Sharpe’s Regiment: The Invasion of France, June to November 1813

Sharpe saw Patrick Harper dressing a feeble Company into ranks on the parade ground. He turned back to Carline. ‘Colonel Girdwood said the men were being taken to other units?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Would it surprise you, Carline, to know that the Second Battalion still draws pay and rations for seven hundred men?’

Carline said nothing. He was doubtless thinking what Sharpe was thinking, that the seven hundred were non-existent and their pay was being appropriated by Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood. It was a scandal as old as the army; drawing the pay of men who did not exist. Sharpe, in a gesture of irritation, swatted a fly with his hand and ground it into the carpet with his boot. ‘So what do you do with the Second Battalion’s mail? Its paperwork? I presume some of it still comes here?’

‘We send it on to the War Office, sir.’

‘The War Office!’ Sharpe’s astonishment made his voice suddenly loud. The War Office was supposed to conduct war, and Sharpe would have expected the paperwork to go to the Horse Guards that administered the army.

‘To Lord Fenner’s secretary, sir.’ Carline spoke with more confidence, as if the mention of the politician’s name would awe Sharp.

It did. Lord Fenner, the Secretary of State at War, had suggested in his despatch to Wellington that the First Battalion be broken up and now, it seemed, he was the man responsible for the disappearance of the Second Battalion, a disappearance that must obviously have the highest official backing. Or else, and it seemed unthinkable, Lord Fenner was an accomplice with Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood in peculation; stealing money through a forged payroll.

Footsteps were loud in the hallway, and Patrick Harper loomed huge in the doorway of the Mess. He slammed to attention. ‘Men on parade, sir. What there are of them.’

Sharpe turned. ‘Regimental Sergeant Major Harper? This is Captain Carline.’

‘Sir!’ Harper looked at Carline rather as a tiger would look at a goat. Carline, in his dancing shoes and with one hand on the spinet, seemed incapable of speaking. To think of himself as a soldier in the presence of these two tall, implacable men was ridiculous.

‘Sergeant Major,’ Sharpe’s voice was conversational, ‘do you think the war has addled my wits?’

There was a flicker of temptation on the broad face, then a respectful, ‘No, sir!’

‘Then listen to this story, RSM. The South Essex raises a Second Battalion whose job is to find men, train men, then send them to our First Battalion in Spain. Is that correct, Captain Carline?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So it recruits. It did recruit, Captain?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And six months ago, RSM,’ Sharpe swung back, ‘it is made into a Holding Battalion. No more recruiting, of course, it is merely a convenient dung heap for the army’s refuse.’ He stared at Carline. ‘No one knows why. We poor bastards are dying in Spain, but some clodpole decides we don’t need recruits.’ He looked back at Harper. ‘I am told, RSM, that the Holding Battalion has been broken up, it has disappeared, it has vanished! Its mail goes to the War Office, yet it still draws rations for seven hundred men. Sergeant Major Harper?’

‘Sir?’

‘What do you think of that story?’

Harper frowned. ‘It’s a real bastard, sir, so it is.’ He smiled. ‘Perhaps if we break some heads, sir, some bastards will stop lying.’

‘I like that thought, Sergeant Major.’ Sharpe stared at Carline, and his voice was conversational no longer. ‘If you’ve lied to me, Captain, I’ll tear you to tatters.’

‘I haven’t lied, sir.’

Sharpe believed him, but it made no difference. He was in a fog of deception, and the hopelessness of it made him furious as he went into the sunlight to inspect the few men who had been assembled by d’Alembord. Either there were no men in the Second Battalion, in which case there would be no trained replacements for the invasion of France, or, if they did exist, Sharpe would have to find them through Lord Fenner who would, doubtless, not take kindly to an interfering visit from a mere Major.

He stalked through the sleeping huts, wondering how he was to approach the Secretary of State at War, then went to inspect the armoury. The armoury sergeant, a veteran with one leg, was grinning hopefully at him. ‘You remember me, sir?’

Sharpe looked at the leathery, scarred face, and he cursed himself because he could not put a name to it, then Patrick Harper, standing behind him, laughed aloud. ‘Ted Carew!’

‘Carew!’ Sharpe said the name as if he had just remembered it himself. ‘Talavera?’

‘That’s right, sir. Lost the old peg there.’ Carew slapped his right leg that ended in a wooden stump. ‘Good to see you, sir!’

It was good to see Sergeant Carew for, alone in the Chelmsford depot, he knew his job and was doing it well. The weapons were cared for, the armoury tidy, the paperwork exact and depressing. Depressing because, when Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood had marched the Second Battalion away, the records revealed that he had left all their new weapons behind. Those brand-new muskets, greased and muzzlestoppered, were racked beneath oiled and scabbarded bayonets. That fact suggested that the men had been sent to other Battalions who could be expected to provide weapons from their own armouries. ‘He didn’t take any muskets?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Four hundred old ones, sir.’ Sergeant Carew turned the oil-stained pages of his ledger. ‘There, sir.’ He sniffed. ‘Didn’t take no new uniforms neither, sir.’

Non-existent men, Sharpe thought, needed neither weapons nor uniforms, but, just as he was deciding that this quest was hopeless because the Second Battalion had been broken up and scattered throughout the army, Sergeant Carew gave him sudden, extraordinary hope. ‘It’s a funny bloody thing, sir.’ The Sergeant lurched up and down on his wooden leg as he turned to look behind him, fearful that they would be overheard.

‘What’s funny?’

‘We was told, sir, that the Second’s just a holding Battalion. No more recruits? That’s what they said, sir, but three weeks ago, as I live and breathe, sir, I saw one of our parties with a clutch of recruits! Sergeant Havercamp, it was, Horatio Havercamp, and he was marching ’em this way. I said “hello”, I did, and he tells me to bugger off and mind my own business. Me!’ Carew stared indignantly at Sharpe. ‘So I talks to the Captain here and I asks him what’s happening? I mean the recruits never got here, sir, not a one of them. Haven’t seen a lad in six months!’

Sharpe stared at the Sergeant, and the import of what Carew was saying dawned slowly on him. Holding Battalions did not recruit. If there were recruits then there was a Second Battalion, and the seven hundred men did exist, and the Regiment could yet march into France. ‘You saw a recruiting party?’

‘With me own eyes, sir! I told the Captain too!’

‘What did he say?’

‘Told me I was drunk, sir. Told me there were no more recruiting parties, nothing! Told me I was imagining things, but I wasn’t drunk, sir, and sure as you’re standing there and me here I’m telling you I saw Horatio Havercamp with a party of recruits. Now why would they not come here, sir? Can you tell me that?’

‘No, Sergeant, I can’t.’ But he would find out, by God he would find out. ‘You’re certain of what you saw, Sergeant?’

‘I’m certain, sir.’

‘This Sergeant Havercamp wasn’t recruiting for another regiment?’

Carew laughed. ‘Wore our badge, sir! Drummer boys had your eagle on the drums. No, sir. Something funny happening, that’s what I think.’ He was stumping towards the door, his keys jangling on their iron ring. ‘But no one listens to me, sir, not any more. I mean I was a real soldier, sir, smelled the bloody guns, but they don’t want to know. Too high and bloody mighty.’ Carew swung the massive iron door shut, then turned again to make sure none of the depot officers were near. ‘I’ve been in the bloody army since I was a nipper, sir, and I know when things are wrong.’ He looked eagerly up at Sharpe. ‘Do you believe me, sir?’

‘Yes, Ted.’ Sharpe stood in the slanting evening light, and almost wished he did not believe the Sergeant, for, if Ted Carew was right, then a Battalion was not just missing, but deliberately hidden. He went to inspect the stables.

A missing Battalion? Hidden? It sounded to Sharpe like a madman’s fantasy, yet nothing in Chelmsford offered a rational explanation. By noon the next day Sharpe and d’Alembord had searched the paperwork of the depot and found nothing that told them where Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood had gone, or whether the Second Battalion truly existed. Yet Sharpe believed Carew. The Battalion did exist, it was recruiting still, and Sharpe knew he must return to London, though he dreaded the thought.

He dreaded it because he would have to seek an interview with Lord Fenner, and Sharpe did not feel at home among such exalted reaches of society. He suspected, too, that His Lordship would refuse to answer his questions, telling Sharpe, perhaps rightly, that it was none of his business.

Yet to have come this far to fail? He walked onto the parade ground and saw Carline, Merrill and Pierce standing indignantly to attention as Patrick Harper minutely inspected their uniforms. All three officers had shadowed, red-rimmed eyes because they had been up all night. Harper, used to broken nights of war, looked keen and fresh.

‘Halt!’ The sentry at the gate, eager to impress Major Sharpe, bellowed the challenge.

Sharpe turned.

A mounted officer appeared in the archway, glorious and splendid on a superb horse, dazzling in the red, blue and gold uniform of the 1st Life Guards, an officer utterly out of place in this remote, dull barracks square.

‘Bit hard to find, aren’t you?’ The officer laughed as he dismounted close to Sharpe. ‘It is Major Sharpe, yes?’

‘Yes.’

The Captain saluted. ‘Lord John Rossendale, sir! Honoured to meet you!’ Lord John was a tall young man, thin as a reed, with a humorous, handsome face and a lazy, friendly voice. ‘First time I’ve been here. I’m told there’s a decent little pack of hounds up the road?’ He pronounced the word hounds as ‘hinds’.

‘I wouldn’t know.’ Sharpe said it ungraciously. ‘You’re looking for me?’

‘Rather,’ Rossendale beamed happily. ‘Got something for you, sir. Or I did.’ He dug into his sabretache, failed to find whatever he had brought, clicked his fingers, cursed himself for foolishness, then, with a happy and enlightened burst of memory, found what he was looking for in his saddlebag. ‘There you are, sir! Safely delivered.’ He handed Sharpe a thick piece of folded paper, richly sealed. ‘Can I get luncheon here, sir? Your Mess does a decent bite, does it, or would you recommend the town?’

Sharpe did not answer. He had torn the paper open and was reading the ornate script. ‘Is this a joke?’

‘Lord, no!’ Lord John laughed anyway. ‘Bit of a privilege really, yes? He’s always wanted to meet you! He was happy as a drunken bat when the Horse Guards said you’d come home! We heard you’d died this summer, but here you are, eh? Fit as a fiddle? Splendid, eh? Should be quite jolly, really!’

‘Jolly?’

‘Rather!’ Lord John gave Sharpe his friendliest, most charming smile. ‘Best flummery and all that?’

‘Flummery?’

‘Uniform, sir. Get your chap to polish it all up, put on a bit of glitter, yes?’ He glanced at Sharpe’s jacket and laughed. ‘You can’t really wear that one, eh? They’d think you’d come to scour the chimneys.’ He laughed again to show he meant no offence.

Sharpe stared at the invitation, and knew that his luck had turned. A moment ago he had been apprehensive, rightly so, about seeing Lord Fenner, for what mere Major could demand answers of a Secretary of State at War? Now, suddenly, the answer had been delivered by this elegant, smiling messenger who had brought an invitation, a command, for Sharpe to go to London and there meet a man who, within the last year, had insisted that Sharpe was promoted, and a man whom even Lord Fenner dared not offend. The Prince of Wales, Prince Regent of England, demanded Major Richard Sharpe’s attendance at court, and Sharpe, if he was clever enough, would let that eminent Royal gentleman demand to know where the Second Battalion had been hidden. Sharpe laughed aloud. He would go over Lord Fenner’s head, and, with Royalty’s help, would march the Colours of his regiment into France.

CHAPTER TWO

‘There is a yellow line on the carpet. Observe it.’

‘Yes,’ said Major Richard Sharpe.

‘It is there that you stop.’ The chamberlain gave a small, fanciful gesture with his white-gloved fingers as if illustrating how to come to a halt. ‘You bow.’ Another curlicue of the fingers. ‘You answer briefly, addressing His Royal Highness as “Your Royal Highness”. You then bow again.’

Sharpe had been watching people approach the throne for ten tedious minutes. He doubted that, after seeing so many examples, he needed to be given such minute instructions, but the courtier insisted on saying it all again. Every elaborate gesture of the man’s white-gloved hand wafted perfume to Sharpe’s nose.

‘And when you have bowed the second time, Major, you back away. Do it slowly. You may cease the backward motion when you reach the lion’s tail.’ He pointed with his staff at the rampant lion embroidered onto the lavish red carpet. The courtier, with eyes that seemed to be made of ice, looked Sharpe up and down. ‘Some of our military gentlemen, Major Sharpe, become entangled with their swords during the backwards progression. Might I suggest you hold the scabbard away from your body?’

‘Thank you.’

A group of musicians, lavishly dressed in court uniform, with powdered wigs, plucked eyebrows, and intent, busy expressions, played violins, cellos, and flutes. The tunes meant nothing to Sharpe, not one of them a stirring, heart-thumping march that could take a man into battle. These tunes were frivolous and tinkling; mincing, delicate things suitable for a Royal Court. He felt foolish. He was grateful that none of his men could see him now; d’Alembord and Price were safely in Chelmsford, putting some snap into the half-deserted depot, while Harper, though in London, was with Isabella in Southwark.

Above Sharpe was a ceiling painted with supercilious gods who stared down with apparent boredom on the huge room. A great chandelier, its crystal drops breaking the candlelight into a million shards of light, hung at the room’s centre. A fire, an unnecessary luxury this warm night, burned in a vast grate, adding to an already overheated room that stank of women’s powder, sweat, and the cigar smoke that drifted in from the next chamber.

An Admiral was being presented. There was a spatter of light, bored applause from the courtiers who crowded about the dais. The Admiral bowed for a second time, backed away, and Sharpe saw how the man held his slim sword away from his body as he bobbingly reversed over the snarling lion.

‘Lord Pearson, your Royal Highness!’ said the overdressed flunkey who announced the names.

Lord Pearson, attired in court dress, strode confidently forward, bowed, and Sharpe felt his heart beating nervously when he thought that, in a few moments, he would have to follow the man up the long carpet. It was all nonsense, of course, ridiculous nonsense, but he was still nervous. He wished he was not here, he wished he was anywhere but in this stinking, overheated room. He watched Lord Pearson say his few words and thought, with a sense of doom, how impossible it would be to bring up the subject of the missing Battalion in those few, scaring seconds of conversation.

‘It is best,’ the courtier murmured in his ear, ‘to say as little as possible. “Yes, your Royal Highness” or “No, your Royal Highness” are both quite acceptable.’

‘Yes,’ Sharpe said.

There were fifty people being presented this evening. Most had brought their wives who laughed sycophantically whenever the courtiers on the dais laughed. None could hear the witticism that had provoked the laughter, but they laughed just the same.

The men were resplendent in uniform or court dress, their coats heavy with jewelled orders and bright sashes. Sharpe wore no decorations, unless the faded cloth badge that showed a wreath counted as a decoration. He had received that for going into a defended breach, being the first man to climb the broken, blood-slick stones at Badajoz, but it was a paltry thing beside the dazzling jewelled enamels of the great stars that shone from the other uniforms.

He had taken the wreath badge from his old jacket and insisted that the tailor sew it onto his brand-new uniform. It felt odd to be dressed so finely, his waist circled by a tasselled red sash and his shoulder-wings bright with the stars of his rank. Sharpe reckoned the evening had cost him fifty guineas already, most of it to the tailor who had despaired of making the new uniform in time. Sharpe had growled that he would go to the Royal Court in his old uniform and give the tailor’s name as the man responsible, and, as he had expected, the work had been done.

His uniform might be new, but Sharpe still wore his comfortable old boots. Sharpe had obstinately refused to spend money on the black leather shoes proper to his uniform, and the Royal Equerry who had greeted Sharpe in the Entrance Hall of Carlton House had frowned at the knee-high boots. Polish them as he might, Sharpe could not rid them of the scuff marks, or disguise the stitches that closed the rent slashed in the left boot by an enemy’s knife. The Equerry, whose own buckled shoes shone like a mirror, wondered whether Major Sharpe would like to borrow proper footwear.

‘What’s wrong with the boots?’ Sharpe had asked.

‘They’re not regulation issue, Major.’

‘They’re regulation issue to colonels of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard. I killed one of those bastards to get these boots, and I’m damned if I’m taking them off for you.’

The Equerry had sighed. ‘Very good, Major. If you so wish.’

By Sharpe’s side, in its battered scabbard, hung his cheap Heavy Cavalry sword. At Messrs Hopkinsons of St Albans Street, the army agents who were part bankers, part post office and part moneylenders to officers, he had a presentation sword from the Patriotic Fund, given to him as a reward for capturing the French Eagle at Talavera, but he felt uncomfortable with such a flimsy, over-decorated blade. He was a soldier, and he would come to this court with his own sword. But by God, he thought, he would rather be back in Spain. He would rather face a battalion of French veterans than face this ordeal.

‘A pace forward, Major?’

He obeyed, and the step took him closer to the edge of the crowd so that he could see better. He did not like what he saw; plump, self-satisfied people crammed into rich, elegant clothes. Their laughter tinkled as emptily as the music. Those who looked at Sharpe seemed to show a mixture of surprise and pity at his dowdiness, as though a bedraggled fighting cock had somehow found its way into a peacock’s pen.

The women were mostly dressed in white, their dresses tightly bound beneath their breasts to fall sheer to the carpet. Their necklines were low, their throats circled by stones and gold, their faces fanned by busy, delicate spreads of ivory and feathers. A woman standing next to Sharpe, craning to see over the shoulder of a man in front of her, showed a cleavage in which sweat trickled to make small channels through the powder on her breasts.

‘You had a good voyage, Major?’ the courtier asked in a tone which suggested he did not care one way or the other.

‘Yes, very good, thank you.’

‘Another pace forward, I think.’

He shuffled the obedient step. He was to be the last person presented to His Royal Highness. From another room in this huge house came a tinkle of glasses and a burst of laughter. The musicians still sawed at their instruments. The faces of the crowd that lined the long carpet glistened in the candlelight. Everyone, with the exception of Sharpe, wore white gloves, even the men. He knew no one here, while everyone else seemed to know everybody else, and he felt foolish and unwelcome. The air that he breathed seemed heavy, warm and damp, not with the humidity of a summer day, but with strong scent and sweat and powder that he thought would choke in his gullet.

A woman caught his eye and held it. For a second he thought she would smile at him to acknowledge the moment when their eyes locked, but she did not smile, nor look away, but instead she stared at him with an expression of disdainful curiosity. Sharpe had noticed her earlier, for in this overheated, crowded room she stood out like a jewel amongst offal. She was tall, slim, with dark red hair piled high above her thin, startling face. Her eyes were green, as green as Sharpe’s jacket, and they stared at him now with a kind of defiance.

Sharpe looked away from her. He was beginning to feel sullen and rebellious, angry at this charade, wondering what would happen to him if he simply turned and walked away from this place. But he was here for a purpose, to use the privilege of this presentation to ask a favour, and he told himself that he did this thing for the men who waited at Pasajes.

‘Remember, Major, to hold the sword away as you leave the presence.’ The courtier, a head shorter than Sharpe’s six foot, gave his delicate smile. ‘I shall see you afterwards, perhaps?’ He did not sound overjoyed at the prospect.

The moment had come. He was at the front of the crowd, facing the vast carpet, and he could see the eyes staring at him and then the overdressed servant at the foot of the dais looked at him and nodded.

He walked forward. Christ! he thought, but he would trip over or faint. His boots suddenly felt as heavy as pig-iron, his scabbard seemed to swing malevolently between his knees, then he frowned because, to his right, applause had begun and the applause grew and someone, a woman, shouted ‘bravo!’

He was blushing. The applause made him angrier. It was his own god-damned fault. He should have ignored the Royal command, but instead he was walking up this damned carpet, the faces were smiling at him and he was sure that he would become entangled with the huge sword that clanked in its metal scabbard by his side.

The woman who had stared at him, the woman with green eyes, watched him walk to the yellow line. She clapped politely, but without enthusiasm. A dangerous-looking man, she thought, and far more handsome than she expected. She had been told only that he came from the gutter, a bastard son of a peasant whore. ‘You won’t want to bed him, Anne.’ She remembered those words, and the mocking tone of the voice that spoke them. ‘Talk to him, though. Find out what he knows.’

‘Maybe he won’t want to talk to me.’

‘Don’t be a fool. A peasant like that will be flattered to speak to a lady.’

Now she watched the bastard son of a common whore bow, and it was plain that Major Richard Sharpe was not accustomed to bowing. She felt a small surge of excitement that surprised her.

The courtier waited for Sharpe’s clumsy bow to be made. ‘Major Richard Sharpe, your Royal Highness, attached to His Majesty’s South Essex Regiment!’

And the courtier’s words provoked more applause which the man sitting in the gilded, red-velvet cushioned throne encouraged by lightly tapping his white gloved fingers into his palm. No one else had received such applause, no one; and Sharpe blushed like a child as he stared into the glaucous eyes and fat face of the Prince of Wales, who, this night, was encased in the full uniform of a British general; a uniform that bulged on his thighs and over his full belly.

The applause died. The Prince of Wales seemed to gobble with delighted laughter. He stared at Sharpe as if the Rifleman was some delicious confection brought for his delight, then he spoke in a fruity, rich voice that was full of surprise. ‘You are dressed as a Rifleman, eh?’

‘Yes, your Majesty.’ Oh Christ, Sharpe thought. He should have called him ‘Your Royal Highness’.