To all this El Matarife listened. He shrugged when the story finished, as if to suggest that such politics were not his business. ‘I am a soldier.’

Pierre Ducos sipped wine. A gust of wind lifted one of the damp blankets at a window and fluttered the tallow candle that lit their meal. He smiled. ‘Your family was rich once.’ El Matarife stabbed his cheese flecked knife at the Frenchman. ‘Your troops destroyed our wealth.’

‘Your brother,’ and Ducos’ voice held a hint of mockery, ‘has put a price upon the assistance he will give me.’

‘A price?’ The bearded face smiled at the thought of money.

Ducos smiled back. ‘The price is the restoration of your family’s fortune, and more.’

‘More?’ El Matarife looked at his brother. The priest nodded. ‘Three hundred thousand dollars, Juan.’

El Matarife laughed. He looked from his brother to the Frenchman and he saw that neither smiled, that the sum was true, and his laughter died. He stared belligerently at Ducos. ‘You’re cheating us, Frenchman. Your country will never pay that much. Never!’

‘The money will not come from France,’ Ducos said. ‘Where then?

‘From a woman.’ Ducos spoke softly. ‘But first there has to be a death, then an imprisonment, and that, El Matarife, is your part of this.’

The Partisan leader looked at his brother for confirmation, received it, and looked back at the small Frenchman. ‘A death?’

‘One death. The woman’s husband.’

‘The imprisonment?’

‘The woman.’

‘When?’

Pierre Ducos saw the Partisan’s smile and felt the surge of hope. The secret would be safe and France saved. He would buy, with three hundred thousand Spanish dollars that were not his to spend, the future of Napoleon’s empire. ‘When?’ the Partisan asked again.

‘Spring,’ Ducos said. This spring. You will be ready?’

‘So long as your troops leave me alone.’ El Matarife laughed.

‘That I promise.’

‘Then I will be ready.’

The bond was sealed by a handshake. The secret would be safe, the Treaty that would defeat Britain made, and, in the course of it, Pierre Ducos would accomplish his revenge on the Englishman who had broken his spectacles. When the spring came, and when the armies prepared to fight a war that would, within a year, be made redundant by the secret treaty, a man called Richard Sharpe, a soldier, would die.

Major Richard Sharpe, on a damp spring day when a cold wind whipped down a rocky valley, stood on an ancient stone bridge and stared at the road which led southwards to a low pass in the rocky crest. The hills were dark with rain.

Behind him, standing at ease, with their musket locks wrapped with rags and the muzzles plugged with corks to stop the rain soaking into the barrels, stood five companies of infantry.

The crest, Sharpe knew, was five hundred yards away. In a few moments there would be enemy on that crest and his job was to stop them crossing the bridge. A simple job, a soldier’s job. It was made easier because the spring of 1813 was late, the weather had brought these border hills nothing but rain, and the stream beneath the bridge was deep, fast, and impassable. The enemy would have to come to the bridge where Sharpe waited or not cross the watercourse at all.

‘Sir?’ D’Alembord, Captain of the Light Company, sounded apprehensive, as if he did not want to provoke Major Sharpe’s ill temper.

‘Captain?’

‘Staff officer coming, sir.’

Sharpe grunted, but said nothing. He heard the hooves slow behind him, then the horse was in front of him and an excited cavalry Lieutenant was looking down on him. ‘Major Sharpe?’

A pair of dark eyes, hard and angry, looked from the Lieutenant’s gilt spurs, up his boots, up the rich, mud-spattered, blue woollen cloak till they met the excited staff officer’s eyes. ‘You’re in my way, Lieutenant.’

‘Sorry, sir.’

The Lieutenant hastily moved his horse to qne side. He had ridden hard, making a circuit of difficult country, and was proud of his ride. His mare was restless, matching the rider’s exhilarated mood. ‘General Preston’s compliments, sir, and the enemy is coming your way.’

‘I’ve got picquets on the ridge.’ Sharpe said it ungraciously. ‘I saw the enemy a half hour since.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Sharpe stared at the ridge. The Lieutenant was wondering whether he ought to quietly ride away when suddenly the tall Rifleman looked at him again. ‘Do you speak French?’

The Lieutenant, who was nervous of meeting Major Richard Sharpe for the first time, nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘How well?’

The cavalryman smiled. ‘Tres bien, Monsieur, jeparle…’

‘I didn’t ask for a god-damned demonstration! Answer me.’

The Lieutenant was horrified by the savage reproof. ‘I speak it well, sir.’

Sharpe stared at him. The Lieutenant thought that this was just such a stare that an executioner might give a plump and once-privileged victim. ‘What’s your name, Lieutenant?’

‘Trumper-Jones, sir.’

‘Do you have a white handkerchief?’

This conversation, Trumper-Jones decided, was becoming increasingly odd. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good.’ Sharpe looked back to the ridge, and to the saddle among the rocks where the road came over the skyline.

This had become, he was thinking, a bastard of a day’s work. The British army was clearing the roads eastward from the Portuguese frontier. They were driving back the French outposts and prising out. the French garrisons, making the roads ready for the army’s summer campaign.

And on this day of fitful rain and cold wind five British Battalions had attacked a small French garrison on the River Tormes. Five miles behind the French, on the road that would be their retreat, was this bridge. Sharpe, with half a Battalion and a Company of Riflemen had been sent by a circuitous night march to block the retreat. His task was simple; to stop the French long enough to let the other Battalions come up behind and finish them off. It was as simple as that, yet now, as the afternoon was well advanced, Sharpe’s mood was sour and bitter.

‘Sir?’ Sharpe looked up. The Lieutenant was offering him a folded linen handkerchief. Trumper-Jones smiled nervously. ‘You wanted a handkerchief, sir?’

‘I don’t want to blow my nose, you fool!’ It’s for the surrender!’ Sharpe scowled and walked two paces away.

Michael Trumper-Jones stared after him. It was true that fifteen hundred French were approaching this small force of less then four hundred men, but nothing that Trumper-Jones had heard of Richard Sharpe had prepared him for this sudden willingness to surrender. Sharpe’s fame, indeed, had reached England, from whence Michael Trumper-Jones had so recently sailed to join the army, and the closer he had come to the battle lines, the more he had heard the name. Sharpe was a soldier’s soldier, a man whose approval was eagerly sought by other men, whose name was used as a touchstone of professional competence, and apparently a man who now contemplated surrender without a fight.

Lieutenant Michael Trumper-Jones, appalled at the thought, looked surreptitiously at a face made dark by sun and wind. It was a handsome face, marred only by a scar that pulled down Sharpe’s left eye to give him a mocking, knowing expression. Trumper-Jones did not know it, but that scar-pulled expression would disappear with a smile.

What astonished Trumper-Jones most was that Major Richard Sharpe bore no marks of rank, neither sash nor epaulettes; indeed nothing except the big battered cavalry sword at his side indicated that he was an officer. He looked, Trumper-Jones thought, the very image of a man who had taken the first French Eagle captured by the British, who had stormed the breach at Badajoz, and charged with the Germans at Garcia Hernandez. His air of confidence made it hard to believe that he had started his career in the ranks. It made it even harder to believe that he would surrender his outnumbered men without a fight.