“Disguise it, sir?”

“If the Crapauds see us crossing the bridge with powder, what do you think they’ll do?”

“They won’t be happy, sir.”

“No, Pat, they won’t. They’ll use us for target practice.”

It was mid-morning before everything was ready. The French in Fort Josephine had abandoned their desultory cannon fire. Sharpe had half expected the enemy to send an envoy across the river to inquire about the women, but none had come. “Three of the officers’ wives are from the 8th, sir,” Jack Bullen told Sharpe.

“They’re what?” Sharpe asked.

“French regiment, sir. The 8th. They’ve been at Cádiz, but they were sent to reinforce the troops besieging Badajoz. They’re across the river, sir, but some of the officers and their wives slept here last night. Better quarters, see?” Bullen paused, evidently expecting some reaction from Sharpe. “Don’t you see, sir? There’s a whole French battalion over there. The 8th. Not just the garrison, but a fighting battalion. Oh, dear God.” This last was because two women had detached themselves from the rest and were haranguing him in Spanish. Bullen calmed them with a smile. “They say they’re Spanish, sir,” he explained to Sharpe, “and say they don’t want to go to the other fort.”

“What are they doing here in the first place?”

The women talked to Sharpe, both at the same time, both urgently, and he thought he understood that they were claiming to have been captured by the French and forced to live with a pair of soldiers. That might be true, he thought. “So where do you want to go?” he asked them in bad Spanish.

They both spoke again, pointing across the river and southward, claiming that was where they had come from. Sharpe hushed them. “They can go wherever they bloody like, Jack.”

The fort’s gate was thrown open and Bullen led the way through, holding his arms wide to show the French across the river that he meant no harm. The women followed. The track down to the river was rough and stony and the women went slowly until they reached the wooden roadway laid across the pontoons. Sharpe and his men brought up the rear. Harper, his seven-barreled gun slung next to his rifle, nodded across the river. “There’s a reception party, sir,” he said, referring to three mounted French officers who had just appeared outside Fort Josephine. They were waiting there, watching the approaching women and soldiers.

A dozen of Sharpe’s men were manhandling the cart. Lieutenant Sturridge, the engineer, was with them and he kept flinching because the cart had a skewed axle and constantly lurched to the left. It went more smoothly once they were on the bridge, though the women were nervous of crossing because the whole roadway of planked chesses was vibrating from the pressure of the winter-swollen river as it forced its way between the bargelike pontoons. Dead branches and flotsam were jammed on the upstream side, increasing the pressure and making the water break white about the bluff bows. Each of the big pontoons was held against the current by a pair of thick anchor chains and Sharpe hoped that five barrels of damp powder would prove sufficient to shatter the massive construction. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Harper asked.

“Porto?”

“All those poor bastards,” Harper said, remembering the awful moment when the pontoon bridge across the Douro had snapped. The roadway had been crowded with folk fleeing the invading French, and hundreds of them had drowned. Sharpe still saw the children in his dreams.

The three French officers were riding down to the bridge’s far end now. They waited there and Sharpe hurried past the women. “Jack,” he called to Bullen, “I need you to translate.”

Sharpe and Bullen led the way to the Spanish bank. The women followed hesitantly. The three French officers waited and, as Sharpe drew near, one of them took off his cocked hat in salute. “My name is Lecroix,” he said as he introduced himself. He spoke in English. Lecroix was a young man, exquisitely uniformed, with a lean handsome face and very white teeth. “Captain Lecroix of the 8th,” he added.

“Captain Sharpe.”

Lecroix’s eyes widened slightly, perhaps because Sharpe did not look like a captain. His uniform was torn and dirty and, though he wore a sword, as officers did, the blade was a Heavy Cavalry trooper’s weapon, which was a huge and unwieldy blade better suited for butchering. He carried a rifle too, and officers did not usually carry longarms. Then there was his face, tanned and scarred, a face you might meet in some fetid alley, not in a salon. It was a frightening face and Lecroix, who was no coward, almost recoiled from the hostility in Sharpe’s eyes. “Colonel Vandal,” he said, putting the stress on the name’s second syllable, “sends his compliments, monsieur, and requests that you permit us to recover our wounded”—he paused, glancing at the handcart that had been stripped of the women’s luggage, thus revealing the powder kegs—“before you attempt to destroy the bridge.”

“Attempt?” Sharpe asked.

Lecroix ignored the scorn. “Or do you intend to leave our wounded for the amusements of the Portuguese?”

Sharpe was tempted to say that any French wounded deserved whatever they got from the Portuguese, but he resisted the urge. The request, he reckoned, was fair enough and so he drew Jack Bullen away far enough so that the French officers could not overhear him. “Go and see the brigadier,” he told the lieutenant, “and tell him these buggers want to fetch their wounded over the river before we destroy the bridge.”

Bullen set off back across the bridge while two of the French officers started back toward Fort Josephine, followed by all the women except the two Spaniards who, barefooted and ragged, hurried south down the river’s bank. Lecroix watched them go. “Those two didn’t want to stay with us?” He sounded surprised.

“They said you captured them.”

“We probably did.” He took out a leather case of long thin cigars and offered one to Sharpe. Sharpe shook his head, then waited as Lecroix laboriously struck a light with his tinderbox. “You did well this morning,” the Frenchman said once the cigar was alight.

“Your garrison was asleep,” Sharpe said.

Lecroix shrugged. “Garrison troops. No good. Old and sick and tired men.” He spat out a shred of tobacco. “But I think you have done all the damage you will do today. You will not break the bridge.”

“We won’t?”

“Cannon,” Lecroix said laconically, gesturing at Fort Josephine, “and my colonel is determined to preserve the bridge, and what my colonel wants, he gets.”

“Colonel Vandal?”

“Vandal,” Lecroix corrected Sharpe’s pronunciation, “Colonel Vandal of the 8th of the Line. You have heard of him?”

“Never.”

“You should educate yourself, Captain,” Lecroix said with a smile.

“Read the accounts of Austerlitz and be astonished by Colonel Vandal’s bravery.”

“Austerlitz?” Sharpe asked. “What was that?”

Lecroix just shrugged. The women’s luggage was dropped at the bridge’s end and Sharpe sent the men back, then followed them until he reached Lieutenant Sturridge who was kicking at the planks on the foredeck of the fourth pontoon from the bank. The timber was rotten and he had managed to make a hole there. The stench of stagnant water came from the hole. “If we widen it,” Sturridge said, “then we should be able to blow this one to hell and beyond.”

“Sir!” Harper called. Sharpe turned eastward and saw French infantry coming from Fort Josephine. They were fixing bayonets and forming ranks just outside the fort, but he had no doubt they were coming to the bridge. It was a big company, at least a hundred men. French battalions were divided into six companies, unlike the British who had ten, and this company looked formidable with fixed bayonets. Bloody hell, Sharpe thought, but if the frogs wanted to make a fight of it, then they had better hurry because Sturridge, helped by a half dozen of Sharpe’s men, was prising off the pontoon’s foredeck and Harper was carrying the first powder barrel toward the widening hole.