Sharpe's Revenge Read Online Free

need a bandage. There’ll be some bruising and soreness. You’re a lucky man.’
    Ford translated for the distraught Bampfylde, but the Naval Captain was not listening. Instead he was staring through angry and shameful tears at the black-haired Rifleman who had come to stand over him. Sharpe said nothing, but just tossed down the smoking pistol and walked away. He had failed to kill the man, which angered him, but honour had been served on the dead of the Teste dc Buch. He had eaten his grass before breakfast, and now Sharpe must cement his fragile peace with Jane, send her away with his love, then go back to the place he knew the best and feared the most: the battlefield.

    Bordeaux still belonged to the Emperor, though for how long no one could 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.
    â€˜Hey! Pigface!’ The Sergeant had noted the sentry’s surreptitious interest.
    â€˜Sergeant?’
    â€˜Water. Fetch some water for my horse.’
    The sentry, who was under orders not to stir from his post, tried to ignore the command.
    â€˜Hey! Pigface! I said get some water.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜I am Major Pierre Ducos.’ Ducos did not look up from his work.
    â€˜My name is Colonel