Sharpe's Revenge (24 page)

One week after the funerals Madame Pellemont arrived with her family lawyer and an impudent claim that half the château's estate, and half the château itself, properly belonged to her daughter who had gone through a betrothal ceremony with the dead Comte de Lassan. Lucille listened in apparent patience, then, when at last the lawyer politely requested her response, she opened her brother's drawer, took out the silver-hilted pistol, and threatened to shoot both Madame Pellemont and her lawyer if they did not leave her home immediately. They hesitated, and it was said that Lucille's voice could be heard in the sexton's house beyond the blacksmith's shop as she screamed at them to leave the château.

Madame Pellemont and her lawyer left, and the silver-hilted pistol, which turned out to be unloaded, was thrown after them. It lay in the road for three hours before anyone dared to pick it up.

Lucille's father-in-law, old General Castineau, came all the way from Bourges to sympathize with her. The General had only one leg; his other had been lost to an Austrian cannonball. He sat for hours with Lucille. He told her she should marry again, that every woman needed a husband, and, because he was a widower, and because he was sentimental, and because he saw in Lucille what his sharp-eyed son had once seen, he offered himself. Lucille turned him down, though so gently that the old General had no chance to take offence.

General Castineau also assured her that it was most unlikely for any Englishmen to have killed Henri and the Dowager.

‘I saw them,' Lucille insisted.

‘You saw men in green. Every country's army has men in green coats. Our own dragoons wear green. Or wore green. God knows what they'll wear now.'

‘Those men were English.'

The General tried to explain that the English were hardly likely to be in Normandy since their army had invaded the south of France and had already been evacuated from Bordeaux. A few Englishmen had been with the allies who reached Paris, but not many. And anyway, why should an Englishman seek out this family? He begged Lucille to give the question her most serious attention.

‘They were English,' Lucille said stubbornly.

The General sighed. ‘Marie tells me you're not eating.'

Lucille ignored his concern, preferring her own. ‘I hate the English.'

‘That's understandable,' General Castineau said soothingly, though from all he had heard it was better to be captured by the English than by the Russians, and he was about to expatiate on that grisly theme when he remembered that Lucille was hardly in a receptive frame of mind for such reflections. ‘You should eat,' he said sternly. ‘I've ordered a dish of lentil soup for you today.'

‘If the Englishmen come back,' she said, ‘I'll kill them.'

‘Quite right, quite right, but if you don't eat you won't have the strength to kill them.'

That remark made Lucille look shrewdly at the General, almost as though he had propounded a peculiarly difficult idea, but one which made surprising sense. She nodded agreement. ‘You're right, Papa,' and at lunchtime she wolfed down all the lentil soup, then carved herself a thick slice of the ham that the General had been hoping to carry off the next day in his saddlebag.

That evening the General met privately with the doctor and both men agreed that the terrible events had sadly disturbed Madame Castineau's wits. The doctor could think of no easy cure, unless Madame Castineau could be persuaded to take the waters, which sometimes worked, but which were horribly expensive. Otherwise, he said, nature and time must do the healing. ‘Or marriage,' the doctor said with a certain wistfulness, ‘Madame needs a man's touch, if you understand me.'

‘She won't marry again,' General Castineau opined. ‘She was too much in love with my son, and now she'd rather wither away than dilute his memory. It's a sad waste, Doctor.'

General Castineau left next morning, though he made certain that there would always be reliable men from the village in the château in case the brigands should return and, indeed, just two hours after the General had left, five strange horsemen approached from the northern road that dropped off the wooded ridge and the farmworkers ran to the château's entrance with loaded muskets and hefted pitchforks.

The strange horsemen approached slowly, with their hands held in clear view. They stopped a good few yards from the moat's bridge and their leader, a plump man, politely requested an audience with Monsieur the Comte de Lassan.

‘He's dead.' It was the miller's son who answered truculently.

Monsieur Roland, the advocate from Paris, eyed the ancient musket in the boy's hands and chose his next words very carefully. ‘Then I would like to speak with a member of his family, Monsieur? My name is Roland, and I have the honour to be a lawyer in the service of his Most Christian Majesty.'

The words, gently said, impressed the miller's son who ran to tell Madame Castineau that yet another gentleman had come to see her.

Roland, whose rump had been made excruciatingly sore by long days in the saddle, walked with Lucille in the orchards. His four men patrolled the edges of the trees with drawn pistols to deter any strangers from intruding on the discussion.

Roland explained that he was charged by the Royal Treasury with the recovery of a sum of gold stolen by the English. The coins had been deposited in the Teste de Buch fort, and Roland had come to Normandy to hear Commandant Lassan's evidence about the loss of the bullion. He was desolated, Roland repeated the word, desolated, to hear of the Commandant's death.

‘Murder,' Lucille corrected him.

‘Murder,' Roland humbly accepted the correction.

‘The English murdered him,' Lucille said. ‘The men in green coats. The Riflemen.'

Roland stopped his slow pacing and turned an astonished face on the widow. ‘Are you certain, Madame?'

Lucille, galled that no one believed her, turned in fury on the plump lawyer. ‘Monsieur, I am sure! I am sure! I saw them! They were men in green coats, Englishmen just like those my brother feared, and they murdered my mother and my brother. They are animals, Monsieur, animals! My brother had said they might come, and they did! He even knew the Englishman's name. Sharpe!'

‘I think you are right, Madame,' Roland said quietly, and Lucille, who till now had not been taken seriously by a single person, could only stare at the Parisian lawyer. ‘In fact I am sure you are right,' Roland added.

‘You believe me, Monsieur?' Lucille said in a very relieved and somewhat surprised voice.

‘I do believe you. These are ruthless men, Madame. Believe me, I have met this Sharpe.' Roland shuddered. ‘He and his comrade have stolen a fortune that belongs to France, and now they will try to kill the men who can testify to that theft. I should have thought to warn your brother. Alas, dear lady, that I did not think to do so.'

Lucille shook her head in denial of the lawyer's self accusation. ‘Henri mentioned no gold,' she said after a while.

‘A soldier should carry secrets well, and the existence of this gold was most secret.' Roland, sweating profusely in the spring sunshine, turned and walked back towards the château. ‘I do not think the Englishmen will return now,' he said soothingly.

‘I wish they would return.' Lucille alarmed the lawyer by revealing an enormous brass-muzzled horse-pistol that lay heavy in the wide pocket of her apron. ‘If they do return, Monsieur, I shall kill at least one of them.'

‘Leave the killing to those who know best how to do it.' Roland, knowing this visit was wasted, was eager to return to Caen where there was at least a vestige of civilization. He feared that Lucille would invite him to luncheon, and that the château's evident poverty would provide a most meagre meal, but, to his relief, Lucille made no such offer.

Roland mounted his horse at the château's entrance. He had given Madame Castineau his address, and begged her to write to him if the Englishmen returned, though he admitted he put small faith in such a thing happening. Nevertheless, looking down at the sad Lucille, he felt a pang of sympathy. ‘May I presume to give Madame advice?'

‘I should be honoured, Monsieur.'

Roland collected his reins. ‘Marry again, Madame. A woman such as yourself should not be alone; not in these troubled times and in this sad country. Permit me to say that I am married, Madame, and that it gives me the greatest peace and happiness.'

Lucille smiled, but said nothing.

Roland turned his horse, then, remembering one last question, turned the animal back again. ‘Madame? Forgive my indelicacy, but did your brother lose two fingers of his right hand?'

‘They cut them off!' Lucille wailed the words in sudden agony. ‘The Englishmen cut them off!'

Roland, thinking the loss of the two fingers must have happened when Sharpe's men had captured the Teste de Buch fort, did not ask Lucille to amplify the answer which already seemed to confirm Ducos's written testimony. Instead the lawyer raised his hat. ‘Thank you, Madame, and I am sorry if I have caused you distress.'

That night, in his comfortable lodgings in Caen, Monsieur Roland wrote two reports. The first would be sent to the King's Minister of Finance and it respectfully and regretfully reported the murder of Henri Lassan and the consequent lack of any new evidence that might lead to the gold's recovery. Roland added his suspicions that the two English officers, Sharpe and Frederickson, had been responsible for Lassan's death. ‘They must certainly be charged with murder,' he wrote, ‘and the search for them must continue, both in France and in Britain.'

Roland's second report was far more detailed. It began by saying that Pierre Ducos's written testimony had been substantially confirmed, and that it now seemed virtually certain that the two English Rifle officers had stolen the Emperor's gold. They had also killed Lassan, presumably so that he could not testify against them. The death of Lassan prompted Roland to consider the possibility that the two English officers had already murdered Pierre Ducos; how else to account for Ducos's continued silence? Roland respectfully suggested that the two Englishmen must already have left France, but hoped they might yet be found and brought to vengeance. He added the welcome news that the English Navy had been requested by the new French government to desist from their explorations in and around the Teste de Buch fort, which request had been reluctantly complied with. The English search about the fort had found none of the imperial gold or baggage.

This second report was written on fine India paper which Monsieur Roland took to a calligrapher in Paris. The calligrapher sealed the India paper inside two sheets of thicker paper that were so cleverly pasted together that they appeared to a casual glance to be one thick sheet of paper. Then, on the thicker paper's creamy surface, the calligrapher inscribed an extremely tedious ode in praise of the Greek Gods.

The ode was briefly read by a French government censor. Two weeks later the poem was delivered to the island of Elba, off the Tuscany coast, where the creamy page was delicately peeled apart to reveal the India paper inside. Within an hour Roland's longer report was being read by an Emperor in exile, but an Emperor who still retained some sharp claws. Except that the claws could not be unsheathed, for the enemy was hidden, and so, though Monsieur Roland's report was filed carefully away, it was not forgotten. The report, after all, concerned money, and the exiled Emperor had need of money if his dreams were once again to blazon Europe with his glory. The English Riflemen might have vanished for the moment, but they would reappear, and when they did the Emperor would have them found and have them killed. For glory.

The Saxon Dragoon wished to go home. He told Sergeant Challon as much, and the Sergeant reminded the Saxon of the vow they had all taken when they had waited in the deserted farmhouse. The vow had been an agreement that all the Dragoons would remain with Major Ducos until everything was safe, but if any man did wish to leave then he must forfeit his share of the Emperor's treasure.

The Saxon shrugged. ‘I just want to go home.'

Challon put his arm about the big man's shoulder. ‘It won't be long, Herman.'

‘Home,' the Saxon said stubbornly.

‘And you'll go home without any of the money?' Challon asked enticingly. The two men were in the stableyard of a tavern in Leghorn. Challon had gone to the stables to make certain the horses were being fed, and the Saxon had followed the Sergeant in hope of finding some privacy for this conversation.

Herman shrugged. ‘I deserve something, Sergeant, and you know it.' It had been the Saxon who had been slightly wounded when he crossed the wooden bridge with Sergeant Challon to kill Henri Lassan, and it had been the Saxon who had made such havoc in the Seleglise farmhouse which Ducos had ordered attacked so that the local people would believe the subsequent attack on Lassan the work of casual brigands.