Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe's Revenge, Sharpe's Waterloo, Sharpe's Devil Read Online Free

tell. The river wharfs were empty, the warehouses bare and the city’s coffers dry. A few men still proclaimed their loyalty to Napoleon, but most longed for the peace that would revive trade and, as a symbol of that longing, they made themselves white cockades that were the badge of France’s royal house. At first the cockades were kept hidden, but as each day passed more were worn in open defiance of the Bonapartist troops that remained. Those imperial defenders were few, and pitifully weak. Some crippled veterans and pensioners manned the river forts, and a half battalion of young infantrymen guarded the prefecture, but all the good troops had marched south and east to reinforce Marshal Soult and, encouraged by their absence, the hungry city grumbled with disaffection and rebellion.
    On a March morning, brisk with a cold wind and wet with rain that swept from the Atlantic, a single wagon arrived at the city’s prefecture. The wagon held four heavy crates and was escorted by a troop of cavalrymen who, oddly, were commanded by an infantry Colonel. The wagon stopped in the prefecture’s yard and its Dragoon escort, on weary and muddied horses, slouched empty-eyed in their saddles. They wore their hair in cadenettes; small pigtails which hung beside their cheeks and were a mark of their élite status.
    The infantry Colonel, elderly and scarred, climbed slowly from his saddle and walked to the porticoed entrance where a sentry presented his musket. The Colonel was too weary to acknowledge the sentry’s salute, but just pushed through the heavy door. The cavalry escort was left under the command of a Dragoon Sergeant who had a face that was the texture of knife-slashed leather. He sat with his heavy straight-bladed sword resting across his saddle bow and the nervous sentry, trying not to catch the Sergeant’s hostile eyes, could see that the edge of the dulled blade was brightly nicked from recent battle.
    ‘Hey! Pigface!’ The Sergeant had noted the sentry’s surreptitious interest.
    ‘Sergeant?’
    ‘Water. Fetch some water for my horse.’
    The sentry, who was under orders not to stir from his post, tried to ignore the command.
    ‘Hey! Pigface! I said get some water.’
    ‘I’m supposed to stay ...’
    The sentry went silent because the Sergeant had drawn a battered pistol from a saddle holster.
    The Sergeant thumbed back the pistol’s heavy cock. ‘Pigface?’
    The sentry stared into the pistol’s black muzzle, then fled to get a bucket of water while, upstairs, the infantry Colonel had been directed into a cavernous room that had once been gracious with marble walls, a moulded plaster ceiling, and a polished boxwood floor, but which was now dirty, untidy and chill despite the small fire that burned in the wide hearth. A small bespectacled man was the room’s only occupant. He sat hunched over a green malachite table on which a slew of papers curled between the wax-thick stumps of dead candles. ‘You’re Ducos?’ the infantryman demanded without any other greeting.
    ‘I am Major Pierre Ducos.’ Ducos did not look up from his work.
    ‘My name is Colonel Maillot.’ Maillot seemed almost too tired to speak as he opened his sabretache and took out a scaled dispatch that he placed on the table. Maillot deliberately placed the dispatch on top of the paper upon which Ducos was writing.
    Pierre Ducos ignored the insult. Instead he lifted the dispatch and noted the red seal that bore the insignia of a bee. Other men might have shown astonishment at receiving a missive with the Emperor’s private seal, but Ducos’s attitude seemed to express irritation that the Emperor should aggravate him with further work. Nor, as other men would have done, did Ducos immediately open the dispatch, but instead he insisted on finishing the work that the Colonel had interrupted. ‘Tell me, Colonel,’ Ducos had an extraordinarily deep voice for such a puny man, ‘what would your judgement be on a General of Brigade who