Sharpe’s Siege: The Winter Campaign, 1814

Sharpe looked into the narrow face that had been powdered pale. He suddenly remembered that Hogan, in his sick ramblings, had mentioned the name Maquereau, meaning ‘pimp’, and he wondered if the insult was a nickname for this elegant, fastidious man. ‘You’re the Comte de Maquerre?’

‘I have that honour, Monsieur, and I travel to Arcachon with you.’ De Maquerre’s cloak had fallen open to reveal the uniform of the Chasseurs Britannique. Sharpe knew that regiment’s reputation. The officers were Frenchmen loyal to the ancien régime, while its men were deserters from the French Army and all unmitigated scoundrels. They could fight when the mood took them, but it was not a regiment Sharpe would want on his flank in battle.

‘Captain Frederickson! Four men to get the Frenchman’s baggage on board! Quick now!’

De Maquerre tugged at his buttoned, kidskin gloves. ‘You have quarters for my horse? And the packhorse.’

‘No horses,’ Sharpe said sourly, which only tossed the Comte de Maquerre into a sulky fit of protests in which the name of the Duc d’Angoulême, Louis XVIII, and the Lord Wellington featured prominently. In the meantime an angry message came from the Scylla demanding to know why the Amelie had not slipped her moorings at the flood tide, and finally Sharpe had to give way.

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 FOUR

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 command 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.