The Major bowed to Sharpe. “If you insist, sir.”
“I do insist, Major.”
The Major clearly did not believe Sharpe, but could do nothing about it. He stepped stiffly backward. “Then good day to you, sir.”
The Espiritu Santo weighed anchor in the next day’s dawn and, under a watery sun, headed southward. By midday the island of Saint Helena with its ring of warships was left far behind, as was the Emperor, chained to his rock.
And Sharpe, carrying Bonaparte’s gift, sailed to a distant war.
PART ONE
BAUTISTA
Capitan-General Vivar’s wife, the Countess of Mouromorto, had been born and raised in England, but Sharpe had first met Miss Louisa Parker when, in 1809 and with thousands of other refugees, she was fleeing from Napoleon’s invasion of northern Spain. The Parker family, oblivious to the chaos that was engulfing a continent, could grieve only for their lost Protestant Bibles with which they had forlornly hoped to convert Papist Spain. Somehow, in the weltering chaos, Miss Louisa Parker had met Don Bias Vivar who, later that same year, became the Count of Mouromorto. Miss Parker had meanwhile become a Papist, and thereafter Bias Vivar’s wife. Sharpe saw neither of them again till, in the late summer of 1819, Dona Louisa Vivar, Countess of Mouromorto, arrived unannounced and unexpected in the Normandy village where Sharpe farmed.
At first Sharpe did not recognize the tall, black-dressed woman whose carriage, attended by postilions and outriders, drew up under the chateau’s crumbling arch. He had supposed the lavish carriage to belong to some rich person who, traveling about Normandy, had become lost in the region’s green tangle of lanes and, it being late on a hot summer’s afternoon, had sought out the largest farmhouse of the village for directions and, doubtless, refreshments as well. Sharpe, his face sour and unwelcoming, had been prepared to turn the visitors away by directing them to the inn at Seleglise, but then a dignified woman had stepped down from the carriage and pushed a veil back from her face. “Mister Sharpe?” she had said after a few awkward seconds, and suddenly Sharpe had recognized her, but even then he had found it hard to reconcile this woman’s reserved and stately appearance with his memories of an adventurous English girl who had impulsively abandoned both her Protestant religion and the approval of her family to marry Don Bias Vivar, Count of Mouromorto, devout Catholic, and soldier of Spain.
Who, Dona Louisa now informed Sharpe, had disappeared. Bias Vivar had vanished.
Sharpe, overwhelmed by the suddenness of the information and by Louisa’s arrival, gaped like a village idiot. Lucille insisted that Dona Louisa must stay for supper, which meant staying for the night, and Sharpe was peremptorily sent about making preparations. There was no spare stabling for Dona Louisa’s valuable carriage horses, so Sharpe ordered a boy to unstall the plough horses and take them to a meadow while Lucille organized beds for Dona Louisa and her maids, and rugs for Dona Louisa’s coachmen. Luggage had to be unstrapped from the varnished carriage and carried upstairs where the chateau’s two maids laid new sheets on the beds. Wine was brought up from the damp cellar, and a fine cheese, which Lucille would otherwise have sent to the market in Caen, was taken from its nettle-leaf wrapping and pronounced fit for the visitor’s supper. That supper would not be much different from any of the other peasant meals being eaten in the village for the chateau was pretentious only in its name. The building had once been a nobleman’s fortified manor, but was now little more than an overgrown and moated farmhouse.
Dona Louisa, her mind too full of her troubles to notice the fuss her arrival had prompted, explained to Sharpe the immediate cause of her unexpected visit. “I have been in England and I insisted the Horse Guards tell me where I might find you. I am sorry not to have sent you warning of my coming, but I need help.” She spoke peremptorily, her voice that of a woman who was not used to deferring the gratification of her wishes.
She was nevertheless forced to wait while Sharpe’s two children were introduced to her. Patrick, age five, offered her ladyship a sturdy bow while Dominique, age three, was more interested in the ducklings that splashed at the moat’s edge. “Dominique looks like your wife,” Louisa said.