“Will it work?”

“It should go bang,” Sturridge said gloomily.

“I’m taking you over the bridge,” Sharpe told him.

“There’s a handcart outside,” Sturridge said, “and we’ll need it. Five barrels should be enough, even of this rubbish.”

“You’ve got fuse?”

Sturridge unbuttoned his blue jacket and showed that he had several yards of slow match coiled around his waist. “You just thought I was portly, didn’t you? Why doesn’t he just blow the bridge at this end? Or in the middle?”

“So the French can’t rebuild it.”

“They couldn’t anyway. Takes a lot of skill to make one of those bridges. Doesn’t take much to undo one, but making a pontoon bridge isn’t a job for amateurs.” Sturridge hammered the lid back onto the opened powder barrel. “The French aren’t going to like us being over there, are they?”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“So is this where I die for England?”

“That’s why I’m there. To make sure you don’t.”

“That is a consolation,” Sturridge said. He glanced across at Sharpe who was leaning, arms folded, against the wall. Sharpe’s face was shadowed by his shako’s peak, but his eyes were bright in the shadow. The face was scarred, hard, watchful, and thin. “Actually it is a consolation,” Sturridge said, then flinched because the brigadier was bellowing in the courtyard, demanding to know where Sturridge was and why the damned bridge was still intact. “Bloody man,” Sturridge said.

Sharpe went back to the sunlight where Moon was exercising the captured horse, showing off to the French wives who had gathered by the eastern gate where Jack Bullen had commandeered the handcart for their luggage. Sharpe ordered the bags off and the cart to the main magazine where Harper and a half dozen men loaded it with gunpowder. Then the women’s luggage was placed on top. “It’ll disguise the powder barrels,” Sharpe explained to Harper.