Sharpe’s Escape: The Bussaco Campaign, 1810. Bernard Cornwell

in my throat, sir,’ Harper said. ‘It catches something dreadful, sir. I was always a sickly child, sir, on account of the peat smoke in our cottage. My mother made me sleep outside, God rest her soul, until the wolves came for me.’

      ‘Wolves?’ Slingsby sounded cautious.

      ‘Three of them, sir, big as you’d like, with slobbery great tongues the colour of your coat, sir, and I had to sleep inside after that, and I just coughed my way through the nights. It was all that smoke, see?’

      ‘Your parents should have built a chimney,’ Slingsby said disapprovingly.

      ‘Now why didn’t we think of that?’ Harper enquired innocently and Sharpe laughed aloud, earning a vicious look from the Lieutenant.

      The rest of the light company was close now and Ensign Iliffe was among them. Sharpe saw the boy’s sabre was red at the tip. Sharpe nodded at it. ‘Well done, Mister Iliffe.’

      ‘He just came at me, sir.’ The boy had suddenly found his voice. ‘A big man!’

      ‘He was a sergeant,’ Harris explained, ‘and he was going to stick Mister Iliffe, sir.’

      ‘He was!’ Iliffe was excited.

      ‘But Mister Iliffe stepped past him neat as a squirrel, sir, and gave him steel in the belly. It was a good stroke, Mister Iliffe,’ Harris said, and the Ensign just blushed.

      Sharpe tried to recall the first time he had been in a fight, steel against steel, but the trouble was he had been brought up in London and almost born to that kind of savagery. But for Mister Iliffe, son of an impoverished Essex gentleman, there had to be a shock in realizing that some great brute of a Frenchman was trying to kill him and Sharpe, remembering how sick the boy had been, reckoned he had done very well. He grinned at Iliffe. ‘Only the one Crapaud, Mister Iliffe?’

      ‘Only one, sir.’

      ‘And you an officer, eh? You’re supposed to kill two a day!’

      The men laughed. Iliffe just looked pleased with himself.

      ‘Enough chatter!’ Slingsby took command of the company. ‘Hurry up!’ The South Essex colours had moved south along the ridge top, evidently going towards the fight with the second leading column, and the light company slanted that way. The French shells had stopped their futile harassment of the slope and were instead firing at the ridge top now, their fuses leaving small pencil traces in the sky above the light company. The sound of the second column was loud now, a cacophony of drums, war cries and the stutter of the skirmishers’ muskets.