Sharpe's Revenge

CHAPTER 4

Nairn’s Brigade was no more. Broken by battle and leaderless, its shrunken battalions were attached to other brigades. The reason was purely administrative, for now the army was to be run by bureaucrats instead of by fighting men, and the bureaucrats had been ordered to disband the army that had fought from the Portuguese coast to deep inside France. Frederickson was curious to discover just how far the army had marched and found his answer with the help of some old maps that he uncovered in a Toulouse bookseller’s shop. “As the crow flies,” he told Sharpe in an aggrieved voice, “it’s only six hundred and sixty miles, and it took us six years.”

Or ten thousand miles as a soldier reckoned miles, which was as bad roads that froze in winter, were quagmires in spring and choked the throat with dust in summer. Soldiers’ miles were those that were marched under the weight of back-breaking packs. They were miles that were marched over and over again, in advance and retreat, in chaos and in fear. Soldiers’ miles led to sieges and battles, and to the death of friends, but now those soldiers’ miles were all done and the army would travel the crow’s one hundred and twenty miles to Bordeaux where ships waited to take them away. Some battalions were being sent to garrisons far across the oceans, some were being ordered to the war in America, and a few were being sent home where, their duty done, they would be disbanded.

Frederickson’s company was ordered to England where, along with the rest of its battalion, the company would be broken up and the men sent to join other battalions of the Goth. Most of the Spaniards who had enlisted in the company during the war had already deserted. They had joined the Greenjackets only to kill Frenchmen, and, that job efficiently done, Frederickson gladly turned his blind eye to their departure. Sharpe, without a battalion of his own or even a job, received permission to travel back to England with the Riflemen and so, three weeks after the French surrender, he found himself clambering on to one of the flat-bottomed river barges that had been hired to transport the army up the River Garonne to the quays of Bordeaux.

Seconds before the barge was poled away from the wharf a messenger arrived from Divisional Headquarters with a bag of mail for Frederickson’s company. The bag was small, for most of the company could not read or write, and of those who could there were few whose relatives would think to write letters. One letter was for a man who had died at Fuentes d’Onoro, but whose mother, refusing to believe the news, still insisted on writing each month with exhortations for her long dead son to be a good soldier, a fervent Christian, and a credit to his family,

There was also a packet for Major Richard Sharpe, forwarded from London by his Army Agents. The packet had first been sent to the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, then forwarded to General Headquarters, then to Division, and had thus taken over a month to reach Sharpe.

“So you needn’t have worried/ Frederickson said, ”Jane wrote after ail.“

“Indeed,” Sharpe carried the packet forward to find a patch of privacy in the barge’s bows where he tore off the sealing wafer and, with a quite ridiculous and boyish anticipation, tore open the packet to find two letters.

The first was irom a man in Lancashire who claimed to have invented a chain-shot that could be fired from a standard musket or rifle and which, if fired low, would be fatal against the legs of cavalry horses. He begged Major Sharpe’s help in persuading the Master General of Ordnance to buy the device, which was called Armbruster’s Patent Horse-Leg Breaker. Sharpe screwed the letter into a ball and threw it over the barge’s gunwale.

The second letter was from Sharpe’s Army Agents. They presented their compliments to Major Sharpe, then begged leave to inform him that, in accordance with his written instructions to allow Mrs Jane Sharpe authority over his account, they had sold all his 4 per cent stock and transferred the monies into the charge of Mrs Jane Sharpe of Cork Street, Westminster. They thanked Major Sharpe for the trust and privilege of handling his affairs, and hoped that should he ever need such services again, he would not forget his humble and obedient servants, Messrs Hopkinson and Son, Army Agents, of St Albans Street, London. The humble servants added that the expense of selling the 4 per cent stock and the necessary ledger work for the closure of his account amounted to £16. 145. 4d, which sum had been deducted from the draft passed to Mrs Jane Sharpe. They wished to remind Major Sharpe that they still held his Presentation sword donated by the Patriotic Fund, and begged to remain, etc.

The bargemen hoisted a clumsy gaff-rigged sail that made the tarred shrouds creak ominously. Sharpe stared uncomprehendingly at the letter, unaware that the barge was moving. A small child on the far bank sucked her thumb and stared solemnly at the strange soldiers who were being carried away from her.

“Good news, I trust?” Frederickson clambered into the bows to interrupt Sharpe’s reverie.

Sharpe wordlessly handed the letter to Frederickson who read it swiftly. “I didn’t know you’d got a Presentation sword?” Frederickson said cheerfully.

“That was for taking the eagle at Talavera. I think it was a fifty guinea sword.”

“A good one?”

“Very ornate.” Sharpe wondered how Frederickson could so completely have misunderstood the importance of the letter, and merely be curious about a blued and gilded sword. “It’s a Rinkfiel-Solingen blade and a Kimbley scabbard. Wouldn’t serve in a fight.”

“Nice to hang on the wall, though.” Frederickson handed the letter back. “I’m glad for you. It’s splendid news.”

“Is it?”

“Jane’s collected the money, so presumably she’s off to buy your house in Dorset. Isn’t that what you wanted to hear?”

“Eighteen thousand guineas?”

Frederickson stared at Sharpe. He blinked. At length he spoke. “Jesus wept.”

“We found diamonds at Vitoria, you see,” Sharpe confessed.

“How many?”

“Hundreds of the bloody things.” Sharpe shrugged. “Sergeant Harper found them really, but he shared them with me.”

Frederickson whistled softly. He had heard that much of the Spanish Crown jewels had disappeared when the French baggage was captured at Vitoria, and he had known that Sharpe and Harper had done well from the plunder, but he had never dared to put the two stories together. Sharpe’s fortune was vast. A man could live like a prince for a hundred years on such a fortune.

“She could buy a splendid house for a hundred guineas,” Sharpe said petulantly, “why does she need eighteen thousand?”

Frederickson sat on the stump of the bowsprit. He was still trying to imagine Sharpe as an immensely wealthy man. “Why did you give her the authority?” he asked after a while.

“It was before the duel.” Sharpe shrugged apologetically. “I thought I was going to die. I wanted her to be secure.”

Frederickson tried to reassure his friend. “She’s probably found a better investment.”

“But why hasn’t she written?” And that was the real rub, the blistering rub that so insidiously attacked Sharpe. Why had Jane not written? Her silence was only made worse by this tantalizing evidence which suggested that his wife was a rich woman living in London’s Cork Street. “Where is Cork Street?”

“Somewhere near Piccadilly, I think. It’s a good address.”

“She can afford it, can’t she?”

Frederickson twisted on his makeshift seat to watch a marsh harrier glide eastwards, then he shrugged. “You’ll be home in three weeks, so what does it matter?”

“I suppose it doesn’t.”

“That’s what women do to you,” Frederickson said philosophically. “They choke up your barrel and chip your flint. Which reminds me. Some of these bastards think that just because we’re at peace they don’t have to clean their rifles. Sergeant Harper! Weapon inspection, now!”

Thus they floated towards home.

Later that day, as the barge wallowed between sunlit meadows, Sergeant Harper sat with Sharpe in the bows. “What will you do now, sir?”

“Resign my commission, I suppose.” Sharpe was staring at two fishermen. They wore white blouses and wide straw hats, and looked very peaceful. It was hard to imagine that a month ago this had been a country at war. “And I suppose you’ll go to Spain to fetch Isabella?”

“If I’m allowed to, sir.”

This was Harper’s rub. He, like Sharpe, was a wealthy man, and a married man, too. There was no longer any need for Patrick Harper to wear the King’s badge, which he had only ever assumed out of poverty and hunger. He wanted his precious discharge papers, and Sharpe had failed to secure them. Sharpe had collected all the requisite forms, but he had needed to secure the signatures of a Staff Medical Officer, a Regimental Surgeon of the Goth, and of a General Officer. He would also have needed the imprint of the regimental seal of the Both. Sharpe had blithely assumed that such things would be easily secured, but the army’s regulations had defeated him. The army was no longer run by men who understood that a favour would be repaid by victory on a battlefield, but instead by men who could only read the small print of the regulations. Those bureaucrats understood only too well how many men would try and leave the ranks, and extraordinary precautions were being taken to stop any such desertions. Harper was thus being forced to stay in the army.

“There is another way,” Sharpe said diffidently.

“Sir?”

“Become my servant.”

Harper frowned, not at the prospect of menial servitude, but because he did not see how it would achieve his ambition.

Sharpe explained. “So long as I’m on the active list, then I’m allowed a servant. That servant can travel at my discretion. So as soon as we’re in England we’ll go to Dorset, I’ll report that you were kicked to death by a horse, and then you just go free. The army will cross you off the list, and we won’t need a Regimental Surgeon to testify that you’re dead because you’ll have died outside of regimental lines. We’ll need a civilian doctor, and maybe even a coroner, but there’s bound to be some drunkards in Dorset who’ll take a bribe.”

Harper thought about it, then nodded. “It sounds good to me, sir.”

“There is a small problem.”

“Sir?” Harper sounded guarded.

“King’s Regulations, Sergeant, concerning the interior economy of a regiment, insist that no non-commissioned officer is on any account to be permitted to act as an officer’s servant.”

“You looked the rules up, did you, sir?”

“I just quoted them to you.”

Harper smiled. Then he hooked his big powder-stained fingers into the frayed hems of his Sergeant’s badge. “I never wanted the stripes in the first place.”

“I seem to remember it was one hell of a struggle to make you wear them.”

“Should have saved your breath, sir.” Harper ripped the stripes off his sleeve. He stared ruefully at the patch of dirty cloth for a moment, then threw it overboard. “Busted back to the ranks,” he said, then laughed.

Sharpe watched the drifting stripes, and he thought how many hard years had passed since he had first persuaded Harper to put up that patch of white cloth. It was all coming to an end, Sharpe thought; all that he had held most dear and known best.

And ahead of him. beyond this placid river with its fishermen, herons, moorhens, and reeds, what then? The future was like a great mist, in which even Jane was indistinct. Sharpe touched the crumpled letter in his pocket, and persuaded himself that when he found Jane all would be well. He would discover that her letters had gone astray, nothing more.

Frederickson came forward and saw the bare patch on Harper’s sleeve,

“I demoted Rifleman Harper to the ranks.“ Sharpe explained.

“May one ask why?”

“For being Irish.” Sharpe said, then he thought how much he would miss Patrick Harper’s friendship, but consoled himself that Jane was waiting for him, and thus he had all the happiness in the world to anticipate and then to enjoy.

So they floated on.

The quays at Bordeaux were busier than they had been for years. Wharves which had been kept empty by the Royal Navy’s blockade Were suddenly sprouting with masts and spars. Fat-bellied merchant ships queued in the river for their turn at the stone quays where the soldiers waited between netted mounds of supplies. Cannon barrels were slung into holds, while the gun carriages were broken down to be stacked against bulkheads. Protesting horses were lowered into floating stalls. A British Army, fresh from victory, was being hurried out of France. “The very least they could have done,” Harper grumbled, “was let us march into Paris.”

That was a small grudge against the larger tragedies that were now the daily coin of the Bordeaux quays. Those tragedies were occasioned by an army decree which ruled that only those soldiers’ wives who could prove they had married with the permission of their husband’s commanding officers would be carried home. All other women, and their children, were to be abandoned in Bordeaux.

The abandoned women were mostly Portuguese and Spanish who had left their villages when the army marched through. Some had been sold to a soldier by their families. Sharpe could remember when a strong young girl could be bought for marriage for just five guineas. Most of the women had gone through a camp-marriage, which was no marriage in the eyes of the Church, but many had persuaded a village priest to give a blessing to their union. It did not matter now for, unless the regimental records confirmed a Colonel’s permission, the marriage was reckoned to be false. Thousands of women were thus forcibly taken off the quays, then prevented from rejoining their men by a cordon of provosts armed with loaded muskets. The wailing of the women and their small children was ceaseless.

“How are they supposed to get home?” Harper asked.

“Walk,” Frederickson said harshly.

“God save Ireland,” Harper said, “but I hate this damned army.”

On the morning that Frederickson’s Riflemen joined the chaos on the quays three men from redcoat battalions tried to desert to join their wives. One successfully swam upstream, his dark head constantly surrounded by the splashes of musket-balls. Men already on the ships cheered him. A Naval gig, ordered to cut him off, somehow managed to tangle her oars and Sharpe guessed that the sailors had no stomach for their job and had deliberately made a nonsense of the attempt. Two other redcoats, trying to climb a wall of the docks, were caught and charged with attempted desertion.

Frederickson was busy scribbling pieces of paper which would serve as marriage certificates for the six men of his company who might otherwise lose their women. Sharpe, as the more senior officer, gladly added his own signature, then glossed his name with the description of Temporary Brigade Commander. He doubted if the papers would work, but they had to be tried.

Sharpe and Frederickson carried the papers, along with all the company’s other musters, returns and order books, to an office that was guarded by provosts and administered by civilian officials of the Transport Board. Sharpe wanted to challenge their authority with his reputation, but when he reached the office the city’s multitude of church clocks successively pealed midday in a cacophony of time that sounded like a celebration of victory. It was also the signal for the Transport Board officials to close their ledgers for luncheon. They would return, they said, at three o’clock. Till then the Riflemen must wait, though if the officers wished to take luncheon in the city, then they were permitted to pass the picquet-line of provosts.

Sharpe and Frederickson left the company under Rifleman Harper’s command and, out of curiosity, went to find their luncheon in the city. Yet, just as soon as the two officers were beyond the barrier, they were besieged by crying women. One held up a baby as though the infant’s mute appeal would be sufficient to change the heartless decision of the authorities. Sharpe tried to explain that he had no standing in the matter. This group of women were Spanish. They had no money, they were not permitted to see their men, they were just expected to walk home. No one cared about them. Some had spent five years with the British army, carrying packs and muskets like their men, but now they were to be discarded. “Are we to be whores?” one screamed at Sharpe. “He wants us to be a whore!” The woman pointed at a civilian who was standing a few yards away. It appeared he was a Frenchman who had come to the docks to recruit women for his house. The man, seeing Sharpe look at him, smiled and bowed.

“I don’t like that man,” Frederickson said mildly.

“Nor me.” Sharpe gazed at the well-dressed Frenchman who, under the scrutiny, feigned boredom. “Shall we let him know how much we dislike him?”

“It would probably make both of us feel a great deal better if we did. You’ll cut off his retreat?”

Sharpe gently extricated himself from the women, then sauntered past the Frenchman who was content to wait until the Spanish women had finished their importuning of the Riflemen. The Frenchman had watched every British officer so besieged, and knew that the women must soon abandon their hopeless appeals and that afterwards the prettiest among them would be glad of his offer of employment. He lit himself a cigar, blew smoke towards the gulls that screamed about the ships’ topmasts, and thought that never before, and perhaps never again, would whores be no so cheap. Then, suddenly, he saw a one-eyed and toothless Rifleman moving fast towards him. The Frenchman twisted to run away.

He twisted to find himself facing another scarred Rifleman. “Good afternoon,” Sharpe said.

The Frenchman tried to swerve round Sharpe, but the Rifleman reached out a hand, checked the Frenchman, then turned him and pushed him towards Frederickson. Frederickson, who had removed his eyepatch and false teeth in honour of the occasion, let the Frenchman come, then kicked him massively between the legs.

The man collapsed. Frederickson stooped and retrieved the man’s fallen cigar.

The Frenchman was breathless on the cobbles, his hands clutching a pain that was like a thousand red-hot musket balls exploding outwards from his groin. For a few seconds he could not draw breath, then he gasped and afterwards screamed so loud that even the gulls seemed to be silenced. The provosts twitched towards the sound, then decided that the two Rifle officers were best left in peace.

“Shut your bloody face, you pimp.” Sharpe slapped the man’s cheek hard enough to loosen teeth, then began cutting open his pockets and seams much as if the Frenchman was a battlefield corpse. He found a few coins that he distributed to the women. It was a small gesture, and one that was shrunk to nothing in the face of the women’s plight. It was also a gesture that could not be repeated for the sake of every woman who accosted the two Riflemen as they crossed the city’s bridge.

To escape the hopeless appeals they ducked into a wineshop where Frederickson, who spoke good French, ordered ham, cheese, bread and wine. Outside the wineshop a legless man swung himself into the gutter where he held out a French infantry shako as a begging bowl.

The weeping women, and the sight of the beggar who had once marched proudly beneath his regiment’s eagle, had depressed Sharpe. Nor did the pathetic paper signs pinned to the wineshop’s walls help his mood. Frederickson translated the small, handwritten notices. “Jean Blanchard, of the hundred and sixth of the line, seeks his wife, Marie, who used to live in the Fishmongers Street. If anyone knows of her please to tell the landlord.” The next was a plea from a mother to anyone who could inform her where her son might be. He had been a Sergeant of the Artillery, and had not been seen or heard of in three years. Another family, moved to Argentan, had left a notice for their three sons in case any should ever come back from the wars. Sharpe tried to count the small notices, but abandoned the effort at a hundred. He supposed the inns and church porches of Britain would be just as thick with such small appeals. Back on the battlefield Sharpe had never somehow thought that a rifle shot could ricochet so far.

“I suspect we shouldn’t have come into the city.” Frederickson pushed his plate aside. The cheese was stale and the wine sour, but it was the stench of a city’s despair that had blunted his hunger. “Let’s hope they give us an early ship.”

At three o’clock Sharpe and Frederickson returned to the Transport Board offices. They gave their names to a clerk who asked them to wait in an empty counting-house where dust lay thick on the tall desks. Beneath the window one of the two men who had been caught trying to join his wife was being strapped to a triangle for a flogging. Sharpe, remembering the day when he had been flogged, turned away, only to see that a tall, thin, and pale-eyed Provost Captain was staring at him from the counting house doorway.

“You’re Major Sharpe, aren’t you, sir?” the Captain asked.

“Yes.”

“And you’re Frederickson?”

“Captain Frederickson,” Frederickson insisted.

“My name is Salmon.” Captain Salmon took a piece of paper from his pocket. “I’m ordered to escort you both to the prefecture.”

“Escort us?” Sharpe reached for the piece of paper which was nothing more than a written confirmation of what Salmon had just said. The signature meant nothing to Sharpe.

“Those are my orders, sir.” Salmon spoke woodenly, but there was something in his tone of voice which sent a small shiver down Sharpe’s spine. Or perhaps it was the realization that in the corridoooutside the empty counting-house Salmon had a squad of provosts armed with muskets and bayonets.

“Are we under arrest?” Sharpe asked.

“No, sir,” but there was a very slight hesitation.

“Go on,” Sharpe ordered.

Salmon hesitated again, then shrugged. “If you refuse to accompany me, sir, then I’m ordered to arrest you.”

For a moment Sharpe wondered if this was some practical joke being played by an old acquaintance, yet Salmon’s demeanour suggested this was no jest. And clearly the summons presaged trouble. “For Christ’s sake,” Sharpe protested, “we only kicked a pimp in the balls!”

“I don’t know anything about that, sir.”

“Then what is this about?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Then who wants us?” Sharpe insisted.

“I don’t know, sir.” Salmon still spoke woodenly. “You’re both to bring your baggage, sir. All of it. I’ll have your servants fetch it to the prefecture.”

“I don’t have a servant,” Frederick said, “so you’ll have to fetch my baggage yourself, Salmon.”

Salmon ignored the gibe. “If you’re ready, gentlemen?”

“I need to speak to my servant first.” Sharpe leaned on a desk to show he would not move until Harper was fetched.

The Irishman was summoned and ordered to bring both officers’ baggage to the prefecture. A provost would show Harper the way. As soon as Harper was gone, Sharpe and Frederickson were ordered to leave. They filed out of the room, down the stairs, and into the flogging yard where Salmon’s grim squad closed about them. The two Riflemen might not have been under arrest, but it felt and looked just as if they were. The man being flogged gave a pathetic moan, then the drummer boys laid on again with their whips. Beyond the wall the man’s wife and children sobbed.

“Welcome to the peacetime army, sir,” Frederickson said.

Then they were marched away.

CHAPTER 5

“This tribunal,” Lieutenant-Colonel Wigram solemnly intoned, “has been convened by and under the authority of the Adjutant-General.” Wigram was reading from a sheaf of papers and did not look up to catch the Riflemen’s eyes as he read. He went on to recite his own commission to chair this tribunal, then the separate authorities for the presence of every other person in the room.

The room was a magnificent marbled chamber in Bordeaux’s prefecture. Four tables had been arranged in the form of a hollow square in the very centre of the room. The top table, where the tribunal itself sat, was an extraordinary confection of carved and gilded legs on which was poised a slab of shining green malachite. To its left was a humble deal table where two clerks busily recorded the proceedings, while to the right was a table for the official observers and witnesses. Completing the square, and facing the magnificent malachite table, was another cheap deal table which had been reserved for Sharpe and Frederickson. The two Rifle officers had been fetched straight up the prefecture stairs and into the room. Captain Salmon had reported to Wigram that their baggage was being fetched, then had left. Sharpe and Frederickson had still not been given any indication why they had been summoned or why this pompous tribunal had been convened.

Sharpe gazed malevolently at Wigram who, apparently oblivious of the baleful look, droned on. Wigram was a man Sharpe had met before, and had disliked mightily.

He was a staff Colonel, a petty-minded and meticulous bore; a clerk in a Colonel’s uniform. Wigram, Sharpe also remembered only too well, had been an avid supporter of Captain Bampfylde in the days before the Teste de Buch expedition had sailed. Surely this tribunal could have nothing to do with the man Sharpe had fought above a dawn-grey ocean? Yet that seemed only too possible, for one of the official observers on Sharpe’s left was a Naval officer.

Wigram tonelessly introduced the other two members of the tribunal; both Lieutenant-Colonels from the Adjutant-General’s department. One of the two was a uniformed lawyer, the other a provost officer. Both men had sallow and unfriendly faces. The Naval officer was introduced to Sharpe and Frederickson as Captain Harcourt. The second man at Harcourt’s table was, strangely, a civilian French lawyer.

“The purpose of this tribunal,” Wigram at last reached the meat of his document, “is to enquire into certain happenings at the Teste de Buch fort, in the Bay of Arcachon, during the month of January this year.”

Sharpe felt an initial pulse of relief. His conscience was entirely clear about the fight at the Teste de Buch fort, yet the relief did not last, for the formality of this tribunal was very chilling. Papers and pens had been provided on the Riflemen’s table and Sharpe wrote a question for Frederickson, “Why a French lawyer?”

“God alone knows,” Frederickson scribbled in reply.

“I shall begin,” Wigram selected a new sheaf of paper, “by recapitulating the events which took place at the Teste de Buch fortress.”

It had been decided, Wigram informed the tribunal, to capture the fort in an attempt to deceive the enemy into thinking that a sea-borne invasion might follow. The expedition was under the overall command of Captain Horace Bampfylde, RN. The land troops were commanded by Major Richard Sharpe. Wigram looked up at that point and found himself staring into Sharpe’s unfriendly eyes. The staff officer, who wore small round-lensed spectacles, quickly looked back to his paper.

The fort had been successfully captured, Wigram went on, though, there was disagreement between Captain Bampfylde and Major Sharpe as to the exact manner in which that success had been achieved.

“Wrong,” Sharpe said, and his interruption so astonished the room that no one objected to it. “Any disagreement between Captain Bampfylde and myself,” Sharpe said harshly, “was ended by a duel. He lost.”

“I was about to point out,” Wigram said icily, “that all the indications reveal that the predominant credit for the fort’s capture must be given to you, Major Sharpe. Or is it that you wish this tribunal to investigate a clearly illegal occurrence of duelling?”

The Naval Captain smiled, then hastily looked more solemn as Wigram continued. Among those captured at the fort, Wigram said, had been an American Privateer, Captain Cornelius Killick. Killick had been promised good treatment by Captain William Frederickson and, when it appeared that promise was being broken by Bampfylde, Major Sharpe had released the American and his crew.

“Is that accurate, Major?” It was the provost Lieutenant-Colonel who asked the question.

“Yes,” Sharpe answered.

“Yes, sir,” Wigram corrected Sharpe.

“Yes, it is accurate,” Sharpe said belligerently.

There was a pause, and Wigram evidently decided not to press the issue.

Major Sharpe, Wigram continued, had subsequently marched inland with all the army troops, plus a contingent of Royal Marines under the command of Captain Neil Palmer.

“May one enquire,” it was the army lawyer who now interrupted Wigram, “why Captain Palmer is not here to present his evidence?”

“Captain Palmer has been sent on a voyage to Van Dieman’s Land,” Wigram replied.

“He would have been,” Frederickson said loudly enough for the whole room to hear.

The lawyer ignored Frederickson. “We nevertheless have an affidavit from Captain Palmer?”

“There was no opportunity to secure one.” Wigram was clearly discomfited by the questions.

“There wouldn’t have been,” Frederickson said sardonically.

Sharpe laughed aloud. He wondered how Bampfylde had so conveniently managed to have Palmer sent all the way to Australia, then he wondered how Bampfylde had managed to have this tribunal instituted. God damn the man! He had lost a duel, but had somehow continued the fight. How? The man had lied, had been a coward, yet here, in this captured prefecture, it was Sharpe and Frederickson who were being questioned.

During Sharpe’s absence from the fort, Wigram pressed on with his account, the weather conditions were such that Captain Bampfylde deemed it sensible to take his ships off shore. Bampfylde’s decision was made easier by intelligence which claimed that Major Sharpe and all his men had been defeated and captured. That intelligence later proved to be false.

Major Sharpe subsequently returned to the Teste de Buch fort, defended it against French attack, and finally escaped thanks to the intervention of the American, Killick. Wigram paused. “Is that an accurate account, Major Sharpe?”

Sharpe thought for a few seconds, then shrugged. “It’s accurate.” In fact it had been surprisingly accurate. The nature of their quasi-arrest that afternoon had convinced Sharpe that this tribunal had been established solely to exonerate Bampfylde, yet so far he had to admit that the proceedings had been scrupulously fair and the facts not at all helpful to Bampfylde’s reputation. Was it possible that this tribunal was establishing the facts to present at Bampfylde’s court-martial?

Subsequently, Wigram recounted, Captain Bampfylde had accused Major Sharpe of accepting a bribe from the American, Killick. Sharpe, hearing that accusation for the first time, sat up, but Wigram anticipated his outrage by asking whether any evidence had been produced to substantiate the allegation.

“None at all,” Captain Harcourt said firmly.

Sharpe was sitting bolt upright now. Was this tribunal indeed to be Bampfylde’s doom? Frederickson must have felt the same hope, for he swiftly drew a sketch of a Naval officer dangling in a noose from a scaffold. He pushed the sketch to Sharpe, who smiled.

Frederickson’s sketched prognostication of Bampfylde’s fate seemed accurate, for Harcourt was now invited to offer the tribunal a summary of the Navy’s own investigation. That investigation, held at Portsmouth at the beginning of April, had found Captain Bampfylde derelict in his duty. Specifically he was blamed for his precipitate abandonment of the captured fort, and for not returning when the storm abated to seek news of the shore party.

“So court-martial him,” Sharpe offered harshly.

Harcourt glanced at the Riflemen, then shrugged. “It was decided that, for the good of the service, there will be no court-martial. You may be assured, though, that Captain Bampfylde has left the Navy, and that he still has difficulty with his bowels.”

The small jesting reference to the duel passed unnoticed. If there was to be no court-martial, Sharpe wondered, then why in hell were they here? The Navy had decided to hush up an embarrassing incident, yet this army tribunal was re-opening the sack of snakes and apparently doing it with the Navy’s connivance.

It would be assumed, Wigram continued, from the evidence already offered to the tribunal, that Captain Bampfylde’s accusations against Major Sharpe were groundless. The army had indeed already decided as much. Major Sharpe had been faced by a French brigade commanded by the notorious General Calvet, which brigade Major Sharpe had roundly defeated. Nothing but praise could attach itself to such an action. Captain Harcourt, who seemed rather sympathetic to the two Riflemen, applauded by slapping the table top. The French lawyer, who could hardly be supposed to share Harcourt’s sympathy, nevertheless beamed happily.

“Perhaps they want to give us both Presentation swords,” Frederickson wrote on his piece of paper.

“Now, however,” Wigram’s voice took on a firmer tone, “fresh evidence has been received at the Adjutant-General’s office.” Wigram laid down the papers from which he had been reading and looked owlishly to his right. “Monsieur Roland? Perhaps you would be so kind as to summarise that evidence?”

The room was suddenly expectant and quiet. Sharpe and Frederickson did not move. Even the two clerks, who had been busily writing, became entirely still. The French lawyer, as if enjoying this moment of notoriety, slowly pushed back his chair before rising to his feet.

Monsieur Roland was a fleshy, happy-looking man. He was entirely bald, all but for two luxurious side-whiskers that gave his benevolent face an air of jollity. He looked like a family man, utterly trustworthy, who would be happiest in his own drawing room with his children about him. When he spoke he did so in fluent English. He thanked the tribunal for the courtesy shown in allowing him to speak. He understood that the recent events in Europe might lead ignorant men to suppose that no Frenchman could ever again be trusted, but Monsieur Roland represented the law, and the law transcended all boundaries. He thus spoke, Roland said, with the authority of the law, which authority sprang from a ruthless regard for the truth. Then, more prosaically, he said that he was a lawyer employed by the French Treasury, and that therefore he had the honour to represent the interests of the newly restored King of France, Louis XVIII.

“Might one therefore presume,” the lawyer from the Adjutant-General’s department had a silky, almost feline voice, “that until a few weeks ago, Monsieur, you were perforce an advocate for the Emperor?”

Roland gave a small bow and a bland smile. “Indeed, Monsieur, I had that honour also.”

The tribunal’s members smiled to demonstrate that they understood Roland’s apparently effortless change of allegiance. The smiles suggested that the tribunal was composed of worldly men who were above such petty things as the coming and going of emperors and kings.

“In December last year,” Roland had arranged his papers, and could now begin his peroration, “the Emperor was persuaded to contemplate the possibility of defeat. He did not do this willingly, but was pressed by his family; chief among them his brother, Joseph, whom you gentlemen will remember as the erstwhile King of Spain.” There was a delicacy in Roland’s tone which mocked Joseph Bonaparte and flattered the British. Wigram, whose contribution to Joseph’s downfall had been to amass paperwork, smiled modestly to acknowledge the compliment. Sharpe’s face was unreadable. Frederickson was drawing two Rifle officers.

“The Emperor,” Roland hooked his thumbs behind his coat’s lapels, “decided that, should he be defeated, he might perhaps sail to the United States where he was assured of a warm welcome. I cannot say that he was enthusiastic about such a plan, but it was nevertheless urged upon him by his brother who alarmed the Emperor by tales of the ignominy that the family would suffer if they were forced to surrender to their enemies. Happily the generosity of those enemies has made such prophecies worthless,” again Roland had flattered his hosts, “and it is now evident that the Emperor may confidently rely on his victors to treat him with a proper dignity.”

“Indeed.” Wigram could not forbear the pompous interruption.

Frederickson, who had always had a great facility at sketching, was now surrounding his two Rifle officers with a battery of field artillery. All the guns faced the two Greenjackets.

Roland paused to drink water. “Nevertheless,” he began again, “at Joseph’s instigation, preparations were made for an emergency flight from France. Thus, at all times, a travelling coach stood prepared for the Emperor. In its baggage were clothes, uniforms, and decorations. However, the Emperor understood that the carriage could not be too heavily burdened, or else its weight would impede his flight. He therefore arranged, and in the most solemn secrecy, to have his heavy baggage stored at a coastal fort where, in the event of flight, it could be swiftly loaded on board a ship and carried to the United States of America. The officer chosen to convey that baggage to the Atlantic coast was a Colonel Maillot. I have here copies of his orders, signed by the Emperor himself.” Roland picked up the sheets of paper and carried them to the three members of the tribunal.

“Where is this Colonel now?” the English lawyer asked sharply. Despite his unfriendly face, the lawyer seemed assiduous to ask any question that might help Sharpe and Frederickson.

“Colonel Maillot is being sought,” Roland replied suavely. “Sadly the present confusion in France makes his whereabouts a mystery. It is even possible, alas, that Colonel Maillot was killed in the last few weeks of the fighting.”

There was silence as the tribunal scanned the papers. Frederickson, abandoning his gloomy drawing, wrote a quick question. “Have you heard of Maillot?”

“No,” Sharpe scrawled in reply.

Roland had returned to his own table and picked up another sheet of paper. “Colonel Maillot delivered the baggage to a trusted officer here in Bordeaux. That officer was a Major named Pierre Ducos.”

Sharpe hissed a curse under his breath. Now he understood why he was in this room. He did not know how Ducos had worked this, but Sharpe knew who his enemies were, and none was more remorseless than Pierre Ducos. Sharpe felt ambushed. He had been prepared to fight down the clumsy and untruthful attack of the disgraced Captain Bampfylde, and all the time it had been the far more dangerous, and far more cunning, Pierre Ducos who had been working for his downfall. “I know Ducos,” he wrote.

“Major Ducos,” Roland went blandly on, “conveyed the baggage in great secrecy to the Teste de Buch fort which covers the seaward entrance of the Bassin d’Arcachon.”

“He’s lying!” Sharpe interrupted.

“Quiet!” Wigram slapped the table.

“It was that fortress, of course,” Roland was quite unmoved by Sharpe’s interruption, “which, thanks to the great gallantry of Major Sharpe,” here Roland bowed slightly towards the angry Sharpe, “was captured shortly after the baggage had been conveyed thither. The baggage consisted of four large wooden crates that had been concealed inside the fortress.”

“How were the crates concealed?” Frederickson asked, but in such a respectful tone that no one reprimanded him for interrupting.

“I have here Major Ducos’s report,” Roland held up the sheets of paper, “which reveals that the four wooden crates were bricked up in the fort’s main magazine. The work was done by men entirely loyal to the Emperor. None of the fort’s garrison was present when the work was done, and only the fort’s commandant was apprised of the existence of the baggage. The tribunal already has copies of the commandant’s report, and that of Major Ducos, but I now submit those officers’ original documents.”

The papers were duly handed across, and again there was silence as the tribunal perused them. It was the Adjutant-General’s lawyer who broke the silence with a petulant complaint that the Commandant’s handwriting was almost illegible.

“Commandant Lassan explains in the final paragraph of his report that he lost two fingers of his right hand during the defence of the fort,” Roland excused the almost indecipherable scrawl, “but you will nevertheless discover that your copy is an exact transcription of his words.”

“I assume,” the Adjutant-General’s lawyer aligned the edges of the papers in front of him, “that, if it should prove necessary, these officers can give evidence?”

“Indeed,” Roland bowed acknowledgement of the point, “but they were unwilling to travel into British-held territory at this moment.”

“We are fortunate,” Wigram said fulsomely, “that you yourself showed no such reluctance, Monsieur Roland.”

Roland bowed at the compliment, then explained that he had travelled with a party of British officers to London where he had taken this matter to the Judge Advocate General in Whitehall. That official had ordered the Adjutant-General to establish an investigative tribunal, and ordered the Royal Navy to bring Monsieur Roland to Bordeaux. The Frenchman picked up his papers again. “You will notice, gentlemen, that on the final page of Commandant Lassan’s account, he states that when the fortress was finally reoccupied by the French, the baggage was gone.” Roland paused to look at his copy of the report. “You will further note from Commandant Lassan’s testimony that before the fort was evacuated by the British he saw heavy objects being transported from the seaward bastions to the American’s vessel.”

The Adjutant-General’s lawyer frowned. “Do we have any other evidence which confirms that the baggage was hidden in the fortress? What about this General,” he leafed through his papers, “Calvet. He eventually reoccupied the fort, so wouldn’t he have known about it?”

“General Calvet was never informed of its presence,” Roland said, “the Emperor’s instructions were adamant that as few men as possible were to know of his preparations for exile. France was still fighting, gentlemen, and it would not have served the Emperor well if men had thought he was already contemplating defeat and flight.”

“But Calvet’s evidence would be instructive,” the English lawyer insisted. “He could, for instance, confirm whether baggage was indeed removed to the American’s ship?”

Roland paused, then shrugged. “General Calvet, gentlemen, has proclaimed an unswerving loyalty to the deposed Emperor. I doubt whether he would co-operate with this tribunal.”

“I would have thought we had quite sufficient evidence anyway,” Wigram said.

Roland smiled his thanks for Wigram’s help, then continued. “The inference of Commandant Lassan’s report, gentlemen, is that the Emperor’s baggage was taken by the British forces under Major Sharpe’s command. They had every right to do so, of course, for the baggage was properly a seizure of war.”

“Then why are you here?” the Provost officer asked in a pained voice.

Roland smiled. “Permit me to remind you that I am here on behalf of his Most Christian Majesty, Louis XVIII. It is the opinion of His Majesty’s legal advisers, myself among them, that if the seizure of the imperial baggage was a legitimate act of war, and as such was duly reported to the proper authorities, then it now belongs to the government of Great Britain. If, however,” and here Roland turned to look at the two Riflemen, “the seizure was for private gain, and was never so reported, then our opinion holds that the said baggage is now the property of the Emperor’s political successor, which is the French Crown, and that the French Crown would be justified in any attempts to recover it.”

Lieutenant-Colonel Wigram dipped a quill in ink. “Perhaps it would help the tribunal, Monsieur Roland, if you were to tell us the contents of the Emperor’s baggage?”

“With the greatest pleasure, Colonel.” Roland picked up another sheet of paper. “There were some personal items. These were not inventoried properly, for they were packed in great haste, but we know there were some uniforms, decorations, portraits, snuff boxes, swords, candlesticks, and other keepsakes of a sentimental nature. There was also a valise of monogrammed small clothes.” He mentioned the last item with a deprecating smile, and was rewarded with appreciative laughter. Roland was making his revelations with a lawyer’s innate skill, though in truth the clumsiest of speakers could have held the room spellbound. For years the Emperor Napoleon had been an apparently superhuman enemy endowed with an exotic and fascinating evil, yet now, in this magnificent room, the tribunal was hearing from a man who could provide them with an intimate glimpse of that extraordinary being. “Some of these possessions,” Roland went on, “belonged to Joseph Bonaparte, but the bulk of the baggage belonged to the Emperor, and the greatest part of that baggage was coin. There were twenty wooden boxes, five in each crate, and each box contained ten thousand gold francs.”

Roland paused to let each man work out the fabulous sum. “As I said earlier,” he went on blandly, “His Most Christian Majesty will have no claim upon this property if it should transpire that it was a seizure of war. If, however, the baggage is still unaccounted for, we shall take a most strenuous interest in its recovery.”

“Jesus Christ,” Frederickson hissed. He had written the sum of two hundred thousand francs under his drawing of the beleaguered Riflemen, and now, beside it, he wrote its crude equivalent in English pounds, £89,000, os, od. It was a fabulous sum, even dwarfing Sharpe’s fortune. Frederickson seemed dissatisfied with that simple total, for he went on feverishly totting up other figures.

Wigram’s twin lenses turned on Sharpe. “I believe I am correct in saying that you reported no capture of money on your return from the Tcste de Buch expedition, Major?”

“I did not, because there was none.”

“If there had been,” the provost Lieutenant-Colonel broke in, “you would agree that it would have been your duty to hand it over to the competent authorities?”

“Of course,” Sharpe said, though he had never known a single soldier actually to surrender such windfalls of enemy gold. Neither Sharpe nor Harper had declared the fortunes they had taken from the French baggage at Vitoria.

“But you are insisting that you did not discover any money in the fort?” the provost pressed Sharpe.

“We found no money,” Sharpe said firmly.

“And you would deny,” the Lieutenant-Colonel’s tone was sharper now, “that you divided such a spoil with the American, Killick, and that, indeed, your only motive for delaying your departure from the fort, which delay, I must say, occasioned many deaths among your men, was solely so that you could make arrangements to remove the gold?”

“That’s a lie.” Sharpe was standing now.

Frederickson touched a hand to Sharpe’s arm, as if to calm him. “By my reckonings,” Frederickson said calmly, “that amount of gold would weigh somewhat over six tons.

Are you suggesting that two companies of Riflemen and a handful of Marines somehow managed to remove six tons of gold, their own wounded men, and all their personal, baggage while they were under enemy fire?“

“That is precisely what is being suggested,” the provost said icily.

“Have you ever been under fire?” Frederickson enquired just as icily.

Wigram, disliking the twist that the questions were taking, slapped the table and stared at Frederickson. “Did you enrich yourself with captured gold at the Teste de Buch fort, Captain?”

“I emphatically deny doing any such thing, sir,” Frederickson spoke with dignity, “and can state with certain knowledge that Major Sharpe is equally innocent.”

“Are you, Major?” Wigram asked Sharpe.

“I took no money.” Sharpe tried to match Frederickson’s calm dignity“.

Wigram’s face flickered with a smile, as though he was about to make a very telling point. “Yet not a month ago, Major, your wife withdrew more than eighteen thousand pounds…”

“God damn you!” For a second the whole tribunal thought that Sharpe was about to draw his big sword, climb the table, and cause carnage. “God damn you!” Sharpe shouted again. “You have the temerity to suggest I’d let men die for greed and you have spied on my wife! If you were a man, Wigram, I’d call you out now and I’d fillet you.” Such was the force of Sharpe’s words, and such the anger evident on his face, that the tribunal was cowed. Monsieur Roland frowned, not with disapproval, but at the thought effacing a man like Sharpe in battle. Frederickson, sitting beside Sharpe, watched the faces of the aghast tribunal and believed that his friend had entirely pricked the ridiculous charges with his blazing anger. Wigram, accustomed to the servility of clerks, could say nothing.

Then the tall gilded door opened.

Captain Salmon, oblivious of the room’s charged atmosphere, carried in a white cloth bag that he laid on the table in front of Colonel Wigram. He whispered something to the Colonel, then, with the obsequious step of a servant, left the room.

Wigram, with hands that almost trembled, opened the white bag. Out of it he drew Sharpe’s telescope. He peered myopically at the engraved plate, then, steeling himself for the confrontation, looked up at the Rifleman. “If you are innocent, Major, then how do you explain your possession of this glass?”

“I’ve owned it for months,” Sharpe snapped.

“I can vouch for that,” Frederickson said.

Wigram handed the telescope to Monsieur Roland. “Perhaps, Monsieur, you will translate the inscription for the benefit of the tribunal?”

The Frenchman took the telescope, peered at the plate inset on the outer barrel, then spoke the translation aloud. “To Joseph, King of Spain and the Indies, from his brother, Napoleon, Emperor of France.”

There was a murmur in the room. Wigram stilled the sound with a further question. “Is this the sort of personal belonging, Monsieur, which the Emperor or his brother might have stored in their baggage?”

“Indeed,” Roland said.

Wigram paused, then shrugged. “The tribunal should be apprised that the glass was discovered in Major Sharpe’s baggage during an authorized search that was done on my orders during the last hour.” Wigram, buoyed up by the evidence of the telescope, had regained his former confidence and now stared directly at Sharpe. “It is not the business of this tribunal to be a judge of the facts, but merely to decide whether a competent court-martial should be given those facts to judge. The tribunal will now make that decision, and will inform you of its findings at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Until that hour you are forbidden to leave this building. You will discover that Captain Salmon has made adequate billeting arrangements.“

Frederickson collated his sketches and notes. “Are we under arrest, sir?”

Wigram paused. “Not yet, Captain. But you are under military discipline, and therefore ordered to remain in confinement until your fate is announced tomorrow morning.”

The other officers in the room did not look at either Rifleman. It had been the discovery of the telescope that had plunged their certainty of Sharpe’s innocence into an assurance of the Rifleman’s guilt. Sharpe stared at them one by one, but they would not look back.

Frederickson plucked Sharpe’s arm towards the door. Captain Salmon and a half dozen of his men waited on the landing outside. Sharpe and Frederickson might not be prisoners, but it was clearly only a matter of time before they were formally charged and their swords were taken away.

Salmon was embarrassed. “There’s a room set aside for you, sir,” he said to Sharpe. “Your servant’s waiting there.”

“We’re not under arrest,” Sharpe challenged him.

“The room’s upstairs, sir,” Salmon said doggedly, and the presence of his provosts was enough to persuade the two Riflemen to accompany him to the upper floor and into a room that looked out to the city’s main square. A very indignant Patrick Harper waited there. There was also a chamber pot, two wooden chairs, and a table on which was a loaf of bread, a plate of cheese, and a tin jug of water. There was a pile of blankets and a heap of baggage that Harper had fetched from the quayside. There were three packs, three canteens, but no weapons or ammunition. Salmon hesitated, as though he wanted to stay in the room with the three Riflemen, but a glare from Harper made the Captain back abruptly into the corridor.

“That bastard of a provost searched your packs.” Harper was still smarting under that indignity. “I tried to stop him, so I did, but he threatened me with a flogging.”

“They took my rifle?” Sharpe asked.

“It’s in the bloody guardroom downstairs, sir.” Harper was incensed that he, like Sharpe, had been disarmed. “They’ve got my rifle and gun there as well. Even my bayonet!” Sharpe and Frederickson, because they had not been officially placed under arrest, had been allowed to keep their swords, but those were now their only weapons.

“I hate provosts,” Frederickson said mildly.

“So what the hell’s happening, sir?” Harper asked Sharpe.

“We’re only accused of stealing half the bloody gold in France. Jesus Christ! It’s bloody madness!”

“Indeed it is.” Frederickson was placidly cutting the loaf into big chunks.

“I’m sorry, William.”

“Why should you apologize to me?”

“Because this is my battle. Goddamn bloody Ducos!”

Frederickson shrugged. “They could hardly ignore me. They must have known I’d testify to your ignorance, which would be embarrassing for the authorities, so it’s much simpler to implicate me in the crime as well. Besides, if there had been that much gold in the fort, I’d have undoubtedly helped you to steal it.” He cut the cheese with his knife. “Pity about the telescope, though. It’s just the corroborative evidence they needed.”

“They need the gold,” Sharpe said, “and it never existed!”

“It existed all right, but not in the fort.” Frederickson frowned. “I’ve no doubt there’ll be a battle-royal between Paris and London as to who the money really belongs to, but the one thing they’ll agree on is that we’ve got a damned good share of it. And who’s to disprove that?”

“Killick?” Sharpe suggested.

Frederickson shook his head. “The word of a confessed American pirate against a French government lawyer?”

“Ducos, then,” Sharpe said savagely, “and I’ll rip his damned bowels out.”

“Either Ducos,” Frederickson agreed, “or the Commandant,” he looked at his notes to find the Commandant’s name, “Lassan. The problem is that it will be very difficult to find either man if we’re under arrest, and I would suggest to you that we will very soon be placed under arrest.”

Sharpe went to the window and stared at the ships’ masts which showed above the rooftops. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

“Getting the hell out of here,” Frederickson spoke very mildly, “is called desertion.” Both officers stared at each other, appalled at the enormity of what they proposed. Desertion would invite a court-martial, loss of rank, and imprisonment, but exactly the same fate would attend them if they were found guilty of stealing the Emperor’s gold and concealing it from their masters. “And there is rather a lot of gold at stake,” Frederickson added gently, “and unlike you, I’m a poor man.”.

“You can’t come.” Sharpe turned on Harper.

“Mary, Mother of God, and why not?”

“Because if you desert, and are caught, they’ll shoot you. They’ll only cashier us, because we’re officers, but they’ll shoot you.”

“I’m coming anyway.”

“For God’s sake, Patrick! I don’t mind taking the risk for myself, and Mr Frederickson’s in the same boat as I am, but I won’t have you…”,

“And why don’t you just save your bloody breath?” Harper asked, then, after a pause, “sir?”

Frederickson smiled. “I wasn’t enjoying peace much anyway. So let’s go back to war, shall we?”

“War?” Sharpe stared back at the ships’ masts. He should have been on board one of those vessels, ready for the voyage up the Garonne estuary, across Biscay, around Ushant, and so home to Jane.

“Because if we’re to escape this problem,” Frederickson said softly, “then we’ll have to fight, and we’re rather better at fighting when we’re armed and free. So let’s get the hell out of here, find Ducbs or Lassan, and make some mischief. And some money.”

Sharpe stared west. Somewhere out there, beneath the sinking sun, was an enemy who still skulked and schemed. So his reunion with Jane must wait, and peace must wait, for a last fight must still be fought. But after that, he prayed, he would find his peace in the English countryside. “We’ll go tonight,” he said, but he suddenly wished to the depths of his heart that he was sailing home instead. But an enemy had decreed otherwise, so Sharpe’s war was not yet done.

CHAPTER 6

The Chateau Lassan was in Normandy. It was called a chateau for it had once had the pretensions of a fortress, and was still the home of a noble family, yet in truth it was now little more than a large moated farmhouse, though it was undeniably a very pleasant farmhouse. The two storeys of the main wing were built of grey Caen stone that had been quarried and dressed fifty years before the Conqueror had sailed for England. In the fifteenth century, and as a result of a fortunate marriage, the lord of the manor had added a second wing at right angles to the first. The new wing, even now in 1814 it was still known as the ‘new’ wing, was pierced by a high arched gate and surmounted by a crenellated tower. A private chapel with deep lancet windows completed the chateau that was surrounded by a moat which also protected an acre of land that had once been gracious with lawns and flowers.

It had been many years since the moat had defended the house against an enemy’s attack and so the drawbridge had been left permanently down and its heavy-geared windlass had^been taken away to make the upper part of a cider press. Two further wooden bridges were put across the moat; one led from the chateau to the dairy and the other gave quick access from house to orchards. The old moat-encircled garden became a farmyard; a compost heap mouldered warm by the chapel wall, chickens and ducks scrabbled for feed, and two hogs fattened where once the lords and ladies had strolled on the smoothly scythed lawn. The ‘new’ wing, all but for the chapel, had become farm buildings where horses and oxen were stabled, wains were stored, and apples heaped next to the press.

The Revolution had left the Chateau Lassan unscathed, though its master, dutifully and humbly serving his King in Paris, had gone to the guillotine solely because he possessed an ancient title. The local Committee of Public Safety had visited the homely chateau and tried to summon a fashionable and bloodthirsty enthusiasm to pillage the dead Count’s belongings, but the family was well-liked and, after much harmless bluster, the Committee had muttered an apology to the dowager Countess and contented themselves with stealing five barrels of newly pressed cider and a wagon-load of the old Count’s wine. The new Count, an earnest eighteen-year-old, was troubled by his conscience into the belief that the disasters of France were truly the result of social inequalities, and so told the local Committee that he would renounce his title and join the new Republic’s army. The Committee, privately astonished that anyone should renounce the privileges they so publicly despised, applauded the decision, though the dowager Countess was seen to purse her lips with disapproval. Her daughter, just seven years old, did not understand any of it. There had been five other children, but all had died in infancy. Only the eldest, Henri, and the youngest, Lucille, had survived.

Now, twenty-one years later, the wars that had begun against the Republic and continued against the Empire were at last over. The Dowager Countess still lived, and liked to sit where the sun was trapped by the junction of the chateau’s two wings and where roses grew clear up to the moss which grew on the chateau’s stone roof. The old lady shared the chateau with her daughter. Lucille had been married to a General’s son, but within two months of the wedding her husband had died in the snows of Russia and Lucille Castineau had returned to her mother as a childless widow.

Now, in the peace that came after Easter, the son had come home as well. Henri, Comte de Lassan, had walked up the lane and crossed the drawbridge, just as if he was returning from a stroll, and his mother had wept with joy that her soldier son had survived, and that night, just as if he had never been away, Henri took the top place at the supper table. He had quietly and unfussily folded his blue uniform away in the pious hope that he would never again be forced to wear it. He said grace before the meal, then commented that the apple blossom looked thin in the orchards.

“We need to graft new stock on to the trees,” his mother said.

“Only there isn’t any money,” Lucille added.

“You must borrow some, Henri,” the Dowager Countess said. “They wouldn’t lend to two widows like us, but they’ll lend to a man.”

“We have nothing to sell?”

“Very little.” The Dowager sat very straight-backed. “And what little is left, Henri, must be preserved. It is not right that a Comte de Lassan be without family silver or good horses.”

Henri smiled. “The titles of the old nobility were abolished over twenty years ago, Maman. I am now Monsieur Henri Lassan, nothing more.”

The Dowager sniffed disapproval. She had seen the fashions of French nomenclature come and go. Henri, Comte de Lassan had become Citoyen Lassan, then Lieutenant Lassan, then Capitaine Lassan, and now he claimed to be plain Monsieur Lassan. That, in the Dowager’s opinion, was nonsense. Her son was the Count of this manor, lord of its estates and heir to eight centuries of noble history. No government in Paris could change that.

Yet, despite his mother, Henri refused to use his title and disliked it when the villagers bowed to him and called him ‘my Lord’. One of those villagers had once been on the Committee of Public Safety, but those heady days of equality were long gone and the ageing revolutionary was now as eager as any man to doff his cap to the Comte de Lassan.

“Why don’t you please Maman?” Lucille asked her brother. It was a Sunday afternoon soon after Henri’s return and, while the Dowager Countess took her afternoon nap, the brother and sister had crossed one of the wooden bridges and were walking between the scanty blossomed apple trees towards the millstream that lay at the end of the chateau’s orchards.

“To call myself Count would be a sin of pride.”

“Henri!” Lucille said reproachfully, though she knew that no reproach would sway her gentle, but very stubborn brother. She found it hard to imagine Henri as a soldier, though it had been clear from his letters that he had taken his military responsibilities with great seriousness, and, reading between the lines, that he had been popular with his men. Yet always, in every letter, Henri had spoken of his ambition to become a priest. When the war is over, he would write, he would take orders.

The Dowager Countess decried, disapproved of, and even despised such an ambition. Henri was nearly forty years old, and it was high time that he married and had a son who would carry the Lassan name. That was the important thing; that a new Count should be born, and on Henri’s return the Dowager quickly invited Madame Pellemont and her unmarried daughter to visit the chateau, and thereafter harried Henri with frequent and tactless hints about Mademoiselle Pellemont who, though no beauty, was malleable and placid. “She has broad hips, Henri,” the Dowager said enticingly. “She’ll spit out babies like a sow farrowing a litter.”

The Dowager did not extend her desire for grandchildren to her daughter, for if Lucille were to marry again her children would not bear the family name, nor would any son of Lucille’s be a Count of Lassan. It was the survival of that name and lineage that the Dowager wanted, and so Lucille’s marriage prospects were of no interest to the Dowager. In fact two men had proposed marriage to the widow Castineau, but Lucille did not want to risk the unhappiness of losing love again. “I shall grow old and crotchety,” she told her brother, though the last quality seemed an unlikely fate, for Lucille had an innate vivacity that gave her face an illuminating smile. She had grey eyes, light brown hair, and a long lantern jaw. She thought herself plain, and was certainly no great beauty, yet the spark in her soul was bright, and the man who had married her had counted himself to be among the most fortunate of husbands.

“Will you marry again?” her brother asked as they walked down to the millstream.

“No, Henri. I shall just moulder away here. I like it here, and I’m kept busy. I like being busy.” Lucille was an early riser, and rarely rested in daylight. When so many men had been away at the wars it had been Lucille who ran the farm, the cider press, the mill, the dairy, and the chateau. She supervised the lambing, she raised calves, and fattened hogs for the slaughter. She mended the centuries old flax sheets on which the family still slept, she churned butter, made cheese, and eked out the family’s tiny income in an effort to preserve the estate. She had been forced to sell two fields, and much of the old silver, yet the chateau had survived for Henri’s return. Henri thought that the work had worn his sister out, for she was thin and pale, but Lucille denied the accusation. “It isn’t the work that’s so tiring, but money. There’s never enough. We have to mend the tower roof, we need new apple trees.” Lucille sighed. “We need everything. Even the chairs in the kitchen need mending, and I can’t afford a carpenter.”

They came to the millrace and sat on the stone wall above the glistening rush of water. Henri had been carrying a musket which he now propped against the wall. His coat pockets were weighed down with two heavy pistols. He disliked carrying the weapons, but the French countryside was infested with armed bands of men who had either deserted from the Emperor’s armies or else had been discharged and had no home or work. Such men often attacked villagers, and had even ransacked small towns. No such brigands had yet been seen near the chateau, but Henri Lassan would take no chances and thus carried the weapons whenever he left the safe area inside the moat. The chateau’s few farmworkers were also armed, and the village knew that if the bell above the chateau’s chapel tolled then there was danger abroad and they should herd their cattle into the chateau’s yard.

“Not that I can promise a very successful defence,” Henri now said ruefully. “I wasn’t very good at defending my fortress.” He had commanded the Teste de Buch fort and, day after day, year after year, he had watched the empty sea and thought the war was passing him by until, in the very last weeks of the fighting, the British Riflemen had come from the landward side to bring horror to his small command.

Lucille heard the sadness in her brother’s voice. “Was it awful?”

“Yes,” Henri said simply, then fell silent so that Lucille thought he would say no more, but after a moment Henri shrugged and began to speak of that one lost fight. He told her about the Englishmen in green, and how they had appeared in his fortress as though from nowhere. “Big men,” he said, “and scarred. They fought like demons. They loved to fight. I could tell that from their faces.” He shuddered. “And they destroyed all my books, all of them. They took years to collect, and afterwards there wasn’t one left.”

Lucille twisted a campion’s stalk about her finger. “The English.“ She said it disparagingly, as though it explained everything.

“They are a brutal people.” Henri had never known an Englishman, yet the prejudice against the island race was bred into his Norman bone. There was a tribal memory of steel-helmeted archers and mounted men-at-arms who crossed the channel to burn barns, steal women, and slaughter children. To Henri and Lucille the English were a rapacious and brawling race of Protestants whom God had seen fit to place just across the water. “I sometimes dream of those Riflemen,” Henri Lassan now said.

“They failed to kill you,” Lucille said as if to encourage her brother’s self-esteem.

“At the end they could have killed me. I waded into the sea, straight for their leader. He’s a famous soldier, and I thought I might expiate my failure if I killed him, or pay for it if I died myself, but he would not fight. He lowered his sword. He could have killed me, but he did not.”

“So there’s some good in the green men?”

“I think he just despised me.” Henri Lassan shrugged. “His name is Sharpe, and I have the most ridiculous nightmare that one day he will come back to finish me off. That is stupid, I know, but I cannot shake the notion away.” He tried to smile the foolishness away, but Lucille could tell that somehow this Sharpe had become her brother’s private demon; the man who had shamed Lassan as a soldier, and Lucille wondered that a man who wanted to be a priest nevertheless should also worry that he had not been a great soldier. She tried to tell her brother that the failure did not matter, that he was a better man than any soldier.

“I hope I will be a better man,” Henri said.

“As a priest?” Lucille touched on the argument which their mother pursued so doggedly.

“I’ve thought of little else these past years.” And, he could have added, he had prepared himself for little else over these past years. He had read, studied, and argued with the priest at Arcachon; always testing the soundness of his own faith and always finding it strong. The alternative to the priesthood was to become the master of this chateau, but Henri Lassan did not relish the task. The old building needed a fortune spent on its walls and roof. It would be best, he thought privately, if the place was sold and if his mother would live close to the abbey in Caen, but he knew he could never persuade the Dowager of that sensible solution.

“You don’t sound utterly certain that you want to be a priest,” Lucille said.

Henri shrugged. “There’s been a Lassan in this house for eight hundred years.” He stopped, unable to argue against the numbing weight of that tradition, and even feeling some sympathy for his mother’s fervent wishes for the family’s future. But if the price of that future was Mademoiselle Pellemont? He shuddered, then looked at his watch. “Maman will be awake soon.”

They stood. Lassan glanced once more at the far hills, but nothing untoward moved among the orchards, and no green men threatened on the high ridge where the elms, beeches and hornbeams grew. The chateau was calm, at peace, and safe, so Henri picked up his loaded musket and walked his sister home.

“They’re scared, you see,” Harper explained, and, as if to prove his point, he wafted the chamber-pot towards the provost sentries who guarded the corridor outside the room where Sharpe and Frederickson wasted.

The provost recoiled from the chamber-pot, then protested when Harper offered to remove the strip of cloth which covered its contents.

“You can’t expect gently-born officers to live in a room with the stench of shit,” Harper said, “so I have to empty it.”

“Go to the yard. Don’t bloody loiter about.” It was the Provost Sergeant who snapped the orders at Harper.

“You’re a grand man, Sergeant.”

“Get the hell out of here. And hurry, man!” The Sergeant watched the big Irishman go down the stairs. “Bloody Irish, and a bloody Rifleman,” he said to no one in particular, “two things I hate most.”

The windowless corridor was lit by two glass-fronted lanterns which threw the shadows of the three guards long across the floorboards. Laughter and loud voices echoed from the prefecture’s ground floor where the highest officials of the Transport Board were giving a dinner. A clock at the foot of the deep stairwell struck half past eight.

More than fifteen minutes passed before Harper came whistling up the stairs. He carried the empty chamber-pot in one hand. Inside the pot were three empty wine glasses, while on his shoulder was a sizeable wooden keg that he first dropped on to the landing, then rolled towards the officers’ doorway with his right foot. He nodded a cheerful greeting to the Provost Sergeant. “A gentleman downstairs sent this up to the officers, Sergeant.”

The Provost Sergeant stepped into the path of the rolling keg which he checked with a boot. “Who sent it?”

“Now how would I be knowing that?” Harper, when it pleased him, could easily play the role of a vague-witted Irishman. That such a role, however it distorted the truth, nevertheless suited the prejudice of men like the Provost Sergeant only made it the more effective. “He didn’t give me his name, nor did he, but he said he had a sympathy for the poor gentlemen. He said he’d never met them, but he was sorry for them. Mind you, Sergeant, the gentleman was more than a little drunk himself, which always makes a man sympathetic. Isn’t that the truth? It’s a pity our wives don’t drink more, so it is.”

“Shut your face.” The Sergeant tipped the cask on to its end, then worked the bung loose. He was rewarded with the rich smell of good brandy. He thrust the bung home. “I’ve got orders not to allow anyone to communicate with the officers.”

“You wouldn’t deny them a wee drink now, would you?”

“Shut your bloody face.” The Sergeant stood, reached for the chamber-pot, and took out the three glasses. “Get inside, and tell your damned officers that if they’re thirsty they should drink water.”

“Yes, Sergeant. Whatever you say, Sergeant. Thank you, Sergeant.” Harper edged past the keg, then darted through the door as though he truly feared the Provost Sergeant’s wrath. Once inside the room he closed the door, then grinned at Sharpe. “As easy as stealing a fleece off a lamb’s back, sir. One keg of brandy safely delivered. The bastards just couldn’t wait to take it off me.”

“Let’s just hope they drink it,” Frederickson said.

“In two hours,” Harper said confidently, “those three will be dancing drunk. I even thought to bring them some glasses.”

“How much did the brandy cost?” Sharpe asked.

“All you gave me, sir, but the fellow in the kitchens said it was the very best.” Harper, properly pleased with himself, went on to deliver the rest of his news. There were only three guards on the top landing, and he had seen no other sentries till he reached the ground floor where he saw a sergeant and two men in the guardroom by the front door. “But they weren’t provosts, sir, so they mayn’t be any trouble to us. I said hello to them, and saw our guns in there.” There were another two sentries in the town square beyond the front door. “They’re giving a grand dinner downstairs, so there’s a fair number of fellows wandering about looking for places to piss. Oh, and there’s a bookcase on the first floor, sir, full of bloody ledgers.”

“Did you look for the stables?” Sharpe asked.

“I did, sir, but they’re already locked tight, and so’s the yard gate.”

“So there’s no chance of stealing horses?”

Harper considered the question, then shrugged. “It’ll be hard, sir.”

“We’re infantry,” Frederickson said dismissively, “so we can damn well walk out of the city.”

“And if they send cavalry after us?”

Frederickson dismissed the fear. “How will they know which way we’ve gone? Besides, the French cavalry never caught us, so what chance would you give our dozy lot?”

“We walk, then.” Sharpe stretched his arms wide as though he prepared for exercise. “But where to?”

“That’s easy,” Frederickson said. “We go to Arcachon.”

“Arcachon?” Sharpe asked with surprise. That was the town closest to the Teste de Buch fort, but otherwise he could think of no special significance attached to the place.

But Frederickson, while Harper had been performing his charade with the chamber-pot, had been deep in thought. There never had been any gold in the fort, Frederickson now explained, at least not when the Riflemen had captured it. If that fact could be proved, then their troubles would be over. “What we need to do,” he went on, “is find Commandant Lassan. I don’t believe he wrote that statement. I believe Ducos made it up.” Frederickson paused as a man laughed outside the door. “I suspect your brandy is being appreciated, Sergeant.”

“Why do you think the Commandant’s statement was faked?” Sharpe asked.

Frederickson paused to strike a flame in his tinderbox and to light one of his small foul cheroots. “Do you remember his quarters?”

Sharpe thought back to the few hectic days he had spent at the Teste de Buch fortress. “I remember the bastard had a lot of books. He couldn’t fight, but he had a lot of bloody books.”

“Do you remember what the books were about?”

“I had better things to do than read.”

“I looked,” Frederickson said, “and I remember that Commandant Lassan had a very civilized library, which made it a great pity when we turned most of it into cartridge paper and cannon-wadding. I recall some very fine editions of essays, and a large, indeed comprehensive, collection of sermons and other devotional literature. A very devout man, our Commandant Lassan.”

“Then no wonder we beat the bastard to jelly,” Harper said happily.

“And if he is devout,” Frederickson ignored Harper’s cheerful comment, “then my guess is that he may also be honest. It doesn’t always follow, of course, I remember a very sanctimonious chaplain of the Goth who stole the mess ragged and then ran off with a Corporal’s rather rancid woman, but I’m willing to think Lassan may be cut from a rather better cloth. Indeed, I seem to recall that the American told us he was a decent man?”

“Yes, he did,” Sharpe remembered.

“So let’s hope he is decent. Let’s hope that he’ll deny that damned statement and ease us all off a bloody sharp hook. The trick of it is simply to find the man, then persuade him to travel to London.”

Frederickson’s calm words made the task sound oddly easy. Sharpe, turning to the window, saw how the darkness was shrouding the city. There was a slender moon, sharp-edged and low above a tangle of dark masts and rigging which showed over the black rooftops. Candles showed in some windows and torches flickered where link-boys escorted pedestrians about the streets. “Why Arcachon, though?” Sharpe turned back from the window. “You think Lassan lives there?”

“I doubt we shall be so fortunate as that,” Frederickson said, “but because he’s an educated man, and a devout one, it’s likely that he and the local priest would have been on friendly terms. It’s hard to find civilized conversation in a small garrison, let alone someone to play chess with, and I recall that we kindled a fire with a very fine chess-set from Lassan’s quarters. So, my suggestion is that we find the priest of Arcachon and hope he can tell us where to find Lassan. Do you agree?”

“I think it’s a brilliant notion,” Sharpe said admiringly.

“I’m just a humble Rifle Captain,” Frederickson said, “and therefore flattered by the praise of a staff officer.”

“But,” Sharpe said, “if Lassan’s an honourable man, why would Ducos falsify a statement of his? He must know that Lassan could deny it.”

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Frederickson admitted, “but we’ll never know unless we find Lassan.”

“Or get out of here,” Harper said grimly. “Can I have permission to hit a provost?”

“No killing,” Frederickson warned. “If we kill one of the bastards then they’ll have real cause to court-martial us.” He crept close to the door. “I wonder if our brandy is working.”

The three men went silent as they tried to decipher the small sounds from beyond the door. They heard voices, and then, quite distinctly, the sound of liquid being poured. “Another half hour,” Sharpe decided.

The half hour crept by, but at last the first of the town’s clocks rang ten. Sharpe grimaced, seized the door handle, and nodded at Harper. “You first, Sergeant.”

He snatched the door open, and their escape had begun.

Lieutenant-Colonel Wigram was the guest of honour at the dinner which the Transport Board was giving in the prefecture. The officials and their guests had dined well on roast mutton, roast chicken, and baked pears. Now, as the bottles of brandy thickened among the remaining bottles of claret, Wigram was invited to make a speech.

He spoke well. The vast majority of the men about the long table were civilians from London who had come to supervise the onerous task of removing an army from France. Their days were spent in settling accounts with the masters of ships, allocating hull space, and securing supplies for the army’s journey home. Now, in the candlelit splendour of the prefecture’s large hall, they could hear a little of what that army had achieved.

“In the darkest days of the struggle,” Wigram said, “when every man’s voice at home was raised against our endeavours, and when any prudent man might have deemed our cause lost, there would never have been a dinner as splendid as this one you have so generously provided. Then, gentlemen, we lived on very short commons indeed. Many is the night when I have given my horse the last food from my saddlebags, then slept hungry myself. The French were never far away on those cold nights, yet we survived, gentlemen, we survived.” There were murmurs of admiration, and a few guests, overcome both by Wigram’s heroism and the plenitude of the wine, tapped their glasses with their spoons to make a pleasant ringing applause.

“And even later,” Wigram’s glasses reflected the candlelight as he looked up to make sure his voice reached the far end of the table where the more junior guests sat, “when fortune smiled more compassionately upon us, hardship was still our constant companion.” In fact Wigram had slept between sheets every night of his war, and had been known to have a cook flogged because his nightly joint of beef was underdone, but this was no time to quibble. This was a time for every man to garner what credit he could from the war, and Wigram could garner with the best. He bowed to Captain Harcourt, another guest at the dinner, and paid a fulsome tribute to the contribution made by the Royal Navy. Again there was applause.

Finally Wigram turned to a question he had frequently pondered. “I am often asked,” he said, “what qualities arc most desirable in a soldier, and I confess to cause astonishment when I reply that it is not a sturdy arm, nor an adventurous spirit which gains an army its victories. Such qualities are necessary, of course, but without leadership they will inevitably fail. No, gentlemen, it is the man who keeps his mental faculties alert who contributes most to the glorious cause. A soldier must be a thinker. He must be a master of detail. He must be a man whose precision of thinking will render him staunch and steady amidst danger and uncertainty.” It was at that point that Lieutenant-Colonel Wigram paused, his mouth dropped open, and one by one the guests turned to stare with amazement at the apparitions which had appeared in the doorway.

It was commonly said that most men only joined the British Army for drink. The French scornfully accused the British of fighting drunk, indeed of not being able to fight unless they were drunk, though if the charge was true then it was astonishing that the French did not make their own men drunk because, sober, they could never beat the British. There was, nevertheless, a great deal of truth in the charges. The British Army was notorious for drunkenness, and more than one French unit had escaped capture by leaving tempting bottles and casks to waylay their pursuers.

So it was hardly astonishing that the three provosts were drunk. Each had consumed close to a pint and a half of brandy, and they were not merely drunk, but gloriously, happily and carelessly oblivious of being drunk. They were, in truth, in a temporary nirvana so pleasant that none of the three had even noticed when a big Irishman rapped them hard on the skull to introduce a temporary unconsciousness. It was during that blank moment that each of the provosts had been stripped stark naked. Then, to make certain they stayed incapable, Sharpe and Frederickson had poured yet more brandy down their spluttering throats.

Thus it was that Lieutenant-Colonel Wigram’s speech was interrupted by three deliriously drunken men who were as naked as the day on which they were born.

The Provost Sergeant stared about him in blinking astonishment as he found himself in the brilliantly lit banqueting hall. He hiccupped, bowed to the company, and tried to speak. “Fire,” he at last managed to say, then he slid down a wall to fall asleep.

Behind him smoke seeped through the open door.

Wigram stared, aghast.

“Fire!” This time the voice came from outside, and was a huge roar of warning. Wigram panicked, but so did almost every man in the room. Glasses and plates smashed as men fought to escape the tables and cram themselves through one of the room’s two doors. The naked provosts were trampled underfoot. Smoke was thickening in the corridor and billowing up the stairwell. Wigram fought to escape with the rest. He lost his glasses in his panic, but somehow managed to scramble through the door, across the vestibule, and down into the town square where the dinner guests assembled to watch the promised inferno.

There was none. A guard sergeant filled a bucket of water and doused the pile of brandy-soaked uniforms which, heavily sprinkled with gunpowder and then piled with loosely stacked, brandy soaked ledgers, had caused the pungent smoke. There was a nasty scorch-mark on the carpet, which hardly mattered for, being embroidered with the imperial initial ‘N’, it was due for destruction anyway. Most of the ledgers were scorched, and a few had burned to ash, but the fire had not spread and so no real harm had been done. The Sergeant ordered the three drunken provosts to be carried to the yard and dumped in a horse-trough, then, pausing only to steal half a dozen bottles of brandy from the table in the banqueting hall, he went to the front door and reported to the officers that all was well.

Except half an hour later someone thought to look on the top floor of the prefecture and discovered that three Riflemen were missing. Two rifles, a seven-barrelled gun, a bayonet, and six ammunition pouches were also missing from the guardroom.

Colonel Wigram, panicking like a wet hen, wanted to call out the guard, then send cavalry galloping all over France to discover the fugitives. Captain Harcourt was calmer. “There’s no need,” he said.

“No need?”

“My dear Wigram, there are picquets at every exit from the city, and even if Major Sharpe’s party evades those sentries, we know precisely where they’re going.”

“We do?”

“Naturally. That one-eyed Rifleman was entirely correct in his evidence to the tribunal. No men could have removed six tons of gold under enemy fire. Surely you understood that?”

Wigram had understood no such thing, but was unwilling to display such ignorance. “Of course,” he said huffily.

“They could never have carried the gold away, so they must have hidden it at the Teste de Buch, and I warrant you that’s where they’ve gone. And that’s where we’ve had a sloop since last week. Might I trouble you for a single messenger to warn the crew that they’ll have to arrest Major Sharpe and his companions?”

“Of course.” Wigram felt aggrieved that no one had told him about the Navy’s precautions. “You’ve had a sloop there for a week?”

“You don’t want the bloody French to get the gold, do you?”

“But by law it belongs to them!”

“I’ve spent the last twenty years killing the bastards, and don’t intend to hand them a pile of gold just because a peace treaty’s been signed. If it’s necessary we’ll tear that damned fort apart to find the bloody stuff!” Harcourt glanced up at the stars, as if judging the weather, then grinned. “There is one consolation in all this, my dear Colonel. By running away, Major Sharpe and Captain Frederickson have proved their guilt, so when the Navy catches them, you shouldn’t have any trouble in convening a court-martial. Shall we send that messenger? And because the roads are likely to be dangerous, perhaps he’d better be given a cavalry troop as escort? Then perhaps you’d care to finish your speech? I must admit to a great fascination in your theory as to the role of the thinking man in gaining victory.”

But somehow the joy had deserted Wigram’s evening. He did at least find his spectacles, but someone had trampled them in the rush and one lens was broken and an earpiece bent. So he abandoned his speech, cursed all Riflemen, then went to his quarters and slept.

CHAPTER 7

It had been easy enough to escape the prefecture by causing some small chaos, but leaving the city itself would be a harder task. Every exit was guarded by a picquet of redcoats. The soldiers were not there to guard Bordeaux against the marauding bands of the countryside, but rather to apprehend any deserter who might have evaded the provosts at the quays and be trying to take his woman back to Spain and Portugal.

Sharpe had used the stars to find a westward road through the city, but now, so close to the open country, he had been forced to stop. He was staring at a picquet of a dozen soldiers who were silhouetted about a brazier. Sharpe was too far away to distinguish their faces or see what regiment they might be from. He silently cursed the lost telescope.

“If we wait much longer,” Frederickson warned, “they’ll have men after us.”

“Surely they won’t stop officers walking past?” Harper offered.

“Let’s hope not.” Sharpe decided Harper was right, and that rank alone should suffice to see them past the bored guards. He nevertheless wondered just what he should do if the picquet proved obdurate. It was one thing to strip drunken provosts naked, but quite another to use force against a squad of redcoats. “Cock your rifles,” Sharpe said as they walked forward.

“Are you going to shoot them?” Frederickson sounded incredulous.

“Threaten them, anyway.”

“I won’t shoot anyone.” Frederickson left his rifle slung on his shoulder. Harper had fewer scruples and dragged back the cock of his seven barrelled gun. The monstrous click of the heavy lock made the officer commanding the picquet turn towards the approaching Riflemen.

Sharpe was close enough now to see that the picquet’s officer was a tall and dandified man who, like many infantry officers who aspired to high fashion, wore a cavalryman’s fur-edged pelisse over one shoulder. The officer strolled towards the three Riflemen with a languid, almost supercilious, air. The three must have looked strange for, in an army that had swiftly accustomed itself to peace, they were accoutred for war. They had heavy packs, crammed pouches, and were festooned with weapons. The sight of those weapons made the picquet’s sergeant snap an order to his men who unslung their muskets and shuffled into a crude line across the road. The officer calmly waved his hand as if to suggest that the sergeant need not feel any alarm. The officer had now walked thirty yards away from the brazier. He stopped there, folded his arms, and waited for the Riflemen to reach him. “If you haven’t got passes,” he said in a most superior and disdainful voice, “then I’ll have no choice but to arrest you.”

“Shoot the bugger,” Sharpe said gleefully to Harper.

But Harper was grinning, the officer was laughing, and Fortune, the soldier’s fickle goddess, was smiling on Sharpe. The tall and disdainful officer was Captain Peter d’Alembord of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers. He was an old friend who had once served under Sharpe and who now commanded Sharpe’s old light company. d’Alembord also knew Frederickson and Harper well, and was delighted to see both men.

“How are you, Regimental Sergeant Major?” he asked Harper.

“I’m just a Rifleman again now, sir.”

“Quite right, too. You were far too insubordinate to be promoted.” d’Alembord looked back to Sharpe. “Purely out of interest, sir, but do you have a pass?”

“Of course I don’t have a bloody pass, Dally. The bastards want to arrest us.”

It had been pure good luck that had brought Sharpe to this picquet that was manned by his old battalion. He was close enough now to recognize some of the men about the brazier. He saw Privates Weller and Clayton, both good men, but this was no time to greet old comrades, nor to implicate them in this night’s escapade. “Just get us quietly out of the city, Dally, and forget you ever saw us.”

d’Alembord turned to his picquet. “Sergeant! I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

The Sergeant was curious. The picquet duty had been boring, and now some small excitement broke the tedium, but he was too far from the three Riflemen to recognize them. He took a few steps forward. “Can I say where you’ll be, sir? If I’m asked.”

“In a whorehouse, of course.” d’Alembord sighed. “The trouble with Sergeant Huckfield,” he said to Sharpe, “is that he’s so damned moral. A good soldier, but horribly tedious. We’ll go this way.” He led the three Riflemen into a foetid black alley that reeked with an overwhelming stench of blood. “They put me next to a slaughterhouse,” d’Alembord explained.

“Is there a safe way out of the city?” Sharpe asked.

“There are dozens,” d’Alembord said. “We’re supposed to patrol these alleys, but most of the lads don’t take kindly to arresting women and children. Consequently we tend to do quite a lot of looking the other way these days. The provosts, as you might imagine, are more energetic.” He led the Riflemen away from the butcher’s stink and into a wider alley. Dogs barked behind closed doors. Once a shutter opened from an upper window and a face peered out, but no one called any alarm or query. The alley twisted incomprehensibly, but eventually emerged into a rutted lane edged with sooty hedges where the smell of open country mingled with the city’s malodorous stench. The main road’s that way,“ Dally pointed southwards across dark fields, ”but before you go, sir, would you satisfy my curiosity and tell me just what in God’s name is happening?“

“It’s a long story, Dally,” Sharpe said.

“I’ve got all night.”

It did not take that long, merely ten minutes to describe the day’s extraordinary events. Then the sound of hooves on a road to the north forced another delay, and Sharpe used it to discover how his old battalion was managing without him. “What’s the new Colonel like?”

“He’s a rather frightened and fussy little man who quite rightly believes we’re all wondrously expert and that he’s got a lot to learn. His biggest terror is that the army will somehow post you back to the regiment and thus show up his manifold deficiencies. On the other hand he’s not an unkind man, and given time, might even become a decent soldier. I doubt he’s good enough to beat the French yet, but he could probably squash a Luddite riot without killing too many innocents.”

“Are they sending you to America?” Sharpe asked.

d’Alembord shook his head. “Chelmsford. We’re to recruit up to scratch ready for garrison duty in Ireland. I suppose I shall have the pleasure of knocking your countrymen’s heads together, RSM?”

“Make sure they don’t knock yours, sir,” Harper said.

“I’ll try to avoid that fate.” d’Alembord cocked his head to the night wind, but the mysterious hoofbeats had faded to the west. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help here, sir?” he asked Sharpe.

“When do you go to Chelmsford?”

“Any day now.”

“Do you have any leave owing?”

“My God, do I? They owe me half my life.”

“So you can deliver a message for me?”

“With the greatest of pleasure, sir.”

“Find Mrs Sharpe. The last address I had was in Cork Street, London, but she may have moved to Dorset since then. Tell her everything I’ve told you tonight. Tell her I shall come home when I can, and tell her that I need some influence on my side. Ask her to find Lord Rossendale.”

“That’s a clever thought, sir.” d’Alembord recognized „Lord Rossendale’s name, for d’Alembord had been with Sharpe during the strange London interlude when Sharpe had been adopted as a favourite of the Prince Regent’s. One result of that favouritism was the naming of Sharpe’s old regiment as the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, and another was a distant but friendly acquaintanceship with one of the Prince’s military aides, Lord John Rossendale. If any man could harness the full power of influence to clear Sharpe’s name, it was Rossendale. Sharpe knew that the best method of establishing his innocence was to discover Lassan or Ducos, but if that search failed then he would need powerful friends in London, and Rossendale was the first and most approachable of those friends.

“If you can’t find my wife,” Sharpe added, “then try and see Rossendale directly. He can talk to the Prince.”

“I’ll do that gladly, sir. And how do I send messages back to you?”

Sharpe had not thought of that problem, nor did he want to consider it now. The night was getting cold, and he was impatient to be on his way westwards. “We’ll probably be home within a month, Dally. It can’t take much longer than that to find one French officer. But if we fail? Then for God’s sake make sure Rossendale knows we’re innocent. There never was any gold.”

“But if we are delayed,” Frederickson was more cautious, “then perhaps we can send a message to you?”

“Send it to Greenwoods.” Greenwoods was another firm of Army Agents. “And take care, sir.” d’Alembord shook Sharpe’s hand.

“You haven’t seen us, Dally.”

“I haven’t even smelt you, sir.”

The three Riflemen crossed a rough piece of pastureland towards the embanked high road. The high road was not the most direct route to Arcachon, for it led more south than west, but it was a road that Sharpe and Frederickson had ambushed not many weeks before and, once they reached the ambush site, they knew they could find their way across country to the Teste de Buch fort.

“I’d forgotten you had such high connections,” Frederickson said with amusement.

“You mean Lord Rossendale?”

“I mean the Prince Regent. Do you think he’ll help?”

“I’m sure he’ll help.” Sharpe spoke with a fervent confidence, for he remembered the Prince’s assiduous kindnesses in London. “Just so long as Jane can reach Lord Rossendale.”

“Then I wish your wife Godspeed.” Frederickson climbed the turf bank and stamped his feet on the flint roadbed. He waited for his two companions to climb the embankment, then all three turned southwest. Thus, on a night road, Sharpe walked away from the army. He was a fugitive now, sought by the British authorities, by the French, and doubtless by his old enemy, Ducos. The Riflemen had become rogues, ejected from their own society, and gone to vengeance.

Jane Sharpe felt aggrieved.

Her grievance had come with the arrival of peace and her slow realization that her husband was a man who was entirely bereft of the ambitions of peace. Jane had never doubted his resolve in war, when Private Richard Sharpe had risen high by his own merits and energy, but Jane knew that her husband had no wish to transmute that wartime reputation into peacetime success. He only wanted to bury himself in the depths of rural England, there to farm and vegetate. Jane had spent most of her life in rural England, out on the cold clay marshland of Essex, and she had no wish to return to those bare comforts. She could understand that her husband might enjoy such an existence, but Jane dreaded the prospect of rural exile and foresaw that the only visitors to their country house would be old army comrades like Sergeant Harper.

Jane liked Harper, but she did not think she should mention that liking to Lady Spindacre, for it was quite clear that the Lady Spindacre would not approve of a Major’s wife being fond of a mere Sergeant, and an Irish Sergeant at that. Lady Spindacre moved in altogether more exalted circles, and Jane’s grievance was fuelled when she realized that those circles were now open to her, but only if Sharpe would be willing to forsake the country and use the high friendships he had made in London.

“But he won’t,” she bemoaned to the Lady Spindacre.

“You must force him, dearest. He has instructed you to buy a house, so buy one in London! You say he has given you power of the money?”

The memory of that trusting gesture touched Jane with a few seconds’ remorse, but then the remorse was overborne by her new and certain realization that she alone knew what was best for Richard Sharpe’s career. The war had ended, yet there was still promotion to be had, but not if he resigned from the service and buried himself in some Dorsetshire hamlet. The Lady Spindacre, impressed that Jane had once been presented to the Prince Regent, and convinced that the presentation had sprung from the Prince’s genuine interest in her husband, opined that there were a multitude of peacetime jobs that were in the gift of Royalty, and that such jobs, filled by military men, were not demanding of time, yet were generous in their pay, promotion, and prestige. “He cannot retire as a Major,” Lady Spindacre said scathingly.

“And only a brevet Major, indeed,” Jane confessed.

“At the very least he should secure his Colonelcy. He could take a sinecure at the Tower, or at Windsor. My dear Jane, he should insist on a knighthood! Look how many other men, with much lesser achievements, are being deluged with rewards! All your husband needs do, my dearest, is to cultivate those high attachments. He must present himself at Court, he must persist in his acquaintances there, and he will succeed.”

This was all sweet and sensible music to Jane who, newly released from a stultifying youth, saw the world as a great and exciting place in which she could soar. Sharpe, she knew, had already had his adventures, but surely he would not deny her the opportunities of social advancement?

And Juliet, Lady Spindacre, was ideally placed to advise on such advancement. She was no older than Jane, just twenty-five, yet she had cleverly married a middle-aged Major-General who had died of the fever in southern France. Jane met the newly widowed Lady Juliet on the boat which returned them both to England, and the two girls had made an immediate friendship. “You must not keep calling me Lady Spindacre,” Juliet had said, and Jane had revelled in the intimacy that was cemented by the similarities between the two girls. They were both women who attracted lascivious glances from the ship’s officers, they shared a fascination in the feminine accoutrements of clothes and cosmetics, men and intrigue, and they were both ambitious to succeed in society. “Of course,” the Lady Spindacre explained, “I shall have to be reticent for a while, because of dear Harold’s death, but it will only be for a short while.” Lady Spindacre was not wearing mourning for, she said, her dear Sir Harold would not have wanted it. “He only ever wanted me to be a spirit at liberty, to enjoy myself,”

Juliet Spindacre’s enjoyment of life was nevertheless threatened by her health, which was fragile, and by her constant worries about the dead Sir Harold’s will. “He had children by his first wife,” Juliet told Jane, “and they are monsters! They will doubtless attempt to purloin the inheritance, and till the case is settled I am quite penniless.”

This penury was no immediate problem, for Jane Sharpe had the resources of her husband’s great fortune that had been taken from the enemy at Vitoria. “At the very least,” Lady Spindacre advised, “you should establish yourself in London until the Major returns. That way, dearest one, you can at least attempt to assist his career, and if he should be so ungrateful on his return as to insist on a country home, then you can rest in the assurance that you did your best.”

Which all seemed eminently sensible to Jane who, on reaching London, and advised by the dear Lady Spindacre, withdrew all her husband’s money. She disliked Messrs Hopkinson of St Alban’s Street who, when she first approached them, had tried by every means possible to prevent her from closing Major Sharpe’s account. They questioned his signature, doubted her authority, and it was only a visit from Lady Spindacre’s lawyer that eventually persuaded them to make over a letter of credit which Jane sensibly lodged in a proper banking house where a young and elegant man seemed delighted to make her acquaintance.

Not all the money was so sensibly secured. The Lady Spindacre had much to teach Jane about the ways of society, and such lessons were expensive. There was a house in fashionable Cork Street to buy, new servants to find, and furniture to buy. The servants had to be uniformed, and then there were the necessary dresses for Jane and Lady Spindacre. They needed dresses for morning wear, for receiving, for dinners, for luncheons, for suppers, and such were the strictures of Jane’s new busy life that no single dress could be worn more than once, at least, Lady Spindacre averred, not in front of the people the two friends intended to court. There were calling cards to engrave, carriages to hire, and connections to make, and Jane persuaded herself that she did it all in her husband’s best interests.

Thus Jane was busy and, in her business, happy. Then, just two weeks after the bells of London had rung their joyous message of peace, the thunderbolt had struck.

The thunderbolt arrived in the form of two dark-suited men who claimed to bear the authority of the Judge Advocate General’s office. Jane had refused to receive them in her new drawing-room in Cork Street, but the two men forced their way past the maid and firmly, though courteously, insisted on speaking with Mrs Jane Sharpe. They asked first whether she was the wife of Major Richard Sharpe.

Jane, pressed in terror against the Chinese wallpaper that the dear Juliet had insisted on buying, confirmed that she was.

And was it true, the two men asked, that Mrs Sharpe had recently withdrawn eighteen thousand nine hundred and sixty-four pounds, fourteen shillings and eightpence from Messrs Hopkinson and Sons, Army Agents, of St Alban’s Street?

And what if she had? Jane asked.

Would Mrs Sharpe care to explain how her husband came to have so much money in his possession?

Mrs Sharpe did not care to explain. Jane was frightened, but she found the courage to brazen out her defiance. Besides, she saw how both men were attracted to her, and she had the wit to know that such men would not be personally unkind to a young lady.

The two dark-suited men nevertheless respectfully informed Mrs Sharpe that His Majesty’s Government, pending an investigation into the behaviour of her husband, would seek the return of the monies. All the monies, which, Jane knew, meant all the monies spent on powder and lace and hair-pieces and satin and champagne and the house; even the house! Her house!

She panicked when the men were gone, but dear Lady Spindacre, who had been in bed with a mild fever, rallied swiftly and declared that no dark-suited men from the Judge Advocate General’s office had the right to persecute a lady. “The judge Advocate General is a nonentity, dearest one. Merely a tiresome civilian who needs to be slapped down.”

“But how?” Jane no longer appeared as a sophisticated and elegant beauty, but rather resembled the timid and innocent girl she had been just a year before.

“How?” The Lady Spindacre, seeing the threat to the source of Jane’s money, which was also the only source of the Lady Spindacre’s present wealth, was ready for battle. “We use those connections, of course. What else is society for? What was the name of the Prince Regent’s aide de camp? The one who was so solicitous of your husband?”

“Lord Rossendale,” Jane said, “Lord John Rossendale.” So far she had been too scared to try and profit from that tenuous connection; it seemed too ambitious and too remote, but now an emergency had happened, and Jane well understood that Carlton House, where the Prince’s court resided, far outranked the drab offices of the Judge Advocate General. “But I only met Lord Rossendale once,” she said timidly.

“Was he rude to you?”

“Far from it. He was most kind.”

“Then write to him. You will have to send him some small trifle, of course.”

“What could I possibly send such a man?”

“A snuff-box is usual,” Lady Spindacre said casually.

“For a respectable favour, he’d expect one costing at least a hundred pounds. Would you like me to buy one, dearest? I am not feeling so poorly that I cannot reach Bond Street.”

A jewelled snuff-box was duly bought and, that same evening, Jane wrote her letter. She wrote it a dozen times until she was satisfied with her words then, as carefully as a child under the stern eye of a tutor, she copied those words on to a sheet of her new perfumed writing-paper.

Next morning a servant delivered the letter and the precious snuff-box to Carlton House.

And Jane waited.

The cure of Arcachon was hearing confessions when the ugly foreign soldier came into his church. The soldier came silently out of the night and, though he carried no weapons, other than the sword which any gentleman might wear, his eye-patch and scarred face caused a shiver of horror to go through the parishioners who waited their turn for the confessional. One of the parishioners, an elderly spinster, whispered the news to Father Marin through the muslin which served as a screen in the confessional box. “He has only one eye, Father, and a horrid face.”

“Is he armed?”

“He has a sword.”

“What is he doing?”

“Sitting at the back of the church, Father, near the statue of St Genevieve.”

“Then he’s doing no harm, and you are not to worry yourself.”

It was another hour before Father Marin had finished his task, by which time two other parishioners had come to the church to tell him that the foreign soldier was not alone, but had two comrades who were drinking in the tavern by the saddler’s shop. Father Marin had learned that the strangers wore very old and faded green uniforms.

One woman was certain they were Germans, while another was equally sure they were British.

Father Marin eased himself out of the confessional and, by the light of St Genevieve’s votive candles, saw the ugly stranger still sitting patiently at the back of the now empty church. “Good evening, my son. Did you come for confession?”

“I doubt God has the patience to hear all my sins.” Frederickson spoke in his idiomatic French. “Besides, Father, I’m a Protestant heretic rather than a Catholic one.”

Father Marin genuflected to the altar, crossed himself, then lifted his stained stole over his grey head. “Are you a German heretic or an English one? My parishioners suspect you of being both.”

“They’re right in both respects, Father, for I have the blood of both peoples/But my uniform is that of a British Captain.”

“What’s left of your uniform,” Father Marin said with amusement. “Are you anything to do with the Englishmen who are exploring the Teste de Buch fort?” The old priest saw that he had astonished the stranger,

“Exploring?” Frederickson asked suspiciously.

“English sailors have been occupying the fort for ten days. They’ve pulled down what’s left of the internal walls, and now they’re digging in the surrounding sand like rabbits. The rumour is that they’re searching for gold.”

Frederickson laughed. “The rumour’s true, Father, but there’s no gold there.”

“It’s further rumoured that the gold was buried by the Englishmen who captured the fort in January. Were you one of those men, my son?”

“I was, Father.”

“And now you are here, in my humble church, while your companions are drinking wine in the town’s worst tavern.” Father Marin rather enjoyed seeing Frederickson’s discomfiture at the efficiency of Arcachon’s gossips. “How did you come here?”

“We walked from Bordeaux. It took three days.”

Father Marin lifted his cloak from a peg behind the Virgin’s statue and draped it about his thin shoulders. “You had no trouble on the road? We hear constantly of brigands.”

“We met one band.”

“Just the three of you?”

Frederickson shrugged, but said nothing.

Father Marin held a hand towards the door. “Clearly you are a capable man, Captain. Will you walk home with me? I can offer you some soup, and rather better wine than that which your companions are presently enjoying.”

It took three hours of conversation and two lost games of chess before Frederickson persuaded the old priest to reveal Henri Lassan’s address. Father Marin proved very careful of his old friend, Lassan, but after the two chess games the old priest was satisfied that this one-eyed Captain Frederickson was also a good man. “You mean him no harm?” Marin sought the reassurance.

“I promise you that, Father.”

“I shall write to him,” Father Marin warned, “and tell him you are coming.”

“I should be grateful if you did that,” Frederickson said.

“I do miss Henri.” Father Marin went to an ancient table that served as his desk and began sifting through the detritus of books and papers. “In truth he was a most unsuitable soldier, though his men liked him very much. He was very lenient with them, I remember. He was also most distressed that you defeated him.”

“I shall apologise to him for that.”

“He won’t bear a grudge, I’m sure. I can’t swear he’ll be at his home, of course, for he was intent on joining the priesthood. I constantly tried to dissuade him, but…” Father Marin shrugged, then returned to his slow search among the curled and yellowing papers on the table.

“Why did you try to dissuade him?”

“Henri’s altogether too saintly to be a priest. He’ll believe every hard luck story that’s fed to him, and consequently he’ll kill himself with compassion, but, if that’s what he wishes, then so be it.” Father Marin found the piece of paper he sought. “If you do him harm, Captain, I shall curse you.”

“I mean him no harm.”

Father Marin smiled. “Then you have a very long walk, Captain.” The address was in Normandy. The Chateau Lassan, Father Marin explained, was not far from the city of Caen, but it was very far from the town of Arcachon. “When will you leave?” the priest asked.

“Tonight, Father.”

“And the sailors?”

“Let them dig. There’s nothing to find.”

Father Marin laughed, then showed his mysterious visitor to the door. A pale scimitar moon hung low over the church’s roof-ridge. “Go with God,” Father Marin said, “and thank Him for sending us peace.”

“We brought the peace, Father,” Frederickson said, “by beating that bastard Napoleon.”

“Go!” The priest smiled, then went back indoors. He fully intended to write his warning letter to Henri Lassan that very same night, but he fell asleep instead, and somehow, in the days that followed, he never did put pen to paper. Not that it mattered, for Father Marin was convinced Frederickson meant no harm to the Comte de Lassan.

And in the sand dunes, like rabbits, the sailors dug on.

CHAPTER 8

Father Marin had warned Frederickson that it might take a full month for a man to walk from Arcachon to Caen, but that was by daylight and without needing to avoid cither predatory bandits or patrolling provosts. There were public coaches that could make the journey in a week, and such coaches were well guarded by armed outriders, but both Sharpe and Frederickson reckoned that the new French government, believing them to be thieves, might already be seeking them. Similarly, the news that British sailors were searching the Teste de Buch persuaded Sharpe that they were just as much at risk from their own countrymen as from the French. It was better, Sharpe and Frederickson agreed, to walk by night and thus to avoid all eyes.

They encountered their greatest obstacle just three nights after leaving Arcachon. They had headed east to meet the River Garonne south of Bordeaux. The river was too deep and wide to be safely swum, and it took a full night’s scouting before they found a boat. It was a ferryman’s skiff that was chained to a thick wooden post sunk deep into the river bank. Harper spat on his hands, crouched, then tugged the post bodily from the flinty soil. Frederickson had already cut two branches to serve as paddles. The river’s current was so swift that Sharpe feared their boat might be swept clear into Bordeaux itself, but somehow they managed to steer the small craft safe to the eastern shore.

They crossed another and smaller river the next night, and then at last could turn north. Father Marin had given Frederickson a route; by Angouleme, Poitiers, Tours, Le Mans, Alencon, Falaise, and thus to Caen.

All three Riflemen were accustomed to travelling by night, for the army had always marched long before dawn so that its day’s journey was done before the Spanish sun was at its fiercest. Now, in the French countryside, it was doubtful whether a single soul was aware of the Riflemen’s passing. The skills they used were by now innate; the skills of men who had patrolled in war for all their lives. They knew how to travel in silence and how to hunt. One night, despite the presence of three guard dogs in a farmyard, Frederickson and Harper stole two freshly farrowed piglets that were roasted the next day in a tumbledown and deserted farmhouse high on a hill. Two nights later, in a wood that was thick with wild-flowers, Sharpe shot a deer that they disembowelled and butchered. They plucked fish from streams with their bare hands. They dined on fungi and dandelion roots. They ate hares, rabbits, and squirrels, and all they missed from their diet was wine and rum.

They avoided towns and villages. Sometimes they would hear a church bell tolling in the dusk, or smell the stench of a great town, but always they looped east or west before continuing along deserted tracks or following the contour lines of great vineyards. They waded streams, climbed hills, and struggled through brackish marshland. They followed the Pole Star on clear nights, and on others they would walk a high road to find their directions from its milestones. In their tattered uniforms they looked like vagabonds, but vagabonds so well armed that they must have appeared more fearsome than the brigands they took such trouble to avoid.

On the tenth night of their journey they were forced to lay up through the darkness. All day they had watched the clouds piling up in the west, and by nightfall the whole sky was shrouded by sullen black thunderheads. The three Riflemen were snug in a ruined byre, and when the first stab of lightning flickered to earth Sharpe decided to stay put. It had already begun to rain, softly at first, but soon it began to spit malevolently, then swelled until the downpour was thrashing the earth in a sheeting and stinging deluge. The thunder cracked and tumbled across the sky, sounding just like the passage of heavy roundshot.

Harper slept while Sharpe and Frederickson crouched in the byre’s entrance. Both men were fascinated by the storm’s violence. Lightning twisted and split into rivulets of brilliant white fire so that it seemed as if the sky itself was in agony.

“Didn’t it thunder the night before the battle at Salamanca?” Frederickson almost had to shout to be heard above the violent noise.

“Yes.” Sharpe could hear sheep bleating their panic somewhere to the west, and he was considering the prospect of mutton for breakfast.

Frederickson sheltered his tinderbox inside his greatcoat and struck a flame for one of his few remaining cheroots. “I astonish myself by positively enjoying this life. I think perhaps I could wander in darkness for the rest of my life.”

Sharpe smiled. “I’d rather reach home.”

Frederickson uttered a scornful bark of laughter. “I hear an echo of a married man’s lust.”

“I was thinking of Jane, if that’s what you mean.” Since leaving Bordeaux, Sharpe had taken care not to mention Jane, for he knew with what small sympathy Frederickson regarded the state of marriage, but Sharpe’s worries had only increased with his silence and now, under the storm’s threat, he could not resist articulating those worries. “Jane will be fretting.”

“She’s a soldier’s wife. If she isn’t prepared for long absences and long silences, then she shouldn’t have married you. Besides, d’Alembord will see her soon enough.”

“That’s true.”

“And she has money,” Frederickson continued remorselessly, “so I cannot see that she has great cause for concern. Indeed, I rather suspect that you’re more worried about her than she is about you.”

Sharpe hesitated before admitting to that truth, but then, needing his friend’s consolation, he nodded. “That’s true.”

“You’re worried that she’s tired of you?” Frederickson insisted.

“Good God, no!” Sharpe protested vehemently, too vehemently, for in truth that worry was never far from his thoughts. It was a natural concern occasioned by the unhappiness of their parting and by Jane’s subsequent silence, but Sharpe had no taste to discuss such intimacies even with Frederickson. His voice sounded harsh. “I’m merely worried because bloody Wigram knew she’d withdrawn that money. It means someone’s investigated my affairs at home. What if they try to confiscate her money?”

“Then she’ll be poor,” Frederickson said heartlessly, “but doubtless she’ll live until you clear your name. One presumes your wife has friends who won’t allow her to slide into ignominious penury?”

“She has no friends that I know of.” Sharpe had snatched Jane from her uncle’s house where she had been forced to live a reclusive life. That life had prevented her from making any close friends and, bereft of such help, Sharpe did not know how Jane would survive poverty and isolation. She was too young and innocent for hardship, he thought, and that realization provoked a surge of affection and pity for Jane. He suddenly wished he had risked the coach journey. Perhaps, by now, they could already have found Lassan and be on their way home with the proof they needed, but instead Sharpe was marooned in this water-lashed storm and he imagined a penniless Jane crouching beneath the same thunderous violence in solitary and abject fear. “Maybe she thinks I’m already dead.”

“For Christ’s sake!” Frederickson was disgusted with Sharpe’s self-pity. “She can read the casualty lists, can’t she? And she must have received one of your letters. And d’Alembord will be with her soon, and you can be sure he won’t permit her to starve. For God’s sake, man, stop agitating about what can’t be altered! Let’s find Henri Lassan, then worry about the rest of our damned lives.” Frederickson paused as a shattering explosion of thunder slammed a snake’s tongue of lightning into some woods on a nearby hill. Flames blazed from twisted branches after the lightning strike, but the burning leaves were soon extinguished by the numbing rain. Frederickson drew on his cheroot. “I wish I understood love,” he said in a more conversational tone, “it seems a very strange phenomenon.”

“Does it?”

“I remember, the last time I was in London, paying sixpence to see the pig-faced woman. Do you remember how celebrated she was for a few months? She was exhibited in most of the larger towns, I recall, and there was even talk that she might be displayed in Germany and Russia. I confess it was a most singular experience. She was very porcine indeed, with a rather snouty face, small eyes, and bristly hairs on her cheeks. It was not quite a sow’s face, but a very close approximation. I rather think her manager had slit her nostrils to increase the illusion.”

Sharpe wondered what the pig-woman had to do with his friend’s scepticism about love. “And seeing an ugly woman was worth sixpence?” he asked instead.

“One received one’s money’s worth, as I recall. Her manager used to make the wretched creature snuffle chopped apple and cold porridge out of a feeding trough on the floor, and if you paid an extra florin she’d strip to the waist and suckle a rather plump litter of piglets.” Frederickson chuckled at the memory. “She was, in truth, hideously loathsome, but I heard a month later that a gentleman from Tamworth had proposed marriage to her and had been accepted. He paid the manager a hundred guineas for the loss of business, then took the pig-lady away for a life of wedded bliss in Staffordshire. Extraordinary!” Frederickson shook his head at this evidence of love’s irrationality. “Don’t you find it extraordinary?”

“I’d rather know if you paid the extra florin,” Sharpe said.

“Of course I did.” Frederickson sounded irritated that the question was even asked. “I was curious.”

“And?”

“She had entirely normal breasts. Do you think the gentleman from Tamworth was in love with her?”

“How would I know?”

“One has to assume as much. But whether he was or not it’s entirely inexplicable. It would be like going to bed with Sergeant Harper.” Frederickson grimaced.

Sharpe smiled. “You’ve never been tempted, William?”

“By Sergeant Harper? Don’t be impertinent.”

“By marriage, I mean.”

“Ah, marriage.” Frederickson was silent for a while and Sharpe thought his friend would not answer. Then Frederickson shrugged. “I was jilted.”

Sharpe immediately wished he had not asked the question. “I’m sorry.”

“I can’t see why you should be.” Frederickson sounded angry at having revealed this aspect of his past. “I now regard it as a most fortunate escape. I have observed my married friends, and I don’t exclude present company, and all I can say, with the greatest of respect, is that most wives prove to be expensive aggravations. Their prime attraction can be most conveniently hired by the hour, so there seems little reason to incur the expense of keeping one for years. Still, I doubt you’ll agree with me. Married men seldom do.” He twisted back into the byre to find Harper’s sword-bayonet that he drew from its scabbard and tested against his thumb. “I have a fancy for a breakfast of mutton.”

“I had the very same wish.”

“Or would you prefer lamb?” Frederickson asked solicitously.

“I think mutton. Shall I go?”

“I need the exertion.” Frederickson carefully extinguished his cheroot, then stored it in his shako. He stood, peered for a moment into the slashing rain, then plunged into the night.

Harper snored behind Sharpe. At the hilltop the great branches of foliage heaved and bucked in the sodden wind. Lightning sliced the sky, and Sharpe wondered what malevolent fate had brought his career to this extremity, and then he prayed that the weather would clear so that this journey could be done and an honest Frenchman found.

Henri Lassan had struggled with his conscience. He had even gone so far as to consult with the Bishop, he had prayed, until at last he had made his decision. One night at the supper table he informed his mother of that decision. The family was eating sorrel soup and black bread. They drank red wine which was so bad that Lucille had put some grated ginger in the bottle to improve its taste.

Henri sat at the head of the table. “Maman?”

“Henri?”

Henri paused with a spoonful of soup just inches above his plate. “I will marry Mademoiselle Pellemont, as you wish.”

“I am very pleased, Henri.” The old lady was not going to revel in her victory, but offered her response very gravely and with the smallest inclination of her head.

Lucille showed more pleasure. “I think that’s wonderful news.”

“She has excellent hips,” the Dowager said. “Her mother had sixteen children, and her grandmother twelve, so it’s a good choice.”

“A very solid choice,” Henri Lassan said with a trace of a smile.

“She has a very lovely nature,” Lucille said warmly, and it was true. There might be those who thought Marie Pellemont to have the placidity and attractiveness of a gentle and not very energetic cow, but Lucille had always liked Marie who was her own age, and who would now become the new Comtesse de Lassan.

A betrothal ceremony was fixed for a fortnight’s time and, even though the chateau had fallen on lean times, the family tried hard to make apt provision for the occasion. All but one of the chateau’s saddle horses were sold so that the guests could receive their traditional gifts, sword knots for the men and nosegays for the women, and so there would be lavish food and decent wine for the guests of quality. The villagers and tenantry must also be fed, and provided with great vats of cider. Lucille found herself busy baking apple-cakes, and pressing great trays of nettle-wrapped cheese. She made sure that the hams hanging in the chateau’s chimneys were not too nibbled by bats. She cut away the worst of the ravages, then rubbed pepper into the dark hams to keep the animals at bay. It was a happy time. The days were lengthening and growing warmer.

Then, just a week before the betrothal ceremony, the first armed brigands were reported in the chateau’s vicinity.

The report came from a man ditching the top fields above the mill-stream. He had watched as some ragged fugitives, all armed and wearing the vestiges of imperial uniforms, had skulked along the stream-bed. They had been carrying two slaughtered lambs.

That night Henri Lassan slept with a loaded musket beside his bed. He barricaded the bridges over the moat with old cider vats, then released geese into the yard to act as sentries. Geese were more reliable than dogs, but no strangers disturbed the geese, neither that night nor the next, and Henri dared to hope that the vagabonds had merely been passing through the district.

Then, just the very next day, a horrific report came of a farmhouse burned beyond the next village of Seleglise. The smoke of the burning barn could be plainly seen from the chateau. The farmer, all his family, and both his maid-servants had been killed. The details of the massacre, brought by the miller of Seleglise, were appalling, so much so that Henri did not tell either his mother or Lucille. The miller, an elderly and devout man, shook his head. “They were Frenchmen who did this, my Lord.”

“Or Poles, or Germans, or Italians.” Lassan knew there were desperate men of all those nationalities released from Napoleon’s defeated armies. Somehow he did not wish to believe that Frenchmen could do such things to their own kind.

“All the same,” the miller said, “they were once soldiers of France.”

“True,” and that same day Henri Lassan donned the uniform he had hoped never to wear again, strapped on a sword, and led a party of his neighbours on a hunt for the murderers. The farmers who rode with him were brave men, but even they baulked at riding into the deep forest beyond Seleglise where the murderous vagabonds had doubtless taken shelter. The farmers contented themselves with firing shots blindly into the trees. They scared a lot of pigeons and lacerated many leaves, but no shots were fired back.

Lassan considered postponing the betrothal ceremony, but his mother was adamantly against such a course. It had taken the Dowager the best part of twenty years to persuade her adult son to take a bride, and she was not about to risk that happy eventuality because of a few vagrant scum lurking five miles away. It seemed her faith was rewarded, for there were no further incidents, and every guest travelled in safety to the chateau.

The betrothal ceremony, though modest, went very well. The weather was fine, Marie Pellemont looked as beautiful as her relieved mother could make her, while Henri Lassan, in a suit of fine blue cloth that had belonged to his father, looked properly noble. The Dowager had brought out the remains of the family’s silver, including a great dish, three feet across and a foot deep, which was cast in the form of a scallop shell cradling the de Lassan coat-of-arms. A flautist, violinist and drummer from the village provided the music, there was country dancing, and there was the solemn giving of pledges followed by the exchange of gifts. Mademoiselle Pellemont received a bolt of beautiful pale-blue silk from China; a treasure that the Dowager had possessed for fifty years, always meaning to make it into a gown fit for Versailles itself. Henri received a silver-hilled pistol that had once belonged to Marie’s father. The village cure muddled the words of his blessing, while the local doctor, a widower, danced so much with Lucille that the tongues wagged happily about the chateau’s courtyard from which the compost heap had been removed in honour of this great day. Soon, the villagers thought, the widow Castineau would also be married, and not before time, because Lucille was nearly thirty, childless, and was a woman of the most excellent kindness and disposition. The doctor, the village thought, could do far far worse, though doubtless the widow Castineau could do far better.

By midnight all the guests had gone, except for three male cousins from Rouen who would spend the night in the chateau. Henri put his new pistol into a drawer, then went to the kitchen where his three cousins were sousing themselves with good Calvados. Lucille and Marie, the elderly kitchen-maid, were scouring the great scallop dish with handfuls of abrasive straw, while the Dowager was complaining that Madame Pellemont had been insufficiently appreciative of the bolt of silk. “I warrant she hasn’t seen fabric of that quality since before the revolution.”

“Marie liked it,” Lucille was ever the peace-maker, “and she’s promised to make her wedding dress from it, Maman.”

Henri, reminded of that ordeal which he faced in a month’s time, said he was going outside to release the geese. He did so, then, wondering whether he had made the right choice by agreeing to marry, he leaned against the chateau’s wall and stared up at the full moon. It was a warm night, even muggy, and the moon was surrounded by a gauzy halo. He could hear music coming from the village and he supposed that the revelry was continuing in the wineshop by the church.

“It’s going to rain tomorrow.” The Dowager came out from the kitchen door and looked up at the hazed moon.

“We need some rain.”

“It’s a warm night.” The Dowager offered her arm to her son. “Perhaps it will be a hot summer. I do hope so. I notice that I feel the cold more keenly than I used to.”

Henri walked his mother to the bridge which led to the dairy. They stopped on the bridge’s planks, just short of the new barricade, and stared down into the still, black and moon-reflecting water of the moat.

“I see you’re wearing your father’s sword,” the Dowager suddenly said.

“Yes.”

“I’m glad.” The Dowager lifted her head to listen to the music which still sounded from the village. “It’s almost like the old days.”

“Is it?”

“We used to dance a great deal before the revolution. Your father was a great dancer, and had a fine voice.”

“I know.”

The Dowager smiled. “Thank you for agreeing to marry, Henri.”

Henri smiled, but said nothing.

“You’ll find Mademoiselle Pellemont is a most agreeable girl,” the Dowager said.

“She won’t be a difficult wife,” Henri agreed.

“She’s like your sister, in some ways. She’s not given to vapours or airs. I don’t like women who have vaporous souls; they aren’t to be trusted.”

“Indeed not.” Henri leaned on the bridge’s balustrade, then jerked upright as the geese suddenly hissed behind him.

The Dowager gripped her son’s arm. “Henri!”

The Dowager had been alarmed by footsteps which had suddenly sounded by the dairy where flagstones provided a firm footing in the sea of hoof-churned mud. There were dark shapes moving among the mooncast shadows. “Who is it?” Henri called.

“My Lord?” It was a deep voice that replied. The tone of the voice was respectful, even friendly.

“Who is it?” Henri called again, then gently pushed his mother towards the lit door of the kitchen.

But, before the Dowager could take a single pace, two smiling men appeared from the shadows. They were both tall, long-haired men who wore green uniform jackets. They walked on to the far end of the bridge with their hands held wide to show that they meant no harm. Both men wore swords and both had muskets slung on their shoulders.

“Who are you?” Lassan challenged the strangers.

“You’re Henri, Comte de Lassan?” the taller of the two men asked politely.

“I am,” Lassan replied. “And who are you?”

“We have a message for you, my Lord.”

The Dowager, reassured by the respect in the stranger’s voice, stood beside her son.

“Well?” Lassan demanded.

The two uniformed men were standing very close to the barricade, not two paces from Lassan. They still smiled as, with a practised speed, they unslung the heavy weapons from their shoulders.

“Run, Maman!” Henri pushed his mother towards the chateau. “Lucille! The bell! Ring the bell!” He turned after his mother and tried to shield her with his body.

The tallest of the two men fired first and his bullet entered Lassan’s back between two of his lower ribs. The bullet was deflected upwards, exploding his heart into bloody shreds, then flattened itself on the inside of his breastbone. As he fell he pushed his mother in the small of her back, making her stumble down to her knees.

The Dowager turned to see the second man’s gun pointed at her. She stared defiantly. “Animal!”

The second man fired and his bullet smacked through the Dowager’s right eye and into her brain.

Mother and son were dead.

Lucille came to the kitchen door and screamed.

The two men climbed the barricade and walked into the chateau’s yard. There were other shapes in the darkness behind them.

Lucille ran back into the kitchen where her cousins were struggling to their feet. One of the cousins, less drunk than his companions, drew his pistol, cocked it, and went to the door from where he saw the dark shapes at the far side of the yard. He fired. Lucille pushed him aside and raised the great blunderbuss that was kept loaded and ready above the soap vats. She cocked it, then fired it at the murderers. The butt hammered with brutal pain into her shoulder. One of the two killers shouted with agony as he was hit. The other two cousins pushed past Lucille and ran into the darkness, but a fusillade of gunfire from beyond the moat made them drop to the cobblestones. The bullets smacked into the chateau’s ancient stone wall. Marie, the kitchen-maid, was screaming. The geese were hissing and stretching their necks. The dogs in the barn were barking fit to wake the dead.

Lucille snatched up an ancient battered horse-pistol, dragged back its cock, and ran towards the dark shapes that crouched over the bodies of her mother and brother. “Stop her!” a deep voice called in French from beyond the moat, and one of her cousins, as if obeying the voice, stood up and caught Lucille about the waist and dragged her down on to the cobbles just as three more weapons fired from beyond the moat. The bullets whiplashed over Lucille and her cousin. She raised her head to see the two men who had killed her family climbing back over the barricade. She had wounded one of them, but not badly. Lucille was crying, screaming for her mother, but she saw in the moonlight that the men who escaped her vengeance wore green coats. The men in green! The English devils who had haunted her brother had come back in an evil night to finish their foul work. She howled like a dog at their retreating shapes, then fired the pistol at the retreating killers. Scraps of exploding powder from the pistol’s pan burned her face, and the flash dazzled her.

The dogs in the barn were scrabbling at the door. Marie was sobbing. A servant ran to the chapel bell and began to toll the alarm. Villagers, alerted by the gunfire and harried by the bell’s frantic noise, swarmed through the chateau’s main arch. Some carried lanterns, all carried weapons. Those with guns blazed to the east where the attackers had long disappeared. The villagers’ gunfire did more damage to the dairy and the chateau’s orchards than to the murderers.

Lucille, weeping helplessly, pushed through the villagers to where her mother and brother lay in a pool of lantern-light. The village priest had covered the Dowager’s face with a handkerchief. The old woman’s black dress was soaked with blood that shone in the yellow light.

Henri Lassan lay on his back. His fine suit of clothes had been cut with knives, almost as if his murderers had thought that he kept coins in his coat seams. His old engraved sword had been stolen. Strangest of all was the presence of a short-handled axe beside his body. The cheap axe had been used to hack off two fingers from Henri Lassan’s right hand. The job had been done clumsily, so that his thumb and third finger were half severed as well. There was no sign of the two missing fingers.

The priest thought the disfigurement must have been done in the cause of Satanism. There had been an outbreak of devil worship in the Norman hills not many years before, and the Bishop had warned against a revival of the foul practice. The priest crossed himself, but kept his opinion to himself. Sufficient unto the night was the evil already done.

Lucille, already widowed, and now orphaned and denied her good brother’s life, wept like an inconsolable child while the chapel bell still tolled its useless message to an empty night.

For three days Lucille Castineau wept and would not be comforted. The cure tried, the local doctor tried, and her cousins tried. It was all in vain. Only after the funeral did she show some of her old spirit when she saddled her brother’s horse, took his new pistol from his study, and rode to the far side of Seleglise where she fired shot after shot into the thick woodland.

Then she went home where she ordered both wooden bridges over the moat to be dismantled. It was a horrific job, for the timbers were massive, and it was even a pointless job, for the damage had already been done, but the farm workers, with help from the villagers, sawed through the great pieces of wood that were taken away to strengthen barns, byres, and cottages. Then Lucille had a notice posted on the church door, and another posted on the door of the church at Seleglise, which promised a reward of two hundred francs for information which would lead to the capture and death of the Englishmen who had murdered her family.

The villagers believed that the widow Castineau was distraught to temporary madness, for there was no evidence that the killers had been English and, indeed, the kitchen-maid swore she had heard a voice call out in French. A very deep voice, Marie remembered distinctly, a real devil’s voice, she said, but Lucille insisted that it had been Englishmen who had committed the murders, and so the reward notices faded in the sunlight and curled in the night’s dew. Lucille had sworn she would sell the upper orchards to raise the reward money if someone would just lead her to revenge.

One week after the funerals Madame Pellemont arrived with her family lawyer and an impudent claim that half the chateau’s estate, and half the chateau itself, properly belonged to her daughter who had gone through a betrothal ceremony with the dead Comte de Lassan. Lucille listened in apparent patience, then, when at last the lawyer politely requested her response, she opened her brother’s drawer, took out the silver-hiked pistol, and threatened to shoot both Madame Pellemont and her lawyer if they did not leave her home immediately. They hesitated, and it was said that Lucille’s voice could be heard in the sexton’s house beyond the blacksmith’s shop as she screamed at them to leave the chateau.

Madame Pellemont and her lawyer left, and the silver-hilted pistol, which turned out to be unloaded, was thrown after them. It lay in the road for three hours before anyone dared to pick it up.

Lucille’s father-in-law, old General Castineau, came all the way from Bourges to sympathize with her. The General had only one leg; his other had been lost to an Austrian cannonball. He sat for hours with Lucille. He told her she should marry again, that every woman needed a husband, and, because he was a widower, and because he was sentimental, and because he saw in Lucille what his sharp-eyed son had once seen, he offered himself. Lucille turned him down, though so gently that the old General had no chance to take offence.

General Castineau also assured her that it was most unlikely for any Englishmen to have killed Henri and the Dowager.

“I saw them,” Lucille insisted.

“You saw men in green. Every country’s army has men in green coats. Our own dragoons wear green. Or wore green. God knows what they’ll wear now.”

“Those men were English.”

The General tried to explain that the English were hardly likely to be in Normandy since their army had invaded the south of France and had already been evacuated from Bordeaux. A few Englishmen had been with the allies who reached Paris, but not many. And anyway, why should an Englishman seek out this family? He begged Lucille to give the question her most serious attention.

“They were English,” Lucille said stubbornly.

The General sighed. “Marie tells me you’re not eating.”

Lucille ignored his concern, preferring her own. “I hate the English.”

“That’s understandable,” General Castineau said soothingly, though from all he had heard it was better to be captured by the English than by the Russians, and he was about to expatiate on that grisly theme when he remembered that Lucille was hardly in a receptive frame of mind for such reflections. “You should eat,” he said sternly. “I’ve ordered a dish of lentil soup for you today.”

“If the Englishmen come back,” she said, „I’ll kill them.“

“Quite right, quite right, but if you don’t eat you won’t have the strength to kill them.”

That remark made Lucille look shrewdly at the General, almost as though he had propounded a peculiarly difficult idea, but one which made surprising sense. She nodded agreement. “You’re right, Papa,” and at lunchtime she wolfed down all the lentil soup, then carved herself a thick slice of the ham that the General had been hoping to carry off the next day in his saddlebag.

That evening the General met privately with the doctor and both men agreed that the terrible events had sadly disturbed Madame Castineau’s wits. The doctor could think of no easy cure, unless Madame Castineau could be persuaded to take the waters, which sometimes worked, but which were horribly expensive. Otherwise, he said, nature and time must do the healing. “Or marriage,” the doctor said with a certain wistfulness, “Madame needs a man’s touch, if you understand me.”

“She won’t marry again,” General Castineau opined. “She was too much in love with my son, and now she’d rather wither away than dilute his memory. It’s a sad waste, Doctor.”

General Castineau left next morning, though he made certain that there would always be reliable men from the village in the chateau in case the brigands should return and, indeed, just two hours after the General had left, five strange horsemen approached from the northern road that dropped off the wooded ridge and the farmworkers ran to the chateau’s entrance with loaded muskets and hefted pitchforks.

The strange horsemen approached slowly, with their hands held in clear view. They stopped a good few yards from the moat’s bridge and their leader, a plump man, politely requested an audience with Monsieur the Comte de Lassan.

“He’s dead.” It was the miller’s son who answered truculently.

Monsieur Roland, the advocate from Paris, eyed the ancient musket in the boy’s hands and chose his next words very carefully. “Then I would like to speak with a member of his family, Monsieur? My name is Roland, and I have the honour to be a lawyer in the service of his Most Christian Majesty.”

The words, gently said, impressed the miller’s son who ran to tell Madame Castineau that yet another gentleman had come to see her.

Roland, whose rump had been made excruciatingly sore by long days in the saddle, walked with Lucille in the orchards. His four men patrolled the edges of the trees with drawn pistols to deter any strangers from intruding on the discussion.

Roland explained that he was charged by the Royal Treasury with the recovery of a sum of gold stolen by the English. The coins had been deposited in the Teste de Buch fort, and Roland had come to Normandy to hear Commandant Lassan’s evidence about the loss of the bullion. He was desolated, Roland repeated the word, desolated, to hear of the Commandant’s death.

“Murder,” Lucille corrected him.

“Murder,” Roland humbly accepted the correction.

“The English murdered him,” Lucille said. “The men in green coats. The Riflemen.”

Roland stopped his slow pacing and turned an astonished face on the widow. “Are you certain, Madame?”

Lucille, galled that no one believed her, turned in fury on the plump lawyer. “Monsieur, I am sure! I am sure! I saw them! They were men in green coats, Englishmen just like those my brother feared, and they murdered my mother and my brother. They are animals, Monsieur, animals! My brother had said they might come, and they did! He even knew the Englishman’s name. Sharpe!”

“I think you are right, Madame,” Roland said quietly, and Lucille, who till now had not been taken seriously by a single person, could only stare at the Parisian lawyer. “In fact I am sure you are right,” Roland added.

“You believe me, Monsieur?” Lucille said in a very relieved and somewhat surprised voice.

“I do believe you. These are ruthless men, Madame. Believe me, I have met this Sharpe.” Roland shuddered. “He and his comrade have stolen a fortune that belongs to France, and now they will try to kill the men who can testify to that theft. I should have thought to warn your brother. Alas, dear lady, that I did not think to do so.”

Lucille shook her head in denial of the lawyer’s self accusation. “Henri mentioned no gold,” she said after a while.

“A soldier should carry secrets well, and the existence of this gold was most secret.” Roland, sweating profusely in the spring sunshine, turned and walked back towards the chateau. “I do not think the Englishmen will return now,” he said soothingly.

“I wish they would return.” Lucille alarmed the lawyer by revealing an enormous brass-muzzled horse-pistol that lay heavy in the wide pocket of her apron. “If they do return, Monsieur, I shall kill at least one of them.”

“Leave the killing to those who know best how to do it.” Roland, knowing this visit was wasted, was eager to return to Caen where there was at least a vestige of civilization. He feared that Lucille would invite him to luncheon, and that the chateau’s evident poverty would provide a most meagre meal, but, to his relief, Lucille made no such offer.

Roland mounted his horse at the chateau’s entrance. He had given Madame Castineau his address, and begged her to write to him if the Englishmen returned, though he admitted he put small faith in such a thing happening. Nevertheless, looking down at the sad Lucille, he felt a pang of sympathy. “May I presume to give Madame advice?”

“I should be honoured, Monsieur.”

Roland collected his reins. “Marry again, Madame. A woman such as yourself should not be alone; not in these troubled times and in this sad country. Permit me to say that I am married, Madame, and that it gives me the greatest peace and happiness.”

Lucille smiled, but said nothing.

Roland turned his horse, then, remembering one last question, turned the animal back again. “Madame? Forgive my indelicacy, but did your brother lose two fingers of his right hand?”

“They cut them off!” Lucille wailed the words in sudden agony. “The Englishmen cut them off!”

Roland, thinking the loss of the two fingers must have happened when Sharpe’s men had captured the Teste de Buch fort, did not ask Lucille to amplify the answer which already seemed to confirm Ducos’s written testimony. Instead the lawyer raised his hat. “Thank you, Madame, and I am sorry if I have caused you distress.”

That night, in his comfortable lodgings in Caen, Monsieur Roland wrote two reports. The first would be sent to the King’s Minister of Finance and it respectfully and regretfully reported the murder of Henri Lassan and the consequent lack of any new evidence that might lead to the gold’s recovery. Roland added his suspicions that the two English officers, Sharpe and Frederickson, “had been responsible for Lassan’s death. ”They must certainly be charged with murder,“ he wrote, ”and the search for them must continue, both in France and in Britain.“

Roland’s second report was far more detailed. It began by saying that Pierre Ducos’s written testimony had been substantially confirmed, and that it now seemed virtually certain that the two English Rifle officers had stolen the Emperor’s gold. They had also killed Lassan, presumably so that he could not testify against them. The death of Lassan prompted Roland to consider the possibility that the two English officers had already murdered Pierre Ducos; how else to account for Ducos’s continued silence? Roland respectfully suggested that the two Englishmen must already have left France, but hoped they might yet be found and brought to vengeance. He added the welcome news that the English Navy had been requested by the new French government to desist from their explorations in and around the Teste de Buch fort, which request had been reluctantly complied with. The English search about the fort had found none of the imperial gold or baggage.

This second report was written on fine India paper which Monsieur Roland took to a calligrapher in Paris.

The calligrapher sealed the India paper inside two sheets of thicker paper that were so cleverly pasted together that they appeared to a casual glance to be one thick sheet of paper. Then, on the thicker paper’s creamy surface, the calligrapher inscribed an extremely tedious ode in praise of the Greek Gods.

The ode was briefly read by a French government censor. Two weeks later the poem was delivered to the island of Elba, off the Tuscany coast, where the creamy page was delicately peeled apart to reveal the India paper inside. Within an hour Roland’s longer report was being read by an Emperor in exile, but an Emperor who still retained some sharp claws. Except that the claws could not be unsheathed, for the enemy was hidden, and so, though Monsieur Roland’s report was filed carefully away, it was not forgotten. The report, after all, concerned money, and the exiled Emperor had need of money if his dreams were once again to blazon Europe with his glory. The English Riflemen might have vanished for the moment, but they would reappear, and when they did the Emperor would have them found and have them killed. For glory.

The Saxon Dragoon wished to go home. He told Sergeant Challon as much, and the Sergeant reminded the Saxon of the vow they had all taken when they had waited in the deserted farmhouse. The vow had been an agreement that all the Dragoons would remain with Major Ducos until everything was safe, but if any man did wish to leave then he must forfeit his share of the Emperor’s treasure.

The Saxon shrugged. “I just want to go home.”

Challon put his arm about the big man’s shoulder. “It won’t be long, Herman.”

“Home,” the Saxon said stubbornly.

“And you’ll go home without any of the money?” Challon asked enticingly. The two men were in the stableyard of a tavern in Leghorn. Challon had gone to the stables to make certain the horses were being fed, and the Saxon had followed the Sergeant in hope of finding some privacy for this conversation.

Herman shrugged. “I deserve something, Sergeant, and you know it.” It had been the Saxon who had been slightly wounded when he crossed the wooden bridge with Sergeant Challon to kill Henri Lassan, and it had been the Saxon who had made such havoc in the Seleglise farmhouse which Ducos had ordered attacked so that the local people would believe the subsequent attack on Lassan the work of casual brigands.

“You deserve something,” Challon said soothingly. “I’ll talk to Major Ducos. He won’t like it, but I’ll try and persuade him to be generous. I’ll tell him how loyal you’ve been.” Challon had smiled, begun to walk away, but then whipped back as he drew his long straight sword. The Saxon’s own blade was only half out of its scabbard as Challon’s sword ripped into his throat. Twenty minutes later the Saxon’s naked body was left in the street outside the tavern yard where it was reckoned to be just another dead sailor.

Ducos sold the Dragoons’ horses in Leghorn, then paid the captain of a barca-longa to take himself and the seven remaining Dragoons southwards to Naples. It was a nervous voyage, for the coast was infested by Barbary pirates, but the occasional presence of a British naval squadron cheered Ducos. Despite that naval protection, the barca-longa, a two-masted coastal cargo vessel, put into a safe haven each night and the consequent delays meant that the voyage to Naples took eight days.

Sergeant Challon, in a rare outburst of disagreement with Pierre Ducos, had argued against seeking refuge in Naples. The city was the capital of the Kingdom of Naples, and its King was a Frenchman who had once been a Marshal in Napoleon’s armies. Surely, Challon argued,

Marshal Murat would not offer shelter to men who had betrayed Napoleon, but Ducos patiently explained that Murat had broken with his erstwhile master. Napoleon might have put Murat on the throne of Naples, but Murat could only keep that throne if he was now seen to be an enemy of the broken Emperor, to which end he was busy cultivating new alliances and his Neapolitan troops had even marched north to expel the remnants of the Imperial French Army from Rome. “So you see,” Ducos patiently continued, “an enemy of the Emperor’s will be a friend to the Marshal.”

Not that Ducos had any intention of seeking an audience with Murat, yet he knew he must somehow secure the help of the authorities. Strangers were suspect in a place like Naples, so Ducos must not be a stranger.

Ducos established his men in a small harbour tavern, then used his old skills, and not a little money, to discover who, besides Murat, was the power in this filthy and ramshackle city beneath its smoking volcano. It took Ducos ten days, but then he found himself kneeling before an elaborate throne and kissing the plump ring of a very fat Cardinal. “My name,” Ducos said humbly, “is Count Poniatowski.”

“You are Polish?” The Cardinal was so fat that his breath rasped in his throat if he even waddled the short distance from his throne’s dais to the door of his audience chamber. The throne itself was supposed to face the wall, unused, except during the short period between the death of one Pope and the election of the next, but the Cardinal liked to sit in its cushioned magnificence and look down on the humble petitioners who knelt before its dais.

“I am Polish, your Eminence,” Ducos confirmed.

“Perhaps you would prefer it if we spoke in Polish?” the Cardinal asked in French.

“Your Eminence is too kind,” Ducos replied in heavily accented Polish.

The Cardinal, who spoke Italian, Latin and French, but not a word of any other language, smiled as if he had understood. It was possible, he allowed to himself, that this scrawny little man was truly a Polish aristocrat, but the Cardinal doubted it. Most refugees these days were from France, but the Cardinal’s first very simple trap had failed to embarrass this petitioner, so his Eminence graciously suggested that perhaps they should continue their conversation in Italian so that the Count Poniatowski could practise that language. “And allow me to ask, my dear Count, why you have come to our humble country?”

The country might be humble, Ducos reflected, but not this monstrous Prince of the Church who employed more than a hundred and twenty servants in his own household and whose private chapel had more eunuchs in its choir than had ever sung at any one time in St Peter’s. On either side of the cardinal young boys wielded paper fans to cool the great man’s brow. At the foot of the dais were guards in yellow and black, armed with ancient halberds which, despite their age, could still cleave a man from skull to balls in the time it would take to cock a pistol. The room itself seemed a fantasy of decorated stone, carved into adoring angels and archangels. In truth the decorations were ofscagliola, a false stone made of plaster and glue, but Ducos recognized the skill of the craftsmen who had made the dazzling objects. “I have come, your Eminence, for the sake of my health.”

“You are a consumptive, my son?”

“I have a breathing problem, your Eminence, which is aggravated by cold weather.”

The Cardinal suspected that the Count’s breathing problem was more likely to be aggravated by an enemy’s sword, but it would be impolite to say as much. “The city,” he said instead, and with a wave of his plump hand about his splendid audience chamber, “will be hard on your lungs, my dear Count. There is much smoke in Naples.”

“I would prefer to live in the countryside, your Eminence, on a hilltop where the fresh air is untainted by smoke.”

And where, the Cardinal thought, enemies could be perceived at a good distance, which explained why the Count Poniatowski had so generously presented a large ruby to the Cardinal’s funds as an inducement for this audience. The Cardinal shifted himself on his cushioned throne and stared over the Count’s head. “It is my experience, my dear Count, that invalids such as yourself live longer if they are undisturbed.”

“Your Eminence understands my paltry needs only too well,” Ducos said.

“His Majesty,” it was the first time the Cardinal had acknowledged the existence of a higher power in the state than himself, “insists upon the prudent policy that our wealthier citizens, those who pay the land taxes, you understand, should live in peace.”

“It is well known,” Ducos said, “that his Majesty pays the closest attention to your Eminence’s wise advice.” Ducos doubted whether any wealthy person in the kingdom paid any tax at all, but doubtless the Cardinal was merely using the word to describe the gifts he would expect, and now was the time to make it clear that the Count Poniatowski was a man who had gifts to give. Ducos took a purse from his pocket and, closely watched by the Cardinal, poured some gems into his palm. Ducos, knowing that the sheer weight of the boxed gold would prove too heavy to carry across an embattled continent, had bought diamonds, rubies, sapphires and pearls in Bordeaux. He had purchased the gems for a very low price, for the starving merchants in Bordeaux had been desperate for trade, and especially for gold. “I was hoping, your Eminence,” Ducos began, but then let his voice tail away.

“My dear Count?” The Cardinal waved away the small boys whose job was to fan him in the sultry months.

“It takes time for a man to settle in a foreign country, your Eminence,” Ducos still held the handful of precious stones, “and under the pressures of strange circumstances, and due to the necessities of establishing a home, a man might forget some civic duties like the payment of his land tax. If I were to offer you a payment of that tax now, perhaps your Eminence can persuade the authorities to take a kindly view of my convalescence?”

The Cardinal reached out a fat palm which was duly filled with some very fine gems. “Your responsibility does credit to your nation, my dear Count.”

“Your Eminence’s kindness is only exceeded by your Eminence’s wisdom.”

The Cardinal pushed the gems into a pocket that was concealed beneath his red, fur-trimmed Cappa Magna. “I have a mind, my dear Count, to help you further. Mother Church has long admired the stalwart manner in which you Poles have resisted the depredations of the tyrant Napoleon, and now it falls to my humble lot to give a proper appreciation of that admiration.”

Ducos wondered what new financial screw the Cardinal would turn, but bowed his thanks.

“You seek a house,” the Cardinal said, “upon a hill. A place where an invalid can live in peace, undisturbed by any past acquaintances who might disturb his fragile recovery?”

“Indeed, your Eminence.”

“I know such a place,” the Cardinal said. “It has belonged to my family for many years, and it would give me the keenest pleasure, my dear Count, if you were to occupy the house. You will need to give it the merest touch of paint, but otherwise…” The Cardinal shrugged and smiled.

Ducos realized that the house was a ruin which he would now have to rebuild at his own expense, and all the while he would be paying this fat man an extortionate rent, but in return Ducos was receiving the protection of the Cardinal who, more than any other man, was the real power in the kingdom of Naples. Ducos accordingly offered the Cardinal a very low bow. “Your Eminence’s kindness overwhelms me.”

“It is a very spacious house,” the Cardinal said, thereby warning Ducos that the rent would be concomitantly large.

“Your Eminence’s generosity astounds me,” Ducos said.

“But a large house,” the Cardinal said slyly, “might be a suitable dwelling for a man who has arrived in our humble country with seven male servants? And all of them armed?”

Ducos spread his hands in a gesture of innocence. “As your Eminence so wisely observed, an invalid needs peace, and armed servants are conducive to peace.” He bowed again. “If I might offer your Eminence some rent now?”

“My dear Count!” The Cardinal seemed overwhelmed, but recovered sufficiently to accept the second purse which contained a handful of French golden francs.

The Cardinal was quite sure that the Count Poniatowski was neither a Count, nor Polish, but was almost certainly a wealthy French refugee who had fled the wrath of the victorious allies. That did not matter so long as the ‘Count’ lived peaceably in the kingdom, and so long as he was a source of income to the Cardinal who needed a very large income to sustain his household. Thus the Count was made welcome, and the very next day a lugubrious priest with an enormously long nose was instructed to lead the Count northwards to the Villa Lupighi which stood mouldering on a steep bare hill above the coast.

The villa was indeed a ruin; a vast and decaying structure which would cost a fortune to be fully restored, but Ducos had no intention of making a full restoration, only of lying low, in security, until the last question about an Emperor’s missing gold had been asked and answered. He explored his new home that overlooked the astonishingly blue sea, and Ducos saw how no one could approach the villa without being seen, and so he expressed to the long-nosed priest his full and grateful satisfaction.

Ducos had found both a refuge and a powerful protector, and thus, for the first time since he had shot Colonel Maillot, Pierre Ducos felt safe.

Sharpe had to risk letting Frederickson enter the city of Caen, for the Riflemen needed detailed instructions if they were to find the village where Henri Lassan lived.

Frederickson went into the city alone and unarmed, posing as a discharged German veteran of Napoleon’s army who sought his old Chef de battalion. No one challenged his right to be in the city, and thus he indulged himself with a tour of the great church where his namesake, William the Conqueror, lay buried. Frederickson stood for a long time in front of the marble slab, then was accosted by a cheerful priest who merrily recounted how the Conqueror’s body had been so filled with putrefaction at the time of its burial in 1087 that it had exploded under the pressure of the foul-smelling gases. “The church emptied!” The priest laughed as if he had actually been there. “Not that our Billy’s down there any more, of course.”

“He isn’t?” Frederickson was surprised.

“Those Revolutionary bastards desecrated the tomb and scattered the bones. We collected a few scraps in ‘02, but I doubt if any of them are the real thing. On Judgement Day we’ll likely find a scrofulous beggar coming out of the hole instead of the Conqueror.”

The priest gladly accepted the offer of a glass of wine, and just as gladly told Frederickson how to reach Henri Lassan’s village which lay some forty miles away. “But be careful!” The priest reiterated Father Marin’s warning. “The countryside is a dangerous place, my friend. It’s full of villains andjriurderers! The Emperor would never have allowed such a state.”

“Indeed not,” Frederickson agreed, and the two men commiserated with each other over the sad state of France now that the Emperor was gone.

It was dusk before Frederickson rejoined his companions, and night had fallen by the time Sharpe led them away from the city’s environs. The three Riflemen still planned to travel in the dark, for by daylight a man moving across country could prompt a score of telltale signs; a hare running from its lay, a pigeon startled to clatter through leaves, or even the curious gaze of somnolent cattle could alert a suspicious man to surreptitious movement. At night those dangers were lessened, for after sundown the Norman cottages were tight barred. It was easy to avoid the cottages, even in the darkness, for each one had a great manure heap piled against an outer wall and the Riflemen’s sense of smell was sufficient to send them looping far from any wakeful and suspicious villagers.

They travelled west. Sometimes they would walk for miles along deep and rutted lanes like those in England’s west country. At other times they struggled through high-hedged fields, or climbed to some wooded ridge from where they could judge their position by moonlight. It took two nights to find the right district, and another night to discover Lassan’s chateau in its deep, private valley that was filled with drifts of decaying blossom. Sharpe and Harper spent the last two hours of that night scouting round the chateau. They saw a youth sitting in the chateau’s gateway. Behind him, and silhouetted by a lantern, was a crude barricade of barrels. The youth was armed with what looked like an old fowling piece. He had tipped his chair back, and seemed asleep, and Sharpe had been tempted to make his entry there and then. He resisted the urge, for to have entered at that witching hour would have caused a frantic alarm. The boy was clearly posted to guard against the brigands who threatened the countryside, and Sharpe had no wish to be mistaken for such a villain. Instead he and Harper went back to the high wooded spur where Frederickson had found a hiding place.

They spent the whole of the next day on the high ground of the ridge. They were hidden by hornbeams, elms, beeches, and oaks. It was frustrating to be so close to their quarry, and yet be forced to let the daylight hours pass in inactivity, but Sharpe had decided that, in their ragged state, a daylight approach would cause suspicion and might even trigger disaster. He could see from his eyrie that every man in the valley carried a gun; even the two boys in the big orchard who laboriously ringed the trunks of the apple trees with tar carried muskets.

“We’ll go just after sundown,” Sharpe decided. The dusk was a time when men were relaxing from a day’s labours.

The Riflemen anticipated their success. One evening’s conversation, Frederickson averred, would be sufficient to persuade Henri Lassan to travel to England. In a week, Sharpe thought, he would be back in London. Within two weeks, at the very most, he would be back with Jane.

“I’ll take some leave when we’re home,” Frederickson said.

“You can visit us in Dorset.” Sharpe had a homely dream of entertaining old friends in his well-deserved comfort.

Frederickson smiled crookedly. “I have a greater yearning to visit Rome, I’d like to stand where the emperors once stood. They say an astonishing amount of the imperial city still stands, though it’s evidently much decayed. Perhaps you’ll come with me?” he offered to Sharpe.

“Dorset will do me well enough.” Sharpe, lying on the high ground and staring down at the moated chateau, envied Henri Lassan his house. Sharpe might not have rejoiced, as Frederickson did, in the ruins of the ancient world, but he perceived a great calmness in this old Norman farmhouse. He hoped Jane had found something similar in England. He suddenly did not want a modern house with its regular geometric windows and square angular lines. He wanted something calmer and older like this chateau which slumbered in its deep valley.

„I’ll be back in Donegal,“ Harper said wistfully. „I’ll buy some Protestant acres, so I will.”

“You’ll be a farmer?” Sharpe asked.

“Aye, sir, and I’ll have a grand house, so I will. Somewhere where the children can grow in peace.” Harper fell silent, perhaps thinking of how close that coveted heaven had become.

“Soldiers’ dreams,” Frederickson said dismissively, “just soldiers’ dreams.” He rolled on to his belly, parted the leaves in front of him, and stared down the barrel of his rifle towards the distant chateau. Six cows were being driven to the byre for milking. He could just see a man standing in the farmyard, beyond the moat, and he wondered if that solitary figure was Henri Lassan, and Frederickson thought how many soldiers’ dreams were fixed on that one man’s honesty. A farm in Ireland, a house in Dorset, and a sketchbook in the Roman Forum; all would come true if only one honest man would tell the truth. He let the leaves fall slowly back, then slept, waiting for the dusk.

An hour after the sun had sunk, and when the light was still thick and gold about the lengthening shadows, the three Riflemen crept from the woods and stalked down a deep hedgerow which led to the laneway which edged the moat at the front of Lassan’s chateau.

Sharpe reached the laneway first and saw the same young man standing guard in the chateau’s archway. The youth was clearly bored. He thought himself unobserved and so was practising a crude arms drill of his own invention. He shouldered his fowling piece, presented it, grounded it, then thrust it forward as though it was tipped with a bayonet. After a while, and tiring of his military dreams, the boy sidled past the crude barricade of barrels and disappeared into the chateau’s yard.

Frederickson crouched beside Sharpe. “Shall we go now?” he asked.

Sharpe stared at the crenellated tower above the gatehouse. He could not imagine why Lassan had not thought to post a sentry on that high commanding platform, but no man watched from that eyrie so Sharpe decided it was safe to go. Sharpe had decreed that just he and Frederickson would approach the chateau, and that neither man would carry weapons. Two unarmed men in the twilight posed no great threat. Harper would wait with all the weapons in the hedgerow, and only join the officers once Lassan had been safely reached.

The boy was still hidden inside the yard as Sharpe and Frederickson scrambled through the hedge and walked down the lane’s grass verge. No one called an alarm. This facade of the chateau, hard on the moat and facing the village, was an almost featureless wall, betraying that the building had once been a small fortress.

“It’s a very pretty house,” Frederickson murmured.

“Monsieur Lassan’s a very lucky man,” Sharpe agreed.

They had to step off the verge to approach the bridge across the moat. Once on the roadbed their boots crunched on loose stone, but still no one challenged them, not even when they reached the moat and stepped on to the moss-edged planks of the ancient drawbridge. They hurried into the shelter of the archway, then edged silently by the crude barricade of empty barrels. Sharpe saw a flock of geese cropping at a thin patch of grass at the far side of the chateau’s yard.

“Back!” Frederickson hissed. He had glimpsed the boy coming back towards the arch. The lad had evidently gone to the kitchen to collect his supper that he was now carefully carrying in both hands. His long-barrelled fowling piece was slung on his shoulder.

The two Riflemen pressed themselves against the wall of the arch. The boy, intent on not spilling a drop of his soup, did not even look up as he turned into the thick shadow of the gateway.

Frederickson pounced.

The boy, in sudden terror, let the bowl fall as he twisted violently away. He was too slow. The wooden bowl spilt its contents across the cobbles as a knife jarred cold against his throat. An arm went round the boy’s face, muzzling his mouth.

“Not a word!” Frederickson hissed in French. He was holding the flat of a clasp-knife’s blade against the boy’s adam’s apple. “Be very quiet, my lad, very quiet. You’re not going to be hurt.”

Sharpe took the old fowling piece from the boy’s shoulder. He opened the lock’s frizzen and blew the priming powder away to make the gun safe. The boy was wide-eyed and shivering.

“We mean no harm,” Frederickson spoke very slowly and softly to the boy. “We don’t even have guns, you see? We’ve simply come here to talk to your master.” He took his hand from the boy’s mouth.

The boy, cleariy terrified out of his wits by the two scarred and ragged men, tried to speak, but the events of the last few seconds had struck him dumb. Frederickson gripped the nape of the boy’s jerkin. “Come with us, lad, and don’t be frightened. We’re not going to hurt you.”

Sharpe propped the fowling piece against the wall, then led the way out of the shadowed arch. He could see a lit window across the chateau’s yard, and the shadow of a person moving behind the small panes of glass. He hurried. Frederickson kept hold of the frightened boy. Two of the geese stretched their necks towards the Riflemen.

The geese began their cackling too late, for Sharpe had already reached the kitchen door which, because the boy had to return his soup bowl, was still unlocked. Sharpe did not wait on ceremony, but just pushed open the heavy door.

Frederickson thrust the boy away from him, then ducked under the lintel behind Sharpe.

Two women were in the candle-lit kitchen. One, an elderly woman with work-reddened hands, was stirring a great vat that hung on a pothook above the fire. The other, a much younger and thinner woman who was dressed all in black, was sitting at the table with an account book. The two women stared in frozen horror at the intruders.

“Madame?” Frederickson said from behind Sharpe who had stopped just inside the door.

“Who are you?” It was the thin woman in black who asked the question.

“We’re British officers, Madame, and we apologize for thus disturbing you.”

The thin woman stood. Sharpe had an impression of a long and bitter face. She turned away from the intruders to where two water vats stood in an alcove. “Haven’t you done enough already?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Madame,” Frederickson said gently, “I think you misunderstand us. We are only here…”

“William!” Sharpe, understanding none of what was being said, turned and pushed Frederickson out of the kitchen. He had seen the thin black-dressed woman turn back from the vats, and in her hands was a great brass-muzzled horse-pistol. Her grey eyes held nothing but a bitter hatred and Sharpe knew, with the certainty of the doomed, that everything had gone wrong. He pushed Frederickson desperately into the yard and he tried to throw himself out of the door, but he knew he was too late. His body flinched from the terrible pain to come. He had already begun to scream in anticipation of that pain when Lucille Castineau pulled the trigger and Sharpe’s world turned to thunder and agony. He felt the bullets strike like massive blows, and he saw a sear of flame flash its light above him, and then, blessedly, as the gun’s stunning echo died away, there was just nothing.