Sharpe's Revenge (31 page)

‘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?'

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.'