“Lower the barrels, Lieutenant!” Lassan wanted to pump his shots into that fragile hull.

The Scylla’s guns were run out, ready to fire when the frigate wore, but the bow-chasers, long-nines, barked defiance. The balls cracked on the bastion’s stone, doing no damage, then the sergeant on the barrack roof again had the enemy in his line of aim. “One!” the sergeant shouted.

“Fire!” Gerard bellowed. The great barrels jerked back and up, the wheels rumbled as they rolled back down the slide, and the smoke, that stank like rotten eggs, pumped again into the cold air. Lassan’s garrison might have been stripped to the bone, he might not even have crews for every gun, but he would do his duty and he would show the British that an under-manned fort could still hurt them and still, by the grace of the good God and in the service of the French Emperor, win battles.

The handcart was made of splintered, fragile wood that was held to uncertain unity by bent, rusted nails and with lashings of thin, frayed, black twine. Some of the wheel-spokes were broken.

Sharpe pulled the handcart out of the cattle byre and listened to the ghastly screech of the wooden axle that ran through two ungreased wooden blocks. He supposed that the cart was used to take hay from these meadows into the village, or perhaps bedding straw to the fort, but it had been abandoned through the frost months to lie in this byre where the spiders had made thick webs on its spokes and handles. “It could work.” Sharpe tested the small bed of the cart and it seemed solid enough. “Except we don’t speak French.”

“Sweet William does, sir,” Harper said, then, seeing Sharpe’s face, corrected himself. “Captain Frederickson croaks Frog, sir.”

A group of armed men, approaching a fort, invited hostility, but two men, pushing a wounded comrade on a handcart, posed no threat.

“Jesus.” Frederickson’s voice was awed when, arriving at the cattle byre, he heard Sharpe’s plan. “We’re supposed to walk up and ask for a bloody sawbones?”

“You suggested knocking on the front door,” Sharpe said. “So why not?”

The Riflemen still drifted down the gentle slope. They came in scattered groups, spread out in the chain formation they would use in battle, and no alarm had been raised at the sight. Sharpe doubted whether any Frenchman had even seen the dark shapes flit down the slope. Once on the lower ground, over the tiny stream and hidden by the ditches that were edged by straggling blackthorn hedges, the Riflemen were invisible. The fort still thundered its huge noise.

“What we need,” Sharpe said, “is blood.” He was reckoning that the fort would not refuse entry to a mortally wounded man, but mortal wounds were usually foul with blood and, in search of it, both officers looked instinctively to Patrick Harper.

Who stared back with a slow and horrified understanding. “No! Holy Mother, no!”

“It has to come out, Patrick.” Sharpe spoke in a voice of sweet reason.

“You’re not a surgeon, sir. Besides!” Harper’s swollen face suddenly looked cheerful. “There’s no pincers, remember?”

Sweet William unbuckled his pouch. “The barber-surgeons of London, my dear Sergeant, will pay six shillings and six pence for a ten-ounce bag of sound teeth taken from corpses. You’d be surprised how many fashionable London ladies wear false teeth taken from dead Frogs.” Frederickson flourished a vile-looking pair of pincers. “They’re also useful for a spot of looting.”

“God save Ireland.” Harper stared at the pincers.

Captain Frederickson smiled. “You’ll be doing it for England, Sergeant Harper, for your beloved King.”

“Christ, no, sir!”

“Strip to the waist,” Sharpe ordered^

“Strip?” Harper had backed into the corner of the filthy byre.

“We need to have your chest soaked in blood,” Sharpe said as though this was the most normal procedure in the world. “As soon as the tooth’s pulled, Patrick, let the blood drip on to your skin. It won’t take long.”

“Oh, Christ in his heaven!” Harper crossed himself.

“It doesn’t hurt, man!” Frederickson took out his two false teeth and grinned at Harper. “See?”

“That was done with a sword, sir. Not bloody pincers!”

“We could do it with a sword.” Sharpe said it helpfully.

“Oh, Mary mother of God! Christ!” Harper, seeing nothing but evil intent on his officers’ faces, knew that he must mutiny or suffer. “You’d be giving me a wee drink first?”

“Brandy?” Frederickson held out his canteen.

Harper seized the canteen, uncorked it, and tipped it to his mouth.

“Not too much,” Frederickson said.

“It’s not your bloody tooth. With respect, sir.”

Frederickson looked at Sharpe. “Do you wish to play the surgeon, sir?”

“I’ve never actually drawn a tooth.” Sharpe, in front of the curious Riflemen who had gathered to watch Harper’s discomfiture, kept his voice very formal.

Frederickson shrugged. “We should have a screw-claw, of course, but the pincers work well enough on corpses. Mind you, there is a knack to it.”

“A knack?”

“You don’t pull.” Frederickson demonstrated his words with graphic movements of the rusted pincers. “You push the tooth towards the jawbone, twist one way, the other, then slide it out. It’s really not hard.”

“Jesus!” The big Irish sergeant had gone pale as rifle-cartridge paper.

“I think,” Sharpe said it with some misgivings, “that as Sergeant Harper and I have been together so long, I ought to do the deed. Push, twist, and pull?”

“Precisely, sir.”

It took five minutes to persuade and prepare Harper. The Irishman showed no fear in battle; he had gone grim-faced into the carnage of a dozen battlefields and come out victorious, but now, faced with the little business of having a tooth pulled, he sat terrified and shaking. He clung to Frederickson’s brandy as if it alone could console him in this dreadful ordeal.

“Show me the tooth.” Sharpe spoke solicitously.

Harper eventually opened his mouth and pointed to an upper tooth that was surrounded by inflamed gum. “There.”

Sharpe used a handle of the pincers and, as gently as he could, tapped the tooth. “That one?”

“Jesus Christ!” Harper bellowed and jerked away. “Bloody kill me, you will!”

“Language, Sergeant!” Frederickson was trying not to laugh while the other Riflemen were grinning with keen enjoyment.

Sharpe reversed the pincers. The jaws, somewhat battered and rusted, were saw-toothed for better purchase. It was a handy instrument for burglary and doubtless ideal for the procurement of false teeth from mangled corpses, but whether it was truly suitable for a surgical operation Sharpe could not yet say. “It can’t be worse than having a baby,” he said to Harper. “And Isabella didn’t make this fuss.”

“Women don’t mind pain,” the Irishman said. “I do.”

“Don’t grip the fang too hard,” Frederickson observed helpfully, “or you might smash it, sir. It’s the devil of a job to fetch out the remnants of a broken tooth. I saw it happen to Jock Callaway before Salamanca and it quite spoilt Jock’s battle. You remember Jock, sir?”

“The 61st?” Sharpe asked.

“Died of the fever next winter, poor fellow.” Frederickson stooped to see what was happening.

The word ‘fever’ shot through Sharpe’s head like a death-knell, but this was no time for such thoughts. “Open-your mouth, Sergeant.”

“You’ll be gentle?” Harper’s voice was sullen and mutinous.

“I will be as gentle as a new-born lamb. Now open your bloody gob.”

The huge mouth with its yellowed teeth opened. The Irishman’s eyes were wary and a faint groan, half a moan, escaped as Sharpe brought the pincers up.

Slowly, very slowly, doing his utmost not to jar the offending tooth, Sharpe closed the vicious jaws on that part of the tooth not hidden by the swollen gum-tissue. “That’s not too bad, is it?” he asked soothingly. He gripped the handles tight, but not too tight, and felt a faint tremor run through the huge man. “Ready?”