Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe’s Revenge, Sharpe’s Waterloo, Sharpe’s Devil. Bernard Cornwell

had been a viscount or a duke. Look at us!’ She gestured about the farmyard. ‘We call it a château, but it’s really nothing more than a large and penniless farmhouse with a very inconvenient ditch around it.’

      ‘It’s a very beautiful farmhouse,’ Sharpe said.

      ‘To be sure.’ Lucille liked it when Sharpe praised the house. She often said that all she now wanted was to live in the château for ever. There had been a time, she admitted, when she had thought that she would like to cut a dash in Paris, but then her husband had died, and her ambition had died with him.

      One evening Sharpe asked about Castineau and Lucille fetched his portrait. Sharpe saw a thin, dark-faced man in a well-cut colonel’s uniform which gleamed with gold aigulettes. He carried a brass helmet under his left arm and a sabre in his right hand. ‘He was very handsome,’ Lucille said wistfully. ‘No one understood why he chose me. It certainly wasn’t for my money!’ She laughed.

      ‘How did he die?’

      ‘In battle,’ Lucille said curtly, then, with an apologetic shrug, ‘how do men die in battle, Major?’

      ‘Nastily.’ Sharpe said the word in English.

      ‘Very nastily, I’m sure,’ Lucille said in the same language, ‘but do you miss it, Major?’

      Sharpe pushed his black hair, with its grey streak, away from his forehead. ‘The day I heard that peace was signed was one of the happiest of my life.’

      ‘Truly?’

      ‘Truly.’

      Lucille paused to thread a needle. This evening she was embroidering one of her old dresses. ‘My brother said that you were a man who enjoyed war.’

      ‘Maybe.’

      ‘Maybe.’ Lucille mockingly imitated Sharpe’s scowl. ‘What is this peut-être? Did you enjoy it?’

      ‘Sometimes.’

      She sighed with exasperation at his obdurate evasion. ‘So what is enjoyable about war? Tell me, I would like to understand.’

      Sharpe had to grope for words if he was to offer an explanation in the unfamiliar language. ‘It’s very clear-cut. Things are black or white. You have a task and you can measure your success absolutely.’

      ‘A gambler would say the same,’ Lucille said scornfully.

      ‘True.’

      ‘And the men you killed? What of them? They were just losers?’

      ‘Just losers,’ Sharpe agreed, then he remembered that this woman’s husband had died in battle, and blushed. ‘I’m sorry, Madame.’

      ‘For my husband?’ Lucille instantly understood Sharpe’s contrition. ‘I sometimes think he died in the way he wished. He went to war with such excitement; for him it was all glory and adventure.’ She paused in the middle of a stitch. ‘He was young.’

      ‘I’m glad he didn’t fight in Spain,’ Sharpe said.

      ‘Because that makes you innocent of his death?’ Lucille scorned him with a grimace. ‘Why are soldiers such romantics? You obviously thought nothing of killing Frenchmen, but just a little knowledge of your enemy makes you feel sympathy! Did you never feel sympathy in battle?’

      ‘Sometimes. Not often.’

      ‘Did you enjoy killing?’

      ‘No,’ Sharpe said, and he found himself telling her about the battle at Toulouse and how he had decided not to kill anyone, and how he had broken the vow. That battle seemed so far away now, like part of another man’s life, but suddenly he laughed, remembering how he had seen General Calvet on the battlefield and, because it might help Lucille understand, he described his feelings at that moment; how he had forgotten his fear and had desperately wanted to prove himself a better fighter than the doughty Calvet.

      ‘It sounds very childish to me,’ Lucille said.

      ‘You never rejoiced when Napoleon won great victories?’ Sharpe asked.

      Lucille gave a very characteristic shrug. ‘Napoleon.’ She pronounced his name scathingly, but then she relented. ‘Yes, we did feel pride. We shouldn’t have done, perhaps, but we did. Yet he killed many Frenchmen to give us that pride. But,’ she shrugged again, ‘I’m French, so yes, I rejoiced when we won great victories.’ She smiled. ‘Not that we heard of many great victories in Spain. You will tell me that was because we were foolish enough to fight the English, yes?’

      ‘We were a very good army,’ Sharpe said, and then, provoked by Lucille’s continuing curiosity, he told her about Spain, and about his daughter, Antonia, who now lived with relatives on the Portuguese border.

      ‘You never see her?’ Lucille asked in a shocked voice.

      He shrugged. ‘It’s being a soldier.’

      ‘That takes preference over love?’ she asked, appalled.

      ‘Her mother’s dead,’ Sharpe said lamely, then tried to explain that Antonia was better off where she was.

      ‘Her mother’s dead?’ Lucille probed, and Sharpe described his first wife, and how she had died in the snows of a high mountain pass.

      ‘Couldn’t your daughter live with your parents?’ Lucille asked, and Sharpe had to confess that he had no parents and that, indeed, he was nothing but a fatherless son of a long-dead whore. Lucille was amused by his embarrassed confession. ‘William the Conqueror was a bastard,’ she said, ‘and he wasn’t a bad soldier.’

      ‘For a Frenchman,’ Sharpe allowed.

      ‘He had Viking blood,’ Lucille said. ‘That’s what Norman means. Northman.’ When Lucille told him facts like that she made Sharpe feel very ignorant, but he liked listening to her, and some days he would even take one of her books up to the tower and try hard to read what she had recommended. Lucille gave him one of her brother’s favourite books which contained the essays of a dead Frenchman called Montesquieu. Sharpe read most of the essays, though he frequently had to shout down to the yard for the translation of a difficult word.

      One night Lucille asked him about his future. ‘We’ll find Ducos,’ Sharpe answered, ‘but after that? I suppose I’ll go home.’

      ‘To your wife?’

      ‘If I still have a wife,’ Sharpe said, and thus for the first time acknowledged his besetting fear. That night there was a thunderstorm as violent as the one which had punctuated Sharpe’s long journey north through France. Lightning slashed the ridge north of the château, the dogs howled in the barn, and Sharpe lay awake listening to the rain pour off the roof and slosh in the gutters. He tried to remember Jane’s face, but somehow her features would not come clear in his memory.

      In the rinsed daylight next morning the carrier arrived from Caen with a letter addressed to Monsieur Tranchant, which was the name Frederickson had said he would use if he had news for Sharpe. The letter bore a Paris address and had a very simple message. ‘I’ve found him. I will wait here till you can come. I am known as Herr Friedrich in my lodging house. Paris is wonderful, but we must go to Naples. Write to me if you cannot come within the next fortnight. My respect to Madame.’ There was no explanation of how Frederickson had found Ducos’s whereabouts.

      ‘Captain Frederickson sends you his respects,’ Sharpe told Lucille.

      ‘He’s a good man,’ Lucille said very blandly. She was watching Sharpe grind an edge on to his sword with one of the stones used to sharpen the château’s sickles. ‘So you’re leaving us, Major?’

      ‘Indeed, Madame, but if you have no objections I would like to wait a few days to see if my Sergeant returns.’

      Lucille shrugged. ‘D’accord.’

      Harper returned a week later, full of his own happy news. Isabella