Sharpe 18 - Sharpe's Siege by Bernard Cornwell Read Free Book Online

friend's enthusiasm, hoped that a new wife had not sapped Sharpe's appetite for the bloody business that lay ahead at Arcachon.
    Commandant Henri Lassan thought he detected sleet in the dawn, but he could not be sure until he climbed to the western bastion and saw how the flakes settled briefly on the great cheeks of his guns before melting into cold rivulets of water. The guns were loaded, as they always were, but their muzzles and vent-holes were stoppered against the damp. “Good morning, Sergeant!”
    “Sir!” The sergeant stamped his feet and slapped his hands against the cold.
    Lassan's orderly climbed the stone ramp with a tray of coffee-mugs. Lassan always brought the morning guard a mug of coffee each and the men appreciated the small gesture. The Commandant, they said, was a gentleman.
    Children ran across the courtyard and women's voices sounded from the kitchens. There should not be women in the fort, but Lassan had let the families of his gun crews take up the quarters vacated by the infantry who had gone to the northern battles. Lassan believed his men were less likely to desert if their families were inside the defences.
    “There she is, sir.” The sergeant pointed through the sleeting rain.
    Lassan looked over the narrow Arcachon channel where the tide raced across the shoals. Beyond the sandbanks the surging grey waves were torn by wind into a maelstrom of broken white water amidst which, beating southwards, was a little ship.
    The ship was a British brig-sloop with two tall masts and a vast driver-sail at her stern. Her black and white banded hull hid, Lassan knew, eighteen guns. Her sails were reefed, but even so she seemed to plunge through the waves and Lassan saw how high the spray fountained from the brig's stem. “Our enemies,” he said mildly, “are having a disturbed breakfast.”
    “Yes, sir.” The sergeant laughed.
    Lassan cradled his coffee mug. There was something vulnerable about his face, a drawn and frightened look that made his men protective of him. They knew Commandant Lassan wished to become a priest when this war ended and they liked him for it, but they also knew that he would fight as a soldier until the last shot of the war had been fired. Now he stared at the British brig. “You saw her last night?”
    “At sundown, sir,” the sergeant was certain. “And there were lights out there at night.”
    “He's watching us, isn't he?” Lassan smiled. “He's seeing what we're made of.”
    The sergeant slapped the gun as a reply.
    Lassan turned to stare thoughtfully into the fort's courtyard. A warning had come from Bordeaux that he was to prepare for a British attack, but Bordeaux had sent him no men to reinforce his shrunken garrison. Lassan could man his big guns, or he could protect the landward walls, but he could not do both. If the British landed troops, and sent warships into the channel, then Lassan would be trapped between the hammer and the anvil. He turned back to stare at the British brig. If Bordeaux was right, that inquisitive craft was making a reconnaissance, and Lassan must deceive the watchers. He must make them think the fort was so thinly defended that a landing by troops would be unnecessary.
    Lieutenant Gerard came yawning from the green-painted door of the officers' quarters. Lassan hailed him. “Lieutenant!”
    “Sir?”
    “No flag today! And no washing hung to dry on the barracks' roof!” Not that anyone was likely to dry washing in this weather.
    Gerard, his blue jacket unbuttoned above his braces, frowned. “No flag, sir?”
    “You heard me, Lieutenant! And no men in the embrasures, you hear? Sentries in the citadels only.”
    “I hear you, sir.”
    Lassan turned back to see the brig-sloop tack into the rain-sodden wind. He saw a shiver of sails, a spume of foam, and he imagined the cloaked officers, their braid tarnished by salt, staring at the grey, crouching fort through their spyglasses. He knew that such little ships, sent to spy on the