At the day’s end, and despite its unrelenting activity, Sharpe felt that most of his work was still unfinished. He said as much to Nairn when they met before supper in the farm’s parlour. The Scotsman, as ever, was ebullient. ‘Four brace of duck! Almost as satisfying as a good battle.’
‘I’ve got enough work without fighting battles,’ Sharpe grumbled.
‘There speaks the true staff officer.’ Nairn stretched out his legs so his servant could tug off his muddied boots. ‘Any important news?’ he asked Sharpe.
Sharpe decided not to worry Nairn with the problem of the cattle. ‘The only remarkable aspect of today, sir, is that Colonel Taplow didn’t make any trouble.’
Lieutenant Colonel Taplow commanded one of Nairn’s two English battalions. He was a short and choleric man with a manner of astonishing incivility who perceived slights to his dignity in every order. Nairn rather liked the foul man. ‘Taplow’s easy enough to understand. Think of him as typically English; stubborn, stupid, and solid. Like a lump of undercooked pork.’
‘Or salt beef,’ Sharpe would not rise to the Scotsman’s bait, ‘and I hope you like salt beef, sir, because you’re going to get a damned lot of it.’
Next day the advance continued. Every village greeted the British with a sullen curiosity that later turned to astonished approval when the villagers discovered that, unlike their own armies, this one paid for the food they took from barns and storehouses. Soldiers found French girls who then joined the Spanish and Portuguese wives who straggled behind the advancing battalions. The women were more trouble than the soldiers, for many of the Spanish wives had an ineradicable hatred of the French that could lead to quick savage knife fights. Sharpe once had to kick two women apart, then, when the Spanish girl turned from her French enemy and tried to stab Sharpe, he stunned her with his rifle butt before spurring his horse onwards.
Sergeant Harper, before leaving St Jean de Luz, had sent his own Spanish wife home. She and the baby had gone to Pasajes, just across the French border, with orders to wait there for Harper. ‘She’ll do just fine, sir,’ Harper said to Sharpe. ‘She’s happier with her own people, so she is.’
‘You don’t worry about her?’
Harper was astonished at the question. ‘Why should I? I gave the lass money, so I did. She knows I’ll fetch her and the child when it’s time.’
Harper might not have worried about his Isabella, but Sharpe found Jane’s absence hard to bear. He persuaded himself that it was unreasonable to expect any letters to have yet reached him from Britain, but he still eagerly searched each new bag of mail that came to the brigade. At other times he tried to imagine where Jane was and what she did. He constructed a dream in his head of the house she would buy; a gracious stone house set in a placid gentle countryside. There would be a place in the house where he could hang up his ugly heavy sword, and another place for his battered rifle. He imagined friends visiting, and long conversations by candlelight in which they would remember these lengthening spring days as they pursued an army across its homeland. He imagined a nursery where his children would grow up far from the stink of powder smoke.
They were a soldier’s dreams of peace, and peace was in the air like the smell of almond blossom. Each day brought a new rumour of the war’s ending; Napoleon was confidently said to have taken poison, then a contrary rumour claimed that the Emperor had broken a Russian army north of Paris, but the very next day a Spanish Colonel swore on the six bleeding wounds of Christ that the Prussians had trounced Bonaparte and fed his body to their hunting dogs. An Italian deserter from Marshal Soult’s army reported that the Emperor had fled to the United States, while the chaplain of Colonel Taplow’s fusiliers was entirely certain that Napoleon was negotiating a personal peace with Britain’s Prince Regent; the chaplain had heard as much from his wife whose brother was a dancing-master to a discarded mistress of the Prince.
Fed by such rumours the talk of the army turned more and more to the mysterious condition of peacetime. Except for a few months in 1803, most men had never known Britain and France to be at peace. These men were soldiers, their trade was to kill Frenchmen, and peace was as much a threat as a promise. The threats of peace were very real, unemployment and poverty, while the promises of peace were more tenuous and, for most men in the army, non-existent. An officer could resign his commission, take his half pay, and chance his arm at civilian life, but most of the soldiers had enlisted for life, and peace for them would simply mean their dispersal to garrisons across the world. A few would be discharged, but without pension and with a bleak future in a world where other men had learned useful skills.
‘You’ll get me papers?’ Harper nevertheless asked Sharpe one night.
‘I’ll get you papers, Patrick, I promise.’ The ‘papers’ were the certificate of discharge that would guarantee that Sergeant Patrick Harper had been retired because of wounds. ‘What will you do then?’ Sharpe asked.
Harper had no doubts. ‘Fetch the wife, sir, then go home.’
‘To Donegal?’
‘Where else?’
Sharpe was thinking that Donegal was a long way from Dorset. ‘We’ll miss our friends,’ he said instead.
‘That’s the truth, sir.’
Sharpe was visiting Captain William Frederickson’s company that had taken over a windmill on a shallow hill above a wide, tree-bordered stream. The Riflemen’s supper was roast pork, a dish that Captain Frederickson was very partial to and which meant that no sow or piglet was safe if it was close to his line of march. Sharpe was given a generous helping of the stolen meat, after which Frederickson led him up the dizzying cradle of ladders which climbed to the mill’s cap. There Frederickson opened a small door and the two officers crawled out on to a tiny platform that gave access to the mill’s big axle. A spitting rain was being gusted by an east wind. ‘There,’ Frederickson pointed eastwards.
Beyond the stream, and beyond the dark loom of some further woods, there was a glimmering smear of light in the night sky. Only one thing could make a light such as that: the flames of an army’s bivouac fires reflecting off low clouds. The two Rifle officers were looking towards the French.
‘They’re camped around Toulouse,’ Frederickson said.
‘Toulouse?’ Sharpe repeated vaguely.
‘It’s a French city, though I wouldn’t expect anyone as exalted as a staff officer to know that. It’s also the place where Marshal Soult doubtless hopes to stop us, unless the war ends first.’
‘Perhaps it’s all wishful thinking.’ Sharpe took the bottle of wine that Frederickson offered him. ‘Boney’s escaped from disaster before.’
‘There’ll be peace,’ Frederickson said firmly. ‘Everyone’s tired of the fighting.’ He paused. ‘I wonder what the devil we’ll all do in peacetime?’
‘Rest,’ Sharpe said.
‘In your Dorset home?’ Frederickson, knowing that Jane had gone home to purchase a country property, was amused. ‘And after a month of it you’ll be wishing to hell that you were back here in the rain, wondering just what the bastards are planning, and whether you’ve got enough ammunition for the morning.’
‘Have you?’ Sharpe asked with professional concern.
‘I stole four cartridge boxes from Taplow’s quartermaster.’ Sweet William fell silent as a billow of wind stirred the furled and tethered mill-sails.
Sharpe gazed towards the French encampment. ‘Is it a big city?’
‘Big enough.’
‘Fortified?’
‘I would imagine so.’ Frederickson took the wine bottle back and tipped it to his mouth. ‘And I imagine it will be a bastard of a city to take.’
‘They all are,’ Sharpe said drily. ‘Do you remember Badajoz?’
‘I doubt I’ll ever forget it,’ Frederickson said, though nor would any man who had fought across that ditch of blood.
‘We took that at Eastertime,’ Sharpe said, ‘and next week is Easter.’
‘Is it, by God?’ Frederickson asked. ‘By
God, so it is.’
Both men fell silent, both wondering whether this would be their last Easter. If peace was a promise, then it was a promise barred by that great red smear of light for, unless the French surrendered in the next few days, then a battle would have to be fought. One last battle.
‘What will you do, William?’ Sharpe took the bottle and drank.
Frederickson did not need the question explained. ‘Stay in the army. I don’t know another life and I don’t think I’d be a good tradesman.’ He fumbled with flint and steel, struck a spark to his tinder box, then lit a cheroot. ‘I find I have a talent for violence,’ he said with amusement.
‘Is that good?’ Sharpe asked.
Frederickson hooted with laughter at the question. ‘Violence solved your problem with bloody Bampfylde! If you hadn’t fought the bugger then you can be certain he’d even now be making trouble for you in London. Violence may not be good, my friend, but it has a certain efficiency in the resolution of otherwise insoluble problems.’ Frederickson took the bottle. ‘I can’t say I’m enamoured of a peacetime army, but there’ll probably be another war before too long.’
‘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 du
ties 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 saddlebags still bulging, the nine men rode north. They faced a few weeks of risk, a few months of hiding, then triumph.
CHAPTER 2
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.
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