SHARPE’S REGIMENT

‘Maggie said you killed a man?’

‘Yes.’ He turned to look at her thin face. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Belle.’

He was silent. He had killed a man who was beating the living daylights out of Maggie. Sharpe had cut the man’s throat, and the blood had soaked into Maggie’s hair and she had laughed and cuffed Sharpe round the head for messing her up. She had sent Sharpe out of the rookery, knowing that the murdered man’s friends would look for revenge, for Sharpe had killed one of the kings of St Giles, one of the leaders of the criminals who lived in such safe squalor in the dark maze. Maggie had saved Sharpe’s life then, and she was doing it again now, even though she could have left him unwarned, hoped for his death, and kept the jewels of Vitoria for herself.

Or perhaps she was not saving his life, for he could neither see nor hear anything untoward. Somewhere a dog barked, fierce and urgent, and then there was a yelp as it was silenced with a blow. A voice sang in an alleyway, there was laughter from a gin shop, and always the cries of babies and the shouts of anger and the screaming of men and women who lived and fought together in the tight filth of the small rooms where two families could share one room with a third in the hallway outside.

The girl coughed, a racking, hollow, dreadful sawing that would kill her before two winters had passed, and Sharpe knew the sound would bring the men into the alley if, indeed, they looked for him.

A bottle broke nearby. The gate of the entranceway creaked open an inch, stopped, and creaked again.

The girl’s hands were on his back as if his nearness gave her comfort. He held the gun with both hands, its butt on the ground, its muzzle facing upwards so that the loose charge of killing fragments would not trickle down the barrel. He waited. The gate had opened only a few inches.

The gate was the only entrance into this place. It did not move again. Sharpe wondered if the two men waited for him to come out, preferring to ambush him as he came through the gateway rather than come themselves into the dark cul-de-sac where he might be waiting. He knew he must tempt them inside, make them think he was defenceless here, and he felt the crawling excitement that he had thought he would only get on a battlefield where he faced the French. At this moment, just as he did on a battlefield, he must dictate the enemy’s move for them. He smiled. The two men who pursued him, if indeed they came to kill him, had found themselves an enemy. ‘Belle?’ He spoke in a whisper.

‘What?’

‘Make a noise!’

She knew what he meant. She began to moan, to give small gasps, and her hands rubbed up and down his back as the noises grew louder. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Come on, my love, come on!’ The two men obeyed her.

Two men, and moving so swiftly and silently that at first Sharpe was hardly aware that they had slunk past the door, then he saw the gleam of a knife and he pressed back with his spine to keep Belle moaning and the noise drew the two men towards the dark space beside the stairs.

Sharpe pulled the trigger. He half expected the old gun not to work, but the priming flashed; he had already closed one eye to keep his night vision; and the huge pistol bucked in his hands as the charge exploded and the barrel tried to leap upwards.

It was a nasty weapon. Its effect, in the tight entranceway, was as if a canister had been fired from a field gun. The scraps of stone and metal sprayed out from the stubby, splayed barrel and ricocheted from the walls to throw the two men backwards in blood and smoke and, even as they fell, Sharpe was moving. He dropped the empty gun, picked up the long, heavy, killing sword, and shouted the war-shout that put fear into his enemies.