Читать книгу Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe’s Revenge, Sharpe’s Waterloo, Sharpe’s Devil - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 26

Patrick Harper liked London’s cheerfully robust chaos. He could not have contemplated living there, though he had relatives in Southwark, but he had enjoyed his two previous visits, and once again found an endless entertainment in the hawkers and street-singers. There were also enough Irish accents in the capital to make a Donegal man feel comfortable.

Yet he was not comfortable now. He should have been for he was sitting in a tavern with a pot of ale and a steak and oyster pie, yet a very unhappy Captain d’Alembord was threatening to capsize Harper’s well-ordered world.

‘I think I can understand why it has happened,’ d’Alembord said painfully, ‘I just don’t want to believe that it’s true.’

‘It’s not true, sir,’ Harper said stoutly, and in utter defiance of all Captain d’Alembord’s evidence. ‘Mrs Sharpe’s good as gold, so she is. Take me round there, sir, and she’ll be as happy as a child to see me.’

D’Alembord shrugged. ‘She quite refused to receive me again, and Lord Rossendale has ignored all my letters. I finally went to see Sir William Lawford. Do you remember him?’

‘Of course I remember One-armed Willy, sir.’ Sir William Lawford, now a member of Parliament, had commanded the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers until the French had removed one of his arms at Ciudad Rodrigo.

D’Alembord shook his head sadly. ‘Sir William assured me that Mrs Sharpe and Lord Rossendale are,’ d’Alembord paused, then said the damning word, ‘intimate. It could just be ill-natured gossip, of course.’

‘It must be nothing but gossip.’ Harper’s world was bounded by certainties, one of which was that a pledge of love was entirely unbreakable, which was why, though he was made very uncomfortable by these speculations about Jane Sharpe, he still refused to give them any credit. ‘I expect they’re just trying to help Mr Sharpe, sir, so it stands to reason that they have to spend a bit of time together. And you know how tongues start flapping when a man and woman spend time together. So why don’t we just walk round there and I’ll give her the Major’s letter, and I’ll warrant she’ll be as happy as a hog in butter when she reads it. I’ll just finish the pie first, if I might. Are you sure you wouldn’t want a bite of it yourself?’

‘You finish it, Sergeant-Major.’

‘I’m not a soldier any more, sir,’ Harper said proudly, then plucked at the hem of his new coat as proof. He had discarded the old clothes Madame Castineau had given him, and replaced them with a suit of thickly woven wool, stout boots, gaiters, and a neckcloth which he had purchased with part of the money he had left in London where, like Sharpe, he had sold his Vitoria jewels. He was clearly pleased with his purchases, which made him look like a prosperous farmer come to town. His only weapon now was a thick and ungainly cudgel. ‘I haven’t got my papers yet,’ he admitted to d’Alembord, ‘but once Mr Sharpe’s off the hook then I dare say he’ll get them.’

‘Be careful you’re not arrested.’

‘Who’d dare?’ Harper grinned and gestured towards the cudgel.

The pie finished and the ale drunk, the two men walked slowly westwards. It was a lovely spring evening. The sky was delicately veined with thin cloud beyond the gauzy pall of London’s smoke, and the new leaves in the squares and wider streets had still not been darkened by soot and so looked spring-bright and full of hope. The beauty of the evening infused Harper with a quite unwarranted optimism. ‘It’s going to be all right, sir, so it is,’ he insisted. ‘Just wait till Mrs Sharpe sees me! It’ll be grand to see the lass again!’ He dropped a coin into the upturned shako of a legless beggar. D’Alembord did not have the heart to tell Harper that the vast majority of wounded indigents were not, despite their remnants of army uniforms, veterans of the war, but were merely taking advantage of the generosity of officers home from France. ‘Have you thought,’ Harper went on, ‘of writing to Nosey?’

‘Nosey’ was the newly created Duke of Wellington who, for lack of any better government appointment in London, had just been made Ambassador to Paris. ‘I’ve written to him,’ d’Alembord said, ‘though I’ve had no reply.’

‘Nosey won’t let Mr Sharpe down, sir.’

‘He won’t defend him if he thinks he’s a murderer.’

‘We’ll just have to prove he isn’t.’ Harper tossed another penny, this time to a man with empty eye-sockets.

They turned into Cork Street where Harper sniffed his disapproval for the elegant houses. ‘Mr Sharpe will never live here, sir. She’ll have to change her tune a bit smartish, I can tell you! He’s set on the countryside, so he is.’

‘And I tell you she’s set her heart on London.’

‘But she’s the woman, isn’t she? So she’ll have to do what he wants.’ That was another of Harper’s unshakeable certainties.

‘Hold hard.’ D’Alembord put a hand on Harper’s arm. ‘That’s the house, see?’ He pointed to the far end of the street where a varnish-gleaming phaeton was drawn up outside Jane’s house. A pair of matching chestnuts were in the carriage shafts and an urchin was earning a few coins by holding the horses’ heads. ‘See her?’ D’Alembord was unable to hide the disgust he felt.

Jane was being handed down the steps by a very tall and very thin young man in the glittering uniform of a cavalry Colonel. He wore pale blue breeches, a dark blue jacket, and had a fur lined pelisse hanging from one shoulder. Jane was in a white dress covered by a dark blue cloak. The cavalryman helped her climb into the high, perilous seat of the phaeton which was an open sporting carriage much favoured by the rich and reckless.

‘That’s Lord Rossendale,’ d’Alembord said grimly.

For the first time since meeting d’Alembord, Harper looked troubled. There was something about Jane’s gaiety which contradicted his pet theory that, at worst, she and Rossendale were mere allies in their attempt to help Sharpe. Nevertheless it was for this meeting with Jane that Harper had come to London, and so he took Sharpe’s letter from a pocket of his new coat and stepped confidently into the roadway to intercept the carriage.

Lord Rossendale was driving the phaeton himself. Like many young aristocrats, he held the professional carriage-drivers in great awe, and loved to emulate their skills. Rossendale tossed the urchin a coin, climbed up beside Jane, and unshipped his long whip. He cracked the thong above the horses’ heads and Jane whooped with feigned and flattering alarm as the well-trained and spirited pair started away. The carriage wheels blurred above the cobbles.

Harper, standing in the roadway, raised his right hand to attract Jane’s attention. He held Sharpe’s letter aloft.

Jane saw him. For a second she was incredulous, then she assumed that if Harper was in Cork Street, her husband could not be far away. And if her husband was in London then her lover was threatened with a duel. That prospect made her scream with genuine fright. ‘John! Stop him!’

Lord Rossendale saw a huge man holding a cudgel. It was early in the day for a footpad to be on London’s more fashionable streets, but Rossendale nevertheless assumed that the big man was attempting a clumsy ambush. He flicked the reins with his left hand and shouted at the horses to encourage them to greater speed.

‘Mrs Sharpe! Ma’am! It’s me!’ Harper was shouting and waving. The carriage was twenty yards away and accelerating fast towards him.

‘John!’ Jane screamed with fright.

Lord Rossendale stood. It was a dangerous thing to do in so precarious a vehicle, but he braced himself against the seat, then slashed the whip forward so that its thong curled above the horses’ heads.

‘Sergeant!’ D’Alembord shouted from the pavement.

The whip’s thong cracked, and its tip raked Harper’s cheek. If it had struck him one inch higher it would have slashed his right eye into blindness, but instead it merely cut his tanned face to the bone. He fell sideways as the horses’ hooves crashed past him. Harper rolled desperately away, yet even so the phaeton’s wheels were so close that he saw their metal rims flicking sparks up from the flint in the cobbles. He heard a whoop of joy.

It was Jane who had made the triumphant sound. Harper sat up in the road and saw her looking back, and he saw, too, the excitement in her eyes. Blood was streaming down Harper’s face and soaking his new neckcloth and coat. Lord Rossendale had sat again while Jane, her face turned back towards Harper and still registering a mixture of relief and joy, was gripping her lover’s arm.

Harper stood up and brushed the roadway’s horsedung off his trousers. ‘God save Ireland.’ He was disappointed and astonished, rather than angry.

‘I did warn you.’ D’Alembord picked up Harper’s cudgel and restored it to the Irishman.

‘Sweet Mother of God.’ Harper stared after the carriage until it slewed into Burlington Gardens. Then, still with an expression of incredulity, he stooped to pick up the fallen letter that was spattered with his blood.

‘I’m sorry, Sergeant-Major,’ d’Alembord said unhappily.

‘Mr Sharpe will kill the bastard.’ Harper stared in the direction the carriage had taken. ‘Mr Sharpe will crucify him! As for her?’ He shook his head in wonderment. ‘Has the woman lost her wits?’

‘It all makes me believe,’ d’Alembord steered Harper towards the pavement, ‘that the two of them are hoping the Major never does come home. It would suit them very well if he was arrested and executed for murder in France.’

‘I would never have believed it!’ Harper was still thinking of Jane’s parting cry of triumph. ‘She was always kind to me! She was as good as gold, so she was! She never gave herself airs, not that I saw!’

‘These things happen, Sergeant-Major.’

‘Oh, Christ!’ Harper leaned on an area railing. ‘Who in heaven’s name is to tell Mr Sharpe?’

‘Not me,’ d’Alembord said fervently, ‘I don’t even know where he is!’

‘You do now, sir.’ Harper tore open Sharpe’s letter and gave it to the officer. ‘The address is bound to be written there, sir.’

But d’Alembord would not take the letter. ‘You write to him, Sergeant-Major. He’s much fonder of you than he is of me.’

‘Jesus. I’m just a numbskull Irishman from Donegal, sir, and I couldn’t write a letter to save my own soul. Besides, I’m going to Spain to fetch my own wife home.’

D’Alembord reluctantly took the letter. ‘I can’t write to him. I wouldn’t know what to say.’

‘You’re an officer, sir. You’ll think of something, so you will.’ Harper turned again to stare at the empty street corner. ‘Why is she doing it? In the name of God, why?’

D’Alembord had pondered that question himself. He shrugged. ‘She’s like a caged singing bird given freedom. The Major took her out of that awful house, gave her wings, and now she wants to fly free.’

Harper scorned that sympathetic analysis. ‘She’s rotten to the bloody core, sir, just like her brother.’ Jane’s brother had been an officer in Harper’s battalion. Harper had killed him, though no one but he and Sharpe knew the truth of that killing. ‘Christ, sir.’ A foul thought had struck Harper. ‘It’ll kill Mr Sharpe when he finds out. He thinks the sun never sets on her!’

‘Which is why I don’t want to write the news to him, Sergeant-Major.’ D’Alembord pushed the letter into his coat’s tail pocket. ‘So perhaps it’s better for him to live in ignorant bliss?’

‘Christ on His cross.’ Harper brushed at the blood on his cheek. ‘I don’t want to be the one who has to tell him, sir.’

‘But you’re his friend.’

‘God help me, that I am.’ Harper walked slowly down the street and dreaded the moment when he would go back to France and be forced to break the news. ‘It’ll be like stabbing him to his heart, so it will, to his very heart.’

By the end of May Sharpe could walk to the château’s mill and back. He had made himself a crutch, yet still he insisted on putting his weight on to his right leg. His left arm was stiff and could not be fully raised. Doggedly he persisted in exercising it, forcing the joint a fraction further each day. The exercise was horribly painful, so much so that it brought tears to his eyes, but he would not give up.

Nor did he give up hope of Jane’s arrival. He liked to sit in the château’s archway and stare up the village street. One day an impressive carriage did appear there, and Sharpe’s hopes soared, but it was only a church dignitary visiting the priest. No message came from Harper, nor from d’Alembord who surely must have learned of Sharpe’s whereabouts from the Irishman. ‘Perhaps Harper was arrested?’ Sharpe suggested to Frederickson.

‘He’s a very hard man to arrest.’

‘Then why …’ Sharpe began.

‘There’ll be an explanation,’ Frederickson interrupted curtly. Sharpe frowned at his friend’s tone. In these last weeks Frederickson had seemed very content and happy, undoubtedly immersed in his courtship of Lucille Castineau. Sharpe had watched the two of them walking in the orchards, or strolling beside the stream, and he had seen how each seemed to enjoy the other’s company. Sharpe, though he was besieged by worry over Jane, had been glad for his friend. But now, in the evening light, as the two Riflemen lingered in the château’s archway, there was a troublesome echo of Frederickson’s old asperity. ‘There’ll be a perfectly simple explanation,’ Frederickson reiterated, ‘but for now I’m more worried about Ducos.’

‘I am, too.’ Sharpe was prising at the edge of the ragged plaster which still encased his thigh. The doctor insisted that the plaster should stay another month, but Sharpe was impatient to cut it away.

‘You shouldn’t think about Ducos,’ Frederickson said airily, ‘not while you’re still peg-legging. You should be intent on your recovery, nothing else. Why don’t you let me worry about the bastard?’

‘I rather thought you had other concerns?’ Sharpe suggested carefully.

Frederickson pointedly ignored the comment. He lit a cheroot. ‘I rather suspect I’m just wasting my time here. Unless we believe that Ducos will simply walk down that road and ask to be arrested.’

‘Of course he won’t.’ Sharpe wondered what had gone wrong between his friend and the widow, for clearly something had gone badly awry for Frederickson to be speaking in such an offhand way.

‘One of us should start looking for him. You can’t, but I can.’ Frederickson still spoke sharply. He did not look at Sharpe, but rather stared aloofly towards the village.

‘Where can you look?’

‘Paris, of course. Anything important in France will be recorded in Paris. The Emperor’s archives will be kept there. I can’t say I’m enamoured with the thought of searching through old ledgers, but if it has to be done, then so be it.’ Frederickson blew a cloud of smoke that whirled away across the moat. ‘And it’ll be better than vegetating here. I need to do something!’ He spoke in sudden savagery.

‘And you’ll leave me alone here?’

Frederickson turned a scornful eye on Sharpe. ‘Don’t be pathetic!’

‘I don’t mind being alone,’ Sharpe’s own anger was showing now, ‘but no one speaks English here! Except me.’

‘Then learn French, damn it!’

‘I don’t want to speak the bloody language.’

‘It’s a perfectly civilized language. Besides, Madame Castineau speaks some English.’

‘Not to me, she doesn’t,’ Sharpe said grimly.

‘That’s because she’s frightened of you. She says you scowl all the time.’

‘Then she’s hardly likely to want me here on my own, is she?’

‘For Christ’s sake!’ Frederickson said with disgust. ‘Do you want Ducos found or not?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Then I’ll damned well go to Paris,’ Frederickson said in a tone of hurt finality. ‘I’ll leave tomorrow.’

Sharpe, who truly did not want to be left alone in the widow’s household, sought another reason to dissuade his friend. ‘But you promised to escort Jane from Cherbourg!’

‘She hasn’t sent for that service yet,’ Frederickson said caustically, and suggesting what Sharpe did not want to believe, which was that Jane would not now be coming at all. ‘But if she does come,’ Frederickson continued, ‘she can do what other people do: hire guards.’

Sharpe tried another tack. ‘The French authorities must still be looking for us, and you’re rather a noticeable man.’

‘You mean this?’ Frederickson flicked a corner of his mildewed eye shade. ‘There must be twenty thousand wounded ex-soldiers in Paris. They’ll hardly notice one more. Besides, I won’t be so foolish as to travel in my uniform. I’ll leave it here, and you can bring it to Paris when I send for you. That is, of course, if I succeed in getting a sniff of Ducos.’

‘What do you mean? Bring it to Paris?’

‘That’s perfectly coherent English, I would have thought, but if you need a translation it means that you can bring me my jacket when you come to Paris.’ Frederickson stared at the birds wheeling about the church steeple. ‘I mean that when I’ve discovered some trace of Pierre Ducos I will send you a message and, should you be sufficiently recovered, and should Sergeant Harper have returned, you can come and join me. Is that so very hard to comprehend?’

Sharpe did not say anything until Frederickson turned and looked at him. Then, staring into the single truculent eye, Sharpe asked the feared question, ‘Why are you not coming back here, William?’

Frederickson looked angrily away. He drew on the cheroot. For a long time he said nothing, then, at last, he relented. ‘I asked Madame Castineau for the honour of her hand this afternoon.’

‘Ah,’ Sharpe said helplessly, and he knew the rest of the story and he felt a terrible sorrow for his proud friend.

‘She was entirely charming,’ Frederickson went on, ‘just as one would expect from such a lady, but she was also entirely adamant in her refusal. You ask why I will not return here? Because I would find it grossly embarrassing to continue an acquaintanceship which has proved so unwelcome to Lucille.’

‘I’m certain you’re not unwelcome,’ Sharpe said, and, when Frederickson made no reply, he tried again. ‘I’m so very sorry, William.’

‘I can’t possibly imagine why you should be sorry. You don’t like the woman, so presumably you should be glad that she won’t become my wife.’

Sharpe ignored the bombast. ‘Nevertheless, William, I am truly sorry.’

Frederickson seemed to crumple. He closed his eyes momentarily. ‘So am I,’ he said quietly. ‘I want to blame you, in some ways.’

‘Me!’

‘You advised me to pounce. I did. It seems I missed.’

‘You pounce before you propose. For God’s sake, William, can’t you see that women want to be pursued before they’re caught?’ Frederickson said nothing, and Sharpe tried further encouragement. ‘Try again!’

‘One doesn’t reinforce failure. Isn’t that the very first lesson of successful soldiering? Besides, she was quite clear in her refusal. I made a fool of myself, and I don’t intend to stay here and endure the embarrassment of that memory.’

‘So go,’ Sharpe said brutally, ‘but I’ll come with you.’

‘Do you mean to hop to Paris? And what if Jane does come to the château? And how will Harper find you?’ Frederickson threw down the cheroot and ground it under the toe of his boot. ‘What I’m trying to tell you, my friend, is that I seek my own solitary company for a while. Misery does not make the best entertainment for others.’ He turned and saw the elderly Marie carrying dishes to the table in the yard. ‘I see supper is served. I would be most grateful if you attempted to carry a little more of the conversation tonight?’

‘Of course.’

It was still a miserable supper, but for Sharpe, as for Frederickson, it had fast become a season of misery.

Harper had disappeared, Jane’s silence was ominous, and in the morning a moody Frederickson left for Paris. Madame Castineau stayed indoors, while, in the château’s archway, Sharpe sat alone and scowling.

May had been warm, but June was like a furnace. Sharpe mended in the heat. Lucille Castineau would watch as he exercised his left arm, holding the great cavalry sword outstretched for as long as he could before the muscles became nerveless and, after a moment’s quivering, collapsed. He could not raise the arm very high, but each day he forced it a fraction higher. He drenched himself with sweat as he exercised. He disobeyed the doctor by cutting away the brittle plaster from his right leg and, though he was in agony for three days, the pain slowly ebbed. He stumped doggedly about the yard to strengthen his atrophied thigh muscles. He had let his black hair grow very long so that the missing chunk of his left ear would be hidden. One morning, as Sharpe stared into his shaving mirror to judge the success of that vain disguise, he saw a streak of grey in the long black hair.

No news came from London, and none from Frederickson in Paris.

Sharpe looked for tasks about the château and took a simple pleasure in their completion. He rehung a door in the dairy, remade the bed of the cider press and repaired the kitchen chairs. When he could not find work he went for long walks, either between the apple trees or up the steep northern ridge where he forced his pace until the sweat ran down his face with the exertion and pain.

Lucille saw the pain on his face that evening. ‘You shouldn’t try to …’ she began, but then said nothing more, for her English was not good enough.

Most of all Sharpe liked to climb up to the tower roof that Frederickson and Harper had mended, and where he would spend hours just staring down the two roads which met at the château’s gate. He looked for the return of friends or the coming of his beloved, but no one came.

In late June he struggled to clear a ditch of brambles and weeds, then he repaired the ditch’s long disused sluice gate. The herdsman was so pleased that he sent for Madame Castineau who clapped her hands when she saw the water run clear from the mill-race to irrigate the pasture. ‘The water, how do you say? No water for years, yes?’

‘How many years?’ Sharpe was leaning on a billhook. With his long hair and filthy clothes he might have been mistaken for a farm labourer. ‘Vingt, quarante?’

Sharpe’s French came slowly, but night by night, sitting awkwardly at the supper table, he was forced to communicate with Madame Castineau. By the end of June he could hold a conversation, though there were still annoying misunderstandings, but by the middle of July he was as comfortable in French as he had ever been in Spanish. He and Lucille now discussed everything: the late war, the weather, God, steam power, India, the Americas, Napoleon, gardening, soldiering, the respective merits of England and France, how to keep slugs out of vegetable gardens, how to grow strawberries, the future, the past, aristocrats.

‘There were too many aristocrats in France,’ Lucille said scornfully. She was sitting in the last of a summer evening’s sunlight, darning one of the big flax sheets. ‘It wasn’t like England, where only the eldest son inherits. Here, everyone inherited, so we bred aristocrats like rabbits!’ She bit the thread and tied off her stitches. ‘Henri would never use his title, which annoyed Maman. She didn’t care that I ignored mine, but daughters were never important to Maman.’

‘You have a title?’ Sharpe asked in astonishment.

‘I used to have one, before they were all abolished during the revolution. I was only a child, of course; nothing but a little scrap of a child, but I was still formally the Vicomtesse de Seleglise.’ Lucille laughed. ‘What a nonsense!’

‘I don’t think it’s a nonsense.’

‘You’re English, which means you are a fool!’ she said dismissively. ‘It was a nonsense, Major. There were noblemen who were truly nothing but peasants who lived off beans, but still they were accounted aristocrats because their great-great-grandfather had been a viscount or a duke. Look at us!’ She gestured about the farmyard. ‘We call it a château, but it’s really nothing more than a large and penniless farmhouse with a very inconvenient ditch around it.’

‘It’s a very beautiful farmhouse,’ Sharpe said.

‘To be sure.’ Lucille liked it when Sharpe praised the house. She often said that all she now wanted was to live in the château for ever. There had been a time, she admitted, when she had thought that she would like to cut a dash in Paris, but then her husband had died, and her ambition had died with him.

One evening Sharpe asked about Castineau and Lucille fetched his portrait. Sharpe saw a thin, dark-faced man in a well-cut colonel’s uniform which gleamed with gold aigulettes. He carried a brass helmet under his left arm and a sabre in his right hand. ‘He was very handsome,’ Lucille said wistfully. ‘No one understood why he chose me. It certainly wasn’t for my money!’ She laughed.

‘How did he die?’

‘In battle,’ Lucille said curtly, then, with an apologetic shrug, ‘how do men die in battle, Major?’

‘Nastily.’ Sharpe said the word in English.

‘Very nastily, I’m sure,’ Lucille said in the same language, ‘but do you miss it, Major?’

Sharpe pushed his black hair, with its grey streak, away from his forehead. ‘The day I heard that peace was signed was one of the happiest of my life.’

‘Truly?’

‘Truly.’

Lucille paused to thread a needle. This evening she was embroidering one of her old dresses. ‘My brother said that you were a man who enjoyed war.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Maybe.’ Lucille mockingly imitated Sharpe’s scowl. ‘What is this peut-être? Did you enjoy it?’

‘Sometimes.’

She sighed with exasperation at his obdurate evasion. ‘So what is enjoyable about war? Tell me, I would like to understand.’

Sharpe had to grope for words if he was to offer an explanation in the unfamiliar language. ‘It’s very clear-cut. Things are black or white. You have a task and you can measure your success absolutely.’

‘A gambler would say the same,’ Lucille said scornfully.

‘True.’

‘And the men you killed? What of them? They were just losers?’

‘Just losers,’ Sharpe agreed, then he remembered that this woman’s husband had died in battle, and blushed. ‘I’m sorry, Madame.’

‘For my husband?’ Lucille instantly understood Sharpe’s contrition. ‘I sometimes think he died in the way he wished. He went to war with such excitement; for him it was all glory and adventure.’ She paused in the middle of a stitch. ‘He was young.’

‘I’m glad he didn’t fight in Spain,’ Sharpe said.

‘Because that makes you innocent of his death?’ Lucille scorned him with a grimace. ‘Why are soldiers such romantics? You obviously thought nothing of killing Frenchmen, but just a little knowledge of your enemy makes you feel sympathy! Did you never feel sympathy in battle?’

‘Sometimes. Not often.’

‘Did you enjoy killing?’

‘No,’ Sharpe said, and he found himself telling her about the battle at Toulouse and how he had decided not to kill anyone, and how he had broken the vow. That battle seemed so far away now, like part of another man’s life, but suddenly he laughed, remembering how he had seen General Calvet on the battlefield and, because it might help Lucille understand, he described his feelings at that moment; how he had forgotten his fear and had desperately wanted to prove himself a better fighter than the doughty Calvet.

‘It sounds very childish to me,’ Lucille said.

‘You never rejoiced when Napoleon won great victories?’ Sharpe asked.

Lucille gave a very characteristic shrug. ‘Napoleon.’ She pronounced his name scathingly, but then she relented. ‘Yes, we did feel pride. We shouldn’t have done, perhaps, but we did. Yet he killed many Frenchmen to give us that pride. But,’ she shrugged again, ‘I’m French, so yes, I rejoiced when we won great victories.’ She smiled. ‘Not that we heard of many great victories in Spain. You will tell me that was because we were foolish enough to fight the English, yes?’

‘We were a very good army,’ Sharpe said, and then, provoked by Lucille’s continuing curiosity, he told her about Spain, and about his daughter, Antonia, who now lived with relatives on the Portuguese border.

‘You never see her?’ Lucille asked in a shocked voice.

He shrugged. ‘It’s being a soldier.’

‘That takes preference over love?’ she asked, appalled.

‘Her mother’s dead,’ Sharpe said lamely, then tried to explain that Antonia was better off where she was.

‘Her mother’s dead?’ Lucille probed, and Sharpe described his first wife, and how she had died in the snows of a high mountain pass.

‘Couldn’t your daughter live with your parents?’ Lucille asked, and Sharpe had to confess that he had no parents and that, indeed, he was nothing but a fatherless son of a long-dead whore. Lucille was amused by his embarrassed confession. ‘William the Conqueror was a bastard,’ she said, ‘and he wasn’t a bad soldier.’

‘For a Frenchman,’ Sharpe allowed.

‘He had Viking blood,’ Lucille said. ‘That’s what Norman means. Northman.’ When Lucille told him facts like that she made Sharpe feel very ignorant, but he liked listening to her, and some days he would even take one of her books up to the tower and try hard to read what she had recommended. Lucille gave him one of her brother’s favourite books which contained the essays of a dead Frenchman called Montesquieu. Sharpe read most of the essays, though he frequently had to shout down to the yard for the translation of a difficult word.

One night Lucille asked him about his future. ‘We’ll find Ducos,’ Sharpe answered, ‘but after that? I suppose I’ll go home.’

‘To your wife?’

‘If I still have a wife,’ Sharpe said, and thus for the first time acknowledged his besetting fear. That night there was a thunderstorm as violent as the one which had punctuated Sharpe’s long journey north through France. Lightning slashed the ridge north of the château, the dogs howled in the barn, and Sharpe lay awake listening to the rain pour off the roof and slosh in the gutters. He tried to remember Jane’s face, but somehow her features would not come clear in his memory.

In the rinsed daylight next morning the carrier arrived from Caen with a letter addressed to Monsieur Tranchant, which was the name Frederickson had said he would use if he had news for Sharpe. The letter bore a Paris address and had a very simple message. ‘I’ve found him. I will wait here till you can come. I am known as Herr Friedrich in my lodging house. Paris is wonderful, but we must go to Naples. Write to me if you cannot come within the next fortnight. My respect to Madame.’ There was no explanation of how Frederickson had found Ducos’s whereabouts.

‘Captain Frederickson sends you his respects,’ Sharpe told Lucille.

‘He’s a good man,’ Lucille said very blandly. She was watching Sharpe grind an edge on to his sword with one of the stones used to sharpen the château’s sickles. ‘So you’re leaving us, Major?’

‘Indeed, Madame, but if you have no objections I would like to wait a few days to see if my Sergeant returns.’

Lucille shrugged. ‘D’accord.’

Harper returned a week later, full of his own happy news. Isabella was still in her native Spain, but now safely provided with money and a rented house. The baby was well. It had taken Harper longer than he had anticipated to find a ship going to Pasajes, so he had temporarily abandoned his plans for taking Isabella back to Ireland. ‘I thought you and I should finish our business first, sir.’

‘That’s kind of you, Patrick. It’s good to see you again.’

‘Good to see you, sir. You’re looking grand, so you are.’

‘I’m going grey.’ Sharpe touched his forelock.

‘Just a badger’s streak, sir.’ Harper had been about to add that it would attract the women, but then he remembered Jane and he bit the comment off just in time.

The two men walked along the stream which fed the mill-race. Sharpe liked to sit by this stream with a horsehair fishing line and some of Henri Lassan’s old lures. He told Harper of Frederickson’s letter. He said they would leave in the morning, bound first for Paris, then for Naples. He said he was feeling almost wholly fit and that his leg was very nearly as strong as ever. He added a lot more entirely inconsequential news, and only after a long time did he ask the question that the Irishman dreaded. Sharpe asked it in a very insouciant voice that did not in the least deceive Harper. ‘Did you manage to see Jane?’

‘So Captain d’Alembord didn’t write to you, sir?’ Harper had continued to hope that d’Alembord might have broken the bad news to Sharpe.

‘No letter reached me. Did he write?’

‘I wouldn’t know, sir. It’s just that he and I saw Mrs Sharpe together, sir, so we did.’ Harper could not bear telling the truth and tried desperately to return the conversation to its former harmless pattern. He muttered that the cows across the stream looked good and fleshy.

‘They don’t give a bad yield, either,’ Sharpe said with a surprising enthusiasm. ‘Madame has her dairymaid rub butterwort on the teats; she says it gives more milk.’

‘I must remember that one, sir.’ Harper stripped a grass stalk of its seeds which he scattered into a drainage ditch. ‘And would that be the sluice gate you rebuilt, sir?’

Sharpe proudly showed Harper how he had stripped the worm-gear of rust and smeared it with goose-fat so that the rebuilt blade would once again rise and fall. ‘See?’ The gear was still stiff, but Sharpe managed to close the gate to cut off the stream water.

‘That’s grand, sir.’ Harper was impressed.

Sharpe wound the gate open again, then sat heavily down on the stream bank. He stared away from Harper, looking across the water towards the beech trees that climbed up the northern spur of the hills. ‘Tell me about Jane.’

Harper still tried to evade telling the truth. ‘I didn’t speak to her, sir.’

Sharpe seemed not to hear the evasion. ‘It isn’t hard to explain, is it?’

‘What’s that, sir?’

Sharpe plucked a leaf of watercress from the stream’s edge. ‘I saw an eel trap once, and I was wondering whether I could put one down by the spillway.’ He pointed downstream towards the mill. ‘But I can’t remember how the damn thing worked exactly.’

Harper sat a pace or two behind Sharpe. ‘It’s like a cage, isn’t it?’

‘Something like that.’ Sharpe spat out a shred of leaf. ‘I suppose she took the money and found herself someone else?’

‘I don’t know what she did with the money, sir,’ Harper said miserably.

Sharpe turned and looked at his friend. ‘But she has found another man?’

Harper was pinned to the truth now. He hesitated for a second, then nodded bleakly. ‘It’s that bugger called Rossendale.’

‘Jesus Christ.’ Sharpe turned away so that Harper would not see the pain on his face. For a split second that pain was like a red hot steel whip slashing across his soul. It hurt. He had more than half expected this news, and he had thought himself prepared for it, but it still hurt more than he could ever have dreamed. He was a soldier, and soldiers had such high pride, and no wound hurt more than damaged pride. God, it hurt.

‘Sir?’ Harper’s voice was thick with sympathy.

‘You’d better tell me everything.’ Sharpe was like a wounded man aggravating his injury in the vain hope that it would not prove so bad as he had at first feared.

Harper told how he had tried to deliver the letter, and how Lord Rossendale had scarred him with his whip. He said he was certain Jane had recognized him. His voice tailed away as he described Jane’s whoop of triumph. ‘I’m sorry, sir. Jesus, I’d have killed the bugger myself, but Mr d’Alembord threatened to turn me over to the provosts if I did.’

‘He was quite right, Patrick. It isn’t your quarrel.’ Sharpe pushed his fingers into the soft earth beside a water-rat’s hole. He had watched the otters in this stream, and envied them their playfulness. ‘I didn’t really think she’d do it,’ he said softly.

‘She’ll regret it, sir. So will he!’

‘God!’ Sharpe almost said the word as a burst of laughter, then, after another long pause during which Harper could scarcely even bear to look at him, Sharpe spoke again. ‘Her brother was rotten to his black heart.’

‘So he was, sir.’

‘Not that it really matters, Patrick. Not that it really matters at all,’ Sharpe said in a very odd voice. ‘It’s just sauce for the goose, I suppose.’

Harper did not understand, nor did he like to ask for any explanation. He sensed Sharpe’s hurt, but did not know how to salve it, so he said nothing.

Sharpe stared at the northern hill. ‘Rossendale and Jane must think I’m done for, don’t they?’

‘I suppose so, sir. They think the Crapauds will arrest you for murder and chop your head off.’

‘Perhaps they will.’ Not six months before, Sharpe thought, he had commanded his own battalion, had a wife he loved, and could have called upon the patronage of a prince. Now he wore a cuckold’s horns and would be the laughing stock of his enemies, but there was nothing he could do except bear the agony. He pushed himself upright. ‘We’ll not mention this again, Sergeant.’

‘No, sir.’ Harper was feeling immensely relieved. Sharpe, he thought, had taken the news far better than he had expected.

‘And tomorrow we leave for Paris,’ Sharpe said brusquely. ‘You’ve got money?’

‘I fetched some from London, sir.’

‘We’ll hire horses in Caen. Perhaps, if you’d be kind enough, you’ll lend me some so I can pay Madame Castineau for her services to me? I’ll repay you when I can.’ Sharpe frowned. ‘If I can.’

‘Don’t even think about repaying it, sir.’

‘So let’s go and kill the bugger!’ Sharpe spoke with an extraordinary malevolence, and Harper somehow doubted whether Pierre Ducos was the man Sharpe spoke of.

Next morning they wrapped their weapons and, in a summer rainstorm, left Lucille’s château to find an enemy.