Sharpe’s Honour: The Vitoria Campaign, February to June 1813

Ducos, like a predator watching its victim, stared at the woman.

She was beautiful, this Golden Whore. Men who saw her for the first time hardly dared believe that any woman was so beautiful. Her skin was as white and clear as the white pearl shells of the Biscay beaches. Her hair was golden. An accident of lip and bone, of eye and skin had given her a look of innocence that made men wish to protect her. Pierre Ducos could think of few women so little in need of protection.

She was French. She was born Helene Leroux and she had served France since her sixteenth year. She had slept in the beds of the powerful and brought from their pillows the secrets of their nations, and when the Emperor had taken the decision to annex Spain to his Empire, he had sent Helene as his weapon.

She had pretended to be the daughter of victims of the Terror. She had married, on instructions from Paris, a man close to the Spanish King, a man privy to the secrets of Spain. She was still married, though her husband was far off, and she bore the title that he had given her. She was the Marquesa de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba. She was lovely as a summer dream and as treacherous as sin. She was La Puta Dorada.

Ducos smiled. A hawk, high above its victim, might have felt the same satisfaction that the bespectacled French Major felt as he ordered his aide to send his compliments to the Marquesa with a request, which, from Pierre Ducos, was tantamount to an order, that her Ladyship come to his presence immediately.

La Marquesa de Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba, smelling of rosewater and smiling sweetly, was ushered into Major Ducos’s bare room an hour later. He looked up from the table. ‘You’re late.’

She blew a kiss from her lace-gloved hand and walked past him to the bastion. ‘The country looks very pretty today. I asked your deliciously timid Lieutenant to fetch me some wine and grapes. We could eat out here, Pierre. Your skin needs some sun.’ She shaded her face with a parasol and smiled at him. ‘How are you, Pierre? Dancing the night away, as ever?’

He ignored her mockery. He stood in the doorway and his deep voice was harsh. ‘You have six wagons in this fortress.’

She pretended awe. ‘Has the Emperor made you his wagonmaster, Pierre? I must congratulate you.’

He took a folded piece of paper from his waistcoat pocket. ‘They are loaded with gold and silver plate, paintings, coins, tapestries, statues, carvings, and a wine cellar packed in sawdust. The total value is put at three hundred thousand Spanish dollars.’ He stared at her in silent triumph.

‘And some furniture, Pierre. Did your spy not find the furniture? Some of it’s rather valuable. A very fine Moorish couch inlaid with ivory, a japanned éscritoire that you’d like, and a mirrored bed.’

‘And doubtless the bed in which you persuaded General Verigny to guard your stolen property?’ General Verigny was the cavalry officer whose men had guarded the wagons on their journey from Salamanca.

‘Stolen, Pierre? It all belongs to me and my dear husband. I merely thought that while Wellington threatens to defeat us I would remove our few household belongings into France. Just think of me as a simple refugee. Ah!’ She smiled at Ducos’s aide who had brought a tray on which stood an opened bottle of champagne, a single glass, and a dish of white grapes. ‘Put it on the parapet, Lieutenant.’

Scowling, Ducos waited till his aide had gone. ‘The property is loaded on French army wagons.’

‘Condemned wagons, Pierre.’

‘Condemned by General Verigny’s Quartermaster.’

‘True.’ She smiled. ‘A dear man.’

‘And I will countermand his condemnation.’

She stared at him. She feared Pierre Ducos, though she would not give him the satisfaction of showing her fear. She recognised the threat that he offered her. She was running from Spain, running from the victory that Wellington threatened, and she was taking the wealth with her that would make her independent of whatever tragedies befell France. Now Ducos menaced that independence. She plucked a grape from the bunch. ‘Tell me, Pierre, do you order your breakfast with a threat? If you want something of me, why don’t you just ask? Or is it that you want to share my plunder?’

He scowled at that. No one could accuse Pierre Ducos of greed. He changed the subject. ‘I wanted to know how you felt about your husband returning from America.’

She laughed. ‘You want me to go back to his bed, Pierre? Don’t you think I’ve suffered enough for France?’

‘Does he still love you?’

‘Love? What an odd word from you, Pierre.’ She stared up at the tricolour. ‘He still wants me.’

‘He knows you’re a spy?’

‘I’m sure someone’s told him, aren’t you? But Luis doesn’t take women seriously, Pierre. He’d think I was a spy because I was unhappy without him. He thinks that once he’s back and I’m neatly tucked up beneath his glass dome then everything will be all right again. He can grunt all over me and then weep to his confessor. Men are so stupid.’

‘Or do you choose stupid men?’

‘What a boudoir conversation we are having.’ She smiled brilliantly at him. ‘So what do you want, Pierre?’

‘Why has your husband come home?’

‘He doesn’t like the climate in South America, Pierre. It gives him wind, he says. He suffers from wind. He once had a servant whipped who laughed when he broke it.’

‘He’s gone to Wellington.’

‘Of course he has! Luis is Spain’s new hero!’ She laughed. Her husband had led a Spanish army against rebels in the Banda Oriental, the area of land north of the River Plate. The rebels, seeing Spain humiliated by France, were trying to wrest their independence from the Spanish. To the Marquesa’s surprise; indeed, to the surprise of many people, the Marqués had defeated them. She flicked a grape pip over the parapet. ‘He must have outnumbered them by a hundred to one! Or perhaps he broke wind in their faces? Do you think that’s the answer, Pierre? A grape?’ She smiled at his silence and poured herself champagne. ‘Tell me why you summoned me here with your usual charm and consideration.’

‘Your husband wants you back?’

‘You know he does. I’m sure you intercept all his letters. His lust exceeds his patriotism.’

‘Then I want you to write a letter to him.’

She smiled. ‘Is that all? One letter? Do I get to keep my wagons then?’ She asked the question in a small girl’s voice.

He nodded.

She watched him, suspecting a bargain so easily made. Her voice was suddenly hard. ‘You’ll let me move my property to France for one letter?’

‘One letter.’

She shrugged. ‘You’ll give me papers?’

‘Of course.’

She sipped the champagne. ‘What do I write?’

‘Inside.’

He had written the letter and she had only to copy it onto the writing paper that bore the crest of her husband’s family. She admired Ducos’s efficiency in stealing the paper so that it was prepared for her. He gave her the only chair in the room, a freshly cut quill, and ink. ‘Do improve the phrasing, Helene.’

‘That won’t be difficult, Pierre.’

The letter told a harrowing tale. It replied to a letter from the Marqués and said that she wanted nothing more than to join him, that her joy at his return had filled her with longing and expectation, but that she feared to come to him so long as he was under Wellington’s command.

She feared because there was an English officer who had pursued her most vilely, insulted her and her husband, who had heaped every indignity upon her. She had complained, she said, to the English Generalisimo, yet nothing could be done because the offending officer was a friend of Wellington’s. She feared for her virtue, and until the officer was removed from Spain she feared to come to her husband’s side. The officer, she wrote, had already attempted to violate her once, in which attempt he had been defeated only by his drunkenness. She did not feel safe while the vile man, Major Richard Sharpe, lived. She signed the letter, carefully dabbing drops of champagne onto the ink so that the writing appeared tear-stained, then smiled at Ducos. ‘You want them to fight a duel?’

‘Yes.’

She laughed. ‘Richard will slaughter him!’

‘Of course.’

She smiled. ‘Tell me, Pierre. Why do you want Richard to kill my husband?’

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’

If her husband, a Grandee of Spain and a sudden, unlikely hero, was killed by an Englishman, then the fragile alliance between Spain and England would be stretched dangerously. The alliance was one of expedience. The Spanish had no love for the English. They resented that they needed a British army to expel the French. It was true that they had made Wellington the Generalisimo of all their armies, but that was a recognition of his talent, and the necessity of the act had only made their need of him more apparent. She watched Ducos dry the ink with sand. ‘You do know that there won’t be a duel, don’t you?’

‘There won’t?’ He shook the sand onto the floor.

‘Arthur won’t allow them.’ ‘Arthur’ was Wellington. ‘What will you do then, Pierre?’

He ignored the question. ‘You know this could be Major Sharpe’s death warrant?’

‘Yes.’

‘It doesn’t worry you?’

She smiled prettily. ‘Richard can look after himself, Pierre. The gods smile on him. Besides, I’m doing this for France, am I not?’

‘For your wagons, dear Helene.’

‘Ah yes. My wagons. When do I get my pass for them?’

‘For the next convoy north.’

She nodded and stood up. ‘You really believe they’ll fight, Pierre?’

‘Does it matter?’

She smiled. ‘I’d rather like to be a widow. A rich widow. La Viuda Dorada.’

‘Then you must hope Major Sharpe obliges you.’

‘He always has in the past, Pierre.’ She filled the room with her perfume.

He folded the letter. ‘Are you fond of him?’

She put her head to one side and seemed to think about it. ‘Yes. He has the virtue of simplicity, Pierre, and loyalty.’

‘Hardly your tastes, I would have thought?’

‘How little you know my tastes, Pierre. Am I dismissed? May I return to my pleasures?’

‘Your seal?’

‘Ah.’ She took off a ring that she wore above her lace glove and handed it to him. He pressed it into hot wax and gave the signet back to her.

‘Thank you, Helene.’

‘Don’t thank me, Pierre.’ She stared at him with a slight, mocking smile on her face. ‘Do you open the Emperor’s letters to me, Pierre?’

‘Of course not.’ He frowned at such a thought, while inside he was wondering how Napoleon sent such letters so that they avoided his men.

‘I thought not.’ She licked her lips. ‘You know he’s still fond of me.’

‘I believe he stays fond of all his lovers.’

‘You’re so very sweet, Pierre.’ She turned her folded parasol in her hands. ‘You know he thinks of me as quite an expert on Spanish matters? He asks my advice even?’

‘So?’ Ducos stared at her.

‘I must congratulate you, Pierre. I told the Emperor that your idea for the Treaty was magnificent.’ She smiled at the shock on his face. ‘Truly, Pierre! Magnificent. That was the very word I used. Of course, I told him we might beat Wellington first, but if we didn’t? Magnificent!’ She smiled a victor’s smile. ‘So you’re not going to stop my little wagons crossing the border, are you?’

‘I have already made my promise.’

‘But to whom, sweet little Pierre? To whom?’ She said the last two words as she opened the door. She smiled again. ‘Good day, Major. It was such a small pleasure.’

He listened to her heels on the stone of the passage and felt bitterly angry. Napoleon, always a fool for a pair of legs in a bed, had told the Golden Whore about Valençay? And now she dared to threaten him? That if her puny wagons did not reach France then she would betray her country by revealing the Treaty’s existence?

He walked onto the ramparts. The letter she had written was in his hand, and it was the key to the Treaty. Today he would give it to the Inquisitor, and tomorrow the Inquisitor, with his brother, would start the journey westwards. Within three days, he decided, the matter would be irreversible, and within another two weeks he would sew up that pretty mouth for ever.

He watched her greet General Verigny beneath him, watched her climb with the General into her carriage, and he thought with what joy he would see that whore brought low. She dared to threaten him? Then she would live to regret the threat throughout eternity.

He turned back to his office. He would defy her. He would save France, defeat Britain, and dazzle the world with his cleverness. For a few seconds, standing with his back to the magnificent view from Burgos’s ramparts, he imagined himself as the new Richelieu, the new bright star in France’s glory. He could not lose, he knew it, for he had calculated the risks, and he would win.

CHAPTER THREE

‘Tents!’ Sharpe spat the word out. ‘Goddamned bloody tents!’

‘For sleeping in, sir.’ Sergeant Patrick Harper kept a rigidly straight face. The watching men of the South Essex grinned.

‘Bloody tents.’

‘Clean tents, sir. Nice and white, sir. We could make flower gardens round them in case the lads get homesick.’

Sharpe kicked one of the enormous canvas bundles. ‘Who needs goddamned tents?’

‘Soldiers, sir, in case they get cold and wet at night.’ Harper’s thick Ulster accent was rich with amusement. ‘I expect they’ll give us beds next, sir, with clean sheets and little girls to tuck us up at night. And chamberpots, sir, with God save the King written on their rims.’

Sharpe kicked the heap of tents again. ‘I’ll order the Quartermaster to burn them.’

‘He can’t do that, sir.’

‘Of course he can!’

‘Signed for, sir. Any loss will be deducted from pay, sir.’

Sharpe prowled round the great heap of obscene bundles. Of all the ridiculous, unnecessary, stupid things, the Horse Guards had sent tents! Soldiers had always slept in the open! Sharpe had woken in the morning with his hair frozen to the ground, had woken with his clothes sopping wet, but he had never wanted a tent! He was an infantryman. An infantryman had to march, and march fast, and tents would slow them down. ‘How are we supposed to carry the bloody things?’

‘Mules, sir, tent mules. One to two companies. To be issued tomorrow, sir, and signed for.’

‘Jesus wept!’

‘Probably because he didn’t have a tent, sir.’

Sharpe smiled, because he was enjoying himself, but this sudden arrival of tents from headquarters posed problems he did not need. The tents would need five mules to carry them. Each mule could carry two hundred pounds, plus thirty more pounds of forage that would keep the animal alive for six days. If they marched on a campaign like last summer’s then he would have to assume that forage would be short and extra mules would have to carry extra forage. But the extra mules would need feed too, which meant more mules still, and if he assumed a march of six weeks then that was nine hundred extra pounds of forage. That would need four to five more mules, but those mules would need an extra seven hundred pounds of feed which would mean four more mules, who would also need forage; and so on, until the ridiculous but accurate conclusion was reached that it would take fourteen extra mules simply to keep the five tent-carrying mules alive! He kicked another tent. ‘Christ, Patrick! It’s ridiculous!’

It was three days since the French had surrendered to them in the hills. They had marched north from the bridge, suddenly leaving the approaches to Salamanca and coming into an area of hills and bad tracks. Waiting for them was the bulk of the army, and a white-grey pile of goddamned tents. Sharpe scowled. ‘We’ll leave them in store.’

‘And have them stolen, sir?’

Sharpe swore. What Harper meant, of course, was that the storekeeper would sell the tents to the Spanish, claim that they were stolen, and have them charged to the Battalion’s accounts. ‘You know the storekeeper?’

‘Aye.’ Harper sounded dubious.

‘How much?’

‘Handful.’

Sharpe swore again. He could doubtless get five pounds out of the Battalion accounts to bribe the storekeeper, but the job would be a nuisance. ‘He’s no friend of yours, this storekeeper?’

‘He’s from County Down.’ Harper said it meaningfully. ‘Sell his own bloody mother for a shilling.’

‘You’ve got nothing on the bastard?’

‘No.’ Harper shook his head. ‘He’s tighter than an orangeman’s drum.’

‘I’ll get you the handful.’ He could sell one of the mules that would arrive tomorrow, claim it died of glanders or God knows what, and see if anyone dared question him. He shook his head in exasperation, then grinned at the big Sergeant. ‘How’s your woman?’

‘Grand, sir!’ Harper beamed. ‘Blooming, so she is. I think she’d like to cook you one of those terrible meals.’

‘I’ll come for one this week.’ Isabella was a small, dark Spanish girl whom Harper had rescued from the horror at Badajoz. Ever since that terrible night she had loyally followed the Battalion, along with the other wives, mistresses and whores who formed a clumsy tail to every marching army. Sharpe suspected that Harper would be marrying before the year’s end.

The huge Irishman pushed his shako back and scratched at his sandy hair. ‘Did your dago find you, sir?’

‘Dago?’

‘Officer; a real ribbon-merchant. He was sniffing about this morning, so he was. Looked as if he’d lost his purse. Grim as a bloody judge.’

‘I was here.’

Harper shrugged. ‘Probably wasn’t important.’

But Sharpe was frowning. He did not know why, but his instinct, that kept him alive on the battlefield, was suddenly warning him of trouble. The warning was sufficient to destroy the small moment of happiness that insulting the tents had given him. It was as if, on a day of hope and peace, he had suddenly smelt French cavalry. ‘What time was he here?’

‘Sunrise.’ Harper sensed the sudden alertness. ‘He was just a young fellow.’

Sharpe could think of no reason why a Spanish officer should want to see him, and when something had no reason, it was liable to be dangerous. He gave the tents a parting kick. ‘Let me know if you see him again.’

‘Aye, sir.’ Harper watched Sharpe walk towards the Battalion’s headquarters. He wondered why the mention of the gaudy-uniformed Spaniard had plunged Sharpe into such sudden tenseness. Perhaps, he thought, it was just more of Sharpe’s guilt and grief.

Harper could understand grief, but he sensed that Sharpe’s mood was not simple grief. It seemed to the big Irishman that his friend had begun to hate himself, perhaps blaming himself for his wife’s death and the abandonment of his child. Whatever it was, Harper thought, he hoped that soon the army would march against the French. By that bridge, when the infantrymen had not a shot between them, Harper had seen the old energy and enthusiasm. Whatever Sharpe’s sadness was, it had not stopped his ability to fight.

‘He needs a good battle,’ he said to Isabella that night.

She made a scornful sound. ‘He needs another wife.’

Harper laughed. ‘That’s all you women think about. Marriage, marriage, marriage!’ He had been drinking with the other Sergeants of the Battalion and had come back late to find the food she had cooked for him spoilt.

She pushed the burnt eggs about the pan as if hoping that by rearranging them she would improve their looks. ‘And what’s wrong with marriage?’

Harper, who could sense marriage on his own horizon, decided that discretion was the best part of valour. ‘Nothing at all. Have you got any bread?’

‘You know I have. You fetch it.’

There were limits to discretion, though. A man’s job was not to fetch bread, or be on time for a meal, and Harper sat silent as Isabella grumbled about the billet and as she complained to him about the landlady, and about Sergeant Pierce’s wife who had stolen a bucket of water, and told him that he should see a priest before the campaign began so as to make a good confession. Harper half listened to it all. ‘I smell trouble ahead.’

‘You’re right.’ Isabella scooped the eggs onto a tin plate. ‘Big trouble if you don’t fetch the bread.’ When she spoke English she did it with a northern Irish accent.

‘Fetch it yourself, woman.’

She said something that Harper’s Spanish was not good enough to understand, but went to the corner of the room and unearthed the hidden loaf. ‘What kind of trouble, Patrick?’

‘He’s bored.’

‘The Major?’

‘Aye.’ Harper deigned to cut the loaf with his rifle’s bayonet. ‘He’s bored, my love, and when he’s bored he gets into trouble.’

Isabella poured the ration wine. ‘Rainbows?’

Harper laughed. He was fond of saying that Major Sharpe was always chasing the pot of gold that lay at the end of every rainbow. He found the pots often enough, but, according to Harper, he always discarded them because the pots were the wrong shape. ‘Aye. The bugger’s chasing rainbows again.’

‘He should get married.’

Harper kept a diplomatic silence, but his instinct, like Sharpe’s, suddenly sensed danger. He was remembering Sharpe’s sudden change of mood that day when he had mentioned the ribbon-merchant, and Harper feared because he knew Richard Sharpe was capable of chasing rainbows into hell itself. He looked at his woman, who waited for a word of praise, and smiled at her. ‘You’re right. He needs a woman.’

‘Marriage,’ she said tartly, but he could see she was pleased. She pointed her spoon at him. ‘You look after him, Patrick.’

‘He’s big enough to look after himself.’

‘I know big men who can’t fetch bread.’

‘You’re a lucky woman, so you are.’ He grinned at her, but inside he was wondering just what it was that had alarmed Sharpe. Like the prospect of marriage that he sensed for himself, he sensed trouble coming for his friend.

‘Ah, Sharpe! No problems? Good!’ Lieutenant Colonel Leroy was pulling on thin kid-leather gloves. He had been a Major till a few weeks before, but now the loyalist American had achieved his ambition to command the Battalion. The glove on his right hand hid the terrible burn scars that he had earned a year before at Badajoz. Nothing could hide the awful, puckered, distorting scar that wrenched the right side of his face. He looked into the morning sky. ‘No rain today.’

‘Let’s hope not.’

‘Tent mules coming today?’

‘So I’m told, sir.’

‘God knows why we need tents.’ Leroy stooped to light a long, thin cigar from a candle that, on his orders, was kept alight in Battalion headquarters for just this purpose. ‘Tents will just soften the men. We might as well march to war with milkmaids. Can you lose the bloody things?’

‘I’ll try, sir.’

Leroy put on his bicorne hat, pulling the front low to shadow his thin, terrible face. ‘What else today?’

‘Mahoney’s taking Two and Three on a march. Firing practice for the new draft. Parade at two.’

‘Parade?’ Leroy, whose voice still held the flat intonation of his native New England, scowled at his only Major. Joseph Forrest, the Battalion’s other Major, had been posted to the Lisbon Staff to help organise the stores that poured into that port. ‘Parade?’ Leroy asked. ‘What goddamned parade?’

‘Your orders, sir. Church parade.’

‘Christ, I’d forgotten.’ Leroy blew smoke towards Sharpe and grinned. ‘You take it, Richard, it’ll be good for you.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Well, I’m off!’ Leroy sounded pleased. He had been invited to Brigade headquarters for the day and was anticipating equal measures of wine and gossip. He picked up his riding crop. ‘Make sure the parson gives the buggers a rousing sermon. Nothing like a good sermon to put men in a frog-killing mood. I hear there was a ribbon-merchant looking for you?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did he want?’