Sharpe's Fortress (43 page)
And then the place was forgotten. The Mahrattas were defeated, and even more of India
came under British rule or influence. But Sir Arthur Wellesley was done with India, it was
time to sail home and look for advancement against the more dangerous and nearer enemy,
France. It will be four years before he sails from England to Portugal and to the campaign
that will raise him to a dukedom. Sharpe will also go home, to a green instead of a red
jacket, and he too will sail to Portugal and march from there into France, but he has a snare
or two waiting on his path before he reaches the peninsula. So Sharpe will march again.
Bernard Cornwell was
born in London in 1944 - a 'warbaby' - whose father was a Canadian airman and mother in
Britain's Women's Auxiliary Air Force. He was adopted by a family in Essex who belonged to a
religious sect called the Peculiar People (and they were), but escaped to London University
and, after a stint as a teacher, he joined BBC Television where he worked for the next 10
years. He began as a researcher on the Nationwide programme and ended as Head of Current
Affairs Television for the BBC in Northern Ireland. It was while working in Belfast that he met
Judy, a visiting American, and fell in love. Judy was unable to move to Britain for family
reasons so Bernard went to the States where he was refused a Green Card. He decided to earn a
living by writing, a job that did not need a permit from the US government - and for some years
he had been wanting to write the adventures of a British soldier in the Napoleonic wars - and
so the Sharpe series was born. Bernard and Judy married in 1980, are still married, still live
in the States and he is still writing Sharpe.
Next in the series by Bernard
Cornwell
Sharpe's Trafalgar
Sharpe has to go home from
India, and he would have left in 1805 and Cape Trafalgar lies on his way home, so why should he
not be there at the right time? The greatest difficulty in writing this book was engineering
the plot so that Sharpe could be on board a fighting ship of the Royal Navy (he would have
sailed home in an East Indiaman, a merchant ship), but once that was solved Sharpe could give a
capable hand in this, the greatest of all sea battles fought under sail.