shook his head. ‘You are a stubborn fool, Mr Sharpe.’
‘And you’re a filthy little bastard.’
‘Mr Sharpe,’ Ducos leaned back in his chair, ‘tell me what explanation she offered to you. She must have offered you some reason for her arrest?’
Sharpe shook his head as though he was having difficulty with his senses. ‘She said she had a dream about you. She was ordered to marry you by the Emperor and she saw you naked and it was the most horrid thing she’d ever…’
‘Sergeant!’
The first blow landed on Sharpe’s skull, a glancing blow, but then there was a pile-driving thump in his belly and the air rushed out of him. He forced himself to the right, was helped by a blow to his head, and then he was on the ground. ‘Stop!’
A boot thudded at his kidneys. He pulled the brass tube out of his sleeve, turned it, and gripped it with his right hand. He would have one chance only, just one.
‘No!’ He shouted it desperately, as if he was a child begging to be spared a beating, and then yelped as a boot hammered on his thigh. Ducos spoke a word in French.
The blows stopped. The Sergeant leaned down to haul Sharpe up by his collar. The other three men were standing back, weapons lowered, grins on their faces.
Lavin pulled Sharpe up and never saw the hand that struck up with the jagged brass tube.
Sharpe bellowed in anger, the war shout. They thought him weak and beaten, but he had one fight in him and they would learn what a Rifleman was in a fight.
The tube, jagged brass edges splayed at its end, struck Lavin’s groin and Sharpe twisted it, pushed and gouged as the Sergeant let go of him and screamed a horrid, high scream and dropped his hands to the blood and pain, but already Sharpe had let the tube go, was rising to the Sergeant’s right, was moving with all his speed and filling the room with his battle shout.
The Sergeant’s body blocked two men. The third raised his musket, but the muzzle was seized, pulled, and the heel of Sharpe’s right hand struck the man’s moustache, breaking bone, snapping the head back, then Sharpe dropped his bleeding hand to the musket’s lock, turned the gun, and pulled the trigger.
The two remaining men had dared not fire for fear of their own comrades. Seconds only had passed since the Sergeant had stooped to pick up the broken English officer. Now a musket belched smoke and noise.
One man fell, the musket ball in his lungs, and Sharpe hammered back with the brass butt at the man whose musket he had taken and who still grappled with him. The butt hit the man’s head, but he dragged Sharpe down, close to the bleeding, sobbing Sergeant, and the room echoed to a second musket shot, hammering louder than thunder in the room, drowning even the agony of Sergeant Lavin.
Sharpe twisted, heaved, flailed with the musket at the man who had fired as he fell. He still shouted, knowing that men are frightened by noise, by savagery, and he wrenched his right foot free from the man who held it, rose snarling from the bloody floor and lunged with his captured bayonet in short, professional strokes at the last of his enemies still standing. Ducos, his mouth open, was standing terrified at the door. He had no weapon.
The bayonets clashed, Sharpe pushed his opponent’s aside, lunged again, then broke to his right, to the table, seized the sword and his voice was triumphant as he swung it, the scabbard scraping free and flying across the room, and he sliced down with the blade, shouting in savage victory, and cut into the last man’s neck, dragging the blade back against bone and blood. He saw the man begin to fall, then finished him off with a lunge that was dragged downwards by the dying man. In seconds, just seconds, he had killed two men and wounded two others.
He twisted and jerked the sword free, then turned to the door. ‘Ducos!’
The door was empty.
He went to it, the sword bloody in his hand. His face was a mask of blood, his uniform soaked with Lavin’s blood. One man against four, and that a Rifleman! Sergeant Harper would say they were fair odds.
‘Ducos! You bastard! Ducos!’
He walked into the corridor. Behind him the Sergeant sobbed and wailed and bled into the hands cupped over his groin.
‘Ducos! You filth!’
‘M’sieu?’
The voice came from his right. Sharpe turned.
A group of French officers stood there. They were elegant and clean, staring aghast at the bloody man with the swollen face and the savage voice and the sword that dripped blood.
The French officers wore swords, but none was drawn.
One man stepped forward, a tall man in green and pink, a man who frowned. ‘Major Vaughn?’
It was Verigny. His face was screwed up, either because of the smell of blood, or the sight of Sharpe. ‘Major?’
‘My name is Sharpe.’ There was no point in concealment any longer. ‘Major Richard Sharpe.’ He leaned on the wall. The tip of the sword rested on the flagstones and made there a small pool of thick blood.
Verigny seemed to stand to attention. ‘I came from honour, Major, that you would be treated in accord with honour.’
Sharpe jerked his head towards the door. ‘The bastards tried to kill me. I had no sword then. I fought back.’ Sergeant Lavin was sobbing in high, pitiful cries from within the square, stone-walled room.
Verigny looked through the door. He stepped back and stared in awe at the Rifleman who had made the room look like a slaughterhouse. ‘You will be treated good, Major. You have need of a doctor?’
‘Yes. And water. Food. A bed.’
‘Of course.’
‘These clothes washed. A bath.’
‘Of course.’
Sharpe pulled his right hand from the sword. His palm was a bloody mess. It hurt. He held the sword out with his left hand. ‘I am your prisoner again, it seems.’
‘You will do me the honour to keep the sword, M’sieu, till we have discussion on what we do to you.’
Sharpe nodded, then turned back into the room. He retrieved his scabbard and sword belt, but could not fasten them with his wounded hand. He went and stood over the moaning, sobbing Sergeant Lavin who looked up at him with eyes that seemed to mix pain with an astonishment that he had been beaten. Sharpe looked at the French General. ‘Sir?’
‘Major?’
‘Tell this eunuch he got his wish.’
Verigny was chilled by the Rifleman’s voice. ‘His wish, M’sieu?’
‘He wanted an Englishman. He got one.’
Sharpe was led to one of the buildings
