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‘You should get married,’ Sharpe said quietly.
Frederickson sneered at that thought. ‘Why do condemned men always encourage others to join them on the gallows?’
‘It isn’t like that.’
‘Marriage is an appetite,’ Frederickson said savagely, ‘and once you’ve enjoyed the flesh, all that’s left is a carcass of dry bones.’
‘No,’ Sharpe protested.
‘I do hope it isn’t true,’ Frederickson toasted Sharpe with the half empty wine bottle, ‘and I especially hope it isn’t true for all of my dear friends who have pinned their hopes of peacetime happiness on something as wilfully frail as a wife.’
‘It isn’t true,’ Sharpe insisted, and he hoped that when he returned to headquarters he would find a letter from Jane.
But there was none, and he remembered their arguments before the duel and he wondered whether his own peacetime happiness had been soured by his stubbornness.
And in the morning the brigade was ordered to advance eastwards. Towards Toulouse.
In finding Sergeant Challon, Major Pierre Ducos had unwittingly found his perfect instrument. Challon liked to have a woman in his bed, meat at his table, and wine in his belly, but most of all Challon liked to have his decisions made for him and he was ready to reward the decision maker with a dogged loyalty.
It was not that Challon was a stupid man; far from it, but the Dragoon Sergeant understood that other men were cleverer than himself, and he quickly discovered that Pierre Ducos was among the cleverest he had ever known. That was a comfort to Challon, for if he was to survive his treachery to the Emperor’s cause, then he would need cleverness.
The nine horsemen had travelled eastwards from Bordeaux. Their route took them far to the north of where Marshal Soult retreated in front of the British army, and far to the south of where the Emperor protected Paris with a dazzling display of defensive manoeuvres. Ducos and his men rode into the deserted uplands of central France. They lived well on their journey. There was money for an inn room each night, and money for those men who wanted whores, and money for food, and money for spare horses, and money for good civilian clothes to replace the Dragoons’ uniforms, though Ducos noted that each man saved his green uniform coat. That was pride; the same pride that made the Dragoons wear their hair long so that, one day, they might again plait it into the distinctive cadenettes. Their possession of money also made the nine men ride circumspectly, for the forests were full of dangers, yet by avoiding the main roads they travelled safely around the places where hungry brigands laid desperate ambushes.
Ducos, Sergeant Challon, and three of the troopers were Frenchmen. One of the other Dragoons was a German; a great hulking Saxon with eyes the colour of a winter’s sky and hands that, despite the loss of two fingers on his right hand, could still break a man’s neck with ease. There was a Pole who sat dark and quiet, yet seemed eager to please Ducos. The other two Dragoons were Italians, recruited in the early heady days of Napoleon’s career. All spoke French, all trusted Challon and, because Challon trusted Ducos, they were happy to offer allegiance to the small bespectacled Major.
After a week’s eastward travel Ducos found a deserted upland farm where for a few days the nine men lay up in seclusion. They were not hiding, for Ducos was happy to let the Dragoons ride to the nearby town so long as they fetched him back whatever old newspapers were available. ‘If we’re not hiding,’ one of the Italians grumbled to Challon, ‘then what are we doing?’ The Italians disliked being stranded in the primitive comforts of the turf-roofed farmhouse, but Challon told them to be patient.
‘The Major’s sniffing the wind,’ Challon said, and Ducos was indeed sniffing the strange winds that blew across France, and he was beginning to detect a danger in them. After two weeks in the farm Ducos told Challon of his fears. The two men walked down the valley, crossed an uncut meadow and walked beside a quick stream. ‘You realize,’ Ducos said, ‘that the Emperor will never forgive us?’
‘Does it matter, sir?’ Challon, ever the soldier, had a carbine in his right hand while his eyes watched the forest’s edge across the stream. ‘God bless the Emperor, sir, but he can’t last for ever. The bastards will get him sooner rather than later.’
‘Did you ever meet the Emperor?’ Ducos asked.
‘Never had that honour, sir. I saw him often enough, of course, but never met him, sir.’
‘He has a Corsican’s sense of honour. If his family is hurt, Sergeant, then Napoleon will never forgive. So long as he has a breath in his body he will seek revenge.’
The grim words made Challon nervous. The four crates that Challon had escorted to Bordeaux had contained property that belonged to the Emperor and to his family, and soon the Emperor would have all the leisure in the world to wonder what had happened to that precious consignment. ‘Even so, sir, if he’s imprisoned, what can he do?’
‘The Emperor of France,’ Ducos said pedantically, ‘is the head of the French State. If he falls from power, Challon, then there will be another head of state. That man, presumably the King, will regard himself as Napoleon’s legitimate heir. I presume that you would like to die of a peaceful old age in France?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So would I.’ Ducos was staring over the stream and dark trees towards a tall crag of pale rock about which two eagles circled in the cold wind, but Ducos was not seeing the rock, nor even the handsome birds, but instead was remembering the Teste de Buch fort where, once again, he had been humiliated by an English Rifleman. Sharpe. It was odd, Ducos thought, how often Sharpe had crossed his path, and even odder how often that crude soldier had succeeded in frustrating Ducos’s most careful plans. It had happened again at the benighted fort on the French coast and Ducos, seeking some clever stroke that would give himself and Sergeant Challon freedom, had found himself thinking more and more about Major Richard Sharpe.
At first Ducos had resented the intrusion of Sharpe into his thoughts, but in these last two days he had begun to see that there was a possible purpose to that intrusion. Perhaps it would be possible for Ducos to take revenge on his old enemy as a part of the concealment of the theft. The plan was intricate, but the more Ducos tested it, the more he liked it. What he needed now was Challon’s support, for without the Sergeant’s physical courage, and without the loyalty that the other Dragoons felt for Challon, the intricacy was doomed. So, as they walked beside the stream, Ducos spoke low and urgently to the Sergeant, and what he said revealed a golden bridge to a wonderful future for Sergeant Challon.
‘It will mean a visit to Paris,’ Ducos warned, ‘then a killing somewhere in France.’
Challon shrugged. ‘That doesn’t sound too dangerous, sir.’
‘After which we’ll leave France, Sergeant, till the storm blows out.’
‘Very good, sir.’ Challon was quite content so long as his duties were clear. Ducos could do the planning, and Challon would doubtless do the killing. Thus, in Challon’s world, it had ever been; he was content to let the officers devise their campaign plans, and he would cut and hack with a blade to make those plans work.
Ducos’s clever mind was racing backwards and forwards, sensing the dangers in his ideas and seeking to pre-empt those risks. ‘Do any of your men write?’
‘Herman’s the only one, sir. He’s a clever bugger for a Saxon.’
‘I need an official report written, but not in my own handwriting.’ Ducos frowned suddenly. ‘How can he write? He’s had two fingers chopped off.’
‘I didn’t say he wrote so as you can read it, sir,’ Challon said chidingly, ‘but he’s got his letters.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ for Ducos could even see a virtue in the Saxon’s illegible handwriting. And that, he realized, was the hallmark of a good plan, when even its apparent frailties turned into real advantages.
So that night, under a flickering rushlight, the nine men made a solemn agreement. The agreement was a thieves’ pact which pledged them to follow Ducos’s careful plan and, to further that plan, the Saxon laboriously wrote a long document to Ducos’s dictation. Afterwards, as the Dragoons slept, Ducos wrote his own long report which purported to describe the fate of the Emperor’s missing baggage. Then, in the morning, with panniers and saddle-bags still bulging, the nine men rode north. They faced a few weeks of risk, a few months of hiding, then triumph.
CHAPTER TWO
Over the next few days it seemed as if Wellington was offering peace an opportunity, for he broke off his direct advance on Toulouse and instead ordered the army into a confusing series of manoeuvres that could only delay any confrontation with Marshal Soult’s army. If the manoeuvres were designed to offer the French a chance to retreat, they did not take it, but just waited at Toulouse while the British, Spanish and Portuguese forces made their slow and cumbersome advance. One night Nairn’s brigade was marched through pelting rain to where Engineers were laying a pontoon bridge across a wide river. Sharpe knew the river was the Garonne, for his orders said as much, but he had no idea where in France the Garonne ran. Nor did it much matter for the night became a fiasco when the Engineers discovered their bridge was too short. Nairn’s men slept by the roadside as the Engineers swore and wrestled with the clumsy tin boats that should have carried the wooden roadway. Eventually the crossing was abandoned.
Three days later a bridge was successfully laid elsewhere on the river, troops crossed, but it seemed the bridge led to nothing but swampland in which the artillery floundered up to its axles. In Spain no such mistake would have happened, for in Spain there had always been willing local guides eager to lead the British army towards the hated French, but here, on the Emperor’s own soil, there was no such help. Neither was there any opposition from the local population who merely seemed numbed by the years of war.
The troops who struggled in the swamps were called back and their bridge was dismantled. There had been no interference from Marshal Soult’s army that was entrenched about the city’s outskirts; A German deserter reported on the enemy dispositions, and also said that the Emperor Napoleon had committed suicide. ‘A German soldier will say anything to get a decent meal,’ Nairn grumbled, ‘or an English one to get a bottle of rum.’
No confirmation came of the Emperor’s death. It seemed that Napoleon still lived, Paris was uncaptured, and so the war went on. Wellington ordered a new bridge made and this time almost the whole army crossed to find itself north of Toulouse and between two rivers. They marched south and by Good Friday they were close enough to smell the cooking fires of the city. Next day the army marched even closer and Sharpe, riding ahead with Nairn, saw what obstacles protected the city. Between the British and Toulouse there lay a long hog-backed ridge. Beyond the ridge was a canal, but the ridge provided the city’s real protection for it was the high ground, and whoever possessed it could pour a killing fire down on to their enemies. Sharpe drew out his telescope and gazed at the ridge’s summit where he saw fresh scars of newly dug earth which betrayed that the French, far from being ready to surrender, were still fortifying the hill’s top. ‘I hate God-damned bloody trenches,’ he said to Nairn.
‘You’ve faced them before?’
‘In the Pyrenees. It wasn’t pleasant.’
It began to rain as the two men rode back to the British lines. ‘Tomorrow’s Easter Day,’ Nairn said moodily.
‘Yes.’
Nairn took a long swig of rum from his flask, then offered it to Sharpe. ‘Even for a disbeliever like me it’s a bloody inappropriate day to fight a battle, wouldn’t you say?’
Sharpe did not reply for a gun had boomed behind him. He twisted in his saddle and saw the dirty puff of smoke on the crest of the ridge and, just a second later, he saw a spurt of water splash and die in the western marshes. The French were sighting in their twelve-pounders; the killing guns with their seven foot barrels.
The thought of those efficiently served weapons gave Sharpe a quick sudden pain in his belly. He had somehow convinced himself that there would be no fight, that the French would see how hopeless their cause was, yet the enemy gunners were even now ranging their batteries and Sharpe could hear the whining scrape of blades being whetted on stones in the British cavalry lines. At luncheon, which Nairn’s military family ate inside a large tent, Sharpe found himself hoping that peace would be announced that very afternoon, yet when a message arrived it proved to be orders for the brigade to prepare itself for battle the next day.
Nairn solemnly toasted his aides. ‘An Easter death to the French, gentlemen.’
‘Death to the French,’ the aides repeated the old toast, then stood to drink the King’s health.
Sharpe slept badly. It was not work that kept him awake, for the last marching orders had been copied and dispatched well before nightfall. Nor was it the supper of salt beef and sour wine that had made him restless. It was the apprehension of a man before battle; that same apprehension which had kept him awake on the nights before the duel with Bampfylde. The apprehension was fear; pure naked fear, and Sharpe knew that battle by battle the fear was getting worse for him. When he had first joined the army as a private he had been young and cocksure; he had even felt exhilarated before a fight. He had felt himself to be immortal then, and that had made him confident that he could maul and claw and kill any man who opposed him. Now, as an officer, and married, he possessed more knowledge and so had more fear. Tomorrow he could die.
He tried the old tricks to conquer the knowledge; attempting to snatch an augury of life or death from the commonplace. If a sparrow alighted this side of a puddle, he would live. He despised such superstitious obsessions, yet could not help but indulge them, though he had made the attempt too often in the past to believe in any such trivial portents. Indeed, every man in both armies, Sharpe knew, was trying to snatch just such prophecies from their fears, but there were few who would allow themselves to see death written in their stars, yet many must die. The eve of battle was a time for talismans and amulets and charms and prayers, but the dawn would bring the kick of musket-butts, the hiss of sabres and the skull-shattering sound of artillery firing. So Sharpe shivered in the night and hoped his death would be quick, and that he would not scream beneath the surgeon’s knife.
By dawn the rain had stopped and a drying wind blew across the countryside. High clouds scudded away from the sun’s rising as Sharpe walked through the smoking bivouac fires in search of a cavalry armourer who could put an edge on to his sword. It was the sword of a trooper of the Heavy Cavalry; a long-bladed, heavy, and unbalanced weapon. It was far too unwieldy for most men, even for the burly men who rode the big horses and trained with dumb-bells to give strength to their sword arms, but Sharpe liked the sword and was strong enough to make it into a responsive and murderous weapon.
He found an armourer who ran the blade up his treadled wheel and afterwards stropped it on his leather apron. Sharpe gave the man a coin, then shared a tin mug of tea. Afterwards, with the oiled sword-blade safe in its scabbard, he went back to Nairn’s tent outside of which he found the old Scotsman breakfasting on bread, cold salt-beef, and strong tea. Nairn watched with amusement as Sharpe unrolled the ancient and threadbare jacket from his pack. ‘While you were gone,’ Nairn said, ‘I was vouchsafed a new glimpse of our noble Colonel Taplow.’
Sharpe was grateful for the distraction from his fears. ‘Tell me, please?’
‘He’s holding a service of Holy Communion, for officers only, mark you, behind the latrines in ten minutes. You are invited, but I took the liberty of declining on your behalf. And on mine, as it happens.’
Sharpe laughed. He sat opposite Nairn and wondered whether his right hand was shaking as he reached for a slice of twice-baked bread. The butter was rancid, but the salt on the beef smothered the sour taste.
Nairn picked a shred of salt-beef from his teeth. ‘The thought of Taplow at his sacred offices is quite loathsome. Do you think God listens to such a man?’ Nairn poured rum into his tea.
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘You’re not a believer, Sharpe?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Nor am I, of course, but I was still half tempted to attend Taplow’s magical incantations. Just in case they helped. I’m damned nervous, Sharpe.’
Sharpe felt a sudden strong surge of affection for Nairn. ‘Me too, sir.’
‘You? Truly?’
Sharpe nodded. ‘Truly. It doesn’t get easier.’
‘How many battles have you fought?’
Sharpe was dunking a lump of hard bread into his tea. He left it there as he thought, then shrugged. ‘God knows, sir. Dozens of the damn things. Too many.’
‘Enough to entitle you to be cautious, Richard. You don’t have to be heroic today. Leave that to some wet-behind-the-ears Lieutenant who needs to make his name.’
Sharpe smiled his thanks. ‘I’ll try, sir.’
‘And if I do anything foolish today, you will tell me?’
Sharpe looked up at the Scotsman, surprised by this confession of uncertainty. ‘You won’t need that, sir.’
‘But you’ll tell me?’ Nairn insisted.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Not that I’ll share any of the glory with you, Sharpe, you mustn’t think that, though I might say afterwards that you were moderately useful.’ Nairn laughed, then waved a greeting to two of his other aides who came to the breakfast table. ‘Good morning, gentlemen! I was thinking last night that perhaps Paris doesn’t count.’
‘Paris?’ One of the puzzled aides asked.
Nairn was evidently thinking of the war’s ending. ‘Perhaps the northern allies will take Paris, but Napoleon might just fall back and fall back, and we’ll keep matching on, and someday this summer the whole damned lot of us will meet in the very middle of France. There’ll be Boney himself in the centre, and every French soldier left alive with him, and the rest of Europe surrounding him, and then we’ll have a proper battle. One last real bastard of a killing. It seems unfair to have come this far and never actually fought against Napoleon himself.’ Nairn gazed wistfully across the bivouacs where the smoke of the cooking fires melded into skeins like a November mist. ‘I’ll keep the Highlanders in reserve, Sharpe. That way no one can accuse me of showing them favouritism.’
It was a strange world, Sharpe thought, in which to keep a battalion out of the battle line was construed as an insult. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘I suppose there’s no point in giving Captain Frederickson direct orders?’
‘Not if you want those orders obeyed, sir. But he knows what to do, and his men would appreciate a visit from you.’
‘Of course, of course.’ Nairn added more rum to his tea, then frowned. ‘Frederickson’s Rifles are the only men in this brigade who eat properly. They never have salt beef! Why do we never catch them looting?’
‘Because they’re Riflemen, sir. They’re much too clever.’
Nairn smiled. ‘At least there’ll be no more salt beef once this battle’s won. We’ll have French rations.’
The other aides arrived, faces gleaming from their razors. Sharpe had still not shaved, and he had a sudden irrational conviction that he would survive the day if he did not shave, then another equally strong impulse said that he would only live if he did shave, and he felt the reptilian squirm of fear in his belly. He stared up at the long, long ridge that, just like the British bivouacs, was topped by a shifting layer of smoke. The smoke was thick enough to suggest the large numbers of Frenchmen who would be defending the high ground this day. Sharpe thought of Jane and suddenly longed for the Dorset house with its implicit promise of a nursery. He was about to ask whether any mail had arrived when a light flashed from the ridge top and Sharpe knew it was the sun reflecting from a telescope as an enemy officer gazed down at the British lines. The fear stirred in Sharpe. He was tempted to take some of Nairn’s rum, but resisted.
The waiting abraded the fear. The first Spanish, Portuguese and British brigades had marched long before dawn, their long lines uncoiling from the encampment in a sluggishly macabre motion, but Nairn’s brigade would be one of the last to leave the lines. They could only wait, pretending confidence, as the minutes wore on. Nairn inspected his battalions and tossed gruff encouragement to the soldiers. Some of the Highlanders sang psalms, but their tunes were so dirge-like that Sharpe went out of earshot. He had decided that his survival lay in not shaving.
It took another half hour before the orders came from Division and Nairn at last could order his men forward. Taplow’s battalion led, and the Highlanders marched at the rear. The brigade followed the other battalions who were already marching to the ridge’s southern slopes. Sharpe, mounted on his mare Sycorax, could see the Spanish Divisions that waited at the ridge’s northern end. Today those Spaniards had the place of honour, for they would comprise the major attack up the ridge’s spine. They had asked for the honour. As they attacked, so the British and Portuguese, under Marshal Beresford, would assault the ridge’s southern end to split the French defences. Other British troops were ringed about the city to make threatening feints designed to stop Marshal Soult concentrating his army on the ridge.
The French, secure on their heights, could see all that Wellington planned. There could be no deception this day, no sleight of arms to blind the enemy and cheat him. This would be work, hard work, work for the bayonet and the bullet, work for the infantry.
The southward march was not easy for the ground was soft. Nairn’s brigade, among the last in Beresford’s long column, found the tracks churned into a morass. At first that clinging mud was their only problem, but as their route angled ever closer to the ridge the brigade came within range of the French gunners. Nairn ordered his men to march through the marshy fields to the west of the tracks, but still the roundshot slashed into his battalion columns. The British artillery tried to reply, but they were shooting uphill at enemy batteries well dug in behind thick emplacements.
‘Close up, you scum!’ Lieutenant-Colonel Taplow bellowed at his leading company after a cannonball had crashed through a file to leave three men bloody and twitching on the soaking ground. ‘Leave them there!’ he shouted at two men who stooped to help the victims. ‘Leave them, I say, or I’ll have you flogged!’ At the rear of Taplow’s fusiliers a band played, their music made ragged by their stumbling progress over the tussocky soft ground. Drummer boys were ordered to attend to the three men, but two were already dead and the third had not long to live. The battalion surgeon finished the man with a quick knife cut, then, shrugging, wiped his bloody hands on his grey breeches.
The French artillery pumped smoke from the ridge crest. Sharpe, staring eastwards, could sometimes see the trace of a dark line in the sky and he knew he watched a cannonball at the top of its arcing flight, and he also knew that such a pencil line was only visible in the sky when the ball was coming straight at the observer. At those moments he felt a temptation to spur Sycorax onwards, feigning some urgent duty, but he restrained himself in case any man should think him cowardly. Instead he rode steadily, flinching inwardly, and hid his relief as the balls missed. One roundshot thumped into the mud just ahead of Sycorax, making the mare rear frantically. Somehow Sharpe kept his feet in the stirrups and his arse on the saddle as the gobbets of wet mud fountained about him. The mare was not properly trained to battle, but she was a good steady horse. She had been a gift from Jane, and that thought gave Sharpe a sentimental longing to see his wife. He wondered if her mail had become lost, because no letter had yet arrived, then a cannonball went just over his shako to decapitate a redcoat marching to Sharpe’s left and he forgot his wife in the sudden surge of fear.
‘Close up!’ a Sergeant shouted. ‘Close up!’ It was the litany of battle and the only obituary of the common soldier.
‘You’re used to this, I suppose?’ A Lieutenant, one of Nairn’s junior aides, spurred alongside Sharpe. Ahead of them a man’s entrails were being trodden into the mud, but either the Lieutenant did not notice or did not recognize what he saw.
‘I don’t think you ever get used to it,’ Sharpe said, though it was not true. One did get used to it, but that did not help the fear. The Lieutenant, who was new to the war, was clearly terrified, though he was trying hard not to show it. ‘It’s better,’ Sharpe said truthfully, ‘once you can fire back. It’s much less frightening then.’
‘Bless you, sir, I’m not frightened.’
‘I am.’ Sharpe grinned, then looked to his right and saw that Frederickson’s men were so far unscathed. Frederickson had taken his Riflemen closer to the enemy, which had been a shrewd move for the Greenjackets made a small and seemingly negligible target compared to the long and cumbersome column of redcoats. The French were firing over the Riflemen’s heads.
A cavalry officer galloped past Frederickson’s men towards the head of Beresford’s column. Sharpe recognized the man as one of Wellington’s aides, and assumed from his haste that he carried an urgent message. A clue to the message came when the ridge’s northern end suddenly exploded with cannon fire. Sharpe twisted in his saddle and saw that the French had unmasked a dozen batteries that were hammering their missiles down the hill at the attacking Spaniards.
The Lieutenant frowned. ‘I thought we were supposed to attack at the same time as the Dagoes, sir?’
‘We were.’
God only knew what had gone wrong, but gone wrong it had. The Spaniards, instead of waiting until Beresford’s diversionary attack was in position to the south, had precipitately charged up the ridge’s northern slopes. Their bright uniforms and gaudy colours made a brave show, but it was a gallant display being eviscerated by the concentrated fire of the deadly twelve-pounders.
‘Halt! Halt!’ Divisional officers were galloping back down Beresford’s column. ‘Face right! Face right!’
Battalion officers and sergeants took up the cry and the great column halted and clumsily turned to face the bleak, steep slope at the ridge’s centre.
Nairn, who had been riding at the head of his brigade, spurred back. ‘Column of half companies!’ he ordered. It seemed that Marshal Beresford must be contemplating an immediate assault on the ridge. Certainly, if Beresford was to divert attention from the Spanish attack then he could not wait till he reached the gentler slopes at the ridge’s southern end, but would be forced to launch his eleven thousand men on a desperate uphill scramble against the French entrenchments.
The French batteries, seeing the British and Portuguese battalions shake into their attack columns, kept firing. ‘Lie down!’ Nairn shouted. ‘Lie down!’
