CHAPTER 10

There was small sleep to be had that night for either Riflemen or Marines. The dawn was cold; bitter cold. Wraiths of mist drifted above the meadows frosted crisply white.

Sharpe woke with a stinging headache behind his bandaged forehead. He sat with his back against a pollarded willow and felt a louse in his armpit that must have come from the Amelie, but he was too tired and too cold to hunt for it.

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” Frederickson, teeth chattering with the cold, crouched by Sharpe. “Nothing passed yesterday.”

Dim in the mist, a hundred yards upstream, a handsome stone bridge with carved urns marking the limits of its balustrades, arched over the Leyre. Next to the bridge, and on the western bank down which Sharpe and his small force had marched last night, there stood a stone-built house from which a trickle of chimney smoke tantalized the senses with its promise of a warm fire.

“It’s a toll-house,” Frederickson said, “and the bugger wouldn’t give us coffee.”

No doubt, Sharpe reflected, the toll-keepers of France were as disobliging as their English counterparts. There was something about that job to bring out the surliness in a man. “If we had enough powder we could break that damn bridge.”

“We don’t,” Frederickson said unhelpfully.

Sharpe struggled to his feet. Frederickson had taken the last watch and his picquets were set double-strength about the margins of the water-meadow where the small force had bivouacked. It had been a miserable bivouac. Some of the Marines had sheltered beneath the scanty cover of the limbers, but most of Sharpe’s men had simply rolled themselves in greatcoats, pillowed their heads on packs, and shivered through the slow, small hours.

A cow, on the further bank, bellowed softly and watched the two men who walked beside the river. A cow at pasture in February suggested a softer climate than England, but it was still damned cold. A swan, beautiful and ghostly, appeared beneath the bridge, followed a moment later by its mate, and the two birds, disdaining the unnatural movement in the fields, glided gently downstream. “Luncheon,” Frederickson said.

“I never liked their taste,” Sharpe said, “like stringy water-weeds.” He flinched as a sudden stab of pain lanced in his head. He wondered if the naval surgeon had been wrong, and if his wound was more serious than the mere bloody scrape of a carbine ball. He seemed to remember that Johnny Pearson of the Buffs had taken such a wound at Busaco, sworn it was nothing, then dropped dead a week later.

A rickety wooden fence, untended and draped with frost-whitened thorn, barred the steep embankment that carried this High Road of France southwards. Sharpe climbed to the carriageway that was formed of a white, flinty stone which had been rammed hard to smoothness, but which was nevertheless rutted and puddled with ice. No weeds grew on the surface, which bespoke constant use. To the south, where the road disappeared in the mist, he could see the shapes of houses, a church, and tall, bare poplars. The river curved here, and doubtless that small town was where the old road crossed the river, while this bridge, newer and wider, had been built in the meadows outside the town so that the hurrying armies would not have to negotiate narrow, mediaeval streets on their urgent journeys to Spain. Down this carriageway, for the last six years, the guns and men and ammunition and horses and blades and saddles and all the countless trivia of war had been dragged to feed the French armies. And up this same road, Sharpe thought, those same armies would trudge in defeat. “What’s in the town?”

Frederickson knew Sharpe’s question meant what enemy forces might be in the town. “The toll-keeper says nothing.”

Sharpe turned to look north. “And up there?”

“A stand of beeches a quarter mile up and an excuse for a farm. It’ll do.”

Sharpe grunted. He trusted Frederickson absolutely, and if Frederickson said that the beeches and farm were the best site for an ambuscade, then Sharpe knew it would be pointless to look elsewhere.

A violent screech, a flapping of wings, and a sudden curse betrayed that the swans had been purloined for food. Captain Palmer, scratching his crotch and yawning, climbed the fence. “Morning, sir.”

“Morning, Palmer,” Sharpe said. “Cold enough for you?”

Palmer did not reply. The three officers walked towards the toll-house that was marked by a white barred gate across the road. A black and white painted board, just like those on the toll-houses of England, announced the crossing charges. There was a ford to the right of the bridge, but the ford had been half blocked with boulders so that no carriage or waggon could escape payment of the toll.

The toll-keeper, peg-legged and bald, stood truculently by his gate. He spoke to Frederickson, who, in turn, spoke to Sharpe. “If we haven’t got the laissez-passer then we have to pay six sous.”

“Lacy-passay?” Sharpe asked.

“I rather gave him to think we’re German troops fighting for Bonaparte,” Frederickson said. “The lacy-passay allows us to escape all tolls.”

“Tell him to go to hell.”

Frederickson conveyed Captain Sharpe’s compliments to the toll-keeper who answered by spitting at Sharpe’s feet. „Trots hommes,“ the man said, holding up three fingers in case these heathen German troops did not understand him, „six sous.”

“Bugger him.” Sharpe raised the black-painted metal latch that held the gate shut and, from above him, a click sounded and he looked up to see the toll-keeper’s wife leaning from an upper window. She was a woman of squat, startling ugliness, her hair bound with a muslin scarf, and, more to the immediate point, armed with a vast, brass-barrelled blunderbuss that covered the three officers.

„Six sous,“ said the toll-keeper stoically. Life held few surprises for toll-keepers, and strange troops were nothing new to him.

Captain Palmer, who held Major Richard Sharpe’s reputation in some awe, was now astonished to see the Rifleman grudgingly take out a ten-franc silver piece. A delay ensued while the toll-keeper went indoors, unlocked his iron-bound chest, found the right change, then gave Sharpe a written receipt which, Frederickson explained, would enable reimbursement to be made at the District Headquarters in Bordeaux.

“I can’t have that bugger charging for all of us,” Sharpe said. “Rather than disarm his Grenadier, William, we’ll march the men through the ford.”

“Yes, sir.” Frederickson was highly amused by the whole transaction.

“Shouldn’t we…?” Palmer began hesitantly.

“No,” Sharpe said. “We’re under orders not to agitate civilians, Captain. No stealing, no raping. If anyone breaks that order he’ll be hanged. By me. Instantly.” His headache had made him speak more sharply than he had intended.

“Yes, sir.” Palmer sounded subdued.

They walked to the stand of beeches that Frederickson had patrolled in the night. “It’s the right place,” Sharpe said grudgingly, “if anything travels today. Which I doubt.” Any sensible man would stay indoors on this cold day.

The beeches lay to the right of the road, the farm to the left. The farm was a miserable hovel of a place; merely a mud-walled cottage surrounded by frosted slush with two dilapidated outbuildings where chickens lived in filthy straw.

A pigsty lay beyond a low hedge. Sharpe broke a piece of cat-ice with his heel, then swivelled to look where the road passed between the beeches and the farm’s hedgerow. “We use your Marines there, Palmer. You stop them, and the Rifles will kill them.”

Palmer, not wanting to show any lack of understanding, nodded. Frederickson understood instantly. By using the Marines, with their heavy firepower of quick-loading muskets, as the stop in the bottle, Sharpe would force an enemy to scatter left and right to outflank the road-block. On those flanks they would run into the hidden Riflemen. It would be quick, bloody, and effective. “What if they come from the south?”