‘Major Sharpe?’
He jumped, scared by the sudden voice, and then a cloth bundle was pushed at him and he saw, dim in the darkness, a hooded shape. ‘Miss Gibbons? Is that you?’
‘Yes! I have to talk to you!’
Sharpe climbed onto the ledge. He saw Harper look nervously southwards as he stove in the second punt. Sharpe was holding the bundle while Jane Gibbons’ gloved hand, in an unconscious gesture of nervousness, rested on his arm. She was silent now, staring past Sharpe at the huge man who wrestled to turn the third punt over.
He smiled. ‘Thank you for this.’
She shook her head. ‘I wanted to help. Are the militia out?’
‘Yes.’
‘They’ll come here. They always warn us.’ She took her hand from his arm. She was standing on the platform that was built at the end of the tunnel, the stage from which someone could step down into the boats. ‘You are going to stop them?’
‘The auctions? Yes.’
‘What happens to my uncle?’
Somehow the question surprised him; he had thought of her as an ally, a conspirator, but suddenly he saw what he had not seen all day, that the disgrace of her uncle would reflect upon this household. ‘I don’t know.’ It was a feeble answer. He was tempted to tell her of the men who waited in Pasajes, of the disgrace they would suffer if their pride was to be laid up and they were to be denied a victory for which they had suffered and endured these long years.
‘And Colonel Girdwood? Will he be finished?’
There was a hollow knocking of wood as Harper tossed two paddles into the punt, then began to drag it towards the far marker that showed where this creek joined the River Crouch. Sharpe nodded. ‘He’ll be finished. Disgraced.’
‘Good!’ She hissed the word, revelling in it. For a moment she was silent. The boathouse was in shadow, but her eyes glistened with the pale reflection of moonlight. She stared at Sharpe almost defiantly. They want me to marry him.’
It was like the moment when, on a clear day, a twelve pounder enemy shot thumps the air close by, astonishing and sudden, threatening and unexpected. Sharpe only gaped. They what?’
‘We’re supposed to marry!’
‘Him?’
‘My uncle demands it,’ she paused, her eyes bright in her shadowed face, ‘but if he’s in disgrace . . .’
‘He’ll be finished.’ Sharpe heard a clinking sound, the fall of a hoof on the road. At the same moment came the call of a nightjar, soft and insistent. ‘Cu-ick, cu-ick, cu-ick.’ Sharpe had never heard a nightjar in marshland. It was Harper sounding a warning. ‘I have to go!’ For a second, a mad second, he wanted to take her with him. ‘I shall come back. You understand?’
She nodded, then there was a sudden braying of a trumpet, a whoop like that of a huntsman, and he pulled away from her. ‘I’ll come back!’ The first carbine shots cracked down the creekbed.
The militia was like a second British army, but a privileged one. A man who joined the militia could never be asked to serve abroad and his wife, unlike the wife of a regular soldier, received an allowance while he was away from home. It was a pampered, soft, well-trained, and useless army. It had been raised to resist an invasion that had never come, while now, nine years later, it starved the regular army of good men. Some militia men transferred to the regulars, attracted by the bounty and wanting, after their training, to do some real fighting, but most preferred to avoid the dangers of real soldiering.
The militia cavalry of South Essex, whose honorary Colonel was Sir Henry Simmerson, kept a troop quartered close to Foulness. Their task was to patrol the creeks against smuggling, guard the Foulness Camp, and protect Sir Henry’s big brick house. When a man ran from Foulness, the militia cavalry went eagerly into a practised routine, because they had been offered a bounty should they ever succeed in stopping a deserter. Now, like a gift from heaven, the troops saw the big man who hauled the punt north towards the Crouch. Their first bullets drove him into the cover of the reeds.