A moment or so later he would see the dark fur slinking along the edge of the trees and he would have one chance of a shot. He reckoned he would bag his second fox lower down, but only after his terrier Nosey had flushed it out. It was just like war, he thought. Set an ambush, bloody the enemy, then attack to finish him off. Except the trouble with bloody foxes was that they never were finished off.

FROM the wood's edge he could just see the roof of the farmhouse a mile away.

The Chateau Lassan, it was called, a castle, only it was not really a castle.

The farmyard's gate was still an old castellated tower, and at one time, inside the circling moat, there had been a small stronghold where the Vicomte of Seleglise had lorded it over a dozen villages, but the castle had crumbled and all that was left was a chapel, barn, dairy, stables, the watermill and the big farmhouse where Sharpe had found Lucille. Lucille and happiness, he thought, except that a man could not live among a people who dismissed him as an enemy. He did not want to leave Normandy, and he knew Lucille would hate to go from the land that had been in her family for 800 years, but if the village did not accept him, then Sharpe knew he would have to surrender. Go back to England, he thought, and make a life there. But what life? He could not afford any land in England, not unless Lucille sold the chateau, and that would break her heart. It would break his heart, Sharpe thought, for he was learning to love this patch of stubborn Norman earth.

A group of six or seven people appeared on the road above the farm and Sharpe frowned in puzzlement. There was little enough traffic on that road at any time, let alone on a cold winter's dawn. Then he wondered if they were hurrying to beat the snow and, glancing up at the heavy airy, he reckoned they might indeed be in for a blizzard. The small group vanished beneath the opposite crest and Sharpe waited for them to reappear where the road crossed the stream at the valley's end. A cockerel crowed, and Sharpe looked to the east to see that the sun was rimming the layers of grey cloud with livid red.