SHARPE’S SIEGE
Richard Sharpe and the
Winter Campaign, 1814
BERNARD CORNWELL

Copyright

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.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1988

Reprinted five times

First published in Great Britain by Collins 1987

Copyright © Rifleman Productions Ltd 1987

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

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

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Source ISBN: 9780007298600

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2011 ISBN: 9780007346813

Version: 2017-04-26

Sharpe’s Siege is dedicated to

Brenym McNight, Terry Farrand, Bryan Thorniley,

Diana Colbert, Ray Steele, and Stuart Wilkie;

with thanks

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Map of The French Biscay Coast

Map of Bassin

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

Historical Note

Sharpe’s Story

Keep Reading

About the Author

The SHARPE Series (in chronological order)

The SHARPE Series (in order of publication)

Also by Bernard Cornwell

About the Publisher

‘Cornwell has maintained a marvellously high standard throughout the series … brilliantly lucid and compellingly exciting’

Evening Standard

CHAPTER ONE

It was ten days short of Candlemas, 1814, and an Atlantic wind carried shivers of cold rain that slapped on narrow cobbled alleys, spilt from the broken gutters of tangled roofs, and pitted the water of St Jean de Luz’s inner harbour. It was a winter wind, cruel as a bared sabre, that whirled chimney smoke into the low January clouds shrouding the corner of south-western France where the British Army had its small lodgement.

A British soldier, his horse tired and mud-stained, rode down a cobbled street in St Jean de Luz. He ducked his head beneath a baker’s wooden sign, edged his mare past a fish-cart, and dismounted at a corner where an iron bollard provided a tethering post for the horse. He patted the horse, then slung its saddle-bags over his shoulder. It was evident he had ridden a long way.

He walked into a narrow alley, searching for a house that he only knew by description; a house with a blue door and a line of cracked green tiles above the lintel. He shivered. At his left hip there hung a long, metal-scabbarded sword, and on his right shoulder was a rifle. He stepped aside for a woman, black-dressed and squat, who carried a basket of lobsters. She, grateful that this enemy soldier had shown her a small courtesy, smiled her thanks, but afterwards, when she was safely past him, she crossed herself. The soldier’s face had been bleak and scarred; darkly handsome, but still a killer’s face. She blessed her patron saint that her own son would not have to face such a man in battle, but had a secure, safe job in the French Customs service instead.

The soldier, oblivious of the effect his face had, found the blue door beneath the green tiles. The door, even though it was a cold day, stood ajar and, without knocking, he pushed his way into the front room. There he dropped his pack, rifle, and saddle-bags on to a threadbare carpet and found himself staring into the testy face of a British Army surgeon. ‘I know you,’ the Army surgeon, his shirt-cuffs thick with dried blood, said.

‘Sharpe, sir, Prince of Wales’s Own …’

‘I said I knew you,’ the surgeon interrupted. ‘I took a musket-ball out of you after Fuentes d’Onoro. Had to truffle around for it, I remember.’

‘Indeed, sir.’ Sharpe could hardly forget. The surgeon had been half drunk, cursing, and digging into Sharpe’s flesh by the light of a guttering candle. Now the two men had met in the outer room of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Hogan’s lodgings.

‘You can’t go in there.’ The surgeon’s clothes were drenched in prophylactic vinegar, filling the small room with its acrid scent. ‘Unless you want to die.’

‘But …’

‘Not that I care.’ The surgeon wiped his bleeding-cup on the tail of his shirt then tossed it into his bag. ‘If you want the fever, Major, go inside.’ He spat on his wide-bladed scarifying gouge, smeared the blood from it, and shrugged as Sharpe opened the inner door.

Hogan’s room was heated by a huge fire that hissed where its flames met the rain coming down the chimney. Hogan himself was in a bed heaped with blankets. He shivered and sweated at the same time. His face was greyish, his skin slick with sweat, his eyes red-rimmed, and he was muttering about being purged with hyssop.

‘His topsails are gone to the wind,’ the surgeon spoke from behind Sharpe. ‘Feverish, you see. Did you have business with him?’

Sharpe stared at the sick man. ‘He’s my particular friend.’ He turned to look at the surgeon. ‘I’ve been on the Nive for the last month, I knew he was ill, but …’ He ran out of words.

‘Ah,’ the surgeon seemed to soften somewhat. ‘I wish I could offer some hope, Major.’

‘You can’t?’

‘He might last two days. He might last a week.’ The surgeon pulled on his jacket that he had shed before opening one of Hogan’s veins. ‘He’s wrapped in red flannel, bled regular, and we’re feeding him gunpowder and brandy. Can’t do more, Major, except pray for the Lord’s tender mercies.’

The sickroom stank of vomit. The heat of the huge fire pricked sweat on Sharpe’s face and steamed rain-water from his soaking uniform as he stepped closer to the bed, but it was obvious Hogan could not recognize him. The middle-aged Irishman, who was Wellington’s Chief of Intelligence, shivered and sweated and shook and muttered nonsenses in a voice that had so often amused Sharpe with its dry wit.

‘It’s possible,’ the surgeon spoke grudgingly from the outer room, ‘that the next convoy might bring some Jesuit’s bark.’

‘Jesuit’s bark?’ Sharpe turned towards the doorway.

‘A South American tree-bark, Major, sometimes called quinine. Infuse it well and it can perform miracles. But it’s a rare substance, Major, and cruelly expensive!’

Sharpe went closer to the bed. ‘Michael? Michael?’

Hogan said something in Gaelic. His eyes flickered past Sharpe, closed, then opened again.

‘Michael?’

‘Ducos,’ the sick man said distinctly, ‘Ducos.’

‘He’ll not make sense,’ the surgeon said.

‘He just did.’ Sharpe had heard a name, a French name, the name of an enemy, but in what feverish context and from what secret compartment of Hogan’s clever mind the name had come, Sharpe could not tell.

‘The Field Marshal sent me,’ the surgeon seemed eager to explain himself, ‘but I can’t work miracles, Major. Only the Almighty’s providence can do that.’

‘Or Jesuit’s bark.’

‘Which I haven’t seen in six months.’ The surgeon still stood at the door. ‘Might I insist you leave, Major? God spare us a contagion.’

‘Yes.’ Sharpe knew he would never forgive himself if he did not give Hogan some gesture of friendship, however useless, so he stooped and took the sick man’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze.

‘Maquereau,’ Hogan said quite distinctly.

‘Maquereau?’

‘Major!’

Sharpe obeyed the surgeon’s voice. ‘Does maquereau mean anything to you?’

‘It’s a fish. The mackerel. It’s also French slang for pimp, Major. I told you, his wits are wandering.’ The surgeon closed the door on the sickroom. ‘And one other piece of advice, Major.’

‘Yes?’

‘If you want your wife to live, then tell her she must stop visiting Colonel Hogan.’

Sharpe paused by his damp luggage. ‘Jane visits him?’

‘A Mrs Sharpe visits daily,’ the doctor said, ‘but I have not the intimacy of her first name. Good day to you, Major.’

It was winter in France.

The floor was a polished expanse of boxwood, the walls were cliffs of shining marble, and the ceiling a riot of ornate plasterwork and paint. In the very centre of the floor, beneath the dark, cobweb encrusted chandelier and dwarfed by the huge proportions of the vast room, was a malachite table. Six candles, their light too feeble to reach into the corners of the great room, illuminated maps spread on the green stone table.

A man walked from the table to a fire that burned in an intricately carved hearth. He stared at the flames and, when at last he spoke, the marble walls made his voice seem hollow with despair. ‘There are no reserves.’

‘Calvet’s demi-brigade …’

‘Is ordered south without delay.’ The man turned from the fire to look at the table where the candle-glow illuminated two pale faces above dark uniforms. ‘The Emperor will not take it kindly if we …’

‘The Emperor,’ the smallest man at the table interrupted in a voice of surprising harshness, ‘rewards success.’

January rain spattered the tall, east-facing windows. The velvet curtains of this room had been pulled down twenty-one years before, trophies to a revolutionary mob that had stormed triumphant through the streets of Bordeaux, and there had never been the money nor the will to hang new curtains. The consequence, in winters like this, was a draught of malevolent force. The fire scarcely warmed the hearth, let alone the whole huge room, and the general standing before the feeble flames shivered. ‘East or north.’

It was a simple enough problem. The British had invaded a small corner of southern France, nothing but a toe-hold between the southern rivers and the Bay of Biscay, and these men expected the British to attack again. But would Field Marshal the Lord Wellington go east or north?

‘We know it’s north,’ the smallest man said. ‘Why else are they collecting boats?’

‘In that case, my dear Ducos,’ the general paced back towards the table, ‘is it to be a bridge, or a landing?’

The third man, a colonel, dropped a smoked cigar on to the floor and ground it beneath his toe. ‘Perhaps the American can tell us?’

‘The American,’ Pierre Ducos said scathingly, ‘is a flea on the rump of a lion. An adventurer. I use him because no Frenchman can do the task, but I expect small help of him.’

‘Then who can tell us?’ The general came into the aureole of light made by the candles. ‘Isn’t that your job, Ducos?’

It was rare for Major Pierre Ducos’ competency to be so challenged, yet France was assailed and Ducos was almost helpless. When, with the rest of the French Army, he had been ejected from Spain, Ducos had lost his best agents. Now, peering into his enemy’s mind, Ducos saw only a fog. ‘There is one man,’ he spoke softly.

‘Well?’

Ducos’ round, thick spectacle lenses flashed candlelight as he stared at the map. He would have to send a message through the enemy lines, and he risked losing his last agent in British uniform, but perhaps the risk was justified if it brought the French the news they so desperately needed. East, north, a bridge, or a landing? Pierre Ducos nodded. ‘I shall try.’

Which was why, three days later, a French lieutenant stepped gingerly across a frosted plank bridge that spanned a tributary of the Nive. He shouted cheerfully to warn the enemy sentries that he approached.

Two British redcoats, faces swathed in rags against the bitter cold, called for their own officer. The French lieutenant, seeing he was safe, grinned at the picquet. ‘Cold, yes?’

‘Bloody cold.’

‘For you.’ The French lieutenant gave the redcoats a cloth-wrapped bundle that contained a loaf of bread and a length of sausage, the usual gesture on occasions such as this, then greeted his British counterpart with a happy familiarity. ‘I’ve brought the calico for Captain Salmon.’ The Frenchman unbuckled his pack. ‘But I can’t find red silk in Bayonne. Can the colonel’s wife wait?’

‘She’ll have to.’ The British lieutenant paid silver for the calico and added a plug of dark tobacco as a reward for the Frenchman. ‘Can you buy coffee?’

‘There’s plenty. An American schooner slipped through your blockade.’ The Frenchman opened his cartouche. ‘I also have three letters.’ As usual the letters were unsealed as a token that they could be read. More than a few officers in the British Army had acquaintances, friends or relatives in the enemy ranks, and the opposing picquets had always acted as an unofficial postal system between the armies. The Frenchman refused a mug of British tea and promised to bring a four-pound sack of coffee, purchased in the market at Bayonne, the next day. ‘That’s if you’re still here tomorrow?’

‘We’ll be here.’

And thus, in a manner that was entirely normal and quite above suspicion, Pierre Ducos’ message was safely delivered.

‘Why ever shouldn’t I visit Michael? It’s eminently proper. After all, no one can expect a sick man to be ill-behaved.’

Sharpe entirely missed Jane’s pun. ‘I don’t want you catching the fever. Give the food to his servant.’

‘I’ve visited Michael every day,’ Jane said, ‘and I’m in the most excellent health. Besides, you went to see him.’

‘I should imagine,’ Sharpe said, ‘that my constitution is more robust than yours.’

‘It’s certainly uglier,’ Jane said.

‘And I must insist,’ Sharpe said with ponderous dignity, ‘that you avoid contagion.’

‘I have every intention of avoiding it.’ Jane sat quite still as her new French maid put combs into her hair. ‘But Michael is our friend and I won’t see him neglected.’ She paused, as if to let her husband counter her argument, but Sharpe was quickly learning that in the great skirmish of marriage, happiness was bought by frequent retreats. Jane smiled. ‘And if I can endure this weather, then I must be quite as robust as any Rifleman.’ The sea-wind, howling off Biscay, rattled the casements of her lodgings. Across the roofs Sharpe could see the thicket of masts and spars made by the shipping crammed into the inner harbour. One of those ships had brought the new uniforms that were being issued to his men.

It was not before time. The veterans of the South Essex, that Sharpe now had to call the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, had not been issued with new uniforms in three years. Their coats were ragged, faded, and patched, but now those old jackets, that had fought across Spain, were being discarded for new, bright cloth. Some French Battalion, seeing those new coats, would think of them as belonging to a fresh, unblooded unit and would doubtless pay dear for the mistake.

The orders to refit had given Sharpe this chance to be with his new wife, as it had given all the married men of the Battalion a chance to be with their wives. The Battalion had been stationed on the line of the River Nive, close to French patrols, and Sharpe had ordered the wives to stay in St Jean de Luz. These few days were thus made precious to Sharpe, days snatched from the frost-hard river-line, days to be with Jane, and days spoilt only by the illness that threatened Hogan’s life.

‘I take him food from the Club,’ Jane said.

‘The Club?’

‘Where we’re lunching, Richard.’ She turned from the mirror with the expression of a woman well pleased with her own reflection. ‘Your good jacket, I think.’

In every town that the British occupied, and in which they spent more than a few days, one building became a club for officers. The building was never officially chosen, nor designated as such, but by some strange process and within a day of two of the Army’s arrival, one particular house was generally agreed to be the place where elegant gentlemen could retire to read the London papers, drink mulled wine before a decently tended fire, or play a few hands of whist of an evening. In St Jean de Luz the chosen house faced the outer harbour.

Major Richard Sharpe, born in a common lodging-house and risen from the gutter-bred ranks of Britain’s Army, had never used such temporary gentlemen’s clubs before, but new and beautiful wives must be humoured. ‘I didn’t suppose,’ he spoke unhappily to Jane, ‘that women were allowed in gentlemens’ clubs?’ He was reluctantly buttoning his new green uniform jacket.

‘They are here,’ Jane said, ‘and they’re serving an oyster pie for luncheon.’ Which clinched the matter. Major and Mrs Richard Sharpe would dine out, and Major Sharpe had to dress in the stiff, uncomfortable uniform that he had bought for a royal reception in London and hated to wear. He reflected, as he climbed the wide stairs of the Officers’ Club with Jane on his arm, that there was much wisdom in the old advice that an officer should never take a well-bred wife to an ill-bred war.

Yet the frisson of irritation passed as he entered the crowded dining-room. Instead he felt the pang of pride that he always felt when he took Jane into a public place. She was undeniably beautiful, and her beauty was informed by a vivacity that gave her face character. She had eloped with him just months before, fleeing her uncle’s house on the drab Essex marshes to come to the war. She drew admiring glances from men at every table, while other officers’ wives, enduring the inconveniences of campaigning for the sake of love, looked enviously at Jane Sharpe’s easy beauty. Some, too, envied her the tall, black-haired and grimly scarred man who seemed so uncomfortable in the lavishness of the club’s indulgent comforts. Sharpe’s name was whispered from table to table; the name of the man who had taken an enemy standard, captured one of Badajoz’s foul breaches, and who, or so rumour said, had made himself rich from the blood-spattered plunder of Vitoria.

A white-gloved steward abandoned a table of senior officers to hasten to Jane’s side. ‘The cap’n wanted to sit ’ere, ma’am,’ the steward was unnecessarily brushing the seat of a chair close to one of the wide windows, ‘but I said as how it was being kept for someone special.’

Jane gave the steward a smile that would have enslaved a misogynist. ‘How very kind of you, Smithers.’

‘So he’s over there.’ Smithers nodded disparagingly towards a table by the fire where two naval officers sat in warm discomfort. The junior officer was a lieutenant, while one of the other man’s two epaulettes was bright and new, denoting a recent promotion to the rank of a full post captain.

Smithers looked devotedly back to Jane. ‘I’ve reserved a bottle or two of that claret you liked.’

Sharpe, who had been ignored by the steward, pronounced the wine good and hoped he was right. The oyster pie was certainly good. Jane said she would deliver a portion to Hogan’s lodgings that same afternoon and Sharpe again insisted that she should not actually enter the sickroom, and he saw a flicker of annoyance cross Jane’s face. Her irritation was not caused by Sharpe’s words, but by the sudden proximity of the naval captain who had rudely come to stand immediately behind Sharpe’s chair in a place where he could overhear the conversation of Major and Mrs Sharpe’s reunion.

The naval officer had not come to eavesdrop, but rather to stare through the rain-smeared window. His interest was in a small flotilla of boats that had appeared around the northern headland. The boats were squat and small, none more than fifty feet long, but each had a vast press of sail that drove the score of craft in a fast gaggle towards the harbour entrance. They were escorted by a naval brig that, in the absence of enemies, had its gunports closed.

‘They’re chasse-marées,’ Jane said to her husband.

‘Chasse-marrys?’

‘Coastal luggers, Richard. They carry forty tons of cargo each.’ She smiled, pleased with her display of knowledge. ‘You forget I was raised on the coast. The smugglers in Dunkirk used chasse-marées. The Navy,’ Jane said loudly enough for the intrusive naval captain to hear, ‘could never catch them.’

But the naval captain was oblivious to Mrs Sharpe’s goad. He stared at the straggling fleet of chasse-marées that, emerging from a brief rain-squall, seemed to crab sideways to avoid a sand-bar that was marked by a broken line of dirty foam. ‘Ford! Ford!’

The naval lieutenant dabbed his lips with a napkin, snatched a swallow of wine, then hastened to his captain’s side. ‘Sir?’

The captain took a small spyglass from the tail pocket of his coat. ‘There’s a lively one there, Ford. Mark her!’

Sharpe wondered why naval officers should be so interested in French coastal craft, but Jane said the Navy had been collecting the chasse-marées for days. She had heard that the boats, with their French crews, were being hired with English coin, but for what purpose no one could tell.

The small fleet had come to within a quarter mile of the harbour, and, to facilitate their entry into the crowded inner roads, each ship was lowering its topsail. The naval brig had hove-to, sails shivering, but one of the French coasters, larger than the rest of its fellows, was still under the full set of its five sails. The water broke white at its stem and slid in bubbling, greying foam down the hull that was sleeker than those of the other, smaller vessels.

‘He thinks it’s a race, sir,’ the lieutenant said with happy vacuity above Sharpe’s shoulder.

‘A handy craft,’ the captain said grudgingly. ‘Too good for the Army. I think we might take her on to our strength.’

‘Aye aye, sir.’

The faster, larger lugger had broken clear of the pack. Its sails were a dirty grey, the colour of the winter sky, and its low hull was painted a dull pitch-black. Its flush deck, like all the chasse-marées’ decks, was an open sweep broken only by the three masts and the tiller by which two men stood. Fishing gear was heaped in ugly, lumpen disarray upon the deck’s planking.

The naval brig, seeing the large lugger race ahead, unleashed a string of bright flags. The captain snorted. ‘Bloody Frogs won’t understand that!’

Sharpe, offended by the naval officers’ unwanted proximity, had been seeking a cause to quarrel, and now found it in the captain’s swearing in front of Jane. He stood up. ‘Sir.’

The naval captain, with a deliberate slowness, turned pale, glaucous eyes on to the Army major. The captain was young, plump, and confident that he outranked Sharpe. They stared into each other’s eyes, and Sharpe felt a sudden certainty that he would hate this man. There was no reason for it, no justification, merely a physical distaste for the privileged, amused face that seemed so full of disdain for the black-haired Rifleman.

‘Well?’ The naval captain’s voice betrayed a gleeful anticipation of the imminent argument.

Jane defused the confrontation. ‘My husband, Captain, is sensitive to the language of fighting men.’

The captain, not certain whether he was being complimented or mocked, chose to accept the words as a tribute to his gallantry. He glanced at Sharpe, looking from the Rifleman’s face to the new, unfaded cloth of the green jacket. The newness of the uniform evidently suggested that Sharpe, despite the scar on his face, was fresh to the war. The captain smiled superciliously. ‘Doubtless, Major, your delicacy will be sore tested by French bullets.’

Jane, delighted at the opening, smiled very sweetly. ‘I’m sure Major Sharpe is grateful for your opinion, sir.’

That brought a satisfying reaction; a shudder of astonishment and fear on the annoying, plump face of the young naval officer. He took an involuntary step backwards, then, remembering the cause of the near quarrel, bowed to Jane. ‘My apologies, Mrs Sharpe, if I caused offence.’

‘No offence, Captain … ?’ Jane inflected the last word into a question.

The captain bowed again. ‘Bampfylde, ma’am. Captain Horace Bampfylde. And allow me to name my lieutenant, Ford.’

The introductions were accepted gracefully, as tokens of peace, and Sharpe, outflanked by effusive politeness, sat. ‘The man’s got no bloody manners,’ he growled loudly enough to be overheard by the two naval officers.

‘Perhaps he didn’t have your advantages in life?’ Jane suggested sweetly, but again the scene beyond the window distracted the naval men from the barbed comments.

‘Christ!’ Captain Bampfylde, careless of the risk of offending a dozen ladies in the dining-room, shouted the word. The outraged anger in his voice brought an immediate hush and fixed the attention of everyone in the room on the small, impertinent drama that was unfolding on the winter-cold sea.

The black-hulled lugger, instead of obeying the brig’s command to lower sails and proceed tamely into the harbour of St Jean de Luz, had changed her course. She had been sailing south, but now reached west to cut across the counter of the brig. Even Sharpe, no sailor, could see that the chasse-marée’s fore and aft rig made the boat into a handy, quick sailor.

It was not the course change that had provoked Bampfylde’s astonishment, but that the deck of the black-hulled lugger had suddenly sprouted men like dragon’s teeth maturing into warriors, and that, from the mizzen mast, a flag had been unfurled.

The flag was not the blue ensign of the Navy, nor the tricolour of France, nor even the white banner of the exiled French monarchy. They were the colours of Britain’s newest enemy; the Stars and Stripes of the United States of America.

‘A Jonathon!’ a voice said with disgust.

‘Fire, man!’ Bampfylde roared the order in the confines of the dining-room as though the brig’s skipper might hear him. Yet the brig, head to wind, was helpless. Men ran on its deck, and gunports lifted, but the American lugger was seething past the brig’s unarmed counter and Sharpe saw the dirty white blossom of gunsmoke as the small broadside was poured, at pistol-shot length, into the British ship.

Lieutenant Ford groaned. David was taking on Goliath and winning.

The sound of the American gunfire came over the windbroken water like a growl of thunder, then the lugger was spinning about, sails rippling as the American skipper let his speed carry him through the wind’s eye, until, taut on the opposite tack, he headed back past the brig’s counter towards the fleet of chasse-marées.

The brig, foresails at last catching the wind to lever her hull around, received a second mocking broadside. The American carried five guns on each flank, small guns, but their shot punctured the brig’s Bermudan cedar to spread death down the packed deck.

Two of the brig’s guns punched smoke into the cold wind, but the American had judged his action well and the brig dared fire no more for fear of hitting the chasse-marées into which, like a wolf let rip into a flock, the American sailed.

The hired coasters were unarmed. Each sea-worn boat, sails frayed, was crewed by four men who did not expect, beneath the protection of their enemy’s Navy, to face the gunfire of an ally.

The French civilian crews leaped into the cold water as the Americans, serving their guns with an efficiency that Sharpe could only admire even if he could not applaud, put ball after ball into the luggers’ hulls. The gunners aimed low, intending to shatter, sink, and panic.

Ships collided. One chasse-marée’s mainmast, its shrouds cut, splintered down to the water in a tangle of tarred cables and tumbling spars. One boat was settling in the churning sea, another, its rudder shot away, turned broadside to receive the numbing shock of another’s bow in its gunwales.

‘Fire!’ Captain Bampfylde roared again, this time not as an order, but in alarm. Flames were visible on a French boat, then another, and Sharpe guessed the Americans were using shells as grenades. Rigging flared like a lit fuse, two more boats collided, tangled, and the flames flickered across the gap. Then a merciful rain-squall swept out of Biscay to help douse the flames even as it helped hide the American boat.

‘They’ll not catch her,’ Lieutenant Ford said indignantly.

‘Damn his eyes!’ Bampfylde said.

The American had got clear away. She could outsail her square-rigged pursuers, and she did. The last Sharpe saw of the black-hulled ship was the flicker of her grey sails in the grey squall and the bright flash of her gaudy flag.

‘That’s Killick!’ The naval captain spoke with a fury made worse by impotence. ‘I’ll wager that’s Killick!’

The spectators, appalled by what they had seen, watched the chaos in the harbour approach. Two luggers were sinking, three were burning, and another four were inextricably tangled together. Of the remaining ten boats no less than half had grounded themselves on the harbour bar and were being pushed inexorably higher by the force of the wind-driven, flowing tide. A damned American, in a cockle boat, had danced scornful rings around the Royal Navy and, even worse, had done it within sight of the Army.

Captain Horace Bampfylde closed his spyglass and dropped it into his pocket. He looked down at Sharpe. ‘Mark that well,’ the captain said, ‘mark it very well! I shall look to you for retribution.’

‘Me?’ Sharpe said in astonishment.

But there was no answer, for the two naval officers had strode away leaving a puzzled Sharpe and a tangle of scorched wreckage that heaved on the sea’s grey surface and bobbed towards the land where an Army, on the verge of its enemy’s country, gathered itself for its next advance, but whether to north or east, or by bridge or by boat, no one in France yet knew.

CHAPTER TWO

He had a cutwater of a face; sharp, lined, savagely tanned; a dangerously handsome face framed by a tangled shock of gold-dark hair. It was battered, beaten by winds and seas and scarred by blades and scorched by powder-blasts, but still a handsome face; enough to make the girls look twice. It was just the kind of face to annoy Major Pierre Ducos who disliked such tall, confident, and handsome men.

‘Anything you can tell me,’ Ducos said with forced politeness, ‘would be of the utmost use.’

‘I can tell you,’ Cornelius Killick said, ‘that a British brig is burying its dead and that the bastards have got close to forty chasse-marées in the harbour.’

‘Close to?’ Ducos asked.

‘It’s difficult to make an accurate count when you’re firing cannon, Major.’ The American, careless of Ducos’ sinister power, leaned over the malachite table and lit a cigar from a candle’s flame. ‘Aren’t you going to thank me?’

Ducos’ voice was sour with undisguised irony. ‘The Empire is most grateful to you. Captain Killick.’

‘Grateful enough to fetch me some copper sheeting?’ Killick’s French was excellent. ‘That was our agreement.’

‘I shall order some sent to you. Your ship is at Gujan, correct?’

‘Correct.’

Ducos had no intention of ordering copper sheeting sent to the Bassin d’Arcachon, but the American had to be humoured. The presence of the privateer captain had been most fortuitous for Ducos, but what happened to the American now was of no importance to an embattled France.

Cornelius Killick was the master of the Thuella, a New England schooner of sleek, fast lines. She had been built for one purpose alone; to evade the British blockade and, under Killick’s captaincy, the Thuella had become a thorn in the Royal Navy’s self-esteem. Whether as a cargo ship that evaded British patrols, or as a privateer that snapped up stragglers from British convoys, the schooner had led a charmed life until, at the beginning of January, as the Thuella stole from the mouth of the Gironde in a dawn mist, a British frigate had come from the silvered north and its bow-chasers had thumped nine-pounder balls into the Thuella’s transom.

The schooner, carrying a cargo of French twelve-pounder guns for the American Army, turned south. Her armament was no match for a frigate, nor could her speed save her in the light, mist-haunted airs. For three hours she was pounded. Shot after shot crashed into the stern and Killick knew that the British gunners were firing low to spring his planks and sink his beloved ship. But the Thuella had not sunk, and the mist was stirred by catspaws of wind, and the wind became a breeze and, even though damaged, the schooner had outrun her pursuer and taken refuge in the vast Bassin d’Arcachon. There, safe behind the guns of the Teste de Buch fort, the Thuella was beached for repairs.

The wounded Thuella needed copper, oak, and pitch. Day followed day and the supplies were promised, but never came. The American consul in Bordeaux pleaded on Cornelius Killick’s behalf, and the only answer had been the strange request, from Major Pierre Ducos, that the American take a chasse-marée south and investigate why the British collected such craft in St Jean de Luz. There was no French Navy to make the reconnaissance, and no French civilian crew, lured by British gold, could be trusted with the task, and so Killick had gone. Now, as he had promised, he had come to this lavish room in Bordeaux to give his report.

‘Would you have any opinion,’ Ducos now asked the tall American, ‘why the British are hiring chasse-marées?’

‘Perhaps they want a regatta?’ Killick laughed, saw that this Frenchman had no sense of humour at all, and sighed instead. ‘They plan to land on your coast, presumably.’

‘Or build a bridge?’

‘Where to? America? They’re filling the damned harbour with boats.’ Killick drew on his cigar. ‘And if they were going to make a bridge, Major, wouldn’t they take down the masts? Besides, where could they build it?’

Ducos unrolled a map and tapped the estuary of the Adour. ‘There?’

Cornelius Killick hid his impatience, remembering that the French had never understood the sea, which was why the British fleets now sailed with such impunity. ‘That estuary,’ the American said mildly, ‘has a tidefall of over fifteen feet, with currents as foul as rat-puke. If the British build a bridge there, Major, they’ll drown an army.’

Ducos supposed the American was right, but the Frenchman disliked being lectured by a ruffian from the New World. Major Ducos would have preferred confirmation from his own sources, but no reply had come to the letter that had been smuggled across the lines to the agent who served France in a British uniform. Ducos feared for that man’s safety, but the Frenchman’s pinched, scholarly face betrayed none of his worries as he interrogated the handsome American. ‘How many men,’ Ducos asked, ‘could a chasse-marée carry?’

‘A hundred. Perhaps more if the seas were calm.’

‘And they have forty. Enough for four thousand men.’ Ducos stared at the map on his table. ‘So where will they come, Captain?’

The American leaned over the table. Rain tapped on the window and a draught lifted a corner of the map that Killick weighted down with a candlestick. ‘The Adour, Arcachon, or the Gironde.’ He tapped each place as he spoke its name.

The map showed the Biscay coast of France. That coast was a sheer sweep, almost ruler straight, suggesting long beaches of wicked, tumbling surf. Yet the coast was broken by two river mouths and by the vast, almost landlocked Bassin d’Arcachon. And from Arcachon to Bordeaux, Ducos saw, it was a short march, and if the British could take Bordeaux they would cut off Marshal Soult’s army in the south. It was a bold idea, a risky idea, but on a map, in an office in winter, it seemed to Ducos a very feasible one. He moved the candle away and rolled the map into a tight tube. ‘You would be well advised, Captain Killick, to be many leagues from Arcachon if the British do make a landing there.’

‘Then send me some copper.’

‘It will be dispatched in the morning,’ Ducos said. ‘Good day to you, Captain, and my thanks.’

When the American was gone Ducos unrolled the map again. The questions still nagged at him. Was the display in St Jean de Luz’s harbour merely a charade to draw attention away from the east? Ducos cursed the man who had not replied to his letter, and wondered how much credence could be put on the words of an American adventurer. North or east, bridge or boats? Ducos was tempted to believe the American, but knowing an invasion was planned was useless unless the landing place was known. Yet one man might still tell him, and to know the answer would bring a victory, and France, in this bitter, wet winter of 1814, was in need of a victory.

‘Looking for us, sir?’ A midshipman in a tarred jacket stood at the top of weed-slimed watersteps on St Jean de Luz’s quay.

‘Are you the Vengeance?’ Sharpe looked apprehensively at the tiny boat, frail on the filth-littered water, that was to carry him to the Vengeance. Sharpe had received a sudden order, peremptory and harsh, that offered no explanations but merely demanded his immediate presence on the quay where a boat from His Majesty’s ship Vengeance would be waiting.

Four grinning oarsmen, doubtless hoping to see the Rifle officer slip on the steep stone stairs, waited in the gig. ‘The captain would have sent his barge, sir,’ the midshipman said in unconvincing apology, ‘but it’s being used for the other gentlemen.’

Sharpe stepped into the rocking gig. ‘What other gentlemen?’

‘No one confides in me, sir.’ The midshipman could scarce have been more than fourteen, but he gave his orders with a jaunty confidence as Major Sharpe crouched on the stern thwart and wondered which of the ships moored in the outer harbour was the Vengeance.

It seemed to be none of them, for the midshipman took his tiny craft out through the harbour entrance to buck and thump its bows in the tide-race over the sandbar. Ahead now, in the outer roads, a flotilla of naval craft was anchored. Amongst them, and towering over the other vessels like a behemoth, was a ship of the line. ‘Is that the Vengeance?’ Sharpe asked.

‘It is, sir. A 74, and as sweet a sailor as ever was.’

The midshipman’s enthusiasm seemed misplaced to Sharpe. Nothing about the Vengeance suggested sweetness; instead, moored in the long swell of the grey ocean, she seemed like a brutal mass of timber, rope and iron; one of the slab-sided killers of Britain’s deep-water fleet. Her chequered sides were like cliffs, and the ponderous hull, as Sharpe’s gig neared the vast craft, gave off the rotten stench of tar, unwashed bodies and ordure; the normal odour of a battleship becalmed.

The midshipman shouted orders, oars backed, the tiller was thrown across, and somehow the gig was laid alongside with scarce a bump of timber. Above Sharpe now, water dripping from its lower rungs, was a tumblehome ladder leading to the maindeck. ‘You’d like a sling lowered, sir?’ the midshipman asked solicitously.

‘I’ll manage.’ Sharpe waited as a wave lifted the gig, then jumped for the rain-slicked ladder. He clawed at it, held on, then scrambled ignominiously up to the greeting of a bosun’s whistle.

‘Major Sharpe! Welcome aboard.’

Sharpe saw an eager, ingratiating lieutenant who clearly expected to be recognized. Sharpe frowned. ‘You were with …’

‘With Captain Bampfylde, indeed, sir. I’m Ford.’

The elegantly clothed Ford made inconsequential conversation as he steered Sharpe towards the stern cabins. It was an honour, he said, to have such a distinguished soldier aboard, and was it possible that Sharpe was related to Sir Roderick Sharpe of Northamptonshire?

‘No,’ Sharpe was remembering Captain Bampfylde’s parting words in the Officer’s Club. Were those the reason for his summons here?

‘One of the Wiltshire Sharpes, perhaps?’ Ford seemed eager to place the Rifleman in a comforting social context.

‘Middlesex,’ Sharpe said.

‘Do mind your head,’ Ford smiled as he waved Sharpe under the break of the poopdeck. ‘I can’t quite place the Middlesex Sharpes.’

‘My mother was a whore, I was born in a common lodging-house, and I joined the Army as a private. Does that make it easier?’

Ford’s smile did not falter. ‘Captain Bampfylde’s waiting for you, sir. Please go in.’

Sharpe ducked under the lintel of the opened doorway to find himself in a lavishly furnished cabin that extended the width of the Vengeance’s wide stern. A dozen officers, their wine glasses catching the light from the galleried windows, sat around a polished dining table.

‘Major! We meet in happier circumstances.’ Captain Horace Bampfylde greeted Sharpe with effusive and false pleasure. ‘No damned American to spoil our conversation, eh? Come and meet the company.’

Seeing Bampfylde in his ship made Sharpe realize how very young the naval captain was. Bampfylde must still lack two years of thirty, yet the naval captain possessed an ebullient confidence and a natural authority to compensate for his lack of years. He had a fleshy face, quick eyes, and an impatient manner that he tried to disguise as he made the introductions.

Most of the men about the table were naval officers whose names meant nothing to Sharpe, but there were also two Army officers, one of whom Sharpe recognized. ‘Colonel Elphinstone?’

Elphinstone, a big, burly Engineer whose hands were calloused and scarred, beamed a welcome. ‘You haven’t met my brother-in-arms, Sharpe; Colonel Wigram.’

Wigram was a grey-faced, dour, bloodless creature who acknowledged the ironic introduction with a curt nod. ‘If you could seat yourself, Major Sharpe, we might at last begin.’ He managed to convey that Sharpe had delayed this meeting.

Sharpe sat beside Elphinstone in a chair close to the windows that looked on to the big, grey Atlantic swells that scarcely moved the Vengeance’s ponderous hull. He sensed an awkwardness in the cabin, and he judged that there was disagreement between Wigram and Elphinstone, a judgment that was confirmed when the tall Engineer leaned towards him. ‘It’s all bloody madness, Sharpe. Marines have got the pox so they want you instead.’

The comment, ostensibly made in a confiding voice, had easily carried to the far end of the table where Bampfylde sat. The naval captain frowned. ‘Our Marines have a contagious fever, Elphinstone; not the pox.’

Elphinstone snorted derision, while Colonel Wigram, on Sharpe’s left, opened a leather-bound notebook. The middle-aged Wigram had the manner of a man whose life had been spent in an office; as though all his impetuosity and enjoyment had been drained by dusty, dry files. His voice was precise and fussy.

Yet even Wigram’s desiccated voice could not drain the excitement from the proposals he brought to this council of war. One hundred miles to the north, and far behind enemy lines, was a fortress called the Teste de Buch. The fortress guarded the entrance to a natural harbour, the Bassin d’Arcachon, which was just twenty-five miles from the city of Bordeaux.

Elphinstone, at the mention of Bordeaux, gave a scornful grunt that was ignored by the rest of the cabin.

The fortress of Teste de Buch, Wigram continued, was to be captured by a combined naval and Army force. The expedition’s naval commander would be Captain Bampfylde, while the senior Army officer would be Major Sharpe. Sharpe, understanding that the chill, pedantic Wigram would not be travelling north, felt a pang of relief.

Wigram gave Sharpe a cold, pale glance. ‘Once the fortress is secured, Major, you will march inland to ambush the high road of France. A successful ambush will alarm Marshal Soult, and might even detach French troops to guard against further such attacks.’ Wigram paused. It seemed to Sharpe, listening to the slap of water at the Vengeance’s stern, that there was an unnatural strain in the cabin, as though Wigram approached a subject that had been discussed and argued before Sharpe arrived.

‘It is to be hoped,’ Wigram turned a page of his notebook, ‘that any prisoners you take in the ambush will provide confirmation of reports reaching us from the city of Bordeaux.’

‘Balderdash,’ Elphinstone said loudly.

‘Your dissent is already noted,’ Wigram said dismissively.

‘Reports!’ Elphinstone sneered the word. ‘Children’s tales, rumours, balderdash!’

Sharpe, uncomfortably trapped between the two men, kept his voice very mild. ‘Reports, sir?’

Captain Bampfylde, evidently Wigram’s ally in the disagreement, chose to reply. ‘We hear, Sharpe, that the city of Bordeaux is ready to rebel against the Emperor. If it’s true, and we profoundly hope that it is, then we believe the city might rise in spontaneous revolt when they hear that His Majesty’s forces are merely a day’s march away.’

‘And if they do rise,’ Colonel Wigram took up the thread, ‘then we shall ship troops north to Arcachon and invade the city, thus cutting France in two.’

‘You note, Sharpe,’ Elphinstone was relishing this chance to stir more trouble, ‘that you, a mere major, are chosen to make the reconnaissance. Thus, if anything goes wrong, you will carry the blame.’

‘Major Sharpe will make his own decisions,’ Wigram said blandly, ‘after interrogating his prisoners.’

‘Meaning you won’t go to Bordeaux,’ Elphinstone said confidingly to Sharpe.

‘But you have been chosen, Major,’ Wigram’s pale eyes looked at Sharpe, ‘not because of your lowly rank, as Colonel Elphinstone believes, but because you are known as a gallant officer unafraid of bold decisions.’

‘In short,’ Elphinstone continued the war across the table, ‘because you will make an ideal scapegoat.’

The naval officers seemed embarrassed by the contretemps, all but for Bampfylde who had evidently relished the clash of colonels. Now the naval captain smiled. ‘You merely have to understand, Major, that your first task is to escalade the fortress. Perhaps, before we explore the subsequent operations, Colonel Wigram might care to tell us about the Teste de Buch’s defences?’

Wigram turned pages in his notebook. ‘Our latest intelligence demonstrates that the garrison can scarcely man four guns. The rest of its men have been marched north to bolster the Emperor’s Army. I doubt whether Major Sharpe will be much troubled by such a flimsy force.’

‘But four fortress guns,’ Elphinstone said harshly, ‘could slice a Battalion to mincemeat. I’ve seen it!’ Implying, evidently truthfully, that Wigram had not.

‘If we imagine disaster,’ Bampfylde said smoothly, ‘then we shall allow timidity to convince us into inaction.’ The comment implied cowardice to Elphinstone, but Bampfylde seemed oblivious of the offence he had given. Instead he unrolled a chart on to the table. ‘Weight the end of that, Sharpe! Now! There seems to me just one sensible way to proceed.’

He outlined his plan which was, indeed, the only sensible way to proceed. The naval flotilla, under Bampfylde’s command, would sail northwards and land troops on the coast south of the Point d’Arcachon. That land force, commanded by Sharpe, would proceed towards the fortress, a journey of some six hours, and make an escalade while the defenders were distracted by the incursion of a frigate into the mouth of the Arcachon channel. ‘The frigate’s bound to take some punishment,’ Bampfylde said equably, ‘but I’m sure Major Sharpe will overcome the gunners swiftly.’

The chart showed the great Basin of Arcachon with its narrow entrance channel, and marked the fortress of Teste de Buch on the eastern bank of that channel. A profile of the fort, as a landmark for mariners, was sketched on the chart, but the profile told Sharpe little about the stronghold’s defences. He looked at Elphinstone. ‘What do we know about the fort, sir?’

Elphinstone had been piqued by Bampfylde’s discourteous treatment and thus chose to use the technical language of his trade, doubtless hoping thereby to annoy the bumptious naval captain. ‘It’s an old fortification, Sharpe, a square-trace. You’ll face a glacis rising to ten feet, with an eight counterscarp into the outer ditch. A width of twenty and a scarp often. That’s revetted with granite, by the way, like the rest of the damned place. Climb the scarp and you’re on a counterguard. They’ll be peppering you by now and you’ve got a forty foot dash to the next counterscarp.’ The colonel was speaking with a grim relish, as if seeing the figures running and dropping through the enemy’s plunging fire. ‘That’s twelve feet, it’s flooded, and the enceinte height is twenty.’

‘The width of that last ditch?’ Sharpe was making notes.

‘Sixteen, near enough.’ Elphinstone shrugged. ‘We don’t think it’s flooded more than a foot or two.’ Even if the naval officers did not understand Elphinstone’s language, they could understand the import of what he was saying. The Teste de Buch might be an old fort, but it was a bastard; a killer.

‘Weapons, sir?’ Sharpe asked.

Elphinstone had no need to consult his notes. ‘They’ve got six thirty-six pounders in a semi-circular bastion that butts into the channel. The other guns are twenty-fours, wall mounted.’

Captain Horace Bampfylde had listened to the technical language and understood that a small point was being scored against him. Now he smiled. ‘We should be grateful it’s not a tenaille trace.’

Elphinstone frowned, realizing that Bampfylde had understood all that had been said. ‘Indeed.’

‘No lunettes?’ Bampfylde’s expression was seraphic. ‘Caponiers?’

Elphinstone’s frown deepened. ‘Citadels at the corners, but hardly more than guerites.’

Bampfylde looked to Sharpe. ‘Surprise and speed, Major! They can’t defend the complete enceinte, and the frigate will distract them!’ So much, it seemed, for the problems of capturing a fortress. The talk moved on to the proposed naval operations inside the Bassin d’Arcachon, where more chasse-marées awaited capture, but Sharpe, uninterested in that part of the discussion, let his thoughts drift.

He did not see Bampfylde’s plush, shining cabin, instead he imagined a rising grass slope, scythed smooth, called a glacis. Beyond the glacis was an eight foot drop into a granite faced, sheer-sided ditch twenty feet wide.

At the far side of the ditch his men would be faced with a ten foot climb that would lead to a gentle, inward-facing slope; the counterguard. The counterguard was like a broad target displayed to the marksman on the inner wall, the enceinte. Men would cross the counterguard, screaming and twisting as the balls thumped home, only to face a twelve foot drop into a flooded ditch that was sixteen feet wide.

By now the enemy would be dropping shells or even stones. A boulder, dropped from the twenty foot high inner wall, would crush a man’s skull like an eggshell, yet still the wall would have to be climbed with ladders if the men were to penetrate into the Teste de Buch. Given a month, and a train of siege artillery, Sharpe could have blasted a broad path through the whole trace of ditches and walls, but he did not have a month. He had a few moments only in which he must save a frigate from the terrible battering of the fort’s heavy guns.

‘Major?’ Abruptly the image of the twenty foot wall vanished to be replaced by Bampfylde’s quizzically mocking smile. ‘Major?’

‘Sir?’

‘We are talking, Major, of how many men would be needed to defend the captured fortress while we await reinforcements from the south?’

‘How long will the garrison have to hold?’ Sharpe asked.

Wigram chose to answer. ‘A few days at the most. If we do find that Bordeaux’s ripe for rebellion, then we can bring an Army corps north inside ten days.’

Sharpe shrugged. ‘Two hundred? Three? But you’d best use Marines, because I’ll need all of my Battalion if you want me to march inland.’

It was Sharpe’s first trenchant statement and it brought curious glances from the junior naval officers. They had all heard of Richard Sharpe and they watched his weather-darkened, scarred face with interest.

‘Your Battalion?’ Wigram’s voice was as dry as old paper.

‘A brigade would be preferable, sir.’

Elphinstone snorted with laughter, but Wigram’s expression did not change. ‘And what leads you to suppose, Major, that the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers are going to Arcachon?’

Sharpe had assumed it because he had been summoned, and because he was the de facto commander of the Battalion, but Colonel Wigram now disabused him brutally.

‘You are here, Major, because you are supernumerary to regimental requirements.’ Wigram’s voice, like his gaze, was pitiless. ‘Your regimental rank, Major, is that of captain. Captains, however ambitious, do not command Battalions. You should be apprised that a new commanding officer, of due seniority and competence, is being appointed to the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers.’

There was a horrid and embarrassed silence in the cabin. Every man there, except for the young Captain Bampfylde, knew the bitter pangs of promotion denied, and each man knew they were watching Sharpe’s hopes being broken on the wheel of the Army’s regulations. The assembled officers looked away from Sharpe’s evident hurt.

And Sharpe was hurt. He had rescued that Battalion. He had trained it, given it the Prince of Wales’s name, then led it to the winter victories in the Pyrenees. He had hoped, more than hoped, that his command of the Battalion would be made official, but the Army had decided otherwise. A new man would be appointed; indeed, Wigram said, the new commanding officer was daily expected on the next convoy from England.

The news, given so coldly and unsympathetically in the formal setting of the Vengeance’s cabin, cut Sharpe to the bone, but there was no protest he could make. He guessed that was why Wigram had chosen this moment to make the announcement. Sharpe felt numbed.

‘Naturally,’ Bampfylde leaned forward, ‘the glory attached to the capture of Bordeaux will more than compensate for this disappointment, Major.’

‘And you will rejoin your Battalion, as a major, when this duty is done,’ Wigram said, as though that was some consolation.

‘Though the war,’ Bampfylde smiled at Sharpe, ‘may well be over because of your efforts.’

Sharpe stirred himself from the bitter disappointment. ‘Single-handed efforts, sir? Your Marines are poxed, my Battalion can’t come, what am I supposed to do? Train cows to fight?’

Bampfylde’s face showed a flicker of a frown. ‘There will be Marines, Major. The Biscay Squadron will be combed for fit men.’

Sharpe, his belligerence released by Wigram’s news, stared at the young naval captain. ‘It’s a good thing, is it not, that the malady has not spread to your sailors, sir? You seemed to have a full ship’s company as I came aboard?’

Bampfylde stared like a basilisk at Sharpe. Colonel Elphinstone gave a quick, sour laugh, but Wigram slapped the table like a timid schoolmaster calling a rowdy class to order. ‘You will be given troops. Major, in numbers commensurate to your task.’

‘How many?’

‘Enough,’ Wigram said testily.

The question of Sharpe’s troops was dropped. Instead Bampfylde talked of a brig-sloop that had been sent to watch the fortress and to question any local fishermen who put to sea. The presence of the American privateer was discussed and Bampfylde smiled as he spoke of the punishment that would be fetched on Cornelius Killick. ‘We must regard that doomed American as a bonus for our efforts.’ Then the talk went to naval signals, far beyond Sharpe’s competence to understand, and again he wondered about that fortress. Even under-manned a fortress was a formidable thing, and no one in this wide cabin seemed interested in ensuring that he was given a proper force. At the same time, as the voices buzzed about him, he tried to assuage the deep pain of losing the command of his Battalion.

Sharpe knew the regulations disqualified him from commanding the Battalion, but there were other Battalions commanded by majors and the regulations seemed to be ignored for those men. But not for Sharpe. Another man was to be given the superb instrument of infantry that Sharpe had led through the winter’s battles and, once again, Sharpe was adrift and unwanted in the Army’s flotsam. He reflected, bitterly, that if he had been a Northamptonshire Sharpe, or a Wiltshire Sharpe, with an Honourable tag to his name and a park about his father’s house, then this would not have happened. Instead he was a Middlesex Sharpe, conceived in a whore’s transaction and whelped in a slum, and thus a fit whipping-boy for bores like Wigram.

Colonel Elphinstone, sensing that Sharpe was miles away again, kicked the Rifleman’s ankle and Sharpe recovered attentiveness in time to hear Bampfylde inviting the assembled officers to dine with him.

‘I fear I can’t.’ Sharpe did not want to stay in this cabin where his disappointment had shamed him in front of so many officers. It was a petty motive, pride-born, but a soldier without pride was a soldier doomed for defeat.

‘Major Sharpe,’ Bampfylde explained with ill-concealed scorn, ‘has taken a wife, so we must forgo his company.’

‘I haven’t taken a wife,’ Elphinstone said belligerently, ‘but I can’t dine either. Your servant, sir.’

The two men, Sharpe and Elphinstone, travelled back to St Jean de Luz in Bampfylde’s barge. Elphinstone, swathed in a vast black cloak, shook his head sadly. ‘Bloody madness, Sharpe. Utter bloody madness.’

It began to rain. Sharpe wished he was alone with his misery.

‘You’re disappointed, aren’t you?’ Elphinstone remarked.

‘Yes.’

‘Wigram’s a bastard,’ Elphinstone said savagely, ‘and you’re to take no bloody notice of him. You’re not going to Bordeaux. Those are orders.’

Sharpe, stirred from his self-pity by Elphinstone’s ferocious words, looked at the big Engineer. ‘So why are we taking the fort, sir?’

‘Because we need the chasse-marées, why else? Or were you dozing through that explanation?’

Sharpe nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

The rain fell harder as Elphinstone explained that the whole Arcachon expedition had been planned simply to release the three dozen chasse-marées that were protected behind the fortress guns. ‘I need those boats, Sharpe, not to waltz into bloody Bordeaux, but to build a bloody bridge. But for Christ’s sake don’t tell anyone it’s a bridge. I’m telling you, because I won’t have you gallivanting off to Bordeaux, you understand me?’

‘Entirely, sir.’

‘Wigram thinks we want the boats for a landing, because that’s what the Peer wants everyone to think. But it’s going to be a bridge, Sharpe, a damned great bridge to astonish the bloody Frogs. But I can’t build the bloody bridge unless you capture the bloody fort and get me the boats. After that, enjoy yourself. Go and ambush the high road, then go back to Bampfylde and tell him the Frogs are still loyal to Boney. No rebellion, no farting about, no glory.’ Elphinstone stared gloomily at the water which was being pocked by the cold rain into a resemblance of dirty, heaving gunmetal. ‘It’s Wigram who’s got this bee in his bonnet about Bordeaux. The fool sits behind a bloody desk and believes every rumour he hears.’

‘Is it a rumour?’

‘Some precious Frenchman pinned his ear back.’ Elphinstone plucked his cloak even tighter as the barge struggled against the current sweeping about the sandbar. ‘Michael Hogan didn’t help. He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Elphinstone sniffed. ‘Damned shame he’s ill. I can’t understand why he encouraged Wigram, but he did. But you’re to take no notice, Sharpe. The Peer expects you to take the fortress, let bloody Bampfylde extract the boats, then come back here.’

Sharpe stared at Elphinstone and received a nod of confirmation. So Wellington was not unaware of Wigram’s plans, but Wellington was putting his own man, Sharpe, into the operation. Was that, Sharpe wondered, the reason why he had lost his Battalion?

‘It wouldn’t matter,’ Elphinstone went on, ‘except that we need the bloody Navy to carry us there, and we can’t control them. Bampfylde thinks he’ll get an earldom out of Bordeaux, so stop the silly bugger dead. No rising, no rebellion, no hopes, no glory, and no bloody earldom.’

Sharpe smiled. ‘There’ll be no fortress unless I have decent troops, sir.’

‘You’ll get the best I can find,’ Elphinstone promised, ‘but not in such numbers that might tempt you to invade Bordeaux.’

‘Indeed, sir.’

The oarsmen were grunting with the effort of fighting the tide’s last ebb as the barge rounded the harbour’s northern mole. Sharpe understood well enough what was happening. A simple cutting out expedition, necessitating the capture of a coastal fort, was needed to release the chasse-marées, but ambitious officers, eager to make a name for themselves in the waning months of the war, wished to turn that mundane operation into a flight of fancy. Sharpe, who would make the reconnaissance inland, was ordered to blunt their hopes.

The steersman pointed the boat’s prow towards a flight of green-slimed steps. The white-painted barge, in smoother water now, cut swiftly towards the quay. The rain became tempestuous, slicking the quay’s stones darker and drumming on the top of Sharpe’s shako.

‘In oars!’ the steersman shouted.

The white bladed oars rose like wings and the craft coasted in a smooth curve to the foot of the steps. Sharpe looked up. The harbour wall, sheer and black and wet, reared above him like a cliff. ‘How high is that?’ he asked Elphinstone.

The Colonel squinted upwards. ‘Eighteen feet?’ Then Elphinstone saw the point of Sharpe’s question and shrugged. ‘Let’s hope Wigram’s right and they’ve stripped the Teste de Buch of defenders.’

Because if the fort’s enceinte was defended Sharpe would have no chance, none, and his men would die so that the naval officer could blame the Army for failure. That was a chilling thought for a winter’s dusk in which the rain slanted from a steel-grey sky to pursue Sharpe through the alleys to where his wife sewed up a rent in his old jacket; his battle-jacket, the green jacket that he would wear to a fortress wall that waited for him in Arcachon.

CHAPTER THREE

‘I suppose,’ Richard Sharpe said harshly, ‘that the Army couldn’t find any real soldiers?’

‘That’s about the cut of it,’ the Rifle captain replied. ‘Mind you, I suppose the Army couldn’t find any real commanding officers either?’

Sharpe laughed. Colonel Elphinstone had done his best, and that best was very good indeed for, if Sharpe could not take his own men into battle, then there was no unit he would rather lead than Captain William Frederickson’s men of the 60th Rifles. He took Frederickson’s hand. ‘I’m glad, William.’

‘We’re not unhappy ourselves.’ Frederickson was a man of villainous, even vile, appearance. His left eye was gone and the socket was covered by a mildewed patch. Most of his right ear had been torn away by a bullet while two of his front teeth were clumsy fakes. All the wounds had been taken on the battlefield.

Frederickson’s men, with clumsy and affectionate wit, called him ‘Sweet William’. The 60th, raised to fight against the Indian tribes in America, was still known as the Royal American Rifles, though half the Company were Germans, a quarter were Spaniards enrolled during the long war, and the rest were British except for a single, harsh-faced man who alone justified his regiment’s old name. Sharpe had fought alongside this Company two years before and, seeing the bitter face, the name came back to him. ‘That’s the American. Taylor, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ Frederickson and Sharpe stood far enough from the two paraded Companies so their voices could not be overheard by the men.

‘We might come up against some Jonathons,’ Sharpe said. ‘There’s some bugger called Killick skulking in Arcachon. Will it worry Taylor if he has to fight his countrymen?’

Frederickson shrugged. ‘Leave him to me, sir.’

Two Companies of the green-jacketed Riflemen had been given to Sharpe. Frederickson commanded one, a Lieutenant Minver the other, and together they numbered one hundred and twenty-three men. Not many, Sharpe thought, to assault a fortress on the French coast. He walked further along the quay with Frederickson, stopping by a fish cart that dripped bloody scales into a puddle. ‘Between you and me, William, it’s a mess.’

‘I thought it might be.’

‘We leave tomorrow to capture a fortress. It isn’t supposed to be heavily defended, but no one’s sure. After that, God knows what happens. There’s a madman who wants us to invade France, but between you and me we’re not.’

Frederickson grinned, then turned and looked at the two Companies of Riflemen. ‘We’re capturing a fort all by our little selves?’

‘The Navy says a few Marines might be well enough to help us.’

‘That’s very decent of them.’ Frederickson stared at the great bulk of the Vengeance. Barges, propelled by huge sweeps, were taking casks of water from the harbour to the huge ship.

‘You’ll draw extra ammunition,’ Sharpe said. ‘The First Division’s paying for it.’

‘I’ll rob the bastards blind,’ Frederickson said happily.

‘And tonight you’ll do me the honour of dining with Jane and myself?’

‘I’d like to meet her.’ Frederickson sounded guarded.

‘She’s wonderful.’ Sharpe said it warmly, and Frederickson, seeing his friend’s enthusiasm, hoped that a new wife had not sapped Sharpe’s appetite for the bloody business that lay ahead at Arcachon.

Commandant Henri Lassan thought he detected sleet in the dawn, but he could not be sure until he climbed to the western bastion and saw how the flakes settled briefly on the great cheeks of his guns before melting into cold rivulets of water. The guns were loaded, as they always were, but their muzzles and vent-holes were stoppered against the damp. ‘Good morning, Sergeant!’

‘Sir!’ The sergeant stamped his feet and slapped his hands against the cold.

Lassan’s orderly climbed the stone ramp with a tray of coffee-mugs. Lassan always brought the morning guard a mug of coffee each and the men appreciated the small gesture. The Commandant, they said, was a gentleman.

Children ran across the courtyard and women’s voices sounded from the kitchens. There should not be women in the fort, but Lassan had let the families of his gun crews take up the quarters vacated by the infantry who had gone to the northern battles. Lassan believed his men were less likely to desert if their families were inside the defences.

‘There she is, sir.’ The sergeant pointed through the sleeting rain.

Lassan looked over the narrow Arcachon channel where the tide raced across the shoals. Beyond the sandbanks the surging grey waves were torn by wind into a maelstrom of broken white water amidst which, beating southwards, was a little ship.

The ship was a British brig-sloop with two tall masts and a vast driver-sail at her stern. Her black and white banded hull hid, Lassan knew, eighteen guns. Her sails were reefed, but even so she seemed to plunge through the waves and Lassan saw how high the spray fountained from the brig’s stem. ‘Our enemies,’ he said mildly, ‘are having a disturbed breakfast.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The sergeant laughed.

Lassan cradled his coffee mug. There was something vulnerable about his face, a drawn and frightened look that made his men protective of him. They knew Commandant Lassan wished to become a priest when this war ended and they liked him for it, but they also knew that he would fight as a soldier until the last shot of the war had been fired. Now he stared at the British brig. ‘You saw her last night?’

‘At sundown, sir,’ the sergeant was certain. ‘And there were lights out there at night.’

‘He’s watching us, isn’t he?’ Lassan smiled. ‘He’s seeing what we’re made of.’

The sergeant slapped the gun as a reply.

Lassan turned to stare thoughtfully into the fort’s courtyard. A warning had come from Bordeaux that he was to prepare for a British attack, but Bordeaux had sent him no men to reinforce his shrunken garrison. Lassan could man his big guns, or he could protect the landward walls, but he could not do both. If the British landed troops, and sent warships into the channel, then Lassan would be trapped between the hammer and the anvil. He turned back to stare at the British brig. If Bordeaux was right, that inquisitive craft was making a reconnaissance, and Lassan must deceive the watchers. He must make them think the fort was so thinly defended that a landing by troops would be unnecessary.

Lieutenant Gerard came yawning from the green-painted door of the officers’ quarters. Lassan hailed him. ‘Lieutenant!’

‘Sir?’

‘No flag today! And no washing hung to dry on the barracks’ roof!’ Not that anyone was likely to dry washing in this weather.

Gerard, his blue jacket unbuttoned above his braces, frowned. ‘No flag, sir?’

‘You heard me, Lieutenant! And no men in the embrasures, you hear? Sentries in the citadels only.’

‘I hear you, sir.’

Lassan turned back to see the brig-sloop tack into the rain-sodden wind. He saw a shiver of sails, a spume of foam, and he imagined the cloaked officers, their braid tarnished by salt, staring at the grey, crouching fort through their spyglasses. He knew that such little ships, sent to spy on the French coast, often stopped the fishing boats that worked close inshore. Today then, and every day for the next week, only those fishermen whom Henri Lassan trusted would be allowed past the guns of the Teste de Buch. They would be encouraged to take English gold, and encouraged to drink a glass of dark rum in English cabins, and encouraged to sell lobsters to blue-coated Englishmen, and in return they would tell a plausible lie or two on behalf of Henri Lassan.

Then, with a roar from these great, passive guns that waited for employment, Henri Lassan would strike a blow for France.

He smiled, pleased with his notion, and went to breakfast.

Before dinner Sharpe faced a miserable and unhappy few moments. ‘The answer,’ he repeated, ‘is no.’

Regimental Sergeant Major Patrick Harper stood in the small parlour of Jane’s lodgings and twisted his wet shako in thick, strong fingers. ‘I talked with Mr d’Alembord, sir, so I did, and he said I could come. I mean we’re only sitting around like washer-women in a bloody drought, so we are.’

‘There’s a new colonel coming, Patrick. He needs his RSM.’

Harper frowned. ‘Needs his major, too.’

‘He can’t lose both of us.’ Sharpe did not have the power to deny the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers the services of this massive Irishman. ‘And if you come, Patrick, the new man will only appoint a new RSM. You wouldn’t want that.’

Harper frowned. ‘I’d rather be in a scrap if one’s going, sir, and Mr Frederickson wouldn’t take me amiss, nor would he.’

Sharpe could not be persuaded. ‘No.’

The huge man, four inches taller than Sharpe’s six feet, grinned. ‘I could take sick leave, sir, so I could.’

‘You have to be sick first.’

‘But I am!’ Harper pointed to his mouth. ‘I’ve got a toothache something desperate, sir. Here!’ He opened his mouth, jabbed with his finger, and Sharpe saw that Harper did indeed have a reddened and swollen upper gum.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘It’s dreadful, so it is!’ Harper, sensing a chink in Sharpe’s armour, became enthusiastic about his pain. ‘It’s more of a throb, sir. On and off, on and off, like a great drumbeat in your skull. Desperate, it is!’

‘Then see a surgeon tonight,’ Sharpe said unsympathetically, ‘and have it pulled. Then get back to Battalion where you belong.’

Harper’s face dropped. ‘Truly, sir? I can’t come?’

Sharpe sighed. ‘I’d rather have you along, RSM, than any dozen other men.’ That was true a thousand times over. Sharpe knew of no man he would rather fight beside, but it could not be at Arcachon. ‘I’m sorry, Patrick. Besides you’re a father now. You should take care.’ Harper’s Spanish wife, just a month before, had given birth to a son that had been christened Richard Patricio Augustine Harper. Sharpe had found the choice of Richard an embarrassment, but Jane had been delighted when Harper sought permission to use the name. ‘And I’m doing you a favour, RSM,’ Sharpe went on.

‘How would that be, sir?’

‘Because your son will still have a father in two weeks.’ Sharpe was seeing that black, sheer, wet wall and the image of it made his voice savage. Then he turned as the door opened. ‘My dear.’

Jane, beautiful in a blue silken dress, smiled delightedly at Harper. ‘Sergeant Major! How’s the baby?’

‘Just grand, ma’am!’ Harper had formed a firm alliance with Mrs Sharpe that seemed aimed at subverting Major Sharpe’s authority. ‘And Isabella thanks you for the linen.’

‘You’ve got toothache!’ Jane frowned with concern. ‘Your cheek’s swollen.’

Harper blushed. ‘It’s only a wee ache, ma’am, nothing at all!’

‘You must have oil of cloves! There’s some in the kitchen. Come along!’

The oil of cloves was discovered and Harper sent, disconsolate, into the night.

‘He can’t come,’ Sharpe said after dinner, when he and Jane walked back alone through the town.

‘Poor Patrick.’ Jane insisted on stopping at Hogan’s lodgings, but there was no news. She had visited earlier in the day and thought the sick man was looking better.

‘I wish you wouldn’t risk yourself,’ Sharpe said.

‘You’ve said so a dozen times, Richard, and I promise I heard you each time.’

They went to bed and, just four hours later, the landlady hammered on their door. It was pitch dark outside and bitterly cold inside the bedroom. Frost had etched patterns on the small windowpanes, patterns that were reluctant to melt even though Sharpe revived the fire in the tiny grate. The landlady had brought candles and hot water. Sharpe shaved, then pulled on his old and faded Rifleman’s uniform. It was the uniform in which he fought, stained with blood and torn by bullet and blade. He would not go into action in any other uniform.

He oiled his rifle’s lock. He always carried a long-arm into battle, even though it had been ten years since he had been made into an officer. He drew his Heavy Cavalry sword from its scabbard and tested the fore-edge. It seemed odd to be going to war from his wife’s bed, odder still not to be marching with his own men or with Harper, and that thought gave him a flicker of unrest for he was not used to fighting without Harper beside him.

‘Two weeks,’ he said. ‘I should be back in two weeks. Maybe less.’

‘It will seem like eternity,’ Jane said loyally, then, with an exaggerated shudder, she threw the bedclothes back and snatched up the clothes that Sharpe had hung to warm before the fire. Her small dog, grateful for the chance, leaped into the warm pit of the bed.

‘You don’t have to come,’ Sharpe said.

‘Of course I’ll come. It’s every woman’s duty to watch her husband sail to the wars.’ Jane shivered suddenly, then sneezed.

A half hour later they went into the fish-smelling lane and the wind was like a knife in their faces. Torches flared on the quayside where the Amelie rose on the incoming tide.

A dark line of men, weapons gleaming softly, filed aboard the merchantman that was to be Sharpe’s transport. The Amelie was no jewel of Britain’s trading fleet. She had begun life as a collier, taking coal from the Tyne to the smoke thick Thames, and her dark timbers still stank thickly of coal-dust.

Casks and crates and nets of supplies were slung on board in the pre-dawn darkness. Boxes of rifle ammunition were piled on the quayside and with them were barrels of vilely salted and freshly-killed beef. Twice baked bread was wrapped in canvas and boxed in resinous pine. There were casks of water for the voyage, spare flints for the fighting, and whetstones for the sword-bayonets. Rope ladders were coiled in the Amelie’s scuppers so that the Riflemen, reaching the beach where they must disembark, could scramble down to the longboats sent from the Vengeance.

A smear of silver-grey marked the dawn and flooded slowly to show the filthy, littered water of the harbour. Aboard the Scylla, a frigate moored in the harbour roads, yellow lights showed from the stern cabin where doubtless the frigate’s captain took his breakfast.

‘I’ve wrapped you a cheese.’ Jane’s voice sounded small and frightened. ‘It’s in your pack.’

‘Thank you.’ Sharpe bent to kiss her and wished suddenly that he was not going. A wife, General Craufurd used to say, weakens a soldier. Sharpe held his wife an instant, feeling her ribs beneath the layers of wool and silk, then, suddenly, her slim body jerked as she sneezed again.

‘I’m catching a cold.’ She was shivering. Sharpe touched her forehead and it was oddly hot.

‘You’re not well.’

‘I hate rising early.’ Jane tried to smile, but her teeth were chattering and she shivered again. ‘And I’m not certain the fish was entirely to my taste last night.’

‘Go home!’

‘When you’re gone.’

Sharpe, even though a hundred men watched him, kissed his wife again. ‘Jane …’

‘My dear, you must go.’

‘But …’

‘It’s only a cold. Everyone gets a cold in winter.’

‘Sir!’ Sweet William saluted Sharpe and bowed to Jane. ‘Good morning, ma’am! Somewhat brisk!’

‘Indeed, Mr Frederickson.’ Jane shivered again.

‘Everyone’s aboard, sir.’ Frederickson turned to Sharpe.

Sharpe wanted to linger with Jane, he wanted to reassure himself that she had not caught Hogan’s fever, but Frederickson was waiting for him, men were holding the ropes that would swing the gangplank away, and he could not stay. He gave Jane a last kiss, and her forehead was like fire. ‘Go home to bed.’

‘I will.’ She was shaking now, hunched and clenched against the bitter wind.

Sharpe paused, wanting to say something memorable, something that would encompass the inchoate, extraordinary love he felt for her, but there were no words. He smiled, then turned to follow Frederickson on to the Amelie’s deck.

The daylight was thin now, seeping through the hilly landscape behind the port and making the streaked, bubbling, heaving water of the harbour silver. The gangplank crashed on to the stones of the quay.

Far out to sea, like some impossible mountain forming on the face of the waters, an airy structure of dirty grey sails caught the morning daylight. It was the Vengeance getting under way. She looked formidably huge; a great floating weapon that could make the air tremble and the sea shake when she launched her full broadside, but she would be useless in the shoal waters by the Teste de Buch fort. That would have to be taken by men and by hand-held weapons.

‘He’s signalling.’ Tremgar, master of the Amelie, spat over the side. ‘Means they’ll be moving us off. Stand by, forrard!’ He bellowed the last words.

A topsail dropped from the nearby Scylla’s yards and the movement, suggesting an imminent departure, made Sharpe turn to the quay. Jane, swathed in her powder-blue cloak, was still there. Sharpe could see her shivering. ‘Go home!’

A voice shouted. ‘Wait! Wait!’ The accent was French and the speaker a dully-dressed man, evidently a servant, who rode a small horse and led a packhorse on a leading rein. ‘Amelie! Wait!’

‘Bloody hell.’ Tremgar had been packing a pipe with dark tobacco that he now pushed into a pocket of his filthy coat.

Behind the servant and packhorse and, stately as a bishop in procession, rode a tall, elegant man on a tall, elegant horse. The man had a delicate, sensitive face, a white cloak clasped with silver, and a bicorne hat shielded with oiled cloth against the rain.

The gangplank was rigged again and the man, with a faint shudder as though the stench of the Amelie was too much for a gentleman of his fastidious tastes, came aboard. ‘I seek Major Sharpe,’ he announced in a French accent to the assembled officers who had gathered in the ship’s waist.

‘I’m Sharpe.’ Sharpe spoke from the poop deck.

The newcomer turned in a movement that would have been elegant on a dance-floor, but seemed somewhat ludicrous on the battered deck of an erstwhile collier. He took a quizzing glass from his sleeve and, with its help, inspected the tattered uniform of Major Richard Sharpe. He bowed, somehow suggesting that he should have been the recipient of such an honour himself, then took off his waterproofed hat to reveal sleek, silver hair that was brushed back to a black velvet bow. He held out a sealed envelope. ‘Orders.’

Sharpe had jumped down from the poop and now tore open the envelope. ‘To Major Sharpe. The bearer of this note is the Comte de Maquerre. You will render him every assistance within your power. Bertram Wigram, Colonel.’

Sharpe looked into the narrow face that had been powdered pale. He suddenly remembered that Hogan, in his sick ramblings, had mentioned the name Maquereau, meaning ‘pimp’, and he wondered if the insult was a nickname for this elegant, fastidious man. ‘You’re the Comte de Maquerre?’

‘I have that honour, Monsieur, and I travel to Arcachon with you.’ De Maquerre’s cloak had fallen open to reveal the uniform of the Chasseurs Britannique. Sharpe knew that regiment’s reputation. The officers were Frenchmen loyal to the ancien régime, while its men were deserters from the French Army and all unmitigated scoundrels. They could fight when the mood took them, but it was not a regiment Sharpe would want on his flank in battle.

‘Captain Frederickson! Four men to get the Frenchman’s baggage on board! Quick now!’

De Maquerre tugged at his buttoned, kidskin gloves. ‘You have quarters for my horse? And the packhorse.’

‘No horses,’ Sharpe said sourly, which only tossed the Comte de Maquerre into a sulky fit of protests in which the name of the Duc d’Angoulême, Louis XVIII, and the Lord Wellington featured prominently. In the meantime an angry message came from the Scylla demanding to know why the Amelie had not slipped her moorings at the flood tide, and finally Sharpe had to give way.

Which meant another delay as the Comte’s two horses were coaxed aboard and a section of Frederickson’s Riflemen were moved out of the forward hold to make way for the beasts. Trunks and cases were carried up the gangplank.

‘I cannot, of course,’ the Comte de Maquerre said, ‘travel in this ship.’

‘Why not?’ Sharpe asked.

A wrinkle of the nostril was the only answer and a further delay ensued while a message was sent to the Scylla which demanded that His Excellency the Comte de Maquerre be allowed quarters on board the frigate or, preferably, the Vengeance.

Captain Grant of the Scylla, doubtless under pressure from the Vengeance, returned a short answer. The Comte, disgusted, went below to the cabin he would now have to share with Frederickson.

The light was full now, dissipated by clouds and showing the filth that floated yellow and black in the grey harbour. A dead dog bumped against the Amelie’s hull as the forward cables were released, then the aft splashed free, and from overhead came the menacing sound of great sails unleashing to the wind’s power. A gull gave its lonely, harsh cry that sailors believed was the sound of a drowned soul in agony.

Sharpe stared at the golden-haired girl in the cloak of silver-blue and he blamed the wind for the tears in his eyes. Jane had a handkerchief to her face and Sharpe prayed that he had not seen the first symptoms of the fever in her. He tried to convince himself that Jane was right, and that she merely suffered from eating bad fish the night before, but goddamn it, he thought, why did she have to visit Hogan?

‘Go home!’ he shouted across the widening gap.

Jane shivered, but stayed. She watched the Amelie claw clumsily out beyond the bar and Sharpe, staring back to the harbour, saw the tiny signal of her white-waving handkerchief get smaller and smaller and finally disappear as a rain-squall seethed and hissed over the broken sea.

The Vengeance loomed over the other ships. The Amelie, pumps already working, took station astern while the Scylla, fast and impatient, leaped ahead into the squalls. The brig sloops closed behind the Amelie, and the shore of France was nothing but a dark smear on a grey sea.

A buoy, tarred black and marking God alone knew what hazard in this empty waste, slipped astern and thus the expedition to Arcachon, amidst chaos and uncertainty, was under way.

CHAPTER FOUR

All day Commandant Henri Lassan watched the ships pass. He watched from within one of the fort’s covered citadels and with the help of a brass-barrelled telescope that had belonged to his grandfather.

No flag flew from the fort. One of the local fishermen, trusted by Lassan, had taken his small boat to the Lacanau shoals where the British brig had taken the smack’s wind and invited the captain aboard. Rum had been served, gold paid for fish, and the fisherman had solemnly informed the enemy that the fort was deserted entirely of its old garrison. They had gone north, he said, to serve the Emperor, and only a few local militia now patrolled the ramparts. If the lie was believed then Lassan might entice the British into the range of his heavy guns, and he had cause to think the lie had worked for the brig had flattened her sails into the wind and gone southwards.

Now, instead of the brig, a vast line of grey sails flecked the western horizon. Commandant Lassan guessed the ships were eight or nine miles out to sea and he knew that he watched a British convoy carrying men and weapons and horses and ammunition to their Army to the south.

The sight made Henri Lassan feel lonely. His Emperor was far away and he was alone on the coast of France and his enemy could sail with impunity down that coast in a massive convoy that would have needed a fleet to disrupt. Except there were no more French fleets; the last had been destroyed by Nelson nine years before and what ships were left rotted in their anchorages.

A few privateers, American and French, sailed the ocean, but they were like small dogs yapping at the heels of a vast herd. Even Cornelius Killick, in his splendid Thuella, could not have taken a ship from that convoy. Killick would have waited for a straggler perhaps, but nothing less than a fleet could have broken that vast line of ships.

It was painful to see the enemy’s power so naked, so unchallenged, so ponderous. In the great holds of those hull-down ships were the instruments that would bring death to Soult’s army in the south, and Lassan could do nothing. He could win his small battle, if it came, but the greater struggle was beyond his help.

That thought made him chide himself for lack of faith and, in penitence, he went to the fort’s small chapel and prayed for a miracle. Perhaps the Emperor, marching and counter-marching his men along the frost hardened roads of the north, could win a great victory and break the alliance that ringed France, yet the Emperor’s desperation was witnessed by the fort’s emptiness. France had been scraped for men, then scraped again, and many of the next class of conscripts had already fled into the woods or hills to escape the sergeants who came to take cannon-fodder still not grown to manhood.

A clash of boots, a shout, and the squeal of the gate hinges which, however often greased, insisted on screeching like a soul entering purgatory, announced a visitor to the fort. Lassan pocketed his beads, crossed himself, and went into the twilight.

‘The bastards! The double-crossing bastards! Good evening, Henri.’ Cornelius Killick, his savage face furious, nodded to the Commandant. ‘Bastards!’

‘Who?’

‘Bordeaux! No copper! No oak! What am I supposed to do? Paste paper over the bloody holes?’

‘Perhaps you’ll take some wine?’ Lassan suggested diplomatically.

‘I’ll take some wine.’ The American followed Lassan into the Commandant’s quarters that looked more like a library than a soldier’s rooms. ‘That bastard Ducos! I’d like to pull his teeth out through his backside.’

‘I thought,’ Lassan said gently, ‘that the coffin-maker in Arcachon had given you some elm?’

‘Given? The bastard made us pay three times the price! And I don’t like sailing with a ship’s arse made out of dead man’s wood.’

‘Ah, a sailor’s superstition.’ Lassan poured wine into the crystal glasses that bore his family’s coat of arms. The last Comte de Lassan had died beneath the guillotine, but Henri had never been tempted to use the title that was rightfully his. ‘Did you see all those fat merchantmen crawling south?’

‘All day,’ Killick said gloomily. ‘Take one of those and you make a small fortune. Not as much as an Indiaman, of course.’ He finished the glass of wine and poured himself more. ‘I told you about the Indiaman I took?’

‘Indeed you did,’ Henri Lassan said politely, ‘three times.’

‘And was her hold crammed with silks? With spices? With treasures of the furthest East? With peacock’s plumes and sapphires blue?’ Killick gave his great whoop of a laugh. ‘No, my friend. She was crammed to the gunwales with saltpetre. Saltpetre to make powder, powder to drive bullets, bullets to kill the British. It is kind of our enemies, is it not, to provide the powers of their own destruction?’ He sat beside the fire and stared at the thin, scholarly-faced Lassan. ‘So, my friend, are the bastards coming?’

‘If they want the chasse-marées,’ Lassan said mildly, ‘they’ll have to come here.’

‘And the weather,’ the American said, ‘will let them land safely.’ The long Biscay shore, that could thunder with tumbling surf, was this week in gentler mood. The breaking waves beyond the channel were four or five feet high, frightening enough to landlubbers, but not high enough to stop ships’ boats from landing.

Lassan, still hoping that his deception would persuade the British that they had no need to land men on the coast to the south, nevertheless acknowledged the possibility. ‘Indeed.’

‘And if they do come by land,’ Killick said brutally, ‘they’ll beat you.’

Lassan glanced at the ebony crucifix that hung between his bookshelves. ‘Perhaps not.’

The American seemed oblivious of Lassan’s appeal to the Almighty. ‘And if they take the fort,’ he went on, ‘they’ll command the whole Basin.’

‘They will, indeed.’

‘And they’ll take the Thuella.’ Killick said it softly, but in his imagination he was seeing his beautiful ship captured by mocking British sailors. The Thuella would be sailed to England as a prize, and a sleek New England schooner, made to ride the long winds of empty oceans, would become an unloved coasting ship carrying British trade. ‘By God, they will not take her!’

‘We’ll do our best,’ Lassan said helplessly, though how four gun crews could resist a British attack was indeed a problem that called for a miracle. Lassan did not doubt that his guns could wreak damage, but once the British discovered the guns were manned they would soon land their Marines and surround the fort. And Lassan, because the Emperor had been greedy for men, could not defend the seaward and the landward walls at once.

The grim news made the American silent. He stared at the small fire, his hawk’s face frowning, and when he finally spoke his voice was oddly tentative. ‘What if we fought?’

‘You?’ Lassan could not hide his surprise.

‘We can fight, Henri.’ Killick grinned. ‘And we’ve got those damned twelve-pounder guns in our hold.’ He was suddenly filled with enthusiasm, seizing a map from Lassan’s table and weighting its corners with books. ‘They’ll land south of Point Arcachon?’

‘Undoubtedly.’

‘And there are only two routes they can take north. The paths by the beach, or the road!’ Killick’s face was alight with the thought of action, and Lassan saw that the American was a man who revelled in the simple problems of warfare. Lassan had met other such men; brave men who had made their names famous throughout France and written pages of history through their love of violent action. He wondered what would happen to such men when the war ended.

‘You’re a sailor,’ Lassan said gently, ‘and fighting on land is not the same as a sea battle.’

‘But if the bastards aren’t expecting us, Henri! If the pompous bastards think they’re safe! Then we ambush them!’ Killick was certain his men, trained gunners, could handle the French artillery and he was seeing, in his hopeful imagination, the grapeshot cutting down marching files of British Marines. ‘By God we can do it, Henri!’

Lassan held up a thin hand to stop the enthusiastic flow. ‘If you really want to help, Captain Killick, then put your men into the fort.’

‘No.’ Killick knew only too well what the British would do to a captured privateer’s crew. If Killick fought to save the Thuella then he must have a safe retreat in case he was defeated. Yet in his plan to ambush the British on their approach march he could not see any chance of defeat. The enemy Marines would be surprised, flayed by grapeshot, and the Thuella would be safe.

Henri Lassan, staring at the map, wondered whether the American’s plan delineated the miracle he had prayed for. If the British did not capture the fort they could not take the chasse-marées, and without the chasse-marées they were trapped behind the rivers running high with winter’s floodwaters.

Trapped. And perhaps the Emperor, bloodying his northern enemies, would march south and give the British Army a shattering defeat.

For, though Wellington had conquered every French Marshal or General sent to fight him, he had never faced the Emperor’s genius. Lassan wondered if this big, handsome American had found the small answer that would hold up the British just long enough to let the Emperor come south and teach the goddamns a lesson in warfare. Then a pang of realism forced Lassan’s mind to contemplate failure. ‘What will you do, mon ami, if the British win?’

Killick shrugged. ‘Dismast the Thuella and make her look like a wreck, then pray that the British ignore her. And you, Commandant, what will you do?’

Lassan smiled sadly. ‘Burn the chasse-marées, of course.’ By so doing he would condemn the two hundred men of the crews and their families to penury. The mayor and curé had begged him to preserve the boats which, even in French defeat, would give life and bread to the communities of the Biscay coast, but in defeat Henri Lassan would do his duty. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,’ he said.

‘It won’t.’ Killick brandished his cigar to leave an airy trace of smoke like that made by the burning fuse of an arcing mortar shell. ‘It’s a brilliant idea, Henri! So let the buggers come, eh?’

They drank to victory in a winter’s dusk while, far to the south, where they crossed the path of a great convoy tacking the ocean, Richard Sharpe and his small force came north to do battle.

It snowed in the night. Sharpe stood by the stinking tar-coated ratlines on the Amelie’s poop deck and watched the flakes whirl around the riding light. The galley fire was still lit forward and it cast a great sheet of flickering red on the foresail. The galley’s smoke was taken northwards towards the lights of the Vengeance.

The Amelie was making good time. The helmsman said so, even Captain Tremgar, grunting out of his bunk at two in the morning, agreed. ‘Never known the old sow to sail so well, sir. Can you not sleep, now?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll be having a drop of rum with you?’

‘No, thank you.’ Sharpe knew that the merchant Captain was offering a kindness, but he did not want his wits fuddled by drink as well as sleeplessness.

He stood alone by the rail. Sometimes, as the ship leaned to a gust of wind, a lantern would cast a shimmering ray on to a slick, hurrying sea. The snow whirled into nothingness. An hour after Tremgar’s brief conversation Sharpe saw a tiny spark of light, very red, far to the east.

‘Another ship?’ he asked the helmsman.

‘Lord love you, no, sir!’ The snow-bright wind whirled the helmsman’s voice in snatches to Sharpe. ‘That be land!’

A cottage? A soldier’s fire? Sharpe would never know. The spark glimmered, sometimes disappearing altogether, yet then flickering back to crawl at its snail’s pace along the dark horizon, and the sight of that far, anonymous light made Sharpe feel the discomfort of a soldier at sea. His imagination, that would plague him in battle, saw the Amelie shipwrecked, saw the great seas piling cold and grey on breaking timbers among which the bodies of his men would be whirled like rats in a barrel. That one small red spark was all that was safe, all that was secure, and he knew he would rather be a hundred miles behind the enemy lines and on firm ground than be on a ship in a treacherous sea.

‘You cannot sleep. Nor I.’

Sharpe turned. The ghostly figure of the Comte de Maquerre, hair as white as the great cloak that was clasped with silver at his throat, came towards him. The Comte missed his footing as the Amelie’s blunt bow thumped into a larger wave and the tall man had to clutch Sharpe’s arm. ‘My apologies, Major.’

Steadied by Sharpe, the Comte rested his backside on one of the small cannon that had been issued to the Amelie for its protection.

The Comte, his hair remarkably sleek for such an hour of the morning, stared eastwards. ‘France.’ He said the name with reverence, even love.

‘St Jean de Luz was in France,’ Sharpe said in an ungracious attempt to imply that the Comte’s company was not welcome.

The Comte de Maquerre ignored the comment, staring instead at the tiny spark as though it was the Grail itself. ‘I have been away, Major, for eighteen years.’ He spoke with a tragic intonation. ‘Waiting for liberty to be reborn in France.’

The ship dipped again and Sharpe glimpsed a whorl of grey water that was gone as swiftly as it had been illuminated. The snow melted on his face. Everyone spoke of liberty, he thought. The monarchists and the anti-monarchists, the Republicans and the anti-Republicans, the Bonapartists and the Bourbons, all carried the word around as if it was a genie trapped in a bottle and they were the sole possessors of the world’s corkscrew. Yet if Sharpe was to go down to the hold now and wake up the soldiers who slept so fitfully and uncomfortably in the stinking ’tween-decks of the Amelie, and if he was to ask each man what he wanted in life, then he knew, besides being thought mad by the men, that he would not hear the word Liberty used. They wanted a woman as a companion, they wanted cheap drink, they wanted a fire in winter and fat crops in summer, and they wanted a patch of land or a wineshop of their own. Most would not get what they desired.

But nor would Sharpe. He had a sudden, startlingly clear vision of Jane lying sick; sweating in the cold shivers of the killing fever. The image, so extraordinarily real in the freezing night, made him shiver himself.

He tried to shake the vision away, then told himself that Jane suffered from nothing more than an upset stomach and a winter’s cold, but the superstition of a soldier suddenly gripped Sharpe’s imagination and he knew, with an utter certainty, that he sailed away from a dying wife. He wanted to howl his misery into the snow-dark night, but there was no help there. No help anywhere. She was dying. That knowledge might have been vouchsafed by a dreamlike image, but Sharpe believed it. ‘Damn your bloody liberty.’ Sharpe spoke savagely.

‘Major?’ The Comte, hearing Sharpe’s voice but no distinct words, edged down the ship’s rail.

Jane would be dead and Sharpe would return to the coldly heaped soil of her grave. He wanted to weep for the loss.

‘Did you speak, Monsieur?’ the Comte persisted.

Sharpe turned to the Comte then. The Rifleman had been distracted by his thoughts, but now he concentrated on the tall, pale aristocrat. ‘Why are you here?’

‘Here, Monsieur?’ de Maquerre was defensive. ‘For the same reason you are here. To bring liberty to France!’

Sharpe’s instincts were alert now. He was sensing that a new player had entered the game, a player who would confuse the issues of this expedition. ‘Why?’ he persisted.

De Maquerre shrugged. ‘My family is from Bordeaux, Major, and a letter was smuggled to me in which they claim the citizens are prepared to rebel. I am ordered to discover the truth of the letter.’

God damn it, but his instincts were right. Sharpe was supposed to discover the mood of the French, but Wigram, knowing that Sharpe would return a gloomy answer, had sent this aristocrat at the very last moment. Doubtless de Maquerre would give Wigram the answer he wanted; the answer that would lead to madness. Sharpe laughed sourly. ‘You think two Companies of Riflemen can provoke Bordeaux into rebellion?’

‘No, monsieur,’ the Comte de Maquerre paused as a wave lurched the ship sideways. ‘I think two Companies of Riflemen, with the help of some Marines, can hold the fort at Arcachon until more men are carried north by chasse-marée. Isn’t that why the boats are being collected? To make an invasion? And where better to invade than at Arcachon?’

Sharpe did not reply. Elphinstone had ordered him to scotch Wigram’s desk-born ambitions, but now this foppish Frenchman would make that task difficult. It would be simpler, Sharpe thought, to tip the man overboard now.

‘But if the city of Bordeaux is ready for rebellion,’ de Maquerre was happily oblivious of Sharpe’s thoughts, ‘then we can topple the regime now, Major. We can raise insurrection in the streets, we can humble the tyrant. We can end the war!’ Again Sharpe made no reply, and the Comte stared at the tiny glimmer of light in the cold darkness. ‘Of course,’ the Comte continued, ‘if I do succeed in raising the city against the ogre I shall expect your troops to come to my aid immediately.’

Startled, Sharpe twisted to look at the pale profile of the Comte de Maquerre. ‘I have no such orders.’

The Comte also turned, showing Sharpe a pair of the palest, coldest eyes imaginable. ‘You have orders, Major, to offer me every assistance in your power. I carry a commission from your Prince Regent, and a commission from my King. When ordered, Major, you will obey.’

Sharpe was saved from a reply by the harsh clang of the ship’s bell. He wondered, irritably, why sailors did not just ring the hour like other folk, but insisted on sounding gnomic messages of indeterminate meaning upon their bells. Feet padded on the deck as the watch was changed. The binnacle lantern flared bright as the lid was lifted.

‘Your first duty, Major,’ the Count ignored the dark figures who came up the poop-deck ladders, ‘is to safely put my horses ashore.’

Sharpe had taken enough. ‘My first duty, my Lord, is to my men. If you can’t get your horses ashore then they stay here and I won’t lift a goddamned finger to help you. Good day.’ He stalked across the deck, a gesture somewhat spoilt by the need to stagger as the Amelie creaked on to a new course in obedience to lights that flared suddenly from the Vengeance’s poop.

The dawn crept slow from the grey east. The snow stopped and Sharpe could see, in the half-light, that none had settled on the land that proved surprisingly close. A brig was close inshore and signal flags hung bright from her mizzen yard.

‘She wasn’t with us yesterday.’ Sweet William, looking disgustingly well-rested, nodded towards the signalling brig. He had brought Sharpe a mug of tea. ‘She must have been poking around the fortress. Sleep sound?’

‘No sleep.’ Sharpe cradled the mug and sipped the hot, sour liquid. The shore looked barren. Sand dunes were grey behind the flicker of surf and beyond the dunes were the dark shapes of stunted pines. No houses were visible. Far inland there were the low, humped shapes of hills, and to the north there was a promontory of low, shadowed ground that jutted into the bleak waters.

Captain Tremgar pointed to the headland. ‘Point Arcachon.’ He turned away from the two Rifle officers and bellowed orders through a speaking trumpet. Sharpe heard the thumping rumble as the anchor cables snaked and whipped out of the hawse-holes. Sails, that a moment before had been filled with wind, flapped like monstrous bat wings as the topmen furled the stiff canvas on to the yards. The Vengeance, looming vast in the morning light, was already anchored, and already launching her first boats. ‘Christ on his cross!’ Sweet William vented a sudden anger. He was staring at the boats that huddled beside the Vengeance.

Sharpe took his spyglass from the sleeve-pocket on his overalls and extended the ivory barrels. The glass had been a gift from the Emperor of the French to his brother, the King of Spain, but the gift had been lost among the loot of Vitoria and was now carried by an English Rifleman.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Sharpe echoed Frederickson’s blasphemy. The Vengeance had launched three longboats and each was filling with red-jacketed Marines. ‘There must be a hundred of them!’ He watched the men gingerly descend the tumble-home to step into the rocking boats. The sea, miraculously, was gentle this morning, heaving with the long swells of the ocean, but not broken into whitecaps. Sharpe raised the glass, cursing because the small movements of the Amelie made training the telescope difficult, and he saw yet more red-coated Marines waiting on the Vengeance’s maindeck. ‘That bastard didn’t need us at all!’

‘Not to take the fort, perhaps,’ Sweet William lit a cheroot, ‘but a force of trained Riflemen will be damned useful for the march on Bordeaux.’

‘Damn his bloody soul!’ Sharpe understood now. Wigram had sent de Maquerre to force a decision, and Bampfylde had secreted the Marines to implement the decision. Come hell or high water Wigram and Bampfylde wanted to take Bordeaux, and Sharpe was caught in the middle. He watched the packed longboats pull towards the breaking surf and he felt a bitter anger at Bampfylde who had lied about a malady so that he could have trained skirmishers for his madcap scheme. Even the sun, showing through the clouds for the first time in weeks, could not alleviate Sharpe’s anger.

‘It’s my belief,’ Frederickson said, ‘that he wanted you personally.’

‘Me?’

‘He probably has an exalted view of your ability,’ Frederickson said drily. ‘If the celebrated Major Sharpe fails, then no reasonable man could expect Captain Bampfylde to succeed. On the other hand, of course, who better than yourself to guarantee success?’

‘Bugger Bampfylde,’ Sharpe said.

The longboats landed their red-coated troops, then were launched back through the surf. The oarsmen, tugging against wind and tide, jerked like small marionettes to pull the heavy boats free of the shore’s suction. They did not come to the Amelie; instead they went to the Vengeance where still more Marines waited for disembarkation.

The morning ticked on. A breakfast of gravy-dipped bread was passed around the Riflemen who waited on the Amelie’s deck. Those Marines already ashore formed up in ranks and, to Sharpe’s astonishment, a half Company was marched off the beach towards the shelter of the dark pines. Sharpe himself was supposed to command the land operations, yet he was being utterly ignored. ‘Captain Tremgar!’

‘Sir?’

‘Your boat can put me ashore?’

Tremgar, a middle-aged man wrapped in a filthy tarpaulin jacket, knocked the dottle from his pipe on the brass binnacle cover that was covered with tiny dents from just such treatment. ‘Ain’t got orders to do it, Major.’

‘I’m giving you orders!’

Tremgar turned. One of the longboats was pulling away from the Vengeance and carrying, instead of Marines, a group of blue-cloaked naval officers. Tremgar shrugged. ‘Don’t see why not, Major.’

It took twenty minutes to lower the Amelie’s small tender into the water, and another five before Sharpe was sitting uncomfortably on the stern thwart. The Comte de Maquerre, seeing a chance to escape from the stinking collier, had insisted on sharing the boat. He had exchanged his British uniform for a suit of brown cloth.

From the Amelie’s deck the sea had appeared benign, but here, in the tiny boat, it swelled and threatened and ran cold darts of fear up Sharpe’s back. The oars spattered him with water, the waves heaved towards the gunwales, and at any moment Sharpe expected the small rowboat to turn turtle. The Comte, wrapped in his cloak, looked seasick.

Sharpe twisted. The Amelie’s tar- and salt-stained hull reared above him. A cook jettisoned a bucket of slops over the side and gulls, screaming like banshees, swooped from the air between the yards to fight over the scraps.

The Comte, offended by Sharpe’s cavalier treatment in the small hours, said not a word. Slowly, oar-tug by oar-tug, the four boatmen dragged the small craft away from the Amelie and the grumble of the surf, like the roar of a far-off, relentless battle, grew louder.

Sharpe instinctively touched his weapons. His rifle was muzzle-stopped against sea-water splashes, while the lock was wrapped in an old rag for protection. His sword was clumsy in the confines of the tiny boat. A surge heaved the boat up and ran it forward towards the breaking surf that betrayed itself to Sharpe as a spume of spray being whipped from a curling wave by the wind’s flick, then the boat dropped into a valley of sliding, glassy grey water that was flecked with floating seaweed.

This was the point of danger. This was the moment when the small boats must go from the sea’s cradle into the broken forces where the waves battered at the shore. Years ago, on a beach like this in Portugal, Sharpe had watched the longboats broach in the combers and spill their men like puppets into the killing sea. The bodies, he remembered, had come ashore white and swollen, uniforms split by the swelling flesh, and dogs had worried at the corpses for days.

‘Pull!’ the bo’sun shouted. ‘Pull, you bastards!’

The oarsmen pulled and, like a wagon loaded with cannon-shot, the boat fought the upward slope of the wave. The oars bent under the strain, then the vast power of the sea caught the boat’s transom and it was running, suddenly free of all constraint, and the bo’sun was shouting at the men to ship oars and was leaning his full weight on the tiller behind Sharpe.

The bo’sun’s shout seemed like a prolonged bellow that melded with the roar of the surf. The world was white and grey, streaked bottle green at its heart where the wave broke to carry the tiny boat surging forward. Sharpe’s right hand was a cold and bloodless white where it gripped the gunwale, then the boat’s bow was dipping, falling, and the water was smashing around Sharpe’s ears in scraps of freezing white and still the shout echoed in his ears and he felt the panic of a man caught in a danger that is uncontrollable.

The bow caught, the boat twisted and shuddered, and suddenly she was running amidst bubbling sea-streaks beneath which the sand made a hissing noise as tons of beach were drawn backwards by the sucking water.

‘Now!’ the bo’sun shouted, ‘now, you heathens!’ and the bow-men were overboard, up to their knees in churning water and dragging the small boat towards the safety of the shelving beach.

‘There, Major. That was easy,’ the bo’sun said calmly.

Sharpe, trying not to show the terror he had felt, stepped forward over the thwarts. The two remaining oarsmen, grinning at him, helped his unsteady progress. Another wave, breaking and running up the beach, lifted the boat and shifted it sideways so that Sharpe fell heavily on to a huge black man who laughed at the soldier’s predicament.

Sharpe stood again, balanced himself at the prow, then leaped into the receding wave. No firm ground, no lush soil of the most peaceful village green in England, had ever felt so good to him. He splashed to dry sand, breathing a silent thanks for safety as at last his boots crunched the small ridge of seaweed, shells, and timber scraps that marked the height of the winter tides.

‘Major!’ A voice hailed him. Lieutenant Ford, Bampfylde’s aide, walked through the clinging sand. ‘Welcome ashore. You’re precipitate, are you not, sir?’

‘Precipitate?’ Sharpe, taking the rag off his rifle-lock, had to shout over the noise of wind and surf.

‘You’d not been ordered ashore, sir.’ Ford spoke respectfully, but Sharpe was certain the young lieutenant had been sent by Bampfylde to deliver this reproof. The captain himself, resplendent in blue, white and gold, directed affairs fifty yards down the strand.

‘Let me remind you, Lieutenant,’ Sharpe said, ‘that proceedings ashore are under my command.’

The Comte de Maquerre, looking grey beneath the powder he had put on to his face, brushed at his cloak then stumped through the sand towards Bampfylde.

Ford glanced at the Comte, then back to Sharpe. ‘You can see, sir,’ the lieutenant could not hide his embarrassment, ‘that our Marines have had a miraculous recovery.’

‘Indeed.’ There must have been hundreds of Marines on the beach and Sharpe had seen at least another fifty march inland.

‘The captain feels,’ Ford had carefully placed himself in a position that made it impossible for Sharpe to walk towards Bampfylde, ‘that we can safely look after the matter ourselves.’ He smiled, as though he had brought splendid news.

Sharpe stared at the young, nervous lieutenant. ‘The matter?’

‘The capture of the Teste de Buch,’ Ford still smiled as if he could infect Sharpe with his good tidings.

Sharpe stared at Ford. ‘You’re standing in my path, Lieutenant.’

‘Oh! My apologies, sir!’ Ford stepped aside.

Bampfylde was greeting the Comte de Maquerre with evident familiarity, but, seeing Sharpe approach, he gestured for the Frenchman to wait, then stepped briskly towards the Rifleman, ‘’Morning Sharpe! Quite a clever one, what?’

‘Clever, sir?’

‘The weather! God smiles on sailormen.’ A gust of wind picked up particles of sand and rattled them against Sharpe’s tall boots.

‘Lieutenant Ford, sir, tells me you do not require my services.’

‘Not at the Teste de Buch, certainly. One of our brigs quizzed a fisherman yesterday, Sharpe. Seems the Frogs have abandoned the fort! How about that, eh? There’s a few fencibles left there, but I can’t see you need to bother yourself with that sort of scum! I think the prudent thing, Major, is for you to march inland.’

‘Inland, sir?’

‘Weren’t you planning to ambush the high road? But I want you back here, with your report, by the forenoon on Thursday. Is that clear?’

Sharpe looked past the plump, confident Bampfylde to see the Marines being paraded on the sand. They were in light order, having left their packs and greatcoats on the Vengeance. They also seemed to be in fine fettle and the sight angered Sharpe. ‘Your men made a miraculous recovery, Captain?’

‘Did they not, Major?’ Bampfylde, in the heartiest of moods, smiled. ‘A ruse de guerre, Major. You understand?’

Sharpe contained his fury. ‘A ruse, sir?’

‘We didn’t want enemy agents in St Jean de Luz to suspect our plans. They’ll have reported sick Marines and a tiny force of soldiery; scarce sufficient to round up a herd of sheep, let alone march on Bordeaux, eh?’ Bampfylde saw Sharpe’s disbelief and smiled at it. ‘I’ve got more Marines afloat, Sharpe, if they’re needed.’

‘To capture Bordeaux?’ Sharpe’s voice was mocking.

‘If Maquereau says it can be done, then we shall. He’s riding direct to Bordeaux, Sharpe. A brave fellow, what? Your advice will be invaluable, of course, but Maquereau will be the judge of failure or success.’ Bampfylde, on the brink of his triumph, was trying hard to be affable.

‘Maquereau, sir?’

‘Ah, the Comte de Maquerre. You mustn’t use his nickname, Sharpe, it’s not polite.’ Bampfylde laughed. ‘But you’re on the verge of great events, Major. You’ll be grateful for this opportunity.’

Sharpe’s gratitude was lost in anger. Bampfylde had lied consistently. He had wanted Sharpe and the Riflemen for his dreams of glory, and now, on a cold French beach, Sharpe was exposed to the madness against which Elphinstone had warned him. ‘I thought, sir, that the decision about Bordeaux was my responsibility.’

‘And we’ve spared you that decision, Major. You can’t deny that de Maquerre will be a more cogent witness?’ Bampfylde paused, sensing Sharpe’s anger. ‘Naturally I shall take your advice, Major.’ Bampfylde opened the lid of his watch as if to demonstrate that Sharpe was delaying his advance. ‘Be back by Thursday, Major! That’s when Maquereau should bring us the good news from Bordeaux. Remember now! Speed and surprise, Major! Speed and surprise!’

Bampfylde turned away, but Sharpe called him back. ‘Sir! You believe the fisherman?’

Bampfylde bridled. ‘Is it your business, Sharpe?’

‘You’ll send picquets ahead, sir?’

Bampfylde snapped his watch-lid shut. ‘If I wish for lessons in the operations of military forces, Major, then I shall seek them from my superiors, not my inferiors. My boats will fetch your men now, Major Sharpe, and I will bid you good day.’

Bampfylde walked away. He did not need Sharpe to capture the fort, so he would not dilute his victory by having Sharpe’s name mentioned in the despatch he would send to the Admiralty. That despatch was already taking shape in Bampfylde’s head, a despatch that would be printed in the Naval Gazette and tell, with a modesty that would be as impressive as it was transparent, of a fortress carried, of a bay cleared, and of a victory gained. But that small victory would be but a whisper compared to the trumpeted glory when Bordeaux fell. Thus Bampfylde walked through the cloying, crunching sand and his head was filled with dreams of triumph and the sweeter dreams of victory’s rewards that were fame and wealth beyond measure.

CHAPTER FIVE

Cornelius Killick spat coffee grounds into the fire that had been lit beneath the pine trees. The wind was chill, but at least it was not raining, though Killick suspected the lull in the foul weather would not last.

Some of his men slept, some clenched muskets, others played cribbage or dice. They were nervous, but they took comfort from their captain’s blithe confidence.

Killick’s confidence was a pretence. He was as nervous as any of his men, and regretting his impulsive offer to defend the fort’s landward approaches. It was not that the American was afraid of a fight, but it was one thing to fight at sea, where he knew the meaning of every catspaw on the water and where he could use his skill at the Thuella’s helm to run confusion about his enemies, and quite another to contemplate a fight on dry land. It was, as his Irish lieutenant would say, a horse of a different colour, and Cornelius Killick was not sure he liked the colour.

He hated the fact that the land was such a clogging, cloying platform for a fight. A ship moved guns much faster than wheels, and there was nowhere to hide at sea. There, in the clean wind, a fight was open and undisguised, while here any bush could hide an enemy. Killick was keenly aware that he had never trained as a soldier, nor even experienced a battle on land, yet he had made the offer to Commandant Lassan, and so, in this chill wind, he was preparing to offer battle if the British Marines came.

Yet if Cornelius Killick had doubts to plague his confidence, he also had compensating encouragements. With him were the six twelve-pounder guns that had been swung out of the Thuella’s hold and mounted on their carriages. Their solidity gave Killick an odd comfort. The guns, so beautifully designed and yet so functional in their appearance, offered an implicit promise of victory. The enemy would come with muskets and be faced with these weapons that Napoleon called his ‘beautiful daughters’. They were Gribeauval twelve-pounders, brute killers of the battlefield, massive.

To serve those guns Killick had sixty men; all of them trained in the use of cannon. The American knew well what fate the British might give to a captured privateer’s crew, so Killick had not ordered his men to give battle, but had instead invited their help. Such was their faith in him, and such their liking for him, that only two dozen men had declined this chance. Thus Killick would be served this day by volunteers, fighters all. How could impressed troops, led by arrogant, dandified officers, Killick asked himself, defeat such men as these?

A wind stirred the pines and drifted the fire’s smoke towards the village. No one was visible on the far ramparts of the fort, nor did any flag show.

‘Maybe the bastards won’t come today.’ Lieutenant Docherty poured himself some of the muddy coffee.

‘Maybe not.’ Killick leaned to the fire and lit a cigar. He felt a sudden pang that he should be forced to this unnatural fight or else lose his ship. He could not face losing the Thuella. ‘But if they do come, Liam, we’ll shock the bastards out of their skins.’ That was Killick’s third advantage; that he had the surprise of ambush on his side.

An hour later the first message arrived from Point Arcachon. Killick had posted four scouts, each one mounted on a lumbering carthorse, and the news came clumping northwards that Marines had landed safely and were already advancing along the tangle of sandy tracks that edged the beach.

‘Did they see you?’ Killick asked the gun-captain who brought the message.

‘No.’ The man was scornful of the Marines’ watchfulness.

Killick stood and clapped his hands. ‘We’re moving, lads! We’re moving!’ The Thuella’s crew had waited with the guns at a point midway between the beach paths and the inland road. Now Killick knew which route the British were taking and so the guns had to be manhandled westwards to bar that route.

Other messages came as the guns were shifted. A hundred and fifty Marines had landed; they had neither artillery nor horses, and all marched north. Other men had followed the Marines ashore, but they had stayed on the beach. The scouts, all four of them, came back to the ambush site.

Henri Lassan had chosen the place, and chosen well. The guns were sited at the edge of a pine wood that topped a shallow ridge that jutted into a spreading, flat expanse of sand that edged the dunes of the beach. Two cottages had stood in the sandy space, but both had burned down in the last few years and their charred remains were all that broke up the area across which the Marines must march.

The gun emplacement also offered Killick’s men protection. The twelve-pounders were shadowed by the pines, so that the grapeshot would blast, obscene and sudden, out of the darkness into the light. And even if the Marines were to counter-attack and brave the maelstrom of fire that would be slashing diagonally towards the sea they must climb a crumbling bank of sand that was six feet high and steep enough to demand the help of hands if it was to be negotiated.

Twenty men went back for the gun limbers, while the rest of Killick’s men prepared the big guns for battle. The barrels had to be shifted on the carriages from their travelling position into the fighting stance, then trunnions must be clamped with iron capsquares as powder and grapeshot were rammed into cold muzzles. The grapeshot was adapted from the stocks taken from the Thuella’s magazine, and each canvas-wrapped bundle of balls would be propelled by four pounds and four ounces of French powder that came in a serge bag shaped to the cannon’s breech. Vent-prickers slid into touch-holes to break the powder bags, then tin tubes filled with finely mealed powder were rammed down to carry the fire to the charge.

Killick stooped at the breech of one gun. He squinted through the tangent sights, set for point blank range, then gave the brass handle of the elevating screw a quarter turn. Satisfied, he went to each of the other guns and stared down the sights to imagine the tangling death he would cause to flicker above the clearing’s sand. The guns’ mute promise of terrible power gave Killick a welcome surge of confidence.

‘The Commandant thanks you, Cornelius.’ Lieutenant Liam Docherty had warned Commandant Lassan that the British had landed. ‘He wishes you joy of the meeting.’

Killick gave his swooping, bellowing laugh as if in anticipation of victory. ‘They’ll not be here for six hours yet, Liam,’ he paused to light a cigar, ‘but we’ll kill the sons of devils when they do come, eh?’

‘We will indeed.’ For Liam Docherty the coming battle would be one tiny shard of the vengeance he took on the British for their savagery in suppressing the rebellion of the United Irishmen. Docherty’s father had been hanged as a rebel in Ireland, casually strung up beside a peat-dark stream with as little ceremony as might attend the death of a rabid dog, and the boy’s mother, rearing him in America, would not let him forget. Nor did Liam Docherty wish to forget. He imagined the redcoats coming into the clearing and he relished the savage surprise that would be unleashed from the six gun barrels.

Some villagers, made curious by the strange happenings to the south, had come into the trees to watch the Americans prepare. Cornelius Killick welcomed them. In the night he had been besieged by fears, by imaginings of disaster, but now, when the shape of the enemy’s approach was plain and the skilful placing of his ambush apparent, he felt sure of success and was glad that this victory would be witnessed by spectators. ‘I wonder what they’d say in Marblehead if they could see us now,’ he said happily to Docherty.

Liam Docherty thought that few people in Marblehead would be astonished by this new adventure of Killick’s. Cornelius Killick had always had the reputation of being a reckless rogue. ‘Maybe they’ll name a street after you.’

‘A street? Why not rename the bloody town?’

Only one thing remained to be done, and that was done with a due solemnity. Cornelius Killick unfurled the great ensign that he had fetched from the Thuella. Its stars and stripes had been sewn together by a committee of Marblehead ladies, then blessed by a Presbyterian Minister who had prayed that the flag would see much slaughter of the Republic’s enemies. This day, Killick promised himself, it would. The flag, drooping in the windless space beneath the trees, would be carried forward at the first gunshot and it would stand proud as the gunners worked and as the enemy fell.

Cornelius Killick and the men of the Thuella were ready.

The beach was strangely deserted when the Marines were gone. The wind was cold as Sharpe’s men tumbled uncertainly through the surf to drag their packs, greatcoats and weapons to the dunes.

‘One more boat, sir,’ Frederickson said unnecessarily.

Sharpe grunted. The clouds had hidden the sun again and he could see little inland through his telescope. On one far hill a track seemed to wind uncertainly upwards, but there was no visible village or church that might correspond to the scanty map that Frederickson spread on the sand. ‘The captain said we were three miles south of Point Arcachon, here.’

Sharpe knew the map by heart and did not bother to glance down. ‘There are no roads eastwards. Our quickest route is up to Arcachon then use the Bordeaux road.’

‘Follow the web-foots on the beach?’

‘Christ, no.’ Sharpe did not care if he never saw Bampfylde again. ‘We’ll take the inland road.’ He turned. The Comte de Maquerre was standing disconsolate by the tideline watching as his two horses, each given a long lead rope, were unceremoniously dumped overboard. The horses would have to swim now, tethered to the Amelie’s boat, and the Count feared for their loss.

Frederickson still stared at the map. ‘How are you going to stop Bampfylde invading France?’

‘By refusing to believe that prinked-up bastard.’ Sharpe nodded towards the Frenchman. ‘I should have heaved him overboard last night.’

‘I could have an accident with a rifle?’ Frederickson offered helpfully.

It was a cheerful thought for a cold morning, but Sharpe shook his head before turning to watch a working party of Riflemen wrestling supplies through the surf. ‘We can jettison the bloody ladders,’ Sharpe said sourly. He wondered how Bampfylde proposed crossing the ditches and walls of the Teste de Buch without scaling-ladders, then dismissed the problem as irrelevant now. Sharpe’s job now was to go inland, ambush a military convoy on the great road that led southwards, and try to discover the mood of Bordeaux from the captives he would take. ‘We’ll split the supplies between the men. What we can’t carry, we leave.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Frederickson folded the map and pushed it into his pouch. ‘You’ll leave the order of march to me?’

But Sharpe did not reply. He was staring at a group of seated Riflemen who sheltered from the icy wind in a fold of the sand-dunes. ‘You!’ he bellowed, ‘come here!’

The Riflemen’s faces, bland with the innocence that always greeted an officer’s anger, turned to stare at Sharpe, but one man stood, shook sand from his green jacket, and started towards the two officers. ‘Did you know?’ Sharpe turned furiously on Frederickson.

‘No,’ Frederickson lied.

Sharpe looked towards the man he had summoned. ‘You stupid bloody fool!’

‘Sir.’

‘Jesus Christ! I make you a bloody RSM and what do you do? You throw it away!’

Patrick Harper’s cheek was even more swollen from the toothache and, as though it explained all, he touched the swelling. ‘It was this, sir.’

The reply took the wind from Sharpe’s anger. He stared at the huge Irishman who gave him a lopsided grin in return. ‘Your tooth?’ Sharpe asked menacingly.

‘I went to the surgeon to have the tooth pulled, so I did, sir, and he gives me some rum against the pain, so he does, sir, and I think I must have taken a drop too much, sir, and the next thing I know is I’m on a ship, sir, and the bastard still hasn’t touched the tooth, nor has he, sir, and the only explanation I can possibly think of, sir, is that in my legally inebriated condition some kind soul presumed I was one of Captain Frederickson’s men and put me on to the Amelie.’ Harper paused in his fluent, practised lie. ‘It was the very last thing I wanted, sir. Honest!’

‘You lying bastard,’ Sharpe said.

‘Maybe, sir, but it’s the truth so help me God.’ Patrick Harper, delighted with both his exploit and explanation, grinned at his officer. The grin spoke the real truth; that the two of them always fought together and Harper was determined that it should stay that way. The grin also implied that Major Richard Sharpe would somehow avert the righteous wrath of the Army from Harper’s innocent head.

‘So your tooth still isn’t pulled?’ Sharpe asked.

‘That’s right, sir.’

‘Then I’ll damn well pull it now,’ Sharpe said.

Harper took a step backwards. He was four inches taller than Sharpe’s six feet, with muscles to match his size, while on his shoulders were slung a rifle and his fearful seven-barrelled gun, but over his broad, swollen face there suddenly appeared a look of sheer terror. ‘You’ll not pull the tooth, sir.’

‘I damn well will.’ Sharpe turned to Frederickson. ‘Find me some pincers, Captain.’

Frederickson’s hand instinctively went to the pouch at his belt, then checked. ‘I’ll ask the men, sir.’

Harper blanched. ‘Mr Sharpe! Sir! Please!’

‘Quiet!’ Sharpe stared at the huge Ulsterman. In truth he was relieved that Harper was here, but the Army was the Army and the relief could not be betrayed. ‘You’re a damned fool, RSM. What about your son?’

‘He’s a bit too young to fight yet, sir.’ Harper grinned, and Sharpe had to look away so that he did not return the grin.

‘No pincers, sir!’ Frederickson sounded disappointed, though Sharpe suspected Sweet William had made no kind of real search for the implement. ‘You’ll want us under way, sir?’

‘Inland. Sergeant Harper!’

‘Sir?’

‘Attach yourself to Captain Frederickson’s Company and assume whatever rank he sees fit to give you.’

‘Sir!’

Like beasts of burden the Riflemen shouldered packs, canteens, weapons, greatcoats and supplies. They went eastwards into the trees, then northwards on the country road that straggled between the few marsh hamlets of this barren coast.

It was not much of a road, merely a rutted cart track that wound between brush and pine and edged past great swamps where long-legged wading birds flapped slowly into the winter air as the Riflemen passed. The Green Jackets marched fast, as they were trained to march, and always, a quarter mile ahead, the picquets signalled back towards Sharpe that the road was clear.

It seemed strange to be this deep in France. This was the land of Bonaparte, the enemy land, and between Sharpe and Bordeaux, indeed between Sharpe and Paris, there were no friendly troops. A single squadron of enemy cavalry could cut this march into butcher’s offal, yet the Green Jackets marched undisturbed and unseen.

‘If we go at this pace,’ Frederickson said, ‘we’ll overtake the Marines.’

‘It had occurred to me,’ Sharpe said mildly.

The eye-patched man stared at Sharpe. ‘You’re not thinking of taking the …’

‘No,’ Sharpe interrupted. ‘If Bampfylde wants to take the fort, he can. But if the map’s right we have to go close to Arcachon, so we might take a look at the fort before we turn eastwards.’

Patrick Harper carried the picquets’ packs and coats as punishment, but the extra weight made no difference to his marching pace. His tooth bothered him; the pain of that was foul and throbbing, but he had no other cares in the world. He had followed Sharpe because it was unthinkable to stay behind when Sharpe went off on his own. Harper had seen that happen before and the Major had nearly killed himself in Burgos Castle as a result. Besides, Jane Sharpe, giving him the oil of cloves, had suggested he stowed away, Isabella had insisted he stay with the Major, and Captain Frederickson had turned his blind eye to Harper’s presence. Harper felt he was in his proper place; with Sharpe and with a column of Riflemen marching to battle.

Their green jackets and dark trousers melded with the cloud-darkened pines. The 60th had been raised for just such terrain, the American wilderness, and Sharpe, turning sometimes to watch the men, could see how well chosen the uniform was. At a hundred paces an unmoving man could be invisible. For a moment Sharpe felt the sudden pride of a Rifleman. The Rifles, he believed as an article of his soldier’s faith, were simply, indisputably, the finest troops in all the world.

They fought like demons and were made more deadly because they were trained, unlike other infantry, to fight independently. These men, in danger, would not look to an officer or sergeant for instruction, but would know, thanks to their training, just what to do. They were mostly squat and ugly men, toothless and pinched-faced, villainous and foul-mouthed, but on a battlefield they were kings, and victory was their common coin.

They could fight and they could march. God, but they could march! In ’09, trying to reach the carnage of Talavera, the Light Division had marched forty-two hilly miles in twenty-six hours and had arrived in good order, weapons primed, and ready to fight. These men marched thus now. They did it unthinkingly, not knowing that the pace they unconsciously assumed was the fastest marching pace of all the world’s armies. They were Riflemen, the finest of the best, and they were going north to war.

While to their west, on the less happy trails that edged the tumbled dunes, the Marines faltered.

It was not their fault. For months now, on a diet of worm-infested biscuit, rotting meat, foul water and rum, they had been immured in the forecastles of the great ships that weathered the Biscay storms. They were not hardened to marching, and the sand they crossed gave treacherous footing and chafed their boots on softened skin. Their muskets, all of the heavy Sea Service pattern, seemed to grow heavier by the mile. Their chest straps, whitened and taut, constricted labouring lungs. It was a cold day, but sweat stung their eyes while the muscles at the backs of their legs burned like fire. Some of the men were burdened by ropes and grapnel hooks that they would use to scale the fort’s wall instead of the long ladders that Bampfylde had deemed unnecessary for the Marines.

‘We shall call a halt.’ Captain Bampfylde did not do it for the men’s benefit, but his own. If they laboured, he suffered. His handmade boots had rubbed his right heel raw and raised blisters on his toes. The leather band of his bicorne hat was like a ring of steel and his white breeches were cutting into his crotch like a sawhorse.

The captain was regretting his intrepidity. He had been eager to lead these men into battle, and that could not be done from the deck of the Vengeance any more than it could be done from the quarterdeck of the Scylla. That frigate, under Captain Grant, would nose into the Arcachon channel to draw the fire of what few defenders might infest the fort’s bastions. Once those defenders were occupied with the frigate, and while their gaze was fastened seawards, the Marines would assault the empty landward ramparts. It was that assault which would capture the imagination of the British public when it was printed in the Naval Gazette, not the old story of a ship bombarding a battery.

Captain of Marines Palmer saluted Bampfylde. ‘We’re behind time, sir.’

‘God damn it, Palmer, if I require your contribution then I shall ask for it!’

‘Sir!’ Palmer was unmoved by Bampfylde’s anger. Neil Palmer was ten years older than Bampfylde and too experienced to be worried by the petulance of yet another ambitious young captain who resented the fame gained by Nelson’s band of brothers. ‘I’ll put picquets out, sir?’

‘Do it!’ Bampfylde subsided against the trunk of a tree. He wanted to haul off his precious boots and dabble his sore feet in the shallows of the sea, but he dared not betray such weakness in front of his men.

‘Water, sir?’ Lieutenant Ford offered a canteen.

‘After you, Ford.’ Bampfylde knew such behaviour was proper, and he was a man eager to be seen to behave heroically in all things.

He consoled himself that his discomfort was a small price to pay for the renown that he would win this day. The Marines might come late to the fortress, but the fortress would fall just the same, and the blisters on his feet would be forgotten in the blaze of glory. He opened his watch, saw they had already rested ten minutes, but decided a few more minutes could not hurt. He stretched out tired legs, tipped his hat forward, and polished the news of victory that he would write this night.

While a hundred yards away, standing on a sudden rise of sandy soil that made a bare ridge through the thin pines, Captain Palmer stared at the countryside through a heavy, ancient telescope. Far to the north, beyond the fading ridges of sand and conifers, a rainstorm misted the land like a vast curtain. The rain lifted for a brief instant and Palmer thought he saw the malevolent, dark shape of the fort hull-down on the horizon, but, as the rain closed again on his view, he could not be certain of what he had seen.

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