It was all over – anyone could see that, the town indefensible – but Cox still hoped. He had been weeping at the death and destruction, the swath that had gone through his town and his hopes.

'How?'

There were answers offered by the staff officers with Cox, good answers, and they told the Brigadier of the French shells that had landed just before the explosion. The officers looked over the wall at the massing crowd of Frenchmen who had come to stare at the giant breach in the town's defences, and at the pall of smoke, as men might watch a once-proud King on his deathbed.

'A shell,' one of the officers told Cox. 'It must have set off the small ammunition.'

'Oh, God.' Cox was close to tears. 'We should have had a magazine.'

Cox tried to stiffen his will to go on fighting, but they all knew it was done. There was no ammunition left, nothing to fight with, and the French would understand. There would be no unpleasantness; the surrender would be discussed in a civilized way, and Cox tried to stave it off, tried to find hope in the smoke-filled air, but finally agreed.

'Tomorrow, gentlemen, tomorrow. We fly the flag one more night.' He pushed his way through the group and saw Sharpe and Lossow waiting. 'Sharpe. Lossow. Thank God you're alive. So many gone.'

'Yes, sir.'

Cox was biting back tears. 'So many.' Sharpe wondered if Tom Garrard had survived. Cox noticed the blood on the Rifleman's uniform. 'You're wounded?'

'No, sir. I'm all right. Permission to leave, sir?'

Cox nodded, an automatic reaction. The gold was forgotten in the horror of the lost war.

Sharpe plucked Lossow's sleeve. 'Come on.'

At the bottom of the ramp, a puzzled look on his face, Cesar Moreno waited for them. He put a hand out to stop Sharpe. 'Teresa?'

Sharpe smiled, the first smile since the explosion. 'She's safe. We're leaving now.'

'And Joaquim?'

'Joaquim?' For a second Sharpe was not certain whom Teresa's father was talking about, and then he remembered the fight on the rooftop. 'He's dead.'

'And this?' Cesar Moreno's hand was still on Sharpe's sleeve as he looked round the destruction.

'An accident.'

Moreno looked at him and shrugged. 'Half our men are dead.'

There was nothing Sharpe could say. Lossow broke in. 'The horses?'

Moreno looked at him and shrugged. 'They were not in the house that collapsed. They're all right.'

'We'll use them!' The German went ahead and Moreno checked Sharpe with a hand.

'She'll take over, I suppose.'

The Rifleman nodded. 'Probably. She can fight.'

Moreno gave a rueful smile. 'She knows whose side to be on.'

Sharpe looked at the smoke, at the flames on the hilltop, smelt the burning. 'Don't we all?' He shook himself free, turned again to the grey-haired man. 'I'll be back for her, one day.'

'I know.'

The French had left their lines to gape at the smoking ruins at the northern wall. There was nothing to stop the Company leaving, and they took the gold and went west, under the smoke, and back to the army. The war was not lost.

EPILOGUE

'What happened, Richard?'

'Nothing, sir.'

Hogan moved his horse forward to a patch of succulent grass. 'I don't believe you.'

Sharpe stirred in his saddle; he hated riding. 'There was a girl.'

'Is that all?'

'All? She was special.'

The breeze from the sea was cool on his face; the water sparkled with a million flashes of light, like a giant army of lance-tips, and beating northwards towards the Channel a frigate laid its grey sails towards the land and left a streak of white in its path.

Hogan watched the ship. 'Despatches.'

'News of victory?' Sharpe's tone was ironic.

'They won't believe it. It's a funny victory.' Hogan stared at the distant horizon, miles out to sea from the hilltop where their horses stood. 'Do you see the fleet out there? A convoy going home.'

Sharpe grunted, felt the twinge in his healing shoulder. 'More money for the bloody merchants. Why couldn't they have sent it here?'

Hogan smiled. 'There's never enough, Richard. Never.'

'There had better be now. After what we did to get it here.'

'What did you do?'

'I told you, nothing.' He stared a challenge at the gentle Irish Major. 'We were sent to get it, we got it, and we brought it back.'

'The General's pleased.' Hogan said it in a neutral tone.

'He'd bloody better be pleased! For Christ's sake!'

'He thought you were lost.' Hogan's horse moved again, cropping the grass, and the Major took off his cocked hat and fanned his face. 'Pity about Almeida.'

Sharpe made a face. 'Pity about Almeida.'

Hogan sighed patiently. 'We thought it was done for. We heard the explosion, of course, and there was no gold. Without the gold there was no chance.'

'There was a little chance.' Sharpe almost spat the words at him and Hogan shrugged.

'No, not a chance you'd want, Richard.'

Sharpe let his anger sink; he thought of the girl, watched the frigate flap its sails and bend into its next tack. 'Which would you rather have had, sir?' His voice was very cold, very far away. 'The gold, or Almeida?'

Hogan pulled his horse's head up. 'The gold, Richard. You know that.'

'You're sure?'

Hogan nodded. 'Very sure. Thousands might have died without the gold.'

'But we don't know that."

Hogan waved his arm at the landscape. 'We do.'

It was a miracle, perhaps one of the greatest feats of military engineering, and it had taken up the gold. The gold had been needed, desperately needed, or the work would never have been finished and the ten thousand labourers, some of whom Sharpe could see, could have packed up their shovels and picks and simply waited for the French. Sharpe watched the giant scrapers, hauled by lines of men and oxen, shaping the hills.

'What do you call it?'

'The Lines of Torres Vedras.'

Three lines barred the Lisbon peninsula, three giant fortifications made with the hills themselves, fortifications that dwarfed the granite-works at Almeida. The first line, on which they rode, was twenty-six miles long, stretching from the Atlantic to the Tagus, and there were two others behind it. The hills had been steepened, crowned with gun batteries, and the lowland flooded. Behind the hillcrests sunken roads meant that the twenty-five thousand garrison troops could move unseen by the French, and the deep valleys, where they could not be filled, were blocked with thorn-trees, thousands of them, so that from the air it must have looked as if a giant's child had shaped the landscape the way a boy played with a few square inches of wet soil by a stream.

Sharpe stared eastwards, at the unending line, and he found it hard to believe. So much work, so many escarpments made by hand, crowned with hundreds of guns cased in stone forts, their embrasures looking to the north, to the plain where Massena would be checked.

Hogan rode alongside him. 'We can't stop him, Richard, not till he gets here. And here he stays.'

'And we're back there.' Sharpe pointed towards Lisbon, thirty miles to the south.

Hogan nodded. 'It's simple. He'll never break the lines, never; they're too strong. And he can't go round; the Navy's there. So here he stops, and the rains start, and in a couple of months he'll be starving and we come out again to reconquer Portugal.'

'And on into Spain?' Sharpe asked.

'On into Spain.' Hogan sighed, waved again at the huge scar of the unbelievable fortress. 'And we ran out of money. We had to get money.'

'And you got it.'

Hogan bowed to him. 'Thank you. Tell me about the girl?'

Sharpe told him as they rode towards Lisbon, crossing the second and third lines that would never be used. He remembered the parting after they had left the river fortress, unchallenged, and the Light Company, clumsily mounted on the Spanish horses, had bounced after Lossow's Germans. One French patrol had come near them, but the Germans had wheeled to meet it, their sabres drawn in one hissing movement, and the French had sheered away. They had stopped beside the Coa and Sharpe had handed Teresa the one thousand gold coins he had promised.