SHARPE’S REGIMENT

‘Then I’ll do it for you. With pleasure. But you have to bring me one thing, Major, and soon.’ He looked at her, saying nothing, and her green eyes stared into his. ‘There must be proof, Major. Accounts, letters, anything on paper. Bring them to me.’

He was about to say that he did not know where to find them, but the words sounded feeble in his head so he checked them. Lawford had also wanted proof, yet now Lord Fenner was alerted and doubtless would be taking precautions against the discovery of any such proof.

She leaned closer to him. To the people who walked past the small embowered restaurant garden it seemed as if they were a pair of handsome lovers; an officer and his lady. ‘I will promise you, Major, that I will give you what you want.’

‘I don’t even know who you are.’

‘I’m called Lady Camoynes. The Dowager Countess Camoynes.’ She seemed to offer the name as a token of her trustworthiness. ‘Bring me that proof, and you can ask for anything you want of the Horse Guards. They’ll give you an army to keep you quiet. You want a Rifle Battalion of your own? They’ll give it to you.’

He smiled at the thought. ‘Where do I find you?’

‘You don’t. Take the proof to the Rose. I’ll send a servant every day to see if you have it.’

He would have to go back to Foulness, and swiftly. If proof existed, it was there. He shrugged. ‘You know about it, I do, isn’t our word enough?’

She closed her eyes as if in exasperation. ‘I am a woman, and you’re no one, alley-cat, no one.’ She opened her eyes. ‘They are politicians and men of standing.’ She said it mockingly. ‘Whom will they believe?’

‘Won’t they already have destroyed the proof?’

‘Not yet. Lord Fenner will do nothing until he’s met Sir William again. You have one day, when they think you’re doing nothing. After tomorrow night?’ She shrugged. ‘They’ll destroy the proof, Major, and in three days time there’ll be no men at Foulness. They’ll march them away, they’ll scatter them in a hundred depots and garrisons! It will never have happened, and if you claim that it did they’ll call you a fool and strip your commission away.’

She leaned back and sipped her champagne. Sharpe said nothing. He had thought it would all be so simple, that he would reveal what he had discovered and that an outraged army would thank him, give him what he wanted, and then, before going back in triumph to Spain, he would visit the big brick house on the marshes and demand to see Jane Gibbons. Instead, everything he had discovered would be hidden and denied, and he would be treated as an embarrassment and a fool.

She finished her champagne, stood up and the waiter scuttled through the tables as she laced the mask back onto her face. Sharpe paid the man and followed Lady Camoynes back into the Gardens.

She walked towards the central pavilion, stalking, imperious and beautiful, in the centre of one of the walkways. ‘You will have to do what is necessary swiftly, Major.’

‘Indeed, my Lady.’

‘You’ll leave tonight?’

‘In the morning.’ He was planning already, knowing that he must remove more than just paperwork from Foulness.

‘Good.’ She steered him by the arm towards a dark gap in the box hedges. ‘These are not pleasure gardens for nothing, alley-cat, and tonight, for reasons that are none of your business, I need a real man. Find us somewhere private.’

He smiled, and led her into the tangle of box where, long ago, he had learned his earliest lessons of fieldcraft. Tonight he would lie with her beneath the leaves, and in the morning, as a full Major of His Britannic Majesty’s army, he would return to Foulness. He had thought, by escaping over the marshes, that his task had been completed, but this woman, who clawed at him and loved him as though this was her last night on earth, had told him that the fight had just begun.

CHAPTER 14

‘Property of a widow, sir.’ The owner of the livery stables wiped his palms on his leather apron, spat tobacco juice at a cat that sunned itself on his cobbles, then ran a hand along the springs of the carriage. ‘I grant you it ain’t clean, Major, but in very nice trim! New axles! New splinter-bar I put on myself. Take you anywhere!’ He slapped one of the iron-rimmed wheels. ‘Tell you the truth, Major, I was thinking of using it for myself.’

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