“Sir?”

“You will fire the boats! Start at the southern moorings!”

A jeer went up and Lassan instinctively reached for his pistol, but his sergeant touched his arm. “Sir.” The sergeant’s voice was sad.

A creak sounded, then another. There was the squeak of an oar in its thole, then there were splashes and Lassan could see, in the darkness, the white marks of blades touching water. He still watched and, in the glistening darkness where the torchlight touched the water into ripples, he saw the ghostly shapes of white-painted boats.

On the flowing tide the British had rowed up channel and Lassan, listening to the ridicule of his countrymen, saw the blue-jacketed sailors, cutlasses in their hands, swarming from their longboats on to the ckasse-marees. The French crews, welcoming English gold, applauded.

Lassan turned away. “We go east, Lieutenant.”

“Sir.”

Henri Lassan, with his little band of gunners, stumbled away from the village. He would follow the Arcachon’s southern shore, then head inland to Bordeaux to report to his superiors that he had failed, that Arcachon was lost, and that the British had taken their boats.

And thus the battle of Arcachon, that had begun with such high hopes for its defenders, ended in a rain-cold night of bleak defeat.

Five French dead and one dead Rifleman were laid in the fort’s chapel, not out of reverence, but simply because it was the most convenient place for the corpses to lie until there was time to bury them. Lieutenant Minver stripped the white frontal from the altar and ordered two of his men to tear it into strips for bandages; then, being a well-trained young man who had been told constantly by his parents never to leave a light burning in an empty room, he pinched out the flame of the Eternal Presence before going back to the courtyard.

The Teste de Buch was in chaos. Riflemen manned the ramparts while Marines and sailors seethed in the courtyard. The six field guns, with their limbers, had been dragged into the fort where they were objects of much curiosity to the seamen. The Scylla, her flanks riven by the heavy shot, was moored beneath the silent guns.

The Marines’ packs and supplies were being ferried from a brig anchored below the Scylla, then slung over the fort’s wall by a system of ropes and pulleys. The Marines had marched in light-order, but had still reached the fort two hours after Sharpe’s Riflemen.

“I must thank you, Major Sharpe.” Captain Bampfylde limped on blistered feet into the room where Sharpe was being bandaged by a naval surgeon. Bampfylde flinched at the sight of so much blood on Sharpe’s face and shirt. “My dear fellow, permit me to say how sorry I am?”

The surgeon, a drunkard of morose disposition, answered in place of Sharpe. “It’s nothing, sir. Head wounds bleed like a stuck pig.” He finished the bandaging and gave Sharpe’s head a light buffet. “I’ll warrant you’ve got a head like a bloody bass drum, though.”

If the man meant painful, then he was right, and the friendly tap had not helped, but at least Sharpe’s sight had come back as soon as the blood was washed from his eyes. He looked up at Bampfylde whose young, plump face looked tired. “The fort wasn’t exactly deserted.”

“So it seems!” Bampfylde crossed to the table and examined a bottle-of wine abandoned by the French garrison. He plucked out the cork and poured a little into a convenient glass. He smelt it, swirled it around, examined it, then sipped it. “Very nice. A trifle young, I’d say.” He poured more wine into the glass. “Still, no bones broken, eh?”

“I lost one man dead.”

Bampfylde shrugged. ‘Scylla lost sixteen!“ He said it as if to show that the Navy had taken the greater punishment.

“And the Marines?” Sharpe asked.

“Two men were scratched,” Bampfylde said airily. “I always thought that clearing was the most likely place for an ambuscade, Sharpe. If they want to catch the likes of us, though, they’ll have to show a livelier leg, what?” He laughed.

Bampfylde was a lying bastard, Sharpe thought. The two Riflemen sent by Frederickson had warned the Marines of the field guns, and Marine Captain Palmer had already thanked Sharpe for the service. But Bampfylde was speaking as though he had both detected and defeated the ambush, whereas the bloody man had done nothing. Bampfylde finished the wine. “Some of the Americans escaped?” He made the question sound like an accusation.

“So I believe.” Sharpe did not care. Bampfylde had thirty American prisoners to send to England, and surely that was enough. The fort was taken, seamen from the Scylla had gone up channel to find the chasse-mare’es, and no man could have expected more of the day.

“So you’ll go inland in the morning, Sharpe?” Bampfylde peered at Sharpe’s head wound. “That’s only a scratch, isn’t it? Nothing to slow your reconnaissance?”

Sharpe did not reply. The fort was taken, Elphinstone would get the extra chasse-marees he needed, and the rest of this operation was farcical. Besides, he did not care whether Bordeaux was seething with discontent or not, he only cared that Jane should not die while he was away. Sharpe twisted round to look at the surgeon. “What’s the first symptom of fever?”

The surgeon was helping himself to the wine. “Black-spot, Yellow, Swamp? Walcheren? Which fever?”

“Any fever,” Sharpe growled.

The surgeon shrugged. “A heated skin, uncontrolled shivering, a looseness of the bowels. I can’t say you have any pyretic symptoms yourself, Major.”

Sharpe felt a horrid dread. For a second he felt a temptation to claim that his wound was incapacitating and to demand that he was returned to St Jean de Luz by the first ship.

“Well, Sharpe?” Bampfylde was offended that Sharpe had ignored his questions. “You will be marching inland?”

“Yes, sir.” Sharpe stood. Anything rather than endure this bumptious naval captain. Sharpe would march inland, ambush the road, then return and refuse to have any further part of Bampfylde’s madness. He knew he should dry his sword if it was not to have rust spots by morning, but he was too tired. He had not slept last night, he had marched all day, and he had taken a fortress. Now he would sleep.

He pushed past Bampfylde and went to find a cot in an empty room of the barracks. There, surrounded by the small belongings of a gunner evicted by his Green Jackets, he lay down and slept.

It was night now, a cold night. Sentries shivered on the ramparts and the flooded ditch had a skin of thin ice. The wind dropped, the rain had died, and the clouds thinned to leave a sky pricked by cold, white, winter-bright stars above the shimmering, glittering, ice-edged marshes.

Across those silent marshes, and from the silvered, steel-flat waters of Arcachon, a glimmer of mist was born. The mist skeined slow in a still night, a night of frost and white vapour beyond a fort where the blood spilt in a skirmish froze hard in the darkness.

Torches flared in the courtyard of the Teste de Buch. Breath smoked to vapour. Frost touched the cobbles white and rimed the gun barrels on the ramparts.

Bampfylde had ordered the Green Jackets to rest and replaced them with Marines whose scarlet coats and white crossbelts seemed bright in the starlit night.

Nine French prisoners, one of them the sergeant who had fired at Sharpe from the barrack roof, were locked in an empty ready magazine. They would be taken by Bampfylde’s ships to the rotting prison hulks in the Thames or else to the new stone jail built by French prisoners in the wilds of Dartmoor.

The other prisoners were locked in the spirit store that Bampfylde had ordered emptied of its brandy and wine. Thirty men were crammed into a space fit for no more than a dozen. They were the Americans.

“At least they claim they’re Americans!” Bampfylde, his bootless feet propped on an ammunition box, sat in front of a fire that had been lit in Lassan’s old quarters. “But I’ll warrant half of them are our deserters!”