Sharpe’s Siege: The Winter Campaign, 1814. Bernard Cornwell

Ducos,’ the general paced back towards the table, ‘is it to be a bridge, or a landing?’

      The third man, a colonel, dropped a smoked cigar on to the floor and ground it beneath his toe. ‘Perhaps the American can tell us?’

      ‘The American,’ Pierre Ducos said scathingly, ‘is a flea on the rump of a lion. An adventurer. I use him because no Frenchman can do the task, but I expect small help of him.’

      ‘Then who can tell us?’ The general came into the aureole of light made by the candles. ‘Isn’t that your job, Ducos?’

      It was rare for Major Pierre Ducos’ competency to be so challenged, yet France was assailed and Ducos was almost helpless. When, with the rest of the French Army, he had been ejected from Spain, Ducos had lost his best agents. Now, peering into his enemy’s mind, Ducos saw only a fog. ‘There is one man,’ he spoke softly.

      ‘Well?’

      Ducos’ round, thick spectacle lenses flashed candlelight as he stared at the map. He would have to send a message through the enemy lines, and he risked losing his last agent in British uniform, but perhaps the risk was justified if it brought the French the news they so desperately needed. East, north, a bridge, or a landing? Pierre Ducos nodded. ‘I shall try.’

      Which was why, three days later, a French lieutenant stepped gingerly across a frosted plank bridge that spanned a tributary of the Nive. He shouted cheerfully to warn the enemy sentries that he approached.

      Two British redcoats, faces swathed in rags against the bitter cold, called for their own officer. The French lieutenant, seeing he was safe, grinned at the picquet. ‘Cold, yes?’

      ‘Bloody cold.’

      ‘For you.’ The French lieutenant gave the redcoats a cloth-wrapped bundle that contained a loaf of bread and a length of sausage, the usual gesture on occasions such as this, then greeted his British counterpart with a happy familiarity. ‘I’ve brought the calico for Captain Salmon.’ The Frenchman unbuckled his pack. ‘But I can’t find red silk in Bayonne. Can the colonel’s wife wait?’

      ‘She’ll have to.’ The British lieutenant paid silver for the calico and added a plug of dark tobacco as a reward for the Frenchman. ‘Can you buy coffee?’

      ‘There’s plenty. An American schooner slipped through your blockade.’ The Frenchman opened his cartouche. ‘I also have three letters.’ As usual the letters were unsealed as a token that they could be read. More than a few officers in the British Army had acquaintances, friends or relatives in the enemy ranks, and the opposing picquets had always acted as an unofficial postal system between the armies. The Frenchman refused a mug of British tea and promised to bring a four-pound sack of coffee, purchased in the market at Bayonne, the next day. ‘That’s if you’re still here tomorrow?’

      ‘We’ll be here.’

      And thus, in a manner that was entirely normal and quite above suspicion, Pierre Ducos’ message was safely delivered.

      ‘Why ever shouldn’t I visit Michael? It’s eminently proper. After all, no one can expect a sick man to be ill-behaved.’

      Sharpe entirely missed Jane’s pun. ‘I don’t want you catching the fever. Give the food to his servant.’

      ‘I’ve visited Michael every day,’ Jane said, ‘and I’m in the most excellent health. Besides, you went to see him.’

      ‘I should imagine,’ Sharpe said, ‘that my constitution is more robust than yours.’

      ‘It’s certainly uglier,’ Jane said.

      ‘And I must insist,’ Sharpe said with ponderous dignity, ‘that you avoid contagion.’

      ‘I have every intention of avoiding it.’ Jane sat quite still as her new French maid put combs into her hair. ‘But Michael is our friend and I won’t see him neglected.’ She paused, as if to let her husband counter her argument, but Sharpe was quickly learning that in the great skirmish of marriage, happiness was bought by frequent retreats. Jane smiled. ‘And if I can endure this weather, then I must be quite as robust as any Rifleman.’ The sea-wind, howling off Biscay, rattled the casements of her lodgings. Across the roofs Sharpe could see the thicket of masts and spars made by the shipping crammed into the inner harbour. One of those ships had brought the new uniforms that were being issued to his men.

      It was not before time. The veterans of the South Essex, that Sharpe now had to call the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, had not been issued with new uniforms in three years. Their coats were ragged, faded, and patched, but now those old jackets, that had fought across Spain, were being discarded for new, bright cloth. Some French Battalion, seeing those new coats, would think of them as belonging to a fresh, unblooded unit and would doubtless pay dear for the mistake.

      The orders to refit had given Sharpe this chance to be with his new wife, as it had given all the married men of the Battalion a chance to be with their wives. The Battalion had been stationed on the line of the River Nive, close to French patrols, and Sharpe had ordered the wives to stay in St Jean de Luz. These few days were thus made precious to Sharpe, days snatched from the frost-hard river-line, days to be with Jane, and days spoilt only by the illness that threatened Hogan’s life.

      ‘I take him food from the Club,’ Jane said.

      ‘The Club?’

      ‘Where we’re lunching, Richard.’ She turned from the mirror with the expression of a woman well pleased with her own reflection. ‘Your good jacket, I think.’

      In every town that the British occupied, and in which they spent more than a few days, one building became a club for officers. The building was never officially chosen, nor designated as such, but by some strange process and within a day of two of the Army’s arrival, one particular house was generally agreed to be the place where elegant gentlemen could retire to read the London papers, drink mulled wine before a decently tended fire, or play a few hands of whist of an evening. In St Jean de Luz the chosen house faced the outer harbour.

      Major Richard Sharpe, born in a common lodging-house and risen from the gutter-bred ranks of Britain’s Army, had never used such temporary gentlemen’s clubs before, but new and beautiful wives must be humoured. ‘I didn’t suppose,’ he spoke unhappily to Jane, ‘that women were allowed in gentlemens’ clubs?’ He was reluctantly buttoning his new green uniform jacket.

      ‘They are here,’ Jane said, ‘and they’re serving an oyster pie for luncheon.’ Which clinched the matter. Major and Mrs Richard Sharpe would dine out, and Major Sharpe had to dress in the stiff, uncomfortable uniform that he had bought for a royal reception in London and hated to wear. He reflected, as he climbed the wide stairs of the Officers’ Club with Jane on his arm, that there was much wisdom in the old advice that an officer should never take a well-bred wife to an ill-bred war.

      Yet the frisson of irritation passed as he entered the crowded dining-room. Instead he felt the pang of pride that he always felt when he took Jane into a public place. She was undeniably beautiful, and her beauty was informed by a vivacity that gave her face character. She had eloped with him just months before, fleeing her uncle’s house on the drab Essex marshes to come to the war. She drew admiring glances from men at every table, while other officers’ wives, enduring the inconveniences of campaigning for the sake of love, looked enviously at Jane Sharpe’s easy beauty. Some, too, envied her the tall, black-haired and grimly scarred man who seemed so uncomfortable in the lavishness of the club’s indulgent comforts. Sharpe’s name was whispered from table to table; the name of the man who had taken an enemy standard, captured one of Badajoz’s foul breaches, and who, or so rumour said, had made himself rich from the blood-spattered plunder of Vitoria.

      A white-gloved steward abandoned a table of senior officers to hasten to Jane’s side. ‘The cap’n wanted to sit ’ere, ma’am,’ the steward was unnecessarily brushing the seat of a chair close to one of the wide windows, ‘but I said as how it was being kept for someone special.’

      Jane gave the steward