Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe’s Revenge, Sharpe’s Waterloo, Sharpe’s Devil. Bernard Cornwell
Читать онлайн книгу.
was Jane who had made the triumphant sound. Harper sat up in the road and saw her looking back, and he saw, too, the excitement in her eyes. Blood was streaming down Harper’s face and soaking his new neckcloth and coat. Lord Rossendale had sat again while Jane, her face turned back towards Harper and still registering a mixture of relief and joy, was gripping her lover’s arm.
Harper stood up and brushed the roadway’s horsedung off his trousers. ‘God save Ireland.’ He was disappointed and astonished, rather than angry.
‘I did warn you.’ D’Alembord picked up Harper’s cudgel and restored it to the Irishman.
‘Sweet Mother of God.’ Harper stared after the carriage until it slewed into Burlington Gardens. Then, still with an expression of incredulity, he stooped to pick up the fallen letter that was spattered with his blood.
‘I’m sorry, Sergeant-Major,’ d’Alembord said unhappily.
‘Mr Sharpe will kill the bastard.’ Harper stared in the direction the carriage had taken. ‘Mr Sharpe will crucify him! As for her?’ He shook his head in wonderment. ‘Has the woman lost her wits?’
‘It all makes me believe,’ d’Alembord steered Harper towards the pavement, ‘that the two of them are hoping the Major never does come home. It would suit them very well if he was arrested and executed for murder in France.’
‘I would never have believed it!’ Harper was still thinking of Jane’s parting cry of triumph. ‘She was always kind to me! She was as good as gold, so she was! She never gave herself airs, not that I saw!’
‘These things happen, Sergeant-Major.’
‘Oh, Christ!’ Harper leaned on an area railing. ‘Who in heaven’s name is to tell Mr Sharpe?’
‘Not me,’ d’Alembord said fervently, ‘I don’t even know where he is!’
‘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?’