Lieutenant Sturridge was a Royal Engineer whose job was to destroy the bridge. He was a nervous young man who seemed terrified of Moon. “The far end?” Sharpe asked, wanting to be sure he had heard correctly.

Moon looked exasperated. “If we break the bridge at this end, Sharpe,” he explained with exaggerated patience as though he were speaking to a young and not very bright child, “the damn thing will float downstream, but will still be attached to the far bank. The French can then salvage the pontoons. Not much point in coming all this way and leaving the French with a serviceable pontoon bridge that they can rebuild, is there? But if we break it at the Spanish end, the pontoons should end up on this bank and we can burn them.” A barrel load of canister or grapeshot hissed overhead and the brigadier threw Fort Josephine an irritated glance. “Get on with it,” he said to Sharpe. “I want to be away by tomorrow’s dawn.”

A picquet from the 74th’s light company guarded the eighteen women. Six were officers’ wives and they stood apart from the rest, trying to look brave. “You’ll take them over,” Sharpe told Jack Bullen.

“I will, sir?”

“You like women, don’t you?”

“Of course, sir.”

“And you speak some of their horrible language, don’t you?”

“Incredibly well, sir.”

“So take the ladies over the bridge and up to that other fort.”

While Lieutenant Bullen persuaded the women that no harm would come to them and that they must gather their luggage and be ready to cross the river, Sharpe looked for Sturridge and found the engineer in the fort’s main magazine. “Powder,” said Sturridge as he greeted Sharpe. He had prised the lid from a barrel and now tasted the gunpowder. “Bloody awful powder,” he spat it out with a grimace. “Bloody French powder. Nothing but bloody dust. Damp, too.”