Sharpe's Siege

CHAPTER 1

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. “Must 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 toehold 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-mare’es,” 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-mare’es. 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-marees’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-marees 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-marees‘ 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-maree’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 wind-broken 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-marees.

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-marees 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-maree’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.