‘You know the Lady Camoynes?’
‘Not well,” Sharpe said hastily. ‘She was kind enough to speak to me once or twice.’
Lawford grunted. ‘I hope you were polite, Richard.’
‘Indeed, sir,’ Sharpe smiled. ‘I was very humble.’
‘Good.’ Lawford looked at the dreadful, battle-stained green jacket. ‘Because you do sometimes seem to have difficulty in knowing your proper place.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And what favour can I do for you?’
‘I think, sir, that Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood will be trying to resign his commission and I would be grateful, sir, if it could be put to him that unless he accepts command of the First Battalion in Spain then criminal charges might be brought? Would that be possible?’
Lawford blew a long stream of cigar smoke as he watched Sharpe. ‘And why, in the name of God, do you want to serve under Girdwood?’
‘I don’t intend to serve under him, sir.’
Sir William smiled very slowly, understanding. ‘I think I know the right ear, yes. May I say I’m glad that I am not your enemy, Richard?’
‘I’m glad of that too, sir.’
He took Jane Gibbons away from the court. He was going back to Spain, and there were a hundred things he wanted to do before the Battalion left. They walked down the massive staircase towards the octagon room, and Jane suddenly gasped and gripped his arm. ‘Major!’
‘You can call me Richard now.’
She was not listening. She stared fearfully towards the bottom of the staircase.
The defeated, knowing that the next day they would buy themselves out of scandal, and eager to stop the smallest rumours from sullying their reputation, had decided to brazen this night out. They had come to Carlton House. Lord Fenner saw Sharpe and stepped back so that he would not be forced to recognise his enemy.
But Sir Henry Simmerson, who had just handed his cloak to a servant, did not have the same sense. He stared in outraged anger. His niece, dressed in her simple blue country dress, was coming down the Prince Regent’s stairs on the arm of the man Sir Henry hated most in all the world. ‘Jane! I ordered you home! I’ll have the skin off you!’
‘Sir Henry!’ It was Sharpe who replied. His voice, echoing in the marbled splendour of the hall, seemed unnaturally loud. He put his right hand over Jane’s to calm her fears.
Sir Henry stared at them, and Sharpe, in the same loud voice, spoke two brief words that, though much used in Britain’s army, were rarely heard in Carlton House. Then, with his bride on his arm and his sword at his side, he went into the night. He was going to Spain.
EPILOGUE FRANCE, November 1813
EPILOGUE
Dawn showed a landscape whitened by frost and slashed by dark valleys. Smoke, like wisps of morning mist, drifted from the steep hillsides where troops brewed tea or cleared their muskets of an overnight charge. Men, stamping their boots and slapping their mittened hands against the cold, stared northwards at the heaped hills that were rocky, precipitous, and held by the enemy.
Sergeant Major Harper laughed. ‘You look disappointed, Charlie. What is it? You thought they had horns and tails?’
Private Charles Weller, now in d’Alembord’s Light Company, was staring in awe at a small group of men who, a good half mile away from where Weller stood, struggled uphill with buckets of water to their rock-embrasured trenches at the hill’s top. ‘They’re French?’
‘The real article, Charlie. Old Trousers, frogs, me-sewers, whatever you want to call the buggers. And just like us.’
‘Like us?’ Weller had been raised in a country that spoke of Frenchmen as monkeys, as devils, as anything but humans.
‘Just like us.’ Harper sipped his tea and thought about it. ‘Bit slower with their muskets and a bit nippier on their feet, but that’s all. Christ, it’s cold!’
It was November in the mountains. The Prince of Wales’ Own Volunteers had marched through high, rocky passes, shrouded in sudden fogs, the moss-grown precipices dripping with water that soaked the thin, spongy turf of the high valleys. Goats and eagles shared the rocks, wolves howled in the darkness. A storm had greeted the Battalion one night, the lightning slashing down to whiten the cliffs and crack at rocks like the whip of doom.