and tentative for a cavalry charge that might leave the horsemen exposed to a sudden counter-attack. Besides, Sharpe could see that the French were dreadfully outnumbered, outnumbered as heavily as he had been at the Teste de Buch. The enemy, scarce more than a heavy picquet line, was everywhere being pushed back before a burgeoning number of British and Portuguese troops.
A mile ahead there was a sudden, rushing sound like a huge wave breaking on a beach and Sharpe saw a rocket rise into the air and plummet towards the east. It had been over a year since he had seen the Rocket Artillery and he supposed it was as inaccurate as ever. Yet somehow the odd sight made him feel at home. “Remember those?” he asked Frederickson.
Sweet William, who had been with Sharpe when the rockets were first used against the astonished French, nodded. “Indeed I do.”
A mounted infantry captain, red coat bright, galloped up the track towards Sharpe. His voice, as he curbed his spirited horse, was peremptory with a staff officer’s vicarious authority. “Who the devil are you? What are you doing here?”
“My name is Sharpe, my rank is Major, and you call me ”sir“.”
The captain stared with incredulity, first at Sharpe, then at the dirty, draggled mixture of Riflemen and Marines who stared dully towards the rocket’s smoking trail. “Sharpe?” The captain seemed to have lost his voice. “But you’re…” he checked. ”You’ve come from the north, sir?“
“Yes.” It seemed too difficult to explain it all; to explain how an American privateer captain had agreed to rescue a garrison and to land that garrison as close as he dared to the British lines. To explain how the Thuella had flogged her way south through a wet night, and how Riflemen and Marines had thumped the schooner’s pump-handles till their muscles burned in the cold, or how Sharpe, his turn at the pumps over, had drunk brandy with an American enemy in a small cabin and promised, that when this damn fool war was done, to drink even more in a place called Marblehead. Or to explain how, in the rain-misted dawn, Cornelius Killick had landed Sharpe’s men north of the Adour estuary.
“I wish I could take you further,” the American had said.
“You can’t.” A strange sail had been spotted to the south, merely a scrap of ghostly white above a blurred horizon, but the sail meant danger to the Thuella and so Killick had turned for the shore.
Now Sharpe, marching south, had met British troops north of the river which could only mean that Elphinstone had built his bridge. “Who are you?” Sharpe asked the staff captain.
“First Division, sir.”
Sharpe nodded towards another racing plume of rocket smoke. “The Adour?”
“Yes, sir.”
They were safe. There would be surgeons for the wounded and a precious bridge across the river; a bridge leading south to St Jean de Luz and to Jane.
The bridge was there. The miraculous bridge, the bridge that only a clever man could build, a bridge to outflank the French Army, a bridge of boats.
The bridge was made from chasse-marees. A whole fleet of the luggers was moored side-by-side in the wide river mouth and, stretching from deck to deck and supported by vast cables, was a wide roadway of planks. Over the bridge marched red-coated Companies, Company after Company, an Army outflanking an enemy and going further into France. The Divisional headquarters, the staff officer said, was still south of the river.
Sharpe took his men to the northern bank where a surgeon had erected a tent and waited for customers. “Best if you wait here,” Sharpe said to Frederickson.
“Yes, sir.”
Sharpe looked at his Marines and Riflemen, at Harper and Minver and Rossner and Palmer and all the men who had fought as no men should be asked to fight. “I’ll come back for you,” he said lamely.
Sharpe left them. He walked against the tide of the invading Division, edging his way across the plank bridge that rose and fell with the small waves of the estuary. It was for this bridge that his men had taken the Teste de Buch. They had drawn the enemy to the wrong place so that the bridge could be built undisturbed.
The bridge was nearly a quarter-mile in length and had to resist the massive rise and fall of ocean tides. Seamen, under naval officers, manned windlasses that governed the anchors of the moored boats. The windlasses balanced the long bridge against the currents of river and ocean and against the vast, surging tide that swept into the Adour.
The bridge, guarded by a fleet of brigs, was a miracle of engineering.
And the man who had built it waited on the southern sea-wall where a vast capstan, built into a cage of wooden beams, could compensate the roadway’s cables against the estuary’s tidefall. Colonel Elphinstone, standing on the capstan’s platform, watched the dirty, blood- and powder-stained Rifleman approach. The expression on Elphinstone’s face was one of sheer disbelief that slowly turned to pleasure. “He said you were captured!”
The small rain stung Sharpe’s face as he looked up to the colonel. “Who, sir?”
“Bampfylde.” Elphinstone’s eyes took in the blood on Sharpe’s thigh and head. “You escaped!”
“We all did, sir. Every last goddamn man that Bampfylde abandoned. Except for the dead, of course. There were twenty-seven dead, sir.” Sharpe paused, remembering that more had died since his last count. Two of the wounded had died on the Thuella and had been slid into a grey sea. And Sharpe supposed that the American Rifleman, Taylor, must be numbered with the dead, even though he lived and was even now sailing westwards.
“Maybe thirty, sir. But the French sent a brigade against us, and we fought the bastards to a standstill, sir.” Sharpe heard the anger in his own voice and knew that this honest man did not deserve it. “I’m sorry, sir. I need a horse.”
“You need a rest.” Elphinstone, with surprising agility for a heavy, middle-aged man, swung himself down the cage of beams. “A brigade, you say?”
“A demi-brigade,” Sharpe said. “But with artillery.”
“Good God Almighty.”
Sharpe turned to watch a Battalion of Portuguese infantry scramble down the sea-wall towards the rope- held planks. “I see Bampfylde brought you the chasse-marees. The bastard did something right.”
“He says he took the fort!” Elphinstone said. “He said you went inland and were defeated.”
“Then he’s a poxed, lying bastard. We took the fort. Then we went inland, beat the Frogs by the river, and came back to find the fort abandoned. We beat them there, too.”
“Not too loud, Sharpe,” Elphinstone said, “ware right flank.”
Sharpe twisted round. Yards down the river bank was a party of some two dozen officers, both Army and Navy, who had come to see this prodigy; a floating bridge that crossed an estuary. With them were ladies who had been invited to witness the far smoke of battle. Gleaming carriages were parked on a marshy road two hundred yards to the rear. “Is that Bampfylde?”
“Gently now, Sharpe!” Elphinstone said.
“Bugger Bampfylde.” Sharpe was streaked with mud, spattered with dried blood, salt-stained, and scorched with powder burns. He walked along the sea-wall’s narrow path towards the spectators who clustered about two tripod-mounted telescopes. A spatter of applause and admiration sounded as another rocket arched towards the grey clouds.
Two naval lieutenants blocked Sharpe’s progress. One of them, seeing the soldier’s tattered, dirty state, suggested that Sharpe make a detour. “Go down there.” The naval officer pointed to the swampy mud inland of the wall.
“Get out of my way. Move!” The sudden command startled all of the spectators. A woman dropped her umbrella and gave a small scream at Sharpe’s bloody, dirty appearance, but Captain Horace Bampfylde, explaining at length how he had captured a fortress and brought these cfiasse-marees south to help out the Army, fell into a terrified silence.
“You poxed bastard,” Sharpe said. “You coward!”
“Sir!” An Army officer touched Sharpe’s arm in remonstrance, but Sharpe rounded on the man, who stepped back in sudden fear from the savage face.
Sharpe looked back to Bampfylde. “You ran away.”
“That is not…”
