Sharpe's Revenge (32 page)

‘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 château, 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 château'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 coul 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 château to find an enemy.

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 Triomphe, 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-Élysees, 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
Souricière
, 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.