Sharpe's Revenge (38 page)

Calvet raised his musket so that the barrel was under Sharpe's chin. ‘Put your rifle down, Major, and tell your two men to do the same.' He saw Sharpe's hesitation. ‘You'd prefer my men to disarm you? It's all one to me, but if you wish to keep your swords like gentlemen, then I suggest you put down your guns.'

There was perhaps a shade more pride in grounding their own arms than having them forcibly taken away, and so the three Riflemen slowly stooped and ignominiously abandoned their guns on the white roadway. Calvet waited till Sharpe was standing again, then once more put his musket to the Rifleman's throat. ‘Do you know where Pierre Ducos is, Major?'

‘Yes,' Sharpe said defiantly.

‘But I don't,' Calvet disarmingly confessed. ‘So tell me.'

‘Go to hell, General.'

‘You're determined to die like a cornered rat, aren't you? You'll die snarling, full of defiance. Except I'm under the orders of a fat Cardinal to return you to Naples. Have you seen the prison in Naples? You might survive it, Major, but so crippled with disease and hunger and filth that you'll wish you'd never been born. But if you tell me what I wish to know, Englishman, then I'll consider letting you walk away from this miserable kingdom.' Calvet twitched the musket so that the cold barrel knocked against Sharpe's jawbone. ‘Where is Pierre Ducos, Major?'

‘I should have killed you at Toulouse,' Sharpe said.

‘So that was you?' Calvet laughed. ‘The Englishman who can kill me has not been born, Major, but I will shoot you down like a rabid dog if you don't tell me where Pierre Ducos is hiding.' He twitched the musket again to jar its foresight against Sharpe's chin. ‘Tell me, Englishman.'

Sharpe stared into the Frenchman's eyes, then, with a speed that equalled Calvet's earlier quickness, he slapped the General's face. The blow sounded like a pistol shot.

Calvet's head was jerked to one side. He stepped back, brought the musket into his shoulder and aimed it between Sharpe's eyes. ‘Bastard,' he snarled.

‘Bugger off,' Sharpe said in English.

Calvet pulled the trigger.

Sharpe twisted away, reached for his sword hilt, and he had drawn a clear foot of the steel clear of the scabbard before he realized that the musket had not been loaded. Calvet laughed. ‘You can stop pissing your breeches, Major, the gun wasn't loaded. So pick up your bloody rifles and take me to Ducos.' He turned away from Sharpe and ordered his men to fall in. The moustached veterans obediently made two ragged ranks, but the three Riflemen did not move. Calvet turned on them with feigned astonishment. ‘Don't just stand there! Move!'

Still none of the three Riflemen shifted. ‘You expect us to take you to Ducos?' Sharpe asked.

‘Listen, you Goddamn fool.' Calvet, who was plainly enjoying himself, walked back and planted himself squarely in front of Sharpe. ‘Why should I send you to the Cardinal? All he wants to do is steal the gold for himself. And the Emperor wants it back, and that's my task, Major, and to help me fulfil it I'm offering you an alliance. You tell me where Ducos is hiding, and I will let you live. Indeed, I will even offer you the greater privilege of fighting under my command. For a change, Englishman, you and I will be on the same side. We are allies. Except that I am a General of Imperial France and you are a piece of English toadshit, which means that I give the orders and you obey them like a lilywhite-arsed conscript. So stop gawping like a novice nun in a gunners' bath-house and tell me where we're going!'

‘I don't think we have very much choice,' Frederickson observed drily.

Nor did they. And thus Sharpe was under orders again, back in an army's discipline, but this time serving a new master: the Emperor of Elba himself, Napoleon.

‘Of course the Cardinal wants the money, he's nothing but a tub of greed, but what high churchman isn't?' General Calvet spoke quietly to Sharpe. The two men were lying at the crest of a steep ridge from where they could observe the Villa Lupighi which lay on yet a higher hill a mile to the west. They were hidden and shaded by a thick growth of ilex and cypress. Frederickson, Harper and the General's twelve men were resting among the gnarled trunks of an ancient olive grove that grew in a small valley behind the ilex-covered ridge. ‘And like every other churchman,' Calvet went on, ‘the Cardinal wants someone else to do his dirty work for him. In this case, us.'

The Cardinal had done everything he could to make Calvet's task easier, except betray Ducos's hiding place. The Cardinal had provided a house in which Calvet and his men could wait for Sharpe's arrival in Naples. That arrival had been reported by the customs' officials who had been warned by the Frenchman to expect a tall, black-haired man and a shorter, one-eyed companion. The house where Calvet waited had been very close to the place where the Frenchman had ambushed the three Riflemen. A messenger had come from the city to warn Calvet that three, not two, Englishmen had left on the northern road, and it had been a simple matter for Calvet to wait at the ravine's northern end. ‘You'll notice, though,' Calvet went on, ‘that the Cardinal has left us alone now.'

‘Why
^?
'

Calvet said nothing for a few seconds, but just stared at the Villa Lupighi through an ancient battered telescope. Finally he grunted. ‘Why? So we conveniently kill Ducos, then the Cardinal can arrest us and keep the money. Which is why, Englishman, we shall have to outguess the bastard.'

Calvet's idea for outguessing the Cardinal had the virtues of extreme simplicity. The Cardinal must surely plan to waylay Calvet as he withdrew from the villa, and the likeliest places for that ambush would be on any of the roads leading away from the half-ruined house. So Calvet would not leave the villa by road. Instead three of his men would be detached from the assault and sent to the west of the villa where a small village lay on the sea-shore. The three men's task was to sequester one of the bright-painted and high-prowed fishing boats from the tiny harbour. Two of the three men had been sailors before the collapse of the French Navy had persuaded Napoleon to turn seamen into soldiers, and though their detachment meant sacrificing three precious men from the assault, Calvet was certain the ploy would outwit the Cardinal. ‘We'll also attack at night,' Calvet had decided, ‘because if that fat fool has sent troops, then you can be certain they're almost as useless as you are.' Raw troops were easily confused by night fighting, which was why, Calvet continued, he had not launched his brigade of conscripts against the Teste de Buch fort during the night. ‘If I'd had my veterans, Englishman, we'd have gobbled you up that very first night.'

‘Many French veterans have tried to kill me,' Sharpe said mildly, ‘and I'm still here.'

‘That's just the luck of the devil.' Calvet spotted some movement at the villa and went silent as he gazed through the glass. ‘How did you learn French?' he asked after a while.

‘From Madame Castineau.'

‘In her bed?'

‘No,' Sharpe protested.

‘Is she beautiful?' Calvet asked greedily.

Sharpe hesitated. He knew he could deflect Calvet's impudent enquiries by describing Lucille as very plain, but he suddenly found that he could not so betray her. ‘I think so,' he said very lamely.

Calvet chuckled at the answer. ‘I'll never understand women. They'll turn down a score of prinked-up thoroughbreds, then flop on to their backsides when some chewed-up mongrel like you or me hangs out his tongue. Mind you, I'm not complaining. I bedded an Italian duchess once, and thought I'd shock her by telling her I was the son of a ditch-digger, but it only made her drag me back to the sheets.' He shook his head at the memory. ‘It was like being mauled by a troop of Cossacks.'

‘I told you,' Sharpe lied with fragile dignity, ‘that I didn't go to Madame Castineau's bed.'

‘Then why should she try to protect you?' Calvet demanded. He had already confessed to Sharpe that it was Madame Castineau's unwitting letter that had alerted Napoleon to Ducos's treachery, and he now described how that letter had tried to exonerate the Riflemen. ‘She was insistent you were as innocent as a stillborn baby. Why would she say that?'

‘Because we are innocent,' Sharpe said, but he felt a thrill of gratitude at such evidence of Lucille's protective care. Then, to change the subject, he asked whether Calvet was married.

‘Christ, yes,' Calvet spat out a shred of chewing tobacco, ‘but the good thing about war, Englishman, is that it keeps us away from our own wives but very close to other men's wives.'

Sharpe smiled dutifully, then reached out and took the General's telescope. He stared at the villa for a long time, then slid the tubes shut. ‘We'll have to attack from this side.'

‘That's bloody obvious. A schoolboy with a palsied brain could have worked that one out.'

Sharpe ignored the General's sarcasm. He was beginning to like Calvet, and he sensed that the Frenchman liked him. They had both marched in the ranks, and both had endured a lifetime of battles. Calvet had risen much higher in rank, but Calvet had a devotion to a cause that Sharpe did not share. Sharpe had never fought for King George in the same fanatic spirit that Calvet offered to the Emperor. Calvet's devotion to the fallen Napoleon was absolute, and his alliance with Sharpe a mere expedience imposed by that forlorn allegiance. When Calvet attacked the Villa Lupighi he would do it for the Emperor, and Sharpe suspected that Calvet would cheerfully march into hell itself if the Emperor so demanded it.

Not that attacking the Villa Lupighi should be hellish. It had none of the defensive works of even a small redoubt of the late wars. There was no glacis to climb, no ravelins to flank, no embrasures to gout cannon-fire. Instead it was merely a ragged and fading building that decayed on its commanding hilltop. During the night Calvet and Sharpe had circled much of that hill and had seen how the lantern-light glowed in the seaward rooms while the eastern and ruined half of the building was an inky black. That dark tangle of stone offered itself as a hidden route to the enemy's heart.

The only remaining question was how many of that enemy waited in the rambling and broken villa. During the morning Sharpe and Calvet had seen at least two dozen men around the villa. Some had just lounged against an outer wall, staring to sea. Another group had walked with some women towards the village harbour. Two had exercised large wolf-like dogs. There had been no sight of Pierre Ducos. Calvet was guessing that Ducos had about three dozen men to defend his stolen treasure, while Calvet, less his three boat-snatchers, would be leading just ten. ‘It'll be a pretty little fight,' Calvet now grudgingly allowed.

‘It's the dogs that worry me.' Sharpe had seen the size of the two great beasts which had strained against the chains of their handlers.

Calvet sneered. ‘Are you frightened, Englishman?'

‘Yes.' Sharpe made the simple reply, and he saw how the honesty impressed Calvet. Sharpe shrugged. ‘It used not to be bad, but it seems to get worse. It was awful before Toulouse.'

Calvet laughed. ‘I had too much to do at Toulouse to be frightened. They gave me a brigade of wet-knickered recruits who would have run away from a schoolmistress's cane if I hadn't put the fear of God into the bastards. I told them I'd kill them myself if they didn't get in there and fight.'

‘They fought well,' Sharpe said. ‘They fought very well.'

‘But they didn't win, did they?' Calvet said. ‘You saw to that, you bastard.'

‘It wasn't my doing. It was a Scotsman called Nairn. Your brigade killed him.'

‘They did something right, then,' Calvet said brutally. ‘I thought I was going to die there. I thought you were going to shoot me in the back, and I thought to hell with it. I'm getting too old for it, Major. Like you, I find myself pissing with fright before a battle these days.' Calvet was returning honesty with honesty. ‘It became bad for me in Russia. I used to love the business before that. I used to think there was nothing finer than to wake in the dawn and see the enemy waiting like lambs for the sword-blades, but in Russia I got scared. It was such a damned big country that I thought I'd never reach France again and that my soul would be lost in all that emptiness.' He stopped, seemingly embarrassed by his confession of weakness. ‘Still,' he added, ‘brandy soon put that right.'

‘We use rum.'

‘Brandy and fat bacon,' Calvet said wistfully, ‘that makes a proper bellyful before a fight.'

‘Rum and beef,' Sharpe countered.

Calvet grimaced. ‘In Russia, Englishman, I ate one of my own corporals. That put some belly into me, though it was very lean meat.' Calvet took his telescope back and stared at the villa which now seemed deserted in the afternoon heat. ‘I think we should wait till about two hours after midnight. Don't you agree?'

Sharpe silently noted how this proud man had asked for his opinion. ‘I agree,' he said, ‘and we'll attack in two groups.'

‘We will?' Calvet growled.

‘We go first,' Sharpe said.

‘We, Englishman?'

‘The Rifles, General. The three of us. The experts. Us.'

‘Do I give orders, or you?' Calvet demanded belligerently.

‘We're Riflemen, best of the best, and we shoot straighter than you.' Sharpe knew it was only a soldier's damned pride that had made him insist on leading the assault. He patted the butt of his Baker rifle. ‘If you want our help, General, then we go first. I don't want a pack of blundering Frenchmen alerting the enemy. Besides, for a night attack, our green coats are darker than yours.'