Challon said. He was still holding Sharpe’s rifle, but what was he to do?
Shoot the priest? “Are they going to sing?” the lawyer asked incredulously, for the priest had turned to his flock, raised his hands, and now brought them down. And so the crowd began to sing.
They sang carols in the falling snow. They sang all the beautiful old carols of Christmas, the carols of a baby and a star, of a manger and the shepherds, and of angels’ wings beating in the winter snow over Bethlehem. They sang of wise men and of gold, of Mary and her child, and of peace on earth and joy in heaven. They sang lustily, as though the loudness of their voices could stave off the bitter cold of the waning afternoon. “In a moment,” Lucille had come down from the bedrooms, “they will want to come in. I must give them wine, some food.” “They can’t come in!” Lorcet snapped. “How will you stop them?”
Lucille asked as she folded Patrick’s clothes on to the table. “They know we’re here. We have lamps shining.” “You will tell them to go away, Madame!”
Lorcet insisted. “Me!” Lucille asked, her eyes widening. “I should tell my neighbours that they cannot sing me carols on Christmas Eve? Non, monsieur, I shall not tell them any such thing,” “Then we’ll just leave the doors locked,”
Sergeant Challon said, “and they can freeze to death. They’ll get tired soon enough. And you, Madame, had better pray that your Englishman is bringing the gold.” Lucille went back to the stairs. “I shall pray, Sergeant,” she told Challon, “but not for that.” She went up to her child. “Bitch,” Challon said, and followed her. While outside the carollers sang on.
“THERE used to be a third bridge over the moat,” Jacques Malan explained, “and it led to the chapel, but they pulled it down years ago. Only they left the stone pilings, see? Just under the water.” Malan had not only fetched his musket, but had put on his old uniform so that now he was glorious in the blue, white and scarlet of Napoleon’s old guard. Thus dressed for battle he had led Sharpe on a wide circuit through the woods so that they approached the chateau from the east, hidden from the gate-tower by the farmhouse and the chapel roof. Malan now reversed his musket and stabbed its stock down through the moat’s skim of ice. “There,” he said, as the musket butt struck stone. He stepped carefully across so that he was standing in the moat with a few inches of water lapping his boots. He probed for the next piling. “There are five stones,” he told Sharpe, “Miss one, though, and you’ll fall in the water.”
“But what happens once we’re across?” “We climb to the roof,” Malan said.
“There’s a stone jutting out, see?” He pointed. “We throw a rope round it and climb.” And once they were on the chapel roof, Sharpe thought, there was a window into an old attic that was filled with 800 years of junk, and the only other entrance to the attic was through a hatch high on the end wall of the bedroom and it needed a ladder to reach that hatch. Sharpe had only ever been into the attic once when he had marvelled at the collection of rubbish that Lucille’s family had stowed away. There was a suit of armour up there, he remembered, and crates of mouldering clothes, ancient arrows, a crossbow, a weather-cock which had fallen off the chapel, a stuffed pike caught by Lucille’s grandfather, and a rocking horse that Sharpe thought he might get down for Patrick, though he hoped the toy would not put the idea of becoming a cavalryman into the boy’s head. “I’d never live that down,” he said aloud.
“Live what down?” Malan asked. He was standing on the third hidden piling, and probing for the fourth. “If Patrick becomes a cavalryman.” “Mon Dieu! That would be terrible!” Malan agreed, then jumped across the last stones and on to the narrow ledge that edged the chapel. He held out his musket to help Sharpe across the last two pilings. “They sing well!” he said, listening to the two choirs of villagers. “You do this carol singing. in England, too?” “Of course we do.” “But my captain said the English did not believe in God.” “But they believe in getting free food and drink,” Sharpe said. “So maybe they’re not mad after all,” Malan conceded. “And you have brandy in the house, monsieur?