‘That’s him. His son, now, he’s your man. I’ll have him do it for you. You’ll get a better price if you’re patient.’ She was pushing the jewels back into the bag.
‘Take as long as you like.’
Sharpe could have let Messrs Hopkinson, his army agents, handle the jewels, but he did not trust them to give him full value, any more than he would have trusted the fashionable jewellers of West London. Maggie Joyce, a queen in this kingdom of crime, was one of his own people and it was unthinkable that she would cheat him. She would take her commission on the sale, and that he expected, but rather her than the supercilious merchants who would see the Rifleman as a sheep to be fleeced.
She pushed the bag into a cupboard that seemed filled with rags. ‘Would you be wanting money now, Dick?’
‘No.’ There had been gold at Vitoria too, so much gold that the coins had spilt into the mud to be reddened by the setting sun. He had put a year’s salary of French gold into the army agent’s safe, money that he would live on while in England and which would gather interest when he returned to Spain. He wrote down Messrs Hopkinson’s address for Maggie Joyce. ‘That’s where you put the money, Maggie. In my name.’ He and Harper would split the proceeds later.
She laughed. ‘Christ, Dick, but you always were a lucky bastard! When I first saw you I didn’t know whether to drown you or eat you, you were that skinny, but the good Lord told me to be kind to you. Ah, Christ, and He was right! Now, are you going to get drunk with me?’
He was, and he did; splendidly, laughingly drunk, and even the problems of a lying Lord Fenner disappeared in the haze of gin and half-forgotten stories that were embroidered by Maggie’s Irish skill into great sagas of youthful lawlessness.
He left her late. The city bells were ringing a quarter to three, and his head was spinning with too much gin and too much smoke in a small room. Even the stinking alleyway smelt good to him. ‘You take care of yourself!’ she called after him. ‘And bring yourself back soon!’
It was dark as sin in the alleys. There was a moon, but small light got past the high, narrow houses that seemed to lean together at their tops.
Sharpe was drunk, and he knew it. He was happy, too, made sentimental by a visit to a past he had half forgotten. He crossed a small court, went under an archway, and it seemed to him now that the rookery, instead of being a foul place of poverty and disease, was a warm, intricate warren of friendly, caring people. He laughed aloud. God damn all Lords! Especially lying bastards of politicians. He decided he hated no one, no single evil soul in all the whole mad world, as much as he hated bloody politicians.
The two men who followed him were sensibly cautious, but not apprehensive. They had been astonished when the officer had come into the rookery, for one of them was a killer hired from these very alleyways, and their victim had been foolish enough to come into the one place where his death would be easy and unquestioned. No Bow Street Runner dared enter the St Giles Rookery.
The two men knew who their victim was, but the knowledge did not worry them. These men did not fear a soldier, not even a famous soldier, and certainly not a drunken one. No man, however fast and skilled with weapons, could resist an ambush. Sharpe would be dead before he even knew that he was in danger.
Sharpe was unaware of them. Instead of their footsteps he listened to the crying children. That was a memory that came swamping back. The rookery was always full of children crying, small children, for once they had reached four or five they had learned not to cry. The sound made him think of his own daughter, orphaned in Spain, and that thought was maudlin. He rested against a wall.
There were few people about. The rookery, he knew, was alive and watching, but only a few whores were in the alleys, either against walls or coming home from Drury Lane. Their men, the hard masters who took their pence, stood in small groups where a torch lit a patch of mud and brick.