Major Richard Sharpe had made every preparation for his own death. His horse, Sycorax, and his fine French telescope would go to Captain William Frederickson, his weapons would become the property of Sergeant Patrick Harper, while everything else would belong to his wife Jane. Everything, that was, except for the uniform in which Sharpe always fought. That uniform consisted of knee-high riding boots, French cavalry overalls, and a faded green jacket of the 95th Rifles. Sharpe had asked to be buried in that uniform.

“If you weren’t buried in those rags,” Frederickson observed disdainfully, “they’d be burned anyway.”

It was true that the leather boots had been deeply scarred by knives, bayonets and sabres, and that the overalls were so patched with brown homespun that they looked more like a ploughman’s cast-off breeches than the plundered uniform of a Chasseur Colonel of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, and that the green jacket was so faded and threadbare that even a moth could not have made a decent meal from it, but the clothes were still those in which Sharpe fought and were therefore dear to him. He might have looked like a scarecrow in the old uniform, but wearing it for battle was one of his obsessive superstitions, which was why, on a cold March morning in 1814, and despite being miles from any enemy soldier, Sharpe wore the old clothes.

“You’ll have to take off the jacket,” Frederickson, who understood Sharpe’s superstitious attachment to the uniform, warned his friend.

“I know.” There was no detail of this morning that Sharpe had not rehearsed again and again in his mind. What would happen this morning was called ‘grass before breakfast’. It sounded innocuous, but it could well mean death.

The two men stood on a low grassy bluff above a grey and sullen Atlantic.