Bernard Cornwell – 1812 10 Sharpe’s Enemy

The chapel door was open and, as Sharpe passed, a hand shot out and grasped his left shoulder. He swung on the hand, right fist already moving, then stopped. A woman stood there, swaying and blinking, and behind her there were candles beyond the open door in the grille. ‘Coming in, darling?’ She smiled at Sharpe, then staggered against the door.

‘Go and sleep it off.’

A man’s voice, speaking in French, called from inside the chapel. The woman shook her head. ‘He’s no bloody good, darling. Brandy, brandy, brandy.’ A child, not three years old, came and stood beside her mother and peered up solemnly at Sharpe, sucking its thumb. The woman squinted at Sharpe. ‘Who are you?’

‘Lord Wellington.’ The French voice shouted again and there was the sound of movement. Sharpe pushed the woman inside the door. ‘Go on, love. He’s feeling better now.

‘A chance would be a fine thing. Come back, yes?’

‘We’ll be back.’

He led his men, grinning broadly, round the further corner and down to the passageway that led to the inner cloister. Footsteps echoed in it as he approached and then a child burst from the archway, pursued by another child, and they ran into the upper cloister and shrieked with laughter and excitement. A voice yelled at them from a storeroom. The drunks seemed to be sleeping it offin this upper level.

Sharpe motioned his men to wait in the passageway and walked out onto the upper cloister level where he had stood and talked with Madame Dubreton. He stayed in the shadows and he stared down into the eye of chaos. This was the anarchy that Wellington feared, the short step from order, the abandonment of hope and discipline.

Flames lit the deep cloister. A great fire burned on the broken stones, above the wreckage of the delicate canals, and the fire was fed by thorn trees and by planks that had been torn from the great windows of the hall on the northern side of the cloister. The windows ran from the ground level, past the upper walkway, to delicate arches beneath the gallery, and now that the protective planks had been prised from the stonework the window spaces gave free entrance between courtyard and hall. Their glass was long gone. Men and women came and went between the two areas and Sharpe watched from above.

He had run from the Foundling Home before his tenth birthday and he had gone into the dark close alleys of London’s slums. There was work there for a nimble child. It was a world of thieves, body-snatchers, murderers; of drunkards, cripples, and of whores who had sold themselves into disease and ugliness. Hope meant nothing to the inhabitants of St Giles. For many their longest journey in this world was a mile and a half along the length of Oxford Street, due west, to the three-sided gibbet at Tyburn. The countryside, just two miles north up the Tottenham Court Road, was as remote as paradise. St Giles was a place of disease, starvation, and a future so dark that a man measured it in hours and took his pleasures accordingly. The gin-shops, the gutter, the floors of the common lodging houses were the places where men and women dissolved their desperation in drink, coupling, and finally in death that tipped most into the open sewer along with the night’s harvest of dead babies. Without hope there was nothing but desperation

And these people were desperate. They must have known that revenge was coming, perhaps in the spring when the armies stirred from winter torpor, and until it came they numbed their desperation. They had drunk and were still drinking. Food lay on the broken stones, men lay with women, children picked their way through the couples to find bones that still had chewable meat or wineskins whose spigots they would suck on desperately. Close to the fire some of the bodies were naked, asleep, while further away they were covered in blankets and clothes. Some moved. One man was dead, blood black on his opened stomach. The noise was not from here, but from the hall and Sharpe could not see what was prompting the sound. He thought of the minutes ticking by, of Frederickson counting in the cold thorns.