despite the scar on his face, was fresh to the war. The captain smiled superciliously. ‘Doubtless, Major, your delicacy will be sore tested by French bullets.’
Jane, delighted at the opening, smiled very sweetly. ‘I’m sure Major Sharpe is grateful for your opinion, sir.’
That brought a satisfying reaction; a shudder of astonishment and fear on the annoying, plump face of the young naval officer. He took an involuntary step backwards, then, remembering the cause of the near quarrel, bowed to Jane. ‘My apologies, Mrs Sharpe, if I caused offence.’
‘No offence, Captain … ?’ Jane inflected the last word into a question.
The captain bowed again. ‘Bampfylde, ma’am. Captain Horace Bampfylde. And allow me to name my lieutenant, Ford.’
The introductions were accepted gracefully, as tokens of peace, and Sharpe, outflanked by effusive politeness, sat. ‘The man’s got no bloody manners,’ he growled loudly enough to be overheard by the two naval officers.
‘Perhaps he didn’t have your advantages in life?’ Jane suggested sweetly, but again the scene beyond the window distracted the naval men from the barbed comments.
‘Christ!’ Captain Bampfylde, careless of the risk of offending a dozen ladies in the dining-room, shouted the word. The outraged anger in his voice brought an immediate hush and fixed the attention of everyone in the room on the small, impertinent drama that was unfolding on the winter-cold sea.
The black-hulled lugger, instead of obeying the brig’s command to lower sails and proceed tamely into the harbour of St Jean de Luz, had changed her course. She had been sailing south, but now reached west to cut across the counter of the brig. Even Sharpe, no sailor, could see that the chasse-marée’s fore and aft rig made the boat into a handy, quick sailor.
It was not the course change that had provoked Bampfylde’s astonishment, but that the deck of the black-hulled lugger had suddenly sprouted men like dragon’s teeth maturing into warriors, and that, from the mizzen mast, a flag had been unfurled.
The flag was not the blue ensign of the Navy, nor the tricolour of France, nor even the white banner of the exiled French monarchy. They were the colours of Britain’s newest enemy; the Stars and Stripes of the United States of America.
‘A Jonathon!’ a voice said with disgust.
‘Fire, man!’ Bampfylde roared the order in the confines of the dining-room as though the brig’s skipper might hear him. Yet the brig, head to wind, was helpless. Men ran on its deck, and gunports lifted, but the American lugger was seething past the brig’s unarmed counter and Sharpe saw the dirty white blossom of gunsmoke as the small broadside was poured, at pistol-shot length, into the British ship.
Lieutenant Ford groaned. David was taking on Goliath and winning.
The sound of the American gunfire came over the windbroken water like a growl of thunder, then the lugger was spinning about, sails rippling as the American skipper let his speed carry him through the wind’s eye, until, taut on the opposite tack, he headed back past the brig’s counter towards the fleet of chasse-marées.
The brig, foresails at last catching the wind to lever her hull around, received a second mocking broadside. The American carried five guns on each flank, small guns, but their shot punctured the brig’s Bermudan cedar to spread death down the packed deck.
Two of the brig’s guns punched smoke into the cold wind, but the American had judged his action well and the brig dared fire no more for fear of hitting the chasse-marées into which, like a wolf let rip into a flock, the American sailed.
The hired coasters were unarmed. Each sea-worn boat, sails frayed, was crewed by four men who did not expect, beneath the protection of their enemy’s Navy, to face the gunfire of an ally.
The French civilian crews leaped into the cold water as the Americans, serving their guns with an efficiency that Sharpe could only admire even if he could not applaud, put ball after ball into the luggers’ hulls. The gunners aimed low, intending to shatter, sink, and panic.
Ships collided. One chasse-marée’s mainmast, its shrouds cut, splintered down to the water in a tangle of tarred cables and tumbling spars. One boat was settling in the churning sea, another, its rudder shot away, turned broadside to receive the numbing shock of another’s bow in its gunwales.
‘Fire!’ Captain Bampfylde roared again, this time not as an order, but in alarm. Flames were visible on a French boat, then another, and Sharpe guessed the Americans were using shells as grenades. Rigging flared like a lit fuse, two more boats collided, tangled, and the flames flickered across the gap. Then a merciful rain-squall swept out of Biscay to help douse the flames even as it helped hide the American boat.
‘They’ll not catch her,’ Lieutenant Ford said indignantly.
‘Damn his eyes!’ Bampfylde said.
The American had got clear away. She could outsail her square-rigged pursuers, and she did. The last Sharpe saw of the black-hulled ship was the flicker of her grey sails in the grey squall and the bright flash of her gaudy flag.
‘That’s Killick!’ The naval captain spoke with a fury made worse by impotence. ‘I’ll wager that’s Killick!’
The spectators, appalled by what they had seen, watched the chaos in the harbour approach. Two luggers were sinking, three were burning, and another four were inextricably tangled together. Of the remaining ten boats no less than half had grounded themselves on the harbour bar and were being pushed inexorably higher by the force of the wind-driven, flowing tide. A damned American, in a cockle boat, had danced scornful rings around the Royal Navy and, even worse, had done it within sight of the Army.
Captain Horace Bampfylde closed his spyglass and dropped it into his pocket. He looked down at Sharpe. ‘Mark that well,’ the captain said, ‘mark it very well! I shall look to you for retribution.’
‘Me?’ Sharpe said in astonishment.
But there was no answer, for the two naval officers had strode away leaving a puzzled Sharpe and a tangle of scorched wreckage that heaved on the sea’s grey surface and bobbed towards the land where an Army, on the verge of its enemy’s country, gathered itself for its next advance, but whether to north or east, or by bridge or by boat, no one in France yet knew.
CHAPTER TWO
He had a cutwater of a face; sharp, lined, savagely tanned; a dangerously handsome face framed by a tangled shock of gold-dark hair. It was battered, beaten by winds and seas and scarred by blades and scorched by powder-blasts, but still a handsome face; enough to make the girls look twice. It was just the kind of face to annoy Major Pierre Ducos who disliked such tall, confident, and handsome men.
‘Anything you can tell me,’ Ducos said with forced politeness, ‘would be of the utmost use.’
‘I can tell you,’ Cornelius Killick said, ‘that a British brig is burying its dead and that the bastards have got close to forty chasse-marées in the harbour.’
‘Close to?’ Ducos asked.
‘It’s difficult
