Strangest of all were the rockets. Lord John had heard much of the rocket corps, for they were a pet project of his former master, the Prince Regent, but this was the first time he had seen them fired. The first missile was wonderfully accurate and so lethal that every French gun crew within a hundred yards had fled in panic, but the next salvo was laughable. One rocket had seemed to threaten the group of Lord Uxbridge’s staff officers and they had whooped gleefully as they scattered away from its hissing shell.
Lord John spurred his horse too hard and it almost bolted with him. He managed to curb the mare after a hundred yards and turned to see the rocket buried in the mud with its stick burning merrily above it. The buried powder charge exploded harmlessly.
Then, looking towards the road to find his friends, he saw Sharpe coming towards him instead.
For a second Lord John knew he must stand and fight. The next second he realized he would be dead if he did.
And so he turned and fled.
Lord John’s servants were somewhere ahead with the cavalry’s baggage. Harris, the coachman, who had ridden from Brussels with a letter from Jane, had also ridden ahead to find that night’s quarters. Christopher Manvell and Lord John’s other friends had disappeared in the panic engendered by the rogue rocket. Lord John was suddenly alone in the pelting rain with his one dreadful enemy spurring towards him.
He gave his horse its head. It was a good horse, five years old and trained on the hunting field. It had stamina and speed, and was certainly a faster horse than Sharpe rode, and Lord John had learned on the hunting field how best to ride treacherous country. He must have stretched his lead by an extra hundred yards in the first half mile. There were ironic cheers from the road where the retreating gunners supposed the two officers to be racing.
Lord John was oblivious to the cheers and the rain; indeed to everything but his predicament. He was cursing himself; he should have ridden towards his companions and sheltered under their protection, but instead, in a blind panic, he was racing ever further away from help. He dared not look behind. His horse thundered along a field margin, raced over soaking rows of newly scythed hay, then galloped down a gentle incline towards a hedge, beyond which, and across one more field, a long dark copse of trees offered a concealed path back to the road.
His horse almost baulked at the hedge, not because of the height of the blackthorn, but because the approach to the obstacle was inches deep in mud. Lord John savagely rowelled the beast, and somehow it lumbered and scraped its way over the thorns. It landed heavily, splashing thick mud that soaked Lord John’s red coat. He spurred-the horse again, forcing it to struggle up from the sticky ground. The pasture was firmer going, but even here the earth was spongy from rain.
He reached the trees safely and, looking back from their shelter, saw that Sharpe had yet to negotiate the deep mud at the hedge. Lord John felt safe. He ducked into the thick and leafy copse which proved a perfect hiding place. The road, along which the guns crashed and jangled, was no more than a quarter-mile away and Lord John would be hidden under the wood’s leafy, dripping cover right to the road’s verge. There he could wait until his friends offered him support. Sharpe, he was certain, would try nothing violent in front of witnesses.
Lord John slowed his blown horse to a walk, letting it pick a twisting path between oak and beech. The rain spattered on the uppermost leaves and dripped miserably from the lower. A scrabbling sound to his right made him whip round in sudden alarm, but it was only a red squirrel racing along an oak branch. He sagged in the saddle, feeling despair.
He despaired because of honour. Honour was the simple code of the gentleman. Honour said a man did not run from an enemy, honour said a man did not flirt with the temptations of murder, and honour said a man did not show fear. Honour was the thin line that protected the privileged from disgrace, and Lord John, slouched in his wet saddle in a damp wood under a thunderous sky, knew he had run his honour ragged. Jane, in her letter, had threatened to leave him if he fulfilled his promise to return Sharpe’s money. How long, she had asked, would Lord John allow Sharpe to persecute her happiness? If Lord John could not settle Sharpe, then she would find a man who would. She had underlined the word `man’ three times.