‘I must say war is an ordeal,’ Lord John smiled at the Duchess from the sideboard.
The Duchess shrugged off his flippancy, and instead offered the elegant young man a most suspicious stare. ‘Have you come alone?’
Lord John smiled winningly as he returned to the table. ‘Bristow is very kindly finding me two tickets.’
‘I suppose it’s that woman?’
Lord John hesitated, then nodded. ‘It is Jane, indeed.’
‘Damn you, Johnny.’
The Duchess had sworn in a very mild tone, but her words still made Lord John bridle. Nevertheless he was too much in awe of the older woman to make any voluble protest.
The Duchess supposed she would have to write to Lord John’s mother and confess that the silly boy had brought his paramour to Brussels. She blamed the example of Harry Paget who had run off with the wife of Wellington’s younger brother. Such an open display of adultery was suddenly the fashionable sport among cavalrymen, but it could too easily turn into a blood sport and the Duchess feared for Lord John’s life. She was also offended that a young man as charming and eligible as Lord John should flaunt his foolishness. ‘If it was London, Johnny, I wouldn’t dream of letting her come to a ball, but I suppose Brussels is different. There’s really no saying who half these people are. But don’t present this girl to me, John, because I won’t receive her, I really won’t! Do you understand?’
‘Jane’s very charming - ’ Lord John commenced a defence of his slighted lover.
‘I don’t care if she’s as beautiful as Titania and as charming as Cordelia; she’s still another man’s wife. Doesn’t her husband worry you?’
‘He would if he were here, but he isn’t. At the end of the last war he found himself some French creature and went to live with her, and so far as we know, he’s still in France.’ Lord John chuckled. ‘The poor fool’s probably been imprisoned by Napoleon.’
‘You think he’s in France?’ The Duchess sounded aghast.
‘He certainly isn’t with the army, I made sure of that.’
‘Oh, my dear Johnny.’ The Duchess lowered her cup of coffee and gave her young friend a compassionate look. ‘Didn’t you think to check the Dutch army list?’
Lord John Rossendale said nothing. He just stared at the Duchess.
She grimaced. ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe is on Slender Billy’s staff, Johnny.’
Rossendale blanched. For a second it seemed that he would be unable to respond, but then he found his voice. ‘He’s with the Prince of Orange? Here?’
‘Not in Brussels, but very close. Slender Billy wanted some British staff officers because he’s commanding British troops.’
Rossendale swallowed. ‘And he’s got Sharpe?’
‘Indeed he has.’
‘Oh, my God.’ Rossendale’s face had paled to the colour of paper. ‘Is Sharpe coming tonight?’ he asked in sudden panic.
‘I certainly haven’t invited him, but I had to give Slender Billy a score of tickets, so who knows who he might bring?’ The Duchess saw the fear on her young friend’s face. ‘Perhaps you’d better go home, Johnny.’
‘I can’t do that.’ For Lord John to run away would be seen as the most shameful of acts, yet he was terrified of staying. He had not only cuckolded Richard Sharpe, but in the process he had effectively stolen Sharpe’s fortune, and now he discovered that his enemy was not lost in France, but alive and close to Brussels.
‘Poor Johnny,’ the Duchess said mockingly. ‘Still, come and dance tonight. Colonel Sharpe won’t dare kill you in my ballroom, because I won’t let him. But if I were you I’d give him his wife back and find yourself someone more suitable. What about the Huntley girl? She’s got a decent fortune, and she’s not really ugly.’ The Duchess mentioned another half-dozen girls, all eligible and nobly born, but Lord John was not listening. He was thinking of a dark-haired and scarred soldier whom he had cuckolded and impoverished, a soldier who had sworn to kill him in revenge.
Forty miles to the south, the Dragoon Lieutenant who had been kicked by his dying horse haemorrhaged in the nettles beside the ditch. He died before any surgeons could reach him. The Lieutenant’s servant rifled the dead man’s possessions. He kept the officer’s coins, the locket from about his neck, and his boots, but threw away the book on phrenology. The first French infantry butchered the Lieutenant’s dead horse with their bayonets and marched into Belgium with the bleeding joints of meat hanging from their belts. An hour later the Emperor’s coach passed the corpse, disturbing the flies which had been crawling over the dead Lieutenant’s face and laying their eggs in his blood-filled mouth and nostrils.
The campaign was four hours old.
The Prussian guns withdrew north of Charleroi. The artillery officer wondered why no one had thought to blow up the bridge which crossed the River Sambre in the centre of the town, but he supposed there must be fords close to Charleroi which would have made the destruction of the fine stone bridge into a futile and even petulant gesture. Once the guns had gone, the black-uniformed Prussian cavalry waited in the town north of the river, reinforcing the brigade of infantry that ransacked the houses near the bridge for furniture, which they rather half-heartedly made into a barricade at the bridge’s northern end. The townspeople sensibly stayed indoors and closed their shutters. Many of them took their carefully stored tricolours from their hiding places. Belgium had been a part of France till just a year before, and many folk in this part of the province resented being made a part of the Netherlands.
The French approached Charleroi on all the southern roads. The inevitable green-coated Dragoons reached the town first, followed by Cuirassiers and Red Lancers. None of the horsemen tried to force a passage across the barricaded bridge. Instead the Red Lancers, many of whom were Belgians, trotted eastwards in search of a ford. On the river’s northern bank a troop of black-uniformed Prussian Hussars shadowed the Red Lancers, and it was those Hussars who, rounding a bend in the Sambre Valley, discovered a party of French engineers floating a pontoon bridge off the southern bank. Six of the engineers had swum to the northern bank where they were fastening a rope to a great elm tree. The Hussars drew their sabres to drive the unarmed men back into the river, but French artillery had already closed on the southern bank and, as soon as the Hussars went into the trot, the first roundshot slammed across the water. It bounced a few yards ahead of the Hussars’ advance, then slammed into a wood where it tore and crashed through the thickly leaved branches.
The Hussar Captain called his men back. He could see red uniforms further up the river bank, evidence that the Lancers had found a place to cross. He led his men back to Charleroi where a desultory musket fight was flickering across the river. The French Dragoons had taken up positions in the southern houses, while the Prussian infantry in their dark blue coats and black shakos lined the barricade. The Hussar Captain reported to a Prussian brigade commander that the town was already outflanked, which news was sufficient to send most of the Prussian infantry marching briskly northwards. A last derisive French volley smashed splinters from the furniture barricade, then the town fell silent. The Prussian Hussars, left with a battalion of infantry to garrison the northern half of Charleroi, waited as French infantry reached the town and garrisoned the houses on the river’s southern bank. Glass crashed onto cobbles as soldiers bashed out window-panes to make crude loopholes for muskets.
A half-mile south of the bridge the first French staff officers were rifling the mail in Charleroi’s post office in search of letters which might have been posted by Allied officers and thus provide clues of British or Prussian plans. Such clues would add to the embarrassing riches of intelligence which had recently flooded in to Napoleon’s headquarters from Belgians who desperately wanted to be part of France again. The bright tricolours hanging from the upper floors of Charleroi’s newly liberated houses were evidence of that longing.
A French General of Dragoons found a bespectacled infantry Colonel inside a tavern close to the river and
angrily demanded to know why the barricaded bridge had not been captured. The Colonel explained that he was still waiting for orders, and the General swore like the trooper he had once been and said that a French officer did not need orders when the enemy was in plain sight. ‘Attack now, you damned fool, unless you want to resign from the Emperor’s service.’
The Colonel, trained in the proper management of war, diagnosed the General’s crude enthusiasm as excitement and gently tried to calm the old man by explaining that the sensible course was to wait until the artillery reached the town, and only then to mount an attack on the infantry who guarded the barricaded bridge. ‘Two volleys of cannon-fire will clear them away,’ the Colonel explained, ‘and there’ll be no need for our side to suffer any casualties. I think that’s the prudent course, don’t you?’ The Colonel offered the General a patronizing smile. ‘Perhaps the General would care to take a cup of coffee?’
‘Bugger your coffee. And bugger you.’ The Dragoon General seized the Colonel’s uniform jacket and dragged the man close so that he could smell the General’s garlic and brandy flavoured breath. ‘I’m attacking the bridge now,’ the General said, ‘and if I take it, I’m coming back here and I’m going to tear your prudent bloody balls off and give your regiment to a real man.’
He let the Colonel go, then ducked out of the tavern door into the street. A Prussian musket bullet fluttered overhead to smack against a house wall that was smothered with posters advertising a fair, which was to be held on the feast day of St Peter and Paul. Someone had limewashed a slogan huge across the rash of posters: ‘Vive l’Empereur!’
‘You!’ The General shouted at an infantry lieutenant who was sheltering in an alley from the desultory Prussian fire. ‘Bring your men! Follow me. Bugler! Sound the assemble!’ The General beckoned to his orderly to bring his horse forward and, ignoring the Prussian musketry, he pulled himself into his saddle and drew his sword. ‘Frenchmen!’ he shouted to gather in whatever men were within earshot. ‘Bayonets! Sabres!’
The General knew that the town had to be taken and the momentum of the day’s advance kept swift, and so he would lead a rag-taggle charge against the Prussian infantrymen who lined the crude barricade. He fancied he could see a lower section at one end of the piled furniture where a horse might be able to jump the obstruction. He kicked his horse into a trot and the hooves kicked up sparks from the cobbles.
The General knew he would probably die, for infantry took pleasure in killing cavalry and he would be the leading horseman in the attack on the bridge, but the General was a soldier and he had long learned that a soldier’s real enemy is the fear of death. Beat that fear and victory was certain, and victory brought glory and fame and medals and money and, best of all, sweetest of all, most glorious and wondrous of all, the modest teasing grin of a short black-haired Emperor who would pat the Dragoon General as though he was a faithful dog, and the thought of that Imperial favour made the General quicken his horse and raise his battered sword. ‘Charge!’ Behind him, spurred on by his example, a ragged mass of dismounted Dragoons and sweating infantry flooded towards the bridge. The General, his white moustaches stained with tobacco juice, spurred on to the bridge.
The Prussian infantry levelled their muskets over the furniture barricade.
The General saw the glitter of sunlight flashing from the brass decorations of the muskets. ‘Kill the bastards! Kill the bastards!’ he screamed to persuade himself that he was not frightened, and suddenly the barricade dissolved in an explosion of smoke through which the musket flames stabbed like shivers of light and the General’s long white moustache was whipped by a bullet that went on to tear away his left ear-lobe, but that was the only injury he took for he had always been a lucky man, and he caught a glimpse of long weeds shivering under the silvery water beneath the bridge, then he kicked his heels hard back, and his awkward ugly horse clumsily jumped the heaped chairs at the right-hand end of the barricade. The horse soared through the foul-smelling smoke and the General saw a bayonet reach towards the animal’s belly, but he slashed down with the sword, knocking the bayonet aside, and suddenly the horse had landed safely beyond the furniture and was running free of the smoke. The Prussian Hussars, who had waited fifty yards from the bridge to give themselves room to charge any attacker who broke through the infantry, spurred forward, but the General ignored them. He wheeled his horse back to the barricade and drove the animal hard at the frightened infantrymen.
‘Bastards! Bastards!’ He killed a Prussian soldier, slicing the sword hard into the man’s neck above the stiff black collar. The remaining infantrymen were running. There had not been many Prussians at the bridge, for at best they had only been supposed to delay the French advance. Flames stabbed across the furniture from the French side, and the General shouted at his men to hold their damned fire and to pull the barricade down instead.
The Prussian infantry was running north. The cavalry, seeing that the French had captured the bridge with an insolent ease, turned to follow the foot soldiers. The French General, knowing he had earned his pat on the head from the Emperor, shouted derision at their retreat. ‘You lily-livered bastards! You boy-lovers! You lap-dogs! Stay and fight, you scum!’ He spat, then sheathed his sword. Blood from his torn ear was soaking his left epaulette with its tarnished chains and gilded eagle.
French infantry began to dismantle the barricade. The single dead Prussian infantryman, his uniform already looted of food and coins, lay by the bridge. A Dragoon sergeant hauled the body aside as more cavalrymen poured across the bridge. A woman ran from one of the houses on the northern bank and was almost knocked down by a clattering troop of Dragoons. The woman carried a bouquet of dried violets, their petals faded almost to lilac. She went to the French General’s stirrup and held the pathetic bouquet up to the grim-faced man. ‘Is he coming?’ she asked.
There was no need for her to say who ‘he’ was; her eager face was enough.
The bloodied General smiled. ‘He’s coming, ma poule.’
‘These are for you.’ She offered the General the drooping flowers. Throughout Napoleon’s exile the violet had been the symbol of the Bonapartistes, for the violet was the flower which, like the deposed Emperor, would return in the spring.
The General reached down and took the little bouquet. He fixed the fragile blossoms in a buttonhole of his braided uniform, then leaned down and kissed the woman. Like her, the General had prayed and hoped for the violet’s return, and now it had come and it would surely blossom more gloriously than ever before. France was on the march, Charleroi had fallen, and there were no more rivers between the Emperor and Brussels. The General, scenting victory, turned his horse to search for the infantry Colonel who had refused to attack the bridge and whose military career was therefore finished. France had no need of prudence, only of audacity and victory and of the small dark-haired man who knew how to make glory bright as the sun and as sweet as the violet. Vive l’Empereur.
CHAPTER 3
A single horseman approached Charleroi from the west. He rode on the Sambre’s northern bank, drawn towards the town by the sound of musketry which had been loud an hour before, but which now had faded into silence.
The man rode a big docile horse. He did not like horses and rode badly.
He was a tall man with a weathered face on which a blade had slashed a cruel scar. The scar gave his face a mocking, sardonic cast except when he smiled. His hair was black, but with a badger’s streak of white. Behind his horse a dog loped obediently. The dog suited the man, for it was big, fierce, and unkempt.
The man wore French cavalry boots, much patched, but still supple and tight about his calves. Above the scarred boots he wore French cavalry overalls that had been reinforced with leather where the crutch and inside legs took the saddle’s chafing. The red stripes on the overall’s outer seams had long faded to a dull purple. Outside the overalls he wore a faded green jacket that was decorated with the remnants of black piping. The jacket was the uniform of Britain’
s 95th Rifles, though it was now so threadbare and patched that it might have belonged to a tramp. The man’s brown tricorne hat had come from neither the French nor the British army, but had been bought at the market in the Norman town of Caen. The scarlet, gold and black cockade of the Netherlands was gaudy on the hat.
In a holster on the man’s saddle was a British-made Baker rifle. Stuck into his snake-clasped belt was a long-barrelled German pistol, while at his left hip was a battered metal scabbard in which there hung a British heavy cavalry sword. The man was a mockery of a soldier, tattered in a medley of a uniform, and sitting his horse with the grace of a sack of meal.
His name was Sharpe, Richard Sharpe, and he was a British soldier. He came from the gutter, the child of a whore, and he had only escaped the gallows by taking the King’s shilling and enlisting as a private in the 33rd Regiment of Foot. He became a sergeant and later, because of an act of suicidal bravery, became one of the few men promoted from the ranks to become an officer. He had joined the 95th Rifles and later commanded the red-coated Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers. He had fought in Flanders, in India, in Portugal, in Spain and in France. He had been a soldier for almost all his life, but of late he had been a farmer in Normandy, drawn to the land of his enemies by a woman met by chance in the chaos of peace. Now, by the chaos of war, and because the exiled Napoleon had returned to France and thrust a new period of battle on Europe, Sharpe was a lieutenant-colonel in the 5th Belgian Light Dragoons, a regiment he had never met, had no wish to meet, and would not have recognized if it had formed line and charged him. The promotion was nothing more than a device to give Richard Sharpe some status on the Prince of Orange’s staff, but so far as Sharpe himself was concerned he was still a Rifleman.
The rising sun, lancing down the Sambre valley, dazzled Sharpe. He pulled the tricorne hat low over his eyes. The land he rode was marshy, forcing him to weave an intricate course past the more treacherous patches. He kept glancing north to make certain no enemy troops appeared to pin him against the river. Not that he believed that the firing he had heard had been caused by the French. They were not expected to advance till July, and were certainly not expected in this part of Belgium, so Sharpe suspected that the musketry had been caused by Prussian troops at firing practice, yet a long acquaintance with war’s surprises had spurred Sharpe to investigate the sound.