Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe’s Revenge, Sharpe’s Waterloo, Sharpe’s Devil

‘Because Bampfylde chose pistols.’ Frederickson had just lit a cheroot and the wind whirled its smoke quickly away.

‘God damn it.’ Sharpe turned away again. He was nervous, and he did not mind showing his nervousness to Frederickson. The Rifle Captain was one of Sharpe’s closest friends and a man who understood how nerves could make the belly into a tight cold knot before a fight. Frederickson, half English and half German, was a fearsome looking man who had given up most of his teeth and one of his eyes on Spanish battlefields. His men, with clumsy affection, called him after a homely flower, Sweet William, though on a battlefield he was anything but sweet. He was a soldier, as tough as any in the army, and tough enough to understand how a brave man could be almost paralysed by fear.

Sharpe understood that too, yet even so he was surprised by the fear he felt in this cold morning. He had been a soldier ever since he had joined the 33rd as a sixteen-year-old recruit. In the twenty-one years since, he had clawed his way through defended breaches, he had stood in the musket line and traded death with an enemy not forty paces away, he had shattered cavalry charges with volley fire, he had fought the lonely fight of a skirmisher ahead of the battle line, he had watched the enemy’s artillery tear his men to red ruin, and he had done all of those things more often than he could remember. He had fought in Flanders, India, Portugal, Spain and France. He had risen from the red-coated ranks to become one of His Majesty’s officers. He had taken an enemy standard, and been captured himself. He had been wounded. He had killed. Other men had spent their lives mastering the skills of peace, but Richard Sharpe had become a master of war. Few men had fought so often, few men had fought so well, and now, Sharpe thought, the lumpen memories of those many fights were gnawing at his confidence. He knew the luck of the long bloody years could not hold, or perhaps it was that now, better than most men, he understood the danger and therefore feared it. That a man who had fought across the foulest battlefields could be killed by grass before breakfast seemed an appropriate twist of fortune. ‘Why do they call it “grass before breakfast”?’ he demanded of Frederickson who, knowing that Sharpe already knew the answer and that the question had sprung only from his friend’s irritation, did not bother to answer.

‘It’s a ridiculous name,’ Jane had said two weeks before, ‘a stupid, stupid name.’ ‘Grass before breakfast’ simply meant a duel which, traditionally, was fought at dawn and usually on some sward of lawn which gave the pistols or swords room for their work. ‘If you insist on fighting this stupid duel,’ Jane had continued, ‘I shall return home. I won’t permit you to destroy yourself, Richard.’

‘Then you had better go home,’ Sharpe had said, ‘because I’m fighting it.’

The disagreement had started as a skirmish, but developed into a searing, exhausting argument that had soured the last two weeks. Jane’s reasons for not wanting Sharpe to eat grass before breakfast were entirely good. For a start he might very well be killed, which would leave Jane a widow, but even if he won, he would still be a loser. Duelling had been banned in the army, and if Sharpe insisted on fighting, then his career could be undone in a single moment. Her husband’s career was precious to Jane and she did not want it risked; neither by a duel, nor even by the skirmishes of a war’s ending. Jane said it was time for Sharpe to go back to England and take the plaudits for his achievements. In England, she said, he would be a hero and he could take a hero’s reward. Had he not been given an audience by the Prince of Wales, and would not that Prince now make certain that Major Sharpe became Sir Richard? Jane wanted Sharpe to abandon the army, to forget the duel, and to sail home, but instead, like the stubborn fool he was, he would stay to eat grass before breakfast and Jane could see all that future eminence, and all those princely rewards, fading like pistol smoke in a wind. Thus she had tried her ultimatum: that if Sharpe insisted on fighting, she would publicly shame him by going home. Sharpe had successfully called her bluff, but at the price of a fortnight’s cold and silent misery.

Frederickson fumbled with his watch again. ‘Half past six.’

‘It’s cold.’ Sharpe seemed to notice the temperature for the first time.

‘In an hour,’ Frederickson said, ‘we’ll be breakfasting on chops and pease pudding.’

‘You might be.’

‘We will be,’ Frederickson insisted patiently, then turned to watch a small black carriage which appeared at the foot of the low hill. The coachman whipped the horses up the rutted earth track, then steered towards the bent pine trees where he stopped with a clatter of trace chains and squealing brake blocks. Sergeant Harper, looking indecently cheerful, unfolded himself from the cramped interior and offered Sharpe a confident grin. ‘Good morning, sir! A bit chilly.’

‘Morning, Sergeant.’

‘I’ve got the bugger, sir.’ Harper gestured at a black-dressed man who had shared the coach.

‘Good morning, Doctor,’ Sharpe said politely.

The doctor ignored the greeting. He was a thin elderly Frenchman who stayed inside the small carriage. He had a black bag which doubtless contained knives, bonesaws, gouges and clamps. The doctor had been reluctant to come to this dawn slaughter, which was why Frederickson had charged Harper with the duty of making sure the man was up and ready. No British doctor, either of the Navy or Army, had been willing to serve at this illegal ceremony which could well lead to courts-martial for everyone involved.

‘He was drunk last night, sir.’ Harper, wearing a Rifleman’s green jacket as faded as either Sharpe’s or Frederickson’s, confided to Sharpe.

‘Who was drunk? The doctor?’

‘No, sir. Captain Bampfylde was drunk. He stayed ashore, you see, and I saw him in the yard of that big inn back of the ropewalk.’ Harper laughed with a scornful pleasure. ‘Pissed as a bishop, he was. He’s as twitchy as a cat, I reckon.’

‘I’m nervous, too,’ Sharpe snapped. ‘I hardly slept last night.’ Or the night before, because the anticipation of this duel had kept him awake as he tried to foresee what might happen in this cold morning. Now he would discover what was ordained, and the closeness of the discovery only added to the fear. He confessed as much to Harper, and was glad to make the confession, for the big Irishman was Sharpe’s closest friend and a man who had shared all of the battles since Wellington’s army had first landed in Portugal.

‘But you weren’t drunk, sir. Bampfylde’s going to have the bloody shakes this morning. They’ll be pouring eggs into him, they will.’ Harper, four inches taller than Sharpe’s six feet, seemed amused at the impending confrontation. Harper had no doubt that Sharpe would despatch Captain Bampfylde’s loathsome soul to eternal damnation.

And Sharpe had no doubt that Bampfylde deserved such a fate. Bampfylde was a Naval officer, Captain of the great Vengeance which was anchored in the outer roads, and, just weeks before, he had led an expedition north to capture a French coastal fort. Sharpe had been the senior land officer and, once the fort was captured, Sharpe had marched inland to ambush the French supply road. He had returned to the captured Teste de Buch fort to find Bampfylde gone. Sharpe, with two companies of Riflemen and a force of Marines, had been stranded in the fort, where he had been besieged by a French brigade led by a General called Calvet. By the grace of God, the luck of the Rifles, and the help of an American privateer, Sharpe had saved his men. But not all of them; too many had died in the fort, and Bampfylde was to blame. Sharpe, returning from the savagery of the battle against Calvet, and lethal with indignation, had challenged the Naval officer to this confrontation. ‘I wish we were fighting with swords.’

‘Swords or guns, who cares?’ Harper said blithely.

‘I care.’

‘He’s a dead bastard either way.’

‘He’s a late bastard.’ Frederickson swung his arms to generate warmth, then, apparently oblivious to the gnawing tensions in Sharpe, asked Harper if the company was ready to march.

‘Aye, sir.’

‘Good.’ For as soon as this duel was fought, Frederickson would take his prime company of the 60th Rifles eastwards to join the army. Sergeant Harper would go with Frederickson for, just like Sharpe, he had become detached from his old battalion. That battalion, the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, had a new Colonel who had appointed his own Majors and a new Regimental Sergeant-Major, which had left Sharpe and Harper adrift.

Harper had been eagerly recruited by Frederickson who, in turn, had been just as eagerly snapped up by Major-General Nairn, a Scotsman who at long last had been given his own fighting brigade and wanted Frederickson’s men to add a lethal sting to his skirmish line. Nairn also wanted Sharpe, not for the skirmish line, but to be his chief of staff.

‘But I’ve never been a staff officer,’ Sharpe had protested.

‘I’ve never commanded a brigade before,’ Nairn had replied cheerfully.

‘I must talk with Jane,’ Sharpe had said, and had then gone back to his lodgings where he broke a week’s chill silence, but their discussion about Nairn’s offer had been no happier than the tearful, rage-shredding arguments about the duel. Jane still insisted that they go home, and this time added a new reason for Sharpe to desert the army. Once peace came, she averred, the price of property in England would rise steeply, which made it all the more sensible to sail home now and find a London house. Sharpe had violently protested at such a notion, claiming that he would never live in London; that it was a vile, dirty, crowded and corrupt city, and while he was not averse to buying a house, that house should be in the country. For no very good reason he wanted to live in Dorset. Someone had once extolled that county, and the idea had lodged irreversibly in his head.

In the end, exhausted by the arguments, a reluctant compromise had been agreed, Jane would go home to take advantage of the existing prices of property, but she would seek a country house in Dorset. In the meantime, and if he survived the duel, Sharpe would serve Major-General Nairn.

‘But why?’ Jane had pleaded tearfully. ‘You said yourself you feared fighting more battles. You can’t fight and live for ever!’ But Sharpe could not really tell her why he refused to go home before the war’s ending. He certainly did not want to be a staff officer, and he readily acknowledged his reluctance to face more battles, but there was a deeper reason that fought those urges and which tugged at his soul like a dark and torrential current. His friends would be in Nairn’s brigade; Nairn himself, Frederickson, and Harper. So many friends had died, and so few were left, and Sharpe knew he would never forgive himself if he deserted those good friends in the last weeks of a long war. So he would stay and fight. But first he would kill a Naval officer, or else be killed himself.

‘I spy the bastards,’ Frederickson said happily.

Three horsemen were spurring along the road from the town. All wore dark blue naval cloaks and had fore-and-aft cocked hats. Sharpe looked past the three Naval officers to see if any mounted provosts were riding from the town to stop the duel and arrest the participants. The duel was not exactly a secret, indeed half the depot officers in St Jean de Luz had wished Sharpe luck, so he could only assume that the provosts had chosen to be deaf and blind to the duel’s illegality.

The Naval officers walked their horses up the hill and, without an apparent glance at Sharpe, dismounted fifty yards away. One of the officers held the horses’ reins, one paced nervously, while the third walked towards the three Riflemen.

Frederickson, who was Sharpe’s second, went to meet the approaching Naval officer. ‘Good morning, Lieutenant!’

‘Good morning, sir.’ Lieutenant Ford was Bampfylde’s second. He carried a wooden case in his right hand. ‘I apologise that we’re late.’

‘We’re just pleased that you’ve arrived.’ Frederickson glanced towards Captain Bampfylde who still paced nervously behind the three horses. ‘Is your principal prepared to make an apology, Lieutenant?’

The question was asked dutifully, and just as dutifully answered. ‘Of course not, sir.’

‘Which is regrettable.’ Frederickson, whose company had suffered at the Teste de Buch fort because of Bampfylde’s cowardice, did not sound in the least regretful. Indeed his voice was positively gleeful in anticipation of Bampfylde’s death. ‘Shall we let the proceedings begin, Lieutenant?’ Without waiting for an answer he beckoned to Sharpe as Ford signalled to Bampfylde.

The two principals faced each other without speaking. Bampfylde looked deathly pale to Sharpe, but quite sober. He was certainly not shaking. He looked angry, but any man who had been accused of gross cowardice should look angry.

Ford opened the wooden case and produced two duelling pistols. Bampfylde, because he had been challenged, had been offered the choice of weapons, and he had chosen a pair of long-barrelled French-made percussion pistols. Frederickson weighed them in his hands, inspected their hammers, then pulled the ramrod from one of the guns and probed both barrels. He was checking that neither pistol had concealed rifling in the rear part of their barrels. Both were smooth-bore. They were, so far as a craftsman’s high skill could make them, identical weapons.

The doctor was leaning forward in the carriage to watch the careful preparations. His coachman, swathed in a cloak, stood by the horses’ heads. Harper waited by the pine trees.

Ford loaded both pistols, carefully watched by Frederickson. The Lieutenant used fine black powder that was dispensed from a small measuring cup. Ford was nervous, his hand quivered, and some of the powder was wisped away by the wind, but he carefully took an extra pinch to compensate for the loss. The powder was tamped down with the ramrod, then each lead ball was wrapped in an oiled leather patch. Bullets, however carefully cast, were never quite of a perfect calibre, but the leather patch made the fit as true as was possible, and thus gave the pistols added accuracy. Greater accuracy would have been achieved if the weapons’ barrels had been rifled, but that was thought to be unsporting. The balls were rammed down the barrels, then the ramrod was struck with a brass hammer to make sure that the missiles were sitting hard against the powder charge.

Once the barrels were charged Ford opened a small tin case which contained the percussion caps. Each cap was a wafer of paper-thin copper enclosing a tiny charge of black powder. When the pistol’s hammer struck the copper wafer the hidden powder exploded to lance a tiny jet of flame down the touch-hole to the compacted charge in the barrel. Such guns were finicky, expensive, and much more reliable than the old-fashioned flintlock that was so prone to dampness. Ford carefully pressed the caps into the tiny recesses beneath the two hammers, then gently lowered the hammers so the guns were safe. Then, with a curiously diffident air, he offered both butts to Frederickson.

Frederickson, thus given the choice, looked at Sharpe.

‘Either,’ Sharpe said curtly. It was the first word either principal had spoken since they had met. Bampfylde glanced at Sharpe as the Rifleman spoke, then quickly looked away. The Naval officer was a plump young man with a smooth face, while Sharpe had a tanned, scarred skin and angular bones. A scar on the Rifleman’s left cheek distorted his mouth to give his face an unwitting look of mockery that only disappeared when he smiled.

Frederickson chose the right-hand gun. ‘Coats and hats, gentlemen, please,’ he said solemnly.

Sharpe had anticipated this ritual, yet it still seemed strange and clumsy as he threw down his shako, then as he took off the threadbare rifleman’s jacket. On the jacket’s sleeve was a dirty cloth badge; a wreath of oak leaves that proved he had once led a Forlorn Hope into a breach that had been savage with fire and steel. He gave the coat to Frederickson who, in return, handed the loaded pistol to Sharpe. The wind stirred Sharpe’s black hair that he irritably pushed away from his eyes.