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

a table by the fire where two naval officers sat in warm discomfort. The junior officer was a lieutenant, while one of the other man’s two epaulettes was bright and new, denoting a recent promotion to the rank of a full post captain.

      Smithers looked devotedly back to Jane. ‘I’ve reserved a bottle or two of that claret you liked.’

      Sharpe, who had been ignored by the steward, pronounced the wine good and hoped he was right. The oyster pie was certainly good. Jane said she would deliver a portion to Hogan’s lodgings that same afternoon and Sharpe again insisted that she should not actually enter the sickroom, and he saw a flicker of annoyance cross Jane’s face. Her irritation was not caused by Sharpe’s words, but by the sudden proximity of the naval captain who had rudely come to stand immediately behind Sharpe’s chair in a place where he could overhear the conversation of Major and Mrs Sharpe’s reunion.

      The naval officer had not come to eavesdrop, but rather to stare through the rain-smeared window. His interest was in a small flotilla of boats that had appeared around the northern headland. The boats were squat and small, none more than fifty feet long, but each had a vast press of sail that drove the score of craft in a fast gaggle towards the harbour entrance. They were escorted by a naval brig that, in the absence of enemies, had its gunports closed.

      ‘They’re chasse-marées,’ Jane said to her husband.

      ‘Chasse-marrys?’

      ‘Coastal luggers, Richard. They carry forty tons of cargo each.’ She smiled, pleased with her display of knowledge. ‘You forget I was raised on the coast. The smugglers in Dunkirk used chasse-marées. The Navy,’ Jane said loudly enough for the intrusive naval captain to hear, ‘could never catch them.’

      But the naval captain was oblivious to Mrs Sharpe’s goad. He stared at the straggling fleet of chasse-marées that, emerging from a brief rain-squall, seemed to crab sideways to avoid a sand-bar that was marked by a broken line of dirty foam. ‘Ford! Ford!’

      The naval lieutenant dabbed his lips with a napkin, snatched a swallow of wine, then hastened to his captain’s side. ‘Sir?’

      The captain took a small spyglass from the tail pocket of his coat. ‘There’s a lively one there, Ford. Mark her!’

      Sharpe wondered why naval officers should be so interested in French coastal craft, but Jane said the Navy had been collecting the chasse-marées for days. She had heard that the boats, with their French crews, were being hired with English coin, but for what purpose no one could tell.

      The small fleet had come to within a quarter mile of the harbour, and, to facilitate their entry into the crowded inner roads, each ship was lowering its topsail. The naval brig had hove-to, sails shivering, but one of the French coasters, larger than the rest of its fellows, was still under the full set of its five sails. The water broke white at its stem and slid in bubbling, greying foam down the hull that was sleeker than those of the other, smaller vessels.

      ‘He thinks it’s a race, sir,’ the lieutenant said with happy vacuity above Sharpe’s shoulder.

      ‘A handy craft,’ the captain said grudgingly. ‘Too good for the Army. I think we might take her on to our strength.’

      ‘Aye aye, sir.’

      The faster, larger lugger had broken clear of the pack. Its sails were a dirty grey, the colour of the winter sky, and its low hull was painted a dull pitch-black. Its flush deck, like all the chasse-marées’ decks, was an open sweep broken only by the three masts and the tiller by which two men stood. Fishing gear was heaped in ugly, lumpen disarray upon the deck’s planking.

      The naval brig, seeing the large lugger race ahead, unleashed a string of bright flags. The captain snorted. ‘Bloody Frogs won’t understand that!’

      Sharpe, offended by the naval officers’ unwanted proximity, had been seeking a cause to quarrel, and now found it in the captain’s swearing in front of Jane. He stood up. ‘Sir.’

      The naval captain, with a deliberate slowness, turned pale, glaucous eyes on to the Army major. The captain was young, plump, and confident that he outranked Sharpe. They stared into each other’s eyes, and Sharpe felt a sudden certainty that he would hate this man. There was no reason for it, no justification, merely a physical distaste for the privileged, amused face that seemed so full of disdain for the black-haired Rifleman.

      ‘Well?’ The naval captain’s voice betrayed a gleeful anticipation of the imminent argument.

      Jane defused the confrontation. ‘My husband, Captain, is sensitive to the language of fighting men.’

      The captain, not certain whether he was being complimented or mocked, chose to accept the words as a tribute to his gallantry. He glanced at Sharpe, looking from the Rifleman’s face to the new, unfaded cloth of the green jacket. The newness of the uniform evidently suggested that Sharpe, despite the scar on his face, was fresh to the war. The captain smiled superciliously. ‘Doubtless, Major, your delicacy will be sore tested by French bullets.’

      Jane, delighted at the opening, smiled very sweetly. ‘I’m sure Major Sharpe is grateful for your opinion, sir.’

      That brought a satisfying reaction; a shudder of astonishment and fear on the annoying, plump face of the young naval officer. He took an involuntary step backwards, then, remembering the cause of the near quarrel, bowed to Jane. ‘My apologies, Mrs Sharpe, if I caused offence.’

      ‘No offence, Captain … ?’ Jane inflected the last word into a question.

      The captain bowed again. ‘Bampfylde, ma’am. Captain Horace Bampfylde. And allow me to name my lieutenant, Ford.’

      The introductions were accepted gracefully, as tokens of peace, and Sharpe, outflanked by effusive politeness, sat. ‘The man’s got no bloody manners,’ he growled loudly enough to be overheard by the two naval officers.

      ‘Perhaps he didn’t have your advantages in life?’ Jane suggested sweetly, but again the scene beyond the window distracted the naval men from the barbed comments.

      ‘Christ!’ Captain Bampfylde, careless of the risk of offending a dozen ladies in the dining-room, shouted the word. The outraged anger in his voice brought an immediate hush and fixed the attention of everyone in the room on the small, impertinent drama that was unfolding on the winter-cold sea.

      The black-hulled lugger, instead of obeying the brig’s command to lower sails and proceed tamely into the harbour of St Jean de Luz, had changed her course. She had been sailing south, but now reached west to cut across the counter of the brig. Even Sharpe, no sailor, could see that the chasse-marée’s fore and aft rig made the boat into a handy, quick sailor.

      It was not the course change that had provoked Bampfylde’s astonishment, but that the deck of the black-hulled lugger had suddenly sprouted men like dragon’s teeth maturing into warriors, and that, from the mizzen mast, a flag had been unfurled.

      The flag was not the blue ensign of the Navy, nor the tricolour of France, nor even the white banner of the exiled French monarchy. They were the colours of Britain’s newest enemy; the Stars and Stripes of the United States of America.

      ‘A Jonathon!’ a voice said with disgust.

      ‘Fire, man!’ Bampfylde roared the order in the confines of the dining-room as though the brig’s skipper might hear him. Yet the brig, head to wind, was helpless. Men ran on its deck, and gunports lifted, but the American lugger was seething past the brig’s unarmed counter and Sharpe saw the dirty white blossom of gunsmoke as the small broadside was poured, at pistol-shot length, into the British ship.

      Lieutenant Ford groaned. David was taking on Goliath and winning.

      The sound of the American gunfire came over the windbroken water like a growl of thunder, then the lugger was spinning about, sails rippling as the American skipper let his speed carry him through the wind’s eye, until, taut on the opposite tack, he headed back past the brig’s counter towards the fleet of chasse-marées.