“Love makes us vulnerable,” Sharpe admitted.
“Doesn’t it just?” d’Alembord said warmly. “But virtue should give us confidence.”
“Virtue?” Sharpe wondered just what moral claims his friend was making for himself.
“The virtue of our cause,” d’Alembord explained as though it was the most natural thing in the world. “The French have got to be beaten.”
Sharpe smiled. “They’re doubtless saying the same of us.”
D’Alembord was silent for a few seconds, then spoke in a sudden and impassioned rush. “I don’t count Lucille, of course, and you mustn’t think I do, but it is a filthily evil nation, Sharpe. I cannot forget what they did to my family or to our co-religionists. And think of their revolution! All those poor dead innocent people. And Bonaparte’s no better. He just attacks and attacks, then steals from the countries he conquers, and all the time he talks of virtue and law and the glories of French civilization. Their virtue is all hypocrisy, their law applies only to benefit themselves, and their civilization is blood on the cobblestones.”
Sharpe had never suspected that such animosity lay beneath his friend’s elegant languor. “So it isn’t just the majority, Peter?”
D’Alembord seemed embarrassed to have betrayed such feelings. “I’m sorry, I truly am. You must think me very rude. I heartily like Lucille, you know I do. I exaggerate, of course. It is not the French who are essentially evil, but their government.” He stopped abruptly, evidently stifling yet more anti-French venom;
Sharpe smiled. “Where Lucille and I live they will tell you that France is blessed by God but cursed with Paris. They perceive Paris as an evil place inhabited by the most loathsome and grasping people.”
“It sounds like London.” D’Alembord smiled wanly. “You won’t tell Lucille my thoughts? I would not like to offend her.”
“Of course I won’t tell her.”
“And perhaps you will do me one more favour?”
“With pleasure,”
D’Alembord took a creased and damp letter from his pocket. “If I do become rye dung tomorrow, perhaps you’ll deliver this to Anne? And tell her I didn’t suffer? No tales of surgeon’s knives, Sharpe, and no descriptions of nasty wounds, just a clean bullet in the forehead will do for my end, however nasty the truth will probably be.”
“I won’t need to deliver it, but I’ll keep it for you.” Sharpe pushed the letter into a pocket, then turned as a spatter of musket fire sounded from the right of the line, about the chateau of Hougoumont.
A scatter of French infantry were running back from the orchard where British musket flames sparked bright in the dusk. Sharpe could see redcoats going forward among the trees south of the farm. The French must have sent a battalion to discover whether the farmstead was garrisoned, or else the enemy was merely foraging for firewood, but, whatever their mission, the blue-coated infantry had run into a savage firefight. More redcoats ran from the farm to take their bayonets into the woodland.
“What angers me”, d’Alembord was taking no notice of the sudden skirmish, “is not knowing how it will all end. If I die tomorrow, I’ll never know, will I?”
Sharpe shook his head in scornful dismissal of his friend’s fears. “By summer’s end, my friend, you and I will sit in a conquered Paris and drink wine. We probably won’t even remember a day’s fighting in Belgium! And you’ll go home and marry your Anne and be happy ever after.”
D’Alembord laughed at the prophecy. “And you, Sharpe, what happens to you? Do you go back to Normandy?”
“Yes.”
“And the local people won’t mind that you fought against France?”
“I don’t know.” That worry was never far from Sharpe’s thoughts, nor indeed, from Lucille’s. “But I’d like to go back,” Sharpe went on. “I’m happy there. I’m planning to make some calvados this year. The chateau used to make a lot, but it hasn’t produced any for twenty or more years. The local doctor wants to help us. He’s a good fellow.” Sharpe suddenly thought of his meeting with Lord John and of the promissory note that, if it was honoured, would make so many things possible in Lucille’s chateau. “I met bloody Rossendale today. I took the promissory note off him direct. I hope you don’t mind.”