Sharpe smiled. ‘Where’s Tom?’
‘Who are you?’ Her voice was hard as steel.
He took his shako off and smiled chidingly at her. ‘Maggie!’ He said it as if she had wounded him by her forgetfulness.
She frowned at him. She looked at the officer’s sash, the leather bag, the sword, up to his high, black collared neck and to his scarred, hard face, and suddenly, almost alarmingly, she wept. ‘Dear Christ, it’s yourself?’ She had never lost the accent of Kilkenny, the only legacy her parents had given to her, besides a quick wit and an indomitable strength. ‘Dick?’ She said it with utter disbelief.
‘It’s myself.’ He did not know whether to laugh or cry.
She reached over the table, clasped him, and the astonished gin-drinkers watched in awed surprise as the officer held her back. She shook her head. ‘Dear God, look at the man! You an officer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Dear Christ on the cross! They’ll make me into the bloody Pope next! You’ll take some gin.’
‘I’ll take some gin.’ He put his shako on the table. ‘Tom?’
‘He’s dead, darling. Dead these ten winters. Christ, look at yourself. Will you be wanting a bed?’
He smiled. ‘I’m at the Rose.’
She wiped her eyes. ‘There was a time, Dick Sharpe, when my bed was all you ever wanted. Come round here. Leave those sinners to gawp at you.’
He sat beside her on the bench. He put the bag on the floor, stretched his long legs under the crude counter, and Maggie Joyce stared at him in astonishment. ‘Oh Christ! But you look good in yourself!’ She laughed at him, and he let his hand rest in hers. Maggie Joyce had been a mother to him once, rescuing him when he ran away from the foundling home, and he had known her when she had first gone onto the streets. Later, when he had become skilled at opening locked doors, she would come back in the dawn and climb into his bed and teach him the ways of the world. She had been lithe then, as sharp a whip as any in the rookery.
She had tears in her eyes. ‘Christ, and I thought you were long gone to hell!’
‘No.’ He laughed.
They both laughed, perhaps for what had been and what might have been, and while they laughed, and while she took the small coins from her customers and poured gin into their tin cups, the two men who had followed Richard Sharpe from Drury Lane stood unnoticed at the back wall and watched him. Two men, one swathed in a greatcoat despite the warm night, the other a native of this rookery. Both men had weapons, the skill to use them, and much, much patience. They waited.
CHAPTER 4
The two men, by not ambushing Sharpe on his way to Maggie Joyce’s, had lost a fortune.
In Maggie’s back room Sharpe unlaced the leather bag and spilt, onto her table, a king’s ransom in diamonds. She stared at it, poking at the gems with a finger, as if she could not believe what she saw, ‘Christ in his heaven, Dick! Real?’
‘Real.’
‘Mary, Mother of God!’ She picked up a necklace of filigreed gold, hung with pearls and diamonds. ‘Clean?’
‘Clean.’
Which was not utterly true, yet the owners of the jewellery had no claim on it now. This was part of the plunder of Vitoria, the treasure of an empire that had been abandoned by the French in their panic to escape Wellington’s victory. Men had become rich that day, and none richer than Sharpe and Harper who had taken these diamonds from a field of gold and pearls, silks and silver. Maggie Joyce delved into the heap of treasure that had once dazzled the aristocracy of the Spanish court. ‘You’re a rich man, Dick Sharpe. You know that?’
He laughed. This was a soldier’s luck and that, he knew only too well, could turn sour in the flash of a musket’s pan. ‘Can you sell them for me?’
‘Sure and I can!’ She held a ring to the light of a candle. ‘Would you remember Cross-Eyed Moses?’
‘Green coat and a big stick?’