‘There is a yellow line on the carpet. Observe it.’

      ‘Yes,’ said Major Richard Sharpe.

      ‘It is there that you stop.’ The chamberlain gave a small, fanciful gesture with his white-gloved fingers as if illustrating how to come to a halt. ‘You bow.’ Another curlicue of the fingers. ‘You answer briefly, addressing His Royal Highness as “Your Royal Highness”. You then bow again.’

      Sharpe had been watching people approach the throne for ten tedious minutes. He doubted that, after seeing so many examples, he needed to be given such minute instructions, but the courtier insisted on saying it all again. Every elaborate gesture of the man’s white-gloved hand wafted perfume to Sharpe’s nose.

      ‘And when you have bowed the second time, Major, you back away. Do it slowly. You may cease the backward motion when you reach the lion’s tail.’ He pointed with his staff at the rampant lion embroidered onto the lavish red carpet. The courtier, with eyes that seemed to be made of ice, looked Sharpe up and down. ‘Some of our military gentlemen, Major Sharpe, become entangled with their swords during the backwards progression. Might I suggest you hold the scabbard away from your body?’

      ‘Thank you.’

      A group of musicians, lavishly dressed in court uniform, with powdered wigs, plucked eyebrows, and intent, busy expressions, played violins, cellos, and flutes. The tunes meant nothing to Sharpe, not one of them a stirring, heart-thumping march that could take a man into battle. These tunes were frivolous and tinkling; mincing, delicate things suitable for a Royal Court. He felt foolish. He was grateful that none of his men could see him now; d’Alembord and Price were safely in Chelmsford, putting some snap into the half-deserted depot, while Harper, though in London, was with Isabella in Southwark.

      Above Sharpe was a ceiling painted with supercilious gods who stared down with apparent boredom on the huge room. A great chandelier, its crystal drops breaking the candlelight into a million shards of light, hung at the room’s centre. A fire, an unnecessary luxury this warm night, burned in a vast grate, adding to an already overheated room that stank of women’s powder, sweat, and the cigar smoke that drifted in from the next chamber.

      An Admiral was being presented. There was a spatter of light, bored applause from the courtiers who crowded about the dais. The Admiral bowed for a second time, backed away, and Sharpe saw how the man held his slim sword away from his body as he bobbingly reversed over the snarling lion.

      ‘Lord Pearson, your Royal Highness!’ said the overdressed flunkey who announced the names.

      Lord Pearson, attired in court dress, strode confidently forward, bowed, and Sharpe felt his heart beating nervously when he thought that, in a few moments, he would have to follow the man up the long carpet. It was all nonsense, of course, ridiculous nonsense, but he was still nervous. He wished he was not here, he wished he was anywhere but in this stinking, overheated room. He watched Lord Pearson say his few words and thought, with a sense of doom, how impossible it would be to bring up the subject of the missing Battalion in those few, scaring seconds of conversation.

      ‘It is best,’ the courtier murmured in his ear, ‘to say as little as possible. “Yes, your Royal Highness” or “No, your Royal Highness” are both quite acceptable.’

      ‘Yes,’ Sharpe said.

      There were fifty people being presented this evening. Most had brought their wives who laughed sycophantically whenever the courtiers on the dais laughed. None could hear the witticism that had provoked the laughter, but they laughed just the same.

      The men were resplendent in uniform or court dress, their coats heavy with jewelled orders and bright sashes. Sharpe wore no decorations, unless the faded cloth badge that showed a wreath counted as a decoration. He had received that for going into a defended breach, being the first man to climb the broken, blood-slick stones at Badajoz, but it was a paltry thing beside the dazzling jewelled enamels of the great stars that shone from the other uniforms.

      He had taken the wreath badge from his old jacket and insisted that the tailor sew it onto his brand-new uniform. It felt odd to be dressed so finely, his waist circled by a tasselled red sash and his shoulder-wings bright with the stars of his rank. Sharpe reckoned the evening had cost him fifty guineas already, most of it to the tailor who had despaired of making the new uniform in time. Sharpe had growled that he would go to the Royal Court in his old uniform and give the tailor’s name as the man responsible, and, as he had expected, the work had been done.

      His uniform might be new, but Sharpe still wore his comfortable old boots. Sharpe had obstinately refused to spend money on the black leather shoes proper to his uniform, and the Royal Equerry who had greeted Sharpe in the Entrance Hall of Carlton House had frowned at the knee-high boots. Polish them as he might, Sharpe could not rid them of the scuff marks, or disguise the stitches that closed the rent slashed in the left boot by an enemy’s knife. The Equerry, whose own buckled shoes shone like a mirror, wondered whether Major Sharpe would like to borrow proper footwear.

      ‘What’s wrong with the boots?’ Sharpe had asked.

      ‘They’re not regulation issue, Major.’

      ‘They’re regulation issue to colonels of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard. I killed one of those bastards to get these boots, and I’m damned if I’m taking them off for you.’

      The Equerry had sighed. ‘Very good, Major. If you so wish.’

      By Sharpe’s side, in its battered scabbard, hung his cheap Heavy Cavalry sword. At Messrs Hopkinsons of St Albans Street, the army agents who were part bankers, part post office and part moneylenders to officers, he had a presentation sword from the Patriotic Fund, given to him as a reward for capturing the French Eagle at Talavera, but he felt uncomfortable with such a flimsy, over-decorated blade. He was a soldier, and he would come to this court with his own sword. But by God, he thought, he would rather be back in Spain. He would rather face a battalion of French veterans than face this ordeal.

      ‘A pace forward, Major?’

      He obeyed, and the step took him closer to the edge of the crowd so that he could see better. He did not like what he saw; plump, self-satisfied people crammed into rich, elegant clothes. Their laughter tinkled as emptily as the music. Those who looked at Sharpe seemed to show a mixture of surprise and pity at his dowdiness, as though a bedraggled fighting cock had somehow found its way into a peacock’s pen.

      The women were mostly dressed in white, their dresses tightly bound beneath their breasts to fall sheer to the carpet. Their necklines were low, their throats circled by stones and gold, their faces fanned by busy, delicate spreads of ivory and feathers. A woman standing next to Sharpe, craning to see over the shoulder of a man in front of her, showed a cleavage in which sweat trickled to make small channels through the powder on her breasts.

      ‘You had a good voyage, Major?’ the courtier asked in a tone which suggested he did not care one way or the other.

      ‘Yes, very good, thank you.’

      ‘Another pace forward, I think.’

      He shuffled the obedient step. He was to be the last person presented to His Royal Highness. From another room in this huge house