The two corporals, grinning in their red jackets, helped push the nine men into two crude ranks. The drummer boys, yawning and sticky-eyed, banged their drums and, before the sun was risen properly, they were marching through the detritus of the hiring fair. The young man in broadcloth, who had given his name to the clerk as Giles Marriott, walked in front of Sharpe. He did not speak a word to his neighbour, the half-wit, Tom. Sharpe noticed, as they crossed the market place in the grey dawn, how Marriott stared at a fine, brick-built house.
'Move it! Come on!' Corporal Terence Clissot pushed Marriott. 'Get a bloody move on!'
Yet still Marriott stared back, half-tripping as he walked, and Sharpe turned to look at the house, wondering what it was that made the young, good-looking man stare so fixedly at it. The drums still rattled and it was, perhaps, their sound that made one of the shutters open on the upper floor.
A girl stared out. Sharpe saw her, looked at Marriott, and thought there was a glistening in the man's eye. Marriott lifted a hand half-heartedly, then seemed to decide that the small gesture was futile in the face of this huge gesture he had just made to spite the girl who had jilted him. He dropped his hand and walked on. Yet the half-gesture, so feebly made and so quickly retracted, had not escaped Sergeant Havercamp. He saw the girl, looked at Marriott, and laughed.
They marched south. The hedgerows were thick with dew. The drums, now they were out of the town, fell silent. None of the nine men spoke.
A dog barked. Nothing unusual in a country dawn, except this dog was chasing after them and Sergeant Havercamp turned, snarled, raised his boot to kick at it, then checked his foot.
It was Buttons. Behind the dog, running just as hard, smock flapping and with a bundle on his shoulder, was Charlie Weller. 'Wait for me! Wait for me!'
Havercamp laughed. 'Come on, lad!'
Weller looked behind, as if to make sure that his mother was not following him, but the lane was clear. 'Can I join, Sergeant?'
'You're welcome, lad! Into line! We'll swear you in at the next town!'
Weller grinned at Sharpe, pushed in beside him, and the boy's face showed all the excitement proper at the beginning of a great adventure. They collected the other recruits and their guards from the barn, then headed south for a soldier's life.
At Grantham, where they were locked into the yard of the Magistrate's Court, Sharpe watched Sergeant Havercamp strike a deal. Twelve prisoners were released to him, manacled men who were pushed into the back of the line. More bread was given to them and Sharpe watched young Tom, the half-wit, thrust the loaf at his mouth and gnaw at it. The boy grinned constantly, always watching for a cuff, a curse or a kick. If he was spoken to he giggled and smiled.
That night three men ran, two successfully getting away, almost certainly to find another recruiting party and gull another guinea from the King. The third was caught, brought to the yard where they had slept, and beaten by Corporal Clissot and Sergeant Havercamp. When the beating was over, and the man was lying bleeding and bruised on the yard's cobbles, Sergeant Havercamp retrieved the King's guinea, then kicked the man out into the road. There was small future in taking a jumper back to the Battalion for the man would doubtless only try to desert again.
Giles Marriott had stared in awe at the beating, flinching when the Corporal's boots slammed into the man's ribs. Marriott was pale by the time the punishment was given. He looked at Sharpe. 'Are they allowed to do that?'
Sharpe was astonished that Marriott had spoken, the young man had hardly opened his mouth since he had come to the inn to get his shilling. 'No,' Sharpe shrugged. 'But it's quicker than turning him over to a magistrate.'
'You've been in before?'
'Yes.'
'What's it like?'
'You'll be all right.' Sharpe smiled and drank the mug of tea that was their breakfast. 'You can read and write. You'll become a clerk.'
Charlie Weller was petting his dog. 'I want to fight!'
Marriott still stared at Havercamp, who was shutting the yard gate on the bruised, bleeding man. 'They shouldn't behave like that.'
Sharpe wanted to laugh aloud at the hurt words, but instead he looked sympathetically at the frightened young man. 'Listen! Havercamp's not bad. You're going to meet much worse than him. Just remember a few rules and they can't touch you.'
'What?'
'Never step out of line, never complain, never look into a sergeant's or an officer's eyes, and never say anything except yes or no. Got it?'
'I don't understand.'
'You will,' Harper said. He had come back from the pump in the yard under which he had dunked his head so that the water now streamed down his face and soaked his thin, torn shirt. 'By God you will, lad.'
'You! Paddy!' It was Sergeant Havercamp's voice, booming over the yard. 'Turn round!'
Harper obeyed. The water had soaked the thin shirt to his hugely muscled back and showed, through its thin weave, the scars that lay over his spine. Sergeant Havercamp grinned beneath his red moustache. 'Paddy, Paddy, Paddy! Why didn't you tell me?'
'Tell you what, Sarge?'
'You served, didn't you? You're an old soldier, Paddy!'
'You never asked me!' Harper said indignantly.
'What regiment?'
'Fourth Dragoon Guards.'
Havercamp stared at him. 'Now you didn't scamper, did you, Paddy?'
'No, Sarge.'
Havercamp stepped a pace closer. 'And you're not going to give me any trouble, are you, Paddy?' Havercamp, wary of the huge man, was nevertheless resentful of all the beer he had poured into Harper's throat in an attempt to make him join an army that, obviously, the big Irishman had wanted to rejoin all along.
'No, Sarge.'
"Cos I'm bleeding watching you.'
Harper smiled, waited until Havercamp was a pace away, then spoke. 'Bastard!' He said it just loud enough for Havercamp to hear, and just softly enough for the Sergeant to pretend that he had not. Harper laughed and looked at Marriott. 'I'll tell you one other thing, lad.'
'What?' Marriott's face was pale with worry.
'Just remember that all the officers and a good few of the sergeants are bloody terrified of you.'
'All the officers?' Sharpe said indignantly.
'Well, almost all,' Harper laughed. He was enjoying himself. He picked Buttons up, fondled the dog, and grinned at Sharpe. 'Isn't that right, Dick?'
'You're full of bloody Irish wind, you are, Paddy.'
Harper laughed. 'It's the English air.'
'On your feet!' Sergeant Havercamp shouted. 'Come on, you bastards! Get on your plates of meat! Move!'
Sharpe was wondering whether he and Harper would have to jump. It could be done, he knew, simply by overpowering the slack guard that watched them each night. He feared it would be necessary because every southwards step seemed to be taking them towards Chelmsford and he could not imagine the ignominy of being delivered to Captain Carline and his plump Lieutenants. Sharpe had embarked on this deception in the belief that they would be taken to wherever the Second Battalion was hidden, yet Sergeant Havercamp was inexorably leading them towards the Chelmsford barracks.
Then, at a large village called Witham, and to Sharpe's relief, Sergeant Havercamp took them off the Chelmsford road. The Sergeant was in high spirits. He made them march in step, putting Sharpe and Harper at the front and the corporals at the back. ‘Ill teach you buggers to be soldiers. Left! Left!' One of the drummer boys tapped the pace with his stick.
They spent their last night of travel in a half empty barn. Havercamp had them up early, and they marched in the dawn into a landscape like none Sharpe had seen before in England.
It was a country of intricate rivers, streams, marshes, a country loud with the cry of gulls telling Sharpe they were close to the sea. There was a smell of salt in the air. The grass was coarse. Once, far off to his left, he saw the wind whipping a grey sea white towards a great expanse of mud, then the view disappeared as Sergeant Havercamp turned them inland once more.
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They marched through flat farmlands where the few trees had been bent westwards by the wind from the sea. They crossed the fords of sluggish rivers that ran in wide, muddy beds to meet the salt tide. The houses, low and squat, had weatherboards painted a malevolent black, while the churches were visible far over the flat land.
'Where are we?' Harper asked. He and Sharpe still led the small procession as Havercamp turned them eastwards again, into the wind with its smell of salt and its lonely sounds of seabirds.
'Somewhere in Essex.' Sharpe shrugged. No milestones marked the road they now walked, and no fingerboards pointed to a village or town. The only landmark now was a great house, brick built, with spreading, elegant wings on either side of its three-storeyed main block. On the house's roof was an intricate weather-vane. The house was two miles away, a lonely place, and Sharpe wondered, as they marched along the deserted road towards the great, isolated building, whether the house was their destination.
'Fall out! Fast now! Fall out!' Sergeant Havercamp was suddenly bawling from the back of the line. 'Into the ditch! Come on! Hurry, hurry, hurry, you bastards! Into the ditch! Fall out!'
Corporal Clissot pushed Sharpe, who stumbled into Harper so that both of them fell into the ditch that was stinking with green slime. They sat up to their waists in the foul water, and watched as a carriage and four came towards them. Giles Marriott, who had shown in the last two days a distressing urge to stand up for what he saw as his rights, protested at having to stand in the ditch, but Havercamp unceremoniously kicked him into the foul sludge, then jumped the obstacle, turned smartly in a turnip field, and stood to attention with his right hand saluting the carriage.
Two coachmen sat on the carriage's box, and three passengers sat within its cushioned interior. The leather hoods had been folded back, and one of the passengers, a girl, held a parasol against the sun.
'Christ!' Harper said.
'Quiet!' Sharpe put a hand on the Irishman's arm.
Sir Henry Simmerson, riding in the open carriage, raised a fat hand towards Sergeant Havercamp, while his small, angry eyes flicked over the muddy, gawping recruits in the ditch. Sharpe saw the jug ears, the porcine face, then he stared down at the green scum on the water so that Sir Henry would not notice him.
'That's . . .' Harper began.
'I know who the hell it is!' Sharpe hissed.
And next to Sir Henry Simmerson, opposite a stern, grey-haired woman, and beneath a parasol of white lace, was a girl whom Sharpe had last seen in a parish church four years before. Jane Gibbons, Simmerson's niece, and the sister of the man who had tried to kill Sharpe at Talavera.
'On your feet! Hurry! Come on!'
The dust from the carriage wheels was gritty in the air as Sharpe and Harper climbed from the ditch and dripped water onto the dry road. 'Form up! In twos!'
Sharpe stared at the receding carriage. He could see the passengers sitting stiffly apart and he tried to tell himself that Jane Gibbons was hating to be beside her uncle.
'By the front! Quick march!'
Sharpe had held the Eagle in Carlton House before the admiring gaze of the courtiers, and now another remembrance of that far-off day had come back. Sir Henry Simmerson had been the first Lieutenant Colonel of the South Essex, an angry, arrogant fool who had believed the battle lost and had taken the Battalion from the battle line in panic. He had been relieved of his command, and the South Essex, who had been shamed by his leadership, recovered their honour that day by capturing the French standard.
And afterwards, when Sharpe and Harper had been alone in the battle-smoke, amidst the litter of death and victory, Lieutenant Christian Gibbons, Sir Henry's nephew, had tried to take the Eagle from them.
Gibbons had died, stabbed by Harper with a French bayonet, yet the inscription on his marble memorial, undoubtedly composed by Sir Henry, claimed that he had died taking the Eagle. And on Sharpe's last visit to England, in a small parish church which must, he knew now, be close to this flat, marshy place, he had met Jane Gibbons.
In all the years since, on battlefields and in foul, smoky, flea-ridden billets, in the palaces of Spain where he had met La Marquesa, in his own marriage bed, he had not forgotten her. Sharpe's wife, before she died, had laughed because he carried a locket with Jane Gibbons' picture inside, a locket Sharpe had taken from her dead brother. The locket was lost now, yet he had not forgotten her.
Perhaps because she was the image of the England that soldiers remembered when they fought in a harsh, hot country. She had golden hair, soft cheeks, and eyes the same colour as the bright blue gowns that draped the Virgins of all Spanish churches. Sharpe had lied to her, telling her that her brother had died a hero's death, and he had been nervous before her grateful smile. She had seemed to him, in that cool, dark church, where she had come to place a pot of gilliflowers beneath her brother's memorial, to be a creature of another world; gentle, with a vein of quick life, too beautiful and precious for his harsh hands or battle-scarred face.
She must, he thought as they followed the carriage's tracks, be married by now. Even in an England where, as Captain d'Alembord often said, there were not enough well-washed men for wellborn girls, Surely such a beautiful, smiling creature would not be left unwed. And seeing her again, this suddenly, on this desolate track in the marshes at the edge of England, he felt the old attraction, the old, hopeless attraction for a girl so lovely. He felt, too, the old temptation to believe that no girl, come from so foul and treacherous a family, could be worthy of love.
'Pick your bloody feet up! Move!' Sergeant Havercamp slashed with his cane at his recruits. 'Put your shoulders back, Marriott! You're in the bloody army, not in a bloody dance! March!'
The carriage turned off the road ahead and Sharpe saw it go towards the large, elegant, brick house, with its white painted window frames and its weathervane which, as the small band of recruits got closer, Sharpe saw to be in the shape of a French Eagle. That bird, he thought, was coming back to haunt him. That one act on a battlefield, that first capture of a vaunted enemy standard, had made the South Essex's reputation, had saved Sharpe's career, and now, he feared, it was a symbol of the men who had tried to kill him in London, and who would certainly try again if they discovered his identity.
'If that bugger sees us . . .' Harper did not finish the sentence.
'I know.' And how fitting it would be, Sharpe thought, if Sir Henry was among his enemies.
'Shut your faces! March!' Sergeant Havercamp cracked his cane on Sharpe's back. 'Pick your bloody feet up! You know how!'
They did not go to Sir Henry's house, for the eagle on the weathervane had convinced Sharpe that the big place was indeed Sir Henry's, but instead turned southwards onto an even smaller track. They filed along a bank beside a drainage ditch, waded a deep ford that was sticky with mud, and, when Sir Henry's house was far on the horizon, turned left again onto a larger road rutted by cart tracks.
A bridge was ahead of them, a wooden bridge guarded by soldiers. 'Break step! That means walk, you bastards, or else you'll break the bloody bridge!'
A dozen men in the South Essex's yellow facings guarded the crossing. A sergeant called cheerfully to Havercamp as the recruits straggled over the echoing bridge that crossed a deep, mud-banked creek of the sea.
'Left! Left!' The drum tap gave them the beat by which they could regain proper marching step, they were off the bridge, past the picquet, and ahead of them Sharpe saw the place he had come to find.
He did not know where he was, except that this was a lost, empty part of the Essex coast, but ahead of him, in a wet, marshy land, he saw an army camp. There were huts, tents, two brick buildings, and, on a higher swell of land, a great parade ground that was thick with marching men. Buttons, as if as eager as his master to get into the army, ran excitedly ahead.
Sharpe felt the same excitement. He had found the Second Battalion of the South Essex, he had found the men he would lead to France. All that was left to do now was to find out why Lord Fenne
r had lied and then to take these men, against all his enemies here and in London, out of this hidden place and to the war against the French.
Chapter 7
On the mornings of the second and fourth Monday of each month, at eleven o'clock precisely, Lieutenant Colonel Bartholomew Girdwood's servant brought a small pot of boiling pitch to his master. Then, carefully, he put a thick cloth over the Colonel's mouth, other cloths on his cheeks and nostrils, and, with a spatula borrowed from the Battalion surgeon, he smeared the boiling tar into the Colonel's moustache. He worked it in, forcing the thick, steaming mess deep into the wiry hairs, and, though sometimes the Colonel's face would flicker as a boiling drop reached the skin of his lip, he would stay utterly silent until the servant had finished the task. The cloths would be removed, there would be a pause while the tar set solid, then the servant, with scissors, file and heated spatula, shaped and polished the moustache so that, for another two weeks, it would need no further attention.
'Thank you, Briggs!' The Colonel tapped his moustache. It sounded like a nail rapping on ivory. 'Excellent!'
'Thank you, sir.'
Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood stared into the mirror. He liked what he saw. Tarred moustaches had been a fashion for officers of Frederick the Great's army, a fashion which forced a man's face into an unsmiling, martial expression that suited Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood's unsmiling, martial character.
He fancied himself a harsh man. He was unfortunately smaller than he wished, but his thick-soled boots and high shako made up for the lack of inches. He was thin, muscled, and his face could have belonged to no one but a soldier. It was a hard face, clean shaven but for the moustache, with harsh black eyes and black hair trimmed short. He was a man of rigorous routine, his meals taken to the minute, his days governed by a strict timetable that was meticulously charted on the wall of his office.