Sharpe’s Regiment: The Invasion of France, June to November 1813. Bernard Cornwell

not possess him for ever, because she wanted him, because he was gentle. He was also, she suddenly thought, Fenner’s enemy, and any man who was Lord Fenner’s enemy must be her friend.

      Tonight, if Fenner was right, Sharpe would die. Lady Camoynes paused, the damp bag of stones in her hand, and dreamed suddenly of revenge. If Sharpe survived this night, if he proved he could win this one battle over her enemy, then perhaps he would be a worthy ally for total victory. She turned to stare into the garden and her embittered, thin face smiled. She would have an ally, a soldier, a hero, so she would take the risk and have her vengeance if only, on this night of laughter and luxury, her soldier lived.

      Richard Sharpe walked into a bad place. He did it knowingly, deliberately, and without fear.

      It was called a rookery, one of many in London, but this was as foul a rookery as any the city could boast. The houses were tiny, crammed together, and built so flimsily that sometimes, without any apparent cause, they slumped into the alleyways in a thunderous cascade of timber, bricks and tiles that killed the people who lived a dozen to a room. This was a place of disease, poverty, hunger, and filth beyond reason. It was Sharpe’s home.

      He had lived in this rookery as a child. He had learned his first skills here, how to pick locks and open barred shutters. Here he had coupled with his first woman and killed his first man, and both before he was thirteen.

      He walked slowly. It was a dark place, lit intermittently by the flaring torches of the gin shops. The alleys were crowded, the people had suspicious eyes that were sunk in thin, starved, vicious faces. They wore rags. Children cried. Somewhere a woman screamed and a man bellowed at her. There was no privacy in a place such as this, a whole life was lived open to the gaze of predatory neighbours.

      ‘Sir?’ A thin hand wavered at a doorway. He shook his head at the girl, walked on, then suddenly turned back. The girl, her head wrapped in a scarf, stood above a stinking, legless man who held a knife. The man jerked his head. ‘You can go in the alley with her.’

      Sharpe stooped to the man. ‘Where do I find Maggie Joyce?’

      ‘Who are you?’

      ‘Where do I find Maggie Joyce?’ He did not raise his voice, but the crippled pimp heard the savagery, the threat, and he covered the knife blade with his left hand to show he meant no harm. ‘You know Bennet’s place?’

      ‘I know it.’

      ‘She runs it.’

      The news confirmed what Sharpe had learned from a beggar outside the Rose Tavern and, in thanks, he gave the girl a coin. She would be dead, probably, before she was eighteen.

      The place stank worse than he remembered. All the filth of these lives was poured into the streets, the dung, urine, and dead mixed with the scum in the gutters. He found, that by not even thinking about it, he could still thread the labyrinth into which criminals disappeared with such ease.

      No one dared chase a man into these alleys, not unless he had friends to help him inside. It would have taken an army to flush out these dark, chill places. Here the poor, who had nothing, were lords. This was their miserable kingdom, and their pride was in their reputation for savagery, and their protection lay in the fact that no one, unless he was a fool, would dare walk these passages. Here poverty ruled, and crime was its servant, and every night there were murders, and rapes, and thefts, and maimings, and not one criminal would ever be betrayed because the strictest code of the rookery was silence.

      Men watched Sharpe pass. They eyed his boots, his sword, his sash, and the cloth of his jacket. Any one of those things could be sold for a shilling or more, and a shilling in St Giles was a treasure worth killing for. They eyed the big leather bag that he carried, a bag that, except during the skirmish at Tolosa when it had been guarded by Isabella, had not left either Sharpe or Harper’s side. The men of the rookery also saw Sharpe’s eyes, his scars, the size of him, and though some men spat close to his boots as he walked slowly through the dark, damp alleys, none raised a hand against him.

      He came to a torch that flared in an old, rusted bracket above a brief flight of steps. Women sat on the steps. They had gin bottles in one hand, babies in the other. One had lost an eye, another was bleeding from her scalp, while two clasped sucking children to their bare breasts as Sharpe climbed the stairs and pushed open a much-mended wooden door.

      The room he entered was lit by tallow candles that drooped from iron hooks in the ceiling. It was crowded with men and women, children too, all drinking the gin that was the cheapest escape from the rookery. They fell silent as he entered. Their faces were hostile.

      He pushed through them. He kept one hand firmly on his pouch in which were a few coins and his other hand gripped the neck of the stiff leather bag which was the reason for his visit to this place. He growled once, when a man refused to move, and when the customers saw that the tall, well-dressed soldier was not afraid of them, they moved reluctantly to let him pass. He went towards the back of the room, pressing through a stink equal to the stench of Carlton House, towards a table, well lit by candles, on which were ranked rows of gin bottles either side of an ale barrel. Two men, with scarred, implacable faces, guarded the table. One carried a bell-mouthed horse-pistol, the other a cudgel. Some of the customers were jeering Sharpe now, shouting at him to get out.

      A woman sat behind the table, a massive woman with a face like stone and arms like twisted ropes. She had red hair, going grey, that was twisted back into a bun. Beside her, against the wall, was a second, iron-tipped cudgel. She stared at him with hostility. ‘What do you want, soldier?’ she sneered at him. Officers did not come here to mock the poverty of a rookery with their tailor-made clothes.

      ‘Maggie?’

      She looked at him suspiciously. Knowing her name meant nothing, everyone in the rookery knew Maggie Joyce; gin goddess, midwife, procuress, and eight times a widow. She had grown fat, Sharpe saw, fat as a barrel, but he guessed that the bulk was hard muscle and not soft flesh. Her hair was going white, her face was lined and hard, yet he knew she was no more than three years older than himself. She jerked her head at one of her two guards, making him step closer to the soldier, then glared at Sharpe. ‘Who are you?’

      Sharpe smiled. ‘Where’s Tom?’

      ‘Who are you?’ Her voice was hard as steel.

      He took his shako off and smiled chidingly at her. ‘Maggie!’ He said it as if she had wounded him by her forgetfulness.

      She frowned at him. She looked at the officer’s sash, the leather bag, the sword, up to his high, black-collared neck and to his scarred, hard face, and suddenly, almost alarmingly, she wept. ‘Dear Christ, it’s yourself?’ She had never lost the accent of Kilkenny, the only legacy her parents had given to her, besides a quick wit and an indomitable strength. ‘Dick?’ She said it with utter disbelief.

      ‘It’s myself.’ He did not know whether to laugh or cry.

      She reached over the table, clasped him, and the astonished gin-drinkers watched in awed surprise as the officer held her back. She shook her head. ‘Dear God, look at the man! You an officer?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Dear Christ on the cross! They’ll make me into the bloody Pope next! You’ll take some gin.’

      ‘I’ll take some gin.’ He put his shako on the table. ‘Tom?’

      ‘He’s dead, darling. Dead these ten winters. Christ, look at yourself! Will you be wanting a bed?’

      He smiled. ‘I’m at the Rose.’

      She wiped her eyes. ‘There was a time, Dick Sharpe, when my bed was all you ever wanted. Come round here. Leave those sinners to gawp at you.’

      He sat beside her on the bench. He put the bag on the floor, stretched his long legs under the crude counter, and Maggie Joyce stared at him in astonishment. ‘Oh Christ! But you look good in yourself!’ She laughed at him, and he let his hand rest in hers. Maggie Joyce had been a mother to him once, rescuing him when he ran away from the foundling home, and he had known her when she had first gone