It seemed like a dream. Sharpe knew that England was as heavy with beggars and slums and horror as any city in Spain, yet after the plains of Leon or the mountains of Galicia, this landscape seemed like a foretaste of heaven.

They walked through an England heavy with food and soft with foliage, a country of ponds and rivers and streams and lakes. A country of pink-cheeked women and fat men, of children who were not wary of soldiers or strangers. It was unnatural to see chickens pecking the road-verges undisturbed, their necks not wrung by soldiers; to see cows and sheep that were in no danger from the Commissary officers, to see barns unguarded, and cottage doors and windows not broken apart for firewood, nor marked with the chalk hieroglyphs of the billeting sergeants. Sharpe still found himself judging every hill, every wood, every turn in the road as a place to fight. That hedgerow, with its sunken lane behind, would be a deathtrap to cavalry, while an open meadow, bright with buttercups and rising towards a fat farm on a gentle hill, would be a place to avoid like the plague if French cuiraisseurs were in the area. England seemed to Sharpe to be a plump country, lavish and soft. Yet if he found it strange it was nothing to the reaction of Harper's wife.

Harper had asked that Isabella should come with them. She was pregnant, and the big Irishman did not want her following the army into strange, hostile France. He had a cousin who lived in Southwark, and there Isabella had been deposited until the war should end. 'A man doesn't need his wife on his coat-tails, Harper had declared with all the authority of a man married less than a month.

'You didn't mind her there before you were married, Sharpe had said.

'That's different! Harper said indignantly. 'The army's no place for a married woman, nor is it.