pathetically hidden, were dragged in heavy sacks up the sandy road.
To one of the merlons, a jutting stone stub between two embrasures, a stripped pine trunk was lashed tight. It had been the tallest tree in the woodlands and now, at its tapering tip, it carried a crude flag.
The flag was not the Union flag, for Minver’s men could not find sufficient blue cloth to make such a thing. Instead it was the flag of England; the red cross of St George made from the sleeves of Marines’ uniforms and sewn on to a white field that had previously served as a tablecloth in the house of the Customs Inspector at Le Moulleau. A red cross on white, the flag of the man who had slain the dragon, and though few of Sharpe’s men would hold allegiance to England, coming as they did from Germany or Ireland or Scotland or Wales or Spain, the flag was oddly comforting. It streamed in the wind-gusts as a signal to an empty sea.
The defences were Sharpe’s concern. There were four ramparts, and at the corners of the fort were higher citadels, little more than guerites for the shelter of sentries, but the citadels effectively blocked swift movement from one rampart to the next. A soldier, wishing to go from the north wall to the east, must thread the two doorways of the north-east citadel and, to make a swifter passage, Sharpe had walkways of rough pine lashed together then bridged diagonally across the corners.
The courtyard was not square, but made into an irregular shape by the buildings that were sheltered beneath the ramparts. The burned barracks filled the square of the north-eastern corner, while the garrison offices and the officers’ quarters filled the south-western. The gap between them was crudely but thickly barricaded with an abatis of untrimmed pine trees. If the enemy penetrated the courtyard then they would be faced by the thick hedge of bristly pine.
Sharpe’s greatest worry was ammunition. Lieutenant Fytch, set to count the cartridges left to the Marines, gloomily reported that each man had scarce thirty shots left. The Riflemen, who always carried more into battle, had over sixty, but the grim total was less than nine thousand cartridges in the fort. A Battalion could fire as much in the first five minutes of a battle, and Frederickson, scratching calculations on a bastion with a spare rifle flint, grunted. “I reckon we’ve got enough for an eighteen-minute battle. After that we’ll be throwing blacking-balls at them.”
“We’ve got the powder in the horns.” Sharpe was speaking of the fine powder that every rifleman carried in a horn. The powder was kept for the special shots, when marksmanship might be spoiled by the coarser powder of cartridges, but Sharpe knew that, even if spare bullets could be found, the extra powder would not be sufficient for more than six or seven hundred rounds.
So more men were sent out to search for powder. The villagers had duck guns, therefore there must be powder in the countryside, and Sharpe gave the men permission to pull walls down to find hidden supplies. He would be lucky, he thought, to even double his ammunition supply, so other means of killing Frenchmen must be devised.
Lieutenant Fytch had a dozen men sharpening pine stakes that had first been hammered into the bed of the wet ditch. The stakes, whittled to points with knives and bayonets, were hidden beneath the water in those places Sharpe judged the most dangerously exposed to French assaults. Above the stakes, heaped on the ramparts, were piles of masonry that had been loosened by Bampfylde’s explosions. A building stone, dropped from the firestep, would kill a man as effectively as any bullet, yet the piled masonry seemed a pathetic weapon to prepare against whatever might come from the east.
“Perhaps they won’t come,” Patrick Harper said.
“There aren’t supposed to be many troops in this area,” Sharpe said hopefully.
“I suppose they was ghosts we were fighting two days ago?” Harper asked innocently. “And perhaps we won’t need this bastard.” He slapped the breech of one of the two twelve-pounder guns rescued from the ditch. Harper had taken it upon himself to make the guns battleworthy. Presently there was not enough powder to fire even one cannon, but Harper prayed enough propellant would be scraped up from the local village. Like many an infantryman he was fascinated by cannon and wanted desperately to make at least one of these guns capable of firing a shot. With a gentleness that was surprising in such a huge man, and with a tenacity Sharpe had seen before in the Irishman, Harper was using a narrow-bladed awl to dig the iron spike, scrap by bright scrap, out of the vent-hole.
“Can it be cleared?” Sharpe asked.
Harper’s pause seemed to suggest that the job might be expedited if officers did not insist on asking him damn-fool questions, then he shrugged. „I’ll clear the bastard if it takes all day and night, sir.“
By the afternoon Sharpe fervently hoped that the cannons could be made to work, for Lieutenant Minver had struck gold. Or rather, in the strongroom at the back of the Customs House at Le Moulleau, he had found eight barrels of black powder.
“It’s filthy stuff, sir,” Minver said dubiously.
Sharpe fingered some of the powder in his right hand. It was old, it smelt damp, and it was the worst kind of black powder; that made from the dusty leavings of finer powder and adulterated with ground pit-coal, but it was still gunpowder. He put a pinch into the pan of his rifle, snapped the flint on to the frizzen, and the powder fizzed dirtily. “Mix it with the other captured powder. And well done.”
A laboratory was made in the chapel where three men tore pages from Lassan’s remaining books and twisted the paper into crude cartridges that were filled with the coarse powder. They lacked bullets as yet, but Frederickson had a squad of men ripping the lead from the church at Arcachon and Sergeant Rossner was stoking a fire in the furnace that had once heated the French shot and Lieutenant Fytch was the possessor of a pistol that came complete with a mould for bullet-making which, though slightly smaller in calibre than the muskets or rifles, would still make a usable missile. Some undamaged bullets were raked out of the burned barracks where, Sharpe supposed, his spare ammunition had been exploded by Bampfylde.
More powder still came from Arcachon and from the villages of Le Teste, Pyla and Le Moulleau. There were leather bags of powder, boxes of powder, and small barrels of powder. There were even musketoons, an ancient matchlock, six blunderbusses, eight duck guns, and a fine duelling pistol that had yet another bullet mould in its wooden case.
The men were busy and, as ever, purposeful activity made them content. When a cheer announced that Patrick Harper had succeeded in making one of the twelve-pounders battle-worthy, that contentment soared into a confidence that belied the desperation of their predicament. Harper started on the second twelve-pounder gun. “Unless you’d like me to work on one of the big buggers?” he asked Sharpe hopefully.
Sharpe declined the offer. He did not have enough men to raise one of the vast thirty-six pounders from the channel, nor could he spare the powder needed to fire one of the huge guns. Even these smaller field guns, if they could both be fired, would not be used more than once or twice. They were weapons for emergency only.
“Sir!” The wounded man watching inland waved to Sharpe. “Visitor, sir!”
Sharpe ran to the gate, walked across the precarious plank bridge, and saw a tall, long-haired man walking towards the glacis.
It was Cornelius Killick, and the sight of the American astonished Sharpe. He had thought Killick would have long gone inland, yet here was the privateer captain looking for all the world as though he merely took an afternoon stroll. Sharpe met the American beyond the glacis. “I thought you’d gone to Paris, Mr Killick.”
Killick ignored Sharpe’s greeting, staring instead at the work being done to barricade the fort’s blackened archway. “You look as if you’re expecting trouble, Major.”
“Maybe.”
“Stranded, are you? A modern Robinson Crusoe?”
“Maybe.”
Killick laughed at Sharpe’s evasive answers, then allowed himself to be drawn away from the fort. “I’m doing a bit of repair work myself
“You are?”
“I’m putting an elmwood arse on an oak-built ship.” The American grinned. “The Thuella wasn’t quite as knocked up as I thought. You want passage, Major Sharpe?”
“To America?” The thought amused Sharpe.
“We make fine whisky, Major,” Killick said persuasively, “and fine women!”
“If you say so, but I’ll refuse just the same.”
The two men walked to the sand dunes by the channel where the American opened a leather bag and offered Sharpe an oyster. “Ever eaten a raw oyster, Major?”
