The infantry had jumped from the ramparts and shouted at the cavalry to make way. Sharpe, teeth snarling, dared them to come. He taunted them. He stepped towards them, wanting one of them to try, just one.

“Sir!” a voice shouted from behind. “Sir!”

Sharpe stepped backwards and, seeing it, the French attacked.

A sergeant led them. He was old in war, toughened by years of campaigning, and he knew the Englishman would lunge.

Sharpe lunged. The Frenchman jerked his musket aside, parrying, and bellowed his victory as he thrust forward.

He was still shouting as Sharpe’s sword, which had been twisted over the bayonet’s stab, punctured his belly. Sharpe turned the blade, pushing, and the blood spewed into the breaking foam as the blade seemed to be swallowed by the big belly. Sharpe stepped back, jerked the sword, and the blade came free in a welter of new blood.

“Sir!”

He went backwards. Another horseman drove into the water and Sharpe swung his blade at the horse’s head, it reared, then a man came from his other side, an officer in a darker uniform, and Sharpe turned, parried a clumsy thrust, and drew his sword back for the killing thrust.

“Not him! Not him!” Killick shouted it.

Sharpe checked his thrust.

Lassan, knowing that he would not die on this day of rain and savagery, lowered his sword into the water. “Go.”

Sharpe went. He turned and plunged further into the sea. The longboats were already pulling away. Men clung to the transom of the nearest boat while other men, safely in the craft, reached hands and rifles towards him.

A pistol bullet spat in a plurne beside Sharpe’s face. He was up to his chest now, half wading and half swimming, and he reached with his left hand, lunged, and caught an outstretched rifle barrel.

“Pull!” Killick shouted. “Pull!”

A last cavalryman charged into the sea, but an oarblade, slapped down on to the water, frightened the horse. The French, their muskets made useless by rain, could only watch.

Sharpe clung to the rifle with his left hand. The weapon’s foresight dug into his palm. The sword in his right hand was dragging him down, as was the heavy scabbard. He kicked with his feet, water slopped into his mouth and he gagged.

“Pull! Pull! Pull!” Killick’s voice roared over the clanking of the Thuella’s windlass that dragged the anchor clear of the channel’s silt. The sails were dropping into the small wind and the Thuella was stirring in the water.

The boats bumped on the ship’s side and men pushed the Riflemen towards the deck. Someone took Sharpe’s collar and hauled him dripping and heavy into the longboat. “Up!”

A ladder was built into the ship’s side. Sharpe, unsteady in the rocking longboat, thrust his sword into his scabbard that squirted water as the blade went home. He reached for the ladder, climbed, then American hands hauled him on to the Thuella‘s deck. He had swallowed sea-water and, with a sudden spasm, he vomited it on to the scrubbed deck. He gasped for breath, vomited more, then lay, chest heaving, in the scuppers.

He heard cheers, German and Spanish and British cheers, even American cheers, and Sharpe twisted, looked through a gunport, and saw the coastline already sliding past. French gunners were wrestling the twelve-pounders through wet sand, but too late and to no avail. The longboats were being towed at ropes’ ends, the Thuella’s wet sails were filling with a new, easterly breeze, and the French were left behind, impotent.

They had escaped.

EPILOGUE

Cavalry was nervous on wet fields. French horsemen would summon courage, ride a few yards forward, then swerve away from a threatened British volley. Unseen artillery, firing at unseen targets, punched the drizzling air, while infantry, shivering in the February cold, waited for orders.

Sharpe’s force, pushing four handcarts loaded with wounded, came to the skirmish from the north. A squadron of French cavalry saw them, wheeled right, then drew curved sabres for the charge.

“Two ranks! Fix swords!” Sharpe sensed the enemy would not press the charge home, but he went through the dutiful motions and the enemy officer, seeing the waiting bayonets, and not knowing that there was not a single loaded musket or rifle in the twin ranks, dutifully withdrew. The battle, if battle it was, seemed too scattered and tentative for a cavalry charge that might leave the horsemen exposed to a sudden counter-attack. Besides, Sharpe could see that the French were dreadfully outnumbered, outnumbered as heavily as he had been at the Teste de Buch. The enemy, scarce more than a heavy picquet line, was everywhere being pushed back before a burgeoning number of British and Portuguese troops.

A mile ahead there was a sudden, rushing sound like a huge wave breaking on a beach and Sharpe saw a rocket rise into the air and plummet towards the east. It had been over a year since he had seen the Rocket Artillery and he supposed it was as inaccurate as ever. Yet somehow the odd sight made him feel at home. “Remember those?” he asked Frederickson.

Sweet William, who had been with Sharpe when the rockets were first used against the astonished French, nodded. “Indeed I do.”

A mounted infantry captain, red coat bright, galloped up the track towards Sharpe. His voice, as he curbed his spirited horse, was peremptory with a staff officer’s vicarious authority. “Who the devil are you? What are you doing here?”

“My name is Sharpe, my rank is Major, and you call me ”sir“.”

The captain stared with incredulity, first at Sharpe, then at the dirty, draggled mixture of Riflemen and Marines who stared dully towards the rocket’s smoking trail. “Sharpe?” The captain seemed to have lost his voice. “But you’re…” he checked. ”You’ve come from the north, sir?“

“Yes.” It seemed too difficult to explain it all; to explain how an American privateer captain had agreed to rescue a garrison and to land that garrison as close as he dared to the British lines. To explain how the Thuella had flogged her way south through a wet night, and how Riflemen and Marines had thumped the schooner’s pump-handles till their muscles burned in the cold, or how Sharpe, his turn at the pumps over, had drunk brandy with an American enemy in a small cabin and promised, that when this damn fool war was done, to drink even more in a place called Marblehead. Or to explain how, in the rain-misted dawn, Cornelius Killick had landed Sharpe’s men north of the Adour estuary.

“I wish I could take you further,” the American had said.

“You can’t.” A strange sail had been spotted to the south, merely a scrap of ghostly white above a blurred horizon, but the sail meant danger to the Thuella and so Killick had turned for the shore.

Now Sharpe, marching south, had met British troops north of the river which could only mean that Elphinstone had built his bridge. “Who are you?” Sharpe asked the staff captain.

“First Division, sir.”

Sharpe nodded towards another racing plume of rocket smoke. “The Adour?”

“Yes, sir.”

They were safe. There would be surgeons for the wounded and a precious bridge across the river; a bridge leading south to St Jean de Luz and to Jane.

The bridge was there. The miraculous bridge, the bridge that only a clever man could build, a bridge to outflank the French Army, a bridge of boats.

The bridge was made from chasse-marees. A whole fleet of the luggers was moored side-by-side in the wide river mouth and, stretching from deck to deck and supported by vast cables, was a wide roadway of planks. Over the bridge marched red-coated Companies, Company after Company, an Army outflanking an enemy and going further into France. The Divisional headquarters, the staff officer said, was still south of the river.

Sharpe took his men to the northern bank where a surgeon had erected a tent and waited for customers. “Best if you wait here,” Sharpe said to Frederickson.