‘Two guineas?’
‘That would be plenty. In the boathouse? Tonight?’
She nodded, her eyes suddenly bright with mischievous delight. ‘And you’ll stop the auctions?’
‘I’ll stop them. With your help.’ He smiled at her, and it seemed like a miracle that their heads were so close. He could smell her scent, like a clean thing in a foul land.
She looked at the dog in her lap. She seemed embarrassed suddenly, then her big eyes came back to Sharpe and she hesitated. ‘I want . . .’ But whatever she was to say could not be said, for there was a sudden yelping coming from the lawn.
‘Jane!’ It was the petulant, peremptory voice that had haunted Sharpe through the summer before Talavera. ‘Where are you, girl? Jane!’ Anger flecked Sir Henry’s voice. Sharpe imagined him, portly and red-faced, striding over the lawn. ‘Jane!’
She scrambled backwards up the steps. ‘I was looking for Rascal, uncle. He got out of the house!’ She was at the top of the steps now, and Sharpe was shrinking back into the tunnel. Sir Henry’s voice was desperately close.
‘Lock him up, for God’s sake, girl! You know Colonel Girdwood doesn’t like dogs! Now hurry!’
‘I’m coming, uncle!’
She turned, walked away without a backward glance, and Sharpe, muddy and undiscovered in the boathouse, wanted to shout his luck aloud. His heart was still beating in extraordinary, tremulous excitement and he was filled with a crazy, idiotic happiness that made him want to laugh out loud, to shout his good news across these lonely marshes, to forget that he was trapped in this crimping business of Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood’s Battalion.
She remembered him! He had thought so often of her. Even when he was married, and the dreams had seemed unworthy, he had thought of her and tried to convince himself that her behaviour to him in that small, cool church where they had met so briefly had shown that she liked him. And now this!
She remembered him, she trusted him! She would help him! She had given him the key to escape. He knew, from their first meeting, that her parents were dead, that she lived with her aunt and uncle, and he had assumed that she would be long married, but he had seen no ring on her ringer. Instead he had seen delight on her face as she, surely, must have seen it on his.
The happiness was on him, the foolish, crazy, insane happiness of a man who believes himself, despite the lack of evidence, to be in love, and the happiness made him laugh aloud as he leaned down to pick up his shovel and as he wondered how he and Harper would escape from Foulness this night.
Then the happiness went.
He had not noticed it till this moment, so bound up was he by her sudden appearance and by the shock of her words on all his hopes, but Giles Marriott, whom Sharpe had ordered to go away, had obeyed. He had gone.
CHAPTER 9
Sharpe shifted responsibility from himself by claiming that Marriott had left to talk with the corporal.
‘Filth!’ Sergeant Lynch glared at Sharpe. ‘You’re lying, filth!’ ‘Sarge! He said he wanted to talk to the corporal!’ Sergeant Lynch stalked around Sharpe, but the Rifleman stood, rigid and unblinking, the very image of a soldier who might know what his superior wants to know, but who will never lose his attitude of dumb, outraged innocence. It was a pose Sergeant Lynch knew well, and it convinced him of the futility of pursuing the charge of complicity. ‘So when did you miss him, filth?’
Sharpe blinked and frowned. ‘Twenty minutes, Sarge? No more.’ ‘And you said nothing!’ Lynch screamed the words. ‘He said he’d gone to the corporal!’ The two men stood by the entrance of the boathouse. The rest of the squad, terrified, stood in the flooding mud of the incoming tide. Corporal Mason, in whose party Harper worked, watched nervously from further down the creek bed.
‘Sergeant Lynch?’ It was Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood’s voice, coming from the top of the wall that raised Sir Henry’s garden above the level of the marsh. ‘What the devil’s this noise about?’