Sharpe’s Battle: The Battle of Fuentes de Oñoro, May 1811. Bernard Cornwell

      ‘And you trained them too, no doubt?’ Valverde inquired.

      ‘I killed them,’ Sharpe said, ‘and the fat little bugger too.’ His words wiped the supercilious look off both men’s thin faces, while Sharpe himself was suddenly overwhelmed with a memory of the Tippoo’s water-tunnel filled with the shouting bodyguard armed with jewelled muskets and broad-bladed sabres. Sharpe had been thigh-deep in scummy water, fighting in the shadows, digging out the bodyguard one by one to reach that fat, glittering-eyed, buttery-skinned bastard who had tortured some of Sharpe’s companions to death. He remembered the echoing shouts, the musket flashes reflecting from the broken water and the glint of the gems draped over the Tippoo’s silk clothes. He remembered the Tippoo’s death too, one of the few killings that had ever lodged in Sharpe’s memory as a thing of comfort. ‘He was a right royal bastard,’ Sharpe said feelingly, ‘but he died like a man.’

      ‘Captain Sharpe,’ Hogan put in hastily, ‘has something of a reputation in our army. Indeed, you may have heard of him yourself, my Lord? It was Captain Sharpe who took the Talavera eagle.’

      ‘With Sergeant Harper,’ Sharpe put in, and Kiely’s officers stared at Sharpe with a new curiosity. Any soldier who had taken an enemy standard was a man of renown and the faces of most of the guards’ officers showed that respect, but it was the chaplain, Father Sarsfield, who reacted most fulsomely.

      ‘My God and don’t I remember it!’ he said enthusiastically. ‘And didn’t it just excite all the Spanish patriots in Madrid?’ He climbed clumsily down from his horse and held a plump hand out to Sharpe. ‘It’s an honour, Captain, an honour! Even though you are a heathen Protestant!’ This last was said with a broad and friendly grin. ‘Are you a heathen, Sharpe?’ the priest asked more earnestly.

      ‘I’m nothing, Father.’

      ‘We’re all something in God’s eyes, my son, and loved for it. You and I shall talk, Sharpe. I shall tell you of God and you shall tell me how to strip the damned French of their eagles.’ The chaplain turned a smiling face on Hogan. ‘By God, Major, but you do us proud by giving us a man like Sharpe!’ The priest’s approval of the rifleman had made the other officers of the Real Compañía Irlandesa relax, though Kiely’s face was still dark with distaste.

      ‘Have you finished, Father?’ Kiely asked sarcastically.

      ‘I shall be on my way with Captain Sharpe, my Lord, and we shall see you in the morning?’

      Kiely nodded, then turned his horse away. His other officers followed, leaving Sharpe, the priest and Captain Donaju to follow the straggling column formed by the Real Compañía Irlandesa’s baggage, wives and servants.

      By nightfall the Real Compañía Irlandesa was safe inside the remote San Isidro Fort that Wellington had chosen to be their new barracks. The fort was old, outdated and had long been abandoned by the Portuguese so that the tired, newly arrived men first had to clean out the filthy stone barracks rooms that were to be their new home. The fort’s towering gatehouse was reserved for the officers, and Father Sarsfield and Donaju made themselves comfortable there while Sharpe and his riflemen took possession of one of the magazines for their own lodgings. Sarsfield had brought a royal banner of Spain in his baggage that was proudly hoisted on the old fort’s ramparts next to the union flag of Britain. ‘I’m sixty years old,’ the chaplain told Sharpe as he stood beneath Britain’s flag, ‘and I never thought the day would come when I’d serve under that banner.’

      Sharpe looked up at the British flag. ‘Does it worry you, Father?’

      ‘Napoleon worries me more, my son. Defeat Napoleon, then we can start on the lesser enemies like yourself!’ The comment was made in a friendly tone. ‘What also worries me, my son,’ Father Sarsfield went on, ‘is that I’ve eight bottles of decent red wine and a handful of good cigars and only Captain Donaju to share them with. Will you do me the honour of joining us for supper now? And tell me, do you play an instrument, perhaps? No? Sad. I used to have a violin, but it was lost somewhere, but Sergeant Connors is a rare man on the flute and the men in his section sing most beautifully. They sing of home, Captain.’

      ‘Of Madrid?’ Sharpe asked mischievously.

      Sarsfield smiled. ‘Of Ireland, Captain, of our home across the water where few of us have ever set foot and most of us never shall. Come, let’s have supper.’ Father Sarsfield put a companionable arm across Sharpe’s shoulder and steered him towards the gatehouse. A cold wind blew over the bare mountains as night fell and the first cooking fires curled their blue smoke into the sky. Wolves howled in the hills. There were wolves throughout Spain and Portugal and in winter they would sometimes come right up to the picquet line in the hope of snatching a meal from an unwary soldier, but this night the wolves reminded Sharpe of the grey-uniformed Frenchmen in Loup’s brigade. Sharpe supped with the chaplain and afterwards, under a star-shining sky, he toured the ramparts with Harper. Beneath them the Real Compañía Irlandesa grumbled about their accommodations and about the fate that had stranded them on this inhospitable border between Spain and Portugal, but Sharpe, who had orders to make them miserable, wondered if instead he could make them into real soldiers who would follow him over the hills and far into Spain to where a wolf needed to be hunted, trapped and slaughtered.

      Pierre Ducos waited nervously for news of the Real Compañía Irlandesa’s arrival in Wellington’s army. The Frenchman’s greatest fear was that the unit would be positioned so far behind the fighting front that it would be useless for his purposes, but that was a risk Ducos was forced to run. Ever since French intelligence had intercepted Lord Kiely’s letter requesting King Ferdinand’s permission to take the Real Compañía Irlandesa to war on the allied side, Ducos had known that the success of his scheme depended as much on the allies’ unwitting cooperation as on his own cleverness. Yet Ducos’s cleverness would achieve nothing if the Irishmen failed to arrive, and so he waited with mounting impatience.

      Little news came from behind the British lines. There had been a time when Loup’s men could ride with impunity on either side of the frontier, but now the British and Portuguese armies were firmly clamped along the border and Loup had to depend for his intelligence on the unreliable and minuscule handful of civilians willing to sell information to the hated French, on interrogations of deserters and on educated guesses formed from the observations of his own men as they peered through spyglasses across the mountainous border.

      And it was one of those scouts who first brought Loup news of the Real Compañía Irlandesa. A troop of grey dragoons had gone to one of the lonely hill tops which offered a long view into Portugal, and from where, with luck, a patrol might see some evidence of a British concentration of forces that could signal a new advance. The lookout post dominated a wide, barren valley where a stream glittered before the land rose to the rocky ridge on which the long-abandoned fort of San Isidro stood. The fort was of little military value for the road it guarded had long fallen into disuse and a century of neglect had eroded its ramparts and ditches into mockeries of their former strength so that now the San Isidro was home to ravens, foxes, bats, wandering shepherds, lawless men, and the occasional patrol of Loup’s grey dragoons who might spend a night in one of the cavernous barracks rooms to stay out of the rain.

      Yet now there were men in the fort, and the patrol leader brought Loup news of them. The new garrison was not a full battalion, he said, just a couple of hundred men. The fort itself, as Loup well knew, would need at least a thousand men to man its crumbling walls, so a mere two hundred hardly constituted a garrison, yet strangely the newcomers had brought their wives and children with them. The dragoons’ troop leader, a Captain Braudel, thought the men were British. ‘They’re wearing red coats,’ he said, ‘but not the usual stovepipe hats.’ He meant shakoes. ‘They’ve got bicornes.’

      ‘Infantry, you say?’

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      ‘No cavalry? Any artillery?’

      ‘Didn’t see any.’

      Loup picked at his teeth with a sliver of wood. ‘So what were they doing?’

      ‘Doing drill,’