Читать книгу Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe’s Revenge, Sharpe’s Waterloo, Sharpe’s Devil - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 27

If William Frederickson was in need of solace after his disappointment that Lucille Castineau had rejected his proposal of marriage, then no place was better provided to supply that solace than Paris.

At first he made no efforts to track down Pierre Ducos; instead he simply threw himself into an orgy of distraction to take his mind away from the widow Castineau. He wandered the city streets and admired building after building. He sketched Notre-Dame, the Conciergerie, the Louvre, and his favourite building, the Madeleine. His best drawing, for it was suffused with his own misery, was of the abandoned Arc de Triomphe, intended to be a massive monument to Napoleon’s victories, but now nothing more than the stumps of unfaced walls which stood like ruins in a muddy field. Russian soldiers were encamped about the abandoned monument while their women hung washing from its truncated stonework.

The city was filled with the troops of the victorious allies. The Russians were in the Champs-Élysees, the Prussians in the Tuileries, and there were even a few British troops bivouacking in the great square where Louis XVI’s head had been cut off. A prurient curiosity made Frederickson pay a precious sou to see the Souricière, the ‘mousetrap’, which was the undercroft of the Conciergerie where the guillotine’s victims had been given their ‘toilette’ before climbing into the tumbrils. The ‘toilette’ was a haircut that exposed the neck’s nape so that the blade would not be obstructed, and Frederickson’s guide, a cheerful man, claimed that half Paris’s mattresses were stuffed with the tresses of dead aristocrats. Frederickson probed the thin mattress in his cheap lodging house and was disappointed to find nothing but horsehair. The owner of the house believed Herr Friedrich to be a veteran of the Emperor’s armies; one of the many Germans who had fought for France.

On the day after his visit to the Conciergerie, Frederickson met an Austrian cavalry Sergeant’s wife who had fled from her husband and now sought a protector. For a week Frederickson thought he had successfully blotted Lucille out of his mind, but then the Austrian woman went back to her husband and Frederickson again felt the pain of rejection. He tried to exorcise it by walking to Versailles where he drowned himself in the château’s magnificence. He bought a new sketchbook and for three days he feverishly sketched the great palace, but all the while, though he tried to deny it to himself, he was thinking of Madame Castineau. At night he would try to draw her face until, disgusted with his obession, he tore up the sketchbook and walked back to Paris to begin his search for Pierre Ducos.

The records of the Imperial Army were still held in the Invalides, guarded there by a sour-faced archivist who admitted that no one had informed him what he was expected to do with the imperial records. ‘No one is interested any more.’

‘I am,’ Frederickson said, and at the cost of a few hours sympathetic listening to the archivist, he was given access to the precious files. After three weeks Frederickson had still not found Pierre Ducos. He had found much else that was fascinating, scandals that could waste hours of time to explore, but there was no file on Ducos. The man might as well never have existed.

The archivist, sensing a fellow bitterness in Herr Friedrich’s soul, became enthusiastic about the search, which he believed was for Frederickson’s former commanding officer. ‘Have you written to the other officers you and he served with?’

‘I tried that,’ Frederickson said, but then a stray idea flickered into his thoughts. It was an idea so tenuous that he almost ignored it, but, because the archivist was breathing into his face, and because the man had lunched well on garlic soup, Frederickson admitted there was one officer he had not contacted. ‘A Commandant Lassan,’ he said, ‘I think he commanded a coastal fort. I didn’t know him, but Major Ducos often talked of him.’

‘Let’s look for him. Lassan, you said?’

The idea was very nebulous. Frederickson could now wander freely among the file shelves, but, before Napoleon’s surrender, regulations had strictly controlled access to the imperial files. Then, any officer drawing a file had his name, and that day’s date, written on the file’s cover, and Frederickson had been wondering whether Ducos had discovered Lassan through these dusty records and, if so, whether the dead man’s file would show Ducos’s signature on its cover. If it did – the idea was very tenuous – the archivist might remember the man who had drawn that file.

‘It shows an address in Normandy.’ The archivist had discovered Lassan’s slim file. ‘The Château Lassan. I doubt that’s one of the great houses of France. I’ve never heard of it.’

‘May I see?’ Frederickson took the file and felt the familiar pang as he saw Lucille’s address. Then he looked at the file’s cover. There was only one signature, that of a Colonel Joliot, but the date beside Joliot’s name showed that this file had been consulted just two weeks before Lassan’s murder. The coincidence was too fortuitous, so, rejecting coincidence, ‘Colonel Joliot’ had to be Pierre Ducos. ‘Joliot,’ Frederickson said, ‘that sounds a familiar name?’

‘It would be if you wore spectacles!’ The archivist touched an inky finger to his own eyeglasses. ‘The Joliot brothers are the most reputable spectacle makers in Paris.’

Ducos wore spectacles. Frederickson recalled Sharpe describing the Frenchman’s livid anger when Sharpe had once broken those precious spectacles in Spain. Had Ducos consulted this file, then scribbled a familiar name on its cover as a disguise for his own identity? Frederickson had to hide his sudden excitement, which was that of a hunter sighting his prey. ‘Where would I find the Joliot brothers?’

‘They’re behind the Palais de Chaillot, Capitaine Friedrich, but I assure you that neither of them is a colonel!’ The archivist tapped the signature.

‘I need to see a spectacle-maker anyway,’ Frederickson said. ‘My eye, Monsieur, is sometimes made tired by reading.’

‘It is age, mon Capitaine, nothing but age.’

That diagnosis was echoed by Jules Joliot who greeted Captain Friedrich in his elegant shop behind the Palace of Chaillot. Joliot wore a tiny gold bee in his lapel as a discreet emblem of his loyalty to the Emperor. ‘All eyes grow tired with age,’ he told Frederickson, ‘even the Emperor is forced to use reading glasses, so you must not think it any disgrace. And, Capitaine, you will forgive me, but your one eye is forced to do the labour of two so, alas, it will tire more easily. But you have come to the best establishment in Paris!’ Monsieur Joliot boasted that his workshops had despatched spyglasses to Moscow, monocles to Madrid, and eyeglasses to captured French officers in London and Edinburgh. Alas, he said, the war’s ending had been bad for business. Combat was hard on fine lenses.

Frederickson asked why a captured officer would send for spectacles from Paris when, surely, it would have been swifter to buy replacement glasses in London. ‘Not if he wanted fine workmanship,’ Joliot said haughtily. ‘Come!’ He led Frederickson past cabinets of line telescopes and opened a drawer in which he kept some of his rivals’ products. ‘These are spectacles from London. You perceive the distortion at the edge of the lens?’

‘But if an officer loses his spectacles,’ Frederickson insisted, ‘how would you know what to send him as a replacement?’

Joliot proudly showed his visitor a vast chest of shallow tray-like drawers which each held hundreds of delicate plaster discs. Joliot handled the fragile discs with immense care. Each human eye, Joliot said, was subtly different, and great experimentation was needed to find a lens which corrected any one eye’s unique deficiency. Once that peculiar lens was discovered it was copied exactly in plaster, and the casts were kept in these drawers. ‘This one is an eyeglass for Marshal Ney, this one for the left eye of Admiral Suffren, and here,’ Joliot could not resist the boast, ‘are the Emperor’s reading glasses.’ He opened a velvet lined box in which two plaster discs rested. He explained that by using the most delicate gauges and calipers, a skilled workman could grind a lens to the exact same shape as one of the plaster discs. ‘No other firm is as sophisticated as we, but, alas, with the war’s ending, we are sadly underemployed. We shall soon have to begin making cheap magnifying glasses for the amusement of children and women.’

Frederickson was impressed, but Frederickson had no way of discovering that the Joliot Brothers had never ground a lens in their lives, or that they simply supplied the same Venetian lens that every other spectacle-maker used. The plaster discs, with their promise of scientific accuracy, were nothing but a marvellous device for improving sales.

‘Now,’ Joliot said, ‘we must experiment upon your tired eye, Captain. You will take a seat, perhaps?’

Frederickson had no wish to be experimented on. ‘I have a friend,’ he said, ‘whose spectacles came from your shop, and I noticed that his lens suited my eye to perfection.’

‘His name?’

‘Pierre Ducos. Major Pierre Ducos.’

‘Let us see.’ Joliot seemed somewhat disappointed at not being able to dazzle Frederickson with his array of experimental lenses. Instead he took Frederickson into a private office where the firm’s order book rested on a long table. ‘Pierre Ducos, you say?’

‘Indeed, Monsieur. I last saw him at Bordeaux, but alas, where he is now, I cannot tell.’

‘Then let us see if we can help.’ Monsieur Joliot adjusted his own spectacles and ran a finger down the pages. He hummed as he scanned the lists, while Frederickson, not daring to hope, yet fearing to lose hope, stared about the room which was foully decorated with large plaster models of dissected human eyes.

The humming suddenly ceased. Frederickson turned to see Monsieur Joliot holding a finger to an entry in the big ledger. ‘Ducos, you say?’ Monsieur Joliot spelled the name, then said it again. ‘Major Pierre Ducos?’

‘Indeed, Monsieur.’

‘You must have very bad sight, mon Capitaine, if his lenses suited your eye. I see that we supplied him with his first eyeglasses in ’09, and that we urgently despatched replacements to Spain in January of ’13. He is a very short-sighted man!’

‘Indeed, but most loyal to the Emperor.’ Frederickson thus tried to keep Monsieur Joliot’s co-operation.

‘I see no address in Bordeaux,’ Joliot said, then beamed with pleasure. ‘Ah! I see a new order arrived only last week!’

Frederickson hardly dared ask the next question for fear of being disappointed. ‘A new order?’

‘For no less than five pairs of spectacles! And three of those pairs are to be made from green glass to diminish the sun’s glare.’ Then, suddenly, Joliot shook his head. ‘Alas, no. The order is not for Major Ducos at all, but for a friend. The Count Poniatowski. Just like you, Capitaine, the Count has discovered that Major Ducos’s spectacles suit his eyes. It frequently happens that a man discovers that his friend’s eyeglasses suit him, and so he orders a similar pair for himself.’

Or, Frederickson thought, a man did not want to be found, so used another name behind which he could hide. ‘I would be most grateful, Monsieur, if you would give me the Count Poniatowski’s address. Perhaps he will know where I might find the Major. As I told you, we were close friends, and the war’s ending has left us sadly separated.’

‘Of course.’ Monsieur Joliot had no scruples about betraying a client’s address, or perhaps his scruples were allayed by the thought that he might lose this customer if he did not comply. ‘It’s in the Kingdom of Naples.’ Joliot scribbled down the Villa Lupighi’s address, then asked whether Captain Friedrich could remember which lens of Ducos’s spectacles had suited his eye.

‘The left,’ Frederickson said at random, then was forced to pay a precious coin as a deposit on the monocle which Monsieur Joliot promised to frame in tortoiseshell and to have ready in six weeks. ‘Fine workmanship takes that long, I fear.’

Frederickson bowed his thanks. As he left the shop he discovered that the passion of the hunt had meant that he had not thought of Lucille Castineau for the best part of an hour, though the moment he realized his apparent freedom from that obsession, so it returned with all its old and familiar sadness. Nevertheless the hounds had found a scent, and it was time to summon Sharpe to the long run south.

It was the ignorance that was the worst, Ducos decided, the damned, damned ignorance.

For years he had moved in the privileged world of a trusted imperial officer; he had received secret reports from Paris, he had read captured dispatches, he had known as much as any man about the workings of the Empire and the machinations of its enemies, but now he was in darkness.

Some newspapers came to the Villa Lupighi on the coast north of Naples, but they were old and, as Ducos knew well, unreliable. He read that a great conference would decide Europe’s future, and that it would meet in Vienna. He saw that Wellington, newly made a duke, would be Britain’s Ambassador in Paris, but that was not the news Ducos sought. Ducos wished to learn that a British Rifle officer had been court-martialled. He wanted to be certain that Sharpe was disgraced, for then no one else could be blamed for the disappearance of the Emperor’s gold. Lacking that news, Ducos’s fears grew until the Rifleman had become a nemesis to stalk his waking nightmares.

Ducos armed himself against his worst fears. He had Sergeant Challon clear the undergrowth from the hill on which the decayed Villa Lupighi stood so that, by the time the work was done, the old house seemed to be perched on a mound of scraped earth on which no intruder could hope to hide.

The villa itself was a massive ruin. Ducos had restored the living quarters at the building’s western end where he occupied rooms which opened on to a great terrace from which he could stare out to sea. He could not use the terrace from midday onwards for he found that the brilliant sunlight reflecting off the sea hurt his eyes and, until the Joliot Brothers sent him the tinted spectacles, he was forced to spend his afternoons indoors.

Sergeant Challon and his men had the rooms behind Ducos’s more palatial suite. Their quarters opened on to an internal courtyard built like a cloister. An old fig tree had split one corner of the cloister. Each of the Dragoons had his own woman living in the house, for Challon had insisted to Ducos that his men could not live like monks while they were waiting for the day when it would be safe to leave this refuge. The women were found in Naples and paid with French silver.

The eastern half of the villa, which looked inland to the olive groves and high mountains, was nothing but a ruined chaos of fallen masonry and broken columns. Some of the ruined walls were three storeys high, while others were just a foot off the ground. At night, when Ducos’s fears were at their highest, two savage dogs were unleashed to roam those fallen stones.

Sergeant Challon tried to ease Ducos’s fears. No one would find them in the Villa Lupighi, he said, for the Cardinal was their friend. Ducos nodded agreement, but each day he would demand another loophole made in some exterior wall.

Sergeant Challon had other fears himself. ‘The men are happy enough now,’ he told Ducos, ‘but it won’t last. They can’t wait here for ever. They’ll get bored, sir, and you know how bored soldiers soon become troublemakers.’

‘They’ve got their women.’

‘That’s their nights taken care of, sir, but what use is a woman in daylight?’

‘We have an agreement,’ Ducos insisted, and Challon agreed that they did indeed have an agreement, but now he wanted its terms altered. Now, he suggested, the remaining Dragoons should only stay with Ducos until the year’s end. That was enough time, Challon insisted, and afterwards each man would be free to leave, and to take his share of the gold and jewels.

Ducos, presented with the ultimatum, agreed. The year’s end was a long way off, and perhaps Challon was right in his belief that by the New Year the dangers would be gone.

‘You should enjoy yourself, sir,’ Sergeant Challon said slyly. ‘You’ve got the money, sir, and what else is money for?’

And Ducos did try to enjoy himself. One week, after a comet had been discovered, he fancied himself as an astronomer and ordered celestial globes and telescopes to be sent from Naples. That enthusiasm died to be replaced with a burning desire to write the history of Napoleon’s wars, which project evaporated after four nights of feverish writing.

He devised a scheme for irrigating the high fields behind the village which lay between the villa and the sea, then he took up painting and insisted that Sergeant Challon fetched the prettiest girls from the village to stand before his easel. He obsessively worked at mathematical problems, he tried to learn the spinet, he found a fascination in maps on which he refought the campaigns of two decades and, in so doing, pushed the bounds of Empire further than Napoleon had ever done. He took to wearing the uniforms that had been in the Emperor’s baggage, and the villagers spoke of the mad, half-blind French Marshal who paced his vast house dressed in gold braid and with a huge curved sword hanging by his skinny legs. Ducos might call himself the Count Poniatowski, and claim to be a sickly Polish refugee, yet the villagers knew he was as French as their own King who had once been a real French Marshal.

Sergeant Challon endured all the enthusiasms, for the benefits of indulgence were manifold. There truly was so much money to be divided that this temporary exile was endurable. Challon knew that Ducos could go on spending money like water and there would still be a fortune at the year’s end. Even so, when Ducos insisted that more guards be hired, Challon felt constrained to offer a warning note.

‘The lads won’t be too happy to pay them, sir.’

‘I’ll pay them.’ That generosity was easy to offer because Ducos had insisted that he himself guard the treasure which was stored in a great iron chest cemented to the floor in Ducos’s rooms. Even Challon was not certain just how much money was in the box, though he knew down to the last sou just how much each man had been promised at the year’s ending. Ducos, to keep faith with the Dragoons, only had to ensure that those shares were faithfully paid when the time came, and in the meantime the balance was his to spend. He knew, even if Challon did not, that the balance was an Emperor’s ransom; more than even the greedy Cardinal might imagine.

Challon again tried to change Ducos’s mind. ‘There might be trouble, sir, between my lads and these new fellows.’

‘You’re a Sergeant, Challon, you know how to prevent trouble.’

Challon sighed. ‘The new men will want women.’

‘They may have them.’

‘And weapons, sir.’

‘Buy only the best.’

So Challon went to the waterfront at Naples and found twenty men who had once served as soldiers. They were scum, Challon told Ducos, but they were scum who knew how to fight. They were deserters, jailbirds, murderers, and drunks, yet they would be loyal to a man who could pay good wages.

The newly hired men moved into the half ruined rooms in the villa’s centre. They brought women, pistols, sabres and their muskets. There was no trouble, for they recognized Challon’s natural authority and were well rewarded for very little effort. They were not allowed on to the western terrace which was the private domain of their new employer who rarely appeared elsewhere outside the building for he said the sun hurt his eyes, though sometimes they would glimpse him strolling through the big internal courtyard in one of his magnificent uniforms. It was rumoured that he rarely had a woman in his rooms, though once, when he did, the girl reported that the Count Poniatowski had done nothing except stare north to where, far beyond the horizon, another imperial exile had his small kingdom in the Mediterranean. The newly hired guards opined that the Count Poniatowski was mad, but his pay was good, his food and wine plentiful, and he did not quibble when a village girl complained of rape. He would simply have the girl or her parents paid in gold, then encourage his men to practise with their weapons and to keep a good look out for strangers in the hot barren landscape. ‘We should have a cannon,’ he said to Challon one day.

Sergeant Challon, presented with this new evidence of Major Ducos’s fears, sighed. ‘It’s not necessary, sir.’

‘It is necessary. Vitally necessary.’ Ducos had decided that his safety depended on artillery, and nothing would change his mind. He showed Challon how a small field gun, mounted in the villa’s southern wall, would dominate the road which approached the hill. ‘Go to Naples, Challon. Someone will know where a gun can be had.’

So Challon took the money and returned three days later with an old-fashioned grasshopper gun. It was a small field piece which, fifty years before, had been issued to infantry battalions in some armies. The gun was reckoned small enough for two men to carry, which only proved that its inventor had never had to march over rough country with the three-foot brass barrel roped to his shoulder. The barrel was fitted with four stout legs which served as a carriage and, when it was fired, the whole contraption leaped into the air; thus earning the weapon its nickname. Mostly it toppled over after each convulsion, but it could easily be set on its feet again. ‘It’s all I could get, sir.’ Challon seemed somewhat embarrassed by the small and old-fashioned grasshopper gun.

Ducos, though, was delighted, and for a week the landscape echoed with the dull blows of the gun’s firing. It took less than a half pound of powder for its charge, yet still it succeeded in blasting a two and a half pound ball over six hundred yards. For a week, solaced by his new toy, Ducos could forget his fears, but when the novelty wore off his terror returned and a green man again began to haunt his dreams. Yet he was fiercely armed, he had loyal men, and he could only wait.

On the day Sharpe left the château Lucille Castineau discovered a piece of paper behind the mirror on the chest of drawers in her room. Sharpe had scrawled Lucille’s name on the paper which, when unfolded, proved to contain twelve English golden guineas.

Lucille Castineau did not wish to accept the coins. The gold pieces somehow smacked of charity, and thus offended her aristocratic sense of propriety. She supposed that the big Irishman had brought the money. Her instinct was to return the guineas, but she had no address to which she could send any draft of money. Sharpe had written a brief message in hurried and atrocious French on the sheet of paper which had enclosed the coins, but the message only contained a fulsome thanks for Madame Castineau’s kindnesses, a hope that this small donation would cover the expenses of Sharpe’s convalescence, and a promise that he would inform Madame Castineau of what had happened in Naples.

Lucille fingered the thick gold coins. Twelve English guineas amounted to a small fortune. The château’s dairy urgently required two new roof beams, there were hundreds of cuttings needed if the cider orchard was to be replenished, and Lucille had a nagging desire to own a small two-wheeled cart that could be drawn by a docile pony. The coins would buy all those things, and there would still be enough money left over to pay for a proper grave-slab for her mother and brother. So, putting aristocratic propriety to one side, Lucille swept the coins into the pocket of her apron.

‘Life will be better now,’ Marie, the elderly kitchenmaid, who had elected herself as a surrogate mother to the widow Castineau, said to Lucille.

‘Better?’

‘No Englishmen.’ The maid was skinning a rabbit which Harper and Sharpe had snared the previous evening.

‘You didn’t like the Major, Marie?’ Lucille sounded surprised.

Marie shrugged. ‘The Major’s a proper man, Madame, and I liked him well enough, but I did not like the wicked tongues in the village.’

‘Ah.’ Lucille sounded very calm, though she knew well enough what had offended the loyal Marie. Inevitably the villagers had gossiped about the Englishman’s long stay in the château and more than one ignorant person had confidently suggested that Madame and the Major had to be lovers. ‘Tongues will be tongues,’ Lucille said vaguely. ‘A lie cannot hurt the truth.’

Marie had a peasant’s firm belief that a lie could sully the truth. The villagers would say there was no smoke without fire, and mud on a kitchen floor spoke of dirty boots, and those snidely sniggering suggestions upset Marie. The villagers told lies about her mistress, and Marie expected her mistress to share her indignation.

But Lucille would not share Marie’s anger. Instead she calmed the old woman down, then said she had some writing to do and was not to be disturbed. She added that she would be most grateful if the miller’s son could be fetched to take a letter to the village carrier.

The letter went to the carrier that same afternoon. It was addressed to Monsieur Roland, the advocate from the Treasury in Paris, to whom, at long last, Lucille told the whole truth. ‘The Englishmen did not want you to be told,’ she wrote, ‘for they feared you would not believe either them or me, yet, on my honour, Monsieur, I believe in their innocence. I have not told you this before because, so long as the English were in my house, so long did I honour their fear that you would arrange their arrest if you were to discover their presence here. Now they are gone, and I must tell you that the scoundrel who murdered my family and who stole the Emperor’s gold is none other than the man who accused the Englishmen of his crime; Pierre Ducos. He now lives somewhere near Naples, to which place the Englishmen have gone to gain the proof of their innocence. If you, Monsieur, can help them, then you will earn the gratitude of a poor widow.’

The letter was sent, and Lucille waited. The summer grew oppressively hot, but the countryside was safer now as cavalry patrols from Caen scoured the vagabonds out of the woodlands. Lucille often took her new pony-cart between the neighbouring villages, and the old gossip about her faded because the villagers now saw that the widower doctor frequently served as the pony-cart’s driver. It would be an autumn marriage, the villagers suggested, and quite right too. The doctor might be a good few years older than Madame, but he was a steady and kindly man.

The doctor was indeed a confidant of Lucille, but nothing more. She told the doctor, and only the doctor, about the letter she had sent, and expressed her sadness that she had received no reply. ‘Not a proper reply, anyway. Monsieur Roland did acknowledge that he had received my letter, but it was only that, an acknowledgement.’ She made a gesture of disgust. ‘Perhaps Major Sharpe was right?’

‘In what way?’ the doctor asked. He had driven the pony-cart to the top of the ridge where it rolled easily along a dry-rutted road. Every few seconds there were wonderful views to be glimpsed between the thick trees, but Lucille had no eyes for the scenery.

‘The Major did not want me to write. He said it would be better if he was to find Ducos himself.’ She was silent for a few seconds. ‘I think perhaps he would be angry if he knew I had written.’

‘Then why did you write?’

Lucille shrugged. ‘Because it is better for the proper authorities to deal with these matters, n’est-ce-pas?’

‘Major Sharpe didn’t think so.’

‘Major Sharpe is a stubborn man,’ Lucille said scornfully, ‘a fool.’

The doctor smiled. He steered the little cart off the road, bumped it up on to a patch of grass, then curbed the pony in a place from where he and Lucille could stare far to the south. The hills were heavy with foliage and hazed by heat. The doctor gestured at the lovely landscape. ‘France,’ he said with great complacency and love.

‘A fool.’ Lucille, oblivious of all France, repeated the words angrily. ‘His pride will make him go to be killed! All he had to do was to speak to the proper authorities! I would have travelled to Paris with him, and I would have spoken for him, but no, he has to carry his sword to his enemy himself. I do not understand men sometimes. They are like children!’ She waved irritably at a wasp. ‘Perhaps he is already dead.’

The doctor looked at his companion. She was staring southwards, and the doctor thought what a fine profile she had, so full of character. ‘Would it trouble you, Madame,’ he asked, ‘if Major Sharpe was dead?’

For a long time Lucille said nothing, then she shrugged. ‘I think enough French children have lost their fathers in these last years.’ The doctor said nothing, and his silence must have convinced Lucille that he had not understood her words, for she turned a very defiant face on him. ‘I am carrying the Major’s baby.’

The doctor did not know what to say. He felt a sudden jealousy of the English Major, but his fondness for Lucille would not let him betray that ignoble feeling.

Lucille was again staring at the slumbrous landscape, though it was very doubtful if she was aware of the great view. ‘I’ve told no one else. I haven’t even dared take communion these last weeks, for fear of my confession.’

A professional curiosity provoked the doctor’s next words. ‘You’re quite certain you’re pregnant?’

‘I’ve been certain these three weeks now. Yes, I am certain.’

Again the doctor was silent, and his silence troubled Lucille who again turned her grey eyes to him. ‘You think it is a sin?’

The doctor smiled. ‘I’m not competent to judge sinfulness.’

The bland reply made Lucille frown. ‘The château needs an heir.’

‘And that is your justification for carrying the Englishman’s child?’

‘I tell myself that is why, but no.’ She turned to stare again at the distant hills. ‘I am carrying the Major’s child because I think I am in love with him, whatever I mean by that, and please do not ask me. I did not want to love him. He has a wife already, but …’ she shrugged helplessly.

‘But?’ the doctor probed.

‘But I do not know,’ she said firmly. ‘All I do know is that a bastard child of a bastard English soldier will be born this winter, and I would be very grateful, dear doctor, if you would attend the confinement.’

‘Of course.’

‘You may tell people of my condition,’ Lucille said very matter of factly, ‘and I would be grateful if you would tell them who the father is.’ She had decided that the news was best spread quickly, before her belly swelled, so that the malicious tongues could exhaust themselves long before the baby was born. ‘I will tell Marie myself,’ Lucille added.

The doctor, despite his fondness for the widow, rather relished the prospect of spreading this morsel of scandal. He tried to anticipate the questions that he would be asked about the widow’s lover. ‘And the Major? Will he return to you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lucille said very softly. ‘I just don’t know.’

‘But you would like him to return?’

She nodded, and the doctor saw a gleam in her eye, but then Lucille cuffed the tear away, smiled, and said it was time they went back to the valley.

Lucille made her confession that week, and attended Mass on the Sunday morning. Some of the villagers said they had never seen her looking so happy, but Marie knew that the happiness was a mere pose which she had assumed for the benefit of the church. Marie knew better, for she saw how often Madame would gaze down the Seleglise road as if she hoped to see a scowling horseman coming from the south. Thus the warm weeks of a Norman summer passed, and no horseman came.