Those Marines who had remained at the Teste de Buch were the first men to leave the slighted fortress. They were rowed to the brig and, on their way, tipped muskets from the fort’s armoury into the corroding seawater. The Comte de Maquerre, after an emotional farewell to the newly woken Favier, went to the Scylla.
By ten in the morning only a handful of sailors were left ashore. Quickfuses were laid into the fort’s magazines, while another was taken to a stack of powder barrels that had been piled in the kitchens beneath the barracks block. The spare rifle ammunition, left by Sharpe to await his return, was piled on to that stack. Jules Favier, who had taken his horse safely beyond the drawbridge before the destruction began, shook Bampfylde’s hand. “God save King George, Captain.”
“God bless King Louis.”
Favier used a naval ladder to descend the western battlements, then picked his way through the sand to where his horse was tethered. He waved a last time to Captain Bampfylde who, surrounded by his acolytes, walked to his waiting boat. A lieutenant paused, turned at the fuse’s end, and Favier saw the snap of light as flint struck steel.
There was a pause as fire ate up the worsted quick-match that had been soaked with a liquid solution of mealed powder, spirits of wine, and isinglass. Bampfylde was being rowed through choppy waves towards the Cavalier. Spits of rain pitted the sand while gulls, wheeling effortlessly, rode the strong wind that blew from the hills towards the sea. Favier mounted his horse.
The quick-match, hissing sparks, darted into an embrasure of the Teste de Buch. The first brig had hoisted its anchor and was already, under sails blown to a flat hardness, beating towards the channel’s mouth. The Scylla, Amelie, and Vengeance, sails reefed, were already hull down.
Captain Bampfylde climbed the Cavalier’s tumblehome. The brig’s sidesmen twittered their pipes, the anchor was lifted, and Lieutenant Martin ordered sheets hauled tight. He was to take Captain Bampfylde to the Vengeance and it would be a pretty piece of seamanship to transfer the captain in this weather.
Bampfylde, grinning with anticipation like a raw midshipman, stood at the rail of the Cavalier’s small quarterdeck. “It should be a picture, Ford!”
“Indeed it should, sir.” Ford opened his watch and saw that it was still an hour short of midday, the time when the French brigade should arrive. Now they would come to find a fortress destroyed.
The two men waited. The rain striking the Cavalier’s vast driver sail made a rapping tattoo that was matched by the quiver of Bampfylde’s excited fingers.
Lieutenant Ford was nervous. “Perhaps, sir, the rain’s…”
But even as he spoke the fuse-borne fire bit home.
A lance of light, white and sharp and straight as a blade, pierced into the low cloud from the very centre of the Teste de Buch. It was followed by smoke; roiling greasy smoke shot through with red flames that spat outwards in sudden, angry dashes.
Then came the noise; the rolling, grumbling, hammering sound of the powder magazines exploding, and in the noise came another roar as the explosives in the barracks caught the fire and Captain Bampfylde clapped his hands with delight as stones, tiles, and timbers shattered upwards.
The single flame vanished, to be replaced by a horror of dirty smoke that carried ashes, made sodden by the rain, far out to sea. A few flames flickered bright above the unscathed ramparts, then, dampened by the squalls, disappeared. Bampfylde, pleased with his work, smiled. “The French nation is deprived of one fortress, Ford. That is a consolation to us.”
“Indeed, sir.”
Bampfylde turned. “I shall use your cabin, Mr Martin. Pray send me some coffee or, failing that, tea..”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The brigs turned where the shoals marked the limit of Cap Ferrat and were swallowed in the rising sea and the squalls of rain. The coast was left deserted, its fort empty and shattered, and the squadron was gone.
Sharpe’s last sight of the bridge over the Leyre was of the powder billowing flame and smoke outwards, of stones from the balustrade making vast splashes in the shallow water, of the toll-keeper’s windows smashing inwards, and of four toppling stone urns. The bridge still stood, but it was weakened and no artilleryman would dare take the weight of guns over that stone roadway until a competent engineer, fond of life, volunteered to stand beneath the blackened arch as the guns trundled overhead.
The Riflemen and Marines bivouacked after a mere five miles, leaving the river bank to go to an enormous house standing in a vast garden of lawns and lakes. The house remained shut despite all the hammering on its doors and, though Sharpe saw dark figures, silhouetted by candlelight, who folded shutters on the upper floor, no one appeared to inquire who the soldiers were. A carved escutcheon over the main door suggested that the house had been, and maybe still was, the residence of aristocrats.
There was a barn at the house’s rear that was more than an adequate bivouac. There was straw, kindling for fires, and blessed shelter against the rain that had started to sweep in great gust-borne swathes over the garden.
Sharpe ate tinned chicken with the cheese Jane had packed for him, and washed both down with wine taken from the ambushed convoy. Frederickson squatted beside him at the end of the barn that had been designated officer’s territory.
“She said,” Frederickson told Sharpe, “that she didn’t mean to scream. She’s called Lucille. She’s rather fetching, don’t you think?”
“She’s not ugly,” Sharpe allowed. He watched the pale girl who sat shyly with her man at the barn’s far end. “But Robinson’s a Marine! Marines can’t take wives on to ships.”
“She says he paid for her. Twenty francs.” Frederickson sucked a wing-bone clean. “That’s a very fair price for a bride in these parts.”
“I paid that!” Sharpe protested.
“I suppose she’s yours, then,” Frederickson laughed.
“What’s he going to do? Kiss her goodbye at Arcachon? Does she know he’s a Marine?”
“I told her,” Frederickson said.
Sharpe shrugged. Any troops marching through the countryside seemed to end with a tail of women, but it was one thing to be a soldier, rooted on land, and quite another to be a Marine who could offer a wife no home. “Can they ship her to England?” Sharpe asked Palmer.
“No.” Palmer was cleaning the vent of his pistol. “Anyway, Robinson’s already married. Got a wife and two nippers in Portsmouth.“ He blew dust away from the touch-hole.
“I suppose when he’s finished with her,” Frederickson said, “she’d better go to one of my men. We can smuggle her on to the Amelie.” No one demurred. It was a normal enough solution to a routine problem, and there were always men willing to take on a discarded or widowed woman. Sharpe remembered, after Badajoz, meeting a weeping woman who had just lost her husband in the dreadful slaughter of that fight. She did not weep for the loss, but because she had precipitately accepted another man in marriage and then been asked for the same favour by a sergeant who would have been a much better catch.
Sharpe slept seven hours, waking to the predawn darkness and the hiss of rain on the wooden roof. Sergeants stirred sleepers awake with boot toe-caps and the first flames flickered to boil water.
Sharpe went outside and stood against the barn wall where Frederickson companionably joined him.
“He’s gone,” Sweet William said.
Sharpe yawned. “Who’s gone?”
“Marine Robinson. He buggered off with his Lucille. Another of Cupid’s walking wounded.”
“Bloody hell.”
“Palmer’s not best pleased.” Frederickson buttoned his breeches.
“Did the picquets see anything?”
“They say not.” Frederickson walked with Sharpe to a fire where Sergeant Harper was stewing tea. “Morning, Sergeant! It’s my guess,” Frederickson looked back to Sharpe, “that the picquets were asked to look the other way.” The Marines had provided the guard last night.