Harper had abandoned Mrs Parker and formed a line of Riflemen at the edge of the farm’s outer wall. Their volley had scattered the easternmost cavalry to give Sharpe’s group a ghost of a chance. “Run! Run!”

The men slung their rifles and ran. Sharpe could hear the enemy hooves behind. He could hear the creak of the saddles and the shout of the officers and Sergeants. More rifle bullets flicked past, firing from the farm to give him cover. Louisa stared, eyes wide.

“Left, sir!” A man shouted. “Left!” Cavalrymen were coming from the west; men who had ridden around the roadblock and who now put their beasts to jump the stone wall that edged the road. One man, his horse in midflight, was hit by a bullet and slewed sideways. The others came on unscathed and Sharpe knew his squad would be trapped. He dragged the big sword free, planted his feet, and let the first Frenchman ride at him. “Run on!” he shouted at his men. “Run on!”

The first Frenchman was a Dragoon officer who leaned low in his saddle and speared his sword forward so that, like a lance, it would rip into Sharpe’s belly. The Rifleman backswung his own sword, left to right, in a two-handed blow that was aimed at the horse’s mouth. It struck home on bone and teeth, the animal wrenched aside, and Sharpe threw himself against its body so that the Frenchman’s sword went past and outside him. He tried to reach up to drag the rider from the saddle, missed, and his shako went flying as the forage net thumped him down on to the road. The horse’s rear leg struck his hip, then the Dragoon was gone and Sharpe scrambled to his feet.

“Down!” It was Harper’s voice and he instinctively dropped flat as another volley crashed overhead. A horse screamed, then slid and fell in the road’s muck. One of the beast’s flailing hooves missed Sharpe’s skull by an inch.

“Run!” Harper bellowed.

Sharpe caught a glimpse of the carnage on the road. Harper’s volley, aimed at the congestion formed by the constriction of the stone walls, had stopped the horsemen dead. Sharpe ran through the farm gate. There was an open pasture to cross before he was safe. Riflemen were already filing into the farmhouse and he saw the first shutter pushed aside by a rifle barrel.

“Behind you!” Hooves again, this time from the left, and Sharpe snarled as he turned. His sword swung towards the horse which swerved away and forced its rider to try the dificult cross-cut down and across his own body. Lunging, the Rifleman felt his own sword pierce the Dragoon’s left thigh. The impetus of man and horse dragged the rider free of the blade. More rifles fired, one bullet going so close to Sharpe that he felt its passage like a thump of wind.

“Run!” Harper called again.

Sharpe ran. He reached the farmhouse just as the last Rifleman scrambled over its threshold. Harper was ready to shut the door and jam it tight with a chest, “Thank you!” Sharpe gasped as he cannoned through the door. Harper ignored him.

Sharpe found himself in a passage which ran clean through the farmhouse from north to south. Doors barred the passage’s outer entrances, while two other doors led into the house itself. He chose the door on the left which opened into a spacious kitchen where, quivering with fright, a man and a woman crouched beside the hearth in which, suspended from a pothook, a seething cauldron stank of lye. The Parkers’ coachman offered the couple urgent explanation, then began loading a huge horse-pistol. Louisa was trying to prise a small ivory-hilted pistol from its snug-fitting case.

“Where’s your aunt?” Sharpe asked.

“There.” She pointed to a door at the back of the kitchen.

“Get in there.”

“But…“

“I said get in there!” Sharpe closed the pistol case and, despite Louisa’s indignation, pushed her towards the scullery where her aunt and uncle crouched among tall stone jars. He limped to the closest window and saw the Dragoons milling about just beyond the small barn. His men were firing at them. A horse reared, a Frenchman clapped a hand to a wounded arm, and a trumpet screamed.

The Dragoons scattered. They did not go far; only to find shelter behind the stone barn or the field walls, and Sharpe knew it would only be seconds before, dismounted, they began to rattle the farmhouse with their carbine fire. “How many windows are there, Sergeant?”

“Dunno, sir.” Williams was panting from the effort of running uphill.

A bullet lashed through the kitchen from outside. It struck a high beam above Sharpe. “Keep your bloody heads down! And fire back!”

There were three rooms downstairs; the large kitchen which had a window facing north and another south. The small scullery where the Parkers crouched had no windows. Beyond the passage was a much larger, windowless room, this one a byre for the animals. Two pigs and a dozen scared chickens were its only occupants.

A ladder from the kitchen led upstairs where there was a single room for sleeping. The farm’s relative prosperity was witnessed by a massive bed and a chest of drawers. The room had two windows, also facing north and south. Sharpe put Riflemen in both windows, then ordered Sergeant

Williams to take charge of the upstairs room and to make loopholes in the eastern and western walls. “And break through the roof.”

“The roof?” Williams gaped up at the thick beams and the timbers which hid the tiles.

“To keep watch east and west,” Sharpe ordered. Until he could see to his flanks then he was vulnerable to French surprise.

Downstairs again, Sharpe ordered a loophole to be hacked next to the chimney breast. The Spanish farmer, understanding what needed to be done, produced a pickaxe and began to pound at his wall. A crucifix, hanging on the limewashed stone, juddered with the force of the man’s blows.

“Bastards right!” Harper shouted from the window. Rifles cracked. The greenjackets who fired ducked back, letting others take their places. Some dismounted Dragoons had tried to rush the farm, but three of them now lay in a puddle; two scrambled up and limped to safety, the third was still. Sharpe saw the splash of rain in the blood-rippled water.

Then, for a few moments, there was relative peace.

None of Sharpe’s men was wounded. They were breathless and damp, but safe. They stayed crouched low under the threat of carbine fire that flayed at the windows, but the bullets did no harm except to the house. Sharpe, peering out, saw that the enemy was hidden in ditches or behind the dunghill. The farmer’s wife was nervously offering sliced sausage to the greenjackets.

George Parker crept on hands and knees from the scullery. He nervously waited for Sharpe’s attention which, once gained, he used to enquire what course of action Lieutenant Sharpe planned to follow.

Lieutenant Sharpe informed Mr Parker that he intended to wait for darkness to fall.

Parker swallowed. “That could be hours!”

“Five at the most, sir.” Sharpe was reloading his rifle, “unless God makes the sun stand still.”

Parker ignored Sharpe’s levity. “And then?”

“Break out, sir. Not till it’s dead of night. Hit the bastards when they’re not expecting it. Kill a few of them, and hope the others get confused.” Sharpe righted the rifle and primed its pan. “They can’t do much damage to us so long as we stay low.”

“But…“ Parker flinched as a bullet smacked into the wall above his head. ”My dear wife, Lieutenant, wishes your assurance that our carriage will be retrieved?“

“Afraid not, sir.” Sharpe knelt up, saw a flicker of a shadow beyond the dunghill, and fired his rifle. Smoke billowed from the weapon, and a wad of burning paper smoked on the floor. “There won’t be time, sir.” He crouched, took a cartridge from his pouch, and bit the bullet away.

“But my testaments!”

Sharpe did not like to reveal that the testaments, when last seen, had been strewn in the Spanish mud. He spat the bullet into his rifle’s muzzle. “Your testaments, sir, are now in the hands of Napoleon’s army.” He rammed ball, wadding and powder down his rifle barrel. The saltpetre from the powder was rank and dry in his mouth.