‘Christ!’ She stared at them.
‘Those are for Maggie, these are for you.’ He gave her two more. ‘You’ve seen nothing, heard nothing, know nothing.’
She ran, one hand holding the gun through her skirts, and Sharpe waited till the sound of her bare feet faded to nothing, then, in the odd silence, he walked back to Drury Lane.
‘You’ve seen nothing, nor have you, until you’ve seen it!’ Even at half past three in the morning the huge Ulsterman was talking happily. ‘More men that the Lord God killed in Sodom and Gomorrah. They cover the earth like locusts, and at their centre, at the very heart of them, there are the drummers.’ Harper began to bang his palms on the table. ‘A great, solid mass of men! They’re coming and the very earth is shaking, so it is, and they’re coming at you!’ His hands still beat the table, rattling the bottles that he had made good use of.
A crowd listened.
‘And the guns! The guns. I tell you. If you can imagine it, if you can imagine all the powder in all the earth crammed into the barrels, and the gunners working themselves into a slather, and the sound of it is like the end of the world! The drums, the guns, and the Frenchies with their bayonets, and there’s just you and a few comrades. Not many, but you’re there! You’re waiting, so you are, and every mother’s son of you knows that the bastards are coming for you, just you!’
Sharpe stood at the door, the dead Sergeant’s civilian greatcoat covering his uniform. He grinned, then whistled a few, brief, apparently tuneless notes.
Patrick Harper held his hands up as though he was pushing on a great door. ‘They’re coming towards you, so they are, and you can’t see the sky for the smoke itself, and you can’t hear a thing but the guns and the screams, and you’re thinking that it’s a long wee step from Donegal to Sallymanker, and you’re wondering if you’ll ever see your mother again!’ He shook his head dramatically.
Sharpe whistled the notes once more, a Rifleman’s battlefield call that meant “close on me”. He repeated it.
The Sergeant looked about the faces. ‘You’ll not go away?’
More than a dozen people were left, listening enthralled, and Sharpe almost wished they had come here to recruit, for he and Harper could have walked out of the taproom with a dozen prime youngsters.
The Sergeant pushed his chair away from the table and grinned at his audience. ‘Time for a dribble, lads. Just you wait!’ He came to the door, took in the dark coat and the blood that was still on Sharpe’s face. ‘Sir?’
‘Get my rifle, all my kit, everything! And yours! Fetch Isabella. We’re going. Back alley in ten minutes.’
‘Aye, sir.’
Sharpe went outside. No one had seen him, no landlord or tavern servant would be able to say that he had seen Major Sharpe alive. Now he and Harper must take Isabella back to the Southwark house and then, with the inspiration he had gained from watching the actors, they would go to find the Second Battalion of the South Essex.
It was dawn before Isabella was safely restored to the Southwark house. She accepted the sudden panic gracefully, though even she was curious as Sharpe and Harper stripped themselves of their uniforms and gave their weapons to Harper’s cousin. ‘You keep them for us!’ Harper said.
‘They’ll be safe.’
Mrs Reilly brought them old, ragged clothes, and Sharpe exchanged his comfortable French boots for a pair of broken, gaping shoes. Each man hid a few coins in their rags.
‘How do I look?’ Harper asked, laughing.
‘Awful,’ Sharpe laughed with him.
When Harper had come from the Rose Tavern, gripping Isabella in one hand and Sharpe’s belongings in the other, he had brought orders that had been delivered to the tavern during the evening. Sharpe had read them. Lord Fenner ordered him to report instantly to the Chatham depot for transport to Spain. If Lord Fenner had also been behind the murder attempt then these orders, Sharpe surmised, were merely a disguise, or perhaps a precaution against Sharpe’s survival.