“Not a word, Major.” Killick was pleased with Sharpe’s shock reaction. “But I thank you anyway.”

Sharpe stood. “I have work to do.” His hopes were sliding into a bleak despair. “Good day to you.”

Killick watched the tall figure walk away. “Remember, Major! Oyster shells! Halfway between here and Gujan, and that ain’t bally-hoo!”

Sharpe went into the fortress. He wanted to speak with no one. Suddenly all the preparations he had made against siege seemed useless, contemptible, and pathetic. The hay-rakes, taken from the villages, seemed feeble instruments with which scaling-ladders could be knocked aside. The two guns, made ready by Harper, were toys to swat at a monster. The pine abatis was a bauble, no more of an obstacle than a sheep hurdle. Jane was dying. Sharpe could not see beyond that fact.

“Sir!” Frederickson ran up the stone ramp. “Sir!”

Sharpe, who had been sitting in one of the embrasures that faced the channel, looked up. “William?”

“Two thousand of the buggers, plus two batteries of artillery.” Frederickson’s mounted Riflemen had returned on lathered horses with the grim news.

Sharpe looked down again, wondering what purpose the white lines on the rampart, each numbered, had served.

“Sir?” Frederickson frowned.

Sharpe’s head jerked up again. “Two thousand, you say?”

“At least.”

Sharpe forced himself to attend to the news. “How far?”

“Three hours.”

“They’ll arrive in darkness,” Sharpe spoke softly. Somehow he did not care if it was two or twenty thousand.

“Sir?” Frederickson was puzzled by Sharpe’s mood.

“Tell me,” Sharpe suddenly stood, “what happens when you burn oyster shells?”

“Oyster shells?” Frederickson frowned at the strange question. “You get quicklime, of course.”

“Lime?” Sharpe told himself he could not wallow in self-pity. He had men to defend and an enemy to defy. “It blinds people?”

“That’s the stuff,” Frederickson said.

“Then we’ve got three hours to fetch some.” Sharpe was shaking himself back to normal. He passed on Killick’s directions and ordered one of the limbers taken north.

Two hours later, when the light was nothing but a glow above the western horizon, eight barrels of quicklime were carried into the fortress. Like the powder from the Customs House it was old and damp through too long storage behind the lime-kilns and it clumped in great dirty-white fist-sized lumps, but Frederickson took the barrels to the gallery where the cooking fires were lit and levered off the barrel tops so that the powder would start to dry. “It’s a nasty weapon,” he said to Harper.

“It’s a nasty war,” Harper crumbled one of the lumps, “and if the Frogs decide not to fight, sir, we can always paint the bloody place white.”

From the courtyard outside came the sound of stones whispering on steel as the bayonets were sharpened. The job was being done with the obsessiveness of men who knew that careful preparation could fractionally tip the casual scales of life and death in their favour. Sharpe, listening to the hiss of steel, tried to guess what his enemy planned.

The French, he decided, would be mostly raw troops. They would arrive in weary darkness and head for the village that promised shelter and water. Yet their General would know that a surprise night assault could bring him swift victory. If Sharpe was that General he would assemble his veterans and send them on a silent march to the north, from whence, while the defenders were distracted by the noise of the troops in the village, those veterans would strike.

So Sharpe must strike first.

Except that, sitting in the gathering dusk, Sharpe was assailed by bleak and horrid doubts. One hundred and seventy men, desperately short of ammunition, faced over ten times their own number. The enemy brought guns, while Sharpe only had the two twelve-pounders that were loaded, like the duck-guns, with scraps of stone and metal. It was madness to fight here, yet unthinkable to surrender without a fight.

Captain Frederickson, his face smeared black with dampened soot scraped from the shattered kitchen chimney, crouched beside Sharpe. “I’ve chosen a dozen men, sir. Including Harper.”

“Good.” Sharpe tried to imbue his voice with enthusiasm, but could not succeed. “I don’t understand, William, why the bastards are fighting us. Why not let us rot here? Why waste men on us?”

“Christ knows, sir.” Frederickson obviously did not care. He only anticipated a rare fight. “You’ll want a prisoner, no doubt?”

“It would be useful, William.” Sharpe stared eastwards, but there was still no sign of the approaching French forces. “I wish I could come with you.”

“You can’t, sir.”

“No.” This was one of the sacrifices of command; that Sharpe must delegate. In years past he would have liked nothing better than to have led a raiding party against the enemy, but now he must stay in the fortress where the nervous garrison could see and take confidence from his calm demeanour.

He walked with Frederickson to the north-west corner of the fort where, with the aid of a fishing net hung from an embrasure, the Riflemen climbed down to the night-shadowed sand. The shining metal of their weapons and uniforms had, like their faces, been blacked. They carried no packs, no canteens, only ammunition, bayonets, and firearms. They were Sharpe’s best and if he lost them tonight he would lose this battle.

When they had disappeared into the darkness Sharpe turned and walked, feeling suddenly lonely, to the eastern ramparts. He waited there, staring inland, until at last the sounds came from the darkness.

“Sir?” A Marine sentry spoke nervously.

“I hear it, lad.” Sharpe heard the chink of trace chains, the thump of wheels, the noise of artillery drawn behind horses. He heard, too, the soft thunder made by boots. The French had come.

For a long time he could not see the enemy. There was no moon and the land was dark. He heard the noises, he heard the voices raised in sudden orders, then a flash of lantern light showed, another, and slowly, dimly, Sharpe made out the darker mass that seemed to mill into the village to the south.

The enemy had come and the second battle of Arcachon was about to begin.

CHAPTER 14

General Calvet sat in a miserable hovel in a miserable village on the miserable edge of an increasingly miserable France. “You say this Sharpe is good?”

“Lucky,” Ducos said scornfully.

“The Emperor,” Calvet said, “will tell you a soldier needs luck more than brains. He came up from the ranks?”

“Like yourself, General,” Ducos replied.

“Then he must be good.” Calvet rubbed his hands in gleeful anticipation. The general had a broad, scarred face, burned with powder stains like dark tattoos. He wore a bushy, black veteran’s moustache. “Favier! You’ve fought the English, what are they like?”

Favier knew this was a time for truth, not bombast. “Unimaginative in attack, rock-solid in defence, and quick with their muskets, very.”

“But these scoundrels are short of ammunition.” The general had heard how the British had scoured the local villages for powder. Calvet sat at a scarred table with a map drawn by Commandant Lassan beside the bread and cheese that was his supper. “So the quicker they are with muskets, the sooner they’ll exhaust their powder.” Calvet stared at the map. A double ditch, one of them flooded, surrounded three sides of the fort, but the fourth side, that which faced the channel, had no flooded ditch. The main bastion stood in the tidal shallows, but the northern half of the western wall was edged with sand as far as the moat’s outflow. That was the vulnerable place.

The moat’s outflow was a sluice gate in a small, masonry dam at the fort’s north-western corner. That dam would act as a bridge leading to the ramparts’ base, and the trick of this attack, Calvet knew, would be to draw the defenders’ attention away from that spot.