Sharpe's Revenge (18 page)

The Dowager Countess decried, disapproved of, and even despised such an ambition. Henri was nearly forty years old, and it was high time that he married and had a son who would carry the Lassan name. That was the important thing; that a new Count should be born, and on Henri's return the Dowager quickly invited Madame Pellemont and her unmarried daughter to visit the château, and thereafter harried Henri with frequent and tactless hints about Mademoiselle Pellemont who, though no beauty, was malleable and placid. ‘She has broad hips, Henri,' the Dowager said enticingly. ‘She'll spit out babies like a sow farrowing a litter.'

The Dowager did not extend her desire for grandchildren to her daughter, for if Lucille were to marry again her children would not bear the family name, nor would any son of Lucille's be a Count of Lassan. It was the survival of that name and lineage that the Dowager wanted, and so Lucille's marriage prospects were of no interest to the Dowager. In fact two men had proposed marriage to the widow Castineau, but Lucille did not want to risk the unhappiness of losing love again. ‘I shall grow old and crotchety,' she told her brother, though the last quality seemed an unlikely fate, for Lucille had an innate vivacity that gave her face an illuminating smile. She had grey eyes, light brown hair, and a long lantern jaw. She thought herself plain, and was certainly no great beauty, yet the spark in her soul was bright, and the man who had married her had counted himself to be among the most fortunate of husbands.

‘Will you marry again?' her brother asked as they walked down to the millstrcam.

‘No, Henri. I shall just moulder away here. I like it here, and I'm kept busy. I like being busy.' Lucille was an early riser, and rarely rested in daylight. When so many men had been away at the wars it had been Lucille who ran the farm, the cider press, the mill, the dairy, and the château. She supervised the lambing, she raised calves, and fattened hogs for the slaughter. She mended the centuries old flax sheets on which the family still slept, she churned butter, made cheese, and eked out the family's tiny income in an effort to preserve the estate. She had been forced to sell two fields, and much of the old silver, yet the château had survived for Henri's return. Henri thought that the work had worn his sister out, for she was thin and pale, but Lucille denied the accusation. ‘It isn't the work that's so tiring, but money. There's never enough. We have to mend the tower roof, we need new apple trees.' Lucille sighed. ‘We need everything. Even the chairs in the kitchen need mending, and I can't afford a carpenter.'

They came to the millrace and sat on the stone wall above the glistening rush of water. Henri had been carrying a musket which he now propped against the wall. His coat pockets were weighed down with two heavy pistols. He disliked carrying the weapons, but the French countryside was infested with armed bands of men who had either deserted from the Emperor's armies or else had been discharged and had no home or work. Such men often attacked villagers, and had even ransacked small towns. No such brigands had yet been seen near the château, but Henri Lassan would take no chances and thus carried the weapons whenever he left the safe area inside the moat. The château's few farmworkers were also armed, and the village knew that if the bell above the château's chapel tolled then there was danger abroad and they should herd their cattle into the château's yard.

‘Not that I can promise a very successful defence,' Henri now said ruefully. ‘I wasn't very good at defending my fortress.' He had commanded the Teste de Buch fort and, day after day, year after year, he had watched the empty sea and thought the war was passing him by until, in the very last weeks of the fighting, the British Riflemen had come from the landward side to bring horror to his small command.

Lucille heard the sadness in her brother's voice. ‘Was it awful?'

‘Yes,' Henri said simply, then fell silent so that Lucille thought he would say no more, but after a moment Henri shrugged and began to speak of that one lost fight. He told her about the Englishmen in green, and how they had appeared in his fortress as though from nowhere. ‘Big men,' he said, ‘and scarred. They fought like demons. They loved to fight. I could tell that from their faces.' He shuddered. ‘And they destroyed all my books, all of them. They took years to collect, and afterwards there wasn't one left.'

Lucille twisted a campion's stalk about her finger. ‘The English.' She said it disparagingly, as though it explained everything.

‘They are a brutal people.' Henri had never known an Englishman, yet the prejudice against the island race was bred into his Norman bone. There was a tribal memory of steel-helmeted archers and mounted men-at-arms who crossed the channel to burn barns, steal women, and slaughter children. To Henri and Lucille the English were a rapacious and brawling race of Protestants whom God had seen fit to place just across the water. ‘I sometimes dream of those Riflemen,' Henri Lassan now said.

‘They failed to kill you,' Lucille said as if to encourage her brother's self-esteem.

‘At the end they could have killed me. I waded into the sea, straight for their leader. He's a famous soldier, and I thought I might expiate my failure if I killed him, or pay for it if I died myself, but he would not fight. He lowered his sword. He could have killed me, but he did not.'

‘So there's some good in the green men?'

‘I think he just despised me.' Henri Lassan shrugged. ‘His name is Sharpe, and I have the most ridiculous nightmare that one day he will come back to finish me off. That is stupid, I know, but I cannot shake the notion away.' He tried to smile the foolishness away, but Lucille could tell that somehow this Sharpe had become her brother's private demon; the man who had shamed Lassan as a soldier, and Lucille wondered that a man who wanted to be a priest nevertheless should also worry that he had not been a great soldier. She tried to tell her brother that the failure did not matter, that he was a better man than any soldier.

‘I hope I will be a better man,' Henri said.

‘As a priest?' Lucille touched on the argument which their mother pursued so doggedly.

‘I've thought of little else these past years.' And, he could have added, he had prepared himself for little else over these past years. He had read, studied, and argued with the priest at Arcachon; always testing the soundness of his own faith and always finding it strong. The alternative to the priesthood was to become the master of this château, but Henri Lassan did not relish the task. The old building needed a fortune spent on its walls and roof. It would be best, he thought privately, if the place was sold and if his mother would live close to the abbey in Caen, but he knew he could never persuade the Dowager of that sensible solution.

‘You don't sound utterly certain that you want to be a priest,' Lucille said.

Henri shrugged. ‘There's been a Lassan in this house for eight hundred years.' He stopped, unable to argue against the numbing weight of that tradition, and even feeling some sympathy for his mother's fervent wishes for the family's future. But if the price of that future was Mademoiselle Pellemont? He shuddered, then looked at his watch. ‘Maman will be awake soon.'

They stood. Lassan glanced once more at the far hills, but nothing untoward moved among the orchards, and no green men threatened on the high ridge where the elms, beeches and hornbeams grew. The château was calm, at peace, and safe, so Henri picked up his loaded musket and walked his sister home.

‘They're scared, you see,' Harper explained, and, as if to prove his point, he wafted the chamber-pot towards the provost sentries who guarded the corridor outside the room where Sharpe and Frederickson waited.

The provost recoiled from the chamber-pot, then protested when Harper offered to remove the strip of cloth which covered its contents.

‘You can't expect gently-born officers to live in a room with the stench of shit,' Harper said, ‘so I have to empty it.'

‘Go to the yard. Don't bloody loiter about.' It was the Provost Sergeant who snapped the orders at Harper.

‘You're a grand man, Sergeant.'

‘Get the hell out of here. And hurry, man!' The Sergeant watched the big Irishman go down the stairs. ‘Bloody Irish, and a bloody Rifleman,' he said to no one in particular, ‘two things I hate most.'

The windowless corridor was lit by two glass-fronted lanterns which threw the shadows of the three guards long across the floorboards. Laughter and loud voices echoed from the prefecture's ground floor where the highest officials of the Transport Board were giving a dinner. A clock at the foot of the deep stairwell struck half past eight.

More than fifteen minutes passed before Harper came whistling up the stairs. He carried the empty chamber-pot in one hand. Inside the pot were three empty wine glasses, while on his shoulder was a sizeable wooden keg that he first dropped on to the landing, then rolled towards the officers' doorway with his right foot. He nodded a cheerful greeting to the Provost Sergeant. ‘A gentleman downstairs sent this up to the officers, Sergeant.'

The Provost Sergeant stepped into the path of the rolling keg which he checked with a boot. ‘Who sent it?'

‘Now how would I be knowing that?' Harper, when it pleased him, could easily play the role of a vague-witted Irishman. That such a role, however it distorted the truth, nevertheless suited the prejudice of men like the Provost Sergeant only made it the more effective. ‘He didn't give me his name, nor did he, but he said he had a sympathy for the poor gentlemen. He said he'd never met them, but he was sorry for them. Mind you, Sergeant, the gentleman was more than a little drunk himself, which always makes a man sympathetic. Isn't that the truth? It's a pity our wives don't drink more, so it is.'

‘Shut your face.' The Sergeant tipped the cask on to its end, then worked the bung loose. He was rewarded with the rich smell of good brandy. He thrust the bung home. ‘I've got orders not to allow anyone to communicate with the officers.'

‘You wouldn't deny them a wee drink now, would you?'

‘Shut your bloody face.' The Sergeant stood, reached for the chamber-pot, and took out the three glasses. ‘Get inside, and tell your damned officers that if they're thirsty they should drink water.'

‘Yes, Sergeant. Whatever you say, Sergeant. Thank you, Sergeant.' Harper edged past the keg, then darted through the door as though he truly feared the Provost Sergeant's wrath. Once inside the room he closed the door, then grinned at Sharpe. ‘As easy as stealing a fleece off a lamb's back, sir. One keg of brandy safely delivered. The bastards just couldn't wait to take it off me.'

‘Let's just hope they drink it,' Frederickson said.

‘In two hours,' Harper said confidently, ‘those three will be dancing drunk. I even thought to bring them some glasses.'

‘How much did the brandy cost?' Sharpe asked.

‘All you gave me, sir, but the fellow in the kitchens said it was the very best.' Harper, properly pleased with himself, went on to deliver the rest of his news. There were only three guards on the top landing, and he had seen no other sentries till he reached the ground floor where he saw a sergeant and two men in the guardroom by the front door.

‘But they weren't provosts, sir, so they mayn't be any trouble to us. I said hello to them, and saw our guns in there.' There were another two sentries in the town square beyond the front door. ‘They're giving a grand dinner downstairs, so there's a fair number of fellows wandering about looking for places to piss. Oh, and there's a bookcase on the first floor, sir, full of bloody ledgers.'

‘Did you look for the stables?' Sharpe asked.

‘I did, sir, but they're already locked tight, and so's the yard gate.'

‘So there's no chance of stealing horses?'

Harper considered the question, then shrugged. ‘It'll be hard, sir.'

‘We're infantry,' Frederickson said dismissively, ‘so we can damn well walk out of the city.'

‘And if they send cavalry after us?'

Frederickson dismissed the fear. ‘How will they know which way we've gone? Besides, the French cavalry never caught us, so what chance would you give our dozy lot?'

‘We walk, then.' Sharpe stretched his arms wide as though he prepared for exercise. ‘But where to?'

‘That's easy,' Frederickson said. ‘We go to Arcachon.'

‘Arcachon?' Sharpe asked with surprise. That was the town closest to the Teste de Buch fort, but otherwise he could think of no special significance attached to the place.

But Frederickson, while Harper had been performing his charade with the chamber-pot, had been deep in thought. There never had been any gold in the fort, Frederickson now explained, at least not when the Riflemen had captured it. If that fact could be proved, then their troubles would be over. ‘What we need to do,' he went on, ‘is find Commandant Lassan. I don't believe he wrote that statement. I believe Ducos made it up.' Frederickson paused as a man laughed outside the door. ‘I suspect your brandy is being appreciated, Sergeant.'