Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe's Revenge, Sharpe's Waterloo, Sharpe's Devil Read Online Free PDF Page A

Revolutionary ideals, then had learned that Napoleon’s imperial ambitions were really the same ideals, but transmuted by one man’s genius into a unique and irreplaceable glory. Now, as Napoleon’s glory crumbled, the ideals must live on, only now Ducos recognized that France itself was the embodiment of that greatness.
    Ducos had thus persuaded himself in that damp night that the irrelevant trappings of Imperial France could be sacrificed. A new France would rise, and Ducos would serve that new France from a position of powerful responsibility. For the moment, though, a time of waiting and safety was needed. So, in the morning, he summoned the Dragoon Sergeant Challon to the prefecture where he sat the grizzled sergeant down at the green malachite table across which Ducos pushed the one remaining sheet of the Emperor’s dispatch. ‘Read that, Sergeant.’
    Challon confidently picked up the paper, then, realizing that he could not bluff the bespectacled officer, dropped it again. ‘I don’t read, sir.’
    Ducos stared into the bloodshot eyes. ‘That piece of paper gives you to me, Sergeant. It’s signed by the Emperor himself.’
    ‘Yes, sir.’ Challon’s voice was toneless.
    ‘It means you obey me.’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    Ducos then took a risk. Spread on the table was a newspaper which he ordered Challon to throw to the floor. The Sergeant was puzzled at the order, but obeyed. Then he went very still. The newspaper had hidden two white cockades; two big cockades of flamboyant white silk.
    Challon stared at the symbols of Napoleon’s enemies, and Ducos watched the pigtailed Sergeant. Challon was not a subtle man, and his leathery scarred face betrayed his thoughts as openly as though he spoke them aloud. The first thing the face betrayed to Ducos was that Sergeant Challon knew what was concealed in the four crates. Ducos would have been astonished if Challon had not known. The second thing that the Sergeant betrayed was that he, just like Ducos, desired those contents.
    Challon looked up at the small Major. ‘Might I ask where Colonel Maillot is, sir?’
    ‘Colonel Maillot contracted a sudden fever which my physician thinks will prove fatal.’
    ‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir,’ Challon’s voice was very wooden, ‘as some of the lads liked the Colonel, sir.’ For a second, as he looked into those hard eyes, Ducos thought he had wildly miscalculated. Then Challon glanced at the incriminating cockades. ‘But some of the lads will learn to live with their grief.’
    The relief washed through Ducos, though he was far too clever to reveal either that relief or the fear which had preceded it. Challon, Ducos now knew, was his man. ‘The fever,’ Ducos said mildly, ‘can be very catching.’
    ‘So I’ve heard, sir.’
    ‘And our responsibility will demand at least six men. Don’t you agree?’
    ‘I think more than that will survive the fever, sir,’ Challon said as elliptically as Ducos. They were now confederates in treachery, and neither could state it openly, though each perfectly understood the other.
    ‘Good.’ Ducos picked up one of the cockades. Challon hesitated, then picked up the other, and thus their pact was sealed.
    Two mornings later there was a sea-fog that rolled from the Garonne estuary to shroud Bordeaux in a white, clinging dampness through which nine horsemen rode eastwards in the dawn. Pierre Ducos led them. He was dressed in civilian clothes with a sword and two pistols at his belt. Sergeant Challon and his men were in the vestiges of their green uniforms, though all the troopers had discarded their heavy metal helmets. Their saddle bags bulged, as did the panniers of the pack horses that three of the troopers led.
    To deceive, cheat, disguise, and outwit; those were the skills Ducos had given to his Emperor; which skills must now serve his own ends. The horses clattered through the city’s outer gate, stirred the fog with their passing, and then were gone.

CHAPTER 1
    ‘Of