A third shell tore through the rafters of the garrison’s offices and exploded on the upper floor. Lieutenant Fytch, shooting out of the door like a rabbit pursued by a ferret, shouted for water.

The fourth shell buried itself in the ashes and blackened timber of the burned barracks and vented those relics up and out as it coughed its dark explosion.

“We’ve got one dead, sir!” A Rifleman pointed to the second shell which had come to rest on the ramp. No smoke came from the reed which held the fuses, but Sharpe had seen such things explode quite inexplicably.

“Stay clear of it!”

There was a pause in which, Sharpe knew, the enemy was realigning the guns and ladling black powder into the swabbed barrels. Sharpe was furious with himself. For some reason he had not anticipated mortar fire and the shock of it stunned him.

“I suppose,” Frederickson said, “we’re going to have to endure it for a while.”

“I imagine so.” But the powder laboratory was threatened, as was the surgeon’s room, and Sharpe shouted for Lieutenant Minver to make up a work-party to remove both to safer places deep in the stone galleries.

Six men ran with fouled water from the well and handed their buckets into the offices where other men fought the fire. Two Marines carried the wounded man towards the surgery, while a Rifleman dragged the dead man to the side of the yard. Sharpe saw, with approval, how the dead man’s ammunition was rescued.

Two more guns fired, this time with a different sound, and Sharpe whipped round to see that two of the enemy’s twelve-pounder guns, Napoleon’s ‘beautiful daughters’, were successfully embrasured in the scorched watermill. They were firing heavy canister, presumably to scour the defenders from the ramparts, and the heavy balls thudded on stone or whispered overhead. “Rifles! Watch those bastards!” The gunners, five hundred yards away to the south-east, just might show themselves in a window of the mill, though the smoke of their guns provided a sheltering screen against the Rifles’ aim. Then, in a shattering beat of sound, the six other twelve-pounders, some inside the mill and the others sheltered by a stone wall that ran alongside the stream-race, opened fire.

A howitzer shell screamed down, this one exploding five yards above the courtyard’s cobbles, and a fragment of its casing took the skulltop from one of the men who had crouched for shelter behind the furnace. Bullet-making had been interrupted by the attack and molten lead, tipped by the shell’s blast, poured slow and obscene on to the dead face.

Another shell landed on the eastern ramparts and tossed a Rifleman down into the courtyard. The next shell overshot, cracking apart in the dry northern ditch, while the last of this second volley, its fuse damp, bounced, span, smoked, and Patrick Harper, magnificently casual as he emerged from a powder gallery, checked the spin with his boot, licked forefinger and thumb, then bent down and plucked the burning fuse free. “Good morning, sir!”

“Good morning, RSM. Thank you for last night.”

Harper cocked an ear to the morning’s sounds. “Doesn’t seem to have discouraged the bastards, sir.”

Sharpe left just a dozen men in the shelter of the citadels, mostly Riflemen, and the rest were put deep in the safe galleries of the fort. The offices would have to burn.

Sharpe stayed on the ramparts, as did Captain Palmer, but Frederickson was ordered unwillingly into shelter. The heavy canister balls rattled and scraped on the stones, bounced spinning from the glacis, and tore at the makeshift flag. Once a French gunner showed himself beside the mill, four rifles spat, but the man, with a derisive gesture, leaped to safety.

The shells had to be endured. They came with a horrid frequency, no longer spaced in batches of four because each French gun, finding its rhythm, fired at its own pace. Sometimes two or three would land together, sometimes there would be a pause as long as thirty seconds when no shell landed, but the morning seemed to Sharpe to be an unending thunder. Again and again the explosions cracked and shook and rumbled and the foul-smelling smoke soured the air and flames started again in the destroyed barracks to match the flames that shot up above the ramparts from the burning offices. Six men, led by Minver, had helped move the makeshift surgery into a ready magazine while another six, led by Harper, rescued the laboratory with its precious load of half-made cartridges.

A young Marine, crouching beside Sharpe in the dubious safety of the south-east citadel, flinched each time a shell exploded. “Bastards,” he said, “bastards.” Fragments of shell casing scrabbled on stone; one fragment came through the citadel door and dropped, still smoking, at Sharpe’s feet.

“Bastards,” the Marine said. A shell hit the citadel roof, making a noise like the ringing crack of a sledge-hammer, and Sharpe heard the shell scrape as it slid down the stone roof towards the ditch and he knew if it exploded outside the loopholes the iron would scythe this casement clean like a butcher’s cleaver swept at waist level, but the shell splashed harmlessly into the ditch.

“Bastards,” the Marine said.

The fortress shook with the explosions, the air thumped with them, the cobbles were scorched by them. One of Harper’s cannon, so lovingly restored, was blown from its carriage. A corpse, hit in the belly by an exploding shell, spattered flesh and blood on the walls. One of Sharpe’s walkways, circumventing the citadels, was lifted from its place and dropped into the barracks’ rubble. Another, at the south-western corner, was burned by the flames that climbed from Lassan’s offices.

The twelve-pounders, seeing no movement on the walls, changed to solid shot and the hammer blows rang like harsh bells throughout the Teste de Buch. At five hundred yards, over open sights, the gunners could not miss. Their iron shot skimmed the glacis to crack into the ramparts and the stones, laid with poor mortar, began to shift.

“Bastards.” The Marine’s knuckles, gripping the stock of his heavy musket, were white.

“What’s your name? Sharpe asked.

The Marine, who looked about sixteen years old, blinked. “Moore, sir.”

“Where are you from?”

“Exminster, sir.”

“Where’s that?” Sharpe was peering through the loophole, watching for an attack, but when the boy did not reply, he turned to him. “Well?”

“Near Exeter, sir. In Devon.”

“Farmers?”

“Father’s a publican, sir. The Stowey Arms.”

Two shells exploded, filling the air with smoke, thunder and the hot breath of flame, and Marine Moore, for once, did not swear.

“One day,” Sharpe said, “you and I will drink some pots of ale at your Stowey Arms in Exminster and no one will believe the tales we tell.”

The boy grinned. “Yes, sir.”

„Is it a good alehouse?“

“The best, sir.”

“And the ale?”

“Rare stuff, sir. Better than the muck you get here.”

“French beer,” Major Richard Sharpe said authoritatively, “is pissed by virgins.” He saw the boy grin as he was supposed to, and slapped his shoulder. “You, Marine Moore, look through that hole. You see anything move, sing out. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m relying on you.” Sharpe, hiding his own terror that was quite as keen as Moore’s, stepped out of the citadel’s shelter. He straightened his jacket and sword, then walked down the southern rampart. He saw the destruction in the courtyard, heard a roundshot shiver a merlon not six paces away, but walked on calmly. Men, sheltering in the archways opening from the courtyard or crouching in the rampart’s citadels, should see him now. He must look calm in the face of this terror, he must let them know that the shells and shot, however loud, were not the end of the earth. He remembered how he, as a younger soldier, had watched his officers and sergeants and how he had believed that if they could take the murderous sounds, then so could he.