‘And I’m hoping you do,’ Anderson said enthusiastically, and Sharpe remembered when he had been just as impatient to join a fight.
‘Just stay alive, Lieutenant,’ he said, knowing the words were meaningless. But Sharpe feared the tunnel simply because a tunnel, any tunnel, was easy to defend. However inaccurate a musket was, a tunnel would serve to guide the bullets as they ricocheted from its walls, and a group of determined infantry could fill a tunnel with a deadly hail of lead. Lieutenant Anderson was Sharpe’s answer to that fear.
Sharpe had half expected an argument at the city gate that lay at the end of the Rue de Vincennes, but the guard there simply hauled the gate open and sullenly watched them pass. The street beyond had small houses that petered out into scrubby fields where goats and cattle grazed in the moonlight.
They turned north just as the city clocks started a jangled chiming to mark eleven. They were following a paved road. To Sharpe’s right was countryside, to his left he could see houses, beyond which was the city’s wall. Ahead was a sprawling village and Sharpe stopped well short of it. ‘We wait here,’ he said, turning off the road into a small orchard. ‘The cart goes no further,’ he ordered. ‘Pat? You and I will take a look ahead.’
He left Harry Price in charge of the company with orders to lie quiet while he and Harper made their way through the rough fields to the east of the village, which was dominated by a church and, next to it, a big building with two high gables. Sharpe settled into a ditch and nodded at the big building. ‘That’s the tavern,’ Sharpe said.
‘Whorehouse too, sir.’
‘Probably.’
‘And it’s busy enough,’ Harper grunted. They could see lamplight showing through the big building’s windows. They could also see moonlight glinting from the bayonets of two sentries posted on the firestep of the city’s wall.
‘Busy drinking and whoring,’ Sharpe said.
‘Lucky people, then. Do we go look at them?’
‘No, let them drink. We’ll move a few minutes before midnight. Lieutenant Anderson claims his watch is accurate enough.’
Sharpe watched the tavern for a few more minutes, unable to shift the dread from his thoughts. He tried to think of Lucille, tried to imagine a wedding service in the chateau’s old chapel that he had done his best to restore, but the more he thought of that hoped-for day, the worse his anticipation of this night’s madness. He was fairly sure the battalion could get into the house, and he was equally sure that Lanier’s battalion was there, but once the firing started there was a good chance of chaos, and a fight inside a large house would be difficult to control. Lanier must be warned already of a battalion of British troops moving through the city, but had he detected Sharpe’s presence behind him? And if so, would the tunnel be barricaded? Dear God, he thought, but I should have led the battalion in the main assault, because this was madness. ‘Let’s fetch the others, Pat,’ he said, and then, after a pause, ‘and thank you.’
‘Thank me?’
‘For everything. From Portugal onwards.’
Harper was silent for a moment. ‘Is that how you’re feeling?’
‘Terrified, Pat.’
‘Then let me lead.’
‘Christ, no. It’s just nerves, Pat. I was the same before Toulouse.’
‘And we won that.’
‘We always win,’ Sharpe said, hoping he spoke the truth.
He waited until Lieutenant Anderson’s watch said it was a quarter hour short of midnight, then he led the Light Company and the artillerymen back through the fields to the ditch at the edge of the village. He dared not use the road because they would be seen by the sentries on the wall’s firestep, but trees and hedgerows hid their approach. An owl hooted somewhere to the east as Sharpe crouched behind a thorn bush. ‘Time, Lieutenant?’
Anderson tilted the watch to catch the moonlight. ‘Eight minutes to midnight, sir.’
‘We wait,’ Sharpe said. Beyond the tavern he could see the loom of the city wall and the roof of the Delaunay buildings beyond. There were at least two sentries on that wall, the pale moonlight still reflecting from their fixed bayonets, but Sharpe was confident his men had not been seen. ‘Tell me when it’s three minutes to midnight,’ he told Anderson.
Because then he would go where every instinct told him not to go.
Damn it, the war was over! And Sharpe was going to war.
There was singing in the tavern as Sharpe approached, a raucous singing by men who had plainly been drinking, and the sound persuaded Sharpe not to use the big door at the building’s front. The last thing he wanted was a drunken brawl, and so he swerved to the right and found a smaller door at the building’s side. It opened into a lantern-lit kitchen where a big man was stirring a pot on a stove and two women were sitting at a table jointing chicken carcasses. The big man just gaped as Sharpe’s men filed into the steamy room. ‘Where’s the tunnel?’ Sharpe demanded of the man.
‘Monsieur?’
‘The tunnel,’ Sharpe snarled. ‘Le tunnel. Où est-il?’
The man looked from Sharpe’s scarred face to Harper’s eyes and seemed to shiver. ‘In the cellar, monsieur.’
‘And where’s that?’
The man was holding a big ladle that he dumbly pointed at a door. Sharpe wrenched it open and found himself in a hallway where a second door opened onto a dark flight of stairs leading down. ‘This way!’ he called, and ran down the steps. ‘Harry!’
Captain Price caught up with Sharpe in the cellar that was stacked with barrels and with racks of wine bottles. ‘Sir?’
‘Three men, Harry, stay here and make sure the bastards upstairs don’t follow us.’
‘Sir,’ Price said.
The cellar was dimly lit by lanterns, and in their light Sharpe could see a big wooden door on the far side. He dragged it open and there were more steps going down into darkness. ‘Time, Lieutenant?’ he asked.
‘A minute to midnight, sir,’ Anderson answered after a pause.
‘Then let’s go. You stay behind me, Lieutenant.’
Sharpe ran down the stone steps to find a tunnel some six or seven feet wide and low enough to make him stoop. Harper had brought one of the lanterns and Sharpe could see that the tunnel seemed to be hacked through a pale limestone. Harper paused beside him, the lantern in one hand, his volley gun in the other. The Irishman peered into the tunnel’s darkness. ‘Christ, it’s a lot of bloody work just to get cheaper wine.’
‘According to Fox it started as a gypsum mine,’ Sharpe said.
‘Gypsum?’
‘Plaster, Pat. The stuff the elephant’s made from. Are we all here?’
‘All but Harry Price and his three men.’
‘Then let’s go.’ The tunnel sloped down for the first few yards then tilted upwards. The lantern gave a feeble light, barely illuminating more than a few feet of the stone walls. ‘If your man’s expecting us,’ Harper began and did not finish the thought, but nor did he need to because Sharpe was wondering the same. If Lanier had men guarding the tunnel then it would be a bloody business to get through.