Sharpe's Revenge (42 page)

The third bullet jerked the cloth. It went to Sharpe's right, but so close that it could not have missed by more than a sword blade's thickness. Dust sprang from the curtain's thick weave to drift in the silvery dawn light. Sharpe laughed. ‘You missed!'

‘Open the door!' Calvet roared angrily through one of the loopholes.

‘Ducos?' Sharpe called again, and once again the hidden Frenchman fired one of his stock of pistols, but this time the shot was not greeted by Sharpe's mockery. Instead the Rifleman screamed foully, gasped in awful pain, then moaned like a soul in sobbing torment.

Ducos shouted his triumph aloud. He ran to the curtain and snatched the heavy cloth aside. And there, at the moment of his personal victory, he stopped short.

He stopped because a sword blade flashed up to dig its point into the skin of his throat.

An unwounded Sharpe, with dog-blood lining the scars on his powder-stained face, stared into Ducos's eyes.

The Frenchman held a last unfired pistol, but the huge sword was sharp in his throat and the eyes that stared into his were like dark ice. ‘
Non
,
non, non.'
Ducos moaned the words, then his gun dropped on to the floor as his bladder gave way and a stain spread on the white silk of his French Marshal's breeches.

‘Oui, oui, oui,'
Sharpe said, then brought up his left knee in a single, savage kick. The force of it jarred Ducos's spectacles free, they fell and smashed, and then the Frenchman, clutching the warm stain on his breeches, fell after them and screamed a terrible moaning scream.

And the long chase was done.

Sharpe limped to the door to let in an irate General Calvet. The dawn was full now, flooding the limpid sea with a glitter of silver and gold. The villa was thick with smoke, but oddly silent now that the muskets had stopped firing. It was the silence after battle; the unexpected and oddly disappointing silence when the body still craved excitement and there was nothing now to do but clear up the wounded and dead, and find the plunder. Calvet's men tramped into the room and disarmed the broken Dragoons. Harper carried Frederickson downstairs and tenderly laid the officer on to a chaise-longue taken from the dismantled barricade. Two of Calvet's men had been wounded, one of them badly, but none had been killed. The wounded Grenadiers were laid beside Frederickson whose wits were slowly coming back. His face was already blackening and swelling in a vast bruise, but he managed a wry smile when he saw the ludicrously uniformed Pierre Ducos. The Frenchman still gasped from the pain of Sharpe's kick as Harper tied his wrists and ankles, then pushed him scornfully into a corner of the room to join the captured Dragoons.

General Calvet ripped down the alcove's curtain. Beyond it, and deep shadowed at the end of an otherwise empty recess, was a great iron box. The keys for the box were found in a pocket of Pierre Ducos's gaudy uniform. The locks were snapped open, and the lid was lifted on an Emperor's fortune. Calvet's men stared in an awed silence. The gems were so bright in the shadowed alcove that it seemed as if they generated their own dazzling light. Sharpe edged past a Grenadier and gazed down at the splendour.

‘It all belongs to the Emperor,' Calvet warned.

‘I know, but Ducos is mine.'

‘You can have him.' Calvet stooped to pick up a handful of pearls. He let them trickle through his stubby fingers so that they glittered like scraps of starlight.

‘Sir?' Patrick Harper's voice was oddly subdued. He had not gone to see the treasure, but had instead cleared a passage through the barricade and now stood on the terrace, staring southwards. ‘Sir?' he called more loudly. ‘I think there's something you should see here, sir.'

Calvet crossed to the terrace with Sharpe.
‘Merde,'
Calvet said.

A battalion of infantry was approaching the villa. Behind them, and still shadowed by a stand of trees, was a squadron of cavalry. The head of the small column was half a mile away, still on the coastal plain, but only a few minutes from the hill on which the captured villa stood. The battalion's shadow stretched towards the sea, and the dawn's clear light showed that its marching was a shambles, its demeanour unprepossessing, but it was nevertheless a complete battalion of infantry with at least six hundred muskets, and its arrival explained why the Cardinal had given Calvet his free rein.

Because Calvet and Sharpe had done the Cardinal's dirty work, and now the Neapolitans had arrived to reap the work's reward.

‘Merde,'
Sharpe said.

Ducos overcame his pain to crow a vengeful triumph. His friends had come to rescue him, he said, and Sharpe and Calvet would now suffer for their temerity. Harper slapped him to silence.

‘We can escape,' Calvet said glumly, ‘but not with the fortune.'

‘We can take a good deal of it,' Sharpe suggested.

‘The Emperor wants it all.' Calvet scowled at the Neapolitan battalion which now spread itself into a line of three ranks at the foot of the villa's hill. The cavalrymen behind the battalion spurred their horses past the infantry. Clearly the Neapolitans planned to surround the hill. There would be a few minutes before that manoeuvre was completed, and Calvet had rightly guessed that those moments would just be sufficient for his small band to scramble northwards into the hills, but they would be forced to travel light and they would doubtless be pursued mercilessly through all the long hot day. They would be weighed down by the treasure they carried, by their wounded, and by their prisoner.

The battalion of Neapolitan infantry waited on the parched grass. So far they had ignored the small village where Calvet's three men should be guarding a boat, but that did not signify, for the Italian infantry now lay between the villa and Calvet's seaborne escape. Three of the Neapolitan officers stood their horses a few yards in front of the resting infantry and Sharpe guessed that an envoy would soon be sent up the hill to demand the surrender of the villa's occupants.

‘Ignore the bastards.' Calvet, seeing no solution, turned away and ordered his men to fill their packs, cushion covers and any other receptacle they could find with the Emperor's treasure. Harper joined the Frenchmen and marvelled at the slew of rubies, emeralds, diamonds and pearls. There were a few bags of gold heaped at one end of the iron chest, and a tangle of candlesticks at the other, but most of the great box was bright with gems. They lay a foot deep in the box, which was itself three feet high, suggesting that much of the treasure had already been squandered. ‘How much did you waste?' Calvet snapped at Ducos, but the thin-faced Frenchman said nothing. He was waiting for his salvation.

Which salvation appeared to be in the hands of the three Neapolitan officers who spurred their horses up the hill's steep southern flank. Dust drifted from their hooves towards the sea.

‘Bloody hell,' Harper had rejoined Sharpe on the terrace, ‘the buggers look as if they're going to their first communion.' The Irishman spat over the balustrade. His disgust was at the uniforms that the officers wore. Neither he nor Sharpe had ever seen uniforms so splendid or so impractical. All three officers were in pristine and dazzling white. Their elegant cutaway coats were faced with cloth of brightest gold, while their cuffs and epaulettes were similarly arrayed with gold cloth that was dangling with gold chain. They wore black riding boots topped with gold turnovers, and on their heads were tall snow-white bearskins with gold chains looped from the crests to the blood-red plumes. ‘What are we supposed to do,' Harper said, ‘fight the buggers or kiss them?'

Sharpe did not reply. Instead he limped to that part of the balustrade closest to the approaching officers. All three were sweating because of the weight and constriction of their white fur hats. Their leader, whose rank Sharpe could not recognize, curbed his horse and gave the Rifleman a curt nod. ‘Are you French?' the man asked in that language.

‘My name is Richard Sharpe, and I am a Major in His Brittanic Majesty's army,' Sharpe said in English.

‘My name is Colonel Pannizi.' Pannizi must have understood Sharpe's reply, though he still spoke in French. He waited, as though expecting Sharpe to offer him a salute, but the filthy, bloodstained Englishman did not move. Pannizi sighed. ‘And what is an English officer doing in the Kingdom of Naples?'

‘Visiting a friend.'

Pannizi was a slim, handsome man. He wore a razor-thin moustache that curled up into sharp waxed tips. Gold tassels hung from his bearskin's plume, while a tiny gold and silver cuirass hung beneath the high stiff lapels of his white and gold coat. He momentarily closed his eyes in apparent exasperation at Sharpe's insolent answer. ‘Is General Calvet with you?'

‘I am General Calvet. Who the devil are you?'

Pannizi bowed in his saddle towards the stocky Frenchman who now stumped on to the terrace. ‘My name is Colonel Pannizi.'

‘Good morning, Colonel, and goodbye.' Calvet had clearly decided that defiance was the best course of action.

Pannizi touched a white-gloved finger to a tip of his moustache. His two companions, both much younger, sat with impassive faces. Pannizi quietened his horse that jarred away from an insistent fly. ‘You are trespassing upon the property of a prince of the Church.'

‘I couldn't give a bucket of cowshit whose house it is,' Calvet said.

‘The house and all its contents,' Pannizi went on with remarkable equanimity, ‘are hereby placed under the protection of the Kingdom of Naples, whose warrant I hold. I therefore request that you leave the villa immediately.'

‘And if I don't?' Calvet challenged.

Pannizi shrugged. ‘I shall be forced to arrest you, which will cause me extreme pain. The bravery of General Calvet is legendary.'

The flowery compliment plainly pleased Calvet, but could not persuade him. There was a fortune at stake, and even if Calvet himself did not receive a groat of the treasure, he was determined that his master would be denied none of it. ‘To arrest me,' he said, ‘you will have to fight me. Not many men have lived to say they fought General Calvet.'

Pannizi gave a flicker of a smile. He drew his sword, but very slowly so as to demonstrate that he meant no threat. He pointed the shining blade down the hill to where his men sat slumped on the grass, then sheathed the blade again. The gesture was eloquent. Pannizi controlled six hundred bayonets, and must have known that Calvet had scarcely more than a dozen. ‘Your bravery, as I said, is legendary.' Pannizi was hoping to flatter Calvet into surrender.

Calvet glanced at the Neapolitan battalion. Their colours had been unfurled, though the wind was not strong enough to lift the heavy fringed silk. Beneath the two flags the men appeared dispirited and flaccid. ‘You have the stomach for a fight, Colonel?' Calvet challenged Pannizi.

‘I have the orders for a fight, General, and I am a soldier.'

‘A good answer.' Calvet scowled down the hill. He knew better than anyone how hopeless this fight was, yet he was a soldier too, and he also had his orders. ‘And if we surrender to you now?' he asked with evident distaste for the question.

Pannizi looked shocked. ‘My dear General, there is no question of your surrendering! You are invited to be the guests of the Cardinal, the most honoured guests. Consider my regiment to be nothing more than an escort sent to conduct you with due honour into the city.'

Calvet had the grace to smile at the outrageous description. ‘And if we choose not to be the Cardinal's guests?'

‘You are free to leave the kingdom, all of you.'

‘Free?' Calvet probed.

Pannizi nodded. ‘Entirely free. And you may take with you your uniforms and personal weapons,' he paused, ‘but nothing more.'

The threat was in those last three words. Pannizi knew what treasure lay in the villa, and he did not care what became of Calvet, Sharpe, or their men, so long as the treasure became his.

Calvet turned abruptly to stare north. The Neapolitan horsemen had cut off that escape route. He turned back. ‘You will give us fifteen minutes to consider our position, Colonel?'

‘Ten,' Pannizi said, then drew his sword again. He saluted Calvet with the shining blade. ‘And you will do the honour of breakfasting with my officers, General?'

‘Only if you have bacon,' Calvet said. ‘I have a great liking for fat bacon.'

Pannizi smiled. ‘Bacon will be found for you, General. You have ten minutes to anticipate its taste.' The Neapolitan Colonel sheathed his sword, nodded a summons to his two companions, then galloped back down the hill.

‘Merde, merde, merde,'
Calvet said.