Sharpe's Siege

by Bernard Cornwell

  Major Richard Sharpe, born in a common lodging-house and risen from the gutter-bred ranks of Britain’s Army, had never used such temporary gentlemen’s clubs before, but new and beautiful wives must be humoured. ‘I didn’t suppose,’ he spoke unhappily to Jane, ‘that women were allowed in gentlemens’ clubs?’ He was reluctantly buttoning his new green uniform jacket.

  ‘They are here,’ Jane said, ‘and they’re serving an oyster pie for luncheon.’ Which clinched the matter. Major and Mrs Richard Sharpe would dine out, and Major Sharpe had to dress in the stiff, uncomfortable uniform that he had bought for a royal reception in London and hated to wear. He reflected, as he climbed the wide stairs of the Officers’ Club with Jane on his arm, that there was much wisdom in the old advice that an officer should never take a well-bred wife to an ill-bred war.

  Yet the frisson of irritation passed as he entered the crowded dining-room. Instead he felt the pang of pride that he always felt when he took Jane into a public place. She was undeniably beautiful, and her beauty was informed by a vivacity that gave her face character. She had eloped with him just months before, fleeing her uncle’s house on the drab Essex marshes to come to the war. She drew admiring glances from men at every table, while other officers’ wives, enduring the inconveniences of campaigning for the sake of love, looked enviously at Jane Sharpe’s easy beauty. Some, too, envied her the tall, black-haired and grimly scarred man who seemed so uncomfortable in the lavishness of the club’s indulgent comforts. Sharpe’s name was whispered from table to table; the name of the man who had taken an enemy standard, captured one of Badajoz’s foul breaches, and who, or so rumour said, had made himself rich from the blood-spattered plunder of Vitoria.

  A white-gloved steward abandoned a table of senior officers to hasten to Jane’s side. ‘The cap’n wanted to sit ’ere, ma‘am,’ the steward was unnecessarily brushing the seat of a chair close to one of the wide windows, ‘but I said as how it was being kept for someone special.’

  Jane gave the steward a smile that would have enslaved a misogynist. ‘How very kind of you, Smithers.’

  ‘So he’s over there.’ Smithers nodded disparagingly towards a table by the fire where two naval officers sat in warm discomfort. The junior officer was a lieutenant, while one of the other man’s two epaulettes was bright and new, denoting a recent promotion to the rank of a full post captain.

  Smithers looked devotedly back to Jane. ‘I’ve reserved a bottle or two of that claret you liked.’

  Sharpe, who had been ignored by the steward, pronounced the wine good and hoped he was right. The oyster pie was certainly good. Jane said she would deliver a portion to Hogan’s lodgings that same afternoon and Sharpe again insisted that she should not actually enter the sickroom, and he saw a flicker of annoyance cross Jane’s face. Her irritation was not caused by Sharpe’s words, but by the sudden proximity of the naval captain who had rudely come to stand immediately behind Sharpe’s chair in a place where he could overhear the conversation of Major and Mrs Sharpe’s reunion.

  The naval officer had not come to eavesdrop, but rather to stare through the rain-smeared window. His interest was in a small flotilla of boats that had appeared around the northern headland. The boats were squat and small, none more than fifty feet long, but each had a vast press of sail that drove the score of craft in a fast gaggle towards the harbour entrance. They were escorted by a naval brig that, in the absence of enemies, had its gunports closed.

  ‘They’re chasse-marées,’ Jane said to her husband.

  ‘Chasse-marrys?’

  ‘Coastal luggers, Richard. They carry forty tons of cargo each.’ She smiled, pleased with her display of knowledge. ‘You forget I was raised on the coast. The smugglers in Dunkirk used chasse-marées. The Navy,’ Jane said loudly enough for the intrusive naval captain to hear, ‘could never catch them.’

  But the naval captain was oblivious to Mrs Sharpe’s goad. He stared at the straggling fleet of chasse-marées that, emerging from a brief rain-squall, seemed to crab sideways to avoid a sand-bar that was marked by a broken line of dirty foam. ‘Ford! Ford!’

  The naval lieutenant dabbed his lips with a napkin, snatched a swallow of wine, then hastened to his captain’s side. ‘Sir?’

  The captain took a small spyglass from the tail pocket of his coat. ‘There’s a lively one there, Ford. Mark her!’

  Sharpe wondered why naval officers should be so interested in French coastal craft, but Jane said the Navy had been collecting the chasse-marées for days. She had heard that the boats, with their French crews, were being hired with English coin, but for what purpose no one could tell.

  The small fleet had come to within a quarter mile of the harbour, and, to facilitate their entry into the crowded inner roads, each ship was lowering its topsail. The naval brig had hove-to, sails shivering, but one of the French coasters, larger than the rest of its fellows, was still under the full set of its five sails. The water broke white at its stem and slid in bubbling, greying foam down the hull that was sleeker than those of the other, smaller vessels.

  ‘He thinks it’s a race, sir,’ the lieutenant said with happy vacuity above Sharpe’s shoulder.

  ‘A handy craft,’ the captain said grudgingly. ‘Too good for the Army. I think we might take her on to our strength.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  The faster, larger lugger had broken clear of the pack. Its sails were a dirty grey, the colour of the winter sky, and its low hull was painted a dull pitch-black. Its flush deck, like all the chasse-marées‘ decks, was an open sweep broken only by the three masts and the tiller by which two men stood. Fishing gear was heaped in ugly, lumpen disarray upon the deck’s planking.

  The naval brig, seeing the large lugger race ahead, unleashed a string of bright flags. The captain snorted. ‘Bloody Frogs won’t understand that!’

  Sharpe, offended by the naval officers’ unwanted proximity, had been seeking a cause to quarrel, and now found it in the captain’s swearing in front of Jane. He stood up. ‘Sir.’

  The naval captain, with a deliberate slowness, turned pale, glaucous eyes on to the Army major. The captain was young, plump, and confident that he outranked Sharpe. They stared into each other’s eyes, and Sharpe felt a sudden certainty that he would hate this man. There was no reason for it, no justification, merely a physical distaste for the privileged, amused face that seemed so full of disdain for the black-haired Rifleman.

  ‘Well?’ The naval captain’s voice betrayed a gleeful anticipation of the imminent argument.

  Jane defused the confrontation. ‘My husband, Captain, is sensitive to the language of fighting men.’

  The captain, not certain whether he was being complimented or mocked, chose to accept the words as a tribute to his gallantry. He glanced at Sharpe, looking from the Rifleman’s face to the new, unfaded cloth of the green jacket. The newness of the uniform evidently suggested that Sharpe, despite the scar on his face, was fresh to the war. The captain smiled superciliously. ‘Doubtless, Major, your delicacy will be sore tested by French bullets.’

  Jane, delighted at the opening, smiled very sweetly. ‘I’m sure Major Sharpe is grateful for your opinion, sir.’

  That brought a satisfying reaction; a shudder of astonishment and fear on the annoying, plump face of the young naval officer. He took an involuntary step backwards, then, remembering the cause of the near quarrel, bowed to Jane. ‘My apologies, Mrs Sharpe, if I caused offence.’

  ‘No offence, Captain ...?’ Jane inflected, the last word into a question.

  The captain bowed again. ‘Bampfylde, ma’am. Captain Horace Bampfylde. And allow me to name my lieutenant, Ford.‘

  The introductions were accepted gracefully, as tokens of peace, and Sharpe, outflanked by effusive politeness, sat. ‘The man’s got no bloody manners,’ he growled loudly enough to be overheard by the two naval officers.

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t have your advantages in life?’ Jane suggested sweetly, but again the scene beyond
the window distracted the naval men from the barbed comments.

  ‘Christ!’ Captain Bampfylde, careless of the risk of offending a dozen ladies in the dining-room, shouted the word. The outraged anger in his voice brought an immediate hush and fixed the attention of everyone in the room on the small, impertinent drama that was unfolding on the winter-cold sea.

  The black-hulled lugger, instead of obeying the brig’s command to lower sails and proceed tamely into the harbour of St Jean de Luz, had changed her course. She had been sailing south, but now reached west to cut across the counter of the brig. Even Sharpe, no sailor, could see that the chasse-marée’s fore and aft rig made the boat into a handy, quick sailor.

  It was not the course change that had provoked Bampfylde’s astonishment, but that the deck of the black-hulled lugger had suddenly sprouted men like dragon’s teeth maturing into warriors, and that, from the mizzen mast, a flag had been unfurled.

  The flag was not the blue ensign of the Navy, nor the tricolour of France, nor even the white banner of the exiled French monarchy. They were the colours of Britain’s newest enemy; the Stars and Stripes of the United States of America.

  ‘A Jonathon!’ a voice said with disgust.

  ‘Fire, man!’ Bampfylde roared the order in the confines of the dining-room as though the brig’s skipper might hear him. Yet the brig, head to wind, was helpless. Men ran on its deck, and gunports lifted, but the American lugger was seething past the brig’s unarmed counter and Sharpe saw the dirty white blossom of gunsmoke as the small broadside was poured, at pistol-shot length, into the British ship.

  Lieutenant Ford groaned. David was taking on Goliath and winning.

  The sound of the American gunfire came over the wind-broken water like a growl of thunder, then the lugger was spinning about, sails rippling as the American skipper let his speed carry him through the wind’s eye, until, taut on the opposite tack, he headed back past the brig’s counter towards the fleet of chasse-marées.

  The brig, foresails at last catching the wind to lever her hull around, received a second mocking broadside. The American carried five guns on each flank, small guns, but their shot punctured the brig’s Bermudan cedar to spread death down the packed deck.

  Two of the brig’s guns punched smoke into the cold wind, but the American had judged his action well and the brig dared fire no more for fear of hitting the chasse-marées into which, like a wolf let rip into a flock, the American sailed.

  The hired coasters were unarmed. Each sea-worn boat, sails frayed, was crewed by four men who did not expect, beneath the protection of their enemy’s Navy, to face the gunfire of an ally.

  The French civilian crews leaped into the cold water as the Americans, serving their guns with an efficiency that Sharpe could only admire even if he could not applaud, put ball after ball into the luggers’ hulls. The gunners aimed low, intending to shatter, sink, and panic.

  Ships collided. One chasse-marée’s mainmast, its shrouds cut, splintered down to the water in a tangle of tarred cables and tumbling spars. One boat was settling in the churning sea, another, its rudder shot away, turned broadside to receive the numbing shock of another’s bow in its gunwales.

  ‘Fire!’ Captain Bampfylde roared again, this time not as an order, but in alarm. Flames were visible on a French boat, then another, and Sharpe guessed the Americans were using shells as grenades. Rigging flared like a lit fuse, two more boats collided, tangled, and the flames flickered across the gap. Then a merciful rain-squall swept out of Biscay to help douse the flames even as it helped hide the American boat.

  ‘They’ll not catch her,’ Lieutenant Ford said indignantly.

  ‘Damn his eyes!’ Bampfylde said.

  The American had got clear away. She could outsail her square-rigged pursuers, and she did. The last Sharpe saw of the black-hulled ship was the flicker of her grey sails in the grey squall and the bright flash of her gaudy flag.

  ‘That’s Killick!’ The naval captain spoke with a fury made worse by impotence. ‘I’ll wager that’s Killick!’

  The spectators, appalled by what they had seen, watched the chaos in the harbour approach. Two luggers were sinking, three were burning, and another four were inextricably tangled together. Of the remaining ten boats no less than half had grounded themselves on the harbour bar and were being pushed inexorably higher by the force of the wind-driven, flowing tide. A damned American, in a cockle boat, had danced scornful rings around the Royal Navy and, even worse, had done it within sight of the Army.

  Captain Horace Bampfylde closed his spyglass and dropped it into his pocket. He looked down at Sharpe. ‘Mark that well,’ the captain said, ‘mark it very well! I shall look to you for retribution.’

  ‘Me?’ Sharpe said in astonishment.

  But there was no answer, for the two naval officers had strode away leaving a puzzled Sharpe and a tangle of scorched wreckage that heaved on the sea’s grey surface and bobbed towards the land where an Army, on the verge of its enemy’s country, gathered itself for its next advance, but whether to north or east, or by bridge or by boat, no one in France yet knew.

  CHAPTER 2

  He had a cutwater of a face; sharp, lined, savagely tanned; a dangerously handsome face framed by a tangled shock of gold-dark hair. It was battered, beaten by winds and seas and scarred by blades and scorched by powder-blasts, but still a handsome face; enough to make the girls look twice. It was just the kind of face to annoy Major Pierre Ducos who disliked such tall, confident, and handsome men.

  ‘Anything you can tell me,’ Ducos said with forced politeness, ‘would be of the utmost use.’

  ‘I can tell you,’ Cornelius Killick said, ‘that a British brig is burying its dead and that the bastards have got close to forty chasse-marées in the harbour.’

  ‘Close to?’ Ducos asked.

  ‘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 p
romised, 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 chassemaree carry?’