‘Yes,’ Sharpe said, and knew instantly that if he was Palmer, and Bampfylde was the officer demanding the hanging, then Sharpe would fight just like Palmer for the life of his man. God damn it, but, years before, Sharpe had even defended the most useless man in his Light Company in just this same situation.
Palmer saw Sharpe’s hesitation. ‘Robinson fought damned well, sir. Doesn’t your Field Marshal mitigate punishment for bravery in the field?’
Wellington had been known to cancel a half-dozen hangings because the prisoners’ Battalions had fought well. Sharpe swore, hating the decision. ‘Orders are orders, Mr Palmer.’
‘Just as I believe we’re ordered to hang privateers and deserters, sir?’ Palmer said it bluntly, daring Sharpe’s wrath.
‘Damn your insolence.’ Sharpe said it without conviction, almost as a sop to the weakness he was showing. ‘You will apologize to the girl and to her parents. Give them this.’ He took two of the forged silver ten-franc pieces from his pouch.
‘Thank you, sir.’ Palmer beamed as he took the coins.
‘I’m not done with him,’ Sharpe warned. ‘RSM Harper!’
Harper pretended not to notice his restoration to Regimental Sergeant Major. ‘Sir?’
‘Take Marine Robinson and the girl’s father round the back of the barn. I want you at the bridge in ten minutes!’
‘Do I need a rope, sir?’
‘No. But give the father his chance.’ God damn it, Sharpe thought, but he had broken orders again. First he spared a damned American, now a Marine, and what was the point of orders if sentimentality weakened a man into disregarding them?
‘Thank you, sir,’ Palmer said again.
‘You won’t thank me when you see what Patrick Harper can do to a man. You’ll be carrying Robinson home.’
‘Better than burying him, sir.’
The incident put Sharpe into a sour mood, worsened by the feeling that he had shown weakness. Twice now he had backed out of an execution and he wondered if it was because he had taken a respectable wife. Old soldiers claimed that marriage did weaken a man, and Sharpe suspected they were right. His foul mood was not helped by the agonizing slowness with which the powder was being crammed between the bridge’s balustrades. Lieutenant Fytch had ordered the toll-keeper and his wife out of their house and the woman, who had earlier threatened Sharpe with her blunderbuss, was now weeping for the loss of her home. Her husband, stumping on his wooden leg, was dragging belongings out to the road.
The sound of Frederickson’s rifle fire had finished and Sharpe saw the Company marching back towards the bridge. That meant the French had gone altogether, though he knew Sweet William would have left picquets to guard against their return.
Using the Marines to help, the Riflemen hastened the setting of the explosives. The other supplies, destined for Soult’s army, were heaped about the powder barrels. Frederickson sounded his whistle to pull in the picquets, while a squad of Minver’s men pushed the townspeople further away from the bridge. It was getting dark, and Sharpe wanted to be moving.
‘Sir!’ Patrick Harper, who had silently reappeared at the bridge, pointed northwards. ‘Sir!’
Two horsemen had appeared. They had not come by the road, but instead, perhaps forewarned by the retreating infantry, had made a wide detour through the fields. Now, with white handkerchiefs skewered to their sword-tips as makeshift flags of truce, they galloped their horses towards the bridge.
They were good horses, corn fed and with strong hindquarters. Both took the soft, plunging ground like thorough breds and were scarcely blowing as they were curbed beside Sharpe who waved down the cautious rifles of Frederickson’s newly arrived Company.
The Comte de Maquerre, dressed in his Chasseurs Britannique uniform beneath his pale cloak, nodded cautiously at Sharpe. The other rider was a slim, middle-aged man in civilian clothes. He had a face of such startling and pleasant honesty that Sharpe’s weariness and self-disgust seemed to vanish like frost beneath the rising sun. The man was so calm and self-composed that Sharpe instinctively smiled in response to his greeting, which consisted of mild astonishment at the evidence of carnage on the road and a frank expression of admiration for Sharpe’s success.
The man was French, but spoke good English, and his loyalty was proclaimed by the white cockades that he wore, not only on his brown cloak, but also on his bicorne hat. ‘I am Jules Favier, assistant to the Mayor of Bordeaux.’ He spoke as he climbed from the saddle. ‘And I am at your service, Major.’
The Comte de Maquerre stayed on horseback. His thin face, reddened by the cold, seemed nervous. ‘Bordeaux has risen, Major.’
Sharpe stared up at the Comte. ‘Risen?’ This was the news Sharpe most feared, the spur into what Elphinstone had described as madness.
‘Risen for the King!’ Favier said happily. ‘The Bonapartistes have been ejected!’ Favier, contentment suffusing his honest, cold-chapped face, smiled. ‘The rising ended when the garrison came over to our side. The white flag of Bourbon flies, the defences are manned by subjects of his most Christian Majesty, King Louis XVIII, whom God bless.’
‘Indeed,’ Sharpe said. The news explained why the Comte de Maquerre could wear an enemy’s uniform deep in France, but the news meant much, much more. If it was true that the third city of France had rebelled against Bonaparte and persuaded its garrison troops to forsake their Imperial allegiance, then Sharpe was hearing of the end of this war. Wigram and Bampfylde would be proved right. Sharpe knew he should feel an elation, a great soaring of spirit that all the sacrifices had been worthwhile and that twenty-one years of relentless savagery had been brought to peace by Napoleon’s fall, but he could raise nothing more than a grim smile to meet Favier’s enthusiasm.
‘We have come,’ de Maquerre said, ‘for your help.’ He spoke lamely, almost as if what he said gave him embarrassment.
Favier took a paper from his saddle-bag. ‘If you will accept this, monsieur, on behalf of the Provisional and Royalist Government of Bordeaux.’ He handed the paper to Sharpe, then gave a small bow.
The paper was entirely in French, and was decorated with an elaborate seal. Sharpe saw that his name had been spelt wrong; without its final ‘e’. ‘What is it?’
‘You have no French?’ Favier sounded politely surprised. ‘Monsieur, it is a commission that appoints you a Major General in the forces of his most Catholic Majesty, King Louis XVIII of France, whom God bless.’
‘God bless him,’ Sharpe said automatically. ‘A Major General?’
‘Indeed.’ De Maquerre spoke from his saddle. It had been Ducos’ idea that a soldier as ambitious as Sharpe could not resist such a lure.
Sharpe was wondering what Wellington would make of the appointment, and imagined that aristocrat’s grim amusement that a one time private should be offered such a rank. ‘I ...’ he began, but Favier interrupted him.
‘Our citizens have taken Bordeaux, monsieur, but their confidence needs the presence of an ally. Especially an ally as famous and redoubtable as yourself.’ Favier softened his flattery with an honest smile. ‘And once it is known that Allied troops are in the city, then the whole countryside will rise with us.’ Favier spoke with an enthusiasm and confidence that was entirely lacking in the Comte.
Sharpe thought of the local Mayor who had already tried to surrender. Doubtless France was filled with men and women eager to disavow their Napoleonic past and declare for the winning side, but Sharpe was equally sure that Napoleon’s fanatical supporters were not so ready for surrender. The nearest allied forces to Bordeaux, besides Sharpe, were a hundred miles away and there was Marshal Soult with a French army screening their advance. ‘I don’t,‘ Sharpe said, ’have orders from my General that would allow me to help you.‘ He held the commission out to Favier.
‘You have orders,’ de Maquerre said coldly, ‘to give me every assistance.’
Favier seemed upset by de Maquerre’s hostile tone. He smiled at Sharpe. ‘Your Field Marshal, I think, would admire a
soldier who grasped the moment?’
‘Maybe.’
‘And you have a reputation, monsieur, as a man not afraid of great risks?’
Sharpe said nothing. He had been secretly charged by Elphinstone with scotching Bampfylde’s high hopes. One part of Sharpe, that part which had so often dared impossible things, drew him towards Bordeaux, but the soldier within him could imagine his men besieged in that city and surrounded by a population that, with a brigade of Soult’s veterans pressing close, might well decide that their change of allegiance had been premature. ‘I cannot, sir.’ He held out the commission again. ‘I’m sorry.’
A look of disappointment, suggesting personal hurt, crossed Favier’s face. ‘I understand, Major, that your expedition is commanded by Captain Bampfylde, of His Britannic Majesty’s Navy?’
Sharpe paused, thinking that on land Bampfylde held an equal rank to himself, but, merely by boarding the Vengeance, Bampfylde magically arose to become the equivalent of a full colonel, and so, in that knowledge, Sharpe reluctantly nodded. ‘He does command, yes.’
Favier shrugged. ‘Would it offend you, Major, if the Comte and I sought to countermand your refusal by seeking Captain Bampfylde’s approval?’
‘I can’t stop you,’ Sharpe said ungraciously, ‘but I must tell you that I’m starting the return march within an hour. I expect to be at Arcachon this time tomorrow.’
The Comte de Maquerre, as though eager to be on his way, had turned his horse away from Sharpe. Favier, leaving the forged commission in Sharpe’s hand, collected his horse’s reins and pulled himself into the saddle. ‘I hope to meet you in the morning, Major, with orders that will reverse your march. God save King Louis!’
‘God save him.’ Sharpe watched as the two Frenchmen put their horses to the ford. As they threaded the boulders Favier twisted in his saddle to give a parting wave, then put his heels back.
‘What did they want?’ Frederickson, unashamedly curious, asked Sharpe.
‘To make me into a Major General,’ Sharpe said. He tore the commission into shreds of paper and tossed them into the River Leyre. ‘They said Bordeaux’s risen and declared itself for fat Louis.’ Sharpe watched the horsemen disappear in the dusk. The two men evidently knew a cross-country route to Arcachon for they disdained the river bank up which Sharpe had marched the night before. ‘They wanted us to go there.’
‘So bloody Bampfylde’s right?’ Frederickson uttered the suspicions that Sharpe feared to face.
But Sharpe was wondering why the Comte de Maquerre had left most of the talking to the Mayor’s assistant. Aristocrats did not usually defer to bureaucrats. And why, if there were French troops on this road, even defeated French troops, had Maquerre been so confident as to wear his Chasseurs Britannique uniform?
‘I think they were lying,’ Sharpe said, ‘and I’m not going near Bordeaux.’
Sweet William shrugged. ‘Perhaps the war’s over, sir?’ ‘Maybe.’ A cold wind suddenly gusted over the scattered remnants of the French convoy. Tiny flames had been lit in the carriage lamps of the coach in which the two French-women were safely sheltered. ‘But we’ll still blow the goddamned bridge,’ Sharpe said, ‘because no one’s told us not to.’
It was almost dark when the small force of Riflemen and Marines was at last assembled in the river meadow. They were weighed down with plunder, with joints of the dead oxen, with captured wine illicitly stuffed into packs and with enemy weaponry that all soldiers delighted to keep, but inevitably threw away as soon as the marching became heavy and tedious. Most of the surviving French horses had been rounded up, bridled and were being used to carry packs or wounded men, among whom was Marine Matthew Robinson whose face looked as if it had received the full recoil of a twelve-pounder field-gun. The French prisoners, their braces and belts and bootlaces cut, had been released on the river’s far bank.
Sharpe looked around for the last time. The captured quickfuse snaked from the explosives, past the toll-house, down the bank, through the rickety fence, and reached to the centre of the meadow. The townsfolk were far back, the prisoners a half mile up the road, and only the stupid oxen were close to the gunpowder. Sharpe nodded to Minver. ‘Light it.’
Flint struck on steel, half-charred linen kindling was blown to life, and the flame was lowered to the fuse.
‘Wait! Wait!’ A dozen Marines were shouting suddenly.
Minver looked to Sharpe, who nodded, and the flame was blown out. Men were staring north-east, across the river, and in the twilight Sharpe saw a small slim figure, clothed in white, running frantically towards the bridge.
It was the girl, green-eyed and slender, who had been scratched and punched when Robinson tried to rape her. Desperately, her skirts catching the sudden wind like moth-wings, she scrambled over the bridge’s parapet, past the powder, then jumped down into the meadow. She ran on, past Sharpe, past Frederickson’s Company who would form the rearguard, running to the man with the battered face who had forced her into the byre and torn at her clothes.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Sharpe said. The girl was holding one of Robinson’s hands, staring up at him, speaking in fast French, but the expression on her face was one of adoration.
Captain Palmer, as astonished as Sharpe, laughed. ‘Strange things, women.’ He watched the girl pulling herself up to share Robinson’s saddle. ‘An unmarried girl, sir, wants nothing but a husband.’
‘And once she’s got one,’ Sharpe said sourly, ‘she wants everything. It would have been better for both of them if I’d hanged the bastard.’ He looked at Minver. ‘Light it, Lieutenant.’
Flint struck steel again, the flame flickered to illuminate the fuse laying in the grass, then the powder caught, sparked, and fizzed its swift way towards the bridge.
‘March!’ Sharpe turned to his heavily-laden force and pointed the way home. ‘March!’
‘It’s a hulk, sir.’ Lieutenant Tom Martin, of the brig-sloop Cavalier, twisted his bicorne hat in both his hands.
‘A hulk?’ Bampfylde frowned. They were in Commandant Lassan’s old quarters where, because of a lack of firewood, Bampfylde’s steward warmed his master with volumes taken at random from the shelves. The books were in French, which made them unreadable, so both the steward and his master considered that no great harm was being done.
Martin dropped his hat and showed Captain Bampfylde where, on the chart, the Thuella had been found. The schooner was ashore at the end of the tidal creek that led to the village of Gujan. ‘She’s dismasted, sir, aground, and derelict.’
‘You fired at her?’
‘Aye, sir.’ Martin, when at last the damned fog had cleared, had spotted the Thuella far across the shoals. The tide was low, and still falling, so the most he could do was fire at long range. Two or three shots had crashed into the Thuella’s timbers, but at that range, and with such small calibre guns as the Cavalier carried, the damage was slight.
‘Derelict, you say?’ Bampfylde asked.
‘Bottomed, emptied, stripped, scorched, dismasted, and smoking.’ Martin delivered the gloomy words in hope that they would be sufficient. The glass was falling ominously and all the experienced sailors wanted to be at sea before the storm struck, but if Captain Bampfylde believed that the Thuella was salvageable then he might be tempted to stay at Arcachon and God alone knew what damage a storm could wreak on a brig in these enclosed waters.
‘Smoking?’
‘Looked as if the Jonathons tried to fire her, sir. Must be damp wood, though, ’cos she hadn’t burned through.‘
‘You could,’ Bampfylde said sourly, ‘have sent a party to burn her properly, Mr Martin. That would have made sure of her.’
‘They’ve made a battery ashore, sir. Mounted all her guns to face the water.’ Thomas Martin sensed that perhaps he should have informed Captain Bampfylde of that salient fact earlier. ‘They didn’t return fire, sir, but we saw them.’
Damn Sharpe, Bampfylde thought. The Thuella existed, her crew had made themselves a fortress on-land,
and it would take two days to extirpate that nest of pirates. Bampfylde might not have the two days. The weather was surly, threatening a Biscay storm. For two days fog had shrouded the Bay, and now, when at last the fog lifted, all prudent seamen were advising Bampfylde to give his squadron sea-room. ‘Can they refloat her?’
‘No, sir. Looks to me as if they’ve ripped out what’s good and abandoned the rest.’ Captain Cornelius Killick would have loved to hear that statement, for he had worked hard to give just that impression. He had careened the schooner hard over, streaked her timbers and copper with pitch to suggest scorch marks, and lit smoking fires of damp grass to suggest smouldering embers deep in an abandoned hold. ‘And they’ve cut away her figurehead,’ Martin added hopefully.
‘Ah!’ That nugget of information pleased Bampfylde. No sailor would take away a figurehead if a ship still had life in her. ‘It sounds as if she’s done for! And doubtless the storm will finish her off.’
‘Indeed, sir.’ Martin, dismissed, shuffled from the room.
The storm, not the Thuella, was Bampfylde’s chief worry. The still air was being stirred now by a strangely warm wind and every look at the weatherglass confirmed that the mercury shrank inside its four-foot tube. The continued existence of the American privateer, even if grounded and abandoned, was a nuisance, but it was palliated by Bampfylde’s success in having found two splendid French brigs that were both now his prizes and already on their way to England. The chasse-marées had gone south, the fort was garrisoned by Marines and, apart from the Americans, Captain Bampfylde could count his job well done. All that was needed now was for de Maquerre to confirm that Bordeaux was ready to surrender.
But the Comte de Maquerre had not returned and Bampfylde dared not sail until the news from Bordeaux was received. If de Maquerre did not return till Thursday, then the storm would be on the flotilla and it would take seamanship of genius to claw off this shoaled coast.
But at least, if he must wait till Thursday, Bampfylde could send the remaining Marines by longboat to attack the Americans across the Gujan shoals. That thought made Bampfylde frown. Palmer should have searched the village of Gujan, so where was the damned Captain of Marines? Captured? Lost in the fog? Damn the bloody man! Damn and damn again. Bampfylde stared at the chart. If the two brigs covered Killick’s land-battery with gunfire, then the Marines could go in with powder barrels, pitch-blende, and Chinese lights to torch the Thuella down to charred ribs. If the weather held. If.
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 6: Sharpe's Honour, Sharpe's Regiment, Sharpe's Siege Page 81