Читать книгу Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe’s Revenge, Sharpe’s Waterloo, Sharpe’s Devil - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 29

It proved a long journey. Sharpe still feared capture and so he avoided all livery stables, coaching inns and barge quays. They had purchased three good horses with a portion of the money Harper had brought from England, and they coddled the beasts south from Paris. They travelled in civilian clothes, with their uniforms and rifles wrapped inside long cloth bundles. They avoided the larger towns, and spurred off the road whenever they saw a uniformed man ahead. They only felt safe from their shadowy enemies when they crossed the border into Piedmont. From there they faced a choice between the risk of brigands on the Italian roads or the menace of the Barbary pirates off the long coastline. ‘I’d like to see Rome,’ Frederickson opted for the land route, ‘but not if you’re going to press me to make indecent haste.’

‘Which I shall,’ Sharpe said, so instead they sold the horses for a dispiriting loss and paid for passage on a small decaying coaster that crawled from harbour to harbour with an ever-changing cargo. They carried untreated hides, raw clay, baulks of black walnut, wine, woven cloth, pigs of lead, and a motley collection of anonymous passengers among whom the three civilian-clothed Riflemen, despite their bundled weapons, went unremarked. Once, when a dirty grey topsail showed in the west, the captain swore it was a North African pirate and made his passengers man the long sweeps which dipped futilely in the limpid water. Two hours later the ‘pirate’ ship turned out to be a Royal Navy sloop which disdainfully ghosted past the exhausted oarsmen. Frederickson stared at his blistered hands, then snarled insults at the merchant-ship’s captain.

Sharpe was impressed by his friend’s command of Italian invective, but his admiration only earned a short-tempered reproof. ‘I am constantly irritated,’ Frederickson said, ‘by your naïve astonishment for the mediocre attainments of a very ordinary education. Of course I speak Italian. Not well, but passably. It is, after all, merely a bastard form of dog-Latin, and even you should be able to master its crudities with a little study. I’m going to sleep. If that fool sees another pirate, don’t trouble to wake me.’

It was a difficult journey, not just because circumspection and Harper’s shrinking store of money had demanded the most frugal means of travel, but because of Lucille Castineau. Frederickson’s questions about the widow had commenced almost as soon as Sharpe rejoined his friend in Paris. Sharpe had answered the questions, but in such a manner as to suggest that he had not found anything specifically remarkable in Madame Castineau’s life, and certainly nothing memorable. Frederickson too had taken care to sound very casual, as though his enquiries sprang from mere politeness, yet Sharpe noted how often the questions came. Sharpe came to dread the interrogations, and knew that he could only end them by confessing a truth he was reluctant to utter. The inevitable moment for that confession came late one evening when their cargoship was working its slow way towards the uncertain lights of a small port. ‘I was thinking,’ Frederickson and Sharpe were alone on the lee rail and Frederickson, after a long silence, had broached the dreaded subject, ‘that perhaps I should go back to the château when all this is over. Just to thank Madame, of course.’ It was phrased as a benign suggestion, but there was an unmistakable appeal in the words; Frederickson sought Sharpe’s assurance that he would be welcomed by Lucille.