“So I am doomed to return home,” Louisa gazed at the capering boys as she spoke, “and for what, Lieutenant? In England I shall resume my needlework and spend hours with my watercolours. Doubtless I shall be a curiosity for a while; the squire will want to hear of my quaint adventures. Mister Bufford will resume his courtship and reassure me that never again, so long as there is breath in his body, shall I be exposed to such foul danger! I shall play the pianoforte, and spend weeks deciding whether to buy pink ribbons or blue for next year’s gowns. I shall take alms to the poor, and tea with the ladies of the town. It will all be so very unarduous, Lieutenant Sharpe.”
Sharpe felt adrift in an irony he was not clever enough to understand. “So you have decided to marry Mr Bufford?” he asked in trepidation, fearing that the answer would dash all his fragile hopes.
“I’m not heiress enough to attract anyone more exalted,” Louisa said with a feigned self-pity. She brushed a scrap of fallen ash from her skirts. “But it’s surely the sensible thing for me to do, is it not, Lieutenant? To marry Mr Bufford and live in his very pleasant house? I shall have roses planted against the south wall and once in a while, a very long while, I shall see a paragraph in the newspapers and it will tell of a battle faraway, and I’ll remember how very horrid powder smoke smells and how sad a soldier can look when he’s scraping blood off his sword.”
Her last words, which seemed so very intimate, restored Sharpe’s optimism. He looked up at her.
“You see, Lieutenant,” Louisa forestalled anything he might say, “there comes a moment in anyone’s life when a choice presents itself. Isn’t that true?”
The hope, so ill-based, so impractical, so irresistible, soared inside Sharpe. “Yes,” he said. He did not know exactly how she could stay with the army, or how the finances, which were the bane of most impractical romances, would be worked through, but other officers’ wives had houses in Lisbon, so why not Louisa?
“I’m not convinced I want the roses and the embroidery.” Louisa seemed nervous and febrile suddenly, like an untrained horse edging skittishly towards the skirmish line. “I know that I should want those things, and I know I am most foolish in despising them, but I like Spain! I like the excitement here. There isn’t much excitement in England.”
“No.” Sharpe hardly dared move for fear he would scare away her acceptance.
“You think I am wrong to crave excitement?” Louisa did not wait for an answer, but instead asked another question. “Do you really think a British army will stay to fight in Portugal?”
“Of course!”
“I don’t think it will.” Louisa turned to stare at the youths who were stamping on the ashes of the burnt French flag. “Sir John Moore is dead,” she continued, “his army is gone, and we don’t even know if the Lisbon garrison still remains. And if it does, Lieutenant, how can such a small garrison hope to resist the armies of France?”
Sharpe stubbornly clung to his belief that the British army had not surrendered its hopes. “The last news we heard from Lisbon was that the garrison was in place. It can be reinforced! We won two battles in Portugal last year, why not more this year?”
Louisa shook her head. “I think we British have been trounced, Lieutenant, and I suspect we shall abandon Spain to its fate. It’s been a hundred years since a British army was successful in Europe, what makes us think we can be successful now?”
Sharpe at last sensed that Louisa’s ambitions and his own hopes were not, after all, in step. Her nervousness was not that of a girl shyly accepting a proposal, but of a girl anxious not to cause hurt by her rejection. He looked up at her. “Do you believe that, Miss Parker? Or is that Major Vivar’s opinion?”
Louisa paused, then spoke so softly that her voice scarcely carried to Sharpe over the din of the church bells. “Don Bias has asked me to stay in Spain, Lieutenant.”