Sharpe’s Siege: The Winter Campaign, 1814

‘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 world’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?’

‘No, monsieur,’ the Comte de Maquerre paused as a wave lurched the ship sideways. ‘I think two Companies of Riflemen, with the help of some Marines, can hold the fort at Arcachon until more men are carried north by chasse-marée. Isn’t that why the boats are being collected? To make an invasion? And where better to invade than at Arcachon?’

Sharpe did not reply. Elphinstone had ordered him to scotch Wigram’s desk-born ambitions, but now this foppish Frenchman would make that task difficult. It would be simpler, Sharpe thought, to tip the man overboard now.

‘But if the city of Bordeaux is ready for rebellion,’ de Maquerre was happily oblivious of Sharpe’s thoughts, ‘then we can topple the regime now, Major. We can raise insurrection in the streets, we can humble the tyrant. We can end the war!’ Again Sharpe made no reply, and the Comte stared at the tiny glimmer of light in the cold darkness. ‘Of course,’ the Comte continued, ‘if I do succeed in raising the city against the ogre I shall expect your troops to come to my aid immediately.’

Startled, Sharpe twisted to look at the pale profile of the Comte de Maquerre. ‘I have no such orders.’

The Comte also turned, showing Sharpe a pair of the palest, coldest eyes imaginable. ‘You have orders, Major, to offer me every assistance in your power. I carry a commission from your Prince Regent, and a commission from my King. When ordered, Major, you will obey.’

Sharpe was saved from a reply by the harsh clang of the ship’s bell. He wondered, irritably, why sailors did not just ring the hour like other folk, but insisted on sounding gnomic messages of indeterminate meaning upon their bells. Feet padded on the deck as the watch was changed. The binnacle lantern flared bright as the lid was lifted.

‘Your first duty, Major,’ the Count ignored the dark figures who came up the poop-deck ladders, ‘is to safely put my horses ashore.’

Sharpe had taken enough. ‘My first duty, my Lord, is to my men. If you can’t get your horses ashore then they stay here and I won’t lift a goddamned finger to help you. Good day.’ He stalked across the deck, a gesture somewhat spoilt by the need to stagger as the Amelie creaked on to a new course in obedience to lights that flared suddenly from the Vengeance’s poop.

The dawn crept slow from the grey east. The snow stopped and Sharpe could see, in the half-light, that none had settled on the land that proved surprisingly close. A brig was close inshore and signal flags hung bright from her mizzen yard.

‘She wasn’t with us yesterday.’ Sweet William, looking disgustingly well-rested, nodded towards the signalling brig. He had brought Sharpe a mug of tea. ‘She must have been poking around the fortress. Sleep sound?’

‘No sleep.’ Sharpe cradled the mug and sipped the hot, sour liquid. The shore looked barren. Sand dunes were grey behind the flicker of surf and beyond the dunes were the dark shapes of stunted pines. No houses were visible. Far inland there were the low, humped shapes of hills, and to the north there was a promontory of low, shadowed ground that jutted into the bleak waters.

Captain Tremgar pointed to the headland. ‘Point Arcachon.’ He turned away from the two Rifle officers and bellowed orders through a speaking trumpet. Sharpe heard the thumping rumble as the anchor cables snaked and whipped out of the hawse-holes. Sails, that a moment before had been filled with wind, flapped like monstrous bat wings as the topmen furled the stiff canvas on to the yards. The Vengeance, looming vast in the morning light, was already anchored, and already launching her first boats. ‘Christ on his cross!’ Sweet William vented a sudden anger. He was staring at the boats that huddled beside the Vengeance.

Sharpe took his spyglass from the sleeve-pocket on his overalls and extended the ivory barrels. The glass had been a gift from the Emperor of the French to his brother, the King of Spain, but the gift had been lost among the loot of Vitoria and was now carried by an English Rifleman.