Sharpe 3-Book Collection 6: Sharpe’s Honour, Sharpe’s Regiment, Sharpe’s Siege
Three classic Richard Sharpe adventuresRichard Sharpe and the Vitoria Campaign, February to June 1813Major Richard Sharpe awaits the opening shots of the army’s new campaign with grim expectancy. Victory depends on the increasingly fragile alliance between Britain and Spain – an alliance that must be maintained at any cost.Richard Sharpe and the Invasion of France, June to November 1913Major Sharpe’s men are in mortal danger – not from the French, but from the bureaucrats of Whitehall. Unless reinforcements can be brought from England, the regiment will be disbanded.Richard Sharpe and the Winter Campaign, 1814The invasion of France is under way and the British Navy has called upon the services of Major Richard Sharpe. He and a small force of riflemen are to capture a fortress and secure a landing on the French coast – one of the most dangerous missions of his career.
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Bernard Cornwell
Collected Edition:
Sharpe’s Honour,
Sharpe’s Regiment and
Sharpe’s Siege
These novels are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Individual Editions:
Sharpe’s Honour: 9780007338696
Sharpe’s Regiment: 9780007338719
Sharpe’s Siege: 9780007346813
This Collected Ebook Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007454716
Version: 2018-09-18
Contents
BERNARD CORNWELL
Sharpe’s Honour
Richard Sharpe and
the Vitoria Campaign,
February to June 1813
Sharpe’s Honour is for Jasper Partington and Shona Crawford Poole, who marched from the very start
We’ll search every room for to find rich treasure, And when we have got it we’ll spend it at leisure. We’ll card it, we’ll dice it, we’ll spend without measure, And when it’s all gone, bid adieu to all pleasure.
From: The Grenadier’s March (Anon), Quoted in THE RAMBLING SOLDIER, edited by Roy Palmer, Penguin Books, 1977.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Epilogue
Historical Note
Author Note
There was a secret that would win the war for France. Not a secret weapon, nor some surprise strategy that would send the enemies of France reeling in defeat, but a sleight of politics that would drive the British from Spain without a musket being fired. It was a secret that must be kept, and must be paid for.
To which end, on a pitiless winter’s day in 1813, two men climbed into the northern hills of Spain. Whenever the road forked they took the lesser path. They climbed by frost-hardened tracks, going ever higher into a place of rocks, eagles, wind, and cruelty, until at last, at a place where the far sea could be seen glittering beneath a February sun, they came to a hidden valley that smelt of blood.
There were sentries at the valley’s head; men wrapped in rags and pelts, men with muzzle-blackened muskets. They stopped the travellers, challenged them, then incongruously knelt to one of the horsemen, who, with a gloved hand, made a blessing over their heads. The two men rode on.
The smaller of the two travellers, the keeper of this secret of secrets, had a thin, sallow face that was pockmarked by the old scars of smallpox. He wore spectacles that chafed the skin behind his ears. He stopped his horse above a rock amphitheatre that had been made when this valley was mined for iron. He looked with his cold eyes at the scene below him. ‘I thought you didn’t fight the bulls in winter.’
It was a crude bullfight, nothing like the splendour of the entertainment provided in the barricaded plazas of the big cities to the south. Perhaps a hundred men cheered from the sides of the rock pit, while, beneath them, two men tormented a black, angry bull that was slick with the blood drawn from its weakened neck muscles. The animal was weak anyway, ill fed through the winter, and its charges were pitiful, easily evaded, and its end swift. It was not killed with the traditional sword, nor with the small knife plunged between its vertebrae, but by a poleaxe.
A huge man, clothed in leather beneath a cloak of wolf’s fur, performed the act. He swung the great axe, its blade glittering in the weak sun, and the animal tried to swerve from the blow, failed, and it bellowed one last useless challenge at the sky as the axe took its life and cut down, through bone and pipes and sinews and muscles, and the men about the rock pit cheered.
The small man, whose face showed distaste for what he saw, gestured at the axeman. ‘That’s him?’
‘That’s him, Major.’ The big priest watched the small, bespectacled man as if enjoying his reaction. ‘That’s El Matarife.’ The nickname meant ‘the Slaughterman’.
