Читать книгу Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe’s Revenge, Sharpe’s Waterloo, Sharpe’s Devil - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 20

The Château Lassan was in Normandy. It was called a château for it had once had the pretensions of a fortress, and was still the home of a noble family, yet in truth it was now little more than a large moated farmhouse, though it was undeniably a very pleasant farmhouse. The two storeys of the main wing were built of grey Caen stone that had been quarried and dressed fifty years before the Conqueror had sailed for England. In the fifteenth century, and as a result of a fortunate marriage, the lord of the manor had added a second wing at right angles to the first. The new wing, even now in 1814 it was still known as the ‘new’ wing, was pierced by a high arched gate and surmounted by a crenellated tower. A private chapel with deep lancet windows completed the château that was surrounded by a moat which also protected an acre of land that had once been gracious with lawns and flowers.

It had been many years since the moat had defended the house against an enemy’s attack and so the drawbridge had been left permanently down and its heavy-geared windlass had been taken away to make the upper part of a cider press. Two further wooden bridges were put across the moat; one led from the château to the dairy and the other gave quick access from house to orchards. The old moat-encircled garden became a farmyard; a compost heap mouldered warm by the chapel wall, chickens and ducks scrabbled for feed, and two hogs fattened where once the lords and ladies had strolled on the smoothly scythed lawn. The ‘new’ wing, all but for the chapel, had become farm buildings where horses and oxen were stabled, wains were stored, and apples heaped next to the press.

The Revolution had left the Château Lassan unscathed, though its master, dutifully and humbly serving his King in Paris, had gone to the guillotine solely because he possessed an ancient title. The local Committee of Public Safety had visited the homely château and tried to summon a fashionable and bloodthirsty enthusiasm to pillage the dead Count’s belongings, but the family was well-liked and, after much harmless bluster, the Committee had muttered an apology to the dowager Countess and contented themselves with stealing five barrels of newly pressed cider and a wagon-load of the old Count’s wine. The new Count, an earnest eighteen-year-old, was troubled by his conscience into the belief that the disasters of France were truly the result of social inequalities, and so told the local Committee that he would renounce his title and join the new Republic’s army. The Committee, privately astonished that anyone should renounce the privileges they so publicly despised, applauded the decision, though the dowager Countess was seen to purse her lips with disapproval. Her daughter, just seven years old, did not understand any of it. There had been five other children, but all had died in infancy. Only the eldest, Henri, and the youngest, Lucille, had survived.

Now, twenty-one years later, the wars that had begun against the Republic and continued against the Empire were at last over. The Dowager Countess still lived, and liked to sit where the sun was trapped by the junction of the château’s two wings and where roses grew clear up to the moss which grew on the château’s stone roof. The old lady shared the château with her daughter. Lucille had been married to a General’s son, but within two months of the wedding her husband had died in the snows of Russia and Lucille Castineau had returned to her mother as a childless widow.

Now, in the peace that came after Easter, the son had come home as well. Henri, Comte de Lassan, had walked up the lane and crossed the drawbridge, just as if he was returning from a stroll, and his mother had wept with joy that her soldier son had survived, and that night, just as if he had never been away, Henri took the top place at the supper table. He had quietly and unfussily folded his blue uniform away in the pious hope that he would never again be forced to wear it. He said grace before the meal, then commented that the apple blossom looked thin in the orchards.

‘We need to graft new stock on to the trees,’ his mother said.

‘Only there isn’t any money,’ Lucille added.

‘You must borrow some, Henri,’ the Dowager Countess said. ‘They wouldn’t lend to two widows like us, but they’ll lend to a man.’

‘We have nothing to sell?’

‘Very little.’ The Dowager sat very straight-backed. ‘And what little is left, Henri, must be preserved. It is not right that a Comte de Lassan be without family silver or good horses.’

Henri smiled. ‘The titles of the old nobility were abolished over twenty years ago, Maman. I am now Monsieur Henri Lassan, nothing more.’

The Dowager sniffed disapproval. She had seen the fashions of French nomenclature come and go. Henri, Comte de Lassan had become Citoyen Lassan, then Lieutenant Lassan, then Capitaine Lassan, and now he claimed to be plain Monsieur Lassan. That, in the Dowager’s opinion, was nonsense. Her son was the Count of this manor, lord of its estates and heir to eight centuries of noble history. No government in Paris could change that.

Yet, despite his mother, Henri refused to use his title and disliked it when the villagers bowed to him and called him ‘my Lord’. One of those villagers had once been on the Committee of Public Safety, but those heady days of equality were long gone and the ageing revolutionary was now as eager as any man to doff his cap to the Comte de Lassan.

‘Why don’t you please Maman?’ Lucille asked her brother. It was a Sunday afternoon soon after Henri’s return and, while the Dowager Countess took her afternoon nap, the brother and sister had crossed one of the wooden bridges and were walking between the scanty blossomed apple trees towards the millstream that lay at the end of the château’s orchards.

‘To call myself Count would be a sin of pride.’

‘Henri!’ Lucille said reproachfully, though she knew that no reproach would sway her gentle, but very stubborn brother. She found it hard to imagine Henri as a soldier, though it had been clear from his letters that he had taken his military responsibilities with great seriousness, and, reading between the lines, that he had been popular with his men. Yet always, in every letter, Henri had spoken of his ambition to become a priest. When the war is over, he would write, he would take orders.

The Dowager Countess decried, disapproved of, and even despised such an ambition. Henri was nearly forty years old, and it was high time that he married and had a son who would carry the Lassan name. That was the important thing; that a new Count should be born, and on Henri’s return the Dowager quickly invited Madame Pellemont and her unmarried daughter to visit the château, and thereafter harried Henri with frequent and tactless hints about Mademoiselle Pellemont who, though no beauty, was malleable and placid. ‘She has broad hips, Henri,’ the Dowager said enticingly. ‘She’ll spit out babies like a sow farrowing a litter.’

The Dowager did not extend her desire for grandchildren to her daughter, for if Lucille were to marry again her children would not bear the family name, nor would any son of Lucille’s be a Count of Lassan. It was the survival of that name and lineage that the Dowager wanted, and so Lucille’s marriage prospects were of no interest to the Dowager. In fact two men had proposed marriage to the widow Castineau, but Lucille did not want to risk the unhappiness of losing love again. ‘I shall grow old and crotchety,’ she told her brother, though the last quality seemed an unlikely fate, for Lucille had an innate vivacity that gave her face an illuminating smile. She had grey eyes, light brown hair, and a long lantern jaw. She thought herself plain, and was certainly no great beauty, yet the spark in her soul was bright, and the man who had married her had counted himself to be among the most fortunate of husbands.

‘Will you marry again?’ her brother asked as they walked down to the millstream.

‘No, Henri. I shall just moulder away here. I like it here, and I’m kept busy. I like being busy.’ Lucille was an early riser, and rarely rested in daylight. When so many men had been away at the wars it had been Lucille who ran the farm, the cider press, the mill, the dairy, and the château. She supervised the lambing, she raised calves, and fattened hogs for the slaughter. She mended the centuries old flax sheets on which the family still slept, she churned butter, made cheese, and eked out the family’s tiny income in an effort to preserve the estate. She had been forced to sell two fields, and much of the old silver, yet the château had survived for Henri’s return. Henri thought that the work had worn his sister out, for she was thin and pale, but Lucille denied the accusation. ‘It isn’t the work that’s so tiring, but money. There’s never enough. We have to mend the tower roof, we need new apple trees.’ Lucille sighed. ‘We need everything. Even the chairs in the kitchen need mending, and I can’t afford a carpenter.’

They came to the millrace and sat on the stone wall above the glistening rush of water. Henri had been carrying a musket which he now propped against the wall. His coat pockets were weighed down with two heavy pistols. He disliked carrying the weapons, but the French countryside was infested with armed bands of men who had either deserted from the Emperor’s armies or else had been discharged and had no home or work. Such men often attacked villagers, and had even ransacked small towns. No such brigands had yet been seen near the château, but Henri Lassan would take no chances and thus carried the weapons whenever he left the safe area inside the moat. The château’s few farmworkers were also armed, and the village knew that if the bell above the château’s chapel tolled then there was danger abroad and they should herd their cattle into the château’s yard.

‘Not that I can promise a very successful defence,’ Henri now said ruefully. ‘I wasn’t very good at defending my fortress.’ He had commanded the Teste de Buch fort and, day after day, year after year, he had watched the empty sea and thought the war was passing him by until, in the very last weeks of the fighting, the British Riflemen had come from the landward side to bring horror to his small command.

Lucille heard the sadness in her brother’s voice. ‘Was it awful?’

‘Yes,’ Henri said simply, then fell silent so that Lucille thought he would say no more, but after a moment Henri shrugged and began to speak of that one lost fight. He told her about the Englishmen in green, and how they had appeared in his fortress as though from nowhere. ‘Big men,’ he said, ‘and scarred. They fought like demons. They loved to fight. I could tell that from their faces.’ He shuddered. ‘And they destroyed all my books, all of them. They took years to collect, and afterwards there wasn’t one left.’

Lucille twisted a campion’s stalk about her finger. ‘The English.’ She said it disparagingly, as though it explained everything.

‘They are a brutal people.’ Henri had never known an Englishman, yet the prejudice against the island race was bred into his Norman bone. There was a tribal memory of steel-helmeted archers and mounted men-at-arms who crossed the channel to burn barns, steal women, and slaughter children. To Henri and Lucille the English were a rapacious and brawling race of Protestants whom God had seen fit to place just across the water. ‘I sometimes dream of those Riflemen,’ Henri Lassan now said.

‘They failed to kill you,’ Lucille said as if to encourage her brother’s self-esteem.

‘At the end they could have killed me. I waded into the sea, straight for their leader. He’s a famous soldier, and I thought I might expiate my failure if I killed him, or pay for it if I died myself, but he would not fight. He lowered his sword. He could have killed me, but he did not.’

‘So there’s some good in the green men?’

‘I think he just despised me.’ Henri Lassan shrugged. ‘His name is Sharpe, and I have the most ridiculous nightmare that one day he will come back to finish me off. That is stupid, I know, but I cannot shake the notion away.’ He tried to smile the foolishness away, but Lucille could tell that somehow this Sharpe had become her brother’s private demon; the man who had shamed Lassan as a soldier, and Lucille wondered that a man who wanted to be a priest nevertheless should also worry that he had not been a great soldier. She tried to tell her brother that the failure did not matter, that he was a better man than any soldier.

‘I hope I will be a better man,’ Henri said.

‘As a priest?’ Lucille touched on the argument which their mother pursued so doggedly.

‘I’ve thought of little else these past years.’ And, he could have added, he had prepared himself for little else over these past years. He had read, studied, and argued with the priest at Arcachon; always testing the soundness of his own faith and always finding it strong. The alternative to the priesthood was to become the master of this chateau, but Henri Lassan did not relish the task. The old building needed a fortune spent on its walls and roof. It would be best, he thought privately, if the place was sold and if his mother would live close to the abbey in Caen, but he knew he could never persuade the Dowager of that sensible solution.

‘You don’t sound utterly certain that you want to be a priest,’ Lucille said.

Henri shrugged. ‘There’s been a Lassan in this house for eight hundred years.’ He stopped, unable to argue against the numbing weight of that tradition, and even feeling some sympathy for his mother’s fervent wishes for the family’s future. But if the price of that future was Mademoiselle Pellemont? He shuddered, then looked at his watch. ‘Maman will be awake soon.’

They stood. Lassan glanced once more at the far hills, but nothing untoward moved among the orchards, and no green men threatened on the high ridge where the elms, beeches and hornbeams grew. The château was calm, at peace, and safe, so Henri picked up his loaded musket and walked his sister home.

‘They’re scared, you see,’ Harper explained, and, as if to prove his point, he wafted the chamber-pot towards the provost sentries who guarded the corridor outside the room where Sharpe and Frederickson waited.

The provost recoiled from the chamber-pot, then protested when Harper offered to remove the strip of cloth which covered its contents.

‘You can’t expect gently-born officers to live in a room with the stench of shit,’ Harper said, ‘so I have to empty it.’

‘Go to the yard. Don’t bloody loiter about.’ It was the Provost Sergeant who snapped the orders at Harper.

‘You’re a grand man, Sergeant.’

‘Get the hell out of here. And hurry, man!’ The Sergeant watched the big Irishman go down the stairs. ‘Bloody Irish, and a bloody Rifleman,’ he said to no one in particular, ‘two things I hate most.’

The windowless corridor was lit by two glass-fronted lanterns which threw the shadows of the three guards long across the floorboards. Laughter and loud voices echoed from the prefecture’s ground floor where the highest officials of the Transport Board were giving a dinner. A clock at the foot of the deep stairwell struck half past eight.

More than fifteen minutes passed before Harper came whistling up the stairs. He carried the empty chamber-pot in one hand. Inside the pot were three empty wine glasses, while on his shoulder was a sizeable wooden keg that he first dropped on to the landing, then rolled towards the officers’ doorway with his right foot. He nodded a cheerful greeting to the Provost Sergeant. ‘A gentleman downstairs sent this up to the officers, Sergeant.’

The Provost Sergeant stepped into the path of the rolling keg which he checked with a boot. ‘Who sent it?’

‘Now how would I be knowing that?’ Harper, when it pleased him, could easily play the role of a vague-witted Irishman. That such a role, however it distorted the truth, nevertheless suited the prejudice of men like the Provost Sergeant only made it the more effective. ‘He didn’t give me his name, nor did he, but he said he had a sympathy for the poor gentlemen. He said he’d never met them, but he was sorry for them. Mind you, Sergeant, the gentleman was more than a little drunk himself, which always makes a man sympathetic. Isn’t that the truth? It’s a pity our wives don’t drink more, so it is.’

‘Shut your face.’ The Sergeant tipped the cask on to its end, then worked the bung loose. He was rewarded with the rich smell of good brandy. He thrust the bung home. ‘I’ve got orders not to allow anyone to communicate with the officers.’

‘You wouldn’t deny them a wee drink now, would you?’

‘Shut your bloody face.’ The Sergeant stood, reached for the chamber-pot, and took out the three glasses. ‘Get inside, and tell your damned officers that if they’re thirsty they should drink water.’

‘Yes, Sergeant. Whatever you say, Sergeant. Thank you. Sergeant.’ Harper edged past the keg, then darted through the door as though he truly feared the Provost Sergeant’s wrath. Once inside the room he closed the door, then grinned at Sharpe. ‘As easy as stealing a fleece off a lamb’s back, sir. One keg of brandy safely delivered. The bastards just couldn’t wait to take it off me.’

‘Let’s just hope they drink it,’ Frederickson said.

‘In two hours,’ Harper said confidently, ‘those three will be dancing drunk. I even thought to bring them some glasses.’

‘How much did the brandy cost?’ Sharpe asked.

‘All you gave me, sir, but the fellow in the kitchens said it was the very best.’ Harper, properly pleased with himself, went on to deliver the rest of his news. There were only three guards on the top landing, and he had seen no other sentries till he reached the ground floor where he saw a sergeant and two men in the guardroom by the front door. ‘But they weren’t provosts, sir, so they mayn’t be any trouble to us. I said hello to them, and saw our guns in there.’ There were another two sentries in the town square beyond the front door. ‘They’re giving a grand dinner downstairs, so there’s a fair number of fellows wandering about looking for places to piss. Oh, and there’s a bookcase on the first floor, sir, full of bloody ledgers.’

‘Did you look for the stables?’ Sharpe asked.

‘I did, sir, but they’re already locked tight, and so’s the yard gate.’

‘So there’s no chance of stealing horses?’

Harper considered the question, then shrugged. ‘It’ll be hard, sir.’

‘We’re infantry,’ Frederickson said dismissively, ‘so we can damn well walk out of the city.’

‘And if they send cavalry after us?’

Frederickson dismissed the fear. ‘How will they know which way we’ve gone? Besides, the French cavalry never caught us, so what chance would you give our dozy lot?’

‘We walk, then.’ Sharpe stretched his arms wide as though he prepared for exercise. ‘But where to?’

‘That’s easy,’ Frederickson said. ‘We go to Arcachon.’

‘Arcachon?’ Sharpe asked with surprise. That was the town closest to the Teste de Buch fort, but otherwise he could think of no special significance attached to the place.

But Frederickson, while Harper had been performing his charade with the chamber-pot, had been deep in thought. There never had been any gold in the fort, Frederickson now explained, at least not when the Riflemen had captured it. If that fact could be proved, then their troubles would be over. ‘What we need to do,’ he went on, ‘is find Commandant Lassan. I don’t believe he wrote that statement. I believe Ducos made it up.’ Frederickson paused as a man laughed outside the door. ‘I suspect your brandy is being appreciated, Sergeant.’

‘Why do you think the Commandant’s statement was faked?’ Sharpe asked.

Frederickson paused to strike a flame in his tinderbox and to light one of his small foul cheroots. ‘Do you remember his quarters?’

Sharpe thought back to the few hectic days he had spent at the Teste de Buch fortress. ‘I remember the bastard had a lot of books. He couldn’t fight, but he had a lot of bloody books.’

‘Do you remember what the books were about?’

‘I had better things to do than read.’

‘I looked,’ Frederickson said, ‘and I remember that Commandant Lassan had a very civilized library, which made it a great pity when we turned most of it into cartridge paper and cannon-wadding. I recall some very fine editions of essays, a large, indeed comprehensive, collection of sermons and other devotional literature. A very devout man, our Commandant Lassan.’

‘Then no wonder we beat the bastard to jelly,’ Harper said happily.

‘And if he is devout,’ Frederickson ignored Harper’s cheerful comment, ‘then my guess is that he may also be honest. It doesn’t always follow, of course, I remember a very sanctimonious chaplain of the 60th who stole the mess ragged and then ran off with a Corporal’s rather rancid woman, but I’m willing to think Lassan may be cut from a rather better cloth. Indeed, I seem to recall that the American told us he was a decent man?’

‘Yes, he did,’ Sharpe remembered.

‘So let’s hope he is decent. Let’s hope that he’ll deny that damned statement and ease us all off a bloody sharp hook. The trick of it is simply to find the man, then persuade him to travel to London.’

Frederickson’s calm words made the task sound oddly easy. Sharpe, turning to the window, saw how the darkness was shrouding the city. There was a slender moon, sharp-edged and low above a tangle of dark masts and rigging which showed over the black rooftops. Candles showed in some windows and torches flickered where link-boys escorted pedestrians about the streets. ‘Why Arcachon, though?’ Sharpe turned back from the window. ‘You think Lassan lives there?’

‘I doubt we shall be so fortunate as that,’ Frederickson said, ‘but because he’s an educated man, and a devout one, it’s likely that he and the local priest would have been on friendly terms. It’s hard to find civilized conversation in a small garrison, let alone someone to play chess with, and I recall that we kindled a fire with a very fine chess-set from Lassan’s quarters. So, my suggestion is that we find the priest of Arcachon and hope he can tell us where to find Lassan. Do you agree?’

‘I think it’s a brilliant notion,’ Sharpe said admiringly.

‘I’m just a humble Rifle Captain,’ Frederickson said, ‘and therefore flattered by the praise of a staff officer.’

‘But,’ Sharpe said, ‘if Lassan’s an honourable man, why would Ducos falsify a statement of his? He must know that Lassan could deny it.’

‘I don’t know the answer to that,’ Frederickson admitted, ‘but we’ll never know unless we find Lassan.’

‘Or get out of here,’ Harper said grimly. ‘Can I have permission to hit a provost?’

‘No killing,’ Frederickson warned. ‘If we kill one of the bastards then they’ll have real cause to court-martial us.’ He crept close to the door. ‘I wonder if our brandy is working.’

The three men went silent as they tried to decipher the small sounds from beyond the door. They heard voices, and then, quite distinctly, the sound of liquid being poured. ‘Another half hour,’ Sharpe decided.

The half hour crept by, but at last the first of the town’s clocks rang ten. Sharpe grimaced, seized the door handle, and nodded at Harper. ‘You first, Sergeant.’

He snatched the door open, and their escape had begun.

Lieutenant-Colonel Wigram was the guest of honour at the dinner which the Transport Board was giving in the prefecture. The officials and their guests had dined well on roast mutton, roast chicken, and baked pears. Now, as the bottles of brandy thickened among the remaining bottles of claret, Wigram was invited to make a speech.

He spoke well. The vast majority of the men about the long table were civilians from London who had come to supervise the onerous task of removing an army from France. Their days were spent in settling accounts with the masters of ships, allocating hull space, and securing supplies for the army’s journey home. Now, in the candlelit splendour of the prefecture’s large hall, they could hear a little of what that army had achieved.

‘In the darkest days of the struggle,’ Wigram said, ‘when every man’s voice at home was raised against our endeavours, and when any prudent man might have deemed our cause lost, there would never have been a dinner as splendid as this one you have so generously provided. Then, gentlemen, we lived on very short commons indeed. Many is the night when I have given my horse the last food from my saddlebags, then slept hungry myself. The French were never far away on those cold nights, yet we survived, gentlemen, we survived.’ There were murmurs of admiration, and a few guests, overcome both by Wigram’s heroism and the plenitude of the wine, tapped their glasses with their spoons to make a pleasant ringing applause.

‘And even later,’ Wigram’s glasses reflected the candlelight as he looked up to make sure his voice reached the far end of the table where the more junior guests sat, ‘when fortune smiled more compassionately upon us, hardship was still our constant companion.’ In fact Wigram had slept between sheets every night of his war, and had been known to have a cook flogged because his nightly joint of beef was underdone, but this was no time to quibble. This was a time for every man to garner what credit he could from the war, and Wigram could garner with the best. He bowed to Captain Harcourt, another guest at the dinner, and paid a fulsome tribute to the contribution made by the Royal Navy. Again there was applause.

Finally Wigram turned to a question he had frequently pondered. ‘I am often asked,’ he said, ‘what qualities are most desirable in a soldier, and I confess to cause astonishment when I reply that it is not a sturdy arm, nor an adventurous spirit which gains an army its victories. Such qualities are necessary, of course, but without leadership they will inevitably fail. No, gentlemen, it is the man who keeps his mental faculties alert who contributes most to the glorious cause. A soldier must be a thinker. He must be a master of detail. He must be a man whose precision of thinking will render him staunch and steady amidst danger and uncertainty.’ It was at that point that Lieutenant-Colonel Wigram paused, his mouth dropped open, and one by one the guests turned to stare with amazement at the apparitions which had appeared in the doorway.

It was commonly said that most men only joined the British Army for drink. The French scornfully accused the British of fighting drunk, indeed of not being able to fight unless they were drunk, though if the charge was true then it was astonishing that the French did not make their own men drunk because, sober, they could never beat the British. There was, nevertheless, a great deal of truth in the charges. The British Army was notorious for drunkenness, and more than one French unit had escaped capture by leaving tempting bottles and casks to waylay their pursuers.

So it was hardly astonishing that the three provosts were drunk. Each had consumed close to a pint and a half of brandy, and they were not merely drunk, but gloriously, happily and carelessly oblivious of being drunk. They were, in truth, in a temporary nirvana so pleasant that none of the three had even noticed when a big Irishman rapped them hard on the skull to introduce a temporary unconsciousness. It was during that blank moment that each of the provosts had been stripped stark naked. Then, to make certain they stayed incapable, Sharpe and Frederickson had poured yet more brandy down their spluttering throats.

Thus it was that Lieutenant-Colonel Wigram’s speech was interrupted by three deliriously drunken men who were as naked as the day on which they were born.

The Provost Sergeant stared about him in blinking astonishment as he found himself in the brilliantly lit banqueting hall. He hiccupped, bowed to the company, and tried to speak. ‘Fire,’ he at last managed to say, then he slid down a wall to fall asleep.

Behind him smoke seeped through the open door.

Wigram stared, aghast.

‘Fire!’ This time the voice came from outside, and was a huge roar of warning. Wigram panicked, but so did almost every man in the room. Glasses and plates smashed as men fought to escape the tables and cram themselves through one of the room’s two doors. The naked provosts were trampled underfoot. Smoke was thickening in the corridor and billowing up the stairwell. Wigram fought to escape with the rest. He lost his glasses in his panic, but somehow managed to scramble through the door, across the vestibule, and down into the town square where the dinner guests assembled to watch the promised inferno.

There was none. A guard sergeant filled a bucket of water and doused the pile of brandy-soaked uniforms which, heavily sprinkled with gunpowder and then piled with loosely stacked, brandy soaked ledgers, had caused the pungent smoke. There was a nasty scorch-mark on the carpet, which hardly mattered for, being embroidered with the imperial initial ‘N’, it was due for destruction anyway. Most of the ledgers were scorched, and a few had burned to ash, but the fire had not spread and so no real harm had been done. The Sergeant ordered the three drunken provosts to be carried to the yard and dumped in a horse-trough, then, pausing only to steal half a dozen bottles of brandy from the table in the banqueting hall, he went to the front door and reported to the officers that all was well.

Except half an hour later someone thought to look on the top floor of the prefecture and discovered that three Riflemen were missing. Two rifles, a seven-barrelled gun, a bayonet, and six ammunition pouches were also missing from the guardroom.

Colonel Wigram, panicking like a wet hen, wanted to call out the guard, then send cavalry galloping all over France to discover the fugitives. Captain Harcourt was calmer. ‘There’s no need,’ he said.

‘No need?’

‘My dear Wigram, there are picquets at every exit from the city, and even if Major Sharpe’s party evades those sentries, we know precisely where they’re going.’

‘We do?’

‘Naturally. That one-eyed Rifleman was entirely correct in his evidence to the tribunal. No men could have removed six tons of gold under enemy fire. Surely you understood that?’

Wigram had understood no such thing, but was unwilling to display such ignorance. ‘Of course,’ he said huffily.

‘They could never have carried the gold away, so they must have hidden it at the Teste de Buch, and I warrant you that’s where they’ve gone. And that’s where we’ve had a sloop since last week. Might I trouble you for a single messenger to warn the crew that they’ll have to arrest Major Sharpe and his companions?’

‘Of course.’ Wigram felt aggrieved that no one had told him about the Navy’s precautions. ‘You’ve had a sloop there for a week?’

‘You don’t want the bloody French to get the gold, do you?’

‘But by law it belongs to them!’

‘I’ve spent the last twenty years killing the bastards, and don’t intend to hand them a pile of gold just because a peace treaty’s been signed. If it’s necessary we’ll tear that damned fort apart to find the bloody stuff!’ Harcourt glanced up at the stars, as if judging the weather, then grinned. ‘There is one consolation in all this, my dear Colonel. By running away, Major Sharpe and Captain Frederickson have proved their guilt, so when the Navy catches them, you shouldn’t have any trouble in convening a court-martial. Shall we send that messenger? And because the roads are likely to be dangerous, perhaps he’d better be given a cavalry troop as escort? Then perhaps you’d care to finish your speech? I must admit to a great fascination in your theory as to the role of the thinking man in gaining victory.’

But somehow the joy had deserted Wigram’s evening. He did at least find his spectacles, but someone had trampled them in the rush and one lens was broken and an earpiece bent. So he abandoned his speech, cursed all Riflemen, then went to his quarters and slept.