“Or he gave them a canter on the filly,” Harper said. “I’ve known that a good few times.”
“You should write your memoirs,” Frederickson said cheerfully. He looked into the wet landscape where Robinson had disappeared. “We’ll not see him again.”
Nor did they. Love had struck, as callous in its target as a musket ball fired at a Battalion, and a man ran for freedom while Sharpe marched his force into the rain-smeared dawn, going to the ships, going to his own woman whom he had married with as little forethought as Marine Robinson had shown in his desertion, and going home.
At first Sharpe thought a ship must have burned at its moorings, then he thought it a rick-fire, then he assumed Bampfylde must have torched the village. Finally, in the half gale that blew his straggling force along the embanked road of the marshes, he saw that there were no masts in the channel and that the smoke, grey and hazy in the evening light, came from the fortress.
“Jesus wept,” Frederickson said.
“God save Ireland!” Patrick Harper stared at the gaping hole that had been the entrance to the fort. “Were they captured?”
“Frogs would still be here.” Sharpe turned to stare at the village, at the trees to the south, but nothing moved in the landscape. A few villagers stood watching them, but nothing more.
“They’ve gone!” Palmer spoke with horror in his voice.
It was a nightmare. It took minutes to establish that there truly were no ships, not one, that not a single mast reared above a sand-dune, that no brig lay up channel and no frigate beat the stormy waters off the Cape. They had been abandoned.
The gate of the fort was a smoking wreckage, tangled with the charred remains of gun carriages. The drawbridge was dangling chains, scorched by fire, and grey-edged, blackened beams that had fallen into a ditch to lay across the twelve-pounder gun barrels that were half sunk in muddy water.
Two of the Marines splashed over the ditch and one heaved the other up to the stone platform to which the drawbridge had been hinged. The two men disappeared into the fort and came back with the beams that had been intended to be the gallows from which the Americans would hang. The timbers were long enough to bridge the ditch and, by that precarious means and with the horses abandoned to a meadow, Sharpe and his men went into the Teste de Buch. Its granite walls still stood, and the offices were untouched, but precious little else remained.
There were no guns. There was no powder. The arched doorways to the magazines were blasted black. The barracks were a heap of damp ashes. Frederickson, suspicious that the brass-banded well bucket had been left in place, smelt the water. “Fouled.”
Sharpe went to the highest rampart and stared with his telescope to sea. The ocean was an empty, heaving, grey mass whipped to white flecks by the wind. Empty. The broken, charred damp trail of a burned quick-match showed where the fuse had been laid. He swore uselessly.
“We never saw those Frogs again!” Harper said.
“Maquereau.” Sharpe spoke the nickname aloud, recalling his suspicions that the tall aristocrat had been nervous at their last meeting. Not that it mattered now. The bleak truth was, that with less than two hundred men and with no more ammunition than those men carried in their pouches, he was marooned on the French coast a hundred miles from safety. His Riflemen could march that in four days, but could the Marines? And what of the wounded? And if they were caught, Sharpe knew, they would be finished. Even the poorly mounted French cavalry would make short work of a hundred and seventy men.
Those men slumped in the courtyard, made even more miserable by the buffet of wind and rain. “Captain Palmer!” Sharpe’s voice bellowed through the squall. “I want billets found for everyone! Clear out the galleries. Send a squad to cut firewood!”
He would make them busy. Men could make a new gangway over the ditch, and other men were sent to cut down pines that would barricade the gaping archway. Such forestry would be slow work with bayonets, but better than no work at all. Other men dragged two of the twelve-pounder barrels from the ditch and dropped them into two of the carriages that had merely been scorched rather than burned. The big guns, the ship-killers tipped into the shallow waters at the channel’s edge, were too heavy to tackle.
“Lieutenant Fytch! Search every damned room in the place. Bring every cartridge, ball, or powder barrel to the ready magazine.”
Some men were set to cooking, others went to the ramparts where they kept watch in the twilight. The wind raged at them, the rain slopped in bucketfuls from stone walls, but fires burned in galleries bored deep inside stone ramparts and ox-meat cooked in iron pots dragged from the wreckage of the kitchens. Frederickson used the limbers to collect barrels from the village that he filled with clean water from the small stream.
“We don’t know what’s happened,” Sharpe spoke to the officers in Lassan’s old quarters that still had a few books left on the shelves, “so it’s no use speculating. Bampfylde’s gone, we’re here.”
“And who is in Bordeaux?” Frederickson asked slowly.
“God only knows. If it’s Boney’s men then we have to assume they’ll hear of us and come after us. If the city really has declared for Louis then they’ll help us. I want two of your best men, William, to ride that way in the morning. They’re to stay out of trouble, observe, and come back by nightfall with any news. And I want you to question the villagers tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sharpe looked at Palmer. “You take your men to all the local villages tomorrow, and to Arcachon. Search every house! Bring every grain of powder and scrap of lead you can find.”
Palmer nodded. “And the Standing Orders about not upsetting the populace?”
“Write them promissory notes. You’d better bring food, too. Everything you can find.”
Frederickson tossed another newly cut piece of pine on to the fire that spluttered with resin. “You think we’ll stay here?”
“We can’t march south, not if the Frogs are after us, and I’d rather be behind walls than in open country. Besides, if the Navy does come back for us then we’d better be where they can find us.” That seemed the likeliest answer to Sharpe, that this weather had driven the ships offshore and that, as soon as the sea was calmer and the wind more gentle, the great sails would appear again. Yet second thoughts suggested otherwise. Why had Bampfylde slighted the fort? Why had he not left a handful of Marines in place? And why no letter nailed to a door? Those questions indicated to Sharpe that Captain Horace Bampfylde had run. He had abandoned his jejune plans for invading France and scuttled away. The more Sharpe thought about it, the less likely it seemed that the sails of Bampfylde’s flotilla would reappear. “And if we do stay here, gentlemen, then we may have to fight for it.”
Fytch and Minver looked somewhat pale, while Frederickson gave a slow smile, then a chuckle, and finally made the sign of the cross on his faded green jacket. “As Patrick Harper would say, God save Ireland.”
“Shouldn’t we have a flag, sir?” Minver asked.
“A flag?”
“In case a naval ship happens past, sir. Something they can recognize.”
“See to it. Cut a new flagpole tomorrow.”
There was silence for a few seconds. The fire flared bright, then faded again. Lieutenant Fytch smiled nervously. “Perhaps the peace has come?”
“Perhaps the moon will sprout wings and deliver us some artillery,” Sharpe said, “but until someone in British uniform tells me to stop fighting, I’m going to hold this place and you’re going to help me do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So get to work.”
Outside there was a full gale blowing, shrieking over the water and driving rain in stinging blasts. Sharpe and Frederickson ran to the shelter of one of the small citadels where they settled back to watch the flicker of movements that betrayed sentries. Both officers had work to do, but they had instinctively come to this place to say what could not be said in open council. “Would you say,” Sharpe asked quietly, “that we’ve got nine hundred and fifty feet of ramparts here?”