Men screamed in the yard. Men had been blinded, eviscerated, torn ragged. Calvet had instinctively thrown himself flat and now listened to the horror about him. “Charge!” He scrambled up. “Charge!”

He could see how few defenders were left to face him, but at least they were. Riflemen, the British elite, and he would capture these last few as a token of his victory. “Charge!”

Men, made courageous by the paucity of the defenders and roused to gallantry by the general’s voice, obeyed. From among the wounded and the dead, from the clinging smoke of the cannon, a pelting, yelling mass of men emerged. Calvet led them.

“Now!” Frederickson had the last seven lime-barrels at the head of the ramp. Sergeant Rossner threw one, it bounced, split open, then, spewing powder that was turned to instant whitewash by the rain, slammed into the first rank of Frenchmen. A man screamed as the barrel pinned him against the broken gun-carriage and as limewash flayed at his eyes.

Frederickson looked behind him. Sharpe’s men, using the dry cover of the citadel where captured French ammunition had been stored, were holding the southern wall. Minver’s men, with agonizing slowness, were being rowed towards the Thuella.

A second lime barrel thumped down the slope, then a third. More Frenchmen were scrambling on to the walls to attack the citadels, but the men in those small fortresses had the last dry charges and they forced the attackers into the cover of the embrasures.

“Now!” A fourth barrel bounced and struck a man full in the chest.

A pistol fired from the courtyard and Rossner grunted as the bullet hit his arm.

“Go!” Frederickson pushed him towards the sea. “Go!”

More Frenchmen were coming, clawing at the ramp, fighting past the smashed gun carriage, over the broken barrel strakes, and across the bodies of their own wounded. The foot of the ramp was a grotesque mixture of whitewash and blood like a painter’s accident.

“Now!” The fifth barrel went, then the sixth.

Sharpe had come to the head of the ramp. He could see Minver’s men scrambling up the Tkuella’s side, but the French could not be held for long. Some were trying to climb the inner wall to the ramparts, using debris from the burned offices as scaling ladders, and Sharpe ran back to stop them. He drove his sword down once, twice, and a man screamed as the blade raked his face.

“Now!” The last barrel was thrown by Harper. It did not bounce, but flew full tilt to smash into a fresh charge of men. The Thuella’s boats had still not started their return journey.

“Swords!” Frederickson shouted the order.

The French, exhilarated by their victory in the breach and seeing that no more barrels could plunge into their ranks, charged. A single rank of Riflemen, sword-bayonets in place, awaited them.

Then Harper broke the line.

With a shout that filled the whole courtyard with its echo, Patrick Harper charged down the stone slope. He carried the great, bright-bladed axe, and in his veins there was the keening of a thousand Irish warriors. He was shouting in his Gaelic now, daring the French to have at him, and the leading Frenchmen dared not.

Harper was six feet four, a giant, and had muscles like a mainmast’s cables. He did not attack cautiously, feeling for his enemy’s weakness, but screamed his challenge at the full run. The axe took two men with its first blow then Harper turned the blade as though it weighed less than a sword, brought it back, blade dripping blood, while his voice, chanting its ancient language, drove the Frenchmen backwards.

A French captain, eager for glory and knowing that the ramp must be taken, lunged, and the axe-blade slit his belly open to the rain. Harper screamed triumph, defying the French, daring them to come to challenge his blade. He stopped a few feet from the bottom of the ramp, victorious, and the rain dripped pink from the broad-bladed axe that he held in his right hand. He laughed at the French.

“Sergeant!” Sharpe bellowed. “Patrick!”

The longboats, at last, were pushing back to the shore.

“Patrick!” Sharpe cupped his hands. “Come back!”

Harper shouldered the axe. He turned, disdaining to run, and walked slowly up the stone ramp to where Frederickson waited. He turned there and stared down into the courtyard. The officer with the percussion pistol, its barrel charged with powder from a dry horn, slipped a percussion cap over the gun’s nipple, but Calvet, who recognized bravery when he saw it, shook his head. That Rifleman, Calvet thought, should be in the Imperial Guard.

“Citadels!” Sharpe’s shout was sudden in the odd silence that followed Harper’s lone attack. “Retreat! Retreat!”

The Riflemen who had guarded the extremities of the west wall scrambled from their strongholds and ran to the ladders.

Calvet, seeing it, knew his enemy was finished. “Charge!”

“Back! Back! Back!” Sharpe pushed his men away. Now the French could have the fort, but now came the worst moment, the difficult moment, the end of Sharpe’s battle and the race for the boats.

The Riflemen had no time to queue at the ladders, instead they jumped from the walls and fell headlong in the sand. Sharpe waited, standing in one of the embrasures with his sword drawn. Harper came to his side but Sharpe snarled at him to go.

The French charged over the bodies of the dead. They wanted revenge, but found an empty rampart. Empty but for the one officer, sword drawn, whose face was like death. That face checked them for a few seconds, enough to let Sharpe’s men scramble towards the sea’s edge.

Then Sharpe turned and jumped.

The landing knocked all the breath from him. He pitched forward, rifle falling from his shoulder, and his face hit the wet sand.

A hand grabbed his collar and hauled him up. Harper’s voice shouted, “Run!”

Sharpe’s mouth was filled with gritty sand. He spat. He stumbled on the body of one of the Frenchmen dumped on this strip of sand the day before, sprawled, then ran again. His shako was gone. Frenchmen were standing on the ramparts above while to his right, from the north, the cavalry appeared.

The two longboats, oars rising and falling with painful slowness, inched towards the small breaking waves of the channel’s beach. The first Riflemen were in the water, wading towards the boats, reaching for them.

Cornelius Killick, in the leading boat, bellowed an order and Sharpe saw the oars back, saw the clumsy boats swing, and he knew that Killick was turning the craft so that the wider sterns would face the shore.

“Form line!” Frederickson was shouting.

Sharpe swerved towards the shout, pawing sand from his eyes. Thirty Riflemen were bumping into a crude line at the very edge of the sea. Sharpe and Harper joined it.

“Front rank kneel! Present!” Frederickson, as if on a battlefield, faced the cavalry with two ranks that bristled with blades. The leading horseman, an officer, leaned from his saddle to swing his sabre, but the light blade clanged along the sword bayonets like a child’s stick dragged on iron palings.

“Back! Back!” Sharpe shouted it.

The small line marched backwards, step by step, into the sea. Waves drove at their calves, their thighs, and the shock of the cold water reached for their groins.

Horsemen spurred into the sea. The horses, frightened by the blades and waves, reared.

“Come on, you bastards!” Killick shouted. “Swim!”

“Break ranks!” Sharpe shouted it. “Go!” He stayed as rearguard. His rifle encumbered him and he let it drop into the water.

A horseman swung a sabre at Sharpe and the Rifleman’s long sword, used with both Sharpe’s hands, broke the man’s forearm. The Frenchman hissed with pain, dropped his sabre, then his horse jerked back towards dry land. Another horseman was twisting his sabre’s point in a Rifleman’s neck. There was blood, splashes, and more yellow-teethed horses plunging into the foam. Harper, still holding the axe, swung it at the horseman who sheered clumsily away while the body of a Rifleman was tugged by the tide. Harper dragged the body towards the boats, not knowing that the man was already dead.