"Get rid of him," Sharpe said. "Politely! And get those damned civilians off the bridge!" Townspeople, hearing the crackle of musketry, had come to view the battle. The one-legged toll-keeper was vainly trying to make them pay for the privilege of their grandstand view.

Frederickson's rifles snapped from the north as he harried the broken infantry away from the scene of their defeat. Two waggoners and four cavalrymen, hands held high, were being prodded from the beech trees towards the disconsolate prisoners. Marines were piling captured muskets in a pile.

The luckiest Marines were rifling the waggons. Much of the plunder was useless to a looter. There were vats of yellow and black paint that the French mixed to colour their gun-carriages, and which now the Marines spilled on to the road to mingle with the blood and ox-dung. Two of the waggons held nothing but engineer's supplies. There were coils of three inch white-cable, sap forks, cross-cut saws, bench-hammers, chalk-lines, scrapers, felling-axes, augers, and barrels of Hambro' line. There were spare cartouches for the infantry, each bag filled with a wooden block drilled to hold cartridges. Other waggons held drag-chains, crooked-sponges, relievers, bricoles, wad-hooks, sabot-bracers, and hand-spikes. There were garlands for the stacking of round-shot and even band instruments including a Jingling Johnny that a proud Marine paraded about the stripped waggons and shook so that the tiny bells mounted on the wooden frame made a strangely festive sound in the bleak, cold day. Another man banged the clash-pans until Sharpe curtly ordered him to drop the bloody cymbals.

On one waggon there were crates of tinned food. The French had recently invented the process and it was a miracle to Sharpe how such food stayed fresh over weeks or even months. Bayonets prised open lids, and jellied chickens and joints of lamb were hacked into portions so that men's faces, already blackened by powder smoke, were now smeared with grease. Sharpe accepted a leg of chicken and found it delicious. He ordered two dozen of the tins put aside for Frederickson's Riflemen.

And in the centre two waggons, strapped down by three inch cable and covered by a double wrapping of tarpaulin, was powder. Barrels of black powder that were destined for the mortars at Bayonne, and coils of quick-match to be cut into shell-fuses. "Lieutenant Minver!"

"Sir?"

"These waggons! Drag them to the bridge. I want the powder packed in the roadway." It would not be a scientifically controlled explosion, as Hogan so long ago had taught Sharpe to devise, but it might seriously weaken the new stone structure with its proud, carved urns, and the purpose of Sharpe's incursion was to slow the French supplies. A blown bridge, demanding a detour through an old town, would cause a temper-fraying delay. "And pack all the other waggonloads round it!"

That would take at least two hours. In the meantime captured spades dug graves in the cold soil of the water meadows. A French cavalryman, wearing the odd plaited pigtails at his temples, the cadenettes, was buried first. French prisoners did the work for the twenty-two dead Frenchmen, while the Marines dug graves for their three dead.

"Congratulations, sir," Palmer said.

"Your men did well, Captain." Sharpe meant it. He had been impressed by the steadiness of the Marines, and by their swiftness to reload muskets. Those qualities won battles, and battles changed history.

Patrick Harper, a tinned chicken in one hand, brought Sharpe a leather bag taken from the abandoned carriage. "It's all Frog scribble, sir."

Sharpe looked through the papers and suspected they were just the kind of thing Michael Hogan prayed for. Hogan might be dead now, but the papers would be a goldmine to whoever had succeeded to his job.

"Guard them, Patrick."

Harper had also helped himself to a fine, silver-chased pistol that had been discarded in the carriage.

The sun, paled to a silver disc by new cloud and mist, was low. A cold wind, the first wind since Sharpe had spared Killick's life, sighed chill over the graves. A scream came from the farm, and a cheer went up from the Marines searching the last waggon as they found wine bottles packed in sawdust. A corporal brought a bottle to Sharpe. "Sir?"

"Thank you, Corporal." Sharpe held the bottle out to Harper who obligingly struck the neck with the blade of his sword-bayonet. The scream sounded again. A girl's scream.

Sharpe dropped the wine and put his heels back. Prisoners twisted aside as the horse plunged down the bank, jumped a shallow ditch, then Sharpe reined the beast right, ducked under a bare-branched apple tree, and twisted left. Pounding feet sounded behind him, but all Sharpe could see was a man running away, running towards the river and Sharpe put his heels back again.

The man was a Marine. He was clutching his red jacket loose in one hand and holding up his unbuttoned breeches with his other. He looked over his shoulder, saw Sharpe, and dodged to his right.

"Stop!"

The man did not stop, but ducked through a gap in the thorn hedge that tore his jacket from his grasp. He abandoned it and began running across the field. Sharpe forced his horse at the gap, kicked it through, and drew his sword. The man was stumbling, flailing for balance on the tussocks of the meadow, then the flat of the heavy sword, swept down in a clumsy curve, took him on the side of the head. He fell, uncut by the blade, and Sharpe circled the horse back to the fallen man.

It was all because of the farm girl; the green-eyed, pale, shivering girl whom the man had dragged into the scanty hay-store and attacked. She was now sitting, trembling, with the scraps of her torn clothing drawn around her thin body.

"She asked for it," the Marine, taken back to the dung-stinking farmyard, said.

"Shut your face!" Harper had appointed himself Master-at-Arms. "She wouldn't be bloody screaming and you wouldn't be bloody running, would you?"

"Fetch her some clothes," Sharpe snarled at one of the Marines who had formed a circle about the prisoner. "Captain Palmer! You warned this man?"

Palmer, pale-faced, nodded.

"Well?" Sharpe insisted on a verbal acknowledgement.

"Aye, aye, sir." Palmer swallowed. "But the girl wasn't raped, sir."

"You mean she screamed too loudly. But you know what the orders are, don't you?" This question was addressed to all the Marines who stared with undisguised hostility at the Rifle Officer who threatened to hang one of their own comrades. There was silence as Sharpe rammed his sword home. "Now back to your duties! All of you!" He jumped off the horse.

Captain Palmer, a Marine sergeant, Harper and Sharpe stayed with the prisoner. The story came slowly at first, then quickly. It had been attempted rape. The girl, the Marine said, had encouraged him, but her screams and the bruises and scratches on her thin arms told a different story.

"Matthew Robinson's a steady man, sir." Palmer walked with Sharpe to the end of the farmyard. Sharpe could see that Minver's Riflemen had managed to get the first powder waggon to the end of the bridge, but, faced with the slope of the roadway, could get it no further. They were now rolling the powder barrels to the crown of the arch.

"You know what the Standing Orders are," Sharpe said bleakly.

"It won't happen again, sir." Palmer sounded contrite.

"I know damned well it won't happen again!" Sharpe, hating the necessity of the moment, snapped the words. "That's why we're hanging the bastard!"

"I mean we don't need Robinson's death as an example, sir," Palmer pleaded.

"I'm not doing it as an example." Sharpe turned and gestured towards the farmer and his wife. "I'm doing it for them! If the French people think we're savages, Palmer, then they'll fight us. You know what it's like having guerrilleros up your backside when you fight? Every waggon we send up from the coast will have to be guarded by a Battalion! Every one! That's how we beat the French out of Spain, Captain, not just by hammering the bastards in battle, but because half their armies were guarding waggons against Spanish peasants. Peasants like them!" Again he pointed to the French couple.

"The girl wasn't, harmed, sir," Palmer said stubbornly. "And we've proved by our action here that we can offer protection."

"And the story is spread about," Sharpe said, "that a man can rape a girl and his officers will condone it."

Palmer stood his ground. "If Robinson was one of your men, sir, one of your Riflemen, would you."

"Yes," Sharpe said, and knew instantly that if he was Palmer, and Bampfylde was the officer demanding the hanging, then Sharpe would fight just like Palmer for the life of his man. God damn it, but, years before, Sharpe had even defended the most useless man in his Light Company in just this same situation.

Palmer saw Sharpe's hesitation. "Robinson fought damned well, sir. Doesn't your Field Marshal mitigate punishment for bravery in the field?"

Wellington had been known to cancel a half-dozen hangings because the prisoners' Battalions had fought well. Sharpe swore, hating the decision. "Orders are orders, Mr Palmer."

"Just as I believe we're ordered to hang privateers and deserters, sir?" Palmer said it bluntly, daring Sharpe's wrath.

"Damn your insolence." Sharpe said it without conviction, almost as a sop to the weakness he was showing. "You will apologize to the girl and to her parents. Give them this." He took two of the forged silver ten-franc pieces from his pouch.

"Thank you, sir." Palmer beamed as he took the coins.

"I'm not done with him," Sharpe warned. "RSM Harper!"

Harper pretended not to notice his restoration to Regimental Sergeant Major. "Sir?"

"Take Marine Robinson and the girl's father round the back of the barn. I want you at the bridge in ten minutes!"

"Do I need a rope, sir?"

"No. But give the father his chance." God damn it, Sharpe thought, but he had broken orders again. First he spared a damned American, now a Marine, and what was the point of orders if sentimentality weakened a man into disregarding them?

"Thank you, sir," Palmer said again.