Sharpe's Rifles

CHAPTER 13

“Why?” Sharpe’s question was both a challenge and a protest.

“She wanted to help,” Vivar said blithely. “She was eager to help, and I saw no reason why she should not. Besides, Miss Parker has eaten my food and drunk my wine for days, so why should she not repay that hospitality?”

“I told her it was a nonsense! The French will see through her story in minutes!”

“You believe so?” Vivar was sitting close to a water-butt just inside the fort’s inner gateway, where he was smearing footcloths with the pork fat that was issued to every soldier as a specific against blisters. He broke off the distasteful task to stare indignantly at Sharpe. “Why should the French think it strange that a young girl wishes to rejoin her family? I don’t find such a thing strange. Nor, Lieutenant, would I have thought it necessary for me to have either your approval or your opinion.”

Sharpe ignored the reproof. “You just sent her off into the night?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Two of my men are escorting Miss Parker as far as is possible, after which she may walk the remaining distance to the city.” Vivar wrapped one of the greasy cloths about his right foot, then turned with feigned astonishment as though he had just understood the true cause of Sharpe’s displeasure. “You are in love with her!”

“No!” Sharpe protested.

“Then I cannot think why you should be perturbed. Indeed, you should be delighted. Miss Parker will reluctantly inform the French that our attack had been abandoned.” Vivar pulled on his right boot.

Sharpe gaped. “You told her the attack was cancelled?”

Vivar began wrapping his left foot. “I also told her that we will capture the town of Padron at dawn tomorrow. The town lies some fifteen miles or so south of Santiago de Compostela.”

“They’ll never believe that!”

“On the contrary, Lieutenant, they will find it a most likely tale, far more likely than a hare-brained attack on Santiago de Compostela! Indeed, they will be amused that I ever contemplated such an attack, but my brother will entirely understand why I have chosen the lesser town of Padron. It is where Santiago’s funeral boat landed on the coast of Spain, and is thus accounted as a holy place. Not, I agree, as sanctified as Santiago’s burial site, but Louisa’s other indiscretions will explain why Padron will suffice.”

“What other indiscretions?”

“She will tell them that the gonfalon is so far destroyed by time and corruption that it cannot be unfurled. So, instead my plan is to crumble its tattered shreds into a dust that I shall scatter on the sea. That way, though I cannot perform the miracle I wish, I can at least ensure that the gonfalon will never pass into the hands of Spain’s enemies. In brief, Lieutenant, Miss Parker will tell Colonel de I’Eclin that I am abandoning the attack because I fear the strength of their defences. You should appreciate the force of that argument, should you not? You keep telling me how fearsome our enemy is.” Vivar pulled on his left boot and stood. “My hope is that Colonel de I’Eclin will leave the city tonight to ambush our approach march on Padron.”

At least Vivar’s false trail had a plausibility that Louisa’s enthusiastic ideas had lacked, but even so Sharpe was astonished that the Spaniard would risk the girl’s life. He broke the skim of ice on the water-butt and took out his razor which he laid on the butt’s rim. “The French have more sense than to leave the city at night.”

“If they think they have a chance of ambushing our march, and of capturing the gonfalon? I think they might. Louisa will also inform them that you and I have quarrelled, and that you have taken your Riflemen south towards Lisbon.

She will say it was your ungentlemanly attentions which drove her to seek her family’s protection. Thus de l’Eclin will not fear your Riflemen, and I think he might be enticed out of his lair. And if they do not march? What have we lost?“

“We may have lost Louisa!” Sharpe said a little too forcefully. “She could be killed!”

“True, but many women are dying for Spain, so why should Miss Parker not die for Britain?” Vivar took off his shirt and brought out his razor and mirror-fragment. “I think you are fond of her,” he said accusingly.

“Not especially,” Sharpe tried to sound offhand, “but I feel responsible.”

“That is a most dangerous thing to feel for a young woman; responsibility can lead to affection, and affection thus born, I think, is not so lasting as…“ Vivar’s voice faded away. Sharpe had pulled his ragged and torn shirt over his head, and the Spaniard stared with horror at his naked back. ”Lieutenant?“

“I was flogged.” Sharpe, so used to the terrible scars, was always surprised when other people found them remarkable. “It was in India.”

“What had you done?”

“Nothing. A Sergeant didn’t like me, that’s all. The bastard lied.” Sharpe plunged his head under the frigid water, then came up gasping and dripping. He unfolded his razor and began scraping at his chin’s dark stubble. “It was a very long time ago.”

Vivar shuddered, then, sensing that Sharpe would not talk further about it, dipped his own razor in the water. “Myself, I do not think the French will kill Louisa.”

Sharpe grunted, as if to intimate that he did not really care one way or the other.

“The French, I think,” Vivar went on, “do not hate the English as much as they hate the Spanish. Besides, Louisa is a girl of great beauty, and such girls provoke men’s feelings of responsibility.” Vivar waved his razor towards Sharpe as proof of the assertion. “She also has an air of innocence which, I think, will both protect her and make de l’Eclin believe her.” He paused to scrape at the angle of his jaw. “I told her she should weep. Men always believe weeping women.”

“That could make him take her damned head off,” Sharpe said harshly.

“I would be most sorry if they did,” Vivar said slowly. “Most sorry.”

“Would you?” Sharpe, for the first time, heard the betrayal of genuine emotion in the Spaniard’s voice. He stared at Vivar, and repeated the question accusingly, “Would you?”

“Why ever should I not? Of course, I hardly know her, but she seems a most admirable young lady.” Vivar paused, evidently contemplating Louisa’s virtues, then shrugged. “It’s a pity she’s a heretic, but better to be a Methodist than an unbeliever like yourself. At least she’s halfway to heaven.”

Sharpe felt a pang of jealousy. It was evident that Bias Vivar had taken more of an interest in Louisa than he had either detected or believed possible.

“Not that it matters,” Vivar said casually. “I hope she lives. But if she dies? Then I shall pray for her soul.”

Sharpe shuddered in the cold, wondering how many souls would need prayers spoken before the next two days were done.

Vivar’s expedition trudged through a thin cold rain which pecked at the day’s dying.

They followed mountain paths that twisted over barren spurs and led through wild valleys. Once they passed a village sacked by the French. Not a building remained intact, not a person was in sight, not an animal still lived. Nor did one of Vivar’s men speak as they passed the charred beams from which the rain dripped slow.

They had started well before noon, for there were many miles to travel before dawn. Vivar’s Cazadores led. One squadron of the cavalry was mounted to patrol the land ahead of the march. Behind those picquets came the dis-mounted Cazadores, leading their horses. Behind them were the volunteers. The two priests rode just in front of Sharpe’s Riflemen who formed the rearguard. The strongbox travelled with the two priests. The precious cargo had been strapped to a macho, a mule whose vocal cords had been slit so it could not bray to warn the enemy.

Sergeant Patrick Harper was pleased to be marching to battle. The white silk stripes were bright on his ragged sleeve. “The lads are just fine, sir. My boys are delighted, so they are.”

“They’re all your boys,” Sharpe said, by which he meant that Harper’s especial responsibility extended beyond the group of Irish soldiers.

Harper nodded. “So they are, sir, and so they are.” He gave a quick glance at the marching greenjackets and was evidently satisfied that they needed no injunction to move faster. “They’ll be glad to be having a crack at the bastards, so they will.”

“Some of them must be worried?” Sharpe asked, hoping to draw Harper out about a rumoured incident earlier in the week, but the Sergeant blithely disregarded the hint.

“You don’t fight the bloody crapauds without being worried, sir, but think how worried the French would be if they knew the Rifles were coming. And Irish Rifles, too!”

Sharpe decided to question him directly. “What happened between you and Gataker?”

Harper shot him a look of perfect innocence. “Nothing at all, sir.”

Sharpe did not press the matter. He had heard that Gataker, a fly and shifty man, had opposed their involvement in Vivar’s scheme. The greenjackets had no business fighting private battles, he had claimed, especially ones likely to leave most of them dead or maimed. The pessimism could have spread swiftly, but Harper had put a ruthless stop to it and Gataker’s black eye had been explained as a tumble down the gatehouse stairs. “Terrible dark steps there,” was all Harper would say on the matter.

It was for just such swift resolutions of problems that

Sharpe had wanted the Irishman’s promotion, and it had proved an instant success. Harper had assumed the authority easily, and if that authority stemmed more from his strength and personality than from the silk stripes on his right sleeve, then so much the better. Captain Murray’s dying words had been proved right; with Harper on his side, Sharpe’s problems were halved.

The Riflemen marched into the night. It became dark as Hades and, though an occasional granite outcrop loomed blacker than the surrounding darkness, it seemed to Sharpe that they moved blind through a featureless landscape.

Yet this was the country of Bias Vivar’s volunteers. There were herdsmen among them who knew these hills as well as Sharpe had known his childhood alleys about St Giles in London. These men were now scattered throughout the column as guides, their services abetted by the cigars which Vivar had distributed amongst his small force. He was certain no Frenchmen would be this deep in the hills to smell the tobacco, and the small glowing lights acted as tiny beacons to keep the marching men closed up.

Yet, despite the guides and the cigars, their pace slowed in the night and became even slower as the rain made the paths slippery. The frequent streams were swollen, and Vivar insisted that each one was sprinkled with holy water before the vanguard splashed through. The men were tired and hungry, and in the darkness their fears became treacherous; the fears of men who go to an unequal battle and in whom apprehension festers until it becomes close to terror.

The rain stopped two hours before the dawn. There was no wind. Frost made the grass brittle. The cigars were finished, but their usefulness was ended anyway for a mist silted the last valleys before the city.

When the rain stopped, Vivar called a halt.

He stopped because there was a danger that the French might have put heavy picquets into the villages which lay in the hills about the city. Refugees from Santiago de Com-postela knew of no such precautions, but Vivar guarded against it by ordering that any piece of equipment which might rattle or clang must be tied down. Musket and rifle-slings, canteens and mess tins, all were muffled. It still seemed to Sharpe, as they moved off, that the troops made sufficient noise to wake the dead; horseshoes clicked on stone, iron boot-heels thumped frosted earth, but no French picquet startled the darkness with a volley of musketry to warn the distant city.

The Riflemen now led the march. Vivar followed with his cavalry, but the greenjackets led because they were the experienced infantry who would spearhead the attack. Cavalry could not assault a barricaded town; only infantry could achieve such a thing, and this time it had to be done without loaded firearms. Sharpe had reluctantly agreed that his Riflemen would make the assault with the bayonet alone.

A flintlock was a precarious thing. Even uncocked the weapon could fire if the flint’s doghead snagged on a twig, was dragged back, then released. Such a shot, however accidental, would alert French sentries.

It was one thing to order men not to fire; to tell them that their lives depended on a silent approach, but in the misted darkness just before dawn, when a man’s blood was at its coldest and his fears warmest, a cat’s squawl could be enough to scare a Rifleman and make him fire blind into the night. Just one such shot would bring Frenchmen tumbling from their guardhouses.

And so, though yielding the point had added to Sharpe’s dread, he had seen the force of Vivar’s pleading and so had agreed to advance with empty weapons. Now no shot could startle the night.

Yet still the French could be forewarned. Such fears were Sharpe’s tumultuous companions on the long and ever more halting march. Perhaps the French had their own spies in the mountains who, just as the refugees had betrayed information to Vivar, had betrayed Vivar to the city? Or perhaps de l’Eclin, a man whose ruthlessness was absolute, had whipped the truth from Louisa? Perhaps artillery had been fetched from Corunna and waited, charged with canister, to greet the fumbling attackers? Attackers, moreover, who would be tired, cold, and without loaded guns. The first moments of such a fight would be slaughter.

Sharpe’s fears burgeoned and, away from Vivar’s indomitable cheerfulness, he let the doubts gnaw at him. He could not express those doubts, for to do so would destroy whatever confidence his men might have in his leadership. He could only hope that he conveyed the same certainty as Patrick Harper who seemed to march eagerly over the last steep miles. Once, as they splashed through a soggy reach of grassland beneath the dark line of a pinewood, Harper spoke enthusiastically of just how grand it would be to see Miss Louisa again. “She’s a brave lass, sir.”

“And a foolish one,” Sharpe replied sourly, still angry that her life had been risked.

Yet Louisa was the reverse of Sharpe’s fear; the consolation which, like a tiny beacon in an immense darkness, kept him going. She was his hope, but arrayed against that hope were the demons of fear. Those demons became more sinister with every forced halt. Sharpe’s guide, a blacksmith from the city, was leading a circuitous route that would avoid the villages and the man stopped frequently to sniff the air as though he could find his way by scent alone.

At last satisfied, he increased his pace. The Riflemen slithered down a steep hill, reaching a stream that had flooded the meadows and turned the valley’s bottom into a morass of frost and shallow water. Sharpe’s guide stopped at the margin of the marsh. ‘Agua, senor.“

“What does he want?” Sharpe hissed.

“Saying something about water,” Harper replied.

“I know it’s God-damned water.” Sharpe started forward, but the guide dared to pluck at the Rifleman’s sleeve.

“Agua bendita! Senor!“

“Ah!” It was Harper who understood. “He wants the holy water, sir, so he does.”

Sharpe swore at the idiocy of the request. The Riflemen were late and this fool demanded that he sprinkle a morass with holy water? “Come on!”

“Are you sure…“ Harper began.

“Come on!” Sharpe’s voice was made harsher by the fears which seethed inside him. This whole expedition was misbegotten and mad! Yet pride would not let him turn back, nor would it let him make an obeisance towards Vivar’s water-sprites. “I haven’t got any bloody holy water!” he growled. “Anyway, it’s superstitious bloody nonsense, Sergeant, and you know it.”

“I don’t know that at all, sir.”

“Come on!” Sharpe led the way through the stream and cursed because his tattered boots let in cold water. The Riflemen, oblivious to the cause of the small delay at the water’s edge, followed. This mist seemed thicker in the valley’s bottom and the guide, who had splashed through the stream with Sharpe, hesitated on the far bank.

“Hurry!” Sharpe growled, though it was a pointless admonition for the blacksmith spoke no English. “Hurry! Hurry!”

The guide, clearly flustered, indicated a narrow sheep track that angled up the further slope. As he climbed, Sharpe realized they must have come very close to the city, which was betrayed by the mephitic stink of its streets that seemed to him to be a foretaste of the horror that awaited his men.

Sharpe suddenly realized that the thump and chink of moving cavalry had been left behind, and he knew Vivar must have sent the Cazadores on their northward detour which was designed to take them far from the ears of French sentries. The ill-trained volunteer infantry should be some two or three hundred yards behind Sharpe by now. The Riflemen were isolated, ahead of the attack, and now very close to the holy city of St James.

And they were late, for the mist was being silvered by the first hint of the false dawn. Sharpe could see Harper beside him, he could even see the beads of moisture on the peak of Harper’s shako. He had lost his own shako in the battle at the farm, and now wore a Cazador’s forage cap instead. The cap was a pale grey and Sharpe was seized with the sudden irrational knowledge that the light-coloured cloth would make his head a target for some French marksman on the hill above. He snatched it off and threw it into some brambles. He could feel the thump of his heart. His belly was tender and his mouth dry.

The blacksmith, going very cautiously now, led the Riflemen across a rough pasture and into a grove of elm trees that grew at the hill’s summit. The bare branches dripped and the mist wavered in the darkness. Sharpe could smell a fire, though he could not see it. He wondered if it belonged to one of the French guardposts and the thought of the waiting sentries made him feel horribly alone and vulnerable. The dawn was coming. This was the moment when he should be attacking, but the mist masked the landmarks which Vivar had coached him to expect. To his right there should be a church, to his left the loom of the city, and he should not be on a hilltop, but in a deep ravine which would hide the Riflemen’s approach.

Sharpe, lacking those landmarks, supposed there was still further to go, that they yet had to drop down into the ravine, but the blacksmith checked under the trees and, in dumbshow, indicated that the city lay to their left. Sharpe did not respond, and the guide plucked again at the Rifleman’s green sleeve and pointed to the left. “Santiago! Santiago!”

“Jesus bloody wept.” Sharpe dropped to one knee.

“Sir?” Harper knelt beside him.

“We’re in the wrong bloody place!”

“God save Ireland.” The Sergeant’s voice was scarce above a whisper. The guide, unable to gain an understandable response from the greenjackets, disappeared into the darkness.

Sharpe swore again. He was in the wrong place. That mistake worried and irritated him, but what angered him more was the knowledge that Vivar would say it was because the spirits of the stream, the xanes, had been slighted. God damn it, but that was nonsense! All the same Sharpe had gone astray, he was late, and he did not know where Vivar’s other troops were. The fears took hold of him. This was not how an attack should start! There should be bugles and banners in the mist! Instead he was alone, lost, far ahead of the Cazadores and volunteers. He told himself he had known this would happen! He had seen it happen before, in India, where good troops, forced to a night attack, had become lost, frightened, and beaten.

“What do we do, sir?” Harper asked.

Sharpe did not answer, because he did not know. He was tempted to say they would pull back in an abandonment of the whole attack, but then a shape moved to his left, boots rustled the frosted grass, and the blacksmith re-appeared in the mist with Bias Vivar at his side. “You’ve come too far,” Vivar whispered.

“God damn it, I know!”

The blacksmith was evidently trying to explain how the Riflemen had risked the mischief of the xanes, but Vivar could spare no time for such regrets. He waved the man away and knelt beside Sharpe. “It’s two hundred paces to the church. That way.” Vivar pointed to his left. The church should have been to their right.

Vivar’s force had curled around the city in the night and now approached from the north. The city’s northern wall had long been destroyed, its stone taken to build the newer houses which spread beyond the line of mediaeval fortifications along the road which led to Corunna. He had chosen that road for his approach, not only because it lacked the barrier of a mediaeval wall, but also because the guards might think that any approaching troops were Frenchmen coming from Soult’s army.

The church, which served the newer suburb, had been turned into a French guardpost. It lay three hundred yards outside the main defence line that was composed of barricades. Every road into the city had such a guardhouse, intended to give an early alarm should Santiago be assaulted. The sentries of such posts might be killed in an attack, but the noise of their sacrifice would serve as a warning to the city’s main defences. “I think,” Vivar whispered to Sharpe, “that God is with us. He’s sent the mist.”

“He’s sent us to the wrong God-damned place.”

The Riflemen should have been a quarter-mile to the south, in the marshy ravine, and they should have been there an hour before. The ravine snaked behind the church and led up to the houses just outside the main defences. They had lost the chance to make that secretive approach. Nor, so close to the enemy and so near to the treacherous wolf-light of dawn, could they spare the time to creep back through the mist.

“Leave the guardhouse to me,” Vivar said.

“You want me to charge straight past it?”

“Yes.”

Which was easy for Vivar to ask, but it meant a change of plan which put the whole assault in jeopardy. Because they had come late and to the wrong place, the Riflemen would lose surprise. Vivar proposed that Sharpe’s assault ignore the guardhouse. That was possible, but the French sentries would not ignore them. Their reaction would take time. Astonished men lose precious seconds, and further seconds could be lost if the enemy muskets, dampened by the mist, misfired. The darkness might even have swallowed the Riflemen before the French fired, but fire they would, startling the dawn long before the greenjackets had covered the three hundred yards from the church to the city’s defences. The guards at the barricades would be warned. They would be waiting and, at best, Vivar’s force could find itself clinging to a few houses on the northern side of the city and, as the day lightened and the mist shredded, the cavalry would cut off their retreat. By midday, Sharpe knew, they could all be prisoners of the French.

“Well?” Vivar sensed from Sharpe’s silence and immobility that the Rifleman already believed the battle lost.

“Where’s your cavalry?” Sharpe asked, not out of interest, but to delay the horrid decision.

“Davila’s leading them. They’ll be in place. The volunteers are in the pasture behind.” Receiving no response, Vivar touched Sharpe’s arm. “With or without you, I’ll do it. I have to do it, Lieutenant. I would not care if the Emperor himself and all the forces of hell guarded the city, I would have to do it. There is no other way of expunging my family’s shame. I have a brother who is a traitor, so the treason must be washed away with enemy blood. And God will look mercifully upon such a wish, Lieutenant. You say you do not believe, but I think on the verge of battle every man feels the breath of God.”

It was a fine speech, but Sharpe did not relent. “Will God keep the guardhouse quiet?”

“If he wills it, yes.” The mist was lightening. Sharpe could see the bare pale branches of the elm above him. Every second’s delay was puting the assault in more jeopardy, and Vivar knew it. “Well?” he asked again. Still Sharpe said nothing and the Spaniard, with a gesture of disgust, stood. “We Spanish will do it alone, Lieutenant.”

“Bugger you, no! Rifles!” Sharpe stood. He thought of Louisa; she had said something about seizing the moment and, despite his demons, Sharpe thought he might lose her if he did not act now. “Coats and packs off!” The Riflemen, so they could fight unencumbered, obeyed. “And load!”

Vivar hissed a caution against loading the rifles, but Sharpe would not go into the attack with neither surprise nor loaded weapons. The risk of a misfire must be endured. He waited till the last ramrod had been thrust home and the last lock primed. “Fix swords!”

Blades scraped, then clicked as the bayonets’ spring-loaded catches slotted onto the rifle muzzles. Sharpe slung his own rifle and drew his big clumsy sword. Tn file, Sergeant. Tell the men not to make a bloody sound!“ He looked at Vivar. Til not have you thinking we didn’t have the courage.”

Vivar smiled. “I would never have thought that. Here.” He reached up and took the tiny sprig of dead rosemary from his hat and tucked it into a loose loop on Sharpe’s jacket.

“Does that make me one of your elite?” Sharpe asked.

Vivar shook his head. “It’s a herb that averts evil, Lieutenant.”

For a second Sharpe was tempted to reject the super-stition, then, remembering his defiance of the xanes, he let the shred of rosemary stay where it was. The morning’s task had become so desperate that he was even prepared to believe that a dead herb could give him protection. “Forward!”

In for a penny, Sharpe thought and, God damn it, but he had put his approval on Vivar’s madness back in the fort’s chapel when he had let the mystery of the gonfalon overwhelm him like the heady fumes of some dark and heated wine. Now was not the time to let the fears stop the insanity.

So forward. Forward through the trees, past a stone wall, and suddenly Sharpe’s boots grated on flint and he saw they had come to the road. A building loomed dark to his right, while ahead of him he could at last see the guardhouse fire. Its flames were dim, smeared vague by the mist, but it had been lit outside the church and thus illumined the roadway. Any second now the challenge might sound. “Close up!” Sharpe whispered to Harper. “And fingers off triggers!”

“Close up!” Harper hissed. “And don’t bloody fire!”

Sharpe proposed to go past the guardhouse at a run. The noise would begin then, but that could not be helped. It would begin with the smatter of musket and rifle fire, and end in the full cacophony of death. For now, though, there was only the scrape of boots on flint, the thump of muffled equipment, and the hoarse breathing of men already tired by hours and hours of marching.

Harper crossed himself. The other Irishman in the company did the same. They grinned, not with pleasure, but fear. The Riflemen were shaking, and their bellies wanted to empty. Mary, Mother of God, Harper repeated to himself time and time again. He supposed he should say a prayer to St James, but he knew none, and so he nervously repeated the more familiar invocation. Be with us now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Sharpe led the advance. He walked slowly; ever staring at the smeared light of the watch-fire. The flamelight glinted up his sword blade which he held low. Far beyond the first blaze, he could now see the blur of other fires which must be burning at the margin of the main French defence. The mist was silvering, lightening, and he even thought he could see the faint tangle of pinnacles and domes that was the city’s roofline. It was a small city, Vivar had said; a mere handful of houses about the abbey, hostels, cathedral, and plaza, but a city held by the French that must be taken by a motley little army.

A motley, brown-dressed, ill-trained little force that was inspired by one man’s faith. Vivar, Sharpe thought, must be drunk on God if he believed the moth-eaten shred of silk could work its miracle. It was madness. If the British army knew that an ex-Sergeant was leading Riflemen on such a mission, they would court-martial him. Sharpe supposed he was as mad as Vivar; the only difference was that Vivar was goaded by God, and Sharpe by the stubborn, stupid pride of a soldier who would not admit defeat.

Yet, Sharpe reminded himself, other men had achieved glory on dreams just as impractical. Those few knights, forced a thousand years before to their fastnesses in the mountains by the overwhelming armies of Mahomet, must have felt just this same despair. When those knights had tightened their girths and lifted their lances from the stirrup-couches and stared at the great crescent of the enemy beneath the rippling banners that had brought blood from the desert, they must have known that this was the hour of their death. Yet still they had slammed down the visors of their helmets, raked back their spurs, and charged.

A stone grated beneath Sharpe’s foot and brought his thoughts back to the present. They were in a street now, the countryside left behind. The windows of the silent houses had iron grilles. The road was climbing, not steeply, but enough of a slope to make the charge more difficult. A shape moved by the fire, then Sharpe saw there was a crude barrier placed across the road that would stop his mad dash to the city’s main defences. The barriers was nothing but two handcarts and some chairs, but still a barrier.

The moving shape by the watch-fire resolved itself into a human silhouette; a Frenchman who stooped to light a pipe with a burning spill taken from the flames. The man suspected nothing, nor did he look northwards to where he might have seen the reflection of firelight on fixed bayonets.

Then a dog barked in a house to Sharpe’s right. He was so tense that he jumped sideways. The dog became frantic. Another dog took up the alarm, and a cockerel challenged the morning. The Riflemen instinctively quickened their pace.

The Frenchman by the fire straightened and turned. Sharpe could see the distinctive shape of the man’s shako; an infantryman. Not a dismounted cavalryman, but a Goddamned French infantryman who unslung his musket and pointed it towards the Riflemen. ‘Qui vive?

The challenge began the day’s fight. Sharpe took a breath, and ran.