“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.
CHAPTER 9
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 v/eren’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.
Fiye 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.