Sharpe’s Siege: The Winter Campaign, 1814

‘How would that be, sir?’

‘Because your son will still have a father in two weeks.’ Sharpe was seeing that black, sheer, wet wall and the image of it made his voice savage. Then he turned as the door opened. ‘My dear.’

Jane, beautiful in a blue silken dress, smiled delightedly at Harper. ‘Sergeant Major! How’s the baby?’

‘Just grand, ma’am!’ Harper had formed a firm alliance with Mrs Sharpe that seemed aimed at subverting Major Sharpe’s authority. ‘And Isabella thanks you for the linen.’

‘You’ve got toothache!’ Jane frowned with concern. ‘Your cheek’s swollen.’

Harper blushed. ‘It’s only a wee ache, ma’am, nothing at all!’

‘You must have oil of cloves! There’s some in the kitchen. Come along!’

The oil of cloves was discovered and Harper sent, disconsolate, into the night.

‘He can’t come,’ Sharpe said after dinner, when he and Jane walked back alone through the town.

‘Poor Patrick.’ Jane insisted on stopping at Hogan’s lodgings, but there was no news. She had visited earlier in the day and thought the sick man was looking better.

‘I wish you wouldn’t risk yourself,’ Sharpe said.

‘You’ve said so a dozen times, Richard, and I promise I heard you each time.’

They went to bed and, just four hours later, the landlady hammered on their door. It was pitch dark outside and bitterly cold inside the bedroom. Frost had etched patterns on the small windowpanes, patterns that were reluctant to melt even though Sharpe revived the fire in the tiny grate. The landlady had brought candles and hot water. Sharpe shaved, then pulled on his old and faded Rifleman’s uniform. It was the uniform in which he fought, stained with blood and torn by bullet and blade. He would not go into action in any other uniform.

He oiled his rifle’s lock. He always carried a long-arm into battle, even though it had been ten years since he had been made into an officer. He drew his Heavy Cavalry sword from its scabbard and tested the fore-edge. It seemed odd to be going to war from his wife’s bed, odder still not to be marching with his own men or with Harper, and that thought gave him a flicker of unrest for he was not used to fighting without Harper beside him.

‘Two weeks,’ he said. ‘I should be back in two weeks. Maybe less.’

‘It will seem like eternity,’ Jane said loyally, then, with an exaggerated shudder, she threw the bedclothes back and snatched up the clothes that Sharpe had hung to warm before the fire. Her small dog, grateful for the chance, leaped into the warm pit of the bed.

‘You don’t have to come,’ Sharpe said.

‘Of course I’ll come. It’s every woman’s duty to watch her husband sail to the wars.’ Jane shivered suddenly, then sneezed.

A half hour later they went into the fish-smelling lane and the wind was like a knife in their faces. Torches flared on the quayside where the Amelie rose on the incoming tide.

A dark line of men, weapons gleaming softly, filed aboard the merchantman that was to be Sharpe’s transport. The Amelie was no jewel of Britain’s trading fleet. She had begun life as a collier, taking coal from the Tyne to the smoke thick Thames, and her dark timbers still stank thickly of coal-dust.

Casks and crates and nets of supplies were slung on board in the pre-dawn darkness. Boxes of rifle ammunition were piled on the quayside and with them were barrels of vilely salted and freshly-killed beef. Twice baked bread was wrapped in canvas and boxed in resinous pine. There were casks of water for the voyage, spare flints for the fighting, and whetstones for the sword-bayonets. Rope ladders were coiled in the Amelie’s scuppers so that the Riflemen, reaching the beach where they must disembark, could scramble down to the longboats sent from the Vengeance.

A smear of silver-grey marked the dawn and flooded slowly to show the filthy, littered water of the harbour. Aboard the Scylla, a frigate moored in the harbour roads, yellow lights showed from the stern cabin where doubtless the frigate’s captain took his breakfast.

‘I’ve wrapped you a cheese.’ Jane’s voice sounded small and frightened. ‘It’s in your pack.’

‘Thank you.’ Sharpe bent to kiss her and wished suddenly that he was not going. A wife, General Craufurd used to say, weakens a soldier. Sharpe held his wife an instant, feeling her ribs beneath the layers of wool and silk, then, suddenly, her slim body jerked as she sneezed again.

‘I’m catching a cold.’ She was shivering. Sharpe touched her forehead and it was oddly hot.

‘You’re not well.’

‘I hate rising early.’ Jane tried to smile, but her teeth were chattering and she shivered again. ‘And I’m not certain the fish was entirely to my taste last night.’

‘Go home!’

‘When you’re gone.’

Sharpe, even though a hundred men watched him, kissed his wife again. ‘Jane …’

‘My dear, you must go.’

‘But …’

‘It’s only a cold. Everyone gets a cold in winter.’

‘Sir!’ Sweet William saluted Sharpe and bowed to Jane. ‘Good morning, ma’am! Somewhat brisk!’

‘Indeed, Mr Frederickson.’ Jane shivered again.

‘Everyone’s aboard, sir.’ Frederickson turned to Sharpe.

Sharpe wanted to linger with Jane, he wanted to reassure himself that she had not caught Hogan’s fever, but Frederickson was waiting for him, men were holding the ropes that would swing the gangplank away, and he could not stay. He gave Jane a last kiss, and her forehead was like fire. ‘Go home to bed.’

‘I will.’ She was shaking now, hunched and clenched against the bitter wind.

Sharpe paused, wanting to say something memorable, something that would encompass the inchoate, extraordinary love he felt for her, but there were no words. He smiled, then turned to follow Frederickson on to the Amelie’s deck.

The daylight was thin now, seeping through the hilly landscape behind the port and making the streaked, bubbling, heaving water of the harbour silver. The gangplank crashed on to the stones of the quay.

Far out to sea, like some impossible mountain forming on the face of the waters, an airy structure of dirty grey sails caught the morning daylight. It was the Vengeance getting under way. She looked formidably huge; a great floating weapon that could make the air tremble and the sea shake when she launched her full broadside, but she would be useless in the shoal waters by the Teste de Buch fort. That would have to be taken by men and by hand-held weapons.

‘He’s signalling.’ Tremgar, master of the Amelie, spat over the side. ‘Means they’ll be moving us off. Stand by, forrard!’ He bellowed the last words.

A topsail dropped from the nearby Scylla’s yards and the movement, suggesting an imminent departure, made Sharpe turn to the quay. Jane, swathed in her powder-blue cloak, was still there. Sharpe could see her shivering. ‘Go home!’

A voice shouted. ‘Wait! Wait!’ The accent was French and the speaker a dully-dressed man, evidently a servant, who rode a small horse and led a packhorse on a leading rein. ‘Amelie! Wait!’

‘Bloody hell.’ Tremgar had been packing a pipe with dark tobacco that he now pushed into a pocket of his filthy coat.

Behind the servant and packhorse and, stately as a bishop in procession, rode a tall, elegant man on a tall, elegant horse. The man had a delicate, sensitive face, a white cloak clasped with silver, and a bicorne hat shielded with oiled cloth against the rain.

The gangplank was rigged again and the man, with a faint shudder as though the stench of the Amelie was too much for a gentleman of his fastidious tastes, came aboard. ‘I seek Major Sharpe,’ he announced in a French accent to the assembled officers who had gathered in the ship’s waist.

‘I’m Sharpe.’ Sharpe spoke from the poop deck.

The newcomer turned in a movement that would have been elegant on a dance-floor, but seemed somewhat ludicrous on the battered deck of an erstwhile collier. He took a quizzing glass from his sleeve and, with its help, inspected the tattered uniform of Major Richard Sharpe. He bowed, somehow suggesting that he should have been the recipient of such an honour himself, then took off his waterproofed hat to reveal sleek, silver hair that was brushed back to a black velvet bow. He held out a sealed envelope. ‘Orders.’

Sharpe had jumped down from the poop and now tore open the envelope. ‘To Major Sharpe. The bearer of this note is the Comte de Maquerre. You will render him every assistance within your power. Bertram Wigram, Colonel.’