Killick knew that if he did not sign Ducos would use his authority to detain him. Liam Docherty would not sail without Killick and the Thuella would stay in the Bassin, a hostage to Ducos’ whim. In the embarrassed silence the American took the charcoal and scrawled his name. ‘One hour after dawn.’
Ducos, triumphant, witnessed the piece of paper. ‘You had better make your preparations, Mr Killick. Should you be tempted to break this oath, I promise you that your name will be known throughout America as that of a man who abandoned his allies and ran away from a fight. It is not pleasant, Mr Killick, to have one’s name remembered for ever in the lists of traitors. First Benedict Arnold, then Cornelius Killick?’ For a second the look on Killick’s face persuaded Ducos that he had said too much, then the American nodded meekly.
Outside the hovel, Killick swore. The guns thumped from their pits and the first heavy rain, drumming from the north, began to fall. That rain, the American knew, was likely to last through the night, making rifles or muskets difficult to fire. The French now had the advantage of rain, so why did they need his ship?
‘What will you do?’ Henri Lassan asked.
‘Christ knows.’ Killick threw the remains of his cigar into the mud where it was snatched up by a sentry. The American stared at the low profile of the fort that gouted smoke with each burst of an howitzer shell. ‘Is it worse to betray an enemy or an ally, Henri?’
Henri Lassan, who hated what Ducos had done, shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I suppose I’ll have to fire high,’ Killick said, ‘and hope Major Sharpe will forgive me.’ He paused, wondering what carnage was being done inside the cauldron of the fort’s walls where the smoke pulsed from the relentless shells. ‘The bastard’s my enemy, Henri, but I can’t help liking the bugger.’
‘I fear that if Major Ducos had his way,’ Lassan said, ‘Major Sharpe will be dead by this time tomorrow.’
‘So I suppose it doesn’t matter what I do.’ The American gazed at the embattled fortress. ‘You believe in prayer, my friend, perhaps you’d better pray for my soul.’
‘I already pray for it,’ Lassan said.
‘Because my honour,’ Killick said softly, ‘is bargained away. Goodbye, my friend! Till the dawn.’
So the French had two allies; rain and an American, and their victory was thus made certain.
An hour before midnight the archway shuddered as the facing stones fell into the flooded ditch. Every shot thereafter worked more damage on the gateway, gouging out the rubble-filling and tipping the rampart’s pavement above the arch. Frederickson, carrying a hooded lantern, climbed the gate’s internal staircase to examine the extent of the destruction. He came out disgusted. ‘It’s going to fall. Surbedded work.’
‘Surbedded?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Stone laid against the grain.’ Frederickson paused as another roundshot thudded into the archway. ‘The stone’s cut vertically from the quarry and laid horizontally. It lets the water in. That gate’s a shoddy piece of building. They should be ashamed of it.’
But if the French could not build, they could shoot. Even in the rain-curtained darkness the French gunners were hitting their target and Sharpe suspected that dark-lanterns must have been placed on the esplanade as aiming marks. Once in a while the French fired a light ball; a metal, cloth-wrapped cage filled with saltpetre, powder, sulphur, resin and linseed oil. The balls burned fiercely, hissing in the rain, showing the gunners what damage they had inflicted. That damage was more than sufficient to make Sharpe pull his sentries away from the ramparts by the arch, thus abandoning the gateway to the enemy’s artillery.
Yet the rain did greater damage than the guns that night. At midnight, when Sharpe was going around the ramparts, a Marine sergeant found him. ‘Captain Frederickson says can you come, sir?’
Frederickson was in the scorched cavern of the fort’s second magazine, which had been the least damaged by Bampfylde’s explosion. A lantern cast a dull, flickering glow on the blackened rear wall and on the pathetic hoard of powder and made-up cartridges that were Sharpe’s final reserve of ammunition. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Frederickson said.
Sharpe swore. Water had seeped through the granite blocks of the magazine’s arched ceiling and soaked the powder so that the barrels were now filled with a dark grey, porridge-like sludge, while the home-made cartridges had come apart in a soggy mess of paper, lead, and wet powder. The captured French cartridges were also heavy with water and Sharpe swore again; swore foully, uselessly, and savagely.
Frederickson fingered the wall over the barrels. ‘The explosion must have loosened the masonry.’
‘It was dry when we came,’ Sharpe said. ‘I checked!’
‘Rain takes time to seep through, sir,’ Frederickson said.
Six Marines carried the powder to the stone gallery where the cooking fires burned. There the powder could be spread out and some of it would be dry by morning, but Sharpe knew that this disaster meant the end of his defiance.
It was his own fault. He should have covered the powder with a tarpaulin, but he had not thought. There was so much he should have done. He should have foreseen that the enemy had mortars, he should have warned Palmer about the stone dam, he should have made a bigger sortie on the first night, he should have brought Harper’s cannons on to the wall where they would have been safer from the shells. He should have had water ready to fight the fires, he should, perhaps, never have fought at all.
Sharpe sat in the cave of the magazine and a wave of despair hit him. ‘We used over half our good ammunition?’
‘Well over half.’ Frederickson was as unhappy as Sharpe. He sat opposite, knees drawn up, and the lantern threw the shadows of the two riflemen high on the arch of the magazine’s ceiling. ‘We might as well bring the wounded in here now. They’ll be more comfortable.’
‘Yes.’ But neither man moved. ‘There’s some French ammunition in the ready magazines, isn’t there?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Only fifty cartridges in each.’
Sharpe picked up a shard of stone and scratched a square on the magazine floor. He marked the position of the gate on the southern side. ‘The question,’ he spoke slowly, ‘is whether they’re fooling us with the gate and plan to attack somewhere else, or not?’
‘They’ll come for the gate,’ Frederickson said.
‘I think so.’ Sharpe scratched marks over the gate. ‘We’ll put everyone there. Just leave Minver with a handful of men to guard the other walls.’
Sharpe clung to the pathetic hope that a British brig, nosing up the enemy coast with the impunity that Nelson’s victories had given to the Navy, might see his strange flag. A brig, moored in the channel, could fire hell and destruction into an attacking French column. Yet in this weather, with this fitful, veering wind and the blotting, seething rain that bounced four inches high off the shattered cobbles of the yard, Sharpe knew no brig would come. ‘Your fellow might have reached our lines by now.’ He was clutching at straws, and he knew it.
‘If he survived,’ Frederickson said grimly. ‘And if anyone will take him seriously. And even then the Army will have to go on its knees to the Navy and beg them to risk one little boat.’
‘Bugger Bampfylde,’ Sharpe said. ‘I hope he gets the pox.’
‘Amen.’
A twelve-pounder ball crashed into the gate and there was a pause, a cracking sound like a bone breaking, then the grumbling, tumbling, roaring slide as tons of masonry collapsed inwards and downwards. The two officers stared at each other, imagining the stones thumping and sliding into the wet ditch, then settling in a shambolic mound as the dust, started from old mortar, was soaked by the rain.
‘They have a breach,’ Frederickson said in a voice which, by its very insouciance, betrayed apprehension.
Sharpe did not answer. If his men could hold off one more attack, just one, then it would buy time. Time for a ship to find them, time for French fears to settle in. Perhaps, if Calvet was repulsed again, the general
would leave the fort alone, content to screen it with a half battalion of men. The rumble of the subsiding stones faded in the hissing rain.
‘A week ago,’ there was amusement in Sharpe’s voice, ‘men were hoping that Bordeaux would rise. We would be heroes, William, ending the war with a grand gesture.’
‘Someone told lies,’ Frederickson said lightly.
‘Everyone lied. Wellington let those buggers believe in a landing so the French would be fooled. The Comte de Maquerre was a traitor all along.’ Sharpe shrugged as though nothing much mattered any more. ‘The Comte de bloody Maquerre. They call him Maquereau. He’s well-named, isn’t he? Bloody pimp.’
Frederickson smiled at Sharpe’s rare display of knowledge.
‘But it’s really Ducos,’ Sharpe said. Hogan, in his fever, he said both Ducos’ and Maquerre’s names, and this whole deception, that had stranded Sharpe’s men so far from any help, stank of Ducos.
‘Ducos?’
‘He’s just a bastard who I’ll kill one day.’ Sharpe said it in a very matter-of-fact voice, then grimaced because he knew that if this siege was truly Ducos’ work, then the Frenchman was very close to victory. ‘It’ll be bloody work tomorrow, William.’
‘Very.’
‘Do the men have the fight in them?’
Frederickson paused. Harper’s huge voice shouted in the yard, bringing order to the men who had gone to see the collapsed gatehouse. ‘The Rifles do,’ Frederickson said. ‘Most of mine are Germans and they’ll never surrender. The Spanish hate the goddamn crapauds and just want to kill more of them. I think the Marines will fight to show you they’re as good as the Rifles.’
Sharpe gave a half smile, half grimace. ‘We can hold one attack, William. But after that?’
‘Yes.’ Frederickson knew exactly how bad things were. And this damned rain, he thought, would not help.
After one attack, Sharpe knew, he must think of the unthinkable. Of surrender. Pride demanded that they defended the breach at least one time, but French anger might not allow a surrender after that one defence. Sharpe had seen men, their blood-lust goaded beyond endurance, put a captured fortress to the sack. Frenchmen, beyond sense, would hunt with sharpened bayonets through the stone corridors to take revenge on the defenders. The butchery would be vile, but pride was still pride and they would fight at least one more time. Sharpe tried to imagine what Wellington might do, he tried to think back over all the sieges he had fought to see if there was something left undone that he could do, he tried to think of some clever move to unsettle the enemy. He thought of nothing useful. ‘I’ll bet their general’s telling the poor buggers that we’ve got a hundred women in here,’ Sharpe laughed.
Frederickson grinned. ‘He’ll give every man a half pint of wine, tell them they can rape every woman inside, then point them at the breach. It never fails. You should have seen us at San Sebastian.’
‘I missed that.’ Sharpe had been in England when the British had captured San Sebastian.
Frederickson smiled. ‘It wasn’t pretty.’
An howitzer shell exploded in the courtyard. ‘You’d think the buggers would run out of ammunition,’ Sharpe said. It was oddly pleasant to sit here, sharing a friendship’s intimacy, knowing that nothing could now be done to diminish the slaughter that would come in the dawn. The French twelve-pounders still fired, even though the breach was formed, but now they sprayed the fallen stones with canister to prevent working parties from steepening the face up which their troops would swarm in the morning.
‘If they capture us,’ Frederickson said, ‘perhaps they’ll send us to Paris on our way to Verdun. I’d like to see Paris.’
The words reminded Sharpe of Jane’s wish to see the French capital when the war ended. He thought of his wife dead, of her body taken for a hasty burial. Damn Cornelius Killick, he thought, for taking away his hope.
Frederickson unexpectedly broke into song. ‘Ein schifflein sah ich fahren.’
Sharpe recognized the tune that was popular among the Germans who fought in Wellington’s Army. ‘Meaning?’
Frederickson gave a rueful smile. ‘“I saw a small ship sailing.” Pray for a frigate to come in the morning, sir. Think of its broadside raking the Frog camp.’
Sharpe shook his head. ‘I don’t think God listens to soldiers.’
‘He loves them,’ Frederickson said. ‘We’re the fools of the Lord, the last honest men, creation’s scapegoats.’
Sharpe smiled. In the morning, he thought, they would give this General Calvet a fight to remember, and afterwards, when it was over, but that did not bear thinking about. Then, suddenly, he stared at his friend. ‘Ein schiff?’ Sharpe asked, ‘what was it again?’
‘Ein schifflein sah ich fahren,’ Frederickson said slowly. ‘I saw a small ship sailing.’
‘God damn it!’ Sharpe’s helplessness suddenly vanished with the burgeoning of an idea as bright as a shell’s explosion. ‘I’m a fool!’ He faced defeat for want of a ship, and a ship existed. Sharpe scrambled to his feet and shouted into the yard for a rope to be fetched. ‘You’re to stay here, William. Prepare for an assault on the gate, you understand?’
‘And you?’
‘I’m going out. I’ll be back by dawn.’
‘Out? Where?’
But Sharpe had gone to the ramparts. A rope was fetched so he could climb down to the sand where the French corpses still lay, and so that, in a wet night, he could make a devil’s pact that might bring deliverance to the fools of the Lord.
CHAPTER 18
In the morning the rain fell in a sustained cloudburst. It hammered and seethed and bounced on the fort and ran from the ramparts to slop in bucketfuls on to the puddled courtyard. It seemed impossible for rain to be so savage, yet it persisted. It drummed on men’s shakoes, it flooded into the galleries carved into the ramparts, and its noise made even the firing of the twelve-pounders seem dull. It was like the rains before the great flood; a deluge.
It doused the cooking fires of the French and flooded the hovels where Calvet’s men had tried to sleep. It turned the powder in musket pans to gritty mud. The fire-rate of the artillery was slowed because each serge bag of powder had to be protected from the rain and each vent had to be covered until the last second before the portfire was touched. The artillery colonel cursed that the damned British had burned out the mill’s roof with their sortie, and cursed again because his howitzers had to give up the unequal struggle when their pits filled with yellow-coloured floodwater.
‘Bacon for breakfast!’ Calvet spoke with delighted anticipation.
His cooks, working under a roof, fried bacon for the general. The smell tormented those poor souls who huddled against hovel walls and cursed the rain, the mud, the goddamns, and the war.
The cavalry, who had vainly cast south for Sharpe’s force, had been sent north in the dawn. A cavalry sergeant, his cloak plastered wet to his horse’s rump, splashed back with news that, because the wind was so small this morning, the Thuella was being towed down the Arcachon channel by two longboats.
‘Bugger the wind,’ Calvet said, ‘and bugger the rain.’ He stumped through mud to the sand-dunes and stared north. Far off, drab, black, and with wet sails dropping from her yards, the big schooner was just visible. ‘We won’t attack,’ Calvet growled, ‘till the damn thing’s in place.’
‘Perhaps,’ Favier ventured cautiously, ‘Captain Killick’s guns won’t fire in this weather?’
‘Don’t be a damned fool. If anyone can make guns fire in the wet it has to be a sailor, doesn’t it?’ Calvet took out his glass, wiped the lenses, and stared at the fortress. The gate was a heap of rubble, a mound of wet stone, a causeway to victory. He went back to his bacon with confidence that this morning’s business would not take long. The British rifles would be useless in this rain and their lime would be turned into whitewash.
Calvet looked at his orderly who was putting an edge on to his sword. ‘Make sure the point’s wicked!’
‘Yes, si
r.’
‘Won’t be a day for the edge, Favier.’ Calvet knew that wet uniforms resisted a sword cut much better than dry. ‘It’ll be a day for stabbing. In and out, Favier, in and out!’ Calvet, feeling far better for his breakfast, glanced at the door where Ducos had suddenly appeared. ‘You look damp, Ducos, and I ate your bacon.’
Ducos did not care that the general goaded him. Today he would capture Richard Sharpe and it would be a consolation to Pierre Ducos amidst the tragedies that beset France. ‘There’s a wind stirring.’
‘Splendid.’
‘The schooner should be anchored soon.’
‘God bless our allies,’ Calvet said. ‘It might have taken them twenty damned years to join the war, but better late than never.’ He went to the doorway and saw that the Thuella had indeed used the freshening wind to hasten her progress. A splash of water showed as the forward anchor was let go. ‘I think,’ Calvet said as the schooner’s gunports opened, ‘that we are at last ready.’ He called for his horse and, from its saddle, saw his wet, dispirited troops forming into their attack column. ‘We shall give our gallant allies twenty minutes of target practice,’ Calvet said, ‘then advance.’
Ducos was staring at the Thuella. ‘If Killick opens fire at all,‘ he said. The schooner lay silent in the channel. Her wet sails were being furled on to the yards, but otherwise there was no sign of movement on the sleek vessel. ’He’s not going to fire!‘ Ducos said savagely.
‘Give him time.’ Calvet also watched the Thuella and imagined the rain seething on the wooden decks.
‘He’s broken his word,’ Ducos said bitterly, then, quite suddenly, the schooner’s battle ensign broke open and flames stabbed across the water, smoke billowed above the channel, and the Thuella’s broadside opened the final attack on the Teste de Buch.
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 6: Sharpe's Honour, Sharpe's Regiment, Sharpe's Siege Page 91