“I slept for three hours.” Frederickson stared out to sea. These western ramparts were the safest, the only wall not covered by the French forces, and the two officers could lean in a gun embrasure and stare at the waves.

“There’s something I should have told you,” Sharpe said uncertainly.

“You have an unnatural passion for my beauty.” Frederickson blew steam from a mug of tea. “I understand it.”

Sharpe smiled a dutiful appreciation. “Jane.”

“Ah.” Frederickson, abandoning jest, turned and leaned his rump on the stone. “Well?”

“She has the fever.”

Frederickson’s one eye considered Sharpe. “She was well the night before…”

“The symptoms appeared next morning.”

Frederickson sighed. “I wish I could express my sorrow properly, sir.”

“It’s not that.” Sharpe was embarrassed into incoherence. “I just think I’m fighting here because I can’t bear to leave her. If she dies, and I’m not there. You understand? If I surrender,” he waved feebly towards the north, “I’ll be taken away from her.”

“I understand.” Frederickson took a cheroot from his pocket. He only had six left and had rationed himself to one a day. He lit it, and drew the smoke into his lungs. He watched Sharpe, knowing what Sharpe wanted to hear, but unable and unwilling to express it. He was saved an immediate reply by the presence of three Riflemen carrying a barrel of lime to one of the citadels.

Frederickson did not know Jane. He had met her just once, and he had discovered a girl of startling prettiness, but that did not make her special. Many girls, to one degree or another, were pretty. Marine Robinson’s green-eyed drab, for whom Robinson risked a deserter’s death, would be as pretty as any society girl if she was washed, dressed properly, and taught the monkey-antics of the salon. Frederickson had noted that Jane had a sweet-natured smile and a pleasant, vivacious personality, but such things were the stock-in-trade of the young woman seeking matrimony. Any father from the middling sort in Britain, and hopeful of marrying his daughter into the better classes, made sure his child was tricked out with such allurements. And as for intelligence, which Jane seemed to have, in Frederickson’s view the largest part of female humanity so blessed inevitably wasted the gift on cheap novels, gossip, or evangelical religion.

So to suffer for such a girl, as Sharpe was evidently suffering, did not touch a nerve in Frederickson’s soul. He allowed that Jane Sharpe might one day prove to be above the common ruck, might even prove to have a distinction and character that would outlast the fading of her beauty, and doubtless Sharpe saw those possibilities within her, but Frederickson, not knowing her, did not. To agonize over a wife was therefore beyond Sweet William’s comprehension; indeed for a soldier to take a wife was beyond his comprehension. Whores could scratch that itch, and so Frederickson found he could say nothing that would be of comfort to his friend. Instead, abandoning sympathy, he posed a question. “If you died this morning, God forbid, then I’d take over?”

“Yes.” Sharpe knew that Frederickson’s commission was senior to Palmer’s.

“Then I,” Frederickson said stonily, “would fight the bastards.”

“Why?”

“Why!” Frederickson stared at Sharpe with amazement. “Because they’re crapauds! Because they’re slimy Frogs! Because as long as they’re fighting us they can’t go south and give the Peer a headache! Because the English have a God-given duty to rid the world of the French! Because it’s what I’m paid to do. Because I’ve got nothing better to do! Because Napoleon Bonaparte is a foul little worm who grovels in his own excrement! Because no one’s ordered me to surrender just because the odds are unhealthy! Because I don’t want to live under French rule and the more of those bastards I kill the more the rest of them will slowly comprehend that fact! Do you need more?” He watched Sharpe. “If you weren’t married, would you surrender?”

“No.”

“So being married has weakened you. It does, you know. Saps a man.” He grinned to show that he did not want to be taken seriously, even if he had spoken with real conviction. “I’m sorry about Jane, I truly am. But her fight isn’t here and you are.”

“Yes.” Sharpe felt ashamed of himself. He wanted to tell Frederickson about the superstition that had kept him going through the ambush and how Killick, unwittingly, had taken that strength away from him, but he could say nothing. “I’m sorry.”

“You need a good fight,” Frederickson said cheerfully. “Nothing like a good fight to raise the spirits. And two weeks from now, my friend, we’ll open a bottle and be embarrassed this conversation ever took place.”

“Yes.” Sharpe had expected some sympathy, and had found none. “They came for a parley.”

“So I heard.”

“They said that Bampfylde was told we’d been defeated. That’s why the Navy buggered off.”

“Clever.” Frederickson blew smoke into the wind.

It was de Maquerre, Sharpe thought. Perhaps Hogan had known de Maquerre was a traitor, but no one else had known. But now Sharpe knew and he vowed, should he survive this siege, that he would seek the Frenchman out. Then the first howitzer shell cracked apart and both men twisted towards the explosion even as the shards of broken shell casing, humming and fizzing from the smoke, spattered about them.

A howitzer was merely a short-barrelled cannon useful for the firing of exploding shell. The loss of accuracy occasioned by the stunted barrel was compensated by the diameter of the shell’s explosion.

Their proper use, in battle, was to lob shells over the heads of friendly troops. Thus, unlike the long-barrelled cannons, they were fired at a gentle upward angle.

Yet General Calvet did not want to use a shallow trajectory. Instead he wanted his four howitzers to fire as mortars; firing almost vertically so their shells would plummet straight down into the killing confines of the fortress walls.

So each eight hundred and eighty pound barrel had to be wrestled from its carriage and laid in a specially made cradle of timbers laid in the gunpits. The timbers were levered and sawn from the village houses, notched to take the howitzer’s trunnions, then wedged solid with wooden quoins. Now, angling up to the sky, they would arc their shells high over the walls. Or so the theory went.

The problems, apart from the shifting and settling of the timbers beneath the hammer blows of each shot, were twofold. First, the gunner must precisely gauge the weight of powder that would send the ball neatly into the courtyard of the Teste de Buch. A quarter ounce too much would send the shell searing far beyond the enemy. Second, the duration of the ball’s flight had to be estimated and one of the five fuses selected as appropriate. It was a science fleshed out with instinct, and the very first guesses of the French artillery colonel were a tribute to his experience.

He ordered five ounces of powder used, far less than a mortar would take for the same distance, and he selected the middle fuse. The first gun, firing its experimental shot, hammered down into the timbers and squirted a quoin loose, but the colonel, watching the tiny trace of smoke from the burning fuse, saw the shell arc sweetly towards the fort, then fall, faster and faster, to provoke a cracking, dirty-smoked explosion in the very centre of the enemy.

The shell was a sphere of cast-iron filled with powder. When the fuse burned to the powder, the shell exploded and fragments of iron whistled out to fill a circle, twenty yards in diameter, with possible death. The shells dropped almost vertically.

“Take cover!” Sharpe shouted through the smoke.

Two men were down, one screaming and clutching his belly, the other motionless.

A second shell hit the ramparts, bounced, and trickled down the stone ramp. Sharpe waited for the explosion.