Sharpe’s Skirmish. Richard Sharpe and the defence of the Tormes, August 1812. By BERNARD CORNWELL.

“That’s true, sir.”

“Cut-throats, rogues, criminals! They’re not above slitting a British straggler’s throat for the value of his equipment, Sharpe! They’re not to be trusted!”

“So I’ve heard, sir.”

The Major lowered his telescope and looked with horror at Sharpe. “You don’t suppose, Sharpe, that the wine belongs to them, do you?”

“I doubt it, sir,” Sharpe said. The wine was French plunder, stolen from one of the local vineyards, and the wine’s original owner had probably died when the frogs pillaged his property.

“My God, man!” Tubbs said, “but if the wine does belong to them, they’ll be furious! Furious! Call your men back!” Tubbs stared at the retreating Light Company, then turned to gaze at the horsemen. “Suppose they want payment for the wine, Sharpe? What do we do?”

“Tell them to bugger off, sir.”

“Tell them to… Oh, my God!” Tubbs was alarmed because one of the riders had broken from the group and was now spurring towards the fortress. He raised his glass again, stared for a few heartbeats, then looked astonished. “Good Lord!”

“What is it, sir?” Sharpe asked calmly.

“It’s a woman, Sharpe, a woman! And armed!” Tubbs was gazing at a thin-faced, good-looking young woman who trotted towards the small fortress with a gun on her back and a sword at her side. She swept off her hat as she approached, loosing a torrent of long black hair. “A woman!”

Tubbs exclaimed, “and rather beautiful.”

“She’s called La Aguja, sir,” Sharpe said, “which means ‘the needle’, and that ain’t because she’s handy with the cotton and thread, sir, but because she likes to kill with a stiletto.”

“Kill with a… you know her, Sharpe?”

“I’m married to her, Major,” Sharpe said, and went down the stairs to greet Teresa.

And reflected that, maybe, whatever they were, he was in the Elysian Fields after all.

Major Pierre Ducos was no more a proper Major than was Lucius Tubbs, but nor was he quite a civilian, though he wore civilian clothes. A policeman, perhaps? Yet that did not do justice to the exquisite subtlety of Ducos’s mind, nor to the influence that he could wield. He was a small man, balding and slight, who wore thick spectacles. At first glance he might have been taken for a clerk, or perhaps a scholar, except that his sober clothes were too well tailored, and then there were his eyes. They might be short-sighted, but they were also as cold and green as a northern sea, suggesting that mercy and pity were qualities long discarded by Major Pierre Ducos. Pity, Ducos considered, was an emotion fit only for women, while mercy was the prerogative of God, and the Emperor deserved sterner virtues. The Emperor needed efficiency, dedication and intelligence, and Ducos supplied all three, which was why he had the Emperor’s ear. He might be a mere Major, but Marshals of France worried about Ducos’s opinion, because that opinion could go straight to Napoleon himself.

And Napoleon had sent Ducos to Spain because the Marshals were failing.

They were being beaten! They were losing eagles! The armies of France, faced by a rabid pack of Spanish peasants and a despicable little British army, were being trounced. Ducos’s responsibility was to analyse those defeats and inform the Emperor what should be done, but no one in Spain knew that was the limit of Ducos’s instructions. They just knew that Ducos had the Emperor’s ear, and if Ducos, having made his analysis, then suggested a remedy, the Marshals were inclined to listen to him.

And now, just after Ducos’s arrival, Marmont had been destroyed!

Humiliated! His so-called Army of Portugal was running through Spain as hard as it could, and even Madrid was being abandoned. Only Soult, Marshal of the Army of the South, was winning victories, but what use were victories over rag-tag Spanish armies when the real war was being fought in Castile?

So Ducos had ridden south, protected from the guerilleros by six hundred cavalrymen, and he had presented Marshal Soult with opportunity, though at first Soult had been unwilling to grasp it. “I cannot spare any men, monsieur,” he told Ducos. “Wherever you look there are guerilleros! And General Ballesteros’s army is intact.”

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