“You’ll attack tonight?” Ducos asked eagerly.

“Don’t be a damned fool, man. That’s what he’s expecting! He’s got his men on alert! They’ll have a bad night and I’ll make it worse, but I won’t attack.” Calvet saw the disapproval on Ducos’ face and, knowing what sinister power Ducos sometimes wielded with the Emperor, the big general deigned to explain himself. “I’ve got raw troops, Ducos, nothing more than bloody farm-boys. Have you ever attacked at night? It’s chaos! A bloody shambles! If they’re repulsed, and they will be, they’ll taste defeat and a new conscript should always be given a victory. It makes him feel invincible! No. We attack tomorrow. The goddamns have had no sleep, they’ll be nervous as virgins in a Grenadiers’ barracks, and we’ll crush them.” Calvet leaned back in his chair and smiled about the crowded room. “Tomorrow night we’ll have Major Sharpe as our dinner guest.”

An aide lit a new candle. “If he’s alive, sir.”

“If he’s not, we’ll eat him.” Calvet laughed. “We ate enough men in Russia. Human flesh tastes like skate, did you know that, Ducos? Next time you eat skate, remember it.”

“Thank you, sir.” Ducos did not smile.

“Boiled buttock of corporal, well-peppered,” Calvet mused. “I’ve dined on worse. What’s the range of their damned rifles?”

“Two hundred paces,” Favier said, “but they can be a nuisance up to four hundred.”

“Then we’ll put the howitzers here.” Calvet’s thumb smeared the pencil marks that showed the village on the map. “I want them bedded down as mortars.”

“Of course, sir,” the Artillery colonel said.

“And the other guns here,” the thumb stabbed down again, leaving a scrap of cheese by the watermill. “Make embrasures in the wall, but don’t open fire tonight. Tonight I want muskets up on the glacis. Lots of them. Keep the bastards worried. I want noise, bangs, shouts.” He was looking at one of his Battalion colonels. “Pick a different spot every few minutes, don’t make it regular. You know how to do it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Make ‘em use up some of their precious ammunition. But keep clear of this place.” Calvet pointed to the dam. “I want that left alone.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And at dawn I want no one in sight, no one.” Calvet stood. He was a huge man, with a paunch like a ready-barrel of howitzer powder. He stretched his arms, yawned, and turned to the straw mattress that was laid by the fire. “Now I’m sleeping, so get out. Wake me at five.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When we do attack,” the general’s rumbling voice checked the exodus of uniformed officers, “we do it quickly, efficiently, and right. Any man who lets me down will have to explain himself, alone, to me.” He raised one clenched fist the size of a small cannon-ball. “Now bugger off and keep the bastards hopping.”

The waves broke and sucked on the beach at the channel entrance, the wind rattled pine branches and sighed over the ramparts, and the picked men of the best French Battalion went to their night-time task while the others slept. And General Calvet, head on a haversack and boots ready by his bed, snored.

“Hold your fire!” Sharpe bellowed the order, heard it echoed by a sergeant, then ran down the southern rampart.

Six or seven musket shots had cracked from the glacis, the balls hissing uselessly overhead, and, two Marines and a Rifleman had instinctively returned fire. “You don’t fire,” Sharpe said, “unless you’re ordered to fire or unless the bastards are climbing the wall! You hear?”

None of the three men replied. Instead, crouching beneath the battlements, they reloaded their weapons.

Sharpe sent Fytch around the ramparts with a new warning that no man was to fire. The French, Sharpe guessed, were trying to provoke just such defensive fire to see which parts of the rampart responded most heavily. Let the bastards guess.

Sixty men were in the old garrison offices, fully armed, but told to catch what sleep they could. When the attack came, and Sharpe did not expect it till the deadest hours of the night, those men could be on the ramparts in minutes.

He crouched in an embrasure. The wind fingered cold on the scabbed blood on his forehead, and the sigh of it in his ears made listening difficult. He thought he heard the scrape of a boot or musket butt on the glacis, but was not sure. Whatever the sound was, it was too small to presage a full attack. Sharpe had crouched beyond a fortress’s defences, throat dry and fear rampant, and he knew what sudden commotion was made by a mass of men moving to the escalade. There would be ladders bumping forward, the chink of equipment, the scrape of hundreds of boots, but he could hear nothing but the wind and see nothing but the blackness.

He went to the eastern wall and crouched beside Sergeant Rossner. “Anything?”

“Nothing, sir.” The German sergeant had his shako upended on the firestep and half-filled with cartridges. Beside him was a roped mass of hay. If an attack came the hay would be lit then slung far over the walls to illuminate targets. No lights were allowed in the courtyard or on the walls of the Teste de Buch, for such lights could only silhouette the defenders for the convenience of French marksmen.

Sharpe moved on, crouching to talk with men, offering them wine from his canteen, always giving the same message. There was nothing to fear from random shots, or from the shouts that sometimes sounded in the darkness. The French were trying to fray the defenders’ nerves, and Sharpe would have done the same. Once there was the sound of massed feet, shouts, and a fusillade of musketry that flattened on the walls, but no dark shapes appeared beyond the glacis lip. Jeers and insults came from the darkness, more shots, but Sharpe’s men, once the first fear had subsided, learned to ignore the sounds.

In Commandmant Lassan’s old quarters two Marines, one who had been a surgeon’s mate and another who had trained in the butcher’s trade, laid out carpenter’s tools, shaving razors, and sewing kits on a table. They had no clamps, instead there was a cauldron of boiling pitch with which to cauterize a stump. They had no camphorated wine, nor any solution of lead acetate, so instead they had a barrel of salt-water to wash wounds, and a pot filled with spider-webs that could be stuffed into deep, cuts. Patrick Harper, the big Irishman, had recommended maggots for cleaning wounds, but the dignity of their new-fetched professional pride would not allow the two Marines to accept the nostrum. They listened to the shots in the night, sipped the brandy that was supposed to dull wounded men’s pain, and wondered when the first wounded would be brought for their attention.

Captain Palmer, trying to sleep where the sixty men were held in reserve, knew that there would be small rest tonight. Musket shots and sudden shouts came faint to the old offices, but not so faint that they did not cause men to stir and reach for their muskets or rifles. “I wish the bastards would come,” one Marine muttered, and Palmer held the same belief. Better to get it over, he thought, than this damned waiting.

A Spanish Rifleman on the southern wall sent for Sharpe. “Can you hear it, senor?” The man spoke in Spanish.

Sharpe listened. Faint, but unmistakable, came the sound of picks and spades thudding into earth, then the ring of a crowbar on stone. “They’re making a battery,” he replied in Spanish.,

“In the village?” The Rifleman made it half a guess and half a question.

Sharpe listened again. “I’d say so.”

“They’ll be in range, then.” The Spaniard slapped the woodwork of his rifle.

“Long range,” Sharpe said dubiously.

“Not for Taylor,” the Spaniard said. The American’s marksmanship was a legend to Frederickson’s men.

But Taylor, this night, was in the darkness; gone with Harper and Frederickson, gone to spread terror among the men who tried to keep a garrison awake with clamour, gone to the kill.