‘You are a fool.’ The voice came from behind him, from beyond the angle of the pool’s parapet. He stood and turned. She watched him. She was masked with a cheap black mask, but there was no hiding her piled red hair that was held with pearl clips. She wore, on this warm August night, a dress of lilac silk that clung to her body in a fashionable sheath. A shawl of dark lace was over her bare shoulders. He remembered, from the night when he had met her at Carlton House, that she was beautiful, and oddly the cheap black mask only enhanced that beauty. He half bowed, clumsy and unsure of himself.
‘Ma’am.’
‘You’ve been looking very grim. Had you realised your own foolishness?’ She put her fan into her other hand and offered her elbow. ‘Walk with me.’
They went down one of the gravel walks that was edged with the intricate box hedges, and Sharpe saw how the men eyed her body and looked enviously at him. Two of the watchmen who guarded Vauxhall were dragging a feebly protesting drunk towards the gate and one of them, perhaps an old soldier, grinned at Sharpe and sketched a salute.
She walked slowly, her head high, her voice amused. ‘They’ll think I’m your whore, Major.’ He did not know what to say, and she laughed mockingly at him. ‘Wives don’t dress like this.’
They don’t?’
‘This is how you attract a husband, Major, but once he has married you he begs you not to dress like it again.’ With arrogant aplomb she swept a child from her path with her fan. ‘Just as a man falling in love with an actress begs her to leave the stage, even though her profession was exactly what attracted him to her in the first place. You have been,’ she went on in the same bored voice, ‘excessively foolish.’
‘Foolish?’
‘You go to the Horse Guards, even though you had been ordered back to Spain, and you behave with childish mystery. The Horse Guards, not being foolish, sent for Sir William Lawford, knowing he had been your Colonel, and you, in your innocence, tell him everything. Do you think we might sit here? They serve a smuggled champagne which is bearable, and fortunately too expensive for the rabble to afford.’
They had come to a place where, beneath lamps hung in the branches of great oaks, tables of white-painted iron were set before a small restaurant. An aproned waiter took her order and obligingly moved the nearest tables away so they would not be overheard.
She had her back to the restaurant and to the people who walked past its small garden. She took off her mask, and her green eyes stared at him with apparent scorn. ‘Take your shako off, Major. You look like a groom waiting on me.’
He put it on the table to which, in a moment, the waiter brought the champagne, some bread, and one of the strange jellied-meat loaves like the one Jane Gibbons had given him just the night before. Now it seemed like a month before. ‘What is it?’
She smiled at his ignorance. ‘A galantine. Aren’t you curious how I should know your business so well?’
‘Yes, Ma’am.’ He poured the champagne. He wished suddenly that he had a cigar.
She sighed, perhaps because he had not asked her directly how she knew so much, and cut into the galantine. ‘You are also a lucky fool. Sir William is an ambitious man. He chose not to speak with the Horse Guards, but with Lord Fenner. Do try the galantine, Major. It might not be ration beef,’ she said the last two words with a sneer, ‘but it won’t slay you.’
‘Lord Fenner?’ Sharpe could not believe that a man he thought a friend had gone to his enemy. ‘He went to Lord Fenner?’
‘Who will make a small bargain with Sir William.’ She laughed at Sharpe’s expression. ‘Fenner, Major Sharpe, has patronage. He can give Sir William a small pourboire. Don’t you know how these things work?’
‘A pourboire?’ He stumbled over the unfamiliar word.
‘A small reward, alley-cat.’ She sipped her champagne and her green-eyes searched his expression. ‘You look like an alley-cat, a very handsome one.’