He had been summoned here, brought by a scented note written in a woman’s hand that reminded him of startling green eyes. He had been at the Rose Tavern, reunited with d’Alembord, Price and Harper when the note had come. There was one other piece of mail for him, waiting since the day he had fled London, a great embossed piece of gilded card that ordered Major Richard Sharpe to attend upon His Royal Highness, the Prince Regent, at ten in the forenoon of Saturday, 21st August, at the Reviewing Stand by The Ring in Hyde Park. Sharpe, sourly thinking of the joys of watching garrison troops re-enact a battle at which none had been present, had pushed the card into his pouch. Then had come the scented letter, the mysterious summons to these gaudy, heady, music-filled gardens.
Vauxhall was crowded this night. All kinds of persons came here, from the highest to the lowest, to this place where the titled and rich mixed with anyone who could pay the few pence admission. Many of the women, and a few of the men, wore cheap black masks. Some women carried their masks on short sticks, holding them before a face that would be recognised. Others were masked in the hope that onlookers would think the hidden face famous. It was a place for fantasies, where the dim lights disguised tawdry clothes, and the plaster grotesques fleshed out hopeful dreams.
The letter had named no place in the garden, nor any time for a rendezvous, and Sharpe walked slowly through the great spread of pleasures. He looked at each masked face, but if the woman who had sent him the letter was here, he saw no sign of her. Two soldiers saluted him, but other soldiers in the crowd, seeing an officer approach, pretended not to notice him so that they would not have to diminish themselves in the eyes of their girls by giving a salute. He passed the central pavilion, four storeys high, in which an orchestra played about the base of the great organ. Couples danced beneath the lamps. A woman, on an elevated stage, sang a sentimental song. Beneath the pavilion’s canopies one of Vauxhall’s restaurants did brisk business.
He went down one of the long, gravelled walks between the intricate hedges which, within their depths, held small, private chambers where couples could retire. Children learned the arts of stalking among these hedges. He saw them now, creeping into angles of the neatly cut box to watch the lovemaking.
He passed a lodge built beside a fountain. The pool of the fountain was thick with rubbish, but at night, under the coloured lamps, the dirty water was glazed with magical gold. A statue of a naked goddess smiled at him from beside the lodge door, while, from one of the private rooms within, came the sound of a violin. One of those rooms was unshuttered and, through the open windows, Sharpe saw three young women sipping wine and looking invitingly and expensively towards the strollers beyond the fountain.
The pigeons of Vauxhall kept revellers’ hours. They strutted on the walks, knowing there were more pickings when the lamps were lit than during the empty hours of daylight. Children chased them fruitlessly. Sharpe turned back towards the beckoning sound of the orchestra in the central pavilion, and, in the warm night, he wondered if it was cold in the high passes of the Pyrenees. Even in summer there could be bitter nights in those hills where the French, so surprisingly, had launched a counter-attack on Wellington. The newspaper had hinted that the attack had been repulsed, but Sharpe wished he was there to know for certain. He wondered what the men left in Pasajes would think if they could see him now, strolling in London’s careless pleasures while they listened to the distant guns that besieged San Sebastian.
He shook off the whores who fell into step with him, refused the hawkers who tried to sell him confections or toffeed apples, and stalked like a dark figure through the gaudy crowds. His scarred face, that still bore the marks of Girdwood’s cane, was grim in this place of music and discreet sin. He felt as out of place here now as he had in Carlton House. He looked at laughing faces, drunken faces, sad faces, and tried to work out what lives those faces hid. Were they clerks and seamstresses snatching a few hours pleasure from a long, drab life? What worries did they have? Did they care that the French had come south again, that the British had repulsed them, that men died in the Spanish rocks? He thought not. London, like England, welcomed victories but wanted nothing more to do with the war. Even Isabella, Harper’s wife, had noticed it. No one was interested. No one cared about the fate of the soldiers. Isabella wanted to go back with her husband, pleading with him not to leave her in this fat, rich city where no one cared and no one understood and where she would be ignorant of her husband’s life or death.