall cheer him up, Rebecque.’

‘I’m sure he’ll be grateful for it, sir.’

‘And tell him he’s to wear Dutch uniform tonight!’

‘Indeed I will, sir.’

The Prince left for Brussels an hour and a half later, his carriage escorted by an honour guard of Dutch Carabiniers who had learned their trade in the French Emperor’s service. Paulette, relieved at the Prince’s departure, lay cosily in his bed while Rebecque took a book to his own quarters. The clerks laboriously copied out the orders listing which battalions the Prince would visit in the coming week, and what manoeuvres each battalion should demonstrate for the Prince’s approval.

Clouds heaped higher in the west, but the sun still shone on the village. A cat curled up by the boot-scraper at the front door of the Prince’s headquarters where the sentry, a British redcoat, stooped to fondle the animal’s warm fur. Wheat and rye and barley and oats ripened in the sun. It was a perfect summer’s day, shimmering with heat and silence and all the beauty of peace.

The first news of French activity reached the Duke of Wellington while he ate his early dinner of roast mutton. The message, which had originated in Charleroi just thirty-two miles away, had first been sent to Marshal Blücher at Namur, then copied and sent on to Brussels, a total journey of seventy miles. The message merely reported that the French had attacked at dawn and that the Prussian outposts had been driven in south of Charleroi.

‘How many French? It doesn’t say. And where are the French now? And is the Emperor with them?’ the Duke demanded of his staff.

No one could tell. The mutton was abandoned on the table while the Duke’s staff gathered about a map pinned to the dining-room wall. The French might have advanced into the country south of Charleroi, but the Duke, as ever, brooded over the left-hand side of the map which showed the great sweep of flat country between Mons and Tournai. That was where he feared a French advance that would cut the British off from the North Sea. If the French took Ghent then the Duke’s army would be denied its supply roads from the North Sea, as well as its route home.

Wellington, had he been in the Emperor’s boots, would have chosen that strategy. First he would have pushed a strong diversionary force at Charleroi, then, when the allies moved to defend Brussels from the south, he would have launched the real attack to the west. It was by just such dazzling manoeuvres that the Emperor had held off the Russian, Prussian and Austrian armies in the spring of 1814. Napoleon, in the weeks before his abdication, had never fought more brilliantly, and no one, least of all Wellington, expected anything but the same cleverness now.

‘We’ve heard nothing from Dornberg?’ the Duke snapped.

‘Nothing.’

The Duke looked back at the Prussian message. It did not tell him how many French had crossed the frontier, nor whether Blücher was concentrating his army; all it told him was that a French force had pushed back the Prussian outposts.

He went back to the dinner-table. His own British and Dutch forces were scattered across five hundred square miles of countryside. They had to be thus dispersed, not only to guard every possible French invasion route, but also so that the mass of men and horses did not strip any one locality of food and grazing. Now, however, he knew the army must begin to shrink towards its battle order. ‘We’ll concentrate,’ the Duke said. Every division of the army had a prearranged town or village where it would gather and wait for further orders. ‘And send a good man to Dornberg to find out what’s happening in front of him.’

The Duke frowned again at Blücher’s message, wondering whether he had over-reacted to its small news. Surely, if the French incursion was serious, the Prussians would have sent a more urgent messenger? No matter. If it turned out to be a false alarm then the army’s concentration could be reversed next day.

Nine miles to the south, in the little village of Waterloo, the hugely fat Prussian Major had stopped his plodding horse at a small inn opposite the church. The wine he had taken for lunch, together with the oppressive afternoon heat, had quite tired him out. He asked for a little restorative brandy, then saw a baker’s tray of delicious cakes being carried into the inn’s side-door. ‘And some of those pastries, I think. The ones with the almond paste, if you’d be so kind.’

He slid out of the saddle and gratefully sat on a bench that was shaded by a small chestnut tree. The despatch which would have told Wellington of the loss of Charleroi and the further French advance lay in the Major’s saddlebag.

The Major leaned against the chestnut’s trunk. Nothing much stirred in the village. The paved road ran between wide grass verges where two tethered cows and four goats grazed. A few chickens scratched by the church steps where a dog twitched in its sleep. A small child played tipcat in the archway of the inn’s stableyard. The fat Major, pleased with such a scene of rural innocence, smiled happily, then, as he waited for his snack, dozed.

Sharpe’s horses limped into the Prince of Orange’s head-quarters just ten minutes after the Prince had left for Brussels. Aggressive French patrols had prevented Sharpe getting close to the road a second time, but he had ridden near enough to see the dust clouds drifting away from the boots, hooves and wheels of an army on the march. Now, flinching at the soreness in his thighs, he eased himself out of the saddle. He shouted for an ostler, tied Nosey to a metal ring on the stableyard wall and gave the dog a bowl of water before, carrying his map and weapons, he limped into the silent house. Dust floated in the beams of light that flooded through the fanlight over the front door. He looked into the map room, but no one was there.

‘Duty Officer!’ Sharpe shouted angrily, then, when no one answered, he hammered his rifle butt against the wooden panelling in the hallway. ‘Duty officer!’

A bedroom door opened upstairs and a face appeared over the banister. ‘I hope there’s a good reason for this noise! Oh, it’s you!’

Sharpe peered into the gloom and saw the affable face of the Baron Jean de Constant Rebecque. ‘Who’s on duty?’

‘Colonel Winckler, I think, but he’s probably sleeping. Most of us are. The Prince has gone to Brussels, and he wants you there as well.’ Rebecque yawned. ‘You’re required to dance.’

Sharpe stared upwards. For a few seconds he was too shocked to speak and Rebecque assumed that the silence merely expressed Sharpe’s horror at being ordered to a ball, but then the Rifleman exploded with his news. ‘Haven’t you heard? My God, Rebecque, the bloody French are north of Charleroi! I sent Dornberg a message hours ago!’

The words hung in the hot still air of the stairwell. It was Rebecque’s turn to stare silently. ‘Sweet God,’ he said after a few seconds, then began buttoning his blue coat. ‘Officers!’ His shout echoed through the house. ‘Officers!’ He ran at the stairs, taking them three at a time. ‘Show me.’ He pushed past Sharpe into the map room where he threw back the heavy wooden shutters to flood the tables with sunlight.

‘There.’ Sharpe placed a filthy finger on the map just north of Charleroi. ‘A mixed force; infantry, cavalry and guns. I was there this morning, and I went back this afternoon. The road was crowded both times. I couldn’t see much this afternoon, but there must have been at least one whole corps on that road. A prisoner told me he thought Napoleon was with them, but he wasn’t certain.’

Rebecque looked up into Sharpe’s tired and dust-stained face and wondered just how Sharpe had taken a prisoner, but he knew this was no time for foolish questions. He turned to the other staff officers who were crowding into the room. ‘Winckler! Fetch the Prince back, and hurry! Harry! Go to Dornberg, find out what in God’s name is happening in Mons. Sharpe, you get some food. Then rest.’

‘I can go to Mons.’

‘Rest! But food first! You look exhausted, man.’

Sharpe obeyed. He liked Rebecque, a Dutchman who, like his Prince, had been educated at Eton and Oxford. The Baron had been the Prince’s tutor at Oxford and was living proof to Sharpe that most education was a waste of effort, for none of Rebecque’s modest good sense had rubbed off on the Prince.

Sharpe went through to the deserted kitchens and found some bread, cheese and ale. As he was cutting the bread the Prince’s girl, Paulette, came sleepily into the room. She was dressed in a grey shift that was loosely belted round her waist. ‘All this noise!’ she said irritably. ‘What’s happening?’

‘The Emperor’s crossed the frontier.’ Sharpe spoke in French.

‘Good!’ Paulette said fiercely.

Sharpe laughed as he cut the mould off a piece of cheese.

‘Don’t you want butter on your bread?’ the girl asked.

‘I couldn’t find any.’

‘It’s in the scullery. I’ll fetch it.’ Paulette gave Sharpe a happy smile. She did not know the Rifleman well, yet she thought he was by far the best-looking man on the Prince’s staff. Many of the other officers considered themselves good-looking, but this Englishman had an interestingly scarred face and a reluctant but infectious smile. She brought a muslin-covered bowl of butter from the scullery and good-naturedly pushed Sharpe to one side. ‘You want an apple with your cheese?’

‘Please.’

Paulette made a plate of food for herself, then poured some ale out of Sharpe’s stone bottle into one of the Prince’s Sèvres teacups. She sipped the ale, then grinned. ‘The Prince tells me your woman is French?’

Sharpe was somewhat taken aback by the girl’s directness, but he nodded. ‘From Normandy.’

‘How? Why? What? Tell me. I want to know!’ She smiled in recognition of her own cheekiness. ‘I like to know everything about everyone.’

‘We met at the end of the war,’ Sharpe said as though that explained everything.

‘And you fell in love?’ she asked eagerly.

‘I suppose so, yes.’ He sounded sheepish.

‘That’s nothing to be ashamed of! I was in love once. He was a dragon, but he went off to fight in Russia, poor boy. That was the last I saw of him. He said he would marry me, but I suppose he was eaten by wolves or killed by cossacks.’ She sighed in sad memory of her lost Dragoon. ‘Will you marry your French lady?’

‘I can’t. I’m already married to a lady who lives in England.’

Paulette shrugged that difficulty aside. ‘So divorce her!’

‘It’s impossible. In England a divorce costs more money than you can dream of. I’d have to go to Parliament and bribe them to pass a law specially for my divorce.’

‘The English are stupid. I suppose that’s why the Prince likes them so much. He feels at home there.’ She laughed. She had thick brown hair, slanting eyes, and a cat-like face. ‘Were you living in France with your woman?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did you leave?’

‘Because the Emperor would have put me in prison if I’d have stayed, and because I needed my half-pay.’

‘Your half-pay?’

Sharpe was both amused and irritated by her questioning, but it was harmless, so he indulged her. ‘I received a pension from the English army. If I’d have stayed in France there would have been no pension.’

Hooves sounded loud in the yard as Colonel Winckler took off after the Prince. Sharpe, glad that he was not having to ride anywhere, began tugging at his tight boots. Paulette pushed his hands away, put his right foot on her lap, tugged off the boot, then did the same for his other foot. ‘My God, you smell!’ She laughingly pushed his feet away. ‘And Madame left France with you?’ Paulette’s questioning had the guileless innocence of a child.

‘Madame and our baby, yes.’

Paulette frowned at Sharpe. ‘Because of you?’

He paused, seeking a modest answer, but could think of nothing but the truth. ‘Indeed.’

Paulette cradled her cup of ale and stared through the open door into the stableyard where chickens pecked at oats and Sharpe’s dog twitched in exhausted sleep. ‘Your French lady must love you.’

‘I think she does, yes.’

‘And you?’

Sharpe smiled. ‘I love her, yes.’

‘And she’s here? In Belgium?’

‘In Brussels.’

‘With the baby? What sort of baby? How old?’

‘A boy. Three months, nearly four. He’s in Brussels too.’

Paulette sighed. ‘I think it’s lovely. I would like to follow a man to another country.’

Sharpe shook his head. ‘It’s very hard on Lucille. She hates that I have to fight against her countrymen.’

‘Then why do you do it?’ Paulette asked in an outraged voice.

‘Because of my half-pay again. If I’d have refused to rejoin the army they’d have stopped my pension, and that’s the only income we have. So when the Prince summoned me, I had to come.’

‘But you didn’t want to come?’ Paulette asked shrewdly.

‘Not really.’ Which was true, though that morning, as he had spied on the French, Sharpe had recognized in himself the undeniable pleasure of doing his job well. For a few days, he supposed, he must forget Lucille’s unhappiness and be a soldier again.

‘So you only fight for the money.’ Paulette said it wearily, as though it explained everything. ‘How much does the Prince pay you for being a colonel?’

‘One pound, three shillings and tenpence a day.’ That was his reward for a brevet lieutenant-colonelcy in a cavalry regiment and it was more money than Sharpe had ever earned in his life. Half of the salary disappeared in mess fees and for the headquarter’s servants, but Sharpe still felt rich, and it was a far better reward than the two shillings and ninepence a day that he had been receiving as a half-pay lieutenant. He had left the army as a major, but the clerks in the Horse Guards had determined that his majority was only brevet rank, not regimental, and so he had been forced to accept a lieutenant’s pension. The war was proving a windfall to Sharpe, as it was to so many other half-pay officers in both armies.

‘Do you like the Prince?’ Paulette asked him.

That was a sensitive question. ‘Do you?’ Sharpe countered.

‘He’s a drunk.’ Paulette did not bother with tact, but just let her scorn flow. ‘And when he’s not drunk he squeezes his spots. Plip plop, plip plop! Ugh! I have to do his back for him.’ She looked to see whether her words had offended Sharpe, and was evidently reassured. ‘You know he was going to marry an English princess?’

‘I know.’

‘She couldn’t stand him. So now he says he will marry a Russian princess! Ha! That’s all he’s good for, a Russian. They rub butter on their skins, did you know that? All over, to keep warm. They must smell.’ She sipped her ale, then frowned as her mind skittered back over the conversation. ‘Your wife in England. She does not mind that you have another lady?’

‘She has another man.’

The evident convenience of the arrangement pleased Paulette. ‘So everything is all right?’

‘No.’ He smiled. ‘They stole my money. One day I shall go back and take it from them.’

She stared at him with large serious eyes. ‘Will you kill the man?’

‘Yes.’ He said it very simply, which made it all the more believable.

‘I wish a man would kill for me,’ Paulette sighed, then stared in alarm because Sharpe had suddenly raised a hand in warning. ‘What is it?’

‘Sh!’ He stood and went in his stockinged feet to the open stableyard door. Far off, like a crackling of burning thorns, he thought he heard musketry. He could not be certain, for the sound was fading and tenuous in the small warm breeze. ‘Do you hear anything?’ he asked the girl.

‘No.’

‘There it is! Listen!’ He heard the noise again, this time it sounded like a piece of canvas ripping. Somewhere, and not so very far off, there was a musket fight. Sharpe looked up at the weathercock on the stable roof and saw the wind had backed southerly. He ran to the kitchen door which opened into the main part of the house. ‘Rebecque!’

‘I hear it!’ The Baron was already standing at the open front door. ‘How far off?’

‘God knows.’ Sharpe stood beside Rebecque. The small wind kicked up dust devils in the street. ‘Five miles?’ Sharpe hazarded. ‘Six?’

The noise faded to nothing, then any chance of hearing it again was drowned in the clatter of hooves. Sharpe looked down the high street, half expecting to see French Dragoons galloping into the small village, but it was only the Prince of Orange who had abandoned his carriage and taken a horse from one of his escort. That escort streamed behind him down the street, together with the aide who had fetched the Prince back.

‘What news, Rebecque?’ The Prince dropped from the saddle and ran into the house.

‘Only what we sent you.’ Rebecque followed the Prince into the map room.

‘Charleroi, eh?’ The Prince chewed at a fingernail as he stared at the map. ‘We’ve heard nothing from Dornberg?’

‘No, sir. But if you listen carefully, you can hear fighting to the south.’

‘Mons?’ The Prince sounded alarmed.

‘No one knows, sir.’

‘Then find out!’ the Prince snapped. ‘I want a report from Dornberg. You can send it after me.’

‘After you?’ Rebecque frowned. ‘But where are you going, sir?’

‘Brussels, of course! Someone has to make sure Wellington has heard this news.’ He looked at Sharpe. ‘I particularly wanted you in attendance tonight.’

Sharpe suppressed an urge to kick His Royal Highness in the royal arse. ‘Indeed, sir,’ he said instead.

‘And I insist you wear Dutch uniform. Why aren’t you in Dutch uniform now?’

‘I shall change, sir.’ Sharpe, despite the Prince’s frequent insistence, had yet to buy himself a Dutch uniform.

Rebecque, sensing that the Prince still intended to dance despite the news of a French invasion, cleared his throat: ‘Surely there’ll be no ball in Brussels tonight, sir?’

‘It hasn’t been cancelled yet,’ the Prince said petulantly, then turned back with specific instructions for Sharpe. ‘I want you in evening dress uniform. That means gold lace, two epaulettes with gold bullion on each and blue cushions. And a dress sword, Sharpe, instead of that butcher’s blade.’ The Prince smiled, as if to soften his sartorial orders, then gestured at one of his Dutch aides. ‘Come on, Winckler, there’s nothing more to do here.’ He strode from the room, leaving Rebecque thin-lipped and silent.

The sound of the hooves faded in the warm air. Rebecque listened again for the sound of musketry, but heard nothing, so instead tapped the map with an ebony ruler. ‘His Royal Highness is quite right, Sharpe, you should be wearing Dutch uniform.’

‘I keep meaning to buy one.’

Rebecque smiled. ‘I can lend you something suitable for tonight.’

‘Bugger tonight.’ Sharpe twisted the map round so that it faced him. ‘Do you want me to go to Mons?’

‘I’ve already sent Harry.’ Rebecque went to the open window and stared into the heat haze. ‘Perhaps nothing is happening in Mons.’ He spoke softly, almost to himself. ‘Perhaps we’re all wrong about Mons. Perhaps Napoleon is just swinging open the front doors and ignoring the back gate.’

‘Sir?’

‘It’s a double-leafed front door, Sharpe, that’s what it is!’ Rebecque spoke with a sudden urgency as he strode back to the table and tapped the map. ‘The Prussians are the left-hand door and we’re the right, and when the French push in the middle, Sharpe, the two leaves will hinge apart. Is that what Bonaparte’s doing to us?’

Sharpe stared down at the map. From the Prince’s headquarters a road ran eastwards through Nivelles to meet the Charleroi highway at an unnamed crossroads. If that crossroads was lost, then Napoleon would have successfully swung the two doors apart. The British and Dutch had been worrying about Mons, but now Sharpe took a scrap of charcoal and scrawled a thick ring round the crossroads. ‘That’s the lock on your doors, Rebecque. Who are our closest troops?’

‘Saxe-Weimar’s brigade.’ Rebecque had already seen the importance of the crossroads. He strode to the door and shouted for clerks.

‘I’ll go there,’ Sharpe offered.

Rebecque nodded acceptance of the offer. ‘But for God’s sake send me prompt news, Sharpe. I don’t want to be left in the dark.’

‘If the French have taken that damned crossroads, we’ll all be in the dark. Permanently. I’m borrowing one of the Prince’s horses. Mine’s blown.’

‘Take two. And take Lieutenant Doggett with you. He can carry your messages.’

‘Does that crossroads have a name?’ That was an important question, for any messages Sharpe sent had to be accurate.

Rebecque searched the table to find one of the larger scale maps that the Royal Engineers had drawn and distributed to all the army headquarters. ‘It’s called Quatre Bras.’

‘Four arms?’

‘That’s what it says here, Quatre Bras. Four Arms. Just what you need for opening double doors, eh?’

Sharpe did not respond to the small jest. Instead he shouted for Lieutenant Doggett, then went to the kitchen where he sat and tugged on his boots. He yelled through the open stableyard door for three horses to be saddled, two for himself and one for Lieutenant Doggett. ‘And untie my dog!’

The orders for Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, sealed with Rebecque’s copy of the Prince of Orange’s personal seal, came ten minutes later. Rebecque brought the orders himself and handed them up to Sharpe who was already mounted. ‘Remember you’re supposed to be dancing tonight,’ Rebecque smiled at Sharpe.

Paulette had come into the stableyard and was leaning against a sun-warmed wall. She smiled at Sharpe as he twisted the Prince’s horse towards the archway. ‘Go carefully, Englishman,’ she called.

The courtyard was filling with horses as staff officers, all alerted by the distant musketry, arrived from the various brigade headquarters to seek information and orders. Sharpe blew the Prince’s whore a kiss, then rode to find a crossroads.

CHAPTER FIVE

The bedroom of the hotel on Brussels’ rue Royale stank of vinegar which Jane Sharpe’s maid had sprinkled onto a red-hot shovel to fumigate the room. A small metal bowl of sulphur powders still burned in the hearth to eradicate whatever pestilential airs the vaporizing vinegar might have missed. It was, Jane had complained, a foul little suite of rooms, but at least she would make sure they held no risk of contagion. The previous occupant had been a Swiss merchant who had been evicted to make way for the English milord and his lady, and Jane had a suspicion that the Swiss, like all foreigners, harboured strange and filthy diseases. The noxious stench of the scorched vinegar and burning sulphur was making Jane feel ill, but in truth she had not felt really well ever since the sea crossing from England.

Lord John Rossendale, elegantly handsome in white breeches and silk stockings, black dancing shoes, and a gold-frogged cut-away coat with a tall blue collar and twin epaulettes of gold chain, stood at the bedroom’s window and stared moodily at the Brussels rooftops.

‘I don’t know whether he’ll be there or not. I just don’t know.’ It was the twentieth time he had confessed such ignorance, but for the twentieth time it did not satisfy Jane Sharpe who sat naked to the waist at the room’s small dressing-table.

‘Why can’t we find out?’ she snapped.

‘What do you expect me to do?’ Lord John ascribed Jane’s short temper to her upset stomach. The North Sea crossing seemed to have disagreed with her, and the journey in the coach to Brussels had not improved her nausea. ‘Do you expect me to send a messenger to Braine-le-Comte?’

‘Why not, if he can provide us with the answer.’

‘Braine-le-Comte is not a person, but the village where the Prince has his headquarters.’

‘I cannot think,’ Jane paused to dab her cheeks with the eau de citron which was supposed to blanche the skin of her face and breasts to a fashionable death-mask whiteness, ‘I cannot think,’ she resumed, ‘why the Prince of Orange, whoever in hell he is, should want to appoint Richard as a staff officer! Richard doesn’t have the manners to be a staff officer. It’s like that Roman Emperor who made his horse into a consul. It’s madness!’ She was being unfair. Jane knew just what a good soldier her husband was, but a woman who has deserted her man and stolen his fortune soon learns to denigrate his memory as a justification for her actions. ‘Don’t you agree that it’s madness?’ She turned a furious damp face on Rossendale who could only shrug mute agreement. Lord John thought Jane looked very beautiful but also rather frightening. Her hair was splendidly awry because of the lead curling strips which, when removed, would leave her with a glorious gold-bright halo, but which now gave her angry face the fierce and tangled aspect of a Greek Fury.

Jane turned back to the mirror. She could spend hours at a dressing-table, gravely staring at her reflection just as an artist might gaze on his work in search of a final gloss that might turn a merely pretty picture into a masterpiece. ‘Would you say there’s colour in my cheeks?’ she asked Lord John.

‘Yes.’ He smiled with relief that she had changed the subject away from Richard Sharpe. ‘In fact you’re looking positively healthy.’

‘Damn.’ She glowered at her reflection. ‘It must be the hot weather.’ She turned as her maid appeared from the anteroom with two dresses, one gold and one white, which were held up for Jane’s inspection. Jane pointed to the pale gold dress then returned her attention to the mirror. She dipped a finger into a pot of rouge and, with exquisite care, reddened her nipples. Then, obsessively, she went back to blanching her face. The table was crowded with flasks and vials; there was bergamot and musk, eau de chipre, eau de luce, and a bottle of Sans Pareil perfume that had cost Lord John a small fortune. He did not resent such gifts for he found Jane’s beauty ever more startling and ever more beguiling. Society might disapprove of the adulterous relationship flaunted so openly, but Lord John believed that Jane’s beauty excused everything. He could not bear to think of losing her, or of not wholly possessing her. He was in love.

Jane grimaced at herself in the mirror. ‘So what happens if Richard is at the ball tonight?’

Lord John sighed inwardly as he turned back to the window. ‘He’ll challenge me, of course, then it will be grass before tomorrow’s breakfast.’ He spoke lightly, but in truth he dreaded having to face Sharpe in a dawn duel. To Lord John, Sharpe was nothing but a killer who had been trained and hardened to death on innumerable battlefields, while Lord John had only ever brought about the death of foxes. ‘We needn’t go tonight,’ he said hopelessly.

‘And have all society say that we are cowards?’ Jane, because she was a mistress, rarely had an opportunity to attend the more elegant events of society, and she was not going to miss this chance of being seen at a duchess’s ball. Not even Jane’s tender digestion would keep her from tonight’s dancing, and nor did she have any real fear of meeting her husband, for Jane well knew Sharpe’s reluctance to dance or to dress up in a frippery uniform, but the possibility of his presence was an alarming thought that she could not resist exploring.

‘I shall just try to avoid meeting him,’ Lord John said helplessly.

Jane dabbed a tentative finger to test whether her rouged nipples had dried. ‘How soon before there’s a battle?’

‘I’m told the Peer doesn’t expect the French to move till July.’

Jane grimaced at the implied delay, then stood with her slender arms raised high to allow her maid to drop the gauzy dress over her head. ‘Do you know what happens in battle?’ she asked Lord John from under the cascading cloth of gold.

It seemed a rather broad question, and one for which Lord John could not think of a specific answer. ‘Rather a lot of unpleasantry, I imagine,’ he said instead.

‘Richard told me that in battle a lot of unpopular officers are killed by their own men.’ Jane twisted herself to and fro in front of the mirror to make sure the dress hung properly. The dress was high waisted and low-breasted; a fashionably filmy screen through which her brightly coloured nipples showed as enticing shadows. Other women would doubtless be wearing such dresses, but none, Jane thought, would dare to wear one without any petticoat as she herself intended. Satisfied, she sat as her maid began to untwist the lead strips from her hair and tease the ringlets into perfection. ‘He told me that you can’t tell what happens in a battle because there’s too much smoke and noise. A battle, in short, is an ideal place to commit a murder.’

‘Are you suggesting I should kill him?’ Lord John was genuinely shocked at the dishonour of the suggestion.

Jane had indeed been hinting at the opportunity for her husband’s murder, but she could not admit as much. ‘I’m suggesting,’ she lied smoothly, ‘that he may not wish to risk his career by fighting a duel, but instead might try to kill you during a battle.’ She dipped her finger in scented black paste that she applied to her eyelashes. ‘He’s a man of excessive pride and extraordinary brutality.’

‘Are you trying to frighten me?’ Lord John attempted to pass the conversation off lightly.

‘I am trying to make you resolute. A man threatens your life and our happiness, so I am suggesting that you take steps to protect us.’ It was as close as Jane dared go to a direct suggestion of murder, though she could not resist one more enticement. ‘You’re probably in more danger from a British rifle bullet than you are from any French weapon.’

‘The French,’ Lord John said uneasily, ‘may take care of him anyway.’

‘They’ve had plenty of chances before,’ Jane said tartly, ‘and achieved nothing.’

Then, ready at last, she stood. Her hair, ringleted, bejewelled and feathered, crowned an ethereal and sensuous beauty that dazzled Lord John. He bowed, kissed her hand, and led her down to the courtyard where their carriage waited. It was time to dance.

His Serene Highness Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar took one look at Rebecque’s orders, grunted his acceptance, and tossed the paper to his Brigade Major. ‘Tell the Prince we’ll be at the crossroads in one hour,’ he told Sharpe.

Sharpe did not reveal that the Prince of Orange knew nothing of the orders. Instead he thanked His Serene Highness, bowed his way out of the inn which was Prince Bernhard’s headquarters, and remounted his horse. Lieutenant Simon Doggett, who had been charged with keeping Nosey from killing the chickens that pecked in the inn yard, followed Sharpe out to the road. ‘Well, sir?’ he asked Sharpe, but in a nervous voice which suggested that he expected his temerity in asking to be met with a savage reproof.

‘He’ll be at the crossroads in one hour with four thousand men. Let’s hope the bastards can fight.’ Saxe-Weimar’s men were mostly German troops in Dutch service who had fought for Napoleon in the previous wars, and not even Saxe-Weimar himself was certain whether they would now fight against their old comrades.

Doggett rode eastwards beside Sharpe. Like so many of the Englishmen who served the Prince of Orange, Doggett was an old Etonian. He was now a lieutenant in the First Foot Guards, but had been seconded to the Prince’s staff because his father was an old friend of the Baron Rebecque. Doggett was fair-haired, fair-skinned and, to Sharpe’s eyes, absurdly young. He was in fact eighteen, had never seen a battle, and was very nervous of the notorious Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe who was thirty-eight years old and had lost count of all his battles.

Sharpe now anticipated another battle; one for a crossroads that linked two armies. ‘If the French already hold Quatre Bras, you’ll have to go back and warn Saxe-Weimar,’ Sharpe told him. ‘Then go to Rebecque and tell him the bad news.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Doggett paused, then found the courage to ask a question. ‘And what will you be doing, sir? If the French have captured the crossroads, I mean?’

‘I’ll be riding to Brussels to tell the Duke to run like hell.’

Doggett glanced to see whether the Rifleman was smiling in jest, and decided he was not. The two men fell silent as they cantered their horses between low hedgerows that were bright with the early spears of foxgloves. Beyond the hedges the cornfields were thick with poppies and edged with cornflowers. Swallows whipped low across the fields, while rooks flew clumsily towards their high nests. Sharpe twisted in his saddle to see that the western sky was still clouded, though there were great gaps between the heaping clouds through which the sun poured an incandescent flood of light. It was evening, but there were still four hours of daylight left. In a week’s time it would be the longest day of the year when, in these latitudes, a gunner could accurately sight a twelve-pounder at half-past nine of an evening.

They passed a great dark wood that grew southwards from the road and, quite suddenly, the pale strip of the paved high road stretched stark across the landscape ahead. Sharpe instinctively reined in his horse as he stared at the small cluster of buildings that marked the crossroads called Quatre Bras.

Nothing moved at the crossroads, or nothing that threatened a soldier’s life. There were no troops at the crossroads and the highway was empty, just a pale dusty strip between its vivid green verges. Sharpe tapped his heels to start his horse moving again.

Wisps of smoke revealed that the cottagers were cooking their evening meals at the hearths of the small hamlet which lay to the north of the crossroads. There was one large stone farmhouse, outside which a small dark-haired girl was playing with some kittens by an empty farm-cart. Three geese waddled across the road. Two old women, bonneted and shawled, sat tatting lace outside a thatched cottage. A pig rooted in an orchard, and milk cows lowed from the farmyard. One of the shawled women must have seen Sharpe and Doggett approaching for she suddenly called the small girl who ran nervously towards the thatched cottage. Beyond the tiny hamlet the smaller unpaved road climbed a shallow hill before disappearing eastwards in a stand of dark trees.

‘You understand the importance of this road?’ Sharpe pointed at the smaller road on which he and Doggett travelled.

‘No, sir,’ Doggett replied honestly.

‘It’s the road that joins us and the Prussians. If the French cut it, we’re on our own, so if we lose these crossroads, the Crapauds have won the damned campaign.’ Sharpe spurred down to the crossroads, touched his hat to the old ladies who were staring with alarm at the two horsemen, then he turned to gaze down the long southwards road that led to Charleroi. The highway stretched pale and deserted in the evening sun, yet this was the very same road on which Sharpe had seen a French corps marching that morning. That sighting had been only twelve miles south of this crossroads, yet now there was no sign of any Frenchmen. Had they stopped? Had they retreated? Sharpe felt a sudden fear that he had raised a false alarm and the force he had seen had been nothing but a feint. Or maybe the French had marched past this crossroads and were already nearing Brussels? No. He dismissed that fear instantly, because there was no sign of an army’s passing. The tall rye in the fields either side of the road was untrampled, and the road’s crude paving of cobbles on impacted chalk and flint had no deep ruts like those made by the passage of heavy guns. So where the hell were the French?

‘Let’s go and find the bastards,’ Sharpe grunted, and once he had said it he marvelled at how easy it was to slip back into the old ways of speaking about the enemy. He had lived in Normandy for seven months, he had learned the French language and come to love the French countryside, yet now, just as if he had never met Lucille, he spoke of the French as a hated enemy. The strangeness of that thought suddenly made him miss the château. Lucille’s home was very grandly called a château, though in truth it was nothing more than a large moated farm with a crenellated tower to remind passers-by that the building had once been a small fortress. Now the château was Sharpe’s home, the first home he had ever truly known. The estates had been neglected in the war and Sharpe had begun the laborious task of repairing the years of neglect. At this time of the year, if Napoleon had not returned, Sharpe should have been thinning the apple crop, stripping away basketloads of the young fruit to give the remaining crop a better chance of ripening in the autumn, but instead he was riding a dusty road in Belgium and searching for an enemy that had mysteriously disappeared.

The road dropped gently down to a ford. To Sharpe’s left the stream flowed into a lake, while ahead of him, beyond the shallow ford, a farm with an arched gateway stood on the left-hand side of the road. A woman stared suspiciously from the farm’s arch at the two soldiers, then stepped back into the yard and slammed the heavy gate. Sharpe had stopped at the ford to let the horses drink. Bright blue dragonflies hovered and darted in the reeds. The evening was warm; a gentle quiet dusk in which the only sounds were the rippling water and the slight clatter of the rye stalks moving in the breeze. It seemed impossible that this might become a battlefield, and perhaps it would not, for Sharpe was already beginning to doubt what he had seen that same morning. Where the hell had the French gone?

He touched the horse’s flanks, splashed through the ford and began to climb the gradual slope beyond. Dogs barked in the farmyard, and Nosey howled in reply till Sharpe snapped at him to be quiet. The familiar homely stink of a dungheap wafted across the highway. Sharpe rode slowly, as though hurrying might spoil the calm of this perfect summer’s evening. The road was unhedged, running between wide strips of rank grass in which wood garlic, foxgloves, columbine and yellow archangel grew. Elder and blackthorn bushes offered patches of shade. A rabbit thumped the verge in alarm at the horsemen’s approach, then scurried into the rye stalks. The evening was fragrant, warm and rich, lit by the great wash of gold light that flooded through the cloud chasms in the western skies.

Off to Sharpe’s left, about a mile away, he could see the roofs of two more farmhouses, while to his right the wood gave way to rolling cornfields intersected by a farm track that twisted between the crops. Nothing untoward moved in the landscape. Had he come to the wrong crossroads? He had a sudden fear that this was not the Charleroi to Brussels road. He took out his map, which indeed suggested that he was riding on the main Brussels highway, but maps were notoriously inaccurate. He looked for a milestone, but none was in sight. He stopped again and listened, but could hear neither musketry nor the sounds of marching men. Had he imagined the enemy this morning? Or the musketry this afternoon? But Rebecque had heard the musketry too. So where were the French? Had they been swallowed into the warm fields?

The road bent slightly to the right. The rye was growing so tall that Sharpe could not see what lay around the bend. He loosened his rifle in its holster and called Nosey to heel. Simon Doggett, riding alongside Sharpe with the spare horse, seemed to share the Rifleman’s nervousness. Both men were instinctively curbing their horses.

They edged round the road’s bend. Ahead now was a road junction shaded by two big chestnut trees. The highway bent to the left, while a smaller track went off to the right. Far beyond the junction, and half-obscured by the tall rye, was a village. The map tallied with what Sharpe saw, so the village had to be Frasnes.

‘We’ll go as far as the village,’ Sharpe said.

‘Yes, sir.’

The sound of their voices broke the nervous spell and both men dug in their heels to make their horses trot. Sharpe had to duck under a low chestnut branch as he turned the next corner to see, five hundred yards ahead of him, the wide village street.

He stopped again. The street seemed empty. He pulled out the battered sea captain’s telescope that he had bought in Caen to replace the expensive glass that he had lost after Toulouse. He trained the awkward heavy instrument on the village’s single street.

Three men sat outside what must be the village inn. A woman in thick black skirts led a donkey laden with hay. Two children ran towards the church. The image of the church wavered, Sharpe checked the glass’s tremor, then froze. ‘Jesus Christ!’

‘Sir?’ Doggett asked in alarm.

‘We’ve got the bastards!’ Sharpe’s voice was filled with satisfaction.

The French had not disappeared, and he had not imagined them. They were in Frasnes. At the far end of the village street, just coming into sight and foreshortened by distance and the ancient lens, was a battalion of French infantry. They must have been singing for, though Sharpe could hear nothing, he could see their mouths opening and closing in unison. This battalion wore darker blue coats than most French infantry and had very dark blue trousers. ‘They’re a battalion of Voltigeurs,’ Sharpe told Doggett. ‘Light infantry. Skirmishers. So where the hell are their Dragoons?’ He panned the telescope left and right, but no horsemen showed in the evening sunlight.

Doggett had taken out his own glass and was staring at the French. They were the first enemy troops he had ever seen and the sight of them had made him go pale. He could hear the beat of his bloodstream echoing fast in his ears. He had often imagined seeing the enemy for the first time, but it was strange how very commonplace and yet how exciting this baptism was. ‘How many of them are there?’ he asked.

‘Six hundred?’ Sharpe guessed. ‘And they’re cocksure bastards to march without a cavalry screen.’ The only horsemen he could see were ten mounted French officers, but he knew the cavalry and guns could not be far behind. No General pushed unsupported skirmishers too far ahead of the main force. He turned to Doggett. ‘Right! You go back to Quatre Bras. Wait there for Saxe-Weimar. Give him my compliments and tell him there’s at least one battalion of French skirmishers coming his way. Suggest he advances as far as the stream and stops them there, but make it a tactful suggestion. Take Nosey and the spare horse, then wait for me at the crossroads. Understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Doggett turned his own horse and awkwardly led the spare horse round in a circle. ‘What will you do, sir?’

‘I’ll keep an eye on these bastards. If you hear shooting, don’t worry. That’s just me playing games. Give Nosey a good kicking if the bastard gives you any trouble.’

Doggett spurred away, followed by a reluctant Nosey, while Sharpe dismounted and led his horse back to the chestnut trees which grew at the road’s fork. Just beyond the chestnuts, in the long grass of the verge, a heavy wooden brush harrow had been abandoned. Sharpe tied the horse’s reins to the harrow’s stout frame, then slid his rifle out of its saddle holster. He checked that the weapon was loaded, then that the flint was firmly seated in its leather-padded jaws.

He went back past the chestnuts, keeping in the shadows of the tall rye on the western side of the road. He ran steadily, getting ever closer to the village and to the approaching enemy. The French troops had not stopped in Frasnes, but were marching doggedly on towards Sharpe who supposed that their orders were to seize the crossroads at Quatre Bras before nightfall. If Saxe-Weimar could reach the crossroads first, and if his men would fight, the French would fail, but it would be a very close race.

Sharpe wanted to slow the French advance. Even a few minutes would help. He dropped in a shallow scrape by the roadside, half hidden by a hazel bush which had been invaded by pink dog roses. None of the approaching enemy seemed to have noticed him. He slid his rifle through the thick grass, then pushed his tricorne hat back so that its peak would not catch on the weapon’s doghead.

He waited. The pistol in his belt dug into his belly. The grass of the road’s verge was warm and dank. There had been rain earlier in the week and the soil under the thick vegetation was still damp. A ladybird crawled up a dry stalk, then stepped delicately across to the oiled and battered stock of the rifle. The enemy marched careless and unsuspecting. The shadows stretched long over the road. It was a summer’s evening as beautiful as God had ever blessed on a wicked world.

A hare appeared on the opposite verge, quivered for a second, then ran swiftly up the road only to leap sideways out of the path of the approaching French infantry. The enemy was three hundred yards away now and marching in a column of four ranks. Sharpe could hear their strong singing. An officer rode ahead of the column on a grey horse. The officer had a red plume on his blue shako and a tall red collar on his unbuttoned blue coat. The red plume was nodding to the rhythm of the horse’s steps. Sharpe aimed at the plume, suspecting that at this extreme range the bullet would drop to hit the horse.

He fired. Birds squawked and exploded out of the crops.

Smoke banged from the pan by Sharpe’s right eye and the burning scraps of powder flayed back to his cheek. The rifle’s heavy brass butt crashed back into his shoulder. He moved even before the singing stopped, rolling into the thick rye stalks where, without bothering to see what damage his shot had done, he began reloading. Prime the pan, close it, pour the cartridge powder down the smoking barrel, then ram in the cartridge’s paper and the ball. He slid the ramrod out, jammed it down the long barrel, then pulled it free. No one had shot back. He rolled again into the shadow of the hazel bush where his foul-smelling powder smoke still lingered.

The column had stopped. The officer had dismounted from the grey horse which was skittering nervously at the road’s edge. Birds wheeled overhead. The officer was unhurt, and none of the men seemed to have been hit. Perhaps the horse was wounded? Sharpe took the loaded pistol from his belt, cocked it, and laid it beside him. Then he aimed the rifle again, this time at one of the men in the front rank.

He fired. Within seconds he fired again, this time emptying the pistol towards the Frenchmen. The second shot would do no damage, but it might persuade the Frenchmen that there was a group of enemy in front of them. Sharpe rolled right again, this time plunging deeper into the rye stalks before reloading the rifle. He pushed the pistol into his belt.

French muskets banged. He heard the heavy lead balls flicking through the stalks of rye, though none went near him. Sharpe was loading fast, going through the drill he had first learned twenty-two years before. Another volley of musketry hammered from the French who were firing blind into the tall crops.

Sharpe did the same, simply aiming the rifle in the direction of the column, and pulling the trigger so that the bullet whipped off through the stalks. He tap-loaded the next cartridge, not bothering to use the cumbersome ramrod, but just slamming the rifle’s butt hard on the ground in hope that the blow would jar the ball down to the loose charge. He fired again, and felt the lesser kick which told him the ball had only lodged half-way down the barrel. That bullet would be lucky to go a hundred yards, but that was not the point. The point was to fire fast to persuade the French that they had run into a strong picquet line.

He fired one more tap-loaded bullet, then ran back parallel to the road. He forced his way through the rye till he was past the chestnuts, then turned to his right. He ran across the road and heard the French shout as they saw him, but by the time they had pulled their triggers, he was already in the shelter of the tall trees. The nervous horse rolled its eyes white and flicked its ears towards the crackling sound of the muskets.

Sharpe reloaded the rifle, this time ramming the bullet hard down against the charge, then released the horse. It was a big black stallion, one of the best in the Prince’s stable and Sharpe hoped the beast was battle trained. Men had died because an untrained horse had taken fright at the sound of musketry. He pulled himself into the saddle, settled his sore thighs, and pushed the rifle into its holster. He pulled the horse round to face eastwards, then spurred it into the tall field of rye. So far the French had been fired on from the field on their left, now they would see an officer on the right of their advance.

A shout told Sharpe he had indeed been seen. The rye hid him from the French rankers, and only those officers on horseback could see the Rifleman over the tall crop. Sharpe waved his right arm as though he was beckoning a skirmish line forward. For all the French officers knew the thick rye might have concealed two whole battalions of Greenjackets.

A trumpet sounded from the French. Sharpe trotted in a semi-circle, going to the enemy’s flank to suggest an enfilading attack, then he turned and spurred back towards Quatre Bras. A wasteful volley was shot towards him, but the range was far too long and the balls spent themselves among the thick stalks. Three mounted officers rode into the field after the volley, but Sharpe had spurred well clear of any threat from the three men. He just trotted northwards, thinking to fire some more rifle shots from the farm by the ford.

Then hoofbeats pounded to Sharpe’s left and he saw another French officer galloping furiously down the high road. Sharpe urged the black stallion on, but the footing under the rye was treacherous; the soil was damp and still held the shape of the plough furrows, and the stallion could not match the Frenchman’s speed on the paved road. The stallion stumbled and Sharpe almost fell, and when he recovered himself he saw that the Frenchman had swerved off the road and, with drawn sabre, was charging straight for him. The man was young, probably a lieutenant.

Damn the bloody man. In all armies there were officers who needed to prove their bravery by single combat. The duel could also help a career; if this young French Lieutenant could take Sharpe’s horse and weapons back to his battalion he would be a hero. Maybe he would even be made into a captain.

Sharpe slowed his horse and dragged his big unwieldy sword out of its scabbard. ‘Go back!’ he shouted in French.

‘When you’re dead, monsieur!’ The Frenchman spoke cheerfully. He looked as young as Doggett. His horse, like Sharpe’s, had been slowed by the plough furrows in the rye field, but the Frenchman rowelled it on as he got close to Sharpe.

Sharpe stood his ground, his right arm facing the attack. The Lieutenant, like all French skirmishing officers, carried a light curved sabre; a good slashing weapon, but not the most accurate blade for the lunge. This man, eager to draw first blood, swerved as he neared Sharpe, then leaned out of his saddle to give a gut-slicing sweep with the glittering blade.

Sharpe simply parried the blow by holding his own heavy sword vertically. The clash of steel jarred up his arm, then he kicked his heels back to force the stallion towards the road. The Frenchman had swept past him, and now tried to turn in the clinging rye.

Sharpe only wanted to reach the road. He had no need to prove anything in single combat. He glanced over his left shoulder and saw the three other officers were still two hundred yards away, then a shouted challenge from his right revealed that the French Lieutenant had succeeded in turning his horse and was now spurring back to make a new attack. He was approaching from behind and slightly to the right of Sharpe. That was foolish, for it meant the Frenchman would have to make his sabre cut across his own and his horse’s body. ‘Don’t be stupid!’ Sharpe called back to him.

‘Are you frightened, Englishman?’ the Lieutenant laughed.

Sharpe felt the anger then; the cold anger that seemed to slow the passage of time itself and make everything appear so very distinctly. He saw the Frenchman’s small moustache above the bared teeth. The man’s shako had a red, white and blue cockade, and some of the shako’s overlapping brass plates were missing from its leather chin-strap. The Lieutenant’s horse was tossing its head, snorting, raising its bright hooves high as it trampled the crop. Husks of rye and scraps of straw were being splintered aside by the charging horse. The Lieutenant’s sabre was raised, reflecting the dying sun in its brilliant polish and ready for the downwards cut that was supposed to hack into Sharpe’s skull. Sharpe was holding his own sword low beside his stirrup, almost as if he could not be bothered to fight. The long blade was whipped by the rye stalks. Sharpe was deliberately curbing the stallion to take shorter slower steps, thus letting the eager Frenchman overtake him, but, just a heartbeat before the sun-bright sabre whipped hard down, Sharpe jerked the long sword back and upwards.

The heavy blade smashed brutally hard into the mouth of the Lieutenant’s horse. The beast reared up on its hind legs, screaming, with blood showing at its lips and teeth. Sharpe was already turning the stallion across its front. The Lieutenant was desperately trying to stay in his saddle. He flailed for balance with his sabre arm, then screamed because he saw the heavy sword coming at his throat. He tried to twist away, but instead his horse plunged back onto its forefeet and threw the Lieutenant’s weight fast forward.

Sharpe held his straight-bladed sword pointed at the Lieutenant’s throat and locked his elbow as the Frenchman fell onto the blade. There was an instant’s resistance, then the sword’s point punctured skin and muscle to tear into the great blood vessels of the Frenchman’s neck. His scream of fear was silenced instantly. He seemed to stare at Sharpe as he died; offering the Englishman a look of mingled surprise and remorse, then a gout of blood, bright as the sun itself, slashed out to soak Sharpe’s right arm and shoulder. Specks of the blood spattered his face, then the Frenchman was falling away and his dying weight ripped his body clear of the long steel blade.

Sharpe twisted the stallion away. He thought briefly of taking the Lieutenant’s horse, but he did not want to be encumbered by the beast. He saw the other three French officers check their advance. He flourished the bloody sword at them in a mocking salute, then trotted back to the road.

He stopped there, wiped the blade on his overalls, and sheathed the sword. His right arm was soaked with the Frenchman’s blood that had saturated the flimsy green sleeve of his old uniform. He grimaced at the smell of fresh blood, then pulled the loaded rifle from its holster. The three officers watched him, but none tried to come close.

He watched the turn in the road by the chestnut trees. After a minute the first French skirmishers ran into sight. They stopped when they saw him, then dived right and left, but at fifty yards the rifle was lethal and Sharpe saw his bullet lift a man clean off the ground.

But at fifty yards the French muskets were almost as accurate as the Baker rifle. Sharpe slammed back his heels and took off down the road as if the demons of hell were at his heels. He counted to eight, then swerved hard left into the tall rye, just as the French volley whipped through the dust cloud left by the stallion’s hooves.

The small volley missed. Sharpe rode on down the slope till he reached the stream where, as the stallion drank, he reloaded the rifle and shoved the weapon into its holster. Then, satisfied that the French would check their advance till they were certain no picquet line waited in ambush, he stared westwards towards the clouds and let out a long heavy breath.

He was measuring the fear he had just felt. For months he had been haunted by his memories of the battle of Toulouse; reliving the bowel-loosening terror he had felt at that last conflict of the last war. There had been no horror particular to Toulouse to explain that extraordinary fear; the battle had been less threatening than a half-dozen of the Spanish engagements, yet Sharpe had never forgotten the awful fear, nor his relief when peace had been declared. He had hung the battered sword over the spice cupboard in Lucille’s kitchen, and had claimed to be glad that he would never again have to draw the war-dulled blade from its metal scabbard. Yet, ever since Toulouse, he had wondered whether his nerve had gone for ever.

Now, holding his blood-soaked right hand to the evening light, he found his answer. The hand was motionless, yet at Toulouse that hand had shaken like a man afflicted with the palsy of St Vitus’s dance. Sharpe slowly closed the hand into a fist. He felt an immense relief that his nerve had come back, but he also felt ashamed that he had enjoyed the discovery.

He looked up at the clouds. He had assured Lucille that he fought only because his pension would be jeopardized if he refused, but in truth he had wanted to know whether the old skills were still there or whether, like a cannon fired too fast and too often, he had simply worn himself out as a soldier. Now he knew, and it had all been so damned easy. The young Lieutenant had ridden on to the blade, and Sharpe had felt nothing. He doubted if his pulse had even quickened as he killed. Twenty-two years of war had honed that skill to near perfection, and as a result a mother in France would soon be weeping.

He looked southwards. Nothing moved among the tall crops. The French would be collecting their casualties, and their officers would be staring northwards in search of a non-existent picquet line.

Sharpe patted the stallion, then walked him downstream until he reached the ford where, once more, he waited for the enemy’s advance. The woman had come back to the farm’s archway from where she and two men stared nervously up the road towards Frasnes. A horsefly settled on the stallion’s neck. Sharpe slapped it bloody, then unsheathed the rifle and held it across his saddle. He would give the French one more shot before retreating back to the crossroads.

Then, from behind him, from the north, he heard the thump of heavy drums and the jaunty thin notes of a flute playing. He twisted in the saddle to see a column of infantry at the crossroads of Quatre Bras. For a second Sharpe’s heart leapt, thinking that a battalion of Riflemen had arrived, then he saw the yellow crossbelts over the green coats and he knew he was seeing Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar’s force of Nassauers. The German brigade officers were already spurring down the road towards Sharpe.

Saxe-Weimar had arrived at the very nick of time. On the long slope above Sharpe the French battalion had spread into skirmish order. They were invisible in the tall rye, yet their purposeful advance could be traced by the disturbance of the crop through which they moved. The Nassauers’ battalion was doubling down the road, while their officers spurred towards the stream to mark the place where the infantry would form a line.

Sharpe rode back behind the advancing troops. Some of the men gave him curious looks because of the blood that had sheeted his right side. He uncorked his canteen and took a long drink of water. More Nassauer infantry were running down the road, their heavy boots stirring a thick dust. Small drummer boys, their lips caked with the road’s dust, beat a ragged advance as they ran. The troops seemed eager enough, but the next few seconds would be the acid test of their willingness to fight against their old master, Napoleon.

The first Nassauer battalion was formed in a line of four ranks on the left-hand side of the road. The battalion’s Colonel stared at the thrashing of unseen men in the rye field on the stream’s far bank, then ordered his men to make ready.

The muskets were lifted to the men’s shoulders.

The Colonel paused. ‘Fire!’

There was a split second’s silence, then the volley crashed hugely loud in the still evening air. The musketballs slammed across the small stream and bent the rye crop as though a squall of wind had struck the stalks. Rooks protested at the disturbance by flapping angrily up from the roadside.

‘Reload!’ To Sharpe’s eyes the battalion’s musket drill was lamentably slow, but it did not matter; they were fighting.

A few French skirmishers returned the fire, but they were massively outnumbered and their shooting was wild. Another Nassauer battalion had formed a line to the right of the stream. ‘Fire!’ Again a volley hammered at the evening’s perfection. A bank of smoke, thick and vile smelling, rolled across the stream.

‘Fire!’ That was the first battalion again. Yet more men were coming from the crossroads and deploying left and right beyond the first two units. Staff officers were galloping busily behind the lines where the battalion’s colours were bright in the dusk. The drummers kept up their din.

‘How many of them?’ The Brigade Major, who spoke English with a thick German accent, reined in beside Sharpe.

‘I only saw one battalion of skirmishers.’

‘Guns? Cavalry?’

‘None that I saw, but they can’t be far behind.’

‘We’ll hold them here as long as we can.’ The Brigade Major glanced at the sun. It was not long now till nightfall, and the French advance would certainly stop with the darkness.

‘I’ll let headquarters know you’re here,’ Sharpe said.

‘We’ll need help by morning,’ the Brigade Major said fervently.

‘You’ll get it.’ Sharpe hoped he spoke the truth.

Lieutenant Simon Doggett waited at the crossroads and frowned when he saw the blood on Sharpe’s arm. ‘Are you hurt, sir?’

‘That’s someone else’s blood.’ Sharpe brushed at the bloodstain, but it was still wet. ‘You’re to go back to Braine-le-Comte. Tell Rebecque that the crossroads at Quatre Bras are safe, but that the French are bound to attack in greater strength in the morning. Tell him we need men here; as many as possible!’

‘And you, sir? Are you staying here?’

‘No. I’ll take the spare horse.’ Sharpe slid out of the saddle and began unbuckling its girth. ‘You take this horse back to headquarters.’

‘Where are you going, sir?’ Doggett, seeing the flicker of irritation on Sharpe’s face, justified his question. ‘The Baron’s bound to ask me, sir.’

‘Tell Rebecque I’m going to Brussels. The Prince wants me to go to a bloody ball.’

Simon Doggett’s face blanched as he looked at Sharpe’s frayed and blood-drenched uniform. ‘Like that, sir? You’re going to a ball dressed like that?’

‘There’s a bloody war on. What does the Young Frog expect? Bloody lace and pantaloons?’ He handed Doggett the stallion’s bridle, then carried the saddle over to the spare horse. ‘Tell Rebecque I’m riding to Brussels to see the Duke. Someone has to tell him what’s happening here. Go on with you!’

Behind Sharpe the firing had died away. The French had retreated, presumably back to Frasnes, while Saxe-Weimar’s men had begun to make their bivouacs. Their axes sounded loud in the long wood as they cut the timber for their cooking fires. The people of the hamlet, sensing what destruction would follow the coming of these soldiers, were packing their few belongings into the farm cart. The small girl was crying, looking for her lost kittens. A man cursed at Sharpe, then went to help harness a thin mule to the cart.

Sharpe wearily mounted his fresh horse. The cross-roads were safe, at least for this one night. He clicked his fingers for Nosey to follow him, then rode northwards in the dusk. He was going to a dance.

CHAPTER SIX

Lucille Castineau stared gravely at her reflection in the mirror which, because it was only a small broken sliver, was being held by her maid, Jeanette, who was forced to tilt the glass up and down in an effort to show her mistress the whole dress. ‘It looks lovely,’ Jeanette said reassuringly.

‘It’s very plain. Oh, well. I am plain.’

‘That’s not true, madame,’ Jeanette protested.

Lucille laughed. Her ball gown was an old grey dress which she had prettified with some lengths of Brussels lace. Fashion dictated a filmy sheath that would scarcely cover the breasts and with a skirt slit to reveal a length of thigh barely disguised beneath a flimsy petticoat, but Lucille had neither the tastes nor the money for such nonsense. She had taken in the grey dress so that it hugged her thin body more closely, but that was her sole concession to fashion. She would not lower its neckline, nor would she have dreamed of cutting the skirt.

‘It looks lovely,’ Jeanette said again.

‘That’s because you haven’t seen what anyone else will be wearing.’

‘I still think it’s lovely.’

‘Not that it matters,’ Lucille said, ‘for I doubt whether anyone will be looking at me. Or will even dance with me.’ She well knew Richard Sharpe’s reluctance to dance, which was why she had been surprised when the message came from the Prince of Orange’s headquarters informing her that Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe would be attending His Royal Highness at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, in anticipation of which His Royal Highness took pleasure in enclosing a ticket for Madame la Vicomtesse de Seleglise. Lucille herself never used her title, but she knew Sharpe was perversely proud of it and must have informed the Prince of its existence.

The reluctant Vicomtesse now propped the broken mirror on a shelf and poked fingers at her hair which she had piled loosely before decorating with an ostrich feather. ‘I don’t like the feather.’

‘Everyone’s wearing them.’

‘I’m not.’ Lucille plucked it out and tickled the sleeping baby with its tip. The baby twitched, but slept on. Henri-Patrick had black hair like his father, but Lucille fancied she already saw her own family’s long skull in the baby’s wrinkled face. If he had his father’s looks and his mother’s brains, Lucille liked to say, Henri-Patrick should be well blessed.

She was unfair, at least to herself. Lucille Castineau had lived all her twenty-seven years in the Norman countryside and, though she came from a noble family, she proudly considered herself to be a farm woman. The rural life had denied her Jane Sharpe’s fashionable pallor; instead Lucille’s skin had the healthy bloom of country weather. She had a long, narrow and strong-boned face, its severity softened by her eyes which seemed to glow with laughter and sense. She was a widow. Her husband had been an elegant officer in Napoleon’s cavalry, and Lucille had often wondered why such a handsome man had sought to marry her, but Xavier Castineau had thought himself most fortunate in his wife. They had been married for only a few weeks before he had been hacked down by a sabre. In the peace after the wars, when Lucille had found herself alone in her family’s Norman château, she had met Sharpe and become his lover. Now she was the mother of his son.

Loyalty to her man had brought Lucille to Brussels. She had never been a Bonapartist, yet that distaste had not made it any easier for her to leave France and follow an army that must fight against her countrymen. Lucille had left France because she loved Sharpe, whom she knew was a better man than he thought himself to be. The war, she told herself, would end one day, but love was timeless and she would fight for it, just as she would fight to give her child his father’s company. Lucille had lost one good man; she would not lose a second.

And tonight, surprisingly, she had an opportunity to dance with her good man. Lucille took a last look in the mirror, decided there was nothing that could be done to make herself any more elegant or beautiful, and so picked up her small bag that contained the precious pasteboard ticket. She kissed her child, gave her hair one last despairing pat, and went to a ball.

A tall man waited at the stable entrance of the lodging house where Lucille Castineau had rented two attic rooms. He was a man whose frightening appearance commanded instant respect. His height, four inches over six feet, was formidable enough, yet he also carried the muscles to match his inches and this evening he looked even more threatening for he hefted an oak cudgel and had a longbarrelled horse-pistol thrust into his belt and a British army rifle slung on one shoulder. He had sandy hair and a flat hard face. The man was in civilian clothes, yet, in this city thronged with soldiers, he had a confidence that suggested he might well have worn a uniform in his time.

The tall man had been leaning against the stable’s open gates, but straightened up as Lucille appeared from the house. She looked nervously at the western sky, tumultuous with dark clouds that had so hastened the dusk that the first lamps were already being lit in the city’s archways and windows. ‘Shall I bring an umbrella?’ she asked.

‘It’s not going to rain tonight, ma’am.’ The tall man spoke with the harsh accent of Ulster.

‘You don’t have to walk me, Patrick.’

‘And what else would I be doing tonight? Besides, the Colonel doesn’t want you walking the streets alone after dark.’ Harper took a step back and gave Lucille an appreciative smile. ‘You look just grand, so you do!’

Lucille laughed good-naturedly at the compliment. ‘It’s a very old dress, Patrick.’

In truth Patrick Harper had not really noticed Lucille’s dress, but, being a married man, he knew the importance a woman attached to a compliment. Harper’s own wife would need more than a few such compliments when he reached home, for she had been adamantly opposed to her husband travelling to Brussels. ‘Why do you do this to me?’ Isabella had demanded. ‘You’re not a soldier any more! You have no need to go! Your place is here, with me!’

That place was Dublin, where, at the end of the last war, Harper had gone with a saddlebag full of stolen gold. The treasure had come from the French baggage captured at Vitoria in Spain, a country where Sergeant Patrick Harper had found both wealth and a wife. Discharged from the army, he had intended to return to his beloved Donegal, but he had reached no further than Dublin where he bought a tavern close to the city’s quays. The tavern also did a thriving trade in the sale of stolen horses, an activity that provided Harper with an excuse to travel deep into the Irish countryside. The return of the Emperor to France and the subsequent declaration of war had been good for Harper’s trade; a good hunter stolen from a Protestant plantation in Ireland would fetch a prime price in England where so many officers equipped themselves for the campaign.

Harper had used the excuse of horse-trading to explain his journey to Isabella, but she knew the real truth of his escapade. It was not horses that fetched Harper to Belgium, but Sharpe. Sharpe and Harper were friends. For six years, on battlefields and in sieges, they had fought side by side and Harper, as soon as he heard of the new war, had waited for a word from his old officer. Instead, and to Isabella’s chagrin, Sharpe had come to Dublin himself. At first it had seemed he was only there to sit out the war with his French woman, but then the summons had come from the Dutch army and Isabella had known that her husband would follow Sharpe.

Isabella had tried to dissuade Patrick. She had threatened to leave him and return to Badajoz. She had cursed him. She had wept, but Harper had dismissed her fears. ‘I’m only going to trade a few horses, woman, nothing else.’

‘You won’t be fighting?’

‘Now why in the name of all Ireland would I want to be fighting?’

‘Because of him,’ Isabella knew her man, ‘and because you can’t resist joining a fight.’

‘I’m not in the army, woman. I just want to make a few pennies by selling some horseflesh. Where’s the harm in that?’

In the end Harper had sworn a sacred oath on the Holy Mother and on all the bleeding wounds of Christ that he would not go into battle, that he would remember he was a husband and a father, and that if he so much as heard a musket shot he would turn tail and run away.

‘Did you hear there was a wee scrap down south today?’ Harper’s voice had a note of relish as he spoke of the fighting to Lucille.

‘A battle?’ Lucille sounded alarmed.

‘Probably just a skirmish, ma’am.’ Harper thrust aside the beggars who shuffled and reached towards Lucille. ‘I expect the Emperor’s getting bored with the waiting and decided to see if anyone was awake on this side of the border.’

‘Perhaps that’s why I haven’t heard from Richard today.’

‘If he’s got a choice between a battle and a dance, ma’am, then begging your presence, he’ll take the battle any day.’ Harper laughed. ‘He’s never been much of a man for dancing, not unless he’s drunk and then he’ll dance with the best of them.’ Harper suddenly realized that he might be betraying some confidences. ‘Not that I’ve ever seen him drunk, ma’am.’

Lucille smiled. ‘Of course not, Patrick.’

‘But we’ll hear from him soon enough.’ Harper raised the cudgel to drive away the beggars who swarmed ever more threateningly the closer they got to the Duke and Duchess of Richmond’s rented house. There were beggars throughout Europe. Peace had not brought prosperity, but higher prices, and the normal ranks of the indigent had been swollen by discharged soldiers. By day a woman could safely walk Brussels’ streets, but at night the pavements became dangerous. ‘Get back, you bastards! Get back!’ Harper thrust two ragged men aside. Beyond the gutter shouting children pursued the polished carriages that rattled towards the rue de la Blanchisserie, but the coachmen were experts with their long whips which snapped sharply back to drive the urchins off.

A squadron of British Hussars were on duty in the rue de la Blanchisserie to keep the beggars away from the wealthy. A helpful corporal with a drawn sabre rode his horse in front of Harper to help clear Lucille’s passage to the big house.

‘I’ll wait for you, ma’am,’ Harper told Lucille when they were safely in the courtyard.

‘You don’t have to, Patrick. I’m sure Richard will escort me home.’

‘I’ll wait here, ma’am,’ Harper insisted.

Lucille was nervous as she climbed the steps. A gorgeously dressed footman inspected her ticket, then bowed her into the hallway which was brilliant with candles and thronged with people. Lucille already felt dowdy. She glanced about the hall, hoping against hope that Richard would be waiting for her, but there was no sign of Sharpe, nor of any of the Prince of Orange’s staff. Lucille felt friendless in an enemy country, but then was relieved to see the Dowager Countess of Mauberges who, like so many other Belgian aristocracy, thought of herself as French and wanted the world to know it. The old lady was defiantly wearing her dead husband’s Legion d’honneur about her neck. ‘Your husband was a member of the Legion, was he not?’ she greeted Lucille.

‘Indeed he was.’

‘Then you should wear his medal.’

Not that the ball needed an extra medal for, to Lucille, it seemed as though a jewel shop had been exploded into extravagant shards of light and colour. The colour came from the men’s uniforms, gorgeous uniforms, uniforms of scarlet and gold, royal blue and saffron, silver and black; uniforms of Hussars, Dragoons, Guards, Jaegers and kilted Highlanders. There were plumes, froggings, epaulettes, aigulettes, and gold-furnished scabbards. There were fur-edged dolmans, silk-lined pelisses, and gorgets of pure gold. There were princes, dukes, earls, and counts. There were plenipotentiaries in court uniforms so decked with gold that their coats seemed like sheets of light. There were jewelled stars and enamelled crosses worn on sashes of brilliant silk, and all lit by the glittering chandeliers which had been hoisted to the ceilling with their burdens of fine white candles.

The women wore paler colours; white or washed yellow or delicate blue. Those ladies slim and brave enough to wear the high fashion were etheral in gauzy dresses that clung to their bodies as they moved. The candlelight glinted from pearls and rubies, diamonds and gold. The room smelt of scents – orange water or eau de cologne, beneath which were the sharper smells of hair powder and sweat. ‘I don’t know’, the Dowager Countess leaned close to Lucille, ‘why some of them bother to dress at all! Look at that creature!’

The Countess jabbed her walking cane in the direction of a girl with bright gold ringlets and eyes as radiant as sapphires. The girl was undeniably beautiful, and clearly knew it for she was wearing no petticoat and a diaphanous dress of pale gold that did little to hide her body. ‘She might as well be stark naked!’ the Countess said.

‘It’s the fashion.’ Lucille felt very drab.

‘When I was a girl it took twelve yards of cloth just to make an underskirt for a ball gown. Now they simply unfold some cheese-cloth and throw it over their shoulders!’ Hardly that even, for most of the women’s shoulders were bared, just as most bosoms were almost naked. ‘And see how they walk! Just like men.’ In the Countess’s childhood, before the Revolution, and before Belgium had been liberated from Austrian rule by the French, women had been taught to glide along a floor, their feet hidden by wide skirts and their slippers barely leaving the polished boards. The effect was graceful, suggesting effortless motion, while now the girls seemed not to care. The Countess shook her head with disgust. ‘You can tell they’re Protestants! No manners, no grace, no breeding.’

Lucille diverted the old lady by showing her the supper room which, like the ballroom, had been draped with the Belgian colours of black, gold and scarlet. Beneath the silk hangings the long tables were covered in white linen and were thick with silver and fine china.

‘They’ll lose all the spoons tonight!’ the Countess said with undisguised satisfaction, then turned as applause greeted the stately polonaise which had progressed from the far side of the house, advanced through the entrance hall and now entered the ballroom to open the dancing formally. Lucille and the Countess sat by the supper room entrance. The uniformed officers and their ladies stepped delicately in the dancing line, they bowed and curtseyed. The music rang sweetly. A child, allowed to stay up and watch the ball’s beginning, stared wide-eyed from a balcony, while the Countess tapped her stick on the parquet floor in time to the music.

After the polonaise, the first waltz brightened the room with its jaunty rhythm. The windows were black with night, but sheeted with the reflections of a thousand candles sparkling on ten thousand jewels. Champagne and laughter ruled the room, while the dancers whirled in glittering joy.

Lucille watched the pretty girl in the diaphanous golden dress who danced with a tall and handsome officer in British cavalry uniform. Lucille noted how the girl refused all partners but that one man and she felt a surge of sympathy because she knew the girl must be in love, just as she herself was in love. Lucille thought the girl and the cavalry officer made a very fine couple, but she wished the girl would smile rather than hold her face in such a cold and supercilious expression.

Then Lucille forgot the girl as the ballroom was swamped by a sudden and prolonged applause, which forced the orchestra to pause.

The Duke of Wellington had appeared with his staff. He stood in the ballroom entrance and acknowledged the applause with a small bow. He was not a tall man, but something about his confidence and reputation gave him an impressive stature. He was dressed in the scarlet and gold of a British field marshal with a tactful Netherlands decoration worn on an orange sash.

Lucille, politely applauding with the rest of the room, wondered whether this man truly was the greatest soldier of his time. Many, including Sharpe, insisted that he was. No one, not even the Emperor, had fought so many battles, and no other General had won all the battles he had ever fought, though the Duke, as every person in the ballroom was aware, had never fought the Emperor. In Vienna, where the Duke had travelled as Britain’s ambassador to the Congress, society had greeted him with outrageous flattery, calling him ‘le vainqueur du vainqueur du monde’, but Lucille guessed that Bonaparte might have other ideas of the Duke’s military stature.

Now the conqueror of the world’s conqueror gestured to stop the applause. ‘He has a good leg,’ the Dowager Countess confided in Lucille.

‘He’s a handsome man,’ Lucille agreed.

‘And he’s not in a corset. You can tell that by the way they bow. My husband never wore a corset, not like some here tonight.’ The Countess cast a scathing eye at the dancers who were beginning yet another waltz, then looked back to the Duke. ‘He’s a young man.’

‘Forty-six,’ Lucille told her, ‘the same age as the Emperor.’

‘Generals are getting younger. I’m sure the soldiers don’t like it. How can a man have confidence in a stripling?’

The Countess fell into a disapproving silence as a young and handsome British officer offered Lucille a low and evidently uncorseted bow. ‘My dear Lucille!’ Captain Peter d’Alembord was resplendent in scarlet coat and white breeches.

‘Captain!’ Lucille responded with a genuine pleasure. ‘How nice to see a friendly face.’

‘My Colonel received an invitation, didn’t know what to do with such a thing, so gave it to me. I can’t believe you’ve persuaded Sharpe to attend, or have you turned him into a dancing man?’

‘He’s supposed to be accompanying the Prince.’ Lucille named d’Alembord to the Dowager Countess of Mauberges who gave the officer a very suspicious examination.

‘Your name is French!’ the Countess accused him.

‘My family were Huguenots, my lady, and therefore unwanted in la belle France.’ D’Alembord’s contemptuous scorn for France made the Countess bridle, but he had already turned back to Lucille. ‘You’ll do me the honour of dancing?’

Lucille would. D’Alembord was an old friend who had dined frequently with Sharpe and Lucille since they had come to the Netherlands. Both men had served in the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers where d’Alembord had succeeded Sharpe to the command of the first battalion’s light company. That battalion was now bivouacked in a village to the west of Brussels where d’Alembord had heard no news of any skirmishes on the frontier. Instead his day had been spent indulging the Colonel’s passion for cricket. ‘I think he plans to kill us all with boredom,’ d’Alembord told Lucille as they took the floor.

‘Poor Peter.’

‘Not at all, I am the most fortunate of men. Except for Sharpe, of course.’

Lucille smiled at the dutiful but pleasing compliment. ‘Of course. And how is Anne?’

‘Very well. She writes to tell me that her father has found a house that will be suitable for us. Not too large, but with adequate stabling and a few acres of grazing.’

‘I’m glad for you.’

D’Alembord smiled. ‘I’m rather glad for me, too.’

‘So stay alive to enjoy it, Peter!’

‘Don’t even tempt fate to suggest I won’t.’ D’Alembord was newly engaged, and filled with a touching happiness at the prospect of his marriage. Lucille rather envied him, wishing that she could marry Sharpe. That admission made her smile to herself. Who would ever have believed that Lucille, Vicomtesse de Seleglise and widow of Colonel Xavier Castineau, would be mother to a half-English bastard?

She turned lithely to the music and saw that the blue-eyed girl in the golden dress was watching her very coldly. Was it the dowdy grey dress that had earned the girl’s scorn? Lucille suddenly felt very shabby and uncomfortable. She turned her back to the girl.

‘Good God!’ D’Alembord, who was a very good dancer, suddenly faltered. His eyes were fixed on someone or something at the room’s edge and Lucille, turning to see what had caught his astonished attention, saw the golden girl returning d’Alembord’s gaze with what seemed to be pure poison.

‘Who is she?’ Lucille asked.

D’Alembord had quite given up any attempt to dance. Instead he offered Lucille his arm and walked her off the floor. ‘Don’t you know?’

Lucille stopped, turned to look at the girl once more then, intuitively, she knew the answer and looked for confirmation into d’Alembord’s worried face. ‘That’s Richard’s wife?’ She could not hide her astonishment.

‘God only knows what she’s doing here! And with her damned lover!’ D’Alembord steered Lucille firmly away from Jane and Lord John Rossendale. ‘Richard will kill him!’

Lucille could not resist turning one more time. ‘She’s very beautiful,’ she said sadly, then she lost sight of Jane as the Duke of Wellington’s party moved across the ballroom floor.

The Duke was offering bland reassurance about the scanty news of the day’s skirmishes. Brussels was full of rumours about a French attack, rumours that the Duke was scarcely able to correct or deny. He knew there had been fighting about Charleroi, and he had heard of some skirmishes being fought in the villages south of the Prince of Orange’s headquarters, but whether the French had invaded in force, or whether there was an attack coming in the direction of Mons, the Duke still did not know. Some of his staff had urged that he abandon the Duchess’s ball, but such an act, he knew, would only have offered encouragement to the Emperor’s many supporters in Brussels and could even have prompted the wholesale desertion of Belgian troops. The Duke had to appear confident of victory or else every waverer in his army would run to be with the Emperor and the winning side.

‘Is Orange here?’ the Duke asked an aide.

‘No, sir.’

‘Let’s hope he brings news. My dear Lady Mary, how very good to see you.’ He bowed over her hand, then dismissed her fears of an imminent French invasion. Gently disengaging himself he walked on and saw Lord John Rossendale waiting to present himself and, with him, a young, pretty and under-dressed girl who somehow looked familiar.

‘Who in God’s name brought Rossendale here?’ the Duke angrily asked an aide.

‘He’s been appointed to Uxbridge’s staff, sir.’

‘Damn Harry. Haven’t we enough bloody fools in the cavalry already?’ Harry Paget, Earl of Uxbridge and commander of the British cavalry, was second in command to the Duke. Uxbridge had eloped with the wife of the Duke’s younger brother, which did not precisely endear him to the Duke. ‘Is Harry here?’ the Duke now asked.

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