“The Major’s sniffing the wind,” Challon said, and Ducos was indeed sniffing the strange winds that blew across France, and he was beginning to detect a danger in them. After two weeks in the farm Ducos told Challon of his fears. The two men walked down the valley, crossed an uncut meadow and walked beside a quick stream. “You realize,” Ducos said, “that the Emperor will never forgive us?”

“Does it matter, sir?” Challon, ever the soldier, had a carbine in his right hand while his eyes watched the forest’s edge across the stream. “God bless the Emperor, sir, but he can’t last for ever. The bastards will get him sooner rather than later.”

“Did you ever meet the Emperor?” Ducos asked.

“Never had that honour, sir. I saw him often enough, of course, but never met him, sir.”

“He has a Corsican’s sense of honour. If his family is hurt, Sergeant, then Napoleon will never forgive. So long as he has a breath in his body he will seek revenge.”

The grim words made Challon nervous. The four crates that Challon had escorted to Bordeaux had contained property that belonged to the Emperor and to his family, and soon the Emperor would have all the leisure in the world to wonder what had happened to that precious consignment. “Even so, sir, if he’s imprisoned, what can he do?”

“The Emperor of France,” Ducos said pedantically, “is the head of the French State. If he falls from power, Challon, then there will be another head of state. That man, presumably the King, will regard himself as Napoleon’s legitimate heir. I presume that you would like to die of a peaceful old age in France?“

“Yes, sir.”

“So would I.” Ducos was staring over the stream and dark trees towards a tall crag of pale rock about which two eagles circled in the cold wind, but Ducos was not seeing the rock, nor even the handsome birds, but instead was remembering the Teste de Buch fort where, once again, he had been humiliated by an English Rifleman. Sharpe. It was odd, Ducos thought, how often Sharpe had crossed his path, and even odder how often that crude soldier had succeeded in frustrating Ducos’s most careful plans. It had happened again at the benighted fort on the French coast and Ducos, seeking some clever stroke that would give himself and Sergeant Challon freedom, had found himself thinking more and more about Major Richard Sharpe.

At first Ducos had resented the intrusion of Sharpe into his thoughts, but in these last two days he had begun to see that there was a possible purpose to that intrusion. Perhaps it would be possible for Ducos to take revenge on his old enemy as a part of the concealment of the theft. The plan was intricate, but the more Ducos tested it, the more he liked it. What he needed now was Challon’s support, for without the Sergeant’s physical courage, and without the loyalty that the other Dragoons felt for Challon, the intricacy was doomed. So, as they walked beside the stream, Ducos spoke low and urgently to the Sergeant, and what he said revealed a golden bridge to a wonderful future for Sergeant Challon.

“It will mean a visit to Paris,” Ducos warned, “then a killing somewhere in France.”.

Challon shrugged. “That doesn’t sound too dangerous, sir.”

“After which we’ll leave France, Sergeant, till the storm blows out.”

“Very good, sir.” Challon was quite content so long as his duties were clear. Ducos could do the planning, and Challon would doubtless do the killing. Thus, in Challon’s world, it had ever been; he was content to let the officers devise their campaign plans, and he would cut and hack with a blade to make those plans work.

Ducos’s clever mind was racing backwards and forwards, sensing the dangers in his ideas and seeking to pre-empt those risks. “Do any of your men write?”

“Herman’s the only one, sir. He’s a clever bugger for a Saxon.”

“I need an official report written, but not in my own handwriting.” Ducos frowned suddenly. “How can he write? He’s had two fingers chopped off.”

“I didn’t say he wrote so as you can read it, sir,” Challon said chidingly, “but he’s got his letters.”

“It doesn’t matter,” for Ducos could even see a virtue in the Saxon’s illegible handwriting. And that, he realized, was the hallmark of a good plan, when even its apparent frailties turned into real advantages.

So that night, under a flickering rushlight, the nine men made a solemn agreement. The agreement was a thieves’ pact which pledged them to follow Ducos’s careful plan and, to further that plan, the Saxon laboriously wrote a long document to Ducos’s dictation. Afterwards, as the Dragoons slept, Ducos wrote his own long report which purported to describe the fate of the Emperor’s missing baggage. Then, in the morning, with panniers and saddlebags still bulging, the nine men rode north. They faced a few weeks of risk, a few months of hiding, then triumph.

CHAPTER 2

Over the next few days it seemed as if Wellington was offering peace an opportunity, for he broke off his direct advance on Toulouse and instead ordered the army into a confusing scries of manoeuvres that could only delay any confrontation with Marshal Soult’s army. If the manoeuvres were designed to offer the French a chance to retreat, they did not take it, but just waited at Toulouse while the British, Spanish and Portuguese forces made their slow and cumbersome advance. One night Nairn’s brigade was marched through pelting rain to where Engineers were laying a pontoon bridge across a wide river. Sharpe knew the river was the Garonne, for his orders said as much, but he had no idea where in France the Garonne ran. Nor did it much matter for the night becam’e a fiasco when the Engineers discovered their bridge was too short. Nairn’s men slept by the roadside as the Engineers swore and wrestled with the clumsy tin boats that should have carried the wooden roadway. Eventually the crossing was abandoned.

Three days later a bridge was successfully laid elsewhere on the river, troops crossed, but it seemed the bridge led to nothing but swampland in which the artillery floundered up to its axles. In Spain no such mistake would have happened, for in Spain there had always been willing local guides eager to lead the British army towards the hated French, but here, on the Emperor’s own soil, there was no such help. Neither was there any opposition from the local population who merely seemed numbed by the years of war.

The troops who struggled in the swamps were called back and their bridge was dismantled. There had been no interference from Marshal Soult’s army that was entrenched about the city’s outskirts. A German deserter reported on the enemy dispositions, and also said that the Emperor Napoleon had committed suicide. “A German soldier will say anything to get a decent meal,” Nairn grumbled, “or an English one to get a bottle of rum.”

No confirmation came of the Emperor’s death. It seemed that Napoleon still lived, Paris was uncaptured, and so the war went on. Wellington ordered a new bridge made and this time almost the whole army crossed to find itself north of Toulouse and between two rivers. They marched south and by Good Friday they were close enough to smell the cooking fires of the city. Next day the army marched even closer and Sharpe, riding ahead with Nairn, saw what obstacles protected the city. Between the British and Toulouse there lay a long hog-backed ridge. Beyond the ridge was a canal, but the ridge provided the city’s real protection for it was the high ground, and whoever possessed it could pour a killing fire down on to their enemies. Sharpe drew out his telescope and gazed at the ridge’s summit where he saw fresh scars of newly dug earth which betrayed that the French, far from being ready to surrender, were still fortifying the hill’s top. “I hate God-damned bloody trenches,” he said to Nairn.

“You’ve faced them before?”