Sharpe's Revenge

CHAPTER 9

Captain Peter d’Alembord sat in the drawing-room of the Cork Street house and felt acutely uncomfortable. It was not that d’Alembord was unused to luxury, indeed he had been raised in an affluent family of the most exquisite tastes, but his very familiarity with civilized living told him that there was something exceedingly vulgar about this high-ceilinged room. There was, he considered, simply too much of everything. A great chandelier, much too large for the room, hung from a plaster finial, while a dozen crystal sconces crowded the walls. The sconces, like the chandelier, dripped with candle wax that should long have been scraped away. The furniture was mostly lacquered black in the fake Egyptian style that had been fashionable ten years earlier. There were three chaise-longues, two footstools, and a scattering of small lion-footed tables. The gilt-framed pictures seemed to have been bought as a job lot; they all showed rather unlikely shepherdesses dallying with very ethereal young men. A box of candied cherries lay gathering dust on one table, and a bowl of almonds on another.

Dust was everywhere and d’Alembord doubted whether the room had been cleaned for days, perhaps even weeks. The grate was piled with ashes, and the room smelt overwhelmingly of powder and stale perfume. A maid had curtseyed when d’Alembord had handed in his card at the door, but there was little evidence that the girl did any cleaning. d’Alembord could only suppose that Jane Sharpe was merely lodging in the house, for he could not believe that she would allow such slovenliness in her own home.

d’Alembord waited patiently. He could find only one book in the room. It was the first of a three volume romance which told the story of a clergyman’s daughter who, snatched from the bosom of her family by brigands in Italy, was sold to the Barbary pirates of Algiers where she became the plaything of a terrible Muslim chief. By the last page of the book, to which d’Alembord had hastily turned, she was still preserving her maidenly virtue, which seemed a most unlikely outcome considering the reputed behaviour of the Barbary pirates, but then unlikely things properly belonged in books. d’Alembord doubted if he would seek out the remaining volumes.

A black and gilt clock on the mantel whirred, then sounded midday. d’Alembord wondered if he dared pull aside the carefully looped velvet curtains and open a window, then decided that such an act might be thought presumptuous. Instead he watched a spider spin a delicate web between the tassels of a table-cloth on which a vase of flowers wilted.

The clock struck the quarter, then the half, then the hour’s third quarter. d’Alembord had come unannounced to the house, and had thus expected to wait, but he had never anticipated being kept waiting as long as this. If he was ignored till one o’clock, he promised himself, he would leave.

He watched the filigreed minute hand jerk from five minutes to four minutes to one. He decided it would be prudent to leave a message in writing and was about to tug the bell-pull and demand paper and pen from the maid, when the drawing-room door suddenly opened and he turned to see the smiling face of Mrs Jane Sharpe.

“It’s Captain d’Alembord!” Jane said with feigned surprise, as though she had not known who had been waiting for her for so long. “What a pleasure!” She held out a hand to be kissed. “Were you offered tea? Or something more potent, perhaps?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“The girl is perverse,” Jane said, though d’Alembord noted that she did not ring the bell to correct the perversity. “I didn’t know the battalion had reached England?”

“Two weeks ago, Ma’am. They’re now in Chelmsford, but I’m on leave.”

“A well deserved leave, I’m sure. Would you like to draw a curtain, Captain? We must not sit here in Stygian gloom.”

d’Alembord pulled back the heavy velvet, then, when Jane had arranged herself on a chaise-longue, he sat opposite her. They exchanged news, complimented London on its current fine weather, and agreed how welcome the coming of peace was. And all the time, as this small-talk tinkled between them, d’Alembord tried to hide the astonishment he was feeling at the change in Jane. When she had been with the army she had seemed a very sweet-natured and rather shy girl, but now, scarce six months later, she was a woman dressed in the very height of fashion. Her green satin gown fell in simple pleats from its high waist to her ankles. The neckline was cut embarrassingly low so that d’Alembord was treated to an ample view of powdered breasts; very pretty breasts, he decided, but somehow it seemed inappropriate for the wife of a man he liked and admired so to display herself. The shoulders of Jane’s dress were puffed and the sleeves very long, very tight and trimmed at their wrists with lace frills. She wore no stockings, instead displaying bare ankles that somehow suggested the vulnerability of innocence. Her shoes were silver slippers tied with silver thongs in the quasi-Greek fashion. Her golden hair was drawn up above her ears, thus displaying her long and slender neck about which was a necklace of rubies which d’Alembord supposed must have been plundered from the French baggage at Vitoria.

The rubies suited her, d’Alembord decided. They were rare jewels for an undoubtedly beautiful woman. He saw her smiling at his inspection, and realized with embarrassment that Jane had perceived his admiration and was relishing it.

He quickly changed the subject to the reason for his visit. He had brought her, d’Alembord said, a message from Major Sharpe. He apologized that he had brought no letter, but explained the hurried circumstances of his meeting with Sharpe in Bordeaux.

“So you don’t know where the Major is now?” Jane asked eagerly.

“Alas no, Ma’am, except that he’s gone to find a French officer who can attest to his innocence.”

The eagerness seemed to ebb from Jane who stood, walked to the window, and stared down the sunlit street. She told d’Alembord that she already knew something of her husband’s predicament, and explained how the two men from the Judge Advocate General’s office had visited her with their outrageous demands. “I’ve heard nothing since then,” Jane said, “and until your visit, Captain, I did not even know whether my husband was alive.”

“Then I’m glad to be the bearer of good news, Ma’am.”

“Is it good news?” Jane turned from the window. “Of course it is,” she added hurriedly, “but it all seems extremely strange to me. Do you think my husband did steal the Emperor’s gold?”

“No, Ma’am!” d’Alembord protested. “The accusations against him are monstrous!”

Jane resumed her seat, thus letting d’Alembord sit again. She plucked the folds of her dress, then frowned. “What I do not understand, Captain, is that if my husband is innocent, which of course he is, then why did he not allow the army to discover that innocence? An innocent man does not run away from a fair trial, does he?”

“He does, Ma’am, if the only evidence against him is false. Major Sharpe is attempting to prove those falsities. And he needs our help.”

Jane said nothing. Instead she just smiled and indicated that d’Alembord should continue speaking.

“What we have to do, Ma’am, is harness what influence we can to prevent the machinery of accusation going farther. And should the Major fail to find the truth in France, then he will need the help of influential friends.”

“Very influential,” Jane said drily.

“He mentioned a Lord Rossendale, Ma’am?” d’Alembord wondered why Jane was so unresponsive, but ploughed on anyway. “Lord Rossendale is an aide to His Royal Highness, the Prince…”

“I know Lord John Rossendale,” Jane said hurriedly, “and I have already spoken with him.”

d’Alembord felt a surge of relief. He had been unsettled by this interview, both by Jane’s new and languid sophistication, and by her apparent lack of concern about her husband’s fate, yet now it seemed as if she had already done her duty by Sharpe. “May I ask, Ma’am, whether Lord Rossendale expressed a willingness to help the Major?” d’Alembord pressed.

“His Lordship assured me that he will do all that is within his power,” Jane said very primly.

“Would that include presenting Major Sharpe’s problem to the Prince Regent, Ma’am?”

“I really couldn’t say, Captain, but I’m sure Lord Rossendale will be assiduous.”

“Would it help, Ma’am, if I was to add my voice to yours?”

Jane seemed to consider the offer, then frowned. “Of course I cannot prevent you from trying to see his Lordship, though I’m sure he is a most busy man.”

“Of course, Ma’am.” d’Alembord was again puzzled by Jane’s impenetrable decorum.

Jane turned to look at the clock. “Of course we will all do everything we can, Captain, though I rather suspect that the best thing to do is to allow my husband to disentangle himself.” She gave a small unamused laugh. “He’s rather good at that, is he not?”

“Indeed he is, Ma’am. Very good, but…”

“And in the meanwhile,” Jane ignored whatever d’Alem-bord had been about to say, “my duty is to make everything ready for his return.” She waved a hand about the room. “Do you like my new house, Captain?”

“Extremely, Ma’am.” d’Alembord concealed his surprise along with his true opinion. He had imagined that Jane was merely staying in the house, now he discovered that she owned it.

“The Major wished to buy a home in the country,” Jane said, “but once I had returned to England I could not endure the thought of burying myself in rustic ignorance. Besides, it is more convenient to look after the Major’s affairs in London than from the country.”

“Indeed, Ma’am.” d’Alembord wanted more details of how Jane was looking after Sharpe’s affairs, but he sensed that further enquiries would reveal nothing. There was something unsettling in the situation, and d’Alembord did not want to provoke it.

“So I bought this house instead,” Jane went on. “Do you think the Major will like it?”

d’Alembord was convinced that Sharpe would detest it, but it was not his place to say so. “It seems a very good house, Ma’am,” he said with as much diplomacy as he could muster.

“Of course I share the house at the moment,” Jane was eager to stress the propriety of her situation, “with a widow. It would hardly be proper otherwise, would it?”

“I’m sure you would do nothing improper, Ma’am.”

“It’s such a pity that the Lady Spindacre is still abed, but dear Juliet’s health is not of the best. You must visit us, Captain, one evening at eight. We usually receive downstairs at that hour, but if no link is lit outside, then you will know that we are not at home. If a lamp is lit then you must announce yourself, though I should warn you that London is sadly bored with soldiers’ tales!” Jane smiled as though she knew her charms would ameliorate the rudeness of her words.

“I would not dream of inflicting soldiers’ tales on you, Ma’am.” d’Alembord spoke stiffly.

“London has so many other fascinations to indulge besides the late wars. It will be good for the Major to come here, I think. Especially as he made some very high connections on his last visit, and it would be impossible to preserve those connections if he buries himself in Dorsetshire.”

“You refer to the Prince?” d’Alembord said in the hope that he would learn more of Jane’s conversation with Lord Rossendale.

“But none of those connections, I think, will care to travel into the remote parts of the country to hear stories of war,” was Jane’s only response. She looked at the clock again, then held out her hand to indicate that the conversation was over. “Thank you for visiting me, Captain.”

“It was my pleasure, Ma’am.” d’Alembord bowed over the offered hand. “Your servant, Ma’am.”

Once outside the house d’Alembord leaned for an instant on the black railings, then shook his head. He had a suspicion that he had achieved nothing, but he could not quite pin down the reasons for that suspicion. Yet there was one thing for which he was supremely grateful, which was that he had no address by which he could reach Sharpe. What in hell could he have written? He sighed, wondered if there was anyone else he could approach for help, then walked away.

The horse-pistol had been loaded with three small pistol bullets. The first had entered the upper part of Sharpe’s left arm where it first shattered his shoulder joint, then ricocheted to crack the blade of the big bone behind. The second bullet tore off the top half of his left ear and gouged a deep cut in his scalp that bled horrifically, though the wound itself was slight enough. The impact of that second bullet had plunged Sharpe into an instant and merciful unconsciousness. The third bullet fractured Sharpe’s right thigh-bone just above the knee and tore the leg’s big artery. The blood puddled about the kitchen’s threshold.

Lucille Castineau, once the shot was fired, had lowered the big smoking pistol and stared defiantly at Frederickson who was picking himself up from the mud outside the door. “Now shoot me,” she said, and though her words sounded dramatic even to herself, she nevertheless felt at that moment as if her defiance embodied a prostrated and defeated France. Indeed, though she never admitted it to anyone but herself, at that proud instant she felt exactly like Joan of Arc herself.

“We don’t even have weapons!” Frederickson snapped the words in French, then shouted for water and rags. “Quick, woman!” He tore his snake-buckled belt free and twisted it as a tourniquet round Sharpe’s right thigh. “Come on, woman! Help me, damn you!”

“Why should we help you?” Lucille was finding it hard to keep her Joan of Arc poise, but she managed to put a superb scorn into her voice. “You killed my brother!”

Frederickson twisted the tourniquet as tight as it could go, then stared in shock at the tall and oddly calm woman. “Your brother’s dead?”

“You killed him! Out there!” She pointed to the yard.

“Madame, I have never been here before.“ Frederickson turned and snapped at the boy, who had plucked up courage to creep close to the door, then turned again to Lucille. ”You have my word of honour, Madame, as a British officer, that none of us has been here before, nor did any of us kill your brother whose death, believe me, I regret to the very depths of my soul. Now, Madame, will you please give me bandages and water. We need a doctor. Hurry!“ He twisted back to the door. ”Sergeant Harper!“ He bellowed hugely into the night. ”Sergeant Harper! Come here! Quick!“

“Sweet Jesus.” Lucille crossed herself, stared at the great pool of blood, and at last suspected that her certainty of who had murdered her family might be wrong. Then, because she was a practical woman, and because recriminations would have to wait, she tore a linen cloth into strips and sent the boy to fetch the doctor.

While Sharpe, pale-faced and with a fluttering pulse, just groaned.

Lord John Rossendale thought of himself as an honourable man; a decent, privileged and fair man. His greatest regret was that he had never been permitted to leave the Prince’s service to fight in the wars, for he suspected that in peacetime there would be an enviable reputation attached to those men who had brought their scars and swords back from Spain and France. He had asked to be allowed to join Wellington’s army often enough, but the Prince of Wales, Regent of England during his father’s bouts of madness, declared that he needed Rossendale’s company. “Johnny amuses me,” the Prince would explain, and he tried to compensate for Rossendale’s disappointment by offering the young cavalryman promotion. Rossendale was now a full Colonel, though he was required to perform no military duties other than the elegant wearing of his dazzling uniform, which duty he could carry ofTto perfection.

Rossendale was, indeed, privileged, but he was not unmindful of those less exalted officers who had carried the brunt of the war against Napoleon, which was why, when

Jane Sharpe’s letter had first come to his attention, he had felt a pang of guilt and a start of compassion. He had also admired the snuff-box, though the gift was quite unnecessary, for Rossendale well remembered Major Sharpe and had preserved a great admiration for the Rifleman. Rossendale had therefore returned the snuff-box to Jane, and with it he had sent a charming note which asked Mrs Sharpe to do the honour of calling on Lord Rossendale at her leisure.

Although Lord John remembered Sharpe very well, he had no exact recollection of Sharpe’s wife. He did dimly recall meeting a fair-haired girl for one evening, but Rossendale met many fair-haired girls and he could not be expected to remember each of them. He fully expected to find Mrs Jane Sharpe dull, for the woman came as a petitioner which would mean that Lord Rossendale must be forced to endure the tedium of her pathetic appeal, yet, for her husband’s sake, Lord Rossendale would do his decent best to oblige.

Mrs Sharpe demonstrated an ominous desperation by calling on Lord Rossendale the very morning after he had returned the jewelled snuff-box. Lord Rossendale had been at the tables the night before and had lost heavily. He could not afford to lose heavily, and so he had drowned his disappointments in drink which meant he was very late in rising, and thus kept the importunate Mrs Sharpe waiting a full two hours. He muttered an apology as he entered his drawing-room and, having apologised, he stood quite still.

Because the importunate Mrs Sharpe was undeniably lovely.

“It is Mrs Sharpe? I do have that honour?” Lord Rossendale could not imagine how he might have forgotten meeting this woman.

She curtseyed. “It is, my Lord.”

And thereafter, like the decent fair man he perceived himself to be, Rossendale attempted to help Mrs Sharpe out of her troubles. He did it most successfully, extracting a promise that the government would take no further interest in Mrs Jane Sharpe’s finances. In the performance of that decent and fair duty, he found himself attracted to her, which was hardly surprising for she was a girl of the most provoking looks, and if she seemed to reciprocate that attraction, then that was also hardly surprising, for Lord John Rossendale was a most elegant, handsome and amusing young man, though admittedly somewhat heavily in debt. Jane, acknowledging her own debt of gratitude to his Lordship, was only too delighted to pay his gambling debts, though each of them insisted that her payments were merely loans.

There was gossip, of course, but the gossip did not hurt Rossendale. The conquest of Mrs Sharpe, if conquest it was, was seen by society as an act of great bravery, for surely the husband would exact a terrible revenge. London knew that a certain Naval officer still found it impossible to sit in comfort, and London wondered how many weeks Lord Rossendale would live once Major Sharpe returned from the wars. The wager book at Lord Rossendale’s club did not give his Lordship more than three months before he was forced to eat grass before breakfast. “And that’ll be the finish of him,” a friend said, “and more’s the pity, for Johnny’s an amusing fellow.”

Yet, despite the threat, neither Jane nor Lord John tried to dull the edge of the gossip by circumspection. And, as her popularity in society increased, so did people feel a growing sympathy for Jane Sharpe. Her husband, it was said, was a thief. He had deserted the army. The man was clearly no good, and Jane was plainly justified if she sought consolation elsewhere.

Jane herself never complained that Major Sharpe was a bad man. She did tell Lord Rossendale that her husband was unambitious, and proved that contention by saying he would mire her in a country village where her silks and satins must be surrendered to the moths. She allowed that he had been a magnificent soldier, but alas, he was also a dull man, and in the society amongst which Jane now moved with such assurance, dullness was a greater sin than murder. Lord Rossendale, though frequently penniless, was never dull, but instead seemed to move in a glittering whirl of crystal bright opportunities.

Yet still, like an awkward bastion that resists the surge of a victorious army, there remained the inconvenient fact of Major Sharpe’s continuing dull existence, and Peter d’Alembord’s visit to Jane’s house was an abrupt and unwelcome reminder of that existence. It was no longer possible, after that meeting, for Jane to pretend that Sharpe had simply disappeared to leave Jane with his money and Rossendale with Jane.

So, that same evening, Jane sent a servant to fetch a carriage and, with a cloak about her bare shoulders, she was conveyed the short distance to Lord Rossendale’s town house which overlooked St James’s Park. The servants bowed her inside, then brought her a light supper and a glass of champagne. His Lordship, they told her, was expected home soon from his Royal duties.

Lord Rossendale, coming into the candle-lit room an hour later, thought he had never seen Jane looking so beautiful. Perturbation, he thought, made her seem so very frail and vulnerable.

“John!” She stood up to greet him.

“I’ve heard, my dearest, I’ve heard.” Lord Rossendale hurried across the room, she met him halfway, and they embraced. Jane clung to him, and Lord Rossendale held her very tight. “I’ve heard the awful news,” he said, “and I’m so very sorry.”

“He came this morning,” Jane’s voice came in a breathless rush. “I hardly credited he would ask for your help! When he said your name I almost blushed! He says he will try to see you, and I could not dissuade him. He wants you to see the Prince about it!”

“Who came?” Lord John feared the answer. He held Jane at arm’s length and there was a look of real fear on his face. “Your husband has returned?”

“No, John!” There was a note of asperity in Jane’s voice at Lord Rossendale’s misapprehension, though his Lordship showed no displeasure at her tone. “It was an officer who was a friend of Richard’s,” she explained, “a Captain d’Alembord. He says he met Richard in Bordeaux, and Richard sent him to London to seek your help! Richard expects you to plead with the Prince.”

“My God, so you haven’t heard?” Lord John dismissed Jane’s news of d’Alembord’s visit and instead, very gently, led her to a settle beside the open window. A warm breeze shivered the candle-flames that lit her face so prettily. “I have some other news for you,” Rossendale said, “and I fear it is distressing news.”

Jane looked up at his Lordship. “Well?”

Lord John first poured her a glass of white wine, then sat beside her. He held one of her hands in both of his. “We have heard from Paris today, my dearest one, and it seems that there was a French officer who could prove your husband’s guilt. Or innocence, of course.” He added the last hastily. “That officer was murdered,” Rossendale paused for a heartbeat, “and it seems most probable that your husband committed the murder. The French have formally requested our assistance in finding Major Sharpe.”

“No.” Jane breathed the word.

“I pray the allegations are not true.” Lord John, like Jane, knew just what was proper to say at such moments.

Jane took her hand from his, stood, and walked to the room’s far end where she stared vacantly into the empty grate. Lord John watched her and, as ever, marvelled at her looks. Finally she turned. “We should not be too astonished at such news, John. I fear that Richard is a very brutal man.”

“He is a soldier,” Rossendale said in apparent agreement.

Jane took a deep breath. “I should not be here, my Lord,” she said with a sudden formality.

“My dearest…” Lord John stood.

Jane held up a hand to check his protest. “No, my Lord. I must think of your reputation.” It was very properly and very prettily said, and the inference of noble suffering touched Lord John’s heart, just as it was meant to do.

He crossed the room and took a temporarily unwilling Jane into his arms. She insisted that her married name was now tainted, and that Lord John must protect himself by preserving his own good name. Lord John hushed her. “You don’t understand, my dear one.”

“I understand that my husband is a murderer,” she said into his uniform coat.

He held her very close. “And when he is captured, my dear one, as he will be captured, what then?”

Jane said nothing.

“You will be alone,” Lord John said, then, just in case she had not worked out for herself the fate that would attend a convicted murderer, “and you will be a widow.”

“No,” she murmured the proper protest.

“So I think it can only reflect on my reputation,” Lord John said nobly, “if I was to offer you my protection.” And he tilted her pretty, tear-stained face to his and kissed her on the mouth.

Jane closed her eyes. She was not a bad woman, though she knew well enough that what she now did was wrong in the world’s eyes. She also knew that she had behaved very ill when Peter d’Alembord had visited her at Cork Street, but she had been frightened to be thus reminded of her husband’s existence and, at the same time, she had so wanted to impress d’Alembord with her new sophistication. She knew, too, that her husband was not the brutal, dull man she depicted, but her behaviour demanded an excuse beyond the excuse of her own appetites, and so she must blame Sharpe for the fact that she now loved another man.

And Jane was in love, as was Lord Rossendaie. They were not just simply in love, but consumed by love, driven by it, drenched in it, and oblivious to the rest of the world in their obsession with it. And Major Sharpe, by murdering a Frenchman, had seemingly removed their last obstacle to it. And thus, in a warm and candle-shivering night, the lovers could at last anticipate their happiness.

There had been no sentry on the tower, Lucille explained to Frederickson, because the roof timbers were rotten. So, a week after their drastic arrival at the chateau, Harper and Frederickson repaired the tower’s roof with weathered oak that they took from the disused stalls in the chateau’s stables. They adzed the timber to size, pegged it tight into the masonry, then spread layers of tar-soaked sacking over the planks. “You should have lead up there, Ma’am,” Frederickson said.

“Lead is expensive,” Lucille sighed.

“Yes, Ma’am.” But Harper delved among the generations of debris that had piled up in the barns and discovered an old lead water-tank that bore the de Lassan coat-of-arms, and he and Frederickson melted it down and made thin sheets of the metal which they fixed between the courses of stone so that the tower at last had a watertight roof,

“I don’t know why you God-damned well bother,” Sharpe grumbled that night.

“I’ve nothing better to do,” Frederickson said mildly, “so I might as well help Madame about the place. Besides, I like working with my hands.”

“Let the bloody place fall down.” Sharpe lay swathed in stiff flax sheets on the goosedown mattress of a massive wooden bed. His right leg was encased in plaster beneath which the flesh throbbed and itched, his head hurt, and his left shoulder was a nagging viper’s nest of pain. The doctor had opined that Sharpe should have the whole arm off, for he doubted if he could otherwise keep the damaged flesh clean, but Harper had performed his old trick of putting maggots into the wound. The maggots had eaten the rotten flesh, but would not touch the clean, and so the arm had been saved. The doctor visited each day, cupping Sharpe with candle-flames and glasses, bleeding him with leeches, and distastefully sniffing the maggot-writhing wounds for any sign of putrefaction. There were none. Sharpe, the doctor said, might be walking again by the summer, though he doubted if the Englishman would ever again have full use of his left arm.

“Bloody God-damned French bitch,” Sharpe now said of Lucille. “I hope her bloody house falls down around her ears.”

“Drink your soup,” Frederickson said, “and shut up.”

Sharpe obediently drank some soup.

“It’s good soup, isn’t it?” Frederickson asked.

Sharpe said nothing, just scowled.

“You’re very ungrateful,” Sweet William sighed. “That soup is delicious. Madame made it specially for you.”

Then it’s probably bloody poisoned.“ Sharpe pushed the bowl away.

Frederickson shook his head. “You should be kinder to Madame Castineau. She feels very guilty about what she did.”

“She bloody well should feel guilty! She’s a murderous bloody bitch. She should be hanged, except hanging’s too good for her.”

Frederickson paused, then blushed. “I would be deeply obliged, my friend, if you would refrain from insulting Madame Castineau in my presence.”

Sharpe stared aghast at his friend.

Frederickson straightened his shoulders as though bracing himself to make a very shameful confession. “I have to confess that I feel a most strong attachment towards Madame.”

“Good God.” Sharpe could say nothing else. This misogynist, this hater of marriage, this despiser of all things female, was in love?

“I understand how you feel about Madame Castineau, of course,” Frederickson hurried on, “and I cannot blame you, but I think you should know that I have the warmest of feelings towards her. Towards,” he paused, tried to meet Sharpe’s gaze, failed, but then, with the coyness of a lover, said the widow’s Christian name fondly, “towards Lucille.”

“Bloody hellfire!”

“I know she isn’t a great beauty like Jane,” Frederickson said with an immense but fragile dignity, “but she has a great calmness in her soul. She’s a very sensible woman, too. And she has a sense of humour. If I had not met her I would scarcely have believed that so many excellent qualities could have been combined in one woman.”

Sharpe blew on a spoonful of soup and tried to accustom himself to the thought of Sweet William in love. It was like discovering a wolf purring, or learning that Napoleon Bonaparte’s favourite occupation was embroidery. “But she’s French!” Sharpe finally blurted out.

“Of course she’s French!” Frederickson said irritably. “What possible objection can that be?”

“We’ve been killing the buggers for twenty years!”

“And now we’re at peace.” Frederickson smiled. “We might even make an alliance to mark that peace.”

“You mean you want to marry her?” Sharpe stared at his friend. “I seem to remember that you thought marriage was a waste of money. Can’t you hire its pleasures by the hour? Isn’t that what you said? And do I remember you telling me that marriage is an appetite and that once you’ve enjoyed the flesh you’re left with nothing but a dry carcass?”

“I might have questioned the validity of marriage once,” Frederickson said airily, “but a man is permitted to reconsider his opinions, is he not?”

“Good God Almighty. You are in love!” Sharpe was flabbergasted. “Does Madame Castineau know how you feel?”

“Of course not!” Frederickson was profoundly shocked at the thought.

“Why ever not?”

“I have no wish to embarrass her by a precipitate declaration of my feelings.”

Sharpe shrugged. “Love is like war, my friend. Victory goes to those who pounce first and pounce hardest.”

“I can hardly imagine myself pouncing,” Frederickson said huffily, but then, because he had a desperate need to share his feelings with a friend, he coyly asked Sharpe whether his looks would be a barrier to his suit. “I know myself to be ugly,” Frederickson touched his eye-patch, “and fear it will be an insuperable difficulty.”

“Remember the pig-woman,” Sharpe advised.

“My feelings in no way resemble the transactions of that squalid tale,” Frederickson said sternly.

“But if you don’t confess your feelings,” Sharpe said, “then you’ll get nowhere! Do you sense her feelings in this matter?”

“Madame behaves very properly towards me.”

Sharpe reflected that proper behaviour was not what his friend sought, but thought it best not to say as much. Instead he wondered aloud whether Frederickson would take a letter to the carrier who risked the dangers of the country roads by travelling once a week to Caen.

“Of course,” Frederickson agreed, “but may I ask why?”

“It’s a letter for Jane,” Sharpe explained.

“Of course.” Frederickson sought to turn the subject back to Lucille Castineau, but did so in such a roundabout way that Sharpe might not suspect the deliberate machination.

“It occurs to me, my friend, that there have been times when I might have been a trifle unsympathetic towards your marriage?”

“Really?” Sharpe flinched as a stab of pain went from his shoulder down to his ribs.

Frederickson did not notice Sharpe’s discomfort. “I assure you that I jested. I see now that marriage is a very fortunate state for mankind.”

“Indeed.” Sharpe resisted discussing Frederickson’s new devotion to the married state. “Which is why I would like Jane to travel here.”

“Is that safe for her?” Frederickson asked.

“I thought you and Patrick might meet her at Cherbourg and escort her here.” Sharpe had resumed drinking the soup which, despite his earlier boorish verdict, was quite delicious. “And once she’s here we can all rent a house while I recover? Maybe in Caen?”

“Maybe.” It was clear that Frederickson had no wish to leave the chateau, yet he agreed to deliver Sharpe’s letter to the village carrier.

But, as it happened, there was no need for the letter to go to the postal office in Caen, for the very next night Patrick Harper offered to carry the letter clean into London itself. “You’re not going to be fighting fit, sir, not for a month or two, and I’m worried about Isabella, so I am.”

“She’s not in London,” Sharpe said.

“Mr Frederickson thinks it’ll be quicker to get a ship for Spain out of England, sir, than it will be from France. So I’ll go to England, see Mrs Sharpe, then fetch my own lass back from Spain. Then I’ll take her to Ireland.” Harper smiled and suddenly there were tears in his eyes. “My God, sir, but I’ll be going home at last. Can you believe it?”

Sharpe felt a moment’s panic at losing this strong man. “Are you going home for ever?”

„I’ll be back here, so I will.“ Harper tossed the seven-barrelled gun on to Sharpe’s bed. „I’ll leave that here, and my uniform too. It’s probably best not to travel in uniform.“

“But you will be back?” Sharpe eagerly sought the reassurance. “Because if I’m going to find Ducos I’ll need you.”

“So you are going to find him, sir?”

“If I have to go to the end of the bloody earth, Patrick, I’ll find that bastard.” It was obvious now, from the evidence of the two fingers that had been hacked off Lassan’s dead body, that it must have been Pierre Ducos who had killed Madame Castineau’s brother. Lucille herself had accepted that verdict, and her acceptance had only increased the remorse she felt for her precipitate shooting of the Rifleman. Sharpe did not care whether she felt remorse or not, nor did he much care that her brother was dead, but he did care that he should find Ducos. „I’ll get well first,“ he now told Harper, ”then I’ll hunt the bugger down.“

Harper smiled. „I’ll be back here to help you, sir, I promise.“

“It would be harder without you,” Sharpe said, which was his way of saying that he could not bear it if Harper deserted him now. Sharpe had always known that peace might separate their friendship, but the immediate prospect of that separation was astonishingly hard to bear.

„I’ll be back by the summer, sir.“

“So long as the provosts don’t catch you, Patrick.”

„I’ll murder the bastards before they lay a hand on me.“

Harper left the next morning. It seemed strange not to hear his tuneless whistle or his loud cheerful voice about the chateau. On the other hand Sharpe was pleased that the Irishman was carrying the letter to Jane for she had always liked Harper and Sharpe was certain she would respond to the big man’s plea that she travel quickly into Normandy where her husband lay ill.

A week after Harper had left, Frederickson carried Sharpe downstairs so he could eat at a table which had been placed in the chateau’s yard. Madame Castineau, knowing that Sharpe disliked her, had kept a very politic distance from the Rifleman since the night when she had shot him. This night, though, she smiled a nervous welcome and said she hoped he would eat well. There was wine, bread, cheese, and a small piece of ham that Frederickson unobtrusively placed on Sharpe’s plate.

Sharpe looked at Frederickson’s plate, then at Madame Castineau’s. “Where’s yours, William?”

“Madame doesn’t like ham.” Frederickson cut himself some cheese.

“But you like it. I’ve seen you kill for it.”

“You need the nourishment,” Frederickson insisted, “I don’t.”

Sharpe frowned. “Is this place short of money?” He knew that Madame Castineau spoke no English, so had no qualms about talking thus in front of her.

“They’re poor as church mice, sir. Rich in land, of course, but that doesn’t help much these days, and they rather emptied the coffers on Henri’s betrothal party.”

“Bloody hell.” Sharpe sliced the ham into three ludicrously small portions. His actions were very clumsy for he could still not use his left arm. He distributed the meat evenly between the three plates. Madame Castineau began to protest, but Sharpe growled her to silence. “Tell her my wife will bring some money from England,” he said.

Frederickson translated, then offered Lucille’s reply which was to the effect that she would accept no charity.

“Tell the bloody woman to take what’s offered.”

“I’ll hardly tell her that,” Frederickson protested.

“Damn her pride, anyway.”

Lucille blanched at the anger in Sharpe’s voice, then hurried into a long conversation in French with Frederickson. Sharpe scowled and picked at his food. Frederickson tried to include him in the conversation, but as it was about the chateau’s history, and the styles of architecture that history reflected, Sharpe had nothing to offer. He leaned his chair back and prayed that Jane would come soon. Surely, he persuaded himself, her previous silence had been an accident of the uncertain delivery of mail to the army. She would have already spoken to d’Alembord, and would doubtless welcome Harper’s arrival. Indeed, it was probable that Harper was already in London and Sharpe felt a welcome and warm hope that Jane herself might arrive at the chateau in less than a week.

Sharpe was suddenly aware that Frederickson had asked him a question. He let the chair fall forward and was rewarded with an agonizing stab of pain down his plastered right leg. “Jesus bloody Christ!” he cursed, then, with a resentful glance at the widow, “I’m sorry. What is it, William?”

“Madame Castineau is concerned because she told the Paris lawyer that we murdered her brother.”

“So she damn well should be.”

Frederickson ignored Sharpe’s surly tone. “She wonders whether she should now write to Monsieur Roland and tell him that we are innocent.”

Sharpe glanced at the Frenchwoman and was caught by her very clear, very calm gaze. “No,” he said decisively.

Won?“ Lucille frowned.

“I think it best,” Sharpe suddenly felt awkward under her scrutiny, “if the French authorities do not know where to find us. They still believe we stole their gold.”

Frederickson translated, listened to Lucille’s response, then looked at Sharpe. “Madame says her letter will surely persuade the authorities of our innocence.”

“No!” Sharpe insisted a little too loudly.

“Why not?” Frederickson asked.

“Because the damned French have already faked evidence against us, so why should we trust them now? Tell Madame I have no faith in the honesty of her countrymen so I would be most grateful if, for so long as we are in her house, she would keep our presence a secret from Paris.”

Frederickson made a tactful translation, then offered Sharpe Lucille’s reply. “Madame says she would like to inform the authorities who was responsible for the murder of her mother and brother. She wants Major Ducos punished.”

“Tell her I will punish Ducos. Tell her it will be my pleasure to punish Ducos.”

The tone of Sharpe’s voice made any translation unnecessary. Lucille looked at Sharpe’s face with its slashing scar that gave him such a mocking look, and she tried to imagine her brother, her gentle and kind brother, facing this awful man in battle, and then she tried to imagine what kind of woman would marry such a man. Frederick-son began to interpret Sharpe’s reply, but Lucille shook her head. “I understood, Captain. Tell the Major that I will be for ever grateful if he can bring Major Ducos to justice.”

“I’m not doing it for her,” Sharpe said in curt dismissal, “but for me.”

There was an embarrassed pause, then Frederickson studiedly returned the conversation to the chateau’s history. Within minutes he and Lucille were again absorbed, while Sharpe, warm in the evening sun, dreamed his soldier’s dreams that were of home and love and happiness and revenge.

CHAPTER 10

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’Alem-bord 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 chateau’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 chateau’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 chateau’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 chateau? 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 chateau’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 car 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 chateau 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 chateau’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 chateau, 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 chateau 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-eire? 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 chateau, 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 chateau’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 chateau to find an enemy.

CHAPTER 11

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 Triumphe, 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-Eilysees, 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 Souriciere, 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 chateau’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 Chateau 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 fine 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?”

Frederiekson 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 ruiri. 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 chateau 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 chateau’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 kitchen-maid, 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 chateau 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. Lutille 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 chateau 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.