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

The doctor might be a good few years older than Madame, but he was a steady and kindly man.

      The doctor was indeed a confidant of Lucille, but nothing more. She told the doctor, and only the doctor, about the letter she had sent, and expressed her sadness that she had received no reply. ‘Not a proper reply, anyway. Monsieur Roland did acknowledge that he had received my letter, but it was only that, an acknowledgement.’ She made a gesture of disgust. ‘Perhaps Major Sharpe was right?’

      ‘In what way?’ the doctor asked. He had driven the pony-cart to the top of the ridge where it rolled easily along a dry-rutted road. Every few seconds there were wonderful views to be glimpsed between the thick trees, but Lucille had no eyes for the scenery.

      ‘The Major did not want me to write. He said it would be better if he was to find Ducos himself.’ She was silent for a few seconds. ‘I think perhaps he would be angry if he knew I had written.’

      ‘Then why did you write?’

      Lucille shrugged. ‘Because it is better for the proper authorities to deal with these matters, n’est-ce-pas?’

      ‘Major Sharpe didn’t think so.’

      ‘Major Sharpe is a stubborn man,’ Lucille said scornfully, ‘a fool.’

      The doctor smiled. He steered the little cart off the road, bumped it up on to a patch of grass, then curbed the pony in a place from where he and Lucille could stare far to the south. The hills were heavy with foliage and hazed by heat. The doctor gestured at the lovely landscape. ‘France,’ he said with great complacency and love.

      ‘A fool.’ Lucille, oblivious of all France, repeated the words angrily. ‘His pride will make him go to be killed! All he had to do was to speak to the proper authorities! I would have travelled to Paris with him, and I would have spoken for him, but no, he has to carry his sword to his enemy himself. I do not understand men sometimes. They are like children!’ She waved irritably at a wasp. ‘Perhaps he is already dead.’

      The doctor looked at his companion. She was staring southwards, and the doctor thought what a fine profile she had, so full of character. ‘Would it trouble you, Madame,’ he asked, ‘if Major Sharpe was dead?’

      For a long time Lucille said nothing, then she shrugged. ‘I think enough French children have lost their fathers in these last years.’ The doctor said nothing, and his silence must have convinced Lucille that he had not understood her words, for she turned a very defiant face on him. ‘I am carrying the Major’s baby.’

      The doctor did not know what to say. He felt a sudden jealousy of the English Major, but his fondness for Lucille would not let him betray that ignoble feeling.

      Lucille was again staring at the slumbrous landscape, though it was very doubtful if she was aware of the great view. ‘I’ve told no one else. I haven’t even dared take communion these last weeks, for fear of my confession.’

      A professional curiosity provoked the doctor’s next words. ‘You’re quite certain you’re pregnant?’

      ‘I’ve been certain these three weeks now. Yes, I am certain.’

      Again the doctor was silent, and his silence troubled Lucille who again turned her grey eyes to him. ‘You think it is a sin?’

      The doctor smiled. ‘I’m not competent to judge sinfulness.’

      The bland reply made Lucille frown. ‘The château needs an heir.’

      ‘And that is your justification for carrying the Englishman’s child?’

      ‘I tell myself that is why, but no.’ She turned to stare again at the distant hills. ‘I am carrying the Major’s child because I think I am in love with him, whatever I mean by that, and please do not ask me. I did not want to love him. He has a wife already, but …’ she shrugged helplessly.

      ‘But?’ the doctor probed.

      ‘But I do not know,’ she said firmly. ‘All I do know is that a bastard child of a bastard English soldier will be born this winter, and I would be very grateful, dear doctor, if you would attend the confinement.’

      ‘Of course.’

      ‘You may tell people of my condition,’ Lucille said very matter of factly, ‘and I would be grateful if you would tell them who the father is.’ She had decided that the news was best spread quickly, before her belly swelled, so that the malicious tongues could exhaust themselves long before the baby was born. ‘I will tell Marie myself,’ Lucille added.

      The doctor, despite his fondness for the widow, rather relished the prospect of spreading this morsel of scandal. He tried to anticipate the questions that he would be asked about the widow’s lover. ‘And the Major? Will he return to you?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ Lucille said very softly. ‘I just don’t know.’

      ‘But you would like him to return?’

      She nodded, and the doctor saw a gleam in her eye, but then Lucille cuffed the tear away, smiled, and said it was time they went back to the valley.

      Lucille made her confession that week, and attended Mass on the Sunday morning. Some of the villagers said they had never seen her looking so happy, but Marie knew that the happiness was a mere pose which she had assumed for the benefit of the church. Marie knew better, for she saw how often Madame would gaze down the Seleglise road as if she hoped to see a scowling horseman coming from the south. Thus the warm weeks of a Norman summer passed, and no horseman came.

PART FOUR

      CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      It proved a long journey. Sharpe still feared capture and so he avoided all livery stables, coaching inns and barge quays. They had purchased three good horses with a portion of the money Harper had brought from England, and they coddled the beasts south from Paris. They travelled in civilian clothes, with their uniforms and rifles wrapped inside long cloth bundles. They avoided the larger towns, and spurred off the road whenever they saw a uniformed man ahead. They only felt safe from their shadowy enemies when they crossed the border into Piedmont. From there they faced a choice between the risk of brigands on the Italian roads or the menace of the Barbary pirates off the long coastline. ‘I’d like to see Rome,’ Frederickson opted for the land route, ‘but not if you’re going to press me to make indecent haste.’

      ‘Which I shall,’ Sharpe said, so instead they sold the horses for a dispiriting loss and paid for passage on a small decaying coaster that crawled from harbour to harbour with an ever-changing cargo. They carried untreated hides, raw clay, baulks of black walnut, wine, woven cloth, pigs of lead, and a motley collection of anonymous passengers among whom the three civilian-clothed Riflemen, despite their bundled weapons, went unremarked. Once, when a dirty grey topsail showed in the west, the captain swore it was a North African pirate and made his passengers man the long sweeps which dipped futilely in the limpid water. Two hours later the ‘pirate’ ship turned out to be a Royal Navy sloop which disdainfully ghosted past the exhausted oarsmen. Frederickson stared at his blistered hands, then snarled insults at the merchant-ship’s captain.

      Sharpe was impressed by his friend’s command of Italian invective, but his admiration only earned a short-tempered reproof. ‘I am constantly irritated,’ Frederickson said, ‘by your naïve astonishment for the mediocre attainments of a very ordinary education. Of course I speak Italian. Not well, but passably. It is, after all, merely a bastard form of dog-Latin, and even you should be able to master its crudities with a little study. I’m going to sleep. If that fool sees another pirate, don’t trouble to wake me.’

      It was a difficult journey, not just because circumspection and Harper’s shrinking store of money had demanded the most frugal means of travel, but because of Lucille Castineau. Frederickson’s questions about the widow