"What is it, sir?" Sharpe asked calmly.

"It's a woman, Sharpe, a woman! And armed! " Tubbs was gazing at a thin-faced, good-looking young woman who trotted towards the small fortress with a gun on her back and a sword at her side. She swept off her hat as she approached, loosing a torrent of long black hair. "A woman!»

Tubbs exclaimed, "and rather beautiful."

"She's called La Aguja, sir, " Sharpe said, "which means 'the needle', and that ain't because she's handy with the cotton and thread, sir, but because she likes to kill with a stiletto."

"Kill with a. . you know her, Sharpe?"

"I'm married to her, Major, " Sharpe said, and went down the stairs to greet Teresa.

And reflected that, maybe, whatever they were, he was in the Elysian Fields after all.

Major Pierre Ducos was no more a proper Major than was Lucius Tubbs, but nor was he quite a civilian, though he wore civilian clothes. A policeman, perhaps? Yet that did not do justice to the exquisite subtlety of Ducos's mind, nor to the influence that he could wield. He was a small man, balding and slight, who wore thick spectacles. At first glance he might have been taken for a clerk, or perhaps a scholar, except that his sober clothes were too well tailored, and then there were his eyes. They might be short-sighted, but they were also as cold and green as a northern sea, suggesting that mercy and pity were qualities long discarded by Major Pierre Ducos. Pity, Ducos considered, was an emotion fit only for women, while mercy was the prerogative of God, and the Emperor deserved sterner virtues. The Emperor needed efficiency, dedication and intelligence, and Ducos supplied all three, which was why he had the Emperor's ear. He might be a mere Major, but Marshals of France worried about Ducos's opinion, because that opinion could go straight to Napoleon himself.

And Napoleon had sent Ducos to Spain because the Marshals were failing.