‘Don’t even think about repaying it, sir.’
‘So let’s go and kill the bugger!’ Sharpe spoke with an extraordinary malevolence, and Harper somehow doubted whether Pierre Ducos was the man Sharpe spoke of.
Next morning they wrapped their weapons and, in a summer rainstorm, left Lucille’s château to find an enemy.
CHAPTER 12
If William Frederickson was in need of solace after his disappointment that Lucille Castineau had rejected his proposal of marriage, then no place was better provided to supply that solace than Paris.
At first he made no efforts to track down Pierre Ducos; instead he simply threw himself into an orgy of distraction to take his mind away from the widow Castineau. He wandered the city streets and admired building after building. He sketched Notre-Dame, the Conciergerie, the Louvre, and his favourite building, the Madeleine. His best drawing, for it was suffused with his own misery, was of the abandoned Arc de Triomphe, intended to be a massive monument to Napoleon’s victories, but now nothing more than the stumps of unfaced walls which stood like ruins in a muddy field. Russian soldiers were encamped about the abandoned monument while their women hung washing from its truncated stonework.
The city was filled with the troops of the victorious allies. The Russians were in the Champs-Élysees, the Prussians in the Tuileries, and there were even a few British troops bivouacking in the great square where Louis XVI’s head had been cut off. A prurient curiosity made Frederickson pay a precious sou to see the Souricière, the ‘mousetrap’, which was the undercroft of the Conciergerie where the guillotine’s victims had been given their ‘toilette’ before climbing into the tumbrils. The ‘toilette’ was a haircut that exposed the neck’s nape so that the blade would not be obstructed, and Frederickson’s guide, a cheerful man, claimed that half Paris’s mattresses were stuffed with the tresses of dead aristocrats. Frederickson probed the thin mattress in his cheap lodging house and was disappointed to find nothing but horsehair. The owner of the house believed Herr Friedrich to be a veteran of the Emperor’s armies; one of the many Germans who had fought for France.
On the day after his visit to the Conciergerie, Frederickson met an Austrian cavalry Sergeant’s wife who had fled from her husband and now sought a protector. For a week Frederickson thought he had successfully blotted Lucille out of his mind, but then the Austrian woman went back to her husband and Frederickson again felt the pain of rejection. He tried to exorcise it by walking to Versailles where he drowned himself in the château’s magnificence. He bought a new sketchbook and for three days he feverishly sketched the great palace, but all the while, though he tried to deny it to himself, he was thinking of Madame Castineau. At night he would try to draw her face until, disgusted with his obession, he tore up the sketchbook and walked back to Paris to begin his search for Pierre Ducos.
The records of the Imperial Army were still held in the Invalides, guarded there by a sour-faced archivist who admitted that no one had informed him what he was expected to do with the imperial records. ‘No one is interested any more.’
‘I am,’ Frederickson said, and at the cost of a few hours sympathetic listening to the archivist, he was given access to the precious files. After three weeks Frederickson had still not found Pierre Ducos. He had found much else that was fascinating, scandals that could waste hours of time to explore, but there was no file on Ducos. The man might as well never have existed.
The archivist, sensing a fellow bitterness in Herr Friedrich’s soul, became enthusiastic about the search, which he believed was for Frederickson’s former commanding officer. ‘Have you written to the other officers you and he served with?’
‘I tried that,’ Frederickson said, but then a stray idea flickered into his thoughts. It was an idea so tenuous that he almost ignored it, but, because the archivist was breathing into his face, and because the man had lunched well on garlic soup, Frederickson admitted there was one officer he had not contacted. ‘A Commandant Lassan,’ he said, ‘I think he commanded a coastal fort. I didn’t know him, but Major Ducos often talked of him.’
‘Let’s look for him. Lassan, you said?’
The idea was very nebulous. Frederickson could now wander freely among the file shelves, but, before Napoleon’s surrender, regulations had strictly controlled access to the imperial files. Then, any officer drawing a file had his name, and that day’s date, written on the file’s cover, and Frederickson had been wondering whether Ducos had discovered Lassan through these dusty records and, if so, whether the dead man’s file would show Ducos’s signature on its cover. If it did - the idea was very tenuous - the archivist might remember the man who had drawn that file.
‘It shows an address in Normandy.’ The archivist had discovered Lassan’s slim file. ‘The Château Lassan. I doubt that’s one of the great houses of France. I’ve never heard of it.’
‘May I see?’ Frederickson took the file and felt the familiar pang as he saw Lucille’s address. Then he looked at the file’s cover. There was only one signature, that of a Colonel Joliot, but the date beside Joliot’s name showed that this file had been consulted just two weeks before Lassan’s murder. The coincidence was too fortuitous, so, rejecting coincidence, ‘Colonel Joliot’ had to be Pierre Ducos. ‘Joliot,’ Frederickson said, ‘that sounds a familiar name?’
‘It would be if you wore spectacles!’ The archivist touched an inky finger to his own eyeglasses. ‘The Joliot brothers are the most reputable spectacle makers in Paris.’
Ducos wore spectacles. Frederickson recalled Sharpe describing the Frenchman’s livid anger when Sharpe had once broken those precious spectacles in Spain. Had Ducos consulted this file, then scribbled a familiar name on its cover as a disguise for his own identity? Frederickson had to hide his sudden excitement, which was that of a hunter sighting his prey. ‘Where would I find the Joliot brothers?’
‘They’re behind the Palais de Chaillot, Capitaine Friedrich, but I assure you that neither of them is a colonel!’ The archivist tapped the signature.
‘I need to see a spectacle-maker anyway,’ Frederickson said. ‘My eye, Monsieur, is sometimes made tired by reading.’
‘It is age, mon Capitaine, nothing but age.’
That diagnosis was echoed by Jules Joliot who greeted Captain Friedrich in his elegant shop behind the Palace of Chaillot. Joliot wore a tiny gold bee in his lapel as a discreet emblem of his loyalty to the Emperor. ‘All eyes grow tired with age,’ he told Frederickson, ‘even the Emperor is forced to use reading glasses, so you must not think it any disgrace. And, Capitaine, you will forgive me, but your one eye is forced to do the labour of two so, alas, it will tire more easily. But you have come to the best establishment in Paris!’ Monsieur Joliot boasted that his workshops had despatched spyglasses to Moscow, monocles to Madrid, and eyeglasses to captured French officers in London and Edinburgh. Alas, he said, the war’s ending had been bad for business. Combat was hard on fine lenses.
Frederickson asked why a captured officer would send for spectacles from Paris when, surely, it would have been swifter to buy replacement glasses in London. ‘Not if he wanted fine workmanship,’ Joliot said haughtily. ‘Come!’ He led Frederickson past cabinets of fine telescopes and opened a drawer in which he kept some of his rivals’ products. ‘These are spectacles from London. You perceive the distortion at the edge of the lens?’
‘But if an officer loses his spectacles,’ Frederickson insisted, ‘how would you know what to send him as a replacement?’
Joliot proudly showed his visitor a vast chest of shallow tray-like drawers which each held hundreds of delicate plaster discs. Joliot handled the fragile discs with immense care. Each human eye, Joliot said, was subtly different, and great experimentation was needed to find a lens which corrected any one eye’s unique deficiency. Once that peculiar lens was discovered it was copied exactly in plaster, and the casts were kept in these drawers. ‘This one is an eyeglass for Marshal Ney, this one for the left eye of Admiral Suffren,
and here,’ Joliot could not resist the boast, ‘are the Emperor’s reading glasses.’ He opened a velvet lined box in which two plaster discs rested. He explained that by using the most delicate gauges and calipers, a skilled workman could grind a lens to the exact same shape as one of the plaster discs. ‘No other firm is as sophisticated as we, but, alas, with the war’s ending, we arc sadly underemployed. We shall soon have to begin making cheap magnifying glasses for the amusement of children and women.’
Frederickson was impressed, but Frederickson had no way of discovering that the Joliot Brothers had never ground a lens in their lives, or that they simply supplied the same Venetian lens that every other spectacle-maker used. The plaster discs, with their promise of scientific accuracy, were nothing but a marvellous device for improving sales.
‘Now,’ Joliot said, ‘we must experiment upon your tired eye, Captain. You will take a seat, perhaps?’
Frederickson had no wish to be experimented on. ‘I have a friend,’ he said, ‘whose spectacles came from your shop, and I noticed that his lens suited my eye to perfection.’
‘His name?’
‘Pierre Ducos. Major Pierre Ducos.’
‘Let us see.’ Joliot seemed somewhat disappointed at not being able to dazzle Frederickson with his array of experimental lenses. Instead he took Frederickson into a private office where the firm’s order book rested on a long table. ‘Pierre Ducos, you say?’
‘Indeed, Monsieur. I last saw him at Bordeaux, but alas, where he is now, I cannot tell.’
‘Then let us see if we can help.’ Monsieur Joliot adjusted his own spectacles and ran a finger down the pages. He hummed as he scanned the lists, while Frederickson, not daring to hope, yet fearing to lose hope, stared about the room which was foully decorated with large plaster models of dissected human eyes.
The humming suddenly ceased. Frederickson turned to see Monsieur Joliot holding a finger to an entry in the big ledger. ‘Ducos, you say?’ Monsieur Joliot spelled the name, then said it again. ‘Major Pierre Ducos?’
‘Indeed, Monsieur.’
‘You must have very bad sight, mon Capitaine, if his lenses suited your eye. I see that we supplied him with his first eyeglasses in ’09, and that we urgently despatched replacements to Spain in January of ‘13. He is a very short-sighted man!’
‘Indeed, but most loyal to the Emperor.’ Frederickson thus tried to keep Monsieur Joliot’s co-operation.
‘I see no address in Bordeaux,’ Joliot said, then beamed with pleasure. ‘Ah! I see a new order arrived only last week!’
Frederickson hardly dared ask the next question for fear of being disappointed. ‘A new order?’
‘For no less than five pairs of spectacles! And three of those pairs are to be made from green glass to diminish the sun’s glare.’ Then, suddenly, Joliot shook his head. ‘Alas, no. The order is not for Major Ducos at all, but for a friend. The Count Poniatowski. Just like you, Capitaine, the Count has discovered that Major Ducos’s spectacles suit his eyes. It frequently happens that a man discovers that his friend’s eyeglasses suit him, and so he orders a similar pair for himself.’
Or, Frederickson thought, a man did not want to be found, so used another name behind which he could hide. ‘I would be most grateful, Monsieur, if you would give me the Count Poniatowski’s address. Perhaps he will know where I might find the Major. As I told you, we were close friends, and the war’s ending has left us sadly separated.’
‘Of course.’ Monsieur Joliot had no scruples about betraying a client’s address, or perhaps his scruples were allayed by the thought that he might lose this customer if he did not comply. ‘It’s in the Kingdom of Naples.’ Joliot scribbled down the Villa Lupighi’s address, then asked whether Captain Friedrich could remember which lens of Ducos’s spectacles had suited his eye.
‘The left,’ Frederickson said at random, then was forced to pay a precious coin as a deposit on the monocle which Monsieur Joliot promised to frame in tortoiseshell and to have ready in six weeks. ‘Fine workmanship takes that long, I fear.’
Frederickson bowed his thanks. As he left the shop he discovered that the passion of the hunt had meant that he had not thought of Lucille Castineau for the best part of an hour, though the moment he realized his apparent freedom from that obsession, so it returned with all its old and familiar sadness. Nevertheless the hounds had found a scent, and it was time to summon Sharpe to the long run south.
It was the ignorance that was the worst, Ducos decided, the damned, damned ignorance.
For years he had moved in the privileged world of a trusted imperial officer; he had received secret reports from Paris, he had read captured dispatches, he had known as much as any man about the workings of the Empire and the machinations of its enemies, but now he was in darkness.
Some newspapers came to the Villa Lupighi on the coast north of Naples, but they were old and, as Ducos knew well, unreliable. He read that a great conference would decide Europe’s future, and that it would meet in Vienna. He saw that Wellington, newly made a duke, would be Britain’s Ambassador in Paris, but that was not the news Ducos sought. Ducos wished to learn that a British Rifle officer had been court-martialled. He wanted to be certain that Sharpe was disgraced, for then no one else could be blamed for the disappearance of the Emperor’s gold. Lacking that news, Ducos’s fears grew until the Rifleman had become a nemesis to stalk his waking nightmares.
Ducos armed himself against his worst fears. He had Sergeant Challon clear the undergrowth from the hill on which the decayed Villa Lupighi stood so that, by the time the work was done, the old house seemed to be perched on a mound of scraped earth on which no intruder could hope to hide.
The villa itself was a massive ruin. Ducos had restored the living quarters at the building’s western end where he occupied rooms which opened on to a great terrace from which he could stare out to sea. He could not use the terrace from midday onwards for he found that the brilliant sunlight reflecting off the sea hurt his eyes and, until the Joliot Brothers sent him the tinted spectacles, he was forced to spend his afternoons indoors.
Sergeant Challon and his men had the rooms behind Ducos’s more palatial suite. Their quarters opened on to an internal courtyard built like a cloister. An old fig tree had split one corner of the cloister. Each of the Dragoons had his own woman living in the house, for Challon had insisted to Ducos that his men could not live like monks while they were waiting for the day when it would be safe to leave this refuge. The women were found in Naples and paid with French silver.
The eastern half of the villa, which looked inland to the olive groves and high mountains, was nothing but a ruined chaos of fallen masonry and broken columns. Some of the ruined walls were three storeys high, while others were just a foot off the ground. At night, when Ducos’s fears were at their highest, two savage dogs were unleashed to roam those fallen stones.
Sergeant Challon tried to ease Ducos’s fears. No one would find them in the Villa Lupighi, he said, for the Cardinal was their friend. Ducos nodded agreement, but each day he would demand another loophole made in some exterior wall.
Sergeant Challon had other fears himself. ‘The men are happy enough now,’ he told Ducos, ‘but it won’t last. They can’t wait here for ever. They’ll get bored, sir, and you know how bored soldiers soon become troublemakers.’
‘They’ve got their women.’
‘That’s their nights taken care of, sir, but what use is a woman in daylight?’
‘We have an agreement,’ Ducos insisted, and Challon agreed that they did indeed have an agreement, but now he wanted its terms altered. Now, he suggested, the remaining Dragoons should only stay with Ducos until the year’s end. That was enough time, Challon insisted, and afterwards each man would be free to leave, and to take his share of the gold and jewels.
Ducos, presented with the ultimatum, agreed. The year’s end was a long way off, and perhaps Challon was right in his belief that by the New Year the dangers would be gone.
br /> ‘You should enjoy yourself, sir,’ Sergeant Challon said slyly. ‘You’ve got the money, sir, and what else is money for?’
And Ducos did try to enjoy himself. One week, after a comet had been discovered, he fancied himself as an astronomer and ordered celestial globes and telescopes to be sent from Naples. That enthusiasm died to be replaced with a burning desire to write the history of Napoleon’s wars, which project evaporated after four nights of feverish writing.
He devised a scheme for irrigating the high fields behind the village which lay between the villa and the sea, then he took up painting and insisted that Sergeant Challon fetched the prettiest girls from the village to stand before his easel. He obsessively worked at mathematical problems, he tried to learn the spinet, he found a fascination in maps on which he refought the campaigns of two decades and, in so doing, pushed the bounds of Empire further than Napoleon had ever done. He took to wearing the uniforms that had been in the Emperor’s baggage, and the villagers spoke of the mad, half-blind French Marshal who paced his vast house dressed in gold braid and with a huge curved sword hanging by his skinny legs. Ducos might call himself the Count Poniatowski, and claim to be a sickly Polish refugee, yet the villagers knew he was as French as their own King who had once been a real French Marshal.
Sergeant Challon endured all the enthusiasms, for the benefits of indulgence were manifold. There truly was so much money to be divided that this temporary exile was endurable. Challon knew that Ducos could go on spending money like water and there would still be a fortune at the year’s end. Even so, when Ducos insisted that more guards be hired, Challon felt constrained to offer a warning note.
‘The lads won’t be too happy to pay them, sir.’
‘I’ll pay them.’ That generosity was easy to offer because Ducos had insisted that he himself guard the treasure which was stored in a great iron chest cemented to the floor in Ducos’s rooms. Even Challon was not certain just how much money was in the box, though he knew down to the last sou just how much each man had been promised at the year’s ending. Ducos, to keep faith with the Dragoons, only had to ensure that those shares were faithfully paid when the time came, and in the meantime the balance was his to spend. He knew, even if Challon did not, that the balance was an Emperor’s ransom; more than even the greedy Cardinal might imagine.