Which meant another delay as the Comte’s two horses were coaxed aboard and a section of Frederickson’s Riflemen were moved out of the forward hold to make way for the beasts. Trunks and cases were carried up the gangplank.
‘I cannot, of course,’ the Comte de Maquerre said, ‘travel in this ship.’
‘Why not?’ Sharpe asked.
A wrinkle of the nostril was the only answer and a further delay ensued while a message was sent to the Scylla which demanded that His Excellency the Comte de Maquerre be allowed quarters on board the frigate or, preferably, the Vengeance.
Captain Grant of the Scylla, doubtless under pressure from the Vengeance, returned a short answer. The Comte, disgusted, went below to the cabin he would now have to share with Frederickson.
The light was full now, dissipated by clouds and showing the filth that floated yellow and black in the grey harbour. A dead dog bumped against the Amelie’s hull as the forward cables were released, then the aft splashed free, and from overhead came the menacing sound of great sails unleashing to the wind’s power. A gull gave its lonely, harsh cry that sailors believed was the sound of a drowned soul in agony.
Sharpe stared at the golden-haired girl in the cloak of silver-blue and he blamed the wind for the tears in his eyes. Jane had a handkerchief to her face and Sharpe prayed that he had not seen the first symptoms of the fever in her.. He tried to convince himself that Jane was right, and that she merely suffered from eating bad fish the night before, but goddamn it, he thought, why did she have to visit Hogan?
‘Go home!’ he shouted across the widening gap.
Jane shivered, but stayed. She watched the Amelie claw clumsily out beyond the bar and Sharpe, staring back to the harbour, saw the tiny signal of her white-waving handkerchief get smaller and smaller and finally disappear as a rain-squall seethed and hissed over the broken sea.
The Vengeance loomed over the other ships. The Amelie, pumps already working, took station astern while the Scylla, fast and impatient, leaped ahead into the squalls. The brig-sloops closed behind the Amelie, and the shore of France was nothing but a dark smear on a grey sea.
A buoy, tarred black and marking God alone knew what hazard in this empty waste, slipped astern and thus the expedition to Arcachon, amidst chaos and uncertainty, was under way.
CHAPTER 4
All day Commandant Henri Lassan watched the ships pass. He watched from within one of the fort’s covered citadels and with the help of a brass-barrelled telescope that had belonged to his grandfather.
No flag flew from the fort. One of the local fishermen, trusted by Lassan, had taken his small boat to the Lacanau shoals where the British brig had taken the smack’s wind and invited the captain aboard. Rum had been served, gold paid for fish, and the fisherman had solemnly informed the enemy that the fort was deserted entirely of its old garrison. They had gone north, he said, to serve the Emperor, and only a few local militia now patrolled the ramparts. If the lie was believed then Lassan might entice the British into the range of his heavy guns, and he had cause to think the lie had worked for the brig had flattened her sails into the wind and gone southwards.
Now, instead of the brig, a vast line of grey sails flecked the western horizon. Commandant Lassan guessed the ships were eight or nine miles out to sea and he knew that he watched a British convoy carrying men and weapons and horses and ammunition to their Army to the south.
The sight made Henri Lassan feel lonely. His Emperor was far away and he was alone on the coast of France and his enemy could sail with impunity down that coast in a massive convoy that would have needed a fleet to disrupt. Except there were no more French fleets; the last had been destroyed by Nelson nine years before and what ships were left rotted in their anchorages.
A few privateers, American and French, sailed the ocean, but they were like small dogs yapping at the heels of a vast herd. Even Cornelius Killick, in his splendid Thuella, could not have taken a ship from that convoy. Killick would have waited for a straggler perhaps, but nothing less than a fleet could have broken that vast line of ships.
It was painful to see the enemy’s power so naked, so unchallenged, so ponderous. In the great holds of those hull-down ships were the instruments that would bring death to Soult’s army in the south, and Lassan could do nothing. He could win his small battle, if it came, but the greater struggle was beyond his help.
That thought made him chide himself for lack of faith and, in penitence, he went to the fort’s small chapel and prayed for a miracle. Perhaps the Emperor, marching and counter-marching his men along the frost hardened roads of the north, could win a great victory and break the alliance that ringed France, yet the Emperor’s desperation was witnessed by the fort’s emptiness. France had been scraped for men, then scraped again, and many of the next class of conscripts had already fled into the woods or hills to escape the sergeants who came to take cannon-fodder still not grown to manhood.
A clash of boots, a shout, and the squeal of the gate hinges which, however often greased, insisted on screeching like a soul entering purgatory, announced a visitor to the fort. Lassan pocketed his beads, crossed himself, and went into the twilight.
‘The bastards! The double-crossing bastards! Good evening, Henri.’ Cornelius Killick, his savage face furious, nodded to the Commandant. ‘Bastards!’
‘Who?’
‘Bordeaux! No copper! No oak! What am I supposed to do? Paste paper over the bloody holes?’
‘Perhaps you’ll take some wine?’ Lassan suggested diplomatically.
‘I’ll take some wine.’ The American followed Lassan into the Commandant’s quarters that looked more like a library than a soldier’s rooms. ‘That bastard Ducos! I’d like to pull his teeth out through his backside.’
‘I thought,’ Lassan said gently, ‘that the coffin-maker in Arcachon had given you some elm?’
‘Given? The bastard made us pay three times the price! And I don’t like sailing with a ship’s arse made out of dead man’s wood.’
‘Ah, a sailor’s superstition.’ Lassan poured wine into the crystal glasses that bore his family’s coat of arms. The last Comte de Lassan had died beneath the guillotine, but Henri had never been tempted to use the title that was rightfully his. ‘Did you see all those fat merchantmen crawling south?’
‘All day,’ Killick said gloomily. ‘Take one of those and you make a small fortune. Not as much as an Indiaman, of course.’ He finished the glass of wine and poured himself more. ‘I told you about the Indiaman I took?’
‘Indeed you did,’ Henri Lassan said politely, ‘three times.’
‘And was her hold crammed with silks? With spices? With treasures of the furthest East? With peacock’s plumes and sapphires blue?’ Killick gave his great whoop of a laugh. ‘No, my friend. She was crammed to the gunwales with saltpetre. Saltpetre to make powder, powder to drive bullets, bullets to kill the British. It is kind of our enemies, is it not, to provide the powers of their own destruction?’ He sat beside the fire and stared at the thin, scholarly-faced Lassan. ‘So, my friend, are the bastards coming?’
‘If they want the chasse-marées,’ Lassan said mildly, ‘they’ll have to come here.’
‘And the weather,’ the American said, ‘will let them land safely.’ The long Biscay shore, that could thunder with tumbling surf, was this week in gentler mood. The breaking waves beyond the channel were four or five feet high, frightening enough to landlubbers, but not high enough to stop ships’ boats from landing.
Lassan, still hoping that his deception would persuade the British that they had no need to land men on the coast to the south, nevertheless acknowledged the possibility. ‘Indeed.’
‘And if they do come by land,’ Killick said brutally, ‘they’ll beat you.’
Lassan glanced at the ebony crucifix that hung between his bookshelves. ‘Perhaps not.’
The American seemed oblivious of Lassan’s appeal to the Almighty. ‘And if they take the fort,’ he went on, ‘they’ll c
ommand the whole Basin.’
‘They will, indeed.’
‘And they’ll take the Thuella.’ Killick said it softly, but in his imagination he was seeing his beautiful ship captured by mocking British sailors. The Thuella would be sailed to England as a prize, and a sleek New England schooner, made to ride the long winds of empty oceans, would become an unloved coasting ship carrying British trade. ‘By God, they will not take her!’
‘We’ll do our best,’ Lassan said helplessly, though how four gun crews could resist a British attack was indeed a problem that called for a miracle. Lassan did not doubt that his guns could wreak damage, but once the British discovered the guns were manned they would soon land their Marines and surround the fort. And Lassan, because the Emperor had been greedy for men, could not defend the seaward and the landward walls at once.
The grim news made the American silent. He stared at the small fire, his hawk’s face frowning, and when he finally spoke his voice was oddly tentative. ‘What if we fought?’
‘You?’ Lassan could not hide his surprise.
‘We can fight, Henri.’ Killick grinned. ‘And we’ve got those damned twelve-pounder guns in our hold.’ He was suddenly filled with enthusiasm, seizing a map from Lassan’s table and weighting its corners with books. ‘They’ll land south of Point Arcachon?’
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘And there are only two routes they can take north. The paths by the beach, or the road!’ Killick’s face was alight with the thought of action, and Lassan saw that the American was a man who revelled in the simple problems of warfare. Lassan had met other such men; brave men who had made their names famous throughout France and written pages of history through their love of violent action. He wondered what would happen to such men when the war ended.
‘You’re a sailor,’ Lassan said gently, ‘and fighting on land is not the same as a sea battle.’
‘But if the bastards aren’t expecting us, Henri! If the pompous bastards think they’re safe! Then we ambush them!’ Killick was certain his men, trained gunners, could handle the French artillery and he was seeing, in his hopeful imagination, the grapeshot cutting down marching files of British Marines. ‘By God we can do it, Henri!’
Lassan held up a thin hand to stop the enthusiastic flow. ‘If you really want to help, Captain Killick, then put your men into the fort.’
‘No.’ Killick knew only too well what the British would do to a captured privateer’s crew. If Killick fought to save the Thuella then he must have a safe retreat in case he was defeated. Yet in his plan to ambush the British on their approach march he could not see any chance of defeat. The enemy Marines would be surprised, flayed by grapeshot, and the Thuella would be safe.
Henri Lassan, staring at the map, wondered whether the American’s plan delineated the miracle he had prayed for. If the British did not capture the fort they could not take the chasse-marées, and without the chasse-marées they were trapped behind the rivers running high with winter’s floodwaters.
Trapped. And perhaps the Emperor, bloodying his northern enemies, would march south and give the British Army a shattering defeat.
For, though Wellington had conquered every French Marshal or General sent to fight him, he had never faced the Emperor’s genius. Lassan wondered if this big, handsome American had found the small answer that would hold up the British just long enough to let the Emperor come south and teach the goddamns a lesson in warfare. Then a pang of realism forced Lassan’s mind to contemplate failure. ‘What will you do, mon ami, if the British win?’
Killick shrugged. ‘Dismast the Thuella and make her look like a wreck, then pray that the British ignore her. And you, Commandant, what will you do?’
Lassan smiled sadly. ‘Burn the chasse-marées, of course.’ By so doing he would condemn the two hundred men of the crews and their families to penury. The mayor and curé had begged him to preserve the boats which, even in French defeat, would give life and bread to the communities of the Biscay coast, but in defeat Henri Lassan would do his duty. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,’ he said.
‘It won’t.’ Killick brandished his cigar to leave an airy trace of smoke like that made by the burning fuse of an arcing mortar shell. ‘It’s a brilliant idea, Henri! So let the buggers come, eh?’
They drank to victory in a winter’s dusk while, far to the south, where they crossed the path of a great convoy tacking the ocean, Richard Sharpe and his small force came north to do battle.
It snowed in the night. Sharpe stood by the stinking tar-coated ratlines on the Amelie’s poop deck and watched the flakes whirl around the riding light. The galley fire was still lit forward and it cast a great sheet of flickering red on the foresail. The galley’s smoke was taken northwards towards the lights of the Vengeance.
The Amelie was making good time. The helmsman said so, even Captain Tremgar, grunting out of his bunk at two in the morning, agreed. ‘Never known the old sow to sail so well, sir. Can you not sleep, now?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll be having a drop of rum with you?’
‘No, thank you.’ Sharpe knew that the merchant Captain was offering a kindness, but he did not want his wits fuddled by drink as well as sleeplessness.
He stood alone by the rail. Sometimes, as the ship leaned to a gust of wind, a lantern would cast a shimmering ray on to a slick, hurrying sea. The snow whirled into nothingness. An hour after Tremgar’s brief conversation Sharpe saw a tiny spark of light, very red, far to the east.
‘Another ship?’ he asked the helmsman.
‘Lord love you, no, sir!’ The snow-bright wind whirled the helmsman’s voice in snatches to Sharpe. ‘That be land!’
A cottage? A soldier’s fire? Sharpe would never know. The spark glimmered, sometimes disappearing altogether, yet then flickering back to crawl at its snail’s pace along the dark horizon, and the sight of that far, anonymous light made Sharpe feel the discomfort of a soldier at sea. His imagination, that would plague him in battle, saw the Amelie shipwrecked, saw the great seas piling cold and grey on breaking timbers among which the bodies of his men would be whirled like rats in a barrel. That one small red spark was all that was safe, all that was secure, and he knew he would rather be a hundred miles behind the enemy lines and on firm ground than be on a ship in a treacherous sea.
‘You cannot sleep. Nor I.’
Sharpe turned. The ghostly figure of the Comte de Maquerre, hair as white as the great cloak that was clasped with silver at his throat, came towards him. The Comte missed his footing as the Amelie’s blunt bow thumped into a larger wave and the tall man had to clutch Sharpe’s arm. ‘My apologies, Major.’
Steadied by Sharpe, the Comte rested his backside on one of the small cannon that had been issued to the Amelie for its protection.
The Comte, his hair remarkably sleek for such an hour of the morning, stared eastwards. ‘France.’ He said the name with reverence, even love.
‘St Jean de Luz was in France,’ Sharpe said in an ungracious attempt to imply that the Comte’s company was not welcome.
The Comte de Maquerre ignored the comment, staring instead at the tiny spark as though it was the Grail itself. ‘I have been away, Major, for eighteen years.’ He spoke with a tragic intonation. ‘Waiting for liberty to be reborn in France.’
The ship dipped again and Sharpe glimpsed a whorl of grey water that was gone as swiftly as it had been illuminated. The snow melted on his face. Everyone spoke of liberty, he thought. The monarchists and the anti-monarchists, the Republicans and the anti-Republicans, the Bonapartists and the Bourbons, all carried the word around as if it was a genie trapped in a bottle and they were the sole possessors of the word’s corkscrew. Yet if Sharpe was to go down to the hold now and wake up the soldiers who slept so fitfully and uncomfortably in the stinking ‘tween-decks of the Amelie, and if he was to ask each man what he wanted in life, then he knew, besides being thought mad by the men, that he would not hear the word Liberty used. They wanted
a woman as a companion, they wanted cheap drink, they wanted a fire in winter and fat crops in summer, and they wanted a patch of land or a wineshop of their own. Most would not get what they desired.
But nor would Sharpe. He had a sudden, startlingly clear vision of Jane lying sick; sweating in the cold shivers of the killing fever. The image, so extraordinarily real in the freezing night, made him shiver himself.
He tried to shake the vision away, then told himself that Jane suffered from nothing more than an upset stomach and a winter’s cold, but the superstition of a soldier suddenly gripped Sharpe’s imagination and he knew, with an utter certainty, that he sailed away from a dying wife. He wanted to howl his misery into the snow-dark night, but there was no help there. No help anywhere. She was dying. That knowledge might have been vouchsafed by a dreamlike image, but Sharpe believed it. ‘Damn your bloody liberty.’ Sharpe spoke savagely.
‘Major?’ The Comte, hearing Sharpe’s voice but no distinct words, edged down the ship’s rail.
Jane would be dead and Sharpe would return to the coldly heaped soil of her grave. He wanted to weep for the loss.
‘Did you speak, Monsieur?’ the Comte persisted.
Sharpe turned to the Comte then. The Rifleman had been distracted by his thoughts, but now he concentrated on the tall, pale aristocrat. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Here, Monsieur?’ de Maquerre was defensive. ‘For the same reason you are here. To bring liberty to France!’
Sharpe’s instincts were alert now. He was sensing that a new player had entered the game, a player who would confuse the issues of this expedition. ‘Why?’ he persisted.
De Maquerre shrugged. ‘My family is from Bordeaux, Major, and a letter was smuggled to me in which they claim the citizens are prepared to rebel. I am ordered to discover the truth of the letter.’
God damn it, but his instincts were right. Sharpe was supposed to discover the mood of the French, but Wigram, knowing that Sharpe would return a gloomy answer, had sent this aristocrat at the very last moment. Doubtless de Maquerre would give Wigram the answer he wanted; the answer that would lead to madness. Sharpe laughed sourly. ‘You think two Companies of Riflemen can provoke Bordeaux into rebellion?’
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 6: Sharpe's Honour, Sharpe's Regiment, Sharpe's Siege Page 69
