“Why isn’t it marked, sir?”

Hogan made a contemptuous noise. “I’m surprised the map even marks Madrid, let alone Valdelacasa.” He was right. The infamous old Tomas Lopez map, the only one available to the armies in Spain, was a wondrous work of the Spanish imagination. Hogan stabbed his finger down onto the map. “The bridge is hardly used, it’s in bad repair. We’re told you can hardly put a cart across, let alone a gun, but it could be repaired and we could have ”old trousers“ up our backsides in no time.” Sharpe smiled. ’Old trousers’ was the Rifle’s strange nickname for the French, and Hogan had adopted the phrase with relish. The Engineer lowered his voice conspiratorially. ”It’s a strange place, I’m told, just a ruined convent and the bridge. They call it El Puente de los Malditos.“ He nodded as if he had made his point.

Sharpe waited a few seconds and sighed. “All right. What does it mean?”

Hogan smiled triumphantly. “I’m surprised you need to ask! It means ”The Bridge of the Accursed“. It seems that, years ago, all the nuns were taken out of the convent and massacred by the Moors. It’s haunted, Sharpe, stalked by the spirits of the dead!”

Sharpe leaned forward to peer more closely at the map. Give or take the width of Hogan’s finger the bridge must be sixty miles beyond the border and they were that far from Spain already. “When do we leave?”

“Now there’s a problem.” Hogan folded the map carefully. “We can leave for the frontier tomorrow but we can’t cross until we’re formally invited by the Spanish.” He leaned back with his cup of brandy. “And we have to wait for our escort.”

“Escort!” Sharpe bridled. “We’re your escort.”

Hogan shook his head. “Oh, no. This is politics. The Spanish will let us blow up their bridge but only if a Spanish Regiment goes along with us. It’s a question of pride, apparently.”

“Pride!” Sharpe’s anger was obvious. “If you have a whole Regiment of Spaniards then why the hell do you need us?”

Hogan smiled placatingly. “Oh, I need you. There’s more, you see.” He was interrupted by Harper. The Sergeant was standing at the window, oblivious of their conversation, and staring into the small square.

“That is nice. Oh, sir, that can clean my rifle any day of the week.”

Sharpe looked through the small window. Outside, on a black mare, sat a girl dressed in black; black breeches, black jacket, and a wide-brimmed hat that shadowed her face but in no way obscured a beauty that was startling. Sharpe saw a wide mouth, dark eyes, coiled hair the colour of fine powder, and then she became aware of their scrutiny. She half smiled at them and turned away, snapped an order at a servant holding the halter of a mule, and stared at the road leading from the plaza towards the centre of Abrantes. Hogan made a small, contented noise. “That is special. They don’t come out like that very often. I wonder who she is?”

“Officer’s wife?” Sharpe suggested.

Harper shook his head. “No ring, sir. But she’s waiting for someone, lucky bastard.”

And a rich bastard, thought Sharpe. The army was collecting its customary tail of women and children who followed the Regiments to war. Each Battalion was allowed to take sixty soldiers’ wives to an overseas war but no-one could stop other women joining the ‘official’ wives; local girls, prostitutes, seamstresses and washerwomen, all making their living from the army. This girl looked different. There was the smell of money and privilege about her, as if she had run away from a rich Lisbon home. Sharpe presumed she was the lover of a rich officer, one of the breed who would regard his woman as much a part of his equipment as his thoroughbred horses, his Manton pistols, his silver dinnerware for camp meals, and the hounds that would trot obediently at his horse’s tail. There were plenty of girls like her, Sharpe knew, girls who cost a lot of money, and he felt the old envy rise in him.

“My God.” Harper, still staring out the window, had spoken again.

“What is it?” Sharpe leaned forward and, like his Sergeant, he could hardly believe his eyes. A Battalion of British Infantry was marching steadily into the square but a Battalion the like of which Sharpe had not seen for more than twelve months. A year in Portugal had turned the army into a Drill-Sergeant’s nightmare: the soldiers’ uniforms had faded and been patched with the ubiquitous brown cloth of the Portuguese peasants, their hair had grown long, the polish had long disappeared from buttons and badges. Sir Arthur Wellesley did not mind; he only cared that a soldier had sixty rounds of ammunition and a clear head, and if his trousers were brown instead of white then it made no difference to the outcome of a fight. But this Battalion was fresh from England. Their coats were a brilliant scarlet, their crossbelts pipeclayed white, their boots a mirror-surfaced black. Each man wore tightly-buttoned gaiters and, even more surprising, they still wore the infamous stocks; four inches of stiffly varnished black leather that constricted the neck and was supposed to keep a man’s chin high and back straight. Sharpe could not remember when he had last seen a stock; once on campaign the men ‘lost’ them, and with them went the running sores where the rigid leather dug into the soft flesh beneath the jawbone.

“They’ve taken the wrong turning for Windsor Castle,” Harper said.

Sharpe shook his head. “They’re unbelievable!” Whoever commanded this Battalion must have made the men’s lives hell to keep them looking so immaculate despite the voyage from England in cramped and foul ships and the long march from Lisbon in the summer heat. Their weapons shone, their equipment was pristine and regular, while their faces bulged red from the constricting stocks and the unaccustomed sun. At the head of each company rode the officers, all, Sharpe noted, mounted superbly. The colours were cased in polished leather and guarded by Sergeants whose halberd blades had been burnished to a brilliant, glittering sheen. The men marched in perfect step, looking neither right nor left, for all the world, as Harper had said, as if they were marching for the Royal duty at Windsor.

“Who are they?” Sharpe was trying to think of the Regiments who had yellow facings on their uniforms but this looked like none of the Regiments he knew.

“The South Essex,” Hogan said.

„The who?“

“The South Essex. They’re new, very new. Just raised by Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry Simmerson, a cousin of General Sir Banestre Tarleton.”

Sharpe whistled softly. Tarleton had fought in the American war and now sat in Parliament as Wellesley’s bitterest military opponent. Sharpe had heard said that Tarleton wanted the command of the army in Portugal for himself and bitterly resented the younger man’s preferment. Tarleton was a man of influence, a dangerous enemy for Wellesley, and Sharpe knew enough about the politics of high command to realise that the presence of Tarleton’s cousin in the army would not be welcomed by Wellesley.

“Is that him?” He pointed to a portly man riding a grey horse in the centre of the Battalion.

Hogan nodded. “That is Sir Henry Simmerson, whom God preserve or preferably not.”

Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry Simmerson had a red face lined with purple veins and pendulous with jowls. His eyes, at the distance Sharpe was seeing them, seemed small and red, and on either side of the suspicious, questing face there sprung prominent ears that looked like the protruding trunnions either side of a cannon barrel. He looked, Sharpe thought, like a pig on horseback. “I’ve not heard of the man.”

“That’s not surprising. He’s done nothing.” Hogan was scornful. “Landed money, in Parliament for Paglesham, justice of the peace and, God help us, a Militia Colonel.” Hogan seemed surprised by his own lack of charity. “He means well. He won’t be content till those lads are the best damned Battalion in the army but I think the man has a terrible shock coming when he finds the difference between us and the Militia.”