Читать книгу Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe’s Revenge, Sharpe’s Waterloo, Sharpe’s Devil - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 22

Father Marin had warned Frederickson that it might take a full month for a man to walk from Arcachon to Caen, but that was by daylight and without needing to avoid either predatory bandits or patrolling provosts. There were public coaches that could make the journey in a week, and such coaches were well guarded by armed outriders, but both Sharpe and Frederickson reckoned that the new French government, believing them to be thieves, might already be seeking them. Similarly, the news that British sailors were searching the Teste de Buch persuaded Sharpe that they were just as much at risk from their own countrymen as from the French. It was better, Sharpe and Frederickson agreed, to walk by night and thus to avoid all eyes.

They encountered their greatest obstacle just three nights after leaving Arcachon. They had headed east to meet the River Garonne south of Bordeaux. The river was too deep and wide to be safely swum, and it took a full night’s scouting before they found a boat. It was a ferryman’s skiff that was chained to a thick wooden post sunk deep into the river bank. Harper spat on his hands, crouched, then tugged the post bodily from the flinty soil. Frederickson had already cut two branches to serve as paddles. The river’s current was so swift that Sharpe feared their boat might be swept clear into Bordeaux itself, but somehow they managed to steer the small craft safe to the eastern shore.

They crossed another and smaller river the next night, and then at last could turn north. Father Marin had given Frederickson a route; by Angoulême, Poitiers, Tours, Le Mans, Alençon, Falaise, and thus to Caen.

All three Riflemen were accustomed to travelling by night, for the army had always marched long before dawn so that its day’s journey was done before the Spanish sun was at its fiercest. Now, in the French countryside, it was doubtful whether a single soul was aware of the Riflemen’s passing. The skills they used were by now innate; the skills of men who had patrolled in war for all their lives. They knew how to travel in silence and how to hunt. One night, despite the presence of three guard dogs in a farmyard, Frederickson and Harper stole two freshly farrowed piglets that were roasted the next day in a tumbledown and deserted farmhouse high on a hill. Two nights later, in a wood that was thick with wild-flowers, Sharpe shot a deer that they disembowelled and butchered. They plucked fish from streams with their bare hands. They dined on fungi and dandelion roots. They ate hares, rabbits, and squirrels, and all they missed from their diet was wine and rum.

They avoided towns and villages. Sometimes they would hear a church bell tolling in the dusk, or smell the stench of a great town, but always they looped east or west before continuing along deserted tracks or following the contour lines of great vineyards. They waded streams, climbed hills, and struggled through brackish marshland. They followed the Pole Star on clear nights, and on others they would walk a high road to find their directions from its milestones. In their tattered uniforms they looked like vagabonds, but vagabonds so well armed that they must have appeared more fearsome than the brigands they took such trouble to avoid.

On the tenth night of their journey they were forced to lay up through the darkness. All day they had watched the clouds piling up in the west, and by nightfall the whole sky was shrouded by sullen black thunderheads. The three Riflemen were snug in a ruined byre, and when the first stab of lightning flickered to earth Sharpe decided to stay put. It had already begun to rain, softly at first, but soon it began to spit malevolently, then swelled until the downpour was thrashing the earth in a sheeting and stinging deluge. The thunder cracked and tumbled across the sky, sounding just like the passage of heavy roundshot.

Harper slept while Sharpe and Frederickson crouched in the byre’s entrance. Both men were fascinated by the storm’s violence. Lightning twisted and split into rivulets of brilliant white fire so that it seemed as if the sky itself was in agony.

‘Didn’t it thunder the night before the battle at Salamanca?’ Frederickson almost had to shout to be heard above the violent noise.

‘Yes.’ Sharpe could hear sheep bleating their panic somewhere to the west, and he was considering the prospect of mutton for breakfast.

Frederickson sheltered his tinderbox inside his greatcoat and struck a flame for one of his few remaining cheroots. ‘I astonish myself by positively enjoying this life. I think perhaps I could wander in darkness for the rest of my life.’

Sharpe smiled. ‘I’d rather reach home.’

Frederickson uttered a scornful bark of laughter. ‘I hear an echo of a married man’s lust.’

‘I was thinking of Jane, if that’s what you mean.’ Since leaving Bordeaux, Sharpe had taken care not to mention Jane, for he knew with what small sympathy Frederickson regarded the state of marriage, but Sharpe’s worries had only increased with his silence and now, under the storm’s threat, he could not resist articulating those worries. ‘Jane will be fretting.’

‘She’s a soldier’s wife. If she isn’t prepared for long absences and long silences, then she shouldn’t have married you. Besides, d’Alembord will see her soon enough.’

‘That’s true.’

‘And she has money,’ Frederickson continued remorselessly, ‘so I cannot see that she has great cause for concern. Indeed, I rather suspect that you’re more worried about her than she is about you.’

Sharpe hesitated before admitting to that truth, but then, needing his friend’s consolation, he nodded. ‘That’s true.’

‘You’re worried that she’s tired of you?’ Frederickson insisted.

‘Good God, no!’ Sharpe protested vehemently, too vehemently, for in truth that worry was never far from his thoughts. It was a natural concern occasioned by the unhappiness of their parting and by Jane’s subsequent silence, but Sharpe had no taste to discuss such intimacies even with Frederickson. His voice sounded harsh. ‘I’m merely worried because bloody Wigram knew she’d withdrawn that money. It means someone’s investigated my affairs at home. What if they try to confiscate her money?’

‘Then she’ll be poor,’ Frederickson said heartlessly, ‘but doubtless she’ll live until you clear your name. One presumes your wife has friends who won’t allow her to slide into ignominious penury?’

‘She has no friends that I know of.’ Sharpe had snatched Jane from her uncle’s house where she had been forced to live a reclusive life. That life had prevented her from making any close friends and, bereft of such help, Sharpe did not know how Jane would survive poverty and isolation. She was too young and innocent for hardship, he thought, and that realization provoked a surge of affection and pity for Jane. He suddenly wished he had risked the coach journey. Perhaps, by now, they could already have found Lassan and be on their way home with the proof they needed, but instead Sharpe was marooned in this water-lashed storm and he imagined a penniless Jane crouching beneath the same thunderous violence in solitary and abject fear. ‘Maybe she thinks I’m already dead.’

‘For Christ’s sake!’ Frederickson was disgusted with Sharpe’s self-pity. ‘She can read the casualty lists, can’t she? And she must have received one of your letters. And d’Alembord will be with her soon, and you can be sure he won’t permit her to starve. For God’s sake, man, stop agitating about what can’t be altered! Let’s find Henri Lassan, then worry about the rest of our damned lives.’ Frederickson paused as a shattering explosion of thunder slammed a snake’s tongue of lightning into some woods on a nearby hill. Flames blazed from twisted branches after the lightning strike, but the burning leaves were soon extinguished by the numbing rain. Frederickson drew on his cheroot. ‘I wish I understood love,’ he said in a more conversational tone, ‘it seems a very strange phenomenon.’

‘Does it?’

‘I remember, the last time I was in London, paying sixpence to see the pig-faced woman. Do you remember how celebrated she was for a few months? She was exhibited in most of the larger towns, I recall, and there was even talk that she might be displayed in Germany and Russia. I confess it was a most singular experience. She was very porcine indeed, with a rather snouty face, small eyes, and bristly hairs on her cheeks. It was not quite a sow’s face, but a very close approximation. I rather think her manager had slit her nostrils to increase the illusion.’

Sharpe wondered what the pig-woman had to do with his friend’s scepticism about love. ‘And seeing an ugly woman was worth sixpence?’ he asked instead.

‘One received one’s money’s worth, as I recall. Her manager used to make the wretched creature snuffle chopped apple and cold porridge out of a feeding trough on the floor, and if you paid an extra florin she’d strip to the waist and suckle a rather plump litter of piglets.’ Frederickson chuckled at the memory. ‘She was, in truth, hideously loathsome, but I heard a month later that a gentleman from Tamworth had proposed marriage to her and had been accepted. He paid the manager a hundred guineas for the loss of business, then took the pig-lady away for a life of wedded bliss in Staffordshire. Extraordinary!’ Frederickson shook his head at this evidence of love’s irrationality. ‘Don’t you find it extraordinary?’

‘I’d rather know if you paid the extra florin,’ Sharpe said.

‘Of course I did.’ Frederickson sounded irritated that the question was even asked. ‘I was curious.’

‘And?’

‘She had entirely normal breasts. Do you think the gentleman from Tamworth was in love with her?’

‘How would I know?’

‘One has to assume as much. But whether he was or not it’s entirely inexplicable. It would be like going to bed with Sergeant Harper.’ Frederickson grimaced.

Sharpe smiled. ‘You’ve never been tempted, William?’

‘By Sergeant Harper? Don’t be impertinent.’

‘By marriage, I mean.’

‘Ah, marriage.’ Frederickson was silent for a while and Sharpe thought his friend would not answer. Then Frederickson shrugged. ‘I was jilted.’

Sharpe immediately wished he had not asked the question. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I can’t see why you should be.’ Frederickson sounded angry at having revealed this aspect of his past. ‘I now regard it as a most fortunate escape. I have observed my married friends, and I don’t exclude present company, and all I can say, with the greatest of respect, is that most wives prove to be expensive aggravations. Their prime attraction can be most conveniently hired by the hour, so there seems little reason to incur the expense of keeping one for years. Still, I doubt you’ll agree with me. Married men seldom do.’ He twisted back into the byre to find Harper’s sword-bayonet that he drew from its scabbard and tested against his thumb. ‘I have a fancy for a breakfast of mutton.’

‘I had the very same wish.’

‘Or would you prefer lamb?’ Frederickson asked solicitously.

‘I think mutton. Shall I go?’

‘I need the exertion.’ Frederickson carefully extinguished his cheroot, then stored it in his shako. He stood, peered for a moment into the slashing rain, then plunged into the night.

Harper snored behind Sharpe. At the hilltop the great branches of foliage heaved and bucked in the sodden wind. Lightning sliced the sky, and Sharpe wondered what malevolent fate had brought his career to this extremity, and then he prayed that the weather would clear so that this journey could be done and an honest Frenchman found.

Henri Lassan had struggled with his conscience. He had even gone so far as to consult with the Bishop, he had prayed, until at last he had made his decision. One night at the supper table he informed his mother of that decision. The family was eating sorrel soup and black bread. They drank red wine which was so bad that Lucille had put some grated ginger in the bottle to improve its taste.

Henri sat at the head of the table. ‘Maman?’

‘Henri?’

Henri paused with a spoonful of soup just inches above his plate. ‘I will marry Mademoiselle Pellemont, as you wish.’

‘I am very pleased, Henri.’ The old lady was not going to revel in her victory, but offered her response very gravely and with the smallest inclination of her head.

Lucille showed more pleasure. ‘I think that’s wonderful news.’

‘She has excellent hips,’ the Dowager said. ‘Her mother had sixteen children, and her grandmother twelve, so it’s a good choice.’

‘A very solid choice,’ Henri Lassan said with a trace of a smile.

‘She has a very lovely nature,’ Lucille said warmly, and it was true. There might be those who thought Marie Pellemont to have the placidity and attractiveness of a gentle and not very energetic cow, but Lucille had always liked Marie who was her own age, and who would now become the new Comtesse de Lassan.

A betrothal ceremony was fixed for a fortnight’s time and, even though the château had fallen on lean times, the family tried hard to make apt provision for the occasion. All but one of the château’s saddle horses were sold so that the guests could receive their traditional gifts, sword knots for the men and nosegays for the women, and so there would be lavish food and decent wine for the guests of quality. The villagers and tenantry must also be fed, and provided with great vats of cider. Lucille found herself busy baking apple-cakes, and pressing great trays of nettle-wrapped cheese. She made sure that the hams hanging in the château’s chimneys were not too nibbled by bats. She cut away the worst of the ravages, then rubbed pepper into the dark hams to keep the animals at bay. It was a happy time. The days were lengthening and growing warmer.

Then, just a week before the betrothal ceremony, the first armed brigands were reported in the château’s vicinity.

The report came from a man ditching the top fields above the mill-stream. He had watched as some ragged fugitives, all armed and wearing the vestiges of imperial uniforms, had skulked along the stream-bed. They had been carrying two slaughtered lambs.

That night Henri Lassan slept with a loaded musket beside his bed. He barricaded the bridges over the moat with old cider vats, then released geese into the yard to act as sentries. Geese were more reliable than dogs, but no strangers disturbed the geese, neither that night nor the next, and Henri dared to hope that the vagabonds had merely been passing through the district.

Then, just the very next day, a horrific report came of a farmhouse burned beyond the next village of Seleglise. The smoke of the burning barn could be plainly seen from the château. The farmer, all his family, and both his maid-servants had been killed. The details of the massacre, brought by the miller of Seleglise, were appalling, so much so that Henri did not tell either his mother or Lucille. The miller, an elderly and devout man, shook his head. ‘They were Frenchmen who did this, my Lord.’

‘Or Poles, or Germans, or Italians.’ Lassan knew there were desperate men of all those nationalities released from Napoleon’s defeated armies. Somehow he did not wish to believe that Frenchmen could do such things to their own kind.

‘All the same,’ the miller said, ‘they were once soldiers of France.’

‘True,’ and that same day Henri Lassan donned the uniform he had hoped never to wear again, strapped on a sword, and led a party of his neighbours on a hunt for the murderers. The farmers who rode with him were brave men, but even they baulked at riding into the deep forest beyond Seleglise where the murderous vagabonds had doubtless taken shelter. The farmers contented themselves with firing shots blindly into the trees. They scared a lot of pigeons and lacerated many leaves, but no shots were fired back.

Lassan considered postponing the betrothal ceremony, but his mother was adamantly against such a course. It had taken the Dowager the best part of twenty years to persuade her adult son to take a bride, and she was not about to risk that happy eventuality because of a few vagrant scum lurking five miles away. It seemed her faith was rewarded, for there were no further incidents, and every guest travelled in safety to the château.

The betrothal ceremony, though modest, went very well. The weather was fine, Marie Pellemont looked as beautiful as her relieved mother could make her, while Henri Lassan, in a suit of fine blue cloth that had belonged to his father, looked properly noble. The Dowager had brought out the remains of the family’s silver, including a great dish, three feet across and a foot deep, which was cast in the form of a scallop shell cradling the de Lassan coat-of-arms. A flautist, violinist and drummer from the village provided the music, there was country dancing, and there was the solemn giving of pledges followed by the exchange of gifts. Mademoiselle Pellemont received a bolt of beautiful pale-blue silk from China; a treasure that the Dowager had possessed for fifty years, always meaning to make it into a gown fit for Versailles itself. Henri received a silver-hilted pistol that had once belonged to Marie’s father. The village curé muddled the words of his blessing, while the local doctor, a widower, danced so much with Lucille that the tongues wagged happily about the château’s courtyard from which the compost heap had been removed in honour of this great day. Soon, the villagers thought, the widow Castineau would also be married, and not before time, because Lucille was nearly thirty, childless, and was a woman of the most excellent kindness and disposition. The doctor, the village thought, could do far far worse, though doubtless the widow Castineau could do far better.

By midnight all the guests had gone, except for three male cousins from Rouen who would spend the night in the château. Henri put his new pistol into a drawer, then went to the kitchen where his three cousins were sousing themselves with good Calvados. Lucille and Marie, the elderly kitchen-maid, were scouring the great scallop dish with handfuls of abrasive straw, while the Dowager was complaining that Madame Pellemont had been insufficiently appreciative of the bolt of silk. ‘I warrant she hasn’t seen fabric of that quality since before the revolution.’

‘Marie liked it,’ Lucille was ever the peace-maker, ‘and she’s promised to make her wedding dress from it, Maman.’

Henri, reminded of that ordeal which he faced in a month’s time, said he was going outside to release the geese. He did so, then, wondering whether he had made the right choice by agreeing to marry, he leaned against the château’s wall and stared up at the full moon. It was a warm night, even muggy, and the moon was surrounded by a gauzy halo. He could hear music coming from the village and he supposed that the revelry was continuing in the wineshop by the church.

‘It’s going to rain tomorrow.’ The Dowager came out from the kitchen door and looked up at the hazed moon.

‘We need some rain.’

‘It’s a warm night.’ The Dowager offered her arm to her son. ‘Perhaps it will be a hot summer. I do hope so. I notice that I feel the cold more keenly than I used to.’

Henri walked his mother to the bridge which led to the dairy. They stopped on the bridge’s planks, just short of the new barricade, and stared down into the still, black and moon-reflecting water of the moat.

‘I see you’re wearing your father’s sword,’ the Dowager suddenly said.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m glad.’ The Dowager lifted her head to listen to the music which still sounded from the village. ‘It’s almost like the old days.’

‘Is it?’

‘We used to dance a great deal before the revolution. Your father was a great dancer, and had a fine voice.’

‘I know.’

The Dowager smiled. ‘Thank you for agreeing to marry, Henri.’

Henri smiled, but said nothing.

‘You’ll find Mademoiselle Pellemont is a most agreeable girl,’ the Dowager said.

‘She won’t be a difficult wife,’ Henri agreed.

‘She’s like your sister, in some ways. She’s not given to vapours or airs. I don’t like women who have vaporous souls; they aren’t to be trusted.’

‘Indeed not.’ Henri leaned on the bridge’s balustrade, then jerked upright as the geese suddenly hissed behind him.

The Dowager gripped her son’s arm. ‘Henri!’

The Dowager had been alarmed by footsteps which had suddenly sounded by the dairy where flagstones provided a firm footing in the sea of hoof-churned mud. There were dark shapes moving among the mooncast shadows. ‘Who is it?’ Henri called.

‘My Lord?’ It was a deep voice that replied. The tone of the voice was respectful, even friendly.

‘Who is it?’ Henri called again, then gently pushed his mother towards the lit door of the kitchen.

But, before the Dowager could take a single pace, two smiling men appeared from the shadows. They were both tall, long-haired men who wore green uniform jackets. They walked on to the far end of the bridge with their hands held wide to show that they meant no harm. Both men wore swords and both had muskets slung on their shoulders.

‘Who are you?’ Lassan challenged the strangers.

‘You’re Henri, Comte de Lassan?’ the taller of the two men asked politely.

‘I am,’ Lassan replied. ‘And who are you?’

‘We have a message for you, my Lord.’

The Dowager, reassured by the respect in the stranger’s voice, stood beside her son.

‘Well?’ Lassan demanded.

The two uniformed men were standing very close to the barricade, not two paces from Lassan. They still smiled as, with a practised speed, they unslung the heavy weapons from their shoulders.

‘Run, Maman!’ Henri pushed his mother towards the château. ‘Lucille! The bell! Ring the bell!’ He turned after his mother and tried to shield her with his body.

The tallest of the two men fired first and his bullet entered Lassan’s back between two of his lower ribs. The bullet was deflected upwards, exploding his heart into bloody shreds, then flattened itself on the inside of his breastbone. As he fell he pushed his mother in the small of her back, making her stumble down to her knees.

The Dowager turned to see the second man’s gun pointed at her. She stared defiantly. ‘Animal!’

The second man fired and his bullet smacked through the Dowager’s right eye and into her brain.

Mother and son were dead.

Lucille came to the kitchen door and screamed.

The two men climbed the barricade and walked into the château’s yard. There were other shapes in the darkness behind them.

Lucille ran back into the kitchen where her cousins were struggling to their feet. One of the cousins, less drunk than his companions, drew his pistol, cocked it, and went to the door from where he saw the dark shapes at the far side of the yard. He fired. Lucille pushed him aside and raised the great blunderbuss that was kept loaded and ready above the soap vats. She cocked it, then fired it at the murderers. The butt hammered with brutal pain into her shoulder. One of the two killers shouted with agony as he was hit. The other two cousins pushed past Lucille and ran into the darkness, but a fusillade of gunfire from beyond the moat made them drop to the cobblestones. The bullets smacked into the château’s ancient stone wall. Marie, the kitchen-maid, was screaming. The geese were hissing and stretching their necks. The dogs in the barn were barking fit to wake the dead.

Lucille snatched up an ancient battered horse-pistol, dragged back its cock, and ran towards the dark shapes that crouched over the bodies of her mother and brother. ‘Stop her!’ a deep voice called in French from beyond the moat, and one of her cousins, as if obeying the voice, stood up and caught Lucille about the waist and dragged her down on to the cobbles just as three more weapons fired from beyond the moat. The bullets whiplashed over Lucille and her cousin. She raised her head to see the two men who had killed her family climbing back over the barricade. She had wounded one of them, but not badly. Lucille was crying, screaming for her mother, but she saw in the moonlight that the men who escaped her vengeance wore green coats. The men in green! The English devils who had haunted her brother had come back in an evil night to finish their foul work. She howled like a dog at their retreating shapes, then fired the pistol at the retreating killers. Scraps of exploding powder from the pistol’s pan burned her face, and the flash dazzled her.

The dogs in the barn were scrabbling at the door. Marie was sobbing. A servant ran to the chapel bell and began to toll the alarm. Villagers, alerted by the gunfire and harried by the bell’s frantic noise, swarmed through the chãteau’s main arch. Some carried lanterns, all carried weapons. Those with guns blazed to the east where the attackers had long disappeared. The villagers’ gunfire did more damage to the dairy and the château’s orchards than to the murderers.

Lucille, weeping helplessly, pushed through the villagers to where her mother and brother lay in a pool of lantern-light. The village priest had covered the Dowager’s face with a handkerchief. The old woman’s black dress was soaked with blood that shone in the yellow light.

Henri Lassan lay on his back. His fine suit of clothes had been cut with knives, almost as if his murderers had thought that he kept coins in his coat seams. His old engraved sword had been stolen. Strangest of all was the presence of a short-handled axe beside his body. The cheap axe had been used to hack off two fingers from Henri Lassan’s right hand. The job had been done clumsily, so that his thumb and third finger were half severed as well. There was no sign of the two missing fingers.

The priest thought the disfigurement must have been done in the cause of Satanism. There had been an outbreak of devil worship in the Norman hills not many years before, and the Bishop had warned against a revival of the foul practice. The priest crossed himself, but kept his opinion to himself. Sufficient unto the night was the evil already done.

Lucille, already widowed, and now orphaned and denied her good brother’s life, wept like an inconsolable child while the chapel bell still tolled its useless message to an empty night.