His optimism was dashed at the barracks. It was dashed as suddenly as if Napoleon’s Imperial Guard had appeared in Chelmsford’s market place. He had come here in hope, expecting to find seven hundred men, and the depot seemed deserted.
There was not even a guard on the gate. The wind stirred the dust, weeds grew between the paving stones, and a door creaked back and forth on ungreased hinges. ‘Guard!’ Sharpe’s voice bellowed angrily and was met by silence.
The four soldiers walked into the archway’s shadow. The depot was not entirely abandoned for, on the far side of the wide parade ground, a file of cavalrymen walked their horses. Sharpe pushed open the creaking door and looked into an empty guardroom. For a few seconds he wondered if the Battalion had been shipped to Spain, if somewhere on the wind-fretted ocean he had crossed their path on this useless mission, but surely the Horse Guards would have known if the Battalion had moved?
‘Someone’s home,’ d’Alembord said. He nodded towards the Union flag that stirred weakly from a flagpole in front of an elegant, brick-built building which, Sharpe remembered, housed the officers’ Mess and the regiment’s offices. Beside the flagpole, its shafts empty, stood an open carriage.
Harper pulled his shako over his forehead. ‘What in hell’s name are cavalry doing here?’
‘Christ knows.’ Sharpe’s voice was grim. ‘Dally?’
‘Sir?’ d’Alembord was brushing the dust from his boots.
‘Take the Sergeant Major. Go round this place and roust the bastards out.’
‘If there’s anyone to roust out,’ d’Alembord said gloomily.
‘Harry! With me.’
Sharpe and Price walked towards the headquarters building. Sharpe’s face, Price saw, boded ill for whoever had left the guardroom empty and the depot unguarded.
Sharpe climbed the steps of the elegant house and, as at the main gate, there was no sentry at the door. He led Price into a long, cool hallway that was hung with pictures of red-coated men in battle array. From somewhere in the house came the tinkle of music and the sound of laughter.
Sharpe opened a white-painted door to find an empty office. A fly buzzed at the unwashed window above the dead bodies of other flies. The papers on the desk were thick with dust. A small, black-cased clock on the mantel had stopped with both its hands hanging down to the six.
Sharpe pushed open a second door on the far side of the hall. He stared into an elegantly appointed dining room, empty as the office, with a great, varnished table on which stood silver statuettes. A half empty decanter of wine held a slowly drowning wasp. Sharpe closed the door.
The hallway was carpeted, its furniture heavy and expensive, and its paintings new. Above a curving staircase was a huge chandelier, its gilded brackets thick with wax. Sharpe put his shako on a table and frowned as the laughter swelled. He heard a girl’s voice distinct above the trilling of the spinet. Lieutenant Price grinned at the sound. ‘Sounds like a brothel, sir.’
‘It does, too.’ Sharpe’s voice hid the anger that was thick in him, an anger at an unguarded barracks where women’s laughter mingled with tinkling music.
He went to the last door in the hallway, the one that he remembered opened into the Mess and from which came the laughter. He pushed the door slowly open, stood in the dark shadows of the hallway, and watched.
Three officers, all wearing the yellow facings and chained-eagle badge of the South Essex, were in the room. Two girls were with them, one sitting at the spinet, the other blindfolded in the centre of the room.
They were playing blind-man’s buff.
The officers laughed, they dodged the lunges of the blindfolded girl. One of them stood guard so that she should not stumble into a low table that carried a tea of thin sandwiches, small pastries, and delicate porcelain cups. That officer, a Captain, was the first to see Sharpe.
The Captain made a mistake. It was common enough error. In Spain men often mistook Sharpe for a private soldier for the Rifleman wore no badges of rank on his shoulders, and his red, whip-tasselled officer’s sash had long been lost. He wore an officer’s weapon, a sword, but in the hall’s shadow the Captain did not see it. He only saw the rifle on Sharpe’s shoulder and he assumed, naturally enough, that only a private would carry a long-arm. Harry Price, whose uniform was more conventional, was hidden behind Sharpe.