Disclaimer: I don't own the Sharpe's series. Mr. Bernard Cornwell does, and I imagine if I said anything to the contrary, I'd be looking down the wrong end of a Baker Rifle. Or a summons.

Anyway, Please enjoy

Sharpe's Legacy

The French have long memories.

In a small village in Normandy they remember a British Officer who won the heart of the Castineau Widow and restored the local Chateau, saved her life from marauding bandits, of how he went to stop the Emperor from starting another war at Waterloo, and of how he went across the world to rescue a friend on his word of honour.

He may have been an Englishman, with all the centuries of hate and mistrust that entailed, but at least he made an effort to speak the language. The fact that the Officer and his wife gave the town jobs and food at the dilapidated chateau if they had any to spare didn't hurt either.

They had two children, Patrick and Dominique. the products of sin, to be sure, bright and good all the same, given the name Lassan, after the widow's dead brother, the former Compte.

Order had been restored.

There were weapons too. A massive straight sword and a battered Baker Rifle. Over the years, the Officer's rifle was oiled and polished to a better condition than when it was used in the war, and was used to hunt rabbits. This was done in the woods by the officer and his children, seldom taking more than an hour on most days.

The three of them came back laughing and hungry.

He never hunted men again.

In time, the son grew up, became a soldier, and went to the wars, taking his father's old sword to the Crimea, and then America.

The daughter married a nobleman, and stayed in France.

Her father's rifle was hung up in a central location, over the parlor fireplace, over the daughter's paintings of her parents, shown as they were, with an honesty characteristic to the family- the Widow with dark hair, large, expressive eyes, and a long jaw, mouth quirked in faint amusement.

The Officer, dressed in a fine green uniform with silver buttons and black piping. The uniform that now resided in a trunk beside some rags that, though threadbare, faded and rent with blade and bullet bore a faint resemblance to the forest-green finery.

He must have been hard man to survive all the injuries those rags spoke of, but not a bad one, if family tales and his appearance in the portrait were any indication.

The Officer's hair was grey, a few threads of black remaining, and his lined, weatherbeaten face bore a large scar at the corner of his mouth. The only reason it did not twist his expression into a mocking one was his smile, directed at the painter of the portrait, love for the painter clearly reflected on his face, as well as good-humored frustration at having to put on that ridiculous jacket yet again.

It was the face of a man who had found his peace.

When the her father died and her mother followed him shortly thereafter, Dominique inherited the Chateau.

So it went. The family, dispersed as it was, grew, and clung to their unique history with a fierce pride.

When the Vichy, and later the Nazis took over, the portraits, rifle and trunks were removed and hidden in a safe place.

No Syphilitic, sticky-fingered Boche bastards were going to get their hands on this family's pride, and when the moment of resistance came, the rifle was loaded with care, an oiled patch wrapped around a recast lead ball, and taken into battle by a young Lassan who had no better weapon-until he shot a German at a hundred yards and took his Mauser.

After the Allied armies fought and bled through the hedgerows, the Baker was cleaned and rehung over the portraits, until the family needed it again.

They say history repeats itself. That like calls to like, and that "blood will out."

Perhaps so.

The Sergeant was a big man, pale of hair and wide of shoulder. One of the largest men in his unit, and most strangely, an Irishman who had joined the Rifle Brigade, he had come to serve England in her darkest hour despite years of bloodshed between the two countries.

Hadn't DeValera lent out fire engines to beleaguered British towns?

But as Sergeant Augustine Richard Harper of Donegal drove through a small Normandy village on a two-day pass from the front, he felt a strange pull down a dark country lane.

Passing two bullet-scarred Wermacht wagons and noticing signs of recent battle, he stopped in front of a large tumbledown farmhouse, and was about to ready his Enfield before he was ambushed.

The "attack" in question proved to be an entire village leavened with a few Sten-bearing Marquisards greeting the young man shouting;

"Vive l' Anglaterre`!"

and breaking out long-hidden bottles.

His fair completion reddened at all the attention, which turned positively familial the instant his name, Augie Harper tumbled from his lips in a musical County Donegal Brogue.

Then a remarkable thing happened. Half of the crowd in this coastal village so near to Britain suddenly remembered that they could speak English, and young Mr. Harper of Donegal had a glass of congac duly pressed into his hand by a lass around his age with black hair and and a jaw just a bit too long to be called beautiful by most. An older man who looked like her father mumbled a question in French, and she introduced them before translating.

The man was her father William, The girl's name proved to be Therese` and Augie wasn't concerned with the fact that their names didn't seem traditionally French, or phased by the sudden recognition of his family name. He was busy getting lost in her lively green eyes and being clapped on the back by everyone in arm's reach until she told him why the name Harper was recognized here.

"Patrick Harper?" Augie asked, "Sure and he was me Gran'da some greats ago. Family tale said he fought in France with some mad bastard of an Englishman. Dick Sharpe, he was. Ended up settling here if I remember correct..."

He paused as it dawned on him. Therese` just smiled, and pulled him into the farmhouse.

He saw portraits of a husband and wife posted under an old rifle. When looked closer at the man in Rifle Green, he remembered stories about a two men, blood brothers who had hacked their way into a French column and stolen an Imperial Eagle at Talley-vera.

She told him the same story, and as she spoke, Augie was reminded of a a seven-barreled gun hung over the bar of his Da's pub, which had never needed to be taken down during the Troubles.

As a smiling Therese` pulled him through the chateau to a big, rough table in the barn packed with various villagers and the rest of the family, she scooted closer than strictly necessary and passed him an immense plate loaded precariously with bacon, cheese, and fresh-baked bread, delicacies best forgotten in a place where the only options were tinned Oxtail Soup or Bully Beef, with the incoming 88's looking more appetizing.

After years of occupation, uncertainty and struggle, they had all made it here, to this place their families had helped build and secure generations before.

Augie was smiling with them now, a big grin fit to beat the band, Therese` and her family were, talking to him, or trying to, and as they sat Augie felt the tenseness of the line leave him as they ate, drank and laughed.

Augie's Enfield sat in his jeep, momentarily forgotten, and the Baker rifle hung on the wall again, over the portraits in the parlor.

In a trunk in the attic, beneath strong wooden beams, some old green uniforms rotted away quietly as laughter and revelry continued below them.

A Harper had returned to Chateau Lassan, greeted by dozens of beaming Lassans, Potiers and others too many to count and gifted with black hair, long jaws, and mocking grins.

This, then, was Richard Sharpe's Legacy.