Brandy and champagne arrived. Frederickson, without asking, poured the red wine from Sharpe’s cup on to the sawdust covered floor and replaced it with champagne. “A toast! To peace!”

“To peace!”

“To Dorset!” Frederickson beamed.

“To Dorset!” Sharpe wondered whether a letter had come from England, then forgot the thought to savour this astounding news. It was over! No more canister, no more bayonets, no more shivering on long night marches, no more stench of French cavalry, no more sabres chopping down, no more bullets. Easter had triumphed and death was defeated. “I must write to Jane,” Sharpe said, and he wondered whether she was celebrating the news in some Dorset village. There would be oxen roasting, hogsheads of ale, church bells ringing. It was over.

“You can write to Jane tomorrow,” Frederickson ordered, “for tonight we get drunk.”

“Tonight we get drunk,” Sharpe agreed, and by one o’clock they were on the city’s walls where they sang nonsense and shouted their triumph towards the British bivouac fires that lay to the city’s west. By two o’clock they were searching for another wineshop, but instead found a group of cavalry sergeants who insisted on sharing some plundered champagne with the Rifle officers. At three o’clock, arm in arm to keep themselves upright, Sharpe and Frederickson staggered through the abandoned French fortifications and crossed the wooden bridge over the canal where two friendly sentries prevented them from falling into the water. At four o’clock they arrested Sergeant Harper on a charge of being sober, and at five o’clock they found him not guilty because he no longer was. At six o’clock Major Richard Sharpe was being sick, and at seven o’clock he staggered to Nairn’s vacant tent and gave instructions that he was not to be woken up ever again. Ever.

Because a war was over, and it was won, and at long long last there was peace.

PART TWO

CHAPTER 4

Nairn’s Brigade was no more. Broken by battle and leaderless, its shrunken battalions were attached to other brigades. The reason was purely administrative, for now the army was to be run by bureaucrats instead of by fighting men, and the bureaucrats had been ordered to disband the army that had fought from the Portuguese coast to deep inside France. Frederickson was curious to discover just how far the army had marched and found his answer with the help of some old maps that he uncovered in a Toulouse bookseller’s shop. “As the crow flies,” he told Sharpe in an aggrieved voice, “it’s only six hundred and sixty miles, and it took us six years.”

Or ten thousand miles as a soldier reckoned miles, which was as bad roads that froze in winter, were quagmires in spring and choked the throat with dust in summer. Soldiers’ miles were those that were marched under the weight of back-breaking packs. They were miles that were marched over and over again, in advance and retreat, in chaos and in fear. Soldiers’ miles led to sieges and battles, and to the death of friends, but now those soldiers’ miles were all done and the army would travel the crow’s one hundred and twenty miles to Bordeaux where ships waited to take them away. Some battalions were being sent to garrisons far across the oceans, some were being ordered to the war in America, and a few were being sent home where, their duty done, they would be disbanded.

Frederickson’s company was ordered to England where, along with the rest of its battalion, the company would be broken up and the men sent to join other battalions of the Goth. Most of the Spaniards who had enlisted in the company during the war had already deserted. They had joined the Greenjackets only to kill Frenchmen, and, that job efficiently done, Frederickson gladly turned his blind eye to their departure. Sharpe, without a battalion of his own or even a job, received permission to travel back to England with the Riflemen and so, three weeks after the French surrender, he found himself clambering on to one of the flat-bottomed river barges that had been hired to transport the army up the River Garonne to the quays of Bordeaux.

Seconds before the barge was poled away from the wharf a messenger arrived from Divisional Headquarters with a bag of mail for Frederickson’s company. The bag was small, for most of the company could not read or write, and of those who could there were few whose relatives would think to write letters. One letter was for a man who had died at Fuentes d’Onoro, but whose mother, refusing to believe the news, still insisted on writing each month with exhortations for her long dead son to be a good soldier, a fervent Christian, and a credit to his family,

There was also a packet for Major Richard Sharpe, forwarded from London by his Army Agents. The packet had first been sent to the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, then forwarded to General Headquarters, then to Division, and had thus taken over a month to reach Sharpe.

“So you needn’t have worried/ Frederickson said, ”Jane wrote after ail.“

“Indeed,” Sharpe carried the packet forward to find a patch of privacy in the barge’s bows where he tore off the sealing wafer and, with a quite ridiculous and boyish anticipation, tore open the packet to find two letters.

The first was irom a man in Lancashire who claimed to have invented a chain-shot that could be fired from a standard musket or rifle and which, if fired low, would be fatal against the legs of cavalry horses. He begged Major Sharpe’s help in persuading the Master General of Ordnance to buy the device, which was called Armbruster’s Patent Horse-Leg Breaker. Sharpe screwed the letter into a ball and threw it over the barge’s gunwale.

The second letter was from Sharpe’s Army Agents. They presented their compliments to Major Sharpe, then begged leave to inform him that, in accordance with his written instructions to allow Mrs Jane Sharpe authority over his account, they had sold all his 4 per cent stock and transferred the monies into the charge of Mrs Jane Sharpe of Cork Street, Westminster. They thanked Major Sharpe for the trust and privilege of handling his affairs, and hoped that should he ever need such services again, he would not forget his humble and obedient servants, Messrs Hopkinson and Son, Army Agents, of St Albans Street, London. The humble servants added that the expense of selling the 4 per cent stock and the necessary ledger work for the closure of his account amounted to £16. 145. 4d, which sum had been deducted from the draft passed to Mrs Jane Sharpe. They wished to remind Major Sharpe that they still held his Presentation sword donated by the Patriotic Fund, and begged to remain, etc.

The bargemen hoisted a clumsy gaff-rigged sail that made the tarred shrouds creak ominously. Sharpe stared uncomprehendingly at the letter, unaware that the barge was moving. A small child on the far bank sucked her thumb and stared solemnly at the strange soldiers who were being carried away from her.

“Good news, I trust?” Frederickson clambered into the bows to interrupt Sharpe’s reverie.

Sharpe wordlessly handed the letter to Frederickson who read it swiftly. “I didn’t know you’d got a Presentation sword?” Frederickson said cheerfully.

“That was for taking the eagle at Talavera. I think it was a fifty guinea sword.”

“A good one?”

“Very ornate.” Sharpe wondered how Frederickson could so completely have misunderstood the importance of the letter, and merely be curious about a blued and gilded sword. “It’s a Rinkfiel-Solingen blade and a Kimbley scabbard. Wouldn’t serve in a fight.”

“Nice to hang on the wall, though.” Frederickson handed the letter back. “I’m glad for you. It’s splendid news.”

“Is it?”

“Jane’s collected the money, so presumably she’s off to buy your house in Dorset. Isn’t that what you wanted to hear?”