Verigny shrugged. ‘Well?’

‘I cannot give you my parole, sir.’

Verigny frowned. The table was silent. The General shrugged. ‘You are a brave man, Major, I do not want to treat you bad.’

‘I cannot accept, sir.’

‘But I want to help, yes? Helene say you treat her with honour, so I do the similar for you! You will be changed! Why do you not let me do this?’

Sharpe stood. The whole table watched him. He stepped over the bench. In his head he could hear Hogan’s insistent words that he must not be captured. He cursed himself. He had sought a warm bed last night when he should have insisted in sleeping in the open air, hidden by woods and night mists.

La Marquesa watched him. She shook her head, is if to tell him that he must not do what he planned. At least, Sharpe thought, she had kept her word. So far the French did not know that they had captured Richard Sharpe.

Verigny smiled. ‘Come, Major! You will be changed!’

In answer Sharpe unbuckled his sword belt. The slings jangled harshly. He leaned forward and put the great sword on the table. The dull metal scabbard scraped on the wood as he looked at the General and pronounced his own failure. ‘I am your prisoner, sir. No parole.’

Beyond the inn door the town burned. A woman screamed. A child sobbed. The lancers searched the houses before torching them, and Richard Sharpe was led under guard and locked into a stable. He had failed.

There was nothing in the cell, no blanket, no cot, not even a bucket. The floor was thick with slime. Each breath made Sharpe want to gag on the stench that was thicker than musket smoke. There was no window. He knew he was deep inside the rock on which Burgos’ castle was built.

He had been brought through the outer courtyard, past walls still scorched from the explosions of British howitzer shells fired in last year’s siege, through the packed, loaded wagons of treasure that crammed the yard, past the roofless, burned out buildings, to the massively walled keep.

He had been pushed down stairs, down a dank, cold corridor, and into this small, square room with its slimy floor and the incessant drip of water onto stone outside. The only light was a faint glow that come through a small hole carved in the thick door.

He shouted that he was a British officer, that he wished to be treated accordingly, but there was no reply. He shouted it in Spanish and English, but his voice faded in the cold echoing corridor to silence.

He touched his temple and winced with the pain. It was swollen where the infantry Sergeant had struck him with a musket butt. The blood was drying to a crust.

Rats moved in the corridor. The water dripped outside. Once he heard voices far away, and he shouted again, but there was no reply.

He had been given no chance to escape on the journey south. The lancers had ridden fast, and Sharpe was put in the centre of a whole squadron, the men behind him with their lances ready to thrust. At night he had been locked up, twice in churches, once in a village jail, and guarded by men who stayed wide awake with loaded muskets on their knees. La Marquesa had travelled in a coach that General Verigny had confiscated in the town where he had found her. Once or twice she would catch Sharpe’s eye and shrug. At night she sent him wine, and food cooked for the lancer officers.

His telescope, his pack, all his belongings except the clothes he wore, had been taken from him. Verigny, who could not understand why Major ‘Vaughn’ was so stubborn, had promised that the belongings would be returned to him. Verigny had kept the promise. When Sharpe was taken up the steep road and into Burgos Castle, his property was given back.

He had been handed over to the fortress troops. Verigny’s men left him in the courtyard, standing under the guard of two infantrymen as the sun climbed higher.

Sharpe had stared at the wagons in the yard, trying to see beneath the roped tarpaulins a clue to confirm La Marquesa’s tale that the treasure of the Spanish empire was here. He waited. Men of the garrison passed him, staring curiously at the prisoner, and still no administrative officer arrived to arrange his future. Once, at one of the high windows in the keep, Sharpe saw a man with a telescope. The glass seemed to be aimed directly at himself.

It had been shortly after he had seen the man with the spyglass that the four infantrymen, led by a Sergeant, had run towards him. He had thought that they were going past him, had stepped back, but one of the men had bellowed at him, swung a fist, and Sharpe had hit back, one punch, two, and then the Sergeant had cracked him on the temple with the musket butt and he had been unceremoniously brought to this cell where he could pace three steps in each direction and where there was no light, no stool, no bed, no hope.

He was thirsty. His head throbbed. He leaned on the wall for a time, fighting pain, darkness and despair. The hours passed, but what time it was he did not know. No bells penetrated to this room hacked in the rock beneath the old castle.

He wondered if he had been recognised, but even if he had then it made no sense for him to be treated this way. He thought of La Marquesa, imagining her in the arms of her General, her head on his chest, her hair golden against his skin. He tried to remember the night in the inn, but it seemed unreal. All that seemed real was this cell, his hurts, and the thirst. He found a wet patch of wall and he licked the stone for moisture. The stench in the cell was foul. Night-soil had been thrown in here, or left by other prisoners, and each breath he took was foetid.

Time passed and passed, measured only by the dripping of water onto stone. They wanted him to despair, to be dragged down by this foul, stinking place, and he fought it by trying to remember the names of every man who had served in his Company since the beginning of the war in Spain, and when he had done that he tried to call aloud the muster-roll of the very first Company he had joined in the army. He paced the cell against the cold, back and forth, his boots splashing on the floor, and sometimes, when the smell was too much, he put his mouth against the spyhole in the door and sucked deep breaths.

He cursed himself for this capture, for oversleeping in the dawn, for accepting the challenge of a duel.

He sensed that the day had passed, that night had come, though the glow at the door did not change. He propped himself in a corner, squatting on his heels with his back to the wall, and tried to sleep. Four nights ago he had been in a real bed, between sheets, with La Marquesa warm against him and over him and he tried to sleep, jerked awake, and listened to the rats outside and the drip of water. He shivered.

He sensed that the prisoner put in this cell was supposed to lie down. They wanted the prisoner here to soil his clothes and be stained with faeces. He would not oblige them.

Three men came for him eventually, two armed with bayonet-tipped muskets and the third the same great hulk of a Sergeant who had first struck Sharpe. The man was huge. He appeared to have no neck and his arms bulged the uniform sleeves with muscle. The Sergeant shouted at him in French, then laughed at the smell of the room.

Sharpe was tired, desperately so, and the thirst had half closed his throat. He stumbled in the sudden light of the flaming torch held by one of his guards and the Sergeant pushed him so he fell, and then hauled him up with a strength that took Sharpe’s weight easily.

They marched him down the corridor, up the stairs, along a second corridor and up more stairs. There was daylight here, coming through small windows that looked into the keep’s central courtyard, and then the Sergeant pushed Sharpe into a room where a fourth soldier waited.