I left it on a bit of a cliffhanger because it was getting long, and because it will force me to finish the next installment a lot more quickly than I did this one.
Word Count: 2043
The fire burnt down all the way down beneath the barest sliver of a moon. The night is clear and brilliant. Davy isn’t on watch tonight. Sharpe ought to tell her to catch some kip, but he can’t quite bring himself to do so, not when the world is easier to face with her at his side. He hopes his presence makes her grief easier to bear. Sometime while they were sitting, without any conscious thought, Sharpe’s arm made its way ’round Day’s slender waist and he’d felt some of the tension go out of her whipcord-lean body. Still, her eyes occasionally dart to the hillsides, likely seeking any sign of the beacons used by the Frogs and traitor.
“I knew him, your Stevens. He made Sergeant before I did. He were a good man.”
Davy’s expression doesn’t change, but against his arm, her ribs expand with her inhale. He waits for her to respond, but she doesn’t, so he continues. “You wrote his mum a good letter. Why did you ball it up?”
“I thought I’d rather wait until I’ve caught the bastard who betrayed us to the Frogs, Sir. Let her know the traitor answered for killing her son.” She’s taken the same neutral tone she’d used when reporting to Nairn. There’s more to it, Sharpe knows there is, but he can’t press her to tell, not if he wants her to ever confide in him. And so he waits.
She stares at the worn toes of her boots. “And because, Sir, I was afraid of giving away too much. You knew immediately how I felt about him when you read it.”
“Only because I know you.”
She lifts questioning eyes to meet his.
“She’s a grieving mother, Davy. She’ll be glad to know her son’s Lieutenant respected him and cared about him. Doubt she’d think there was more to it than that.”
“I’ll send it, then, when we’re back in camp.” She makes a wry face. “I’ll recopy it, first.” She tenses, all softness fleeing her face and body. In a single motion, Davy is on her feet, reaching for her rifle and pack. “Sir, a light, three hills over.”
He follows her pointed finger.
“There. It flickered a few times then was gone. I’ll go scout it out, Sir. I won’t engage, not unless I have to.”
“Davy, no!” Danger is an inescapable part of this life, but he’ll not send his Davy alone into a potential trap.
Davy looks him in the eye. “Sir, I’m an exploring officer. Solo recon is my job.”
”No,” he growls. “You’re not going.”
“But Sir…”
“I said no, and that’s an order.”
The muscle in her jaw clenches and her eyes narrow. “Yes, Sir.”
She’s a good soldier, she won’t disobey orders, won’t talk back, but she’s not happy about it. It’s a stark reminder that he needs to tread carefully with her lest she think he’s trying to use his rank to take advantage. He takes a gentler tone. “It’s the dead of night, Davy, barely a moon, and you would be walking into God only knows what. You’re no use to the mission if you get killed.”
“Wouldn’t be my first time scouting in the dark. Or my hundredth. Sir.” Her voice comes tight between gritted teeth. Sharpe’s heart twists at the anger that she is barely trying to conceal.
She lost her man and her entire squad because of traitor scum, he reminds himself. She’s furious and she’s hurting and she feels guilty for not dying with them. “We’ll check the site come daylight. Get what info we can. We’ll catch the bastards, Davy, I give you my word. Not tonight, but we will.”
“We, Sir?” Unless he’s mistaken, he’s succeeded in allaying her anger at him.
“You. Me.” He takes her hand, slowly, still gauging her mood. “Us.”
“Us,” she repeats. In his hand, her fingers intertwine with his, and his heart lightens.
“Now go catch some kip. Hagman is on watch, and a better woodsman you’ll never find. If there are any more lights, he’ll spot them and report. You’ll sleep safe. Ready yourself for one of those early bloody mornings you’re so fond of.”
“And you, Sir?”
“I hate early bloody mornings.”
Davy snorts. “I meant, don’t you want to get some sleep as well, Sir?”
No, he thinks, I want to take you into the woods and shag you until the sun comes up. But he follows her back to the ashes of the Chosen Men’s campfire and settles himself beside her, among their sleeping fellows.
Davy wakes shivering hours before dawn. The camp is quiet. Next to her, Sharpe is cocooned in his blanket. She gets up without disturbing him and goes for a piss and a change of rags. When she returns, he’s sitting up, his blond hair sticking out at all angles.
“Thought maybe you’d gone off looking for those lights, but you left your pack and blanket.” His voice is light; she doesn’t think he’s accusing her of disobeying his order, and so she sits beside him as close as she dares and drapes her blanket over her shoulders.
“I had to tend to myself, Sir.”
“You’re half frozen.” He starts to pass his blanket to her.
Davy lays a hand on his forearm, stopping him. “You’ll be cold, Sir.”
“I’m used to it.”
“So am I, Sir.”
One of Sharpe’s wiry shoulders rises in a shrug inside his green jacket. Before she can catch herself, Davy smooths his hair with her fingers. An intimate gesture, touching a man’s hair is. She touched Stevens’s long dark hair every chance she got; she can hardly believe she’ll never get to run her fingers through it again. Never touched her bastard husband's hair once their entire marriage. No need to remember Sharpe touching her face earlier in the day, nor tucking a stray lock behind her ear a couple of nights before that. Of course she hasn’t been thinking of the way his hair felt while she bandaged his head moments after the Frogs massacred her squad. And now his keen marksman’s gaze is fixed on her and she needs to explain herself.
“Your hair was sticking up like a dandelion’s petals. Sir.” Blast, that was the opposite of helpful. She hopes Hagman, invisible in the shadows, didn’t see her petting her Major’s head as though he was a stray cat.
The corner of Sharpe’s mouth lifts in a cheeky half-grin. “Aye, that’s me, a delicate flower.”
“A flower that can survive anywhere,” she counters.
When she was a girl, before the orphanage, her mum taught her to make wildflower crowns to sell. Dandelions were Davy’s favourites, even if nobody would buy them. She imagines lazing in a sunny peacetime field with Sharpe, making him a dandelion crown after shagging him senseless. Fanciful idiocy, she scolds herself. She’s got a traitor to catch, a war to fight. She can’t let her desires distract her from her duty. She can’t let her Major know the soppy thoughts she’s having about him. Surely he would lose all the respect he has for her if he knew.
Sharpe snorts. “Is that my reputation, as you put it earlier?”
“Something like.”
“A dandelion.” He raises a teasing, sceptical brow.
“Yes, Sir. Your reputation is that you're a ruffian. Not a proper officer. Looked down on by snobs who haven’t got any of your skills and couldn’t survive any of the things you’ve been through.”
He nods amiably and lays down on his back, drawing his blanket around him. “I am all those things, at that. And,” he adds with a pointed look, “you’re still shivering.” He holds up the edge of his blanket so that she can get underneath, then covers them both with her blanket as well.
The men might talk if they saw, but Davy finds she doesn’t care. The night has turned bloody cold and soldiers often keep warm like this in the field. Indeed, Harris, Cooper, and Perkins are doing similar. Just because she’s a woman, it doesn’t mean anything untoward is happening. She’s exhausted and Sharpe’s warmth next to her is lovely. She feels him give her hand a squeeze as she drifts off. It’s the second night in a row sleeping right beside him, her hand in his, and pox-arsed bother, she’s becoming accustomed to it, something she can ill afford when this assignment is by nature temporary. Still, this life has so few comforts. Even Nairn couldn’t blame her for taking advantage of this small bit of connection.
Sharpe wakes to find his arms full of Davy. In the night, they’d instinctively curled tight together, seeking each other's body heat. In her sleep, Davy melded herself to him, her leg resting on his thigh, her head nestled against his shoulder. The flat of his palm found the small of her back. One of her hands crept inside the collar of his shirt, coming to rest over his heart. Sharpe’s waking movements cause her to stir and grumble, burrowing closer against him still. As he suspected she would, she fits his breastbone as though she were born to. He stretches slightly, taking care not to jar her healing arm. He feels more than sees her awaken. She makes no effort to move away, and not merely, he hopes, because she’s enjoying this cosy little nest they’ve created beneath the frost-covered blankets. His heart pounds beneath her fingers. The movement of her hand from inside his shirt feels like a caress. In the pale light of a grey dawn, it would be all too easy to pretend that she’s his woman, driven into his arms by love or at the very least, by lust. It’s all too easy to imagine waking up with Davy every day, sharing their lives properly, and to ignore the many obstacles to such a thing.
From next to his shoulder, her voice, barely louder than a whisper, gravelly with sleep. “I thought you hated early bloody mornings, Sir.”
He turns his head just enough to murmur into her ear. “Depends on who I’m spending them with, Davy lass.”
She props herself up on her elbow and smiles at him, a smile that goes directly to the pit of his belly. “Sir, you’re a charming bastard.” She extricates herself from his arms, but lets her fingers trail off his hand until the last moment.
No sooner has she disappeared into the undergrowth when Harper rises and builds up the fire. He clatters around with the tea things, and his verbal silence has a pointed quality to it. Sharpe ignores him.
“Two blankets, Sir.” Harper’s voice is conversational.
“Well, we can’t all be giants who don’t feel the cold.”
“And you kept your Davy lass snug and warm all through the night, did you, Sir?”
Bloody hell, of course he’d overheard Sharpe calling her that. “Not the way you’re thinking, Pat.” He hopes his Sergeant will drop it.
“Ah well, better luck next time, Sir.”
Sharpe glowers at him. Aye, he’d shagged Hélène while Harper were on watch, but that doesn’t mean he’d do the same with Davy. Davy isn’t shameless the way Hélène were; she’s reserved and she’s private and if such a thing were to happen between them, he wants it to be private. He wants it to be more than a quick fling. If she returns his feelings, which he can’t be certain of either. But she’d let him close and she’d held his hand and he doesn’t think he imagined the light in her eyes, the mischief in her smile, when she called him a charming bastard.
When she returns from tending herself, she’s all business. Of course she wants to go see the site of those signal lights. They set off at a ground-eating trot, and he can see that she wants to run ahead. She’s holding herself back. They halt, a hillside over from their destination, and Sharpe looks through his spyglass at the blue-jacketed figure on horseback, making its way toward the summit.
“Sir, may I?”
He passes Davy his spyglass. She looks though it and frowns. Under her breath, she mutters “Bloody hell, what can that bastard be doing here?”
So I got a random kudos this morning on an old fic, and went to have a re-read, as you do.
It seems I posted this fic - A Close Shave - exactly three years ago today, on 03 May 2023, and this is what I said in the note at the top:
“At many points over the past six months while finishing Convergent, I've looked forward to the relaxation of just dashing off the occasional 300-word one-shot instead of putting in the time and effort required for a 4K chapter of a longfic. So here’s one.”
So what am I currently doing as practically a full-time job? Putting in the time and effort required for a 4K chapter of a longfic, that's what. And that longfic (A Small Place In France) is a follow-up to Convergent and most of the time and effort is going into keeping the chapters DOWN to 4K. Sigh.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
In the days leading up to the taking of Badajoz, Harper worries about Sharpe’s uncharacteristically heavy drinking. Based on the scene in Company when Sharpe and Harper spend the night before Pat’s flogging drinking together. Written for Whumptober 2025, day 28. Prompts “I could always see straight through you”, “Backstabbing”, “Constellation”.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Sequel to Blood By Firelight. With the coming of morning, Harper can no longer avoid investigating the damage to Captain Sharpe’s leg. Written for Whumptober 2025, day 21. Prompts “Sold my soul, broke my bones”, “kneeling,” “Makeshift splint”.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
It is mentioned in Sharpe’s Company that Sharpe spent the second half of 1811 back in England recruiting. He was feted by London society, where he felt awkward and out of place. Perhaps the events below happened while he was there. Written for Whumptober 2025, day 8, prompt “held at gunpoint”.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Set in India a couple of years before Sharpe's Tiger. Young Richard Sharpe fears becoming a human sacrifice. Written for Whumptober 2025 day 1, prompts “Please don’t cry”, "Lamb to slaughter ", "Ceremony", "Beg for forgiveness".
