‘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?’
Sharpe’s French came slowly, but night by night, sitting awkwardly at the supper table, he was forced to communicate with Madame Castineau. By the end of June he could hold a conversation, though there were still annoying misunderstandings, but by the middle of July he was as comfortable in French as he had ever been in Spanish. He and Lucille now discussed everything: the late war, the weather, God, steam power, India, the Americas, Napoleon, gardening, soldiering, the respective merits of England and France, how to keep slugs out of vegetable gardens, how to grow strawberries, the future, the past, aristocrats.
‘There were too many aristocrats in France,’ Lucille said scornfully. She was sitting in the last of a summer evening’s sunlight, darning one of the big flax sheets. ‘It wasn’t like England, where only the eldest son inherits. Here, everyone inherited, so we bred aristocrats like rabbits!’ She bit the thread and tied off her stitches. ‘Henri would never use his title, which annoyed Maman. She didn’t care that I ignored mine, but daughters were never important to Maman.’
‘You have a title?’ Sharpe asked in astonishment.
‘I used to have one, before they were all abolished during the revolution. I was only a child, of course; nothing but a little scrap of a child, but I was still formally the Vicomtesse de Seleglise.’ Lucille laughed. ‘What a nonsense!’
‘I don’t think it’s a nonsense.’
‘You’re English, which means you are a fool!’ she said dismissively. ‘It was a nonsense, Major. There were noble-men who were truly nothing but peasants who lived off beans, but still they were accounted aristocrats because their great-great-grandfather had been a viscount or a duke. Look at us!’ She gestured about the farmyard. ‘We call it a château, but it’s really nothing more than a large and penniless farmhouse with a very inconvenient ditch around it.’
‘It’s a very beautiful farmhouse,’ Sharpe said.
‘To be sure.’ Lucille liked it when Sharpe praised the house. She often said that all she now wanted was to live in the château for ever. There had been a time, she admitted, when she had thought that she would like to cut a dash in Paris, but then her husband had died, and her ambition had died with him.
One evening Sharpe asked about Castineau and Lucille fetched his portrait. Sharpe saw a thin, dark-faced man in a well-cut colonel’s uniform which gleamed with gold aigulettes. He carried a brass helmet under his left arm and a sabre in his right hand. ‘He was very handsome,’ Lucille said wistfully. ‘No one understood why he chose me. It certainly wasn’t for my money!’ She laughed.
‘How did he die?’
‘In battle,’ Lucille said curtly, then, with an apologetic shrug, ‘how do men die in battle, Major?’
‘Nastily.’ Sharpe said the word in English.
‘Very nastily, I’m sure,’ Lucille said in the same language, ‘but do you miss it, Major?’
Sharpe pushed his black hair, with its grey streak, away from his forehead. ‘The day I heard that peace was signed was one of the happiest of my life.’
‘Truly?’
‘Truly.’
Lucille paused to thread a needle. This evening she was embroidering one of her old dresses. ‘My brother said that you were a man who enjoyed war.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe.’ Lucille mockingly imitated Sharpe’s scowl. ‘What is this peut-être? Did you enjoy it?’
‘Sometimes.’
She sighed with exasperation at his obdurate evasion. ‘So what is enjoyable about war? Tell me, I would like to understand.’
Sharpe had to grope for words if he was to offer an explanation in the unfamiliar language. ‘It’s very clear-cut. Things are black or white. You have a task and you can measure your success absolutely.’
‘A gambler would say the same,’ Lucille said scornfully.
‘True.’
‘And the men you killed? What of them? They were just losers?’
‘Just losers,’ Sharpe agreed, then he remembered that this woman’s husband had died in battle, and blushed. ‘I’m sorry, Madame.’
‘For my husband?’ Lucille instantly understood Sharpe’s contrition. ‘I sometimes think he died in the way he wished. He went to war with such excitement; for him it was all glory and adventure.’ She paused in the middle of a stitch. ‘He was young.’
‘I’m glad he didn’t fight in Spain,’ Sharpe said.
‘Because that makes you innocent of his death?’ Lucille scorned him with a grimace. ‘Why are soldiers such romantics? You obviously thought nothing of killing Frenchmen, but just a little knowledge of your enemy makes you feel sympathy! Did you never feel sympathy in battle?’
‘Sometimes. Not often.’
‘Did you enjoy killing?’
‘No,’ Sharpe said, and he found himself telling her about the battle at Toulouse and how he had decided not to kill anyone, and how he had broken the vow. That battle seemed so far away now, like part of another man’s life, but suddenly he laughed, remembering how he had seen General Calvet on the battlefield and, because it might help Lucille understand, he described his feelings at that moment; how he had forgotten his fear and had desperately wanted to prove himself a better fighter than the doughty Calvet.
‘It sounds very childish to me,’ Lucille said.
‘You never rejoiced when Napoleon won great victories?’ Sharpe asked.
Lucille gave a very characteristic shrug. ‘Napoleon.’ She pronounced his name scathingly, but then she relented. ‘Yes, we did feel pride. We sh
ouldn’t have done, perhaps, but we did. Yet he killed many Frenchmen to give us that pride. But,’ she shrugged again, ‘I’m French, so yes, I rejoiced when we won great victories.’ She smiled. ‘Not that we heard of many great victories in Spain. You will tell me that was because we were foolish enough to fight the English, yes?’
‘We were a very good army,’ Sharpe said, and then, provoked by Lucille’s continuing curiosity, he told her about Spain, and about his daughter, Antonia, who now lived with relatives on the Portuguese border.
‘You never see her?’ Lucille asked in a shocked voice.
He shrugged. ‘It’s being a soldier.’
‘That takes preference over love?’ she asked, appalled.
‘Her mother’s dead,’ Sharpe said lamely, then tried to explain that Antonia was better off where she was.
‘Her mother’s dead?’ Lucille probed, and Sharpe described his first wife, and how she had died in the snows of a high mountain pass.
‘Couldn’t your daughter live with your parents?’ Lucille asked, and Sharpe had to confess that he had no parents and that, indeed, he was nothing but a fatherless son of a long-dead whore. Lucille was amused by his embarrassed confession. ‘William the Conqueror was a bastard,’ she said, ‘and he wasn’t a bad soldier.’
‘For a Frenchman,’ Sharpe allowed.
‘He had Viking blood,’ Lucille said. ‘That’s what Norman means. Northman.’ When Lucille told him facts like that she made Sharpe feel very ignorant, but he liked listening to her, and some days he would even take one of her books up to the tower and try hard to read what she had recommended. Lucille gave him one of her brother’s favourite books which contained the essays of a dead Frenchman called Montesquieu. Sharpe read most of the essays, though he frequently had to shout down to the yard for the translation of a difficult word.
One night Lucille asked him about his future. ‘We’ll find Ducos,’ Sharpe answered, ‘but after that? I suppose I’ll go home.’
‘To your wife?’
‘If I still have a wife,’ Sharpe said, and thus for the first time acknowledged his besetting fear. That night there was a thunderstorm as violent as the one which had punctuated Sharpe’s long journey north through France. Lightning slashed the ridge north of the château, the dogs howled in the barn, and Sharpe lay awake listening to the rain pour off the roof and slosh in the gutters. He tried to remember Jane’s face, but somehow her features would not come clear in his memory.
In the rinsed daylight next morning the carrier arrived from Caen with a letter addressed to Monsieur Tranchant, which was the name Frederickson had said he would use if he had news for Sharpe. The letter bore a Paris address and had a very simple message. ‘I’ve found him. I will wait here till you can come. I am known as Herr Friedrich in my lodging house. Paris is wonderful, but we must go to Naples. Write to me if you cannot come within the next fortnight. My respect to Madame.’ There was no explanation of how Frederickson had found Ducos’s whereabouts.
‘Captain Frederickson sends you his respects,’ Sharpe told Lucille.
‘He’s a good man,’ Lucille said very blandly. She was watching Sharpe grind an edge on to his sword with one of the stones used to sharpen the château’s sickles. ‘So you’re leaving us, Major?’
‘Indeed, Madame, but if you have no objections I would like to wait a few days to see if my Sergeant returns.’
Lucille shrugged. ‘D‘accord.’
Harper returned a week later, full of his own happy news. Isabella was still in her native Spain, but now safely provided with money and a rented house. The baby was well. It had taken Harper longer than he had anticipated to find a ship going to Pasajes, so he had temporarily abandoned his plans for taking Isabella back to Ireland. ‘I thought you and I should finish our business first, sir.’
‘That’s kind of you, Patrick. It’s good to see you again.’
‘Good to see you, sir. You’re looking grand, so you are.’
‘I’m going grey.’ Sharpe touched his forelock.
‘Just a badger’s streak, sir.’ Harper had been about to add that it would attract the women, but then he remembered Jane and he bit the comment off just in time.
The two men walked along the stream which fed the mill-race. Sharpe liked to sit by this stream with a horsehair fishing line and some of Henri Lassan’s old lures. He told Harper of Frederickson’s letter. He said they would leave in the morning, bound first for Paris, then for Naples. He said he was feeling almost wholly fit and that his leg was very nearly as strong as ever. He added a lot more entirely inconsequential news, and only after a long time did he ask the question that the Irishman dreaded. Sharpe asked it in a very insouciant voice that did not in the least deceive Harper. ‘Did you manage to see Jane?’
‘So Captain d’Alembord didn’t write to you, sir?’ Harper had continued to hope that d’Alembord might have broken the bad news to Sharpe.
‘No letter reached me. Did he write?’
‘I wouldn’t know, sir. It’s just that he and I saw Mrs Sharpe together, sir, so we did.’ Harper could not bear telling the truth and tried desperately to return the conversation to its former harmless pattern. He muttered that the cows across the stream looked good and fleshy.
‘They don’t give a bad yield, either,’ Sharpe said with a surprising enthusiasm. ‘Madame has her dairymaid rub butterwort on the teats; she says it gives more milk.’
‘I must remember that one, sir.’ Harper stripped a grass stalk of its seeds which he scattered into a drainage ditch. ‘And would that be the sluice gate you rebuilt, sir?’
Sharpe proudly showed Harper how he had stripped the worm-gear of rust and smeared it with goose-fat so that the rebuilt blade would once again rise and fall. ‘See?’ The gear was still stiff, but Sharpe managed to close the gate to cut off the stream water.
‘That’s grand, sir.’ Harper was impressed.
Sharpe wound the gate open again, then sat heavily down on the stream bank. He stared away from Harper, looking across the water towards the beech trees that climbed up the northern spur of the hills. ‘Tell me about Jane.’
Harper still tried to evade telling the truth. ‘I didn’t speak to her, sir.’
Sharpe seemed not to hear the evasion. ‘It isn’t hard to explain, is it?’
‘What’s that, sir?’
Sharpe plucked a leaf of watercress from the stream’s edge. ‘I saw an eel trap once, and I was wondering whether I could put one down by the spillway.’ He pointed downstream towards the mill. ‘But I can’t remember how the damn thing worked exactly.’
Harper sat a pace or two behind Sharpe. ‘It’s like a cage, isn’t it?’
‘Something like that.’ Sharpe spat out a shred of leaf. ‘I suppose she took the money and found herself someone else?’
‘I don’t know what she did with the money, sir,’ Harper said miserably.
Sharpe turned and looked at his friend. ‘But she has found another man?’
Harper was pinned to the truth now. He hesitated for a second, then nodded bleakly. ‘It’s that bugger called Rossendale.’
‘Jesus Christ.’ Sharpe turned away so that Harper would not see the pain on his face. For a split second that pain was like a red hot steel whip slashing across his soul. It hurt. He had more than half expected this news, and he had thought himself prepared for it, but it still hurt more than he could ever have dreamed. He was a soldier, and soldiers had such high pride, and no wound hurt more than damaged pride. God, it hurt.
‘Sir?’ Harper’s voice was thick with sympathy.
‘You’d better tell me everything.’ Sharpe was like a wounded man aggravating his injury in the vain hope that it would not prove so bad as he had at first feared.
Harper told how he had tried to deliver the letter, and how Lord Rossendale had scarred him with his whip. He said he was certain Jane had recognized him. His voice tailed away as he described Jane’s whoop of triumph. ‘I’m sorry, sir. Jesus, I’d have killed the
bugger myself, but Mr d’Alembord threatened to turn me over to the provosts if I did.’
‘He was quite right, Patrick. It isn’t your quarrel.’ Sharpe pushed his fingers into the soft earth beside a water-rat’s hole. He had watched the otters in this stream, and envied them their playfulness. ‘I didn’t really think she’d do it,’ he said softly.
‘She’ll regret it, sir. So will he!’
‘God!’ Sharpe almost said the word as a burst of laughter, then, after another long pause during which Harper coul scarcely even bear to look at him, Sharpe spoke again. ‘Her brother was rotten to his black heart.’
‘So he was, sir.’
‘Not that it really matters, Patrick. Not that it really matters at all,’ Sharpe said in a very odd voice. ‘It’s just sauce for the goose, I suppose.’
Harper did not understand, nor did he like to ask for any explanation. He sensed Sharpe’s hurt, but did not know how to salve it, so he said nothing.
Sharpe stared at the northern hill. ‘Rossendale and Jane must think I’m done for, don’t they?’
‘I suppose so, sir. They think the Crapauds will arrest you for murder and chop your head off.’
‘Perhaps they will.’ Not six months before, Sharpe thought, he had commanded his own battalion, had a wife he loved, and could have called upon the patronage of a prince. Now he wore a cuckold’s horns and would be the laughing stock of his enemies, but there was nothing he could do except bear the agony. He pushed himself upright. ‘We’ll not mention this again, Sergeant.’
‘No, sir.’ Harper was feeling immensely relieved. Sharpe, he thought, had taken the news far better than he had expected.
‘And tomorrow we leave for Paris,’ Sharpe said brusquely. ‘You’ve got money?’
‘I fetched some from London, sir.’
‘We’ll hire horses in Caen. Perhaps, if you’d be kind enough, you’ll lend me some so I can pay Madame Castineau for her services to me? I’ll repay you when I can.’ Sharpe frowned. ‘If I can.’