Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe's Revenge, Sharpe's Waterloo, Sharpe's Devil by Bernard Cornwell Read Free Book Online Page A

even the handsome birds, but instead was remembering the Teste de Buch fort where, once again, he had been humiliated by an English Rifleman. Sharpe. It was odd, Ducos thought, how often Sharpe had crossed his path, and even odder how often that crude soldier had succeeded in frustrating Ducos’s most careful plans. It had happened again at the benighted fort on the French coast and Ducos, seeking some clever stroke that would give himself and Sergeant Challon freedom, had found himself thinking more and more about Major Richard Sharpe.
    At first Ducos had resented the intrusion of Sharpe into his thoughts, but in these last two days he had begun to see that there was a possible purpose to that intrusion. Perhaps it would be possible for Ducos to take revenge on his old enemy as a part of the concealment of the theft. The plan was intricate, but the more Ducos tested it, the more he liked it. What he needed now was Challon’s support, for without the Sergeant’s physical courage, and without the loyalty that the other Dragoons felt for Challon, the intricacy was doomed. So, as they walked beside the stream, Ducos spoke low and urgently to the Sergeant, and what he said revealed a golden bridge to a wonderful future for Sergeant Challon.
    ‘It will mean a visit to Paris,’ Ducos warned, ‘then a killing somewhere in France.’
    Challon shrugged. ‘That doesn’t sound too dangerous, sir.’
    ‘After which we’ll leave France, Sergeant, till the storm blows out.’
    ‘Very good, sir.’ Challon was quite content so long as his duties were clear. Ducos could do the planning, and Challon would doubtless do the killing. Thus, in Challon’s world, it had ever been; he was content to let the officers devise their campaign plans, and he would cut and hack with a blade to make those plans work.
    Ducos’s clever mind was racing backwards and forwards, sensing the dangers in his ideas and seeking to pre-empt those risks. ‘Do any of your men write?’
    ‘Herman’s the only one, sir. He’s a clever bugger for a Saxon.’
    ‘I need an official report written, but not in my own handwriting.’ Ducos frowned suddenly. ‘How can he write? He’s had two fingers chopped off.’
    ‘I didn’t say he wrote so as you can read it, sir,’ Challon said chidingly, ‘but he’s got his letters.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter,’ for Ducos could even see a virtue in the Saxon’s illegible handwriting. And that, he realized, was the hallmark of a good plan, when even its apparent frailties turned into real advantages.
    So that night, under a flickering rushlight, the nine men made a solemn agreement. The agreement was a thieves’ pact which pledged them to follow Ducos’s careful plan and, to further that plan, the Saxon laboriously wrote a long document to Ducos’s dictation. Afterwards, as the Dragoons slept, Ducos wrote his own long report which purported to describe the fate of the Emperor’s missing baggage. Then, in the morning, with panniers and saddlebags still bulging, the nine men rode north. They faced a few weeks of risk, a few months of hiding, then triumph.

CHAPTER 2
    Over the next few days it seemed as if Wellington was offering peace an opportunity, for he broke off his direct advance on Toulouse and instead ordered the army into a confusing series of manoeuvres that could only delay any confrontation with Marshal Soult’s army. If the manoeuvres were designed to offer the French a chance to retreat, they did not take it, but just waited at Toulouse while the British, Spanish and Portuguese forces made their slow and cumbersome advance. One night Nairn’s brigade was marched through pelting rain to where Engineers were laying a pontoon bridge across a wide river. Sharpe knew the river was the Garonne, for his orders said as much, but he had no idea where in France the Garonne ran. Nor did it much matter for the night became a fiasco when the Engineers discovered their bridge was too short. Nairn’s men slept by