‘What are you staring at, Lieutenant?’

‘Nothing, sir.’ Trumper-Jones had thought Sharpe was watching the southern hills.

Sharpe was, but he had become aware of the Lieutenant’s gaze, and he resented it. He hated being pointed out, being watched. He was comfortable these days only with his friends. He was also aware that he had sounded unnecessarily harsh to the young cavalry officer. He looked up at him. ‘We counted three guns. You agree?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Four pounders?’

‘I think so, sir.’

Sharpe grunted. He watched the crest. He hoped the two questions would make him appear friendlier to the officer, though in truth Sharpe did not feel friendly to any strangers these days. He had been oppressed since Christmas, swinging between violent guilt and savage despair because his wife had died in the snows at the Gateway of God. Unbidden into his mind came the sudden picture of the blood at her throat. He shook his head, as if to drive the picture away. He felt guilty that she had died, he felt guilty that he had been unfaithful to her, he felt guilty that her love had been so badly returned, he felt guilty that he had let his daughter become motherless.

He had become poor through his guilt. His daughter, still not two years old, was growing up with her uncle and aunt, and Sharpe had taken all his savings, that he had stolen from the Spanish government in the first place, and given them to Antonia, his daughter. He had nothing left, except his sword, his rifle, his telescope, and the clothes on his back. He found himself resenting this young staff officer with his expensive horse and gilt scabbard furnishings and new leather boots.

There was a murmur in the ranks behind him. The men had seen the small figures who suddenly appeared on the southern crest. Sharpe turned round.

‘Talion!’ There was silence. ‘Talion! ’Shun!’

The mens’ boots crashed on the wet rocks. They were in two ranks, stretched across the mouth of the small Valley which carried the road northwards.

Sharpe stared at them, knowing their nervousness. These were his men, of his Battalion, and he trusted them, even against this outnumbering enemy. ‘Sergeant Huckfield!’

‘Sir!’

‘Raise the Colours!’

The men, Lieutenant Michael Trumper-Jones thought, grinned most unfittingly for‘ such a solemn moment, then he saw why. The ‘Colours’ were not the usual flags of a Battalion, instead they were scraps of cloth that had been tied to two stripped birch trunks. The rain made them hang limp and flat, so that from any distance it was impossible to see that the flags were nothing more than two cloaks tricked out with yellow facings torn from the jackets of the soldiers. At the head of the two staffs were wrapped more of the yellow cloth to resemble, at least at a distance, the crowns of England.

Sharpe saw the staff officer’s surprise. ‘Half Battalions don’t carry Colours, Mr Trumper-Jones.’

‘No, sir.’

‘And the French know that.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So what will they think?’

‘That you have a full Battalion, sir?’

‘Exactly.’ Sharpe looked back to the south, leaving Michael Trumper-Jones curious as to why this deception was a necessary preliminary to surrender. He decided it was best not to ask. Major Sharpe’s face discouraged casual questions.

And no wonder, for Major Richard Sharpe, as he stared at the southern ridge, was thinking that this river valley was a miserable, unfitting, and stupid place to die. He wondered, sometimes, if in death he would meet Teresa again, would see her thin, bright face that had always smiled a welcome; a face that, as her death receded, had lost the detail in his memory. He did not even have a picture of her, and his daughter, growing up in her Spanish family, had no picture of her mother or her father.

The army, Sharpe knew, would march away from Spain one day, and he would march with it, and his daughter would be left to life, just as he had been left orphaned as a small child. Misery begets misery, he thought, and then he remembered the consolation that Antonia’s uncle and aunt were better, more loving parents than he could have been.

A gust of wind slapped rain over the valley, obscuring the view and hissing on the stones of the bridge. Sharpe looked up at the mounted staff officer. ‘What do you see, Lieutenant?’

‘Six horsemen, sir.’

‘They haven’t got cavalry?’

‘Not that we saw, sir.’

‘That’s their infantry officers then. Buggers will be planning our deaths now.’ He smiled sourly. He wished this weather would end, that the sun would warm the land and push the memory of winter far behind him.

Then the skyline, where it was crossed by the road, was suddenly thick with the blue uniforms of the French. Sharpe counted the companies as they marched towards him. Six. They were the vanguard, the men who would be ordered to rush the bridge, but not till the French guns had been fetched into place.

That morning Sharpe had borrowed Captain Peter d’Alembord’s horse and had ridden the French approach route a dozen times. He had put himself into the place of the opposing commander and had argued with himself until he was certain what the enemy would do. Now, as he watched, they were doing it.

The French knew that a large British force was behind them. They dared not leave the road, abandoning their guns to take to the hills, for then they would be meat for the Partisans. They would want to blast away this road-block swiftly, and their tools for the job would be their guns.

A hundred and fifty yards beneath the crest, where the road twisted for the last time towards the valley floor, there was a flat platform of rock that would make an ideal artillery platform. From there the French could plunge their canisters into Sharpe’s two ranks, could twitch them bloody, and when the British were scattered and torn and wounded and dying, the infantry would charge the bridge with their bayonets. From the convenient rock platform the French guns could fire over the heads of their own infantry. The platform was made for the task, so much so that Sharpe had put a working party there this morning and made them clear the space of the boulders that might inconvenience the gunners.

He wanted the French guns there. He had invited the French to put their guns there.

He watched the three gun teams inch their way down the steep road. Infantrymen helped brake the wheels. Lower and lower they came. It was possible, he knew, that the guns might be brought to the flat land across from the bridge, but to stop that he had posted his handful of Riflemen from the South Essex Light Company on the river bank. The French would have seen them there, would fear the spinning accuracy of the bullets, and would, he hoped, choose to place the guns out of the rifles’ range.

They so chose. Sharpe watched with relief as the teams swung onto the platform, as the weapons were unlimbered, and as the ready ammunition was brought forward.

Sharpe turned. ‘Unstop your muzzles!’ The two red-coated ranks pulled the corks from their musket barrels and unwrapped the damp rags from the locks. ‘Present!’

The muskets went into the mens’ shoulders. The French would see the movement. The French feared the speed of British musket fire, the well drilled rhythm of death that had scoured so many battlefields of Spain.

Sharpe turned away from his men. ‘Lieutenant?’

‘Sir?’ Michael Trumper-Jones answered in a squeak. He tried again in a deeper voice. ‘Sir?’

‘Tie your handkerchief to your sabre.’

‘But, sir…’

‘You will obey orders, Lieutenant.’ It was not said so loudly as to reach any ears other than Trumper-Jones‘, but the words were harshly chilling.

‘Yes, sir.’

The six attack companies of the French were two hundred and fifty yards away. They were in column, their bayonets fixed, ready to come forward when the guns had done their work.