Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe’s Revenge, Sharpe’s Waterloo, Sharpe’s Devil. Bernard Cornwell
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was still the home of a noble family, yet in truth it was now little more than a large moated farmhouse, though it was undeniably a very pleasant farmhouse. The two storeys of the main wing were built of grey Caen stone that had been quarried and dressed fifty years before the Conqueror had sailed for England. In the fifteenth century, and as a result of a fortunate marriage, the lord of the manor had added a second wing at right angles to the first. The new wing, even now in 1814 it was still known as the ‘new’ wing, was pierced by a high arched gate and surmounted by a crenellated tower. A private chapel with deep lancet windows completed the château that was surrounded by a moat which also protected an acre of land that had once been gracious with lawns and flowers.
It had been many years since the moat had defended the house against an enemy’s attack and so the drawbridge had been left permanently down and its heavy-geared windlass had been taken away to make the upper part of a cider press. Two further wooden bridges were put across the moat; one led from the château to the dairy and the other gave quick access from house to orchards. The old moat-encircled garden became a farmyard; a compost heap mouldered warm by the chapel wall, chickens and ducks scrabbled for feed, and two hogs fattened where once the lords and ladies had strolled on the smoothly scythed lawn. The ‘new’ wing, all but for the chapel, had become farm buildings where horses and oxen were stabled, wains were stored, and apples heaped next to the press.
The Revolution had left the Château Lassan unscathed, though its master, dutifully and humbly serving his King in Paris, had gone to the guillotine solely because he possessed an ancient title. The local Committee of Public Safety had visited the homely château and tried to summon a fashionable and bloodthirsty enthusiasm to pillage the dead Count’s belongings, but the family was well-liked and, after much harmless bluster, the Committee had muttered an apology to the dowager Countess and contented themselves with stealing five barrels of newly pressed cider and a wagon-load of the old Count’s wine. The new Count, an earnest eighteen-year-old, was troubled by his conscience into the belief that the disasters of France were truly the result of social inequalities, and so told the local Committee that he would renounce his title and join the new Republic’s army. The Committee, privately astonished that anyone should renounce the privileges they so publicly despised, applauded the decision, though the dowager Countess was seen to purse her lips with disapproval. Her daughter, just seven years old, did not understand any of it. There had been five other children, but all had died in infancy. Only the eldest, Henri, and the youngest, Lucille, had survived.
Now, twenty-one years later, the wars that had begun against the Republic and continued against the Empire were at last over. The Dowager Countess still lived, and liked to sit where the sun was trapped by the junction of the château’s two wings and where roses grew clear up to the moss which grew on the château’s stone roof. The old lady shared the château with her daughter. Lucille had been married to a General’s son, but within two months of the wedding her husband had died in the snows of Russia and Lucille Castineau had returned to her mother as a childless widow.
Now, in the peace that came after Easter, the son had come home as well. Henri, Comte de Lassan, had walked up the lane and crossed the drawbridge, just as if he was returning from a stroll, and his mother had wept with joy that her soldier son had survived, and that night, just as if he had never been away, Henri took the top place at the supper table. He had quietly and unfussily folded his blue uniform away in the pious hope that he would never again be forced to wear it. He said grace before the meal, then commented that the apple blossom looked thin in the orchards.
‘We need to graft new stock on to the trees,’ his mother said.
‘Only there isn’t any money,’ Lucille added.
‘You must borrow some, Henri,’ the Dowager Countess said. ‘They wouldn’t lend to two widows like us, but they’ll lend to a man.’
‘We have nothing to sell?’
‘Very little.’ The Dowager sat very straight-backed. ‘And what little is left, Henri, must be preserved. It is not right that a Comte de Lassan be without family silver or good horses.’
Henri smiled. ‘The titles of the old nobility were abolished over twenty years ago, Maman. I am now Monsieur Henri Lassan, nothing more.’
The Dowager sniffed disapproval. She had seen the fashions of French nomenclature come and go. Henri, Comte de Lassan had become Citoyen Lassan, then Lieutenant Lassan, then Capitaine Lassan, and now he claimed to be plain Monsieur Lassan. That, in the Dowager’s opinion, was nonsense. Her son was the Count of this manor, lord of its estates and heir to eight centuries of noble history. No government in Paris could change that.
Yet, despite his mother, Henri refused to use his title and disliked it when the villagers bowed to him and called him ‘my Lord’. One of those villagers had once been on the Committee of Public Safety, but those heady days of equality were long gone and the ageing revolutionary was now as eager as any man to doff his cap to the Comte de Lassan.
‘Why don’t you please Maman?’ Lucille asked her brother. It was a Sunday afternoon soon after Henri’s return and, while the Dowager Countess took her afternoon nap, the brother and sister had crossed one of the wooden bridges and were walking between the scanty blossomed apple trees towards the millstream that lay at the end of the château’s orchards.
‘To call myself Count would be a sin of pride.’
‘Henri!’ Lucille said reproachfully, though she knew that no reproach would sway her gentle, but very stubborn brother. She found it hard to imagine Henri as a soldier, though it had been clear from his letters that he had taken his military responsibilities with great seriousness, and, reading between the lines, that he had been popular with his men. Yet always, in every letter, Henri had spoken of his ambition to become a priest. When the war is over, he would write, he would take orders.
The Dowager Countess decried, disapproved of, and even despised such an ambition. Henri was nearly forty years old, and it was high time that he married and had a son who would carry the Lassan name. That was the important thing; that a new Count should be born, and on Henri’s return the Dowager quickly invited Madame Pellemont and her unmarried daughter to visit the château, and thereafter harried Henri with frequent and tactless hints about Mademoiselle Pellemont who, though no beauty, was malleable and placid. ‘She has broad hips, Henri,’ the Dowager said enticingly. ‘She’ll spit out babies like a sow farrowing a litter.’
The Dowager did not extend her desire for grandchildren to her daughter, for if Lucille were to marry again her children would not bear the family name, nor would any son of Lucille’s be a Count of Lassan. It was the survival of that name and lineage that the Dowager wanted, and so Lucille’s marriage prospects were of no interest to the Dowager. In fact two men had proposed marriage to the widow Castineau, but Lucille did not want to risk the unhappiness of losing love again. ‘I shall grow old and crotchety,’ she told her brother, though the last quality seemed an unlikely fate, for Lucille had an innate vivacity that gave her face an illuminating smile. She had grey eyes, light brown hair, and a long lantern jaw. She thought herself plain, and was certainly no great beauty, yet the spark in her soul was bright, and the man who had married her had counted himself to be among the most fortunate of husbands.
‘Will you marry again?’ her brother asked as they walked down to the millstream.
‘No, Henri. I shall just moulder away here. I like it here, and I’m kept busy. I like being busy.’ Lucille was an early riser, and rarely rested in daylight. When so many men had been away at the wars it had been Lucille who ran the farm, the cider press, the mill, the dairy, and the château. She supervised the lambing, she raised calves, and fattened hogs for the slaughter. She mended the centuries old flax sheets on which the family still slept, she churned butter, made cheese, and eked out the family’s tiny income in an effort to preserve the estate. She had been forced to sell two fields, and much of the old silver, yet the château had survived for Henri’s return. Henri thought that the work had worn his sister out, for she was thin and pale, but Lucille denied the accusation. ‘It isn’t the work that’s so tiring, but money. There’s never enough. We have to mend the tower roof, we need new apple trees.’ Lucille sighed. ‘We need