darkness. ”Of course,“ the Comte continued, ”if I do succeed in raising the city against the ogre I shall expect your troops to come to my aid immediately.“
Startled, Sharpe twisted to look at the pale profile of the Comte de Maquerre. “I have no such orders.”
The Comte also turned, showing Sharpe a pair of the palest, coldest eyes imaginable. “You have orders, Major, to offer me every assistance in your power. I carry a commission from your Prince Regent, and a commission from my King. When ordered, Major, you will obey.”
Sharpe was saved from a reply by the harsh clang of the ship’s bell. He wondered, irritably, why sailors did not just ring the hour like other folk, but insisted on sounding gnomic messages of indeterminate meaning upon their bells. Feet padded on the deck as the watch was changed. The binnacle lantern flared bright as the lid was lifted.
“Your first duty, Major,” the Count ignored the dark figures who came up the poop-deck ladders, “is to safely put my horses ashore.”
Sharpe had taken enough. “My first duty, my Lord, is to my men. If you can’t get your horses ashore then they stay here and I won’t lift a goddamned finger to help you. Good day.” He stalked across the deck, a gesture somewhat spoilt by the need to stagger as the Amelie creaked on to a new course in obedience to lights that flared suddenly from the Vengeance’s poop.
The dawn crept slow from the grey east. The snow stopped and Sharpe could see, in the half-light, that none had settled on the land that proved surprisingly close. A brig was close inshore and signal flags hung bright from her mizzen yard.
“She wasn’t with us yesterday.” Sweet William, looking disgustingly well-rested, nodded towards the signalling brig. He had brought Sharpe a mug of tea. “She must have been poking around the fortress. Sleep sound?”
“No sleep.” Sharpe cradled the mug and sipped the hot, sour liquid. The shore looked barren. Sand dunes were grey behind the flicker of surf and beyond the dunes were the dark shapes of stunted pines. No houses were visible. Far inland there were the low, humped shapes of hills, and to the north there was a promontory of low, shadowed ground that jutted into the bleak waters.
Captain Tremgar pointed to the headland. “Point Arcachon.” He turned away from the two Rifle officers and bellowed orders through a speaking trumpet. Sharpe heard the thumping rumble as the anchor cables snaked and whipped out of the hawse-holes. Sails, that a moment before had been filled with wind, flapped like monstrous bat wings as the topmen furled the stiff canvas on to the yards. The Vengeance, looming vast in the morning light, was already anchored, and already launching her first boats. “Christ on his cross!” Sweet William vented a sudden anger. He was staring at the boats that huddled beside the Vengeance.
Sharpe took his spyglass from the sleeve-pocket on his overalls and extended the ivory barrels. The glass had been a gift from the Emperor of the French to his brother, the King of Spain, but the gift had been lost among the loot of Vitoria and was now carried by an English Rifleman.
“Jesus Christ!” Sharpe echoed Frederickson’s blasphemy. The Vengeance had launched three longboats and each was filling with red-jacketed Marines. “There must be a hundred of them!” He watched the men gingerly descend the tumble-home to step into the rocking boats. The sea, miraculously, was gentle this morning, heaving with the long swells of the ocean, but not broken into whitecaps. Sharpe raised the glass, cursing because the small movements of the Amelie made training the telescope difficult, and he saw yet more red-coated Marines waiting on the Vengeance’s maindeck. “That bastard didn’t need us at all!”
“Not to take the fort, perhaps,” Sweet William lit a cheroot, “but a force of trained Riflemen will be damned useful for the march on Bordeaux.”
“Damn his bloody soul!” Sharpe understood now. Wigram had sent de Maquerre to force a decision, and Bampfylde had secreted the Marines to implement the decision. Come hell or high water Wigram and Bampfylde wanted to take Bordeaux, and Sharpe was caught in the middle. He watched the packed longboats pull towards the breaking surf and he felt a bitter anger at Bampfylde who had lied about a malady so that he could have trained skirmishers for his madcap scheme. Even the sun, showing through the clouds for the first time in weeks, could not alleviate Sharpe’s anger.
“It’s my belief,” Frederickson said, “that he wanted you personally.”
“Me?”
“He probably has an exalted view of your ability,” Frederickson said drily. “If the celebrated Major Sharpe fails, then no reasonable man could expect Captain Bampfylde to succeed. On the other hand, of course, who better than yourself to guarantee success?”
“Bugger Bampfylde,” Sharpe said.
The longboats landed their red-coated troops, then were launched back through the surf. The oarsmen, tugging against wind and tide, jerked like small marionettes to pull the heavy boats free of the shore’s suction. They did not come to the Amelie; instead they went to the Vengeance where still more Marines waited for disembarkation.
The morning ticked on. A breakfast of gravy-dipped bread was passed around the Riflemen who waited on the Amelie’s deck. Those Marines already ashore formed up in ranks and, to Sharpe’s astonishment, a half Company was marched off the beach towards the shelter of the dark pines. Sharpe himself was supposed to command the land operations, yet he was being utterly ignored. “Captain Tremgar!”
“Sir?”
“Your boat can put me ashore?”
Tremgar, a middle-aged man wrapped in a filthy tarpaulin jacket, knocked the dottle from his pipe on the brass binnacle cover that was covered with tiny dents from just such treatment. “Ain’t got orders to do it, Major.”
“I’m giving you orders!”
Tremgar turned. One of the longboats was pulling away from the Vengeance and carrying, instead of Marines, a group of blue-cloaked naval officers. Tremgar shrugged. “Don’t see why not, Major.”
It took twenty minutes to lower the Amelie‘s small tender into the water, and another five before Sharpe was sitting uncomfortably on the stern thwart. The Comte de Maquerre, seeing a chance to escape from the stinking collier, had insisted on sharing the boat. He had exchanged his British uniform for a suit of brown cloth.
From the Amelie’s deck the sea had appeared benign, but here, in the tiny boat, it swelled and threatened and ran cold darts of fear up Sharpe’s back. The oars spattered him with water, the waves heaved towards the gunwales, and at any moment Sharpe expected the small rowboat to turn turtle. The Comte, wrapped in his cloak, looked seasick.
Sharpe twisted. The Amelies tar- and salt-stained hull reared above him. A cook jettisoned a bucket of slops over the side and gulls, screaming like banshees, swooped from the air between the yards to fight over the scraps.
The Comte, offended by Sharpe’s cavalier treatment in the small hours, said not a word. Slowly, oar-tug by oar-tug, the four boatmen dragged the small craft away from the Amelie and the grumble of the surf, like the roar of a far-off, relentless battle, grew louder.
Sharpe instinctively touched his weapons. His rifle was muzzle-stopped against sea-water splashes, while the lock was wrapped in an old rag for protection. His sword was clumsy in the confines of the tiny boat. A surge heaved the boat up and ran it forward towards the breaking surf that betrayed itself to Sharpe as a spume of spray being whipped from a curling wave by the wind’s flick, then the boat dropped into a valley of sliding, glassy grey water that was flecked with floating sea-weed.
This was the point of danger. This was the moment when the small boats must go from the sea’s cradle into the broken forces where the waves battered at the shore. Years ago, on a beach like this in Portugal, Sharpe had watched the longboats broach in the combers and spill their men like puppets into the killing sea. The bodies, he remembered, had come ashore white and swollen, uniforms split by the swelling flesh, and dogs had worried at the corpses for days.
“Pull!” the bo’sun shouted. “Pull, you bastards!”
The oarsmen pulled and, like a wagon loaded with cannon-shot, the boat fought the upward slope of the wave. The oars bent under the strain, then the vast power of the sea caught the boat’s transom and it was running, suddenly free of all constraint, and the bo’sun was shouting at the men to ship oars and was leaning his
