Sharpe's Siege Read online

  He had elevated the barrels slightly, knowing that the first shots, fired through cold metal, would go low, but he could never have guessed how low. The first blast of grapeshot, instead of taking the red-coated Marines in a storm of metallic death, spattered into the sand. Some of the balls bounced upwards, but Killick did not see a single body struck by grape.

  Killick swore, for his troubles multiplied. The bastards must have known he was there. He had seen the first red jackets ten minutes before and waited for them to march unsuspecting into the clearing, but instead they had lined the trees at the far side and Killick, tired of the delay, had fired his opening volley at that tree line. And he had wasted it. He swore again.

  His men were sponging out, ramming, and levering the guns back into their positions. A British musket fired and Killick heard the ball flicker through the pines above. Then more flames stabbed from the shrubs at the clearing’s far side and the musket balls thudded into the sandy bank or thumped on trees or rained pine needles down on to the gunners.

  Killick ran left. If the Marines were to attack him they would come this way, flitting through the trees, and the dusk would make their scarlet coats hard to see. He shouted at the left hand gun to slew round and cover the approach, then stared into the gathering darkness. He could see nothing.

  Cornelius Killick was nervous. His men were nervous. This was not warfare as he knew it. Killick’s war was out where the wind gave the advantage to the better man and where the dead went to the cleansing sea. It was not in this damned vale of shadows where the enemy could skulk and hide and creep and murder.

  A twig cracked, he twisted, but it was only Marie from the village who stared with huge, worried eyes at him. ‘Go back,’ Killick barked.

  ‘The fort,’ Marie said.

  ‘What about it?’ Killick was searching the southern shadows, watching for the flicker that might betray an enemy movement.

  ‘The flag’s gone,’ Marie said.

  ‘Shot away,’ Killick said, then ignored the girl’s news because British muskets sparked and the far tree-line was puffed with clouds of powder smoke. ‘Go back, Marie! Back!’

  Some of the Thuella’s crew fired back, using the French muskets that were sold so widely in America. If only the bastards would show themselves, Killick thought, then his six guns could tear the guts out of them. ‘Liam! Liam!’ he shouted.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Do you see anything?’ Killick ran through dead pine-needles towards his main battery.

  ‘Only their bloody smoke. Bastards won’t show themselves!’

  A soldier, Killick thought, would know what to do at this point. Perhaps he should throw men into the trees, cutlasses and muskets ready, but what good would that do? They would simply become meat for the Marines’ muskets. Perhaps, he thought, another volley would stir the bastards up. ‘Liam? Aim high and fire!’

  ‘Sir!’

  The brass elevating screws were turned and the portfires touched vent tubes and the fire slipped down to the coarse powder that hammered more grapeshot to slice into the undergrowth across the clearing. A bird squawked and flapped heavily away from the shredded trees, but that was the only visible result of the volley.

  Smoke drifted over the clearing. Good sense told Cornelius Killick that this was the moment to run like hell. He had lost his greatest weapon, surprise, and he risked losing much more, but he was not a man to admit failure. Instead he imagined victory. Perhaps, he thought, the bastards had gone. No muskets fired across the clearing now, no redcoats moved, nothing showed. Perhaps, astonished and shredded by the volleys of grape, the yellow-bellied bastards had turned and run. Killick licked dry lips, tested the surprising thought, and decided it must be the truth. ‘We’ve beaten the bastards, lads!’

  ‘Not these bastards, you haven’t.’

  Killick turned with the speed of a snake, then froze. Standing behind him was a one-eyed man whose face would have terrified an imp of Satan. Captain William Frederickson, in grim jest, always removed his eye-patch and false teeth before a fight and the lack of those cosmetics, added to the horror that was his eye-socket, gave him the face of a man come from a stinking and rotting grave. The Rifle officer’s voice, Killick noticed in stunned astonishment, was oddly polite while, behind him and moving with fast confidence, green-jacketed men whose guns were tipped with long, brass-handled bayonets slipped between the trees.

  Killick put a hand to his pistol’s hilt and the one-eyed man shook his head. ‘It would distress me to kill you. I have a certain sympathy for your Republic.’

  Killick gave his opinion of Frederickson’s sympathy in one short and efficacious word.

  ‘It is the fortune of war,’ Frederickson said. ‘Sergeant Rossner! I want prisoners, not dead ’uns!‘

  ‘Sir!’ The Riflemen, taking the Americans from the rear, and coming so unexpectedly with weapons ready, gave the Thuella’s crew no chance to fight. Docherty drew his sword, but Taylor’s bayonet touched the Irishman’s throat and the feral eyes of the Rifleman told the lieutenant just what would happen if he raised the blade. Docherty let it fall. Some of Thuella’s crew, unable to retreat into the clearing that was covered by the Marines’ muskets, dropped their weapons and ran to shelter with the startled villagers.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ Killick asked.

  ‘Captain Frederickson, Royal American Rifles. You’re supposed to offer me your sword.’

  Killick succinctly gave his view of that suggestion, and Frederickson smiled. ‘I can always take it from you. Do you command here?’

  ‘What if I do?’

  Killick’s truculence only made Frederickson more patient. ‘If you want to fight my lads, then I assure you they’ll welcome the chance. They’ve been fighting for six years, and about the only consolation our Army offers to them is the plunder from dead enemies.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Killick. There was no fight to be had, for the Riflemen were already herding his gun crews back. One of the green-jacketed bastards, the one who had taken Liam Docherty prisoner, was folding the Stars and Stripes into a bundle. Some of his men, Killick saw, were edging away with the villagers, but they had abandoned their weapons so as not to be taken for combatants. Cornelius Killick felt the impotence of a sailor doomed to fight out of water. He could have wept in anger and impotence and for the shame of seeing his flag taken. Instead, clinging to a shred of dignity, he plucked his sword from his scabbard and offered it, hilt first, to Frederickson. ‘If you’d fought me at sea ...’ Killick began.

  ‘... I would be your prisoner,’ Frederickson politely finished the sentence. ‘And if you give me your word that you will not attempt to escape, then you may keep your sword.’

  Killick dutifully slid the blade back into its scabbard. ‘You have my word.’

  Frederickson took a silver whistle from the loop on his crossbelt and blew six blasts on it. ‘Just to let our web-footed friends know that we’ve done their job.’ He opened his pouch and took out an eye-patch and false teeth. ‘You’ll forgive my vanity?’ Frederickson asked as he tied the eye-patch in place. ‘Shall we go back now?’

  ‘Back?’

  ‘To the fort, of course. As my prisoner I can assure you that your treatment will be that of a gentleman.’

  Killick stared at the Rifleman whose face, even with patch and teeth restored, was hardly reassuring. Cornelius Killick expected a British officer to be a supercilious poltroon, all airs and graces and high-spoken delicacies, and he was somewhat shaken to be faced with a man who looked as hard-bitten as this Rifleman. ‘You give me your word we’ll be treated properly?’

  Frederickson frowned, as though the question were indelicate. ‘You have my word as an officer.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘I can’t speak for the food tonight, but doubtless there’ll be wine in abundance. This is, after all, the Médoc, and the harvest was good this year or so I believe. Sergeant!’ He gave a shrug of apology to Killick for thus turning away. ‘Leave the guns to the web-foots! Back to the fort!’
<
br />   ‘Sir!’

  Cornelius Killick, who had hoped to be as successful on land as he was at sea, had met a Rifleman, and all he could do was light a cigar and console himself that, for a sailor, there was no disgrace in being bested ashore. But it irked all the same, God, how it irked!

  And the Arcachon Basin, in which the Thuella was stranded, had fallen.

  Henri Lassan, seeing his men cornered in their bastion and recognizing the import of the feared Green Jackets and their long, glittering bayonets, had known there was no future in fighting. ‘Over! Over!’ He pointed over the bastion and down to the strip of wind-drifted sand that edged the fort’s western ramparts. Here, on the fort’s seaward facing flank, there was no flooded ditch for the tidewater was better than any moat, and his gunners leaped from the embrasures to tumble heavily on the sand. Lassan, as he jumped, felt a sudden, keen pang for the loss of his books, then the wind was driven from him by the jar of his landing. Two of his men twisted their ankles, but they were safely helped into the dune’s cover from where, the wounded men assisted by their comrades, Lassan led his men north. Two rifle bullets followed them, but a bark of command ordered the ceasefire.

  The fortress had fallen, not to Marines, but to Green Jackets, and Lassan wondered how they had come so silently, and how they had pierced the defences without his knowledge, but that was useless speculation today, when he had failed in his task.

  He had lost the Teste de Buch, but he could yet frustrate his enemy. He supposed they had come for the chasse-marées and Lassan, stumbling in the cloying sand, would go to Le Moulleau and there burn the boats.

  Falling night brought cold rain to pit the sand with tiny dark craters. The track wound through dunes, past discarded fish traps and the black ribs of rotted boats. The fishing village lay two miles north and Lassan could see the dense tangle of masts and yards where the chasse-marées had been moored by his orders. The owners of the boats mostly lived aboard, waiting and grumbling until they could be released back to their trade.

  Vestiges of cannon smoke sifted north with Henri Lassan. The tide, he saw, was turning. Tiny waves rolled over the beds where mussels and oysters thrived. No more would the women bring him the flat baskets of shellfish and stop to gossip about the prices in the Arcachon town market or to whisper, with pretended shock, of the bedtime exploits of the American captain. Lassan wondered what had happened to Killick, but that speculation was as useless as wondering how the Teste de Buch had fallen. Commandant Henri Lassan, sword at his waist and pistol in his belt, had a task to do, and he went north in the gathering darkness to perform it.

  And at Le Moulleau the chasse-marée crews mutinied. They gathered outside the white-painted Customs House, disused these many years because of the Royal Navy blockade, but still manned by two uniformed men who opened their heavy door to listen to the commotion outside. Behind the crews were the wooden pilings that edged the sheds where the shellfish were broken open and where the murmur swelled into an angry protest. The ships were their livelihoods. Without the ships they would starve, their children would starve, and their women would starve.

  Lassan’s men, embarrassed by their predicament, stared at the ground. Torches flared in brackets on the Customs House façade, casting a red light on angry faces. Rain spat from the south. Lassan, a reasonable and kind man, raised his hands. ‘My friends!’ He explained why the boats were needed, how the English would use the craft to make a bridge or to land their Army north of the Adour. ‘What of your children then? What of your wives, eh? Tell me that?’

  There was silence, except for the running of the tide and the hiss as rain hit the torches. The faces were suspicious. Lassan knew that the French forces were disliked by the French peasantry, for the Emperor had decreed that French troops could take what rations they wanted and not pay for them. Lassan himself had refused to obey that decree, but the disobedience had been funded from his own pocket. Some of these men knew that, knew that Lassan had always been a decent officer, but still he threatened them with hunger.

  ‘The English,’ a voice shouted from the anonymity of the crowd, ‘are offering twenty francs a day. Twenty!’

  The murmur started again, grew, and Lassan knew he would have to use force to keep these men from interfering with his duty. He had tried reason, but reason was a feeble weapon against the cupidity of peasants, so now he must be savage in his duty. ‘Lieutenant Gerard!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You will fire the boats! Start at the southern moorings!’

  A jeer went up and Lassan instinctively reached for his pistol, but his sergeant touched his arm. ‘Sir.’ The sergeant’s voice was sad.

  A creak sounded, then another. There was the squeak of an oar in its thole, then there were splashes and Lassan could see, in the darkness, the white marks of blades touching water. He still watched and, in the glistening darkness where the torchlight touched the water into ripples, he saw the ghostly shapes of white-painted boats.

  On the flowing tide the British had rowed up channel and Lassan, listening to the ridicule of his countrymen, saw the blue-jacketed sailors, cutlasses in their hands, swarming from their longboats on to the chasse-marées, The French crews, welcoming English gold, applauded.

  Lassan turned away. ‘We go east, Lieutenant.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Henri Lassan, with his little band of gunners, stumbled away from the village. He would follow the Arcachon’s southern shore, then head inland to Bordeaux to report to his superiors that he had failed, that Arcachon was lost, and that the British had taken their boats.

  And thus the battle of Arcachon, that had begun with such high hopes for its defenders, ended in a rain-cold night of bleak defeat.

  CHAPTER 8

  Five French dead and one dead Rifleman were laid in the fort’s chapel, not out of reverence, but simply because it was the most convenient place for the corpses to lie until there was time to bury them. Lieutenant Minver stripped the white frontal from the altar and ordered two of his men to tear it into strips for bandages; then, being a well-trained young man who had been told constantly by his parents never to leave a light burning in an empty room, he pinched out the flame of the Eternal Presence before going back to the courtyard.

  The Teste de Buch was in chaos. Riflemen manned the ramparts while Marines and sailors seethed in the courtyard. The six field guns, with their limbers, had been dragged into the fort where they were objects of much curiosity to the seamen. The Scylla, her flanks riven by the heavy shot, was moored beneath the silent guns.

  The Marines’ packs and supplies were being ferried from a brig anchored below the Scylla, then slung over the fort’s wall by a system of ropes and pulleys. The Marines had marched in light-order, but had still reached the fort two hours after Sharpe’s Riflemen.

  ‘I must thank you, Major Sharpe.’ Captain Bampfylde limped on blistered feet into the room where Sharpe was being bandaged by a naval surgeon. Bampfylde flinched at the sight of so much blood on Sharpe’s face and shirt. ‘My dear fellow, permit me to say how sorry I am?’

  The surgeon, a drunkard of morose disposition, answered in place of Sharpe. ‘It’s nothing, sir. Head wounds bleed like a stuck pig.’ He finished the bandaging and gave Sharpe’s head a light buffet. ‘I’ll warrant you’ve got a head like a bloody bass drum, though.’

  If the man meant painful, then he was right, and the friendly tap had not helped, but at least Sharpe‘s, sight had come back as soon as the blood was washed from his eyes. He looked up at Bampfylde whose young, plump face looked tired. ’The fort wasn’t exactly deserted.‘

  ‘So it seems!’ Bampfylde crossed to the table and examined a bottle of wine abandoned by the French garrison. He plucked out the cork and poured a little into a convenient glass. He smelt it, swirled it around, examined it, then sipped it. ‘Very nice. A trifle young, I’d say.’ He poured more wine into the glass. ‘Still, no bones broken, eh?’

  ‘I lost one man dead.’

  Bampfylde shrugge
d. ‘Scylla lost sixteen!’ He said it as if to show that the Navy had taken the greater punishment.

  ‘And the Marines?’ Sharpe asked.

  ‘Two men were scratched,’ Bampfylde said airily. ‘I always thought that clearing was the most likely place for an ambuscade, Sharpe. If they want to catch the likes of us, though, they’ll have to show a livelier leg, what?’ He laughed.

  Bampfylde was a lying bastard, Sharpe thought. The two Riflemen sent by Frederickson had warned the Marines of the field guns, and Marine Captain Palmer had already thanked Sharpe for the service. But Bampfylde was speaking as though he had both detected and defeated the ambush, whereas the bloody man had done nothing. Bampfylde finished the wine. ‘Some of the Americans escaped?’ He made the question sound like an accusation.

  ‘So I believe.’ Sharpe did not care. Bampfylde had thirty American prisoners to send to England, and surely that was enough. The fort was taken, seamen from the Scylla had gone up channel to find the chasse-marées, and no man could have expected more of the day.

  ‘So you’ll go inland in the morning, Sharpe?’ Bampfylde peered at Sharpe’s head wound. ‘That’s only a scratch, isn’t it? Nothing to slow your reconnaissance?’

  Sharpe did not reply. The fort was taken, Elphinstone would get the extra chasse-marées he needed, and the rest of this operation was farcical. Besides, he did not care whether Bordeaux was seething with discontent or not, he only cared that Jane should not die while he was away. Sharpe twisted round to look at the surgeon. ‘What’s the first symptom of fever?’

  The surgeon was helping himself to the wine. ‘Black-spot, Yellow, Swamp? Walcheren? Which fever?’

  ‘Any fever,’ Sharpe growled.