“Of course.” Lord John plucked at his uniform coat as though that proved his credentials. “Harry Paget asked for me, I begged Prinny’s permission, and he finally relented.” Lord John, though a cavalry officer, had never been permitted to serve with the army. He was an aide to the Prince Regent who had resolutely refused to lose his services, but Henry Paget, Earl of Oxbridge, who was another crony of the Prince and who also commanded Britain’s cavalry, had successfully persuaded the Prince to give Lord John his chance. Lord John laughed as he went to the sideboard where he helped himself to toast, ham and coffee. “Prinny’s damned jealous. He thinks he should be here to fight Napoleon. Talking of whom, is there any news?”
“Arthur doesn’t expect any nonsense from him till July. We think he may have left Paris, but no one’s really very sure.” Arthur was’the Duke of Wellington. “I asked Arthur whether we were quite safe having our ball tonight, and he assured me we are. He’s giving a ball himself next week.”
“I must say war is an ordeal,” Lord John smiled at the Duchess from the sideboard.
The Duchess shrugged off his flippancy, and instead offered the elegant young man a most suspicious stare. “Have you come alone?”
Lord John smiled winningly as he returned to the table. “Bristow is very kindly finding me two tickets.”
“I suppose it’s that woman?”
Lord John hesitated, then nodded. “It is Jane, indeed.”
“Damn you, Johnny.”
The Duchess had sworn in a very mild tone, but her words still made Lord John bridle. Nevertheless he was too much in awe of the older woman to make any voluble protest.
The Duchess supposed she would have to write to Lord John’s mother and confess that the silly boy had brought his paramour to Brussels. She blamed the example of Harry Paget who had run off with the wife of Wellington’s younger brother. Such an open display of adultery was suddenly the fashionable sport among cavalrymen, but it could too easily turn into a blood sport and the Duchess feared for Lord John’s life. She was also offended that a young man as charming and eligible as Lord John should flaunt his foolishness. “If it was London, Johnny, I wouldn’t dream of letting her come to a ball, but I suppose Brussels is different. There’s really no saying who half these people are. But don’t present this girl to me, John, because I won’t receive her, I really won’t! Do you understand?”
„Jane’s very charming — „Lord John commenced a defence of his slighted lover.
“I don’t care if she’s as beautiful as Titania and as charming as Cordelia; she’s still another man’s wife. Doesn’t her husband worry you?”
“He would if he were here, but he isn’t. At the end of the last war he found himself some French creature and went to live with her, and so far as we know, he’s still in France.” Lord John chuckled. “The poor fool’s probably been imprisoned by Napoleon.”
“You think he’s in France?” The Duchess sounded aghast.
“He certainly isn’t with the army, I made sure of that.”
“Oh, my dear Johnny.” The Duchess lowered her cup of coffee and gave her young friend a compassionate look. “Didn’t you think to check the Dutch army list?”
Lord John Rossendale said nothing. He just stared at the Duchess.
She grimaced. “Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe is on Slender Billy’s staff, Johnny.”
Rossendale blanched. For a second it seemed that he would be unable to respond, but then he found his voice. “He’s with the Prince of Orange? Here?”
“Not in Brussels, but very close. Slender Billy wanted some British staff officers because he’s commanding British troops.“
Rossendale swallowed. “And he’s got Sharpe?”
“Indeed he has.”
“Oh, my God.” Rossendale’s face had paled to the colour of paper. “Is Sharpe coming tonight?” he asked in sudden panic.
“I certainly haven’t invited him, but I had to give Slender Billy a score of tickets, so who knows who he might bring?” The Duchess saw the fear on her young friend’s face. “Perhaps you’d better go home, Johnny.”
“I can’t do that.” For Lord John to run away would be seen as the most shameful of acts, yet he was terrified of staying. He had not only cuckolded Richard Sharpe, but in the process he had effectively stolen Sharpe’s fortune, and now he discovered that his enemy was not lost in France, but alive and close to Brussels.
“Poor Johnny,” the Duchess said mockingly. “Still, come and dance tonight. Colonel Sharpe won’t dare kill you in my ballroom, because I won’t let him. But if I were you I’d give him his wife back and find yourself someone more suitable. What about the Huntley girl? She’s got a decent fortune, and she’s not really ugly.” The Duchess mentioned another half-dozen girls, all eligible and nobly born, but Lord John was not listening. He was thinking of a dark-haired and scarred soldier whom he had cuckolded and impoverished, a soldier who had sworn to kill him in revenge.
Forty miles to the south, the Dragoon Lieutenant who had been kicked by his dying horse haemorrhaged in the nettles beside the ditch. He died before any surgeons could reach him. The Lieutenant’s servant rifled the dead man’s possessions. He kept the officer’s coins, the locket from about his neck, and his boots, but threw away the book on phrenology. The first French infantry butchered the Lieutenant’s dead horse with their bayonets and marched into Belgium with the bleeding joints of meat hanging from their belts. An hour later the Emperor’s coach passed the corpse, disturbing the flies which had been crawling over the dead Lieutenant’s face and laying their eggs in his blood-filled mouth and nostrils.
The campaign was four hours old.
The Prussian guns withdrew north of Charleroi. The artillery officer wondered why no one had thought to blow up the bridge which crossed the River Sambre in the centre of the town, but he supposed there must be fords close to Charleroi which would have made the destruction of the fine stone bridge into a futile and even petulant gesture. Once the guns had gone, the black-uniformed Prussian cavalry waited in the town north of the river, reinforcing the brigade of infantry that ransacked the houses near the bridge for furniture, which they rather half-heartedly made into a barricade at the bridge’s northern end. The townspeople sensibly stayed indoors and closed their shutters. Many of them took their carefully stored tricolours from their hiding places. Belgium had been a part of France till just a year before, and many folk in this part of the province resented being made
The French approached Charleroi on all the southern roads. The inevitable greencoated Dragoons reached the town first, followed by Cuirassiers and Red Lancers. None of the horsemen tried to force a passage across the barricaded bridge. Instead the Red Lancers, many of whom were Belgians, trotted eastwards in search of a ford. On the river’s northern bank a troop of black-uniformed Prussian Hussars shadowed the Red Lancers, and it was those Hussars who, rounding a bend in the Sambre Valley, discovered a party of French engineers floating a pontoon bridge off the southern bank. Six of the engineers had swum to the northern bank where they were fastening a rope to a great elm tree. The Hussars drew their sabres to drive the unarmed men back into the river, but French artillery had already closed on the southern bank and, as soon as the Hussars went into the trot, the first roundshot slammed across the water. It bounced a few yards ahead of the Hussars’ advance, then slammed into a wood where it tore and crashed through the thickly leaved branches.
The Hussar Captain called his men back. He could see red uniforms further up the river bank, evidence that the Lancers had found a place to cross. He led his men back to Charleroi where a desultory musket fight was flickering across the river. The French Dragoons had taken up positions in the southern houses, while the Prussian infantry in their dark blue coats and black shakos lined the barricade. The Hussar Captain reported to a Prussian brigade commander that the town was already outflanked, which news was sufficient to send most of the Prussian infantry marching briskly northwards. A last derisive French volley smashed splinters from the furniture barricade, then the town fell silent. The Prussian Hussars, left with a battalion of infantry to garrison the northern half of Charleroi, waited as French infantry reached the town and garrisoned the houses on jhe river’s southern bank. Glass crashed onto cobbles as soldiers bashed out window-panes to make crude loopholes for muskets.
A half-mile south of the bridge the first French staff officers were rifling the mail in Charleroi’s post office in search of letters which might have been posted by Allied officers and thus provide clues of British or Prussian plans. Such clues would add to the embarrassing riches of intelligence which had recently flooded in to Napoleon’s headquarters from Belgians who desperately wanted to be part of France again. The bright tricolours hanging
