Sharpe’s Siege: The Winter Campaign, 1814

‘It’s difficult to make an accurate count when you’re firing cannon, Major.’ The American, careless of Ducos’ sinister power, leaned over the malachite table and lit a cigar from a candle’s flame. ‘Aren’t you going to thank me?’

Ducos’ voice was sour with undisguised irony. ‘The Empire is most grateful to you. Captain Killick.’

‘Grateful enough to fetch me some copper sheeting?’ Killick’s French was excellent. ‘That was our agreement.’

‘I shall order some sent to you. Your ship is at Gujan, correct?’

‘Correct.’

Ducos had no intention of ordering copper sheeting sent to the Bassin d’Arcachon, but the American had to be humoured. The presence of the privateer captain had been most fortuitous for Ducos, but what happened to the American now was of no importance to an embattled France.

Cornelius Killick was the master of the Thuella, a New England schooner of sleek, fast lines. She had been built for one purpose alone; to evade the British blockade and, under Killick’s captaincy, the Thuella had become a thorn in the Royal Navy’s self-esteem. Whether as a cargo ship that evaded British patrols, or as a privateer that snapped up stragglers from British convoys, the schooner had led a charmed life until, at the beginning of January, as the Thuella stole from the mouth of the Gironde in a dawn mist, a British frigate had come from the silvered north and its bow-chasers had thumped nine-pounder balls into the Thuella’s transom.

The schooner, carrying a cargo of French twelve-pounder guns for the American Army, turned south. Her armament was no match for a frigate, nor could her speed save her in the light, mist-haunted airs. For three hours she was pounded. Shot after shot crashed into the stern and Killick knew that the British gunners were firing low to spring his planks and sink his beloved ship. But the Thuella had not sunk, and the mist was stirred by catspaws of wind, and the wind became a breeze and, even though damaged, the schooner had outrun her pursuer and taken refuge in the vast Bassin d’Arcachon. There, safe behind the guns of the Teste de Buch fort, the Thuella was beached for repairs.

The wounded Thuella needed copper, oak, and pitch. Day followed day and the supplies were promised, but never came. The American consul in Bordeaux pleaded on Cornelius Killick’s behalf, and the only answer had been the strange request, from Major Pierre Ducos, that the American take a chasse-marée south and investigate why the British collected such craft in St Jean de Luz. There was no French Navy to make the reconnaissance, and no French civilian crew, lured by British gold, could be trusted with the task, and so Killick had gone. Now, as he had promised, he had come to this lavish room in Bordeaux to give his report.

‘Would you have any opinion,’ Ducos now asked the tall American, ‘why the British are hiring chasse-marées?’

‘Perhaps they want a regatta?’ Killick laughed, saw that this Frenchman had no sense of humour at all, and sighed instead. ‘They plan to land on your coast, presumably.’

‘Or build a bridge?’

‘Where to? America? They’re filling the damned harbour with boats.’ Killick drew on his cigar. ‘And if they were going to make a bridge, Major, wouldn’t they take down the masts? Besides, where could they build it?’

Ducos unrolled a map and tapped the estuary of the Adour. ‘There?’

Cornelius Killick hid his impatience, remembering that the French had never understood the sea, which was why the British fleets now sailed with such impunity. ‘That estuary,’ the American said mildly, ‘has a tidefall of over fifteen feet, with currents as foul as rat-puke. If the British build a bridge there, Major, they’ll drown an army.’

Ducos supposed the American was right, but the Frenchman disliked being lectured by a ruffian from the New World. Major Ducos would have preferred confirmation from his own sources, but no reply had come to the letter that had been smuggled across the lines to the agent who served France in a British uniform. Ducos feared for that man’s safety, but the Frenchman’s pinched, scholarly face betrayed none of his worries as he interrogated the handsome American. ‘How many men,’ Ducos asked, ‘could a chasse-marée carry?’

‘A hundred. Perhaps more if the seas were calm.’

‘And they have forty. Enough for four thousand men.’ Ducos stared at the map on his table. ‘So where will they come, Captain?’

The American leaned over the table. Rain tapped on the window and a draught lifted a corner of the map that Killick weighted down with a candlestick. ‘The Adour, Arcachon, or the Gironde.’ He tapped each place as he spoke its name.

The map showed the Biscay coast of France. That coast was a sheer sweep, almost ruler straight, suggesting long beaches of wicked, tumbling surf. Yet the coast was broken by two river mouths and by the vast, almost landlocked Bassin d’Arcachon. And from Arcachon to Bordeaux, Ducos saw, it was a short march, and if the British could take Bordeaux they would cut off Marshal Soult’s army in the south. It was a bold idea, a risky idea, but on a map, in an office in winter, it seemed to Ducos a very feasible one. He moved the candle away and rolled the map into a tight tube. ‘You would be well advised, Captain Killick, to be many leagues from Arcachon if the British do make a landing there.’

‘Then send me some copper.’

‘It will be dispatched in the morning,’ Ducos said. ‘Good day to you, Captain, and my thanks.’

When the American was gone Ducos unrolled the map again. The questions still nagged at him. Was the display in St Jean de Luz’s harbour merely a charade to draw attention away from the east? Ducos cursed the man who had not replied to his letter, and wondered how much credence could be put on the words of an American adventurer. North or east, bridge or boats? Ducos was tempted to believe the American, but knowing an invasion was planned was useless unless the landing place was known. Yet one man might still tell him, and to know the answer would bring a victory, and France, in this bitter, wet winter of 1814, was in need of a victory.

‘Looking for us, sir?’ A midshipman in a tarred jacket stood at the top of weed-slimed watersteps on St Jean de Luz’s quay.

‘Are you the Vengeance?’ Sharpe looked apprehensively at the tiny boat, frail on the filth-littered water, that was to carry him to the Vengeance. Sharpe had received a sudden order, peremptory and harsh, that offered no explanations but merely demanded his immediate presence on the quay where a boat from His Majesty’s ship Vengeance would be waiting.

Four grinning oarsmen, doubtless hoping to see the Rifle officer slip on the steep stone stairs, waited in the gig. ‘The captain would have sent his barge, sir,’ the midshipman said in unconvincing apology, ‘but it’s being used for the other gentlemen.’

Sharpe stepped into the rocking gig. ‘What other gentlemen?’

‘No one confides in me, sir.’ The midshipman could scarce have been more than fourteen, but he gave his orders with a jaunty confidence as Major Sharpe crouched on the stern thwart and wondered which of the ships moored in the outer harbour was the Vengeance.

It seemed to be none of them, for the midshipman took his tiny craft out through the harbour entrance to buck and thump its bows in the tide-race over the sandbar. Ahead now, in the outer roads, a flotilla of naval craft was anchored. Amongst them, and towering over the other vessels like a behemoth, was a ship of the line. ‘Is that the Vengeance?’ Sharpe asked.

‘It is, sir. A 74, and as sweet a sailor as ever was.’

The midshipman’s enthusiasm seemed misplaced to Sharpe. Nothing about the Vengeance suggested sweetness; instead, moored in the long swell of the grey ocean, she seemed like a brutal mass of timber, rope and iron; one of the slab-sided killers of Britain’s deep-water fleet. Her chequered sides were like cliffs, and the ponderous hull, as Sharpe’s gig neared the vast craft, gave off the rotten stench of tar, unwashed bodies and ordure; the normal odour of a battleship becalmed.

The midshipman shouted orders, oars backed, the tiller was thrown across, and somehow the gig was laid alongside with scarce a bump of timber. Above Sharpe now, water dripping from its lower rungs, was a tumblehome ladder leading to the maindeck. ‘You’d like a sling lowered, sir?’ the midshipman asked solicitously.

‘I’ll manage.’ Sharpe waited as a wave lifted the gig, then jumped for the rain-slicked ladder. He clawed at it, held on, then scrambled ignominiously up to the greeting of a bosun’s whistle.

‘Major Sharpe! Welcome aboard.’

Sharpe saw an eager, ingratiating lieutenant who clearly expected to be recognized. Sharpe frowned. ‘You were with …’

‘With Captain Bampfylde, indeed, sir. I’m Ford.’

The elegantly clothed Ford made inconsequential conversation as he steered Sharpe towards the stern cabins. It was an honour, he said, to have such a distinguished soldier aboard, and was it possible that Sharpe was related to Sir Roderick Sharpe of Northamptonshire?

‘No,’ Sharpe was remembering Captain Bampfylde’s parting words in the Officer’s Club. Were those the reason for his summons here?

‘One of the Wiltshire Sharpes, perhaps?’ Ford seemed eager to place the Rifleman in a comforting social context.

‘Middlesex,’ Sharpe said.

‘Do mind your head,’ Ford smiled as he waved Sharpe under the break of the poopdeck. ‘I can’t quite place the Middlesex Sharpes.’

‘My mother was a whore, I was born in a common lodging-house, and I joined the Army as a private. Does that make it easier?’

Ford’s smile did not falter. ‘Captain Bampfylde’s waiting for you, sir. Please go in.’

Sharpe ducked under the lintel of the opened doorway to find himself in a lavishly furnished cabin that extended the width of the Vengeance’s wide stern. A dozen officers, their wine glasses catching the light from the galleried windows, sat around a polished dining table.

‘Major! We meet in happier circumstances.’ Captain Horace Bampfylde greeted Sharpe with effusive and false pleasure. ‘No damned American to spoil our conversation, eh? Come and meet the company.’

Seeing Bampfylde in his ship made Sharpe realize how very young the naval captain was. Bampfylde must still lack two years of thirty, yet the naval captain possessed an ebullient confidence and a natural authority to compensate for his lack of years. He had a fleshy face, quick eyes, and an impatient manner that he tried to disguise as he made the introductions.

Most of the men about the table were naval officers whose names meant nothing to Sharpe, but there were also two Army officers, one of whom Sharpe recognized. ‘Colonel Elphinstone?’

Elphinstone, a big, burly Engineer whose hands were calloused and scarred, beamed a welcome. ‘You haven’t met my brother-in-arms, Sharpe; Colonel Wigram.’

Wigram was a grey-faced, dour, bloodless creature who acknowledged the ironic introduction with a curt nod. ‘If you could seat yourself, Major Sharpe, we might at last begin.’ He managed to convey that Sharpe had delayed this meeting.

Sharpe sat beside Elphinstone in a chair close to the windows that looked on to the big, grey Atlantic swells that scarcely moved the Vengeance’s ponderous hull. He sensed an awkwardness in the cabin, and he judged that there was disagreement between Wigram and Elphinstone, a judgment that was confirmed when the tall Engineer leaned towards him. ‘It’s all bloody madness, Sharpe. Marines have got the pox so they want you instead.’