Sharpe's Revenge (26 page)

They travelled west. Sometimes they would walk for miles along deep and rutted lanes like those in England's west country. At other times they struggled through high-hedged fields, or climbed to some wooded ridge from where they could judge their position by moonlight. It took two nights to find the right district, and another night to discover Lassan's château in its deep, private valley that was filled with drifts of decaying blossom. Sharpe and Harper spent the last two hours of that night scouting round the château. They saw a youth sitting in the château's gateway. Behind him, and silhouetted by a lantern, was a crude barricade of barrels. The youth was armed with what looked like an old fowling piece. He had tipped his chair back, and seemed asleep, and Sharpe had been tempted to make his entry there and then. He resisted the urge, for to have entered at that witching hour would have caused a frantic alarm. The boy was clearly posted to guard against the brigands who threatened the countryside, and Sharpe had no wish to be mistaken for such a villain. Instead he and Harper went back to the high wooded spur where Frederickson had found a hiding place.

They spent the whole of the next day on the high ground of the ridge. They were hidden by hornbeams, elms, beeches, and oaks. It was frustrating to be so close to their quarry, and yet be forced to let the daylight hours pass in inactivity, but Sharpe had decided that, in their ragged state, a daylight approach would cause suspicion and might even trigger disaster. He could see from his eyrie that every man in the valley carried a gun; even the two boys in the big orchard who laboriously ringed the trunks of the apple trees with tar carried muskets.

‘We'll go just after sundown,' Sharpe decided. The dusk was a time when men were relaxing from a day's labours.

The Riflemen anticipated their success. One evening's conversation, Frederickson averred, would be sufficient to persuade Henri Lassan to travel to England. In a week, Sharpe thought, he would be back in London. Within two weeks, at the very most, he would be back with Jane.

‘I'll take some leave when we're home,' Frederickson said.

‘You can visit us in Dorset.' Sharpe had a homely dream of entertaining old friends in his well-deserved comfort.

Frederickson smiled crookedly. ‘I have a greater yearning to visit Rome. I'd like to stand where the emperors once stood. They say an astonishing amount of the imperial city still stands, though it's evidently much decayed. Perhaps you'll come with me?' he offered to Sharpe.

‘Dorset will do me well enough.' Sharpe, lying on the high ground and staring down at the moated château, envied Henri Lassan his house. Sharpe might not have rejoiced, as Frederickson did, in the ruins of the ancient world, but he perceived a great calmness in this old Norman farmhouse. He hoped Jane had found something similar in England. He suddenly did not want a modern house with its regular geometric windows and square angular lines. He wanted something calmer and older like this château which slumbered in its deep valley.

‘I'll be back in Donegal,' Harper said wistfully. ‘I'll buy some Protestant acres, so I will.'

‘You'll be a farmer?' Sharpe asked.

‘Aye, sir, and I'll have a grand house, so I will. Somewhere where the children can grow in peace.' Harper fell silent, perhaps thinking of how close that coveted heaven had become.

‘Soldiers' dreams,' Frederickson said dismissively, ‘just soldiers' dreams.' He rolled on to his belly, parted the leaves in front of him, and stared down the barrel of his rifle towards the distant château. Six cows were being driven to the byre for milking. He could just see a man standing in the farmyard, beyond the moat, and he wondered if that solitary figure was Henri Lassan, and Frederickson thought how many soldiers' dreams were fixed on that one man's honesty. A farm in Ireland, a house in Dorset, and a sketchbook in the Roman Forum; all would come true if only one honest man would tell the truth. He let the leaves fall slowly back, then slept, waiting for the dusk.

An hour after the sun had sunk, and when the light was still thick and gold about the lengthening shadows, the three Riflemen crept from the woods and stalked down a deep hedgerow which led to the laneway which edged the moat at the front of Lassan's château.

Sharpe reached the laneway first and saw the same young man standing guard in the château's archway. The youth was clearly bored. He thought himself unobserved and so was practising a crude arms drill of his own invention. He shouldered his fowling piece, presented it, grounded it, then thrust it forward as though it was tipped with a bayonet. After a while, and tiring of his military dreams, the boy sidled past the crude barricade of barrels and disappeared into the château's yard.

Frederickson crouched beside Sharpe. ‘Shall we go now?' he asked.

Sharpe stared at the crenellated tower above the gatehouse. He could not imagine why Lassan had not thought to post a sentry on that high commanding platform, but no man watched from that eyrie so Sharpe decided it was safe to go. Sharpe had decreed that just he and Frederickson would approach the château, and that neither man would carry weapons. Two unarmed men in the twilight posed no great threat. Harper would wait with all the weapons in the hedgerow, and only join the officers once Lassan had been safely reached.

The boy was still hidden inside the yard as Sharpe and Frederickson scrambled through the hedge and walked down the lane's grass verge. No one called an alarm. This façade of the château, hard on the moat and facing the village, was an almost featureless wall, betraying that the building had once been a small fortress.

‘It's a very pretty house,' Frederickson murmured.

‘Monsieur Lassan's a very lucky man,' Sharpe agreed.

They had to step off the verge to approach the bridge across the moat. Once on the roadbed their boots crunched on loose stone, but still no one challenged them, not even when they reached the moat and stepped on to the moss-edged planks of the ancient drawbridge. They hurried into the shelter of the archway, then edged silently by the crude barricade of empty barrels. Sharpe saw a flock of geese cropping at a thin patch of grass at the far side of the château's yard.

‘Back!' Frederickson hissed. He had glimpsed the boy coming back towards the arch. The lad had evidently gone to the kitchen to collect his supper that he was now carefully carrying in both hands. His long-barrelled fowling piece was slung on his shoulder.

The two Riflemen pressed themselves against the wall of the arch. The boy, intent on not spilling a drop of his soup, did not even look up as he turned into the thick shadow of the gateway.

Frederickson pounced.

The boy, in sudden terror, let the bowl fall as he twisted violently away. He was too slow. The wooden bowl spilt its contents across the cobbles as a knife jarred cold against his throat. An arm went round the boy's face, muzzling his mouth.

‘Not a word!' Frederickson hissed in French. He was holding the flat of a clasp-knife's blade against the boy's adam's apple. ‘Be very quiet, my lad, very quiet. You're not going to be hurt.'

Sharpe took the old fowling piece from the boy's shoulder. He opened the lock's frizzen and blew the priming powder away to make the gun safe. The boy was wide-eyed and shivering.

‘We mean no harm,' Frederickson spoke very slowly and softly to the boy. ‘We don't even have guns, you see? We've simply come here to talk to your master.' He took his hand from the boy's mouth.

The boy, clearly terrified out of his wits by the two scarred and ragged men, tried to speak, but the events of the last few seconds had struck him dumb. Frederickson gripped the nape of the boy's jerkin. ‘Come with us, lad, and don't be frightened. We're not going to hurt you.'

Sharpe propped the fowling piece against the wall, then led the way out of the shadowed arch. He could see a lit window across the château's yard, and the shadow of a person moving behind the small panes of glass. He hurried. Frederickson kept hold of the frightened boy. Two of the geese stretched their necks towards the Riflemen.

The geese began their cackling too late, for Sharpe had already reached the kitchen door which, because the boy had to return his soup bowl, was still unlocked. Sharpe did not wait on ceremony, but just pushed open the heavy door.

Frederickson thrust the boy away from him, then ducked under the lintel behind Sharpe.

Two women were in the candle-lit kitchen. One, an elderly woman with work-reddened hands, was stirring a great vat that hung on a pothook above the fire. The other, a much younger and thinner woman who was dressed all in black, was sitting at the table with an account book. The two women stared in frozen horror at the intruders.

‘Madame?' Frederickson said from behind Sharpe who had stopped just inside the door.

‘Who are you?' It was the thin woman in black who asked the question.

‘We're British officers, Madame, and we apologize for thus disturbing you.'

The thin woman stood. Sharpe had an impression of a long and bitter face. She turned away from the intruders to where two water vats stood in an alcove. ‘Haven't you done enough already?' she asked over her shoulder.

‘Madame,' Frederickson said gently, ‘I think you misunderstand us. We are only here ...'

‘William!' Sharpe, understanding none of what was being said, turned and pushed Frederickson out of the kitchen. He had seen the thin black-dressed woman turn back from the vats, and in her hands was a great brass-muzzled horse-pistol. Her grey eyes held nothing but a bitter hatred and Sharpe knew, with the certainty of the doomed, that everything had gone wrong. He pushed Frederickson desperately into the yard and he tried to throw himself out of the door, but he knew he was too late. His body flinched from the terrible pain to come. He had already begun to scream in anticipation of that pain when Lucille Castineau pulled the trigger and Sharpe's world turned to thunder and agony. He felt the bullets strike like massive blows, and he saw a sear of flame flash its light above him, and then, blessedly, as the gun's stunning echo died away, there was just nothing.

Captain Peter d‘Alembord sat in the drawing-room of the Cork Street house and felt acutely uncomfortable. It was not that d'Alembord was unused to luxury, indeed he had been raised in an affluent family of the most exquisite tastes, but his very familiarity with civilized living told him that there was something exceedingly vulgar about this high-ceilinged room. There was, he considered, simply too much of everything. A great chandelier, much too large for the room, hung from a plaster finial, while a dozen crystal sconces crowded the walls. The sconces, like the chandelier, dripped with candle wax that should long have been scraped away. The furniture was mostly lacquered black in the fake Egyptian style that had been fashionable ten years earlier. There were three chaise-longues, two footstools, and a scattering of small lion-footed tables. The gilt-framed pictures seemed to have been bought as a job lot; they all showed rather unlikely shepherdesses dallying with very ethereal young men. A box of candied cherries lay gathering dust on one table, and a bowl of almonds on another.

Dust was everywhere and d‘Alembord doubted whether the room had been cleaned for days, perhaps even weeks. The grate was piled with ashes, and the room smelt overwhelmingly of powder and stale perfume. A maid had curtseyed when d'Alembord had handed in his card at the door, but there was little evidence that the girl did any cleaning. d'Alembord could only suppose that Jane Sharpe was merely lodging in the house, for he could not believe that she would allow such slovenliness in her own home.

d‘Alcmbord waited patiently. He could find only one book in the room. It was the first of a three volume romance which told the story of a clergyman's daughter who, snatched from the bosom of her family by brigands in Italy, was sold to the Barbary pirates of Algiers where she became the plaything of a terrible Muslim chief. By the last page of the book, to which d'Alembord had hastily turned, she was still preserving her maidenly virtue, which seemed a most unlikely outcome considering the reputed behaviour of the Barbary pirates, but then unlikely things properly belonged in books. d'Alembord doubted if he would seek out the remaining volumes.

A black and gilt clock on the mantel whirred, then sounded midday. d'Alembord wondered it he dared pull aside the carefully looped velvet curtains and open a window, then decided that such an act might be thought presumptuous. Instead he watched a spider spin a delicate web between the tassels of a table-cloth on which a vase of flowers wilted.

The clock struck the quarter, then the half, then the hour's third quarter. d‘Alembord had come unannounced to the house, and had thus expected to wait, but he had never anticipated being kept waiting as long as this. If he was ignored till one o'clock, he promised himself, he would leave.