Sharpe shrugged in the darkness. “We’ll just have to hold this place, won’t we? Beat the bastards ragged and then rip the guts out of Bampfylde.” The last few words were spoken so savagely that even Frederickson shivered.
Sharpe reached up to his scalp and took off the bandage that had been there since the fort had been captured. He tossed the bloody rag into the darkness. “For two sous, William, I’d march south tomorrow. Take our goddamned chances.”
“It’s a bare country,” Frederickson said, “with few places to hide. And the wounded would slow us down.”
“So we’ll stay.” Sharpe was matter of fact again. “You’ll command the south and east walls and I’ll give you half the Marines as a tow-row Company.” He meant Grenadiers, the shock troops. “Palmer can have Minver’s Company and the other Marines for these walls. I want six of your best men. I’m taking the same from every Company.”
“You, Harper, and the pick of the bunch?” Frederickson smiled.
“In case there’s a tender spot.” Sharpe stood. “Try and get some sleep, William. Tomorrow’s likely to be a long day.”
“And the last peaceful one for a while?”
“If the Frogs know we’re here, yes.” Sharpe slapped the granite wall of the citadel. “Bloody silly place to die, isn’t it?”
That’ll teach ‘em to fight us.“
“Yes.” Sharpe laughed, walked away, then stopped. His voice came out of the darkness. “What does Teste de Buch mean, William?”
“I don’t know. But I know what Tele de Buche would mean.”
It sounded the same to Sharpe. “What?”
“Woodenhead, blockhead, idiot.”
“Goddamn,” Sharpe was amused, for only a blockhead would find himself in this predicament, yet in the morning the blockhead must make his goddamns ready to fight, and not just fight, but win. Here, on the edge of France, in the dead days of winter, they must take victory from disaster and hold the fort.
CHAPTER 13
Major Pierre Ducos rode his horse along the shabby, damp, dispirited lines of conscripts. A few, precious few, veterans stiffened these ranks, but most of the faces were young, pinched and terrified. No wonder, for yesterday some of these youths had been blooded and savaged, and their tale had spread gloom amongst the rest of the demi-brigade. “The enemy was a Battalion strong,” a Chef de Battalion spoke nervously to Ducos, “with skirmishers added.”
“There were less than two hundred men, Colonel.” Ducos’ voice was pitiless. “You were six hundred.” Dear God, but how Ducos despised soldiers! Braggarts and drum-thumpers all, until the enemy knocked the wind out of their bellies, after which they whined that they had been outnumbered, or that the sun had dazzled them, or that their powder had been damp. God only knew why politicians resorted to soldiers as a final instrument of policy; it was like wagering on a cockfight to decide the fate of empires. “And now, Colonel, you will face those same few enemy with upwards of two thousand men. You think it will be enough?” Ducos made the inquiry with a mocking solicitousness.
“They’re behind walls,” the colonel spoke nervously.
“In a fortress that has been slighted,” Ducos said acidly, “and is without cannon and has very little musket ammunition.” Pierre Ducos allowed himself a moment’s pleasure that Richard Sharpe was stranded and trapped. It would, of course, have been far more elegant if Favier had tricked Sharpe into marching through open countryside towards Bordeaux, but the ploy of the forged Bourbon commission had failed and Ducos acknowledged that Favier and de Maquerre had done well. The squadron of ships was gone and Sharpe was bereft. A threatened British landing had been averted, and within a few hours Major Richard Sharpe would be surrounded by bayonets and menaced by two batteries of artillery. Commandant Henri Lassan also marched with the besieging force and, though the Commandant had been disgraced by the loss of his command, restitution had been promised if his intimate knowledge of the Teste de Buch’s defences made General Calvet’s recapture of the coastal fort swift.
At least, Ducos consoled himself, the general of this demi-brigade knew his business. Calvet was an old soldier of France, a veteran of the Revolutionary wars, and a hard man risen from the ranks in the hard way. He had made his name in Russia where, amidst the retreat of the Grand Army, he had held his brigade together. Other men starved, froze, or were hacked to bloody ruin by the Cossacks, but Calvet’s men, fearing their general more than the enemy or the weather, held to their ranks. To this day, it was said, Calvet’s wife slept on a pillow stuffed with the hair cut from the Cossacks her husband had killed with his own sword. It was a rare flash of imagination in a man known for his direct, straightforward, and bloody mode of righting. General Calvet was a brute, a butcher, a tough man in a bloody profession, and Ducos, if he had believed in a God, would have given thanks that such an instrument was at his hand.
Jules Favier, restored to uniform and in high spirits, walked his horse alongside Ducos’ mount. “Calvet,” he said in mild warning, “has never fought goddamns.”
“Goddamns,” Ducos retorted, “have never fought Calvet.”
Colonel Favier acknowledged that truth, then looked at the sky. “The seamen said there’d be a storm.”
“They were wrong,” Ducos said. And indeed the weather, that all night had grumbled with thunder and blown foul and hard, had this morning settled into a gusty, calming mood. Intermittent sunshine glowed on the floodwaters that stretched from overflowing ditches into the fields. Cavalry had gone south across those fields in case Sharpe decided to march to safety down the coast, but Ducos was certain that the Rifleman would stay in the fortress and wait in hope for the return of his ships. “Calvet will settle his hash,” Ducos said with a rare smile on his pinched, scholar’s face.
The gun-wheels rumbled louder than thunder on the plank-bridge at Facture, then the force was on the marshes proper, the Bassin d’Arcachon stretched vast to their right, and the fortress of Teste de Buch lay a half day’s march in front. Calvet, Ducos, and retribution were coming for a Rifleman.
In the night a stab of lightning, its forked branches wide enough to embrace the whole northern sky, had slashed down to sheen the waters of the bay with a steel-hard light that had glittered and gone. The wind had raged at the fort, but in the dawn, that was ragged with clearing cloud, the wind had strangely dropped and the air was suddenly warmer. Patrick Harper, scraping with a blunt razor at the stubble on his face, declared there was even a touch of spring in the February air. “The baby will be two months old today, so he will,” he-declared to Sharpe.
“And better off if you’d stayed with the Battalion,” Sharpe growled.
“Not at all!” Harper was relentlessly cheerful. “The ships will come, sir, so they will.”
One of the wounded men was put on the western ramparts to watch for those ships, while another was placed on the eastern walls to look for the enemy. Two of Frederickson’s Germans, solid reliable men, were sent inland on captured cavalry horses to glean what tidings they could. Another, a silent corporal with a flat, hard face, was sent south on the best of the captured horses. “I’m sorry to lose him,” Sweet William said, “but if he can make it in three days, then we might survive.” The man, a volunteer, had been sent to try and thread the enemy lines and carry news of Sharpe’s predicament to the British Army. Sharpe doubted if the man would ever be seen again, but the possibility that ships could be sent north on a rescue mission was not to be discarded.
The calm, warmer weather raised the men’s spirits. Uniforms, soaked by the last few days’ exertions, were hung to dry on ramparts, giving the Teste de Buch a comfortingly domestic air. Palmer’s Marines, stripped to the waist, took axes and billhooks from the villagers and went to the woods where tree after tree was felled and dragged back to the fort for fuel and barricades. Small boats were broken up and their timbers brought within the walls. Every container that could hold water, from rain-barrels to cooking pots, was carried to an empty, scorched magazine and stored in safety.
It was no time to be careful of French opinion. Houses were searched for food, powder and weapons. Smoked hams and bacon were brought to the fort, cattle were slaughtered, and winter stores of wheat,
