Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe's Revenge, Sharpe's Waterloo, Sharpe's Devil (30 page)

‘You do now, sir.’ Harper tore open Sharpe’s letter and gave it to the officer. ‘The address is bound to be written there, sir.’

But d’Alembord would not take the letter. ‘You write to him, Sergeant-Major. He’s much fonder of you than he is of me.’

‘Jesus. I’m just a numbskull Irishman from Donegal, sir, and I couldn’t write a letter to save my own soul. Besides, I’m going to Spain to fetch my own wife home.’ d‘Alembord reluctantly took the letter. ‘I can’t write to him. I wouldn’t know what to say.’

‘You’re an officer, sir. You’ll think of something, so you will.’ Harper turned again to stare at the empty street corner. ‘Why is she doing it? In the name of God, why?’ d‘Alembord had pondered that question himself. He shrugged. ‘She’s like a caged singing bird given freedom. The Major took her out of that awful house, gave her wings, and now she wants to fly free.’

Harper scorned that sympathetic analysis. ‘She’s rotten to the bloody core, sir, just like her brother.’ Jane’s brother had been an officer in Harper’s battalion. Harper had killed him, though no one but he and Sharpe knew the truth of that killing. ‘Christ, sir.’ A foul thought had struck Harper. ‘It’ll kill Mr Sharpe when he finds out. He thinks the sun never sets on her!’

‘Which is why I don’t want to write the news to him, Sergeant-Major.’ d’Alembord pushed the letter into his coat’s tail pocket. ‘So perhaps it’s better for him to live in ignorant bliss?’

‘Christ on His cross.’ Harper brushed at the blood on his cheek. ‘I don’t want to be the one who has to tell him, sir.’

‘But you’re his friend.’

‘God help me, that I am.’ Harper walked slowly down the street and dreaded the moment when he would go back to France and be forced to break the news. ‘It’ll be like stabbing him to his heart, so it will, to his very heart.’

By the end of May Sharpe could walk to the château’s mill and back. He had made himself a crutch, yet still he insisted on putting his weight on to his right leg. His left arm was stiff and could not be fully raised. Doggedly he persisted in exercising it, forcing the joint a fraction further each day. The exercise was horribly painful, so much so that it brought tears to his eyes, but he would not give up.

Nor did he give up hope of Jane’s arrival. He liked to sit in the château’s archway and stare up the village street. One day an impressive carriage did appear there, and Sharpe’s hopes soared, but it was only a church dignitary visiting the priest. No message came from Harper, nor from d’Alembord who surely must have learned of Sharpe’s whereabouts from the Irishman. ‘Perhaps Harper was arrested?’ Sharpe suggested to Frederickson.

‘He’s a very hard man to arrest.’

‘Then why...’ Sharpe began.

‘There’ll be an explanation,’ Frederickson interrupted curtly. Sharpe frowned at his friend’s tone. In these last weeks Frederickson had seemed very content and happy, undoubtedly immersed in his courtship of Lucille Castineau. Sharpe had watched the two of them walking in the orchards, or strolling beside the stream, and he had seen how each seemed to enjoy the other’s company. Sharpe, though he was besieged by worry over Jane, had been glad for his friend. But now, in the evening light, as the two Riflemen lingered in the château’s archway, there was a troublesome echo of Frederickson’s old asperity. ‘There’ll be a perfectly simple explanation,’ Frederickson reiterated, ‘but for now I’m more worried about Ducos.’

‘I am, too.’ Sharpe was prising at the edge of the ragged plaster which still encased his thigh. The doctor insisted that the plaster should stay another month, but Sharpe was impatient to cut it away.

‘You shouldn’t think about Ducos,’ Frederickson said airily, ‘not while you’re still peg-legging. You should be intent on your recovery, nothing else. Why don’t you let me worry about the bastard?’

‘I rather thought you had other concerns?’ Sharpe suggested carefully.

Frederickson pointedly ignored the comment. He lit a cheroot. ‘I rather suspect I’m just wasting my time here. Unless we believe that Ducos will simply walk down that road and ask to be arrested.’

‘Of course he won’t.’ Sharpe wondered what had gone wrong between his friend and the widow, for clearly something had gone badly awry for Frederickson to be speaking in such an offhand way.

‘One of us should start looking for him. You can’t, but I can.’ Frederickson still spoke sharply. He did not look at Sharpe, but rather stared aloofly towards the village.

‘Where can you look?’

‘Paris, of course. Anything important in France will be recorded in Paris. The Emperor’s archives will be kept there. I can’t say I’m enamoured with the thought of searching through old ledgers, but if it has to be done, then so be it.’ Frederickson blew a cloud of smoke that whirled away across the moat. ‘And it’ll be better than vegetating here. I need to do something!’ He spoke in sudden savagery.

‘And you’ll leave me alone here?’

Frederickson turned a scornful eye on Sharpe. ‘Don’t be pathetic!’

‘I don’t mind being alone,’ Sharpe’s own anger was showing now, ‘but no one speaks English here! Except me.’

‘Then learn French, damn it!’

‘I don’t want to speak the bloody language.’

‘It’s a perfectly civilized language. Besides, Madame Castineau speaks some English.’

‘Not to me, she doesn’t,’ Sharpe said grimly.

‘That’s because she’s frightened of you. She says you scowl all the time.’

‘Then she’s hardly likely to want me here on my own, is she?’

‘For Christ’s sake!’ Frederickson said with disgust. ‘Do you want Ducos found or not?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Then I’ll damned well go to Paris,’ Frederickson said in a tone of hurt finality. ‘I’ll leave tomorrow.’

Sharpe, who truly did not want to be left alone in the widow’s household, sought another reason to dissuade his friend. ‘But you promised to escort Jane from Cherbourg!’

‘She hasn’t sent for that service yet,’ Frederickson said caustically, and suggesting what Sharpe did not want to believe, which was that Jane would not now be coming at all. ‘But if she does come,’ Frederickson continued, ‘she can do what other people do: hire guards.’

Sharpe tried another tack. ‘The French authorities must still be looking for us, and you’re rather a noticeable man.’

‘You mean this?’ Frederickson flicked a corner of his mildewed eye shade. ‘There must be twenty thousand wounded ex-soldiers in Paris. They’ll hardly notice one more. Besides, I won’t be so foolish as to travel in my uniform. I’ll leave it here, and you can bring it to Paris when I send for you. That is, of course, if I succeed in getting a sniff of Ducos.’

‘What do you mean? Bring it to Paris?’

‘That’s perfectly coherent English, I would have thought, but if you need a translation it means that you can bring me my jacket when you come to Paris.’ Frederickson stared at the birds wheeling about the church steeple. ‘I mean that when I’ve discovered some trace of Pierre Ducos I will send you a message and, should you be sufficiently recovered, and should Sergeant Harper have returned, you can come and join me. Is that so very hard to comprehend?’

Sharpe did not say anything until Frederickson turned and looked at him. Then, staring into the single truculent eye, Sharpe asked the feared question, ‘Why are you not coming back here, William?’

Frederickson looked angrily away. He drew on the cheroot. For a long time he said nothing, then, at last, he relented. ‘I asked Madame Castineau for the honour of her hand this afternoon.’

‘Ah,’ Sharpe said helplessly, and he knew the rest of the story and he felt a terrible sorrow for his proud friend.

‘She was entirely charming,’ Frederickson went on, ‘just as one would expect from such a lady, but she was also entirely adamant in her refusal. You ask why I will not return here? Because I would find it grossly embarrassing to continue an acquaintanceship which has proved so unwelcome to Lucille.’

‘I’m certain you’re not unwelcome,’ Sharpe said, and, when Frederickson made no reply, he tried again. ‘I’m so very sorry, William.’

‘I can’t possibly imagine why you should be sorry. You don’t like the woman, so presumably you should be glad that she won’t become my wife.’

Sharpe ignored the bombast. ‘Nevertheless, William, I am truly sorry.’

Frederickson seemed to crumple. He closed his eyes momentarily. ‘So am I,’ he said quietly. ‘I want to blame you, in some ways.’

‘Me!’

‘You advised me to pounce. I did. It seems I missed.’

‘You pounce before you propose. For God’s sake, William, can’t you see that women want to be pursued before they’re caught?’ Frederickson said nothing, and Sharpe tried further encouragement. ‘Try again!’

‘One doesn’t reinforce failure. Isn’t that the very first lesson of successful soldiering? Besides, she was quite clear in her refusal. I made a fool of myself, and I don’t intend to stay here and endure the embarrassment of that memory.’

‘So go,’ Sharpe said brutally, ‘but I’ll come with you.’

‘Do you mean to hop to Paris? And what if Jane does come to the château? And how will Harper find you?’ Frederickson threw down the cheroot and ground it under the toe of his boot. ‘What I’m trying to tell you, my friend, is that I seek my own solitary company for a while. Misery does not make the best entertainment for others.’ He turned and saw the elderly Marie carrying dishes to the table in the yard. ‘I see supper is served. I would be most grateful if you attempted to carry a little more of the conversation tonight?’

‘Of course.’

It was still a miserable supper, but for Sharpe, as for Frederickson, it had fast become a season of misery.

Harper had disappeared, Jane’s silence was ominous, and in the morning a moody Frederickson left for Paris. Madame Castineau stayed indoors, while, in the château’s archway, Sharpe sat alone and scowling.

May had been warm, but June was like a furnace. Sharpe mended in the heat. Lucille Castineau would watch as he exercised his left arm, holding the great cavalry sword outstretched for as long as he could before the muscles became nerveless and, after a moment’s quivering, collapsed. He could not raise the arm very high, but each day he forced it a fraction higher. He drenched himself with sweat as he exercised. He disobeyed the doctor by cutting away the brittle plaster from his right leg and, though he was in agony for three days, the pain slowly ebbed. He stumped doggedly about the yard to strengthen his atrophied thigh muscles. He had let his black hair grow very long so that the missing chunk of his left ear would be hidden. One morning, as Sharpe stared into his shaving mirror to judge the success of that vain disguise, he saw a streak of grey in the long black hair.

No news came from London, and none from Frederickson in Paris.

Sharpe looked for tasks about the château and took a simple pleasure in their completion. He rehung a door in the dairy, remade the bed of the cider press and repaired the kitchen chairs. When he could not find work he went for long walks, either between the apple trees or up the steep northern ridge where he forced his pace until the sweat ran down his face with the exertion and pain.

Lucille saw the pain on his face that evening. ‘You shouldn’t try to ...’ she began, but then said nothing more, for her English was not good enough.

Most of all Sharpe liked to climb up to the tower roof that Frederickson and Harper had mended, and where he would spend hours just staring down the two roads which met at the château’s gate. He looked for the return of friends or the coming of his beloved, but no one came.

In late June he struggled to clear a ditch of brambles and weeds, then he repaired the ditch’s long disused sluice gate. The herdsman was so pleased that he sent for Madame Castineau who clapped her hands when she saw the water run clear from the mill-race to irrigate the pasture. ‘The water, how do you say? No water for years, yes?’

‘How many years?’ Sharpe was leaning on a billhook. With his long hair and filthy clothes he might have been mistaken for a farm labourer.
‘Vingt, quarante?’