Crimping was not illegal. The army often contracted with a businessman to raise recruits, but crimping by a regiment was definitely outside the law. It was clever, it was profitable, and it was starving the South Essex to death. Sharpe felt a sudden, fierce exultation because he had solved the problem, he knew it, and just as he felt that soaring pulse of success, he felt fear too.
He felt fear because a dog, a tiny, white, fierce little handful of a dog, came scampering down the steps from the lawn, saw him, and began barking at him in a shrill yelp.
‘Shut up!’ he hissed. ‘Bugger off!’
‘Rascal!’ It was a girl’s voice. ‘You know the Colonel hates you! Rascal! Come here!’
Sharpe, sitting on the stone steps, slithered urgently towards the cover of the boathouse’s tunnel, but suddenly there was a shadow on the stone and a voice above him. ‘It’s all right, he won’t hurt you. It’s just that the Colonel’s terrified of dogs.’ She laughed.
He knew he should not have looked. He should have muttered an acknowledgement then, like some creature of the earth, skulked back into the dark, wet tunnel.
But the voice was that of a young woman of whom he had dreamed impossible dreams, prompted by a single, brief meeting in a dark, cool church before her brother’s memorial stone.
He did what he knew he should not do. He looked up at her. He reasoned that she would not recognise him, and he wanted, after these four years, to see if she was as truly lovely as his memory of her.
She was stooping, petting the dog, and she smiled again. ‘He sounds very fierce, but he isn’t. He’s a coward, really, though he frightens Lieutenant Colonels, don’t you, Rascal?’ Her voice faded.
Jane Gibbons was staring at him.
She saw a man smeared with mud, yet she recognised him.
He wondered how, in all creation, it was possible for her to recognise him, yet she did. She stared, her mouth open, the dog forgotten, and Sharpe stared back.
He had remembered her as beautiful, but the image of her that he had carried in his head was entirely wrong. He had thought of her as a kind of doll, a creature manufactured in his dreams to be all that he wanted her to be, while now, staring at each other in silent amazement, she seemed to Sharpe to be suddenly so alive and there was the double shock, of seeing her face as he had seen it once before, and of seeing someone so independently alive, not captive in his dreams.
She opened her lips, as if about to speak, but no sound came from her. Her face, shadowed by the straw bonnet that softened the strong lines of her mouth and cheekbones, had the clear, fresh skin that came of England’s climate and that Sharpe so rarely saw in Spain. Her hair, pale as sundrenched gold, was looped beneath her ears. She had been a sister to one of Sharpe’s enemies and was niece to another. Jane Gibbons.
She stared, and for a moment he thought she was going to call out, but then, suddenly, with an impulsive vivacity, she sat on the top step and shook her head. ‘It’s you!’ She spoke in amazement. ‘It is you?’
He did not know what to say. To confirm it was to risk that she would call out, to deny it was to lose this chance of speaking with her, and Sharpe was silent, struck dumb by her loveliness and he thought how he had devalued this beauty in his memory of her, then he felt panic as she turned from him to look towards her uncle.
She did not call out. Instead she looked back to Sharpe, her eyes shining with a kind of quick mischief. ‘It is you?’
‘Yes.’
‘He said you were dead!’ She looked once more towards her uncle and it struck Sharpe that she feared Sir Henry as much as he at this moment did. She looked to Sharpe again. ‘What are you doing here?’ She had grabbed the small dog and now cuddled it in her lap. ‘What are you doing?’ She repeated the question with almost breathless astonishment, mixed with pleasure, and Sharpe, who had only met her once, was startled by her quick vivacity, by the secret delight she took in this meeting. She was beautiful, and there was a streak of mischief in her that gave quickness to that beauty.