Sharpe's Sword

PROLOGUE

The tall man on horseback was a killer.

He was strong, healthy, and ruthless. Some men thought he was young to be a full Colonel in Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, but no-one took advantage of his youth. A single glimpse of his curiously pale eyes, pale-lashed eyes, eyes that gave his strong, handsome face a chill of death, was enough to make men offer respect to Colonel Leroux.

Leroux was the Emperor’s man. He went where Napoleon sent him and he performed his master’s tasks with skill and pitiless efficiency. Now he was in Spain, sent there by the Emperor himself, and Colonel Leroux had just made a mistake. He knew it, he cursed himself for it, but he was also planning how to escape his self-imposed predicament.

He was trapped.

He had ridden with a cavalry escort to a miserable village huddled at the edge of the great plains of Leon and there had found his man, a priest. He had tortured the priest, stripping the skin inch by inch from the living body, and in the end, of course, the priest talked. They all talked to Colonel Leroux in the end. Yet this time he had taken too long. At the moment of victory, at that very moment when the priest could take the pain no longer and screamed out the name which Leroux had come so far to learn, the German cavalry erupted into the village. Men of the King’s German Legion who fought for Britain in this war savaged the French Dragoons, their sabres rising and falling, their hoofbeats drumming a rhythm behind the screams of pain, and Colonel Leroux had run.

He had grabbed one companion, a Captain of the cavalry escort, and together they had ridden desperately north, cutting their way through one group of Germans, and now, an hour later, they had stopped at the edge of a wood that grew about a sudden, quick stream that tumbled towards the River Tormes.

The Dragoon Captain looked behind. “We’ve lost them.”

“We haven’t.” Leroux’s horse was streaked with white sweat, its flanks heaved, and the Colonel felt the terrible heat of the sun smashing through his gorgeous uniform; red jacket looped with gold, green overalls reinforced with leather with the silver buttons running down each leg. His black fur colback, thick enough to stop a sword blow to the head, hung from his pommel. The light breeze could not stir his sweat-plastered blond hair. He suddenly smiled at his companion. “What’s your name?”

The Captain was relieved by the smile. He was frightened of Leroux and this sudden, unexpected friendliness was a welcome change. “Delmas, sir. Paul Delmas.”

Leroux’s smile was full of charm. “Well, Paul Delmas, we’ve done great things so far! Let’s see if we can lose them for good, eh?”

Delmas, flattered by the familiarity, smiled back. “Yes, sir.” He looked behind again, and again he could see nothing except for the bleached grassland silent under the heat. Nothing seemed to move except the wind-ripple of grass, and a solitary hawk, wings motionless, that easelessly rode the cloudless sky.

Colonel Leroux was not deceived by the emptiness. He had spotted the dead ground as they rode and he knew the Germans, good professionals, were out in the plain, spreading the cordon that would drive the fugitives towards the river. He knew too that the British were marching eastwards, that some of their men would be following the river, and he guessed that he and his companion were being driven into an ambush. So be it. He was trapped, outnumbered, but not beaten.

He could not be beaten. He had never been beaten, and now, above all other times, he had to regain the safety of the French army. He had come so near to success, and when he completed the job then he would hurt the British as they had rarely been hurt in this war. He felt the surge of pleasure at the thought. By God, he would hurt them! He had been sent to Spain to discover the identity of El Mirador, and he had succeeded this afternoon, and now all that remained was to take El Mirador back to some torture chamber and squeeze from the British spy the names of all the correspondents in Spain, Italy, and France who sent their messages to El Mirador in Salamanca. El Mirador collected information from throughout Napoleon’s empire, and though the French had long known the code-name, they had never discovered his identity. Leroux had, and so he had to escape this trap, he had to take his captive back to France, and there he would destroy the net of British spies who all worked for El Mirador. But first he must escape this trap.

He let his horse walk into the cool greenness of the wood. “Come on, Delmas! We’re not finished yet!”

He found what he wanted just a few yards into the wood. A fallen beech tree, its trunk rotten, lay in front of a tangle of brambles and wind-driven leaves from last year’s autumn. Leroux dismounted. “Time to work, Delmas!” His voice was optimistic and cheerful.

Delmas did not understand what they were doing, was frightened to ask, but he followed Leroux’s example and stripped off his jacket. He helped the Colonel clear a space behind the log, a hiding place, and Delmas wondered how long they would have to crouch in thorny discomfort until the Germans gave up the hunt. He smiled diffidently at Leroux. “Where do we hide the horses?”

“In a minute.” Leroux dismissed the question.

The Colonel seemed to be measuring the hiding place. He drew his sword and poked at the brambles. Delmas watched the sword. It was a weapon of exquisite craftsmanship, a straight-bladed, heavy cavalry sword made by Kligenthal as were most of the French cavalry blades, but this sword had been made specially for Leroux by the finest craftsman at Kligenthal. It was longer than most swords, heavier too, for Leroux was a tall, strong man. The blade was beautiful, a sheen of steel in the dappled green light of the wood, and the hilt and guard were made of the same steel. The handle was bound by silver wire, the sword’s sole concession to decoration, but despite its plainness, the weapon proclaimed itself as a beautiful, exquisitely balanced killing blade. To hold that sword, Delmas thought, must be to know what King Arthur felt when he slid Excalibur, smooth as grey silk, from the churchyard stone.

Leroux straightened up, seemingly content. “Anything behind us, Delmas?”

The Dragoon Captain turned. Nothing disturbed the peace of the beeches and oaks. “No, sir.”

“Keep watching. They’re not far behind.”

Leroux guessed he had ten minutes which was more than enough. He smiled at Delmas’s back, measured the distance, and lunged.

He wanted this kill to be quick, painless, and with a minimum of blood. He did not want Delmas to cry out and startle anyone who might be further into the trees. The blade, as sharp as the day it had left its maker, pierced the base of Delmas’s head. Leroux’s strength, an enormous strength, drove it through bone, through the spinal cord, and into the brain. There was a soft sigh and Delmas crumpled forward.

Silence.

Leroux guessed he would be captured, and he knew too that the British would not let Colonel Leroux be exchanged for a British Colonel captured by the French. Leroux was a wanted man and he had seen to that himself. He worked by fear, he spread horror about his name, and all his victims, once dead, were inscribed with his name. He would leave a patch of skin untouched and on the patch he would incise two words. Leroux fecit. Just as if he were a sculptor boasting a fine piece of work, he would leave his mark. “Leroux made this.” If Leroux was captured he could expect no mercy. Yet the British would not give a fig for Captain Paul Delmas.

He changed uniforms with the corpse, working with his usual speed and efficiency, and when he was done he pushed his uniform, together with Delmas’s corpse, into the hiding place. He covered them swiftly with leaves and brambles, leaving the body to be eaten by beasts. He drove Delmas’s horse away, not caring where it went, and then he mounted his own horse, placed Delmas’s tall, brass helmet on his head, and turned north towards the river where he expected to be captured. He whistled as he walked the horse, making no attempt to hide his presence, and at his side hung the perfect sword, and in his head was the secret that could blind the British. Leroux could not be beaten.

Colonel Leroux was captured twenty minutes later. British Greenjackets, Riflemen, rose suddenly from cover inside the wood and surrounded him. For a moment Leroux thought he had made a terrible mistake. The British, he knew, were officered by gentlemen, men who took honour seriously, but the officer who captured him seemed as hard and ruthless as himself. The officer was tall, tanned, with dark hair hanging unruly beside a scarred face. He ignored Leroux’s attempt to be pleasant, ordering the Frenchman to be searched, and Leroux had a moment of alarm when a huge Sergeant, even bigger than the officer, found the folded piece of paper between saddle and saddlecloth. Leroux pretended to speak no English, but a Rifleman was brought who spoke bad French, and the officer questioned the Frenchman about the paper. It was a list of names, all Spanish, and beside each name was a sum of money.

“Horse-dealers.” Leroux shrugged. “We buy horses. We’re cavalry.”

The tall Rifle Officer heard the translation and looked at the paper. It could be true. He shrugged and pushed the paper into his pack. He took Leroux’s sword from the big sergeant and the Frenchman could see the sudden lust in the Rifle Officer’s eyes. Curiously for an infantryman, the Rifleman also wore a heavy cavalry sword, but where Leroux’s was expensive and beautiful, the Rifle Officer’s sword was cheap and crude. The British officer held the sword and felt the perfect balance. He wanted it. “Ask what his name is.”

The question was asked and answered. “Paul Delmas, sir. Captain in the Fifth Dragoons.”

Leroux saw the dark eyes rest on him. The scar on the Rifleman’s face gave him a mocking look. Leroux could recognise the man’s competence and hardness, he recognised too the temptation that the Rifleman had to kill him at this moment and take the sword for himself. Leroux looked about the clearing. The other Riflemen seemed just as pitiless, just as tough. Leroux spoke again.

“He wants to give his parole, sir.” The Rifleman translated.

The Rifle Officer said nothing for a moment. He walked slowly about the prisoner, the beautiful sword still in his hand, and when he spoke he did so slowly and clearly. “So what’s Captain Delmas doing on his own? French officers don’t travel alone, they’re too frightened of the Partisans.” He had come in front of Leroux again, and the Frenchman’s pale eyes watched the scarred officer. “And you’re too bloody cocky, Delmas. You should be more scared. You’re up to no bloody good.” He was behind Leroux now. “I think I’ll bloody kill you.”

Leroux did not react. He did not blink, did not move, but just waited until the Rifle Officer was in front of him again.

The tall Rifle Officer stared at the pale eyes as if they would give him a clue to the riddle of the officer’s sudden appearance. “Bring him along, Sergeant. But watch the bastard.”

“Yes, sir!” Sergeant Patrick Harper pushed the Frenchman towards the path and followed Captain Richard Sharpe out of the wood.

Leroux relaxed. The moment of capture was always the moment of greatest danger, but the tall Rifleman was taking him to safety, and with him went the secret Napoleon wanted. El Mirador.

CHAPTER 1

“God damn it, Sharpe! Hurry, man!”

“Yes, sir.” Sharpe made no attempt to hurry. He painstakingly read the piece of paper, knowing that his slowness irritated Lieutenant Colonel Windham. The Colonel slapped a booted leg with his riding crop.

“We haven’t got all day, Sharpe! There’s a war to win.”

“Yes, sir.” Sharpe repeated the words in a patient, stubborn tone. He would not hurry. This was his revenge on Windham for allowing Captain Delmas to have parole. He tipped the paper so that the firelight illuminated the black ink.

“I, the undersigned, Paul Delmas, Captain in the Fifth Regiment of Dragoons, taken prisoner by the English Forces on 14th june, 1812, undertake upon my Honour not to seek to Escape nor to Remove myself from Captivity without Permission, and not pass any Knowledge to the French Forces or their Allies, until I have been Exchanged, Rank for Rank, or Otherwise Released from this Bond. Signed, Paul Delmas. Witnessed by me, Joseph Forrest, Major in His Britannic Majesty’s South Essex Regiment.”

Colonel Windham rapped with his crop again, the noise loud in the predawn chill. “Dammit, Sharpe!”

“Seems to be in order, Sir.”

“Order! Blood and hounds, Sharpe! Who are you to say What’s in order! Good God! I say it’s in order! I do! Remember me, Sharpe? Your commanding officer?”

Sharpe grinned. “Yes, sir.” He handed the parole up to Windham who took it with elaborate courtesy.

“Thank you, Mr. Sharpe. We have your gracious permission to get bloody moving?”

“Carry on, sir.” Sharpe grinned again. He had come to like Windham in the six months that the Colonel had commanded the South Essex, a regard that was also held by the Colonel for his wayward and brilliant Captain of the Light Company. Now, though, Windham still seethed with impatience.

“His sword, Sharpe! For God’s sake, man! Hurry!”

“Yes, sir.” Sharpe turned to one of the houses in the village where the South Essex had bivouacked. The dawn was a grey line in the east. “Sergeant!”

“Sir!”

“The bloody frog’s sword!”

“Sharpe!” Colonel Windham’s protest sounded resigned.

Patrick Harper turned and bellowed into one of the houses. “Mr. McDonald, sir! The French gentleman’s sword, sir, if you’d get a move on, sir!”

McDonald, Sharpe’s new Ensign, just sixteen years old and desperately eager to please his famous Captain, hurried from the house with the beautiful, scabbarded blade. He tripped in his haste, was held by Harper, and then he came to Sharpe and gave him the sword.

God, but he wanted it! He had handled the weapon during. the night, feeling its balance, knowing the power of the plain, shining steel, and Sharpe had felt the lust to own this sword. This was a thing of lethal beauty, made by a master, worthy of a great fighter.

“Monsieur?” Delmas’s voice was mild, polite.

Beyond Delmas Sharpe could see Lossow, the Captain of the German Cavalry and Sharpe’s friend, who had driven Delmas into the prepared trap. Lossow had held the sword too, and shaken his head in mute wonder at the weapon. Now he watched as Sharpe handed the weapon to the Frenchman, a symbol that he had given his parole and could be trusted with his personal weapon.

Windham gave an exaggerated sigh. “Now, perhaps, we can start?”

The Light Company marched first behind Lossow’s cavalry screen, striking up onto the plains before the day’s heat rose in the sky to blind them with sweat and choke them with warm, gritty dust. Sharpe went on foot, unlike most officers, because he had always gone on foot. He had entered the army as a private, wearing the red jacket of the line Regiments and marching with a heavy musket on his shoulder. Later, much later, he had made the impossible jump from Sergeant to officer, joining the elite Rifles with their distinctive green jacket, but Sharpe still marched on foot. He was an infantryman and he marched as his men marched, and he carried a rifle as they carried their rifles or muskets. The South Essex were a redcoat Battalion, but Sharpe, Sergeant Harper, and the nucleus of the Light Company were all Riflemen, accidentally attached to the Battalion, and they proudly retained their dark green jackets.

Light flooded grey on the plain, the sun hinting with a pale red strip in the east of the heat to come, and Sharpe could see the dark shapes of the cavalry outlined on the dawn. The British were marching east, invading French-held Spain, aiming at the great city of Salamanca. Most of the army was far to the south, marching on a dozen roads, while the South Essex with Lossow’s men and a handful of Engineers had been sent north to destroy a small French fort that guarded a ford across the Tormes. The job had been done, the fort abandoned by the enemy, and now the South Essex marched to rejoin Wellington’s troops. It would take two days before they were back with the army and Sharpe knew they would be days of relentless heat as they crossed the dry plain.

Captain Lossow dropped behind his cavalry to be beside Sharpe. He nodded down at the Rifleman. “I don’t trust your Frenchman, Richard.”

“Nor do I.”

Lossow was not discouraged by Sharpe’s curt tone. He was used to Sharpe’s morning surliness. “It’s strange, I think, for a Dragoon to have a straight sword. He should have a sabre, yes?”

“True.” Sharpe made an effort to sound more sociable. “We should have killed the bastard in the wood.”

“That’s true. It’s the only thing to do with Frenchmen. Kill them.” Lossow laughed. Like most of the Germans in Britain’s army, he came from a homeland that had been overrun by Napoleon’s troops. “I wonder what happened to the second man.”

“You lost him.”

Lossow grinned at the insult. “Never. He hid himself. I hope the Partisans get him.” The German drew a finger across his throat to hint at the way the Spanish Guerilleros treated their French captives. Then he smiled down at Sharpe. “You wanted his sword, ja?”

Sharpe shrugged, then spoke the truth. „Ja.“

“You’ll get it, my friend! You’ll get it!” Lossow laughed and trotted ahead, back to his men. He truly did believe that Sharpe would get the sword, though whether the sword would make Sharpe happy was another matter. Lossow knew Sharpe. He knew the restless spirit that drove the Rifleman through this war, a spirit that drove Sharpe from achievement to achievement. Once Sharpe had wanted to capture a French standard, an Eagle, something never done before by a Briton, and he had done it at Talavera. Later he had defied the Partisans, the French, even his own side, in taking the gold across Spain, and in doing it he had met and wanted Teresa. He had won her too, marrying her just two months ago, after he had been the first man across the death-filled breach at Badajoz. Sharpe, Lossow suspected, often got what he wanted, but the achievements never seemed to satisfy. His friend, the German decided, was like a man who, searching for a crock of gold, found ten and rejected them all because the pots were the wrong shape. He laughed at the thought.

They marched two days, bivouacking early and marching before dawn and, on the morning of the third day, the dawn revealed a smear of fine dust in the sky, a great plume that showed where Wellington’s main force covered the roads leading towards Salamanca. Captain Paul Delmas, conspicuous in his strange rust-red pantaloons and with the tall, brass helmet on his head, spurred past Sharpe to stare at the dust cloud as if he hoped to see beneath it the masses of infantry, cavalry and artillery that marched to challenge the greater forces of France. Colonel Windham followed the Frenchman, but reined in beside Sharpe. “A damn fine horseman, Sharpe!”

“Yes, sir.”

Windham pushed back his bicorne hat and scratched at his greying scalp. “He seems a decent enough fellow, Sharpe.”

“You talked to him, sir?”

“Good God, no! I don’t speak Froggy. Snap! Come here! Snap!” Windham was shouting at one of his foxhounds, perpetual companions to the Colonel. Most of the pack had been left in Portugal, in summer quarters, but half a dozen outrageously spoiled dogs came with the Colonel. “No, Leroy chatted to him.” Windham managed to convey that the American Major was bound to speak French, being a foreigner himself. Americans were strange, anyone was strange to Windham who did not have true English blood. “He hunts, you know.”

“Major Leroy, sir?”

“No, Sharpe. Delmas. Mind you, they hunt bloody queer in France. Packs of bloody poodles. I suppose they’re trying to copy us and just can’t get it right.”

“Probably, sir.”

Windham glanced at Sharpe to see if his leg was being pulled, but the Rifleman’s face was neutral. The Colonel courteously touched his hat. “Won’t keep you, Sharpe.” He turned to the Light Company. “Well done, you scoundrels! Hard marching, eh? Soon over!”

It was over at mid-day when the Battalion reached the hills directly across the river from Salamanca. A messenger had come from the army, ordering the South Essex to that spot while the rest of the army marched further east to the fords that would take them to the north bank. The French had left a garrison in the city that overlooked the long Roman bridge and the job of the South Essex was to make sure that none of the garrison tried to escape across the river. It promised to be an easy, restful afternoon. The garrison planned to stay; the guard on the bridge was nothing more than a formal gesture.

Sharpe had been to Salamanca four years before with Sir John Moore’s ill fated army. He had seen the city then in winter, under a cold sleet and an uncertain future, but he had never forgotten it. He stood now on the hill crest two hundred yards from the southern end of the Roman bridge and stared at the city over the water. The rest of the Battalion were behind him, out of sight of the French guns in the forts, and only the Light Company and Windham were with him. The Colonel had come to see the city.

It was a place of honey-coloured stone, a riot of belfries and towers, churches and palaces, all dwarfed by the two Cathedrals on the highest hill. The New Cathedral, three centuries old with its two domed towers, was huge and serene in the sunlight. This city was not a place of trade, like London, nor a granite-faced fortress, like Badajoz, but a place of learning, of prayer, of grace, of beauty that had little purpose but to please. It was a city of gold above a river of silver, and Sharpe was happy to be back.

The city had been spoiled, though. The French had razed the south western corner of Salamanca and left just three buildings. The three had been changed into fortresses, given ditches and walls, loopholes and embrasures, and the old houses and churches, colleges and monasteries had been ruthlessly pulled down to give the three forts a wide field of fire. Two of them overlooked the bridge, denying its use to the British, the third was closer to the city centre. All three, Sharpe knew, would have to be taken before the British left the city and pursued the French army that had withdrawn to the north.

He looked down from the forts to the river. It flowed slowly under the bridge between green trees. Marsh harriers, their wing tips flicked up, glided between green islands. Sharpe looked again at the magnificence of the golden-stoned Cathedral and looked forward to entering the city. He did not know when that would be. Once the far end of the bridge was secured by the Sixth Division, the South Essex would march two miles east to the nearest ford and then go north to join the rest of the army. Few men of Wellington’s forces would see Salamanca until Marmont’s army was defeated, but it was enough for Sharpe, at this moment, to stare at the intricate, serene beauty across the river and to hope that soon, very soon, he would have a chance to explore the streets once more.

Colonel Windham’s mouth twitched into a half smile. “Extraordinary!”

“Extraordinary, sir?”

Windham gestured with his riding crop at the Cathedral, then at the river. “Cathedral, Sharpe. River. Just like Gloucester.”

“I thought Gloucester was flat, sir.”

Windham sniffed at the comment. “River and cathedral. Much the same, really.”

“It’s a beautiful city, sir.”

“Gloucester? Of course it is! It’s English. Clean streets. Not like that damned place.” Windham probably never ventured out of the main street of any English town to explore the rubbish clogged alleyways and rookeries. The Colonel was a countryman, with the virtues of the country, and a deep suspicion of all things foreign. He was no fool, though Sharpe suspected that Lieutenant Colonel Windham sometimes liked to play the fool to avoid that most hurtful of all English insults; being too clever by half. Windham now twisted in his saddle and looked back at the resting Battalion. “Here comes that Frenchman.”

Delmas saluted Windham. Major Leroy had come with him and translated for the Colonel’s benefit. “Captain Delmas asks when he can be sent on to Headquarters, sir.”

“In a damned hurry, ain’t he?” Windham’s tanned leathery face scowled, then he shrugged. “Suppose he wants to get exchanged before the damn frogs run all the way to Paris.”

Delmas was leaning far down from his saddle to let one of the Colonel’s dogs lick his fingers. Leroy spoke with him while Windham fidgeted. The Major turned back to the Colonel. “He’d be grateful for an early exchange, sir. He says his mother is ill and he’s keen to get news of her.”

Sharpe made a sympathetic noise and Windham barked at Sharpe to be quiet. The Colonel watched the Frenchman fussing his dogs with approval. “I don’t mind, Leroy. Damned if I know who’s going to escort him to Headquarters. Do you fancy a hack?”

The Major shook his head. “No, sir.”

Windham screwed himself around again and peered at the Battalion. “I suppose we can ask Butler. He’s usually willing.” He caught sight of Ensign McDonald, much closer. “Does your young man ride, Sharpe?”

“Yes, sir. No horse, though.”

“You have bloody strange ideas, Sharpe.” Windham half disapproved of Sharpe’s belief that an infantry officer should walk like his men. It made sense for some officers to be mounted. They could see further in battle, and be seen by their men, but a Light Company fought on foot in the skirmish line and a man on horseback was a plain target. Sharpe’s officers wore their boots out. McDonald had heard the exchange between Sharpe and Windham and he came close and looked eager. Major Leroy swung himself off his own horse.

“You can take mine. Ride her easy!” Leroy opened his pouch and took out a folded piece of paper. “Here’s Captain Delmas’s parole. You give that to the Officer of the Day at Headquarters, understand?”

“Yes, sir.” McDonald was excited.

Leroy gave the Ensign a leg up onto the horse. “You know where Headquarters is?”

“No, sir.”

“Nor does anyone.” Windham grumbled. He pointed south. “Go that way till you find the army, then go east till you find Headquarters. I want you back here by dusk and if Wellington asks you to dinner, say you’re spoken for.”

“Yes, sir.” McDonald grinned delightedly. “Do you think he might, sir?”

“Get away with you!” Windham acknowledged Delmas’s salute. The Frenchman turned once more to look at Salamanca, staring intently as though looking to see if any British troops had yet made their journey back from the fords and were entering the city streets. Then the pale eyes turned to Sharpe. Delmas smiled. “Au revoir, M’sieur.”

Sharpe smiled back. “I hope your mother’s pox gets better.”

Windham bristled. “Damned unnecessary, Sharpe! Fellow was perfectly pleasant! French, of course, but pleasant.”

Delmas trotted obediently behind the sixteen year old Ensign and Sharpe watched them go before turning back to the gorgeous city across the river. Salamanca. It would be the first bloodless victory of Wellington’s summer campaign, and then Sharpe remembered it would not be quite bloodless. The makeshift fortresses left in the city would have to be reduced so that Wellington could pour his supplies and reinforcements across the long Roman bridge. The city of gold would have to be fought for so that the bridge, built so long ago by the Romans, could help a new army in a modern war.

Sharpe wondered that a bridge so old still stood. The parapets of the roadway were crenellated, like a castle wall, and almost in the centre of the bridge was a handsome small fortress arched above the road. The French had not garrisoned the tiny fort, leaving it in the possession of a statue of a bull. Colonel Windham also stared at the bridge and shook his head. “Bloody awful, eh Sharpe?”

“Awful, sir?”

“More damned arches than bones in a rabbit! An English bridge would be just two arches, ain’t I right? Not all that waste of damned good stone! Still, I suppose the Spanish thought they were bloody clever just to get it across, what?”

Leroy, his face still terribly scarred from Badajoz, answered in his laconic voice. “The Romans built it, sir.”

“The Romans!” Windham grinned happily. “Every damned bridge in this country was built by the Romans. If they hadn’t been here the Spanish would probably never cross a river!” He laughed at the idea. “Good, that! I must write it home to Jessica.” He let his reins drop onto his horse’s neck. “Waste of time this. No damn frogs are going to try and cross the bridge. Still, I suppose the lads could do with a rest.” He yawned, then looked at Sharpe. “Your Company can keep an eye on things, Sharpe.”

Sharpe did not answer. The Colonel frowned. “Sharpe?”

But Sharpe was turning away from the Colonel, unslinging his rifle. “Light Company!”

By God! And wasn’t instinct always right? Sharpe was pulling back the flint of his rifle, moving ahead of Windham’s horse while to his right, down in the small valley which approached the southern end of the bridge was Delmas.

Sharpe had seen the movement in the corner of his eye and then, in a moment of shock, recognised the baggy pantaloons, the brass helmet, and only a rifle could stop the Frenchman now. Only a rifle had the range to kill the fugitive whom Sharpe’s instincts had said not to trust. Damn the parole!

“Good God!” Colonel Windham saw Delmas. “Good God! His parole! God damn him!”

God might well damn Delmas, but only a Rifleman could stop him reaching the bridge and the safety of the French forts on the far side. Delmas, low on his horse’s neck, was a hundred yards from the Riflemen, with the same distance to go to the bridge entrance. Sharpe aimed for the big horse, leading the galloping beast with his foresight, tightening his finger on the trigger and then his view was blocked by Colonel Windham’s horse.

“View halloo!” Windham, his sabre drawn, was spurring after the Frenchman, his dogs giving tongue either side.

Sharpe jerked his rifle up, cursing Windham for blocking the shot, and stared, hopelessly, as the Frenchman, his honour broken with his parole, raced for the bridge and safety.

CHAPTER 2

Windham’s horse blocked all the Riflemens’ shots for a few crucial seconds, but then the Colonel dropped into the concavity of the hillside and Sharpe re-aimed, fired, and was moving down the hill before he could see where his bullet had gone. The powder stung his face from the pan, he smelt the acrid smoke as he ran through it, and then he heard a fusillade of shots from his handful of Riflemen.

Sharpe had missed, but one of his men, Hagman probably, struck Delmas’s horse. The Frenchman was pitched forward, the horse down on its knees, while dust spumed up to hide the dying horse and falling man.

“Skirmish order!” Sharpe yelled, not wanting his men to be bunched into an easy target for the French artillery in the fortresses across the river. He was running fast now, pumping his arms left and right to tell his men to spread out, while ahead Lieutenant Colonel Windham raced up towards the fallen Delmas.

The Frenchman scrambled to his feet, glanced once behind, and began running. The hounds bayed, stretched out, while Windham, sabre reaching forward, thundered behind.

The first French cannon fired from the fortress closest to the river. The sound of the gun was flat over the water, a boom that echoed bleakly above the beauty of river and bridge, and then the shot struck short of Windham, bounced, and came on up the hill. The French gun barrels would be cold, making the first shots drop short, but even a bouncing shot was dangerous.

“Spread out!” Sharpe shouted. “Spread out!”

More guns fired, their reports mingling like thunder, and the wind of one bouncing shot almost wrenched Windham from his horse. The beast swerved and only the Colonel’s superb horsemanship saved him. The spurs went back, the sword was held out again, and Sharpe watched as the running Frenchman stopped and turned to face his pursuer.

Another gun from the fortress, a different note to this firing, and the hillside seemed to leap with small explosions of soil where the canister bullets, sprayed from the bursting tin can at the gun’s muzzle, pecked at the soil. “Spread out! Spread out!” Sharpe was running recklessly, leaping rough ground, and he threw away his fired rifle, knowing one of his men would retrieve it, and clumsily drew his huge, straight sword.

Windham was angry. Honour had been trampled by the breaking of Delmas’s parole, and the Colonel was in no mood to offer the Frenchman mercy. Windham heard the canister strike the ground, heard an agonised yelp as one of his hounds was hit, and then he forgot everything because Delmas was close, facing him, and the British Colonel stretched out with his curved sabre so that its point would spear savagely into the fugitive’s chest.

It seemed to Windham that Delmas struck with his sword too soon. He saw the blade coming, was just bracing his arm for the shock of his own blade meeting the enemy, and then Delmas’s beautiful sword, as it had been intended to do, slammed viciously into the mouth of Windham’s horse.

The animal screamed, swerved, reared up, and Windham fought for control. He let his sabre hang by its wrist-strap as he sawed at the reins, as he saw blood spray from his injured horse’s mouth, and as he struggled he never saw the Frenchman move behind, swing, and never knew what killed him.

Sharpe saw. He shouted helplessly, uselessly, and he saw the great sword slam blade-edge into the Colonel’s back.

Windham seemed to arch away from the stroke. Even in death his knees gripped the horse, even as his head dropped, as his arms went limp and the sabre dangled uselessly. The horse screamed again, tried to shake the dead man from the saddle. It fled away from the man who had hurt it, still bucking and hurting, and then, almost mercifully, a barrel-load of canister threw man and horse into a bloodied mess on the turf.

The hounds sniffed at the dead man and dying horse. Its hooves drummed the dry earth for an instant, the hounds whimpered, and then the horse’s head was down. Blood drained quickly into the parched soil.

Delmas was limping. The fall must have hurt him, but still he hurried, gritting his teeth against the pain, but now Sharpe was gaining. There were houses at the bridge’s southern end, a small outpost of the university city across the river, and Sharpe saw the Frenchman disappear behind a wall. Delmas was almost onto the bridge.

Another canister load of musket balls flayed into the turf, filling the summer air with their whip-crack of death, and then Sharpe saw Patrick Harper, the giant Sergeant, racing up on his right with his seven-barrelled gun held in his hand. Sharpe and Harper were nearing the houses, nearing the safety afforded by their walls from the French guns in the fortresses, but Sharpe had a sudden premonition of danger. “Go wide, Patrick! Wide!”

They swerved right, still running, and as they cleared the corner of the house to get their first glimpse of the roadway running straight across the wide river, Sharpe saw too the kneeling Frenchman pointing a brace of pistols at the place where he expected his pursuers to appear. “Down!”

Sharpe sprawled into Harper, sending them both in a bruising fall to the earth, and at that moment the pistols cracked and the two balls sounded sibilant and wicked over their heads.

“Jesus!” Harper was heaving himself upright. Delmas had already turned and was limping onto the bridge, hurrying towards the northern bank beneath the three fortresses.

The two Riflemen ran forward. They were safe for a moment, hidden from the gunners by the houses, but Sharpe knew that as soon as they emerged onto the bridge the canisters would begin to rattle the ancient stones. He led Harper left, into what little protection the crenellated, low parapet might give, but the very instant that they stepped onto the bridge was the moment they both instinctively dropped to the roadway, heads covered, appalled by the sudden storm of canister that tangled the air above the bridge.

“God save Ireland.” Harper muttered.

“God kill that bastard. Come on!”

They crawled, keeping below the parapet, and their pace was pitifully slow so that Sharpe could see Delmas opening the gap between them. In his path the Frenchman seemed to leave a maelstrom of striking shot, screaming stone shards chipped from the road, the noise of metal on stone, yet the Frenchman was untouched, kept safe by the gunner’s accuracy, and Sharpe could sense that Delmas was escaping.

“Down, sir!” Harper unceremoniously pushed Sharpe with a huge hand, and Sharpe knew that the horrid seven-barrelled gun was being aimed over his head. He clapped his hands to his ears, abandoning the sword for a second, and waited for the explosion above his head.

It was a horrid weapon, a gift from Sharpe to his Sergeant, and a gun that only a huge man could handle. It had been made for the Royal Navy, intended as a weapon to be fired from the topworks down onto the packed decks of enemy ships, but the vicious recoil of the seven half-inch barrels had thrown the sailors clear out of the rigging, sending them falling with fractured shoulders onto their own decks. Patrick Harper, the huge Irishman, was one of the few men who had the brute strength to use one, and now he aimed the stubby, bunched barrels at the pantalooned figure that was limping beneath the arch of the small fortress.

He pulled the trigger and the gun belched smoke, bullets, and burning wadding that fell onto Sharpe’s neck. It was a deadly gun at close range, but at fifty yards, the distance of Delmas’s lead, it would be a lucky bullet that hit. A single word over Sharpe’s head told him the Irishman had missed.

“Come on!”

A half dozen Riflemen had crawled onto the bridge after Sharpe and Harper, the rest stayed in the lee of the buildings and frantically loaded their weapons in hope of a clear shot. Sharpe pushed on, cursing the canister that screamed above the roadway. One ball, freakishly ricocheting from the far parapet, struck his boot heel, and Sharpe swore. “We’ll have to bloody run, Patrick.”

“Sweet Jesus!” The Donegal accent could not hide his feelings about running through the storm of shot. Harper touched the crucifix he wore about his neck. Since he had met Isabella, the Spanish girl he had saved from the rape at Badajoz, he had become more religious. The two might live in mortal sin, but Isabella made sure her huge man paid some respect to their church. “Say the word, sir.”

Sharpe waited for another grinding barrelful of canister to crash onto the roadway. “Now!”

They sprinted, Sharpe’s sword heavy in his pumping arm, and the air seemed filled with the sound of death and the fear rose in him, fear at this ghastly way of dying, hit by canister and unable to strike back. He skidded into the safety of the small archway beneath the fortress and fell against the wall. “God!”

They had survived, God only knew how, but he would not try it again. The air had seemed thick with shot. “We’ll have to bloody crawl, Patrick.”

“Anything you say, sir.”

Daniel Hagman, the oldest man in Sharpe’s Company, and the best sharpshooter in the Battalion, methodically loaded his rifle. He had been a poacher in his native Cheshire, caught one dark night, and he had left wife and family to join the army rather than face the awful justice meted out by the Assizes. He did not use a cartridge with its rough powder, instead he measured his charge from the fine powder kept in his Rifleman’s horn, and then he selected a bullet and rammed it down the barrel. He had wrapped the bullet in a greased leather patch, a patch that would grip the rifling when the gun was fired and give a spin to the bullet which made the weapon so much more accurate than the smooth-bore musket. He primed the gun, aimed, and in his mind was the memory of Rifleman Plunkett who, four years before, had sent a bullet a full and astonishing eight hundred yards to kill a French General. Plunkett was a legend in his regiment, the 95th, because the Baker Rifle was not reckoned to be truly accurate much over two hundred yards, and now Hagman had a clear sight of his target just a hundred yards away.

He smiled. At this range he could pick his spot, and he chose the lower spine, letting the foresight settle a little above it, letting half his breath out, holding it, and then he squeezed the trigger.

He could not miss at that range. The rifle slammed into his shoulder, smoke jetting from pan and muzzle, the burning powder stinging his cheek.

The canister screamed onto the bridge, four cannon-loads fired at once, and Hagman never knew what happened to his bullet. It never reached Delmas. Somewhere in the metal over the bridge the bullet was lost, a freak chance, but Delmas still lived, still limped on towards the safety of the far bank.

Yet there was still a chance. The fortresses were built on top of the hill above the river and once the bridge was close to the northern bank the guns could not see the roadway. In a few more yards, Sharpe knew, he would be able to stand up and run in safety, and Delmas knew it too. The Frenchman forced himself on, ignoring the pain, refusing to be beaten, and he managed to force his hurting body into a slow run that took him even further ahead.

Then it seemed that everything would be lost. There were shouts ahead and Sharpe looked up to see blue uniforms running down the hill towards the bridge. Voltigeurs! French Light infantry, their red epaulettes distinctive in the sunlight, and Sharpe swore for he knew that these troops had been sent out of the fortresses to see Delmas to safety. A dozen Frenchmen were coming down the hill, while others waited at its crest.

Sharpe crawled, pushing himself on, Harper’s breathing hoarse behind him. It truly did seem hopeless now. The Voltigeurs would reach Delmas long before Sharpe or Harper could, but he would not give up. A shard of stone, chipped by a canister strike, clanged on the metal scabbard of his sword while another skinned across his knuckles and drew bright blood.

The Voltigeurs were at the bridge’s end, lining it, fumbling their muskets into the firing position, and Delmas was just feet away. A rifle bullet cracked past Sharpe, he saw a French Voltigeur duck away from the passing of the bullet, and then another Frenchman pitched forward. Forward! Sharpe looked up. There was musket smoke from the houses of the city which bordered the wasteland the French had cleared about the fortresses. “Look!” He pointed up. “The Sixth must have got here!”

It was not the Sixth Division. The muskets were being fired by the citizens of Salamanca, venting their anger on the French who had occupied the city for so long. The Voltigeurs were caught between the two fires; the Riflemen firing across the long bridge and the Spaniards aiming from behind.

“Come on!” They had reached the safe part of the bridge, that part which could not be reached by the guns, but at the same moment Delmas had stumbled into the arms of his rescuers who were already retreating, taking the fugitive up towards the forts.

Sharpe and Harper ran, not caring about the odds, and the French Voltigeur officer calmly turned six of his men around, lined them, and brought their muskets up into the aim.

Sharpe and Harper split automatically, Harper going to the right of the bridge, Sharpe to the left, so that the enemy would have to choose between two smaller targets. Sharpe was shouting now, an incoherent shout of rage that would frighten the enemy, and he could hear Harper bellowing to his right.

Another rifle bullet cracked past them, hitting a Frenchman in the knee and his shout of sudden pain made the others nervous. Two of their number were wounded, both men crawling back towards the hill. Behind them Spanish muskets fired, before them the Riflemen were firing down the long length of the bridge between the two huge men who were screaming defiance at them. The four remaining Voltigeurs pulled their triggers, wanting only to retreat to the safety of the fortresses.

Sharpe sensed the wind of the musket balls, knew he was not hit, and he had the huge sword ready for its first strike. The enemy skirmishers were going backwards, retreating after Delmas, but the officer tried to hold them. He shouted at them, pulled at one of them, and when he saw it was hopeless he turned himself with his long, slim sword waiting for Sharpe.

It was the French officer’s bravery that made the four men turn. Their muskets were not loaded, but they still had bayonets which they twisted onto their muskets, but they were too late to save their Lieutenant.

Sharpe could see the fear in the man’s eyes; wished that he would turn and run, but the man insisted on staying. He moved to block Sharpe, bringing his sword up to lunge, but the huge cavalry sword beat it aside in a numbing, ringing blow, and then Sharpe, not wanting to kill the man, shoulder charged and sent the officer flying backwards onto the roadway of the bridge’s entrance.

The four Voltigeurs were coming back, bayonets outstretched. Sharpe turned towards them, teeth bared, sword ready, but suddenly he could not move. The French Lieutenant had grabbed his ankle, was holding on for dear life, and the Voltigeurs, seeing it, suddenly hurried to take advantage of Sharpe’s loss of balance.

It was a fatal mistake. Patrick Harper, the Irishman, counted himself a friend of Sharpe, despite the disparity in rank. Harper was hugely strong, but, as with so many strong men, he had a touching gentleness and even placidity. Harper was mostly content to let the world go by, watching it with wry humour, but never so in battle. He had been raised on the songs and stories of the great Irish warriors. To Patrick Harper, Cuchulain was not an imaginary hero from a remote past, but a real man, an Irishman, a warrior to emulate. Cuchulain died at twenty-seven, Harper’s present age, and he had fought as Harper fought, with a wild battle song intoxicating him. Harper knew that mad joy too, he had it now as he charged the four men and shouted at them in his own, old language.

He was swinging the heavy seven-barrelled gun like a club. The first stroke beat down a musket and bayonet, beat down onto a Frenchman’s head, and the second stroke threw two men down. Harper was kicking now, stamping them down, using the gun as a mace into which he put all his giant strength. The fourth man lunged with his bayonet and Harper, taking one hand from his club, contemptuously pulled the musket towards him and brought his knee up into the stumbling enemy’s face. All four were down.

The French officer, lying on the ground, watched aghast. His hand nervelessly let go of Sharpe’s ankle, saving himself from the downward stab of the huge sword. More Riflemen were coming now, safe on that part of the bridge that could not be reached by the enemy gunners.

Harper wanted more. He was climbing the hillslope, negotiating the rubble of the houses which the French had blown up to give their forts a wide barrier of waste ground. He went past the two wounded men who, like their comrades below, would be prisoners, and Sharpe followed the Sergeant. “Go right! Patrick! Go right!”

Sharpe could not understand it. Delmas, safe with the other Voltigeurs, was not going towards the fortresses. Instead he was limping right towards the city, towards the balconied houses from which the Spaniards fired. A Voltigeur officer was arguing with him, but Sharpe saw the big Dragoon officer order the man silent. Two other Voltigeurs were detailed to help Leroux, to almost carry the limping man up the slope and Sharpe did not understand why Delmas would go towards the scattered musket fire of the civilians. It was insane! Delmas was within yards of the safety of the forts, but instead he was aiming to plunge into a hostile city into which, at any moment, the Sixth Division of Wellington’s army would march. Delmas was even risking the Spanish musket fire, the closer to which he limped the more dangerous it became.

Then it was no danger. Sharpe, climbing up behind the Dragoon, saw a tall, grey-haired priest appear on one of the balconies of the houses and, though Sharpe could not make out the words, he could hear the priest bellowing in a huge voice. The man’s arms flapped up and down, unmistakeably telling the civilians to stop firing. Damn the priest! He was letting Delmas get into the tangle of alleys, and the civilians were obeying the grey-haired man. Sharpe swore and redoubled his efforts to catch the group of Frenchmen. Damn the bloody priest!

Then Sharpe had to forget Delmas and the priest. The other Voltigeurs, seeing the speed with which Sharpe and Harper were climbing the hillside, had been sent down to deal with them. The first bullets struck dust from the rubble and Sharpe had to roll into cover because the musket fire was too heavy. He heard Harper swear, looked for him, and saw the Irishman rubbing his thigh where he had bruised it in his own swift fall behind a block of stone. The Sergeant grinned. “Didn’t someone say this would be an easy afternoon?”

Sharpe looked behind him. He guessed he was halfway up the slope, a hundred feet above the river, and he could see three of his Riflemen shepherding the prisoners into a huddle. Four more climbed towards them and one of them, Parry Jenkins, was shouting incoherently and pointing beyond Sharpe. At the same instant Harper yelled. “In front, sir!”

The Voltigeurs, annoyed perhaps at the impudence of the Riflemen’s charge, were determined to take the two men isolated on the slope. They had fired their volley and now a dozen of them came down with bayonets to either take prisoners or finish Sharpe and Harper off.

Frustration filled Sharpe with anger. He blamed himself for letting Delmas escape. He should have insisted to Colonel Windham that the man could not be trusted, and now Windham was dead. Sharpe had to presume that poor young McDonald was dead too, killed at sixteen by a bastard who had broken his parole and who was now escaping up the hill. Sharpe came up out of his hiding place with a huge anger, with the great, heavy, ill-balanced sword in his hand, and as he went to meet the Frenchmen it seemed to him, as it so often did in battle, that time slowed down. He could clearly see the face of the first man, could see the gapped, yellowed teeth beneath the straggly moustache, and he could see the man’s throat and he knew where his blade would go and he swung, the steel hissing, and the sharpened tip slashed the enemy’s throat and Sharpe was already bringing it back in an upswing that crashed a second man’s musket aside, bit into the man’s forearm so that he dropped the weapon and was helpless as the downswing slammed through shako and skull.

Harper watched for an instant, grinning, because he was used to the fearsome spectacle of Richard Sharpe going fierce into battle and then he joined in. He left the seven-barrelled gun behind and used a length of fire-blackened timber with which he flailed the red-epauletted enemy until, their courage broken, they were scrambling back up the hill. Harper looked at his Captain whose reddened blade had defeated four men in less than half a minute. He bent down to retrieve the big gun. “Have you ever thought about joining the army, Mr. Sharpe?”

Sharpe was not listening. He was staring at the houses where the priest had stopped the civilians from firing, and now Sharpe was smiling because the priest might be able to order civilians, but he could not order British soldiers about. The Sixth Division had arrived! He could see the red uniforms at the hilltop, he could hear the crackle of muskets, and Sharpe drove himself up the slope so he could find out where Delmas was. Harper followed.

They dropped at the crest. To their right the houses were dotted with red uniforms, to their left were the three forts to which the Voltigeurs were retreating and Delmas was with them! He had been headed off by the Sixth Division and had been forced towards the fortresses. That was a victory of a kind, Sharpe supposed, because now the treacherous Frenchman was trapped in the forts. He looked behind and saw the river bank thick with British troops who marched west along the road beside the Tormes to finish off the cbrdon about the three strongholds. Delmas was trapped!

The French cannons fired again, canister blasting over the wasteland to rattle on the houses, smashing windows and flimsy shutters, aimed at driving the newly arrived British troops into cover.

Sharpe watched Delmas. He watched as the man was helped into the ditch in front of the nearest, smallest fort. Watched as the brass helmet appeared again and the Frenchman was pulled into one of the cannon embrasures. Sharpe watched his enemy go into the fort. The bastard was trapped! The sword was in Salamanca and it might yet belong to Sharpe.

Sharpe looked at Harper. That’s it. Bastard got away.“

“Not next time, sir.” Harper twisted around and stared over the river. A knot of officers were in the shelter of the houses on the far bank, another group of men, unmolested by the French gunners, were carrying Windham’s body up the hill. Harper could see the foxhounds following the sad cortege. As he watched, so the gunners fired again at the bridge. They would let the British take away their dead, but they would still not yield passage of the river. Harper nodded at the bridge. “Don’t think we can go back, sir.”

“No.”

“Not a bad wee city to be stuck in, sir.”

“What?” Sharpe had only been half listening. He had been thinking of Delmas. The Frenchman had murdered Windham, and probably murdered McDonald too. A man who killed while still on parole was a murderer.

“I said it’s not a bad wee city…‘

“I heard you, Patrick.” Sharpe looked at the Sergeant, remembering the fight. “Thank you.”

“For what? Do you think we should join the lads?”

“Yes.”

They scrambled down the hill to join the few Riflemen who, like themselves, were marooned on the northern bank of the river. One of them had retrieved Sharpe’s rifle and carried it all the way across the bridge. He gave it back to his Captain. “What do we do now, sir?”

“Now?” Sharpe listened. Faintly he could hear a rhythmic booming, a sound overlaid with a slight, tinny melody. “Hear that?”

They listened. Parry Jenkins grinned. “It’s a band!”

Sharpe slung his rifle. “I think we should join in.” He guessed that the Sixth Division was making their formal entry into the city; bands playing and colours flying, and he pointed down the river bank to the east. “That way, lads, then up into the city.” The route would take them far from the French cannons pointing across the wasted south-western corner of the city. “And listen, lads!” They looked at him. “Just stay together, you understand? We’re not supposed to be here and the bloody Provosts would just love a chance to put a real soldier in chains.” They grinned at him. “Come on!”

He was wiping the blood from his big sword as he led them along the river bank and then up into a steep alleyway which pointed towards the two Cathedrals on the hilltop. They were behind the houses from which the Spanish civilians had fired at Delmas, where the priest had checked their fire, and Sharpe thought he recognised the tall, grey-haired figure that climbed ahead of him.

He quickened his pace, leaving his Riflemen behind, and the noise of his boots on the cobbled street made the priest turn. He was a tall, elderly man whose face seemed filled with amusement and charity. He smiled at Sharpe and glanced at the sword. “You look as if you want to kill me, my son.”

Sharpe had not known exactly why he had pursued the priest, except to vent his anger at the man’s interference with the afternoon’s fight. The priest’s perfect English took him by surprise, and the man’s cool tone annoyed him. “I kill the King’s enemies.”

The priest smiled at Sharpe’s dramatic tone. “You’re angry with me, my son. Is it because I stopped the civilians shooting? Yes?” He did not wait for an answer, but went on placatingly. “Do you know what the French will do to them if they get a chance? Do you? Have you seen civilians put against a wall and shot like sick dogs?”

Sharpe’s anger spilt into his voice. “For Christ’s sake! We’re here now, not the bloody French!”

“I doubt if it’s for His sake, my son.” The priest irritated Sharpe by continuing to smile. “And for how long are you here? If you don’t defeat the main French armies then you’ll be running back to Portugal and we can expect those Frenchmen to be in our streets again.”

Sharpe frowned. “Are you English?”

“Praise the Lord, no!” For the first time the priest sounded shocked by something Sharpe had said. “I’m Irish, my son. My name is Father Patrick Curtis, though the Salamantines call me Don Patricio Cortes.” Curtis stopped as Harper shepherded the curious Riflemen past the two men. Harper took them on up the street. Curtis smiled again at Sharpe. “Salamanca is my city now, and these people are my people. I understand their hatred of the French, but I must protect them if the French ever rule here again. That man you were chasing. Do you know what he would do to them?”

“Delmas?What?”

Curtis frowned. He had a strong face, deeply lined, dominated by enormous, busy grey eyebrows. “Delmas? No! Leroux!”

It was Sharpe’s turn to be puzzled. “I was chasing a man in a brass helmet. A man with a limp.”

“That’s right! Leroux.” He saw Sharpe’s surprise. “He’s a full Colonel in Napoleon’s Imperial Guard. Philippe Leroux. He’s ruthless, my son, especially against civilians.”

The priest’s calm, informative voice had not mollified Sharpe, who kept his voice hostile. “You know a lot about him.”

Curtis laughed. “Of course! I’m Irish! We’re always interested in other people’s business. In my case, of course, it’s also God’s business to know about people. Even people like Colonel Leroux.”

“And it was my business to kill him.”

“As the centurion said on Golgotha.”

“What?”

“Nothing, my son. A comment in poor taste. Well, Captain?” Curtis made the rank a question, and Sharpe nodded. The priest smiled. “It’s my pleasant duty to welcome you to Salamanca, even if you are English. Consider yourself duly welcomed.

“You don’t like the English?” Sharpe was determined not to like the elderly priest.

“Why should I?” Curtis still smiled. “Does the worm like the plough?”

“I suppose you’d prefer the French?” Sharpe was still convinced that Curtis had stopped the firing to spare the man who had called himself Delmas.

Curtis sighed. “Dear, oh dear! This conversation, if you’ll forgive me, Captain, is getting tiresome. I’ll bid you good-day, my son. I expect we’ll meet again soon. Salamanca’s a small enough town.” He turned and walked ahead of Sharpe, leaving the Rifle Officer annoyed. Sharpe knew he had been bested by the priest, that Curtis’s calmness had easily deflected his anger. Well, damn the priest, and damn Colonel Philippe Leroux. Sharpe walked on, hurrying past Curtis without acknowledging him, and his head was busy with his need for revenge. Leroux. The man who had murdered Windham, had murdered McDonald, had broken his parole, had escaped Sharpe, and who possessed a sword fit for a great fighter. Colonel Leroux; a worthy enemy for this summer of war and heat.

CHAPTER 3

Sharpe overtook his men and led them along beside the two Cathedrals and into streets that were crowded with people ready to celebrate the city’s release from the French. Blankets had been hung from the poorer balconies, flags from the richer, while women leaned over window ledges and balustrades. “Vive Ingles!”

Harper bellowed back at them. “Viva Irlandes!” Wine was pressed on them, flowers tossed to them, and the cheerful holiday crowd jostled the Riflemen as they moved towards the music and the city centre. Harper grinned at Sharpe. “The Lieutenant ought to be here!”

Sharpe’s Lieutenant, Harold Price, would have been inordinately jealous. The girls were beautiful, smiling, and Price would have been torn by indecision like a terrier not knowing which rat to take first. A woman, monstrously fat, jumped up and down to plant a kiss on Harper’s cheek and the Irishman swept her up in his arms, kissed her happily, and put her down. The crowd cheered, loving it, and a small child was handed to the Sergeant who took her, skinny legs flailing, and put her on his shoulders. She drummed on his shako top, beating with the band sound, and beamed at her friends. Today was holiday in Salamanca. The French were gone, either north with Marmont or else into their three cordoned fortresses, and Salamanca was free.

The street opened into a courtyard, gorgeously decorated with carvings, and Sharpe remembered the place from his last visit. Salamanca was a town like Oxford or Cambridge, a University town, and the courtyard was part of the University. The stones of the buildings had been carved as delicately as silver filigree, the workmanship of the masons breath-takingly skilled, and he saw his men staring in wonder at the riotous stone. There was nothing like this to be seen in England, perhaps anywhere in the world, yet Sharpe knew that the best of Salamanca was still to come.

Bells pealed from a dozen belfries, a cacophony of joy that clashed with the army band. Swallows in their hundreds were wheeling and swooping over the rooftops, the harbingers of evening, and he pushed on, nodding and smiling at the people, and he noticed in the next street how the doors still bore the chalk marks left by the French billeting officers. Tonight the Sixth Division would be in these houses, and welcomed more readily because the British paid for their rooms and for their food. The French had gone. And Sharpe smiled because Leroux was trapped in the forts, and then he wondered how it would be possible to arrange it so that he could be present when the Sixth Division assaulted the forts.

The street ended in a wide space and Sharpe saw the tips of bright bayonets bobbing rhythmically over the heads of the crowd towards an archway. Harper put the small girl down, releasing her to run and join the crowd lining the parade route, and the Light Company men followed Sharpe towards the archway. Like all the Riflemen in Sharpe’s Company, Harper had been here before, back in the winter of ’08, and he remembered the Plaza Mayor that lay beyond this archway. It was in the Plaza Mayor that the Sixth Division gathered for the formal parade to mark the British entry into Salamanca.

Sharpe stopped just sort of the archway and looked at Harper. “I’m going to find Major Hogan. Keep the lads together, and meet me here at ten o’clock.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sharpe looked at the men with Harper, rogues all of them. They were typical of the drunks, thieves, murderers and runaways who had somehow become the best infantry in the world. He grinned at them. “You can drink.” They gave ironic cheers and Sharpe held up a hand. “But no fights. We’re not supposed to be here and the bloody Provosts would love to beat the hell out of you. So stay out of trouble, and keep your mates out of trouble, understand? Stick together. You can drink, but I’m not carrying anyone home tonight, so stay on your feet.” Sharpe had reduced the army’s regulations to three simple rules. His men were expected to fight, as he did, with determination. They were not to steal, except from the enemy or unless they were starving. And they were never to get drunk without his permission. They grinned at him and held up wine that had been given them. They would have sore heads in the morning.

He left them and pushed his way through the crowds that lined the archway. He knew just what to expect, but still it took his breath away as he stood for a moment and just stared at what he thought was the most beautiful place he had seen in his life; Salamanca’s Plaza Mayor, the Great Plaza. It had been finished just thirty years before and had taken seventy years to build, but the time had been well spent. The square was formed of continuous houses, each of three storeys above the arched colonnade and every room facing the Plaza opened onto a wrought iron balcony. The severity of the buildings’ design was softened by decorated scrollwork, carved coats of arms, and a spire studded balustrade that edged the sky. The houses met at the north side of the Plaza in a splendid Palacio, higher than the houses and more ornate, and on the eastern side, full in the rays of the descending sun, was the Royal Pavilion. The stone of the whole Plaza was golden in the late afternoon, traced with a thousand, thousand shadows cast by balconies, shutters, carvings and spires. Swallows laced the air of the huge space. The Plaza was of royal dimensions. It spoke of grandeur, pride and magnificence, yet it was a public place and belonged to the citizens of Salamanca. The meanest person could walk and linger in its glory and imagine himself in the residence of a King.

Thousands of people were now crammed into the Plaza’s immensity. They lined the triple balconies and waved scarves and flags, cheered, and tossed blossoms into the paved square. Crowds were thick in the shadowed arcade beneath the colonnade’s eighty-eight arches, and their cheering threatened to drown the band that played beneath the Palacio to whose music the Sixth Division made their solemn and formal entry.

This was a moment to savour, a moment of glory, the moment when the British took hold of this city. The Plaza Mayor had sensed this moment, was making a celebration of it, yet in the very centre of the noise and colour sat a quiet man who looked, on his tall horse, to be almost drab. He wore no uniform. A plain blue coat, grey trousers, and unadorned bicorne hat sufficed Wellington. Before the General marched his troops, the men who had followed him from Portugal through the savage horrors of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz.

The first Battalion of the 89nth Regiment, their jacket facings as deep a green as the valleys of North Devon from whence they came, were followed by the Shropshires, red facings on red jackets, their officers’ coats laced in gold. The swords swept up to salute the plain, hook-nosed man who stood quiet in the riot of noise. The Gist were there, a long way from Gloucestershire, and the sight of them made Sharpe remember Windham’s scornful comparison of the two Cathedral cities. The Colonel would have loved this. He would have tapped his riding crop in time with the music, have criticised the faded jackets of the Queen’s Royals, blue on red, second infantry of the line behind the Royal Scots, but he would not have been in earnest. The Cornishmen of the 32nd marched in, the 36th of Hereford, and all of them marched with colours uncased, colours that stirred in the small wind and showed off the musket and cannon scars of the smoke-tinged flags. The colours were surrounded by Sergeants’ halberds, the wide blades burnished to a brilliant silver.

Hooves sounded by the archway where Sharpe had entered and Lossow, his uniform miraculously brushed, led the first troop of King’s German Legion Light Dragoons into the Plaza. Their sabres were drawn, slashing light, and the officers wore fur edged pelisses casually draped over the gold-laced blue jackets. The Plaza seemed crammed with troops, yet still more came. The brown jackets of the Portuguese Cacadores, Light troops, whose green shako plumes nodded to the music’s tempo. There were Greenjackets too, not Riflemen of the 95th, Sharpe’s old Regiment, but men of the Goth, the Royal American Rifles. He watched them enter the square and he felt a small burst of pride at the sight of their faded, patched uniforms and the battered look of their Baker Rifles. The Rifles were the first onto any battlefield, and the last to leave it. They were the best. Sharpe was proud of his green jacket.

This was just one division, the Sixth, while beyond the city and shielding it from the French field army were the other Divisions of Wellington’s force. The First, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth, the Seventh, and the Light Divisions, forty-two thousand men of the infantry marched this summer. Sharpe smiled to himself. He remembered Rolica, just four years before, when the British infantry had numbered just thirteen and a half thousand men. No one had expected them to win. They had been sent to Portugal with a junior General, and now that General saluted his troops as they marched into Salamanca. At Rolica, Wellington had fought with eighteen guns, this summer’s battle would hear more than sixty British cannon. Two hundred cavalry had paraded at Rolica, now there were more than four thousand. The war was growing, spreading across the Peninsula, up into Europe, and there were rumours that the Americans were beating the drum against England while Napoleon, the ringmaster of it all, was looking north to the empty Russian maps.

Sharpe did not watch the whole parade. In one of the eight streets that led to the Plaza he found a wineshop and bought a skin of red wine that he decanted, carefully, into his round, wooden canteen. A gipsy woman watched him, her black eyes unreadable, one hand holding a baby high on her breast, the other plunged deep into her apron where she clutched the few coins she had begged during the day. Sharpe left a few mouthfuls in the skin and tossed it to her. She caught it and jetted the wine into the baby’s mouth. A stall beneath the Plaza archway was selling food and Sharpe took some tripe, cooked in a spiced sauce, and as he drank his wine, ate the food, he thought how lucky he was to be alive on this day, in this place, and he wished he could share this moment with Teresa. Then he thought of Windham’s body, blood smeared on the dry ground, and he hoped that the Frenchmen shut up in the forts were hearing the band and anticipating the siege. Leroux would die.

The parade finished, the soldiers were marched away or dismissed, yet the band played on, serenading the nightly ceremony in which the people of Salamanca played out a stately flirtation. The townspeople walked in the Plaza each evening. The men walked clockwise at the outer edge of the square, while the girls, giggling and arm in arm, walked counter-clockwise in an inner ring. British soldiers now joined the outer promenaders, eyeing the girls, calling out to them, while the Spanish men, jealous, watched coldly.

Sharpe did not join the circle. Instead he walked in the deep shadow of the arcade, past the shops that sold fine leathers, jewels, books, and silks. He walked slowly, licking the garlic from his fingers, and he was a strange figure in the holiday crowd. He had pushed his shako back, letting his black hair fall over the top of the long scar that ran, beside his left eye, to his cheek. It gave him a sardonic, mocking look when his face was at rest. Only laughter or a smile softened the rigour of the scar. His uniform was as tattered as any Rifleman’s. The scabbard of his long sword was battered. He looked what he was, a fighting soldier.

He was looking for Michael Hogan, the Irish Major who served on Wellington’s staff. Sharpe and Hogan had been friends for most of this war and the Irishman, Sharpe knew, would make good company on this night of celebration. Sharpe had another reason, too. Hogan was in charge of Wellington’s intelligence gathering, sifting through the reports which came from spies and Exploring Officers, and Sharpe hoped that the small, middle-aged Major could answer some questions about Colonel Philippe Leroux.

Sharpe stayed beneath the colonnade, heading towards the group of mounted officers who crowded about the General. The Rifleman stopped when he was close enough to hear their loud laughter and confident voices.

He could not see Hogan. He leaned against a pillar and watched the mounted men, gorgeous in their full dress uniforms, and he was unwilling to join the favour seeking group who crowded round the General. If Wellington picked his nose, Sharpe knew, there would be plenty of officers willing to suck his fingers clean if it brought them one more golden thread for their uniforms.

He tilted the canteen, shut his eyes, and let the raw wine scour his mouth. “Captain! Captain!”

He opened his eyes, but could not see who had shouted, and he presumed that it was not for him and then he saw the priest, Curtis, pushing his way out of the group of horsemen around Wellington. The damned Irishman was everywhere. Sharpe did not move except to cork his canteen.

Curtis walked towards him and stopped. “We meet again.”

“As you said we would.”

“You can always believe a man of God.” The elderly priest smiled. “I was hoping you might be here.”

“Me?”

Curtis gestured towards the mounted officers. “There’s someone who would be relieved, very relieved, to hear from you that Leroux is safely shut up in the fortresses. Would you be so kind as to confirm it?” He gestured again, inviting Sharpe to walk with him, but the tall Rifleman did not move.

“Don’t they believe you?”

The elderly priest smiled. “I’m a priest, Captain, a Professor of Astronomy and Natural History, and Rector of the Irish College here. Those aren’t suitable qualifications, I’m afraid, for these warlike matters. You, on the other hand, will be believed on this subject. Would you mind?”

“You’re what?” Sharpe had thought the man just an interfering priest.

Curtis smiled gently. “I’m eminent, dreadfully eminent, and I’m asking you to do me a kindness.”

Sharpe did not move, still unwilling to walk into the circle of elegant officers. “Who needs reassurance?”

“An acquaintance. I don’t think you’ll regret the experience. Are you married?”

Sharpe nodded, not understanding. “Yes.”

“By Mother Church, I hope?”

“As it happens, yes.”

“You surprise me, and please me.” Sharpe was not sure whether Curtis was teasing him. The priest’s bushy eyebrows went up. “It does help, you see.”

“Help?”

“Temptations of the flesh, Captain. I am sometimes very grateful to God that he has allowed me to grow old and immune to them. Please come.”

Sharpe followed him, curious, and Curtis stopped suddenly. “I don’t have the pleasure of your name, Captain.”

“Sharpe. Richard Sharpe.”

Curtis smiled. “Really? Sharpe? Well, well!” He did not give Sharpe any time to react to his apparent recognition. “Come on then, Sharpe! And don’t go all jellified!”

With that mysterious injunction Curtis found a way through the horses and Sharpe followed him. There must have been two dozen officers, at least, but they were not, as Sharpe had first thought, crowded around Wellington. They were looking at an open carriage, pointing away from Sharpe, and it was to the side of the carriage that Curtis led him.

Someone, Sharpe thought, was indecently rich. Four white horses stood patiently in the carriage traces, a powdered-wigged driver sat on the bench, a footman, in the same livery, on a platform behind. The horses’ traces were of silver chain. The carriage itself was polished to a sheen that would have satisfied the most meticulous Sergeant Major. The lines of the carriage, which Sharpe supposed was a new-fangled barouche, were picked out in silver paint on dark blue. A coat of arms decorated the door, a shield so often quartered that the small devices contained in its many compartments were indistinguishable except at very close inspection. The occupant, though, would have stunned at full rifle range.

She was fair haired, unusual in Spain, and fair skinned, and she wore a dress of dazzling whiteness so that she seemed to be the brightest, most luminous object in the whole of Salamanca’s golden square. She was leaning back on the cushions, one white arm negligently laid on the carriage side, and her eyes seemed languid and amused, bored even, as though she were used to such daily and lavish adulation. She held a small parasol against the evening sun, a parasol of white lace that threw a filmy shadow on her face, but the shadow did nothing to hide the rich, full mouth, the big, intelligent eyes, or the slim, long neck that seemed, after the tanned, brown skin of the army and its followers, to be made of a substance that was of heavenly origin. Sharpe had seen many beautiful women. Teresa was beautiful, Jane Gibbons, whose brother had tried to kill him at Talavera, was beautiful, but this woman was in another realm. Curtis rapped the carriage door. Sharpe was hardly aware of any other person, not even of Wellington himself, and he watched the eyes come to him as she listened to Curtis’ introduction. “Captain Richard Sharpe, I have the honour to name you La Marquesa de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba.“

She looked at him. He half expected her to offer him a white-gloved hand, but she just smiled. “People never remember it.”

“La Marquesa de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba.” Sharpe marvelled that he had got the words out without stammering. He understood exactly what Curtis meant by jellification. She raised an eyebrow in mock surprise. Curtis was telling her, in Spanish, about Leroux. Sharpe heard the name mentioned, and saw her glance at him. Each glance was stupefying. Her beauty was like a physical force. Other women, Sharpe guessed, would hate her. Men would follow her like lap dogs. She had been born beautiful and every artifice that money could buy was enhancing that beauty. She was glorious, tantalising, and, he supposed, untouchable to anyone less than a full-blooded lord and, as he always did when he saw something that he wanted, but could not hope to have, he began to dislike it. Curtis stopped and she looked at Sharpe. Her voice sounded bored. “Leroux is in the forts?”

He wondered where she had learned English. “Yes, Ma’am.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

She nodded, dismissing him, and it seemed to Sharpe that his reassurances had not been wanted, nor welcomed. Then she turned back to him and raised her voice. “You do seem so much more soldierlike, Captain, than these pretty men on their horses.”

He was not supposed to reply. The remark had been made, he suspected, purely to annoy her gallant admirers. She did not even bother to see what effect it had on them, but merely drew a silver-tipped pencil from a small bag and began writing on a piece of paper. One man rose to the bait, a foppish cavalry officer whose English drawl spoke of aristocratic birth.

“Any brute can be brave, Ma’am, but a curry-comb always improves it.”

There was a moment’s silence. La Marquesa looked up at Sharpe and smiled. “Sir Robin Callard thinks you’re an uncombed brute.”

“Rather that than a lap dog, Ma’am.”

She had succeeded. She looked at Callard and raised an eyebrow. He was forced to be brave. He stared at Sharpe, his face furious. “You’re insolent, Sharpe.”

“Yes he is.” The voice was crisp. Wellington leaned forward. “He always has been.” The General knew what La Marquesa was doing, and he would stop it. He hated duelling among his officers. “It’s his strength. And weakness.” He touched his hat. “Good day, Captain Sharpe.”

“Sir.” He backed away from the carriage, ignored by La Marquesa who was folding her piece of paper. He had been dismissed, contemptuously even, and he knew that a tattered Captain with an old sword had no place among these scented, elegant people. Sharpe felt the resentment rise sour and thick within him. Wellington needed Sharpe when there was a breach to be taken at Badajoz, but not now! Not among his Lordship’s own kind. They thought Sharpe was a mere brute who needed a curry-comb, yet he was a brute who kicked, clawed and scratched to preserve their privileged, lavish world. Well damn them. Damn them to a stinking hell. Tonight he would drink with his men, not one of whom would dream of owning as much money as the worth of a single silver trace chain from La Marquesa’s coach. Yet they were his men. Damn the bitch and the men who sniffed about her. Sharpe would prove he did not care a damn for them.

“Sharpe?”

He turned. A handsome cavalry officer, hair as gold as La Marquesa’s, uniform as elegant as Sir Robin Callard’s, stood smiling at him. The man’s left arm was in a sling that covered the blue and silver of his jacket, and for a second Sharpe thought this man must be Callard’s second come to offer a duel. Yet the cavalry officer’s smile was open and friendly, his voice warm. “I’m honoured to meet you, Sharpe! Jack Spears, Captain.” He grinned broadly. “I’m glad you twisted Robin’s nose. He’s a pompous little bastard. Here.” He held a folded piece of paper to Sharpe.

Sharpe took it reluctantly, not wanting anything to do with the glittering circle about the blue and silver barouche. He unfolded the pencil written note. “I am giving a small reception this evening at 10 o’clock. Lord Spears will direct you.” It was signed, simply, “H“.

Sharpe looked at the startlingly handsome cavalryman. “H?”

Spears laughed. “Helena, La Marquesade tiddly-tum and tummly-tid, and the object of an army’s combined lust. Shall I tell her you’ll come?” His voice was relaxed and friendly.

“You’re Lord Spears?”

“Yes!” Spears unleashed all his charm on Sharpe. “By the Grace of God and the timely bloody death of my elder brother. But you can call me Jack, everyone else does.”

Sharpe looked again at the note. Her handwriting was childishly round, like his own. “I have other business tonight.”

“Other business!” Spears’ cry of mock amazement made some of the promenading Salamantines look curiously at the young, handsome cavalry officer. “Other business! My dear Sharpe! What other business could possibly be more important than attempting to breach the fair Helena?”

Sharpe was embarrassed. He knew Lord Spears was being friendly, but Sharpe’s encounter with the Marquesa had made him feel shabby and inadequate. “I have to see Major Hogan. Do you know him?”

“Know him?” Spears grinned. “He’s my lord and master. Of course I know Michael, but you won’t see him tonight, not unless you go south a couple of hundred miles.”

“You work for him?”

“He’s kind enough to call it work.” Spears grinned. “I’m one of his Exploring Officers.”

Sharpe looked at the young Lord with a new respect. The Exploring Officers rode far behind enemy lines, wearing full uniform so they could not be accused of spying, and relying on their swift, corn-fed horses to ride them out of trouble. They sent back a stream of information about enemy movements, entrusting their messages and maps to Spanish messengers. It was a lonely, brave life. Spears laughed. “I’ve impressed the great Sharpe, how wonderful! Was it important to see Michael?”

Sharpe shrugged. In truth he had used Hogan’s name as an excuse for avoiding La Marquesa’s invitation. “I wanted to ask him about Colonel Leroux.”

“That prize little bastard.” For the first time there was something other than gaiety in Spears’ voice. “You should have killed him.” Spears had evidently overheard the priest’s brief conversation with La Marquesa.

“You know him?”

Spears touched the sling. “Who do you think did this? He nearly caught me one dark night last week. I tumbled out of a window to escape him.” He smiled again. “Not very gallant, but I didn’t fancy the noble line of Spears coming to an end in a Spanish fleapit.” He clapped Sharpe’s shoulder with his free hand. “Michael will want to talk to you about Leroux, but in the meantime, my dear Sharpe, you are coming to the Palacio Casares tonight to drink La Marquesa’s champagne.”

Sharpe shook his head. “No, my lord.”

“My lord! My lord! Call me Jack! Now tell me you’re coming!”

Sharpe screwed the paper into a ball. He was thinking of Teresa and feeling noble that he was rejecting the invitation. “I’m not coming, my lord.”

Lord Spears watched Sharpe walk away, cutting across the circling walkers in the Plaza Mayor, and the cavalryman smiled to himself. “Ten to one you do, my friend, ten to one you do.”

CHAPTER 4

Sharpe had wanted to go to La Marquesa’s; the temptation was on him all night, but he stayed away. He told himself that he did so because he did not care to go, but the truth was, and he knew it, that he was frightened of the mockery of La Marquesa’s witty, elegant friends. He would be out of place.

He drank instead, listening to the stories of his men and chasing away the one Provost who tried to challenge their presence in the city. He watched them betting on cockfights, watched them losing their money because the prize birds had been fed rum-soaked raisins, and he pretended that he would rather be with them than with anyone else. They were pleased, he knew, and he felt ashamed because it was a pretence. He watched yet another dead cockerel being taken from the blood-soaked ring, and he thought of the luminous woman with the gold hair and white skin.

Nothing kept the small group of Riflemen in Salamanca and so, the next morning, they marched early to the San Christobal Ridge where the main army waited for the French. They marched with sore heads and sour throats, leaving the city behind and going to the place they belonged.

They all expected a battle. The French had been manoeuvred out of Salamanca, but Marmont had left the garrisons behind in the three fortresses, and it was obvious to even the least soldier that once the French Marshal had been reinforced from the north then he would come back to rescue his men trapped in the city. The British waited for him, hoping he would attack the great ridge that barred the road to the city, the ridge behind which Sharpe reunited his men with the South Essex.

McDonald was dead, buried already, killed by a thrust of Leroux’s sword between his ribs. Major Forrest, in temporary command after the death of Windham, shook his head sorrowfully. “I’m truly sorry about the boy, Richard.”

“I know, sir.” Sharpe had hardly had time to know the Ensign. “You’ll want me to write to his parents?”

“Would you? I’ve written to Windham’s wife.” Forrest was shaving from a canvas bucket. “A letter seems so inadequate. Oh dear.” Forrest was a kind man, even a meek man, and he was ill-suited to the trade of warfare. He smiled at Sharpe. “I’m glad you’re back, Richard.”

“Thank you, sir.” Sharpe grinned. “Look at that.”

Isabella, small and plump, was brushing at Harper’s jacket even as she welcomed him tearfully. The whole Battalion was bivouacked on the grassland, their wives and children in attendance, and as far as Sharpe could see, east and west, other Battalions waited behind the ridge. He walked up to the crest and stared north at the great plain that was bright with poppies and cornflowers. It was over those flowers, over the sun-bleached grass, that the enemy would come. They would come to crush the one army that Britain had in Spain, one army against five French, and Sharpe stared at the heat-blurred horizon and watched for the tell-tale spark of light reflected from sword or helmet that would say the enemy was coming to do battle.

They did not come that day, nor the next, and as the hours passed so Sharpe began to forget the events of Salamanca. Colonel Leroux lost his importance, even the golden haired Marquesa became a remote dream. Sharpe did his job as Company Commander and he filled his time with the day to day rhythm of soldiering. The books had to be kept up to date, there were punishments to mete out, rewards to be given, quarrels to ease, and always the business of keeping bored men up to their highest standard. He forgot Leroux, he forgot La Marquesa, and on the third day on the San Christobal Ridge he had good reason to forget.

It was a perfect day, the kind of summer’s day that a child might remember for ever, a day when the sun shone from a burnished sky and spilt light on the poppies and cornflowers that were spread so lavishly in the ripening wheat. A small breeze stole the venom of the sun and rippled the crops, and onto that perfect stage, that setting of gold, red and blue, came the army of the enemy.

It seemed almost a miracle. An army marched on dozens of roads, its flanks far from each other, and in a summer’s campaign it was usual for a man never to see more than a half dozen other Regiments. Yet suddenly, at the order of a general, the scattered units were drawn together, brought into one great array ready for battle and Sharpe, high on the wind-cooled ridge, watched Marmont perform the miracle.

The cavalry came first, their breastplates and sword blades reflecting the sun in savage flashes at the watching British. Their horses left trampled paths in the flower-strewn wheat.

The infantry were behind, snakes of blue-jacketed men who seemed to fill the plain, spreading east and west, and among them were the guns. The French artillery, Napoleon’s own trade, who made their batteries in full view of the ridge and lifted the burning barrels from the travelling position to the fighting position. Major Forrest, watching with his officers, grinned. “There’s enough of them.”

There usually are, sir,“ Sharpe said.

Hussars, Dragoons, Lancers, Cuiraisseurs, Chasseurs, Guardsmen, Grenadiers, Voltigeurs, Tirailleurs, Infantry, Artillery, Bandsmen, Engineers, Ambulance men, Drivers, Staff, all of them pulled by the beat of the drum to this place where they became an army. Fifty thousand men brought to this patch of land half the size of a country parish, a patch of land that might become well-manured with their blood. The Spanish farmers said the crops grew twice as well the year after a battle.

The French could not see the British. They saw a few officers on the hilltop, saw the flash of light from an occasional telescope aimed at them, but Marmont had to guess where Wellington’s troops were hidden behind the ridge. He would have to guess where to make his attack, knowing all the while that his fine troops might climb the ridge’s scarp only to be suddenly faced with the red-jacketed infantry that could fire their Brown Bess muskets faster than any army in the world. Marmont would have to guess where to attack, and Generals do not like guessing.

He did not guess that first day, nor the next, and it seemed as if the two armies had come together only to be paralysed. Each night men from British Light Companies would go down the hill towards the French to act as picquets against a night attack, but Marmont did not risk his army in the darkness. Sharpe went one night. The noise of the French army was like the noise of a city, its lights were a sprawl of fires scattered as lavishly as the poppies and cornflowers. It was cold at night, the upland not holding the day’s heat, and Sharpe shivered, Leroux and La Marquesa forgotten, waiting for the battle to erupt on the long ridge.

On Monday, after early breakfasts, the road from Salamanca was crowded with people coming to stare at the two armies. Some walked, some rode, some came in carriages, and most made themselves comfortable on a hill beside the village of San Christobal and were irked that the armies were not fighting. Perhaps because the spectators had arrived, there seemed a greater sense of urgency in the British lines, and Sharpe watched as his men once more prepared for battle. Flints were reseated in the leather patch that was gripped in the screw-tightened jaws of the rifle cocks, hot water was swilled into barrels that were already cleaned, and Sharpe sensed the fear that all men have before battle.

Some feared the cavalry and in their minds they rehearsed the thunder of a thousand hooves, the dust rolling like a sea fog from the charge and shot through with the bright blades that could slice a man’s life away or, worse, hook out his eyes and leave him in darkness for life. Others feared musket fire, the lottery of an unaimed bullet coming in the relentless volleys that would fire the dry grass with burning wads and roast the wounded where they fell. All feared the artillery, coughing its death in fan-like swathes. It was best not to think about that.

A hundred thousand men, before and behind the ridge, feared on that perfect day of heat, poppies and cornflowers. The smoke from the French cooking fires of the night drifted in a haze to westward while the gunners prepared their instruments of slaughter. Surely today they would fight. Some men in both armies hoped for the battle, seeking in combat the death that would release them from the pains of diseased bodies. The spectators wanted to see a fight. Why else had they come the long six hot miles from Salamanca?

Sharpe expected battle. He had gone to a Regiment of Dragoons and tipped the armourer to put a new edge on the long sword. Now, at midday, he slept. His shako was tipped over his face and he dreamed that he was lying flat, a horseman riding about him, and the sound of the hooves was distinct in his dreams. He could not rise, even though he knew the cavalryman was trying to kill him, and in his dream he struggled and then felt the lance tip at his waist and he jerked himself sideways, twisting desperately, and suddenly he was awake and a man was laughing above him. “Richard!”

“Christ!” The horse had not been a dream. It stood a yard away, its rider dismounted and laughing at him. Sharpe sat up, shaking the sleep from his eyes. “God, you frightened me!” Major Hogan had woken him by tapping his belt with a booted foot.

Sharpe stood up, drank tepid water from his canteen, and only then grinned at his friend. “How are you, sir?”

“As well as the good Lord permits. Yourself?”

“Bored with this waiting. Why doesn’t the bastard attack?” Sharpe looked at his Company, most of whom dozed in the sun as did the men of the South Essex’s other nine companies. A few officers strolled in front of the somnolent lines. The whole British army seemed asleep, except for a few sentries on the skyline.

Major Hogan, his grey moustache stained yellow by the snuff to which he was addicted, looked Sharpe up and down. “You’re looking well. I hope you are because I might need you.”

“Need me?” Sharpe was putting on his black shako, picking up rifle and sword. “What for?”

“Come for a walk.” Hogan took Sharpe’s elbow for a second and steered him away from the Light Company up the long slope that led to the ridge-crest. “You have news of Colonel Leroux for me?”

“Leroux?” For a brief moment Sharpe was lost. The events of Salamanca seemed so long ago, even far away, and his mind at this moment was concerned with the battle that would be fought for the San Christobal Ridge. He was thinking of skirmishers, of Riflemen, not about the tall, pale-eyed French Colonel who was in the city’s fortresses. Hogan frowned.

“You met him?”

“Yes.” Sharpe laughed ruefully. “I met the bastard.” He told Hogan about the capture of the Dragoon officer, of the parole, of the man’s escape, and finally how he had chased him up the hill. Hogan listened intently.

“You’re certain?”

“That he’s in the forts? Yes.”

“Truly?” Hogan had stopped, was staring hard at Sharpe. “You’re really certain?”

“I saw him climb in. He’s there.”

Hogan said nothing as they finished the climb to the ridge top. They stood there, where the ground dropped steeply away to the great plain where the French were gathered. Sharpe could see an ammunition tumbril coming forward to the closest battery and he had to fight back the thought that his own death might be on that cart.

Hogan sighed. “God damn it, but I wish you’d killed him.”

“So do I.”

Hogan stared, Sharpe suspected without seeing, at the French army. The Major was thoughtful, worried even, and Sharpe waited as he took from his pocket a scrap of paper. Hogan thrust it at Sharpe. “I’ve carried that for two months.”

The paper meant nothing to Sharpe. It had groups of numbers written like words in a short paragraph. Hogan smiled wryly. “It’s a French code, Richard, a very special code indeed.” He took the paper back from Sharpe. “We have a fellow who can read these codes, a Captain Scovell, and damned clever he is too.” Sharpe wondered what the story was behind the scrap of paper. A French messenger ambushed by Partisans? Or one of the Spaniards who tried to smuggle messages through hostile territory, the paper hidden in a boot-heel or hollow stick, a man captured and killed so that this piece of paper could reach Hogan? The French, Sharpe knew, would send four or five identical messages because they knew that most would be intercepted and delivered to the British.

Hogan stared at the numbers. “It’s one thing to decode these messages, Richard, it’s another to understand them. This one’s the Emperor’s own code! How about that?” He smiled in understandable triumph at Scovell’s victory. “It was sent from the man himself to Marshal Marmont and I’ll tell you what it says.” He read from the numbers as if they were words.“ ”I send you Colonel Leroux, my own man, who works for me. You are to afford him whatever he requests.“ That’s all, Richard! I can read it, but I can’t understand it. I know that a Colonel Leroux is here to do a special job, a job for the Emperor himself, but what’s the job? Then I hear more things. Some Spaniards have been tortured, skinned alive, and the bastard signed them with his name. Why?” Hogan folded the paper. “There was something else. Leroux got Colquhoun Grant.”

That shocked Sharpe. “Killed him?”

“No, captured him. We’re not exactly trumpeting that failure about.”

Sharpe could understand Hogan’s misery. Colquhoun Grant was the best of the British Exploring Officers, a colleague of Lord Spears who rode brazenly on the flanks of the French forces. Grant was a severe loss to Hogan, and a triumph for the French.

Sharpe said nothing. To his right he could see, half a mile away, the General and his staff bunched on the skyline. An aide-de-camp had just left the small group and was spurring back down the ridge towards the British forces. Sharpe wondered if something was about to happen.

The French were making a move, yet not a particularly forceful one. Directly ahead of Sharpe and Hogan, at the foot of the ridge scarp, was a small knoll that disturbed the smoothness of the plain where the French were gathered. Two enemy Battalions had come slowly forward and now lined the knoll’s crest. They were no threat to the ridge and, having taken the tiny summit, they seemed content to stay there. Two field guns had come with them.

Hogan ignored them. “I have to stop Leroux, Richard. That’s my job. He’s taking my best people and he’s killing them if they’re Spanish and capturing them if they’re British, and he’s too bloody clever by half.” Sharpe was surprised by the gloom in his friend’s voice. Hogan was not usually downcast by setbacks, but Sharpe could tell that Colonel Philippe Leroux had the Irish Major desperately worried. Hogan looked up at Sharpe again. “You searched him?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me again what you found. Tell me everything.”

Sharpe shrugged. He took off his shako to let the small breeze cool his forehead. He spoke of that day in the wood, of the prisoner’s seeming arrogance. He mentioned the sword, he spoke of his suspicion that Leroux pretended not to understand English. Hogan smiled at that. “You were right. He speaks English like a bloody native. Go on.”

“There isn’t any more. I’ve told you everything!” Sharpe looked behind the ridge to see where the aide-de-camp had ridden, and an urgency suddenly came over him. “Look! We’re moving! Christ!” He crammed his shako back on.

The South Essex, together with another Battalion, had been stirred into activity. They had stood up, dressed their ranks, and now they were climbing the hill in companies. They were going to attack! Sharpe looked north, at the small knoll, and he knew that Wellington was meeting the French move with a move of his own. The French would be pushed offthe small hill, and the South Essex was to be one of the two Battalions that did the pushing. “I must go!”

“Richard!” Hogan held his elbow. “For God’s sake. Nothing else? No papers? No books? Nothing hidden in his helmet, I mean, God, he must have had something!”

Sharpe was impatient. He wanted to be with his men. The Light Company would be first into the attack and Sharpe would lead them. Already he was forgetting Leroux and thinking only of the enemy skirmishers he would face in a few minutes. He snapped his fingers. “No, yes. Yes. There was one thing. Jesus! A piece of paper, he said it was horse dealers or something. It was just a list!”

“You have it?”

“It’s in my pack. Down there.” He pointed to the place the South Essex had left. The Battalion was halfway up the slope now, the Light Company already stretching ahead. “I must go, sir!”

“Can I look for the paper?”

“Yes!” Sharpe was running now, released by Hogan, and his scabbard and rifle thumped as he hurried towards his men. The leather casings were being stripped from the colours so that the flags, unfurled, spread in the small breeze, their tassels bright yellow against the Union Flag. He felt the surge of emotion because the Colours were a soldier’s pride. They were going to fight!

“Are they going to fight?” La Marquesa de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba had come to San Christobal hoping for a battle. Lord Spears was with her, his horse close to the elegant barouche, while La Marquesa herself was chaperoned by a dowdy, middle-aged woman who was wilting of the heat in a thick serge dress. La Marquesa wore white and had her filmy parasol raised against the sun.

Lord Spears tugged at his sling to make it comfortable. “No, my dear. It’s just a redeployment.”

“I do believe you’re wrong, Jack.”

“Ten guineas says I’m not.”

“You owe me twice that already.” La Marquesa had taken out a small, silver telescope that she trained on the two British Battalions. They were marching towards the crest. “Still, I’ll take you, Jack. Ten guineas.” She put the telescope in her lap and picked up a folding ivory fan with which she cooled her face. “Everyone ought to see a battle, Jack. It’s part of a woman’s education.”

“Quite right, my dear. Front row for the slaughter. Lord Spears’ Academy for Young Ladies, battles arranged, mutilations our speciality.”

The fan cracked shut. “What a bore you are, Jack, and just a tiny bit amusing. Oh look! Some of them are running! Do I cheer?”

Lord Spears was realising that he had just lost another ten guineas that he did not have, but he showed no regret. “Why not? Hip, hip…“

“Hooray!” said La Marquesa.

Sharpe blew his whistle that sent his men scattering into the loose skirmish chain. The other nine companies would fight in their ranks, held by discipline, but his men fought in pairs, picking their ground and being the first to meet the enemy. He was on the crest now, the grass long beneath his boots, and his skirmish line was going down towards the enemy. Once again he forgot Leroux, forgot Hogan’s concern, for now he was doing the job for which the army paid him. He was a skirmisher, a fighter of battles between the armies, and the love of combat was rising in him, that curious emotion that diluted fear and drove him to impose his will on the enemy. He was excited, eager, and he led his men at a swift pace down the hillside to where the enemy skirmishers, the Voltigeurs, were coming out to meet him. This was his world now, this small saddle of land between the escarpment and the knoll, a tiny piece of grassland that was warm in the sun and pretty with flowers. There he would meet his enemy and there he would win. “Spread out! Keep moving!” Sharpe was going to war.

CHAPTER 5

Wellington did not want to attack. He saw little sense in sending his army down into the plain, but he was frustrated by the French reluctance to attack him. He had sent two Battalions against the two enemy Battalions on the knoll in the hope that he could provoke Marmont into a response. Wellington wanted to entice the French up onto the ridge, to force their infantry to climb the steep slope and face the guns and muskets that would suddenly appear to blast the tired enemy in chaos and horror back the way they had come.

Such thoughts were far from Richard Sharpe. His job was altogether more simple, merely to take on an enemy Light Company and defeat them. The British, unlike the French, attacked in line. The French had a taste for attacking in columns, great blocks of men driven like battering rams at the enemy line, columns propelled by the serried drummers in their midst, marching beneath the proud eagle standards that had conquered Europe, but that was not the way of Wellington’s army. The two red-coated Battalions made one line, two ranks deep, and it marched forward, its ranks wavering because of the uneven ground, marching towards the French defensive line, three ranks deep, broken only where the field guns waited to fire.

Sharpe’s Company was ahead of the British line.

His job was simple enough. His men had to weaken the enemy line before the British attack crashed home. They would do it by sniping a’t the officers, at the gunners, worrying the morale of the Frenchmen, and to stop them doing it, the French had sent out their own skirmishers. Sharpe could see them clearly, blue-jacketed men with white crossbelts and red shoulders, men who ran forward in pairs and waited for the Light Company. Sweat trickled down Sharpe’s spine.

His Light Company was outnumbered by enemy skirmishers, but he had an advantage denied the French. Most of Sharpe’s men, like the enemy, carried muskets that, though quick to load and fire, were inaccurate except at point blank range. Yet Sharpe also had his green-jacketed Riflemen, the killers at long range, whose slow-loading Baker Rifles would dominate this fight. The grass-stalks were thick, pulling at his boots, brushing against the metal scabbard heavy at his side. He looked to his right and saw Patrick Harper walking as easily as if he was strolling in the hills of his beloved Donegal. The Sergeant, far from looking at the French, was staring over their heads at a hawk. Harper was fascinated by birds.

The French gunners, judging their range, put fire to the priming tubes and the two field guns hammered back on their trails, pulsed smoke in a filthy cloud and crashed their shot at the opposing hillside. The gunners had deliberately aimed short for a cannon-ball could do more damage if it bounced waist high amongst the enemy. They called that bounce a ‘graze’ and Sharpe watched it, spewing grass, dirt and stones on its passage. The ball grazed among his men and slammed up the hill to graze again before it struck a file of the South Essex behind.

“Close up! Close up!” Sharpe could hear the Sergeants shouting.

The noise would start now. Shots, shouts, screams. Sharpe ignored it. He heard the guns, but he watched only his enemy. A Voltigeur officer, a sabre at his side, was spreading his men out and pointing towards Sharpe. Sharpe grinned. “Dan?”

“Sir?” Hagman sounded cheerful.

“You see that bastard?”

“I’ll get him, sir!” The French officer was as good as dead already. It was always the same. Look for the leaders, officers or men, and kill them first. After that the enemy would waver.

Richard Sharpe was good at this. He had been doing it for nineteen years, his whole adult life, more, indeed, than half his life, and he wondered if he would ever be good for anything else. Could he make things with his hands? Could he earn a living by growing things, or was he just this? A killer on a battlefield, legitimised by war for which, he knew, he had a talent. He was judging the distance between the skirmishers, picking his moment, but part of his mind worried about the coming of peace. Could he soldier in peacetime? Was he to lead his men against hunger-rioters in England or against Harper’s countrymen in their ravaged island? Yet there was no sign of this war ending. It had lasted his lifetime, Britain against France, and he wondered if it would last the lifetime of his little daughter, Antonia, of whom he saw so little. Twenty seconds to go.

The guns were at their rhythm now, the roundshot slamming at the attackers and in a few seconds they would change to canister to spray the hillside with death. Harper’s job was to stop that.

Ten seconds Sharpe guessed, and he saw a Frenchman kneel and bring his musket into his shoulder. The musket was aimed at Sharpe, but the range was too great to cause worry. For a second Sharpe thought of poor Ensign McDonald who had so wanted to distinguish himself in the skirmish line. Damn Leroux.

Five seconds, and Sharpe could see his opposing Captain looking nervously left and right. The smoke from the cannons was thickening, the noise hammering at Sharpe’s eardrums. “Now!”

He had lost count of the number of times he had done this.

“Go! Go! Go!”

This was rehearsed. The Light Company broke into a run, the last thing the enemy expected, and they went left and right, confusing their enemy’s aim, and they closed the range to put pressure on the enemy’s nerve. The Riflemen stopped first, wicked guns at their shoulders, and Sharpe heard the first crack which spun the enemy officer backwards, hands up, blood spraying suddenly, and then Sharpe was on his knee, his own rifle at his shoulder, and he saw the puff of smoke where the man had been who was aiming for him and he knew the musket ball had gone wide. Sharpe aimed up the hill. He looked for the enemy Colonel, saw him on his horse, aimed slowly, squeezed, and grinned as he glimpsed the Frenchman fall back from the saddle. That would be Sharpe’s last shot in this battle. Now he would fight his men as a weapon.

More rifles cracked, firing into the smudge of smoke about the nearest gun. If the gunners could be killed, that was good, but at the least the bullets whistling about their weapon would slow their fire and spare the South Essex some of the ghastly canister.

“Sergeant Huckfield! Watch left!”

“Sir!”

The men fought in pairs. One man fired while the other loaded, and both sought targets for each other. Sharpe could see four enemy down, two of them crawling backwards, and he saw that unwounded men were hurrying to help the wounded. That was good. When the uninjured went to help their comrades it meant they were looking for an excuse to leave the battle.

Sharpe’s muskets were firing fast now and his men were going forward, paces at a time, and the enemy were going backwards. The field gun opposite the South Essex had slowed down and Sharpe smiled because he had nothing to do. His men were fighting as he expected them to fight, using their intelligence, pushing the enemy back, and Sharpe looked behind to see where the main Battalion was.

The South Essex were fifty yards behind, coming steadily forward, and on their muskets were bayonets, bright in the sun, and behind them, on the ridge slope, were the bodies broken by the cannon.

“Rifles! Go for the main line! Kill the officers!”

Make widows on this field! Kill the officers, crumble the enemy morale, and Sharpe saw Hagman aim, fire, and the other Riflemen followed. Lieutenant Price was directing the musket fire, keeping the enemy skirmishers pinned back and releasing the Rifles to fire above their heads. Sharpe felt a surge of pride in his men. They were good, so good, and they were showing the spectators just how a Light Company should fight. He laughed aloud.

They were at the foot of the slope now, the enemy Light troops driven back towards their own line, and in a few seconds the South Essex would catch up with their Light Company. They had a hundred yards to go into the attack.

Sharpe pulled his whistle from its holster, waited a few seconds, then blasted out the signal to form company. He heard the Sergeants repeat the signal, watched his men come running towards him for now their skirmishing task was done. Now they would form up on the left of the attacking line and go in like the other Companies. The men sprinted towards him, tugging out bayonets, and he clapped them on the shoulders, said they had done well. Then the Company was formed, marching, and they were climbing the knoll over the blood of their enemies.

The field gun had stopped firing. The smoke was drifting clear.

Sharpe walked in front of his men. The great sword scraped on the scabbard throat as it came clear.

The French line levelled their muskets.

Boots swished through the grass. It was hot. The powder smoke stung men’s nostrils.

“For what we’re about to receive,” a voice said.

“Quiet in the ranks! Close up!”

“Keep your dressing, Mellors! What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get in line, you useless bastard!”

Boots in the grass, the French line seeming to take a quarter turn to the right as the muskets go back into the shoulders. The muzzles, even at eighty yards, look huge.

“Get your bayonet up, Smith! You’re not ploughing the bloody field!”

Sharpe listened to the Sergeants.

“Steady, lads, steady!”

The French officers had their swords raised. The cannon smoke had cleared now and Sharpe could see that the field gun had gone. It had been taken back, away from the infantry.

“Take it like men, lads!”

Seventy yards and the French swords swept down and Sharpe knew they had fired too soon. The smoke rippled from the hundreds of muskets, the sound was like the falling of giant stakes, and the air was thick with the thrumming of the balls.

The attacking line was jerked by the balls. Some men fell backwards, some stumbled, most kept stolidly on. Sharpe knew the enemy would be frantically reloading, fumbling with cartridges and ramrods, and he instinctively quickened his pace so that the South Essex might close the gap before the enemy had recharged their weapons. The other officers hurried too, and the attacking line began to lose its cohesion. The Sergeants yelled. “It’s not a sodding steeplechase! Watch your dressing!”

Fifty yards, forty, and Major Leroy, whose voice was twice as loud as Forrest’s, bellowed at the South Essex to halt.

Sharpe could see some enemy muskets being rammed. The Frenchmen were looking nervously at their enemy so close.

Leroy filled his lungs.

“Level your muskets!”

The Light Company alone was not loaded. The other companies levelled their muskets and beneath each muzzle the seventeen inch bayonet pointed towards the French.

“Fire!”

“And charge! Come on!”

The crash of that volley, the smoke, and then the redcoats were released from the Sergeants’ discipline and they were free to take the blades up the hill to savage the enemy who had been shattered by the close volley.

“Kill the bastards. Go on! Get in with them!” And the cheer carried them up the slope, screaming mad, wanting only to get at the men who had threatened them during the long approach march, and Sharpe ran ahead of his men with his long sword ready.

“Halt! Form up! Hurry!”

The enemy had gone. They had fled the bayonets as Sharpe had guessed they would. The enemy Battalions were running full tilt back towards the main army, and the redcoats were left holding the small knoll which bore the dead and wounded of their enemy. The looting had begun already, practised hands stripping the casualties of clothes and money. Sharpe sheathed his unblooded sword. It had been well done, but now he wondered what was next. Twelve hundred British troops held the small hill, the only British troops on a plain that was peopled with more than fifty thousand Frenchmen. That was not his concern. He settled down to wait.

“They’ve run away!” La Marquesa sounded disappointed.

Lord Spears grinned. “That was only a ten guinea battle, my dear. For two hundred you get the whole spectacle; slaughter, dismemberment, pillage, and even a little rape.”

“Is that where you come in, Jack?”

Spears laughed. “I’ve waited so long for that invitation, Helena.”

“You’ll have to wait a little longer, dear.” She smiled at him. “Was that Richard Sharpe?”

“It was. A genuine hero, and all for ten guineas.”

“Which I doubt I’ll ever see. Is he truly a hero?” Her huge eyes were fixed on Spears.

“Good Lord, yes! Absolutely genuine. The poor fool must have a death wish. He took an Eagle, he was first into Badajoz, and there’s a rumour he blew up Almeida.”

“How delicious.” She opened her fan. “You’re a little jealous of him, aren’t you?”

He laughed, because the accusation was not true. “I wish to have a long, long life, Helena, and die in the bed of someone very young and breathtakingly beautiful.”

She smiled. Her teeth were unusually white. “I rather want to meet a real hero, Jack. Persuade him to come to the Palacio.”

Spears twisted in his saddle, grimacing suddenly because the arm in its sling hurt. “You feel like slumming, Helena?”

She smiled. “If I do, Jack, I’ll come to you for guidance. Just bring him to me.”

He grinned and saluted. “Yes, Ma’am.”

The French would not be goaded into battle. They made no attempt to throw the British off the knoll. Marmont could not see beyond the great ridge and he feared, sensibly, to attack Wellington in a position of the Englishman’s choosing.

Smoke drifted from the knoll, dissipating into shimmering heat over the grass. Men lay on the ground and drank brackish warm water from their canteens. A few desultory fires burned from the musket fire, but no-one moved to stamp them out. Some men slept.

“Is that it?” Lieutenant Price frowned towards the French.

“You want more, Harry?” Sharpe grinned at his Lieutenant.

“I sort of expected more.” Price laughed and turned round to look at the ridge. A staff officer was riding his horse recklessly down the slope. “Here comes a fancy boy.”

“We’re probably being pulled back.”

Harper gave a massive yawn. “Perhaps they’re offering us free entrance to the staffbrothel tonight.”

“Isabella would kill you, Harps!” Price laughed at the thought. “You should be unattached, like me.”

“It’s the pox, sir. I couldn’t live with it.”

“And I can’t live without it. Hello!” Price frowned because the staff officer, instead of riding towards the Colours where the Battalion’s commanding officer would be found, was aiming straight for the Light Company. “We’ve got a visitor, sir.”

Sharpe walked to meet the staff officer who called out when he was still thirty yards away. “Captain Sharpe?”

“Yes!”

“You’re wanted at Headquarters. Now! Do you have a horse?”

“No.”

The young man frowned at the reply and Sharpe knew he was considering yielding up his own horse to expedite the General’s orders. The consideration did not last long in the face of the steep uphill climb. The staff officer smiled. “You’ll have to walk! Quick as you can, please.”

Sharpe smiled at him. “Bastard. Harry?”

“Sir?”

“Take over! Tell the Major I’ve been called to see the General!”

“Aye aye, sir! Give him my best wishes!”

Sharpe walked away from the Company, between the small fires, and up the hillside that was littered with the torn cartridge papers of his skirmishers. Leroux. It had to be Leroux who was pulling Sharpe back towards the city. Leroux, his enemy, and the man who possessed the sword Sharpe wanted. He smiled..He would have it yet.

CHAPTER 6

Wellington was angry, the officers about him nervous of his irritability. They watched Sharpe walk up to the General and salute.

Wellington scowled from the saddle. “By God, you took your time, Mr. Sharpe.”

“I came as fast as I could, my lord.”

“Dammit! Don’t you have a horse?”

“I’m an infantryman, sir.” It was an insolent reply, one that made the aristocratic aides-de-camp that Wellington liked look sharply at the dishevelled, hot Rifleman with the scarred face and battered weapons. Sharpe was not worried. He knew his man. He had saved the General’s life in India and ever since there had been a strange bond between them. The bond was not of friendship, never that, but a bond of need. Sharpe needed a patron, however remote, and Wellington sometimes had reluctant need of a ruthless and efficient soldier. Each man had a respect for the other. The General looked sourly at Sharpe. “So they didn’t fight?”

“No, sir.”

“God damn his French soul.” He was talking of Marshal Marmont. “They march all this bloody way just to pose for us? God damn them! So you met Leroux?” He asked the question in exactly the same tone in which he had damned the French.

“Yes, my lord.”

“You’d recognise him again?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Good.” Wellington sounded far from pleased. “He’s not to escape from us, d’you understand? You’re to capture him. Understand?”

Sharpe understood. He would be going back to Salamanca and his job, suddenly, was to trap the pale-eyed French Colonel who even had Wellington worried. “I understand, sir.”

“Thank God somebody does.” The General snapped. “I’m putting you under Major Hogan’s command. He seems to have the knack of making you to the line, God knows how. Good day, Mr. Sharpe.”

“My lord?” Sharpe raised his voice for the General was already wheeling away.

“What is it?”

“I have a whole Company that would recognise him, sir.”

“You do, do you?” Wellington’s bad mood had driven him into clumsy sarcasm. “You want me to strip the South Essex of a Light Company just to make your life easier?”

“There are three forts, my lord, a long perimeter, and one man can’t have eyes everywhere.”

“Why not? They expect it of me.” Wellington laughed, breaking his bad mood with an extraordinary suddenness. “All right, Sharpe, you can have them. But don’t you lose him. Understand? You will not lose him.” The blue eyes conveyed the message.

“I won’t lose him, sir.”

Wellington half smiled. “He’s all yours, Hogan. Gentlemen!”

The staff officers trotted obediently after the General, leaving Hogan alone with Sharpe.

The Irishman laughed quietly. “You have a deep respect for senior officers, Richard, it’s what makes you into such a great soldier.”

“I’d have been here sooner if that bastard had lent me his horse.”

“He probably paid two hundred guineas for it. He reckons it’s worth more than you are. On the other hand that nag cost ten pounds, and you can borrow it.” Hogan was pointing towards his servant who was leading a spare horse towards them. Hogan had anticipated Sharpe arriving on foot and he waited as the Rifleman climbed clumsily into the saddle. “I’m sorry about the panic, Richard.”

“Is there a panic?”

“God, yes. Your piece of paper started it.”

Sharpe hated riding. He liked to be in control of his destiny, but horses seemed not to share that wish. He gingerly urged it forward, hoping it would keep pace with Hogan’s walking animal and, somehow, he managed to stay abreast. “The list?”

“Didn’t it look familiar?”

“Familiar?” Sharpe frowned. He could only remember a list of Spanish names with sums of money beside them. “No.”

Hogan glanced behind to make sure his servant was out of earshot. “It was in my handwriting, Richard.”

“Yours? Good God!” Sharpe’s hands fumbled with the rein while his right boot had come out of the stirrup. He never understood how other people made riding look easy. “How in hell’s name did Leroux get a list in your handwriting?”

“Now there’s a question to cheer up a dull morning. How in hell’s name did he? Horse dealers!” He said the last words scornfully, as if Sharpe had been at fault.

The Rifleman had managed to get his foot back into the stirrup. “So what was it?”

“We have informants, yes? Hundreds of them. Almost every priest, doctor, mayor, shoemaker, blacksmith and anyone else you care to mention sends us snippets of news about the French. Marmont can’t break wind without ten messages telling us. Some of them, Richard, are very good messages indeed, and some of them cost us money.” Hogan paused as they passed a battery of artillery. He returned a Lieutenant’s salute, then looked back at Sharpe. “Most of them do it out of patriotism, but a few need money to keep their loyalty intact. That list, Richard, was my list of payments for the month of April.” Hogan looked and sounded sour. “It means, Richard, that someone in our headquarters is working for the French, for Leroux. God knows who! We’ve got cooks, washerwomen, grooms, clerks, servants, sentries, anyone! God! I thought I’d just misplaced that list, but no.”

“So?”

“So? So Leroux has worked his way through that list. He’s killed most of them in ways that are pretty horrid, and that’s bad enough, but the really bad news is yet to come. One man on that list, a priest, just happened to know something that I’d rather he hadn’t known. And now, I think, Leroux knows it.”

Sharpe said nothing. His horse was ambling happily enough, going westward on the track that led behind the ridge. He would let Hogan tell his unhappy tale at his own pace.

The Irish Major wiped sweat from his face. “Leroux, Richard, is damned close to hurting us really badly. We can afford to lose a few priests and mayors, but that’s not what Leroux wants. We can afford to lose Colquhoun Grant, but that isn’t what Leroux came here to do either. There’s one person, Richard, we can’t afford to lose. That’s the person Leroux came to get.”

Sharpe frowned. “Wellington?”

“Him too, maybe, but no. Not Wellington.” Hogan slapped irritably at a fly. “This is the bit I shouldn’t tell you, Richard, but I’ll tell you a little of it, just enough so you know how important it is for you to stop that bastard getting out of the forts.” He paused again, collecting his thoughts. “I told you we have informants throughout Spain. They’re useful, God knows they’re useful, but we have informants of much more value than that. We have men and women in Italy, in Germany, in France, in Paris itself! People who hate Bonaparte and want to help us, and they do. A regiment of Lancers leaves Milan and we know it within two weeks, and we know where they’re going and how good their horses are, and even the name of their Colonel’s mistress. If Bonaparte bawls out a General, we know about it, if he asks for a map of Patagonia we hear about it. Sometimes I think we know more about Bonaparte’s empire than he does, and all, Richard, because of one person who just happens to live in Salamanca. And that person, Richard, is the person Leroux has come to find. And once he’s found them, he’ll torture them, he’ll find out all the names of the correspondents throughout Europe, and suddenly we’ll be blind.”

Sharpe knew better than to ask who the person was. He waited.

Hogan smiled wryly. “You want to know who it is? Well, I won’t tell you. I know, Wellington knows, and a few Spaniards know because they’re responsible for passing the messages to Salamanca.”

“The priest knew?”

“Aye. The priest on my list knew, and now, God rest his soul, he’s dead. Most of the messengers don’t know the real name, they just know the codename. El Mirador.”

“El Mirador.” Sharpe repeated the words.

“Right. El Mirador, the best damned spy in Britain’s service, and our job is to stop Leroux finding El Mirador. And the easiest way to do that, Richard, is for you to stop Leroux. He’ll try and escape, I know that, and I can guess when he’ll do it.”

“When?”

“During our attack on the forts. He can’t do it at any other time. We’ve got those forts surrounded, but in the turmoil of a fight, Richard, he’ll have his plans ready. Stop him!”

That’s all? Stop him? Capture him?“

“That’s all, but don’t underestimate him. Capture him and give him to me and I promise you Colonel Leroux will not see daylight again till this war’s over. We’ll lock him up so tight he’ll wish he hadn’t been born.”

Sharpe thought about it. It would not be so difficult. The Sixth Division had sealed off the forts, and even in an attack the cordon of men would still ring the wasteland. All that would be left was for Sharpe, or one of his Company, to recognise Leroux among the prisoners. He grinned at Hogan, wanting to cheer him up. “Consider it done.”

“If you’re doing it, Richard, I will.” It was a nice compliment.

They had ridden close to the hill on which the spectators had gathered and Sharpe looked to his right to see a grinning figure coming towards them on a fiery, well-ridden horse. Even one-handed Lord Spears was a finer horseman than Sharpe could hope to be. His Lordship was in high spirits.

“Michael Hogan! By the Good Lord! You’re looking dull as a parson, sir! Where are your Irish spirits? Your carefree, devil-may-care attitude to life’s daily toil?”

Hogan looked with some fondness at the cavalryman. “Jack! How’s the arm?”

“Totally mended, sir. As good as the day it was born. I’m keeping it in a sling so you won’t send me back to work. Richard Sharpe! I watched your Company at work. They were hungry!”

“They’re good.”

“And you’re both invited to a pique-nique. Now.” He grinned at them.

“A what?” Hogan frowned.

“A pique-nique. It’s a French word, but I suppose we’ll all be using it soon. For you peasants who don’t speak French it means a simple, light repast taken in the open air. We’ve got chicken, ham, spiced sausages, some delicious cake, and best of all some wine. We, of course, are myself and La Marquesa de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba. You’re both specifically invited.”

Hogan smiled. It seemed that Sharpe accepting the responsibility for Leroux had lifted a weight from his shoulders. “La Marquesa! It’s time I rubbed shoulders with the aristocracy!”

“What about me?” Spears looked aggrieved. “Am I not noble enough for you? Good Lord! When my ancestors ate the forbidden fruit in Eden they insisted on having it served on a silver platter. You’re coming?” This last he addressed to Sharpe.

Sharpe shrugged. Hogan was insisting on going, so Sharpe was forced to follow, and though part of him yearned to see La Marquesa again, another, greater part of him was scared of the encounter. He hated being tempted by things he could not have, and he could feel his mood becoming surly as he climbed the hill behind Hogan and Spears.

La Marquesa watched them come. She raised a languid hand in greeting. “Captain Sharpe! You’ve at last accepted one of my invitations!”

“I’m with Major Hogan, Ma’am.” The instant he said it, he regretted it. He had been trying to say that he had not come willingly, that he was not her slave, but his words made it sound as though he had need to be forced into her company. She smiled.

“I owe Major Hogan my thanks.” She turned her lavish beauty onto the Irishman. “We’ve met, Major.”

“Indeed we have, Ma’am. At Ciudad Rodrigo, I remember.”

“So do I, you were most charming.”

“The Irish usually are, Ma’am.”

“Such a pity the English haven’t learned from their neighbours.” She looked at Sharpe who sat, miserable, on his uncomfortable horse. She smiled again at Hogan. “You’re well?”

“Indeed, Ma’am, and thank you, Ma’am. Yourself? Your husband?”

“My husband, ah!” She fanned her face. “Poor Luis is in South America, suppressing one of our Colonial rebellions. It seems so silly. You’re here to liberate our country while Luis is busy doing the opposite somewhere else.” She laughed, then looked again at Sharpe. “My husband, Captain Sharpe, is a soldier, like you.”

“Indeed, Ma’am?”

“Well not quite like you. He’s much older, much fatter, and he dresses much better. He’s also a General, so perhaps he’s not quite like you.” She patted the leather seat of the barouche between herself and her perspiring chaperone. “I have some wine, Captain, won’t you join me?”

“I’m quite comfortable, Ma’am.”

“You don’t look it, but if you insist.” She smiled. She was, as he remembered, dazzlingly beautiful. She was a dream, something of exquisite fineness, someone of whom Sharpe was resentful for he found her beauty overwhelming. She still smiled at him. “Jack tells me you’re a true hero, Captain Sharpe.”

“Not at all, Ma’am.” He was wondering if he should go and fetch his Company, and make his excuses to Major Forrest who would be hugely unhappy at losing his Light troops.

Lord Spears guffawed with laughter. “Not a hero! Listen to him! I love it!”

Sharpe frowned, embarrassed, and looked to Hogan for help. The Irishman grinned at him. “You took an Eagle, Richard.”

“With Harper, sir.”

“Oh God! The modest hero!” Lord Spears was enjoying himself. He imitated Sharpe’s reluctant voice. “It was all an accident. Eagle just dropped off its staff, straight into my hands. I was picking wild flowers at the time. Then I lost my way at Badajoz. Thought I was going to church parade and just happened to climb this breach. Very awkward.” Spears laughed. “God damn it, Richard! You even saved the Peer’s life!”

“Arthur’s life?” La Marquesa asked. She looked with interest at Sharpe. “When? How?”

“The Battle of Assaye, Ma’am.”

“Battle of Assaye! What’s that? Where was it?”

“India, Ma’am.”

“So what happened?”

“His horse was piked, Ma’am. I happened to be there.”

“Oh, God help us!” Spears’ smile was friendly. “He only fought off thousands of bloody heathens and says he happened to be there.”

Sharpe’s embarrassment was acute. He looked at Hogan. “Should I fetch my Company, sir?”

“No, Richard, you should not. It can wait. I’m thirsty, you’re thirsty, and her Ladyship is kindly offering wine.” He bowed to La Marquesa. “With your permission, Ma’am?” He held his hand out for the bottle that the chaperone held.

“No, Major! Jack will do it. He has the manners of a servant, don’t you Jack?”

“I’m a slave to you, Helena.” Spears took the bottle happily, while Hogan brought Sharpe a glass. Sharpe’s horse had moved some feet away from the carriage in search of greener grass and Sharpe was glad to be out of La Marquesa’s earshot. He drank the wine quickly, finding himself to be parched, and discovered Hogan at his elbow. The Irishman smiled sympathetically.

“She’s got you in full retreat, Richard. What’s the matter?”

“It’s not my place, sir, is it? That’s my place.” He nodded down the hill to where the South Essex relaxed on their knoll. The French were not moving.

“She’s just a woman, trying to be friendly.”

“Yes.” Sharpe thought of his wife, the dark haired beauty who would despise this aristocratic luxury. He glanced at La Marquesa. “Why does she speak such good English?”

“Helena?” Even Hogan, Sharpe noted, seemed to know her well enough to use her Christian name. “She’s half English. Spanish father, English mother, and raised in France.” Hogan drank his own wine. “Her parents were killed in the Terror, very nasty, and Helena managed to escape to an Uncle in Spain, in Saragossa. Then she married the Marques de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba, and became as rich as the hills. Houses all over Spain, a couple of castles, and a very good friend to us, Richard.”

“What are you talking about?” Her voice carried to them and Hogan turned his horse.

“Business, Ma’am, just business.”

“This is a pique-nique, not an Officers’ Mess. Come here!”

She made Spears give Sharpe more wine that he drank just as fast as the first glass. The crystal goblet was ridiculously small.

“You’re thirsty, Captain?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“I have plenty of bottles. Some chicken?”

“No, Ma’am.”

She sighed. “You’re so hard to please, Captain. Ah! There’s Arthur!”

Wellington was, indeed, returning westward along the track behind the ridge.

Spears twisted in his saddle to look at the General. “Ten to one he comes up here to see you, Helena?”

“I’d be surprised if he didn’t.”

“Sharpe!” Spears grinned at him. “Two guineas he won’t come?”

“I don’t gamble.”

“I do! Christ! Half the bloody estate’s gone.”

“Half of it?” La Marquesa laughed. “All of it, Jack. All of it, and a lot more. What will you leave your heir?”

“I’m not married, Helena, thus none of my bastards can be described as an heir.” He blew her a kiss. “If only your dear husband would die I would be on my knees to you. I think we’d make a handsome couple.”

“And how long would my fortune last?”

“Your beauty is your fortune, Helena, and that is safe for ever.”

“How pretty, Jack, and how untrue.”

“The words were said by Captain Sharpe, my dear, I just repeated them.”

The huge blue eyes looked at Sharpe. “How pretty, Captain Sharpe.”

He was blushing because of Spears’ lie and he hid it by wrenching the reins harshly about and staring at the quiescent French. Lord Spears followed him and spoke softly. “You fancy her, don’t you?”

“She’s a beautiful woman.”

“My dear Sharpe.” Spears leaned over and led the Rifleman’s horse forward a few paces. “If you want her, try her.” He laughed. “Don’t worry about me. She won’t look at me. She’s very discreet, our Helena, and she’s not going to endure Jack Spears boasting round the city that he tucked his feet in her bed. You should mount an attack, Sharpe!”

Sharpe was angry. “You mean lovers from the servant’s hall keep quiet, because they’re so grateful?”

“Your words, friend, not mine.”

“True.”

“And if you must know, you may be right.” Spears was still friendly, but his words were low and forceful. “Some people think the meat in the servant’s hall is better than the thin stuff served in the banquet hall.”

Sharpe looked at the handsome face. “La Marquesa?”

“She gets what she wants, you get what I want.” He grinned. “I’m doing you a favour.”

“I’m married.”

“God help me! Do you say your prayers every night?” Spears laughed aloud, then turned for hoofbeats presaged Wellington’s arrival at the head of his staff. The General reined in, doffed his bicorne hat, then cast a cold glance at Spears and Sharpe.

“You’re well escorted, Helena!”

“Dear Arthur!” She offered him her hand. “You have disappointed me!”

“I? How?”

“I came for a battle!”

“So did we all. If you have any complaints you must address them to Marmont. The fellow absolutely refuses to attack!”

She pouted at him. “But I so hoped to see a battle!”

“You will, you will.” He patted his horse’s neck. „I’ll lay you odds that the French will sneak away tonight. I gave them their chance and they turned it down, so tomorrow I’ll take those forts.“

“The forts! I can watch from the Palacio!”

“Then pray Marmont sneaks away tonight, Helena, for if he does I’ll lay on a full assault for you. All the battle you could wish!”

She clapped her hands. “Then I will give a reception tomorrow night. To celebrate your victory. You’ll come?”

“To celebrate my victory?” Wellington seemed positively skittish in her presence. “Of course I’ll come!”

She waved a hand round all the horsemen gathered about the elegant barouche. “You must all come! Even you, Captain Sharpe! You must come!”

Wellington’s eyes met Sharpe. The General gave a thin smile. “Captain Sharpe will be busy tomorrow night.”

“Then he will come when his business is finished. We shall dance till dawn, Captain.”

Sharpe felt, though he did not know if it was meant, a subtle mockery in the eyes that watched him. Tomorrow. Tomorrow he would face Leroux, tomorrow he would fight that sword, and Sharpe felt the desire to fight. He would beat Leroux, this Colonel who had put a chill of fear into the British, he would face him, fight him, and he would drag him captive from the wasteland. Tomorrow he would fight, and these foppish aristocrats would watch from La Marquesa’s Palacio and suddenly Sharpe knew what reward he wanted for facing Colonel Philippe Leroux. Not just the sword. He would have that anyway as the spoils of war, but something else. He would have the woman. He smiled at her for the first time, and nodded. “Tomorrow.”

CHAPTER 7

Tired cavalry scouts came back to the city in the early Tuesday hours. Marmont’s army had gone north in the night. The French had abandoned the garrison of the forts in the city, they would bide their time now and hope that at some point in the summer they would catch Wellington flat-footed and fight a battle more on their own terms.

The fortresses served no purpose now for Wellington. They had failed to bring Marmont to battle for their rescue, and they stopped his supply trains using the long Roman bridge, so the fortresses would be destroyed. La Marquesa would get her battle, and Sharpe would have to seek Leroux among the prisoners.

If there were prisoners. It had seemed a light thing for the General to promise La Marquesa an assault of the three buildings, but Sharpe could see that the defenders would not easily give in. He had stared long and hard at the buildings, marooned in their waste ground, and the more he looked, the less he liked.

The waste ground was split by a deep gorge that ran southwards towards the river. On the right of the gorge was the largest of the French forts, the San Vincente, while to the left were the forts of La Merced and San Cayetano. An attack on any one of the three forts would be savaged by gunfire from the others.

The three buildings had been convents until the French evicted the nuns and turned this corner of the city into a stronghold. For nearly a week now the convents had been under fire from British guns, yet the artillery had done remarkably little damage. The French had prepared the buildings well.

Out of the levelled houses that had surrounded the convents they had made a crude glacis that bounced the round-shot up and over the defensive works. They had buttressed walls behind the deep ditch which surrounded each convent and over their gun emplacements and troop shelters they had made huge, thick roofs. Each roof was like a massive box filled with earth, designed to soak up the British howitzer shells that fell with fluttering smoke from the sky. The French garrisons were surrounded, trapped, but it would be hard for the British to break in.

Sharpe paraded his Company, not entirely by chance, outside the Palacio Casares. The huge gates stood open, revealing the central courtyard in the middle of which a fountain splashed into a raised pool. The courtyard was paved, filled with flowers in ornate tubs, and Sharpe stared through the shadows of the archway at the great door above the formal steps. The house seemed deserted. Thickly woven straw mats had been lowered over the windows, blotting the sun, and the water in the fountain was the only sign of movement in the great, rich house.

Above the gateway, on the tall, blank, outer wall, the coat of arms that decorated the barouche door was carved in pale gold stone. Above that, high above, Sharpe could see plants growing at the wall’s top, evidence perhaps of a balcony or even roof garden and it was there, he knew, that La Marquesa would get her view, above the rooftops, of the wasteland and the forts. Not that she would see much. The attack would be made at last light. Sharpe would have preferred a night attack, but Wellington distrusted them, remembering the closeness of disaster to success that the night had brought in Seringapatam so long ago.

He turned away from the house, to his Company, and he knew that he had become obsessed with this woman. It seemed to him to be ridiculous, to be an ambition of impossible proportions, but now he was snagged on it. His job was to kill Leroux, to protect the unknown figure of El Mirador, yet his mind stayed with La Marquesa.

“Sir?” Harper came to formal attention. “Company ready for inspection, sir!”

“Lieutenant Price!”

“Sir?”

“Weapons, please.” Sharpe trusted his men. None would go into battle with unserviceable weapons. Price could look at them, tug at screwed flints, feel bayonet edges, but he would find nothing. Sharpe could hear the assault troops being paraded. They were all Light troops, the best of their Battalions, and they were assembling way back from the wasteland, hoping that the sudden eruption of the attack would take the French by surprise. The siege guns still fired. Four eighteen pounders had been dragged across the fords and brought to the city and the huge, iron guns hammered at the forts.

“Listen to me.” He spoke quietly. “We’re not here for heroics. It’s not our job to capture the forts, understand?” They nodded. Some grinned. “The other Light companies do that. Our job is to find one man, the man we captured. So we stay behind the attack. If we can we move to one side, out of the firing line. I don’t want casualties. Keep your heads down. It’s skirmish order all the way. If we capture the forts, then our job is to search the prisoners. Normal squads. I don’t want anyone going off on their own. There’s no bloody reward so don’t go in for heroics. And remember. This bastard killed young McDonald and he killed Colonel Windham. He’s dangerous. If you find him, or if you think you’ve found him, tie the sod up. And I’m paying ten guineas for his sword.”

“What if it’s worth more, sir?” It was Batten’s voice; the whining, grumbling, never satisfied Batten. Harper started towards him, but Sharpe held up a hand.

“It is worth more, Batten, probably twenty times more, but if you sell it to anyone else but me I’ll have you digging latrines for the rest of the bloody war. Clear?”

The others grinned. A private soldier could hardly expect to sell a valuable sword on the open market. He would be accused of stealing it, and the penalty for theft could be hanging. Some Sergeants would pay more, but not much more, and make their profit in Lisbon. Ten guineas was a big sum, more than a year’s wages after deductions and the Company knew it was a fair offer. Sharpe raised his voice again. “No bayonets. Load, but flints down. We don’t want them knowing we’re coming. One musket banging off and they’ll be giving us canister for supper.” He nodded at Harper. “Right turn, you know where we’re going.”

Harper kept his voice low. “Right turn!”

“Captain Sharpe!” It was Major Hogan, hurrying towards the main battery where the eighteen pounders sounded.

“Sir!” Sharpe snapped to attention, saluted. In front of the Company they were formal, correct.

“Good luck!” Hogan grinned at the men. They knew him well, the Riflemen had spent weeks with him before they were forcibly joined to the South Essex, the redcoats remembered him from Badajoz or nights when he had come to seek Sharpe’s companionship. The Irish Major looked at Sharpe, turned his back to the men, and made a resigned gesture. “Good luck to you.”

“Not good?”

“No.” Hogan sniffed. “Some idiot messed up the ammunition supply. We’ve got about fifteen rounds for each gun! What the hell use is that?”

Sharpe knew he meant the big eighteen pounders. “What about the howitzers?”

Hogan had taken out his snuff box and Sharpe waited while the Major inhaled his usual huge pinch. He sneezed. “God and his Angels!” He sneezed again. “Bloody howitzers! They’re not denting the bloody place! A hundred and sixty rounds for six guns. It’s no way to run a war!”

“You’re not hopeful.”

“Hopeful?” Hogan waited as an eighteen pounder fired one of its precious, dwindling ammunition stock. “No. But we’ve persuaded the Peer to attack just the centre fort. We’re firing at that.”

“The San Cayetano?”

Hogan nodded. “If we can grab that, then we can build our own batteries there and hammer the others.” He shrugged. “Surprise is everything, Richard. If they don’t expect us…‘ He shrugged again.

“Leroux may not be in the San Cayetano.”

“He probably isn’t. He’s probably in the big one. But you never know. They may all surrender if the middle one falls.”

Sharpe reflected that it could be a long night. If the other forts did decide that resistance was futile then the surrender negotiations could take hours. There were, he guessed, a thousand men in the three garrisons and they would be difficult to search in the darkness. He glanced ruefully at the Palacio Casares behind him. There was a chance, a good chance, that he would never manage to arrive on time. Hogan caught the glance. “You invited?”

“To the celebration? Yes.”

“So’s the whole damned town. I just hope there’s something to celebrate.”

Sharpe grinned. “We’ll surprise them.” He looked round to see his Company being marched into an alleyway and he gestured at their backs. “I must go.”

Three hundred and fifty men, the Light Companies of two brigades of the Sixth Division, were crammed into a street that ran behind the houses facing the wasteland. It was the closest cover to the centre fort, the San Cayetano, but no one, apart from a handful of officers, was allowed to look at the ground they had to cover. Surprise was everything. There were twenty ladders, each surrounded by its carrying party, and they would be the first to rush the two hundred yards towards the fort’s ditch. They would jump into the excavation and then put the ladders against the palisade.

Sharpe could hear the crack of rifles, startling the swallows who flew in the dusk. Riflemen had surrounded the forts for the six days since the army had entered Salamanca, living uncomfortably in shallow pits of the waste ground, sniping at the French embrasures. The evening sounded normal. The French could not have detected anything unusual in the rhythm of the siege. The big guns fired intermittently, the rifles cracked, and as the light faded so did the sound of the firing. It would seem, Sharpe hoped, a peaceful night in the three forts built on the hill above the slow-sliding river Tormes.

A big Sergeant with a scarred face tugged at a rung of one of the ladders. It bent, fractured, and the Sergeant spat moodily against a wall. “Bloody green wood!”

Harper was loading his seven-barrelled gun, carefully measuring powder from his Rifleman’s horn. He grinned up at Sharpe. “Met that Irish priest while you were chatting with the Major, sir. Wished us luck.”

“Curtis? How the hell does he know? I thought this was secret.”

Harper shrugged, then tapped the butt of the huge gun on the ground. “Probably saw this lot march in, sir.” He jerked his head at the Light Companies. “Don’t exactly look as if they’ve come for a Regimental dance.”

Sharpe sat and waited, head back against the wall, the loaded rifle between his knees. It seemed strange, on this perfect summer’s evening, the light fading into translucent grey, to think of the vast, secret war that shadowed the war of guns and swords. How had the priest known this attack was to take place tonight? Were there French spies in Salamanca who also knew? Who might have already warned the fortresses? Sharpe supposed there might be. It was possible that the French were ready, eagerly awaiting the first attack that they would shred with canister.

Sharpe had only seen one French spy. He had been a small Spaniard, jolly and generous, who had purported to be a lemonade seller outside Fuentes d’Onoro. He proved to be a Corporal in one of the Spanish Regiments that fought for the French and Sharpe had watched the man hung. He had died with dignity, a smile on his lips, and Sharpe wondered what bravery it took to be such a man. El Mirador, Sharpe supposed, had that bravery. He had lived in Salamanca, under French occupation, and still he had sent his stream of intelligence towards the British forces in Portugal. Tonight Sharpe was fighting for that brave man, for El Mirador, and he looked up at the fading light and knew that the attack must come soon.

“Sharpe?” A senior officer was looking at him. Sharpe struggled to his feet and saluted.

“Sir?”

“Brigadier General Bowes. I’m in command tonight, but I gather you have your own orders?” Sharpe nodded. Bowes looked curiously at the strange figure, dressed half as an officer and half as a Rifleman. The Brigadier seemed satisfied. “Glad you’re with us, Sharpe.”

“Thank you, sir. I hope we can be useful.”

Bowes gestured abruptly towards the hidden fort. “There’s a crude trench for the first seventy yards. That’ll cover us. After that it’s up to God.” He looked with frank admiration at the wreath on Sharpe’s sleeve. “You’ve done this sort of thing before.”

“Badajoz, sir.”

“This won’t be as bad.” Bowes moved on. The attackers were standing up, straightening their jackets, obsessively checking the last few details before the fight. Some touched their private talismans, some crossed themselves, and most wore the look of forced cheerfulness that hid the fear.

Bowes clapped his hands. He was a short man, built strongly and he climbed on a mounting block set beside one of the houses. “Remember, lads! Quiet! Quiet! Quiet!” This was the Sixth Division’s first battle in Spain and the men listened eagerly, wanting to impress the rest of the army. “Ladders first. After me!”

Sharpe cautioned his own men to wait. Harper would lead the first squad, then Lieutenant Price, while Sergeant McGovern and Sergeant Huckfield had the others. He grinned at them. Huckfield was new to the Company, since Badajoz, promoted from one of the other companies. Sharpe remembered when, as a private, Huckfield had tried to lead the mutiny before Talavera. Huckfield owed his life to Sharpe, but the bargain had been good. He was a conscientious, solid man, good with figures and the Company books, and the memory of that distant day, three years before, when Huckfield had nearly led the Battalion into mutiny was faded and unreal.

The street emptied, the attackers filing into the wasteland, and Sharpe still waited. He did not want his Company mixed with the others. He almost held his breath, listening for the first shot, but the night was silent. “All right, lads. Keep yourselves quiet.”

He went first, through the passage between the houses, and the ground dropped into a steep pit that had been made when the sappers threw up one of the flanking batteries. The nine-pounders were silent behind their fascines.

He could see the other companies ahead, crammed into the shallow trench. It had not been made for the attack, instead it was the remnants of a small street and it gave cover because the destroyed houses either side were banks of rubble. He dared not raise his head to look at the San Cayetano. There was a hope that the French were dozing, not expecting trouble, but he had no reason to suppose that their sentries would be any the less watchful because the night was quiet.

A ladder, far ahead, banged on rubble and there was the sound of loose stones falling. He froze, his senses acute for an enemy reaction, but still the night was quiet. There was a soft background noise, unceasing, and he realised it was the wash of water against the piles of the bridge arches. An owl sounded, south of the river. The light was pearl grey, the west soaked in crimson, the air warm after the day’s heat. The people of Salamanca, he knew, would be walking the stately circles in the great Plaza, sipping wine and brandy, and it would be a night of rich beauty in the city. Wellington was waiting, fearing surprise was lost, and Sharpe suddenly thought of La Marquesa, up on her roof or balcony, staring at the darkening shadows of the wasteland. A bell struck the half-hour past nine.

He heard a scraping and clicking ahead and knew that the attackers were fixing bayonets ready to run from the cover and rush the jumbled waste ground towards the San Cayetano. Lieutenant Price caught Sharpe’s eye and gestured at one of his men’s bayonets. Sharpe shook his head. He did not want the blades to betray the position of his company, far back, and they had no business, anyway, in attacking the fort.

“Go!” Bowes’ voice broke the silence, there was a scramble of feet and the sunken road ahead of Sharpe heaved with bodies that clambered over and through the rubble. This was the moment of danger, the first appearance, for if the French were ready, expecting them, the guns would fire now and decimate the attack.

They fired.

They were small guns in the forts, some were old and captured four pounders, but even a small gun, loaded with canister, can destroy an attack. Sharpe knew the figures well enough. A four pound canister was a tin can, packed with balls, sixty or eighty to a can, and when it was fired the tin burst apart at the gun’s muzzle and the balls spread, like duckshot, in a widening cone. Three hundred yards from the muzzle the cone would be ninety feet across, good odds for a single man in the line of fire, but not if several guns’ cones intersected. The San Cayetano, ahead of the attack, had only four guns, but the San Vincente, across the gorge, the biggest fort, could bring twenty to bear on the flank of the British attack.

They all fired. One first, followed in a handful of seconds by the rest, and the noise of the guns was different, deeper than usual, somehow more solid and Sharpe looked aghast at Harper. “They’re double shotted!”

Harper nodded, shrugged. Two canisters to a gun, say seventy balls in each, and twenty four guns firing. Sharpe listened to the metal hell that was criss-crossing the rubble and tried to work out the figures. Three thousand musket balls, at least, had greeted the attack, ten to each man, and in the silence after the volley he could hear the screams of wounded and then the rattle of muskets from the French embrasures. He could see nothing. He looked at the Company. “Stay there!”

He climbed the rubble side of the street, rolled over its crest and found cover behind a timber baulk. Bowes was alive, sword drawn, and ahead of the attack. “On! On!”

Ladder parties, miraculously alive, came off the ground where they had dived for shelter and began struggling over the jumbled stones. Each ladder was thirty feet, cumbersome on the shadowed ground, but the men were moving and, behind them, more figures advanced towards the dark bulk of the San Cayetano.

The attackers cheered, still confident despite the first, shattering discharge, and it was a miracle to Sharpe that so many had lived through the screaming cones. He slid his rifle forward, leafed up the sight, and then the second shots sounded from the French.

This volley was more ragged than the first. The gunners were loading as fast as they could, single canister only, and the faster crews would fire first. The balls bellowed from the embrasures, clattered on the stones, whirled the dead and wounded in limp disarray, and Sharpe cursed the French. They had known! They had known! There had been no surprise! They had double shotted the guns, had the matches ready for the fuses, and the attack stood no chance. The canisters burst and spread their death over the attackers, gun after gun, the shots coming singly or in small groups, and the lead balls hammered like hard rain on the stones, timber and bodies in the wasteland.

The two forts were ringed with smoke. The third, off to Sharpe’s left, was silent as if its guns, insultingly, were not needed. He could hear the French now, cheering their work as the gunners heaved at their weapons, loaded and fired, loaded and fired, and their flames sprang across the ditch, split the smoke, and licked behind the shredding canister.

“Rifles!”

There was not much they could do, but anything was better than being a spectator of this slaughter. He shouted again. “Rifles!”

His Riflemen poured over the lip of the rubble. He had trained a half dozen of the redcoats to use the Bakers, weapons left by men killed in the last three years, and they came, too. Harper dropped beside him, eyebrows raised, and Sharpe gestured at the nearest fort. “Go for the embrasures!”

They might kill a gunner or two, not much, but something. He heard the first shots, fired himself when the smoke showed a target, but the attack was done. The British did not know it. The men still went forward, shoulders hunched as if pushing into a storm, and they left their dead and wounded on the ground. Screams pierced the harsh sound of guns and Sharpe prayed with each new discharge of canister that a ball might end the screaming. Bowes was still up, still going ahead, taking his sword against the artillerymen and, behind and to each side, the survivors refused to give up. They were scattered now, less susceptible to the rain of lead, but too few to hope for victory. A ladder party actually made the ditch. Sharpe saw them jump in, heard the muskets fire from the palisade, and then he saw the Brigadier, limned against the spreading pall of smoke, and Bowes was hit. He seemed to dance on the spot, feet skittering to keep him upright and his sword fell as his hands clutched at his stomach. His head went back in a silent scream, more shots threw him forward and still he tried to stand, and then it was as if a whole barrel load of canister slammed the quivering figure, threw it flat, and the wasteland was suddenly empty of running men.

The attackers had gone to ground, defeated, and the French jeered at them, shouted insults, and the cannon fire died away.

There were no more men to throw into the attack, except Sharpe’s Company and he was not going to sacrifice them to the gunners. At Badajoz the army had gone on attacking, again and again into worse fire than this, in a smaller space, until it had seemed to Sharpe that all the canister in all the world could not go on killing the stream of men that had poured at the breaches. This attack had started with three hundred and fifty men, and there were no more. It was done.

The cannon smoke turned the dusk into false night and the French threw a lighted carcass, packed straw soaked with oil and bound in canvas, over their parapet. Shouts came from the wasteland. “Back! Back!”

Some men risked the fire, stood up, and ran. The French stayed silent. More men plucked up courage and the survivors, bit by bit, began their retreat. Still the French held their fire, happy that the British had given up, and men stopped to pick up their wounded. Sharpe looked at his Riflemen. “Back you go, lads.”

They were silent, depressed. They were used to victory, not defeat, but Sharpe knew they had been betrayed. He looked at Harper. “They knew we were coming.”

“Like as not.” The huge Irishman was easing the flint of his rifle, unfired, into the safe position. “They had the guns double-loaded. They knew.”

“I’d like to get the bastard who told them.”

Harper did not reply. He gestured ahead of them and Sharpe saw a man, staggering in the rubble, coming towards them. He had the red facings of the 53rd, the Shropshires, and his face was the colour of his uniform. Sharpe stood up, slung his rifle, and called to the man. “Here! Over here!”

The man seemed not to hear. He was walking, almost drunkenly, weaving on the stones, and Sharpe and Harper ran towards him. The man was moaning. Blood poured from his skull. “I can’t see!”

“You’ll be all right!” Sharpe could not see the man’s face through the blood. His hands, musket discarded, were clutched at his stomach. He seemed to hear Sharpe, the blood-soaked head quested towards the sound, and then he fell into Sharpe’s-arms. The hands came away and blood pumped onto Sharpe’s jacket and overalls. “It’s all right, lad, it’s all right!”

They laid him down and the man began to choke. Harper twisted his torso over, cleared the man’s throat with his finger, and shook his head at Sharpe. The Shropshire man vomited blood, moaned, and muttered again that he could not see. Sharpe undid his canteen, poured water on his eyes, and the blood, soaked there from a canister wound on his forehead, cleared slowly away. “You’ll be all right!”

The eyes opened, then shut immediately as a pain spasm shook him and blood seemed to well from his midriff. Harper tore at the man’s uniform. “God save Ireland!” It was a miracle he was still alive.

“Here!” Sharpe undid his officer’s sash, handed it across, and Harper pushed it beneath the body, caught the end, and tied it as a crude bandage round the horrid wound. He looked at Sharpe. “Head or legs?”

“Legs.”

He took the man’s ankles, they lifted him, and struggled with the burden back towards the houses. Other men were limping on the stones. The French were silent.

They put the man down in the street, full now once again with men, and Sharpe bellowed for bandsmen. The soldier was fighting for his life, the air scraping in his throat, and it seemed impossible that he could survive the wounds. Sharpe shouted again. “Bandsmen!”

An officer, his uniform unstained by dust or blood, his red facings and gold lace new and pristine, looked past Sharpe. “Dale. No musket.” He was dictating to a bespectacled clerk.

“What?” Sharpe turned and looked at the Lieutenant. Harper raised his eyes to heaven, then looked at Sergeant McGovern. The two Sergeants grinned. They knew Sharpe and knew his anger.

“Equipment check.” The Lieutenant looked at Sharpe’s rifle, then at the great sword, then at the Rifleman’s shoulder. “If you’ll excuse me, sir.”

“No.” Sharpe jerked his head towards the wounded man. “Are you planning to charge him?”

The Lieutenant looked round for escape or support, then sighed. “He has lost his musket, sir.”

“It was broken by French shot.” Sharpe’s voice was quiet.

“I’m sure you’ll put that in writing, sir.”

“No. You will. You were out there, weren’t you?”

The Lieutenant swallowed nervously. “No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Sir! I was ordered to stay here, sir!”

“And no one ordered you to make life a bloody misery for the men who went out, did they? How many battles have you been in, Lieutenant?”

The Lieutenant’s eyes looked round the circle of grim, interested faces. He shrugged. “Sir?”

Sharpe reached over to the clerk-Corporal and took the notebook out of his hand. “You write ”destroyed by enemy“ against everything, understand? Everything. Including the boots they lost last week.”

“Yes, sir.” The Lieutenant took the notebook from Sharpe and gave it to the clerk. “You heard the man, Bates. ”Destroyed by enemy“.” The Lieutenant backed away.

Sharpe watched him go. His anger had not vented itself and he wanted to strike out at something, at someone, because the men had died through treachery. The French had been ready, warned of the attack, and good men had been thrown away, and he bellowed again. “Bandsmen!”

Two musicians, doing their battlefield job offending the wounded, came and crouched by the injured Dale. They lifted him clumsily onto a stretcher. Sharpe stopped one of them as they were about to go. “Where’s the Hospital?”

“Irish College, sir,”

“Look after him.”

The man shrugged. “Yes, sir.”

Poor bloody Dale, Sharpe thought, to be betrayed in his first battle. If he survived he would be invalided out of the army. His broken body, good for nothing, would be sent to Lisbon and there he would have to rot on the quays until the bureaucrats made sure he had accounted for all his equipment. Anything missing would be charged to the balance of his miserable wages and only when the account was balanced would he be put onto a foul transport and shipped to an English quayside. There he was left, the army’s obligation discharged, though if he was lucky he might be given a travel document that promised to reimburse any parish overseer who fed him while he travelled to his home. Usually the overseers ignored the paper and kicked the invalid out of their jurisdiction with an order to go and beg somewhere else. Dale might be better offdead than face all that.

Lieutenant Price, wary of Sharpe’s anger, saluted. “Dismiss, sir?”

“Dismiss and get drunk, Lieutenant.”

Price grinned with relief. “Yes, sir. Morning parade?”

“Late one. Nine o’clock.”

Harper could still hear the suppressed rage in Sharpe, but he was one man who did not fear the Captain’s anger. He nodded at Sharpe’s uniform. “Not planning on any formal dinner tonight, sir?”

The uniform was soaked with Dale’s blood, dark against the green, and Sharpe cursed. He brushed at it uselessly. He had planned on going to the Palacio Casares and then he thought how La Marquesa had wanted a battle, and had been given one, and now she could see how a real soldier looked instead of the dripping confections of gold and silver who called themselves fighting men. Harper’s uniform was bloody, too, but Harper had Isabella waiting for him and suddenly Sharpe was tired of being alone and he wanted the golden haired woman and his anger was such that he would use it to take him into her palace and see what happened. He looked at the Irish Sergeant. „I’ll see you in the morning.“

“Yes, sir.”

Harper watched Sharpe walk away and let out a deep breath. “Someone’s in for trouble.”

Lieutenant Price glanced at the huge Sergeant. “Should we go with him?”

“No, sir. I think he fancies a fight. That Lieutenant didn’t give him one so he’s going to look for another one.” Harper grinned. “He’ll be back in a couple of hours, sir. Just let him cool off.” Harper raised his canteen to Price and shrugged. “Here’s to a happy night, sir. A happy, bloody night.”

CHAPTER 8

Sharpe’s resolution to go to La Marquesa waned as he neared the Palacio Casares. Yet he had said to Harper that he would not be back until morning and he could not face slinking back early with his tail between his legs and so he walked on. Yet with every step he worried more about the state of his uniform.

The streets were still filled with men from the Light Companies who waited for dismissal while the final rosters were taken. The wounded, on stretchers and carts, were being carried to the surgeons’ knives and many of the dead were still on the wasteland. The unwounded living stood with bitter, angry expression and the citizens of Salamanca hurried by in the shadows, averting their eyes, hoping the soldiers would not vent their anger on helpless civilians.

The arch gates of the Palacio Casares were wide open, flickering with lights cast by resin torches and Sharpe, like the fearful citizens, kept to the shadows on the far side of the street. He leaned against the wall and pulled his blood-soaked jacket straight. He did up the top buttons and tried to force the high collar, that had long lost its stiffness, into a decent shape round his neck. He wanted to see her.

Candles showed in the hallway. Their light was splintered by the fountain in the courtyard centre. The raised pool was surrounded by the silhouettes of British uniforms, officers’ uniforms, and while most seemed to be taking the air, or smoking a cigar in the night’s coolness, others were puking helplessly on the flagstones. The defeat, it seemed, had not affected the celebration. The courtyard was surrounded by light, the once masked windows ablaze with candles, and music came gently across the street. It was not the spirited thump of martial music, nor the full-bellied sound of soldiers’ taverns, but the thin, precious tinkle of rich peoples’ music. Music as expensive as a crystal chandelier, and Sharpe knew that if he walked over the street, through the tall arch, and over to the hallway he would feel as foreign and strange as if he had been plunged into the court of the King of Tartary. The house was lit like a festival, the rich were at play, and the dead who lay shredded by the canister just a quarter mile away might never have existed.

“Richard! By the moving bowels of the living saints! Is that you?” Lord Spears was in the gateway. In one hand was a cigar that beckoned to him. “Richard Sharpe! Come here, you dog!”

Sharpe smiled, despite his mood, and crossed the street. “My lord.”

“Will you stop ”my lording“ me? You sound like a damned shop-keeper! My friends call me Jack, my enemies what they like. Are you coming in? You’re invited. Not that it makes any difference, every damned mother’s son in town is here.”

Sharpe gestured at his uniform. “I’m hardly in a fit state.”

“Christ! What’s a fit state? I’m drunk as an Archbishop, wits gone to the four winds.” Spears was, Sharpe could see, slightly unsteady. The cavalryman linked his free arm, the cigar clenched between his teeth, into Sharpe’s and steered the Rifleman into the courtyard. “Let’s have a look at you.” He stopped Sharpe in the light, turned him, and looked him up and down. “You should change your tailor, Richard, the man’s robbing you blind!” He grinned. “Bit of blood, that’s all. Come here!” He tossed the cigar into the pool and scooped water with his good hand, throwing it on Sharpe’s uniform and rubbing it down. “How was it out there?”

“Bloody.”

“So I see!” He was on one knee, slapping at Sharpe’s overalls. “It cost me a heavy purse.”

“How?”

Spears looked up and grinned. “I had a hundred on you getting into the fort before midnight. Lost it.”

“Dollars?”

Spears stood up and inspected his handiwork. “Spanish dollars, Richard? I’m a gentleman. Guineas, you fool.”

“You haven’t got a hundred guineas.”

Lord Spears shrugged. “Fellow has to keep up a decent appearance. If they knew I was as broke as a virgin whore they’d cut me dead.”

“Are you?”

Spears nodded. “I am, I am. And I don’t even have her remedy for making good the loss.” He cocked his head to one side, still inspecting Sharpe. “Not bad, Richard, not bad. The weapons add a touch of roughness to the ensemble, but I think we can improve you.” He looked round the courtyard and saw Sir Robin Callard, blind drunk, collapsed against a flower tub. Spears grinned. “Robin bloody Callard, ’pon my soul. He never could take his drink.“ He led the way towards the collapsed staff officer. ”I was at school with this poxy little swine. He used to wet his bed.“ Spears bent down and tugged at Callard. ”Robin? Sweet Robin?“

Callard gagged, threw himself forward, and Spears pushed his head down between his knees. Once he had him bent double he plucked the fur-trimmed cavalry pelisse from the shoulders, then tugged at the cravat. It was pinned. Callard’s head jerked and lolled, he made a drunken protest, but Spears banged the head down again, tugged harder, and the cravat came free. Spears came back to Sharpe. “Here. Wear these.”

“What about him?”

“He can roger the moon, for all I care. You wear ‘em, Richard, and throw them away tomorrow. If the little bastard wakes up and wants them back we’ll shove him head-first into the cess-pit. He’ll think he’s back home.”

Sharpe tucked the cravat into his collar, then draped the pelisse, dark red trimmed with black fur, so that the sleeve hung loose by his left side. Spears grinned at the effect, laughed as Sharpe slung the rifle over the decorative garment. “You look ravishing. Shall we go and find something to ravish?”

The hall was crowded with officers and people of the town and Spears pushed through them, shouting at friends, waving indiscriminately. He looked back at Sharpe. “Eaten?”

“No.”

“There’s a trough in there! I should get your face in it!” Sharpe found himself in a vast room, lit by a thousand candles, and on the walls were great, dark oil paintings that showed men in solemn armour. A table ran the length of the room, beside one wall, and it was covered with a white cloth spread with heaped dishes. Half the foods he did not even recognise; small birds, brown from the ovens, dripping with clear, sticky sauce, and next to them a plate of strange fruits, fantastically decorated with palm leaves, and glistening with ice that sweating servants replenished as they dashed up and down the table’s length. Sharpe took a goose-breast, bit it, and discovered he was ravenous. He took one more to eat while he watched the strange throng.

Half were officers. There were British, German, Spanish and Portuguese, and the colours of their uniforms spanned the whole of a painter’s tray. The rest were civilians, richly and sombrely dressed, and the men, Sharpe guessed, outnumbered the women five to one. They outnumbered the pretty women a hundred to one. A group of British Dragoon officers had invented their own game at the far end of the room, lobbing bread rolls like howitzer shells high over the crowd so they fell indiscriminately amongst a sober group of Spaniards who were pretending that the bread cannonade. was merely a figment of their imaginations. Spears whooped at them as they fired, correcting their aim, calling the fall of iro shot and then, delighted with the game, tossed a whole roasted chicken to one of the group. They chanted the fire orders. “Sponge out! Load! Prime! Stand back! Fire!” The chicken sailed into the air, turning and dripping, then splatted down and scored a glancing blow on the high mantilla and carefully constructed hair of a Spanish matron. She rocked forward slightly, oblivious, apparently, of the Dragoons’ cheers, and her companions looked silently at the ruined, gaping, wire-threaded interior of her piled hair. It seemed to leak a little dust from its remains. One of the men stooped down and tore off a chicken wing and began to munch at it.

Spears waved at Sharpe. “God, Richard, isn’t this fun?” Sharpe pushed through the crowd. “Is the General here?”

“What do you think?” Spears gestured at the cavalry officers. “They wouldn’t dare if he was here. No, the word is he isn’t coming. Lickin‘ his wounds, so to speak.” He was shouting over the crowd’s noise.

Sharpe was introduced to the cavalry officers, a whirl of names, bonhomie, unmemorable faces, and then Spears pushed him through the doorway, back to the hall, and up a huge staircase that separated in two great curves either side of a statue. The statue, which was of a decorous maiden holding a pitcher of water, had been crowned with a British shako. Sharpe had thought that the room with the food must be the main room of the Palacio, but he was shown, at the stair’s top, through a door and into a hall that took his breath away. It was the size of a cavalry drill hall, lined with huge paintings, topped by a ceiling of intricate plaster, and lit by great chandeliers, each a universe of candles, and the crystal winked and dazzled, glittered and shook, above the uniforms of the officers, silver and gold, lace and chain, and above the dresses and jewels of the women. “Jesus!” The word was torn from him involuntarily.

“He sent His apologies.” Spears grinned at him. “Do you like it?”

“It’s incredible!”

“She married one of the richest devils in Spain, and the dullest.” Spears suddenly bowed to a middle-aged civilian. “My lord!”

The civilian nodded gravely to Spears. “My lord.” He was English, plump, with an angry face. He looked at Sharpe, quizzing him up and down with a raised monocle. Sharpe’s uniform was still wet with water and blood. “Who are you?”

Spears stepped in front of Sharpe. “It’s Callard, my lord. You remember him?”

His lordship waved Spears aside. “We have appearances to keep up, Callard, and you are a disgrace. Retire and change.”

Sharpe smiled. „I’ll rip your windpipe out of your fat throat if you don’t take your fat arse out of that door in two seconds.“ The smile had disguised a terrible anger that hammered at the man. For one second the plump man looked as if he would protest, and then he fled, rump going from side to side, leaving Sharpe angry and Lord Spears almost helpless with laughter.

“God, you’re precious, Sharpe. You know who that was?”

“I couldn’t give a damn.”

“So I see. Lord Benfleet. One of our politicians, come to put some spine into the Dagoes. His nickname, you’ll be pleased to know, is Lord Bumfleet. Come on.” He took Sharpe’s elbow and steered him to the top of the steps. “Who do we know here? Who else can you upset?”

An orchestra was playing on a raised dais that was set into a great arch topped by a gilded scallop. The musicians, wigged heads bowed, seemed to be scraping obsequiously for the circling mass on the floor. Among the people standing at the edges of the floor Sharpe saw the dark habits of sleek churchmen, their faces flushed with drink and good food. One face was not flushed. Sharpe saw the bushy eyebrows, and then the hand raised in recognition across the width of the room. Spears saw the gesture. “You know him?”

“Curtis. He’s a professor at the University here.”

“He’s a bloody traitor.”

“He’s what?” Sharpe was startled by the sudden severity in Spears’ voice. “Traitor?”

“Bloody Irishman. God knows, Richard, some of the Irish are all right, but some of them turn my stomach. That one does.”

“Why?”

“He fought against us, did you know that? When the Spanish were on the side of the French he was a chaplain on a naval ship. He volunteered as soon as he knew they would fight the English. He even boasts about it!”

“How do you know?”

“Because the Peer had a lot of so called eminent citizens to dinner one night, his Irish bloody eminence among them, and they sat and griped about the quality of the food. He should be bloody shot.”

Sharpe looked over the dancers to where Curtis was listening to a Spanish officer speak. The Irishman did seem to crop up at the most unexpected places. He had stopped the citizens firing at Leroux and only this evening he had said to Harper that he had known of the coming attack. An Irishman who had no love for the English. Sharpe pushed the thought away. He was seeing spies everywhere, when all that mattered was the utter defeat of Leroux.

Sharpe was not comfortable in this room. This was not his world. The musicians, who had taken a brief pause, started again and the men bowed to ladies, led them to the floor, and Lord Spears grinned at him. “D’you dance?”

“No.”

“I somehow thought you’d say that. It’s very simple, Richard. You keep your feet moving, pretend you know what you’re doing, and pull their little waists firmly into your loins. One trip round the floor and you’ll know if you’re in luck. You should try it!” He dived into the crowd and Sharpe turned away, took a glass from a passing servant, and found a corner where he could stand and drink the wine.

He was out of place here. It was not just the clothes. Any man, he supposed, could get a tailor to dress him like a lord, but it was not just a question of money. How did a man learn which of a dozen knives and forks to pick up first? Or how to dance? Or how to make light conversation with a Marquesa, joke with a Bishop, or how, even, to give orders to a butler? They said it was in the blood of a man’s birth, ordained by God, yet upstarts like Napoleon Bonaparte had come from low birth to the glittering pinnacle of the richest country on earth. He had asked Major Leroy once, the loyalist American, if there was no social distinction in the fledgling United States, but the Major had laughed, spat out a shred of cheroot, and intoned solemnly to Sharpe. “‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ You know what that is?“

“No.”

“The rebels’ Declaration of Independence.” Leroy had spat another tobacco shred from his tongue. “Half the bastards who signed it had slaves, the other half would run a mile rather than shake the hand of a slaughterman. No. I give them fifty years and they’ll all want titles. Barons of Boston and Dukes of New York. It’ll happen.”

And Sharpe, standing in the shards of a myriad refracted candle flames, guessed Leroy was right. If you took every person in this room and abandoned them, Robinson Crusoe style, on an empty island, then inside a year there would be a duke, five barons, and the rest would be serfs. Even the French had brought back the aristocracy! They had murdered it first, as they murdered La Marquesa’s parents, and now Bonaparte was making his Marshals into Princes of this and Dukes of that and his poor, honest brother had been made into King of Spain!

Sharpe looked at the sweating faces over tight collars, the thick thighs laced tight in military uniforms, the ridiculous costumes of the women. Take away the money, he supposed, and they would look like anyone else, softer perhaps, flabbier, but the money, and the birth, gave them something that he lacked. An assurance? An ease of moving through the rich waters of society? Then should he bother? He could walk away from the army, when the war was done, and Teresa would have a home for him in Casatejada among the wide fields that were her family’s property. He need never say ‘my lord’ again, or ‘sir’, or feel belittled by an elegant fool, and he felt an anger inside him at the unfairness of life and, at the same time, a determination that one day he would have them respecting him. God rot them all!

“Richard! Are you going?”

Spears whirled offthe dance floor, climbed the two steps to where Sharpe was standing, and brought with him a small, dark-haired girl with brightly rouged cheeks. “Say hello to Maria.”

Sharpe half bowed to her. “Senorita.”

“We are formal.” Spears grinned at him. “You’re not going, are you?”

“I was.”

“You can’t, my dear fellow! Positively can’t. You’ll have to see La Marquesa, at least. Press her exquisite fingers to your lips, murmur ”charmed“, and compliment heron her frock.”

“Tell her from me she looked wonderful.” He had not seen her, though he had looked, in either room.

Spears slumped back in mock resignation. “Are you a dull dog, Richard? Don’t tell me that the hero of Talavera, the Conqueror of Badajoz, is creeping back to his lonely cot to say a few prayers for lame dogs and orphans! Enjoy yourself!” He gestured at the girl. “Do you want her? She’s probably as clean as they come. Really! You can have her! There are plenty more down there.” Maria, who obviously spoke not a word of English, looked devotedly up into Spears’ handsome face.

Sharpe wondered why Spears was so friendly. Perhaps his Lordship needed a strong arm to protect him from his gambling creditors or maybe, as he had accused La Marquesa, Spears liked the company of his social inferiors. Whatever, it did not matter. “I’m going. It’s been a long day.”

Spears shrugged. “If you must, Richard. If you must. I did try.”

“Thank you, my lord.”

Sharpe took one last look at the ballroom, at the circling, brilliant people beneath the great chandeliers, and he knew he had been foolish in coming to this place. La Marquesa was not to be his reward. He had been presumptuous in even coming. He nodded to Spears, turned, and walked onto the upper landing. He stopped behind the shako-hatted statue and stared up at the great, painted ceiling, and he could not imagine owning one hundredth of one hundredth part of all this wealth. He would go back and tell Harper of it.

“Senor?” A servant had appeared beside him. The man was aloof, liveried, and with a supercilious look in his eye.

“Yes?”

“This way, senor.” The man plucked Sharpe’s sleeve towards a tapestry against the wall.

Sharpe shook the hand off, growled, and he saw alarm come into the servant’s eyes.

“Senor! Por favor! This way!”

It suddenly occurred to Sharpe that the man only had these two words of English, words he had been coached in, and only one person gave orders in this house. La Marquesa. He followed the man towards the hanging tapestry. The servant glanced around the landing, making sure that no-one was watching, and then he swiftly drew back one heavy corner of the great cloth. Behind it was a low, open doorway. “Senor?”

There was urgency in the man’s voice. Sharpe ducked under the lintel and the footman, staying on the landing, let the tapestry fall back into place. Sharpe was alone, quite alone, in a musty and total darkness.

CHAPTER 9

He stood quite still, the air cooler on one side of his face, the sound of revelry muffled by the thick tapestry. He put out his left hand slowly, found the open door, and swung it shut. The hinges were well greased. It moved soundlessly until the latch clicked into place and then Sharpe leaned against it and let his eyes adjust slowly to the darkness.

He was on a small, square landing between two staircases. To his right the steps went downwards into utter darkness, to his left they climbed and at their head he could see a pale square that might have been the night sky except that it was curiously mottled and had no stars. He went to his left, climbing slowly, and his boots grated on the stone steps until he came out onto a wide balcony.

He saw now why there were no stars visible. The open side and roof of the balcony were enclosed by a small-latticed screen, dense with climbing plants, and the effect was to make the balcony comfortably cool. The plant stems had been trained so there were wide gaps between them and he crossed to the nearest gap and rested his shako peak on the lattice so he could see out. The lattice moved. He started back, then realised that the screen was a series of hinged doors, any of which could be opened so that the sun could flood onto the flagstones. The city was spread beneath him, grey moonlight on tiles and stone, the glow of fires reddening some of the buildings.

The balcony was deserted. Rush mats lay at its centre, making a path between troughs planted with small shrubs and stone benches supported by carved, crouching lions. He walked slowly along the balcony’s length and his eye caught strange, intermittent flashes of light from his right. They seemed to come from the balcony floor where it met the wall of the Palacio and he stopped, crouched, and saw that the lights came from a series of tiny windows that looked into the ballroom below. They were like spyholes. Beyond the palm-sized panes of glass were tunnels that must go through stone and plaster and each revealed a small patch of the great ballroom. Sharpe saw Lord Spears circle through his spyhole, his pelisse round Maria’s shoulders and his one good arm somewhere beneath the pelisse. Sharpe stood up and walked on.

The balcony turned to the right and Sharpe stopped at the corner. The rush mats on the new stretch were overlaid with rugs and there were doors, shut and shuttered, that led into the Palacio’s interior. At the far end, hard against a blank wall, Sharpe could see a table that was set with food and wine. The crystal and china winked with the reflected light of a single candle, shielded by glass, that stood in a niche of the wall. Only two chairs stood by the table, both empty, and Sharpe felt the stirring of his instinct, of danger, and he wondered why he had been invited to what looked like a very small party indeed. It made no sense, despite Spears’ explanation, for La Marquesa de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba to invite Captain Sharpe to this private, expensive, and luxurious balcony.

Halfway down the balcony a huge brass telescope was mounted on a heavy iron tripod. Sharpe walked to it and pushed open a lattice door next to the instrument and saw, as he had guessed, that it pointed toward the night’s battlefield. The wasteland was pale in the moonlight, the fortresses dark, and Sharpe could see the ravine clearly that ran between the San Vincente and the smaller forts. There was the glow of fire tingeing the roofline of the San Vincente’s courtyard and he knew the French were celebrating their victory around the flames, but fearing, too, the next assault. There were other fires, small torches that were hand-held in the wasteland where men searched for the wounded and dead. The French ignored them. Sharpe suddenly shivered. For no reason he remembered the burning of the dead after the assault on Badajoz just a few weeks before. There had been too many bodies to bury so they had been stacked in layers, timber between the stripped corpses, and the fires had burned darkly and he remembered how the corpses on the top layer had sat up in the heat, almost as if they were alive and begging for rescue, and then the corpses below had also begun to bend in the great fire and, as if to blot out the vision, he pulled shut the lattice door with a loud click.

“What are you thinking?” Her voice was husky. He turned and La Marquesa was standing by the table, by a door that had opened silently, and a woman servant was in the doorway offering a shawl. La Marquesa shook her head and the servant disappeared, shutting the door as noiselessly as it had opened. La Marquesa was light in the darkness. Her golden hair seemed glowing to Sharpe, spun with gossamer fine radiance, and her dress was a brilliant white. It left her shoulders and arms bare and he could see the shadows of her collarbones and he wanted to put his hands on that fine, pale skin because she was, in a Palacio of priceless and beautiful objects, the most perfect of them all. He felt clumsy.

“I was told to compliment you on your frock.“

“My dress? I suppose that was Jack Spears?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“He never saw me.” She leaned over the table and Sharpe saw her light a small cigar from the candle. He was amazed. He was used to the women of the army smoking their short clay pipes, but he had never seen a woman with a cigar before. She blew a plume of smoke that drifted up to the lattice. “I saw you, though, both of you. You were glowering at the ballroom, hating it all, and he was wondering where he could find an empty bedroom to take that silly girl. Do you smoke?”

“Sometimes. Not now, thank you.” Sharpe gestured at the spyholes. “Did you see through those?”

She shook her head. “The palace is full of spyholes, Captain. Riddled with secret passages.” She walked towards him, her feet quite silent on the rugs. Her voice seemed different to Sharpe, this was not the same woman who had been excited and enthusiastic at San Christobal. Tonight she spoke crisply, with a confident authority, and all traces of wide-eyed naivete had gone. She sat on a cushioned bench. “My husband’s great-great-grandfather built the Palacio and he was a suspicious man. He married a younger wife, like me, and he feared she would be unfaithful so he built the passages and the peepholes. He would follow her round the building, she in light and he in darkness, and everything she did, he watched.” She told the story as if it was a much-told tale, of interest to the listener, but holding boredom for herself. She shrugged, blew smoke upwards, and looked at him. “That’s the story.”

“Did he see anything he shouldn’t have?”

She smiled. “It’s said she discovered about the passages and that she hired two masons. One day she waited until her husband was in a long tunnel that bends round the library. It has only one entrance.” Her eyes were huge in the dimness. Sharpe watched her, entranced by the line of her throat, the shadows on her skin above the low white dress, by the wide mouth. She chopped down with the cigar. “She gave a signal and the masons nailed the entrance shut and then they laid stones over it. After that she made the servants pleasure her, one by one, two by two, and all the time they could hear the husband screaming and scrabbling beyond the wall. She told them it was rats and told them to keep going.” She shrugged. “It’s just a nonsense, of course, not true. The pride of this house would not allow it, but the people of Salamanca tell the story and certainly the passages exist.”

“It’s a harsh story.”

“Yes. It goes on that she died, strangled by the ghost of her husband, and that will be the fate of any mistress of this house who is unfaithful to her husband.” She glanced up at Sharpe as she said the last words and there was a curious hostility in her expression, a challenge perhaps.

“You say the story isn’t true?”

She gave a crooked, secret smile. “How very indelicate of you, Captain Sharpe.” She drew on the cigar, hardening the red point of the tobacco. “What did Lord Spears tell you about me?”

He was startled by the directness of her question, by the inference that she was commanding him to answer. He shook his head. “Nothing.”

“How very unlike Jack.” She drew on the cigar again. “Did he tell you that I asked him to make you come here?”

“No.”

“I did. Aren’t you curious why?”

Heleaned against the frameof the lattice. “I’m curious, yes.”

“Thank God for that! I was beginning to think there wasn’t a human feeling in your body.” Her voice was harsh. Sharpe wondered what game she was playing. He watched as she tossed the cigar onto the flagstones of the balcony and, as it landed, it showered sparks like a musket pan fired at night. “Why do you think, Captain?”

“I don’t know why I’m here, Ma’am.”

“Oh!” Her voice was mocking now. “You find me on my own, ignoring all my guests, not to mention the proprieties, and there’s a table set with wine, and you think nothing?”

Sharpe did not like being toyed with. “I’m only a humble soldier, Ma’am, unused to the ways of my betters.”

She laughed, and her face suddenly softened. “You said that with such delicious arrogance. Do I make you uncomfortable?”

“If it pleases you to, yes.”

She nodded. “It pleases me. So tell me what Jack Spears whispered to you?” The inflection of command was back in her voice, as if she talked to her postilion.

Sharpe was tired of her games. He let his own voice be as harsh as hers. “That you had low tastes, Ma’am.”

She went very still and tense. She was leaning forward on the bench, her hands gripping its edge, and Sharpe wondered if she was about to shout for her servants and have him thrown out. Then she leaned back, relaxed, and waved a hand at the elegant balcony. “I thought I had rather high tastes. Poor Jack thinks everyone is like him.” Her voice had changed again, this time she had spoken with a soft sadness. She stood up and walked to the lattice, pushing open one of the doors. “That business tonight was a shambles.”

The previous subject seemed to have been forgotten, as if it had never existed. Sharpe turned to look at her. “Yes.”

“Why did the Peer order the attack? It seemed hopeless.”

Sharpe was tempted to say that she had wanted a battle, almost pleaded with Wellington for one, but this new, crisp woman was not someone he wanted to annoy, not at this moment. “He’s always impetuous at sieges. He likes to get them done.”

“Which means many deaths?” Her fingers were beating a swift tattoo on the frame of the lattice.

“Yes.”

“What happens now?” She was staring at the forts and Sharpe was staring at her profile. She was the loveliest thing he had ever seen.

“We’ll have to dig trenches. We’ll have to do everything properly.”

“Where?”

He shrugged. “Probably in the ravine.”

“Show me.”

He went to her side, smelling her, feeling her closeness to him and he wondered if she could detect his trembling. He could see a silver comb holding up her piled hair and then he looked away and pointed at the gorge. “Along the right hand side, Ma’am, close to the San Vincente.”

She turned her face to his, just inches away, and her eyes were violet in the moonlight that threw shadows beneath the high cheekbones. “How long will that take?”

“It could be done in two days.”

She kept her face turned up and her eyes stayed on his eyes. He was aware of her body, of the bare shoulders, of dark shadows that promised softness.

She turned abruptly away and crossed to the table. “You haven’t eaten.”

“A little, Ma’am.”

“Come and sit. Pour me some wine.” There were partridges roasted whole, quails stuffed with meat and peppers, and small slices of fruit, that she said were quinces, that had been dipped in syrup and sugar. Sharpe took off his shako, propped his rifle against the wall, and sat. He did not touch the food. He poured her wine, moved the bottle to his own glass, and she stared at him, half smiling, and spoke in a detached, curious voice. “Why didn’t you kiss me just then?”

The bottle clinked dangerously against his glass. He set it down. “I didn’t want to offend you.”

She raised an eyebrow. “A kiss is offensive?”

“If it’s not wanted.”

“So a woman must always show that she wants to be kissed?”

Sharpe was feeling desperately uncomfortable, out of his place in a world he did not understand. He tried to shrug the topic away. “I don’t know.”

“You do. You think that a woman must always invite a man, yes? And that then leaves you guiltless.” Sharpe said nothing, and she laughed. “I forgot. You’re just a humble soldier and you don’t understand the ways of your betters.”

Sharpe looked at the beauty across the table and he tried to tell himself that this was just another woman, and he a man, and that there was nothing more to it than that. He could behave as if she was any woman he had ever known, but he could not convince himself. This was a Marquesa related to Emperors, and he was Richard Sharpe, related to no one apart from his daughter. The difference was like a screen between them and he could not shift it. Others might, but not he. He shrugged inwardly. That’s right, Ma’am. I don’t understand.“

She picked another cigar from the box on the table and leaned over the candle in the niche to light it. She sat down and stared at the cigar glow as if she had never seen it before. Her voice was soft again. “I’m sorry, Captain Sharpe. I don’t mean to offend.” She looked up at him. “How many people do understand? How many, do you think, live like this? One in a hundred thousand? I don’t know.” She looked at the thick rugs, at the crystal on the table. “You think I’m fortunate, don’t you.” She smiled to herself. “I am. Yet I speak five languages, Captain, and all I am expected to do with them is order the daily meals. I look in a mirror and I know just what you see. I open my doors and all those pretty staff-officers flood in and they flatter me, charm me, amuse me, and they all want something of me.” She smiled at him, and he smiled back. She shrugged. “I know what they want. Then there’s my servants. They want me to be lax, to be undemanding. They want to steal my food, my money. My Confessor wants me to live like a nun, to give to his charities, and my husband wants me to sail to South America. Everyone wants something. And now I want something.”

“What?”

She pulled on the cigar, looking at him through the smoke. “I want you to tell me if there’s going to be a battle.”

Sharpe laughed. He sipped the wine. He had been brought up to this balcony to tell her something that any officer, British or Spanish, German or Portuguese, could tell her? He looked at her and her face was serious, waiting, so he nodded. “Yes. There has to be. We haven’t come this far to do nothing, and I can’t see Marmont giving up the west of Spain.”

She spoke with deliberation. “So why didn’t Wellington attack yesterday?”

He had almost forgotten that it was only yesterday that they had sat on the hilltop and watched the two armies. “He wanted Marmont to attack him.”

“I know that. But he didn’t, and the Peer outnumbered him, so why didn’t he attack?”

Sharpe reached forward and cut at a partridge. The skin was crisp and honeyed. He gestured with the slice of meat towards the lights of the spyholes. “There are a dozen generals down there, three dozen staff officers, and you ask me? Why?”

“Because it pleases me!” Her voice was suddenly harsh. She paused to draw on the cigar. “Why do you think? If I ask one of them they’ll smile politely, become charming, and tell me, in so many words, not to worry my head about soldiering. So I’m asking you. Why didn’t he attack?”

Sharpe leaned back, took a deep breath, and launched into his thoughts. “Yesterday the French had their back to a plain. Marmont could have retreated endlessly, in good order, and the battle would have stopped by nightfall. There’d have been, oh…“ he shrugged, ”say, five hundred dead on each side? If our cavalry was better there might have been more, but it would decide nothing. The armies would still have to fight again. Wellington doesn’t want a series of small indecisive skirmishes. He wants to trap Marmont, he wants him in a place where there’s no escape, or where he’s wrong footed, and then he can crush him. Destroy him.“

She watched the sudden passion in Sharpe, the cruelty of his face as he imagined the battle.

“Go on.”

“There isn’t any more. We take the forts and then we go after Marmont.”

“Do you like the French, Captain Sharpe?”

It struck him as a curious question, the wrong question. She meant, surely, did he dislike the French? He made a gesture of indecision. “No.” He smiled. “I don’t dislike them. I don’t have reason to dislike them.”

“Yet you fight them?”

“I’m a soldier.” It was not that simple. He was a soldier because there was nothing else for him to be. He had discovered all those years ago that he could do the job and do it well, and now he could not imagine another life.

Her eyes were curious, huge and curious. “What do you fight for?”

He shook his head, not knowing what to tell her. If he said ‘England’ it would sound pompous, and Sharpe had a suspicion that if he had been born French then he would have fought for France with as much skill and ferocity as he served England. The Colours? Perhaps, because they were a soldier’s pride, and pride is valuable to a soldier, but he supposed the real answer was that he fought for himself to stop himself sliding back into the nothingness where he began. He met her eyes. “My friends.” It was as good an answer as he could think of.

“Friends?”

“They’re more important on a battlefield.”

She nodded, then stood up and walked down the balcony trailing smoke behind her. “What do you say to the charge that Wellington can’t fight an attacking battle? Only a defensive battle?”

“Assaye.”

She turned. “Where he crossed a river in the face of the enemy?”

“Yesterday you knew nothing about Assaye.”

“Yesterday I was in public.” The cigar glowed again.

“He can attack.” Sharpe was impressed by her intelligence, by her knowledge, but he was also mystified. There was something catlike about La Marquesa. She was quiet in her movements, beautiful, but she had claws, he knew, and now he knew she had the intelligence to use them skilfully. “Believe me, Ma’am, he can attack.”

She nodded. “I believe you. Thank you, Captain Sharpe, that’s all I wanted to know.”

“All?”

She turned to the lattice and opened a window in it. “I want to know if the French are coming back to Salamanca. I want to know if Wellington will fight to stop that happening.

You’ve told me he will. You weren’t boasting, you weren’t trying to impress me, you gave me what I wanted; a professional opinion. Thank you.“

Sharpe stood up, not sure if the visit was done and he was being dismissed. He walked towards her. “Why did you want to know?”

“Does it matter?” She still stared at the fortresses.

“I’m curious.” He stopped behind her. “Why?”

She looked back at the table. “You forgot your musket.”

“Rifle. Why?”

She turned round to face him and gave him another of her hostile stares. “How many men have you killed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Truly?”

“Truly. I’ve been a soldier for nineteen years.”

“Do you get frightened?”

He smiled. “Of course. All the time. It gets worse, not better.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. I sometimes think because the older you get, the more you have to live for.”

She laughed at that. “Any woman will tell you otherwise.”

“No, not any woman. Some, maybe. Some men, too.” He gestured at the faraway sound of the party. “Cavalry officers don’t like getting old.”

“You’re suddenly very wise for a humble soldier.” She was mocking him. She put the cigar to her mouth and smoke drifted between them.

She had still not answered his question and he still did not understand why he had been brought to this balcony where the leaves stirred in the night breeze. “You could have asked a thousand people in this town the questions you’ve asked me, and got the same answers. Why me?”

“I told you.” She pointed with the cigar to his rifle. “Now why don’t you pick up the rifle and go?”

Sharpe said nothing. He did not move. Somewhere in the town there were raised voices, drunken soldiers fighting in all probability, and a dog howled at the moon from another street, and he saw her eyes look at his cheek. “What are those black stains?”

Sharpe was becoming used to her sudden questions that had no relevance to the previous conversation. She seemed to like to tease him, bring him almost to the point of anger, and then deflect him with some irrelevance. He brushed his right cheek. “Powder stains, Ma’am. The gunpowder explodes in the rifle pan and throws them up.”

“Did you kill someone tonight?”

“No, not tonight.”

They were standing just two feet apart and Sharpe knew that either could have moved away. Yet they stayed still, challenging each other and he knew that she was challenging him to touch her and he was tempted suddenly, to break the rules. He was tempted to walk away, as Marmont had simply walked away from Wellington’s army, but he could not do it. The full mouth, the eyes, the cheekbones, the curve of her neck, the shadows above the white lace-frilled dress had caught him. She frowned at him. “What does it feel like? To kill a man?”

“Sometimes good, sometimes nothing, sometimes bad.”

“When is it bad?”

He shrugged. “When it’s unnecessary.” He shook his head, remembering the bad dreams. “There was a man at Badajoz, a French artillery officer.”

She had expected more. She tipped her face to one side. “Go on.”

“The fight was over. We’d won. I think he wanted to surrender.”

“And you killed him?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

He gestured at the big sword. “With this.” It had not been that simple. He had hacked at the man, gouged him, disembowelled the corpse in his great rage until Harper had stopped him.

She half turned away from him and stared at the scarcely touched food on the table. “Do you enjoy killing? I think you do.”

He could feel his heart beating in his chest as if it had expanded. It was thumping hollowly, sounding in his eardrums, and he knew it as a compound of fear and excitement. He looked at her face, profiled against the broken moonlight, and the beauty was overpowering, unfair that one person could be so lovely and his hand, almost of its own volition, came slowly up, slowly, until his finger was under her chin and he turned the face towards him.

She gave him a calm, wide-eyed expression, then stepped away from him so his arm was left suspended in mid-air. He felt foolish. Her face was unfriendly. “Do you enjoy killing?”

He had been made to touch her, so she could back away and make him feel foolish. She had brought him here for her small victory, and he knew defeat. He turned away from her, walked to his rifle, slung it on his shoulder, and started back down the balcony without a word. He did not look at her. He walked past her, smelling the tobacco smoke from her cigar.

“Colonel Leroux enjoys killing, Captain.”

For a second he almost kept on walking, but the name of his enemy stopped him. He turned.

“What do you know of Leroux?”

She shrugged. “I live in Salamanca. The French were in this house. Your job is to kill him, yes?”

Her voice was challenging again, impressing him with her knowledge, and again he had the feeling that he was involved in a game of which she only knew the rules. He thought of Leroux in the forts, of the cordon of men about the wasteland, of his own Company in their billets. He had a simple job and he was making it complicated.

“Good night, Ma’am. Thank you for the meal.”

“Captain?”

He kept walking. He went round the corner, past the lights of the spyholes, and he felt a freedom come on him. He would be true to Teresa, who loved him, and he quickened his pace towards the secret staircase.

“Captain!” She was running now, her bare feet slapping the rush mats. “Captain!” Her hand pulled at his elbow. “Why are you going?”

She had teased him earlier, mocked him for not kissing her, withdrawn when he had touched her. Now she held his arm, was pleading with him, her eyes searching his face for some reassurance. He hated her games.

“God damn you to hell, Ma’am.” He put his left arm about her back, half lifted her, and kissed her on the mouth. He crushed her, kissing her to hurt, and when he saw her eyes close, he dropped her. “For God’s sake! Do I enjoy killing? What am I? A bloody trophy for your rotten wall? I’m going to get drunk, Ma’am, in some flea-bitten hovel in this bloody town and I might take a whore with me. She won’t ask me bloody questions. Good night!”

“No!” She held him again.

“What do you want? To save me money?” He was harsh, feeling his hurt. She was more beautiful than he could have imagined a woman to be.

“No.” She shook her head. “I want you, Captain, to save me from Colonel Leroux.” She said it almost bitterly and then, as if ashamed of the kiss, she turned and walked away from him.

“You what?”

She went on walking, back to the corner and onto the lighted side of the balcony. Once again she had surprised him, but this time he felt there was no game. He followed.

She was standing by the telescope, staring through the lattice, and Sharpe propped his rifle against the wall and went close behind her. “Tell me why?”

“I’m frightened of him.” She stared away from him.

“Why?”

“He’ll kill me.”

There was a silence and it seemed to Sharpe to be like a great abyss over which he was suspended on a single, fine blade-edge. One false move and the moment would be lost, finished, and it was as if he and she were alone high above the dark night and he saw the shadow between her shoulder blades, a dark shadow running down into the intricate lace of her dress, and it seemed to him that there was nothing on this dark earth so mysterious, so frightening, or as fragile as a beautiful woman. “He’ll kill you?”

“Yes.”

He put his right hand up, slowly, and put his long finger against her shoulder blade, a touch so gentle that it could have been a strand of her golden hair. He slid the finger down her warm, dry skin and she did not move.

“Why will he kill you?”

His fingertip explored the ridges of her spine. Still she did not move and he let his other fingers down, then pushed them slowly up towards her neck. She was very still.

“You’ve stopped calling me ”Ma’am“.”

“Why will he kill you, Ma’am?”

His fingers were on the nape of her neck where they could feel the wisps of hair that had escaped from the silver combs. He moved his hand right, very slowly, letting his fingers trace and stroke the curve of her long neck. She began to turn and his hand, as if frightened of breaking something very fragile, leaped an inch from her skin. She stopped, waited till she was touched again, and turned to face him.

“Do your friends call you Dick?”

He smiled. “Not for many years.” His arm was tense from the effort of holding it still, hovering on her skin, and he waited for her to speak again, knowing that she had suddenly asked an irrelevant question because she was thinking. She seemed oblivious of his hand, but he knew she was not, and his heart still thumped inside him, and the moment was still there. Her eyes flicked between his.

“I’m frightened of Leroux.” She said it flatly.

He let the palm of his hand drop onto the curve of her neck. Still she seemed to take no notice. His fingers curled onto her back. “Why?”

She gestured at the balcony. “You know what this is?”

He shrugged. “A balcony.”

For a few seconds she said nothing. His hand was feather-light on her neck and he could see the shadows move on her skin as she breathed. He could hear the beat of his heart. She licked her lips. “A balcony, but a special kind of balcony. You can see a long way from here, and it’s built so you can do that.” Her eyes, trusting and serious, were on his. She was speaking simply, as if to a child, so that he would understand her. It was, Sharpe thought, with his hand still on her neck, yet another face of this remarkable woman who changed like lake water, but something in her tone told him that now she was not playing. If there was a true Marquesa, this was she. “You can see the roads over the river, and that’s why it was built. My husband’s great-great-grandfather didn’t want to spy only indoors. He liked to watch his wife when she rode out of the palace, so he built this balcony like a watch-tower. They’re not unusual in Spain, and they have this lattice for a special reason. No one can see in, Mr. Sharpe, but we can see out. It’s a special kind of balcony. In Spanish a balcony is ”balcon“, but this isn’t a ”balcon“. Do you know what it is?”

Sharpe’s hand was utterly still. He did not know the answer, but he could guess. The word almost stumbled as he spoke it, but he said it aloud. “Mirador?”

She nodded. “El Mirador. The watch-place.” She looked at his face. She could see a pulse throbbing in his cheek beside the sword scar. His eyes were dark. She raised an eyebrow as if in question. “You know, don’t you?”

He hardly dared speak, he hardly dared breathe. He moved his hand, sliding it gently onto her back so that his fingertips touched the skin of her spine. The wind stirred the leaves above them.

She frowned slightly. “Do you know?”

“Yes, I know.”

She closed her eyes, seemed to sigh, and he pulled with his hand and she came, so easily, into his chest. Her hair was below his chin, her face cradled in his rough uniform, and her voice was small and pleading.

“No one must know, Richard, no one. Don’t tell anyone that you know, not even the General! No one must know. Promise me?”

“I promise.” He held her close, the wonder of it in his head.

“I’m frightened.”

“Is that why you wanted me here?”

“Yes. But I didn’t know if I could trust you.”

“You can trust me.”

She tipped her head up to his and he could see that her eyes were gleaming. “I’m frightened of him, Richard. He does terrible things to people. I didn’t know! I never knew it would be like this.”

“I know.” He leaned down and her face did not move. He kissed her and suddenly her arms were round him and she clung to him fiercely and kissed him fiercely as if she wanted to suck the strength from him into her own self. Sharpe held her, his arms round the slim body, and he thought of what his enemy would do to this perfect, lovely, golden woman, and he despised himself for distrusting her because he knew, now, that she was braver than he, that she had led her lonely life in the great Palacio, surrounded by enemies, and in danger, always, of a terrible death. El Mirador!

His hand pressed on her back and, through the lace, hanging in fringes, he felt the hooks of her dress, and he slipped his hand between the hooks, felt her skin, and then pressed the bottom hook between finger and thumb, the finger and thumb that were more used to the pressure of flint on mainspring, and the hook slid out of the loop, and he moved his hand up to the second, pressed again, it opened, and she dropped her face onto his chest, still clinging to him. He could not believe this was happening, that he, Richard Sharpe, was on this mirador, this night, with this woman, and he moved his hand to the last hook, pressed it back through the loop and he could feel the metal scraping as it moved, and she seemed to stiffen in his arms. He froze.

She looked up at him and her eyes searched his face as though she needed some reassurance that this man could truly keep her from Leroux’s long Kligenthal. She gave a small smile. “Call me Helena.”

“Helena?” The hook snapped free, he moved his hand, and he sensed the wings of the dress fall away and he put his hand back, stroked, and it was pressed into the rich curve at the small of her back. Her skin was like silk.

Her smile went, all the harshness came back. “Let go of me!” It was snapped like an order, her voice loud. “Let go of me!”

He had been a fool! She had wanted protection, not this, and now he had offended her by imagining what was not to be, and he let go of her, bringing his hand back, and she stepped away from him. Her face changed again. She laughed at him, laughed at his confusion, and she had ordered him away so that she could stand free and let the dress, light as thistledown, rustle to the floor. She was naked beneath the dress and she stepped back to him over its folds. “I’m sorry, Richard.”

He put his arms round her, her skin was pressed against his uniform, his sword belt, his ammunition pouch, and she clung to him and he stared at the dark bulk of the San Vincente and he swore that the enemy would never reach her, never, not while there was breath in his body or while his arm could lift the heavy sword whose hilt was cold on her flank. She hooked a leg round his, lifted herself up, and kissed him again and he forgot everything. The Company, the forts, Teresa; all were scoured away, whirled far off by this moment, by this promise, by this woman who fought her own lonely war against his enemies.

She lowered herself to the floor, took his hand, and her face was grave and innocent. “Come.”

He followed, obedient, in the dark Salamantine night.