“So you’re rich?” Sharpe could not help asking.
“Not I. But my aunt received a sufficiency to create trouble in the world.” Louisa spoke very gravely. “Have you any idea, Mr Sharpe, just how embarrassing it is to be spreading Protestantism in Spain?”
Sharpe shrugged. “You volunteered, miss.”
“True. And the embarrassment is the price I pay for seeing Granada and Seville.” Her eyes lit up, or perhaps it was just the reflected flare of glowing embers. “I would like to see more!”
“But you’re returning to England?”
“My aunt thinks that is wise.” Louisa’s voice was carefully mocking. “The Spanish, you see, are not welcoming her attempts to free them from Rome’s shackles.”
“But you’d like to stay?”
“It’s scarcely possible, is it? Young women, Mr Sharpe, do not have the freedom of this world. I must return to Godalming where a Mr Bufford awaits me.”
Sharpe had to smile at her tone. “Mr Bufford?”
“He’s entirely respectable,” Louisa said, as though Sharpe had intimidated otherwise, “and, of course, a Methodist. His money comes from the manufacture of ink, a trade of such profitability that the future Mrs Bufford may look forward to a large house and a life of great, if tedious, comfort. Certainly it will never be discoloured by the ink, which is manufactured in faraway Deptford.”
Sharpe had never before talked with a girl of Louisa’s evident education, nor heard the monied class spoken of with such deprecation. He had always believed that anyone born to great, if tedious, comfort would be eternally grateful for the gift. “You’re the future Mrs Bufford?”
“That is the intention, yes.”
“But you don’t want to be married?”
“I do desire that, I think.” Louisa frowned. “Are you married?”
“I’m not rich enough to marry.”
“That’s rarely stopped others, I think. No, Mr Sharpe, I simply do not desire to marry Mr Bufford, though my reluctance is doubtless very selfish of me.” Louisa shrugged away her indiscretions. “But I did not hope to find you awakejust to impose my small unhappiness on you. I wished to ask of you, Lieutenant, whether our presence makes it more likely that you and your men will be captured by the French?”
The answer was clearly yes, but equally clearly Sharpe could not say so. “No, miss. So long as we keep going at a fair clip, we should keep ahead of the bast-of them.”
“I was going to enjoin you, should you have answered me truthfully, to abandon us to the bast-to them.” Louisa smiled her gravely mischievous smile.
“I wouldn’t abandon you, miss,” Sharpe said clumsily, glad that the gloom hid his blush.
“My aunt does provoke great loyalty.”
“Exactly.” Sharpe smiled, and the smile turned into a laugh which Louisa hushed by holding a finger to her lips.
“Thank you, Lieutenant.” She stood. “I hope you do not feel badly about our encumbering you?”
“Not now, miss.”
Louisa crept to her door. “Sleep well, Lieutenant.”
“And you, miss.” Sharpe watched as she slipped through the door, and held his breath until he heard the bolt slide safely shut on its far side. His sleep would be turbulent now, for all his thoughts and desires and dreams had been turned inside out and upside down by a gentle, mocking smile. Richard Sharpe was far from home, endangered by a conquering enemy and, just to make things worse, he had fallen in love.
At four in the morning Sharpe was woken by the tinkling alarm of Louisa’s silver watch. He hammered on the Parkers’ door until a groan assured him the family was awake. Then he went to the stable and found that his men had not absconded in the night. They were all present, and they were nearly all drunk.
They were not as drunk as the men who had been abandoned to the French during the retreat, but they had come close. All but a handful of them were insensible, soused, unconscious. The wineskins which Sharpe had purchased lay empty on the floor, but among the bedding straw were also numerous empty bottles of aguardiente and he knew that the Cistercian monks, when they had brought out the sacks of bread, had secreted the brandy as part of their gift. Sharpe swore.