SHARPE’S
BATTLE
Richard Sharpe and the Battle
of Fuentes de Oñoro, May 1811
BERNARD CORNWELL

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1995

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 1995

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

This novel is a work of fiction.

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

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780006473244

Ebook Edition © March 2012 ISBN: 9780007339525

Version: 2017-05-08

Sharpe’s Battle is for Sean Bean

‘As always the action’s the thing – and once Sharpe is surrounded by enemies, both on his own side and the opposition, events move at their usual satisfyingly breathless pace’

Independent on Sunday

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Part Two

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Historical Note

Keep Reading

Sharpe’s Story

About the Author

The SHARPE Series (in chronological order)

The SHARPE Series (in order of publication)

Also by Bernard Cornwell

About the Publisher

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Sharpe swore. Then, in desperation, he turned the map upside down. ‘Might as well not have a bloody map,’ he said, ‘for all the bloody use it is.’

‘We could light a fire with it,’ Sergeant Harper suggested. ‘Good kindling’s hard to come by in these hills.’

‘It’s no bloody use for anything else,’ Sharpe said. The hand-drawn map showed a scatter of villages, a few spidery lines for roads, streams or rivers, and some vague hatchings denoting hills, whereas all Sharpe could see was mountains. No roads or villages, just grey, bleak, rock-littered mountains with peaks shrouded by mists, and valleys cut by streams turned white and full by the spring rains. Sharpe had led his company into the high ground on the border between Spain and Portugal and there become lost. His company, forty soldiers carrying packs, haversacks, cartridge cases and weapons, seemed not to care. They were just grateful for the rest and so sat or lay beside the grassy track. Some lit pipes, others slept, while Captain Richard Sharpe turned the map right side up and then, in anger, crumpled it into a ball. ‘We’re bloody lost,’ he said and then, in fairness, corrected himself. ‘I’m bloody lost.’

‘My grand-da got lost once,’ Harper said helpfully. ‘He’d bought a bullock from a fellow in Cloghanelly Parish and decided to take a short cut home across the Derryveagh Mountains. Then the fog rolled in and grand-da couldn’t tell his left from his right. Lost like a wee lamb he was, and then the bullock deserted the ranks and bolted into the fog and jumped clear over a cliff into the Barra Valley. Grand-da said you could hear the poor wee beast bellowing all the way down, then there was a thump just like you’d dropped a bagpipe off a church tower, only louder, he said, because he reckoned they must have heard that thump all the way to Ballybofey. We used to laugh about it later, but not at the time. God, no, it was a tragedy at the time. We couldn’t afford to lose a good bullock.’

‘Jesus bloody wept!’ Sharpe interrupted. ‘I can afford to lose a bloody sergeant who’s got nothing better to do than blather on about a bloody bullock!’

‘It was a valuable beast!’ Harper protested. ‘Besides, we’re lost. We’ve got nothing better to do than pass the time, sir.’

Lieutenant Price had been at the rear of the column, but now joined his commanding officer at the front. ‘Are we lost, sir?’

‘No, Harry, I came here for the hell of it. Wherever the hell this is.’ Sharpe stared glumly about the damp, bleak valley. He was proud of his sense of direction and his skills at crossing strange country, but now he was comprehensively, utterly lost and the clouds were thick enough to disguise the sun so that he could not even tell which direction was north. ‘We need a compass,’ he said.

‘Or a map?’ Lieutenant Price suggested happily.

‘We’ve got a bloody map. Here.’ Sharpe thrust the balled-up map into the Lieutenant’s hands. ‘Major Hogan drew it for me and I can’t make head nor tail out of it.’

‘I was never any good with maps,’ Price confessed. ‘I once got lost marching some recruits from Chelmsford to the barracks, and that’s a straight road. I had a map that time, too. I think I must have a talent for getting lost.’

‘My grand-da was like that,’ Harper said proudly. ‘He could get lost between one side of a gate and the other. I was telling the Captain here about the time he took a bullock up Slieve Snaght. It was dirty weather, see, and he was taking the short cut –’

‘Shut up,’ Sharpe said nastily.

‘We went wrong at that ruined village,’ Price said, frowning over the creased map. ‘I think we should have stayed on the other side of the stream, sir.’ Price showed Sharpe the map. ‘If that is the village. Hard to tell really. But I’m sure we shouldn’t have crossed the stream, sir.’

Sharpe half suspected the Lieutenant was right, but he did not want to admit it. They had crossed the stream two hours before, so God only knew where they were now. Sharpe did not even know if they were in Portugal or Spain, though both the scenery and the weather looked more like Scotland. Sharpe was supposedly on his way to Vilar Formoso where his company, the Light Company of the South Essex Regiment, would be attached to the Town Major as a guard unit, a prospect that depressed Sharpe. Town garrison duty was little better than being a provost and provosts were the lowest form of army life, but the South Essex was short of men and so the regiment had been taken out of the battle line and set to administrative duties. Most of the regiment were escorting bullock carts loaded with supplies that had been barged up the Tagus from Lisbon, or else were guarding French prisoners on their way to the ships that would carry them to Britain, but the Light Company was lost, and all because Sharpe had heard a distant cannonade resembling far-away thunder and he had marched towards the sound, only to discover that his ears had played tricks. The noise of the skirmish, if indeed it was a skirmish and not genuine thunder, had faded away and now Sharpe was lost. ‘Are you sure that’s the ruined village?’ he asked Price, pointing to the crosshatched spot on the map that Price had indicated.

‘I wouldn’t like to swear to it, sir, not being able to read maps. It could be any of those scratchings, sir, or maybe none.’

‘Then why the hell are you showing it to me?’

‘In a hope for inspiration, sir,’ Price said in a wounded voice. ‘I was trying to help, sir. Trying to raise our hopes.’ He looked down at the map again. ‘Maybe it isn’t a very good map?’ he suggested.

‘It would make good kindling,’ Harper repeated.

‘One thing’s certain,’ Sharpe said as he took the map back from Price, ‘we haven’t crossed the watershed which means these streams must be flowing west.’ He paused. ‘Or they’re probably flowing west. Unless the world’s bloody upside down which it probably bloody is, but on the chance that it bloody isn’t we’ll follow the bloody streams. Here’ – he tossed the map to Harper – ‘kindling.’

‘That’s what my grand-da did,’ Harper said, tucking the crumpled map inside his faded and torn green jacket. ‘He followed the water –’

‘Shut up,’ Sharpe said, but not angrily this time. Rather he spoke quietly, and at the same time gestured with his left hand to make his companions crouch. ‘Bloody Crapaud,’ he said softly, ‘or something. Never seen a uniform like it.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Price said, and dropped down to the path.

Because a horseman had appeared just two hundred yards away. The man had not seen the British infantrymen, nor did he appear to be on the lookout for enemies. Instead his horse just ambled out of a side valley until the reins checked it, then the rider swung himself wearily out of the saddle and looped the reins over an arm while he unbuttoned his baggy trousers and urinated beside the path. Smoke from his pipe drifted in the damp air.

Harper’s rifle clicked as he pulled the cock fully back. Sharpe’s men, even those who had been asleep, were all alert now and lying motionless in the grass, keeping so low that even if the horseman had turned he would probably not have noticed the infantry. Sharpe’s company was a veteran unit of skirmishers, hardened by two years of fighting in Portugal and Spain and as well trained as any soldiers in Europe. ‘Recognize the uniform?’ Sharpe asked Price softly.

‘Never seen it before, sir.’

‘Pat?’ Sharpe asked Harper.

‘Looks like a bloody Russian,’ Harper said. Harper had never seen a Russian soldier, but had a perverse idea that such creatures wore grey and this mysterious horseman was all in grey. He had a short grey dragoon jacket, grey trousers and a grey horsehair plume on his steel-grey helmet. Or maybe, Sharpe thought, it was merely a cloth cover designed to stop the helmet’s metal from reflecting the light.

‘Spaniard?’ Sharpe wondered aloud.

‘The dons are always gaudy, sir,’ Harper said. ‘The dons never did like dying in drab clothes.’

‘Maybe he’s a partisan,’ Sharpe suggested.

‘He’s got Crapaud weapons,’ Price said, ‘and trousers.’ The pissing horseman was indeed armed just like a French dragoon. He wore a straight sword, had a short-barrelled carbine sheathed in his saddle holster and had a brace of pistols stuck in his belt. He also wore the distinctively baggy saroual trousers that the French dragoons liked, but Sharpe had never seen a French dragoon wearing grey ones, and certainly never a grey jacket. Enemy dragoons always wore green coats. Not dark hunting green like the coats of Britain’s riflemen, but a lighter and brighter green.

‘Maybe the buggers are running out of green dye?’ Harper suggested, then fell silent as the horseman buttoned his floppy trousers and hauled himself up onto his saddle. The man looked carefully about the valley, saw nothing to alarm him and so spurred his horse back into the hidden side valley. ‘He was scouting,’ Harper said softly. ‘He was sent to see if anyone was here.’

‘He made a bloody bad job of it,’ Sharpe commented.

‘Even so,’ Price said fervently, ‘it’s a good thing we’re going in the other direction.’

‘We’re not, Harry,’ Sharpe said. ‘We’re going to see who those bastards are and what they’re doing.’ He pointed uphill. ‘You first, Harry. Take your fellows and go halfway up, then wait.’

Lieutenant Price led the redcoats of Sharpe’s company up the steep slope. Half of the company wore the red jackets of Britain’s line infantry while the other half, like Sharpe himself, had the green jackets of the elite rifle regiments. It had been an accident of war that had stranded Sharpe and his riflemen in a redcoat battalion, but sheer bureaucratic inertia had held them there and now it was sometimes hard to tell the riflemen from the redcoats, so shabby and faded were their respective uniforms. From a distance they all looked like brown uniforms because of the cheap Portuguese cloth that the men were forced to use for repairs.

‘You think we’ve crossed the lines?’ Harper asked Sharpe.

‘Like as not,’ Sharpe said sourly, still angry at himself. ‘Not that anyone knows where the damn lines are,’ he said defensively, and in part he was right. The French were retreating out of Portugal. Throughout the winter of 1810 the enemy had stayed in front of the Lines of Torres Vedras just a half-day’s march from Lisbon, and there they had frozen and half starved to death rather than retreat to their supply depots in Spain. Marshal Masséna had known that retreat would yield all Portugal to the British while to attack the Lines of Torres Vedras would be pure suicide, and so he had just stayed, neither advancing nor retreating, just starving slowly through the winter and staring at the lines’ enormous earthworks which had been hacked and scraped from a range of hills across the narrow peninsula just north of Lisbon. The valleys between the hills had been blocked by massive dams or with tangled barricades of thorn, while the hill tops and long slopes had been trenched, embrasured and armed with battery after battery of cannon. The lines, a winter’s hunger and the relentless attacks of partisans had finally defeated the French attempt to capture Lisbon and in March they had begun to retreat. Now it was April and the retreat was slowing in the hills of the Spanish frontier, for it was here that Marshal Masséna had decided to make his stand. He would fight and defeat the British in the river-cut hills, and always, at Masséna’s back, stood the twin fastnesses of Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo. Those two Spanish citadels made the frontier into a mighty barrier, though for now Sharpe’s concern was not the grim border campaign that loomed ahead but rather the mysterious grey horseman.

Lieutenant Price had reached a patch of dead ground halfway up the hill where his redcoats concealed themselves as Sharpe waved his riflemen forward. The slope was steep, but the greenjackets climbed fast for, like all experienced infantrymen, they had a healthy fear of enemy cavalry and they knew that steep hillsides were an effective barrier to horsemen and thus the higher the riflemen climbed, the safer and happier they became.

Sharpe passed the resting redcoats and went on up towards the crest of a spur that divided the two valleys. When he was close to the ridge he waved his greenjackets down into the short grass, then crawled up to the skyline to peer down into the smaller valley where the grey horseman had disappeared.

And, two hundred feet beneath him, saw Frenchmen.

The men were all wearing the strange grey uniform, but Sharpe now knew they were French because one of the cavalrymen carried a guidon. This was a small, swallowtailed banner carried on a lance as a rally mark in the chaos of battle, and this particular shabby, frayed flag showed the red, white and blue of the enemy. The standard-bearer was sitting on his horse in the centre of a small abandoned settlement while his dismounted companions searched the half-dozen stone and thatch houses that looked as if they had been built to shelter families during the summer months when the lowland farmers would bring their flocks to graze the high pastures.

There were only a half-dozen horsemen in the settlement, but with them was a handful of French infantrymen, also wearing the drab and plain grey coats, rather than their usual blue. Sharpe counted eighteen infantrymen.

Harper wriggled uphill to join Sharpe. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ he said when he saw the infantry. ‘Grey uniforms?’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Sharpe said, ‘maybe the buggers have run out of dye.’

‘I wish they’d run out of musket balls,’ Harper said. ‘So what do we do?’

‘Bugger off,’ Sharpe said. ‘No point in having a fight for the hell of it.’

‘Amen to that, sir.’ Harper began to slither down from the skyline. ‘Are we going now?’

‘Give me a minute,’ Sharpe said and felt behind his back for his telescope which was stored in a pouch of his French oxhide pack. Then, with the telescope’s hood extended to shade the outer lens and so stop even this day’s damp light from being reflected downhill, he trained the glass on the tiny cottages. Sharpe was anything but a wealthy man, yet the telescope was a very fine and expensive glass made by Matthew Berge of London, with a brass eyepiece, shutters and a small engraved plate set into its walnut tube. ‘In Gratitude,’ the plate read, ‘AW. September 23rd, 1803.’ AW was Arthur Wellesley, now the Viscount Wellington, a lieutenant general and commander of the British and Portuguese armies which had pursued Marshal Masséna to Spain’s frontier, but on September 23rd, 1803, Major General the Honourable Arthur Wellesley had been astride a horse that was piked in the chest and so pitched its rider down into the enemy’s front rank. Sharpe could still remember the shrill Indian cries of triumph as the red-jacketed General had fallen among them, though he could remember precious little else about the seconds that followed. Yet it was those few seconds that had plucked him from the ranks and made him, a man born in the gutter, into an officer in Britain’s army.

Now he focused Wellington’s gift on the French beneath and watched as a dismounted cavalryman carried a canvas pail of water from the stream. For a second or two Sharpe thought that the man was carrying the water to his picketed horse, but instead the dragoon stopped between two of the houses and began to pour the water onto the ground. ‘They’re foraging,’ Sharpe said, ‘using the water trick.’

‘Hungry bastards,’ Harper said.

The French had been driven from Portugal more by hunger than by force of arms. When Wellington had retreated to Torres Vedras he left behind him a devastated countryside with empty barns, poisoned wells and echoing granaries. The French had endured five months of famine partly by ransacking every deserted hamlet and abandoned village for hidden food, and one way to find buried jars of grain was to pour water on the ground, for where the soil had been dug and refilled the water would always drain away more quickly and so betray where the grain jars were hidden.

‘No one would be hiding food in these hills,’ Harper said scornfully. ‘Who do they think would carry it all the way up here?’

Then a woman screamed.

For a few seconds both Sharpe and Harper assumed the sound came from an animal. The scream had been muffled and distorted by distance and there was no sign of any civilians in the tiny settlement, but as the terrible noise echoed back from the far hillside so the full horror of the sound registered on both men. ‘Bastards,’ Harper said softly.

Sharpe slid the telescope shut. ‘She’s in one of the houses,’ he said. ‘Two men with her? Maybe three? Which means there can’t be more than thirty of the bastards down there.’

‘Forty of us,’ Harper said dubiously. It was not that he was frightened by the odds, but the advantage was not so overwhelming as to guarantee a bloodless victory.

The woman screamed again.

‘Fetch Lieutenant Price,’ Sharpe ordered Harper. ‘Tell everyone to be loaded and they’re to stay just back from the crest.’ He turned round. ‘Dan! Thompson! Cooper! Harris! Up here.’ The four were his best marksmen. ‘Keep your heads down!’ he warned the four men, then waited till they reached the crest. ‘In a minute I’m taking the rest of the rifles down there. I want you four to stay here and pick off any bastard who looks troublesome.’

‘Bastards are going already,’ Daniel Hagman said. Hagman was the oldest man in the company and the finest marksman. He was a Cheshire poacher who had been offered a chance to enlist in the army rather than face transportation for stealing a brace of pheasants from an absentee landlord.

Sharpe turned back. The French were leaving, or rather most of them were, for, judging from the way that the men at the rear of the infantry column kept turning and shouting towards the houses, they had left some of their comrades inside the cottage where the woman had screamed. With the half-dozen cavalrymen in the lead, the main group was trudging down the stream towards the larger valley.

‘They’re getting careless,’ Thompson said.

Sharpe nodded. Leaving men in the settlement was a risk and it was not like the French to run risks in wild country. Spain and Portugal were riddled with guerrilleros, the partisans who fought the guerrilla, the little war, and that war was far more bitter and cruel than the more formal battles between the French and the British. Sharpe knew just how cruel for only the previous year he had gone into the wild north country to find Spanish gold and his companions had been partisans whose savagery had been chilling. One of them, Teresa Moreno, was Sharpe’s lover, only now she called herself La Aguja, the Needle, and every Frenchman she knifed with her long slim blade was one small part of the endless revenge she had promised to inflict on the soldiers who had raped her.

Teresa was now a long way off, fighting in the country around Badajoz, while in the settlement beneath Sharpe another woman was suffering from the attentions of the French and again Sharpe wondered why these grey-uniformed soldiers thought it safe to leave men to finish their crime in the isolated village. Were they certain that no partisans lurked in these high hills?

Harper came back, breathing hard after leading Price’s redcoats up the hill. ‘God save Ireland,’ he said as he dropped beside Sharpe, ‘but the bastards are going already.’

‘I think they’ve left some men behind. Are you ready?’

‘Sure I am.’ Harper eased back his rifle’s doghead.

‘Packs off,’ Sharpe told his riflemen as he shrugged his own pack off his shoulders, then he twisted to look at Lieutenant Price. ‘Wait here, Harry, and listen for the whistle. Two blasts mean I want you to open fire from up here, and three mean I want you down at the village.’ He looked at Hagman. ‘Don’t open fire, Dan, until they see us. If we can get down there without the bastards knowing it’ll be easier.’ He raised his voice so the rest of his riflemen could hear. ‘We go down fast,’ Sharpe said. ‘Are you all ready? Are you all loaded? Then come on! Now!’

The riflemen scrambled over the crest and tumbled headlong down the steep hill behind Sharpe. Sharpe kept glancing to his left where the small French column retreated beside the stream, but no one in the column turned and the noise of the horses’ hooves and the infantrymen’s nailed boots must have smothered the sound of the greenjackets running downhill. It was not until Sharpe was just yards away from the nearest house that a Frenchman turned and shouted in alarm. Hagman fired at the same instant and the sound of his Baker rifle echoed first from the small valley’s far slope, then from the distant flank of the larger valley. The echo crackled on, fainter and fainter, until it was drowned as the other riflemen on the hill top opened fire.

Sharpe jumped down the last few feet. He fell as he landed, picked himself up and ran past a dunghill heaped against a house wall. A single horse was tethered to a steel picket pin driven into the ground beside one of the small houses where a French soldier suddenly appeared in the doorway. The man was wearing a shirt and a grey coat, but nothing below the waist. He raised his musket as Sharpe ran into view, but then saw the riflemen behind Sharpe and so dropped the musket and raised his hands in surrender.

Sharpe had drawn his sword as he ran to the house door. Once there he shouldered the surrendering man aside and burst into the hovel that was a bare stone chamber, beamed with wood and roofed with stone and turf. It was dark inside the cottage, but not so dark that Sharpe could not see a naked girl scrambling over the earth floor into a corner. There was blood on her legs. A second Frenchman, this one with cavalry overalls round his ankles, tried to stand and reach for his scabbarded sword, but Sharpe kicked him in the balls. He kicked him so hard that the man screamed and then could not draw breath to scream again and so toppled onto the bloody floor where he whimpered and lay with his knees drawn tight up to his chest. There were two other men on the beaten earth floor, but when Sharpe turned on them with his drawn sword he saw they were both civilians and both dead. Their throats had been cut.

Musketry sounded ragged in the valley. Sharpe went back to the door where the bare-legged French infantryman was crouching with his hands held behind his head. ‘Pat!’ Sharpe called.

Harper was organizing the riflemen. ‘We’ve got the buggers tamed, sir,’ the Sergeant said reassuringly, anticipating Sharpe’s question. The riflemen were crouching beside the cottages where they fired, reloaded and fired again. Their Baker rifle muzzles gouted thick spurts of white smoke that smelt of rotted eggs. The French returned the fire, their musket balls smacking on the stone houses as Sharpe ducked back into the hovel. He picked up the two Frenchmen’s weapons and tossed them out of the door. ‘Perkins!’ he shouted.

Rifleman Perkins ran to the door. He was the youngest of Sharpe’s men, or was presumed to be the youngest for though Perkins knew neither the day nor the year of his birth, he did not yet need to shave. ‘Sir?’

‘If either of these bastards move, shoot them.’

Perkins might be young, but the look on his thin face scared the unhurt Frenchman who reached out a placating hand as though begging the young rifleman not to shoot. ‘I’ll look after the bastards, sir,’ Perkins said, then slotted his brass-handled sword bayonet onto his rifle’s muzzle.

Sharpe saw the girl’s clothing which had been tossed under a crudely sawn table. He picked up the greasy garments and handed them to her. She was pale, terrified and crying, a young thing, scarcely out of childhood. ‘Bastards,’ Sharpe said to the two prisoners, then ran out into the damp light. A musket ball hissed over his head as he ducked down into cover beside Harper.

‘Bastards are good, sir,’ the Irishman said ruefully.

‘I thought you had them tamed?’

‘They’ve got different ideas on the matter,’ Harper said, then broke cover, aimed, fired and ducked back. ‘Bastards are good,’ he said again as he started to reload.

And the French were good. Sharpe had expected the small group of Frenchmen to hurry away from the rifle fire, but instead they had deployed into a skirmish line and so turned the easy target of a marching column into a scattered series of difficult targets. Meanwhile the half-dozen dragoons accompanying the infantry had dismounted and begun to fight on foot while one man galloped their horses out of rifle range, and now the assorted dragoon carbines and infantry muskets were threatening to overwhelm Sharpe’s riflemen. The Baker rifles were far more accurate than the Frenchmen’s muskets and carbines, and they could kill at four times the distance, but they were desperately slow to load. The bullets, each one wrapped in a leather patch that was designed to grip the barrel’s rifling, had to be forced down the tight grooves and lands of the barrel, whereas a musket ball could be rammed fast down a smoothbore’s unrifled gullet. Sharpe’s men were already abandoning the leather patches in order to load faster, but without the leather the rifling could not impart spin to the ball and so the rifle was robbed of its one great advantage: its lethal accuracy. Hagman and his three companions were still firing down from the ridge, but their numbers were too few to make much difference and all that was saving Sharpe’s riflemen from decimation was the protection of the village’s stone walls.

Sharpe took the small whistle from its pouch on his crossbelt. He blew it twice, then unslung his own rifle, edged round the corner of the house and aimed at a puff of smoke down the valley. He fired. The rifle kicked back hard just as a French musket ball cracked into the wall beside his head. A fleck of stone slashed across his scarred cheek, drawing blood and missing his eyeball by half an inch. ‘Bastards are bloody good.’ Sharpe echoed Harper’s tribute grudgingly, then a crashing musket volley announced that Harry Price had lined his redcoats on the hill top and was firing down at the French.

Price’s first volley was enough to decide the fight. Sharpe heard a French voice shouting orders and a second later the enemy skirmish line began to shred and disappear. Harry Price only had time for one more volley before the grey-coated enemy had retreated out of range. ‘Green! Horrell! McDonald! Cresacre! Smith! Sergeant Latimer!’ Sharpe called to his riflemen. ‘Fifty paces down the valley, make a picquet line there, but get the hell back here if the bastards come back for more. Move! Rest of you stay where you are.’

‘Jesus, sir, you should see in here.’ Harper had pushed open the nearest house door with the muzzle of his seven-barrel gun. The weapon, originally designed to be fired from the fighting tops of Britain’s naval ships, was a cluster of seven half-inch barrels fired by a single flint. It was like a miniature cannon and only the biggest, strongest men could fire the gun without permanently damaging their shoulders. Harper was one of the strongest men Sharpe had ever known, but also one of the most sentimental and now the big Irishman looked close to tears. ‘Oh, sweet suffering Christ,’ Harper said as he crossed himself, ‘the living bastards.’

Sharpe had already smelt the blood, now he looked past the Sergeant and felt the disgust make a lump in his throat. ‘Oh, my God,’ he said softly.

For the small house was drenched in blood, its walls spattered and its floor soaked with it, while on the floor were sprawled the limp bodies of children. Sharpe tried to count the little bodies, but could not always tell where one blood-boltered corpse began and another ended. The children had evidently been stripped naked and then had their throats cut. A small dog had been killed too, and its blood-matted, curly-haired corpse had been tossed onto the children whose skins appeared unnaturally white against the vivid streaks of black-looking blood.

‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ Sharpe said as he backed out of the reeking shadows to draw a breath of fresh air. He had seen more than his share of horror. He had been born to a poorhouse whore in a London gutter and he had followed Britain’s drum from Flanders to Madras and through the Indian wars and now from the beaches of Portugal to the frontiers of Spain, but never, not even in the Sultan Tippoo’s torture chambers in Seringapatam, had he seen children tossed into a dead pile like so many slaughtered animals.

‘There’s more here, sir,’ Corporal Jackson called. Jackson had just vomited in the doorway of a hovel in which the bodies of two old people lay in a bloody mess. They had been tortured in ways that were only too evident.

Sharpe thought of Teresa who was fighting these same scum who gutted and tormented their victims, then, unable to bear the unbidden images that seared his thoughts, he cupped his hands and shouted up the hill, ‘Harris! Down here!’

Rifleman Harris was the company’s educated man. He had once been a schoolmaster, even a respectable schoolmaster, but boredom had driven him to drink and drink had been his ruin, or at least the cause of his joining the army where he still loved to demonstrate his erudition. ‘Sir?’ Harris said as he arrived in the settlement.

‘You speak French?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘There’s two Frogs in that house. Find out what unit they’re from, and what the bastards did here. And Harris!’

‘Sir?’ The lugubrious, red-haired Harris turned back.

‘You don’t have to be gentle with the bastards.’

Even Harris, who was accustomed to Sharpe, seemed shocked by his Captain’s tone. ‘No, sir.’

Sharpe walked back across the settlement’s tiny plaza. His men had searched the two cottages on the stream’s far side, but found no bodies there. The massacre had evidently been confined to the three houses on the nearer bank where Sergeant Harper was standing with a bleak, hurt look on his face. Patrick Harper was an Ulsterman from Donegal and had been driven into the ranks of Britain’s army by hunger and poverty. He was a huge man, four inches taller than Sharpe who was himself six feet tall. In battle Harper was an awesome figure, yet in truth he was a kind, humorous and easy-going man whose benevolence disguised his life’s central contradiction which was that he had no love for the king for whom he fought and little for the country whose flag he defended, yet there were few better soldiers in all King George’s army, and none who was more loyal to his friends. And it was for those friends that Harper fought, and the closest of his friends, despite their disparity in rank, was Sharpe himself. ‘They’re just wee kiddies,’ Harper now said. ‘Who’d do such a thing?’

‘Them.’ Sharpe jerked his head down the small valley to where the stream joined the wider waterway. The grey Frenchmen had stopped there; too far to be threatened by the rifles, but still close enough to watch what happened in the settlement where they had pillaged and murdered.

‘Some of those wee ones had been raped,’ Harper said.

‘I saw,’ Sharpe said bleakly.

‘How could they do it?’

‘There isn’t an answer, Pat. God knows.’ Sharpe felt sick, just like Harper felt sick, but inquiring into the roots of sin would not gain revenge for the dead children, nor would it save the raped girl’s sanity, nor bury the blood-soaked dead. Nor would it find a way back to the British lines for one small light company that Sharpe now realized was dangerously exposed on the edge of the French outpost line. ‘Ask a goddamn chaplain for an answer, if you can ever find one closer than the Lisbon brothels,’ Sharpe said savagely, then turned to look at the charnel houses. ‘How the hell are we going to bury this lot?’

‘We can’t, sir. We’ll just tumble the house walls down on top of them,’ Harper said. He gazed down the valley. ‘I could murder those bastards. What are we going to do with the two we’ve got?’

‘Kill them,’ Sharpe said curtly. ‘We’ll get an answer or two now,’ he said as he saw Harris duck out of the cottage. Harris was carrying one of the steel-grey dragoon helmets which Sharpe now saw were not cloth-covered, but were indeed fashioned out of metal and plumed with a long hank of grey horsehair.

Harris ran his right hand through the plume as he walked towards Sharpe. ‘I found out who they are, sir,’ he said as he drew nearer. ‘They belong to the Brigade Loup, the Wolf Brigade. It’s named after their commanding officer, sir. Fellow called Loup, Brigadier General Guy Loup. Loup means wolf in French, sir. They reckon they’re an elite unit. Their job was to hold the road open through the mountains this past winter and they did it by beating the hell out of the natives. If any of Loup’s men get killed then he kills fifty civilians as revenge. That’s what they were doing here, sir. A couple of his men were ambushed and killed, and this is the price.’ Harris gestured at the houses of the dead. ‘And Loup’s not far away, sir,’ he added in warning. ‘Unless these fellows are lying, which I doubt. He left a detachment here and took a squadron to hunt down some fugitives in the next valley.’

Sharpe looked at the cavalryman’s horse which was still tethered in the settlement’s centre and thought of the infantryman he had captured. ‘This Brigade Loup,’ he asked, ‘is it cavalry or infantry?’

‘The brigade has both, sir,’ Harris said. ‘It’s a special brigade, sir, formed to fight the partisans, and Loup’s got two battalions of infantry and one regiment of dragoons.’

‘And they all wear grey?’

‘Like wolves, sir,’ Harris said helpfully.

‘We all know what to do with wolves,’ Sharpe said, then turned as Sergeant Latimer shouted a warning. Latimer was commanding the tiny picquet line that stood between Sharpe and the French, but it was no new attack that had caused Latimer to shout his warning, but rather the approach of four French horsemen. One of them carried the tricolour guidon, though the swallow-tailed flag was now half obscured by a dirty white shirt that had been impaled on the guidon’s lance head. ‘Bastards want to talk to us,’ Sharpe said.

‘I’ll talk to them,’ Harper said viciously and pulled back the cock of his seven-barrelled gun.

‘No!’ Sharpe said. ‘And go round the company and tell everyone to hold their fire, and that’s an order.’

‘Aye, sir.’ Harper lowered the flint, then, with a baleful glance towards the approaching Frenchmen, went to warn the greenjackets to hold their tempers and keep their fingers off their triggers.

Sharpe, his rifle slung on his shoulder and his sword at his side, strolled towards the four Frenchmen. Two of the horsemen were officers, while the flanking pair were standard-bearers, and the ratio of flags to men seemed impertinently high, almost as if the two approaching officers considered themselves greater than other mortals. The tricolour guidon would have been standard enough, but the second banner was extraordinary. It was a French eagle with gilded wings outspread perched atop a pole that had a crosspiece nailed just beneath the eagle’s plinth. Most eagles carried a silk tricolour from the staff, but this eagle carried six wolf tails attached to the cross-piece. The standard was somehow barbaric, suggesting the far-off days when pagan armies of horse soldiers had thundered out of the Steppes to rape and ruin Christendom.

And if the wolf-tail standard made Sharpe’s blood run chill, then it was nothing compared to the man who now spurred his horse ahead of his companions. Only the man’s boots were not grey. His coat was grey, his horse was a grey, his helmet was lavishly plumed in grey and his grey pelisse was edged with grey wolf fur. Bands of wolf pelt encircled his boot tops, his saddle-cloth was a grey skin, his sword’s long straight scabbard and his carbine’s saddle holster were both sheathed in wolfskin while his horse’s nose band was a strip of grey fur. Even the man’s beard was grey. It was a short beard, neatly trimmed, but the rest of the face was wild and merciless and scarred fit for nightmare. One bloodshot eye and one blind milky eye stared from that weather-beaten, battle-hardened face as the man curbed his horse beside Sharpe.

‘My name is Loup,’ he said, ‘Brigadier General Guy Loup of His Imperial Majesty’s army.’ His tone was strangely mild, his intonation courteous and his English touched with a light Scottish accent.

‘Sharpe,’ the rifleman said. ‘Captain Sharpe. British army.’

The three remaining Frenchmen had reined in a dozen yards away. They watched as their Brigadier swung his leg out of the stirrup and dropped lightly down to the path. He was not as tall as Sharpe, but he was still a big man and he was well muscled and agile. Sharpe guessed the French Brigadier was about forty years old, six years older than Sharpe himself. Loup now took two cigars from his fur-edged sabretache and offered one to Sharpe.

‘I don’t take gifts from murderers,’ Sharpe said.

Loup laughed at Sharpe’s indignation. ‘More fool you, Captain. Is that what you say? More fool you? I was a prisoner, you see, in Scotland. In Edinburgh. A very cold city, but with beautiful women, very beautiful. Some of them taught me English and I taught them how to lie to their drab Calvinist husbands. We paroled officers lived just off Candlemaker Row. Do you know the place? No? You should visit Edinburgh, Captain. Despite the Calvinists and the cooking it is a fine city, very learned and hospitable. When the peace of Amiens was signed I almost stayed there.’ Loup paused to strike flint on steel, then to blow the charred linen tinder in his tinderbox into a flame with which he lit his cigar. ‘I almost stayed, but you know how it is. She was married to another man and I am a lover of France, so here I am and there she is and doubtless she dreams about me a lot more than I dream about her.’ He sighed. ‘But this weather reminded me of her. We would so often lie in bed and watch the rain and mist fly past the windows of Candlemaker Row. It is cold today, eh?’

‘You’re dressed for it, General,’ Sharpe said. ‘Got as much fur as a Christmas whore, you have.’

Loup smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. He was missing two teeth, and those that remained were stained yellow. He had spoken pleasantly enough to Sharpe, even charmingly, but it was the smooth charm of a cat about to kill. He drew on his cigar, making the tip glow red, while his single bloodshot eye looked hard at Sharpe from beneath the helmet’s grey visor.

Loup saw a tall man with a well-used rifle on one shoulder and a battered ugly-bladed sword at his hip. Sharpe’s uniform was torn, stained and patched. The jacket’s black cord hung in tatters between a few silver buttons that hung by threads, while beneath the jacket Sharpe wore a set of leather-reinforced French cavalry overalls. The remains of an officer’s red sash encircled Sharpe’s waist, while around his neck was a loosely knotted black choker. It was the uniform of a man who had long discarded the peacetime trappings of soldiering in exchange for the utilitarian comforts of a fighting man. A hard man, too, Loup guessed, not just from the evidence of the scar on Sharpe’s cheek, but from the rifleman’s demeanour which was awkward and raw-edged as though Sharpe would have preferred to be fighting than talking. Loup shrugged, abandoned his pleasantries and got down to business. ‘I came to fetch my two men,’ he said.

‘Forget them, General,’ Sharpe replied. He was determined not to dignify this Frenchman by calling him ‘sir’ or ‘monsieur’.

Loup raised his eyebrows. ‘They’re dead?’

‘They will be.’

Loup waved a persistent fly away. The steel-plated straps of his helmet hung loose beside his face, resembling the cadenettes of braided hair that French hussars liked to wear hanging from their temples. He drew on his cigar again, then smiled. ‘Might I remind you, Captain, of the rules of war?’

Sharpe offered Loup a word that he doubted the Frenchman had heard much in Edinburgh’s learned society. ‘I don’t take lessons from murderers,’ Sharpe went on, ‘not in the rules of war. What your men did in that village wasn’t war. It was a massacre.’

‘Of course it was war,’ Loup said equably, ‘and I don’t need lectures from you, Captain.’

‘You might not need a lecture, General, but you damn well need a lesson.’

Loup laughed. He turned and walked to the stream’s edge where he stretched his arms, yawned hugely, then stooped to scoop some water to his mouth. He turned back to Sharpe. ‘Let me tell you what my job is, Captain, and you will put yourself in my boots. That way, perhaps, you will lose your tedious English moral certainties. My job, Captain, is to police the roads through these mountains and so make the passes safe for the supply wagons of ammunition and food with which we plan to beat you British back to the sea. My enemy is not a soldier dressed in uniform with a colour and a code of honour, but is instead a rabble of civilians who resent my presence. Good! Let them resent me, that is their privilege, but if they attack me, Captain, then I will defend myself and I do it so ferociously, so ruthlessly, so comprehensively, that they will think a thousand times before they attack my men again. You know what the major weapon of the guerrilla is? It is horror, Captain, sheer horror, so I make certain I am more horrible than my enemy, and my enemy in this area is horrible indeed. You have heard of El Castrador?’

‘The Castrator?’ Sharpe guessed the translation.

‘Indeed. Because of what he does to French soldiers, only he does it while they are alive and then he lets them bleed to death. El Castrador, I am sorry to say, still lives, but I do assure you that none of my men has been castrated in three months, and do you know why? Because El Castrador’s men fear me more than they fear him. I have defeated him, Captain, I have made the mountains secure. In all of Spain, Captain, these are the only hills where Frenchmen can ride safely, and why? Because I have used the guerrilleros’ weapon against them. I castrate them, just as they would castrate me, only I use a blunter knife.’ Brigadier Loup offered Sharpe a grim smile. ‘Now tell me, Captain, if you were in my boots, and if your men were being castrated and blinded and disembowelled and skinned alive and left to die, would you not do as I do?’

‘To children?’ Sharpe jerked his thumb at the village.

Loup’s one eye widened in surprise, as though he found Sharpe’s objection odd in a soldier. ‘Would you spare a rat because it’s young? Vermin are vermin, Captain, whatever their age.’

‘I thought you said the mountains were safe,’ Sharpe said, ‘so why kill?’

‘Because last week two of my men were ambushed and killed in a village not far from here. The families of the murderers came here to take refuge, thinking I would not find them. I did find them, and now I assure you, Captain, that no more of my men will be ambushed in Fuentes de Oñoro.’

‘They will if I find them there.’

Loup shook his head sadly. ‘You are so quick with your threats, Captain. But fight me and I think you will learn caution. But for now? Give me my men and we shall ride away.’

Sharpe paused, thinking, then finally shrugged and turned. ‘Sergeant Harper!’

‘Sir?’

‘Bring the two Frogs out!’

Harper hesitated as though he wanted to know what Sharpe intended before he obeyed the order, but then he turned reluctantly towards the houses. A moment later he appeared with the two French captives, both of whom were still naked below the waist and one of whom was still half doubled over in pain. ‘Is he wounded?’ Loup asked.

‘I kicked him in the balls,’ Sharpe said. ‘He was raping a girl.’

Loup seemed amused by the answer. ‘You’re squeamish about rape, Captain Sharpe?’

‘Funny in a man, isn’t it? Yes, I am.’

‘We have some officers like that,’ Loup said, ‘but a few months in Spain soon cures their delicacy. The women here fight like the men, and if a woman imagines that her skirts will protect her then she is wrong. And rape is part of the horror, but it also serves a secondary purpose. Release soldiers to rape and they don’t care that they’re hungry or that their pay is a year in arrears. Rape is a weapon like any other, Captain.’

‘I’ll remember that, General, when I march into France,’ Sharpe said, then he turned back towards the houses. ‘Stop there, Sergeant!’ The two prisoners had been escorted as far as the village entrance. ‘And Sergeant!’

‘Sir?’

‘Fetch their trousers. Get them dressed properly.’

Loup, pleased with the way his mission was going, smiled at Sharpe. ‘You’re being sensible, good. I would hate to have to fight you in the same way that I fight the Spanish.’

Sharpe looked at Loup’s pagan uniform. It was a costume, he thought, to scare a child, the costume of a wolfman walking out of nightmare, but the wolfman’s sword was no longer than Sharpe’s and his carbine a good deal less accurate than Sharpe’s rifle. ‘I don’t suppose you could fight us, General,’ Sharpe said, ‘we’re a real army, you see, not a pack of unarmed women and children.’

Loup stiffened. ‘You will find, Captain Sharpe, that the Brigade Loup can fight any man, anywhere, anyhow. I do not lose, Captain, not to anyone.’

‘So if you never lose, General, how were you taken prisoner?’ Sharpe sneered. ‘Fast asleep, were you?’

‘I was a passenger on my way to Egypt, Captain, when our ship was captured by the Royal Navy. That hardly counts as my defeat.’ Loup watched as his two men pulled on their trousers. ‘Where is Trooper Godin’s horse?’

‘Trooper Godin won’t need a horse where he’s going,’ Sharpe said.

‘He can walk? I suppose he can. Very well, I yield you the horse,’ Loup said magniloquently.

‘He’s going to hell, General,’ Sharpe said. ‘I’m dressing them because they’re still soldiers, and even your lousy soldiers deserve to die with their trousers on.’ He turned back to the settlement. ‘Sergeant! Put them against the wall! I want a firing squad, four men for each prisoner. Load up!’

‘Captain!’ Loup snapped and his hand went to his sword’s hilt.

‘You don’t frighten me, Loup. Not you nor your fancy dress,’ Sharpe said. ‘You draw that sword and we’ll be mopping up your blood with your flag of truce. I’ve got marksmen up on that ridge who can whip the good eye out of your face at two hundred yards, and one of those marksmen is looking at you right now.’

Loup looked up the hill. He could see Price’s redcoats there, and one greenjacket, but he plainly could not tell just how many men were in Sharpe’s party. He looked back to Sharpe. ‘You’re a captain, just a captain. Which means you have what? One company? Maybe two? The British won’t entrust more than two companies to a mere captain, but within half a mile I have the rest of my brigade. If you kill my men you’ll be hunted down like dogs, and you will die like dogs. I will exempt you from the rules of war, Captain, just as you propose exempting my men, and I will make sure you die in the manner of my Spanish enemies. With a very blunt knife, Captain.’

Sharpe ignored the threat, turning towards the village instead. ‘Firing party ready, Sergeant?’

‘They’re ready, sir. And eager, sir!’

Sharpe looked back to the Frenchman. ‘Your brigade is miles away, General. If it was any closer you wouldn’t be here talking to me, but leading the attack. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I’ve got some justice to execute.’

‘No!’ Loup said sharply enough to turn Sharpe back. ‘I have made a bargain with my men. You understand that, Captain? You are a leader, I am a leader, and I have promised my men never to abandon them. Don’t make me break my promise.’

‘I don’t give a bugger about your promise,’ Sharpe said.

Loup had expected that kind of answer and so shrugged. ‘Then maybe you will give a bugger about this, Captain Sharpe. I know who you are, and if you do not return my men I will place a price on your head. I will give every man in Portugal and Spain a reason to hunt you down. Kill those two and you sign your own death warrant.’

Sharpe smiled. ‘You’re a bad loser, General.’

‘And you’re not?’

Sharpe walked away. ‘I’ve never lost,’ he called back across his shoulder, ‘so I wouldn’t know.’

‘Your death warrant, Sharpe!’ Loup called.

Sharpe lifted two fingers. He had heard that the English bowmen at Agincourt, threatened by the French with the loss of their bowstring fingers at the battle’s end, had first won the battle and then invented the taunting gesture to show the overweening bastards just who were the better soldiers. Now Sharpe used it again.

Then went to kill the wolfman’s men.

Major Michael Hogan discovered Wellington inspecting a bridge over the River Turones where a force of three French battalions had tried to hold off the advancing British. The resulting battle had been swift and brutal, and now a trail of French and British dead told the skirmish’s tale. An initial tide line of bodies marked where the sides had clashed, a dreadful smear of bloodied turf showed where two British cannon had enfiladed the enemy, then a further scatter of corpses betrayed the French retreat across the bridge which their engineers had not had time to destroy. ‘Fletcher thinks the bridge is Roman work, Hogan,’ Wellington greeted the Irish Major.

‘I sometimes wonder, my Lord, whether anyone has built a bridge in Portugal or Spain since the Romans.’ Hogan, swathed in a cloak because of the day’s damp chill, nodded amicably to his Lordship’s three aides, then handed the General a sealed letter. The seal, which showed the royal Spanish coat of arms, had been lifted. ‘I took the precaution of reading the letter, my Lord,’ Hogan explained.

‘Trouble?’ Wellington asked.

‘I wouldn’t have bothered you otherwise, my Lord,’ Hogan answered gloomily.

Wellington frowned as he read the letter. The General was a handsome man, forty-two years old, but as fit as any in his army. And, Hogan thought, wiser than most. The British army, Hogan knew, had an uncanny knack of finding the least qualified man and promoting him to high command, but somehow the system had gone wrong and Sir Arthur Wellesley, now the Viscount Wellington, had been given command of His Majesty’s army in Portugal, thus providing that army with the best possible leadership. At least Hogan thought so, but Michael Hogan allowed that he could be prejudiced in this matter. Wellington, after all, had promoted Hogan’s career, making the shrewd Irishman the head of his intelligence department and the result had been a relationship as close as it was fruitful.

The General read the letter again, this time glancing at a translation Hogan had thoughtfully provided. Hogan meanwhile looked about the battlefield where fatigue parties were clearing up the remnants of the skirmish. To the east of the bridge, where the road came delicately down the mountainside in a series of sweeping curves, a dozen work parties were searching the bushes for bodies and abandoned supplies. The French dead were being stripped naked and stacked like cordwood next to a long, shallow grave that a group of diggers was trying to extend. Other men were piling French muskets or else hurling canteens, cartridge boxes, boots and blankets into a cart. Some of the plunder was even more exotic, for the retreating French had weighed themselves down with the loot of a thousand Portuguese villages and Wellington’s men were now recovering church vestments, candlesticks and silver plate. ‘Astonishing what a soldier will carry on a retreat,’ the General remarked to Hogan. ‘We found one dead man with a milking stool. A common milking stool! What was he thinking of? Taking it back to France?’ He held the letter out to Hogan. ‘Damn,’ he said mildly, then, more strongly, ‘God damn!’ He waved his aides away, leaving him alone with Hogan. ‘The more I learn about His Most Catholic Majesty King Ferdinand VII, Hogan, the more I become convinced that he should have been drowned at birth.’

Hogan smiled. ‘The recognized method, my Lord, is smothering.’

‘Is it indeed?’

‘It is indeed, my Lord, and no one’s ever the wiser. The mother simply explains how she rolled over in her sleep and trapped the blessed little creature beneath her body and thus, the holy church explains, another precious angel is born.’

‘In my family,’ the General said, ‘unwanted children get posted into the army.’

‘It has much the same effect, my Lord, except in the matter of angels.’

Wellington gave a brief laugh, then gestured with the letter. ‘So how did this reach us?’

‘The usual way, my Lord. Smuggled out of Valençay by Ferdinand’s servants and brought south to the Pyrenees where it was given to partisans for forwarding to us.’

‘With a copy to London, eh? Any chance of intercepting the London copy?’

‘Alas, sir, gone these two weeks. Probably there already.’

‘Hell, damn and hell again. Damn!’ Wellington stared gloomily at the bridge where a sling cart was salvaging the fallen barrel of a dismounted French cannon. ‘So what to do, eh, Hogan? What to do?’

The problem was simple enough. The letter, copied to the Prince Regent in London, had come from the exiled King Ferdinand of Spain who was now a prisoner of Napoleon in the French château at Valençay. The letter was pleased to announce that His Most Catholic Majesty, in a spirit of cooperation with his cousin of England and in his great desire to drive the French invader from the sacred soil of his kingdom, had directed the Real Compañía Irlandesa of His Most Catholic Majesty’s household guard to attach itself to His Britannic Majesty’s forces under the command of the Viscount Wellington. Which gesture, though it sounded generous, was not to the Viscount Wellington’s taste. He did not need a stray company of royal palace guards. A battalion of trained infantry with full fighting equipment might have been of some service, but a company of ceremonial troops was about as much use to the Viscount Wellington as a choir of psalm-singing eunuchs.

‘And they’ve already arrived,’ Hogan said mildly.

‘They’ve what?’ Wellington’s question could be heard a hundred yards away where a dog, thinking it was being reproved, slunk away from some fly-blackened guts that trailed from the eviscerated body of a French artillery officer. ‘Where are they?’ Wellington asked fiercely.

‘Somewhere on the Tagus, my Lord, being barged towards us.’

‘How the hell did they get here?’

‘According to my correspondent, my Lord, by ship. Our ships.’ Hogan put a pinch of snuff on his left hand, then sniffed the powder up each nostril. He paused for a second, his eyes suddenly streaming, then sneezed. His horse’s ears flicked back at the noise. ‘The commander of the Real Compañía Irlandesa claims he marched his men to Spain’s east coast, my Lord,’ Hogan went on, ‘then took ship to Menorca where our Royal Navy collected them.’

Wellington snorted his derision. ‘And the French just let that happen? King Joseph just watched half the royal guard march away?’ Joseph was Bonaparte’s brother and had been elevated to the throne of Spain, though it was taking three hundred thousand French bayonets to keep him there.

‘A fifth of the royal guard, my Lord,’ Hogan gently corrected the General. ‘And yes, that’s exactly what Lord Kiely says. Kiely, of course, being their comandante.’

‘Kiely?’

‘Irish peer, my Lord.’

‘Damn it, Hogan, I know the Irish peerage. Kiely. Earl of Kiely. An exile, right? And his mother, I remember, gave money to Tone back in the nineties.’ Wolfe Tone had been an Irish patriot who had tried to raise money and men in Europe and America to lead a rebellion against the British in his native Ireland. The rebellion had flared into open war in 1798 when Tone had invaded Donegal with a small French army that had been roundly defeated and Tone himself had committed suicide in his Dublin prison rather than hang from a British rope. ‘I don’t suppose Kiely’s any better than his mother,’ Wellington said grimly, ‘and she’s a witch who should have been smothered at birth. Is his Lordship to be trusted, Hogan?’

‘So far as I hear, my Lord, he’s a drunk and a wastrel,’ Hogan said. ‘He was given command of the Real Compañía Irlandesa because he’s the only Irish aristocrat in Madrid and because his mother had influence over the King. She’s dead now, God rest her soul.’ He watched a soldier try to fork up the spilt French officer’s intestines with his bayonet. The guts kept slipping off the blade and finally a sergeant yelled at the man to either pick the offal up with his bare hands or else leave it for the crows.

‘What has this Irish guard been doing since Ferdinand left Madrid?’ Wellington asked.

‘Living on sufferance, my Lord. Guarding the Escorial, polishing their boots, staying out of trouble, breeding, whoring, drinking and saluting the French.’

‘But not fighting the French.’

‘Indeed not.’ Hogan paused. ‘It’s all too convenient, my Lord,’ he went on. ‘The Real Compañía Irlandesa is permitted to leave Madrid, permitted to take ship, and permitted to come to us, and meanwhile a letter is smuggled out of France saying the company is a gift to you from His imprisoned Majesty. I smell Frog paws all over it, my Lord.’

‘So we tell these damn guards to go away?’

‘I doubt we can. In London the Prince Regent will doubtless be flattered by the gesture and the Foreign Office, you may depend, will consider any slight offered to the Real Compañía Irlandesa to be an insult to our Spanish allies, which means, my Lord, that we are stuck with the bastards.’

‘Are they good for anything?’

‘I’m sure they’ll be decorative,’ Hogan allowed dubiously.

‘And decoration costs money,’ Wellington said. ‘I suppose the King of Spain did not think to send his guard’s pay chest?’

‘No, my Lord.’

‘Which means I’m paying them?’ Wellington inquired dangerously, and, when Hogan’s only answer was a seraphic smile, the General swore. ‘God damn their eyes! I’m supposed to pay the bastards? While they stab me in the back? Is that what they’re here for, Hogan?’

‘I wouldn’t know, my Lord. But I suspect as much.’

A gust of laughter sounded from a fatigue party that had just discovered some intimate drawings concealed in a dead Frenchman’s coat tails. Wellington winced at the noise and edged his horse further away from the raucous group. Some crows fought over a pile of offal that had once been a French skirmisher. The General stared at the unpleasant sight, then grimaced. ‘So what do you know about this Irish guard, Hogan?’

‘They’re mostly Spanish these days, my Lord, though even the Spanish-born guards have to be descended from Irish exiles. Most of the guardsmen are recruited from the three Irish regiments in Spanish service, but a handful, I imagine, will be deserters from our own army. I’d suspect that most of them are patriotic to Spain and are probably willing to fight against the French, but undoubtedly a handful of them will be afrancesados, though in that regard I’d suspect the officers before the men.’ An afrancesado was a Spaniard who supported the French and almost all such traitors came from the educated classes. Hogan slapped a horsefly that had settled on his horse’s neck. ‘It’s all right, Jeremiah, just a hungry fly,’ he explained to his startled horse, then turned back to Wellington. ‘I don’t know why they’ve been sent here, my Lord, but I am sure of two things. First, it will be a diplomatic impossibility to get rid of them, and second we have to assume that it’s the French who want them here. King Ferdinand, I’ve no doubt, was gulled into writing the letter. I hear he’s not very clever, my Lord.’

‘But you are, Hogan. It’s why I put up with you. So what do we do? Put them to latrine digging?’

Hogan shook his head. ‘If you employ the King of Spain’s household guard on menial tasks, my Lord, it will be construed as an insult to our Spanish allies as well as to His Catholic Majesty.’

‘Damn His Catholic Majesty,’ Wellington growled, then stared balefully towards the trench-like grave where the French dead were now being unceremoniously laid in a long, white, naked row. ‘And the junta?’ he asked. ‘What of the junta?’

The junta in Cadiz was the regency council that ruled unoccupied Spain in their King’s absence. Of its patriotism there could be no doubt, but the same could not be said of its efficiency. The junta was notorious for its internal squabbles and touchy pride, and few matters had touched that pride more directly than the discreet request that Arthur Wellesley, Viscount Wellington, be made Generalisimo of all Spain’s armies. Wellington was already the General Marshal of Portugal’s army and commander of the British forces in Portugal, and no man of sense denied he was the best general on the allied side, not least because he was the only one who consistently won battles, and no one denied that it made sense for all the armies opposing the French in Spain and Portugal to be under a unified command, but nevertheless, despite the acknowledged sense of the proposal, the junta was reluctant to grant Wellington any such powers. Spain’s armies, they protested, must be led by a Spaniard, and if no Spaniard had yet proved capable of winning a campaign against the French, then that was no matter; better a defeated Spaniard than a victorious foreigner.

‘The junta, my Lord,’ Hogan answered carefully, ‘will think this is the thin end of a very broad wedge. They’ll think this is a British plot to take over the Spanish armies piecemeal, and they’ll watch like hawks, my Lord, to see how you treat the Real Compañía Irlandesa.’

‘The hawk,’ Wellington said with a sour twist, ‘being Don Luis.’

‘Precisely, my Lord,’ Hogan said. General Don Luis Valverde was the junta’s official observer with the British and Portuguese armies and the man whose recommendation was needed if the Spanish were ever to appoint Wellington as their Generalisimo. It was an approval that was highly unlikely, for General Valverde was a man in whom all the junta’s great pride and none of its small sense was concentrated.

‘God damn it,’ Wellington said, thinking of Valverde. ‘Well, Hogan? You’re paid to advise me, so earn your damned pay.’

Hogan paused to collect his thoughts. ‘I fear we have to welcome Lord Kiely and his men,’ he said after a few seconds, ‘even while we distrust them, and so it seems to me, my Lord, that we must do our best to make them uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that they either go back to Madrid or else march down to Cadiz.’

‘We drive them out?’ Wellington said. ‘How?’

‘Partly, my Lord, by bivouacking them so close to the French that those guardsmen who wish to desert will find it easy. At the same time, my Lord, we say that we have put them in a place of danger as a compliment to their fighting reputation, despite which, my Lord, I think we must assume that the Real Compañía Irlandesa, while undoubtedly skilled at guarding palace gates, will prove less skilled at the more mundane task of fighting the French. We should therefore insist that they submit to a period of strict training under the supervision of someone who can be trusted to make their life a living misery.’

Wellington gave a grim smile. ‘Make these ceremonial soldiers stoop, eh? Make them chew on humble pie till it chokes them?’

‘Exactly, my Lord. I have no doubt that they expect to be treated with respect and even privilege, so we must disappoint them. We’ll have to give them a liaison officer, someone senior enough to smooth Lord Kiely’s feathers and allay General Valverde’s suspicions, but why not give them a drillmaster too? A tyrant, but someone shrewd enough to smoke out their secrets.’

Wellington smiled, then turned his horse back towards his aides. He knew exactly who Hogan had in mind. ‘I doubt our Lord Kiely will much like Mister Sharpe,’ the General said.

‘I cannot think they’ll take to each other, my Lord, no.’

‘Where is Sharpe?’

‘He should be on his way to Vilar Formoso today, my Lord. He’s an unhappy recruit to the Town Major’s staff.’

‘So he’ll be glad to be cumbered with Kiely instead then, won’t he? And who do we appoint as liaison officer?’

‘Any emollient fool will do for that post, my Lord.’

‘Very well, Hogan, I’ll find the fool and you arrange the rest.’ The General touched his heels to his horse’s flank. His aides, seeing the General ready to move, gathered their reins, then Wellington paused. ‘What does a man want with a common milking stool, Hogan?’

‘It keeps his arse dry during wet nights of sentry duty, my Lord.’

‘Clever thought, Hogan. Can’t think why I didn’t come up with the idea myself. Well done.’ Wellington wheeled his horse and spurred west away from the battle’s litter.

Hogan watched the General go, then grimaced. The French, he was sure, had wished trouble on him and now, with God’s good help, he would wish some evil back on them. He would welcome the Real Compañía Irlandesa with honeyed words and extravagant promises, then give the bastards Richard Sharpe.

The girl clung to Rifleman Perkins. She was hurt inside, she was bleeding and limping, but she had insisted on coming out of the hovel to watch the two Frenchmen die. Indeed she taunted the two men, spitting and screaming at them, then laughed as one of the two captives dropped to his knees and lifted his bound hands towards Sharpe. ‘He says he wasn’t raping the girl, sir,’ Harris translated.

‘So why were the bastard’s trousers round his ankles?’ Sharpe asked, then looked at his eight-man firing squad. Usually it was hard to find men willing to serve on firing squads, but there had been no difficulty this time. ‘Present!’ Sharpe called.

‘Non, Monsieur, je vous prie! Monsieur!’ the kneeling Frenchman called. Tears ran down his face.

Eight riflemen lined their sights on the two Frenchmen. The other captive spat his derision and kept his head high. He was a handsome man, though his face was bruised from Harris’s ministrations. The first man, realizing that his begging was to go unanswered, dropped his head and sobbed uncontrollably. ‘Maman,’ he called pathetically, ‘Maman!’ Brigadier General Loup, back in his fur-edged saddle, watched the executions from fifty yards away.

Sharpe knew he had no legal right to shoot prisoners. He knew he might even be endangering his career by this act, but then he thought of the small, blood-blackened bodies of the raped and murdered children. ‘Fire!’ he called.

The eight rifles snapped. Smoke gusted to form an acrid, filthy-smelling cloud that obscured the skeins of blood splashing high on the hovel’s stone wall as the two bodies were thrown hard back, then recoiled forward to flop onto the ground. One of the men twitched for a few seconds, then went still.

‘You’re a dead man, Sharpe!’ Loup shouted.

Sharpe raised his two fingers to the Brigadier, but did not bother to turn round. ‘The bloody Frogs can bury those two,’ he said of the executed prisoners, ‘but we’ll collapse the houses on the Spanish dead. They are Spanish, aren’t they?’ he asked Harris.

Harris nodded. ‘We’re just inside Spain, sir. Maybe a mile or two. That’s what the girl says.’

Sharpe looked at the girl. She was no older than Perkins, maybe sixteen, and had dank, dirty, long black hair, but clean her up, he thought, and she would be a pretty enough thing, and immediately Sharpe felt guilty for the thought. The girl was in pain. She had watched her family slaughtered, then had been used by God knows how many men. Now, with her rag-like clothes held tight about her thin body, she was staring intently at the two dead soldiers. She spat at them, then buried her head in Perkins’s shoulder. ‘She’ll have to come with us, Perkins,’ Sharpe said. ‘If she stays here she’ll be slaughtered by those bastards.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So look after her, lad. Do you know her name?’

‘Miranda, sir.’

‘Look after Miranda then,’ Sharpe said, then he crossed to where Harper was organizing the men who would demolish the houses on top of the dead bodies. The smell of blood was as thick as the mass of flies buzzing inside the charnel houses. ‘The bastards will chase us,’ Sharpe said, nodding towards the lurking French.

‘They will too, sir,’ the Sergeant agreed.

‘So we’ll keep to the hill tops,’ Sharpe said. Cavalry could not get to the tops of steep hills, at least not in good order, and certainly not before their leaders had been picked off by Sharpe’s best marksmen.

Harper glanced at the two dead Frenchmen. ‘Were you supposed to do that, sir?’

‘You mean, am I allowed to execute prisoners of war under the King’s Regulations? No, of course I’m not. So don’t tell anyone.’

‘Not a word, sir. Never saw a thing, sir, and I’ll make sure the lads say the same.’

‘And one day,’ Sharpe said as he stared at the distant figure of Brigadier General Loup, ‘I’ll put him against a wall and shoot him.’

‘Amen,’ Harper said, ‘amen.’ He turned and looked at the French horse that was still picketed in the settlement. ‘What do we do with the beast?’

‘We can’t take it with us,’ Sharpe said. The hills were too steep, and he planned to keep to the rocky heights where dragoon horses could not follow. ‘But I’ll be damned before I give a serviceable cavalry horse back to the enemy.’ He cocked his rifle. ‘I hate to do it.’

‘You want me to do it, sir?’

‘No,’ Sharpe said, though he meant yes for he really did not want to shoot the horse. He did it anyway. The shot echoed back from the hills, fading and crackling while the horse thrashed in its bloody death throes.

The riflemen covered the Spanish dead with stones and thatch, but left the two French soldiers for their own comrades to bury. Then they climbed high into the misty heights to work their way westwards. By nightfall, when they came down into the valley of the River Turones, there was no sign of any pursuit. There was no stink of saddle-sore horses, no glint of grey light from grey steel, indeed there had been no sign nor smell of any pursuit all afternoon except just once, just as the light faded and as the first small candle flames flickered yellow in the cottages beside the river, when suddenly a wolf had howled its melancholy cry in the darkening hills.

Its howl was long and desolate, and the echo lingered.

And Sharpe shivered.

CHAPTER TWO

The view from the castle in Ciudad Rodrigo looked across the River Agueda towards the hills where the British forces gathered, yet this night was so dark and wet that nothing was visible except the flicker of two torches burning deep inside an arched tunnel that burrowed through the city’s enormous ramparts. The rain flickered silver-red past the flame light to make the cobbles slick. Every few moments a sentry would appear at the entrance of the tunnel and the fiery light would glint off the shining spike of his fixed bayonet, but otherwise there was no sign of life. The tricolour of France flew above the gate, but there was no light to show it flapping dispiritedly in the rain which was being gusted around the castle walls and sometimes even being driven into the deep embrasured window where a man leaned to watch the arch. The flickering torchlight was reflected in the thick pebbled lenses of his wire-bound spectacles.

‘Maybe he’s not coming,’ the woman said from the fireplace.

‘If Loup says he will be here,’ the man answered without turning round, ‘then he will be here.’ The man had a remarkably deep voice that belied his appearance for he was slim, almost fragile-looking, with a thin scholarly face, myopic eyes and cheeks pocked with the scars of childhood smallpox. He wore a plain dark-blue uniform with no badges of rank, but Pierre Ducos needed no gaudy chains or stars, no tassels or epaulettes or aiguillettes to signify his authority. Major Ducos was Napoleon’s man in Spain and everyone who mattered, from King Joseph downwards, knew it.

‘Loup,’ the woman said. ‘It means “wolf”, yes?’

This time Ducos did turn round. ‘Your countrymen call him El Lobo,’ he said, ‘and he frightens them.’

‘Superstitious people frighten easily,’ the woman said scornfully. She was tall and thin, and had a face that was memorable rather than beautiful. A hard, clever and singular face, once seen never forgotten, with a full mouth, deep-set eyes and a scornful expression. She was maybe thirty years old, but it was hard to tell for her skin had been so darkened by the sun that it looked like a peasant woman’s. Other well-born women took care to keep their skins as pale as chalk and soft as curds, but this woman did not care for fashionable looks nor for fashionable clothes. Her passion was hunting and when she followed her hounds she rode astride like a man and so she dressed like a man: in breeches, boots and spurs. This night she was uniformed as a French hussar with skin-tight sky-blue breeches that had an intricate pattern of Hungarian lace down the front of the thighs, a plum-coloured dolman with blue cuffs and plaited white-silk cordings and a scarlet pelisse edged with black fur. It was rumoured that Doña Juanita de Elia possessed a uniform from the regiment of every man she had ever slept with and that her wardrobe needed to be as large as most people’s parlours. To Major Ducos’s eyes the Doña Juanita de Elia was nothing but a flamboyant whore and a soldier’s plaything, and in Ducos’s murky world flamboyance was a lethal liability, but in Juanita’s own eyes she was an adventuress and an afrancesada, and any Spaniard willing to side with France in this war was useful to Pierre Ducos. And, he grudgingly allowed, this war-loving adventuress was willing to run great risks for France and so Ducos was willing to treat her with a respect he would not usually accord to women. ‘Tell me about El Lobo,’ the Doña Juanita demanded.

‘He’s a brigadier of dragoons,’ Ducos said, ‘who began his army career as a groom in the royal army. He’s brave, he’s demanding, he’s successful and, above all, he is ruthless.’ On the whole Ducos had little time for soldiers whom he considered to be romantic fools much given to posturing and gestures, but he approved of Loup. Loup was single-minded, fierce and utterly without illusions, qualities that Ducos himself possessed, and Ducos liked to think that, had he ever been a proper soldier, he would have been like Loup. It was true that Loup, like Juanita de Elia, affected a certain flamboyance, but Ducos forgave the Brigadier his wolf-fur pretensions because, quite simply, he was the best soldier Ducos had discovered in Spain and the Major was determined that Loup should be properly rewarded. ‘Loup will one day be a marshal of France,’ Ducos said, ‘and the sooner the better.’

‘But not if Marshal Masséna can help it?’ Juanita asked.

Ducos grunted. He collected gossip more assiduously than any man, but he disliked confirming it, yet Marshal Masséna’s dislike of Loup was so well known in the army that Ducos had no need to dissemble about it. ‘Soldiers are like stags, madame,’ Ducos said. ‘They fight to prove they are the best in their tribe and they dislike their fiercest rivals far more than the beasts that offer them no competition. So I would suggest to you, madame, that the Marshal’s dislike of Brigadier Loup is confirmation of Loup’s genuine abilities.’ It was also, Ducos thought, a typical piece of wasteful posturing. No wonder the war in Spain was taking so long and proving so troublesome when a marshal of France wasted petulance on the best brigadier in the army.

He turned back to the window as the sound of hooves echoed in the fortress’s entrance tunnel. Ducos listened as the challenge was given, then he heard the squeal of the gate hinges opening and a second later he saw a group of grey horsemen appear in the flamelit archway.

The Doña Juanita de Elia had come to stand beside Ducos. She was so close that he could smell the perfume on her gaudy uniform. ‘Which one is he?’ she asked.

‘The one in front,’ Ducos replied.

‘He rides well,’ Juanita de Elia said with grudging respect.

‘A natural horseman,’ Ducos said. ‘Not fancy. He doesn’t make his horse dance, he makes it fight.’ He moved away from the woman. He disliked perfume as much as he disliked opinionated whores.

The two waited in silent awkwardness. Juanita de Elia had long sensed that her weapons did not work on Ducos. She believed he disliked women, but the truth was that Pierre Ducos was oblivious of them. Once in a while he would use a soldier’s brothel, but only after a surgeon had provided him with the name of a clean girl. Most of the time he went without such distractions, preferring a monkish dedication to the Emperor’s cause. Now he sat at his table and leafed through papers as he tried to ignore the woman’s presence. Somewhere in the town a church clock struck nine, then a sergeant’s voice echoed from an inner courtyard as a squad of men was marched towards the ramparts. The rain fell relentlessly. Then, at last, boots and spurs sounded loud on the stairway leading to Ducos’s big chamber and the Doña Juanita looked up expectantly.

Brigadier Loup did not bother to knock on Ducos’s door. He burst in, already fuming with anger. ‘I lost two men! God damn it! Two good men! Lost to riflemen, Ducos, to British riflemen. Executed! They were put against a wall and shot like vermin!’ He had crossed to Ducos’s table and helped himself from the decanter of brandy. ‘I want a price put on the head of their captain, Ducos. I want the man’s balls in my men’s stewpot.’ He stopped suddenly, checked by the exotic sight of the uniformed woman standing beside the fire. For a second Loup had thought the figure in cavalry uniform was an especially effeminate young man, one of the dandified Parisians who spent more money on their tailor than on their horse and weapons, but then he realized that the dandy was a woman and that the cascading black plume was her hair and not a helmet’s embellishment. ‘Is she yours, Ducos?’ Loup asked nastily.

‘Monsieur,’ Ducos said very formally, ‘allow me to name the Doña Juanita de Elia. Madame? This is Brigadier General Guy Loup.’

Brigadier Loup stared at the woman by the fire and what he saw, he liked, and the Doña Juanita de Elia returned the Dragoon General’s stare and what she saw, she also liked. She saw a compact, one-eyed man with a brutal, weather-beaten face who wore his grey hair and beard short, and his grey, fur-trimmed uniform like an executioner’s costume. The fur glinted with rainwater that had brought out the smell of the pelts, a smell that mingled with the heady aromas of saddles, tobacco, sweat, gun oil, powder and horses. ‘Brigadier,’ she said politely.

‘Madame,’ Loup acknowledged her, then shamelessly looked up and down her skin-tight uniform, ‘or should it be Colonel?’

‘Brigadier at least,’ Juanita answered, ‘if not Maréchal.’

‘Two men?’ Ducos interrupted the flirtation. ‘How did you lose two men?’

Loup told the story of his day. He paced up and down the room as he spoke, biting into an apple he took from Ducos’s desk. He told how he had taken a small group of men into the hills to find the fugitives from the village of Fuentes de Oñoro, and how, having taken his revenge on the Spaniards, he had been surprised by the arrival of the greenjackets. ‘They were led by a captain called Sharpe,’ he said.

‘Sharpe,’ Ducos repeated, then leafed through an immense ledger in which he recorded every scrap of information about the Emperor’s enemies. It was Ducos’s job to know about those enemies and to recommend how they could be destroyed, and his intelligence was as copious as his power. ‘Sharpe,’ he said again as he found the entry he sought. ‘A rifleman, you say? I suspect he may be the same man who captured an eagle at Talavera. Was he with greenjackets only? Or did he have redcoats with him?’

‘He had redcoats.’

‘Then it is the same man. For a reason we have never discovered he serves in a red-jacketed battalion.’ Ducos was adding to his notes in the book that contained similar entries on over five hundred enemy officers. Some of the entries were scored through with a single black line denoting that the men were dead and Ducos sometimes imagined a glorious day when all these enemy heroes, British, Portuguese and Spanish alike, would be black-lined by a rampaging French army. ‘Captain Sharpe,’ Ducos now said, ‘is reckoned a famous man in Wellington’s forces. He came up from the ranks, Brigadier, a rare feat in Britain.’

‘I don’t care if he came up from the jakes, Ducos, I want his scalp and I want his balls.’

Ducos disapproved of such private rivalries, fearing that they interfered with more important duties. He closed the ledger. ‘Would it not be better,’ he suggested coldly, ‘if you allowed me to issue a formal complaint about the execution? Wellington will hardly approve.’

‘No,’ Loup said. ‘I don’t need lawyers taking revenge for me.’ Loup’s anger was not caused by the death of his two men, for death was a risk all soldiers learned to abide, but rather by the manner of their death. Soldiers should die in battle or in bed, not against a wall like common criminals. Loup was also piqued that another soldier had got the better of him. ‘But if I can’t kill him in the next few weeks, Ducos, you can write your damned letter.’ The permission was grudging. ‘Soldiers are harder to kill than civilians,’ Loup went on, ‘and we’ve been fighting civilians too long. Now my brigade will have to learn how to destroy uniformed enemies as well.’

‘I thought most French soldiers would rather fight other regulars than fight guerrilleros,’ the Doña Juanita said.

Loup nodded. ‘Most do, but not me, madame. I have specialized in fighting the guerrilla.’

‘Tell me how,’ she asked.

Loup glanced at Ducos as if seeking permission, and Ducos nodded. Ducos was annoyed by the attraction he sensed between these two. It was an attraction as elemental as the lust of a tomcat, a lust so palpable that Ducos almost wrinkled his nose at the stench of it. Leave these two alone for half a minute, he thought, and their uniforms would make a single heap on the floor. It was not their lust that offended him, but rather the fact that it distracted them from their proper business. ‘Go on,’ he told Loup.

Loup shrugged as though there was no real secret involved. ‘I’ve got the best-trained troops in the army. Better than the Imperial Guard. They fight well, they kill well and they’re rewarded well. I keep them separate. They’re not billeted with other troops, they don’t mix with other troops, and that way no one knows where they are or what they’re doing. If you send six hundred men marching from here to Madrid then I guarantee you that every guerrillero between here and Seville will know about it before they leave. But not with my men. We don’t tell anyone what we’re doing or where we’re going, we just go there and do it. And we have our own places to live. I emptied a village of its inhabitants and made it my depot, but we don’t just stay there. We travel where we will, sleep where we will, and if guerrilleros attack us they die, and not just them, but their mothers, their children, their priests and their grandchildren die with them. We horrify them, madame, just as they try to horrify us, and by now my wolf pack is more horrifying than the partisans.’

‘Good,’ Juanita said simply.

‘Brigadier Loup’s patrol area is remarkably free of partisans,’ Ducos said in generous tribute.

‘But not entirely free,’ Loup added grimly. ‘El Castrador survives, but I’ll use his own knife on him yet. Maybe the arrival of the British will encourage him to show his face again.’

‘Which is why we are here,’ Ducos said, taking command of the room. ‘Our job is to make certain that the British do not stay here, but are sent packing.’ And then, in his deep and almost hypnotic voice, he described the military situation as he comprehended it. Brigadier General Loup, who had spent the last year fighting to keep the passes through the frontier hills free of partisans and who had thus been spared the disasters that had afflicted Marshal Masséna’s army in Portugal, listened raptly as Ducos told the real story and not the patriotic lies that were peddled in the columns of the Moniteur. ‘Wellington is clever,’ Ducos admitted. ‘He’s not brilliant, but he is clever and we under-estimated him.’ The existence of the Lines of Torres Vedras had been unknown to the French until they marched within cannon shot of the defences and there they had waited, ever hungrier, ever colder, through a long winter. Now the army was back on the Spanish frontier and waiting for Wellington’s assault.

It was an assault that would be hard and bloody because of the two massive fortresses that barred the only passable roads through the frontier mountains. Ciudad Rodrigo was the northern fastness and Badajoz the southern. Badajoz had been in Spanish hands till a month before and Masséna’s engineers had despaired of ever reducing its massive walls, but Ducos had arranged a huge bribe and the Spanish commander had yielded the keys to the fortress. Now both keys of Spain, Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo, were firmly in the Emperor’s grip.

But there was a third border fortress which also lay in French hands. Almeida was inside Portugal and, though it was not so important as Ciudad Rodrigo or Badajoz, and though its massive castle had been destroyed with the neighbouring cathedral in an earth-shattering explosion of gunpowder just the previous year, the town’s thick star-shaped walls and its strong French garrison still presented a formidable obstacle. Any British force laying siege to Ciudad Rodrigo would have to use thousands of men to guard against the threat of Almeida’s garrison sallying out to raid the supply roads and Ducos reckoned that Wellington would never abide that menace in his army’s rear. ‘Wellington’s first priority will be to capture Almeida,’ Ducos said, ‘and Marshal Masséna will do his best to relieve the fortress from the British siege. In other words, Brigadier’ – Ducos was speaking more to Loup than to the Doña Juanita – ‘there will be a battle fought close to Almeida. Not much is certain in war, but I think we can be certain of that.’

Loup stared at the map, then nodded agreement. ‘Unless Marshal Masséna withdraws the garrison?’ he said in a tone of contempt suggesting that Masséna, his enemy, was capable of any foolishness.

‘He won’t,’ Ducos said with the certainty of a man who had the power to dictate strategy to marshals of France. ‘And the reason he will not is here,’ Ducos said, and he tapped the map as he spoke. ‘Look,’ he said, and Loup bent obediently over the map. The fortress of Almeida was depicted like a star to imitate its jagged, star-shaped fortifications. Around it were the hatch marks of hills, but behind it, between Almeida and the rest of Portugal, ran a deep river. The Coa. ‘It runs in a gorge, Brigadier,’ Ducos said, ‘and is crossed by a single bridge at Castello Bom.’

‘I know it well.’

‘So if we defeat General Wellington on this side of the river,’ Ducos said, ‘then the fugitives of his army will be forced to retreat across a single bridge scarce three metres wide. That is why we shall leave the garrison in Almeida, because its presence will force Lord Wellington to fight on this bank of the Coa and when he does fight we shall destroy him. And once the British are gone, Brigadier, we shall employ your tactics of horror to end all resistance in Portugal and Spain.’

Loup straightened up. He was impressed by Ducos’s analysis, but also dubious of it. He needed a few seconds to phrase his objection and made the time by lighting a long, dark cigar. He blew smoke out, then decided there was no politic way to voice his doubt, so he just stated it baldly. ‘I’ve not fought the British in battle, Major, but I hear they’re stubborn bastards in defence.’ Loup tapped the map. ‘I know that country well. It’s full of hill ranges and river valleys. Give Wellington a hill and you could die of old age before you could shift the bugger loose. That’s what I hear, anyway.’ Loup finished with a shrug, as if to deprecate his own opinion.

Ducos smiled. ‘Supposing, Brigadier, that Wellington’s army is rotted from the inside?’

Loup considered the question, then nodded. ‘He’ll break,’ he confirmed simply.

‘Good! Because that is precisely why I wanted you to meet the Doña Juanita,’ Ducos said, and the lady smiled at the dragoon. ‘The Doña Juanita will be crossing the lines,’ Ducos continued, ‘and living among our enemies. From time to time, Brigadier, she will come to you for certain supplies that I shall provide. I want you to make the provision of those supplies to Doña Juanita your most important duty.’

‘Supplies?’ Loup asked. ‘You mean guns? Ammunition?’

Doña Juanita answered for Ducos. ‘Nothing, Brigadier, that cannot be carried in the panniers of a packhorse.’

Loup looked at Ducos. ‘You think it’s easy to ride from one army to another? Hell, Ducos, the British have a cavalry screen and there are partisans and our own picquets and God knows how many other British sentries. It isn’t like riding in the Bois de Boulogne.’

Ducos looked unconcerned. ‘The Doña Juanita will make her own arrangements and I have faith in those. What you must do, Brigadier, is acquaint the lady with your lair. She must know where to find you, and how. You can arrange that?’

Loup nodded, then looked at the woman. ‘You can ride with me tomorrow?’

‘All day, Brigadier.’

‘Then we ride tomorrow,’ Loup said, ‘and maybe the next day too?’

‘Maybe, General, maybe,’ the woman answered.

Ducos again interrupted their flirtation. It was late, his supper was waiting and he still had several hours of paperwork to be completed. ‘Your men,’ he said to Loup, ‘are now the army’s picquet line. So I want you to be alert for the arrival of a new unit in the British army.’

Loup, suspecting he was being taught how to suck eggs, frowned. ‘We’re always alert to such things, Major. We’re soldiers, remember?’

‘Especially alert, Brigadier.’ Ducos was unruffled by Loup’s scorn. ‘A Spanish unit, the Real Compañía Irlandesa, is expected to join the British soon and I want to know when they arrive and where they are positioned. It is important, Brigadier.’

Loup glanced at Juanita, suspecting that the Real Compañía Irlandesa was somehow connected with her mission, but her face gave nothing away. Never mind, Loup thought, the woman would tell him everything before the next two nights were done. He looked back to Ducos. ‘If a dog farts in the British lines, Major, you’ll know about it.’

‘Good!’ Ducos said, ending the conversation. ‘I won’t keep you, Brigadier. I’m sure you have plans for the evening.’

Loup, thus dismissed, picked up his helmet with its plume of wet grey hair. ‘Doña,’ he said as he reached the staircase door, ‘isn’t that the title of a married woman?’

‘My husband, General, is buried in South America.’ Juanita shrugged. ‘The yellow fever, alas.’

‘And my wife, madame,’ Loup said, ‘is buried in her kitchen in Besançon. Alas.’ He held a hand towards the door, offering to escort her down the winding stairs, but Ducos held the Spanish woman back.

‘You’re ready to go?’ Ducos asked Juanita when Loup was gone out of earshot.

‘So soon?’ Juanita answered.

Ducos shrugged. ‘I suspect the Real Compañía Irlandesa will have reached the British lines by now. Certainly by the month’s end.’

Juanita nodded. ‘I’m ready.’ She paused. ‘And the British, Ducos, will surely suspect the Real Compañía Irlandesa’s motives?’

‘Of course they will. They would be fools not to. And I want them to be suspicious. Our task, madame, is to unsettle our enemy, so let them be wary of the Real Compañía Irlandesa and perhaps they will overlook the real threat?’ Ducos took off his spectacles and polished their lenses on the skirts of his plain jacket. ‘And Lord Kiely? You’re sure of his affections?’

‘He is a drunken fool, Major,’ Juanita answered. ‘He will do whatever I tell him.’

‘Don’t make him jealous,’ Ducos warned.

Juanita smiled. ‘You may lecture me on many things, Ducos, but when it comes to men and their moods, believe me, I know all there is to know. Do not worry about my Lord Kiely. He will be kept very sweet and very obedient. Is that all?’

Ducos looped his spectacles back into place. ‘That is all. May I wish you a good night’s rest, madame?’

‘I’m sure it will be a splendid night, Ducos.’ The Doña Juanita smiled and walked from the room. Ducos listened as her spurs jangled down the steps, then heard her laugh as she encountered Loup who had been waiting at the foot of the steps. Ducos closed the door on the sound of their laughter and walked slowly back to the window. In the night the rain beat on, but in Ducos’s busy mind there was nothing but the vision of glory. This did not just depend on Juanita and Loup doing their duty, but rather on the clever scheme of a man whom even Ducos acknowledged as his equal, a man whose passion to defeat the British equalled Ducos’s passion to see France triumphant, and a man who was already behind the British lines where he would sow the mischief that would first rot the British army, then lead it into a trap beside a narrow ravine. Ducos’s thin body seemed to quiver as the vision unfolded in his imagination. He saw an insolent British army eroded from within, then trapped and beaten. He saw France triumphant. He saw a river gorge crammed to its rocky brim with bloody carcasses. He saw his Emperor ruling over all Europe and then, who could tell, over the whole known world. Alexander had done it, why not Bonaparte?

And it would begin, with a little cunning from Ducos and his most secret agent, on the banks of the Coa near the fortress of Almeida.

‘This is a chance, Sharpe, upon my soul it is a chance. A veritable chance. Not many chances come in a man’s life and a man must seize them. My father taught me that. He was a bishop, you see, and a fellow doesn’t rise from being curate to bishop without seizing his chances. You comprehend me?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Colonel Claud Runciman’s massive buttocks were well set on the inn bench while before him, on a plain wooden table, were the remnants of a huge meal. There were chicken bones, the straggling stalks of a bunch of grapes, orange peel, rabbit vertebrae, a piece of unidentifiable gristle and a collapsed wineskin. The copious food had forced Colonel Runciman to unbutton his coat, waistcoat and shirt in order to loosen the strings of his corset and the subsequent distending of his belly had stretched a watch chain hung thick with seals tight across a strip of pale, drum-taut flesh. The Colonel belched prodigiously. ‘There’s a hunchbacked girl somewhere about who serves the food, Sharpe,’ Runciman said. ‘If you see the lass, tell her I’ll take some pie. With some cheese, perhaps. But not if it’s goat’s cheese. Can’t abide goat’s cheese; it gives me spleen, d’you see?’ Runciman’s red coat had the yellow facings and silver lace of the 37th, a good line regiment from Hampshire that had not seen the Colonel’s ample shadow in many a year. Recently Runciman had been the Wagon Master General in charge of the drivers and teams of the Royal Wagon Train and their auxiliary Portuguese muleteers, but now he had been appointed liaison officer to the Real Compañía Irlandesa.

‘It’s an honour, of course,’ he told Sharpe, ‘but neither unexpected nor undeserved. I told Wellington when he made me Wagon Master General that I’d do the job as a favour to him, but that I expected a reward for it. A fellow doesn’t want to spend his life thumping sense into thick-witted wagon drivers, good God, no. There’s the hunchback, Sharpe! There she is! Stop her, Sharpe, there’s a kind fellow! Tell her I want pie and a proper cheese!’

The pie and cheese were arranged and another wine-skin was fetched, along with a bowl of cherries, to satisfy the last possible vestiges of Runciman’s appetite. A group of cavalry officers sitting at a table on the far side of the yard were making wagers on how much food Runciman could consume, but Runciman was oblivious of their mockery. ‘It’s a chance,’ he said again when he was well tucked into his pie. ‘I can’t tell what’s in it for you, of course, because a chap like you probably doesn’t expect too much out of life anyway, but I reckon I’ve got a chance at a Golden Fleece.’ He peered up at Sharpe. ‘You do know what real means, don’t you?’

‘Royal, sir.’

‘So you’re not completely uneducated then, eh? Royal indeed, Sharpe. The royal guard! These Irish fellows are royal! Not a pack of common carriers and mule-drivers. They’ve got royal connections, Sharpe, and that means royal rewards! I’ve half an idea that the Spanish court might even give a pension with the Order of the Golden Fleece. The thing comes with a nice star and a golden collar, but a pension would be very acceptable. A reward for a job well done, don’t you see? And that’s just from the Spanish! The good Lord alone knows what London might cough up. A knighthood? The Prince Regent will want to know we’ve done a good job, Sharpe, he’ll take an interest, don’t you see? He’ll be expecting us to treat these fellows proper, as befits a royal guard. Order of the Bath at the very least, I should think. Maybe even a viscountcy? And why not? There’s only one problem.’ Colonel Runciman belched again, then raised a buttock for a few seconds. ‘My God, but that’s better,’ he said. ‘Let the effusions out, that’s what my doctor says. There’s no future in keeping noxious effusions in the body, he tells me, in case the body rots from within. Now, Sharpe, the fly in our unguent is the fact these royal guards are all Irish. Have you ever commanded the Irish?’

‘A few, sir.’

‘Well, I’ve commanded dozens of the rogues. Ever since they amalgamated the Train with the Irish Corps of Wagoners, and there ain’t much about the Irish that I don’t know. Ever served in Ireland, Sharpe?’

‘No, sir.’

‘I was there once. Garrison duty at Dublin Castle. Six months of misery, Sharpe, without a single properly cooked meal. God knows, Sharpe, I strive to be a good Christian and to love my fellow man, but the Irish do sometimes make it difficult. Not that some of them ain’t the nicest fellows you could ever meet, but they can be obtuse! Dear me, Sharpe, I sometimes wondered if they were gulling me. Pretending not to understand the simplest orders. Do you find that? And there’s something else, Sharpe. We’ll have to be politic, you and I. The Irish’ – and here Runciman leaned awkwardly forward as though confiding something important to Sharpe – ‘are very largely Romish, Sharpe. Papists! We shall have to watch our theological discourse if we’re not to unsettle their tempers! You and I might know that the Pope is the reincarnation of the Scarlet Whore of Babylon, but it won’t help our cause if we say it out loud. Know what I mean?’

‘You mean there’ll be no Golden Fleece, sir?’

‘Good fellow, knew you’d comprehend. Exactly. We have to be diplomatic, Sharpe. We have to be understanding. We have to treat these fellows as if they were Englishmen.’ Runciman thought about that statement, then frowned. ‘Or almost English, anyway. You came up from the ranks, ain’t that right? So these things might not be obvious to you, but if you just remember to keep silent about the Pope you can’t go far wrong. And tell your chaps the same,’ he added hastily.

‘A fair number of my fellows are Catholics themselves, sir,’ Sharpe said. ‘And Irish.’

‘They would be, they would be. A third of this army is Irish! If there was ever a mutiny, Sharpe …’ Colonel Runciman shuddered at the prospect of the papist redcoats running wild. ‘Well, it doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?’ he went on. ‘So ignore their infamous heresies, Sharpe, just ignore them. Ignorance is the only possible cause for papism, my dear father always said, and a burning at the stake the only known cure. He was a bishop, so he understood these matters. Oh, and one other thing, Sharpe, I’d be obliged if you didn’t call me Colonel Runciman. They haven’t replaced me yet, so I’m still the Wagon Master General, so it ought to be General Runciman.’

‘Of course, General,’ Sharpe said, hiding a smile. After nineteen years in the army he knew Colonel Runciman’s type. The man had purchased his promotions all the way to lieutenant colonel and there got stuck because promotion above that rank depended entirely on seniority and merit, but if Runciman wanted to be called General then Sharpe would play along for a while. He also sensed that Runciman was hardly likely to prove a difficult man so there was small point in antagonizing him.

‘Good fellow! Ah! You see that scrawny chap who’s just going?’ Runciman pointed to a man leaving the inn through its arched entrance. ‘I swear he’s left half a skin of wine on his table. See it? Go and snaffle it, Sharpe, there’s a stout fellow, before that hunchbacked girl gets her paws on it. I’d go myself, but the damn gout is pinching me something hard today. Off you go, man, I’m thirsty!’

Sharpe was saved the indignity of scavenging the tables like a beggar by the arrival of Major Michael Hogan who waved Sharpe back towards the wreckage of Runciman’s luncheon. ‘Good afternoon to you, Colonel,’ Hogan said, ‘and it’s a grand day too, is it not?’ Hogan, Sharpe noticed, was deliberately exaggerating his Irish accent.

‘Hot,’ Runciman said, dabbing with his napkin at the perspiration that dripped down his plump cheeks and then, suddenly conscious of his naked belly, he vainly tried to tug the edges of his corset together. ‘Damnably hot,’ he said.

‘It’s the sun, Colonel,’ Hogan said very earnestly. ‘I’ve noticed that the sun seems to heat up the day. Have you noticed that?’

‘Well, of course it’s the sun!’ Runciman said, confused.

‘So I’m right! Isn’t that amazing? But what about winter, Colonel?’

Runciman threw an anguished glance towards the abandoned wineskin. He was about to order Sharpe to fetch it when the serving girl whisked it away. ‘Damn,’ Runciman said sadly.

‘You spoke, Colonel?’ Hogan asked, helping himself to a handful of Runciman’s cherries.

‘Nothing, Hogan, nothing but a twinge of gout. I need some more Husson’s Water, but the stuff is damned hard to find. Maybe you could put a request to the Horse Guards in London? They must realize we need medication here? And one other thing, Hogan?’

‘Speak, Colonel. I am ever yours to command.’

Runciman coloured. He knew he was being mocked but, though he outranked the Irishman, he was nervous of Hogan’s intimacy with Wellington. ‘I am still, as you know, Wagon Master General,’ Runciman said heavily.

‘So you are, Colonel, so you are. And a damned fine one too, I might say. The Peer was only saying to me the other day. Hogan, says he, have you ever seen wagons so finely mastered in all your born days?’

‘Wellington said that?’ Runciman asked in astonishment.

‘He did, Colonel, he did.’

‘Well, I’m not really surprised,’ Runciman said. ‘My dear mother always said I had a talent for organization, Hogan. But the thing is, Major,’ Runciman went on, ‘that until a replacement is found then I am still the Wagon Master General’ – he stressed the word ‘General’ – ‘and I would be vastly obliged if you addressed me as –’

‘My dear Wagon Master,’ Hogan interrupted Runciman’s laborious request, ‘why didn’t you say so earlier? Of course I shall address you as Wagon Master, and I apologize for not thinking of that simple courtesy myself. But now, Wagon Master, if you’ll excuse me, the Real Compañía Irlandesa have reached the edge of town and we need to review them. If you’re ready?’ Hogan gestured to the inn’s gateway.

Runciman quailed at the prospect of exerting himself. ‘Right now, Hogan? This minute? But I can’t. Doctor’s orders. A man of my constitution needs to take a rest after …’ He paused, seeking the right word. ‘After …’ he went on and failed again.

‘Rest after labour?’ Hogan suggested sweetly. ‘Very well, Wagon Master, I’ll tell Lord Kiely you’ll meet him and his officers at General Valverde’s reception this evening while Sharpe takes the men up to San Isidro.’

‘This evening at Valverde’s, Hogan,’ Runciman agreed. ‘Very good. And Hogan. About my being Wagon Master General –’

‘No need to thank me, Wagon Master. You’d just embarrass me with gratitude, so not another word! I shall respect your wishes and tell everyone else to do the same. Now come, Richard! Where are your green fellows?’

‘In a taproom at the front of the inn, sir,’ Sharpe said. His riflemen were to join Sharpe in the San Isidro Fort, an abandoned stronghold on the Portuguese border, where they would help train the Real Compañía Irlandesa in musketry and skirmishing.

‘My God, Richard, but Runciman’s a fool!’ Hogan said happily as the two men walked through the inn’s gateway. ‘He’s a genial fool, but he must have been the worst Wagon Master General in history. McGilligan’s dog would have done a better job, and McGilligan’s dog was famously blind, epileptic and frequently drunk. You never knew McGilligan, did you? A good engineer, but he fell off the Old Mole at Gibraltar and drowned himself after drinking two quarts of sherry, God rest his soul. The poor dog was inconsolable and had to be shot. The 73rd Highlanders did the deed with a full firing party and military honours to follow. But Runciman’s just the fellow to flatter the Irish and make them think we’re taking them seriously, but that’s not your job. You understand me?’

‘No, sir,’ Sharpe said, ‘don’t understand you in the least, sir.’

‘You’re being awkward, Richard,’ Hogan said, then stopped and took hold of one of Sharpe’s silver coat buttons to emphasize his next words. ‘The object of all we now do is to upset Lord Kiely. Your job is to insert yourself into Lord Kiely’s fundament and be an irritant. We don’t want him here and we don’t want his bloody Royal Company here, but we can’t tell them to bugger off because it wouldn’t be diplomatic, so your job is to make them go away voluntarily. Oh! Sorry now,’ he apologized because the button had come away in his fingers. ‘The buggers are up to no good, Richard, and we have to find a diplomatic way of getting rid of them, so whatever you can do to upset them, do it, and rely on Runciman the Rotund to smooth things over so they don’t think we’re being deliberately rude.’ Hogan smiled. ‘They’ll just blame you for not being a gentleman.’

‘But I’m not, am I?’

‘As it happens, you are, it’s one of your faults, but let’s not worry about that now. Just get rid of Kiely for me, Richard, with all his merry men. Make them cringe! Make them suffer! But above all, Richard, please, please make the bastards go away.’

The Real Compañía Irlandesa might be called a company, but in fact it was a small battalion, one of the five that made up the household guard of Spain’s royalty. Three hundred and four guardsmen had been on the company’s books when it had last served in the Escorial Palace outside Madrid, but the imprisonment of Spain’s king and benign neglect by the occupying French had reduced its ranks, and the journey by sea around Spain to join the British army had thinned the files even more, so that by the time the Real Compañía Irlandesa paraded on the outskirts of Vilar Formoso there were a mere one hundred and sixty-three men left. The one hundred and sixty-three men were accompanied by thirteen officers, a chaplain, eighty-nine wives, seventy-four children, sixteen servants, twenty-two horses, a dozen mules, ‘and one mistress,’ Hogan told Sharpe.

‘One mistress?’ Sharpe asked in disbelief.

‘There’s probably a score of mistresses,’ Hogan said, ‘two score! A walking brothel, in all likelihood, but his Lordship tells me we have to arrange accommodation suitable for himself and a lady friend. Not that she’s here yet, you understand, but his Lordship tells me she’s coming. The Doña Juanita de Elia is supposed to charm her way across the enemy lines in order to warm his Lordship’s bed and if she’s the same Juanita de Elia that I’ve heard about then she’s well practised in bed warming. You know what they say of her? That she collects a uniform from the regiment of every man she sleeps with!’ Hogan chuckled.

‘If she crosses the lines here,’ Sharpe said, ‘she’ll be damned lucky to escape the Loup Brigade.’

‘How the hell do you know about Loup?’ Hogan asked instantly. For most of the time the Irishman was a genial and witty soul, but Sharpe knew the bonhomie disguised a very keen mind and the tone of the question was a sudden baring of that steel.

Yet Hogan was also a friend and for a split second Sharpe was tempted to confess how he had met the Brigadier and illegally executed two of his grey-uniformed soldiers, but then decided that was a deed best forgotten. ‘Everyone knows about Loup here,’ he answered instead. ‘You can’t spend a day on this frontier without hearing about Loup.’

‘That’s true enough,’ Hogan admitted, his suspicions allayed. ‘But don’t be tempted to inquire further, Richard. He’s a bad boy. Let me worry about Loup while you worry about that shambles.’ Hogan and Sharpe, followed by the riflemen, had turned a corner to see the Real Compañía Irlandesa slouching in parade order on a patch of waste land opposite a half-finished church. ‘Our new allies,’ Hogan said sourly, ‘believe it or not, in fatigue dress.’

Fatigue dress was meant to be a soldier’s duty uniform for everyday wear, but the fatigue uniform of the Real Compañía Irlandesa was much gaudier and smarter than the full dress finery of most British line battalions. The guardsmen wore short red jackets with black-edged, gilt-fringed swallowtails behind. The same gold-trimmed black cord edged their buttonholes and collars, while the facings, cuffs and turnbacks of their coats were of emerald green. Their breeches and waistcoats had once been white, their calf-length boots, belts and crossbelts were of black leather, while their sashes were green, the same green as the high plume that each man wore on the side of his black bicorne hat. The gilded hat badges showed a tower and a rearing lion, the same symbols that were displayed on the gorgeous green and gold shoulder sashes worn by the sergeants and drummer boys. As Sharpe walked closer he saw that the splendid uniforms were frayed, patched and discoloured, yet they still made a brave display in the bright spring sunshine. The men themselves looked anything but brave, instead appearing dispirited, weary and aggravated.

‘Where are their officers?’ Sharpe asked Hogan.

‘Gone to a tavern for luncheon.’

‘They don’t eat with their men?’

‘Evidently not.’ Hogan’s disapproval was acid, but not as bitter as Sharpe’s. ‘Now don’t be getting sympathetic, Richard,’ Hogan warned. ‘You’re not supposed to like these boys, remember?’

‘Do they speak English?’ Sharpe asked.

‘As well as you or I. About half of them are Irish born, the other half are descended from Irish emigrants, and a good few, I have to say, once wore red coats,’ Hogan said, meaning that they were deserters from the British army.

Sharpe turned and beckoned Harper towards him. ‘Let’s have a look at this palace guard, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘Put ’em in open order.’

‘What do I call them?’ Harper asked.

‘Battalion?’ Sharpe guessed.

Harper took a deep breath. ‘’Talion! ’Shun!’ His voice was loud enough to make the closest men wince and the further ones jump in surprise, but only a few men snapped to attention. ‘For inspection! Open order march!’ Harper bellowed, and again very few guardsmen moved. Some just gaped at Harper while the majority looked towards their own sergeants for guidance. One of those gorgeously sashed sergeants came towards Sharpe, evidently to inquire what authority the riflemen possessed, but Harper did not wait for explanations. ‘Move, you bastards!’ he bellowed in his Donegal accent. ‘You’re in a war now, not guarding the royal pisspot. Behave like the good whores we all are and open up, now!’

‘And I can remember when you didn’t want to be a sergeant,’ Sharpe said to Harper under his breath as the startled guards at last obeyed the greenjacket Sergeant’s command. ‘Are you coming, Major?’ Sharpe asked Hogan.

‘I’ll wait here, Richard.’

‘Come on then, Pat,’ Sharpe said, and the two men began inspecting the company’s front rank. An inevitable band of small mocking boys from the town fell into step behind the two greenjackets and pretended to be officers, but a thump on the ear from the Irishman’s fist sent the boldest boy snivelling away and the others dispersed rather than face more punishment.

Sharpe inspected the muskets rather than the men, though he made sure that he looked into each soldier’s eyes in an attempt to gauge what kind of confidence and willingness these men had. The soldiers returned his inspection resentfully, and no wonder, Sharpe thought, for many of these guards were Irishmen who must have been feeling all kinds of confusion at being attached to the British army. They had volunteered for the Real Compañía Irlandesa to protect a Most Catholic King, yet here they were being harried by the army of a Protestant monarch. Worse still, many of them would be avid Irish patriots, fierce for their country as only exiles can be, yet now they were being asked to fight alongside the ranks of that country’s foreign oppressors. Yet, as Sharpe walked down the rank, he sensed more nervousness than anger and he wondered if these men were simply fearful of being asked to become proper soldiers for, if their muskets were any indication, the Real Compañía Irlandesa had long abandoned any pretensions to soldiering. Their muskets were a disgrace. The men carried the serviceable and sturdy Spanish-issue musket with its straight-backed hammer; however these guns were anything but serviceable, for there was rust on the locks and fouling caked inside the barrels. Some of them had no flints, others had no leather flint-seatings, while one gun did not even have the doghead screw to hold the flint in place. ‘Did you ever fire this musket, son?’ Sharpe asked the soldier.

‘No, sir.’

‘Have you ever fired a musket, son?’

The boy looked nervously towards his own sergeant. ‘Answer the officer, lad!’ Harper growled.

‘Once, sir. One day,’ the soldier said. ‘Just the once.’

‘If you wanted to kill someone with this gun, son, you’d have to beat them over the head with it. Mind you’ – Sharpe pushed the musket back into the soldier’s hands – ‘you look big enough for that.’

‘What’s your name, soldier?’ Harper asked him.

‘Rourke, sir.’

‘Don’t call me “sir”. I’m a sergeant. Where are you from?’

‘My da’s from Galway, Sergeant.’

‘And I’m from Tangaveane in County Donegal and I’m ashamed, boy, ashamed, that a fellow Irishman can’t keep a gun in half decent order. Jesus, boy, you couldn’t shoot a Frenchman with that thing, let alone an Englishman.’ Harper unslung his own rifle and held it under Rourke’s nose. ‘Look at that, boy! Clean enough to pick the dirt out of King George’s nose. That’s how a gun should look! ’Ware right, sir.’ Harper added the last three words under his breath.

Sharpe turned to see two horsemen galloping across the waste ground towards him. The horses’ hooves spurted dust. The leading horse was a fine black stallion being ridden by an officer who was wearing the gorgeous uniform of the Real Compañía Irlandesa and whose coat, saddlecloth, hat and trappings fairly dripped with gold tassels, fringes and loops. The second horseman was equally splendidly uniformed and mounted, while behind them a small group of other riders curbed their horses when Hogan intercepted them. The Irish Major, still on foot, hurried after the two leading horsemen, but was too late to stop them from reaching Sharpe. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ the first man asked as he reined in above Sharpe. He had a thin, tanned face with a moustache trained and greased into fine points. Sharpe guessed the man was still in his twenties, but despite his youth he possessed a sour and ravaged face that had all the effortless superiority of a creature born to high office.

‘I’m making an inspection,’ Sharpe answered coldly.

The second man reined in on Sharpe’s other side. He was older than his companion and was wearing the bright-yellow coat and breeches of a Spanish dragoon, though the uniform was so crusted with looped chains and gold frogging that Sharpe assumed the man had to be at least a general. His thin, moustached face had the same imperious air as his companion’s. ‘Haven’t you learned to ask a commanding officer’s permission before inspecting his men?’ he asked with a distinct Spanish accent, then snapped an order in Spanish to his younger companion.

‘Sergeant Major Noonan,’ the younger man shouted, evidently relaying the older man’s command, ‘close order, now!’

The Real Compañía Irlandesa’s Sergeant Major obediently marched the men back into close order just as Hogan reached Sharpe’s side. ‘There you are, my Lords’ – Hogan was addressing both horsemen – ‘and how was your Lordships’ luncheon?’

‘It was shit, Hogan. I wouldn’t feed it to a hound,’ the younger man, whom Sharpe assumed was Lord Kiely, said in a brittle voice that dripped with aloofness but was also touched by the faint slur of alcohol. His Lordship, Sharpe decided, had drunk well at lunch, well enough to loosen whatever inhibitions he might have possessed. ‘You know this creature, Hogan?’ His Lordship now waved towards Sharpe.

‘Indeed I do, my Lord. Allow me to name Captain Richard Sharpe of the South Essex, the man Wellington himself chose to be your tactical adviser. And Richard? I have the honour to present the Earl of Kiely, Colonel of the Real Compañía Irlandesa.’

Kiely looked grimly at the tattered rifleman. ‘So you’re supposed to be our drillmaster?’ He sounded dubious.

‘I give lessons in killing too, my Lord,’ Sharpe said.

The older Spaniard in the yellow uniform scoffed at Sharpe’s claim. ‘These men don’t need lessons in killing,’ he said in his accented English. ‘They’re soldiers of Spain and they know how to kill. They need lessons in dying.’

Hogan interrupted. ‘Allow me to name His Excellency Don Luis Valverde,’ he said to Sharpe. ‘The General is Spain’s most valued representative to our army.’ Hogan gave Sharpe a wink that neither horseman could see.

‘Lessons in dying, my Lord?’ Sharpe asked the General, puzzled by the man’s statement and wondering whether it sprang from an incomplete mastery of English.

For answer the yellow-uniformed General touched his horse’s flanks with the tips of his spurs to make the animal walk obediently along the line of the Real Compañía Irlandesa’s front rank and, superbly oblivious of whether Sharpe was following him or not, lectured the rifleman from his saddle. ‘These men are going to war, Captain Sharpe,’ General Valverde said in a voice loud enough for a good portion of the guard to hear him. ‘They are going to fight for Spain, for King Ferdinand and Saint James, and fighting means standing tall and straight in front of your enemy. Fighting means staring your enemy in the eye while he shoots at you, and the side that wins, Captain Sharpe, is the side that stands tallest, straightest and longest. So you don’t teach men how to kill or how to fight, but rather how to stand still while all hell comes at them. That’s what you teach them, Captain Sharpe. Teach them drill. Teach them obedience. Teach them to stand longer than the French. Teach them’ – the General at last twisted in his saddle to look down on the rifleman – ‘to die.’

‘I’d rather teach them to shoot,’ Sharpe said.

The General scoffed at the remark. ‘Of course they can shoot,’ he said. ‘They’re soldiers!’

‘They can shoot with those muskets?’ Sharpe asked derisively.

Valverde stared down at Sharpe with a look of pity on his face. ‘For the last two years, Captain Sharpe, these men have stayed at their post of duty on the sufferance of the French.’ Valverde spoke in the tone he might have used to a small and unintelligent child. ‘Do you really think they would have been allowed to stay there if they had posed a threat to Bonaparte? The more their weapons decayed, the more the French trusted them, but now they are here and you can provide them with new weapons.’

‘To do what with?’ Sharpe asked. ‘To stand and die like bullocks?’

‘So how would you like them to fight?’ Lord Kiely had followed the two men and asked the question from behind Sharpe.

‘Like my men, my Lord,’ Sharpe said, ‘smartly. And you begin fighting smartly by killing the enemy officers.’ Sharpe raised his voice so that the whole of the Real Compañía Irlandesa could hear him. ‘You don’t go into battle to stand and die like bullocks in a slaughteryard, you go to win, and you begin to win when you drop the enemy officers dead.’ Sharpe had walked away from Kiely and Valverde now and was using the voice he had developed as a sergeant, a voice pitched to cut across windy parade grounds and through the deadly clamour of battlefields. ‘You start by looking for the enemy officers. They’re easy to recognize because they’re the overpaid, overdressed bastards with swords and you aim for them first. Kill them any way you can. Shoot them, club them, bayonet them, strangle them if you must, but kill the bastards and after that you kill the sergeants and then you can begin murdering the rest of the poor leaderless bastards. Isn’t that right, Sergeant Harper?’

‘That’s the way of it, sure enough,’ Harper called back.

‘And how many officers have you killed in battle, Sergeant?’ Sharpe asked, without looking at the rifle Sergeant.

‘More than I can number, sir.’

‘And were they all Frog officers, Sergeant Harper?’ Sharpe asked, and Harper, surprised by the question, did not answer, so Sharpe provided the answer himself. ‘Of course they were not. We’ve killed officers in blue coats, officers in white coats and even officers in red coats, because I don’t care what army an officer fights for, or what colour coat he wears or what king he serves, a bad officer is better off dead and a good soldier had better learn how to kill him. Ain’t that right, Sergeant Harper?’

‘Right as rain, sir.’

‘My name is Captain Sharpe.’ Sharpe stood in the centre front of the Real Compañía Irlandesa. The faces watching him showed a mixture of astonishment and surprise, but he had their attention now and neither Kiely nor Valverde had dared to interfere. ‘My name is Captain Sharpe,’ he said again, ‘and I began where you are. In the ranks, and I’m going to end up where he is, in the saddle.’ He pointed at Lord Kiely. ‘But in the meantime my job is to teach you to be soldiers. I dare say there are some good killers among you and some fine fighters too, but soon you’re going to be good soldiers as well. But for tonight we’ve all got a fair step to go before dark and once we’re there you’ll get food, shelter and we’ll find out when you were last paid. Sergeant Harper! We’ll finish the inspection later. Get them moving!’

‘Sir!’ Harper shouted. ‘’Talion will turn to the right. Right turn! By the left! March!’

Sharpe did not even look at Lord Kiely, let alone seek his Lordship’s permission to march the Real Compañía Irlandesa away. Instead he just watched as Harper led the guard off the waste ground towards the main road. He heard footsteps behind, but still he did not turn. ‘By God, Sharpe, but you push your luck.’ It was Major Hogan who spoke.

‘It’s all I’ve got to push, sir,’ Sharpe said bitterly. ‘I wasn’t born to rank, sir, I don’t have a purse to buy it and I don’t have the privileges to attract it, so I need to push what bit of luck I’ve got.’

‘By giving lectures on assassinating officers?’ Hogan’s voice was frigid with disapproval. ‘The Peer won’t like that, Richard. It smacks of republicanism.’

‘Bugger republicanism,’ Sharpe said savagely. ‘But you were the one who told me the Real Compañía Irlandesa can’t be trusted. But I tell you, sir, that if there’s any mischief there, it isn’t coming from the ranks. Those soldiers weren’t trusted with French mischief. They don’t have enough power. Those men are what soldiers always are: victims of their officers, and if you want to find where the French have sown their mischief, sir, then you look among those damned, overpaid, overdressed, overfed bloody officers,’ and Sharpe threw a scornful glance towards the Real Compañía Irlandesa’s officers who seemed unsure whether or not they were supposed to follow their men northwards. ‘That’s where your rotten apples are, sir,’ Sharpe went on, ‘not in the ranks. I’d as happily fight alongside those guardsmen as alongside any other soldier in the world, but I wouldn’t trust my life to that rabble of perfumed fools.’

Hogan made a calming gesture with his hand, as if he feared Sharpe’s voice might reach the worried officers. ‘You make your point, Richard.’

‘My point, sir, is that you told me to make them miserable. So that’s what I’m doing.’

‘I just wasn’t sure I wanted you to start a revolution in the process, Richard,’ Hogan said, ‘and certainly not in front of Valverde. You have to be nice to Valverde. One day, with any luck, you can kill him for me, but until that happy day arrives you have to butter the bastard up. If we’re ever going to get proper command of the Spanish armies, Richard, then bastards like Don Luis Valverde have to be well buttered, so please don’t preach revolution in front of him. He’s just a simple-minded aristocrat who isn’t capable of thinking much beyond his next meal or his last mistress, but if we’re going to beat the French we need his support. And he expects us to treat the Real Compañía Irlandesa well, so when he’s nearby, Richard, be diplomatic, will you?’ Hogan turned as the group of Real Compañía Irlandesa’s officers led by Lord Kiely and General Valverde came close. Riding between the two aristocrats was a tall, plump, white-haired priest mounted on a bony roan mare.

‘This is Father Sarsfield’ – Kiely introduced the priest to Hogan, conspicuously ignoring Sharpe – ‘who is our chaplain. Father Sarsfield and Captain Donaju will travel with the company tonight, the rest of the company’s officers will attend General Valverde’s reception.’

‘Where you’ll meet Colonel Runciman,’ Hogan promised. ‘I think you’ll find him much to your Lordship’s taste.’

‘You mean he knows how to treat royal troops?’ General Valverde asked, looking pointedly at Sharpe as he spoke.

‘I know how to treat royal guards, sir,’ Sharpe intervened. ‘This isn’t the first royal bodyguard I’ve met.’

Kiely and Valverde both stared down at Sharpe with looks little short of loathing, but Kiely could not resist the bait of Sharpe’s comment. ‘You refer, I suppose, to the Hanoverian’s lackeys?’ he said in his half-drunken voice.

‘No, my Lord,’ Sharpe said. ‘This was in India. They were royal guards protecting a fat little royal bugger called the Sultan Tippoo.’

‘And you trained them too, no doubt?’ Valverde inquired.

‘I killed them,’ Sharpe said, ‘and the fat little bugger too.’ His words wiped the supercilious look off both men’s thin faces, while Sharpe himself was suddenly overwhelmed with a memory of the Tippoo’s water-tunnel filled with the shouting bodyguard armed with jewelled muskets and broad-bladed sabres. Sharpe had been thigh-deep in scummy water, fighting in the shadows, digging out the bodyguard one by one to reach that fat, glittering-eyed, buttery-skinned bastard who had tortured some of Sharpe’s companions to death. He remembered the echoing shouts, the musket flashes reflecting from the broken water and the glint of the gems draped over the Tippoo’s silk clothes. He remembered the Tippoo’s death too, one of the few killings that had ever lodged in Sharpe’s memory as a thing of comfort. ‘He was a right royal bastard,’ Sharpe said feelingly, ‘but he died like a man.’

‘Captain Sharpe,’ Hogan put in hastily, ‘has something of a reputation in our army. Indeed, you may have heard of him yourself, my Lord? It was Captain Sharpe who took the Talavera eagle.’

‘With Sergeant Harper,’ Sharpe put in, and Kiely’s officers stared at Sharpe with a new curiosity. Any soldier who had taken an enemy standard was a man of renown and the faces of most of the guards’ officers showed that respect, but it was the chaplain, Father Sarsfield, who reacted most fulsomely.

‘My God and don’t I remember it!’ he said enthusiastically. ‘And didn’t it just excite all the Spanish patriots in Madrid?’ He climbed clumsily down from his horse and held a plump hand out to Sharpe. ‘It’s an honour, Captain, an honour! Even though you are a heathen Protestant!’ This last was said with a broad and friendly grin. ‘Are you a heathen, Sharpe?’ the priest asked more earnestly.

‘I’m nothing, Father.’

‘We’re all something in God’s eyes, my son, and loved for it. You and I shall talk, Sharpe. I shall tell you of God and you shall tell me how to strip the damned French of their eagles.’ The chaplain turned a smiling face on Hogan. ‘By God, Major, but you do us proud by giving us a man like Sharpe!’ The priest’s approval of the rifleman had made the other officers of the Real Compañía Irlandesa relax, though Kiely’s face was still dark with distaste.

‘Have you finished, Father?’ Kiely asked sarcastically.

‘I shall be on my way with Captain Sharpe, my Lord, and we shall see you in the morning?’

Kiely nodded, then turned his horse away. His other officers followed, leaving Sharpe, the priest and Captain Donaju to follow the straggling column formed by the Real Compañía Irlandesa’s baggage, wives and servants.

By nightfall the Real Compañía Irlandesa was safe inside the remote San Isidro Fort that Wellington had chosen to be their new barracks. The fort was old, outdated and had long been abandoned by the Portuguese so that the tired, newly arrived men first had to clean out the filthy stone barracks rooms that were to be their new home. The fort’s towering gatehouse was reserved for the officers, and Father Sarsfield and Donaju made themselves comfortable there while Sharpe and his riflemen took possession of one of the magazines for their own lodgings. Sarsfield had brought a royal banner of Spain in his baggage that was proudly hoisted on the old fort’s ramparts next to the union flag of Britain. ‘I’m sixty years old,’ the chaplain told Sharpe as he stood beneath Britain’s flag, ‘and I never thought the day would come when I’d serve under that banner.’

Sharpe looked up at the British flag. ‘Does it worry you, Father?’

‘Napoleon worries me more, my son. Defeat Napoleon, then we can start on the lesser enemies like yourself!’ The comment was made in a friendly tone. ‘What also worries me, my son,’ Father Sarsfield went on, ‘is that I’ve eight bottles of decent red wine and a handful of good cigars and only Captain Donaju to share them with. Will you do me the honour of joining us for supper now? And tell me, do you play an instrument, perhaps? No? Sad. I used to have a violin, but it was lost somewhere, but Sergeant Connors is a rare man on the flute and the men in his section sing most beautifully. They sing of home, Captain.’

‘Of Madrid?’ Sharpe asked mischievously.

Sarsfield smiled. ‘Of Ireland, Captain, of our home across the water where few of us have ever set foot and most of us never shall. Come, let’s have supper.’ Father Sarsfield put a companionable arm across Sharpe’s shoulder and steered him towards the gatehouse. A cold wind blew over the bare mountains as night fell and the first cooking fires curled their blue smoke into the sky. Wolves howled in the hills. There were wolves throughout Spain and Portugal and in winter they would sometimes come right up to the picquet line in the hope of snatching a meal from an unwary soldier, but this night the wolves reminded Sharpe of the grey-uniformed Frenchmen in Loup’s brigade. Sharpe supped with the chaplain and afterwards, under a star-shining sky, he toured the ramparts with Harper. Beneath them the Real Compañía Irlandesa grumbled about their accommodations and about the fate that had stranded them on this inhospitable border between Spain and Portugal, but Sharpe, who had orders to make them miserable, wondered if instead he could make them into real soldiers who would follow him over the hills and far into Spain to where a wolf needed to be hunted, trapped and slaughtered.

Pierre Ducos waited nervously for news of the Real Compañía Irlandesa’s arrival in Wellington’s army. The Frenchman’s greatest fear was that the unit would be positioned so far behind the fighting front that it would be useless for his purposes, but that was a risk Ducos was forced to run. Ever since French intelligence had intercepted Lord Kiely’s letter requesting King Ferdinand’s permission to take the Real Compañía Irlandesa to war on the allied side, Ducos had known that the success of his scheme depended as much on the allies’ unwitting cooperation as on his own cleverness. Yet Ducos’s cleverness would achieve nothing if the Irishmen failed to arrive, and so he waited with mounting impatience.

Little news came from behind the British lines. There had been a time when Loup’s men could ride with impunity on either side of the frontier, but now the British and Portuguese armies were firmly clamped along the border and Loup had to depend for his intelligence on the unreliable and minuscule handful of civilians willing to sell information to the hated French, on interrogations of deserters and on educated guesses formed from the observations of his own men as they peered through spyglasses across the mountainous border.

And it was one of those scouts who first brought Loup news of the Real Compañía Irlandesa. A troop of grey dragoons had gone to one of the lonely hill tops which offered a long view into Portugal, and from where, with luck, a patrol might see some evidence of a British concentration of forces that could signal a new advance. The lookout post dominated a wide, barren valley where a stream glittered before the land rose to the rocky ridge on which the long-abandoned fort of San Isidro stood. The fort was of little military value for the road it guarded had long fallen into disuse and a century of neglect had eroded its ramparts and ditches into mockeries of their former strength so that now the San Isidro was home to ravens, foxes, bats, wandering shepherds, lawless men, and the occasional patrol of Loup’s grey dragoons who might spend a night in one of the cavernous barracks rooms to stay out of the rain.

Yet now there were men in the fort, and the patrol leader brought Loup news of them. The new garrison was not a full battalion, he said, just a couple of hundred men. The fort itself, as Loup well knew, would need at least a thousand men to man its crumbling walls, so a mere two hundred hardly constituted a garrison, yet strangely the newcomers had brought their wives and children with them. The dragoons’ troop leader, a Captain Braudel, thought the men were British. ‘They’re wearing red coats,’ he said, ‘but not the usual stovepipe hats.’ He meant shakoes. ‘They’ve got bicornes.’

‘Infantry, you say?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘No cavalry? Any artillery?’

‘Didn’t see any.’

Loup picked at his teeth with a sliver of wood. ‘So what were they doing?’

‘Doing drill,’ Braudel said. Loup grunted. He was not much interested in a group of strange soldiers taking up residence in San Isidro. The fort did not threaten him and if the newcomers were content to sit tight and make themselves comfortable then Loup would not stir them into wakefulness. Then Captain Braudel stirred Loup himself into wakefulness. ‘But some of them were unblocking a well,’ the Captain said, ‘only they weren’t redcoats. They were wearing green.’

Loup stared at him. ‘Dark green?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Riflemen. Damned riflemen. And Loup remembered the insolent face of the man who had insulted him, the man who had once insulted all France by taking an eagle touched by the Emperor himself. Maybe Sharpe was in the San Isidro Fort? Ducos had denigrated Loup’s thirst for vengeance, calling it unworthy of a great soldier, but Loup believed that a soldier made his reputation by picking his fights and winning them famously. Sharpe had defied Loup, the first man to openly defy him in many a long month, and Sharpe was a champion among France’s enemies, so Loup’s vengeance was not just personal, but would send ripples throughout the armies that waited to fight the battle that would decide whether Britain lunged into Spain or was sent reeling back into Portugal.

So that afternoon Loup himself visited the hill top, taking his finest spyglass which he trained on the old fort with its weed-grown walls and half-filled dry moat. Two flags hung limply in the windless air. One flag was British, but Loup could not tell what the second was. Beyond the flags the red-coated soldiers were doing musket drill, but Loup did not watch them long, instead he inched the telescope southwards until, at last, he saw two men in green coats strolling along the deserted ramparts. He could not see their faces at this distance, but he could tell that one of the men was wearing a long straight sword and Loup knew that British light infantry officers wore curved sabres. ‘Sharpe,’ he said aloud as he collapsed the telescope.

A scuffle behind made him turn round. Four of his wolf-grey men were guarding a pair of prisoners. One captive was in a gaudily trimmed red coat while the other was presumably the man’s wife or lover. ‘Found them hiding in the rocks down there,’ said the Sergeant who was holding one of the soldier’s arms.

‘He says he’s a deserter, sir,’ Captain Braudel added, ‘and that’s his wife.’ Braudel spat a stream of tobacco juice onto a rock.

Loup scrambled down from the ridge. The soldier’s uniform, he now saw, was not British. The waistcoat and sash, the half boots and the plumed bicorne were all too fancy for British taste, indeed they were so fancy that for a second Loup wondered if the captive was an officer, then he realized that Braudel would never have treated a captured officer with such disdain. Braudel clearly liked the woman who now raised shy eyes to stare at Loup. She was dark-haired, attractive and probably, Loup guessed, about fifteen or sixteen. Loup had heard that the Spanish and Portuguese peasants sold such daughters as wives to allied soldiers for a hundred francs apiece, the cost of a good meal in Paris. The French army, on the other hand, just took their girls for nothing. ‘What’s your name?’ Loup asked the deserter in Spanish.

‘Grogan, sir. Sean Grogan.’

‘Your unit, Grogan?’

‘Real Compañía Irlandesa, señor.’ Guardsman Grogan was plainly willing to cooperate with his captors and so Loup signalled the Sergeant to release him.

Loup questioned Grogan for ten minutes, hearing how the Real Compañía Irlandesa had travelled by sea from Valencia, and how the men had been happy enough with the idea of joining the rest of the Spanish army at Cadiz, but how they resented being forced to serve with the British. Many of the men, the fugitive claimed, had fled from British servitude, and they had not enlisted with the King of Spain just to return to King George’s tyranny.

Loup cut short the protests. ‘When did you run?’ he asked.

‘Last night, sir. Half a dozen of us did. And a good many ran the night before.’

‘There is an Englishman in the fort, a rifle officer. You know him?’

Grogan frowned, as though he found the question odd, but then he nodded. ‘Captain Sharpe, sir. He’s supposed to be training us.’

‘To do what?’

‘To fight, sir,’ Grogan said nervously. He found this one-eyed, calm-spoken Frenchman very disconcerting. ‘But we know how to fight already,’ he added defiantly.

‘I’m sure you do,’ Loup said sympathetically. He poked at his teeth for a second, then spat the makeshift toothpick away. ‘So you ran away, soldier, because you didn’t want to serve King George, is that it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘But you’d certainly fight for His Majesty the Emperor?’

Grogan hesitated. ‘I would, sir,’ he finally said, but without any conviction.

‘Is that why you deserted?’ Loup asked. ‘To fight for the Emperor? Or were you hoping to get back to your comfortable barracks in the Escorial?’

Grogan shrugged. ‘We were going to her family’s house in Madrid, sir.’ He jerked his head towards his wife. ‘Her father’s a cobbler, and I’m not such a bad hand with a needle and thread myself. I thought I’d learn the trade.’

‘It’s always good to have a trade, soldier,’ Loup said with a smile. He took a pistol from his belt and toyed with it for a moment before he pulled back the heavy cock. ‘My trade is killing,’ he added in the same pleasant voice and then, without showing a trace of emotion, he lifted the gun, aimed it at Grogan’s forehead and pulled the trigger.

The woman screamed as her husband’s blood splashed across her face. Grogan was thrown violently back, blood spraying and misting the air, then his body thumped and slid backwards down the hill. ‘He didn’t really want to fight for us at all,’ Loup said. ‘He’d have been just another useless mouth to feed.’

‘And the woman, sir?’ Braudel asked. She was bending over her dead husband and screaming at the French.

‘She’s yours, Paul,’ Loup said. ‘But only after you have delivered a message to Madame Juanita de Elia. Give madame my undying compliments, tell her that her toy Irish soldiers have arrived and are conveniently close to us, and that tomorrow morning we shall mount a little drama for their amusement. Tell her also that she would do well to spend the night with us.’

Braudel smirked. ‘She’ll be pleased, sir.’

‘Which is more than your woman will be,’ Loup said, glancing at the howling Spanish girl. ‘Tell this widow, Paul, that if she does not shut up I will tear her tongue out and feed it to the Doña Juanita’s hounds. Now come on.’ He led his men down the hill to where the horses had been picketed. Tonight the Doña Juanita de Elia would come to the wolf’s stronghold, and tomorrow she would ride to the enemy like a plague rat sent to destroy them from within.

And somewhere, some time before victory was final, Sharpe would feel France’s vengeance for two dead men. For Loup was a soldier, and he did not forget, did not forgive and never lost.

CHAPTER THREE

Eleven men deserted during the Real Compañía Irlandesa’s first night in the San Isidro Fort and eight men, including four picquets set to stop such desertions, ran on the second night. The guardsmen were providing their own sentries and Colonel Runciman suggested Sharpe’s riflemen took over the duty. Sharpe argued against such a change. His riflemen were supposed to be training the Real Compañía Irlandesa and they could not work all day and stand guard all night. ‘I’m sure you’re right, General,’ Sharpe said tactfully, ‘but unless headquarters sends us more men we can’t work round the clock.’

Colonel Runciman, Sharpe had discovered, was malleable so long as he was addressed as ‘General’. He only wanted to be left alone to sleep, to eat and to grumble about the amount of work expected from him. ‘Even a general is only human,’ he liked to inform Sharpe, then he would inquire how he was supposed to discharge the onerous duties of liaising with the Real Compañía Irlandesa while he was also expected to be responsible for the Royal Wagon Train. In truth the Colonel’s deputy still ran the wagon train with the same efficiency he had always displayed, but until a new Wagon Master General was formally appointed Colonel Runciman’s signature and seal were necessary on a handful of administrative documents.

‘You could surrender the seals of office to your deputy, General?’ Sharpe suggested.

‘Never! Never let it be said that a Runciman evaded his duty, Sharpe. Never!’ The Colonel glanced anxiously out of his quarters to see how his cook was proceeding with a hare shot by Daniel Hagman. Runciman’s lethargy meant that the Colonel was quite content to let Sharpe deal with the Real Compañía Irlandesa, but even for a man of Runciman’s idle nonchalance, nineteen deserters in two nights was cause to worry. ‘Damn it, man’ – he leaned back after inspecting the cook’s progress – ‘it reflects on our efficiency, don’t you see? We must do something, Sharpe! In another fortnight we won’t have a soul left!’

Which, Sharpe reflected silently, was exactly what Hogan wanted. The Real Compañía Irlandesa was supposed to self-destruct, yet Richard Sharpe had been put in command of their training and there was a stubborn streak in Sharpe’s soul that would not let him permit a unit for which he was responsible to slide into ruin. Damn it, he would make the guards into soldiers whether Hogan wanted him to or not.

Sharpe doubted he would get much help from Lord Kiely. Each morning his Lordship woke in a foul ill-temper that lasted until his steady intake of alcohol gave him a burst of high spirits that would usually stretch into the evening, but then be replaced by a morose sullenness aggravated by his losses at cards. Then he would sleep till late in the morning and so begin the cycle again. ‘How in hell,’ Sharpe asked Kiely’s second-in-command, Captain Donaju, ‘did he get command of the guard?’

‘Birth,’ Donaju said. He was a pale, thin man with a worried face who looked more like an impoverished student than a soldier, but of all the officers in the Real Compañía Irlandesa he seemed the most promising. ‘You can’t have a royal guard commanded by a commoner, Sharpe,’ Donaju said with a touch of sarcasm, ‘but when Kiely’s sober he can be quite impressive.’ The last sentence contained no sarcasm at all.

‘Impressive?’ Sharpe asked dubiously.

‘He’s a good swordsman,’ Donaju replied. ‘He detests the French, and in his heart he would like to be a good man.’

‘Kiely detests the French?’ Sharpe asked without bothering to disguise his scepticism.

‘The French, Sharpe, are destroying Kiely’s privileged world,’ Donaju explained. ‘He’s from the ancien régime, so of course he hates them. He has no money, but under the ancien régime that didn’t matter because birth and title were enough to get a man a royal appointment and exemption from taxes. But the French preach equality and advancement on merit, and that threatens Kiely’s world so he escapes the threat by drinking, whoring and gambling. The flesh is very weak, Sharpe, and it’s especially feeble if you’re bored, under-employed and also suspect that you’re a relic of a bygone world.’ Donaju shrugged, as though ashamed of having offered Sharpe such a long and high-minded sermon. The Captain was a modest man, but efficient, and it was on Donaju’s slender shoulders that the day-to-day running of the guard had devolved. He now told Sharpe how he would attempt to stem the desertions by doubling the sentries and using only men he believed were reliable as picquets, but at the same time he blamed the British for his men’s predicament. ‘Why did they put us in this godforsaken place?’ Donaju asked. ‘It’s almost as if your General wants our men to run.’

That was a shrewd thrust and Sharpe had no real answer. Instead he mumbled something about the fort being a strategic outpost and needing a garrison, but he was unconvincing and Donaju’s only response was to politely ignore the fiction.

For the San Isidro Fort was indeed a godforsaken place. It might have had strategic value once, but now the main road between Spain and Portugal ran leagues to the south and so the once huge fastness had been abandoned to decay. Weeds grew thick in the dry moat that had been eroded by rainfall so that the once formidable obstacle had become little more than a shallow ditch. Frost had crumbled the walls, toppling their stones into the ditch to make countless bridges to what was left of the glacis. A white owl roosted in the remains of the chapel’s bell tower while the once-tended graves of the garrison’s officers had become nothing but shallow declivities in a stony meadow. The only serviceable parts of San Isidro were the old barracks buildings that had been kept in a state of crude repair thanks to the infrequent visits of Portuguese regiments which had been stationed there in times of political crisis. During those crises the men would block the holes in the barracks walls to protect themselves from the cold winds, while the officers took up quarters in the twin-towered gatehouse that had somehow survived the years of neglect. There were even gates that Runciman solemnly ordered closed and barred each night, though employing such a precaution against desertion was like stopping up one earth of a mighty rabbit warren.

Yet, for all its decay, the fort still held a mouldering grandeur. The impressive twin-towered gateway was embellished with royal escutcheons and approached by a four-arched causeway that spanned the only section of the dry moat still capable of checking an assault. The chapel ruins were laced with delicate carved stonework while the gun platforms were still hugely massive. Most impressive of all was the fort’s location for its ramparts offered sky-born views deep across shadowy peaks to horizons unimaginable distances away. The eastern walls looked deep into Spain and it was on those eastern battlements, beneath the flags of Spain and Britain, that Lord Kiely discovered Sharpe on the third morning of the guard’s stay in the fort. It seemed that even Kiely had become worried about the rate of desertion. ‘We didn’t come here to be destroyed by desertion,’ Kiely snapped at Sharpe. The wind quivered the waxed tips of his moustaches.

Sharpe fought back the comment that Kiely was responsible for his men, not Sharpe, and instead asked his Lordship just why he had come to join the British forces.

And, to Sharpe’s surprise, the young Lord Kiely took the question seriously. ‘I want to fight, Sharpe. That’s why I wrote to His Majesty.’

‘So you’re in the right place, my Lord,’ Sharpe said sourly. ‘The Crapauds are just the other side of that valley.’ He gestured towards the deep, bare glen that separated the San Isidro from the nearest hills. Sharpe suspected that French scouts must be active on the valley’s far side and would already have seen the movement in the old fort.

‘We’re not in the right place, Sharpe,’ Kiely said. ‘I asked King Ferdinand to order us to Cadiz, to be in our own army and among our own kind, but he sent us to Wellington instead. We don’t want to be here, but we have royal orders and we obey those orders.’

‘Then give your men a royal order not to desert,’ Sharpe said glibly.

‘They’re bored! They’re worried! They feel betrayed!’ Kiely shuddered, not with emotion, but because he had just risen from his bed and was still trying to shake off his morning hangover. ‘They didn’t come here to be trained, Sharpe,’ he snarled, ‘but to fight! They’re proud men, a bodyguard, not a pack of raw recruits. Their job is to fight for the King, to show Europe that Ferdinand still has teeth.’

Sharpe pointed east. ‘See that track, my Lord? The one that climbs to that saddle in the hills? March your men up there, keep them marching for half a day and I’ll guarantee you a fight. The French will love it. It’ll be easier for them than fighting choirboys. Half your men don’t even have working muskets! And the other half can’t use them. You tell me they’re trained? I’ve seen militia companies better trained in Britain! And all those plump militia bastards do is parade in the market place once a week and then beat a retreat to the nearest bloody tavern. Your men aren’t trained, my Lord, whatever you might think, but you give them to me for a month and I’ll have them sharper than a bloody razor.’

‘They’re merely out of practice,’ Kiely said loftily. His immense pride would not let him concede that Sharpe was right and that his vaunted palace guards were a shambles. He turned and gazed at his men who were being drilled on the weed-thick flagstones of the fort’s plaza. Beyond the company, hard by the gatehouse towers, grooms were bringing saddled horses ready for the officers’ midday exercises in horsemanship, while just inside the gate, on a stretch of smooth flagstones, Father Sarsfield was teaching the catechism to some of the company’s children. The learning process evidently involved a deal of laughter; indeed, Sharpe had noticed, wherever the chaplain went, good humour followed. ‘If they were just given an opportunity,’ Kiely said of his men, ‘they’d fight.’

‘I’m sure they would,’ Sharpe said, ‘and they’d lose. What do you want of them? Suicide?’

‘If necessary,’ Kiely said seriously. He had been staring east into enemy-held country, but now looked Sharpe in the eye. ‘If necessary,’ he said again, ‘yes.’

Sharpe gazed at the dissolute, ravaged young face. ‘You’re mad, my Lord.’

Kiely did not take offence at the accusation. ‘Would you call Roland’s defence of Roncesvalles the suicide of a madman? Did Leonidas’s Spartans do nothing but throw away their lives in a fit of imbecility? What about your own Sir Richard Grenville? Was he just mad? Sometimes, Sharpe, a great name and undying fame can only come from a grand gesture.’ He pointed at the far hills. ‘There are three hundred thousand Frenchmen over there, and how many British here? Thirty thousand? The war is lost, Sharpe, it is lost. A great Christian kingdom is going down to mediocrity, and all because of a Corsican upstart. All the glory and the valour and the splendour of a royal world are about to become commonplace and tawdry. All the nasty, mean things – republicanism, democracy, equality – are crawling into the light and claiming that they can replace a lineage of great kings. We are seeing the end of history, Sharpe, and the beginnings of chaos, but maybe, just maybe, King Ferdinand’s household guard can bring the curtain down with one last act of shining glory.’ For a few seconds the drunken Kiely had betrayed his younger, nobler self. ‘That’s why we’re here, Sharpe, to make a story that will still be told when men have forgotten the very name of Bonaparte.’

‘Christ,’ Sharpe said, ‘no wonder your boys are deserting. Jesus! I would too. If I take a man into battle, my Lord, I like to offer him a better than evens chance that he’ll march away with his skin intact. If I wanted to kill the buggers I’d just strangle them in their sleep. It’s kinder.’ He turned and watched the Real Compañía Irlandesa. The men were taking it in turns to use the forty or so serviceable muskets and, with a handful of exceptions, they were virtually useless. A good soldier could shoot a smoothbore musket every twenty seconds, but these men were lucky to get a shot away every forty seconds. The guards had spent too long wearing powdered wigs and standing outside gilded doors, and not long enough learning the simple habits of priming, ramming, firing and loading. ‘But I’ll train them,’ Sharpe said when the echo of another straggling volley had faded across the fort, ‘and I’ll stop the buggers deserting.’ He knew he was undermining Hogan’s stratagem, but Sharpe liked the rank and file of the Real Compañía Irlandesa. They were soldiers like any others, not so well trained maybe, and with more confused loyalties than most, but the majority of the men were willing enough. There was no mischief there, and it cut against Sharpe’s grain to betray good men. He wanted to train them. He wanted to make the company into a unit of which any army could be proud.

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