“You will not!” Jane had said after the shameful confrontation at the ball.
“You’d have me fight him?” Lord John had asked.
“If you were a man,” Jane had sneered, “you would not ask the question.”
Lord John, recognizing the horrid truth in her mockery, had wondered why love’s happiness was so easily soured. “I can fight him, if you insist.”
“I don’t insist!”
“I can fight him, though.” Lord John had sounded hopeless for he knew he would lose a duel against Sharpe.
Jane had suddenly staunched her anger and melted Lord John with a smile. “All I want”, she had said, “is the chance to marry you. And once we are married the money will be yours by right. But we cannot marry until.’
She did not need to go on. Lord John knew that litany. They could not marry while Sharpe lived. Therefore Sharpe must die, and if he was not to be killed in a duel, then he must be taken care of in another way and, in the darkness as Lord John had said his farewells, Jane had urged him to the other way.
“Harris?” Lord John now called to his coachman.
“I can hear you, my lord!” Harris shouted from the cabriolet’s driving seat.
“Did you ever hear of officers being murdered in battle?”
Harris, who had been a cavalry trooper before a French cannon-ball had crushed his left foot at the battle of Corunna, laughed at the naivety of the question. “You hear about it all the time, my lord.” Harris paused for a few seconds while he negotiated the cabriolet over some deep ruts in the high road. “I remember a major who begged us not to kill him, my lord. He knew we couldn’t abide his ways, and he was sure one of us was going to take a hack at him, so he begged for the honour of being killed by the enemy instead.”
“Was he?”
“No. A mucky little devil called Shaughnessy shoved a sword into his back.” Harris laughed at the memory. “Clean old job he made of it, straight out of the drill book!”
“And no one saw?”
“No one who was going to make a malarkey out of it, my lord. Why should they? No one liked the Major. Not that you need worry, my lord.”
“I wasn’t concerned for myself, Harris.”
Harris plucked a bugle from the seat beside him and sounded a blaring note of warning. A battalion of infantry that was marching towards the cabriolet shuffled onto the grass verge. The men, their faces sallow in the small light of the cabriolet’s twin lamps, stared reproachfully at the wealthy officer whose carriage clipped by so smartly behind its matched pair of bays. The battalion’s officers, under the misapprehension that such an equipage must contain a senior officer, saluted.
Lord John said nothing more of murder. He knew he had behaved badly this night, that he should have faced Sharpe and accepted the challenge. He had lost face, he had lost honour, yet now he flirted with the thought of murder, which was beyond all honour, and he did it solely for a woman.
Lord John leaned his head back on the cabriolet’s folded leather hood. Some of his friends said he was bewitched, but if he was, it was a willing enthrallment. He remembered how fondly Jane had said farewell after her anger had abated, and the memory made him lift his hand to see, in the first creeping light of dawn, the small smear of rouge that still remained on his forefinger. He kissed it. Marriage, he thought, would solve everything. No more deception, no more circumspection, no more begging Jane for funds, and no more disdain from society for a golden girl who surely deserved the rewards of marriage. Jane’s happiness would take just one death; one death on a field of slaughter, one more corpse among the battalions of the dead.
And if it was done properly, no one need ever know.
And if, in the morning, Lord John withdrew his promise to repay the money and accepted the challenge of a duel, then the world would accept him as a man of brave honour. And if Sharpe was to die in battle before the duel could be fought, then the honour would be untarnished. Lord John had behaved badly this night, but he knew that all could be repaired, all won, and all made good, and all for a girl of winsome, heart-breaking beauty.