Sharpe's Waterloo (21 page)

‘A silk stocking full of shit with a crown, then.' Harper was quite unmoved by Doggett's outrage. ‘And if the little bugger doesn't watch out, Mr Sharpe will feed his guts to the hogs. It wouldn't be the first time he's done it.'

‘Murdered someone?' Doggett blurted out the question.

Harper turned innocent eyes on the Guards Lieutenant. ‘I know for a fact he's rid the world of some bad officers. We all have! Don't be shocked, Mr Doggett! It happens all the time!'

‘I can't believe it!' Doggett protested, but too loudly, for the sound of his voice made the Prince turn irritably in his saddle.

‘Is something offending you, Mr Doggett?'

‘No, sir.'

‘Then get back here, where you belong.' The Prince looked back to the four battalions of Halkett's brigade which were an itch to his wounded self-esteem. Closest to the crossroads, and just forward of the Highlanders across the highway was a battalion of Lincolnshire men, the 69th, who were unknown to Sharpe. They had never fought in Spain, instead they had been a part of the disastrous expedition that had failed to free the Netherlands at the end of the previous war. Beyond them was the 30th, the Three Tens, a Cambridgeshire battalion which, like the 33rd next in line, had also been a part of the Dutch débâcle. Furthest south was the Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers, the only veterans of the Spanish campaign in the brigade.

‘So who ordered them to form square?' the Prince demanded petulantly.

No one knew, so Harry Webster was sent to discover the answer and came back after ten minutes to say that Sir Thomas Picton had deployed the brigade.

‘But they're not in Picton's division!' The Prince's pique had turned to a real anger that flushed his sallow face.

‘Indeed not, sir,' Rebecque said gently, ‘but—'

‘But nothing, Rebecque! But bloody nothing! Those men are in my corps! Mine! I do not give orders to brigades in Sir Thomas Picton's division, nor do I expect him to interfere with my corps! Sharpe! My compliments to Sir Colin Halkett, and instruct him to deploy his brigade in line. Their task is to give fire, not cower like schoolboys from non-existent cavalry.' The Prince had taken a sheet of paper from his sabretache and was scribbling the order in pencil.

‘But the cavalry—' Sharpe began to protest.

‘What cavalry?' The Prince made a great fuss of pretending to stare across the battlefield. ‘There is no cavalry.'

‘In the dead ground over—'

‘You're frightened of unseen horsemen on the left? But this brigade is on the right! Here, take this.' He thrust the written order at Sharpe.

‘No, sir,' Sharpe said.

The bulbous eyes swivelled to stare in amazement at Sharpe. Rebecque hissed a warning at the Rifleman, while the other staff officers held their breath. The Prince licked his lips. ‘What did you say, Sharpe?' His voice was filled with horror and revulsion.

‘I'm not taking that order, sir. You'll kill every man jack of that brigade if you insist on it.'

For a second the Prince literally shook with rage. ‘Are you refusing to obey an order?'

‘I'm refusing to take that order, sir, yes.'

‘Rebecque! Suspend Colonel Sharpe from his duties. Have this order sent immediately.'

‘You can't—' Sharpe began, but Rebecque seized Sharpe's bridle and tugged his horse out of the Prince's reach. ‘Rebecque, for God's sake!' Sharpe protested.

‘He's entitled!' Rebecque insisted. ‘Listen, by tomorrow he'll have forgotten this. Give him an apology tonight and you won't be suspended. He's a good-hearted man.'

‘I don't give a damn for his heart, Rebecque. It's those men I care about!'

‘Rebecque!' The Prince turned petulantly in his saddle. ‘Has that order gone!'

‘Immediately, sir.' Rebecque shrugged at Sharpe, then turned away to find another officer to carry the Prince's command.

The order was sent. Sir Colin Halkett rode back to the Prince's command post vehemently to protest the command, but the Prince would not be denied. He insisted that there was no danger of a French cavalry attack and that, by deploying in square, the brigade was sacrificing three-quarters of the firepower that might be needed to rake the flank of a French infantry attack.

‘We mustn't be cautious!' the Prince lectured the experienced Sir Colin. ‘Caution won't win battles! Only daring. You will form line! I insist you form line!'

Sir Colin rode unhappily away while Sharpe, goaded beyond endurance by the Prince's crowing voice, spurred forward. ‘Sir,' he said to the Prince.

The Prince ignored him. Instead he looked at Winckler, one of his Dutch aides, and deliberately spoke in English. ‘I can't think why the Duke called his men the scum of the earth, Winckler. I think he must have meant his officers, don't you?'

‘Yes, sir,' Winckler, a sycophantic man, smiled.

Sharpe ignored the provocation. ‘Permission to rejoin my old battalion, sir.'

The Prince gave the smallest, curtest nod.

Sharpe turned his horse away and spurred it forward. Hooves sounded loud behind him, making him twist in his saddle. ‘I thought you promised Isabella you'd stay out of trouble?'

‘There isn't any trouble yet,' Harper said. ‘When there is I'll get the hell out of it, but till then I'll keep you company.'

Harper followed Sharpe down the bank onto the Nivelles road where Sharpe exploded in rage. ‘Bastard! What a cretinous dirty-minded little Dutch bastard! I'd like to ram his poxed bloody crown up his royal arse.' Instead Sharpe snatched the tricorne hat off his head and ripped the black, gold and scarlet cockade of the Netherlands from its crown. He hurled the silken scrap into a patch of nettles. ‘Bastard!'

Harper just laughed.

They scrambled up the bank into the trampled field of rye. To their right the trees were heavy with leaf, though here and there a splintered branch showed where a French cannon-ball or shell had struck high. There was not much litter in this part of the field; merely the corpses of two dead Voltigeurs, a scatter of dead horses, and a discarded and undamaged Cuirassier's breastplate that Harper dismounted to retrieve. ‘Useful, that,' he said as he tied the polished piece of armour to the strap of a saddlebag.

Sharpe did not reply. Instead, he watched as Sir Colin Halkett's brigade staff ordered the four battalions out of square and into line. The regimental bands played behind the brigade. Sharpe saluted the colours of the 69th, the 30th and the 33rd. He felt a particular fondness for the 33rd, the Yorkshire regiment which he had joined as a sullen youth twenty-two years before. He wondered if their recruiters still carried oatcakes pierced on a sword, the curious symbol he'd seen as Sergeant Hakeswill had expounded to the sixteen-year-old Sharpe the benefits of an army life. Hakeswill was long dead, as were almost all the other men Sharpe remembered from the battalion, except for the Lieutenant-Colonel who had led the 33rd when Sharpe had first joined and who was now His Grace the Duke of Wellington.

The six hundred men of the Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers were deployed the furthest south, a full half-mile from the crossroads. Peter d‘Alembord's skirmishers were fifty yards in front of the battalion and having a hard time with the greater number of Voltigeurs. It seemed that Ford had not taken Sharpe's advice to send out extra skirmishers, but was leaving d'Alembord's men to cope as best they could. Sharpe, not wanting to interfere with Ford, reined in a good thirty yards behind the battalion, close to the tree line where the battalion's band was playing. Mr Little, the rotund bandmaster, first greeted Sharpe with a cheerful grin, then with a quick and cheerful rendition of ‘Over The Hills and Far Away', the marching song of the Rifles. Colonel Ford, who had just finished dressing his newly formed line, turned as the music changed. He blinked with surprise to see the two Riflemen, then nervously took off his spectacles and polished their round lenses on his red sash. ‘Come to see us fight, Sharpe?'

‘I've come to see you die.' But Sharpe said it much too softly for anyone but Harper to hear. ‘Can I suggest you form square?' he said more loudly.

Ford was clearly confused. He had only just been ordered to form the battalion into line, and now he was being asked to revert to square? He put his spectacles back into place and frowned at Sharpe. ‘Is that an order from brigade?'

Sharpe hesitated, was tempted to tell the lie, but he had no written authority to prove the order, so he shook his head. ‘It's just a suggestion.'

‘I think we'll manage quite well by following orders, Mr Sharpe.'

‘A pox on you, too.' Again Sharpe spoke too softly for anyone but Harper to hear.

Mr Little's bandsmen played merrily on while Colonel Ford took his place behind the battalion's colours and Sharpe slowly drew his long sword which he rested on his pommel.

The Prince, waiting behind the gun line at the crossroads, felt that at long last he was beginning to impose his youthful genius on the battle.

On the shallow southern crest above Gemioncourt a French cavalry scout stared in disbelief at the long exposed line of infantrymen that had been stationed in front of the woods. He stared for a long time, seeking the implicit trap in the formation, but he could see none. He could only see men lined up for the slaughter and so, turning his horse, he spurred towards the dead ground.

While Sharpe and Harper, with two thousand two hundred men of Halkett's Fifth Brigade, just waited.

In Brussels the gun-fire sounded like very distant thunder, sometimes fading to a barely perceptible rumble, but at other times swollen by a vagary of wind so that the distinct percussive shocks of each gun's firing could be distinguished. Lucille, troubled by the sound, walked Nosey to the southern ramparts where she joined the crowd who listened to the far-off noise and speculated what it might mean. The majority hoped it signified Napoleon by nightfall, a torchlight parade and dancing. The Empire would be restored and safe, for surely the Austrians and Russians would not dare attack France if Britain and Prussia had been defeated?

The first news from the battlefield gave substance to those Imperial hopes. Belgian cavalrymen, their horses sweating and exhausted, brought tales of a shattering French victory. It had been more of a massacre than a battle, the horsemen said. British corpses were strewn across the landscape, Wellington had been killed, and the troops of the Emperor were even now advancing on Brussels with drums beating and Eagles flying.

Lucille noted that the guns were still firing, which seemed to cast doubt on the Belgian claims of victory, though some of the hundreds of English civilians still in Brussels were more ready to give the news credence. They ordered their servants to load the travelling boxes and trunks onto the coaches that had been standing ready since dawn. The coaches were whipped out of the city on the Ghent road; their passengers praying that they would reach the Channel ports before the Emperor's scavenging and victorious horsemen cut the roads. Others of the English, more cautious, waited for official news.

Lucille, unwilling to flee with her child into an unknown future, walked beside one of the first carts of wounded that reached the city. A British infantry sergeant, his face bandaged and one arm crudely splinted, told her that the battle had not been lost when he left Quatre Bras. ‘It was hard work, ma'am, but it weren't lost. And as long as Nosey's alive it won't be lost.'

Lucille went back to her child. She closed the window in the hope that the glass would obscure the sound of the cannons, but the noise drummed on, insistent and threatening. To the west the thunderheads were heaping into a sombre bank that cast an unnaturally dark shadow across the city.

Five streets away from Lucille, in the expensive suite of rooms that had been so thoroughly fumigated, Jane Sharpe vomited.

Afterwards, gasping for breath from the stomach-griping heaves, she went to the window, rested her forehead on the cool glass, and stared at the great ridge of cloud that blackened the western sky. Beneath her, in the hotel yard, a groom whistled as he carried two pails of water from the pump. A flock of pigeons circled, then fluttered down to the stable roof. Jane was aware of none of it, not even of the harsh percussive grumble of gun-fire. She closed her eyes, took a deep, tentative breath, then groaned.

She was pregnant.

She had suspected as much before she and Lord John had left England, but now she was certain. Her breasts were sore and her stomach sour. She ticked the months down on her fingers, reckoning that she would have a January child; a winter's bastard. She swore softly.

She stepped away from the window and crossed to the dressing-table where last night's candles still stood in their puddles of cold wax. She still felt sick. Her skin was prickly with sweat. She hated the thought of being pregnant, of being lumpish and awkward and gross. She rang for her maid, then sat heavily to stare into the looking-glass.

‘Has Harris returned?' Jane asked the maid.

‘Yes, ma'am.'

‘Tell him I shall want him to take a message to his lordship.'

‘Yes, ma'am.'

Jane waved the maid out of the room, then drew a heavy sheet of creamy writing paper towards her. She dipped a quill in ink, sat for a moment in thought, then began to write.

The guns fired on.

 

More troops were arriving at Quatre Bras; troops who had marched till their blistered feet were agony, but who now had to plunge straight into the humid, smoke-thickened air where, unit by unit, the Duke was building the force that would counter-attack the French and drive them back to Frasnes. More and more British guns crashed and jangled off the road and onto the crushed rye stalks. Fires were burning in the crops behind the French skirmishers as British howitzer shells exploded. The battle was not won yet, but the Duke was beginning to feel like a man who had escaped defeat. He knew his Guards Division was close, and there was even a rumour that the British cavalry might reach the crossroads before dark.