The streets became busier once he passed Temple Bar and he reckoned he was safer now, though he still looked back. He hurried along Fleet Street, then turned north into a confusing tangle of narrow alleys. It had begun to rain, he was tired. A crowd of men streamed from a tavern and Sharpe instinctively turned away from them, going into a wider street he recognized as High Holborn. He stopped there to catch his breath. Had he been followed?
Yellow light streamed from windows across the street. Go to Seven Dials, he thought, and find Maggie Joyce. The rain was coming down harder now, drumming on the roof of a parked carriage. Another carriage splashed by and its dim lamps showed a green-and-yellow painted board on the building with the glowing windows. Two watchmen, buttons shining on blue coats and with long staves in their hands, walked slowly past. Had the watch heard the hue and cry? They would be looking for a bloodstained army officer if they had and Sharpe decided he should go to earth. The carriage lamps had revealed that the tavern was the French Horn. The place had once been popular with the musicians from the theater in nearby Drury Lane, but more recently it had been bought by an old soldier who was partial to any officer who happened to be in town, and throughout the army it was now known as the Frog Prick.
Beefsteak, Sharpe thought. Steak and ale, a bed and a warm fire. He had wanted to leave the army, but was still an officer, so the Frog Prick could welcome him. He hefted the pack, crossed the street and climbed the steps.
No one took any notice of him. Perhaps half the patrons in the half-filled taproom were officers, though many of those in civilian clothes might also have been in the army. Sharpe knew none of them. He found an empty table in a shadowed spot by the wall and dropped his pack and took off his rain-soaked coat. A red-haired woman whose apron straps were decorated with the shako plates of a dozen regiments acknowledged that the tavern had a bed to spare for the night. “But you’ll have to share it,” she went on, “and I’ll thank you not to wake the gentleman when you go up there. He went to bed early.” She suddenly grimaced as she realized there was blood on Sharpe’s green jacket.
“A thief tried to take this,” Sharpe explained, parting the satchel. “You can give me a pail of cold water?”
“You’ll want something to clean your boots too?” she asked.
“And a pot of ale,” Sharpe said, “and a steak. A thick one.”
“Haven’t seen many riflemen lately,” the woman said. “I hear they’re going abroad.”
“I hear the same.”
“Where to?” she asked.
“No one knows,” he said.
She leaned close to him. “Copenhagen, sweetheart,” she whispered, “and just make sure you come home in one piece.”
“Copen-” Sharpe began.
“Shh.” She put a finger to her lips. “You ever got a question about the army, darling, you come to the Frog Prick. We know the answers two days before the Horse Guards ask the questions.” She grinned and walked away.
Sharpe opened the satchel and tried to guess how much cash was inside. At least twenty pounds, he reckoned. So crime does pay, he told himself, and shifted his chair so that his back was to the room. Twenty pounds. A man could make a good start in a new life with twenty pounds.
Twenty pounds! A decent night’s work, he thought, though he was angry at himself for having botched the killing. He had been lucky to escape unscathed. He doubted he would be in trouble with the law, for Wapping folk were reluctant to call in the constables. Plenty of men had seen that it was a Rifle officer who had been with Hocking and who, presumably, had done the murder in the back of Beaky Malone’s Tavern, but Sharpe doubted the law would care or even know. Hocking’s body would be carried to the river and dumped on the ebbing tide to drift ashore at Dartford or Tilbury. Gulls would screech over his guts and peck out his remaining eye. No one would hang for Jem Hocking.