Sharpe's Revenge (13 page)

Frederickson had spoken in a most matter-of-fact tone, so much so that Sharpe did not really comprehend what his friend had just said.

‘The war, my dear friend, is over,' Frederickson insisted.

Sharpe stared at Frederickson and said nothing.

‘It's true,' Frederickson said, ‘as I live and breathe, and may I be cursed if I lie, but a British officer has come from Paris. Think of that! A British officer from Paris! In fact a whole slew of British officers have come from Paris! Bonaparte has abdicated, Paris has fallen, the war is over, and we have won!' Frederickson could no longer contain his excitement. He stood and, ignoring the majority of the customers who were French, climbed on to the chair and shouted his news to the whole tavern. ‘Boney's abdicated! Paris has fallen, the war's over, and we've won! By Christ, we've won!'

There was a moment's silence, then the cheers began. Spanish and Portuguese officers sought a hasty translation, then added their own noise to the celebration. The only men who did not cheer were the civilian-clothed and moustached French veterans who stared sullenly into their wine cups. One such man, the news interpreted to him, wept.

Frederickson shouted to a serving girl that he wanted champagne, cheroots, and brandy. ‘We've won!' he exulted to Sharpe. ‘The damn thing's over!'

‘When did Boney abdicate?' Sharpe asked.

‘Christ knows. Last week? Two weeks ago?'

‘Before the battle?' Sharpe insisted.

Frederickson shrugged. ‘Before the battle, yes.'

‘Jesus.' Sharpe momentarily closed his eyes. So Nairn's death had been for nothing? All the blood on the high ridge had been spilt for nothing?

Then, suddenly, he forgot that irony in an overwhelming and astonishing wash of relief. The bells of Europe could ring because the war was over. There would be no more danger. No more summoning the nerve to assault an enemy-held wall, and no more standing rock still as an enemy battalion took aim. No more cannons, no more lancers, no more skirmish line. No more death. It was over. No more waking in the night sheeted with sweat and thinking of a sword blade's threat. The war was over, and the last ranks had been closed up, and the whole damn thing was done. Europe had been rinsed with blood, and it was over. He would live for ever now, and that thought made Sharpe laugh, and suddenly he was shaking hands with allied officers who crowded about the table to hear the details of Frederickson's news. Napoleon, the ogre, the tyrant, the scourge of Europe, the damned Corsican, the upstart, the beast, was finished.

Someone began singing, while other officers were dancing between the tables where the Emperor's veterans sat keeping their thoughts hidden.

Brandy and champagne arrived. Frederickson, without asking, poured the red wine from Sharpe's cup on to the sawdust covered floor and replaced it with champagne. ‘A toast! To peace!'

‘To peace!'

‘To Dorset!' Frederickson beamed.

‘To Dorset!' Sharpe wondered whether a letter had come from England, then forgot the thought to savour this astounding news. It was over! No more canister, no more bayonets, no more shivering on long night marches, no more stench of French cavalry, no more sabres chopping down, no more bullets. Easter had triumphed and death was defeated. ‘I must write to Jane,' Sharpe said, and he wondered whether she was celebrating the news in some Dorset village. There would be oxen roasting, hogsheads of ale, church bells ringing. It was over.

‘You can write to Jane tomorrow,' Frederickson ordered, ‘for tonight we get drunk.'

‘Tonight we get drunk,' Sharpe agreed, and by one o‘clock they were on the city's walls where they sang nonsense and shouted their triumph towards the British bivouac fires that lay to the city's west. By two o'clock they were searching for another wineshop, but instead found a group of cavalry sergeants who insisted on sharing some plundered champagne with the Rifle officers. At three o‘clock, arm in arm to keep themselves upright, Sharpe and Frederickson staggered through the abandoned French fortifications and crossed the wooden bridge over the canal where two friendly sentries prevented them from falling into the water. At four o'clock they arrested Sergeant Harper on a charge of being sober, and at five o‘clock they found him not guilty because he no longer was. At six o'clock Major Richard Sharpe was being sick, and at seven o'clock he staggered to Nairn's vacant tent and gave instructions that he was not to be woken up ever again. Ever.

Because a war was over, and it was won, and at long long last there was peace.

Nairn's Brigade was no more. Broken by battle and leaderless, its shrunken battalions were attached to other brigades. The reason was purely administrative, for now the army was to be run by bureaucrats instead of by fighting men, and the bureaucrats had been ordered to disband the army that had fought from the Portuguese coast to deep inside France. Frederickson was curious to discover just how far the army had marched and found his answer with the help of some old maps that he uncovered in a Toulouse bookseller's shop. ‘As the crow flies,' he told Sharpe in an aggrieved voice, ‘it's only six hundred and sixty miles, and it took us six years.'

Or ten thousand miles as a soldier reckoned miles, which was as bad roads that froze in winter, were quagmires in spring and choked the throat with dust in summer. Soldiers' miles were those that were marched under the weight of back-breaking packs. They were miles that were marched over and over again, in advance and retreat, in chaos and in fear. Soldiers' miles led to sieges and battles, and to the death of friends, but now those soldiers' miles were all done and the army would travel the crow's one hundred and twenty miles to Bordeaux where ships waited to take them away. Some battalions were being sent to garrisons far across the oceans, some were being ordered to the war in America, and a few were being sent home where, their duty done, they would be disbanded.

Frederickson's company was ordered to England where, along with the rest of its battalion, the company would be broken up and the men sent to join other battalions of the 60th. Most of the Spaniards who had enlisted in the company during the war had already deserted. They had joined the Greenjackets only to kill Frenchmen, and, that job efficiently done, Frederickson gladly turned his blind eye to their departure. Sharpe, without a battalion of his own or even a job, received permission to travel back to England with the Riflemen and so, three weeks after the French surrender, he found himself clambering on to one of the flat-bottomed river barges that had been hired to transport the army up the River Garonne to the quays of Bordeaux.

Seconds before the barge was poled away from the wharf a messenger arrived from Divisional Headquarters with a bag of mail for Frederickson's company. The bag was small, for most of the company could not read or write, and of those who could there were few whose relatives would think to write letters. One letter was for a man who had died at Fuentes d'Onoro, but whose mother, refusing to believe the news, still insisted on writing each month with exhortations for her long dead son to be a good soldier, a fervent Christian, and a credit to his family.

There was also a packet for Major Richard Sharpe, forwarded from London by his Army Agents. The packet had first been sent to the Prince of Wales's Own Volunteers, then forwarded to General Headquarters, then to Division, and had thus taken over a month to reach Sharpe.

‘So you needn't have worried,' Frederickson said, ‘Jane wrote after all.'

‘Indeed.' Sharpe carried the packet forward to find a patch of privacy in the barge's bows where he tore off the sealing wafer and, with a quite ridiculous and boyish anticipation, tore open the packet to find two letters.

The first was from a man in Lancashire who claimed to have invented a chain-shot that could be fired from a standard musket or rifle and which, if fired low, would be fatal against the legs of cavalry horses. He begged Major Sharpe's help in persuading the Master General of Ordnance to buy the device, which was called Armbruster's Patent Horse-Leg Breaker. Sharpe screwed the letter into a ball and threw it over the barge's gunwale.

The second letter was from Sharpe's Army Agents. They presented their compliments to Major Sharpe, then begged leave to inform him that, in accordance with his written instructions to allow Mrs Jane Sharpe authority over his account, they had sold all his 4 per cent stock and transferred the monies into the charge of Mrs Jane Sharpe of Cork Street, Westminster. They thanked Major Sharpe for the trust and privilege of handling his affairs, and hoped that should he ever need such services again, he would not forget his humble and obedient servants, Messrs Hopkinson and Son, Army Agents, of St Albans Street, London. The humble servants added that the expense of selling the 4 per cent stock and the necessary ledger work for the closure of his account amounted to £16. 14s. 4d, which sum had been deducted from the draft passed to Mrs Jane Sharpe. They wished to remind Major Sharpe that they still held his Presentation sword donated by the Patriotic Fund, and begged to remain, etc.

The bargemen hoisted a clumsy gaff-rigged sail that made the tarred shrouds creak ominously. Sharpe stared uncomprehendingly at the letter, unaware that the barge was moving. A small child on the far bank sucked her thumb and stared solemnly at the strange soldiers who were being carried away from her.

‘Good news, I trust?' Frederickson clambered into the bows to interrupt Sharpe's reverie.

Sharpe wordlessly handed the letter to Frederickson who read it swiftly. ‘I didn't know you'd got a Presentation sword?' Frederickson said cheerfully.

‘That was for taking the eagle at Talavera. I think it was a fifty guinea sword.'

‘A good one?'

‘Very ornate.' Sharpe wondered how Frederickson could so completely have misunderstood the importance of the letter, and merely be curious about a blued and gilded sword. ‘It's a Rinkfiel-Solingen blade and a Kimbley scabbard. Wouldn't serve in a fight.'

‘Nice to hang on the wall, though.' Frederickson handed the letter back. ‘I'm glad for you. It's splendid news.'

‘Is it?'

‘Jane's collected the money, so presumably she's off to buy your house in Dorset. Isn't that what you wanted to hear?'

‘Eighteen thousand guineas?'

Frederickson stared at Sharpe. He blinked. At length he spoke. ‘Jesus wept.'

‘We found diamonds at Vitoria, you see,' Sharpe confessed.

‘How many?'

‘Hundreds of the bloody things.' Sharpe shrugged. ‘Sergeant Harper found them really, but he shared them with me.'

Frederickson whistled softly. He had heard that much of the Spanish Crown jewels had disappeared when the French baggage was captured at Vitoria, and he had known that Sharpe and Harper had done well from the plunder, but he had never dared to put the two stories together. Sharpe's fortune was vast. A man could live like a prince for a hundred years on such a fortune.

‘She could buy a splendid house for a hundred guineas,' Sharpe said petulantly, ‘why does she need eighteen thousand?'

Frederickson sat on the stump of the bowsprit. He was still trying to imagine Sharpe as an immensely wealthy man. ‘Why did you give her the authority?' he asked after a while.

‘It was before the duel.' Sharpe shrugged apologetically. ‘I thought I was going to die. I wanted her to be secure.'

Frederickson tried to reassure his friend. ‘She's probably found a better investment.'

‘But why hasn't she written?' And that was the real rub, the blistering rub that so insidiously attacked Sharpe. Why had Jane not written? Her silence was only made worse by this tantalizing evidence which suggested that his wife was a rich woman living in London's Cork Street. ‘Where is Cork Street?'

‘Somewhere near Piccadilly, I think. It's a good address.'

‘She can afford it, can't she?'

Frederickson twisted on his makeshift seat to watch a marsh harrier glide eastwards, then he shrugged. ‘You'll be home in three weeks, so what does it matter?'

‘I suppose it doesn't.'

‘That's what women do to you,' Frederickson said philosophically. ‘They choke up your barrel and chip your flint. Which reminds me. Some of these bastards think that just because we're at peace they don't have to clean their rifles. Sergeant Harper! Weapon inspection, now!'

Thus they floated towards home.

Later that day, as the barge wallowed between sunlit meadows, Sergeant Harper sat with Sharpe in the bows. ‘What will you do now, sir?'

‘Resign my commission, I suppose.' Sharpe was staring at two fishermen. They wore white blouses and wide straw hats, and looked very peaceful. It was hard to imagine that a month ago this had been a country at war. ‘And I suppose you'll go to Spain to fetch Isabella?'