Sharpe 3-Book Collection 6: Sharpe's Honour, Sharpe's Regiment, Sharpe's Siege

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘Sir!’

  He looked left. Captain Smith was smiling idiotically, looking pleased with himself. Sharpe ran his cleaned sword into its scabbard.

  He could see, where the road skirted the hillside, a group of four women whose horses’ bridles were held by Spanish servants. The women were wives of Sharpe’s officers. Closer, smiling at him, and walking up the hill with the unnecessary attention and help of two dozen men, came his own wife.

  They had been married two months. She had insisted, against his direct orders, that she would come with him. ‘I’ve always wanted to travel. Besides, it will be good for my sketching.’

  ‘Sketching?’

  ‘I sketch and paint; didn’t you know that?’

  ‘No.’

  Isabella, who had decided that London was a strange and fearful place, had insisted on returning as Jane’s servant. Harper, who had ordered his pregnant wife to remain in London, had, like Sharpe, been flagrantly disobeyed.

  ‘Richard!’ Jane wore a dark red cloak over her dress.

  ‘My love.’ He felt awkward saying it in front of so many men.

  She smiled, striking her beauty into his soul like a sword. ‘I met Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood. Poor man.’

  ‘Poor man.’

  She turned and looked at the battlefield. The British dead were gone, but the French dead, stripped naked, still lay among the rocks. ‘Have I got time for one drawing?’

  ‘It’s hardly suitable, is it?’

  ‘Don’t be pompous.’ She smiled at him, put Rascal on the ground, and took from her bag a large pad and a box of pencils.

  They had been married two months, and Sharpe had not regretted a moment of them. He had not guessed at this kind of happiness, he was even frightened that one day it would be taken from him, and he did not even mind that men laughed at him because of his sudden uxoriousness. The laughter was not cruel, and he was happy. He thought she was happy too. He was astonished how important to him her happiness was. He watched her pencil, amazed at her skill. ‘I have to go and form the Battalion.’

  ‘That’s because you’re important and pompous. Don’t forget I’m here.’

  ‘I’ll try not to, but you’re easily overlooked.’ He smiled at her, thinking he was the luckiest man in the world.

  They were ordered away from the hill an hour later. The Battalion was formed in parade order on the roadside, ready to march, its baggage somewhere behind it. Captain Harry Price stood at the head of a Company. The flags were cased again. They were marching into France.

  Sharpe sat on Sycorax. Jane was beside him on her own mare. It was beginning to rain, the drops huge as pennies where they splashed on the rocks. ‘Sergeant Major!’

  ‘Sir!’

  ‘The Battalion will march in line of Companies.’

  ‘Where to, sir?’

  Sharpe grinned. ‘Into France!’

  But suddenly, before the order to march was given, and to Sharpe’s embarrassment and his wife’s delight, someone cheered. They cheered themselves and their victory. The noise spread, until the Prince of Wales’ Own Volunteers were filling the valley with their sound of delight. Sharpe had taken broken, persecuted men and made them into soldiers.

  ‘That’s enough, Sergeant Major!’

  ‘Sir! ’Talion!‘

  Girdwood was mad, so these men, until another colonel was appointed, belonged to Sharpe now. He watched them march, listened to the singing that had already begun, and he thought how they had fought among the rocks to victory. They were, he considered, as good as any troops he had known and, for the moment at least, they were his men, his responsibility, and his pride. Jane watched him. She saw on his hard, striking face the glint of water that was not rain. He was staring at the men for whom he had fought against all the bastards who despised them because they were mere common soldiers. They were his men, his soldiers, Sharpe’s regiment.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  The Battle of Vitoria (described in Sharpe’s Honour) finished French hopes in Spain. A handful of garrisons clung to their fortresses, but the French field armies, trounced by Wellington, fled northwards across the Pyrenees. No one expected their return. It was thought that the rest of 1813 would be spent in mopping up the French garrisons and preparing (from the new Pasajes supply-base) the invasion of France. A good time, then, for a man to return to England.

  Yet Sharpe and Harper, by returning to Britain, missed some hard and confused fighting. Marshal Soult, sent by Napoleon to shore up the crumbling defences on the Spanish border, surprised Wellington by attacking instead of passively waiting to be attacked. Armies marched, countermarched, and fought in the mists of the Pyrenees, but by autumn’s end the French thrusts had all been defeated, the last fortresses in Spain had fallen (the fall of San Sebastian being particularly horrific), and Wellington could at last advance into France. Sharpe and Harper were back in time for the end of the Pyrenean fighting that cleared the foothills.

  The action described in the epilogue of the novel is based on the famous description by Sir William Napier of the part played by the 43rd during the battle of Nivelle (10th November, 1813). Napier described the battle in Volume V of his History of the War in the Peninsula. It is an unusually authoritative account, for Sir William Napier had been the 43rd’s commanding officer during their attack on the Lesser Rhune.

  Sharpe’s battles with the hierarchy of the army in England are equally historical. The command of Britain’s army during the Napoleonic wars was a shambolic arrangement, split jealously between the War Office and the Horse Guards, with various other bureaucracies ever eager to hold onto their own shares. It was a venal system, open to abuses, of which the most famous was the scandal of 1809 when it was discovered that Mary Anne Clarke, when mistress of the Duke of York, Commander in Chief, had been selling promotions to officers. They had paid her, and she persuaded her lover to make the appointments. Sometimes, when he forgot, she would leave reminders pinned to the curtains of his bed. The Duke, King George III’s second son, though it was proved that he had taken no money himself, was forced to resign for two years.

  The Duke of York has had a bad press. Every child knows about the Grand Old Duke of York, who had ten thousand men, who marched them up to the top of the hill, then marched them down again. He was every bit as bad and indecisive a field general as that nursery rhyme indicates (it was written after his disastrous Flanders campaign of 1794 in which Private Richard Sharpe, aged 16, fought in his first action), but in truth, bed-curtains aside, he was a highly efficient administrator who brought many much needed and sensible reforms to the army. Employing the younger sons of monarchs has always been one of mankind’s lesser problems, but Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, was well matched to his task.

  Yet there was little he could do, or anyone else, to curb the venality of the recruiting system. Sergeant Horatio Havercamp, I suspect, reveals most of the trade’s tricks, though I like to think Horatio would not have stooped as low as some recruiting parties who equipped their hired prostitutes with manacles to pinion the reluctant volunteers in bed. The brothels where such public-spirited ladies worked were known as Crimping Houses. There was no conscription, of course, and every man (even the prisoners illegally handed to the recruiters) was a ‘volunteer’. The army would have dearly liked a press-gang system like the navy, but lacking it, they depended on the wiles of their recruiters and on the depths of their purse. The bounties were extravagant, though the recruit was almost always cheated out of all or most of it, and many colonels added their own monetary rewards to successful recruiters. Crimping existed quite legally. Contractors: independent civilian businessmen, would be offered so much money a head by the War Office, and their profit lay in keeping their bounty low and their promises high. It was much used in Ireland, where poverty drove so many men into the ranks of Britain’s army. In the early years of the war senior commissions would be given to a man who brought the army enough recruits; indeed, that is how Sir Henry Simmerson achieved his Lieutenant
Colonelcy in the novel that opened this series, Sharpe’s Eagle. Such shifts were desperately needed for, with the exception of a few prime Regiments like the Rifles and the Guards, most units were chronically short of recruits; a shortage not helped by the existence of the home-bound militia that drained good men from the regular army.

  The Prince Regent was fond of victory parades in Hyde Park, especially when enemy trophies were laid before him. The Royal family of the Regency period did not enjoy the affection that the present British Royal family receives from the public. It was not an attractive family. King George III had lost his sanity because of illness and his eldest son was a lavish wastrel who hated his father. Indeed, so unpopular was the Royal family, that the valet of the King’s youngest son was roundly applauded by the populace when he laid his master’s scalp open with a sabre stroke. The parades in Hyde Park, as well as indulging the Prince Regent’s soldiering fantasies, unusually allowed him to appear in public to adulation rather than jeers. The British public, though never very fond of the army, was proud of what it was doing under Wellington’s command, and would turn out to cheer dutifully in Hyde Park or to watch the patriotic pageants mounted in London’s theatres.

  The Prince Regent, after he had become King, did publicly express his fantasies that he had been present at battlefields during the late war. He would embarrass Wellington by claiming, at dinner, to have led a charge at Waterloo. The Duke kept a politic silence.

  A politic silence is also best kept about Foulness. It was not a secret military camp in 1813; it is now.

  So Sharpe and Harper are back with the army. They, like so many officers and men of that army, now have their wives with them, and they have, at last, breached the defences of France. Wellington is the first foreign General to invade French soil since the very beginning of the Revolutionary War twenty years earlier. There was a feeling, that winter of 1813, that Napoleon would surely sue for peace soon. He was assailed in the north and his beloved France was invaded from the south. But there are battles yet to be fought, and campaigns to be won, so Sharpe and Harper will march again.

  BERNARD CORNWELL

  Sharpe’s Siege

  Richard Sharpe and

  the Winter Campaign,

  1814

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  EPILOGUE

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE

  Sharpe’s Siege

  is dedicated to

  Brenym McNight, Terry Farrand,

  Bryan Thorniley, Diana Colbert,

  Ray Steele, and Stuart Wilkie;

  with thanks.

  CHAPTER 1

  It was ten days short of Candlemas, 1814, and an Atlantic wind carried shivers of cold rain that slapped on narrow cobbled alleys, spilt from the broken gutters of tangled roofs, and pitted the water of St Jean de Luz’s inner harbour. It was a winter wind, cruel as a bared sabre, that whirled chimney smoke into the low January clouds shrouding the corner of south-western France where the British Army had its small lodgement.

  A British soldier, his horse tired and mud-stained, rode down a cobbled street in St Jean de Luz. He ducked his head beneath a baker’s wooden sign, edged his mare past a fish-cart, and dismounted at a corner where an iron bollard provided a tethering post for the horse. He patted the horse, then slung its saddle-bags over his shoulder. It was evident he had ridden a long way.

  He walked into a narrow alley, searching for a house that he only knew by description; a house with a blue door and a line of cracked green tiles above the lintel. He shivered. At his left hip there hung a long, metal-scabbarded sword, and on his right shoulder was a rifle. He stepped aside for a woman, black-dressed and squat, who carried a basket of lobsters. She, grateful that this enemy soldier had shown her a small courtesy, smiled her thanks, but afterwards, when she was safely past him, she crossed herself. The soldier’s face had been bleak and scarred; darkly handsome, but still a killer’s face. She blessed her patron saint that her own son would not have to face such a man in battle, but had a secure, safe job in the French Customs service instead.

  The soldier, oblivious of the effect his face had, found the blue door beneath the green tiles. The door, even though it was a cold day, stood ajar and, without knocking, he pushed his way into the front room. There he dropped his pack, rifle., and saddle-bags on to a threadbare carpet and found himself staring into the testy face of a British Army surgeon. ‘I know you,’ the Army surgeon, his shirt-cuffs thick with dried blood, said.

  ‘Sharpe, sir, Prince of Wales’s Own ...’

  ‘I said I knew you,’ the surgeon interrupted. ‘I took a musket-ball out of you after Fuentes d’Onoro. Had to truffle around for it, I remember.‘

  ‘Indeed, sir.’ Sharpe could hardly forget. The surgeon had been half drunk, cursing, and digging into Sharpe’s flesh by the light of a guttering candle. Now the two men had met in the outer room of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Hogan’s lodgings.

  ‘You can’t go in there.’ The surgeon’s clothes were drenched in prophylactic vinegar, filling the small room with its acrid scent. ‘Unless you want to die.’

  ‘But...’

  ‘Not that I care.’ The surgeon wiped his bleeding-cup on the tail of his shirt then tossed it into his bag. ‘If you want the fever, Major, go inside.’ He spat on his wide-bladed scarifying gouge, smeared the blood from it, and shrugged as Sharpe opened the inner door.

  Hogan’s room was heated by a huge fire that hissed where its flames met the rain coming down the chimney. Hogan himself was in a bed heaped with blankets. He shivered and sweated at the same time. His face was greyish, his skin slick with sweat, his eyes red-rimmed, and he was muttering about being purged with hyssop.

  ‘His topsails are gone to the wind,’ the surgeon spoke from behind Sharpe. ‘Feverish, you see. Did you have business with him?’

  Sharpe stared at the sick man. ‘He’s my particular friend.’ He turned to look at the surgeon. ‘I’ve been on the Nive for the last month, I knew he was ill, but ...’ He ran out of words.

  ‘Ah,’ the surgeon seemed to soften somewhat. ‘I wish I could offer some hope, Major.’

  ‘You can’t?’

  ‘He might last two days. He might last a week.’ The surgeon pulled on his jacket that he had shed before opening one of Hogan’s veins. ‘He’s wrapped in red flannel, bled regular, and we’re feeding him gunpowder and brandy. Can’t do more, Major, except pray for the Lord’s tender mercies.’

  The sickroom stank of vomit. The heat of the huge fire pricked sweat on Sharpe’s face and steamed rain-water from his soaking uniform as he stepped closer to the bed, but it was obvious Hogan could not recognize him. The middle-aged Irishman, who was Wellington’s Chief of Intelligence, shivered and sweated and shook and muttered nonsenses in a voice that had so often amused Sharpe with its dry wit.

  ‘It’s possible,’ the surgeon spoke grudgingly from the outer room, ‘that the next convoy might bring some Jesuit’s bark.’

  ‘Jesuit’s bark?’ Sharpe turned towards the doorway.

  ‘A South American tree-bark, Major, sometimes called quinine. Infuse it well and it can perform miracles. But it’s a rare substance, Major, and cruelly expensive!’

  Sharpe went closer to the bed. ‘Michael? Michael?’

  Hogan said something in Gaelic. His eyes flickered past Sharpe, closed, then opened again.

  ‘Michael?’

  ‘Ducos,’ the sick man said distinctly, ‘Ducos.’


  ‘He’ll not make sense,’ the surgeon said.

  ‘He just did.’ Sharpe had heard a name, a French name, the name of an enemy, but in what feverish context and from what secret compartment of Hogan’s clever mind the name had come, Sharpe could not tell.

  ‘The Field Marshal sent me,’ the surgeon seemed eager to explain himself, ‘but I can’t work miracles, Major. Only the Almighty’s providence can do that.’

  ‘Or Jesuit’s bark.’

  ‘Which I haven’t seen in six months.’ The surgeon still stood at the door. ‘Might I insist you leave, Major? God spare us a contagion.’

  ‘Yes.’ Sharpe knew he would never forgive himself if he did not give Hogan some gesture of friendship, however useless, so he stooped and took the sick man’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze.

  ‘Maquereau,’ Hogan said quite distinctly.

  ‘Maquereau?’

  ‘Major!’

  Sharpe obeyed the surgeon’s voice. ‘Does maquereau mean anything to you?’

  ‘It’s a fish. The mackerel. It’s also French slang for pimp, Major. I told you, his wits are wandering.’ The surgeon closed the door on the sickroom. ‘And one other piece of advice, Major.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘If you want your wife to live, then tell her she must stop visiting Colonel Hogan.’

  Sharpe paused by his damp luggage. ‘Jane visits him?’

  ‘A Mrs Sharpe visits daily,’ the doctor said, ‘but I have not the intimacy of her first name. Good day to you, Major.’

  It was winter in France.

  The floor was a polished expanse of boxwood, the walls were cliffs of shining marble, and the ceiling a riot of ornate plasterwork and paint. In the very centre of the floor, beneath the dark, cobweb encrusted chandelier and dwarfed by the huge proportions of the vast room, was a malachite table. Six candles, their light too feeble to reach into the corners of the great room, illuminated maps spread on the green stone table.