“I don’t know why you do.” She pulled away slightly. “I’m not beautiful like Jane.”
Sharpe traced a finger down Lucille’s long nose. “She has no beauty inside herself.”
Lucille scorned that compliment with a grimace, then gave Sharpe a warning look. “Her eyes are full of hate. Be careful.”
“There’s nothing she can do now, and her man didn’t dare face me in a duel.”
“Be careful, though,” Lucille insisted.
Sharpe bent and kissed her. “Till tomorrow night, my love. Nosey will look after you till then.” He let go of her shoulders and took a pace backwards. “Let’s be moving, Patrick!”
“Whenever you’re ready.” Harper, tactfully waiting just inside the stable door, appeared with his weapons and pack. He was wearing his old Rifleman’s uniform, less its sergeant’s stripes. He had insisted on accompanying Sharpe to Quatre Bras, not to fight, he said, but just for the chance of glimpsing the Emperor.
“You take care of yourself, Patrick!” Lucille called in English.
“You’ll not catch me anywhere near the fighting, ma’am. I’ve got too much sense for that, so I have.” He had all his old weapons about him, all of them lovingly cleaned and oiled and ready.
Lucille reached up and touched Sharpe’s cheek. “Go with God.”
“And with your love?”
“You know you have that.”
He hated such a parting. Words were hopeless. Sharpe suddenly feared the loss of Lucille and he thought how love made a man fearful and vulnerable. His throat felt thick, so he just turned away and took the reins that Harper held ready. He gripped the pommel, pushed his left boot into the cold stirrup iron, and heaved up into the Hussar saddle with its high spoon that offered support during long hours of riding. His sore thighs complained at being back on a horse. He fiddled his right boot into its stirrup, touched the rifle stock superstitiously, pushed the sword into a comfortable position, then rolled the cloak into a bundle that he jammed under the rifle holster’s strap. He looked for a last time at Lucille. “Kiss the child for me.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow night.” She forced a confident smile.
The dog whined a protest as Sharpe rode away. The Rifleman ducked under the arch, then waited as Harper closed the two heavy gates. The Irishman swung himself into the saddle, then followed Sharpe in the footsteps of the Highlanders.
Sharpe and Harper were going back to war.
In the same short darkness of that midsummer night Lord John Rossendale took a road leading west from Brussels towards a rendezvous with the Earl of Uxbridge and the British cavalry. Lord John did not ride his horse, but rather drove in a gleaming open cabriolet that he had brought from London. Harris, his coachman, was up on the driving box, while Lord John’s groom and valet were bringing on the saddle horses behind. Captain Christopher Manvell had ridden on ahead. Lord John had hoped that his friend would accompany him, but he sensed how much Manvell despised him for so easily surrendering to Sharpe’s threat.
Rossendale closed his eyes and silently cursed. He was in turmoil, trapped between honour and beauty. It was not Manvell’s displeasure that worried him, but Jane’s anger. She had lacerated Lord John for his cowardice. He remembered a time when Jane had feared a duel as much as he, but now she seemed more eager to protect her money than Lord John’s life.
“And you have no right to promise him any money!” Jane had reminded Lord John when they had regained the privacy of their hotel suite. “It is not your money, but mine!”
In truth, if the money belonged to anyone, it was the property of the Emperor’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte, erstwhile King of Spain and the Indies, who had lost his fortune with the battle of Vitoria. King Joseph had fled and the British had swarmed over his supply wagons where some men, Sharpe and Harper among them, had become rich. Sharpe had taken a royal fortune off the battlefield, and it was that fortune which Jane had stolen from him, and much of which she had already spent on a London house and on silks and on furniture and on jewels and on Lord John’s debts, and on silverware and gold plate and Chinese wallpaper and on lapdogs and satin and on the cabriolet in which Lord John now rode towards the cavalry and battle. It was that same fortune which, to save his life, Lord John had promised to return to Sharpe.