‘May it kill the bastard!’ Sharpe sipped his tea. ‘And I hope it hurts.’

They went on horseback to the cemetery to outdistance the curious troops of the South Essex who wanted to follow and watch their Major skewer the Spanish aristocrat. D’Alembord, a natural horseman, led Sharpe on a circuitous route. Sharpe, once again mounted on one of d’Alembord’s spare horses, wondered whether he should accept the younger man’s advice and turn back.

He was behaving stupidly and he knew it. He was thirty-six years of age, a Major at last, and he was throwing it all away for mere superstition. He had joined the army twenty years before, straggling with a group of hungry recruits to escape a murder charge. From that inauspicious beginning he had joined that tiny band of men who were promoted from Sergeant into the Officers’ Mess. He had done more. Most men promoted from the ranks ended their days as Lieutenants, supervising the Battalion stores or in charge of the drill-square. Most such men, Wellington claimed, ended as drunkards. Yet Sharpe had gone on rising. From Ensign to Lieutenant, Lieutenant to Captain, and Captain to Major, and men looked at him as one of the few, the very very few, who might rise from the ranks to lead a Battalion.

He could lead a Battalion, and he knew it. The war was not over yet. The French might be retreating throughout Europe, but no enemy army had yet pierced the French frontier. Even if this year’s campaign was as successful as last year’s, and pushed the French back to the Pyrenees, then there would be hard fighting if, unlike last year, the British were to force their way through those cold, high mountains. Fighting in which Lieutenant Colonels would die and leave their Battalions to new commanders.

Yet he risked it all. He twisted his horse through bright-leaved ash trees on a hill top that overlooked their destination, and he thought of the Marquesa, of her eyes on him, and he knew that he risked all for one woman who played with men, and for another who was dead. None of it made sense, he was simply driven by a soldier’s superstition that said not to do this thing was to risk oblivion.

D’Alembord curbed his horse at the hill’s edge. ‘Dear God!’ He pulled a cigar from his boot-top, struck a light with his flint and steel, and jerked his head at the valley. ‘Looks like a day at the races!’

The cemetery, in Spanish fashion, was a walled enclosure built well away from the town. The hugely thick walls, divided into niches for the dead, were thronged with men. There were the colours of the uniforms of Spain and Britain, the Spanish to the west and north, the British to the south and east, sitting and standing on the wall as though they waited for a bullfight. D’Alembord twisted in his saddle. ‘I thought this was supposed to be private!’

‘So did I.’

‘You can’t go through with it, Sharpe!’

‘I have to.’ He wondered whether another man, an old friend like Major Hogan or Captain Frederickson, could have persuaded him to stop this idiocy. Perhaps, because d’Alembord was a newcomer to the Battalion, and was a man of that easy elegance which Sharpe envied, Sharpe was trying to impress him.

D’Alembord shook his head. ‘You’re mad, sir.’

‘Maybe.’

The Captain blew smoke into the evening sky and pointed with his cigar at the sun which was low in the west. He shrugged, as though accepting the inevitability of the fight. ‘You’ll face up north and south, but he’ll try to manoeuvre you so the sun is in your eyes.’

‘I’d thought of that.’

D’Alembord ignored the ungracious acceptance of his advice. ‘Assume we’ll start with you in the south.’

‘Why?’

‘Because that’s where the British troops are, and that’s where you’ll go to strip off your jacket.’

Somehow Sharpe had not realised how formal this would be, that he would take off his prized Rifleman’s jacket and fight in his grubby shirt. ‘So?’

‘So he’ll be attacking your left, trying to make you go right. He’ll feint right and thrust left. He’ll be expecting you to do the opposite. If I were you, I’d make your feint your attack,’

Sharpe grinned. He had always intended to take fencing lessons, but somehow there had never seemed to be time. In battle a man did not fence, he fought. The most delicate swordsman on a battlefield was usually overwhelmed by the anger of bayonets and savage steel, yet this evening there would be no madness beneath the battlesmoke, just cold skill and death. ‘The last time I fought a skilled swordsman I won.’

‘You did?’ d’Alembord smiled in mock surprise.

‘I got him to run his blade through my thigh. That trapped it and I killed him.’

D’Alembord stared at the Major, whose fame had reached Britain, and saw that he had been told the truth. He shuddered. ‘You are mad.’

‘It helps when you’re fighting. Shall we go down?’

D’Alembord was searching the cemetery and roadway for a sign of Lieutenant Price bringing Colonel Leroy to the duel, but he could see no horsemen. He shrugged inwardly. ‘To our fate, sir, to our fate.’

‘You don’t have to come, d’Alembord.’

‘True, sir. I shall say I was a mere innocent misled by you.’ He spurred his horse down the pastureland of the hillside.

Sharpe followed. It was a beautiful evening, a promise of summer in the blossoms beneath his horse’s hooves and in the warm fragrant air. There was a scattering of high mackerel clouds in the west, each tiny cloud touched with pink as though they were puffs of cannon smoke drifting over a burning field.

The men sitting on the cemetery wall saw the two horsemen coming, recognized the green jacket, and a yell went up as though Sharpe was a prizefighter coming to hammer out a hundred bloody rounds with his naked fists. To his right, coming from the town, he saw a dark coach, windows curtained, and on its doorway, too far away to distinguish the details, was a coat of arms.

He knew that escutcheon. It had been quartered and requartered over the years as the family of Casares el Grande y Melida Sadaba had married more wealth and privilege until now, as the nineteenth century began, the crest was a patchwork of the history of the Spanish nobility. And into that family, marrying the childless widower who had been close to the Spanish throne, had come the golden-haired woman who was a traitor. La Marquesa. She would be pleased, Sharpe thought, to know that two men would face each other with drawn swords on her account.

The cheers were echoed by jeers from the Spaniards as he ducked under the arched gateway of the cemetery. The shadows of the carved graves were long. Flowers wilted in earthenware pots. An old lady, swathed and scarved in black, ignored the unseemly noise that sullied her family’s resting place.

D’Alembord led Sharpe to the south side of the burial ground where they dismounted. The British troops, mixed with some of the tough soldiers of the King’s German Legion, shouted at Sharpe to kill the dago, to teach the bastard a lesson, and then Sharpe heard the far side of the cemetery erupt into celebration and he turned to see his opponent walk into the burial ground. The Marques had his long sword tucked in Spanish fashion beneath his arm. The priest was beside him, while Major Mendora walked behind. The old woman knelt to the priest who made the sign of the cross over her then touched her scarved head.

D’Alembord smiled at Sharpe. ‘I shall go and make polite conversation. Try and persuade them to back down.’

‘They won’t.’

‘Of course not. Fools never do.’ D’Alembord shrugged and walked towards the party of Spaniards. Major Mendora, the Marques’ second, came to meet him.

Sharpe tried to ignore the cheering, the insults, and the shouts. There was no turning back now. In less time than it took the sun to go down, he had changed his life. He had accepted the challenge and nothing would be the same again. Only by walking away now, by refusing to fight, could he save his career. Yet to do that was to lose his pride, and deny fate.