Sharpe's Revenge

PROLOGUE

Major Richard Sharpe had made every preparation for his own death. His horse, Sycorax, and his fine French telescope would go to Captain William Frederickson, his weapons would become the property of Sergeant Patrick Harper, while everything else would belong to his wife Jane. Everything, that was, except for the uniform in which Sharpe always fought. That uniform consisted of knee-high riding boots, French cavalry overalls, and a faded green jacket of the 95th Rifles. Sharpe had asked to be buried in that uniform.

“If you weren’t buried in those rags,” Frederickson observed disdainfully, “they’d be burned anyway.”

It was true that the leather boots had been deeply scarred by knives, bayonets and sabres, and that the overalls were so patched with brown homespun that they looked more like a ploughman’s cast-off breeches than the plundered uniform of a Chasseur Colonel of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, and that the green jacket was so faded and threadbare that even a moth could not have made a decent meal from it, but the clothes were still those in which Sharpe fought and were therefore dear to him. He might have looked like a scarecrow in the old uniform, but wearing it for battle was one of his obsessive superstitions, which was why, on a cold March morning in 1814, and despite being miles from any enemy soldier, Sharpe wore the old clothes.

“You’ll have to take off the jacket,” Frederickson, who understood Sharpe’s superstitious attachment to the uniform, warned his friend.

“I know.” There was no detail of this morning that Sharpe had not rehearsed again and again in his mind. What would happen this morning was called ‘grass before breakfast’. It sounded innocuous, but it could well mean death.

The two men stood on a low grassy bluff above a grey and sullen Atlantic. A long and heaving swell was running from the west to break against the rocks beneath. To the north of the bluff was the French port of St Jean de Luz that was crammed with merchant shipping and fishing boats, while in the harbour’s outer roads a small Royal Navy flotilla lay at anchor. The flotilla consisted of three sloops, two frigates, and a great chequer-sided battleship, the Vengeance.

It was a shivering dawn, yet spring was coming and with the spring would come a resurgence of battle. The Emperor Napoleon had refused the peace terms offered by his enemies, so now the French armies would have to fight to defend their homeland. Their enemies were now all Europe. Wellington’s army of Britons, Spaniards and Portuguese had captured the south-western corner of France and would soon strike yet further into the heartland, while, far to the north, the Prussians, Austrians and Russians skirmished across Napoleon’s northern frontiers.

None of which seemed immediately important to Major Richard Sharpe as he began to pace the frosted grass on the bluffs flat summit. A cold wind was gusting from the ocean and William Frederickson took shelter from it in the lee of some bent and stunted pines. Sharpe, pacing up and down, was oblivious of the wind, obsessed instead with the thought of his own death. The most important thing, he decided, was that Jane was well taken care of. She already had the piece of paper which gave her authority over Sharpe’s money; which money was the profit of the plunder he had taken from the French baggage after the battle at Vitoria. Many soldiers had become rich that day, but few as rich as Major Richard Sharpe or Sergeant Patrick Harper.

Sharpe paced close to Frederickson. “Time?”

Frederickson fumbled with gloved hands to open his watch’s lid. “Twenty minutes past six.”

Sharpe grunted and turned away. The dawn had made the grey clouds palely luminous, while the sea was so dark that it seemed to be made of a liquid and sluggish slate. A small, high-prowcd fishing boat was perilously close to the rocks beneath Sharpe. The fishermen were heaving lobster-pots overboard. Perhaps, Sharpe thought, his enemy would be eating one of those lobsters this very night, while Sharpe would already be as cold as stone and lying six feet under French soil. Grass before breakfast.

“God damn it,” he said in sudden irritation, “why can’t we fight with swords?”

“Because Bampfylde chose pistols.” Frederickson had just lit a cheroot and the wind whirled its smoke quickly away.

“God damn it.” Sharpe turned away again. He was nervous, and he did not mind showing his nervousness to Frederickson. The Rifle Captain was one of Sharpe’s closest friends and a man who understood how nerves could make the belly into a tight cold knot before a fight. Frederickson, half English and half German, was a fearsome looking man who had given up most of his teeth and one of his eyes on Spanish battlefields. His men, with clumsy affection, called him after a homely flower, Sweet William, though on a battlefield he was anything but sweet. He was a soldier, as tough as any in the army, and tough enough to understand how a brave man could be almost paralysed by fear.

Sharpe understood that too, yet even so he was surprised by the fear he felt in this cold morning. He had been a soldier ever since he had joined the 33rd as a sixteen-year-old recruit. In the twenty-one years since, he had clawed his way through defended breaches, he had stood in the musket line and traded death with an enemy not forty paces away, he had shattered cavalry charges with volley fire, he had fought the lonely fight of a skirmisher ahead of the battle line, he had watched the enemy’s artillery tear his men to red ruin, and he had done all of those things more often than he could remember. He had fought in Flanders, India, Portugal, Spain and France. He had risen from the red-coated ranks to become one of His Majesty’s officers. He had taken an enemy standard, and been captured himself. He had been wounded. He had killed. Other men had spent their lives mastering the skills of peace, but Richard Sharpe had become a master of war. Few men had fought so often, few men had fought so well, and now, Sharpe thought, the lumpen memories of those many fights were gnawing at his confidence. He knew the luck of the long bloody years could not hold, or perhaps it was that now, better than most men, he understood the danger and therefore feared it. That a man who had fought across the foulest battlefields could be killed by grass before breakfast seemed an appropriate twist of fortune. “Why do they call it ”grass before breakfast“?” he demanded of Frederickson who, knowing that Sharpe already knew the answer and that the question had sprung only from his friend’s irritation, did not bother to answer.

“It’s a ridiculous name,” Jane had said two weeks before, “a stupid, stupid name.”

“Grass before breakfast‘ simply meant a duel which, traditionally, was fought at dawn and usually on some sward of lawn which gave the pistols or swords room for their work. ”If you insist on fighting this stupid duel,“ Jane had continued, ”I shall return home. I won’t permit you to destroy yourself, Richard.“

“Then you had better go home,” Sharpe had said, “because I’m fighting it.”

The disagreement had started as a skirmish, but developed into a searing, exhausting argument that had soured the last two weeks. Jane’s reasons for not wanting Sharpe to eat grass before breakfast were entirely good. For a start he might very well be killed, which would leave Jane a widow, but even if he won, he would still be a loser. Duelling had been banned in the army, and if Sharpe insisted on fighting, then his career could be undone in a single moment. Her husband’s career was precious to Jane and she did not want it risked; neither by a duel, nor even by the skirmishes of a war’s ending. Jane said it was time for Sharpe to go back to England and take the plaudits for his achievements. In England, she said, he would be a hero and he could take a hero’s reward. Had he not been given an audience by the Prince of Wales, and would not that Prince now make certain that Major Sharpe became Sir Richard? Jane wanted Sharpe to abandon the army, to forget the duel, and to sail home, but instead, like the stubborn fool he was, he would stay to eat grass before breakfast and Jane could see all that future eminence, and all those princely rewards, fading like pistol smoke in a wind. Thus she had tried her ultimatum: that if Sharpe insisted on fighting, she would publicly shame him by going home. Sharpe had successfully called her bluff, but at the price of a fortnight’s cold and silent misery.

Frederickson fumbled with his watch again. “Half past six.”

“It’s cold.” Sharpe seemed to notice the temperature for the first time.

“In an hour,” Frederickson said, “we’ll be breakfasting on chops and pease pudding.”

“You might be.”

“We will be,” Frederickson insisted patiently, then turned to watch a small black carriage which appeared at the foot of the low hill. The coachman whipped the horses up the rutted earth track, then steered towards the bent pine trees where he stopped with a clatter of trace chains and squealing brake blocks. Sergeant Harper, looking indecently cheerful, unfolded himself from the cramped interior and offered Sharpe a confident grin. “Good morning, sir! A bit chilly.”

“Morning, Sergeant.”

“I’ve got the bugger, sir.” Harper gestured at a black-dressed man who had shared the coach.

“Good morning, Doctor,” Sharpe said politely.

The doctor ignored the greeting. He was a thin elderly Frenchman who stayed inside the small carriage. He had a black bag which doubtless contained knives, bonesaws, gouges and clamps. The doctor had been reluctant to come to this dawn slaughter, which was why Frederickson had charged Harper with the duty of making sure the man was up and ready. No British doctor, cither of the Navy or Army, had been willing to serve at this illegal ceremony which could well lead to courts-martial for everyone involved.

“He was drunk last night, sir.” Harper, wearing a Rifleman’s green jacket as faded as either Sharpe’s or Frederickson’s, confided to Sharpe.

“Who was drunk? The doctor?”

“No, sir. Captain Bampfylde was drunk. He stayed ashore, you see, and I saw him in the yard of that big inn back of the ropcwalk.” Harper laughed with a scornful pleasure. “Pissed as a bishop, he was. He’s as twitchy as a cat, I reckon.”

“I’m nervous, too,” Sharpe snapped. “I hardly slept last night.” Or the night before, because the anticipation of this duel had kept him awake as he tried to foresee what might happen in this cold morning. Now he would discover what was ordained, and the closeness of the discovery only added to the fear. He confessed as much to Harper, and was glad to make the confession, for the big Irishman was Sharpe’s closest friend and a man who had shared all of the battles since Wellington’s army had first landed in Portugal.

“But you weren’t drunk, sir. Bampfylde’s going to have the bloody shakes this morning. They’ll be pouring eggs into him, they will.” Harper, four inches taller than Sharpe’s six feet, seemed amused at the impending confrontation. Harper had no doubt that Sharpe would despatch Captain Bampfylde’s loathsome soul to eternal damnation.

And Sharpe had no doubt that Bampfylde deserved such a fate. Bampfylde was a Naval officer, Captain of the great Vengeance which was anchored in the outer roads, and, just weeks before, he had led an expedition north to capture a French coastal fort. Sharpe had been the senior land officer and, once the fort was captured, Sharpe had marched inland to ambush the French supply road. He had returned to the captured Teste de Buch fort to find Bampfylde gone. Sharpe, with two companies of Riflemen and a force of Marines, had been stranded in the fort, where he had been besieged by a French brigade led by a General called Calvet. By the grace of God, the luck of the Rifles, and the help of an American privateer, Sharpe had saved his men. But not all of them; too many had died in the fort, and Bampfylde was to blame. Sharpe, returning from the savagery of the battle against Calvet, and lethal with indignation, had challenged the Naval officer to this confrontation. “I wish we were fighting with swords.”

“Swords or guns, who cares?” Harper said blithely.

“I care.”

“He’s a dead bastard either way.”

“He’s a late bastard.” Frederickson swung his arms to generate warmth, then, apparently oblivious to the gnawing tensions in Sharpe, asked Harper if the company was ready to march.

“Aye, sir.”

“Good.” For as soon as this duel was fought, Frederickson would take his prime company of the 60th Rifles eastwards to join the army. Sergeant Harper would go with Frederickson for, just like Sharpe, he had become detached from his old battalion. That battalion, the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, had a new Colonel who had appointed his own Majors and a new Regimental Sergeant-Major, which had left Sharpe and Harper adrift.

Harper had been eagerly recruited by Frederickson who, in turn, had been just as eagerly snapped up by Major-General Nairn, a Scotsman who at long last had been given his own fighting brigade and wanted Frederickson’s men to add a lethal sting to his skirmish line. Nairn also wanted Sharpe, not for the skirmish line, but to be his chief of staff.

“But I’ve never been a staff officer,” Sharpe had protested.

“I’ve never commanded a brigade before,” Nairn had replied cheerfully.

“I must talk with Jane,” Sharpe had said, and had then gone back to his lodgings where he broke a week’s chill silence, but their discussion about Nairn’s offer had been no happier than the tearful, rage-shredding arguments about the duel. Jane still insisted that they go home, and this time added a new reason for Sharpe to desert the army. Once peace came, she averred, the price of property in England would rise steeply, which made it all the more sensible to sail home now and find a London house. Sharpe had violently protested at such a notion, claiming that he would never live in London; that it was a vile, dirty, crowded and corrupt city, and while he was not averse to buying a house, that house should be in the country. For no very good reason he wanted to live in Dorset. Someone had once extolled that county, and the idea had lodged irreversibly in his head.

In the end, exhausted by the arguments, a reluctant compromise had been agreed. Jane would go home to take advantage of the existing prices of property, but she would seek a country house in Dorset. In the meantime, and if he survived the duel, Sharpe would serve Major-General Nairn.

“But why?” Jane had pleaded tearfully. “You said yourself you feared fighting more battles. You can’t fight and live for ever!” But Sharpe could not really tell her why he refused to go home before the war’s ending. He certainly did not want to be a staff officer, and he readily acknowledged his reluctance to face more battles, but there was a deeper reason that fought those urges and which tugged at his soul like a dark and torrential current. His friends would be in Nairn’s brigade; Nairn himself, Frederickson, and Harper, So many friends had died, and so few were left, and Sharpe knew he would never forgive himself if he deserted those good friends in the last weeks of a long war. So he would stay and fight. But first he would kill a Naval officer, or else be killed himself.

“I spy the bastards,” Frederickson said happily.

Three horsemen were spurring along the road from the town. All wore dark blue naval cloaks and had fore-and-aft cocked hats. Sharpe looked past the three Naval officers to see if any mounted provosts were riding from the town to stop the duel and arrest the participants. The duel was not exactly a secret, indeed half the depot officers in St Jean de Luz had wished Sharpe luck, so he could only assume that the provosts had chosen to be deaf and blind to the duel’s illegality.

The Naval officers walked their horses up the hill and, without an apparent glance at Sharpe, dismounted fifty yards away. One of the officers held the horses’ reins, one paced nervously, while the third walked towards the three Riflemen.

Frederickson, who was Sharpe’s second, went to meet the approaching Naval officer. “Good morning, Lieutenant!”

“Good morning, sir.” Lieutenant Ford was Bampfylde’s second. He carried a wooden case in his right hand. “I apologise that we’re late.”

“We’re just pleased that you’ve arrived.” Frederickson glanced towards Captain Bampfylde who still paced nervously behind the three horses. “Is your principal prepared to make an apology, Lieutenant?”

The question was asked dutifully, and just as dutifully answered. “Of course not, sir.”

“Which is regrettable.” Frederickson, whose company had suffered at the Teste de Buch fort because of Bampfylde’s cowardice, did not sound in the least regretful. Indeed his voice was positively gleeful in anticipation of Bampfylde’s death. “Shall we let the proceedings begin, Lieutenant?” Without waiting for an answer he beckoned to Sharpe as Ford signalled to Bampfylde.

The two principals faced each other without speaking. Bampfylde looked deathly pale to Sharpe, but quite sober. He was certainly not shaking. He looked angry, but any man who had been accused of gross cowardice should look angry.

Ford opened the wooden case and produced two duelling pistols. Bampfylde, because he had been challenged, had been offered the choice of weapons, and he had chosen a pair of long-barrelled French-made percussion pistols. Frederickson weighed them in his hands, inspected their hammers, then pulled the ramrod from one of the guns and probed both barrels. He was checking that neither pistol had concealed rifling in the rear part of their barrels. Both were smooth-bore. They were, so far as a craftsman’s high skill could make them, identical weapons.

The doctor was leaning forward in the carriage to watch the careful preparations. His coachman, swathed in a cloak, stood by the horses’ heads. Harper waited by the pine trees.

Ford loaded both pistols, carefully watched by Frederickson. The Lieutenant used fine black powder that was dispensed from a small measuring cup. Ford was nervous, his hand quivered, and some of the powder was wisped away by the wind, but he carefully took an extra pinch to compensate for the loss. The powder was tamped down with the ramrod, then each lead ball was wrapped in an oiled leather patch. Bullets, however carefully cast, were never quite of a perfect calibre, but the leather patch made the fit as true as was possible, and thus gave the pistols added accuracy. Greater accuracy would have been achieved if the weapons’ barrels had been rifled, but that was thought to be unsporting. The balls were rammed down the barrels, then the ramrod was struck with a brass hammer to make sure that the missiles were sitting hard against the powder charge.

Once the barrels were charged Ford opened a small tin case which contained the percussion caps. Each cap was a wafer of paper-thin copper enclosing a tiny charge of black powder. When the pistol’s hammer struck the copper wafer the hidden powder exploded to lance a tiny jet of flame down the touch-hole to the compacted charge in the barrel. Such guns were finicky, expensive, and much more reliable than the old-fashioned flintlock that was so prone to dampness. Ford carefully pressed the caps into the tiny recesses beneath the two hammers, then gently lowered the hammers so the guns were safe. Then, with a curiously diffident air, he offered both butts to Frederickson.

Frederickson, thus given the choice, looked at Sharpe.

“Either,” Sharpe said curtly. It was the first word either principal had spoken since they had met. Bampfylde glanced at Sharpe as the Rifleman spoke, then quickly looked away. The Naval officer was a plump young man with a smooth face, while Sharpe had a tanned, scarred skin and angular bones. A scar on the Rifleman’s left cheek distorted his mouth to give his face an unwitting look of mockery that only disappeared when he smiled.

Frederickson chose the right-hand gun. “Coats and hats, gentlemen, please,” he said solemnly.

Sharpe had anticipated this ritual, yet it still seemed strange and clumsy as he threw down his shako, then as he took off the threadbare rifleman’s jacket. On the jacket’s sleeve was a dirty cloth badge; a wreath of oak leaves that proved he had once led a Forlorn Hope into a breach that had been savage with fire and steel. He gave the coat to Frederickson who, in return, handed the loaded pistol to Sharpe. The wind stirred Sharpe’s black hair that he irritably pushed away from his eyes.

Bampfylde shrugged off his boat-cloak, then undid the buttons of his blue and white jacket. Beneath it he wore a white silk shirt that was tucked into a sash about the waistband of his white uniform breeches. It was said to be easier, and thus much safer, to remove shreds of silk from a bullet wound, which was why many officers insisted on wearing silk into battle. Sharpe’s shirt was of stained linen.

Ford took Captain Bampfylde’s hat, cloak and jacket, then cleared his throat. “You will take ten paces, gentlemen, to my count — „Ford was very nervous; he swallowed phlegm, then cleared his throat once more — „after which you will turn and fire. If satisfaction is not given with the first exchange, then you may insist on firing a second time, and so forth.”

“You’re happy with your station?” Frederickson asked Bampfylde who gave a start at being thus addressed, then looked around the bluff as if seeking a safer place to fight.

“I am content,” he said after a pause.

“Major?” Frederickson asked Sharpe.

“Content.” The butt of the pistol was made of cross-hatched walnut. The gun felt heavy and unbalanced in Sharpe’s hand, but that was only because he was not used to such weapons. It was undoubtedly a gun of great precision.

“If you’ll turn, gentlemen?” Ford’s voice was shaking.

Sharpe turned so that he was staring out to sea. The freshening wind had begun to fleck the slaty swell with rills of white foam. The wind, he noted, was coming straight into his face so he would not have to aim the pistol off to compensate for a cross-breeze.

“You may cock your weapons,” Frederickson said. Sharpe pulled back the hammer and felt it click into place. He was besieged by a sudden worry that the percussion cap would fall out of its recess, but when he looked he saw that the wafer’s copper edges were so crimped by the tight fit that the cap was effectively wedged tight.

“Ten paces, gentlemen,” Ford announced. “One. Two…”

Sharpe walked his normal paces. He held the gun low. He did not think he had shown any fear to Bampfylde, but his belly was like knotted ice and a muscle was trembling in his left thigh. His throat was dry as dust. He could see Harper out of the corner of his eye.

“Seven. Eight.” Ford had raised his voice so it would carry above the sound of the sea wind. Sharpe was close enough to the bluffs edge to sec the French lobstermen pulling on long oars to escape the sucking undertow at the cliffs ragged base.

“Nine,” Ford shouted, then a perceptible and nervous pause before the last word, “ten.”

Sharpe took the last pace, then turned his back to the Atlantic wind. Bampfylde was already raising his pistol. He looked very near to Sharpe who suddenly seemed unable to raise his right arm. He was thinking of Jane who he knew was waiting in horrid suspense, then he jerked his arm into motion because Bampfylde’s pistol was already nothing but a round black hole pointing straight between Sharpe’s eyes.

He watched the black hole and suddenly felt the warm calm of battle. The reassurance was so unexpected, yet so familiar, that he smiled.

And Bampfylde fired.

Flame pierced at Sharpe through the billowing smoke, but he had already heard the ball go past his head with a crack like a leather whip snapped hard. The bullet could not have been more than six inches from his left ear, and

Sharpe wondered if both pistols pulled to the right. He waited, wanting the smoke of Bampfylde’s pistol to dissipate in the wind. He was still smiling, though he did not know it. Bampfylde, doubtless from nerves, had fired too quickly and thus had wasted his shot. Sharpe now had all the time he needed to take revenge for the men who had died in the fortress of Teste de Buch.

The wind shredded the smoke, revealing a Bampfylde who stood in profile to Sharpe. The Naval Captain was sucking in his belly to make his body into a smaller target. Sharpe had the blade of the pistol’s foresight outlined against the white silk shirt, and now he lined the back notch with the blade foresight, then he edged the pistol a fraction to the left just in case the weapon did pull to the right. He would aim low, for most guns fired high. If this one did not fire high then he would give Bampfylde a belly wound. That would kill, but slowly; as slowly as some of Sharpe’s men had died after Bampfylde had abandoned them behind the enemy’s lines.

His finger curled round the trigger. The smoke was entirely gone from Bampfylde now and was nothing more than a tenuous scrap of distant mist that was being whirled high off the bluffs edge to sail inland.

“Fire, damn you!” Bampfylde blurted the words aloud, and Sharpe, who had been about to fire, saw that the Naval Captain was visibly shaking.

“Fire, God damn you!” Bampfylde called again, and Sharpe knew he had won utterly, for he had reduced this proud man to a quivering coward. Sharpe had accused Bampfylde of cowardice, and now he was proving the allegation.

“Fire!” Bampfylde called the word in despair.

Sharpe lowered the pistol’s muzzle to compensate for the upward pull, then fired.

Sharpe’s pistol did not pull up at all, but had a slight tendency to fire leftwards, rather than right, and the result, instead of a belly shot, was to sear the ball through both checks of Bampfylde’s bottom. It ripped his white naval breeches open, then scored bloody gouges in his flesh. Bampfylde squealed like a stuck pig and lurched forward. He dropped his pistol, fell to his knees and Sharpe felt the exultation of a job well done. He could see blood bright on the white breeches. The doctor was running clumsily with his black bag, but Ford was already kneeling beside the wounded Bampfylde. “It’s only a flesh wound, sir.”

“He’s broken my back!” Bampfylde hissed the words as evidence of his pain.

“He’s creased your arse.” Frederickson was grinning.

Ford looked up at Frederickson. “You agree honour is served, sir?”

Frederickson was finding it hard not to laugh. “Eminently served, Lieutenant. I bid you good day.“

The doctor knelt beside the Naval Captain. “A flesh wound, nothing more. It will only need a bandage. There’ll be some bruising and soreness. You’re a lucky man.”

Ford translated for the distraught Bampfylde, but the Naval Captain was not listening. Instead he was staring through angry and shameful tears at the black-haired Rifleman who had come to stand over him. Sharpe said nothing, but just tossed down the smoking pistol and walked away. He had failed to kill the man, which angered him, but honour had been served on the dead of the Teste de Buch. He had eaten his grass before breakfast, and now Sharpe must cement his fragile peace with Jane, send her away with his love, then go back to the place he knew the best and feared the most: the battlefield.

Bordeaux still belonged to the Emperor, though for how long no one could tell. The river wharfs were empty, the warehouses bare and the city’s coffers dry. A few men still proclaimed their loyalty to Napoleon, but most longed for the peace that would revive trade and, as a symbol of that longing, they made themselves white cockades that were the badge of France’s royal house. At first the cockades were kept hidden, but as each day passed more were worn in open defiance of the Bonapartist troops that remained. Those imperial defenders were few, and pitifully weak. Some crippled veterans and pensioners manned the river forts, and a half battalion of young infantrymen guarded the prefecture, but all the good troops had marched south and cast to reinforce Marshal Soult and, encouraged by their absence, the hungry city grumbled with disaffection and rebellion.

On a March morning, brisk with a cold wind and wet with rain that swept from the Atlantic, a single wagon arrived at the city’s prefecture. The wagon held four heavy crates and was escorted by a troop of cavalrymen who, oddly, were commanded by an infantry Colonel. The wagon stopped in the prefecture’s yard and its Dragoon escort, on weary and muddied horses, slouched empty-eyed in their saddles. They wore their hair in cadenettes; small pigtails which hung beside their cheeks and were a mark of their elite status.

The infantry Colonel, elderly and scarred, climbed slowly from his saddle and walked to the porticoed entrance where a sentry presented his musket. The Colonel was too weary to acknowledge the sentry’s salute, but just pushed through the heavy door. The cavalry escort was left under the command of a Dragoon Sergeant who had a face that was the texture of knife-slashed leather. He sat with his heavy straight-bladed sword resting across his saddle bow and the nervous sentry, trying not to catch the Sergeant’s hostile eyes, could see that the edge of the dulled blade was brightly nicked from recent battle.

“Hey! Pigface!” The Sergeant had noted the sentry’s surreptitious interest.

“Sergeant?”

“Water. Fetch some water for my horse.”

The sentry, who was under orders not to stir from his post, tried to ignore the command.

“Hey! Pigfacc! I said get some water.”

“I’m supposed to stay…”

The sentry went silent because the Sergeant had drawn a battered pistol from a saddle holster.

The Sergeant thumbed back the pistol’s heavy cock. “Pigface?”

The sentry stared into the pistol’s black muzzle, then fled to get a bucket of water while, upstairs, the infantry Colonel had been directed into a cavernous room that had once been gracious with marble walls, a moulded plaster ceiling, and a polished boxwood floor, but which was now dirty, untidy and chill despite the small fire that burned in the wide hearth. A small bespectacled man was the room’s only occupant. He sat hunched over a green malachite table on which a slew of papers curled between the wax-thick stumps of dead candles. “You’re Ducos?” the infantryman demanded without any other greeting.

“I am Major Pierre Ducos.” Ducos did not look up from his work.

“My name is Colonel Maillot.” Maillot seemed almost too tired to speak as he opened his sabretache and took out a scaled dispatch that he placed on the table. Maillot deliberately placed the dispatch on top of the paper upon which Ducos was writing.

Pierre Ducos ignored the insult. Instead he lifted the dispatch and noted the red seal that bore the insignia of a bee. Other men might have shown astonishment at receiving a missive with the Emperor’s private seal, but Ducos’s attitude seemed to express irritation that the Emperor should aggravate him with further work. Nor, as other men would have done, did Ducos immediately open the dispatch, but instead he insisted on finishing the work that the Colonel had interrupted. “Tell me, Colonel,” Ducos had an extraordinarily deep voice for such a puny man, “what would your judgement be on a General of Brigade who allows his command to be defeated by a handful of vagabonds?”

Maillot was too tired to express any judgement, so said nothing. Ducos, who was writing his confidential report to the Emperor on the events at the Teste de Buch fort, dipped his nib in ink and wrote on. It was a full five minutes before Ducos deigned to close his inkwell and slit open the Emperor’s dispatch. It contained two sheets of paper that he read in silence, and afterwards, in obedience to an instruction contained on one of the sheets, he threw the other on to the fire. “It’s taken you long enough to reach me.”

The words were ungracious, but Maillot showed no resentment as he walked to the fire and held chilled hands to the small warmth generated by the burning page. “I’d have been here sooner, but the roads are hardly safe, Major. Even with a cavalry escort one has to beware bandits.” He said the last word mockingly for both men knew that the ‘bandits’ were either deserters from Napoleon’s armies or young men who had fled into the countryside to avoid conscription. What Maillot did not say was that his wagon had been attacked by such bandits. Six of the Dragoons had died, including Maillot’s second-in-command, but Maillot had counter-attacked, then released the surviving Dragoons to pursue and punish the brigands. Maillot was a veteran of the Emperor’s wars and he would not be insulted by mere vagabonds.

Ducos unhooked the spectacles from his ears and wiped the round lenses on a corner of his blue jacket. “The consignment is safe?”

“Downstairs. It’s in an artillery wagon that’s parked in the yard. The escort need food and water, and so do their horses.”

Ducos frowned to show that he was above dealing with such humdrum requirements as food and water. “Do the escort know what is in the wagon?”

“Of course not.”

“What do they think it is?”

Maillot shrugged. “Does it matter? They simply know they have fetched four unmarked crates to Bordeaux.”

Ducos lifted the dispatch’s remaining sheet of paper. “This gives me authority over the escort, and I insist upon knowing whether they can be trusted.”

Maillot sat in a chair and stretched out his long, weary and mud-spattered legs. “They’re commanded by a good man, Sergeant Challon, and they’ll do nothing to cross him. But can they be trusted? Who knows? They’ve probably guessed what’s in the crates by now, but so far they’ve stayed loyal.” He stifled a yawn. “What they’re more concerned about now is food and water.”

“And you, Colonel?” Ducos asked.

“I need food and water, too.”

Ducos grimaced to show that his question had been misunderstood. “What do you do now, Colonel?”

“I return to the Emperor, of course. The consignment is your responsibility. And if you’ll forgive me, I’m damned glad to be shot of it. A soldier should be fighting now, not acting as a baggage-master.”

Ducos, who had just been given the responsibilities of a baggage-master, restored the polished spectacles to his face. “The Emperor does me great honour.”

“He trusts you,” Maillot said simply.

“As he trusts you,” Ducos returned the compliment.

“I’ve been with him many years.”

Ducos glanced at the grey-haired Maillot. Doubtless Maillot had been with the Emperor for many years, but he had never been promoted above the rank of Colonel. Other Frenchmen had risen from the ranks to command whole armies, but not this tall, scarred veteran with his doggedly trustworthy face. In brief, Ducos decided, this Maillot was a fool; one of the Emperor’s loyal mastiffs; a man for errands; a man without imagination. “Bordeaux is not a safe place,” Ducos said softly, almost as if he was speaking to himself, “the mayor has sent a message to the English, asking them to come here. He thinks I don’t know of the message, but I have a copy on this table.”

“Then arrest him,” Maillot said casually.

“With what? Half the town guard wears the white cockade now, and so would the other half if they had the guts.” Ducos stood and crossed to a window from which he stared at the rain which swept in great swathes across the Place St Julien. “The wagon will be safe here tonight,” he said, “and your men can take some of the empty billets.” Ducos turned, suddenly smiling. “But you, Colonel, will do me the honour of taking supper at my lodgings?”

All Maillot wished to do was sleep, but he knew in what favour the Emperor held this small bespectacled man and so, out of courtesy and because Ducos pressed the invitation so warmly, the Colonel reluctantly accepted.

Yet, to Maillot’s surprise, Ducos proved a surprisingly entertaining host, and Maillot, who had snatched two hours’ exhausted sleep in the afternoon, found himself warming to the small man who talked so frankly of his services to the Emperor. “I was never a natural soldier like yourself, Colonel,” Ducos said modestly. “My talents were used to corrupt, outguess and cheat the enemy.” Ducos did not talk of his past failures that night, but of his successes such as the time when he had lured some Spanish guerrilla leaders to truce talks, and how they had all been slaughtered when they trustingly arrived. Ducos smiled at the memory. “I sometimes miss Spain.”

“I never fought there,” Maillot helped himself to more brandy, “but I was told about the guerilleros. How can you fight men who don’t wear uniforms?”

“By killing as many civilians as you can, of course,” Ducos said, then, wistfully, “I do miss the warm climate.”

Maillot laughed at that. “You were evidently not in Russia.”

“I was not.” Ducos shivered at the very thought, then twisted in his chair to peer into the night. “It’s stopped raining, my dear Maillot. You’ll take a turn in the garden?”

The two men walked the sodden lawn and their cigar smoke drifted up through the branches of the pear-trees. Maillot must still have been remembering the Russian Campaign, for he suddenly uttered a short laugh then commented how very clever the Emperor had been in Moscow.

“Clever?” Ducos sounded surprised. “It didn’t seem very clever to those of us who weren’t there.”

“That’s my point,” Maillot said. “We heard about the unrest at home, so what did the Emperor do? He sent orders that the female dancers of the Paris ballet were to perform without skirts or stockings!” Maillot laughed at the memory, then turned to the garden’s high brick wall and unbuttoned his breeches. He went on talking as he pissed. “We heard later that Paris forgot all about the deaths in Russia, because all they could talk about was Mademoiselle Rossillier’s naked thighs. Were you in Paris at the time?”

“I was in Spain.” Ducos was standing directly behind Maillot. As the older man had talked, Ducos had drawn a small pistol from his tail pocket and silently eased back its oiled cock. Now he aimed the pistol at the base of Maillot’s neck. “I was in Spain,” Ducos said again, and he screwed his eyes tight shut as he pulled the trigger. The ball shattered one of Maillot’s vertebrae, throwing the grey head back in a bloody paroxysm. The Colonel seemed to give a remorseful sigh as he collapsed. His head jerked forward to thump against the brickwork, then the body twitched once and was quite still. The foul-smelling pistol smoke lingered beneath the pear branches.

Ducos retched, gagged, and managed to control himself.

A voice shouted from a neighbouring house, wanting an explanation for the gunshot, but when Ducos made no reply there was no further question.

By dawn the body was hidden under compost.

Ducos had not slept. It was not conscience, nor disgust at Maillot’s death that had kept him awake, but the enormity of what that death represented. Ducos, by pulling the trigger, had abandoned all that had once been most dear to him. He had been raised to believe in the sanctity of the Revolutionary ideals, then had learned that Napoleon’s imperial ambitions were really the same ideals, but transmuted by one man’s genius into a unique and irreplaceable glory. Now, as Napoleon’s glory crumbled, the ideals must live on, only now Ducos recognized that France itself was the embodiment of that greatness.

Ducos had thus persuaded himself in that damp night that the irrelevant trappings of Imperial France could be sacrificed. A new France would rise, and Ducos would serve that new France from a position of powerful responsibility. For the moment, though, a time of waiting and safety was needed. So, in the morning, he summoned the Dragoon Sergeant Challon to the prefecture where he sat the grizzled sergeant down at the green malachite table across which Ducos pushed the one remaining sheet of the Emperor’s dispatch. “Read that, Sergeant.”

Challon confidently picked up the paper, then, realizing that he could not bluff the bespectacled officer, dropped it again. “I don’t read, sir.”

Ducos stared into the bloodshot eyes. “That piece of paper gives you to me, Sergeant. It’s signed by the Emperor himself.”

“Yes, sir.” Challon’s voice was toneless.

“It means you obey me.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ducos then took a risk. Spread on the table was a newspaper which he ordered Challon to throw to the floor.

The Sergeant was puzzled at the order, but obeyed. Then he went very still. The newspaper had hidden two white cockades; two big cockades of flamboyant white silk.

Challon stared at the symbols of Napoleon’s enemies, and Ducos watched the pigtailed Sergeant. Challon was not a subtle man, and his leathery scarred face betrayed his thoughts as openly as though he spoke them aloud. The first thing the face betrayed to Ducos was that Sergeant Challon knew what was concealed in the four crates. Ducos would have been astonished if Challon had not known. The second thing that the Sergeant betrayed was that he, just like Ducos, desired those contents.

Challon looked up at the small Major. “Might I ask where Colonel Maillot is, sir?”

“Colonel Maillot contracted a sudden fever which my physician thinks will prove fatal.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir,” Challon’s voice was very wooden, “as some of the lads liked the Colonel, sir.” For a second, as he looked into those hard eyes, Ducos thought he had wildly miscalculated. Then Challon glanced at the incriminating cockades. “But some of the lads will learn to live with their grief.”

The relief washed through Ducos, though he was far too clever to reveal either that relief or the fear which had preceded it. Challon, Ducos now knew, was his man. “The fever,” Ducos said mildly, “can be very catching.”

“So I’ve heard, sir.”

“And our responsibility will demand at least six men. Don’t you agree?”

“I think more than that will survive the fever, sir,” Challon said as elliptically as Ducos. They were now confederates in treachery, and neither could state it openly, though each perfectly understood the other.

“Good.” Ducos picked up one of the cockades. Challon hesitated, then picked up the other, and thus their pact was sealed.

Two mornings later there was a sea-fog that rolled from the Garonne estuary to shroud Bordeaux in a white, clinging dampness through which nine horsemen rode eastwards in the dawn. Pierre Ducos led them. He was dressed in civilian clothes with a sword and two pistols at his belt. Sergeant Challon and his men were in the vestiges of their green uniforms, though all the troopers had discarded their heavy metal helmets. Their saddle bags bulged, as did the panniers of the pack horses that three of the troopers led.

To deceive, cheat, disguise, and outwit; those were the skills Ducos had given to his Emperor; which skills must now serve his own ends. The horses clattered through the city’s outer gate, stirred the fog with their passing, and then were gone.

CHAPTER 1

“Of course the Peer knew about it,” Major-General Nairn was speaking of the duel, “but between you and me I don’t think he was unhappy about it. The Navy’s been rather irritating him lately.”

“I expected to be arrested,” Sharpe said.

“If you’d have killed the bugger, you would have been. Even Wellington can’t absolutely ignore a deceased Naval Captain, but it was clever of you just to crease the man’s bum.” Nairn gave a joyful bark of laughter at the thought of Bampfylde’s wound.

“I was trying to kill him,” Sharpe confessed.

“It was much cleverer of you to give him a sore arse. And let me say how very good it is to see you, my dear Sharpe. I trust Jane is well?”

“Indeed, sir.”

Sharpe’s tone caused Nairn to give the Rifleman an amused look. “Do I detect that you are in marital bad odour, Sharpe?”

“I stink, sir.”

It had taken Sharpe three days to catch up with the advancing army, and another half-day to find Nairn, whose brigade was on the left flank of the advance. Sharpe had eventually discovered the Scotsman on a hilltop above a ford which the British had captured that morning and through which a whole Division now marched. The French were only visible as a few retreating squadrons of cavalry far to the cast, though a battery of enemy artillery occasionally fired from a copse of trees about a mile beyond the river.

“You brought Frederickson?” Nairn now asked.

“His men are at the foot of the hill.”

“Creased his bum!” Nairn laughed again. “Can I assume from your marital odour that Jane is not with you?”

“She sailed for home two days ago, sir.”

“Best place for a woman. I never really did approve of officers carrying wives around like so much baggage. No offence, of course, Jane’s a lovely girl, but she’s still baggage to an army. Hello! Christ!” These last words were a greeting for a French cannonball that had thumped across the river and bounced uphill to force Nairn into a frantic evasion that almost spilled him from his saddle. The Scotsman calmed his horse, then gestured over the river. “You can see what’s happening, Sharpe. The bloody French try to stop us at every river, and we just outflank the buggers and keep moving.” At the foot of the slope Nairn’s brigade patiently waited their turn to cross the ford. The brigade was composed of one Highland battalion and two English county battalions.

“What exactly do you want me to do?” Sharpe asked Nairn.

“Damned if I know. Enjoy yourself. I am!” And indeed the Scotsman, who had endured years of dreary staff work for Wellington, revelled in his new command. Nairn’s only regret was that so far there had been no battle in which he could demonstrate how foolish Wellington had been in not giving him a brigade much earlier. “God damn it, Richard, there’s not much of the war left. I want one crack at the garlic-reekers.”

Sharpe might have been ordered to enjoy himself, but he soon discovered that being chief of staff to a brigade entailed enormously long days and seemingly endless problems. He worked wherever Nairn’s headquarters happened to be; sometimes in a sequestrated farmhouse, but more usually in a group of tents pitched wherever the brigade happened to bivouac. Sometimes Sharpe would hear the thump of guns to the east and he would know that a French rearguard was in action, but Sharpe had neither the time, nor the responsibility, to join the fighting. He only knew that every river crossed and every mile of country captured meant more work for the harried staff officers who had to marry men to food, weapons to ammunition, and Divisional Headquarters’ orders to a baser reality.

It was a salutary job. Sharpe had always expressed a combat soldier’s scorn for most staff officers, believing that such arrogant creatures were overpaid and underworked, but as Sharpe discovered the problems of organizing a brigade, so he learned that it was his job, rather than Nairn’s, to solve those problems. Thus one typical day, just two weeks after his arrival at the brigade, began with an appeal from the commander of a battery of horse artillery whose supply wagon had become lost in the tangle of French lanes behind the British advance. Retrieving the errant wagon was no part of Sharpe’s duties, except that the gunners were detailed to support Nairn’s forward positions and Sharpe knew that field guns without roundshot were useless, and so he sent an aide in search of the missing supplies.

At breakfast a patrol of the King’s German Legion light cavalry fetched a score of French prisoners to the farmhouse that was Nairn’s temporary headquarters. The cavalry commander bellowed for a competent officer and, when Sharpe appeared, the man waved at the frightened enemy soldiers. “I don’t want the buggers!” He and his men galloped away and Sharpe had to feed the Frenchmen, guard them, and find medical help for the half-dozen men whose faces and shoulders had been slashed by the German sabres.

A message arrived from Division ordering Nairn to move his brigade three miles eastward. The brigade was supposed to be enjoying a rest day while the southern divisions caught up, but evidently the orders had been changed. Sharpe sent an aide in search of Nairn who had snatched the opportunity to go duck-shooting, then, just as he had all the clerks, cooks, prisoners, and officers’ servants ready to move, another message cancelled the first. The mules were unloaded and urgent messages sent to countermand the march orders which had long gone to the battalions. Another aide was sent to tell Nairn he could continue slaughtering ducks.

Then three provosts brought a Highlander to headquarters. They had caught the man stealing a goose from a French villager and, though the Scotsman was undoubtedly guilty, and the goose indisputably dead, Sharpe had no doubt that Nairn would find some reason for sparing a fellow Scotsman’s life. Two Spanish officers arrived asking for directions to General Morillo’s Division and, because they were in no hurry, and because Wellington had stressed how vital it was that the Spanish allies were treated well, Sharpe pressed them to stay to lunch which promised to be hastily cooked stolen goose and hard-baked bread.

A village priest arrived to seek assurances that the women of his parish would be safe from the molestation of the British, and in the very next breath mentioned that he had seen some of Marshal Soult’s cavalry to the north-west of his village. Sharpe did not believe the report, which would have implied that the French were attempting an outflanking march, but he had to report the sighting to Division who then did nothing about it.

In the afternoon there were a dozen new standing orders for the clerks to copy and send to Nairn’s three battalions. Sharpe wondered if he would now have time to join the Spaniards who were lingering over the lunch table, but then the problem of the brigade’s cattle landed on his lap.

“They’re just no damned good, sir.” The head drover, a Yorkshireman, stared gloomily at the beasts which had been driven into a pasture behind the headquarters. These animals had been sent as the brigade’s walking larder which the Yorkshireman was supposed to herd forward as the army advanced. “It’s the wet that’s done it, sir.”

“They look plump,” Sharpe said, hoping that optimism would drive the problem away.

“They’re fleshy, right enough,” the Yorkshireman allowed, “but you should see their hooves, sir. It’s fair cruel to do that to a beast.”

Sharpe stooped by the nearest cow and saw how the hoof had separated from the pelt. The gap was filled with a milky, frothy ooze.

“Once they start seeping like that,” the drover said grimly, “then you’ve lost the beasts. They’ve walked their last mile, sir, and I can’t understand the nature of a man who’d do this to a creature. You can’t walk cattle like men, sir, they have to rest.” The Yorkshireman was bitter and resentful.

Two hundred cattle stared reproachfully as Sharpe straightened up. “Are they all like it?”

“All but a handful, sir, and it’ll mean a killing. Nothing else will serve.”

So butchers had to be fetched, ammunition authorised, and barrels and salt found for the meat. All afternoon the sound of bellowing and musket shots, mingling with the stench of blood and powder smoke, filled headquarters. The sounds and smells at least served to drive away the two Spaniards who otherwise seemed intent on draining away Nairn’s precious hoard of captured brandy. An aide arrived from Division demanding to know what the firing was, and Sharpe sent the man back with a curt complaint about the quality of the cattle. The complaint, he knew, would be ignored.

At the day’s end, and despite its unrelenting activity, Sharpe felt that most of his work was still unfinished. He said as much to Nairn when they met before supper in the farm’s parlour. The Scotsman, as ever, was ebullient. “Four brace of duck! Almost as satisfying as a good battle.”

“I’ve got enough work without fighting battles,” Sharpe grumbled.

“There speaks the true staff officer.” Nairn stretched out his legs so his servant could tug off his muddied boots. “Any important news?” he asked Sharpe.

Sharpe decided not to worry Nairn with the problem of the cattle. “The only remarkable aspect of today, sir, is that Colonel Taplow didn’t make any trouble.”

Lieutenant Colonel Taplow commanded one of Nairn’s two English battalions. He was a short and choleric man with a manner of astonishing incivility who perceived slights to his dignity in every order. Nairn rather liked the foul man. “Taplow’s easy enough to understand. Think of him as typically English; stubborn, stupid, and solid. Like a lump of undercookcd pork.”

“Or salt beef,” Sharpe would not rise to the Scotsman’s bait, “and I hope you like salt beef, sir, because you’re going to get a damned lot of it.”

Next day the advance continued. Every village greeted the British with a sullen curiosity that later turned to astonished approval when the villagers discovered that, unlike their own armies, this one paid for the food they took from barns and storehouses. Soldiers found French girls who then joined the Spanish and Portuguese wives who straggled behind the advancing battalions. The women were more trouble than the soldiers, for many of the Spanish wives had an ineradicable hatred of the French that could lead to quick savage knife fights. Sharpe once had to kick two women apart, then, when the Spanish girl turned from her French enemy and tried to stab Sharpe, he stunned her with his rifle butt before spurring his horse onwards.

Sergeant Harper, before leaving St Jean de Luz, had sent his own Spanish wife home. She and the baby had gone to Pasajes, just across the French border, with orders to wait there for Harper. “She’ll do just fine, sir,” Harper said to Sharpe. “She’s happier with her own people, so she is.”

“You don’t worry about her?”

Harper was astonished at the question. “Why should I? I gave the lass money, so I did. She knows I’ll fetch her and the child when it’s time.”

Harper might not have worried about his Isabella, but Sharpe found Jane’s absence hard to bear. He persuaded himself that it was unreasonable to expect any letters to have yet reached him from Britain, but he still eagerly searched each new bag of mail that came to the brigade. At other times he tried to imagine where Jane was and what she did. He constructed a dream in his head of the house she would buy; a gracious stone house set in a placid gentle countryside. There would be a place in the house where he could hang up his ugly heavy sword, and another place for his battered rifle. He imagined friends visiting, and long conversations by candlelight in which they would remember these lengthening spring days as they pursued an army across its homeland. He imagined a nursery where his children would grow up far from the stink of powder smoke.

They were a soldier’s dreams of peace, and peace was in the air like the smell of almond blossom. Each day brought a new rumour of the war’s ending; Napoleon was confidently said to have taken poison, then a contrary rumour claimed that the Emperor had broken a Russian army north of Paris, but the very next day a Spanish Colonel swore on the six bleeding wounds of Christ that the Prussians had trounced Bonaparte and fed his body to their hunting dogs. An Italian deserter from Marshal Soult’s army reported that the Emperor had fled to the United States, while the chaplain of Colonel Taplow’s fusiliers was entirely certain that Napoleon was negotiating a personal peace with Britain’s Prince Regent; the chaplain had heard as much from his wife whose brother was a dancing-master to a discarded mistress of the Prince.

Fed by such rumours the talk of the army turned more and more to the mysterious condition of peacetime. Except for a few months in 1803, most men had never known Britain and France to be at peace. These men were soldiers, their trade was to kill Frenchmen, and peace was as much a threat as a promise. The threats of peace were very real, unemployment and poverty, while the promises of peace were more tenuous and, for most men in the army, nonexistent. An officer could resign his commission, take his half pay, and chance his arm at civilian life, but most of the soldiers had enlisted for life, and peace for them would simply mean their dispersal to garrisons across the world. A few would be discharged, but without pension and with a bleak future in a world where other men had learned useful skills.

“You’ll get me papers?” Harper nevertheless asked Sharpe one night.

„I’ll get you papers, Patrick, I promise.“ The ‘papers’ were the certificate of discharge that would guarantee that Sergeant Patrick Harper had been retired because of wounds. ”What will you do then?“ Sharpe asked.

Harper had no doubts. “Fetch the wife, sir, then go home.”

“To Donegal?”

“Where else?”

Sharpe was thinking that Donegal was a long way from Dorset. “We’ll miss our friends,” he said instead.

“That’s the truth, sir.”

Sharpe was visiting Captain William Frederickson’s company that had taken over a windmill on a shallow hill above a wide, tree-bordered stream. The Riflemen’s supper was roast pork, a dish that Captain Frederickson was very partial to and which meant that no sow or piglet was safe if it was close to his line of march. Sharpe was given a generous helping of the stolen meat, after which Frederickson led him up the dizzying cradle of ladders which climbed to the mill’s cap. There Frederickson opened a small door and the two officers crawled out on to a tiny platform that gave access to the mill’s big axle. A spitting rain was being gusted by an east wind. “There,” Frederickson pointed eastwards.

Beyond the stream, and beyond the dark loom of some further woods, there was a glimmering smear of light in the night sky. Only one thing could make a light such as that: the flames of an army’s bivouac fires reflecting of low clouds. The two Rifle officers were looking towards the French.

“They’re camped around Toulouse,” Frederickson said.

“Toulouse?” Sharpe repeated vaguely.

“It’s a French city, though I wouldn’t expect anyone as exalted as a staff officer to know that. It’s also the place where Marshal Soult doubtless hopes to stop us, unless the war ends first.”

“Perhaps it’s all wishful thinking.” Sharpe took the bottle of wine that Frederickson offered him. “Honey’s escaped from disaster before.”

“There’ll be peace,” Frederickson said firmly. “Everyone’s tired of the fighting.” He paused. “I wonder what the devil we’ll all do in peacetime?”

“Rest,” Sharpe said.

“In your Dorset home?” Frederickson, knowing that Jane had gone home to purchase a country property, was amused. “And after a month of it you’ll be wishing to hell that you were back here in the rain, wondering just what the bastards are planning, and whether you’ve got enough ammunition for the morning.”

“Have you?” Sharpe asked with professional concern.

“I stole four cartridge boxes from Taplow’s quartermaster.” Sweet William fell silent as a billow of wind stirred the furled and tethered mill-sails.

Sharpe gazed towards the French encampment. “Is it a big city?”

“Big enough.”

“Fortified?”

“I would imagine so.” Frederickson took the wine bottle back and tipped it to his mouth. “And I imagine it will be a bastard of a city to take.”

“They all are,” Sharpe said drily. “Do you remember Badajoz?”

“I doubt I’ll ever forget it,” Frederickson said, though nor would any man who had fought across that ditch of blood.

“We took that at Eastertime,” Sharpe said, “and next week is Easter.”

“Is it, by God?” Frederickson asked. “By God, so it is.”

Both men fell silent, both wondering whether this would be their last Easter. If peace was a promise, then it was a promise barred by that great red smear of light for, unless the French surrendered in the next few days, then a battle would have to be fought. One last battle.

“What will you do, William?” Sharpe took the bottle and drank.

Frederickson did not need the question explained. “Stay in the army. I don’t know another life and I don’t think I’d be a good tradesman.” He fumbled with flint and steel, struck a spark to his tinder box, then lit a cheroot. “I find I have a talent for violence,” he said with amusement.

“Is that good?” Sharpe asked.

Frederickson hooted with laughter at the question. “Violence solved your problem with bloody Bampfylde! If you hadn’t fought the bugger then you can be certain he’d even now be making trouble for you in London. Violence may not be good, my friend, but it has a certain efficiency in the resolution of otherwise insoluble problems.” Frederickson took the bottle ‘I can’t say I’m enamoured of a peacetime army, but there’ll probably be another war before too long.“

“You should get married,” Sharpe said quietly.

Frederickson sneered at that thought. “Why do condemned men always encourage others to join them on the gallows?”

“It isn’t like that.”

“Marriage is an appetite,” Frederickson said savagely, “and once you’ve enjoyed the flesh, all that’s left is a carcass of dry bones.”

“No,” Sharpe protested.

“I do hope it isn’t true,” Frederickson toasted Sharpe with the half empty wine bottle, “and I especially hope it isn’t true for all of my dear friends who have pinned their hopes of peacetime happiness on something as wilfully frail as a wife.”

“It isn’t true,” Sharpe insisted, and he hoped that when he returned to headquarters he would find a letter from Jane.

But there was none, and he remembered their arguments before the duel and he wondered whether his own peacetime happiness had been soured by his stubbornness.

And in the morning the brigade was ordered to advance eastwards. Towards Toulouse.

In finding Sergeant Challon, Major Pierre Ducos had unwittingly found his perfect instrument. Challon liked to have a woman in his bed, meat at his table, and wine in his belly, but most of all Challon liked to have his decisions made for him and he was ready to reward the decision maker with a dogged loyalty.

It was not that Challon was a stupid man; far from it, but the Dragoon Sergeant understood that other men were cleverer than himself, and he quickly discovered that Pierre Ducos was among the cleverest he had ever known. That was a comfort to Challon, for if he was to survive his treachery to the Emperor’s cause, then he would need cleverness.

The nine horsemen had travelled eastwards from Bordeaux. Their route took them far to the north of where Marshal Soult retreated in front of the British army, and far to the south of where the Emperor protected Paris with a dazzling display of defensive manoeuvres. Ducos and his men rode into the deserted uplands of central France. They lived well on their journey. There was money for an inn room each night, and money for those men who wanted whores, and money for food, and money for spare horses, and money for good civilian clothes to replace the Dragoons’ uniforms, though Ducos noted that each man saved his green uniform coat. That was pride; the same pride that made the Dragoons wear their hair long so that, one day, they might again plait it into the distinctive cadenettes. Their possession of money also made the nine men ride circumspectly, for the forests were full of dangers, yet by avoiding the main roads they travelled safely around the places where hungry brigands laid desperate ambushes.

Ducos, Sergeant Challon, and three of the troopers were Frenchmen. One of the other Dragoons was a German; a great hulking Saxon with eyes the colour of a winter’s sky and hands that, despite the loss of two fingers on his right hand, could still break a man’s neck with ease. There was a Pole who sat dark and quiet, yet seemed eager to please Ducos. The other two Dragoons were Italians, recruited in the early heady days of Napoleon’s career. All spoke French, all trusted Challon and, because Challon trusted Ducos, they were happy to offer allegiance to the small bespectacled Major.

After a week’s eastward travel Ducos found a deserted upland farm where for a few days the nine men lay up in seclusion. They were not hiding, for Ducos was happy to let the Dragoons ride to the nearby town so long as they fetched him back whatever old newspapers were available. “If we’re not hiding,” one of the Italians grumbled to Challon, “then what are we doing?” The Italians disliked being stranded in the primitive comforts of the turf-roofed farmhouse, but Challon told them to be patient.

“The Major’s sniffing the wind,” Challon said, and Ducos was indeed sniffing the strange winds that blew across France, and he was beginning to detect a danger in them. After two weeks in the farm Ducos told Challon of his fears. The two men walked down the valley, crossed an uncut meadow and walked beside a quick stream. “You realize,” Ducos said, “that the Emperor will never forgive us?”

“Does it matter, sir?” Challon, ever the soldier, had a carbine in his right hand while his eyes watched the forest’s edge across the stream. “God bless the Emperor, sir, but he can’t last for ever. The bastards will get him sooner rather than later.”

“Did you ever meet the Emperor?” Ducos asked.

“Never had that honour, sir. I saw him often enough, of course, but never met him, sir.”

“He has a Corsican’s sense of honour. If his family is hurt, Sergeant, then Napoleon will never forgive. So long as he has a breath in his body he will seek revenge.”

The grim words made Challon nervous. The four crates that Challon had escorted to Bordeaux had contained property that belonged to the Emperor and to his family, and soon the Emperor would have all the leisure in the world to wonder what had happened to that precious consignment. “Even so, sir, if he’s imprisoned, what can he do?”

“The Emperor of France,” Ducos said pedantically, “is the head of the French State. If he falls from power, Challon, then there will be another head of state. That man, presumably the King, will regard himself as Napoleon’s legitimate heir. I presume that you would like to die of a peaceful old age in France?“

“Yes, sir.”

“So would I.” Ducos was staring over the stream and dark trees towards a tall crag of pale rock about which two eagles circled in the cold wind, but Ducos was not seeing the rock, nor even the handsome birds, but instead was remembering the Teste de Buch fort where, once again, he had been humiliated by an English Rifleman. Sharpe. It was odd, Ducos thought, how often Sharpe had crossed his path, and even odder how often that crude soldier had succeeded in frustrating Ducos’s most careful plans. It had happened again at the benighted fort on the French coast and Ducos, seeking some clever stroke that would give himself and Sergeant Challon freedom, had found himself thinking more and more about Major Richard Sharpe.

At first Ducos had resented the intrusion of Sharpe into his thoughts, but in these last two days he had begun to see that there was a possible purpose to that intrusion. Perhaps it would be possible for Ducos to take revenge on his old enemy as a part of the concealment of the theft. The plan was intricate, but the more Ducos tested it, the more he liked it. What he needed now was Challon’s support, for without the Sergeant’s physical courage, and without the loyalty that the other Dragoons felt for Challon, the intricacy was doomed. So, as they walked beside the stream, Ducos spoke low and urgently to the Sergeant, and what he said revealed a golden bridge to a wonderful future for Sergeant Challon.

“It will mean a visit to Paris,” Ducos warned, “then a killing somewhere in France.”.

Challon shrugged. “That doesn’t sound too dangerous, sir.”

“After which we’ll leave France, Sergeant, till the storm blows out.”

“Very good, sir.” Challon was quite content so long as his duties were clear. Ducos could do the planning, and Challon would doubtless do the killing. Thus, in Challon’s world, it had ever been; he was content to let the officers devise their campaign plans, and he would cut and hack with a blade to make those plans work.

Ducos’s clever mind was racing backwards and forwards, sensing the dangers in his ideas and seeking to pre-empt those risks. “Do any of your men write?”

“Herman’s the only one, sir. He’s a clever bugger for a Saxon.”

“I need an official report written, but not in my own handwriting.” Ducos frowned suddenly. “How can he write? He’s had two fingers chopped off.”

“I didn’t say he wrote so as you can read it, sir,” Challon said chidingly, “but he’s got his letters.”

“It doesn’t matter,” for Ducos could even see a virtue in the Saxon’s illegible handwriting. And that, he realized, was the hallmark of a good plan, when even its apparent frailties turned into real advantages.

So that night, under a flickering rushlight, the nine men made a solemn agreement. The agreement was a thieves’ pact which pledged them to follow Ducos’s careful plan and, to further that plan, the Saxon laboriously wrote a long document to Ducos’s dictation. Afterwards, as the Dragoons slept, Ducos wrote his own long report which purported to describe the fate of the Emperor’s missing baggage. Then, in the morning, with panniers and saddlebags still bulging, the nine men rode north. They faced a few weeks of risk, a few months of hiding, then triumph.

CHAPTER 2

Over the next few days it seemed as if Wellington was offering peace an opportunity, for he broke off his direct advance on Toulouse and instead ordered the army into a confusing scries of manoeuvres that could only delay any confrontation with Marshal Soult’s army. If the manoeuvres were designed to offer the French a chance to retreat, they did not take it, but just waited at Toulouse while the British, Spanish and Portuguese forces made their slow and cumbersome advance. One night Nairn’s brigade was marched through pelting rain to where Engineers were laying a pontoon bridge across a wide river. Sharpe knew the river was the Garonne, for his orders said as much, but he had no idea where in France the Garonne ran. Nor did it much matter for the night becam’e a fiasco when the Engineers discovered their bridge was too short. Nairn’s men slept by the roadside as the Engineers swore and wrestled with the clumsy tin boats that should have carried the wooden roadway. Eventually the crossing was abandoned.

Three days later a bridge was successfully laid elsewhere on the river, troops crossed, but it seemed the bridge led to nothing but swampland in which the artillery floundered up to its axles. In Spain no such mistake would have happened, for in Spain there had always been willing local guides eager to lead the British army towards the hated French, but here, on the Emperor’s own soil, there was no such help. Neither was there any opposition from the local population who merely seemed numbed by the years of war.

The troops who struggled in the swamps were called back and their bridge was dismantled. There had been no interference from Marshal Soult’s army that was entrenched about the city’s outskirts. A German deserter reported on the enemy dispositions, and also said that the Emperor Napoleon had committed suicide. “A German soldier will say anything to get a decent meal,” Nairn grumbled, “or an English one to get a bottle of rum.”

No confirmation came of the Emperor’s death. It seemed that Napoleon still lived, Paris was uncaptured, and so the war went on. Wellington ordered a new bridge made and this time almost the whole army crossed to find itself north of Toulouse and between two rivers. They marched south and by Good Friday they were close enough to smell the cooking fires of the city. Next day the army marched even closer and Sharpe, riding ahead with Nairn, saw what obstacles protected the city. Between the British and Toulouse there lay a long hog-backed ridge. Beyond the ridge was a canal, but the ridge provided the city’s real protection for it was the high ground, and whoever possessed it could pour a killing fire down on to their enemies. Sharpe drew out his telescope and gazed at the ridge’s summit where he saw fresh scars of newly dug earth which betrayed that the French, far from being ready to surrender, were still fortifying the hill’s top. “I hate God-damned bloody trenches,” he said to Nairn.

“You’ve faced them before?”

“In the Pyrenees. It wasn’t pleasant.”

It began to rain as the two men rode back to the British lines. “Tomorrow’s Easter Day,” Nairn said moodily.

“Yes.”

Nairn took a long swig of rum from his flask, then offered it to Sharpe. “Even for a disbeliever like me it’s a bloody inappropriate day to fight a battle, wouldn’t you say?”

Sharpe did not reply for a gun had boomed behind him. He twisted in his saddle and saw the dirty puff of smoke on the crest of the ridge and, just a second later, he saw a spurt of water splash and die in the western marshes. The French were sighting in their twelve-pounders; the killing guns with their seven foot barrels.

The thought of those efficiently served weapons gave Sharpe a quick sudden pain in his belly. He had somehow convinced himself that there would be no fight, that the French would see how hopeless their cause was, yet the enemy gunners were even now ranging their batteries and Sharpe could hear the whining scrape of blades being whetted on stones in the British cavalry lines. At luncheon, which Nairn’s military family ate inside a large tent, Sharpe found himself hoping that peace would be announced that very afternoon, yet when a message arrived it proved to be orders for the brigade to prepare itself for battle the next day.

Nairn solemnly toasted his aides. “An Easter death to the French, gentlemen.”

“Death to the French,” the aides repeated the old toast, then stood to drink the King’s health.

Sharpe slept badly. It was not work that kept him awake, for the last marching orders had been copied and dispatched well before nightfall. Nor was it the supper of salt beef and sour wine that had made him restless. It was the apprehension of a man before battle; that same apprehension which had kept him awake on the nights before the duel with Bampfylde. The apprehension was fear; pure naked fear, and Sharpe knew that battle by battle the fear was getting worse for him. When he had first joined the army as a private he had been young and cocksure; he had even felt exhilarated before a fight. He had felt himself to be immortal then, and that had made him confident that he could maul and claw and kill any man who opposed him. Now, as an officer, and married, he possessed more knowledge and so had more fear. Tomorrow he could die.

He tried the old tricks to conquer the knowledge; attempting to snatch an augury of life or death from the commonplace. If a sparrow alighted this side of a puddle, he would live. He despised such superstitious obsessions, yet could not help but indulge them, though he had made the attempt too often in the past to believe in any such trivial portents. Indeed, every man in both armies, Sharpe knew, was trying to snatch just such prophecies from their fears, but there were few who would allow themselves to see death written in their stars, yet many must die. The eve of battle was a time for talismans and amulets and charms and prayers, but the dawn would bring the kick of musket-butts, the hiss of sabres and the skull-shattering sound of artillery firing. So Sharpe shivered in the night and hoped his death would be quick, and that he would not scream beneath the surgeon’s knife.

By dawn the rain had stopped and a drying wind blew across the countryside. High clouds scudded away from the sun’s rising as Sharpe walked through the smoking bivouac fires in search of a cavalry armourer who could put an edge on to his sword. It was the sword of a trooper of the Heavy Cavalry; a long-bladed, heavy, and unbalanced weapon. It was far too unwieldy for most men, even for the burly men who rode the big horses and trained with dumb-bells to give strength to their sword arms, but Sharpe liked the sword and was strong enough to make it into a responsive and murderous weapon.

He found an armourer who ran the blade up his treadled wheel and afterwards stropped it on his leather apron. Sharpe gave the man a coin, then shared a tin mug of tea. Afterwards, with the oiled sword-blade safe in its scabbard, he went back to Nairn’s tent outside of which he found the old Scotsman breakfasting on bread, cold salt-beef, and strong tea. Nairn watched with amusement as Sharpe unrolled the ancient and threadbare jacket from his pack.

“While you were gone,” Nairn said, “I was vouchsafed a new glimpse of our noble Colonel Taplow.”

Sharpe was grateful for the distraction from his fears. “Tell me, please?”

“He’s holding a service of Holy Communion, for officers only, mark you, behind the latrines in ten minutes. You are invited, but I took the liberty of declining on your behalf. And on mine, as it happens.”

Sharpe laughed. He sat opposite Nairn and wondered whether his right hand was shaking as he reached for a slice of twice-baked bread. The butter was rancid, but the salt on the beef smothered the sour taste.

Nairn picked a shred of salt-beef from his teeth. “The thought of Taplow at his sacred offices is quite loathsome. Do you think God listens to such a man?” Nairn poured rum into his tea.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“You’re not a believer, Sharpe?”

“No, sir.”

“Nor am I, of course, but I was still half tempted to attend Taplow’s magical incantations. Just in case they helped. I’m damned nervous, Sharpe.”

Sharpe felt a sudden strong surge of affection for Nairn. “Me too, sir.”

“You? Truly?”

Sharpe nodded. “Truly. It doesn’t get easier.”

“How many battles have you fought?”

Sharpe was dunking a lump of hard bread into his tea. He left it there as he thought, then shrugged. “God knows, sir. Dozens of the damn things. Too many.”

“Enough to entitle you to be cautious, Richard. You don’t have to be heroic today. Leave that to some wet-behind-the-ears Lieutenant who needs to make his name.”

Sharpe smiled his thanks. “I’ll try, sir.”

“And if I do anything foolish today, you will tell me?”

Sharpe looked up at the Scotsman, surprised by this confession of uncertainty. “You won’t need that, sir.”

“But you’ll tell me?” Nairn insisted.

“Yes, sir.”

“Not that I’ll share any of the glory with you, Sharpe, you mustn’t think that, though I might say afterwards that you were moderately useful.” Nairn laughed, then waved a greeting to two of his other aides who came to the breakfast table. “Good morning, gentlemen! I was thinking last night that perhaps Paris doesn’t count.”

“Paris?” One of the puzzled aides asked.

Nairn was evidently thinking of the war’s ending. “Perhaps the northern allies will take Paris, but Napoleon might just fall back and fall back, and we’ll keep marching on, and someday this summer the whole damned lot of us will meet in the very middle of France. There’ll be Boney himself in the centre, and every French soldier left alive with him, and the rest of Europe surrounding him, and then we’ll have a proper battle. One last real bastard of a killing. It seems unfair to have come this far and never actually fought against Napoleon himself.” Nairn gazed wistfully across the bivouacs where the smoke of the cooking fires melded into skeins like a November mist. “I’ll keep the Highlanders in reserve, Sharpe. That way no one can accuse me of showing them favouritism.”

It was a strange world, Sharpe thought, in which to keep a battalion out of the battle line was construed as an insult. “Yes, sir.”

“I suppose there’s no point in giving Captain Frederickson direct orders?”

“Not if you want those orders obeyed, sir. But he knows what to do, and his men would appreciate a visit from you.”

“Of course, of course.” Nairn added more rum to his tea, then frowned. “Frederickson’s Rifles are the only men in this brigade who eat properly. They never have salt beef! Why do we never catch them looting?”

“Because they’re Riflemen, sir. They’re much too clever.”

Nairn smiled. “At least there’ll be no more salt beef once this battle’s won. We’ll have French rations.”

The other aides arrived, faces gleaming from their razors. Sharpe had still not shaved, and he had a sudden irrational conviction that he would survive the day if he did not shave, then another equally strong impulse said that he would only live if he did shave, and he felt the reptilian squirm of fear in his belly. He stared up at the long, long ridge that, just like the British bivouacs, was topped by a shifting layer of smoke. The smoke was thick enough to suggest the large numbers of Frenchmen who would be defending the high ground this day. Sharpe thought of Jane and suddenly longed for the Dorset house with its implicit promise of a nursery. He was about to ask whether any mail had arrived when a light flashed from the ridge top and Sharpe knew it was the sun reflecting from a telescope as an enemy officer gazed down at the British lines. The fear stirred in Sharpe. He was tempted to take some of Nairn’s rum, but resisted.

The waiting abraded the fear. The first Spanish, Portuguese and British brigades had marched long before dawn, their long lines uncoiling from the encampment in a sluggishly macabre motion, but Nairn’s brigade would be one of the last to leave the lines. They could only wait, pretending confidence, as the minutes wore on. Nairn inspected his battalions and tossed gruff encouragement to the soldiers. Some of the Highlanders sang psalms, but their tunes were so dirge-like that Sharpe went out of earshot. He had decided that his survival lay in not shaving.

It took another half hour before the orders came from Division and Nairn at last could order his men forward. Taplow’s battalion led, and the Highlanders marched at the rear. The brigade followed the other battalions who were already marching to the ridge’s southern slopes. Sharpe, mounted on his mare Sycorax, could see the

Spanish Divisions that waited at the ridge’s northern end. Today those Spaniards had the place of honour, for they would comprise the major attack up the ridge’s spine. They had asked for the honour. As they attacked, so the British and Portuguese, under Marshal Beresford, would assault the ridge’s southern end to split the French defences. Other British troops were ringed about the city to make threatening feints designed to stop Marshal Soult concentrating his army on the ridge.

The French, secure on their heights, could see all that Wellington planned. There could be no deception this day, no sleight of arms to blind the enemy and cheat him. This would be work, hard work, work for the bayonet and the bullet, work for the infantry.

The southward march was not easy for the ground was soft. Nairn’s brigade, among the last in Beresford’s long column, found the tracks churned into a morass. At first that clinging mud was their only problem, but as their route angled ever closer to the ridge the brigade came within range of the French gunners. Nairn ordered his men to march through the marshy fields to the west of the tracks, but still the roundshot slashed into his battalion columns. The British artillery tried to reply, but they were shooting uphill at enemy batteries well dug in behind thick emplacements.

“Close up, you scum!” Lieutenant-Colonel Taplow bellowed at his leading company after a cannonball had crashed through a file to leave three men bloody and twitching on the soaking ground. “Leave them there!” he shouted at two men who stooped to help the victims. “Leave them, I say, or I’ll have you flogged!” At the rear of Taplow’s fusiliers a band played, their music made ragged by their stumbling progress over the tussocky soft ground. Drummer boys were ordered to attend to the three men, but two were already dead and the third had not long to live. The battalion surgeon finished the man with a quick knife cut, then, shrugging, wiped his bloody hands on his grey breeches.

The French artillery pumped smoke from the ridge crest. Sharpe, staring eastwards, could sometimes see the trace of a dark line in the sky and he knew he watched a cannonball at the top of its arcing flight, and he also knew that such a pencil line was only visible in the sky when the ball was coming straight at the observer. At those moments he felt a temptation to spur Sycorax onwards, feigning some urgent duty, but he restrained himself in case any man should think him cowardly. Instead he rode steadily, flinching inwardly, and hid his relief as the balls missed. One roundshot thumped into the mud just ahead of Sycorax, making the mare rear frantically. Somehow Sharpe kept his feet in the stirrups and his arse on the saddle as the gobbets of wet mud fountained about him. The mare was not properly trained to battle, but she was a good steady horse. She had been a gift from Jane, and that thought gave Sharpe a sentimental longing to see his wife. He wondered if her mail had become lost, because no letter had yet arrived, then a cannon-ball went just over his shako to decapitate a redcoat marching to Sharpe’s left and he forgot his wife in the sudden surge of fear.

“Close up!” a Sergeant shouted. “Close up!” It was the litany of battle and the only obituary of the common soldier.

“You’re used to this, I suppose?” A Lieutenant, one of Nairn’s junior aides, spurred alongside Sharpe. Ahead of them a man’s entrails were being trodden into the mud, but either the Lieutenant did not notice or did not recognize what he saw.

“I don’t think you ever get used to it,” Sharpe said, though it was not true. One did get used to it, but that did not help the fear. The Lieutenant, who was new to the war, was clearly terrified, though he was trying hard not to show it. “It’s better,” Sharpe said truthfully, “once you can fire back. It’s much less frightening then.”

“Bless you, sir, I’m not frightened.”

“I am.” Sharpe grinned, then looked to his right and saw that Frederickson’s men were so far unscathed. Frederickson had taken his Riflemen closer to the enemy, which had been a shrewd move for the Greenjackets made a small and seemingly negligible target compared to the long and cumbersome column of redcoats. The French were firing over the Riflemen’s heads.

A cavalry officer galloped past Frederickson’s men towards the head of Beresford’s column. Sharpe recognized the man as one of Wellington’s aides, and assumed from his haste that he carried an urgent message. A clue to the message came when the ridge’s northern end suddenly exploded with cannon fire. Sharpe twisted in his saddle and saw that the French had unmasked a dozen batteries that were hammering their missiles down the hill at the attacking Spaniards.

The Lieutenant frowned. “I thought we were supposed to attack at the same time as the Dagoes, sir?”

“We were.”

God only knew what had gone wrong, but gone wrong it had. The Spaniards, instead of waiting until Beresford’s diversionary attack was in position to the south, had precipitately charged up the ridge’s northern slopes. Their bright uniforms and gaudy colours made a brave show, but it was a gallant display being eviscerated by the concentrated fire of the deadly twelve-pounders.

“Halt! Halt!” Divisional officers were galloping back down Beresford’s column. “Face right! Face right!”

Battalion officers and sergeants took up the cry and the great column halted and clumsily turned to face the bleak, steep slope at the ridge’s centre.

Nairn, who had been riding at the head of his brigade, spurred back. “Column of half companies!” he ordered. It seemed that Marshal Beresford must be contemplating an immediate assault on the ridge. Certainly, if Beresford was to divert attention from the Spanish attack then he could not wait till he reached the gentler slopes at the ridge’s southern end, but would be forced to launch his eleven thousand men on a desperate uphill scramble against the French entrenchments.

The French batteries, seeing the British and Portuguese battalions shake into their attack columns, kept firing. “Lie down!” Nairn shouted. “Lie down!”

The battalions dropped, making themselves a smaller and lower target for the enemy gunners, but leaving the officers on horseback feeling horribly exposed. Sharpe stared at the ridge and feared its muscle-sapping steepness. The sun, just rising above the summit, was suddenly dazzling.

“Wait here, Sharpe!” Nairn was excited. “I’ll discover what’s happening. You wait here!”

Sharpe waited. After breakfast he had pushed some bread and beef into a saddle bag and now, suddenly hungry, he gnawed at a lump of the meat.

“They’ve cocked it up!” Colonel Taplow, his red face as bad-tempered as ever, rode to Sharpe’s side. “The Spanish have cocked it up, Sharpe!”

“So it seems, sir.” A cannonball thumped the earth to Sharpe’s left. Sycorax skittered sideways until Sharpe soothed her.

“Seems?” Taplow was incensed by the mild word. “They’ve cocked it up, that’s what they’ve done. Cocked it up!” He gestured to the north where a new sound erupted as French musketry began flaying the Spaniards. The crackle of musketry was a thick, splintering sound that gave witness to just how many defenders had been waiting for the Spanish. “They went too early.” Taplow seemed to revel in the Spanish mistake. “They couldn’t keep their breeches up, could they? Too much damned eagerness, Sharpe. No whippers-in, that’s their problem. No bottom. Not like the English. It’ll be up to us now, Sharpe, you mark my words. It’ll be up to us!“

“Indeed it will, sir.”

The musketry was unending; a sustained terror of sound just like a million snapping rails of wood. And every snap meant another lead bullet flicking down the slope to strike home in the bunched Spanish ranks.

“Ah ha! Told you so! No bottom!” Taplow crowed triumphantly for the Spanish had begun to retreat. The movement was slow at first, merely a slight edging backwards, but it swiftly turned into a quick scramble to escape the flailing bullets. Sharpe was astonished that the Spaniards had climbed as far as they had, and he doubted whether any troops in the world could have gone further, but Colonel Taplow was not so generous. “All priming and no charge, that’s the Dago’s problem. No bottom, Sharpe, no bottom. Have a boiled egg.”

Sharpe accepted a hard-boiled egg which he ate as Beresford’s column patiently waited. The sun’s warmth was detectable now, and the small mist that had cloaked the western marshes was quite gone. A heron flapped clumsily into the air and flew southwards. A cannonball struck into Taplow’s bandsmen and Sharpe watched a blood-spattered trumpet fly into the air.

“It’ll be up to us now!” Taplow said with immense satisfaction. “It’s no good relying on foreigners, Sharpe, they only cock things up. Let me salute you.”

Sharpe suddenly realized that the irascible Taplow was offering a hand. He shook it.

“Good man!” Taplow said. “Proud to know you! Sorry you didn’t take communion, though. A fellow ought to square things with the Almighty before he kills the King’s enemies. Only decent thing to do. Had you realized that your servant forgot to shave you this morning? Flog the fellow. Let me wish you well of the day now!” Taplow galloped southwards towards his men while Sharpe sighed. The egg had taken the edge from his hunger, so he pushed the lump of salt beef back into his pouch. Sycorax dropped her head to crop at the trampled grass.

New orders came. The southwards march was to resume, for there was clearly no advantage to be gained in assaulting the ridge’s centre now that the Spanish attack had been repulsed. Nairn said there was a hope that the Spanish would re-form and attack again, but he could offer no explanation as to why their first attack had been premature. “Perhaps they wanted to end the war without us?”

Beresford’s column re-formed and trudged onwards. The French long-range cannonade continued. The men marched silently, not even singing, for they all knew that they would soon have to turn eastwards and assault the ridge. They had seen one attack bloodily repulsed, and they could guess that Marshal Soult was even now reinforcing the ridge’s southern slopes. From the city’s north and east came the dull crump of gunfire as allied cannon fired at the defences, but it was doubtful if the French would be fooled by such obvious feints. They knew the importance of the ridge, which was doubtless why its summit would prove a hellish place of trenches and batteries. The fears writhed in Sharpe, made worse by the cannonade that echoed in the sky like giant hammer blows.

Beresford’s infantry marched for one more hour before they turned to their right to face the-ridge’s southern slopes. The long march across the enemy’s front had at least brought Beresford’s men to a place that the French had not fortified. No cannons faced down these southern slopes which stretched invitingly up to the bright, pale sky. What lay beyond the horizon, though, was another matter.

The brigades were ordered to form into three vast lines; each line consisting of two brigades arrayed just two men deep. Nairn’s men would form the right hand end of the second line. It took time to make the formation, which was a job best left to Sergeants, and so the officers stared at the empty skyline and pretended they felt no fear. The only enemy in sight, besides the occasional glimpse of an officer riding forward to stare down the slope, was a force of cavalry that spilt right down the ridge’s centre. The enemy cavalry had been sent to threaten the right flank of Beresford’s assault, but an even larger cavalry force of British and German horsemen rode to block them.

“Skirmishers forward!” An aide cantered down the first line.

“I think we’ll put our light chaps on the flank,” Nairn said. “Will you see to it, Sharpe?”

“Can I stay with them, sir?”

Nairn hesitated, then nodded. “But let me know if anything threatens.” He held out his hand. “Remember you’re dining with me tonight, so take care. I don’t want to write a sad letter to Jane.”

“You take care as well, sir.”

Sharpe collected the brigade’s three Light Companies and sent them running to the right flank where they would join Frederickson’s Riflemen. As the attack advanced those skirmishers would scatter to fight their lonely battles with the French light troops. Sharpe, a skirmisher by nature, wanted to fight with them and, as ever, he wanted to fight on foot. He summoned a headquarters’ clerk and gave the man Sycorax’s reins. “Keep her out of trouble.”

“Yes, sir.”

A drummer made a flurry of sound as Taplow uncased his battalion’s colours. Sharpe, walking past the colour party, took his shako off in salute to the two heavy flags of fringed silks. A French roundshot, fired blind and at extreme range from one of the ridge’s centre batteries, smacked into the wet ground and, instead of bouncing, drove a slurry-filled furrow across Sharpe’s front. He wiped the mud from his face and unslung his rifle.

The rifle was another of Sharpe’s eccentricities. Officers might be expected to carry a pistol into battle, but not a longarm, yet Sharpe insisted on keeping the ranker’s weapon. He loaded it as he walked, tested the flint’s seating in its leather-lined doghead, then slung it back on his shoulder.

“A nice day for a battle.” Frederickson greeted Sharpe cheerfully.

“You think Easter is an appropriate day?”

“It has an implicit promise that we’ll rise from the grave. Not that I have any intention of testing the promise.” Frederickson turned his one eye to the skyline. “If you were Marshal Soult, what would you have waiting up there?”

“Every damned field gun in my army.” The knot was tying itself in Sharpe’s belly as he imagined the efficient French twelve-pounders lined wheel to wheel.

“Let us hope he doesn’t have sufficient guns.” Frederickson did not sound hopeful. He, like Sharpe, could imagine the horse-teams dragging the field guns from where the Spanish had been repulsed to where they could decimate this new attack.

Trumpet calls sounded far to Sharpe’s left, were repeated ever closer, and the first line of Beresford’s attack started forward. The second line was held for a moment before it too was ordered into motion. Almost at once the careful alignments of the thin lines wavered because of the ground’s unevenness. Sergeants began bellowing orders for the men to watch their dressing. The officers’ horses, as if sensing what waited for them, became skittish.

“Are you here to take command?” Frederickson asked Sharpe as the skirmishers started forward.

“Are you the senior Captain?”

Frederickson cast a dour look at the Captains of the three redcoat Light Companies. “By a very long way.”

The sour tone told Sharpe that Frederickson was resenting the lack of promotion. Rank was clearly more important to a man who planned to stay in the army, and Frederickson well knew how slow promotion could be in peacetime when there were no cannons and muskets to create convenient vacancies. And Frederickson, more than any man Sharpe knew, deserved promotion. Sharpe made a mental note to ask Nairn if he could help, then smiled. “I won’t interfere with you, William. I’ll just watch, so fight your own battle.”

“The last one,” Frederickson said almost in wonder. “I suppose that’s what it will be. Our last battle. Let us make it a good one, sir. Let’s send some souls to hell.”

“Amen.”

The three advancing lines seemed very fragile as they climbed upwards. The sweep of the lines was interrupted by the battalions’ colours; splashes of bright cloth guarded by the long, shining-bladed halberds. Following the three lines were the battalion bands, all playing different tunes so that the belly-jarring thump of their big drums clashed. The music was jaunty, rhythmic and simple; the music for death.

Frederickson’s Riflemen were mingled with the redcoats of the other three Light companies. Those redcoats carried the quick-firing but short-ranged muskets, while the Green-jackets had the more accurate, longer-ranged rifle that was slow to reload. The mixture of weapons could be lethal; the rifles killed with precision and were protected by the muskets. The men were scattered now, making a screen to repel the attack of any French skirmishers.

Yet so far no enemy had threatened the cumbersome advance. Even the ridge’s centre batteries had ceased their speculative firing. Sharpe could see nothing but the empty skyline and a wisp of high cloud. The thin turf on the slope was dryer than the bottom-ground. A hare raced across the advance’s front, then slewed and scampered downhill. A hawk hovered for a few seconds above Taplow’s colours, then slid disdainfully westwards. From beyond the crest came the sound of a French band playing a quick march; the only evidence that a real enemy waited for Beresford’s thin lines.

The slope steepened and Sharpe’s breath shortened. The enemy’s invisibility seemed ominous. Marshal Soult had been given three hours to observe the preparations for this attack; three hours in which he could prepare a devil’s reception for the three lines that struggled up the ridge. Somewhere ahead of the attack, beyond the empty skyline, the enemy waited with charged barrels and drawn blades. The old game was about to be played once more; the Goddamns against the Crapauds. The game of Crecy and Agincourt, Ramillies and Blenheim. The air was very clear; so clear that when Sharpe turned he could see a woman driving two cows to pasture a half mile beyond the western river. The sight of the woman made Sharpe think of Jane. He knew that he could have accompanied Jane home without any shame, and that even now he could be sitting in England, but instead he was on a French hillside and on the brink of battle’s horror.

He turned back to the east just in time to see a redcoat among Frederickson’s flank skirmishers bend double, clutch his belly, and start gasping for breath. At first Sharpe thought the man was winded, then he saw the puff of dirty white smoke higher on the slope. The redcoat toppled backwards, blood drenching his grey breeches. More French skirmishers fired from positions that had been concealed in a tumble of rocks. The enemy would soon be on the flank of the advance unless they were shifted.

“We’re going to clear those scum out of there!” Frederickson had seen the danger just as soon as Sharpe. He had a company of redcoats offer rapid fire to keep the enemy subdued while Sergeant Harper led a squad with fixed sword-bayonets in a flanking charge. The Frenchmen did not stay to contest the rocks, but retreated nimbly up towards the empty skyline. One of the retreating Frenchmen was hit in the back by a rifle bullet, and Marcos Hernandez, one of Frederickson’s Spanish Riflemen, grinned with pleasure at his own deadly marksmanship.

“Cease fire!” Frederickson called. “Well done, lads. Now don’t bunch up! You’re not in love with each other, so spread out!” Sweet William had taken ofF his eye-patch and removed his false teeth so that he looked like some monstrous being from the grave. He seemed much happier now that the first shots had been fired. Hernandez reloaded, then scored a line on the butt of his rifle to mark another hated Frenchman killed.

The surviving French skirmishers ran over the skyline from where, though the source of the noise stayed hidden, came the sudden sound of massed French drums. The instruments rattled the sky. Sharpe had first heard that malicious sound when he was sixteen and he had heard it on unnumbered battlefields since. He knew what it portended. He was listening to the pas de charge, the heartbeat of an Empire and the sound that drove French infantry to the attack.

“D’you see guns, Sergeant?” Frederickson shouted to Harper who was some yards further up the slope.

“Not a one, sir!”

Then the skyline, as though sown by dragon’s teeth, sprouted men.

“Christ in his Scottish heaven.” Major-General Nairn, surrounded by his junior aides, sounded disgusted with the enemy. “You’d have thought the woollen-headed bastards would have learned by now.” He sheathed his sword and glowered dour disapproval at the two enemy columns.

“Learned, sir?” the young aide, whose first battle this was, asked nervously.

“You are about to see the God-damned Frogs damned even further.” Nairn took a watch from his fob pocket and snapped open the lid. “Good God! If they’re going to offer battle, then they might as well do it properly!”

The aide did not understand, but every veteran in the British attack knew what was about to happen and felt relieved because of it. They had climbed in fear of waiting artillery that would have gouged bloody ruin in the three attacking lines. Even more they had feared the conjunction of artillery and cavalry, for the cavalry would have forced the attacking infantry into protective squares that would have made choice targets for the French gunners. Instead they were faced with the oldest French tactic; a counterattack by columns of massed infantry.

Two such columns were advancing over the skyline. The two columns were immense formations of crammed soldiers, rank after rank of infantrymen assembled into human battering rams that were aimed at the seemingly fragile British lines. These were the same columns that the Emperor Napoleon had led across a continent to smash his enemies’ armies into broken and panicked mobs, but no such column had ever broken an army led by Wellington.

“Halt!” All along the British and Portuguese lines the order was shouted. Sergeants dressed the battalions while the skirmishers readied themselves to beat off the French light troops who, advancing in front of the columns, were supposed to unsettle the British line with random musketry.

The French light troops offered no threat to Beresford; instead it was the momentum of the two great columns that was supposed to drive his men into chaos. Yet, like Wellington, Beresford had faced too many columns to be worried now. His first line would deal with their threat, while his second and third lines would merely be spectators. That first line stood to attention, muskets grounded, and gazed up the long sloping sward over which the two giant formations marched. The French columns looked irresistible, their weight alone seeming sufficient to drive them through the thin skeins of waiting men. Above the Frenchmen’s heads waved their flags and eagles. In the centre of the formations the drummer boys kept up the pas de charge, pausing only to let the marching men shout ‘Vive l’Empereur’ between each flurry of drumbeats. The veterans among the waiting British and Portuguese battalions, who had seen it all before, seemed unmoved.

The skirmishers fell slowly back before the weight of enemy light troops, but they had done their job which was to keep the French skirmish fire off the waiting line. French officers, swords drawn, marched confidently ahead of the columns. Major-General Nairn gazed at the closest column through a telescope, then slammed the tubes shut. “Not many moustaches there!” The old moustached veterans, the backbone of France, were in their graves, and Nairn had seen how young these counter-attacking Frenchmen were. Perhaps that was why Soult had launched them in column, for raw green troops took courage from the sheer closeness of their comrades in the tightly packed mass of men. It was a formation suited to a conscripted, citizen army, but those citizen conscripts were now closing on the professional killers of Britain and Portugal.

When the columns were eighty paces from Beresford’s forward line, the British and Portuguese officers stirred themselves to give a single laconic order. “Present!”

Four thousand heavy muskets came up in a single rippling movement. The leading ranks of the two French columns, seeing their death, checked their pace, but the weight of men behind forced them onwards.

“Hold your fire!” Sergeants warned redcoats who dragged back the cocks of their weapons. The French, made nervous by the silent threat, opened fire as they marched. Only the men in the first two ranks could actually fire, the rest were there merely to add weight. Here and there along the red-coated line a man might fall, but the French aim was spoiled by the need to fire while marching.

“Close up!” A British Sergeant dragged a dead man back from the line.

“Hold your fire!” An officer, slim sword drawn, watched the blue-coated French column come closer. Four thousand muskets were aimed at the heads of the two columns.

A rattle of drums, a pause, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

One heartbeat. The British muskets were steady, the officers’ swords raised, while the men in either army were close enough now to see the expressions on the others’ faces.

“Fire!”

Like a great cough, or like a gigantic throttling explosion, four thousand muskets flamed smoke and lead, and four thousand brass-bound butts mule-kicked back into men’s shoulders. The smoke spewed to hide the French.

“Reload!”

Sharpe, still off to the right flank, saw the nearer enemy column quiver as the heavy bullets struck home. Blue coats were speckled by blood. The whole front rank crumpled and fell, and most of the second rank too. Only one officer was left standing, and he was wounded. The succeeding French ranks were baulked by the barrier of their own dead and wounded, but then the sheer mass of the deep column forced the new front rank to clamber over the bodies and continue the advance. ‘Vive l’Empereur.r

“Fire!”

Now it was the deadly platoon fire that rippled out of the British and Portuguese lines. Hours of training had made these men into clockwork killers. Each platoon of a battalion fired a couple of seconds after the platoon on its left, and so the bullets seemed never ending as they flicked through the screen of smoke to strike at the French. The fire flayed at the enemy, flensing men off the front and flanks of the column, so that it seemed as if the enemy marched into an invisible mincing machine. The French survivors, inexorably forced to the front ranks, tried to struggle into the storm of musketry, but no man could live against that fire. In the past, in the glorious days when the Emperor’s name struck fear into Europe, the columns had won by overaweing their enemies, but Wellington’s men had long mastered the grim art of bloodying French glory. They did it with musket-fire, the fastest musket-fire in the world. They blackened their faces with the explosions of the priming in their weapons’ pans, they bruised their shoulders with the slamming kicks, and they broke the enemy. Cartridge after cartridge was bitten open, loaded and fired, while in front of the British line the musket wadding burned pale in the scorched grass.

The columns could not move. A few brave men tried to advance, but the bullets cut them down. The survivors edged back and the drumroll faltered.

“Cease fire!” a British voice called. “Fix bayonets!”

Four thousand men drew their seventeen-inch blades and slotted them on to hot muzzles.

“Present!” The voices of the officers and sergeants were calm. Most of these men were veterans and they took pride in sounding unmoved by the carnage of battle. “Battalions will advance! Forward!”

All along the front line the battalions marched stolidly into their own fog of smoke. They had fired blind through the choking screen, but a column could hardly be missed even by men obscured by smoke. Now, at last, they broke through the smoke to see what carnage their disciplined fire had done.

Officers’ swords swept downwards. “Charge!”

Now, and only now, did the British and Portuguese soldiers cheer. Till this moment they had kept silent, but now, with blackened faces and bayonets levelled, they cheered and broke into a quick march.

The French broke. They ran. They left two blood-soaked heaps of dead, dying and wounded men behind and raced back towards safety. A drummer boy wept because a bullet was in his guts. He would die before noon, and his drum would be chopped up for firewood.

“Halt!” The British did not press their charge home. There was no need, for the columns had fled in panic.

“Dress ranks! Unfix bayonets! Skirmishers forward! Reload!”

Major-General Nairn looked down at his watch and noted that it had taken precisely three minutes and twenty seconds to break the French attack. In the past, he reflected, when more moustaches had filled the enemy ranks, it would have taken about six minutes longer. He put the watch away. “Advance the brigade.”

“Battalion will advance!”

“Silence in the ranks!”

“Forward!”

The seemingly tenuous lines started forward again. In two gory places the men stepped clumsily over the piles of enemy dead. The men, long practised in the art, dragged their enemies’ bodies with them for a few paces; giving themselves just enough time to loot the pockets and pouches of the dead or wounded. They took food, coins, talismans and drink. One redcoat kicked the wounded drummer boy’s instrument downhill. The drum’s snares twanged as it bounced and rolled down the long hill.

“Looks like it’s going to be an easy Easter!” Frederickson said happily.

But then the skyline was reached, and the plateau of the ridge’s summit was revealed, and nothing looked easy any more.

CHAPTER 3

The battle, as if by mutual consent, stopped to draw breath.

Beresford used the lull to divide his attack. His left hand division would now slant away to threaten the land between the ridge and the city, while the right division, in which Nairn’s Brigade marched, would advance northwards along the ridge’s summit. Horse artillery was being dragged up the slope to thicken Beresford’s attack. The morning passed. Many of the waiting men fell asleep with their heads pillowed on their packs and their faces shaded by mildewed shakoes. Some ate, and a few just stared emptily at the sky. Some men gazed along the ridge towards the fearful French defences. Every few minutes a random French cannonball bounded through the somnolent lines, provoking an irritated scramble from its bouncing path. Sometimes a howitzer shell banged a sharp explosion on the turf, but the fire was sporadic and allowed most of the waiting men to ignore the enemy. Sharpe watched one fusilier patiently hammer the soft lead of a musketball into a perfect cube, then prick its faces with a touch-hole spike to make a dice. No one would gamble with the man who, disgusted, hurled the lead cube away.

In the early afternoon the battalions which had broken the twin French columns were moved to the rear of Beresford’s new formations. Nairn’s brigade now formed the right flank of the first line. He had his two English battalions forward, and his Highlanders in reserve. The horse gunners stacked their ready ammunition alongside the advanced positions, while the skirmishers deployed as a protective screen even further forward.

Sharpe strolled forward to join Frederickson who offered a piece of French garlic sausage. “I suppose,” Frederickson was staring at the ridge’s plateau, “that this would be a good moment to resign from the army?”

Sharpe smiled at the grim joke, then drew out his telescope which he trained on the nearest French fortification. He said nothing, and his silence was ominous. ~

“The bloody French must know the war’s lost,” Frederickson said irritably, “so why prolong the killing?”

“Pride,” Sharpe said curtly, though why, for that matter, were his own countrymen insisting on taking Toulouse if it was really believed that the Emperor was doomed? Perhaps peace was a chimera. Perhaps it was just a rumour that would fade like the stench of blood and powder-smoke from this battlefield.

And, as Sharpe well knew, there would be much blood and smoke on this high ridge. The French were waiting, prepared, and Beresford’s infantry must now advance through a series of strong fortifications that ran across the ridge’s spine. There were gun batteries and entrenchments, all bolstered by earthen redoubts which, topped by palisades, stood like small fortresses athwart the line of attack. One redoubt, larger than the rest, dominated the ridge’s centre and, like its smaller brethren, was faced with a ditch above which its wooden palisade was embrasured for artillery. It was no wonder that Beresford’s climb up the southern slope had not been opposed by French gunfire, for all the enemy cannons were now dug safe into the small forts.

Frederickson borrowed Sharpe’s glass and stared for a long time at the awesome defences. “Easter’s meant to be a day for miracles, is it not?”

Sharpe smiled dutifully, then turned to greet Sergeant Harper. “We’ll be earning our crust today, Sergeant.”

“Aye, sir, we will.” Harper accepted Frederickson’s offer of the telescope and made a quick scrutiny of the great redoubt in the ridge’s centre. “Why don’t we just beat the bastards to jelly with gunfire?”

“Can’t get the big guns up here,” Frederickson answered cheerfully. “We’ve only got galloper guns today.”

“Peashooters.” Harper spat scornfully, then handed the telescope to Sharpe. “Do you know where our boys are, sir?”

’Our boys’ were the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, the battalion that Sharpe and Harper had fought in for so many years. ”They’re off to the east.“ Sharpe vaguely waved in that direction. He could still not see the city of Toulouse, which was hidden by a shoulder of the ridge, but gunsmoke showed in the far distance to betray where Wellington’s feint attacks threatened Toulouse’s eastern suburb.

“They shouldn’t be taking much of a beating today, then,” Harper said hopefully.

“I suppose not.” Sharpe suddenly wished he was back with the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers who, under their new Colonel, did not have to face this devil’s ridge of forts, trenches and guns. They would be safe, while Sharpe was foully aware of the symptoms of terror. He could feel his heart thumping, sweat was chill on his skin, and a muscle in his left thigh was twitching. His throat was parched, his belly felt hollow, and he wanted to vomit. He tried to smile, and sought for some casual words that would demonstrate his lack of fear, but he could think of nothing.

Hooves sounded behind, and Sharpe turned to see Major-General Nairn cantering towards the skirmish line. The General curbed his horse, then grimaced at the landscape ahead. “We’ve got the right flank, so we’ll be attacking the batteries.”

That was a brighter prospect than assaulting the larger redoubts. The batteries, constructed on the edge of the ridge, were the positions from which the long approach march had been cannonaded, and they had been built purely to defend the gunners from counter-battery fire. Thus there were no fortifications facing the ridge’s centre, so Nairn’s brigade would only have to deal with the flanking trenches and the batteries’ guns which had been dragged from their embrasures and arrayed like ordinary field artillery. Those nearest guns were supported by at least two battalions of French infantry who waited in three deep lines to add their volley fire to the gunnery.

Nairn seemed to shiver as he stared at the ridge’s summit, then he asked to borrow Sharpe’s glass through which he gazed long and hard at the enemy positions. He said nothing when he closed the tubes, except to express surprise at the evident quality of the spyglass. “Where did you get it?”

“Vitoria,” Sharpe said. The telescope had been a gift from the Emperor Napoleon to his brother, King Joseph of Spain, who had lost it when his baggage had been captured by the British after the battle at Vitoria. A small brass plate, let into the ivory of the barrel, recorded the gift.

Nairn held the glass out to Sharpe. “I hate to spoil your enjoyment, Major, but I need you.”

Sharpe retrieved his horse. His task, once the advance began, would be to relay Nairn’s orders. The junior aides would be doing the same thing, but Sharpe’s rank and reputation would give him an authority that could be useful to Nairn. At times, Sharpe knew, he would have to use his own judgement, then claim that his decision was a verbal order from Nairn himself.

It was another hour before the order to advance was given. The French had spasmodically shelled the waiting men during the prolonged delay, but the very sparseness of the cannonade was evidence that the real artillery effort would wait until the British and Portuguese troops had marched closer to the guns. Some men grumbled at the wait, others averred that it was necessary so that the Spanish could regroup and attack again from the ridge’s far end. Two chaplains led mules loaded with spare water canteens around the waiting troops. The Irishmen in the ranks crossed themselves. The loudest noise on the ridge, apart from the occasional bang of a French gun, were the pipes of the Highland Regiments.

“It’s going to be a bloody business, right enough. A bloody, bloody business,” Nairn said for the fourth or fifth time to Sharpe. The Scotsman was nervous. He knew this would be his one chance to fight his brigade in battle, and he feared he would be found wanting.

Yet the true responsibility did not lie with Nairn, nor even with Wellington who commanded the battle from its northern flank, but with the ordinary soldier. It was the redcoat and greenjacket who had to march forward in the certain knowledge that the best artillery in Europe waited to decimate his ranks. A shilling, a third of a pint of rum and two pounds of twice baked bread each day were the wages for this moment, and in return they must march into hell and come out victors.

“It won’t be long now,” Nairn said, as if to comfort the aides who bunched around him.

Divisional aides were galloping across the ridge’s southern spur. Bands were forming into ranks and colours were being hoisted. The British gunners gave their cannon trails a last adjustment.

“The General’s compliments, sir,” a cavalry Captain reined in close to Nairn, “and if you are ready?”

“My compliments to the General.” Nairn drew his sword. No actual order to advance had been given, nor was it necessary, for as soon as the leading battalions saw the arrival of the Divisional aide, they were ordered to their feet. What waited for them on the ridge was a foretaste of hell, so it seemed best to get it done fast.

“My compliments to Colonel Taplow,” Nairn said to Sharpe, “and tell him not to let his men fall off to the right.”

“Indeed, sir.” Sharpe put his spurs to Sycorax’s flanks. Nairn’s concern about the right flank was justified for, as the attack met opposition, there would be a temptation for the right-hand men to seek safety down the ridge’s western slope.

Taplow did not wait for Sharpe’s arrival, but had already ordered his men forward. They advanced in two lines behind their chain of skirmishers. The front line was composed of five companies, and the rear of four. The battalion’s bayonets were fixed, and their colours lofted between the two lines. Sharpe found Taplow on a grey horse just in front of the colour party. “The General’s compliments, sir.”

“He’ll not find us wanting!” Taplow interrupted Sharpe. “I told you it would be up to us!” Taplow was in high spirits.

“He’s eager, sir, that your men don’t deviate too far to the right.” Sharpe phrased Nairn’s warning as tactfully as he could.

“Damn your eyes! Does he think we’re amateurs?” Taplow’s rage was instant and overwhelming. “Tell him we shall march to the guns. Direct to the guns! We’ll die like Englishmen, not like skulking Scotchmen. Damn your eyes, Major, and good day to you.”

The other English battalion of Nairn’s brigade marched on Taplow’s left, while behind came the Highlanders who advanced to the eerie skirl of their pipers. They were a secretive, proud battalion who followed their clan chief to war. Many spoke no English, just the Gaelic. In battle they could be terrifying, while off the battlefield they had a grave courtesy. To the left of Nairn’s brigade, and straddling the spine of the ridge’s summit, another brigade advanced.

Frederickson, with the skirmishers of the two English battalions, was far ahead of the leading battalions. The French gunners, waiting with smoking linstocks, ignored the skirmish line. They would wait till the plumper targets of the close-formed battalions were nearer.

The wait was not long. Sharpe, back at Nairn’s side just a few paces ahead of the Highlanders, saw a French gunner give the elevating screw of his cannon one last turn, then jump clear as the linstock came down to hover near the portfire.

“God help us,” said the agnostic Nairn, then, much louder, “steady, lads, steady!”

„Tirez“ shouted the battery’s commander.

The ridge erupted with gunfire. Flames lanced from barrels to pump smoke thick as fog over the hilltop. The roundshot slashed through the advancing battalions. Sharpe saw one ball carve a bloody hole in Taplow’s first line, kill another man in his second, then graze the turf and, on its upward rebound, strike down a file of Highlanders. The one ball had turned four men to meat and blood and splintered bone. The screams of the wounded began to rival the music of the bands and the crashing of the enemy guns. It was not just the closest battery that fired, but the gunners in the central redoubt, and other gunners too, further and higher up the ridge, who could launch their missiles over the heads of their own infantry to plunge and bounce and tear among the British troops.

“Those poor lads.” Nairn watched Taplow’s battalion that was dropping dead and wounded behind its ranks.

“Close up! Close up!” the Sergeants shouted. An Ensign, fifteen years old, and proud to be in his first battle, was disembowelled. A Sergeant, marching behind and to the dead boy’s flank, filched six guineas from the corpse’s tail pocket without even breaking step. “Close up, you bastards! Close up!”

A howitzer shell landed just in front of Taplow’s rear line and, because its fuse still smoked, the closest men scattered. The shell exploded harmlessly as Taplow berated the men for cowards.

Frederickson’s Riflemen had advanced far forward and were now trying to pick off the enemy gunners, but the cannon smoke made a perfect screen to hide the enemy. The smoke also served to obscure the aim of the French gunners, but so long as they fired level and ahead, they could scarcely miss. French skirmishers, armed with muskets, were threatening Frederickson’s men, though even the bravest enemy was loath to come too close to the deadly rifles. Harper was calling targets to his men. “See that officer, Marcos? Kill the bugger.”

“Tell Taplow to double forward at the battery!” Nairn shouted to Sharpe over the noise of the enemy guns. „I’ll put the Highlanders in behind him!“

Sharpe spurred Sycorax forward again. The mare was nervous of the horrid noises. The guns made a deep percussive, ear-thumping bang, while the passage of the roundshot overhead sounded just like heavy barrels being rolled across a wooden floor. A cannonball that came too close sounded like the tearing of cloth, but much more sudden and overwhelming, making a man flinch in the wake of its air-splitting astonishment. Behind all the noises was the sound of the bands and the gut-wrenching music of the pipes. Men screamed, Sergeants shouted, then a new ingredient joined the cacophony: the crackling thunder of an infantry volley. It was a French volley. The enemy battalion was hidden by the cannon smoke, but Sharpe, as he rode towards Taplow, saw the smoke twitch as the bullets flicked through from the ridge’s centre.

“Steady now! Steady!” Taplow was riding immediately behind his front line. His horse sheered away from a wounded man who vomited blood, and Taplow slashed his crop down on to the animal’s rump to keep it steady and obedient. Behind him the battalion’s colours twitched from the strike of musket bullets.

“Major-General Nairn’s compliments, sir…” Sharpe began.

“Damn Nairn!”

“If you’d double, sir, towards the battery…”

“In my own time, sir, in my own time. Damn you.” Taplow twisted his horse away from Sharpe. “Well done!” he exhorted his men. “Close up, my lads! Be steady now! Our turn will come! We’ll kill the bastards in a minute! Close upi Steady now, steady!”

When the attacking line was a hundred paces from the French guns, the enemy changed from roundshot to canister. The tin encased canisters split apart in the muzzle-flames to scatter a charge of lead-balls like bird-shot. Now, instead of the surgical strike of a roundshot, each discharge tore a ragged and gaping red hole in the advancing ranks. Taplow’s line was shrinking fast and littering its wide path with a scatter of dead and injured. The carnage and the noise at last made the advancing battalion check, and that evidence of his men’s fear spurred Taplow to ram his horse through the ranks. “Charge, you buggers! Charge for England!”

Released, the battalion charged. They screamed in fear, but they ran forward, and the smoke of the guns served to hide them from their enemies. A small dip in the ground helped to save them from the worst of the canister as they scrambled towards the smoke and the enemy’s gun line.

“Come on, you bastards! Kill the buggers!” Taplow was ahead of his men, charging like a cavalryman with his sword aloft, when two canisters exploded full in his face so that man and horse were turned instantly into scraps of bloody flesh that ribboned back in the guns’ gale to spatter the ranks behind.

“Charge!” It was a Colour Sergeant who took up the cry.

There was nothing left of Taplow, except blood, bones and gobbets of flesh spread across the ridge. His men charged over the ragged ruin of their Colonel and his horse then plunged into the smoke. A shell, fired from further up the ridge, exploded ten yards behind Sycorax and the mare, terrified, bolted forward into the thick fog of gunsmoke.

The smoke was acrid. Sharpe wanted to draw his sword, but he needed both hands to curb Sycorax’s panic. She burst through the smoke and Sharpe saw a mass of snarling redcoats hacking and thrusting at the French gunners. This was revenge, and none of the Fusiliers would take an enemy’s surrender. The gunners would pay for the damage they had done, and so the bayonets ripped and thrust.

Sycorax stopped, quivering, because a French trench blocked her path. The trench was shallow, as if it had only been half finished. A redcoat and two Frenchmen lay dead inside. Sharpe scraped his sword free and tried to make sense of the chaos beyond the trench. Taplow’s men were brawling, stabbing and clawing their way through the battery while, just seventy paces to their left, a fresh enemy battalion was marching through the gunsmoke. The only man to have seen that threat was Frederickson, who had spread his skirmishers in a tenuous line to block the enemy’s approach, but a handful of Riflemen could not hope to stop a determined charge by a whole battalion. Taplow’s men were in utter disorder, seeking only vengeance, yet at any moment the enemy’s counter-attack would come on them like thunder.

“Form companies!” Sharpe shouted at the fusiliers. He spurred Sycorax over the shallow trench, then used the flat of his sword on men hunting down the last gunners who were trying to find refuge beneath the hot barrels of their guns. “Form companies!” He found a Major. “Are you in command now?”

“Command?” The man was dazed.

“Taplow’s dead.”

“Good God!” The Major gaped at Sharpe.

“For Christ’s sake, form your men! You’re about to be attacked.”

“We are?”

Sharpe twisted to his left and saw that the French battalion had checked their advance while they fixed bayonets yet, despite the small delay, there could not be more than half a minute before the French advanced into the captured battery where they would make mincemeat of the redcoats. Sharpe shouted for the men to form, and a few Sergeants saw the danger and took up the cry, but Sharpe knew it was hopeless. Taplow’s men were oblivious of everything but the captured battery and its small plunder. In less than a minute they would be overwhelmed. He swore under his breath. No one had even thought to spike the enemy guns, and Sharpe wished he had remembered to put a hammer and a few nails in his saddlebag.

Then, blessedly, he heard a crashing volley and he saw the Highlanders coming out of the smoke bank. Nairn had brought them in to the left of Taplow’s charge, and now the Scots fell on the flank of the advancing French battalion. It took just two Scottish volleys before the French gave up the counter-attack.

Sharpe found Taplow’s senior Major. “Form your battalion!”

“I can’t…”

“Do it. Now! Or else I’ll have you arrested! Move!”

A French gunner, wounded from a dozen blades, collapsed beside Sharpe’s horse. Redcoats were drinking the powder-stained water from the gun-buckets in which the cannon swabs were soaked between shots. The English wounded were propped against the wicker baskets filled with earth that made the cannon embrasures. One such basket seemed to explode into dirty shreds under the impact of a roundshot and Sharpe realized that French guns, further up the ridge, had begun to fire into the captured battery.

“You’re the reserve now!” Sharpe shouted at the Major. “Form your men and fall in behind the Highlanders!”

He did not wait to see if he was obeyed, but spurred after the Scots who were marching onwards. To their left, beyond Nairn’s second battalion, another brigade was going forward. The attack seemed to have broken the outer French crust, but as the British advanced so they would squeeze the French into an ever thicker and more impenetrable defence.

Sharpe rode past a dead Rifleman and was relieved to see it was not Harper. Nairn’s attack, spirited and bloody, was going well. The Highlanders’ Grenadier Company was in an enemy trench, led by a group of officers and sergeants who used their massive claymore swords to scour the French out. Frederickson’s sharpshooters picked off the fleeing enemy. Two pipers, apparently oblivious of the horror, calmly played their instruments. There was something about that music, Sharpe thought, that suited a battlefield. The noise was like that which a man might make if he was being skinned alive, but it seemed to fill the enemy with fear just as it inspired the Scots to savagery. A riderless horse, its neck sheeted with blood, galloped in panic towards the enemy lines.

“Taplow’s dead!” Sharpe found Nairn.

Nairn stared at Sharpe as though he had not heard, then he sighed. “So much for prayer before battle. Poor man.”

The neighbouring brigade had stormed a small redoubt and Sharpe could see its ramparts swarming with British and Portuguese infantry. Bayonets rose and fell. The attack, Sharpe decided, had gone beyond the ability of any one man to control it; now it was just a mass of maddened men released to battle, and so long as they could be kept moving forward, then so long was victory possible.

Sharpe lost sense of time. The fear was gone, as it always seemed to vanish once the danger was present. Nairn’s men, thinned out and bloodied, pushed forward into gunfire. Smoke thickened. Knots of men lay in blood where canister had struck. The wounded crawled for help, or vomited, or cried, or just lay softly to let death come. Order seemed to have gone. Instead of battalions marching proudly to the attack, it now seemed to Sharpe that the assault consisted of small groups of men who dashed a few yards forward, then summoned up the courage for another quick advance. Some men sought shelter and had to be rousted back into the advance. Somewhere a colour showed through the smoke. Sometimes a cheer announced an enemy trench taken. A British galloper gun unlimbered and fired fast into the blinding fog.

The defence thickened. The enemy gunfire, which had been shattering at the start of the assault, seemed to double in its intensity. Nairn’s men, broken into leaderless units, went to ground. Nairn tried to force them on, but the brigade was exhausted, yet Division judged the moment to perfection for, just as Nairn knew he could ask no more of his men, a reserve brigade came up behind and swept through the scattered remnants of his three battalions.

The Scotsman had tears in his eyes; perhaps for the dead, or perhaps for pride. His men had done well.

“Congratulations, sir,” Sharpe said, and meant it, for Nairn’s men had driven deep into the horrid defences.

Nairn shook his head. “We should have gone further.” He frowned, listening to the battle. “Some poor bastard’s fetching it rough, though.”

“The big redoubt, sir.” Sharpe pointed forward and left to where, amidst the shifting scrim of gunsmoke, there was a thicker patch of white smoke which betrayed the position of the large central redoubt. Musketry cracked about its earthen walls.

“If we take that fort,” Nairn said, “the battle’s won.”

But other men would have to take the redoubt. They were fresh men, Highlanders of the reserve brigade who marched into the maelstrom with their pipes playing. Nairn could only watch. He sheathed his sword as though he knew it would not be wanted again in this battle, nor, indeed, in this war. “We’ll advance behind the attack, Sharpe.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sharpe rode to reorganize the shattered battalions. Bullets hissed near him, a shell dropped just over his head, and once he seemed to be bracketed by a shrill whistling of canister, yet he somehow led a charmed existence. Around him an army bled, but Sharpe lived. He thought of Jane, of Dorset, and of all the pleasures that waited with peace, and he prayed that victory would come soon, and safely.

The French gunners ripped bloody gaps in the Highlanders who charged the redoubt. Canister coughed at point-blank range, reinforced by the musketry of infantry who lined the palisade to fire down into the swarm of men who scrambled across the dry ditch and over the bodies of their clansmen.

“Rather them than me.” Sergeant Harper stood beside Sharpe’s horse.

Frederickson’s company had come well through the horror. They’d lost six men only. Taplow’s battalion had suffered far worse and, when Sharpe had re-formed it, there seemed only to be half as many men as had started on the attack, and that half so dazed as to be in a trance. Some of the men wept because Taplow was dead. “They liked him,” the Light Company’s Captain had explained to Sharpe. “He flogged them and swore at them, but they liked him. They knew where they were with him.”

“He was a brave man,” Sharpe said.

“He was frightened of peace. He thought it would be dull.”

The Highlanders scrabbled at the earth wall. French muskets clawed at them, but somehow the Scotsmen hauled themselves up and thrust their bayonets over the barricade. One man dragged himself to the top, fell, another took his place, and suddenly the Scots were tearing the palisade to scrap and flooding through the gaps. The cheers of the attackers sounded thin through the smoke. The supporting companies were crossing the ditch of dead men, and the redoubt was taken.

Sharpe sheathed his sword. He noted, with some surprise, that it was unbloodied. Perhaps, he thought, he would not have to kill in this last battle, then a superstitious certainty suggested that he would only survive if he did not try to kill. He touched his unshaven chin, then forgot the auguries of life and death as a massive volley hammered from the far side of the captured redoubt.

“God save Ireland.” Harper’s voice had awe in it.

A French counter-attack, as desperate as the Highland assault, had been launched on the redoubt and Sharpe saw with horror how the blue-coated enemy was clearing the newly taken ramparts. Men fought hand to hand, but the French had the advantage of numbers and they were winning by sheer weight alone.

Survivors of the Scottish regiments jumped down to escape from the fort, French cheers scorned them, then the reserve battalions, more Scotsmen, were snarling forward with bayonets outstretched.

“We’ll form as a reserve!” Nairn shouted at Sharpe.

“Skirmishers forward!” Sharpe shouted.

Nairn’s brigade had marched three battalions strong, but now it formed in only two. The shrunken Highlanders were on the left, and the remains of the two English battalions paraded as one on the right. The men crouched, praying they would not be needed. Their faces were blackened by powder residue through which sweat carved dirty white lines.

The second Scottish attack clawed its way into the redoubt. Once again the bayonets rose and fell on the parapet, and once again the Scots drove the French out.

Smoke drifted to obscure the fight, but the pipes still played and the cheers were again in Gaelic.

Sharpe kept his sword sheathed as he rode Sycorax towards Nairn. Above him, incongruous on this day of struggle, two larks climbed high above the smoke. Sycorax shied away from a dead Scottish Sergeant. The battle had become quiet, or at least it seemed so to Sharpe. Men fought and died not two hundred paces northwards, and all around the guns still thundered their gut-thumping menace into the smoke-cloud, but it seemed unthreatening to Sharpe. He remembered the remains of the salt beef in his pouch, and was astonished to find that a French musket bullet had lodged in the tough, gristly meat. He prised the ball free, then bit hungrily into the food.

“There’s another brigade a quarter mile behind us,” Nairn said. “They’ll go on to the end of the ridge if the fort falls.”

“Good.”

“Thank you for all you did,” Nairn said.

Sharpe, embarrassed by the praise, shook his head. “I didn’t even get my sword wet, sir.”

“Nor me.” Nairn stared up into the sky.

A French cannonball, fired blind from the left flank, and aimed at the Scotsmen who had captured the redoubt, flew wide. It took off the head of Sharpe’s horse in an eruption of warm blood. For a second Sharpe sat on the headless mare, then the body tipped forward and he frantically-kicked his feet out of the stirrups and threw himself sideways as the animal’s corpse threatened to roll on to him. “God damn it!” Sharpe sprawled in a puddle of warm horse blood, then clambered to his feet. “God damn it!”

Nairn governed his impulse to laugh at Sharpe’s undignified fall. “I’m sorry,” he said instead.

“She was a present from Jane.” Sharpe stared at the charnel mess that had been Sycorax. The headless body was still twitching.

“She was a good horse,” Nairn said. “Save the saddle.” He turned in his own saddle to see if one of his spare horses was in sight, but a sudden volley of musketry turned him back.

Another French counter-attack was sweeping forward, this one outflanking and assaulting the redoubt, and again the Scots were being forced backwards by a superior number of men. Blue-coated infantry swarmed at the redoubt’s walls, muskets crashed, and for the second time the French retook the fort. Screams sounded as Highlanders were hunted down inside the courtyard. “The bloody French are fighting well today.” Nairn sounded puzzled.

The enemy scrambled along the palisade, bayoneting wounded Scotsmen. These Frenchmen were, indeed, fighting with a verve that the earlier attack, in column, had not displayed. An eagle standard shone among the smoke and, beneath its brightness, Sharpe saw a French General. The man was stajiding with legs straddled wide on the fort’s southern parapet. It was an arrogant pose, suggesting that the Frenchman was lord of this battlefield and more than equal to anything the British could throw against him. Frederickson’s Riflemen must have seen the enemy General, for a dozen of them fired, but the Frenchman had a charmed life this day.

“That’s Calvet!” Sharpe had trained his glass on the Frenchman and recognized the short, squat figure of the man he had fought at the Teste de Buch. “It’s bloody Calvet!”

“Let’s teach the bastard a lesson.” Nairn drew his sword. It was evident that with the last repulse of the Scots there were no fresh troops to launch against the recaptured redoubt. If Calvet was given more than a few minutes he would reorganize his defence and the fort would be doubly hard to take. Now was the moment to counter-attack, and Nairn’s was the closest brigade. “Quick, Sharpe! Let’s get it over!”

Calvet turned imperiously away. On either flank of the redoubt his men were marching forward. The fort’s ditch was heaped with dead and dying men.

“On your feet!” Nairn had ridden to the space between his two battalions. “Fix bayonets!” He waited till the blades were fixed, then waved his cocked hat. “Forward! Let me hear the pipes!”

The two battalions went forward. So far they were unnoticed. The French were clearing their embrasures and firestep, while one of Calvet’s battalions was being formed in three ranks in front of the shattered palisade and blood-drenched ditch. It was an officer of that battalion who first saw Nairn’s threat and shouted a warning up to the fort’s parapet.

No one had thought to spike the guns, and now the French artillerymen charged them with canister and crashed death out at Nairn’s attack. Sharpe, hurrying to keep up with the mounted Scotsman, saw Nairn fall, but it was only Nairn’s horse that had been wounded. The old Scotsman, his hat gone and his white hair disarrayed, picked himself up and brandished his sword. “Forward!”

The fort had been captured twice, and twice recaptured. The crude earthen square, with its battered palisades, seemed to be sucking men into its horror, almost as if by mutual consent the two armies had agreed that whoever won the fort would gain the day. Sharpe could see open ground to his right, ground that would outflank the smoking redoubt; but cool sense, which might have suggested occupying the ground, had been replaced by a savage pride that would not permit General Calvet the satisfaction of holding the redoubt. Nairn, so long denied the chance to show his skills, would now prove himself the master of this battle’s heart. He had more than the redoubt’s guns to contend with, for the battalion of French infantry were loading their muskets in readiness for Nairn’s assault.

“Steady, lads, steady!” Nairn had launched his attack on an impulse, now he had to slow it down so that his men did not become ragged with fear or eagerness. “Watch your dressing! Steady, lads!” He smiled as Sharpe joined him. “One last effort, Sharpe, just one last effort!”

One of the Highlander’s Colours fell, was retrieved, and hoisted again. A Sergeant’s leg was sliced off at the knee by a cannonball. The pipes whipped fervour into flagging hearts.

The French infantry was loaded and their muskets were raised. There was no sign of Calvet who must have stayed inside the redoubt. Sharpe watched the Frenchmen cock their muskets. “We’ll break the bastards!” Nairn shouted. “We’ll break them!”

The French infantry fired and the air was filled with the splintering volley and the whiplash hiss of its bullets. Smoke gouted thick as blood from the cannon embrasures and Sharpe saw the ground ahead of him churn with the strike of canister. Nairn staggered backwards and Sharpe turned to him in alarm.

“It’s only my leg, man! It’s nothing! Go on! Go on!” Nairn was wounded, but still exultant. He limped, but would not let Sharpe stay with him. “Give them a volley, Richard, now’s your moment!”

“Brigade!” Sharpe’s voice was huge. “Brigade will halt! Present!”

The redcoats stopped. They raised their heavy muskets. The French battalion knew what was coming and frantically tried to reload. Sharpe raised his sword, paused a heartbeat, then swept it down. “Fire!”

A crashing thunderous volley, a spew of acrid smoke, and no time to wonder what damage the bullets had done. “Charge!”

“Take the boys home, Richard!” Nairn called. “Take them home!”

“Charge!” Sharpe felt the rage rising, the unreasonable rage of battle, the anger that would only be slaked by victory. It was this same pride and rage that had made Taplow spur ahead of his men to certain death, and which had made Nairn lead his men into the cauldron that was the redoubt’s killing ground. “Charge!” A musket ball slapped past his face. Sharpe could see the faces of the French infantry now, and they looked desperately young and desperately frightened.

“Charge!” That was Nairn, behind Sharpe now, and the word seemed to hurl the remnants of the brigade into the stench of bodies and blood among which the enemy stood. The Highlanders ran at the French infantry who had nowhere to retreat. The enemy hesitated, and were lost. Nairn’s English battalion was coming at their flank.

Scottish bayonets went forward and came back bloody. The clansmen were old in war, fighting conscripts. Sharpe, on their flank, watched the enemy run, but, in their panic, the French ran towards the closing English. One youngster ran straight towards Sharpe, then, seeing the English officer, the boy raised his bayonet to strike. Sharpe disdainfully stepped to one side and tripped the boy. He left him on the ground for one of Frederickson’s men to disarm or kill.

A cannon crashed canister into the mass of struggling men, killing both Scot and Frenchmen alike.

“Give them fire!” Frederickson shouted, and his skirmishers fired up at the French embrasures. A gunner was flung backwards. A voice bellowed in French from the palisade. Nairn’s Highlanders were already clawing at the sloping earth wall of the fort’s southern face.

“Come right! Come right!” Sharpe shouted at the makeshift English battalion to angle their advance and follow him to the redoubt’s western wall.

Sharpe jumped the ditch and reached for the palisade. A musket flamed at him. His foot slipped on the wet earth and he fell back to the ditch’s foot as Frederickson’s men leaped past him. Sergeant Harper had his seven-barrelled gun unslung. He fired it blindly upwards and three French-men were thrown back to make a space where the Riflemen could reach the top. Sharpe went after them. A man’s blood soaked his face, a body fell on him, but he pushed it aside and helped another man tug at the palisade. A splinter of wood ripped his palm open as he tugged, but then the parapet cracked outwards to make a space through which a man could pass. A French bayonet reached for them, but Sharpe stabbed with his sword and raked the man’s forearm so that the musket and blade dropped.

A Greenjacket went into the gap, was shot, then another man pulled him aside. Harper was wrenching at another part of the barricade, pulling out an earth-filled wicker basket that collapsed a whole section of the defences on to a wounded redcoat. Harper was screaming his own Gaelic challenge. Redcoats were mixed with the Greenjackets, the whole mass of men scrabbling and tearing at the mud bank and timber palisade. They trampled over the wounded and fought their way up to where French muskets hammered and bayonets stabbed down. One Frenchman stabbed too far, his arm was seized, and the man screamed as he was tugged down to the waiting blades. Sharpe was wedged in a gap of the palisade now, desperately trying to fend off a bayonet, when suddenly a whole section of the wall behind him collapsed inwards under the weight of attackers. There were shouts of victory, and the British were suddenly spilling on to the narrow firestep, then leaping down into the courtyard where General Calvet tried to line his men into a solid mass, but Nairn’s Highlanders had already pierced the southern wall, and the first of those Scots now carried their bayonets towards Calvet’s frightened men. The courtyard had been left like a slaughterhouse from the two previous attacks.

“Close on them! Close!” Sharpe shouted, then jumped down to the courtyard.

Now it was blood and stench and blades in a very small place. A French officer tried to duel with Sharpe, but the Rifleman had no time for such heroics and simply threw himself forward, past the man’s lunge, and punched the heavy sword’s guard into the man’s face. The Frenchman fell backwards and Sharpe kicked him in the ribs. Sharpe would have left the man there, but the French officer fumbled at his belt to draw a pistol and Sharpe forgot his superstition about killing, reversed his sword, and thrust the blade down once. A man came at Sharpe with a bayonet, but two Rifle sword-bayonets caught the Frenchman first. A Highland officer disembowelled a gunner with a sweep of the claymore, then hacked at the dead man’s head to make certain of his death.

Calvet was swearing at his men; tugging them into line, cursing them for chicken-livered bastards. A Scots officer came close enough to the General to threaten him with a claymore, but Calvet almost casually parried the blow then lunged his own sword into the Scotsman’s belly before turning back to shout at his men to stand fast and fight the God-damn bastards off.

Calvet’s men were mostly young conscripts who had fought like demons this day, but Nairn’s attack had drained their last courage. Despite their General, they edged back.

A few fought on. A French gunner swung a rammer like a great club. Sharpe ducked under the swing, then lunged. The Frenchman looked oddly surprised as the blade punctured his belly. A Highlander finished the job for Sharpe. A piper was on‘ the southern rampart, flaying the Scots on with his wild music.

Sharpe’s sword handle was slippery with blood. Calvet’s men were breaking and running. The first of them were already spilling over the northern wall. Sharpe looked for Calvet and saw him in the centre of a few moustached veterans and beneath the bright eagle standard. “Calvet!” Sharpe shouted the name as a challenge. “Calvet!”

The Frenchman saw Sharpe. Oddly, instead of bridling at the challenge, he raised his sword in a mock salute. Sharpe struggled to get close to the man, but a sudden rush of Highlanders came between him and the group of Frenchmen. The Colours of three British battalions were in the redoubt now, the mass of men was overwhelming, and Calvet’s last staunch defenders had to give way. They had fought well, but now they just wanted to be out of this courtyard of blood. They retreated calmly, firing their muskets to hold the Scots at bay, then broke to scramble across the northern parapet.

“Man the firestep!” Sharpe ran to the northern parapet.

“Spike those damned guns!” That was the Scots Colonel.

Frederickson’s men were on the northern parapet, firing at the retreating French. Sharpe joined them, unslung his rifle and looked for Calvet. He saw the General walking away, not bothering to run, but just slashing at weeds with his sword as though he took a walk in the country. Sharpe aimed his rifle dead at the small of Calvet’s back, but could not bear to pull the trigger. He twitched the barrel up and to one side before firing so that the bullet slapped past the French General’s right ear.

Calvet turned. He saw the Riflemen lining the parapet. None fired at him, for his calm demeanour spoke of a bravery they could admire. He was a beaten man, but a brave one. He stared at the Riflemen for a second, then bowed an ironic bow. As he straightened up he made an obscene gesture, then walked quietly on. He only began to run when British troops, flooding either side of the redoubt, threatened to cut him off. Ahead of Calvet the smoke blossomed as the Spaniards renewed their assault on the ridge’s northern end. That assault, and the fall of the large fort, broke what spirit was left in Marshal Soult’s army.

The French ran, They ran down the ridge’s eastern face and towards the bridges that crossed the canal and led to the city. Sharpe, standing on the captured firestep, could at last stare down at the spires and towers and pinnacles and roofs of Toulouse. He could see the semi-circle of smoke that marked the British positions to the city’s east and south. It was like looking at a woodcut of a siege, taken from some old book about Marlborough’s wars. He stared, oblivious of the sudden silence on the ridge, and all he could think of was that he was alive.

Sharpe turned away from the city and saw Sergeant Harper alive and well. The big Irishman was cutting a canteen off a Frenchman’s belt. A bugle called victory. A wounded Frenchman cursed his pain and tried to stand. A Highland Sergeant was admiring a French officer’s sword which he had taken as a trophy. Men were ladling water from gun-buckets and pouring it down their faces. A dog ran with a length of intestines in its mouth. A British Lieutenant was dying at the base of the empty French flagpole. The man was blinking desperately, as though he knew that if he let his eyelids stay closed he would slip into eternal night.

Frederickson came and stood beside Sharpe and the two Rifle officers turned to stare down into the enemy city. “Tomorrow,” Frederickson said, “I suppose we’ll have to assault the damned place?”

“It won’t be us, William.” Sharpe knew that bloody business would be given to other battalions. The men who had taken this ridge had earned their pay and the proof of it was in the horror all around. Dead men, wounded men, dying horses, broken gun carriages, smoke, litter; it was a field after battle, the last battle. Surely, Sharpe thought, it had to be the last battle.

Sharpe found a cannon’s cleaning rag and wiped his sword clean. He had wet the blade after all, but soon, he thought, he would hang this long sword on a country wall and let it gather dust. To his north British colours advanced along the ridge as fresh battalions hunted down the last nests of stubborn defenders. The smoke was thinning to a misty haze. There were Spanish colours visible at the ridge’s far crest; proof that this day’s battle was won, even if the city itself had yet to fall. Sharpe suddenly laughed. “I had a sudden urge to take Calvet’s eagle. Did you recognize him?”

“I did.” Frederickson offered his canteen to Sharpe. “Be glad you didn’t try to take his bird, You wouldn’t be alive if you had.”

A bagpipe suddenly sounded, and something plangent in its notes made Sharpe and Frederickson turn.

“Oh, God,” Frederickson said softly.

Four Highlanders carried a litter made of enemy jackets threaded on to enemy muskets. On the litter, his white hair hanging, was Nairn.

Sharpe jumped down to the blood-drenched earth of the courtyard. He crossed to the body just as the Highlanders lowered it to the ground. “He’s dead, sir.” One of the men saw Sharpe’s face and offered the bleak news.

“He said it was his leg.” Sharpe frowned at the old man who had been his friend.

“His lung as well, sir.”

“Oh, Christ!” Tears came to Sharpe’s eyes, then fell down his bloodied cheek. “I was to have had supper with him tonight.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

They buried Nairn in the centre of the redoubt that the Scotsman had captured. A bagpipe played a lament for him, and a chaplain said a Gaelic prayer for him, and his beloved Highlanders fired a volley towards the northern stars for him.

And in the morning, when Sharpe awoke with a parched mouth and a heart that lurched with sorrow when he recalled the Scotsman’s death, it was discovered that Marshal Soult had abandoned Toulouse. He had marched through the gap in the British ring, and he had left the city that now was flaunted with white flags to welcome its enemies. Toulouse had surrendered.

Captain William Frederickson, his false teeth and eyepatch restored to give his scarred face a semblance of respectability, discovered Sharpe in a wineshop that lay close to Toulouse’s prefecture. The wineshop was crowded, but something about Sharpe’s scarred face had dissuaded anyone from sharing his table. It was just after dusk and two days after Soult had abandoned the city to the British. “Have you taken to drinking alone?” Frederickson asked.

“I never abandoned the habit.” Sharpe pushed the bottle of wine across the table. “You’re looking damned cheerful.”

“I am damned cheerful.” Frederickson paused because a loud and prolonged huzza sounded from the prefecture next door. Field-Marshal the Lord Wellington was giving a dinner to celebrate his capture of the city. All the prominent citizens of Toulouse were attending, and all wore the white cockade of the French monarchy and were swearing that they had never supported the upstart Corsican tyrant. “It makes one wonder just who it is we’ve been fighting all these years.” Frederickson straddled a back-to-front chair and nodded thanks for the wine. “But we’re fighting them no longer because the Emperor has abdicated. The Goddamned bloody Emperor has thrown in his hand. Allow me to toast your most excellent, and now quite safe, health.”

Frederickson had spoken in a most matter-of-fact tone, so much so that Sharpe did not really comprehend what his friend had just said.

“The war, my dear friend, is over,” Frederickson insisted.

Sharpe stared at Frederickson and said nothing.

“It’s true,” Frederickson said, “as I live and breathe, and may I be cursed if I lie, but a British officer has come from Paris. Think of that! A British officer from Paris! In fact a whole slew of British officers have come from Paris!

Bonaparte has abdicated, Paris has fallen, the war is over, and we have won!“ Frederickson could no longer contain his excitement. He stood and, ignoring the majority of the customers who were French, climbed on to the chair and shouted his news to the whole tavern. ”Boney’s abdicated! Paris has fallen, the war’s over, and we’ve won! By Christ, we’ve won!“

There was a moment’s silence, then the cheers began. Spanish and Portuguese officers sought a hasty translation, then added their own noise to the celebration. The only men who did not cheer were the civilian-clothed and moustached French veterans who stared sullenly into their wine cups. One such man, the news interpreted to him, wept.

Frederickson shouted to a serving girl that he wanted champagne, cheroots, and brandy. “We’ve won!” he exulted to Sharpe. “The damn thing’s over!”

“When did Boney abdicate?” Sharpe asked.

“Christ knows. Last week? Two weeks ago?”

“Before the battle?” Sharpe insisted.

Frederickson shrugged. “Before the battle, yes.”

“Jesus.” Sharpe momentarily closed his eyes. So Nairn’s death had been for nothing? All the blood on the high ridge had been spilt for nothing?

Then, suddenly, he forgot that irony in an overwhelming and astonishing wash of relief. The bells of Europe could ring because the war was over. There would be no more danger. No more summoning the nerve to assault an enemy-held wall, and no more standing rock still as an enemy battalion took aim. No more cannons, no more lancers, no more skirmish line. No more death. It was over. No more waking in the night sheeted with sweat and thinking of a sword blade’s threat. The war was over, and the last ranks had been closed up, and the whole damn thing was done. Europe had been rinsed with blood, and it was over. He would live for ever now, and that thought made Sharpe laugh, and suddenly he was shaking hands with allied officers who crowded about the table to hear the details of Frederickson’s news. Napoleon, the ogre, the tyrant, the scourge of Europe, the damned Corsican, the upstart, the beast, was finished.

Someone began singing, while other officers were dancing between the tables where the Emperor’s veterans sat keeping their thoughts hidden.

Brandy and champagne arrived. Frederickson, without asking, poured the red wine from Sharpe’s cup on to the sawdust covered floor and replaced it with champagne. “A toast! To peace!”

“To peace!”

“To Dorset!” Frederickson beamed.

“To Dorset!” Sharpe wondered whether a letter had come from England, then forgot the thought to savour this astounding news. It was over! No more canister, no more bayonets, no more shivering on long night marches, no more stench of French cavalry, no more sabres chopping down, no more bullets. Easter had triumphed and death was defeated. “I must write to Jane,” Sharpe said, and he wondered whether she was celebrating the news in some Dorset village. There would be oxen roasting, hogsheads of ale, church bells ringing. It was over.

“You can write to Jane tomorrow,” Frederickson ordered, “for tonight we get drunk.”

“Tonight we get drunk,” Sharpe agreed, and by one o’clock they were on the city’s walls where they sang nonsense and shouted their triumph towards the British bivouac fires that lay to the city’s west. By two o’clock they were searching for another wineshop, but instead found a group of cavalry sergeants who insisted on sharing some plundered champagne with the Rifle officers. At three o’clock, arm in arm to keep themselves upright, Sharpe and Frederickson staggered through the abandoned French fortifications and crossed the wooden bridge over the canal where two friendly sentries prevented them from falling into the water. At four o’clock they arrested Sergeant Harper on a charge of being sober, and at five o’clock they found him not guilty because he no longer was. At six o’clock Major Richard Sharpe was being sick, and at seven o’clock he staggered to Nairn’s vacant tent and gave instructions that he was not to be woken up ever again. Ever.

Because a war was over, and it was won, and at long long last there was peace.