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The Sharpe Fan Fictions of A Lady.

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Bernard Cornwell’s

William Lawford Home from Spain



This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

William Lawford Home from Spain. Copyright © 2025 by A Lady

DEDICATIONS William Lawford Home from Spain is for Sable Crow who supports our fanfiction with her website SharpeTales.net.

And

Bernard Cornwell who brought Richard Sharpe into our world.

William Lawford Home from Spain

A Novel by “A Lady” Based on Characters created by Bernard Cornwell Chapter 1






March, 1812

Durford, England



That interview with Windham left me worn out. As his carriage disappeared down the drive I turned and began to climb the steps up to the house. I suppose I was about half-way up the flight, and thinking how unfit I had become, for I was out of breath and the muscles of my thighs were burning, and my knees were trembling with the effort; and then in that moment the ascent felt to me suddenly unconscionably, impossibly steep, so that I would have to use my hands, only, notwithstanding what my brain was always telling me, lying to me, supplying me with ghostly sensations of fingers which were not there, I no longer possessed them in the plural, of course – a circumstance which even at that point in my life, more than two months following my private disaster, I constantly forgot, and which came as a wretchedly miserable surprise to me every time I was forced to recollect what had happened to me – the stairs were a decidedly impracticable breach - and my mind was instantly flooded by the memory of Ciudad Rodrigo.13

FOOTNOTES

13 It seems reasonable that it was a memory of Ciudad Rodrigo, but perhaps it was in part also a foreshadowing of what my friends were soon to be made to endure at Badajoz, in light of the phenomenon which I had begun to experience from time to time since that calamitous night of the 19th of January in the Year Twelve.



I could hear the roar and thunder of the artillery from the ramparts of the citadel and the dry crackling of distant muskets and the dirty coughing of those closer to hand on both sides – even the less frequent but much sharper reports of the weapons of our Riflemen as they targeted the officers and gun-crews of the French - and the calls of the bugles and the shouts of command and the screaming of the wounded, and the bitter sobbing of the dying as they cried out for Jesus and for the Blessed Virgin and for their own mothers – I swear even the very stench of powder and blood and offal assailed me as I vacillated, incapable, upon the steps of the house - and then came that memory of an intense, brilliant, blinding light – it should have meant death, for it was the explosion of the mine, mere feet from where I had been standing - although I did not die! I never heard the noise of it that night, for in that moment consciousness had left me.

Then, to my dismay and mortification I felt a searing pain in my foot, and my legs slowly gave way. I did not fall, but I sank down upon my knees upon the stone steps and then found that I could not rise; I was filled with a very real fear, then, that I was about to tumble back down the half-flight, for my one hand seemed inadequate to the task of preventing this from happening (I truly did fear falling: I had taken a tumble from the library ladder only a week since, having over-reached myself and finding, too late, that I was unable to grasp the shelf to prevent my falling whilst I tried to recover my balance – I still had the bruises to show for that). In a rising panic I looked about for help -

In a rising panic I looked about for help - and thank God, one of the footmen chanced to be looking out of the doors of the house. Seeing my plight he at once ran down to my assistance – how I envied his unthinking effortless confidence as he took the steps two at a time, so easily, as I once had, when I had been still a boy, and whole (it came to me then: a grey winter’s day of wind and rain, and my Governess Miss Turnbull going away, and they had not told me; I had flown down those steps then, as if everything in the world had depended upon it; upon my catching her before she entered the carriage which was to bear her upon the first part of her journey far away from Durford; everything in my eight-years-old world, anyway: that was the day I learned the lesson of how easily those whom one loves can without warning vanish like phantasms, gone, to become as if they had never existed; but even knowing that, it never made it any easier on subsequent occasions): he offered me his arm, and without compunction I took it and allowed him to help me rise and climb the steps, up, up and into the house. I was grateful – but even as I felt that gratitude, I was sorry that it had to be Wilson. Wilson knew his duty and was as reserved and efficient and as quietly functional an automaton as any footman should know how to be; but as I have said, there was something about him I could not like. All footmen knew how to stand inconspicuously by the wall, present but yet not present, until their services were required – I used to think it was often as if their essential selves went to sleep until summoned again to life by a word from their masters – but, somehow, it was not so with Wilson. I had early on received the oddest impression that he was always very much present and that his brain was perpetually busy with some private scheme or other, turning over like the idling fly-wheel of a steam-engine before the gears are engaged, at a high rate of revolution, in that otherwise inscrutable head. And there had been something oleaginous in his attitude towards me, to date; overly-deferential; yet at the same time insolent, presuming, almost proprietorial. It had become more pronounced since my fall in the library, for he had heard the commotion - the steps making a terrific clatter as they fell, my landing heavily upon the floor and probably crying out – “Oh!” – or something of that nature – and had come running, the first on the scene. Not for the first time, nor the last, I regretted dear faithful Jeremy Collins, who had nurtured a great regard and fondness for me over many years, which I had reciprocated, but who had never shown any signs which could have indicated a possessive or a self-interested or a predatory nature. But he was gone, dead of the fever which had been rife in the flooded marshes of the fortifications at Torres Vedras in the wintry early months of 1811. I was very sorry for his death, not just on his account; the replacement I had been assigned, Amos Horsforth, was a Methodist of the Calvinist persuasion who had made no secret of the fact that he disapproved of me in every conceivable way, whether it had to do with my taste in soap or my taste in music – I could tell that he heartily detested the instrument which I had been fortunate to find in the abandoned villa on the way between Coimbra and Pombal, for its whimsical and pretty adornments which served no purpose beside that of decoration, with as much passion as he detested the music which I played on it, which to his mind was frivolous and worldly and ungodly – or my taste as regarding the officers who formed my staff (regarding which I modelled my choices after Wellington’s own, viz. that they be personable young men of good family and breeding, and cheerful disposition and, crucially, talent – the personable qualification was quite important to me, of course, I confess – I liked to look at the handsome young fellows gathered around my table in the merry candlelight at dinner, and why should I not? I had better sense than to carry on, on campaign, as had been the degenerate custom amongst the officers of the garrison at Dublin; and besides, in those days I had Richard, who that winter had always been somewhere not too far away, which had been a comforting thought to me when I sat solitary in the evenings once, the King drunk, my delightful young dinner-guests had returned to their own quarters - and sometimes not far away at all1) so that his very presence in my billet or tent became as an everlasting reproach – whatever I was doing he made sure that I knew that he thoroughly abominated it, and he would look at me with the eyes of John Knox haranguing the Queen of Scots2 when he was shaving me in the morning if he so much as suspected that I had spent the previous evening in the intimate company of the notorious Richard Sharpe.

“You are not well, sir,” Wilson murmured, with an air of concern which at first I found almost convincing, until I was recalled to myself sufficiently to recognise that that was because I had wanted to be convinced. I was conscious that I was in need of kindness from someone and I thought I had detected kindness in his tone, but I was no longer naïve: something told me that it had been a calculated pretence. Wilson had been angling. I knew then that I was vulnerable and in immediate danger – not physical danger, necessarily, but shall I say I felt a hint of his interest, by which I mean a venal what-could-he-get-out-of-it pricking of his thumbs when he regarded me and my situation – severely injured but recently and still in poor health as a result of that, adrift from the Army which had been as my home and my family for almost twenty years, newly-separated from my wife in circumstances which would, I knew, make my acceptance in society, should I ever attempt to return to it, a matter of some doubt. This would not have been for the first time I had sensed this in a servant. The old familiar warning-signs were clear to be read - I must be vigilant.

“I know that, Wilson,” I said, with some chagrin, which was I suppose at least a little unfair of me, but I had found it galling when Wilson had recently mentioned to me that he had heard me calling out in the night, and, presumably, he had deduced from the isolated word or phrase which he had overheard, that dreams of India and the Peninsula had been assailing me. He had asked if I should wish to be attended upon should such a thing occur again, and I had told him, definitely not! with such a degree of waspishness, instantly regretted of course, that I was afraid I had stirred his resentment, for I told myself that, notwithstanding my cool feelings concerning him and his intentions, he had quite likely meant well; but in raising that issue with me – such a delicate and personal matter as what went on in my sleeping mind when I lay alone and vulnerable in my bed at night – he had certainly overstepped the mark!

“It is not for me to say, sir; but – “

“No; most likely it is not, but you had better say it anyway.”

“It has occurred to me, sir, that you need someone.”

That was a reasonable observation, in the circumstances; yet I wished he had not made it sound somehow so like an indecent proposition.

“I have a house-full of servants.”

“Hardly that, sir. This is a very small establishment compared with what I was used to at Basingstoke.”

“So you say I need someone? Why?”

“To take care of you, sir. At least until you are stronger.”

“A nurse? As if I were an invalid? Oh, spare me!”

Wilson had regarded me sceptically, as if to say, Oh, so you are not an invalid, then?

“No, sir. Not a nurse, as such, if you do not care to think of it in that way. Just someone to help you. At least until you are more able to manage.”

“You think I cannot manage?”

“Last week, sir, in the library – you fell from the steps. You took a sorry tumble.”

“I stupidly got my feet caught in the hem of my banyan; that’s all it was. I should not have gone clambering about dressed like that.”

“As you say, sir.”

We had regained the lobby. It was a large, hard, chilly, echoing place; I had never liked it, and walking through it had always made me feel uneasy, but it was a fine example of its type, quite the grand imposing cavern, clearly meant to impress and probably to intimidate, done out in black and white marble with a chequerboard floor, bristling with modern statuary after the manner of the Greeks and Romans (and some genuinely ancient pieces, the souvenirs of the Earl’s and his father’s and grandfather’s Grand Tours – Grand Tours had become more problematical since those days, what with all the wars; my – no, the Viscount – and his brothers had been reduced to hanging about the Cumberland lakes, the Scottish glens or even the Hebrides, in their years of loitering between the University and engaging with their careers and their marriages, or in the case of Charles, just more loitering whilst he waited for the Earl and the Viscount to die; at least I had got to go on a Grand Tour of sorts, in Flanders, India and the Peninsula) and hung with splendid examples of the portrait-painter’s craft – silks, satins and brocades rendered in so brilliant and lifelike a way that the human figures in the paintings, which these fabrics adorned, seemed almost incidental – cyphers, clothes-horses, mere vehicles to display the genius of Gainsborough and his acolytes, which contrasted strongly with two more sober portraits by Joshua Reynolds which hung alongside them; the whole effect of wealth, taste and ruthless cold-heartedness quite typical of its sort. Wilson helped me to a settle by the wall, positioned so that it faced a large Classical scene, dark and brooding,3 framed in elaborately carved and gilded oak. Something about the painting filled me with disquiet, and it occurred to me that in the past, whenever I had passed through that hall, for some reason I always averted my eyes from it; but now there was no avoiding it.

“Shall I fetch Mrs Milland, sir?” he asked.

“Thank you, but no. Please do not alarm her. I shall be all right – quite all right – by and by.”

Up there, above the first landing of the staircase, that Gainsborough – Viscount Petersfield and his Family. 1778. My eighteen-month-old self in a white satin frock with blue silken ribbons, and dainty white kid-leather slippers, with the golden ringlets and large blue eyes of innocent infancy, guilelessly holding out my plump little arms towards my indifferent-seeming Mama and fixed in an attitude of perpetual suppliant disappointment, for she was interested only in her ridiculous pug Mr Johnson, whilst the Viscount looked fixedly and haughtily out of the frame (how well I had known that expression – Gainsborough had caught it exactly – I remembered how it had been turned upon me from of old, cold, intimidating, rejecting) their backs almost imperceptibly but nonetheless tellingly turned from one another - and Charles pulled the smirking self-satisfied face of an apprentice ten-year-old tyrant, and Henry (nine) and Francis (eight) just looking uncomfortable and embarrassed, as if they had rather been anywhere else at all.

No, I thought then; you shan’t be all right; for you never have been all right.

You need someone.

The words of Wilson. I sat upon upon the settle, too weak and light-headed to take myself anywhere else. A thought occurred to me, some vague note of warning, about Wilson, but in my faint and dizzy state it was there and gone. Those bloody palpitations! It was because of the loss of blood, Dr Fazz had told me. I still did not have enough of the red stuff to get the air properly into me, he said. I did not understand quite what he meant, but apparently that was why I continued so out of breath, with a pounding heart and a dizzy head, and why I almost always felt so cold in those days, no matter how long I sat over the fire. The cure was, as he had already explained to me many times, liver, oysters, eggs, spinach, rare-done beef, portable soup. (No doubt I had encountered portable soup on campaign? Most convenient and nutritious, and as fortifying to the men of His Majesty’s Ships and Regiments of Foot suffering the gaunt deprivations of haggard war as it was restorative to the convalescent ashore at home. I had, and personally I preferred Mrs Milland’s beef broth. The last time I had had portable soup in Spain it had had bits of fluff, grains of gunpowder, tea-leaves, shreds of tobacco and even the odd maggot floating about in it, on account of the leathery gelatinous blocks having spent the better part of two years maturing in the deepest recesses of Sergeant Patrick Harper’s haversack.) But if that were the case, the cure was taking a bloody long time to work its effect! A sea-officer had once explained to me that when the men fell sick with scurvy, a terrible disease whose signs included random bruising to the body, loss of teeth and hair and unpredictable bleeding, after months at sea, a week – even two or three days - of lime juice, or better, lemon juice, and fresh fruit and vegetables if they could be had from the bum-boats, or the market of a port, or even just common green-stuff, so long as the surgeon had been able to source the cure ashore - and the ship’s people were usually all of them well on the road to recovery. I had been eating the things recommended to me by Dr Fazz for almost a month now, and yet I felt hardly any better than I had when I had practically fallen out of the ship’s boat onto the quayside in Portsmouth on the first day of March (unless it had been the last day of February, the year ’12 being a leap-year with an extra day inserted to maintain the integrity of the Gregorian calendar which had been adopted halfway through the previous century – this quadrennial custom still seemed bizarre to me – I wondered how this circumstance had affected the men of the South Essex – would they have qualified for an extra shilling’s pay? If they had then no doubt it would have been subject to an additional day’s stoppages).

You should have someone. I thought again upon what Wilson had said. Had not I said to Sharpe, when he came to see me in the convent at Ciudad Rodrigo, that I might advertise for an assistant? It was a thought that had simply occurred to me as he had been sitting with me; I had not seriously considered it then, and I had not given much consideration to it since, because then, in that hour of my weakness and wretchedness, in my vulnerability, Richard had been the only man I had thought I ever could want with me, to take care of me, to look out for me, as he had done in the past. Of course I could not have asked him – although I had an idea that if I had asked him then and there to return to England with me and be my consigliere, he might well have agreed to resign his commission and enter my employment (for as yet he had not known about his child, Antonia), so sick and tired of the Army and its unfair and arbitrary ways in matters of promotion and preferment he had become by that point. But now I did give thought to the matter.

There was another prominent painting, on the wall, above the great fireplace (then dark, because it was March and there was no excuse for a fire in the hall at that season, myself only being then in residence). It was of Cannock House. I stared at it for a little, as something upon which to fix my attention whilst I attempted to master myself, regain control of my agitated frame, overcome by force of will the unmanly weakness which kept me still pinned to the settle. Memories of my last visit there three years before rose slowly to the surface of my brain, coruscated in daylight for a little, turned about, danced a stately minuet with one another, assembled in ranks to make their courtesies to one another, broke apart, sank into darkness, rose to the surface again, assembled anew.

“Wilson,” I said.

“Sir?”

“You should oblige me greatly if you would conduct me safely to the library. I must write a letter.”

“After you have rested here a while, sir? I shall fetch cushions, a rug - ”

“Now!” I am afraid I snapped at him. Peevish, costive. Perhaps I should have accepted Windham’s offering of Senna pills. “Now,” I said again, in a more reasonable tone. “I am sorry I was short with you just then, Wilson. I appreciate your concern for me. But there is something I must do at once, for I do mean to take your advice.”

“Concerning resting here, sir?”

“Concerning having someone to be with me,” I said, and I saw Wilson dart a swift sly glance at me. I have your measure, friend, I said to him, in my mind. Aloud, I said, “I know who it is for whom I should send – now, I beg, to the library, if you would be so kind.” I fixed him with a look, meaning to try to read his face. He had probably meant it to be inscrutable, but I thought that I detected signs of sudden irritation and displeasure.

“Like a foot in a glove, you could say,” I said.

“I see,” said Windham, frowning slightly. “Carries his halberd in his face, then, as the saying goes, does he? Don’t hold with it myself, no matter how good the man is. The Twenty-third have a lot to answer for, raising that fellow up from Sergeant fifty-odd years ago – set a dangerous precedent! Still, that’s the Welsh for you.”

“You do know why Sharpe was raised from the ranks?” I said.

“Some foolhardy thing he did in India, I gather.”

“Lord Wellington did not tell you then – that Sharpe saved his life at the Battle of Assaye in the Year Three?”

“Did he so? Upon my word! He wrote in cryptic hints, is all.”

“His Lordship cannot speak of it – perhaps it is too painful, or perhaps he simply has little recollection of what happened – he was stunned and insensible for some of the time, I believe, whilst Sharpe was fighting off his assailants – I did not see it; I was overseeing patrols of the highway, down in the South – Doondiah Waugh’s bandits – “

“What, like the Rapparees we hear about in Ireland?”

“Somewhat less deadly, at least to the British. But we all heard the story. Embroidered a little, perhaps – not by Sharpe, but you know how things go on in the mess once the port and the brandy have down the rounds - and grown in the telling, as is the way of these things. But Sharpe was very valiant that day, no doubt of it. Wellesley commissioned him, and he was appointed into the Seventy-Fourth, which had lost so many officers in that battle. That did not resolve well for him, but after he came home to England and transferred into the Ninety-Fifth he never looked back.” (I said that with my fingers figuratively crossed behind my back; I knew perfectly well that Richard’s early experiences with the new-formed Rifle Regiment had been fraught with frustration and unhappiness for him, for he – a valiant fighting soldier, a true warrior - had found himself disregarded by his new superiors on account of his lack of birth and education, and they had made a quartermaster of him, banishing him to the stores at Shorncliffe Barracks, then the not uncommon fate of ageing second lieutenants who had been raised from the ranks – I saw for myself how bitterly afflicted he must have been, to a degree which took me quite aback, when I had occasion to discipline him in that way for a time in the autumn of the Year Ten; the 95th had been supposed to be different from the long-established Redcoat regiments: newly-created, innovative, forward-thinking; but in some ways it had proved as hidebound as all that had gone before, and officers risen from the ranks had still been regarded very much as square pegs in round holes.)

“I am grateful to you for making that clear,” said Windham then, thoughtfully, “although it makes it all the harder…”

“The men love him. He understands them, he knows them – because he was one of them, and for a long time – he marched in the ranks for ten years before he exchanged his musket for a bloody sash scavenged from the battlefield, and a notched Heavy Cavalry sword. He might not be one of them any longer, even though he is not, as you put it, one of us, neither; but they would nevertheless gladly follow him into the mouth of Hades if he asked it of them. He gives them confidence. He is as the spirit of the Army to them. He is their talisman, their Colour – their banner and standard – “

“Extraordinary!” said Windham, to that; so I laid it on more thickly yet -

“ - their Palladium, even, if you like - and they will rally to him. When he is with them, they win, you see. Always. That is what matters. Not that he knows how to comport himself at a formal dinner or whether he is proficient in polite small-talk. He does not, and is not, I should say. But he deserves to be – he should be – ought to be - confirmed as Captain of m – of your Light Company.” (Damme, but it hurt me like the pains of Hades to say that last thing!)

“Oh dear! Thing is, William – the dashed thing is – “

Windham now looked very uncomfortable indeed, and not just on account of the strait-jacket stiffness and tightness of his coat.

“Brian?”

“I’ve had this new chap foisted upon me – family obligations – professional pressure – you know the sort of thing – “ (I do, oh, how well I do! thought I at that!) “ - chap called Rymer. Captain Thomas Rymer. Sound fellow, very sound; I was at Harrow with his grandfather. Family has a large estate in Dorset and owns half of Barbados to boot. Your family owns the other half, of course – the boot on the other foot, as it were, haha!” (The poor fellow obviously thought he had again just committed a witticism.) “Hunting man,” he added, somewhat deflated, seeing that I had declined to join him in his mirth.

“Commission bought and paid for, no doubt. He has money: Your Sharpe has none: ergo, Rymer must have the Light Company.”

“That’s the bu- the nub of it again! You are sharp as a razor!” (Occam’s Razor, I thought, to that, thinking of my namesake, although I had always considered that I was not an entity whose existence could be explained very simply - but did not say it aloud – instinct told me that I should most likely have drawn a blank.) “As sharp as your Brevet-Captain Sharpe, indeed, haha! Now, William - I must indeed tell you frankly he has no chance of having the Light Company as things stand at the present. Rymer comes of what the Spaniards would call the true blood – we don’t have Hidalgos in England, but you know what I mean, and besides, we have something at least similar to those Spanish bu– chaps; I mean, you are one yourself – “

Finally I managed to emit something like a laugh. “Boot. Other foot. I am sorry. Slow on the uptake today.” Oddly, it suddenly occurred to me that Windham would have blundered on and made that jest if it had been a leg of which I had been deprived, and not an arm, and that he had avoided that pitfall by merest random chance.

“Hm, well, to mince the matter, I need to make Rymer the Captain of the Light Company, that is the long and short of it: but what to do with you Sharpe, eh?”

“Short of a transfer it will be back to Lieutenant. That will hurt him extremely. I saw him in such a towering sulk when passed over for the captaincy of the Light Company eighteen months since it would have astonished Agamemnon and made him stretch his eyes searching for superlatives. I wished he had kept to his tent, like Achilles, but alas! he did not, and instead went about the camp, fomenting discord. I do not mean that he croaked against me or the other officer in question – “ (in my mind I crossed my fingers again at that; I knew that of course he had, Richard being Richard!) “ - but the men and the Battalion wives (I apply that word loosely) have a soft place for him in their hearts, and they smoked his unhappiness. The situation became quite painful. If he is to find himself in such a bleak place again, you really must seek to persuade him that it will truly be only for a little.”

Poor Windham was puce now. He looked ripe for an apoplexy. It occurs to me that even if he had not been assassinated by that perfidious Frenchman at Salamanca in July, four months after this interview, he might not in any case have lived to see Burgos that September.

“But it will only be for a little! We are up against Badajoz directly I arrive in Spain, it seems! That will be a bloody business, going on form. I’ve been studying the previous to-ings and fro-ings concerning Badajoz, and it strikes me it’s an absolute bugger of a place – ! Sorry, dearest!”

At that, I raised an eyebrow.

“Oh!” exclaimed Windham, looking all at once as guilty as a child caught stealing an extra piece of cake when it foolishly thinks the adults too absorbed in their tedious tea-time conversation to notice. “At home, when I forget myself as to vocabulary, Jessica always reproves me. She mislikes it greatly when I lapse into strong coarse soldierly language. It is a habit I cannot seem to break. I only saw her last this morning, and I am still in the way of apologising for it!” You poor soul, I thought. Aloud, I said,

“You have previously intimated that you have not long been married, sir.”

“Since Christmas. Met her in Bath in September. Maiden aunt of a god-daughter of mine. Somehow everywhere I went alone, if I walked behind a pillar in the Abbey, she would be there – if I loitered in a colonnade by the Baths, there she would be – if I rounded a corner by the Pump Room, she would be there too – and always without a chaperone - after a fifth such meeting over the punch-bowl in the supper room at a public ball, on which occasion my hand inadvertently touched hers – you know how mortifying such – anyway, I thought, for her sake – “

“A fifth such meeting?” I said, just a little sceptically, thinking that matters had now advanced to more than a little beyond the realms of the merely random. Jessica Windham, I thought, was as calculating and cunning a vixen as had ever contrived to leave her umbrella behind in her Bath lodging-house on a morning when rain was prophesied. And sure enough -

“And the very next day, when I was walking in Milsom Street, there was a sudden shower of rain, and I chanced to look up, and there she was, on the other side of the thoroughfare - without an umbrella! What could I do? It was Fate indeed. After that, I thought that I must ask her – for the good of her reputation, you understand – “

“Of course, Brian. Especially given that it was in Bath. If it had been Cheltenham, say, or Harrogate, you might have contrived an escape – but never in Bath. Everyone is watching everyone else there, all the time.” Good God! I was thinking, meanwhile. She took you for a flat, and she was not wrong!

“Excellent woman, though, excellent! I have not looked back!”

I formed the quick impression that he had rather wished that Jessica had, to remain in Bath turned to a pillar of salt,8 a watchful crystalline caryatid addition to that town’s collection of neo-classical statuary, perpetual example to and moral guardian of elderly maiden ladies, as he made good his escape. The poor fellow – was he actually squirming?

“This recollects me – earlier you referred to the Battalion wives and hinted that they are not all they seem to be?”

“Some of the men are properly married. Most who have women with them are not.”

“You mean the men are – the men are living in – in sin?”

“I should not choose to put it like that.”

“To be honest, neither should I, but Jessica would be most affronted to learn of it. She might even insist on coming out to join me so that she can preach the Good News to them!”

A worried frown appeared then on Windham’s face. My heart went out to him.

“That Good News being that they are all bound for eternal damnation, I suppose,” I said; then, seeing Windham’s expression as it began to dawn upon him that I had impugned his wife’s intentions, I went on,

“Pardon me, Brian; I was being facetious – a besetting fault. In that case, Mrs Colonel Windham must not learn of it,” I said, with a smile which I intended to be conspiratorial. “Put in for a parson – a padre, as the men in the Peninsula have begun to call them. Wellington don’t like ‘em, it is true; but they do very little actual harm, and often not a little good. A few pithy sermons at the drum-head and the right sort of encouragement to the men to make honest women of them would be just as efficacious. Some of the women who follow the drum are nasty puzzles and draggle-tails, it is true, but most of them are decent and honest enough, after their fashion, and do good work in the laundering and cookery line – valuable additions to the camp.”

“But I have kept no secrets from Jessica! I confessed to her concerning my unregenerate past on our wedding-night. She was shocked, but she forgave me, on condition that I should not seek to hide aught from her in the future.”

“I am sure that Mrs Windham will be quite busy enough at home with her brimstone and her tracts. You need not trouble her tender conscience regarding the unorthodox arrangements of the men.”

“Quite so! Just so!” Windham said, after all brightening at the prospect of keeping his Jessica in the dark as far as the mores of the South Essex was concerned. “There will be promotions,” he went on, reverting to the former topic, “although it pains me to say it – for many good men will meet their deaths, no doubt of it. That fortress, William, Badajoz, was designed to be all over a murder-hole; it is lethal in its entirety, and no exaggeration.”

“So I understand,” I said; and now I found that I had ceased to envy Windham his command of what had been still, to me, until then, my Regiment. Badajoz, that sinister brooding blot upon the Spanish landscape, was a killer; we all knew that. It had demonstrated its grim propensity for the awful slaughter of those who would try to take it by storm twice before in the course of the four-year campaign. I recalled that the night before Ciudad Rodrigo I had thought, if I survive this, then next comes Badajoz; and that must be the end of me, for a man’s luck cannot hold forever. At the time I had been convinced that I should not survive to experience Badajoz, however, for I had received a shock to my nerves that morning even before the arrival of Jessica’s letter, when the verse from St Luke – “Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee” – had come unbidden to my mind even as I had been shaving myself in my tent, standing before the glass from which it had seemed that a stranger had of a sudden taken the place of my reflection, staring grimly back at me. Mozart had soothed my fainting spirit then, as I sat at the spinet which I had rescued from that abandoned villa on the road from Coimbra as we had made our way towards Wellington’s new fortifications before Lisbon in the autumn of the Year Ten (I preferred to believe that I had rescued it, at any rate). I thought of my friends, who would come up to Badajoz, that place of evil omen, in a month’s time or thereabouts, and instantly my heart was leaden on their account.

“So there will always be places for good officers.”

“But in the meantime Sharpe will smart, and he will kick against the pricks.”

“Ha! Like St Paul!” said Windham, clearly pleased to have smoked the reference.9

“Not all that much like, save as far as determination and resolve are concerned. St Paul was a very difficult man, first in the cause of the Synagogue and then in that of Christ; Sharpe in his own cause. He really can be a very difficult man indeed when he deems that his pride and honour have been slighted.”

“But I do have your assurance that he is a good officer, William? Diligent, quick-witted, resourceful, can take the initiative in a tight corner?”

“He is a Rifleman, Brian. They are trained to be so. Sharpe is a very good officer. He might not have been at first, but he had an excellent tutor in a Colonel of the Spanish army, Don Blas Vivar – you will hear that name once you are in the Peninsula - who gave him an intensive course in how to be an effective leader of men as they undertook a desperate, even hare-brained, mission together. All he needed was a corrective steer, some few simple words of advice, and most of all, to be given confidence in himself and in his own ability to lead. I understand that your hands are tied, but for the Light Company, there is really no better candidate for captain – the trouble is, he knows it only too well! And the men dote upon him, as I have said. Two years ago at Bussaco I tried a substitute Captain for the Light Company, to satisfy family demands, as it appears now you must do also. That proved to be folly. I could have lost many men - the Colours – the battle, even - for that. Sharpe saved me from ignominy by his quick thinking when he could have left me to flounder, and if he had, I should not have blamed him, for I should have deserved it – I had been compelled by circumstances to treat him shabbily. He has a good heart, you see, for all that sometimes his outward manner and appearance suggests that he is something of a cheval-de-frise in human guise. He’s been in England these last few months before Christmas, you know – recruiting for the Wide-Awake Boys – his second such foray - “

“Ah! I meant to ask you – why is the South Essex called that?”

“It was a nick-name, at first meant to be insulting. An ironic reference to the particularly rustic nature of their remote home county, bounded upon three sides by the flood as it is - by the German Ocean to the east and the Thames to the south and the Stour to the north - and then applied in double irony after they proved insufficiently vigilant to prevent the French from running away with their King’s Colour at Valdelacasa. But then, when Sharpe captured the Eagle at Talavera, they began to take pride in it. They wear it as a badge of honour now, so to speak, along with the chained Eagle upon their shako-plates.”

“I see.”

“For all his pride, Sharpe is still surprisingly humble. He does not bridle at being given Sergeants’ work even after all this time, for in some matters indeed he is not haughty. He drummed up a goodly detachment of recruits back in the autumn. They are to rendezvous with you in Elvas later this month. And he does not mind himself and his men being put to labouring work, so long as he is respectfully requested to undertake such work.10 He will set an uncomplaining example to his men if required to dig or forage, so long as he has been asked to do so with politeness. Some of his fellow-officers despise him for that, and say once a peasant, always a peasant, but I have always found that tendency in him, the willingness to serve, to bend his back and get his hands dirty, quite admirable. My late Uncle, an adherent of the Scottish Kirk, would have called that behaviour Christ-like, although I do not think most of my Anglican colleagues would concur, unless they were secret enthusiasts.11”

Windham was silent for a little, considering. Then an idea seemed to occur to him, and, somewhat bizarrely to my mind, he said,

“This Richard Sharpe – does he hunt?”

I smiled at that: my first instinct had been to gape – how could Sharpe, with his background, possibly ride to hounds? If he had been born a countryman there was a reasonable chance that he might have gone out with the local hunt in the capacity of a servant - but with a great effort I managed to control myself. Just.

“Thomas Rymer hunts foxes,” I said. “Richard Sharpe hunts the King’s enemies. But it seems that is not good enough for the panjandrums at Horse Guards.”

I think my tone made it quite clear that the subject of Sharpe was now concluded. I then let Windham have my considered opinions concerning the other officers whom he had inherited - Major Joseph Forrest, Lieutenant Robert Knowles and Lieutenant Harold Price – all decent, willing, conscientious men, able enough within their limits.

Price tended to drink to excess if left unsupervised, but for the most part he was amiable and competent and knew his duty. He had served me well as adjutant. The other two had no particular talents, as far as I had seen, but performed tolerably well under guidance.

Major Thomas Leroy, I told Windham, was outstanding, and although too much given to certain New World eccentricities, was a fine officer, and even, possibly, in my opinion, a future commander of a Battalion – I saw certain qualities in him which reminded me of Sharpe, I said – meaning Sharpe’s virtues of honour, courage and tenacity, and a white-heat ferocity when cast into the Babylonian furnace12 of vicious hand-to-hand fighting, and an ability to inspire the men with the desire to imitate him even if they could not hope to emulate him - and not the more problematic things about him – Leroy had not a surly nor a rude nor insubordinate fibre in his being; he was a thorough gentleman in nearly all points, almost as if he had been raised an Englishman, and I wished then very much that I could have said the same for Sharpe.

Major Michael Hogan was, of course, a law unto himself, and whilst he often lurked in the vicinity of the South Essex, having a particular connection with Sharpe and his Riflemen which went back three years to when that small remnant had been orphaned from the Army on their retreat to Vigo with Craufurd’s Light Brigade, he was not part of the Wide-Awakes, being one of Wellington’s foremost intelligencers, although he still hid that particular talent beneath the convenient bushel of his former principal role of engineer.

I also gave Windham a brief of the guerrillero leaders with whom he could expect to have to deal, chief amongst whom was, of course, Sharpe’s lover Comandante Teresa Moreno; at my description of that lady Windham’s shade deepened from puce to purple, and I began to wonder whether I ought to ring the bell and ask for Dr Fazackerley to be summoned from Petersfield, against the possibility that the Colonel was indeed about to suffer a stroke.

It was a long morning: luncheon, a brief tour of the grounds and home park by foot and by carriage (Windham had expressed himself keen to visit the stables and the keepers’ hatcheries – poachers, eh, did I have much trouble with poachers? he wanted to know - Jessica meant to experiment with a new specification of man-trap during his absence (I hoped that Daniel Hagman would not hear about that), and had commissioned the village’s blacksmith to fashion half-a-dozen from the schemas which she had obtained, for which the man had been so grateful - he had nine children and a tenth on the way! - and to see the state of the timber, to compare with his own); farewell; and finally he was on his way the eighteen miles to Portsmouth.

At last! I thought, unworthily, as I stood upon the lower steps before the door of the house at two o’clock that afternoon, waving him off with a feeling of immense relief, a copy of Jessica Windham’s recipe for a linctus which the Colonel had kindly written down from memory on my own note-paper and pressed upon me with his very best, and I did not doubt entirely sincere, wishes for my continuing journey back towards good health, tucked into my coat-pocket.

It was whilst I was standing there that I suddenly noticed that Spring appeared to be breaking out. It did not please me however. I thought, Why? What is the point? Then I reflected that it must have begun to happen during those weeks when I was immured in the library like an anchorite, with the shutters of the library windows closed and the curtains drawn, candles burning all the day, myself huddled on the bed which Mrs Milland had had set up there on my instructions, sent from Spain before my embarkation, seeking oblivion - relief from spiritual misery and from physical pain – sometimes in laudanum, for I confess I had lately begun to resort to that, probably more than was justifiable from a medicinal point of view, seeing as Dr Fazz had prescribed it to me to deal with the pain and sleeplessness, but chiefly in reading.

I confess I had quite forgot the Spring. I looked out across the Park disapprovingly. I missed the winter. I had liked it dark and drear! The host of golden daffodils beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze were superfluous to my requirements. Wordsworth was welcome to them; in fact, at that moment I felt that he could put them where the sun did not shine. I did not want flowers and sunlight and fal-lal-la. But the bloody trees all had that particular green look about them which in my mood that day I found ominous, the green which is that shade of peridot and moss, the almost luminous light yellow-green of reviving nature – all the ones which were not that old oak in the middle of my field of sight, in any event. That stubborn old thing was alone tardy in joining in the foolish annual riot of hope and optimism, and I did not blame him. You and me both, old cock, I said, in my heart. Friend Oak and I, we had liked being dead.

It had been pleasant and comfortable, and safe, because if you are dead no harm can be done to you. They ought just to have let us alone: him standing stark there in the Park and me lying broken on the breach at Ciudad Rodrigo, where, bizarrely, I had felt peaceful and at ease. I should have been happy to die. Only they had not let me.

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