Sergeant Challon said, "and they can freeze to death. They'll get tired soon enough. And you, Madame, had better pray that your Englishman is bringing the gold." Lucille went back to the stairs. "I shall pray, Sergeant, " she told Challon, "but not for that." She went up to her child. «Bitch,» Challon said, and followed her. While outside the carollers sang on.

"THERE used to be a third bridge over the moat, " Jacques Malan explained, "and it led to the chapel, but they pulled it down years ago. Only they left the stone pilings, see? Just under the water." Malan had not only fetched his musket, but had put on his old uniform so that now he was glorious in the blue, white and scarlet of Napoleon's old guard. Thus dressed for battle he had led Sharpe on a wide circuit through the woods so that they approached the chateau from the east, hidden from the gate-tower by the farmhouse and the chapel roof. Malan now reversed his musket and stabbed its stock down through the moat's skim of ice. «There,» he said, as the musket butt struck stone. He stepped carefully across so that he was standing in the moat with a few inches of water lapping his boots. He probed for the next piling. "There are five stones, " he told Sharpe, "Miss one, though, and you'll fall in the water."

"But what happens once we're across?" "We climb to the roof, " Malan said.

"There's a stone jutting out, see?" He pointed. "We throw a rope round it and climb." And once they were on the chapel roof, Sharpe thought, there was a window into an old attic that was filled with 800 years of junk, and the only other entrance to the attic was through a hatch high on the end wall of the bedroom and it needed a ladder to reach that hatch. Sharpe had only ever been into the attic once when he had marvelled at the collection of rubbish that Lucille's family had stowed away. There was a suit of armour up there, he remembered, and crates of mouldering clothes, ancient arrows, a crossbow, a weather-cock which had fallen off the chapel, a stuffed pike caught by Lucille's grandfather, and a rocking horse that Sharpe thought he might get down for Patrick, though he hoped the toy would not put the idea of becoming a cavalryman into the boy's head. "I'd never live that down, " he said aloud.