On the left of the courtyard there was just the one door beneath a window dark with stained glass. It was a large door, ornate with decoration, larger than the door on the western side which Sharpe had tried, pushed, and found firmly barred from the far side. He tried the lever handle of the decorated door and it moved. Harper shook his head, gestured at the seven-barrelled gun, and took Sharpe’s place. He looked questioningly at his officer. Sharpe nodded.
Harper shouted as he jumped through the door, a fearful screaming challenge designed to terrify anyone within the building, and he threw himself to one side, crouched, and swept the seven-barrelled gun around the gloom. His voice died away. He was in the chapel and it was empty. ‘Sir?’
Sharpe went inside. He could see little. The stoup that had held holy water was empty and dry, its bowl lined with dust and tiny fragments of stone. The light fell on the tiles of the chapel floor by the doorway and Sharpe could see an untidy brown stain that flaked at the edges of the tiles. Blood. ‘Look, sir.’
Harper was standing at a great iron grille that made the area they were standing in into a kind of ante-chamber to the chapel proper. There was a door pierced in the grille, but the door was padlocked shut. Harper fingered the lock. ‘New, sir.’ Sharpe craned his head back. The grille went to the ceiling where gold paint shone dully on the beams. ‘Why’s it here?’
‘To stop outsiders getting into the chapel, sir. This is as far as anyone could go. Only the nuns were allowed in there, sir. When it was a convent, that is.’
Sharpe pressed his face against the cold bars. The chapel ran left and right, altar to the left, and as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom he saw that the chapel had been defaced. Blood was splashed on the painted walls, statues had been torn from their niches, the light of the Eternal Presence ripped from its hanging chains. It seemed a pointless kind of destruction, but then Pot-au-Feu’s band was desperate, men who had run and had nowhere else to flee to, and such men would wreak their vengeance on anything that was beautiful, valued, and good. Sharpe wondered if Lady Farthingdale was even alive.
Horses’ hooves came faintly from outside the Convent. The two Riflemen froze, listened.
The hooves were coming closer. Sharpe could hear voices. ‘This way!’
They moved quickly, quietly, out into the cloister. The hooves were closer. Sharpe pointed across the courtyard and Harper, astonishingly silent for a huge man, disappeared into the dark shadow beneath the arches. Sharpe stepped backwards, into the chapel, and pulled the door close so that he and his rifle looked through a slit onto the entrance tunnel.
Silence in the courtyard. Not even a wind to stir the dead leaves of the hornbeam on the green and yellow tiles. The hooves stopped outside, the creak of a saddle as a man dismounted, the crunch of boots on the roadway, and then silence.
Two sparrows flew down into the raised pool and pecked among the dead weeds.
Sharpe moved slightly to his right, searching for Harper, but the Irishman was invisible in the shadows. Sharpe crouched so that his shape, if seen through the crack, would be confusing to whoever came out of the dark tunnel.
The gate creaked. Silence again. The sparrows flew upwards, their wings loud in the cloister, and then Sharpe almost jumped in alarm because the silence was shattered by a bellowed shout, a challenge, and a man leaped into the cloister, moving fast, his musket jerking round to cover the dark shadows where assailants might wait, and then the man crouched at the foot of a pillar by the entrance and called softly behind him.
He was a huge man, as big as Harper, and he was dressed in French blue with a single gold ring on his sleeve. The uniform of a French Sergeant. He called again.
A second man appeared, as wary as the first, and this man dragged saddlebags behind him. He was in the uniform of a French officer, a senior officer, his red-collared bluejacket bright with gold insignia. Was this Pot-au-Feu? He carried a cavalry carbine, despite his infantry uniform, and at his side, slung on silver chains, was a cavalry sabre.