“They sailed south,” Sharpe told her, “so they can march inland and take the French from the rear.”

“And you wish you were with them?” Caterina asked Sharpe. She had heard envy in his voice.

“I wish I was,” Sharpe said.

“Me too,” Galiana put in.

“There’s a regiment in the French army,” Sharpe said, “that I’ve got a quarrel with. The 8th of the line. I want to meet them again.”

“Perhaps you will,” Galiana said.

“No, I’m in the wrong place,” Sharpe said sourly.

“But the army will advance from over there”—Galiana pointed inland—“and the French will march to meet them. I think a determined man could ride around the French army and join our forces. A determined man, say, who knows the country.”

“Which is you,” Sharpe said, “not me.”

“I do know the country,” Galiana said, “but whoever commands the fort here will have orders to stop unauthorized Spanish troops from crossing the bridge.” He paused, looking at Sharpe. “But they will have no orders to stop Englishmen.”

“How many days before they get here?” Sharpe asked.

“Three? Four?”

“I’m under orders to take a ship to Lisbon.”

“No ships will be sailing for Lisbon now,” Galiana said confidently.

“The wind might turn,” Sharpe said.

“It’s nothing to do with the wind,” Galiana said, “but with the possibility that General Lapeña is defeated.”

From what Sharpe had heard, everyone expected Lapeña, Doña Manolito, to be thrashed by Victor. “And if he is defeated?” he asked tonelessly.

“Then they will want every available ship ready to evacuate the city,” Galiana said, “which is why no ship will be permitted to leave until the thing is decided.”

“And you expect defeat?” Sharpe asked brutally.

“What I expect,” Galiana said, “is that you will repay the favor you owe me.”

“Get you across the bridge?”

Galiana smiled. “That is the favor, Captain Sharpe. Get me across the bridge.”

And Sharpe thought he might yet meet Colonel Vandal again.

IT WAS CHAOS. BLOODY chaos. It was infuriating. “It is,” Lord William Russell said calmly, “entirely to be expected.”

“God damn it!” Sir Thomas Graham exploded.

“In each and every particular,” Lord William said, sounding far wiser than his twenty-one years, “precisely what we expected.”

“And damn you too,” Sir Thomas said. His horse pricked back its ears at its master’s vehemence. “Bloody man!” Sir Thomas said, slapping his right boot with his whip. “Not you, Willie, him. Him! That bloody man!”

“What bloody man is that?” Major John Hope, Sir Thomas’s nephew and senior aide, asked solemnly.

Sir Thomas recognized the line from Macbeth, but was in too much of a temper to acknowledge it. Instead he put spurs to his horse, beckoned to his aides, and started toward the head of the column where General Lapeña had called yet another halt.

It should all have been so simple. So damned simple. Land at Tarifa and there meet the British troops sent from the Gibraltar garrison, and that had happened as planned, at which point the whole army was supposed to march north. Except they could not leave Tarifa because the Spanish had not arrived, and so Sir Thomas waited two days, two days of consuming rations that were supposed to be reserved for the march. And when Lapeña’s troops did arrive, their boats would not risk crossing the surf on the beach, so the Spanish troops had been forced to wade ashore. They landed soaking, shivering, and starving, in no condition to march, and so another day was wasted.

Yet still it should have been easy. There were just fifty miles to march, which, even with the guns and baggage, should not have taken more than four days. The road went northward, following a river beneath the Sierra de Fates. Then, once out of those hills, they should have crossed the plain by a good road that led to Medina Sidonia where the allied army would turn west to attack the French siege lines that were anchored on the town of Chiclana. That is what should have happened, but it did not. The Spaniards led the march and they were slow, painfully slow. Sir Thomas, riding at the head of the British troops, which formed the rearguard, noted the boots that had torn themselves to pieces and been discarded beside the road. Some weary Spaniards had fallen out of their ranks, joining the broken boots, and they just watched the red-coated and green-jacketed men march by. And maybe that would not have mattered if enough Spaniards, barefoot or not, had reached Medina Sidonia to chase out whatever garrison the French had placed in the town.

General Lapeña had seemed as eager as Sir Thomas when the march started. He understood the necessity of hurrying north and turning west before Marshal Victor could find a place to make a stand. The allied army was supposed to erupt like a storm on the unprotected rear of the French siege lines. Sir Thomas envisaged his men rampaging through the French camps, ravaging the artillery parks, exploding the magazines, and harrying the broken army out of its earthworks and onto the guns of the British line protecting the Isla de León. All it needed was speed, speed, speed, but then, on the second day, Lapeña had decided to rest his footsore troops and instead march through the next night. And even that might have served, except that the Spanish guides had become lost and the army wandered in a great circle under the hard brightness of the stars. “God damn it!” Sir Thomas had exclaimed. “Can’t they see the North Star?”

“There are marshes, Sir Thomas,” the Spanish liaison officer had pleaded.

“God damn it! Just follow the road!”

But the road had not been followed and the army wandered, then halted, and men sat in fields where some tried to sleep. The ground was damp and the night surprisingly cold, so very few managed any rest. The British lit short clay pipes and the officers’ servants walked their masters’ horses up and down while the guides argued until finally some gypsies, woken from their encampment in a grove of cork oaks, pointed the way to Medina Sedonia. The troops had marched for twelve hours and, by the time they bivouacked at midday, had covered only six miles, though at least the King’s German Legion cavalry, who served under Sir Thomas’s command, had managed to surprise a half battalion of foraging French infantry and had killed a dozen enemy and captured twice as many.

General Lapeña, in a fit of energy, had then proposed marching again that same afternoon, but the men were exhausted from a wasted night and the rations were still being distributed. So he had agreed with Sir Thomas to wait until the men were fed, and then he decided they should sleep before they marched at dawn, yet at dawn Lapeña himself was not ready. It seemed that a French officer, one of those captured by the German cavalry, had revealed that Marshal Victor had reinforced the garrison in Medina Sidonia so that now it numbered more than three thousand men. “We cannot go there,” Lapeña had declared. He was a lugubrious man, slightly stooped, with nervous eyes that were rarely still. “Three thousand men! We can beat them, but at what cost? Delay, Sir Thomas, delay. They will hold us up while Victor maneuvers around us!” His hands had made extravagant gestures describing an encirclement, and finished by crushing together. “We shall go to Vejer. Today!” He made the decision with a fine forcefulness. “From Vejer we can assail Chiclana from the south.”

And that was a viable plan. The captured French officer, a bespectacled captain called Brouard, drank too much of General Lapeña’s wine and cheerfully revealed that there was no garrison in Vejer. Sir Thomas knew that a road went north from the town, which meant the allied army could come at the French siege works from the south, rather than from the east, and though he was not happy with the decision, he recognized the sense in it.