Sharpe’s Siege: The Winter Campaign, 1814

‘There’s a new colonel coming, Patrick. He needs his RSM.’

Harper frowned. ‘Needs his major, too.’

‘He can’t lose both of us.’ Sharpe did not have the power to deny the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers the services of this massive Irishman. ‘And if you come, Patrick, the new man will only appoint a new RSM. You wouldn’t want that.’

Harper frowned. ‘I’d rather be in a scrap if one’s going, sir, and Mr Frederickson wouldn’t take me amiss, nor would he.’

Sharpe could not be persuaded. ‘No.’

The huge man, four inches taller than Sharpe’s six feet, grinned. ‘I could take sick leave, sir, so I could.’

‘You have to be sick first.’

‘But I am!’ Harper pointed to his mouth. ‘I’ve got a toothache something desperate, sir. Here!’ He opened his mouth, jabbed with his finger, and Sharpe saw that Harper did indeed have a reddened and swollen upper gum.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘It’s dreadful, so it is!’ Harper, sensing a chink in Sharpe’s armour, became enthusiastic about his pain. ‘It’s more of a throb, sir. On and off, on and off, like a great drumbeat in your skull. Desperate, it is!’

‘Then see a surgeon tonight,’ Sharpe said unsympathetically, ‘and have it pulled. Then get back to Battalion where you belong.’

Harper’s face dropped. ‘Truly, sir? I can’t come?’

Sharpe sighed. ‘I’d rather have you along, RSM, than any dozen other men.’ That was true a thousand times over. Sharpe knew of no man he would rather fight beside, but it could not be at Arcachon. ‘I’m sorry, Patrick. Besides you’re a father now. You should take care.’ Harper’s Spanish wife, just a month before, had given birth to a son that had been christened Richard Patricio Augustine Harper. Sharpe had found the choice of Richard an embarrassment, but Jane had been delighted when Harper sought permission to use the name. ‘And I’m doing you a favour, RSM,’ Sharpe went on.

‘How would that be, sir?’

‘Because your son will still have a father in two weeks.’ Sharpe was seeing that black, sheer, wet wall and the image of it made his voice savage. Then he turned as the door opened. ‘My dear.’

Jane, beautiful in a blue silken dress, smiled delightedly at Harper. ‘Sergeant Major! How’s the baby?’

‘Just grand, ma’am!’ Harper had formed a firm alliance with Mrs Sharpe that seemed aimed at subverting Major Sharpe’s authority. ‘And Isabella thanks you for the linen.’

‘You’ve got toothache!’ Jane frowned with concern. ‘Your cheek’s swollen.’

Harper blushed. ‘It’s only a wee ache, ma’am, nothing at all!’

‘You must have oil of cloves! There’s some in the kitchen. Come along!’

The oil of cloves was discovered and Harper sent, disconsolate, into the night.

‘He can’t come,’ Sharpe said after dinner, when he and Jane walked back alone through the town.

‘Poor Patrick.’ Jane insisted on stopping at Hogan’s lodgings, but there was no news. She had visited earlier in the day and thought the sick man was looking better.

‘I wish you wouldn’t risk yourself,’ Sharpe said.

‘You’ve said so a dozen times, Richard, and I promise I heard you each time.’

They went to bed and, just four hours later, the landlady hammered on their door. It was pitch dark outside and bitterly cold inside the bedroom. Frost had etched patterns on the small windowpanes, patterns that were reluctant to melt even though Sharpe revived the fire in the tiny grate. The landlady had brought candles and hot water. Sharpe shaved, then pulled on his old and faded Rifleman’s uniform. It was the uniform in which he fought, stained with blood and torn by bullet and blade. He would not go into action in any other uniform.

He oiled his rifle’s lock. He always carried a long-arm into battle, even though it had been ten years since he had been made into an officer. He drew his Heavy Cavalry sword from its scabbard and tested the fore-edge. It seemed odd to be going to war from his wife’s bed, odder still not to be marching with his own men or with Harper, and that thought gave him a flicker of unrest for he was not used to fighting without Harper beside him.

‘Two weeks,’ he said. ‘I should be back in two weeks. Maybe less.’

‘It will seem like eternity,’ Jane said loyally, then, with an exaggerated shudder, she threw the bedclothes back and snatched up the clothes that Sharpe had hung to warm before the fire. Her small dog, grateful for the chance, leaped into the warm pit of the bed.

‘You don’t have to come,’ Sharpe said.

‘Of course I’ll come. It’s every woman’s duty to watch her husband sail to the wars.’ Jane shivered suddenly, then sneezed.

A half hour later they went into the fish-smelling lane and the wind was like a knife in their faces. Torches flared on the quayside where the Amelie rose on the incoming tide.

A dark line of men, weapons gleaming softly, filed aboard the merchantman that was to be Sharpe’s transport. The Amelie was no jewel of Britain’s trading fleet. She had begun life as a collier, taking coal from the Tyne to the smoke thick Thames, and her dark timbers still stank thickly of coal-dust.

Casks and crates and nets of supplies were slung on board in the pre-dawn darkness. Boxes of rifle ammunition were piled on the quayside and with them were barrels of vilely salted and freshly-killed beef. Twice baked bread was wrapped in canvas and boxed in resinous pine. There were casks of water for the voyage, spare flints for the fighting, and whetstones for the sword-bayonets. Rope ladders were coiled in the Amelie’s scuppers so that the Riflemen, reaching the beach where they must disembark, could scramble down to the longboats sent from the Vengeance.

A smear of silver-grey marked the dawn and flooded slowly to show the filthy, littered water of the harbour. Aboard the Scylla, a frigate moored in the harbour roads, yellow lights showed from the stern cabin where doubtless the frigate’s captain took his breakfast.

‘I’ve wrapped you a cheese.’ Jane’s voice sounded small and frightened. ‘It’s in your pack.’

‘Thank you.’ Sharpe bent to kiss her and wished suddenly that he was not going. A wife, General Craufurd used to say, weakens a soldier. Sharpe held his wife an instant, feeling her ribs beneath the layers of wool and silk, then, suddenly, her slim body jerked as she sneezed again.

‘I’m catching a cold.’ She was shivering. Sharpe touched her forehead and it was oddly hot.

‘You’re not well.’

‘I hate rising early.’ Jane tried to smile, but her teeth were chattering and she shivered again. ‘And I’m not certain the fish was entirely to my taste last night.’

‘Go home!’

‘When you’re gone.’

Sharpe, even though a hundred men watched him, kissed his wife again. ‘Jane …’

‘My dear, you must go.’

‘But …’

‘It’s only a cold. Everyone gets a cold in winter.’

‘Sir!’ Sweet William saluted Sharpe and bowed to Jane. ‘Good morning, ma’am! Somewhat brisk!’

‘Indeed, Mr Frederickson.’ Jane shivered again.

‘Everyone’s aboard, sir.’ Frederickson turned to Sharpe.

Sharpe wanted to linger with Jane, he wanted to reassure himself that she had not caught Hogan’s fever, but Frederickson was waiting for him, men were holding the ropes that would swing the gangplank away, and he could not stay. He gave Jane a last kiss, and her forehead was like fire. ‘Go home to bed.’

‘I will.’ She was shaking now, hunched and clenched against the bitter wind.

Sharpe paused, wanting to say something memorable, something that would encompass the inchoate, extraordinary love he felt for her, but there were no words. He smiled, then turned to follow Frederickson on to the Amelie’s deck.

The daylight was thin now, seeping through the hilly landscape behind the port and making the streaked, bubbling, heaving water of the harbour silver. The gangplank crashed on to the stones of the quay.

Far out to sea, like some impossible mountain forming on the face of the waters, an airy structure of dirty grey sails caught the morning daylight. It was the Vengeance getting under way. She looked formidably huge; a great floating weapon that could make the air tremble and the sea shake when she launched her full broadside, but she would be useless in the shoal waters by the Teste de Buch fort. That would have to be taken by men and by hand-held weapons.

‘He’s signalling.’ Tremgar, master of the Amelie, spat over the side. ‘Means they’ll be moving us off. Stand by, forrard!’ He bellowed the last words.

A topsail dropped from the nearby Scylla’s yards and the movement, suggesting an imminent departure, made Sharpe turn to the quay. Jane, swathed in her powder-blue cloak, was still there. Sharpe could see her shivering. ‘Go home!’

A voice shouted. ‘Wait! Wait!’ The accent was French and the speaker a dully-dressed man, evidently a servant, who rode a small horse and led a packhorse on a leading rein. ‘Amelie! Wait!’

‘Bloody hell.’ Tremgar had been packing a pipe with dark tobacco that he now pushed into a pocket of his filthy coat.

Behind the servant and packhorse and, stately as a bishop in procession, rode a tall, elegant man on a tall, elegant horse. The man had a delicate, sensitive face, a white cloak clasped with silver, and a bicorne hat shielded with oiled cloth against the rain.

The gangplank was rigged again and the man, with a faint shudder as though the stench of the Amelie was too much for a gentleman of his fastidious tastes, came aboard. ‘I seek Major Sharpe,’ he announced in a French accent to the assembled officers who had gathered in the ship’s waist.

‘I’m Sharpe.’ Sharpe spoke from the poop deck.

The newcomer turned in a movement that would have been elegant on a dance-floor, but seemed somewhat ludicrous on the battered deck of an erstwhile collier. He took a quizzing glass from his sleeve and, with its help, inspected the tattered uniform of Major Richard Sharpe. He bowed, somehow suggesting that he should have been the recipient of such an honour himself, then took off his waterproofed hat to reveal sleek, silver hair that was brushed back to a black velvet bow. He held out a sealed envelope. ‘Orders.’

Sharpe had jumped down from the poop and now tore open the envelope. ‘To Major Sharpe. The bearer of this note is the Comte de Maquerre. You will render him every assistance within your power. Bertram Wigram, Colonel.’

Sharpe looked into the narrow face that had been powdered pale. He suddenly remembered that Hogan, in his sick ramblings, had mentioned the name Maquereau, meaning ‘pimp’, and he wondered if the insult was a nickname for this elegant, fastidious man. ‘You’re the Comte de Maquerre?’

‘I have that honour, Monsieur, and I travel to Arcachon with you.’ De Maquerre’s cloak had fallen open to reveal the uniform of the Chasseurs Britannique. Sharpe knew that regiment’s reputation. The officers were Frenchmen loyal to the ancien régime, while its men were deserters from the French Army and all unmitigated scoundrels. They could fight when the mood took them, but it was not a regiment Sharpe would want on his flank in battle.

‘Captain Frederickson! Four men to get the Frenchman’s baggage on board! Quick now!’

De Maquerre tugged at his buttoned, kidskin gloves. ‘You have quarters for my horse? And the packhorse.’

‘No horses,’ Sharpe said sourly, which only tossed the Comte de Maquerre into a sulky fit of protests in which the name of the Duc d’Angoulême, Louis XVIII, and the Lord Wellington featured prominently. In the meantime an angry message came from the Scylla demanding to know why the Amelie had not slipped her moorings at the flood tide, and finally Sharpe had to give way.

Which meant another delay as the Comte’s two horses were coaxed aboard and a section of Frederickson’s Riflemen were moved out of the forward hold to make way for the beasts. Trunks and cases were carried up the gangplank.

‘I cannot, of course,’ the Comte de Maquerre said, ‘travel in this ship.’

‘Why not?’ Sharpe asked.

A wrinkle of the nostril was the only answer and a further delay ensued while a message was sent to the Scylla which demanded that His Excellency the Comte de Maquerre be allowed quarters on board the frigate or, preferably, the Vengeance.

Captain Grant of the Scylla, doubtless under pressure from the Vengeance, returned a short answer. The Comte, disgusted, went below to the cabin he would now have to share with Frederickson.

The light was full now, dissipated by clouds and showing the filth that floated yellow and black in the grey harbour. A dead dog bumped against the Amelie’s hull as the forward cables were released, then the aft splashed free, and from overhead came the menacing sound of great sails unleashing to the wind’s power. A gull gave its lonely, harsh cry that sailors believed was the sound of a drowned soul in agony.

Sharpe stared at the golden-haired girl in the cloak of silver-blue and he blamed the wind for the tears in his eyes. Jane had a handkerchief to her face and Sharpe prayed that he had not seen the first symptoms of the fever in her. He tried to convince himself that Jane was right, and that she merely suffered from eating bad fish the night before, but goddamn it, he thought, why did she have to visit Hogan?

‘Go home!’ he shouted across the widening gap.

Jane shivered, but stayed. She watched the Amelie claw clumsily out beyond the bar and Sharpe, staring back to the harbour, saw the tiny signal of her white-waving handkerchief get smaller and smaller and finally disappear as a rain-squall seethed and hissed over the broken sea.

The Vengeance loomed over the other ships. The Amelie, pumps already working, took station astern while the Scylla, fast and impatient, leaped ahead into the squalls. The brig sloops closed behind the Amelie, and the shore of France was nothing but a dark smear on a grey sea.

A buoy, tarred black and marking God alone knew what hazard in this empty waste, slipped astern and thus the expedition to Arcachon, amidst chaos and uncertainty, was under way.

CHAPTER FOUR

All day Commandant Henri Lassan watched the ships pass. He watched from within one of the fort’s covered citadels and with the help of a brass-barrelled telescope that had belonged to his grandfather.

No flag flew from the fort. One of the local fishermen, trusted by Lassan, had taken his small boat to the Lacanau shoals where the British brig had taken the smack’s wind and invited the captain aboard. Rum had been served, gold paid for fish, and the fisherman had solemnly informed the enemy that the fort was deserted entirely of its old garrison. They had gone north, he said, to serve the Emperor, and only a few local militia now patrolled the ramparts. If the lie was believed then Lassan might entice the British into the range of his heavy guns, and he had cause to think the lie had worked for the brig had flattened her sails into the wind and gone southwards.

Now, instead of the brig, a vast line of grey sails flecked the western horizon. Commandant Lassan guessed the ships were eight or nine miles out to sea and he knew that he watched a British convoy carrying men and weapons and horses and ammunition to their Army to the south.

The sight made Henri Lassan feel lonely. His Emperor was far away and he was alone on the coast of France and his enemy could sail with impunity down that coast in a massive convoy that would have needed a fleet to disrupt. Except there were no more French fleets; the last had been destroyed by Nelson nine years before and what ships were left rotted in their anchorages.

A few privateers, American and French, sailed the ocean, but they were like small dogs yapping at the heels of a vast herd. Even Cornelius Killick, in his splendid Thuella, could not have taken a ship from that convoy. Killick would have waited for a straggler perhaps, but nothing less than a fleet could have broken that vast line of ships.

It was painful to see the enemy’s power so naked, so unchallenged, so ponderous. In the great holds of those hull-down ships were the instruments that would bring death to Soult’s army in the south, and Lassan could do nothing. He could win his small battle, if it came, but the greater struggle was beyond his help.

That thought made him chide himself for lack of faith and, in penitence, he went to the fort’s small chapel and prayed for a miracle. Perhaps the Emperor, marching and counter-marching his men along the frost hardened roads of the north, could win a great victory and break the alliance that ringed France, yet the Emperor’s desperation was witnessed by the fort’s emptiness. France had been scraped for men, then scraped again, and many of the next class of conscripts had already fled into the woods or hills to escape the sergeants who came to take cannon-fodder still not grown to manhood.

A clash of boots, a shout, and the squeal of the gate hinges which, however often greased, insisted on screeching like a soul entering purgatory, announced a visitor to the fort. Lassan pocketed his beads, crossed himself, and went into the twilight.

‘The bastards! The double-crossing bastards! Good evening, Henri.’ Cornelius Killick, his savage face furious, nodded to the Commandant. ‘Bastards!’

‘Who?’

‘Bordeaux! No copper! No oak! What am I supposed to do? Paste paper over the bloody holes?’

‘Perhaps you’ll take some wine?’ Lassan suggested diplomatically.

‘I’ll take some wine.’ The American followed Lassan into the Commandant’s quarters that looked more like a library than a soldier’s rooms. ‘That bastard Ducos! I’d like to pull his teeth out through his backside.’

‘I thought,’ Lassan said gently, ‘that the coffin-maker in Arcachon had given you some elm?’

‘Given? The bastard made us pay three times the price! And I don’t like sailing with a ship’s arse made out of dead man’s wood.’

‘Ah, a sailor’s superstition.’ Lassan poured wine into the crystal glasses that bore his family’s coat of arms. The last Comte de Lassan had died beneath the guillotine, but Henri had never been tempted to use the title that was rightfully his. ‘Did you see all those fat merchantmen crawling south?’

‘All day,’ Killick said gloomily. ‘Take one of those and you make a small fortune. Not as much as an Indiaman, of course.’ He finished the glass of wine and poured himself more. ‘I told you about the Indiaman I took?’

‘Indeed you did,’ Henri Lassan said politely, ‘three times.’

‘And was her hold crammed with silks? With spices? With treasures of the furthest East? With peacock’s plumes and sapphires blue?’ Killick gave his great whoop of a laugh. ‘No, my friend. She was crammed to the gunwales with saltpetre. Saltpetre to make powder, powder to drive bullets, bullets to kill the British. It is kind of our enemies, is it not, to provide the powers of their own destruction?’ He sat beside the fire and stared at the thin, scholarly-faced Lassan. ‘So, my friend, are the bastards coming?’

‘If they want the chasse-marées,’ Lassan said mildly, ‘they’ll have to come here.’

‘And the weather,’ the American said, ‘will let them land safely.’ The long Biscay shore, that could thunder with tumbling surf, was this week in gentler mood. The breaking waves beyond the channel were four or five feet high, frightening enough to landlubbers, but not high enough to stop ships’ boats from landing.

Lassan, still hoping that his deception would persuade the British that they had no need to land men on the coast to the south, nevertheless acknowledged the possibility. ‘Indeed.’

‘And if they do come by land,’ Killick said brutally, ‘they’ll beat you.’

Lassan glanced at the ebony crucifix that hung between his bookshelves. ‘Perhaps not.’

The American seemed oblivious of Lassan’s appeal to the Almighty. ‘And if they take the fort,’ he went on, ‘they’ll command the whole Basin.’

‘They will, indeed.’

‘And they’ll take the Thuella.’ Killick said it softly, but in his imagination he was seeing his beautiful ship captured by mocking British sailors. The Thuella would be sailed to England as a prize, and a sleek New England schooner, made to ride the long winds of empty oceans, would become an unloved coasting ship carrying British trade. ‘By God, they will not take her!’

‘We’ll do our best,’ Lassan said helplessly, though how four gun crews could resist a British attack was indeed a problem that called for a miracle. Lassan did not doubt that his guns could wreak damage, but once the British discovered the guns were manned they would soon land their Marines and surround the fort. And Lassan, because the Emperor had been greedy for men, could not defend the seaward and the landward walls at once.

The grim news made the American silent. He stared at the small fire, his hawk’s face frowning, and when he finally spoke his voice was oddly tentative. ‘What if we fought?’

‘You?’ Lassan could not hide his surprise.

‘We can fight, Henri.’ Killick grinned. ‘And we’ve got those damned twelve-pounder guns in our hold.’ He was suddenly filled with enthusiasm, seizing a map from Lassan’s table and weighting its corners with books. ‘They’ll land south of Point Arcachon?’

‘Undoubtedly.’

‘And there are only two routes they can take north. The paths by the beach, or the road!’ Killick’s face was alight with the thought of action, and Lassan saw that the American was a man who revelled in the simple problems of warfare. Lassan had met other such men; brave men who had made their names famous throughout France and written pages of history through their love of violent action. He wondered what would happen to such men when the war ended.

‘You’re a sailor,’ Lassan said gently, ‘and fighting on land is not the same as a sea battle.’

‘But if the bastards aren’t expecting us, Henri! If the pompous bastards think they’re safe! Then we ambush them!’ Killick was certain his men, trained gunners, could handle the French artillery and he was seeing, in his hopeful imagination, the grapeshot cutting down marching files of British Marines. ‘By God we can do it, Henri!’

Lassan held up a thin hand to stop the enthusiastic flow. ‘If you really want to help, Captain Killick, then put your men into the fort.’

‘No.’ Killick knew only too well what the British would do to a captured privateer’s crew. If Killick fought to save the Thuella then he must have a safe retreat in case he was defeated. Yet in his plan to ambush the British on their approach march he could not see any chance of defeat. The enemy Marines would be surprised, flayed by grapeshot, and the Thuella would be safe.

Henri Lassan, staring at the map, wondered whether the American’s plan delineated the miracle he had prayed for. If the British did not capture the fort they could not take the chasse-marées, and without the chasse-marées they were trapped behind the rivers running high with winter’s floodwaters.

Trapped. And perhaps the Emperor, bloodying his northern enemies, would march south and give the British Army a shattering defeat.

For, though Wellington had conquered every French Marshal or General sent to fight him, he had never faced the Emperor’s genius. Lassan wondered if this big, handsome American had found the small answer that would hold up the British just long enough to let the Emperor come south and teach the goddamns a lesson in warfare. Then a pang of realism forced Lassan’s mind to contemplate failure. ‘What will you do, mon ami, if the British win?’

Killick shrugged. ‘Dismast the Thuella and make her look like a wreck, then pray that the British ignore her. And you, Commandant, what will you do?’

Lassan smiled sadly. ‘Burn the chasse-marées, of course.’ By so doing he would condemn the two hundred men of the crews and their families to penury. The mayor and curé had begged him to preserve the boats which, even in French defeat, would give life and bread to the communities of the Biscay coast, but in defeat Henri Lassan would do his duty. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,’ he said.