Sharpe’s Regiment: The Invasion of France, June to November 1813. Bernard Cornwell

went to the last door in the hallway, the one that he remembered opened into the Mess and from which came the laughter. He pushed the door slowly open, stood in the dark shadows of the hallway, and watched.

      Three officers, all wearing the yellow facings and chained-eagle badge of the South Essex, were in the room. Two girls were with them, one sitting at the spinet, the other blindfolded in the centre of the room.

      They were playing blind-man’s bluff.

      The officers laughed, they dodged the lunges of the blind-folded girl. One of them stood guard so that she should not stumble into a low table that carried a tea of thin sandwiches, small pastries, and delicate porcelain cups. That officer, a Captain, was the first to see Sharpe.

      The Captain made a mistake. It was a common enough error. In Spain men often mistook Sharpe for a private soldier for the Rifleman wore no badges of rank on his shoulders, and his red, whip-tasselled officer’s sash had long been lost. He wore an officer’s weapon, a sword, but in the hall’s shadow the Captain did not see it. He only saw the rifle on Sharpe’s shoulder and he assumed, naturally enough, that only a private would carry a long-arm. Harry Price, whose uniform was more conventional, was hidden behind Sharpe.

      The Captain frowned. He was a young man with a sharp-featured, thin-lipped face beneath carefully waved blond hair. The smile he had worn for the game was suddenly replaced by irritation. ‘Who the devil are you?’ His voice was confident, the voice of the young master in his little domain, and it stopped the blindfolded girl in her tracks.

      The other two officers were Lieutenants. One of them frowned at Sharpe. ‘Go away! Wrong place! Go!’

      The other Lieutenant giggled. ‘About-turn! Quick march! One-two, one-two!’ He thought he had made a fine joke and laughed again. The girl at the spinet laughed with him.

      ‘Who are you? Well? Speak up, man!’ The Captain’s voice snapped petulantly at Sharpe, then suddenly died away as the Rifleman stepped out of the shadows.

      The realisation that they might have made a mistake came to all three young officers at the same moment. They were suddenly silent and scared as they saw a tall man, black haired, with a face darkened by a foreign sun and scarred by a foreign blade, a strong face that was given a mocking look by the scarred left cheek. That mocking expression vanished when Sharpe smiled, but he was not smiling as he stalked into the Mess. He might have worn no badges of rank, but there was something about his face, about the sword at his side and about the battered hilt of the rifle slung on his shoulder that spoke of something far beyond their understanding. The girl in the room’s centre took off her blindfold and gasped at Sharpe’s sudden, startling appearance.

      The room was well lit by tall southern windows. The carpet was thick. Sharpe came slowly forward and the Captain put his feet together as if at attention and stared at the faded jacket and tried to convince himself that the dark stains on the green cloth were not blood.

      Harry Price, seeing that one of the two girls was pretty, leaned nonchalantly against the door jamb with what he considered a suitably heroic expression. Sharpe stopped. ‘Whose carriage is outside?’

      No one spoke, but one of the girls made a hesitant gesture towards her companion. Sharpe turned. ‘Harry?’

      ‘Sir?’

      ‘You will arrange for the coach outside to be harnessed.’ He looked at the two girls. ‘Ladies. What is about to happen here is not for your ears or eyes. You will oblige me by going to your carriage with Lieutenant Price.’

      Price, delighted with the orders, bowed to the girls, while one of the two Lieutenants, the young man who had laughed at his own jest and who looked hardly more than seventeen, frowned. ‘I say, sir …’

      ‘Quiet!’ It was a voice that sent orders across the chaos of battlefields and the snap of it made the girls squeal and stunned the three officers into shocked silence. Sharpe looked again at the girls. ‘Ladies? You will please leave.’

      They fled, snatching scarves and reticules, abandoning music sheets, uneaten cakes, cups of tea, and a bowl of chocolate confections. Sharpe closed the door behind them.

      He turned. He took the rifle from his shoulder and slammed it onto a varnished, delicate table. The sound made the three officers shiver. Sharpe looked at the Captain beside the spinet. ‘Who are you?’

      ‘Carline, sir.’

      ‘Who’s officer of the day?’

      Carline swallowed nervously. ‘I am, sir.’

      Sharpe looked at the Lieutenant who had told him to go away. ‘You?’

      The Lieutenant forced his voice to sound unafraid. ‘Merrill, sir.’

      ‘And you?’

      ‘Pierce, sir.’

      ‘What Battalion are you?’ He looked back to Carline.

      Carline, scarcely older than the two Lieutenants, tried to match the dignity of his higher rank with an unruffled face, but his voice came out as a frightened squeak. ‘South Essex, sir.’ He cleared his throat. ‘First Battalion.’

      ‘Who’s the senior officer in the depot?’

      ‘I am, sir,’ Carline said. He could not, Sharpe thought, have been more than twenty-two or three.

      ‘Where’s Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood?’

      There was silence. A fly battered uselessly against a window. Sharpe repeated the question.

      Captain Carline licked his lips. ‘Don’t know, sir.’

      Sharpe walked to a massive sideboard that was heavy with decanters and ornaments. In the very centre of the display was a silver replica of a French Eagle which he picked up. On its base was a plaque. ‘This Memento of the French Eagle, Captured at Talavera by the South Essex under the Command of Colonel Sir Henry Simmerson, was Proudly Presented by Him to the Officers of the Regiment in Memory of the Gallant Feat.’ Sharpe grimaced. Sir Henry Simmerson had been relieved of the command before Sharpe and Harper had captured the Eagle. He turned to the three officers, the Eagle held in his hands as though it were a weapon. ‘My name is Major Richard Sharpe.’

      Sharpe would have needed a soul of stone not to enjoy their reaction. They had been frightened of him from the moment he had walked from the hall shadows, but their fear was almost palpable now. A man they had thought a thousand miles away had come to this plump, soft, lavish place, and each of the three men felt a terrible, quivering fear. Pierce, who had laughed as he ordered Sharpe to about-turn, visibly shook. Sharpe let the fear settle into them before speaking in a low voice. ‘You’ve heard of me?’

      ‘Yes, sir,’ Carline answered.

      These officers, Sharpe knew, were the rump of the First Battalion, the men who kept its home records and who were supposed to despatch replacements to Spain. Except there were no recruits, there were no replacements, because the depot was dead and empty, and its officers were entertaining young ladies. Sharpe looked at the two Lieutenants, seeing fleshy, spoilt faces above rich uniforms that, well cut though they were, could not hide the spreading waists and fat thighs. Merrill and Pierce, in turn, stared back at the tall, battle-hardened Rifleman as though he was a visitor from some strange, undiscovered island of savages.

      Sharpe put the Eagle back on the sideboard. ‘Why was there no guard detail on the gate?’

      ‘Don’t know, sir.’ Carline, Sharpe saw, was wearing glossy dancing shoes buttoned over silk stockings.

      ‘What in Christ’s name do you mean? You’re officer of the day, aren’t you?’ The sudden loudness of Sharpe’s voice startled them.

      ‘Should have been, sir.’ Carline said it helplessly.

      Sharpe looked through the window as the file of horsemen, dressed in fatigues, trotted past. ‘Who the hell are they?’

      ‘Militia, sir. They use the stables here.’

      The