Sharpe's Revenge (35 page)

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 château 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.

It proved a long journey. Sharpe still feared capture and so he avoided all livery stables, coaching inns and barge quays. They had purchased three good horses with a portion of the money Harper had brought from England, and they coddled the beasts south from Paris. They travelled in civilian clothes, with their uniforms and rifles wrapped inside long cloth bundles. They avoided the larger towns, and spurred off the road whenever they saw a uniformed man ahead. They only felt safe from their shadowy enemies when they crossed the border into Piedmont. From there they faced a choice between the risk of brigands on the Italian roads or the menace of the Barbary pirates off the long coastline. ‘I'd like to see Rome,' Frederickson opted for the land route, ‘but not if you're going to press me to make indecent haste.'

‘Which I shall,' Sharpe said, so instead they sold the horses for a dispiriting loss and paid for passage on a small decaying coaster that crawled from harbour to harbour with an ever-changing cargo. They carried untreated hides, raw clay, baulks of black walnut, wine, woven cloth, pigs of lead, and a motley collection of anonymous passengers among whom the three civilian-clothed Riflemen, despite their bundled weapons, went unremarked. Once, when a dirty grey topsail showed in the west, the captain swore it was a North African pirate and made his passengers man the long sweeps which dipped futilely in the limpid water. Two hours later the ‘pirate' ship turned out to be a Royal Navy sloop which disdainfully ghosted past the exhausted oarsmen. Frederickson stared at his blistered hands, then snarled insults at the merchant-ship's captain.

Sharpe was impressed by his friend's command of Italian invective, but his admiration only earned a short-tempered reproof. ‘I am constantly irritated,' Frederickson said, ‘by your naive astonishment for the mediocre attainments of a very ordinary education. Of course I speak Italian. Not well, but passably. It is, after all, merely a bastard form of dog-Latin, and even you should be able to master its crudities with a little study. I'm going to sleep. If that fool sees another pirate, don't trouble to wake me.'

It was a difficult journey, not just because circumspection and Harper's shrinking store of money had demanded the most frugal means of travel, but because of Lucille Castineau. Frederickson's questions about the widow had commenced almost as soon as Sharpe rejoined his friend in Paris. Sharpe had answered the questions, but in such a manner as to suggest that he had not found anything specifically remarkable in Madame Castineau's life, and certainly nothing memorable. Frederickson too had taken care to sound very casual, as though his enquiries sprang from mere politeness, yet Sharpe noted how often the questions came. Sharpe came to dread the interrogations, and knew that he could only end them by confessing a truth he was reluctant to utter. The inevitable moment for that confession came late one evening when their cargo-ship was working its slow way towards the uncertain lights of a small port. ‘I was thinking,' Frederickson and Sharpe were alone on the lee rail and Frederickson, after a long silence, had broached the dreaded subject, ‘that perhaps I should go back to the château when all this is over. Just to thank Madame, of course.' It was phrased as a benign suggestion, but there was an unmistakable appeal in the words; Frederickson sought Sharpe's assurance that he would be welcomed by Lucille.

‘Is that wise?' Sharpe was staring towards the black loom of the coast. Far inland a sheet of summer lightning flickered pale above jagged mountains.

‘I don't know if wisdom applies to women,' Frederickson said in heavy jest, ‘but I would appreciate your advice.'

‘I really don't know what to say.' Sharpe tried to shrug the topic away, then, in an attempt to head it off entirely, he asked Frederickson if he had tasted anything odd in the supper served on board that night.

‘Everything on this ship tastes odd.' Frederickson was irritated by Sharpe's change of subject. ‘Why?'

‘They said it was rabbit. But I was in the galley this morning and noted that the paws of the carcasses had been chopped off.'

‘You have a sudden taste for rabbit paws?'

‘It's just that I was told that rabbit carcasses sold without paws are almost certainly not rabbit at all, but skinned cats.'

‘It's undoubtedly useful information,' Frederickson said very caustically, ‘but what in hell has that got to do with my returning to the château? I do you the distinct honour of asking for your advice about my marital future, and all you can do is blather on about dead cats! For Christ's sake, you've eaten worse, haven't you?'

‘I'm sorry,' Sharpe said humbly. He still stared at the dark coast rather than at his friend.

‘I have been thinking about my behaviour,' Frederickson now adopted a tone of ponderous dignity, ‘and have decided that I was wrong and you were right. I should have pounced before proposing. My mistake, I believe, lay in treating Madame Castineau with too great a fragility. Women admire a more forthright attitude. Is that so?'

‘Sometimes,' Sharpe said awkwardly.

‘A very useful reply,' Frederickson said sarcastically, ‘and I do thank you for it. I am asking your advice and I would be grateful for more substantial answers. I know your feelings about Madame Castineau ...'

‘I doubt you do ...' Sharpe began the feared confession.

‘You have a distaste for her,' Frederickson insisted on continuing, ‘and I can understand that attitude, but I confess that I have found it impossible to exorcise her from my thoughts. I apologise profoundly if I embarrass you by raising the matter, but I would be most grateful if you could tell me whether, after I had left the château, she showed even the slightest attachment to my memory.'

Sharpe knew how very hard it was for Frederickson to reveal these private agonies, but Sharpe also knew it was time for him to make those agonies much worse with the admission that he had himself become Lucille's lover. He feared that his friendship with Frederickson would be irreparably damaged by such an admission, but it was clearly inescapable. He hesitated for a bleak moment, then seized his courage. ‘William, there is something that you ought to know, something I should have told you much earlier, indeed, I should have told you in Paris, but ...'

‘I don't wish to hear unwelcome news,' Frederickson, hearing the despondency in Sharpe's voice, interrupted brusquely and defensively.

‘It is important news.'

‘You are going to tell me that Madame does not wish to see me again?' Frederickson, anticipating the bad news, was trying to hurry it.

‘I'm sure she would be very happy to renew your acquaintance,' Sharpe said feebly, ‘but that ...'

‘But that she would not be happy if I was to renew my attentions? I do understand.' Frederickson spoke very stiffly. He had interrupted Sharpe again in a desperate attempt to finish the conversation before his pride was lacerated any further. ‘Will you oblige me by not mentioning this matter again?'

‘I must just say, I insist on saying . . .'

‘I beg you.' Frederickson spoke very loudly. ‘Let the matter rest. You, of all people, should understand how I feel,' which, oblique though it was, was Frederickson's first indication that he had learned the truth about Jane from Harper.

Thereafter neither Sharpe nor Frederickson spoke of Madame Castineau. Harper, oblivious to either officer's interest in Lucille, would sometimes speak of her, but he soon realized that the subject was tender and so ceased to mention the widow, just as he never spoke of Jane. The only safe topic of conversation was the Riflemen's mutual enthusiasm for the pursuit and punishment of Pierre Ducos.

Which pursuit and punishment at last seemed imminent when, on a hot steamy morning, the merchant ship came to Naples. The first evidence of the city's proximity arrived before dawn when a southerly wind brought the stench of faecal alleyways across the darkened sea. In the first light Sharpe saw the volcanic smoke smearing a cloudless sky, then there was the hazy outline of hills, and lastly the glory of the city itself, stinking and lovely, heaped on a hill in jumbled confusion. The bay was crowded. Fishing boats, cargo vessels and warships were heading to and from the great harbour into which, creeping against a sulphurous wind, three Riflemen came for vengeance.

Monsieur Roland had silently cursed the widow Castineau. Why had she not written earlier? Now the Englishmen, with all their precious information, had fled, and Roland himself must move with an unaccustomed alacrity.

He wrote an urgent message that was placed in the hollow handle of a sword-hilt. The sword belonged to a Swiss doctor who half killed six horses in his haste to reach the Mediterranean coast where a sympathizer carried him in a fast brigantine to Elba. The Royal Naval frigate, ostensibly guarding Elba's small harbour at Portoferraio, did not search the brigantine, and if she had her crew would merely have discovered that one of the Emperor's old doctors had arrived to serve his master.

The message was unrolled in an ante-chamber of an Emperor's palace that was nothing more than an enlarged gardener's cottage which stood in a grand position high above the sea. The Emperor himself was somewhere in the island's interior where he was surveying land that could be used to plant wheat. A messenger was sent to summon him.

That evening the Emperor walked in the small garden behind his palace. A man had been found among his exiled entourage who both knew Pierre Ducos and, by some fluke of good fortune that could hardly be expected to attend a fallen idol like Napoleon, had even met the two English Riflemen. ‘You'll sail for Naples tomorrow, and you will take a dozen soldiers with you,' the Emperor ordered. ‘I doubt that Murat will want to help me, but we have little time, so you will have to seek his aid.' The Emperor stopped and jabbed a finger into the chest of his companion. ‘But do not, my dear Calvet, tell him that there is money at stake. Murat's like a dog smelling a bitch on heat when he scents money.'