"You have more, Madame, " the small man said, "much more. And I would advise you not to try to leave the house, or else Corporal Lebecque will shoot you."

He nodded to her, then ducked under the staircase door to help the men who were ransacking the bedrooms. Lucille looked at the thin corporal who had been ordered to watch her. "We are not rich, " she said. "You're richer than we are, " the corporal answered. He had a ferret's face, Lucille thought, with ravaged teeth and sallow eyes. "Much richer, " he added. "You won't hurt us?"

Lucille asked, clutching Patrick. "That depends on your Englishman, " the corporal said, "and on my sergeant's mercy." "Your sergeant?" Luciile asked, guessing he meant the big man who had first confronted her. "And my sergeant, the corporal continued, "does not have mercy. It was bled out of him in the war. It was bled out of us all. You have coffee?" A shot sounded far away, and Lucille thought of the terrible things that war had left in its wake. She remembered the stories of pillage and murder that racked poor France and which now, at Christmas, had arrived at her own front door. She held her child, closed her eyes and prayed.

THE fox had twisted in the air when it was hit, a last reflex making the beast leap to escape the shot, and then it fell to leave a smear of blood on the frosted grass. "One less, " Sharpe told Nosey. "Leave it alone, boy, " he said, nudging the dog away from the corpse and he wondered if he should skin it for the fur and brush, then thought the hell with it. He kicked the dead animal into the underbrush, then turned and looked down the valley. Odd, he thought, that the group of pedestrians had not appeared on the bridge. The familiar smell of powder smoke lingered as he stared down the valley. Maybe the travellers had been in a hurry and were already hidden by the beech trees on the far slope? But those trees were bare and he could see no flicker of movement where the road climbed beneath their branches.