«From That's All She Read»
Our Hero, Captain Richard Sharpe, has been a married man for a few months when this story opens and he meets the fabulous Marquesa Helena. She's beautiful, aristocratic , blonde and not quite what she seems, so you guessed it, Sharpe is a goner. And I suspect she has read several of the Bernard Cornwell books because she knows how to get him to do whatever she wants: while you are in bed with him, tell him someone is threatening to do awful things to you. Hey presto - he's yours.
The situation in Sharpe's Sword is this: Our Hero and his cohorts are responsible for a prisoner, a French dragoon officer, whom we already know is a master spy and nasty guy named Leroux in disguise. He is under the direct command of Napoleon himself, entrusted with finding a list of all the agents helping the British in Europe and beyond, and thereafter killing each and every one his favorite way: flaying. Sharpe is hot, more or less, on his trail after he kills first Ensign Expendable and then their current and well-liked Colonel Windham. The prisoner has taken refuge somewhere in Salamanca, which is mostly in British hands now. There he meets Jack Spears, one of Major Hogan's "exploring officers", a jocular, inveterate gambler . Spears befriends him, introduces him to la Marquesa, who invites him up to her chambers and her bed. No one much sees our dear Richard for a few days after that.
When our Married Man emerges from la Marquesa's bower, he has one more reason to kill Leroux. Besides the list of names, the fact that he killed the ensign and colonel and that he has the waycoolest sword ever and Sharpe wants it, Helena has told him the evil man plans to kill her. Bingo. Unfortunately when Sharpe tracks him down, the man manages to break Sharpe's own sword and stab him in the gut. He almost dies. In fact, Harper digs up the graves of all the dead soldiers from the battle, French, British, all of them, and does not find his body. That leads him and Hogan to look in the Death Room, where a quite historical alcoholic Irish sergeant is tending him. Though Sharpe is almost dead, they manage to revive him. All left to Our Hero is to rest and recover at the Marquesa's, where he learns the truth about her but finds it rather ameliorated by the fact that she has fallen in love with him. Oh, and there were some battles.
If you saw the BBC television movie, it bears little or no resemblance to the novel. The novel is, as with all of them, better than the movie. You get Sharpe at his most susceptible to blondes who welcome him to their beds, hey wait.. I used to be a blonde! Hmmm. You get the reverses, the revelation of an ally or two, the faithful Harper, the precise battle scenes, and more insight into the Peninsular Wars.
My husband Jim read the novel to me. We are already on to the next one, Sharpe's Enemy, complete with the odious Obadiah Hakeswell.
From That's All She Read, by Nan Hawthorne, [...]
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