The three French hors.e.m.e.n stood round the twitching, bleeding Englishman.

"He's finished," one of the Lancers said, then slid out of his saddle and knelt beside the Englishman. He unsheathed a knife and cut at the straps of Lord John's sabretache that clinked with coins. He tossed the pouch up to his companion, then slit open the Englishman's pockets, starting with his breeches. "The dirty bougre p.i.s.sed himself, see?" The Lancer spoke with a Belgian accent. "Rich as a pig in s.h.i.t, this one. Here!" He had found more coins in the pockets of Lord John's breeches. The Lancer ripped away Lord John's silk stock and tore at his shirt. Lord John tried to speak, but the Lancer slapped his face. "Quiet, s.h.i.tface!" Under Lord John's shirt he found a golden chain with a golden locket. He snapped the chain with one jerk of his hand, clicked the locket lid open with his b.l.o.o.d.y thumb, and whistled when he saw the golden-haired beauty whose picture lay inside. "Have a look at that piece of meat! Last time he'll screw her, eh? She'll have to find someone else to warm her up." He tossed the locket to his companion, pulled the watch from Lord John's fob, then rolled the wounded man onto his belly to get at the pockets in his coat's tail. He found a folding spygla.s.s that he shoved into his own pockets. The Hussar who had blinded Lord John was searching the Englishman's saddlebags, but now shouted a warning that the enemy's light cavalry was getting dangerously close.

The Lancer stood, put his right boot on Lord John's back and used his lordship as a makeshift mounting block. He and his companion wheeled away. So far it had been a good day; the two Belgians had set out on their charge with the idea of hunting down a richly dressed officer and, by finding Lord John, they had taken at least a year's pay in plunder. The Hussar took Lord John's horse.

Lord John slowly, slowly twisted his burning, bleeding, blinded eyes from the mud. He wanted to cry, but his eyes were like bars of fire that annealed his tears. He moaned. The glory had turned obscene, to an agony that filled his whole universe. The pain burned and racked at his back and leg. The pain tore and filled him. He screamed, but he could not move, he cried but no help came. It was over, all the honour and the excitement and all the gold-bright future, all reduced to a bleeding blind horror face down in the mud.

The survivors of the British charge came home slowly. There were not many. A few riderless horses formed ranks with the survivors as the rolls were taken. One regiment had charged with three hundred and fifty troopers, of whom only twenty one came home. The rest were dead, or dying, or prisoners. The British heavy cavalry had broken a whole French corps, and themselves with it.

Steam rose from the wet fields. The day was hot now.

The Prussians had not come.

CHAPTER 17.

"There." Rebecque pointed at the bodies which lay in the gra.s.s east of La Haye Sainte. They were scattered in a fan shape, like men killed as they spread out from a single point of attack. At the centre of the fan, where men had bunched together in desperate defence, the bodies were in heaps. Sharpe glowered while Harper, a few paces behind the Prince's staff, crossed himself at the horrid sight.

"They were Hanoverians. Good troops, all of them." Rebecque spoke bleakly, then sneezed. The drying weather was bringing back his hay fever.

"What happened?" Sharpe asked.

"He advanced them in line, of course." Rebecque did not look at Sharpe as he spoke.

"There were cavalry?"

"Of course. I tried to stop him, but he won't listen. He thinks he's the next Alexander the Great. He wants me to have an orange banner made that a man will carry behind him at all times.' Rebecque's voice tailed away.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n him."

"He's only twenty-three, Sharpe, he's a young man and he means very well." Rebecque, fearing that his previous words might be construed as disloyal, found excuses for the Prince.

"He's a G.o.dd.a.m.ned butcher," Sharpe said icily. "A butcher with pimples."

"He's a prince," Rebecque said in uncomfortable reproof. "You should remember that, Sharpe."

"At best, Rebecque, he might make a half-decent lieutenant, and I even doubt that."

Rebecque did not respond. He just turned away and stared through tearful eyes at the western half of the valley that was a mangled ruin of dead infantry, dead cavalrymen and dead horses beneath the skeins of cannon smoke. He sneezed again, then cursed the hay fever.

"Rebecque! Did you see it? Wasn't it glorious?" The Prince spurred his horse from the knot of men who marked Wellington's position at the elm tree. "We should have been there, Rebecque! My G.o.d, but the only place for honour is in the cavalry!"

"Yes, sir." Rebecque, still unnaturally subdued, did his best to match his monarch's high spirits.

"They took two Eagles! Two Eagles!" The Prince clapped his hands. "Two! They've brought one to show the Duke. Have you ever seen one close up, Rebecque? They're not gold at all, just tricked out to look like gold. They're just a shabby French trick, nothing else!" The Prince noticed Sharpe's presence for the first time and generously included the Englishman in his excitement. "You should go and take a look, Sharpe. It's not every day you see an Eagle!"

"Sergeant Harper and I once captured an Eagle," Sharpe's voice was filled with an unmistakable loathing. "It was five years ago when you were still at school."

The Prince's happy face changed as though someone had just struck him. Rebecque, startled by Sharpe's egregious rudeness, tried to drive his horse between the Rifleman and the Prince, but the Prince would have none of his Chief of Staff's tact. "What the h.e.l.l are you doing here?" he asked Sharpe instead. "I told you to stay in Hougoumont."

"They don't need me there."

"Sir!" The Prince shouted the word, demanding that Sharpe use the honorific. The other staff officers, Doggett among them, backed away from the royal anger.

"They don't need me there," Sharpe said stubbornly, then he could no longer resist his dislike and derision of the Prince. "The men at Hougoumont are proper soldiers. They don't need me to teach them how to unb.u.t.ton their breeches before they p.i.s.s."

"Sharpe!" Rebecque yelped helplessly.

"So what happened to them?" Sharpe pointed at the Red Germans but looked at the Prince.

"Rebecque! Arrest him!" the Prince screamed at his Chief of Staff. "Arrest him! And his man. What the h.e.l.l are you doing here anyway?" The question was screamed at Harper, who gazed placidly back at the Prince without bothering to offer any answer.

"Sir - , Rebecque knew he had neither the authority nor the cause to make any arrests, but the Prince did not want to listen to any reasoned explanations.

"Arrest him!"

Sharpe raised two fingers into the Prince's face, added the appropriate words, and turned his horse away.

The Prince screamed at the Riflemen to come back, but suddenly the French cannons, which had paused while the British cavalry were being slaughtered in the valley, opened fire again, and it seemed to Sharpe as though every gun on the French ridge fired at the same instant, making a clap of doom fit to mark the world's ending and even sufficient to divert a prince's outrage.

The sh.e.l.ls and roundshot raged at the British ridge. Explosions and fountains of earth shook the whole line. The noise was suddenly deafening; a melding of cannon-fire into one long thunderous roll that hammered at the sky. The Prince's staff instinctively ducked. A gunner officer, not ten paces from where Sharpe was cantering away from the Prince, disappeared in an explosion of blood as a twelve-pound ball struck him clean in the belly. One of his guns, struck full on the muzzle, bucked backwards into the deep wheel ruts made by its own recoil. The French were serving their guns with a frenetic and desperate speed.

Which could only mean one thing.

Another a.s.sault was coming.

It was two minutes past three, and the Prussians had not come.

Belgian soldiers, fugitives from the battle, streamed into Brussels. This was not their war; they had no allegiance to a Dutch Stadt-holder made King of the French-speaking province of Belgium, nor did they have any love for the British infantry that had jeered their departure.

Once in the city they were besieged for news. The battle was lost, the Belgians said. Everywhere the French were victorious. The streams in the forest of Soignes were running with English blood.

Lucille, walking through the streets in search of news, heard the tales of dead men strewn across a forest floor. She listened to accounts of vengeful French cavalry hunting down the last survivors, but she could still hear the gun-fire and she reasoned that the cannons would not be firing if the battle had already been won.

She called on her acquaintance, the Dowager Countess of Mauberges, who lived in the fragile gentility of a small house behind the rue Montagne du Pare. The ladies drank coffee. The Countess's house backed onto the kitchen yard of Brussels' most fashionable hotel. "The hotel kitchens are already cooking tonight's dinner," the Countess confided in Lucille.

"Life must go on," Lucille said piously. She supposed that the Countess was obliquely apologizing for the smell of cooking grease that permeated the dusty parlour. Above Lucille's head the crystal drops of a candelabra shivered to the guns' sound.

"No! You mistake me! They're cooking the celebratory dinner, my dear!" The Countess was elated. "They say the Emperor is very fond of roast chicken, so that is what they are cooking! Myself, I prefer duck, but I shall eat chicken tonight most gladly. It's being served with bread sauce, I believe, or so the servants tell me. They gossip with the hotel staff, you see." She sounded rather ashamed of betraying that she listened to servants' gossip, but nevertheless the cooking was an augury of French victory so the Dowager Countess could not keep the good news to herself.

"They're cooking for the Emperor?" Lucille sounded dubious.

"Of course! He'll want a victory dinner, will he not? It will be just like old times! All the captured Generals being forced to eat with him, and that nasty little Prince s...o...b..ring over his food! I shall enjoy that sight, indeed I shall. You'll come, will you not?"

"I doubt I shall be invited."

"There will be no time to send invitations! But of course you must come, all the n.o.bility will be there. You shall have dinner with the Emperor tonight and you shall watch his victory parade tomorrow." The Countess sighed. "It will all be so enjoyable!"