In the afternoon the Riflemen marched clear of the fog which hung behind them like a great cloud over the Bassin d‘Arcachon. Wisps of mist, like outriders to the fog bank, still drifted above the flat, marshy landscape over which the road was carried on an embankment shored by plaited hurdles. Widgeon, teal and snipe flapped away from the marching men. Harper, who loved birds, watched them, but not so closely that he did not see the twisted rope handle of an eel-trap. Two eels were inside and the beasts were chopped up with a sword bayonet and distributed among the Riflemen.
It was cold, but the march warmed them. By late afternoon, within sight of two small villages, they reached a miserable, plank bridge rotting over a sluggish stream. ‘I suppose this could be Facture.’ Sharpe stared at the map. ‘Christ knows.’
He sent Lieutenant Minver with six men to discover the names of the closest villages, and with them went a bag of silver French francs to buy what food could be prised from the peasants. The ten-franc silver coins were forgeries, made at Wellington’s command by counterfeiters recruited from the Army’s ranks. The Peer insisted that all supplies in France were paid for with good coin, but French peasants would not touch Spanish silver, only French, so Wellington had simply melted the one down to make the other. The silver content was good, the coins indistinguishable from those minted in Paris, and everyone concerned was happy.
‘They’re bloody poor, sir.’ Minver returned with five loaves, three eels, and a basket of lentils. ‘And this is the River Leyre, sir.’
‘No meat?’ Frederickson was disgusted. Each of the Riflemen carried three days’ supply of dried beef in their packs, but Frederickson, Sharpe knew, was very fond of freshly-killed pork.
‘No meat,’ Minver said. ‘Unless they’re hiding it.’
‘Of course they’re bloody hiding it,’ Frederickson said scathingly. ‘You want me to go, sir?’ He looked hopefully to Sharpe.
‘No.’ Sharpe was staring back the way they had come where, in the distance, a straggle of redcoats appeared. Sharpe was cold, his head was hurting like the devil, and now he had the Marines on his coat-tails. ‘Bloody hell!’
‘I was hoping you’d be here, sir,’ Palmer greeted Sharpe.
‘Hoping?’
‘If Killick went inland, which seems likely, then we’re better following you. Or going with you.’ Palmer grinned, and Sharpe realized that the Marine captain had no intention of hunting Killick and only wanted to be a part of Sharpe’s expedition. Setting an ambush on a high road of France was, to Captain Palmer, a taste of real soldiering, while following some half-armed fugitives in a scramble over a cold marsh was just a waste of time. Palmer’s lieutenant, a thin, vacant youth called Fytch, hovered close to his seniors to overhear Sharpe’s decision.
‘I presume, Captain,’ Sharpe said carefully, ‘that you were given a free hand in your search for Captain Killick?’
‘Indeed, sir. I was told not to come back till I’d found the scoundrel. Not till Thursday, anyway.’
‘Then I can’t stop you accompanying me, can I?’ Fifty muskets would be damned useful, so long as the Marines could keep pace with the Riflemen. ‘We march that way.’ Sharpe pointed south-east into the damp water-meadows that edged the Leyre.
Palmer nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’
They marched, and if it had not been for his piercing, spiking headache, Sharpe would have been a happy man. For three days he was free to cause chaos, to carry the war, which the French had carried throughout Europe, deep into the heart of France itself. He would dutifully question his prisoners, but Sharpe already knew that he would not recommend an advance on Bordeaux and, if de Maquerre returned with such a recommendation, Sharpe, as senior land officer, would forbid the madness. He felt relieved of care, he was free, he was a soldier released from the leash to fight his own war; to which end, and reinforced with fifty footsore Marines, he marched south-east to set an ambush.
‘I expected an answer to my letter,’ Ducos said, ‘I hardly expected you to come yourself.’
The Comte de Maquerre was chilled to the marrow. He had ridden across freezing marshland, and through low, vine-covered hills where the wind had been as bitter as a blade of ice; and all to be thus ungraciously received in a capacious room lit by six candles on a malachite table. ‘My news is too important to be entrusted to a letter.’
‘So?’
‘A landing.’ De Maquerre crouched by the fire, holding his thin hands to its small flames. ‘At Arcachon. The fort’s probably taken already and more men can be shipped north within a week.’ He twisted to stare at Ducos’ thin face. ‘Then they’ll march on Bordeaux.’
‘Now? In this weather?’ Ducos gestured towards the un-curtained windows where the wind beat a sharp tattoo of freezing rain on the black glass. Only that morning Ducos had found three sparrows frozen to death on the balcony of his quarters. ‘No one could land in this weather!’
‘They already have landed,’ de .Maquerre said. ‘I was with them. And once they hold the Bassin d’Arcachon they’ll have sheltered waters to land a bigger force.‘ The Comte thrust impotently at the glowing coals, trying to rouse fierce flames, then described how he was supposed to return to Bampfylde with an encouragement for the British plans. ’If I say the city will rebel, then they’ll ship their troops north.‘
‘How many?’
‘The First Division.’
Ducos trimmed the wick of a smoking candle. ‘How do you know all this?’
‘Through a man called Wigram, a colonel ...’
‘... on the staff of the British First Division.’ Ducos’ knowledge of the enemy was encyclopaedic, and he loved to display it. ‘A painstaking man.’
‘Indeed,’ de Maquerre shivered violently, ‘and a man who will offer indiscretions in return for an aristocrat’s company. Even a French aristocrat!’ de Maquerre laughed softly, then twisted to face the table. ‘Hogan’s sick.’
‘How sick?’ Ducos’ interest was quickened by the news.
‘He’ll die.’
‘Good, good.’ Pierre Ducos stared at his maps. He had the answer he had so desperately sought, but, like a man brought a priceless gift, he began to doubt the generosity of the giver. Suppose this news had been planted on de Maquerre? Suppose, after all, the British planned a bridge across the Adour, but wished the French to concentrate troops at Arcachon? Or suppose the invading force flooded ashore at the mouth of the Gironde? The answer had brought him no relief, merely more doubts. ‘How many troops are already ashore?’
‘Three Companies of Marines, two of Riflemen.’
‘That’s all!’ Ducos snapped the words.
‘They think it’s enough,’ de Maquerre said mildly. ‘They plan to take the fortress, then ambush the supply road.’
‘Ambitious of them,’ Ducos said softly.
‘They’ve got an ambitious bastard doing it,’ de Maquerre said viciously. ‘A real bastard. It would be a pleasure to bury him.’
‘Who?’ Ducos asked in polite interest. His attention was on the map where his finger traced the thin line of the River Leyre. If such an ambush was planned, then that would be the closest stretch of road to the British landing.
‘Major Richard Sharpe, Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers. He’s really a Rifleman. God knows why he fights in a line Battalion.’
‘Sharpe?’
Something in Ducos’ voice made Maquerre turn. ‘Sharpe.’ A spasm showed on Ducos’ face, a twist of hatred that went almost as soon as it appeared, but was nevertheless a rare revelation of the real man behind the careful mask.
Richard Sharpe. The man who had mocked Ducos, who had once broken Ducos’ spectacles, and who had destroyed all Ducos’ careful plans in Spain.
Sharpe. A brute, a mindless barbarian whose sword had wrecked so many careful, elegant schemes. Sharpe, whom Ducos had once had at his mercy in Burgos Castle, except that the Rifleman had filled a small room with blood from which Ducos had fled in horror. Sharpe.
‘You know him?’ de Maquerre aske
d tentatively.
Know him? Did Ducos know Sharpe? If Pierre Ducos had been a superstitious man, which he prided himself on not being, he would have believed that Sharpe was his personal devil. How else did the Rifleman crop up so often to ruin his meticulous plans?
For Ducos was a man who laid careful, almost mathematical plans. He was a soldier whose rank bore no relation to his responsibility, a secretive man who drew together the strands of politics and soldiering, police-work and spying, all to the Emperor’s glory. Now, in Bordeaux, Ducos was responsible for defending France’s southern flank by forecasting the enemy’s plans and, for once, the mention of Sharpe’s name brought him relief.
If Sharpe had been sent to Arcachon, then doubtless de Maquerre’s news was correct. Wellington would not waste Sharpe on a diversion. Ducos’ enemy had been delivered into his hands. Sharpe was doomed.
The exultation in that thought made Ducos pace to the window. A few lights flickered in the city that the Major so despised. The merchants of Bordeaux were suffering from the British blockade, their warehouses and quays were empty, and doubtless they would welcome a British victory if it swelled their bellies again and filled their strongboxes. ‘You’ve done well, Comte.’
De Maquerre acknowledged the praise with a shrug. Ducos turned. ‘You leave tomorrow. Find Sharpe. I’ll tell you where, and order him to Bordeaux.’
‘If he obeys,’ de Maquerre sounded dubious.
Ducos laughed; a strange, sudden yelp of a sound. ‘We’ll entice him! We’ll entice him! Then go to Arcachon and give the very opposite message. You understand?’
De Maquerre, huddled by the fire, smiled slowly. By telling Bampfylde that there would be no rebellion in Bordeaux he would spike the British hopes for a landing, while, at the same time, he could maroon Sharpe in France. De Maquerre nodded. ‘I understand.’
Ducos repeated his odd laugh. General Calvet’s demi-brigade was billeted in Bordeaux on their journey south to Soult’s Army. One half Battalion had already left with the cumbersome supplies, but Calvet must have at least two thousand men remaining who could destroy Sharpe at Arcachon. Ducos would ruin the British hopes for a march on Bordeaux and he would also hunt his own enemy, his own most hated enemy, to death on the marshes of France. Revenge, the Spanish said, was a dish best eaten cold, and this revenge, in this winter, would be as cold and thorough as any man, even the implacable Pierre Ducos, could wish.
CHAPTER 10
There was small sleep to be had that night for either Riflemen or Marines. The dawn was cold; bitter cold. Wraiths of mist drifted above the meadows frosted crisply white.
Sharpe woke with a stinging headache behind his bandaged forehead. He sat with his back against a pollarded willow and felt a louse in his armpit that must have come from the Amelie, but he was too tired and too cold to hunt for it.
‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.’ Frederickson, teeth chattering with the cold, crouched by Sharpe. ‘Nothing passed yesterday.’
Dim in the mist, a hundred yards upstream, a handsome stone bridge with carved urns marking the limits of its balustrades, arched over the Leyre. Next to the bridge, and on the western bank down which Sharpe and his small force had marched last night, there stood a stone-built house from which a trickle of chimney smoke tantalized the senses with its promise of a warm fire.
‘It’s a toll-house,’ Frederickson said, ‘and the bugger wouldn’t give us coffee.’
No doubt, Sharpe reflected, the toll-keepers of France were as disobliging as their English counterparts. There was something about that job to bring out the surliness in a man. ‘If we had enough powder we could break that damn bridge.’
‘We don’t,‘ Frederickson said unhelpfully.
Sharpe struggled to his feet. Frederickson had taken the last watch and his picquets were set double-strength about the margins of the water-meadow where the small force had bivouacked. It had been a miserable bivouac. Some of the Marines had sheltered beneath the scanty cover of the limbers, but most of Sharpe’s men had simply rolled themselves in greatcoats, pillowed their heads on packs, and shivered through the slow, small hours.
A cow, on the further bank, bellowed softly and watched the two men who walked beside the river. A cow at pasture in February suggested a softer climate than England, but it was still damned cold. A swan, beautiful and ghostly, appeared beneath the bridge, followed a moment later by its mate, and the two birds, disdaining the unnatural movement in the fields, glided gently downstream. ‘Luncheon,’ Frederickson said.
‘I never liked their taste,’ Sharpe said, ‘like stringy water-weeds.’ He flinched as a sudden stab of pain lanced in his head. He wondered if the naval surgeon had been wrong, and if his wound was more serious than the mere bloody scrape of a carbine ball. He seemed to remember that Johnny Pearson of the Buffs had taken such a wound at Busaco, sworn it was nothing, then dropped dead a week later.
A rickety wooden fence, untended and draped with frost-whitened thorn, barred the steep embankment that carried this High Road of France southwards. Sharpe climbed to the carriageway that was formed of a white, flinty stone which had been rammed hard to smoothness, but which was nevertheless rutted and puddled with ice. No weeds grew on the surface, which bespoke constant use. To the south, where the road disappeared in the mist, he could see the shapes of houses, a church, and tall, bare poplars. The river curved here, and doubtless that small town was where the old road crossed the river, while this bridge, newer and wider, had been built in the meadows outside the town so that the hurrying armies would not have to negotiate narrow, mediaeval streets on their urgent journeys to Spain. Down this carriageway, for the last six years, the guns and men and ammunition and horses and blades and saddles and all the countless trivia of war had been dragged to feed the French armies. And up this same road, Sharpe thought, those same armies would trudge in defeat. ‘What’s in the town?’
Frederickson knew Sharpe’s question meant what enemy forces might be in the town. ‘The toll-keeper says nothing.’
Sharpe turned to look north. ‘And up there?’
‘A stand of beeches a quarter mile up and an excuse for a farm. It’ll do.’
Sharpe grunted. He trusted Frederickson absolutely, and if Frederickson said that the beeches and farm were the best site for an ambuscade, then Sharpe knew it would be pointless to look elsewhere.
A violent screech, a flapping of wings, and a sudden curse betrayed that the swans had been purloined for food. Captain Palmer, scratching his crotch and yawning, climbed the fence. “Morning, sir.‘
“Morning, Palmer,‘ Sharpe said. ’Cold enough for you?‘
Palmer did not reply. The three officers walked towards the toll-house that was marked by a white barred gate across the road. A black and white painted board, just like those on the toll-houses of England, announced the crossing charges. There was a ford to the right of the bridge, but the ford had been half blocked with boulders so that no carriage or waggon could escape payment of the toll.
The toll-keeper, peg-legged and bald, stood truculently by his gate. He spoke to Frederickson, who, in turn, spoke to Sharpe. ‘If we haven’t got the laissez-passer then we have to pay six sous.’
‘Lacy-passay?’ Sharpe asked.
‘I rather gave him to think we’re German troops fighting for Bonaparte,’ Frederickson said. ‘The lacy-passay allows us to escape all tolls.’
‘Tell him to go to hell.’
Frederickson conveyed Captain Sharpe’s compliments to the toll-keeper who answered by spitting at Sharpe’s feet. ‘Trois hommes,’ the man said, holding up three fingers in case these heathen German troops did not understand him, ‘six sous.’
‘Bugger him.’ Sharpe raised the black-painted metal latch that held the gate shut and, from above him, a click sounded and he looked up to see the toll-keeper’s wife leaning from an upper window. She was a woman of squat, startling ugliness, her hair bound with a muslin scarf, and, more to the immediate point, armed with a vast, brass-barrelled blun
derbuss that covered the three officers.
‘Six sous,’ said the toll-keeper stoically. Life held few surprises for toll-keepers, and strange troops were nothing new to him.
Captain Palmer, who held Major Richard Sharpe’s reputation in some awe, was now astonished to see the Rifleman grudgingly take out a ten-franc silver piece. A delay ensued while the toll-keeper went indoors, unlocked his iron-bound chest, found the right change, then gave Sharpe a written receipt which, Frederickson explained, would enable reimbursement to be made at the District Headquarters in Bordeaux.
‘I can’t have that bugger charging for all of us,’ Sharpe said. ‘Rather than disarm his Grenadier, William, we’ll march the men through the ford.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Frederickson was highly amused by the whole transaction.
‘Shouldn’t we ...?’ Palmer began hesitantly.
‘No,’ Sharpe said. ‘We’re under orders not to agitate civilians, Captain. No stealing, no raping. If anyone breaks that order he’ll be hanged. By me. Instantly.’ His headache had made him speak more sharply than he had intended.
‘Yes, sir.’ Palmer sounded subdued.
They walked to the stand of beeches that Frederickson had patrolled in the night. ‘It’s the right place,’ Sharpe said grudgingly, ‘if anything travels today. Which I doubt.’ Any sensible man would stay indoors on this cold day.
The beeches lay to the right of the road, the farm to the left. The farm was a miserable hovel of a place; merely a mud-walled cottage surrounded by frosted slush with two dilapidated outbuildings where chickens lived in filthy straw. A pigsty lay beyond a low hedge. Sharpe broke a piece of cat-ice with his heel, then swivelled to look where the road passed between the beeches and the farm’s hedgerow. ‘We use your Marines there, Palmer. You stop them, and the Rifles will kill them.’
Palmer, not wanting to show any lack of understanding, nodded. Frederickson understood instantly. By using the Marines, with their heavy firepower of quick-loading muskets, as the stop in the bottle, Sharpe would force an enemy to scatter left and right to outflank the road-block. On those flanks they would run into the hidden Riflemen. It would be quick, bloody, and effective. ‘What if they come from the south?’
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 6: Sharpe's Honour, Sharpe's Regiment, Sharpe's Siege Page 78