Harper to raise his voice. “They must own a lot of land to fill all these barns!”

“It’s good land, too!” Sharpe agreed.

Muskets crashed close behind them, coming from the stables which formed the western defences. Sharpe ran into the stables to see Guardsmen taking their turns at the loopholes. Other men were awkwardly perched on the roof beams, firing through holes they had made in the slates. Smoke from the muskets was thick among the empty stalls.

Sharpe climbed onto a manger, then hauled himself to a vacant beam where he punched a hole in the slates. French skirmishers were flooding past the stables, running through the hayfield from where he and Harper had watched the first attack. He levelled his rifle through his makeshift loophole, tracked a man carrying an officer’s sword, led him by a few inches, then fired.

The rifle’s smoke prevented him seeing whether he had done any damage. He ducked as a deafening crash announced the strike of an eight-pound cannon-ball that splintered viciously through the stable rafters and struck two Guardsmen down in gouts of blood. Another cannon-ball smacked against the stable’s outer wall, ringing like a sledgehammer but doing no damage to the thick masonry. Sharpe, too cramped in the roof space to reload his rifle, shouted for Harper to give him his.

There was no answer.

Sharpe twisted round. Harper was standing at the stable entrance, staring towards the northern gate through which he and Sharpe had entered the chateau.

“Patrick! Give me your rifle!”

Still Harper did not reply. Instead, and without taking his eyes off the gate, he unslung his seven-barrelled gun.

Sharpe dropped from the beam and ran to the stable door.

The northern gates were juddering. The French had somehow reached the rear of Hougoumont and were straining and heaving at the two gates which were held shut by wooden locking bar slotted into twin iron brackets. The gates were old and rickety, and every heave creaked them further apart. A French musket fired through the crack between the gates, then an axe-blade appeared in the gap. The axe chopped down with massive force, biting into the exposed locking bar. A Coldstreamer lieutenant was leading the garrison reserve towards the gate, but before the squad could reach the danger point, the axe struck again and this time with such brute force that the bar splintered and one end jumped clear out of its bracket so that the double gates scraped back and a flood of screaming Frenchmen charged into the courtyard. The charge was led by a huge lieutenant who was even taller than Harper. It was the huge Lieutenant who was carrying the massive pioneers’ axe that had broken through the gate.

“Fire!” the Coldstreamer Lieutenant shouted, then was swamped by the surge of Frenchmen who swept over his men. Bayonets sliced down and came back red. The axe scythed wickedly to splay open a guardsman’s ribs.

Harper levelled the volley gun and fired at the mass of men. Sharpe dropped his empty rifle and drew his sword. Coldstreamers were running from the house, the barn and the stables. Muskets flared and crashed. A Frenchman went down under an officer’s sword, then the officer was driven screaming to the cobbles by two French bayonets. Yet more of the blue-coated skirmishers were running through the wide open gates.

Sharpe could see no way of retrieving order from the chaos. It was simply a time to fight. The French, half confused by the unfamiliar surroundings and by the scattered defenders, searched for ways into the farm buildings. Two. of them ran to the chapel where the wounded tried to trip them. The French raised their bayonets to finish the three bandaged men, then turned as they heard a more threatening challenge behind them. Sharpe had charged the two men, his sword swinging in a wild sweep. The taller of the two Frenchmen, a sergeant, stepped back from the swing and jabbed hard forward with his blade. Sharpe’s momentum took him past the threat, he half tripped on a wounded Guardsman’s broken leg, cannoned off the chapel wall, and lunged with the sword. The Guardsman was screaming in sudden pain, but the sword had ripped a wound in the French Sergeant’s belly. The other Frenchman came to his Sergeant’s aid, then seemed to fly backwards as a rifle bullet struck his throat. Harper had discarded his volley gun, and now reversed the rifle and slammed the brass butt into the Sergeant’s face. The huge French officer with the axe was by the stable wall, slashing and cutting down at the redcoats. Someone had split a barrel of half-ripe apples that were being trampled underfoot by the savagely fighting men. A group of French infantry ran towards the main house, but a volley from its rear windows cut them down. Sharpe’s mare, terrified of the noise, reared up and lashed with her hooves.

“Bugger this!” Harper picked up one of the French muskets and lunged with its bayonet to finish the Sergeant. The yard was a chaos of shouting men, but beyond the wild-faced French attackers Sharpe could see a disciplined group of Guardsmen struggling to close the huge gates. God alone knew how the small group of Coldstreamers had reached the gates, but they had and, with the strength of desperation, they were now forcing the two heavy doors shut against a renewed rush of enemy infantry. By a miracle none of the Frenchmen already inside the chateau’s yard saw what was happening behind them. A Coldstreamer sergeant had retrieved the broken bar and dropped it into the brackets as, at last, the doors were rammed shut. Most of the Guardsmen pushing on the gates had been officers who now turned with drawn swords to take the intruders from the rear.

“Now kill the bastards!” A voice with a Scots accent shouted the command. “Kill them all!”

A French drummer boy ran screaming past Sharpe. A French corporal followed, saw the Rifleman, and turned to fire his musket. The flint fell on an empty pan. The man’s eyes widened with fear, Sharpe lunged, the man tried to pull the blade from his ribs, but Sharpe drove it forwards, twisting it, forcing the man down to the cobbles where he kicked the sword free before slamming the blade back into the Frenchman’s throat. The armourer who had honed Sharpe’s blade had done a good job, for the weapon was wickedly sharp, and it needed to be for none of the men who clawed and stabbed and struggled in the courtyard had been given time to reload their muskets, so this fight would now have to be done with steel alone. The importance of Hougoumont gave the fight an extra and brutal bitterness, for every man knew that whoever held the chateau held the western flank of the battlefield. The Coldstreamers fought to rescue a battle, while the French under their giant Lieutenant fought for immortal glory.

But their prospect of glory was fading. The closing of the gate had cut the French off from aid, so now, trapped on the yard’s cobbles, they retreated into a rally square about the huge Lieutenant who stood with a bloody axe above the bodies of four Guardsmen. Outside the chateau, and giving the fight the desperation of urgency, volleys of French musket-fire witnessed that the building’s perimeter was again under heavy assault.

“Finish them off!” a British officer ordered. The Guardsmen in the yard were desperately needed to defend the chateau’s outer walls so there would be no time now for delicacies like trying to persuade the huge Lieutenant to surrender.

Guardsmen tore into the group of Frenchmen. A redcoat went down beneath a French bayonet, then the Coldstreamers seemed to swarm over the blue-coated enemy. An elegant officer lunged with his sword, kicked a Frenchman in the crutch, then lunged again. The yard echoed with the clang and scrape of blades, the scuff of boots on cobbles, and the screams of men slashed or pierced by blades. Patrick Harper, mindless of the promise made to his wife, shouted a Gaelic war cry as he stabbed his captured bayonet forward in the short savage lunges of a professional soldier. One of the Guards’ officers in the front rank of the fight was a colonel; the expensive gold lace of his uniform was sheeted with blood as he stamped his foot forward to lunge his sword with a clinical exactitude.