“RSM Harper?” Frederickson backed away from his captive. “Take the bugger back.” Sweet William, careless of the conventions of this war, first tied a gag about the officer’s mouth. “Tommy? John? Go with Mr Harper.” Frederickson was careful to give Harper the honorific due to a Regimental Sergeant Major.
It took twenty minutes before the French officer was hauled by a loop of rope to the battlements on the western face, followed by nine precious cartouches of ready ammunition, and it was another ten minutes before Harper and his escort were back with Frederickson. They made themselves known with the harsh call of a nightjar, were answered in kind, then went on to the east where more Frenchmen waited in the darkness.
“He says, sir,” Lieutenant Fytch was acting as interpreter, “that there won’t be an attack tonight.”
“He does, does he?” Sharpe kept his eyes on the captured French officer who shook in the corner of the room.
Sharpe did not blame the man. The French captain had been brought to the makeshift surgery to answer questions and the man doubtless believed the ranks of pincers, saws, probes, and razors were to be used on him. Each slow, burping bubble of the simmering pitch made Captain Mayeron shudder.
“Ask him who’s in command,” Sharpe ordered. He half listened to the ensuing conversation as he probed through Mayeron’s belongings. There was a fine watch with a chased silver lid that told Sharpe it was quarter past three in the morning. There was a bundle of letters, tied in a green ribbon, all written from Rheims and signed Jeanette. There was a miniature painting, enclosed in a leather wallet and presumably of the same Jeanette who simpered artfully at the beholder. There was a handkerchief, a clasp knife, three walnuts, an unwashed fork and spoon, a flask of brandy, a pencil stub, and a small, leather-clad diary that contained sketches of the countryside and a clumsy, heavy-jowled, pencil-drawn portrait of a girl called Marie. In the same page was a slip of pasteboard on which was glued some dried flowers and signed, evidently with love, by the same Marie.
“Calvet,” Fytch said. “A general.”
“Never heard of him. Ask him if Bordeaux has risen for the King?”
The question elicited an indignant, long answer that translated simply as ‘no’.
Sharpe was not surprised by the answer, but he probed further. “Ask him if there was any trouble in the city recently?”
Captain Mayeron, prompted by a particularly rich burst of bubbling from the cauldron of pitch, said there had been some bread riots at Christmas, but no political trouble except the usual grumbling of merchants made poor by the blockade. And no, the garrison had not rebelled, and no, he did not think the population was ready to rebel against the Emperor. He seemed to think about the last answer, shrugged, then repeated it.
Sharpe listened to the translation and began to understand the treachery of the Comte de Maquerre. Hogan, in his feverish babbling, had used the man’s name, together with the name of Pierre Ducos, and now Sharpe suspected he was a victim of the clever Frenchman’s scheming.
Or was he? In these last few hours, alone with his thoughts, Sharpe had begun to suspect a deeper, more secret scheme. Why would Wellington allow men like Wigram and Bampfylde to harbour grandiose schemes of invasion? Neither staff colonels nor naval captains had the authority to authorize such adventures, yet neither man had been slapped down except by Elphinstone who was of their own rank. Wellington or the Admiral of the Biscay Squadron could have ordered the two men to stop their scheming, yet they had been allowed to indulge their dreams of madness. And why had the Comte de Maquerre been sent to Bordeaux? Surely the answer was that Wellington wanted the French to believe in an Arcachon landing. General Calvet’s presence at Arcachon meant that he could not oppose a bridge across the Adour. So the victim was not Sharpe, but the French, yet de Maquerre’s treachery had still abandoned Sharpe to this fate in a slighted fortress.
Captain Mayeron, fearful because of the boiling pitch, suddenly spoke.
“He asks,” Fytch translated, “whether he can be exchanged.”
“For whom?” Sharpe asked. “They haven’t taken any of us prisoner! Give him his belongings back, then lock him in the liquor store.”
Sharpe returned to the ramparts and there stood down half of his men and sent them to get some precious sleep. The captured Captain Mayeron had convinced Sharpe that the enemy he faced, though overwhelming in numbers, was half-trained and incapable of a night-time escalade. The Frenchman had also convinced Sharpe that he was not caught in a trap, but was an unwitting part of a greater trap. But that was no consolation, for in the morning the French guns would begin their fire and the time of trial would begin.
Frederickson first led his squad eastwards, then south through the tangle of small meadows. He was drawn by a rhythmic, clanging sound that came from the direction of the watermill.
He paused in the black-shadowed shelter of the byre where Harper had drawn his own tooth. There was the beat of owl-wings overhead, then silence again except for the ring of picks or crowbars on the watermill’s stones.
Frederickson waved his men into hiding, then stared at the mill. There was the faintest glow of light limning the doors and windows, suggesting that men worked inside the big stone building by the light of shielded lanterns.
“They’re putting guns in there,” Harper offered his opinion in a hoarse whisper.
“Probably.” Artillery placed in the mill would be protected by stone walls from rifle fire, and would be able to rake the southern and eastern flanks of the beleaguered fortress.
Frederickson turned towards the village where the bulk of the enemy forces had gone. More half-shielded lights showed among the small buildings, but he could see no movement between the village and the mill. He wondered how many picquets guarded the big stone building that straddled the stream. “Hernandez?”
The Spanish Rifleman from Salamanca appeared beside Frederickson. He moved with an uncanny silence; a stealth learned when he was a guerrillero, and a stealth much prized by Captain Frederickson. The Spaniard listened to his Captain’s quick orders, showed a white grin against blackened skin, and went southwards. Hernandez, Frederickson believed, could have picked the devil’s own pockets and got clean away.
The other Riflemen waited for twenty minutes. A French squad fired from the glacis, shouted insults at the ramparts, but no defender fired back. A dog barked in the village, then yelped as it was kicked into silence.
Frederickson smelt Hernandez before he saw him, or rather he smelt blood, then heard two thumps as the Spaniard seemed to materialize out of the shadows. “There are four men on the track from the mill to the village,” Hernandez whispered, “and there were two guarding the bridge.”
“Were?”
„Si, senor.“ Hernandez gestured to the ground and thus explained the curious double thump that had presaged his return.
Frederickson’s voice was gentle with reproof. “You didn’t cut their heads off, did you, Marcos?”
„Si, senor. Now they cannot give the alarm.“
“That’s certainly true.” Frederickson was glad that the darkness cloaked the horrors at his feet.
He led his squad south, following the path reco’nnbitred by Hernandez, a path that led to the small bridge beside the mill. Once at the bridge they were close enough to see the shapes of men working inside the building. One group of men, using crowbars, sledgehammers and picks, were making loopholes in the thick outer wall of the mill, while others cleared the mill’s machinery to leave a space for the guns. “There were twenty French bastards inside,” Hernandez whispered.
“Guns?”
“I didn’t see them.”