Dubreton laughed. 'Yes, you could. He laughed again, pleased at his immodesty, but despite the laughter he was still tense, still watchful, the eyes rarely leaving the doors and roof.

'Sir! Harper growled from behind them, pointing his gun at the chapel door. Bigeard had swung round to face it. There was a small noise from inside, a grating noise, and Dubreton threw his cheroot away. 'Sergeant! To our right!

Harper moved fast as Dubreton waved Bigeard to stand behind the officers and to their left. The Colonel looked at Sharpe. 'You were in there. What's there?

'A chapel. There's a bloody great grille behind the door. I think it's being unlocked.

The chapel doors were pulled open and facing them, curtseying, were two girls. They giggled, turned, and fetched a table from behind them which they carried out the door, beneath the cloister, and placed in the sunlight. One looked at Bigeard, then at Harper, and made a face of mock surprise at their height. They giggled again.

A third girl appeared with a chair which she placed beside the table. She too curtseyed towards the officers then blew them a kiss.

Dubreton sighed. 'I fear we must endure whatever they have planned for us.

'Yes, sir.

Boots clattered in the chapel and soldiers filed out, left and right, into the cloisters. They wore uniforms of Britain, France, Portugal and Spain, and their muskets were tipped with bayonets. Their faces were mocking as they filed to line three of the four walls. Only the wall behind Dubreton and Sharpe was unguarded. The three girls stood by the table. They wore low cut blouses, very low, and Sharpe guessed they must be cold.

'Mes amis! Mes amis!’ The voice boomed from within the chapel. It was a deep voice, gravelly, a great bass voice. 'Mes amis.’

A ludicrous figure came out of the shadow, through the cloister's arch, to stand by the table. He was short and immensely fat. He spread his arms, smiled. 'Mes amis!

His legs were cased in tall black leather boots, cut away behind the knees, and then in white breeches that were dangerously tight about his huge fat thighs. His belly wobbled as he laughed silently, ripples of fat running up his body beneath the flowered waistcoat he wore beneath a blue uniform jacket that was lavishly adorned with gold leaves and looping strands. The jacket could not button over his immense front, instead it was held in place by a golden waist sash, while a red sash was draped across his right shoulder. At his neck, below the multitude of chins, an enamelled gold cross hung. The tassels of his gold epaulettes rested on his fat arms.

Sergeant Deron, now calling himself Marshal Pot-au-Feu, took off his hat, wondrously plumed in white, and revealed a face that was almost cherubic. An aging cherub with a halo of white curls, a face that beamed with goodwill and delight. 'Mes amis! He looked at Sharpe. 'Parlez-vous Francais?

'No.

He wagged a finger at Sharpe. 'You should learn the French. A beautiful language! Eh, Colonel? He smiled at Dubreton who said nothing. Pot-au-Feu shrugged, laughed, and looked again to Sharpe. 'My English is very bad. You the Colonel meet, yes? He twisted his head as far as the rolls of fat on his neck would allow. 'Mon Colonel! Mon brave!’

'Coming, sir, coming! Coming! And here I am! The man with the yellow face, the toothless grin, the blue, child-like eyes, and the horrid ungovernable spasms, leaped grotesquely through the door. He was dressed in the uniform of a British Colonel, but the finery did nothing to hide the lumpen gross body or the brute strength that was in his arms and legs.

The capering figure stopped, half crouching, and stared at Sharpe. The face twitched, the voice cackled, and then the mouth twisted into a smile. 'Sharpy! Hello Sharpy! A string of spittle danced from his lips as the face jerked.

Sharpe turned calmly towards Harper. 'Don't shoot, Sergeant.

'No, sir. Harper's voice was full of loathing. 'Not yet, sir.

'Sir! Sir! Sir! The yellow face laughed at them as the man who called himself Colonel straightened up. 'No ‘sirs’ here, no. No bloody airs and bloody graces here. The cackle again, obscene and piercing.

Sharpe had half expected this, and he suspected that Harper had expected it too, yet neither had voiced the fear. Sharpe had hoped that this man was dead, yet this man boasted he could not be killed. Here, in the sunlight of the cloister, spittle dangling from his mouth, stood ex-Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill. Hakeswill.

CHAPTER 5

Obadiah Hakeswill, the Sergeant who had recruited Sharpe into the army, the man who had caused Sharpe to be flogged in a dusty Indian square. Hakeswill.

The man who had Harper flogged earlier this same year, who had tried to rape Teresa, Sharpe's wife, who had held a saw-backed bayonet at the throat of Sharpe's baby daughter, Antonia. Obadiah Hakeswill.

The head twitched on its long neck. The spittle dropped in a glittering cartwheel from his mouth. He hawked, spat, and shuffled sideways. This was the man who could not be killed.

He had been hanged when he was twelve. It was a trumped-up charge of stealing sheep, trumped-up because the vicar whose daughter young Hakeswill had tried to molest did not want to drag his child's reputation in the mud. The magistrates had been happy to oblige.

He was the youngest of all the prisoners being hanged that day. The executioner, wanting to please the massed spectators, had not given any of his victims a neck-breaking drop. He had suspended them slowly, letting them hang and throttle themselves to death, letting the crowd enjoy each choking sound, each futile kick, and the executioner had tantalized the crowd by offering to tug on the ankles and responding to their shouts of yes or no. No one cared about the small boy at the end of the gibbet. Hakeswill had hung, feigning death, cunning even as he slipped into nightmare-ridden darkness, and then, before the end, the heavens had opened.

The street outside the gaol was hammered and sluiced by the cloudburst, lightning slammed and bent the weathercock on the high church steeple, and the wide market street cleared as men, women and children ran for shelter. No one cared as Hakeswill's uncle cut the small body down. They thought the boy was dead, that the body was being sold to a doctor eager for a fresh corpse to explore, but the uncle took Obadiah into an alleyway, slapped him into consciousness, and told the child to go away, never to return. Hakeswill had obeyed.

He had started twitching that day and the twitching had not stopped in thirty years. He had found the army, a refuge for men like himself, and in its ranks he had discovered a simple code for survival. To those who were superior, the officers, Hakeswill was the perfect soldier. He was punctilious in his duty, in his respect, and he was made into a Sergeant. No officer with Hakeswill as his Sergeant needed worry about discipline. Sergeant Hakeswill terrorized his Companies into obedience and the price of freedom from that tyranny was paid to the ugly Sergeant in money, liquor or women. It never ceased to amaze Hakeswill what a married woman would do to keep her soldier husband from a flogging. His life was dedicated to revenge upon a fate that had made him ugly, unloved, a creature loathed by its fellows, useful only to its superiors.

Yet fate could give blessings too. It had cheated death for Obadiah Hakeswill. He was not the only man or woman to escape a hanging. So many survived that some hospitals charged the cost of caring for the living-hanged on the ghouls who fought to snatch fresh corpses from the gallows to sell to doctors, yet Hakeswill saw himself as unique. He was the man who had survived death, and now no man could kill him. He feared no man. He could be hurt, but he could not be killed, and he had proven that on battlefields and in back alleys. He was the favoured child of death.