Sharpe’s Revenge: The Peace of 1814

Sharpe had anticipated this ritual, yet it still seemed strange and clumsy as he threw down his shako, then as he took off the threadbare rifleman’s jacket. On the jacket’s sleeve was a dirty cloth badge; a wreath of oak leaves that proved he had once led a Forlorn Hope into a breach that had been savage with fire and steel. He gave the coat to Frederickson who, in return, handed the loaded pistol to Sharpe. The wind stirred Sharpe’s black hair that he irritably pushed away from his eyes.

Bampfylde shrugged off his boat-cloak, then undid the buttons of his blue and white jacket. Beneath it he wore a white silk shirt that was tucked into a sash about the waistband of his white uniform breeches. It was said to be easier, and thus much safer, to remove shreds of silk from a bullet wound, which was why many officers insisted on wearing silk into battle. Sharpe’s shirt was of stained linen.

Ford took Captain Bampfylde’s hat, cloak and jacket, then cleared his throat. ‘You will take ten paces, gentlemen, to my count –’ Ford was very nervous; he swallowed phlegm, then cleared his throat once more – ‘after which you will turn and fire. If satisfaction is not given with the first exchange, then you may insist on firing a second time, and so forth.’

‘You’re happy with your station?’ Frederickson asked Bampfylde who gave a start at being thus addressed, then looked around the bluff as if seeking a safer place to fight.

‘I am content,’ he said after a pause.

‘Major?’ Frederickson asked Sharpe.

‘Content.’ The butt of the pistol was made of cross-hatched walnut. The gun felt heavy and unbalanced in Sharpe’s hand, but that was only because he was not used to such weapons. It was undoubtedly a gun of great precision.

‘If you’ll turn, gentlemen?’ Ford’s voice was shaking.

Sharpe turned so that he was staring out to sea. The freshening wind had begun to fleck the slaty swell with rills of white foam. The wind, he noted, was coming straight into his face so he would not have to aim the pistol off to compensate for a cross-breeze.

‘You may cock your weapons,’ Frederickson said. Sharpe pulled back the hammer and felt it click into place. He was besieged by a sudden worry that the percussion cap would fall out of its recess, but when he looked he saw that the wafer’s copper edges were so crimped by the tight fit that the cap was effectively wedged tight.

‘Ten paces, gentlemen,’ Ford announced. ‘One. Two …’

Sharpe walked his normal paces. He held the gun low. He did not think he had shown any fear to Bampfylde, but his belly was like knotted ice and a muscle was trembling in his left thigh. His throat was dry as dust. He could see Harper out of the corner of his eye.

‘Seven. Eight.’ Ford had raised his voice so it would carry above the sound of the sea wind. Sharpe was close enough to the bluff’s edge to see the French lobstermen pulling on long oars to escape the sucking undertow at the cliff’s ragged base.

‘Nine,’ Ford shouted, then a perceptible and nervous pause before the last word, ‘ten.’

Sharpe took the last pace, then turned his back to the Atlantic wind. Bampfylde was already raising his pistol. He looked very near to Sharpe who suddenly seemed unable to raise his right arm. He was thinking of Jane who he knew was waiting in horrid suspense, then he jerked his arm into motion because Bampfylde’s pistol was already nothing but a round black hole pointing straight between Sharpe’s eyes.

He watched the black hole and suddenly felt the warm calm of battle. The reassurance was so unexpected, yet so familiar, that he smiled.

And Bampfylde fired.

Flame pierced at Sharpe through the billowing smoke, but he had already heard the ball go past his head with a crack like a leather whip snapped hard. The bullet could not have been more than six inches from his left ear, and Sharpe wondered if both pistols pulled to the right. He waited, wanting the smoke of Bampfylde’s pistol to dissipate in the wind. He was still smiling, though he did not know it. Bampfylde, doubtless from nerves, had fired too quickly and thus had wasted his shot. Sharpe now had all the time he needed to take revenge for the men who had died in the fortress of Teste de Buch.

The wind shredded the smoke, revealing a Bampfylde who stood in profile to Sharpe. The Naval Captain was sucking in his belly to make his body into a smaller target. Sharpe had the blade of the pistol’s foresight outlined against the white silk shirt, and now he lined the back notch with the blade foresight, then he edged the pistol a fraction to the left just in case the weapon did pull to the right. He would aim low, for most guns fired high. If this one did not fire high then he would give Bampfylde a belly wound. That would kill, but slowly; as slowly as some of Sharpe’s men had died after Bampfylde had abandoned them behind the enemy’s lines.

His finger curled round the trigger. The smoke was entirely gone from Bampfylde now and was nothing more than a tenuous scrap of distant mist that was being whirled high off the bluff’s edge to sail inland.

‘Fire, damn you!’ Bampfylde blurted the words aloud, and Sharpe, who had been about to fire, saw that the Naval Captain was visibly shaking.

‘Fire, God damn you!’ Bampfylde called again, and Sharpe knew he had won utterly, for he had reduced this proud man to a quivering coward. Sharpe had accused Bampfylde of cowardice, and now he was proving the allegation.

‘Fire!’ Bampfylde called the word in despair.

Sharpe lowered the pistol’s muzzle to compensate for the upward pull, then fired.

Sharpe’s pistol did not pull up at all, but had a slight tendency to fire leftwards, rather than right, and the result, instead of a belly shot, was to sear the ball through both cheeks of Bampfylde’s bottom. It ripped his white naval breeches open, then scored bloody gouges in his flesh. Bampfylde squealed like a stuck pig and lurched forward. He dropped his pistol, fell to his knees and Sharpe felt the exultation of a job well done. He could see blood bright on the white breeches. The doctor was running clumsily with his black bag, but Ford was already kneeling beside the wounded Bampfylde. ‘It’s only a flesh wound, sir.’

‘He’s broken my back!’ Bampfylde hissed the words as evidence of his pain.

‘He’s creased your arse.’ Frederickson was grinning.

Ford looked up at Frederickson. ‘You agree honour is served, sir?’

Frederickson was finding it hard not to laugh. ‘Eminently served, Lieutenant. I bid you good day.’

The doctor knelt beside the Naval Captain. ‘A flesh wound, nothing more. It will only need a bandage. There’ll be some bruising and soreness. You’re a lucky man.’

Ford translated for the distraught Bampfylde, but the Naval Captain was not listening. Instead he was staring through angry and shameful tears at the black-haired Rifleman who had come to stand over him. Sharpe said nothing, but just tossed down the smoking pistol and walked away. He had failed to kill the man, which angered him, but honour had been served on the dead of the Teste de Buch. He had eaten his grass before breakfast, and now Sharpe must cement his fragile peace with Jane, send her away with his love, then go back to the place he knew the best and feared the most: the battlefield.

Bordeaux still belonged to the Emperor, though for how long no one could tell. The river wharfs were empty, the warehouses bare and the city’s coffers dry. A few men still proclaimed their loyalty to Napoleon, but most longed for the peace that would revive trade and, as a symbol of that longing, they made themselves white cockades that were the badge of France’s royal house. At first the cockades were kept hidden, but as each day passed more were worn in open defiance of the Bonapartist troops that remained. Those imperial defenders were few, and pitifully weak. Some crippled veterans and pensioners manned the river forts, and a half battalion of young infantrymen guarded the prefecture, but all the good troops had marched south and east to reinforce Marshal Soult and, encouraged by their absence, the hungry city grumbled with disaffection and rebellion.

On a March morning, brisk with a cold wind and wet with rain that swept from the Atlantic, a single wagon arrived at the city’s prefecture. The wagon held four heavy crates and was escorted by a troop of cavalrymen who, oddly, were commanded by an infantry Colonel. The wagon stopped in the prefecture’s yard and its Dragoon escort, on weary and muddied horses, slouched empty-eyed in their saddles. They wore their hair in cadenettes; small pigtails which hung beside their cheeks and were a mark of their élite status.

The infantry Colonel, elderly and scarred, climbed slowly from his saddle and walked to the porticoed entrance where a sentry presented his musket. The Colonel was too weary to acknowledge the sentry’s salute, but just pushed through the heavy door. The cavalry escort was left under the command of a Dragoon Sergeant who had a face that was the texture of knife-slashed leather. He sat with his heavy straight-bladed sword resting across his saddle bow and the nervous sentry, trying not to catch the Sergeant’s hostile eyes, could see that the edge of the dulled blade was brightly nicked from recent battle.

‘Hey! Pigface!’ The Sergeant had noted the sentry’s surreptitious interest.

‘Sergeant?’

‘Water. Fetch some water for my horse.’

The sentry, who was under orders not to stir from his post, tried to ignore the command.

‘Hey! Pigface! I said get some water.’

‘I’m supposed to stay …’

The sentry went silent because the Sergeant had drawn a battered pistol from a saddle holster.

The Sergeant thumbed back the pistol’s heavy cock. ‘Pigface?’

The sentry stared into the pistol’s black muzzle, then fled to get a bucket of water while, upstairs, the infantry Colonel had been directed into a cavernous room that had once been gracious with marble walls, a moulded plaster ceiling, and a polished boxwood floor, but which was now dirty, untidy and chill despite the small fire that burned in the wide hearth. A small bespectacled man was the room’s only occupant. He sat hunched over a green malachite table on which a slew of papers curled between the wax-thick stumps of dead candles. ‘You’re Ducos?’ the infantryman demanded without any other greeting.

‘I am Major Pierre Ducos.’ Ducos did not look up from his work.

‘My name is Colonel Maillot.’ Maillot seemed almost too tired to speak as he opened his sabretache and took out a sealed dispatch that he placed on the table. Maillot deliberately placed the dispatch on top of the paper upon which Ducos was writing.

Pierre Ducos ignored the insult. Instead he lifted the dispatch and noted the red seal that bore the insignia of a bee. Other men might have shown astonishment at receiving a missive with the Emperor’s private seal, but Ducos’s attitude seemed to express irritation that the Emperor should aggravate him with further work. Nor, as other men would have done, did Ducos immediately open the dispatch, but instead he insisted on finishing the work that the Colonel had interrupted. ‘Tell me, Colonel,’ Ducos had an extraordinarily deep voice for such a puny man, ‘what would your judgement be on a General of Brigade who allows his command to be defeated by a handful of vagabonds?’

Maillot was too tired to express any judgement, so said nothing. Ducos, who was writing his confidential report to the Emperor on the events at the Teste de Buch fort, dipped his nib in ink and wrote on. It was a full five minutes before Ducos deigned to close his inkwell and slit open the Emperor’s dispatch. It contained two sheets of paper that he read in silence, and afterwards, in obedience to an instruction contained on one of the sheets, he threw the other on to the fire. ‘It’s taken you long enough to reach me.’

The words were ungracious, but Maillot showed no resentment as he walked to the fire and held chilled hands to the small warmth generated by the burning page. ‘I’d have been here sooner, but the roads are hardly safe, Major. Even with a cavalry escort one has to beware bandits.’ He said the last word mockingly for both men knew that the ‘bandits’ were either deserters from Napoleon’s armies or young men who had fled into the countryside to avoid conscription. What Maillot did not say was that his wagon had been attacked by such bandits. Six of the Dragoons had died, including Maillot’s second-in-command, but Maillot had counter-attacked, then released the surviving Dragoons to pursue and punish the brigands. Maillot was a veteran of the Emperor’s wars and he would not be insulted by mere vagabonds.

Ducos unhooked the spectacles from his ears and wiped the round lenses on a corner of his blue jacket. ‘The consignment is safe?’

‘Downstairs. It’s in an artillery wagon that’s parked in the yard. The escort need food and water, and so do their horses.’

Ducos frowned to show that he was above dealing with such humdrum requirements as food and water. ‘Do the escort know what is in the wagon?’

‘Of course not.’

‘What do they think it is?’

Maillot shrugged. ‘Does it matter? They simply know they have fetched four unmarked crates to Bordeaux.’

Ducos lifted the dispatch’s remaining sheet of paper. ‘This gives me authority over the escort, and I insist upon knowing whether they can be trusted.’

Maillot sat in a chair and stretched out his long, weary and mud-spattered legs. ‘They’re commanded by a good man, Sergeant Challon, and they’ll do nothing to cross him. But can they be trusted? Who knows? They’ve probably guessed what’s in the crates by now, but so far they’ve stayed loyal.’ He stifled a yawn. ‘What they’re more concerned about now is food and water.’

‘And you, Colonel?’ Ducos asked.

‘I need food and water, too.’

Ducos grimaced to show that his question had been misunderstood. ‘What do you do now, Colonel?’

‘I return to the Emperor, of course. The consignment is your responsibility. And if you’ll forgive me, I’m damned glad to be shot of it. A soldier should be fighting now, not acting as a baggage-master.’

Ducos, who had just been given the responsibilities of a baggage-master, restored the polished spectacles to his face. ‘The Emperor does me great honour.’

‘He trusts you,’ Maillot said simply.

‘As he trusts you,’ Ducos returned the compliment.

‘I’ve been with him many years.’

Ducos glanced at the grey-haired Maillot. Doubtless Maillot had been with the Emperor for many years, but he had never been promoted above the rank of Colonel. Other Frenchmen had risen from the ranks to command whole armies, but not this tall, scarred veteran with his doggedly trustworthy face. In brief, Ducos decided, this Maillot was a fool; one of the Emperor’s loyal mastiffs; a man for errands; a man without imagination. ‘Bordeaux is not a safe place,’ Ducos said softly, almost as if he was speaking to himself, ‘the mayor has sent a message to the English, asking them to come here. He thinks I don’t know of the message, but I have a copy on this table.’

‘Then arrest him,’ Maillot said casually.

‘With what? Half the town guard wears the white cockade now, and so would the other half if they had the guts.’ Ducos stood and crossed to a window from which he stared at the rain which swept in great swathes across the Place St Julien. ‘The wagon will be safe here tonight,’ he said, ‘and your men can take some of the empty billets.’ Ducos turned, suddenly smiling. ‘But you, Colonel, will do me the honour of taking supper at my lodgings?’

All Maillot wished to do was sleep, but he knew in what favour the Emperor held this small bespectacled man and so, out of courtesy and because Ducos pressed the invitation so warmly, the Colonel reluctantly accepted.

Yet, to Maillot’s surprise, Ducos proved a surprisingly entertaining host, and Maillot, who had snatched two hours’ exhausted sleep in the afternoon, found himself warming to the small man who talked so frankly of his services to the Emperor. ‘I was never a natural soldier like yourself, Colonel,’ Ducos said modestly. ‘My talents were used to corrupt, outguess and cheat the enemy.’ Ducos did not talk of his past failures that night, but of his successes such as the time when he had lured some Spanish guerrilla leaders to truce talks, and how they had all been slaughtered when they trustingly arrived. Ducos smiled at the memory. ‘I sometimes miss Spain.’

‘I never fought there,’ Maillot helped himself to more brandy, ‘but I was told about the guerilleros. How can you fight men who don’t wear uniforms?’

‘By killing as many civilians as you can, of course.’ Ducos said, then, wistfully, ‘I do miss the warm climate.’

Maillot laughed at that. ‘You were evidently not in Russia.’

‘I was not.’ Ducos shivered at the very thought, then twisted in his chair to peer into the night. ‘It’s stopped raining, my dear Maillot. You’ll take a turn in the garden?’

The two men walked the sodden lawn and their cigar smoke drifted up through the branches of the pear-trees. Maillot must still have been remembering the Russian Campaign, for he suddenly uttered a short laugh then commented how very clever the Emperor had been in Moscow.

‘Clever?’ Ducos sounded surprised. ‘It didn’t seem very clever to those of us who weren’t there.’

‘That’s my point,’ Maillot said. ‘We heard about the unrest at home, so what did the Emperor do? He sent orders that the female dancers of the Paris ballet were to perform without skirts or stockings!’ Maillot laughed at the memory, then turned to the garden’s high brick wall and unbuttoned his breeches. He went on talking as he pissed. ‘We heard later that Paris forgot all about the deaths in Russia, because all they could talk about was Mademoiselle Rossillier’s naked thighs. Were you in Paris at the time?’

‘I was in Spain.’ Ducos was standing directly behind Maillot. As the older man had talked, Ducos had drawn a small pistol from his tail pocket and silently eased back its oiled cock. Now he aimed the pistol at the base of Maillot’s neck. ‘I was in Spain,’ Ducos said again, and he screwed his eyes tight shut as he pulled the trigger. The ball shattered one of Maillot’s vertebrae, throwing the grey head back in a bloody paroxysm. The Colonel seemed to give a remorseful sigh as he collapsed. His head jerked forward to thump against the brickwork, then the body twitched once and was quite still. The foul-smelling pistol smoke lingered beneath the pear branches.

Ducos retched, gagged, and managed to control himself. A voice shouted from a neighbouring house, wanting an explanation for the gunshot, but when Ducos made no reply there was no further question.

By dawn the body was hidden under compost.

Ducos had not slept. It was not conscience, nor disgust at Maillot’s death that had kept him awake, but the enormity of what that death represented. Ducos, by pulling the trigger, had abandoned all that had once been most dear to him. He had been raised to believe in the sanctity of the Revolutionary ideals, then had learned that Napoleon’s imperial ambitions were really the same ideals, but transmuted by one man’s genius into a unique and irreplaceable glory. Now, as Napoleon’s glory crumbled, the ideals must live on, only now Ducos recognized that France itself was the embodiment of that greatness.

Ducos had thus persuaded himself in that damp night that the irrelevant trappings of Imperial France could be sacrificed. A new France would rise, and Ducos would serve that new France from a position of powerful responsibility. For the moment, though, a time of waiting and safety was needed. So, in the morning, he summoned the Dragoon Sergeant Challon to the prefecture where he sat the grizzled sergeant down at the green malachite table across which Ducos pushed the one remaining sheet of the Emperor’s dispatch. ‘Read that, Sergeant.’

Challon confidently picked up the paper, then, realizing that he could not bluff the bespectacled officer, dropped it again. ‘I don’t read, sir.’

Ducos stared into the bloodshot eyes. ‘That piece of paper gives you to me, Sergeant. It’s signed by the Emperor himself.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Challon’s voice was toneless.

‘It means you obey me.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Ducos then took a risk. Spread on the table was a newspaper which he ordered Challon to throw to the floor. The Sergeant was puzzled at the order, but obeyed. Then he went very still. The newspaper had hidden two white cockades; two big cockades of flamboyant white silk.

Challon stared at the symbols of Napoleon’s enemies, and Ducos watched the pigtailed Sergeant. Challon was not a subtle man, and his leathery scarred face betrayed his thoughts as openly as though he spoke them aloud. The first thing the face betrayed to Ducos was that Sergeant Challon knew what was concealed in the four crates. Ducos would have been astonished if Challon had not known. The second thing that the Sergeant betrayed was that he, just like Ducos, desired those contents.

Challon looked up at the small Major. ‘Might I ask where Colonel Maillot is, sir?’

‘Colonel Maillot contracted a sudden fever which my physician thinks will prove fatal.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir,’ Challon’s voice was very wooden, ‘as some of the lads liked the Colonel, sir.’ For a second, as he looked into those hard eyes, Ducos thought he had wildly miscalculated. Then Challon glanced at the incriminating cockades. ‘But some of the lads will learn to live with their grief.’

The relief washed through Ducos, though he was far too clever to reveal either that relief or the fear which had preceded it. Challon, Ducos now knew, was his man. ‘The fever,’ Ducos said mildly, ‘can be very catching.’

‘So I’ve heard, sir.’

‘And our responsibility will demand at least six men. Don’t you agree?’

‘I think more than that will survive the fever, sir,’ Challon said as elliptically as Ducos. They were now confederates in treachery, and neither could state it openly, though each perfectly understood the other.

‘Good.’ Ducos picked up one of the cockades. Challon hesitated, then picked up the other, and thus their pact was sealed.

Two mornings later there was a sea-fog that rolled from the Garonne estuary to shroud Bordeaux in a white, clinging dampness through which nine horsemen rode eastwards in the dawn. Pierre Ducos led them. He was dressed in civilian clothes with a sword and two pistols at his belt. Sergeant Challon and his men were in the vestiges of their green uniforms, though all the troopers had discarded their heavy metal helmets. Their saddle bags bulged, as did the panniers of the pack horses that three of the troopers led.

To deceive, cheat, disguise, and outwit; those were the skills Ducos had given to his Emperor; which skills must now serve his own ends. The horses clattered through the city’s outer gate, stirred the fog with their passing, and then were gone.

CHAPTER ONE

‘Of course the Peer knew about it,’ Major-General Nairn was speaking of the duel, ‘but between you and me I don’t think he was unhappy about it. The Navy’s been rather irritating him lately.’

‘I expected to be arrested,’ Sharpe said.

‘If you’d have killed the bugger, you would have been. Even Wellington can’t absolutely ignore a deceased Naval Captain, but it was clever of you just to crease the man’s bum.’ Nairn gave a joyful bark of laughter at the thought of Bampfylde’s wound.

‘I was trying to kill him,’ Sharpe confessed.

‘It was much cleverer of you to give him a sore arse. And let me say how very good it is to see you, my dear Sharpe. I trust Jane is well?’

‘Indeed, sir.’

Sharpe’s tone caused Nairn to give the Rifleman an amused look. ‘Do I detect that you are in marital bad odour, Sharpe?’

‘I stink, sir.’

It had taken Sharpe three days to catch up with the advancing army, and another half-day to find Nairn, whose brigade was on the left flank of the advance. Sharpe had eventually discovered the Scotsman on a hilltop above a ford which the British had captured that morning and through which a whole Division now marched. The French were only visible as a few retreating squadrons of cavalry far to the east, though a battery of enemy artillery occasionally fired from a copse of trees about a mile beyond the river.