The horsemen, who were escorted by a single British officer, were not wearing the ubiquitous red coats of the island's garrison, but instead wore dark blue uniforms. It had been five years since Sharpe had seen such uniform jackets worn openly. The men who wore that blue had once ruled Europe from Moscow to Madrid, but now their bright star had fallen and their sovereignty was confined to the yellow stucco walls of the lonely house that lay at this road's end.

The yellow house was low and sprawling, and surrounded by dark, glossy-leaved trees and a rank garden. There was nothing cheerful about the place. It had been built as a cowshed, extended to become a summer cottage for the island's Lieutenant Governor, but now, in the dying days of 1820, the house was home to fifty prisoners, ten horses and unnumbered rats. The house was called Longwood, it lay in the very middle of the island of Saint Helena, and its most important prisoner had once been the Emperor of France. Bonaparte.

They were not, after all, wasting their time.

It seemed that General Bonaparte had an avid appetite for visitors who could bring him news of the world beyond Saint Helena's seventy square miles. He received such visitors after luncheon, and as his luncheon was always at eleven in the morning, and it was now twenty minutes after noon, the Spanish officers were told that if they cared to walk in the gardens for a few moments, His Majesty would receive them when he was ready.

Not "General Bonaparte," which was the greatest dignity his British jailers would allow him, but "His Majesty," the Emperor, would receive the visitors, and any visitor unwilling to address His Majesty as Votre Majeste was invited to straddle his mule and take the winding hill road back to the port of Jamestown. The Captain of the Spanish frigate, a reclusive man called Ardiles, had bridled at the instruction, but had restrained his protest, while the other Spaniards, all of them army officers, had equably agreed to address His Majesty as majestically as he demanded. Now, as His Majesty finished luncheon, his compliant visitors walked in the gardens where toadstools grew thick on the lawn. Clouds, building in the west, were reflected in the murky surfaces of newly dug ponds. The English Major who had led the procession up to the plateau, and who evidently had no intention of paying any respects to General Bonaparte, had stepped in the deep mud of one of the pond banks, and now tried to scrape the muck off his boots with his riding crop. There was a grumble of thunder from the heavy clouds above the white-walled semaphore station.

"It's hard to believe, isn't it?" Harper was as excited as a child taken to a country fair. 'You remember when we first saw him? Jesus! It was raining that day, so it was." That first glimpse had been at the battlefield of Quatre Bras, two days before Waterloo, when Sharpe and Harper had seen the Emperor, surrounded by lancers, in the watery distance. Two days later, before the bigger bloodletting began, they had watched Bonaparte ride a white horse along the French ranks. Now they had come to his prison and it was, as Harper had said, hard to believe that they were so close to the ogre, the tyrant, the scourge of Europe. And even stranger that Bonaparte was willing to receive them so that, for a few heart-stopping moments on this humid day, two old soldiers of Britain's army would stand in the same stuffy room as Bonaparte and would hear his voice and see his eyes and go away to tell their children and their grandchildren that they had met Europe's bogeyman face to face. They would be able to boast that they had not just fought against him for year after bitter year, but that they had stood, nervous as schoolboys, on a carpet in his prison house on an island in the middle of the South Atlantic.

Sharpe, even as he waited, found it hard to believe that Bonaparte would receive them. He had ridden all the way from Jamestown in the belief that this expedition would be met with a scornful refusal, but had consoled himself that it would be sufficient just to see the lair of the man who had once terrified all of Europe, and whose name was still used by women to frighten their children into obedience. But the uniformed men who opened Longwood's gates had welcomed them, and a servant now brought them a tray of weak lemonade. The servant apologized for such pale refreshment, explaining that His Majesty would have liked to serve his distinguished visitors wine, but that his British jailers were too mean to provide him with a sufficient supply, and so the lemonade must be enough. The Spanish officers turned dark, reproving glances on Sharpe, who shrugged. Above the hills the thunder growled. The English Major, disdaining to mingle with the Spanish visitors, slashed with his riding crop at a glossy-leaved hedge.

After a half hour the sixteen visitors were ushered into the house itself. It smelled dank and musty. The wallpaper of the hallway and of the billiard room beyond was stained with damp. The pictures on the wall were black and white etchings, soiled and fly-blown. The house reminded Sharpe of a poor country rectory that desperately pretended to a higher gentility than it could properly afford. The house was certainly a pathetically far cry from the great marble floors and mirrored halls of Paris where Sharpe and Harper, after the French surrender in 1815, had joined the soldiers of all Europe to explore the palaces of a defeated and humiliated empire. Then, in echoing halls of glory, Sharpe had climbed massive staircases where glittering throngs had once courted the ruler of France. Now Sharpe waited to see the same man in an anteroom where three buckets betrayed that the house roof leaked, and where the green baize surface of the billiard table was as scuffed and faded as the Rifleman's jacket that Sharpe had worn in special honor of this occasion.

They waited another twenty minutes. A clock ticked loudly, then wheezed as it gathered its strength to strike the half hour. Just as the clock's bell chimed, two officers wearing French uniforms with badly tarnished gold braid came into the billiard room. One gave swift instructions in French which the other man translated into bad Spanish.

The visitors were welcome to meet the Emperor, but must remember to present themselves bareheaded to His Imperial Majesty.

The visitors must stand. The Emperor would sit, but no one else was allowed to sit in His Imperial Majesty's presence.

No man must speak unless invited to do so by His Imperial Majesty.

And, the visitors were told once again, if a man was invited to speak with His Imperial Majesty then he must address the Emperor as Votre Majeste. Failure to do so would lead to an immediate termination of the interview. Ardiles, the dark-faced Captain of the frigate, scowled at the reiterated command, but again made no protest. Sharpe was fascinated by the tall, whip-thin Ardiles, who took extraordinary precautions to avoid meeting his own passengers. Ardiles ate his meals alone, and was said to appear on deck only when the weather was appalling or during the darkest night watches when his passengers could be relied on to be either sick or asleep. Sharpe had met the Captain briefly when he had embarked on the Espiritu Santo in Cadiz, but to some of the Spanish army officers this visit to Longwood gave them their first glimpse of their frigate's mysterious Captain.

The French officer who had translated the etiquette instructions into clumsy Spanish now looked superciliously at Sharpe and Harper. "Did you understand anything at all?" he asked in badly accented English.

"We understood perfectly, thank you, and are happy to accept your instructions," Sharpe answered in colloquial French. The officer seemed startled, then gave the smallest nod of acknowledgment.

"His Majesty will be ready soon," the first French officer said, and then the whole group waited in an awkward silence. The Spanish army officers, gorgeous in their uniforms, had taken off their bicorne hats in readiness for the imperial audience. Their boots creaked as they shifted their weight from foot to foot. A sword scabbard rapped against the bulbous leg of the billiard table. The sour Captain Ardiles, looking as malignant as a bishop caught in a whorehouse, stared sourly out of the window to where a rumble of ominous thunder cannoned about the black mountains. Harper rolled a billiard ball slowly down the table's length. It bounced off the far cushion and slowed to a stop.