Challon stared at the symbols of Napoleon’s enemies, and Ducos watched the pigtailed Sergeant. Challon was not a subtle man, and his leathery scarred face betrayed his thoughts as openly as though he spoke them aloud. The first thing the face betrayed to Ducos was that Sergeant Challon knew what was concealed in the four crates. Ducos would have been astonished if Challon had not known. The second thing that the Sergeant betrayed was that he, just like Ducos, desired those contents.

Challon looked up at the small Major. “Might I ask where Colonel Maillot is, sir?”

“Colonel Maillot contracted a sudden fever which my physician thinks will prove fatal.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir,” Challon’s voice was very wooden, “as some of the lads liked the Colonel, sir.” For a second, as he looked into those hard eyes, Ducos thought he had wildly miscalculated. Then Challon glanced at the incriminating cockades. “But some of the lads will learn to live with their grief.”

The relief washed through Ducos, though he was far too clever to reveal either that relief or the fear which had preceded it. Challon, Ducos now knew, was his man. “The fever,” Ducos said mildly, “can be very catching.”

“So I’ve heard, sir.”

“And our responsibility will demand at least six men. Don’t you agree?”

“I think more than that will survive the fever, sir,” Challon said as elliptically as Ducos. They were now confederates in treachery, and neither could state it openly, though each perfectly understood the other.

“Good.” Ducos picked up one of the cockades. Challon hesitated, then picked up the other, and thus their pact was sealed.

Two mornings later there was a sea-fog that rolled from the Garonne estuary to shroud Bordeaux in a white, clinging dampness through which nine horsemen rode eastwards in the dawn. Pierre Ducos led them. He was dressed in civilian clothes with a sword and two pistols at his belt. Sergeant Challon and his men were in the vestiges of their green uniforms, though all the troopers had discarded their heavy metal helmets. Their saddle bags bulged, as did the panniers of the pack horses that three of the troopers led.

To deceive, cheat, disguise, and outwit; those were the skills Ducos had given to his Emperor; which skills must now serve his own ends. The horses clattered through the city’s outer gate, stirred the fog with their passing, and then were gone.

CHAPTER 1

“Of course the Peer knew about it,” Major-General Nairn was speaking of the duel, “but between you and me I don’t think he was unhappy about it. The Navy’s been rather irritating him lately.”

“I expected to be arrested,” Sharpe said.

“If you’d have killed the bugger, you would have been. Even Wellington can’t absolutely ignore a deceased Naval Captain, but it was clever of you just to crease the man’s bum.” Nairn gave a joyful bark of laughter at the thought of Bampfylde’s wound.

“I was trying to kill him,” Sharpe confessed.

“It was much cleverer of you to give him a sore arse. And let me say how very good it is to see you, my dear Sharpe. I trust Jane is well?”

“Indeed, sir.”

Sharpe’s tone caused Nairn to give the Rifleman an amused look. “Do I detect that you are in marital bad odour, Sharpe?”

“I stink, sir.”

It had taken Sharpe three days to catch up with the advancing army, and another half-day to find Nairn, whose brigade was on the left flank of the advance. Sharpe had eventually discovered the Scotsman on a hilltop above a ford which the British had captured that morning and through which a whole Division now marched. The French were only visible as a few retreating squadrons of cavalry far to the cast, though a battery of enemy artillery occasionally fired from a copse of trees about a mile beyond the river.

“You brought Frederickson?” Nairn now asked.

“His men are at the foot of the hill.”

“Creased his bum!” Nairn laughed again. “Can I assume from your marital odour that Jane is not with you?”

“She sailed for home two days ago, sir.”

“Best place for a woman. I never really did approve of officers carrying wives around like so much baggage. No offence, of course, Jane’s a lovely girl, but she’s still baggage to an army. Hello! Christ!” These last words were a greeting for a French cannonball that had thumped across the river and bounced uphill to force Nairn into a frantic evasion that almost spilled him from his saddle. The Scotsman calmed his horse, then gestured over the river. “You can see what’s happening, Sharpe. The bloody French try to stop us at every river, and we just outflank the buggers and keep moving.” At the foot of the slope Nairn’s brigade patiently waited their turn to cross the ford. The brigade was composed of one Highland battalion and two English county battalions.

“What exactly do you want me to do?” Sharpe asked Nairn.

“Damned if I know. Enjoy yourself. I am!” And indeed the Scotsman, who had endured years of dreary staff work for Wellington, revelled in his new command. Nairn’s only regret was that so far there had been no battle in which he could demonstrate how foolish Wellington had been in not giving him a brigade much earlier. “God damn it, Richard, there’s not much of the war left. I want one crack at the garlic-reekers.”

Sharpe might have been ordered to enjoy himself, but he soon discovered that being chief of staff to a brigade entailed enormously long days and seemingly endless problems. He worked wherever Nairn’s headquarters happened to be; sometimes in a sequestrated farmhouse, but more usually in a group of tents pitched wherever the brigade happened to bivouac. Sometimes Sharpe would hear the thump of guns to the east and he would know that a French rearguard was in action, but Sharpe had neither the time, nor the responsibility, to join the fighting. He only knew that every river crossed and every mile of country captured meant more work for the harried staff officers who had to marry men to food, weapons to ammunition, and Divisional Headquarters’ orders to a baser reality.

It was a salutary job. Sharpe had always expressed a combat soldier’s scorn for most staff officers, believing that such arrogant creatures were overpaid and underworked, but as Sharpe discovered the problems of organizing a brigade, so he learned that it was his job, rather than Nairn’s, to solve those problems. Thus one typical day, just two weeks after his arrival at the brigade, began with an appeal from the commander of a battery of horse artillery whose supply wagon had become lost in the tangle of French lanes behind the British advance. Retrieving the errant wagon was no part of Sharpe’s duties, except that the gunners were detailed to support Nairn’s forward positions and Sharpe knew that field guns without roundshot were useless, and so he sent an aide in search of the missing supplies.

At breakfast a patrol of the King’s German Legion light cavalry fetched a score of French prisoners to the farmhouse that was Nairn’s temporary headquarters. The cavalry commander bellowed for a competent officer and, when Sharpe appeared, the man waved at the frightened enemy soldiers. “I don’t want the buggers!” He and his men galloped away and Sharpe had to feed the Frenchmen, guard them, and find medical help for the half-dozen men whose faces and shoulders had been slashed by the German sabres.

A message arrived from Division ordering Nairn to move his brigade three miles eastward. The brigade was supposed to be enjoying a rest day while the southern divisions caught up, but evidently the orders had been changed. Sharpe sent an aide in search of Nairn who had snatched the opportunity to go duck-shooting, then, just as he had all the clerks, cooks, prisoners, and officers’ servants ready to move, another message cancelled the first. The mules were unloaded and urgent messages sent to countermand the march orders which had long gone to the battalions. Another aide was sent to tell Nairn he could continue slaughtering ducks.