'The Colonel's gone too, sir!' Smith sounded shocked.

'Good! Good!' Sharpe was forcing himself to sound cheerful. Most mornings, as Harper knew well, Sharpe was in a foul mood until the sun or a good march had warmed him, but today, with the uncertainty and chaos that surrounded him, he had to pretend that all was normal. 'You've found some drovers?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Get them moving!' Sharpe had ordered that men should be found who, before they joined the army, had been herdsmen. A dozen would be needed to drive the Battalion's ration cattle on the march. 'And, Captain Smith?'

'Sir?'

'Number four Company's yours!'

'Thank you, sir!'

He led them, a raggle-taggle Battalion, out of Foulness. As the dawn leeched the dark sky pale they approached a ford across the Crouch, and Harper, marching at the front of the column, was teaching the lead Company the words of "The Drummer Boy." 'Sing, you protestant b.a.s.t.a.r.ds! Sing!'

By the time they had crossed the Crouch, and the first stragglers were limping to catch up, the lead Company knew the first three verses. It was not a song that was heard much on Britain's roads, where the officers liked to pretend that the only marching songs were patriotic and stern, but the tune was catching, and the drummer boy's exploits extraordinary, and the men bellowed out the lines about the lad's pleasuring of the Colonel's wife with a gusto. Beyond the Crouch, as they approached a small village, Sharpe called a halt. Geese flew overhead. A miller cranked the sails of his mill to catch the wind, and Sharpe looked at the men who collapsed onto the side of the road and he decided that, given a chance, these men could fight as well as any in Spain.

They must be given that chance. He had no proof now, no evidence of the crimping, and Sharpe knew the evidence was lost. If he had been more gentle with Jane, if he had not blundered into a proposal of marriage on just the fourth time he had met her, then she might even now be planning to find the books. Yet he had frightened her away, before he could tell her where she might find lodgings or help, before any of the small, all-important details could be settled. His ten guineas were doubtless lost, scooped up by a servant, and Sharpe rode to a desperate risk.

'No proof then, sir?' d'Alembord rode alongside Sharpe.

'None, Dally.'

d'Alembord looked at the red rose in Sharpe's b.u.t.tonhole, decided to say nothing, and gave a confident smile instead. 'We'll just have to get confessions out of these b.u.g.g.e.rs.' He waved at the officers and sergeants ahead.

'Their word against Lord Fenner?' Sharpe shrugged. 'I think I've got a better idea.' He told d'Alembord his thought of the previous night, the outrageous, splendid, desperate idea, and d'Alembord, after hearing it, laughed. Then, realising that Sharpe was serious, he looked appalled. 'You can't do it!'

'I can,' Sharpe said mildly. 'You don't have to come.'

'Of course I'll come! The worst they can do is hang us, isn't it?'

Sharpe laughed, grateful for the support. He was finding this morning, this day, this march, a trial. Not just because of the foolhardy action he planned, but because he was bitterly regretting his stupid, impulsive proposal of marriage. He had shocked her. He felt a fool. He felt as if he had been given a chance to approach something precious and wonderful, and, with cra.s.s clumsiness, he had spoilt it. He tried to convince himself that he was fortunate she had not accepted him on the spot, but instead he felt only regret for his tactlessness.

Jane Gibbons haunted his thoughts to embarra.s.s him, and his enemies haunted them to make him fearful. As soon as Girdwood reached London, the orders would be written for Sharpe's arrest. Doubtless Fenner would send to Foulness first, then to Chelmsford, and Sharpe watched the road behind his columns as though he expected to see the messengers galloping towards him. His lead over his enemies was slight, and each hour that pa.s.sed as the unwieldy column trudged along the dusty road, brought failure closer to him.

Sharpe knew he must not show his fears. He found Horatio Havercamp and called him to one side so that the Sergeant walked beside Sharpe's horse in an interval between Companies. 'Sir?'

'How much did you make, Horatio?'

'Make, sir?'

'Horatio Havercamp, I started in this army where you did. I know all the b.l.o.o.d.y tricks and a few even you haven't b.l.o.o.d.y learned. How much did you make?'

Havercamp grinned. 'We got the poor b.u.g.g.e.rs' wages, sir.'

No wonder, Sharpe thought, the sergeants had been so keen to discover any small fault with a man's kit that would deserve a deduction from the pay. Those deductions made up the sergeants' extra income. 'So how much did you make?'

'Three pound a week? Varied a bit, of course.'

'Five pounds a week, maybe?'

'Say four, sir,' Havercamp grinned cheerfully. 'But it was all official like! Above board, sir. Orders.'

Sharpe looked at the sly face. 'You knew it b.l.o.o.d.y wasn't.'

'Didn't do any harm, sir, did it? The army needs men; they've always paid for crimping, so why not us?'

'But didn't you ever wonder what would happen when someone found out?'

The Sergeant still had his look of sly enjoyment. 'If you was going to arrest us, sir, you'd have done it. You haven't, which makes me think that you need us. Besides, have you ever seen a better recruiting sergeant than me, sir?' He grinned at Sharpe and took from his pocket the two golden guineas which, with his marvellous dexterity, he made come and go between his knuckles. 'It ain't every sergeant who can say he recruited Major Sharpe, is it?'

Sharpe smiled. 'Suppose that I think you'd be more useful to me in Spain?'

'I always heard you were a sensible man, sir. You find recruits here, sir, not there!'

'But there are no profits in it any more, Sergeant.'

'No, sir.' Sergeant Havercamp smiled happily. He knew the profits were still there, not perhaps of the same magnitude, but recruiters had to carry government cash, and if he organised just two fictional jumpers a week then that was two guineas to be split between himself and his corporals. Sergeant Havercamp knew he would do very nicely, even if, as was the usual practice, officers were sent with each party. Horatio knew how to fix an officer's purse as well as any man's. 'Anything else, sir?'

'One thing. Is there a Mother Havercamp? You know, the one the General chats to over the garden gate?'

Havercamp laughed. 'Haven't seen the old maggot in years, sir. Don't want to, neither.'

Sharpe laughed.

They came to Chelmsford in the middle of the afternoon, flooding the sleepy depot with men, and the problems that had plagued Sharpe before dawn were now magnified a hundred times. It was here that his real work had to begin.

He had been thinking of this moment ever since the idea had come to him across the table from Jane Gibbons. He had tried to antic.i.p.ate the problems, but even so there were a thousand details he had not thought of, and, outside of d'Alembord, Price, and Harper, he had no capable men to cope with the chaos.

He did not have the proof he needed to shield these men from Lord Fenner, nor, he thought now, would that evidence come. If Jane Gibbons did help him, if she brought the accounts even at the very last moment, then he would be spared the desperate risk he planned, but without such proof he must do what his enemies had already done; he must hide the Battalion.

Not all of them, for not all were ready to do what he would ask of them. He split the four trained Companies away from the others, and to those four Companies he issued uniforms and muskets. The others, the untrained or half-trained recruits, he must leave here and hope that, within the next four days, no one would succeed in taking them away.

'Sir!' Charlie Weller broke the ranks of his squad and ran to Sharpe's side. 'Please, sir!'

'What is it, Charlie?' Sharpe was watching the barracks archway, fearing a messenger from London.

'I want to come with you, sir. Please?' Weller gestured at the four Companies in their bright new jackets. 'They're going to Spain, aren't they, sir!'

Sharpe smiled. 'You'll get there one day, Charlie.'

'Sir! Please! I can do it!'

'You're not even musket trained, Charlie! The French are good, you know. Really good.'

'I can do it, sir. Give me a chance!' There were tears in his eyes. He gestured towards Sharpe's rifle. 'I'll show you, sir!'

Sharpe pulled his rifle out of reach. 'So you can shoot a gun, but it's not like shooting rabbits. These b.a.s.t.a.r.ds fire back.'

'Sir!'

Sharpe looked at Weller's desperation and he remembered how this boy had run after the recruiting party in the dawn. 'Tell Sergeant Harper you're in Lieutenant Price's Company.'

Jubilation exploded in the boy. 'Thank you, sir!'

'But don't get killed in your first battle, Charlie.'

He wished all the problems were that simple to solve. There were camp kettles to find, billhooks to issue, mules to steal from the militia stable, and all had to be done in a hurry because Sharpe knew he must be away from this place before any orders arrived from London. He split the sergeants between the two units, leaving Sergeant Havercamp to recruit from Chelmsford. He left Brightwell too, as Sergeant Major here beneath Captain Finch. Sharpe was not happy with the arrangement, but if he was successful in the next few days, then Finch and Brightwell would soon be relieved by better men. Sharpe kept Sergeant Lynch with his trained men. Sharpe wanted to have the renegade, vicious Irishman under his own eye.

The ration cattle had not arrived yet, and the coachman claimed that the carriage's splinter-bar was breaking, but relented when Sharpe promised him a gold coin if the wood stayed whole. Captain Carline, appalled by the sudden energy that was infusing the quiet barracks, went pale when Sharpe told him to prepare to march.

'We are coming back this evening, aren't we, sir?'

'Why?'

'I had dinner arranged . . .' His voice trailed away.

'Hurry, Captain!'

There were still more problems. Half the men's shoes had broken down on the day's brief march, and there were not enough new shoes to be issued. Price went in search of men who had been cobblers before they joined the army. Most of the papers from Foulness were put into the offices, but Sharpe kept the attestation forms. These forms, all now saying that the men were in the First Battalion of the South Ess.e.x, would be embarra.s.sing to Sharpe's enemies. They proved no wrong-doing, but the absence of the forms, in an army that thrived on paperwork, would make it almost impossible for Lord Fenner to scatter the men left in Chelmsford to other barracks. The attestation form was a man's pa.s.sport in this army. Without it, he did not exist. Sharpe kept them in the carriage.

And at last, at seven o'clock, when the midges were dancing in the evening air over the gatehouse and the swallows darting above the Mess roof, the four Companies were ready. They paraded in full marching order, their equipment and weapons heavy on their shoulders. They believed that Sharpe, as an unwelcome exercise, was doing no more than marching them to the outskirts of the town and back. It was a belief that all but his three closest comrades shared.

"Talion! By the front!' Harper's voice was huge. 'Quick march!'

The four Companies, followed by the coach, went under the archway and turned west towards Chelmsford. Sharpe skirted the town, going north, and it was not until the tallest spire of Chelmsford had disappeared that he allowed himself a small measure of hope. He still kept them marching at a cracking pace, taking them down narrow, thick-grown lanes, losing them in a scented, soft country of orchards, hedges, and gentle hills. He marched them until the sun, huge and glorious, almost touched the western horizon. Then, where a meadow lay by a great covert of oak and beech, he stopped the exhausted column and called the officers to him. 'This, gentlemen, is where we sleep.'

Captain Carline, whose elegant breeches had been chafed thin by the ride, gaped at him. 'Sleep, sir? But we haven't got tents!'

'Good.'

They slept.

For two days he marched them westward. They slept rough, as they would in Spain, and Sharpe spared the men the parades and drills which had plagued them at Foulness. Not that he made it easy, but he tried, so far as it was possible in this plump, easy country, to give them a taste of what a campaign march was like.

At night they set picquets. To two of his Captains, Smith and Carline, a picquet was a smart group of men who stood to attention at the boundary of a camp and had no purpose other than to salute officers.

On the first night that Smith set the picquets, Regimental Sergeant Major Harper, hidden in a thicket of blackberries, put a bullet into a tree trunk beside the Captain. Smith jumped a foot in the air. 'Sir! Sir!'

Sharpe beckoned Smith to one side. 'If that was the French and not the RSM, you'd be dead. Hide the b.u.g.g.e.rs.'

'Hide them?'

'If you were French, Captain, how would you approach this place?'

Smith frowned, then pointed to where the lane disappeared over the hill by a stand of elms. 'There, sir?'

'So guard it. And tell them I'll come looking for them.'

That night and the subsequent nights, about the officers' fire, Sharpe talked of battles. He did not do it boastfully, but because none of these men, except for d'Alembord and Price, knew what it was to face the French. He told them how to smell unseen cavalry, how to clean a musket on a battlefield, how to face a charging horse, how to make a billet out of nothing, and sometimes Sharpe would wander about the other camp-fires and tell the same stories to the men. Harper did it too, working his Irish magic so that, within two days, he could swear at them foully and they still grinned and tried to impress him with their endurance.

'They're good lads, sir,' Harper said.

They were, too, and they were beginning to want to go to Spain, but Sharpe sometimes feared in the night that their hopes would be dashed by his temerity. His idea, that might mean no proof would be needed, was a desperate gamble. He tried not to contemplate failure, and marched his hidden Battalion onwards.

The men were not spared all drills. Where they could, on common land or on the patches of heath that they discovered as they went further west, Sharpe would suddenly bellow at them to form square, or line, or a column of half Companies, and he had Lieutenant Mattingley at his side to time the manoeuvre. They got better each day, even began to enjoy the experience, and they were blessed with little rain, warm sun, and some back pay from the Battalion chest that was still kept in the hired coach. The money dwindled fast. It was used to pay millers for flour, farmers for beer, and innkeepers for ration ale.

On the third day Sharpe stopped the march. The men were harder than they had ever been, as dirty and ragged as any soldiers in Spain, and happier than he had dared hope. He made it a day of exercises, two Companies against two, games in which men tried to surprise picquets or conceal themselves in woodland; stalking games that would not be of great use to any of them unless they joined the Light Company, but which were a rest from the hard slog of marching. That evening, to the concern of the sergeants and officers, he let them go to the tavern in a nearby village, promising to flog any man who made trouble or who could not walk back to the bivouac.

'You won't see the filth again.' Sergeant Lynch, put into d'Alembord's Company, was surly still, ever ready to preach doom. Slowly, as the punishment he had expected did not materialise, he was regaining his old b.u.mptious confidence. Charlie Weller still stared at him in hatred, remembering the death of b.u.t.tons.

Sharpe did not smile. He sensed the mutual hatred between himself and the Irish Sergeant. 'I am not a gambling man, Sergeant Lynch, but I will wager you one pound a man, which you can well afford, that every man will come back.'

Lynch would not take the bet and every man came back.

Twice Sharpe met senior officers, both riding close to their country estates, and both delighted to meet him. They nodded genially at the marching men. Sharpe said they were on exercise and neither officer thought there was anything odd in it, which meant that there was no hue and cry being made for a half Battalion missing in England.

Sharpe was certain that Lord Fenner would inst.i.tute a search, but he guessed the search would concentrate on Chelmsford and then, perhaps, on one of the depots, like Chatham, from whence the replacements sailed to Spain. If he was found in the next two days, before he could lay on the display that he planned, then he knew he was doomed.

On the Friday morning, as the half Battalion turned southwards, Sharpe called Lieutenant Mattingley to him. Mattingley, like Smith, wanted to impress Sharpe, wanted forgiveness, and he showed a doglike relief when he saw that Sharpe was smiling. 'Sir?'

'It is Friday, Mattingley.'

'Indeed, sir.'

'I want chicken for dinner.'

'Chicken, sir? There's beef left.'

'Chicken!' Sharpe waved to a woman who watched the men pa.s.s and who returned ribald comments as good as she got from the marching ranks. 'White chickens, Mattingley, to the number of sixty.'

'Sixty white chickens, sir?'

'White chickens taste better. Buy them. Steal them if we haven't enough money, but find me sixty white chickens for dinner.'

Mattingley wondered if Sharpe was proving to be just another eccentric officer. 'Yes, sir.'

'And Mattingley?'

'Sir?'

'I want a feather mattress. Keep the feathers.'

Mattingley was now convinced that Sharpe, who still wore a fading rose beneath his collar, was touched in the head. Too much fighting, perhaps. 'A feather mattress. Of course, sir.'