scrabbled vainly for his fallen sword.
A French shout of command made him turn his face left, but he could see nothing. Carbines fired. A ball fluttered overhead, another slapped the wall beside him, then a Baker rifle’s quick crack, that Sharpe had heard a million times before, sounded to his right and he could hear the scrape of boots on stone as the riflemen came into the courtyard. Another crack, a scream, and another Baker rifle had found a victim, then Frederickson was shouting orders.
A volley splintered the dusk, sparking pricks of flame from rifle muzzles, then half the Green Jackets went forward, their comrades covering them, and the long sword-bayonets were carried up the stone ramp and Sharpe heard them cheer and knew that the fort was taken. He was blind.
Slowly, fearfully, Sharpe raised a hand to his throbbing head and gouged at his right eye. He scraped blood away and saw a shimmer of light. His eyes were thick with blood, sealed by it, and he spat on a filthy hand and scraped at the gore to clear his right eye and dimly saw Frederickson’s men scouring the water-bastion with their bayonets. He felt a pang of relief, clear as spring water, that he could see. He could see the enemy leaping from the embrasures, abandoning fort and guns, and he saw a shot from the Scylla, that had been firing vainly for ninety minutes, take the head from a Rifleman on the western ramparts. The body, streaming blood like a squirting wine-bag, tumbled down on to the courtyard’s cobbles.
“Get the flag down!” Sharpe bellowed it. He was on his hands and knees, blood soaking his shirt and threatening to close his right eye again. “The flag!”
Lieutenant Minver, understanding, cut the halyard with his sword so that the tricolour fluttered down. That would stop the Scylla’s guns.
“Close the gate!” Sharpe shouted again, and the effort lanced such quick agony through his skull that he sobbed. He shook his head, trying to clear the pain, but it pulsed like a needle of fire behind his eyes.
A massive volley sounded to the south and Sharpe, his head hurting with every move, twisted round to see the blossom of smoke from the grove of trees. “Captain Frederickson! Captain Frederickson!”
Frederickson took the stairs to the upper rampart three at a time. “Jesus!” He stooped beside Sharpe and tried to wipe the blood away from his face, but Sharpe, still on his hands and knees, twisted away. “Minver’s Company to the ramparts. Take yours and clear those damned American guns.” He saw Frederickson hesitate. “Go!”
Frederickson went and Sharpe, the pain suddenly dreadful, realized that the Scylla had ceased fire and that the field guns had ended their fusillade. He leaned against the wall, closed his good eye, and let the pain come. He had captured a fort.
Cornelius Killick could have happily taken Nicolas Leblanc and wrung his damned French neck.
It was Leblanc’s factory, at St Denis near Paris, that manufactured the potassium nitrate that was mixed with charcoal and sulphur to make gunpowder.
It was not that Cornelius Killick had ever heard of Nicolas Leblanc, but the American knew powder, and he knew, the instant that his guns fired, that French powder was fit only for July the Fourth fire-crackers. The potassium nitrate, saltpetre, was at fault, but that again Killick could not know, but he did know when a gun coughed instead of banged. He had charged the guns as he would his own guns, and as if he was using American powder, but he should have elevated the guns to compensate for the poor quality of the charges.
He had elevated the barrels slightly, knowing that the first shots, fired through cold metal, would go low, but he could never have guessed how low. The first blast of grapeshot, instead of taking the red-coated Marines in a storm of metallic death, spattered into the sand. Some of the balls bounced upwards, but Killick did not see a single body struck by grape.
Killick swore, for his troubles multiplied. The bastards must have known he was there. He had seen the first red jackets ten minutes before and waited for them to march unsuspecting into the clearing, but instead they had lined the trees at the far side and Killick, tired of the delay, had fired his opening volley at that tree line. And he had wasted it. He swore again.
His men were sponging out, ramming, and levering the guns back into their positions. A British musket fired and Killick heard the ball flicker through the pines above. Then more flames stabbed from the shrubs at the clearing’s far side and the musket balls thudded into the sandy bank or thumped on trees or rained pine needles down on to the gunners.
Killick ran left. If the Marines were to attack him they would come this way, flitting through the trees, and the dusk would make their scarlet coats hard to see. He shouted at the left hand gun to slew round and cover the approach, then stared into the gathering darkness. He could see nothing.
Cornelius Killick was nervous. His men were nervous. This was not warfare as he knew it. Killick’s war was out where the wind gave the advantage to the better man and where the dead went to the cleansing sea. It was not in this damned vale of shadows where the enemy could skulk and hide and creep and murder.
A twig cracked, he twisted, but it was only Marie from the village who stared with huge, worried eyes at him. “Go back,” Killick barked.
“The fort,” Marie said.
“What about it?” Killick was searching the southern shadows, watching for the flicker that might betray an enemy movement.
“The flag’s gone,” Marie said.
“Shot away,” Killick said, then ignored the girl’s news because British muskets sparked and the far tree-line was puffed with clouds of powder smoke. “Go back, Marie! Back!”
Some of the Thuella’s crew fired back, using the French muskets that were sold so widely in America. If only the bastards would show themselves, Killick thought, then his six guns could tear the guts out of them. “Liam! Liam!” he shouted.
“Sir?”
“Do you see anything?” Killick ran through dead pine-needles towards his main battery.
“Only their bloody smoke. Bastards won’t show themselves!”
A soldier, Killick thought, would know what to do at this point. Perhaps he should throw men into the trees, cutlasses and muskets ready, but what good would that do? They would simply become meat for the Marines’ muskets. Perhaps, he thought, another volley would stir the bastards up. “Liam? Aim high and fire!”
“Sir!”
The brass elevating screws were turned and the portfires touched vent tubes and the fire slipped down to the coarse powder that hammered more grapeshot to slice into the undergrowth across the clearing. A bird squawked and flapped heavily away from the shredded trees, but that was the only visible result of the volley.
Smoke drifted over the clearing. Good sense told Cornelius Killick that this was the moment to run like hell. He had lost his greatest weapon, surprise, and he risked losing much more, but he was not a man to admit failure. Instead he imagined victory. Perhaps, he thought, the bastards had gone. No muskets fired across the clearing now, no redcoats moved, nothing showed. Perhaps, astonished and shredded by the volleys of grape, the yellow- bellied bastards had turned and run. Killick licked dry lips, tested the surprising thought, and decided it must be the truth. “We’ve beaten the bastards, lads!”
“Not these bastards, you haven’t.”
Killick turned with the speed of a snake, then froze. Standing behind him was a one-eyed man whose face would have terrified an imp of Satan. Captain William Frederickson, in grim jest, always removed his eye-patch and false teeth before a fight and the lack of those cosmetics, added to the horror that was his eye-socket, gave him the face of a man come from a stinking and rotting grave. The Rifle officer’s voice, Killick noticed in stunned astonishment, was oddly polite while, behind him and moving with fast confidence, green-jacketed men whose guns were tipped with long, brass-handled bayonets slipped between the trees.
Killick put a hand to his pistol’s hilt and the one-eyed man shook his head. “It would distress me to kill you. I have a certain sympathy for your Republic.”
Killick gave his opinion of Frederickson’s sympathy in one short and efficacious word.
“It is the fortune of war,” Frederickson said. “Sergeant Rossner! I want prisoners, not dead ‘uns!”
“Sir!” The Riflemen, taking the Americans from the rear, and coming so unexpectedly with weapons ready, gave the Thuella’s crew no chance to fight. Docherty drew his sword, but Taylor’s bayonet touched the Irishman’s throat and the feral eyes of the Rifleman told the lieutenant just what would happen if he raised the blade. Docherty let it fall. Some of Thuella’s crew, unable to retreat into the clearing that was covered by the Marines’
