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

when Ducos insisted that more guards be hired, Challon felt constrained to offer a warning note.

      ‘The lads won’t be too happy to pay them, sir.’

      ‘I’ll pay them.’ That generosity was easy to offer because Ducos had insisted that he himself guard the treasure which was stored in a great iron chest cemented to the floor in Ducos’s rooms. Even Challon was not certain just how much money was in the box, though he knew down to the last sou just how much each man had been promised at the year’s ending. Ducos, to keep faith with the Dragoons, only had to ensure that those shares were faithfully paid when the time came, and in the meantime the balance was his to spend. He knew, even if Challon did not, that the balance was an Emperor’s ransom; more than even the greedy Cardinal might imagine.

      Challon again tried to change Ducos’s mind. ‘There might be trouble, sir, between my lads and these new fellows.’

      ‘You’re a Sergeant, Challon, you know how to prevent trouble.’

      Challon sighed. ‘The new men will want women.’

      ‘They may have them.’

      ‘And weapons, sir.’

      ‘Buy only the best.’

      So Challon went to the waterfront at Naples and found twenty men who had once served as soldiers. They were scum, Challon told Ducos, but they were scum who knew how to fight. They were deserters, jailbirds, murderers, and drunks, yet they would be loyal to a man who could pay good wages.

      The newly hired men moved into the half ruined rooms in the villa’s centre. They brought women, pistols, sabres and their muskets. There was no trouble, for they recognized Challon’s natural authority and were well rewarded for very little effort. They were not allowed on to the western terrace which was the private domain of their new employer who rarely appeared elsewhere outside the building for he said the sun hurt his eyes, though sometimes they would glimpse him strolling through the big internal courtyard in one of his magnificent uniforms. It was rumoured that he rarely had a woman in his rooms, though once, when he did, the girl reported that the Count Poniatowski had done nothing except stare north to where, far beyond the horizon, another imperial exile had his small kingdom in the Mediterranean. The newly hired guards opined that the Count Poniatowski was mad, but his pay was good, his food and wine plentiful, and he did not quibble when a village girl complained of rape. He would simply have the girl or her parents paid in gold, then encourage his men to practise with their weapons and to keep a good look out for strangers in the hot barren landscape. ‘We should have a cannon,’ he said to Challon one day.

      Sergeant Challon, presented with this new evidence of Major Ducos’s fears, sighed. ‘It’s not necessary, sir.’

      ‘It is necessary. Vitally necessary.’ Ducos had decided that his safety depended on artillery, and nothing would change his mind. He showed Challon how a small field gun, mounted in the villa’s southern wall, would dominate the road which approached the hill. ‘Go to Naples, Challon. Someone will know where a gun can be had.’

      So Challon took the money and returned three days later with an old-fashioned grasshopper gun. It was a small field piece which, fifty years before, had been issued to infantry battalions in some armies. The gun was reckoned small enough for two men to carry, which only proved that its inventor had never had to march over rough country with the three-foot brass barrel roped to his shoulder. The barrel was fitted with four stout legs which served as a carriage and, when it was fired, the whole contraption leaped into the air; thus earning the weapon its nickname. Mostly it toppled over after each convulsion, but it could easily be set on its feet again. ‘It’s all I could get, sir.’ Challon seemed somewhat embarrassed by the small and old-fashioned grasshopper gun.

      Ducos, though, was delighted, and for a week the landscape echoed with the dull blows of the gun’s firing. It took less than a half pound of powder for its charge, yet still it succeeded in blasting a two and a half pound ball over six hundred yards. For a week, solaced by his new toy, Ducos could forget his fears, but when the novelty wore off his terror returned and a green man again began to haunt his dreams. Yet he was fiercely armed, he had loyal men, and he could only wait.

      On the day Sharpe left the château Lucille Castineau discovered a piece of paper behind the mirror on the chest of drawers in her room. Sharpe had scrawled Lucille’s name on the paper which, when unfolded, proved to contain twelve English golden guineas.

      Lucille Castineau did not wish to accept the coins. The gold pieces somehow smacked of charity, and thus offended her aristocratic sense of propriety. She supposed that the big Irishman had brought the money. Her instinct was to return the guineas, but she had no address to which she could send any draft of money. Sharpe had written a brief message in hurried and atrocious French on the sheet of paper which had enclosed the coins, but the message only contained a fulsome thanks for Madame Castineau’s kindnesses, a hope that this small donation would cover the expenses of Sharpe’s convalescence, and a promise that he would inform Madame Castineau of what had happened in Naples.

      Lucille fingered the thick gold coins. Twelve English guineas amounted to a small fortune. The château’s dairy urgently required two new roof beams, there were hundreds of cuttings needed if the cider orchard was to be replenished, and Lucille had a nagging desire to own a small two-wheeled cart that could be drawn by a docile pony. The coins would buy all those things, and there would still be enough money left over to pay for a proper grave-slab for her mother and brother. So, putting aristocratic propriety to one side, Lucille swept the coins into the pocket of her apron.

      ‘Life will be better now,’ Marie, the elderly kitchenmaid, who had elected herself as a surrogate mother to the widow Castineau, said to Lucille.

      ‘Better?’

      ‘No Englishmen.’ The maid was skinning a rabbit which Harper and Sharpe had snared the previous evening.

      ‘You didn’t like the Major, Marie?’ Lucille sounded surprised.

      Marie shrugged. ‘The Major’s a proper man, Madame, and I liked him well enough, but I did not like the wicked tongues in the village.’

      ‘Ah.’ Lucille sounded very calm, though she knew well enough what had offended the loyal Marie. Inevitably the villagers had gossiped about the Englishman’s long stay in the château and more than one ignorant person had confidently suggested that Madame and the Major had to be lovers. ‘Tongues will be tongues,’ Lucille said vaguely. ‘A lie cannot hurt the truth.’

      Marie had a peasant’s firm belief that a lie could sully the truth. The villagers would say there was no smoke without fire, and mud on a kitchen floor spoke of dirty boots, and those snidely sniggering suggestions upset Marie. The villagers told lies about her mistress, and Marie expected her mistress to share her indignation.

      But Lucille would not share Marie’s anger. Instead she calmed the old woman down, then said she had some writing to do and was not to be disturbed. She added that she would be most grateful if the miller’s son could be fetched to take a letter to the village carrier.

      The letter went to the carrier that same afternoon. It was addressed to Monsieur Roland, the advocate from the Treasury in Paris, to whom, at long last, Lucille told the whole truth. ‘The Englishmen did not want you to be told,’ she wrote, ‘for they feared you would not believe either them or me, yet, on my honour, Monsieur, I believe in their innocence. I have not told you this before because, so long as the English were in my house, so long did I honour their fear that you would arrange their arrest if you were to discover their presence here. Now they are gone, and I must tell you that the scoundrel who murdered my family and who stole the Emperor’s gold is none other than the man who accused the Englishmen of his crime; Pierre Ducos. He now lives somewhere near Naples, to which place the Englishmen have gone to gain the proof of their innocence. If you, Monsieur, can help them, then you will earn the gratitude of a poor widow.’

      The letter was sent, and Lucille waited. The summer grew oppressively hot, but the countryside was safer now as cavalry patrols from Caen scoured the vagabonds out of the woodlands. Lucille often took her new pony-cart between the neighbouring