Sharpe’s Prey: The Expedition to Copenhagen, 1807
Sharpe’s Prey: The Expedition to Copenhagen, 1807
Bernard Cornwell
Richard Sharpe is sent to Copenhagen to deliver a bribe to stop the Danes handing over possession of their battle fleet to the French.It seems very easy. But nothing is easy in a Europe stirred by French ambitions. The Danes possess a battle fleet that could replace every ship the French lost at Trafalgar, and Napoleon's forces are gathering to take it. The British have to stop them, while the Danes insist on remaining neutral.Dragged into a war of spies and brutality, Sharpe finds that he is a sacrificial pawn. But pawns can sometimes change the game, and Sharpe makes his own rules. When he discovers a traitor in his midst, he becomes a hunter in a city besieged by British troops.Soldier, hero, rogue – Sharpe is the man you always want on your side. Born in poverty, he joined the army to escape jail and climbed the ranks by sheer brutal courage. He knows no other family than the regiment of the 95th Rifles whose green jacket he proudly wears.
SHARPE’S
PREY
Richard Sharpe and the Expedition to Copenhagen, 1807
BERNARD CORNWELL
Copyright
This novel is a work of fiction. The incidents and some of the characters portrayed in it, while based on real historical events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2001
Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2001
Map © Ken Lewis
Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007130559
Ebook Edition © JULY 2009 ISBN: 9780007338702
Version: 2017-05-06
Sharpe’s Prey is for Jarl, Gerda, Bo and Christine
‘Bernard Cornwell’s sharp, tough infantryman hero, who chose to fight on his feet, is a man we shall hear more from’
Daily Mail
Table of Contents
Title Page (#ueeefd3a4-e6cb-5835-bf45-f8afd4e5f4b1)
Copyright (#uc13a01a6-fb2c-5f21-833c-8933983f576f)
Dedication (#uad9c8aa0-25f4-55ef-9ec4-79ab7cac025d)
Epigraph (#ueb3002ad-8f63-5e8a-a63b-be20e780080c)
Map (#ufca78627-bcf7-5642-ad8c-8f91a5f7f490)
Chapter One (#u92e45568-bf68-5f2b-ab56-f8618ba1ca45)
Chapter Two (#u81fed046-006d-5888-bd8d-b22793597e6e)
Chapter Three (#u0eadee5f-49f2-549a-bb55-ebeecc2d483b)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Historical Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Sharpe’s Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
The SHARPE Series (in chronological order) (#litres_trial_promo)
The SHARPE Series (in order of publication) (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Bernard Cornwell (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
Captain Henry Willsen of His Majesty’s Dirty Half Hundred, more formally the 50th Regiment of West Kent, parried his opponent’s sabre. He did it hurriedly. His right hand was low so that his sabre’s blade was raised in the position known to the fencing masters as the quarte basse and the knowledgeable spectators thought the parry was feeble. A surprised murmur sounded, for Willsen was good. Very good. He had been attacking, but it was apparent he had been slow to see his taller opponent’s counter and now he was in disorganized retreat. The taller man pressed, swatting the quarte basse aside and lunging so that Willsen skittered backwards, his slippers squeaking with a staccato judder on the wooden floor which was liberally scattered with French chalk. The very sound of the slippers on the chalked wood denoted panic. The sabres clashed harshly again, the taller man stamped forward, his blade flickering, clanging, reaching, and Willsen was countering in apparent desperation until, so fast that those watching could scarce follow his blade’s quick movement, he stepped to one side and riposted at his opponent’s cheek. There seemed little power in the riposte, for its force all came from Willsen’s wrist rather than from his full arm, but the sabre’s edge still struck the taller man with such might that he lost his balance. He swayed, right arm flailing, and Willsen gently touched his weapon’s point to his opponent’s chest so that he toppled to the floor.
‘Enough!’ the Master-at-Arms called.
‘God’s teeth.’ The fallen man swept his blade at Willsen’s ankles in a fit of pique. The blow was easily blocked and Willsen just walked away.
‘I said enough, my lord!’ the Master-at-Arms shouted angrily.
‘How the devil did you do that, Willsen?’ Lord Marsden pulled off the padded leather helmet with its wire visor that had protected his face. ‘I had you on your damned arse!’
Willsen, who had planned the whole passage of the fight from the moment he made a deliberately soft quarte basse, bowed. ‘Perhaps I was just fortunate, my lord?’
‘Don’t patronize me, man,’ Lord Marsden snapped as he climbed to his feet. ‘What was it?’
‘Your disengagement from the sixte was slow, my lord.’
‘The devil it was,’ Lord Marsden growled. He was proud of his ability with foil or sabre, yet he knew Willsen had bested him easily by feigning a squeaking retreat. His lordship scowled, then realized he was being ungracious and so, tucking the sabre under his arm, held out a hand. ‘You’re quick, Willsen, damned quick.’
The handful of spectators applauded the show of sportsmanship. They were in Horace Jackson’s Hall of Arms, an establishment on London’s Jermyn Street where wealthy men could learn the arts of pugilism, fencing and pistol shooting. The hall was a high bare room lined with racks of swords and sabres, smelling of tobacco and liniment, and decorated with prints of prize fighters, mastiffs and racehorses. The only women in the place served drinks and food, or else worked in the small rooms above the hall where the beds were soft and the prices high.
Willsen pulled off his helmet and ran a hand through his long fair hair. He bowed to his beaten opponent, then carried both sabres to the weapon rack at the side of the hall where a tall, very thin and extraordinarily handsome captain in the red coat and blue facings of the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards was waiting. The guardsman, a stranger to Willsen, tossed away a half-smoked cigar as Willsen approached. ‘You fooled him,’ the Captain said cheerfully.
Willsen frowned at the stranger’s impertinence, but he answered politely enough. Willsen, after all, was an employee in Horace Jackson’s Hall and the Guards Captain, judging by the elegant cut of his expensive uniform, was a patron. The sort of patron, moreover, who could not wait to prove himself against the celebrated Henry Willsen. ‘I fooled him?’ Willsen asked. ‘How?’
‘The quarte basse,’ the guardsman said, ‘you made it soft, am I right?’
Willsen was impressed at the guardsman’s acuity, but did not betray it. ‘Perhaps I was just fortunate?’ he suggested. He was being modest, for he had the reputation of being the finest swordsman in the Dirty Half Hundred, probably in the whole army and maybe in the entire country, but he belittled his ability, just as he shrugged off those who reckoned he was the best pistol shot in Kent. A soldier, Willsen liked to say, should be a master of his arms and so he practised assiduously and prayed that one day his skill would be useful in the service of his country. Until that time came he earned his captain’s pay and, because that was not sufficient to support a wife, child and mess bill, he taught fencing and pistol-shooting in Horace Jackson’s Hall of Arms. Jackson, an old pugilist with a mashed face, wanted Willsen to leave the army and join the establishment full time, but Willsen liked being a soldier. It gave him a position in British society. It might not be a high place, but it was honourable.
‘There’s no such thing as luck,’ the guardsman said, only now he spoke in Danish, ‘not when you’re fighting.’
Willsen had been turning away, but the change of language made him look back to the golden-haired Guards Captain. His first careless impression had been one of privileged youth, but he now saw that the guardsman was probably in his early thirties and had a cynical, knowing cast to his devil-may-care good looks. This was a man, Willsen thought, who would be at home in a palace or at a prizefight. A formidable man too, and one who was of peculiar importance to Willsen, who now offered the guardsman a half-bow. ‘You, sir,’ he said respectfully, ‘must be Major the Honourable John Lavisser?’
‘I’m Captain Lavisser,’ Captain and Major Lavisser said. The Guards gave their officers dual ranks; the lower one denoted their responsibility in the regiment while the higher was an acknowledgement that any Guards officer was a superior being, especially when compared to an impoverished swordsman from the Dirty Half Hundred. ‘I’m Captain Lavisser,’ the Honourable John Lavisser said again, ‘but you must call me John. Please.’ He still spoke in Danish.
‘I thought we were not to meet till Saturday?’ Willsen said, taking off his fencing slippers and pulling on boots.
‘We’re to be companions for a fair time’ – Lavisser ignored Willsen’s hostility – ‘and it’s better, I think, that we should be friends. Besides, are you not curious about our orders?’
‘My orders are to escort you to Copenhagen and see you safe out again,’ Willsen responded stiffly as he pulled on his red coat. The wool of the coat was faded and its black cuffs and facings were scuffed. He strapped on his seven-guinea sword, unhappily aware of the valuable blade that hung from Lavisser’s slings, but Willsen had long learned to curb his envy at the inequalities of life, even if he could not entirely forget them. He knew well enough that his captaincy in the Dirty Half Hundred was worth £1,500, exactly what it cost to purchase a mere lieutenancy in the Guards, but so be it. Willsen had been taught by his Danish father and English mother to trust in God, do his duty and accept fate, and fate had now decreed he was to be the companion of a man who was the son of an earl, a guardsman, and an aide to Prince Frederick, Duke of York, who was the second son of George III and Commander in Chief of the British army.
‘But don’t you want to know why we are going to Copenhagen?’ Lavisser asked.
‘I have no doubt I shall be informed at the proper time,’ Willsen said, his manner still stiff.
Lavisser smiled and his thin, saturnine face was transformed with charm. ‘The proper time, Willsen, is now,’ he said. ‘Come, at least allow me to buy you supper and reveal the mysteries of our errand.’
In truth Captain Willsen was intrigued. He had served twelve years in the British army and had never heard a shot fired in anger. He yearned to distinguish himself and now, quite suddenly, a chance had arisen because an officer was needed to escort the Duke of York’s aide to Copenhagen. That was all Willsen knew, though his commanding officer had hinted that his facility with small arms might be a great advantage. Willsen had been worried at first, fearing that he would be fighting against his father’s people, but he had been assured that the danger in Copenhagen came from the French, not the Danes, and that assurance had permitted Willsen to accept the responsibility, just as it had piqued his curiosity. Now Lavisser was offering to explain and Willsen, who knew he had been churlish, nodded. ‘Of course. It will be a pleasure to dine with you, sir.’
‘My name is John,’ Lavisser insisted as he led Willsen down the staircase to the street. Willsen half expected to find a carriage waiting, but it appeared Lavisser was on foot even though a small chill rain was falling. ‘Hard to believe it’s July,’ Lavisser grumbled.
‘It will be a bad harvest,’ Willsen remarked.
‘I thought we might get a bite at Almack’s,’ Lavisser suggested, ‘and maybe play a hand afterwards?’
‘I never wager,’ Willsen answered, and even if he did he could never have afforded the high stakes at Almack’s.
‘How very wise you are,’ Lavisser said. They were both speaking English again. ‘And I thought it might please you if we had a word with Hanssen before supper.’
‘Hanssen?’
‘The first secretary at the Danish embassy,’ Lavisser explained. He gave his companion an earnest look. ‘I want to be quite certain that our activities are not prejudicial to Denmark. Hanssen’s a decent man and I’ve always found his advice very sound.’
Willsen shared the desire to avoid upsetting Denmark and so he rather liked the idea of talking to someone from the embassy, but his innate caution came to the fore. ‘Are we supposed to be revealing our purposes to the Danish government?’
‘Of course we’re not and of course we shan’t.’ Lavisser stopped and unleashed his dazzling smile on Willsen. ‘Sir David told me you expressed scruples about visiting Denmark? Is that right? Believe me, my dear Willsen, I feel the same. My mother’s family live there and I will do nothing, nothing, that places them in jeopardy.’ He paused, then his voice became, if anything, even more earnest. ‘If you and I cannot bring Denmark and Britain into a closer friendship, my dear Willsen, then we have no business going there, none. I merely seek general reassurances from Hanssen. I want news of the political situation in Denmark. I want to know what pressures the French are applying. The French are the irritants, but aren’t they always? And of course Hanssen will want to know the purpose of our visit, but we shall merely say we are visiting families. What could be more innocent?’ Lavisser smiled, walked on and Willsen, reassured, followed the tall guardsman across the street. A crossing sweeper, a skinny boy with a running sore on his forehead, sprinted to brush a horse dropping out of Lavisser’s path. The guardsman spun a careless sixpence towards the lad, then led Willsen down an alleyway. ‘Would it offend you if we visited Hanssen by his servants’ entrance?’ Lavisser asked. ‘Only with the Baltic so tremulous you can be sure that the damned Frogs will be watching his front door.’
‘The French? In London?’
‘They have agents everywhere,’ Lavisser said, ‘even London. But not, I think, in this alley.’
The alley was noisome and dark. It culminated in a gate that stood ajar and led into a bleak narrow yard that was made even darker by the day’s dense clouds and the surrounding walls. The yard’s cobbles were half covered in rubbish that was being loaded onto a handcart by a tall, heavy-set man who seemed surprised to see two red-coated officers invade his grubby domain. He hastily stood aside, snatched off his ragged hat and tugged his forelock as the two officers stepped gingerly through the yard’s filth.
‘Would you be averse to feminine company after supper?’ Lavisser asked.
‘I’m a married man, Captain,’ Willsen said severely.
‘Do call me John, please.’
Willsen was made uncomfortable by the invitation to such familiarity. ‘I’ll not stay after supper,’ he said awkwardly, edging past the cart.
Henry Willsen was one of the finest swordsmen in the British army and his skill with a pistol would have been the envy of any duellist, but he had no defence against the attack which erupted as soon as he had passed the rubbish cart. The tall man kicked Willsen in the back of one knee and, as the officer fell, his assailant stabbed upwards with a knife that slid between Willsen’s ribs. The blade sank to the hilt and the man held it there, supporting Willsen who was gasping suddenly as his right hand groped for the hilt of his cheap sword. He managed to take hold of the weapon, though feebly, but Captain Lavisser, who had turned when the tall man attacked, just smiled and knocked Willsen’s hand aside. ‘I don’t think you need that, Harry,’ he said.
‘You …’ Willsen tried to speak, but his lungs were filling with blood. He began to choke and his eyes widened as he shook his head.
‘I do apologize, my dear Willsen,’ Lavisser said, ‘but I’m afraid your presence in Copenhagen would be a most dreadful embarrassment.’ The Guards officer stepped hurriedly back as the big man, who had been supporting Willsen’s weight with his knife, jerked the blade free. Willsen slumped and his attacker dropped beside him and slashed the knife across his throat. Willsen began to make choking noises as he jerked spasmodically on the cobbles. ‘Well done,’ Lavisser said warmly.
‘Easy work,’ the big man grunted. He stood, wiping the blade on his dirty coat. He was very tall, very broad in the chest and had the scarred knuckles of a pugilist. His face was pitted with pox scars, his nose had been broken and ill set at least once, and his eyes were like stones. Everything about him declared that he was from as low a gutter as could bear life and just to look at him was to be glad that the gallows stood tall outside Newgate Prison.
‘He’s still alive.’ Lavisser frowned at Willsen.
‘Not for long, he ain’t,’ the big man said, then stamped hard on Willsen’s chest. ‘Not now, he ain’t.’
‘You are an example to us all, Barker,’ Lavisser said, then stepped close to the lifeless Willsen. ‘He was a very dull man, probably a Lutheran. You’ll take his cash? Make it look like a robbery?’
Barker had already begun cutting the dead man’s pockets open. ‘You think they’ll find another bugger to go with us?’ he asked.
‘They seem tediously intent on giving me company,’ Lavisser said airily, ‘but time is short now, very short, and I doubt they’ll find anyone. But if they do, Barker, then you must deal with the new man just as you dealt with this one.’ Lavisser seemed fascinated by the dead Willsen, for he could not take his eyes from him. ‘You are a great comfort to me, Barker, and you will like it in Denmark.’
‘I will, sir?’
‘They are a very trusting people,’ Lavisser said, still unable to take his gaze from Willsen’s body. ‘We shall be as ravening wolves among the woolliest of baa-lambs.’ He finally managed to look away from the corpse, raised a languid hand and edged past the handcart. He made bleating noises as he went down the alley.
The rain fell harder. It was the end of July, 1807, yet it felt more like March. It would be a poor harvest, there was a new widow in Kent and the Honourable John Lavisser went to Almack’s where he lost considerably more than a thousand guineas, but it no longer mattered. Nothing mattered now. He left worthless notes of hand promising to pay his debts and walked away. He was on his way to glory.
Mister Brown and Mister Belling, the one fat and the other thin, sat side by side and stared solemnly at the green-jacketed army officer across the table. Neither Mister Belling nor Mister Brown liked what they saw. Their visitor – he was not exactly a client – was a tall man with black hair, a hard face and a scar on his cheek and, ominously, he looked like a man who was no stranger to scars. Mister Brown sighed and turned to stare at the rain falling on London’s Eastcheap. ‘It will be a bad harvest, Mister Belling,’ he said heavily.
‘I fear so, Mister Brown.’
‘July!’ Brown said. ‘July indeed! Yet it’s more like March!’
‘A fire in July!’ Mister Belling said. ‘Unheard of!’
The fire, a mean heap of sullen coals, burned in a blackened hearth above which hung a cavalry sabre. It was the only decoration in the panelled room and hinted at the office’s military nature. Messrs Belling and Brown of Cheapside were army agents and their business was to look after the finances of officers who served abroad. They also acted as brokers for men wanting to buy or sell commissions, but this wet, chill July afternoon was bringing them no fees. ‘Alas!’ Mister Brown spread his hands. His fingers were very white, plump and beautifully manicured. He flexed them as though he was about to play a harpsichord. ‘Alas,’ he said again, looking at the green-jacketed officer who glowered from the opposite side of the table.
‘It is the nature of your commission,’ Mister Belling explained.
‘Indeed it is,’ Mister Brown intervened, ‘the nature, so to speak, of your commission.’ He smiled ruefully.
‘It’s as good as anyone else’s commission,’ the officer said belligerently.
‘Oh, better!’ Mister Brown said cheerfully. ‘Would you not agree, Mister Belling?’
‘Far better,’ Mister Belling said enthusiastically. ‘A battlefield commission, Mister Sharpe? ’Pon my soul, but that’s a rare thing. Rare!’
‘An admirable thing!’ Mister Brown added.
‘Most admirable,’ Mister Belling agreed energetically. ‘A battlefield commission! Up from the ranks! Why, it’s a …’ He paused, trying to think what it was. ‘It’s a veritable achievement!’
‘But it is not’ – Mister Brown spoke delicately, his plump hands opening and closing like a butterfly’s wings – ‘fungible.’
‘Precisely.’ Mister Belling’s manner exuded relief that his partner had found the exact word to settle the matter. ‘It is not fungible, Mister Sharpe.’
No one spoke for a few seconds. A coal hissed, rain spattered on the office window and a carter’s whip cracked in the street, which was filled with the rumble, crash and squeal of wagons and carriages.
‘Fungible?’ Lieutenant Richard Sharpe asked.
‘The commission cannot be exchanged for cash,’ Mister Belling explained. ‘You did not buy it, you cannot sell it. You were given it. What the King gives you may give back, but you cannot sell. It is not’ – he paused – ‘fungible.’
‘I was told I could sell it!’ Sharpe said angrily.
‘You were told wrong,’ Mister Brown said.
‘Misinformed,’ Mister Belling added.
‘Grievously so,’ Mister Brown said, ‘alas.’
‘The regulations are plain,’ Mister Belling went on. ‘An officer who purchases a commission is free to sell it, but a man awarded a commission is not. I wish it were otherwise.’
‘We both do!’ Mister Brown said.
‘But I was told …’
‘You were told wrong,’ Mister Belling snapped, then wished he had not spoken so brusquely for Lieutenant Sharpe started forward in his chair as though he was going to attack the two men.
Sharpe checked himself. He looked from the plump Mister Brown to the scrawny Mister Belling. ‘So there’s nothing you can do?’
Mister Belling stared at the smoke-browned ceiling for a few seconds as though seeking inspiration, then shook his head. ‘There is nothing we can do,’ he pronounced, ‘but you might apply to His Majesty’s government for a dispensation. I’ve not heard of such a course ever being followed, but an exception might be made?’ He sounded very dubious. ‘There are senior officers, perchance, who would speak for you?’
Sharpe said nothing. He had saved Sir Arthur Wellesley’s life in India, but he doubted whether the General would help him now. All Sharpe wanted was to sell his commission, take the £450 and get out of the army. But it seemed he could not sell his rank because he had not bought it.
‘Such an appeal would take time,’ Mister Brown warned him, ‘and I would not be sanguine about the outcome, Mister Sharpe. You are asking the government to set a precedent and governments are chary of precedents.’
‘Indeed they are,’ Belling said, ‘and so they should be. Though in your case … ?’ He smiled, raised his eyebrows, then sat back.
‘In my case?’ Sharpe asked, puzzled.
‘I would not be sanguine,’ Mister Brown repeated.
‘You’re saying I’m buggered?’ Sharpe asked.
‘We are saying, Mister Sharpe, that we cannot assist you.’ Mister Brown spoke severely for he had been offended by Sharpe’s language. ‘Alas.’
Sharpe gazed at the two men. Take them both down, he thought. Two minutes of bloody violence and then strip their pockets bare. The bastards must have money. And he had three shillings and threepence halfpenny in his pouch. That was it. Three shillings and threepence halfpenny.
But it was not Brown or Belling’s fault that he could not sell his commission. It was the rules. The regulations. The rich could make more money and the poor could go to hell. He stood, and the clatter of his sabre scabbard on the chair made Mister Brown wince. Sharpe draped a damp greatcoat round his shoulders, crammed a shako onto his unruly hair and picked up his pack. ‘Good day,’ he said curtly, then ducked out of the door, letting in a gust of unseasonably cold air and rain.
Mister Belling let out a great sigh of relief. ‘You know who that was, Mister Brown?’
‘He announced himself as Lieutenant Sharpe of the 95th Rifles,’ Mister Brown said, ‘and I have no reason to doubt him, do I?’
‘The very same officer, Mister Brown, who lived, or should I say cohabited, with the Lady Grace Hale!’
Mister Brown’s eyes widened. ‘No! I thought she took up with an ensign!’
Mister Belling sighed. ‘In the Rifles, Mister Brown, there are no ensigns. He is a second lieutenant. Lowest of the low!’
Mister Brown stared at the closed door. ‘’Pon my soul,’ he said softly, ‘’pon my soul!’ Here was something to tell Amelia when he got home! A scandal in the office! It had been whispered throughout London how the Lady Grace Hale, widow to a prominent man, had moved into a house with a common soldier. True, the common soldier was an officer, but not a proper officer. Not a man who had purchased his commission, but rather a sergeant who had earned a battlefield promotion, which was, in its way, entirely admirable, but even so! Lady Grace Hale, daughter of the Earl of Selby, living with a common soldier? And not just living with him, but having his baby! Or so the gossip said. The Hale family claimed the dead husband had been the child’s father and the date of the baby’s birth was conveniently within nine months of Lord William’s death, but few believed it. ‘I thought the name was somehow familiar,’ Brown said.
‘I scarcely credited it myself,’ Mister Belling admitted. ‘Can you imagine her ladyship enduring such a man? He’s scarce more than a savage!’
‘Did you note the scar on his face?’
‘And when did he last shave?’ Belling shuddered. ‘I fear he is not long for the army, Mister Brown. A curtailed career, would you not say?’
‘Truncated, Mister Belling.’
‘Penniless, no doubt!’
‘No doubt!’ Brown said. ‘And he carried his own pack and greatcoat! An officer doesn’t carry a pack! Never seen such a thing in all my years. And he was reeking of gin.’
‘He was?’
‘Reeking!’ Brown said. ‘Well, I never! So that’s the fellow, is it? What was the Lady Grace thinking of? She must have been quite mad!’ He jumped, startled because the door had been suddenly thrown open. ‘Mister Sharpe?’ he said faintly, wondering if the tall rifleman had returned to exact vengeance for their unhelpfulness. ‘You forgot something, perhaps?’
Sharpe shook his head. ‘Today’s Friday, isn’t it?’ he asked.
Mister Belling blinked. ‘It is, Mister Sharpe,’ he said feebly, ‘it is indeed.’
‘Friday,’ Mister Brown confirmed, ‘the very last day of July.’
Sharpe, dark-eyed, tall and hard-faced, stared suspiciously at each of the two men in turn, then nodded reluctantly. ‘I thought it was,’ he said, then left again.
This time it was Brown who let out a sigh of relief as the door closed. ‘I cannot think,’ he said, ‘that promoting men from the ranks is a wise idea.’
‘It never lasts,’ Belling said consolingly, ‘they ain’t suited to rank, Mister Brown, and they take to liquor and so run out of cash. There is no prudence in the lower sort of men. He’ll be on the streets within the month, rely upon it, within the month.’
‘Poor fellow,’ Mister Brown said and shot the door’s bolt. It was only five o’clock in the evening, and the office was supposed to remain open until six, but somehow it seemed prudent to shut up early. Just in case Sharpe came back. Just in case.
Grace, Sharpe thought, Grace. God help me, Grace. God help me. Three shillings, three pence and a bloody halfpenny, all the money he had left in the world. What do I do now, Grace? He often talked to her. She was not there to listen, not now, but he still talked to her. She had taught him so much, she had encouraged him to read and tried to make him think, but nothing lasts. Nothing. ‘Bloody hell, Grace,’ he said aloud and men on the street gave him room, thinking him either mad or drunk. ‘Bloody hell.’ The anger was welling inside him, thick and dark, a fury that wanted to explode in violence or else drown itself in drink. Three shillings and threepence bloody halfpenny. He could get well drunk on that, but the ale and gin he had taken at midday was already sour in his belly. What he wanted was to hurt someone, anyone. Just a blind, desperate anger.
He had not planned it this way. He thought he would come to London, borrow an advance from an army agent, and then go away. Back to India, he had thought. Other men went there poor and came back rich. Sharpe the nabob and why not? Because he could not sell his rank, that was why not. Some snotty child with a rich father could buy and sell his rank, but a real soldier who had fought his way up the ladder could not. Bugger them all. So what now? Ebenezer Fairley, the merchant who had sailed with Sharpe from India, had offered him a job, and Sharpe supposed he could walk to Cheshire and beg from the man, but he had no urge to start that journey now. He just wanted to vent his anger and so, reassured that it was indeed Friday, he walked towards the Tower. The street stank of the river, coal smoke and horse dung. There was wealth in this part of London that lay so close to the docks and to the Custom House and to the big warehouses crammed with spices, tea and silks. This was a district of counting houses, bankers and merchants, a conduit for the world’s wealth, but the money was not displayed. A few clerks hurried from one office to another, but there were no crossing sweepers and none of the signs of luxury that filled the elegant streets to the city’s west. The buildings here were tall, dark and secret, and it was impossible to tell whether the grey-haired man scuttling with a ledger under his arm was a merchant prince or a worn-out clerk.
Sharpe turned down Tower Hill. There was a pair of red-coated sentries at the Tower’s outer gate and they pretended not to see the sabre scabbard protruding from Sharpe’s greatcoat and he pretended not to see them. He did not care if they saluted him or not. He did not much care if he never saw the army again so long as he lived. He was a failure. Storekeeper to the regiment. A bloody quartermaster. He had come from India, where he had received a commission into a red-coated regiment, to England, where he had been placed in the greenjackets, and at first he had liked the Rifles, but then Grace had gone and everything went wrong. Yet it was not her fault. Sharpe blamed himself, but still did not understand why he had failed. The Rifles were a new kind of regiment, prizing skill and intelligence above blind discipline. They worked hard, rewarded progress and encouraged the men to think for themselves. Officers trained with the men, even drilled with them, and the hours that other regiments wasted in pipe-claying and stock-polishing, in boot-licking and tuft-brushing, the green-jackets spent in rifle practice. Men and officers competed against each other, all trying to make their own company the best. It was exactly the kind of regiment that Sharpe had dreamed of when he had been in India, and he had been recommended to it. ‘I hear you’re just the sort of officer we want,’ Colonel Beckwith had greeted Sharpe, and the Colonel’s welcome was heartfelt, for Sharpe brought the green-jackets a wealth of recent experience in battle, but in the end they did not want him. He did not fit. He could not make small talk. Perhaps he had frightened them. Most of the regiment’s officers had spent the last years training on England’s south coast, while Sharpe had been fighting in India. He had become bored with the training, and after Grace he had become bitter so that the Colonel had taken him away from number three company and put him in charge of the stores. Which was where most officers up from the ranks were placed in the hidebound, red-coated regiments, but the Rifles were supposed to be different.
Now the regiment had marched away, going to fight somewhere abroad, but Sharpe, the morose quartermaster, had been left behind. ‘It’ll be a chance,’ Colonel Beckwith had told Sharpe, ‘to clean out the hutments. Give them a damn good scouring, eh? Have everything ready for our return.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Sharpe had said, and thought Beckwith could go to hell. Sharpe was a soldier, not a damned barracks cleaner, but he had hidden his anger as he watched the regiment march north. No one knew where it was going. Some said Spain, others said they were going to Stralsund, which was a British garrison on the Baltic, though why the British held a garrison on the southern coast of the Baltic no one could explain, and a few claimed the regiment was going to Holland. No one actually knew, but they all expected to fight and they marched in fine spirits. They were the greenjackets, a new regiment for a new century, but with no place for Richard Sharpe. So Sharpe had decided to run. Damn Beckwith, damn the green-jackets, damn the army and damn everything. He had reckoned he would sell his commission, take the money and find a new life. Except he could not sell because of the bloody regulations. God damn it, Grace, he thought, what do I do?
Only he knew what he was going to do. He was still going to run. Yet to start a new life he needed money, which was why he had made certain it was a Friday. Now he edged down the greasy stairs at the foot of Tower Hill and nodded to a waterman. ‘Wapping Steps,’ he said, settling in the boat’s stern.
The waterman shoved off, letting the river current carry him downstream past Traitor’s Gate. The masts were thick on either side of the river where ships and barges were double berthed against wharves crudely protected by bulging fenders made of thick, twisted, tar-soaked rope. Sharpe knew those fenders. The worn-out ones had been carted to the foundling home in Brewhouse Lane where the children had been made to dismantle the matted remnants of tar and hemp. At the age of nine, Sharpe remembered, he had lost the nails on four of his fingers. It had been useless work. Teasing out the hemp strands with small bare and bloody hands. The strands were sold as an alternative for the horsehair that stiffened the plaster used on walls. He looked at his hands now. Still rough, he thought, but no longer black with tar and bloody with ripped nails.
‘Recruiting?’ the waterman asked.
‘No.’
The curt tone might have offended the waterman, but he shrugged it off. ‘It ain’t my business,’ he said, deftly using an oar to keep the boat drifting straight, ‘but Wapping ain’t healthy. Not to an officer, sir.’
‘I grew up there.’
‘Ah,’ the man said, giving Sharpe a puzzled look. ‘Going home, then?’
‘Going home,’ Sharpe agreed. The sky was leaden with cloud and darkened further by the pall of smoke that threaded the spires and towers and masts. A black sky over a black city, broken only by a jagged streak of pink in the west. Going home, Sharpe thought. Friday evening. The small rain pitted the river. Lights glimmered from portholes in the berthed ships which stank of coal dust, sewage, whale oil and spices. Gulls flew like white scraps in the early dark, wheeling and diving about the heavy beam at Execution Dock, where the bodies of two men, mutineers or pirates, hung with broken necks.
‘Watch yourself,’ the waterman said, skilfully nudging his skiff in among the other boats at the Wapping Steps. He was not warning Sharpe against the slippery flight of stairs, but against the folk who lived in the huddled streets above.
Sharpe paid in coppers, then climbed up to the wharf which was edged with low warehouses guarded by ragged dogs and cudgel-bearing thugs. This place was safe enough, but once through the alley and into the streets he was in hungry territory. He would be back in the gutter, but it was his gutter, the place he had started and he felt no particular fear of it.
‘Colonel!’ A whore called to him from behind a warehouse. She lifted her skirt then spat a curse when Sharpe ignored her. A chained dog lunged at him as he emerged onto High Street where a dozen small boys whooped in derision at the sight of an army officer and fell into mocking step behind him. Sharpe let them follow for twenty paces, then whipped round fast and snatched the nearest boy’s shabby coat, lifted and slammed him against the wall. Two of the other boys ran off, doubtless to fetch brothers or fathers. ‘Where’s Maggie Joyce?’ Sharpe asked the boy.
The child hesitated, wondering whether to be brave, then half grinned. ‘She’s gone, mister.’
‘Gone where?’
‘Seven Dials.’
Sharpe believed him. Maggie was his one friend, or he hoped she was, but she must have had the sense to leave Wapping, though Sharpe doubted that the Seven Dials was much safer. But he had not come here to see Maggie. He had come here because it was Friday night and he was poor. ‘Who’s the Master at the workhouse?’ he asked.
The child looked really scared now. ‘The Master?’ he whispered.
‘Who is it, boy?’
‘Jem Hocking, sir.’
Sharpe put the lad down, took the halfpenny from his pocket and spun it down the street so that the boys pursued it between the people, dogs, carts and horses. Jem Hocking. That was the name he had hoped to hear. A name from a black past, a name that festered in Sharpe’s memory as he walked down the centre of the street so that no one emptied a slop bucket over his head. It was a summer evening, the cloud-hidden sun was still above the horizon, but it seemed like winter twilight here. The houses were black, their old bricks patched with crude timbers. Some had fallen down and were nothing but heaps of rubble. Cesspits stank. Dogs barked everywhere. In India the British officers had shuddered at the stench of the streets, but none had ever walked here. Even the worst street in India, Sharpe thought, was better than this foetid place where the people had pinched faces, sunk with hunger, but their eyes were bright enough, especially when they saw the pack in Sharpe’s left hand. They saw a heavy pack, a sabre and assessed the value of the greatcoat draped like a cloak over his broad shoulders. There was more wealth on Sharpe than these folk saw in a half-dozen years, though Sharpe reckoned himself poor. He had been rich once. He had taken the jewels of the Tippoo Sultan, stripping them from the dying king’s body in the shit-stinking tunnel of the Water Gate of Seringapatam, but those jewels were gone. Bloody lawyers. Bloody, bloody lawyers.
But if the folk saw the wealth on Sharpe they also saw that he was very tall and very strong and that his face was scarred and hard and bitter and forbidding. A man would have to be desperately hungry to risk his life in an attempt to steal Sharpe’s coat or pack and so, like wolves that scented blood but feared losing their own, the men watched him pass and, though some followed him as he turned up Wapping Lane, they did not pursue him into Brewhouse Lane. The poorhouse and the foundling home were there and no one went close to those grim high walls unless they were forced.
Sharpe stood in the doorway of the old brewery, long closed down, and stared across the street at the workhouse walls. On the right was the poorhouse that mostly held folk too old to work, or else they were sick or had been abandoned by their children. Landlords turned them onto the street and the parish beadle brought them here, to Jem Hocking’s kingdom, where the men were put in one ward and the women in the other. They died here, husbands forbidden to speak with their wives, and all half starved until their corpses were carried in a knacker’s cart to a pauper’s grave. That was the poorhouse, and it was divided from the foundling home by a narrow, three-storey brick house with white-painted shutters and an elegant wrought-iron lantern suspended above its well-scrubbed front steps. The Master’s house. Jem Hocking’s small palace which overlooked the foundling home which, like the poorhouse, had its own gate: a black slab of heavy timber smeared with tar and surmounted with rusted iron spikes four inches long. A prison, really, for orphans. The magistrates sent pregnant girls here, girls too poor to have a home or too sick to sell their swollen bodies on the streets. Their bastards were born here and the girls, as often as not, died of the fever. Those that survived went back to the streets, leaving their children in the tender care of Jem Hocking and his wife.
It had been Sharpe’s home once. And now it was Friday.
He crossed the street and hammered on the small wicket door set into the foundling home’s larger gate. Grace had wanted to come here. She had listened to Sharpe’s stories and believed she could change things, but there had never been time. So Sharpe would change things now. He lifted his hand to hammer again just as the wicket door opened to reveal a pale and anxious young man who flinched away from Sharpe’s fist. ‘Who are you?’ Sharpe demanded as he stepped through the small opening.
‘Sir?’ The young man had been expecting to ask that same question.
‘Who are you?’ Sharpe asked. ‘Come on, man, don’t bloody dither! And where’s the Master?’
‘The Master’s in his house, but …’ The young man abandoned whatever he had been trying to say and instead attempted to stand in front of Sharpe. ‘You can’t go in there, mister!’
‘Why not?’ Sharpe had crossed the small yard and now pushed open the door to the hall. When he had been a child he had thought it a vast room, big as a cathedral, but now it looked squalid and small. Scarce bigger than a company’s barrack room, he realized. It was supper and some thirty or more children were sitting on the floor among the oakum and the tar-encrusted fenders that was their daily work. They scooped spoons in wooden bowls while another thirty children queued beside a table that held a cauldron of soup and a bread board. A woman, her red arms massive, stood behind the table while a young man, equipped with a riding crop, lolled on the hall’s low dais above which a biblical text arched across the brown-painted wall. Be sure your sin will find you out.
Sixty pairs of eyes stared at Sharpe in astonishment. None of the children spoke for fear of the riding crop or a blow from the woman’s burly arm. Sharpe did not speak either. He was staring at the room, smelling the tar and fighting against the overwhelming memories. It had been twenty years since he had last been under this roof. Twenty years. It smelt the same, though. It smelt of tar and fear and rotten food. He stepped to the table and sniffed the soup.
‘Leek and barley gruel, sir.’ The woman, seeing the silver buttons and the black braid and the sabre, dropped a clumsy curtsey.
‘Looks like lukewarm water to me,’ Sharpe said.
‘Leek and barley, sir.’
Sharpe picked up a random piece of bread. Hard as brick. Hard as ship’s biscuit.
‘Sir?’ The woman held out her hand. She was nervous. ‘The bread is counted, sir, counted.’
Sharpe tossed it down. He was tempted to some extravagant gesture, but what would it do? Upsetting the cauldron merely meant the children would go hungry, while dropping the bread into the soup would achieve nothing. Grace would have known what to do. Her voice would have cracked like a whip and the work-house servants would have been scurrying to fetch food, clothes and soap. But those things cost money and Sharpe only had a pocketful of copper.
‘And what have we here?’ a strong voice boomed from the hall door. ‘What has the east wind blown in today?’ The children whimpered and went very still while the woman dropped another curtsey. Sharpe turned. ‘And who are you?’ the man demanded. ‘Colonel of the regiment, are you?’
It was Jem Hocking. Come like the devil to the heart of hell.
He was no devil to look at. See Jem Hocking in the street and a man might take him for a prosperous farmer up from the Vale of Kent. The years had whitened his hair and stretched his chequered waistcoat taut across a bulging belly, but he was still a bull of a man with wide shoulders, stout legs and a face as flat as a shovel. Thick jowls hung beneath bushy white side whiskers, a golden watch chain held a dozen seals, his tall boots were tasselled, his dark-blue coat was edged with velvet cuffs and he carried a varnished black staff with a silver knob. He was the Master and for a moment Sharpe could not speak. He was overwhelmed by hatred, by the memories of this man’s cruelty, even by fear. Twenty years and a battlefield commission had not taken away that fear. He wanted to imitate the children; he wanted to freeze, pretend not to exist, not even breathe in case he was noticed.
‘Does I know you?’ Hocking demanded. The big man was frowning, trying to discern something familiar in Sharpe’s scarred face, but the memory would not come. He shook his head in puzzlement. ‘So who are you?’
‘My name is Dunnett,’ Sharpe said, using the name of an officer in the greenjackets who held a particular dislike of Sharpe. ‘Major Warren Dunnett,’ he said, promoting Dunnett from captain.
‘A major, eh? And what kind of uniform is that, Major? Red coats I know, and blue I’ve seen, but bless me, I ain’t seen green and black.’ He stepped towards Sharpe, pushing the children’s skinny legs out of the way with his beadle’s staff. ‘Is it a newfangled uniform, eh? Some kind of coat that gives a man the right to trespass on parish property?’
‘I was looking for the Master,’ Sharpe said. ‘I was told he was a man of business.’
‘Business.’ Hocking spat the word. ‘And what business do you have, Major, other than the killing of the King’s enemies?’
‘You want me to talk about it here?’ Sharpe asked. He took one of the pennies from his coat pocket and spun it towards the ceiling. It glittered as it flew, watched by hungry, astonished children, then fell into Sharpe’s hand and vanished.
The sight of the money, even a humble penny, was all the reassurance Hocking needed. The rest of his questions could wait. ‘I has business outside the poorhouse tonight,’ he announced, ‘it being a Friday. You’ll take an ale with me, Major?’
‘That would be a pleasure, Master,’ Sharpe lied.
Or perhaps it was not a lie, for Sharpe was angry and revenge was a pleasure. And this revenge had been simmering in his dreams for twenty years. He glanced a last time at the text on the wall and wondered if Jem Hocking had ever considered the truth of it.
Be sure your sin will find you out.
Jem Hocking should have taken note and been on his knees in prayer.
Because Richard Sharpe had come home.
CHAPTER TWO
The tavern displayed no name. There was not even a painted sign hanging outside, nothing, indeed, to distinguish it from the neighbouring houses except, perhaps, a slight air of prosperity that stood out in Vinegar Street like a duchess in a whorehouse. Some folk called it Malone’s Tavern because Beaky Malone had owned and run it, though Beaky had to be dead by now, and others called it the Vinegar Alehouse because it was in Vinegar Street, while some knew the house simply as the Master’s because Jem Hocking did so much of his business in its taproom.
‘I have interests,’ Jem Hocking said grandly, ‘beyond those of the mere parish. I am a man of parts, Major.’
Meaning, Sharpe thought, that Hocking persecuted more than the workhouse inmates. He had become rich over the years, rich enough to own scores of houses in Wapping, and Friday night was when the tenants brought him the rent. Pennies only, but pennies added up, and Hocking received them in the taproom where they vanished into a leather bag while a cowed white-haired clerk made notes in a ledger. Two young men, both tall, strongly built and armed with cudgels, were the taproom’s only other customers and they watched every transaction. ‘My mastiffs,’ Hocking had explained the two young men.
‘A man of responsibility needs protection,’ Sharpe had said, using two of his three shillings to buy a flagon of ale. The girl brought four tankards. The clerk, it seemed, was not to be treated to Major Dunnett’s largesse. Only Sharpe, Hocking and the two mastiffs were to drink.
‘It takes a man of authority to recognize responsibility,’ Hocking said, then buried his face in the tankard for a few seconds. ‘What you are seeing, Major, is private business.’ He watched a thin woman offer some coppers to the clerk. ‘But in my parish duties,’ Hocking went on, watching the clerk count the coins, ‘I have responsibility for the disbursement of public funds and for the care of immortal souls. I take neither duty lightly, Major.’ The public funds were fourpence three farthing a day for each pauper out of which Jem Hocking managed to purloin twopence, while the rest was grudgingly spent on stale bread, onions, barley and oatmeal. The care of souls yielded no profit, but did not require any outlay either.
‘You have overseers?’ Sharpe asked, pouring himself and Hocking more ale.
‘I have a Board of Visitors,’ Hocking agreed. He watched the ale being poured. ‘The law says we must. So we do.’
‘So where is the responsibility?’ Sharpe asked. ‘With you? Or the Board?’ He saw the question had offended Hocking. ‘I assume it is you, Master, but I have to be sure.’
‘With me,’ Hocking said grandly. ‘With me, Major. The Board is appointed by the parish and the parish, Major, is infested with bleeding orphans. And not just our own! Some even gets stranded here by the ships. Only last week the mudlarks found a girl child, if you can imagine such a thing.’ He shook his head and dipped his nose into the ale’s froth while Sharpe imagined the mudlarks, men and women who combed the Thames foreshore at low tide in search of scraps fallen overboard, bringing a child to Brewhouse Lane. Poor child, to end with Hocking as a guardian. ‘The Board, Major,’ Hocking went on, ‘cannot cope with so many children. They confine themselves to a quarterly examination of the accounts which, you may be sure, add up to the exact penny, and the Board votes me an annual motion of thanks at Christmas time, but otherwise the Board ignores me. I am a man of business, Major, and I spare the parish the trouble of dealing with orphans. I have two score and sixteen of the little bastards in the house now, and what will the Board of Visitors do without me and Mrs Hocking? We are a godsend to the parish.’ He held up a hand to check anything Sharpe might say. This was not to deflect a compliment, but rather because a thin young man had come from the tavern’s back door to whisper in his ear. A raucous cheer sounded from behind the door. The cheers had been sounding ever since Sharpe had arrived in the tavern and he had pretended not to hear them. Now he ignored the young man who tipped a stream of coins into the clerk’s leather bag, then gave Hocking a pile of grubby paper slips that vanished into the big man’s pocket. ‘Business,’ Hocking said gruffly.
‘In Lewes,’ Sharpe said, ‘the parish offers three pounds to anyone who will take an orphan out of the workhouse.’
‘If I had such cash, Major, I could strip Brewhouse Lane of the little bastards in five minutes.’ Hocking chuckled. ‘For a pound apiece! A pound! But we ain’t a rich parish. We ain’t Lewes. We ain’t got the funds to palm the little bastards off onto others. No, we relies on others paying us!’ He sank half the ale, then gave Sharpe a suspicious look. ‘So what does you want, Major?’
‘Drummer boys,’ Sharpe said. The 95th did not employ drummer boys, but he doubted Jem Hocking understood that.
‘Drummer boys,’ Hocking said. ‘I’ve got lads that could beat a drum. They ain’t much good for anything, but they can beat a drum. But why come to me for them, Major? Why not go to Lewes? Why not get three pounds with every lad?’
‘Because the Lewes Board of Visitors won’t let the boys go to be soldiers.’
‘They won’t?’ Hocking could not hide his astonishment.
‘There are women on the Board,’ Sharpe said.
‘Ah, women!’ Hocking exclaimed. He shook his head in exasperation and despair. ‘They’ll be the end of common sense, women will. There are none on our Board, I warrant you that. Women!’
‘And the Canterbury Board insists the boys go before a magistrate,’ Sharpe said.
‘Canterbury?’ Hocking was confused.
‘We have a second battalion at Canterbury,’ Sharpe explained, ‘and we could get the boys from there, only the magistrates interfere.’
Hocking was still confused. ‘Why wouldn’t the bloody magistrates want boys to be soldiers?’
‘The boys die,’ Sharpe said, ‘they die like bloody flies. You have to understand, Mister Hocking, that the Rifles are the troops nearest the enemy. Under their noses, we are, and the boys have to serve as cartridge carriers when they ain’t drumming. Back and forth, they are, and somehow they seem to be targets. Bang, bang. Always killing boys, we are. Mind you, if they live, it’s a fine life. They can become Chosen Men!’
‘A rare opportunity,’ Hocking said, believing every word of Sharpe’s nonsense. ‘And I can assure you, Major, there’ll be no interference from Boards or magistrates here. None! You can take my word for it.’ He poured himself more ale. ‘So what are we talking about here?’
Sharpe leaned back, pretending to think. ‘Two battalions?’ he suggested. ‘Twenty companies? Say we lose four boys a year to the enemy and another six die of fever or manage to grow up? Ten lads a year? They have to be eleven years old, or near enough to pass.’
‘Ten boys a year?’ Hocking managed to hide his enthusiasm. ‘And you’d pay?’
‘The army will pay, Mister Hocking.’
‘Aye, but how much? How much?’
‘Two pounds apiece,’ Sharpe said. He was amazed at his own glibness. He had dreamed of this revenge, plotting it in his imagination without ever thinking he would actually work it, yet now the lines were slipping off his tongue with convincing ease.
Hocking stuffed a clay pipe with tobacco as he considered the offer. Twenty pounds a year was a fine sum, but a little too obvious. A little too tidy. He drew a candle towards him and lit the pipe. ‘The magistrates will want paying,’ he observed.
‘You said there’d be no trouble from magistrates,’ Sharpe objected.
‘That’s because they’ll be paid,’ Hocking pointed out, ‘and there’ll be other costs, Major, other costs. Always are other costs.’ He blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. ‘Have you talked to your Colonel about this?’
‘I wouldn’t be here otherwise.’
Hocking nodded. Which meant Sharpe had negotiated a price with the Colonel and Hocking was damned sure it was not two pounds a boy. Five pounds, more like, with the Colonel creaming a pair off the top and Sharpe taking a single. ‘Four pounds,’ Hocking said.
‘Four!’
‘I don’t need you, Major,’ Hocking said. ‘I’ve got chimney sweeps who like my lads, and those that don’t sweep chimneys can shovel up the pure.’ He meant they could collect dog turds that they delivered to the city’s tanners who used the faeces to cure leather. ‘Some boys go to sea,’ Hocking said grandly, ‘some sweep chimneys, some scoop shit, some dies, and the rest go to the gallows. They’re all scum, Major, but they’re my scum, and if you wants them then you pays my price. And you will, you will.’
‘I will, why?’
‘Because, Major, you don’t need to come to Wapping to get boys. You can find lads anywhere, magistrates or no magistrates.’ Hocking turned his shrewd eyes on Sharpe. ‘No, Major, you came to me on purpose.’
‘I came to you for drummer boys,’ Sharpe said, ‘and no awkward magistrates and no one caring that so many die.’
Hocking still stared at him. ‘Go on,’ he said.
Sharpe hesitated, then seemed to make up his mind. ‘And girls,’ he said.
‘Ah.’ Hocking half smiled. He understood weakness and greed and Sharpe, at last, was making sense.
‘We hear –’ Sharpe began.
‘Who’s we?’
‘The Colonel and me.’
‘And who told you?’ Hocking asked fiercely.
‘No one told me,’ Sharpe said, ‘but someone told the Colonel. He sent me.’
Hocking leaned back and pulled at his bushy side whiskers as he considered the answer. He found it plausible and nodded. ‘Your Colonel likes ’em young, eh?’
‘We both do,’ Sharpe said, ‘young and untouched.’
Hocking nodded again. ‘The boys will be four pounds apiece and the girls ten a time.’
Sharpe pretended to consider the price, then shrugged. ‘I want a taste tonight.’
‘Girl or boy?’ Hocking leered.
‘Girl,’ Sharpe said.
‘You’ve got the money?’
Sharpe patted his pack which stood on the sawdust-strewn floor. ‘Guineas,’ he said.
Another cheer sounded behind the back door and Hocking jerked his head in that direction. ‘I’ve got business in there, Major, and it’ll take me an hour or two to settle it. I’ll have the girl cleaned up while you wait. But I want five pounds now.’
Sharpe shook his head. ‘You’ll see my money when I see the girl.’
‘Getting particular, are we?’ Hocking sneered, though he did not insist on receiving any deposit. ‘What do you want, Major? A redhead? A blackbird? Fat? Skinny?’
‘Just young,’ Sharpe said. He felt dirty even though he was merely pretending.
‘She’ll be young, Major,’ Hocking said and held out his hand to seal the bargain. Sharpe took the hand and suppressed a shudder when Hocking held on to it. Hocking gripped hard, frowning. ‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘but you do look familiar.’
‘I was raised in Yorkshire,’ Sharpe lied. ‘Maybe you were up there once?’
‘I don’t travel to foreign places.’ Hocking let go of Sharpe’s hand and stood. ‘Joe here will show you where to wait, but if I was you, Major, I’d watch the dogs for a while.’
Joe was one of the two young men and he jerked his head to show that Sharpe should follow him through the tavern’s back door. Sharpe knew what to expect there, for when Beaky Malone had been alive Sharpe had helped in that back room which was little more than a long and gloomy shed raised above the yards of three houses. It stank of animals. There were storerooms at either end of the shed, but most of the space had been converted into a makeshift arena of banked wooden benches that enclosed a pit twelve feet in diameter. The pit’s floor was sand and was surrounded by a barrier of planks.
‘It’s in there,’ Joe said, indicating one of the storerooms. ‘It ain’t luxury, but there’s a bed.’
‘I’ll wait out here,’ Sharpe said.
‘When the dogs are done,’ Joe explained, ‘wait in the room.’
Sharpe climbed to the topmost bench where he sat close under the roof beams. Six oil lamps hung above the pit, which was spattered with blood. The shed stank of it, and of gin, tobacco and meat pies. There must have been a hundred men on the benches and a handful of women. Some of the spectators watched Sharpe as he climbed the steps. He did not fit in here and the silver buttons of his uniform coat made them nervous. All uniforms unsettled these folk, and spectators made room for him on the bench just as a tall man with a hooked nose climbed over the plank barrier. ‘The next bout, ladies and gentlemen,’ the man bellowed, ‘is between Priscilla, a two-year-old bitch, and Nobleman, a dog of three years. Priscilla is by way of being the property of Mister Philip Machin’ – the name provoked a huge cheer – ‘while Nobleman,’ the man went on when there was silence, ‘was bred by Mister Roger Collis. You may place your wagers, gentlemen and ladies, and I do bid you all good fortune.’
A boy climbed to Sharpe’s bench, wanting to take his money, but Sharpe waved the lad away. Jem Hocking had appeared on a lower bench now and the wagers were being carried to his clerk. Another man, as thin as the ringmaster, threaded his way up the crowded benches to sit beside Sharpe. He looked about thirty, had hooded eyes, long hair and a flamboyant red handkerchief knotted about his skinny neck. He slid a knife from inside a boot and began cleaning his fingernails. ‘Lumpy wants to know who the hell you are, Colonel,’ he said.
‘Who’s Lumpy?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Him.’ The thin man nodded at the ringmaster.
‘Beaky’s son?’
The man gave Sharpe a very suspicious look. ‘How would you know that, Colonel?’
‘Because he looks like Beaky,’ Sharpe said, ‘and you’re Dan Pierce. Your mother lived in Shadwell and she only had one leg, but that never stopped her whoring, did it?’ The knife was suddenly just beneath Sharpe’s ribs, its point pricking his skin. Sharpe turned and looked at Pierce. ‘You’d kill an old friend, Dan?’
Pierce stared at Sharpe. ‘You’re not …’ he began, then checked. The knife was still in Sharpe’s side. ‘No,’ Pierce said, not trusting his suspicions.
Sharpe grinned. ‘You and me, Dan? We used to run errands for Beaky.’ He turned and looked at the ring where the dog and the bitch were being paraded. The bitch was excited, straining at the leash as she was led about the ring. ‘She looks lively,’ Sharpe said.
‘A lovely little killer,’ Pierce declared, ‘quick as a fish, she is.’
‘But too lively,’ Sharpe said. ‘She’ll waste effort.’
‘You’re Dick Sharpe, aren’t you?’ The knife vanished.
‘Jem doesn’t know who I am,’ Sharpe said, ‘and I want it to stay that way.’
‘I’ll not tell the bastard. Is it really you?’
Sharpe nodded.
‘An officer?’
Sharpe nodded again.
Pierce laughed. ‘Bloody hell. England’s run out of gentlemen?’
Sharpe smiled. ‘That’s about it, Dan. Have you got money on the bitch?’
‘The dog,’ Pierce said. ‘He’s good and steady.’ He stared at Sharpe. ‘You really are Dick Sharpe.’
‘I really am,’ Sharpe said, though it had been twenty years since he had last been in this rat pit. Beaky Malone had always prophesied that Sharpe would end up on the gallows, but somehow he had survived. He had run from London, gone to Yorkshire, murdered, joined the army to escape the law and there found a home. He had been promoted until, one hot day on a dusty battlefield in India, he had become an officer. Sharpe had come from this gutter and earned the King’s commission and now he was going back. The army did not want him, so he would say goodbye to the army, but first he needed money.
He watched as the timekeeper held up a great turnip watch. A coin had been tossed and the bitch was to fight first. The dog was lifted out of the ring and two cages were handed across the planks. A small boy unlatched the cages, tipped them, then vaulted the planks.
Thirty-six rats scuttled about the sand.
‘Are you up and ready?’ the ringmaster shouted. The crowd cheered.
‘Five seconds!’ the timekeeper, a drunken schoolmaster, called, then peered at his watch. ‘Now!’
The bitch was released and Sharpe and Pierce leaned forward. The bitch was good. The first two rats died before the others even realized a predator was among them. She nipped them by the neck, shook them vigorously and dropped them promptly, but then her excitement overtook her and she wasted valuable seconds snapping at three or four rats in turn. ‘Shake them!’ her owner bawled, his voice lost in the crowd’s cheers. She ran into a knot of the rats and started working again, ignoring the beasts that attacked her, but then she would not let go of a big black victim. ‘Drop it! Dead ‘un!’ her owner screamed. ‘Drop it! Drop it, you bastard bitch! It’s a dead ’un!’
‘She’s too young,’ Pierce said. ‘I told Phil to give her another six months. Let her practise, I said, but he wouldn’t listen. Cloth ears, that’s his problem.’ He stared at Sharpe. ‘I can’t believe it. Dick Sharpe a bloody jack pudding.’ He meant officer, for a jack pudding was a motley fool from the fairground, a clown dressed in fake finery and with donkey’s ears pinned to his hair. ‘Hocking didn’t recognize you?’
‘I don’t want him to either.’
‘I won’t tell the bastard,’ Pierce said, then settled back to watch the bitch hunt the last few rats. The sand was speckled with fresh blood. A few of the rats were merely crippled and those who had wagered on the bitch were shouting at her to finish them off. ‘I thought when I first saw her,’ Pierce said, ‘that she’d hunt like her mother did. Christ, but that bitch was a cold-hearted killer. But this one’s too young. She’ll get better.’ He watched her kill a rat that had been particularly elusive. She shook it hard, spraying blood onto the customers closest to the barrier. ‘It ain’t the teeth that kills ’em,’ Pierce said, ‘but the shaking.’
‘I know.’
‘’Course you do, ’course you do.’ Pierce watched as the boy climbed into the ring and shoved the bloodied rats into a sack. ‘Lumpy’s still trying to sell the corpses,’ he said. ‘You’d think someone would want to eat them. Nothing wrong with rat pie, especially if you don’t know what it is. But he can’t sell ’em.’ He looked down at Jem Hocking. ‘Is there to be trouble?’
‘Would you mind?’
Pierce picked at a tooth with a long fingernail. ‘No,’ he said curtly, ‘and Lumpy will be pleased. He wants to run the book here, but Hocking won’t let him.’
‘Won’t let him?’
‘Hocking owns the place now,’ Pierce said. ‘He owns every house in the street, the bastard.’ Two more cages had been tipped into the arena and the new rats, black and slick, scampered about the ring as a roar from the crowd greeted the dog. It was held above the skittering sand for a second, then dropped and began to fight. It went about its business efficiently and Pierce grinned. ‘Jem’s going to lose his shirt on this one.’
The bitch had been good and quick, but the dog was old and experienced. It killed swiftly and the crowd’s cheers got louder. Most, it seemed, had bet on the dog and the pleasure of winning was doubled by the knowledge that Jem Hocking was about to lose. Except that Jem Hocking was not a man to lose. The dog had killed about twenty of the rats when suddenly a spectator on the front bench leaned forward and vomited over the barrier and the dog immediately ran to gobble up the half-digested meat pie. The owner screamed at it, the crowd jeered and Hocking’s face showed nothing.
‘Bastard,’ Pierce said.
‘Old trick that,’ Sharpe said, leaning back. He fingered his sabre’s hilt. He did not like the weapon’s curved blade which was too light to do real damage, but it was the official weapon of Rifle officers. He would have preferred one of the basket-hilted broadswords that the Scots carried into battle, but regulations were regulations and the greenjackets had insisted he equip himself properly. A sword or sabre, they said, was merely decorative and an officer who was forced to use one in battle had already failed so it did not matter that the light cavalry sabre was unhandy, but Sharpe had used enough swords in battle and he had never failed. Go into a breach, he had told Colonel Beckwith, and you’ll be glad enough of a butchering sword, but the Colonel had shaken his head. ‘It is not the business of Rifle officers to be in the breach,’ he had said. ‘Our job is to be outside, killing from a distance. That is why we have rifles, not muskets.’ Not that any of it mattered to Sharpe now. He would make his money, resign his commission, sell the sabre and forget the Rifles.
Lumpy closed the entertainment by announcing that the next evening would be a mixture of cockfighting and badger-baiting. They would be Essex badgers, he boasted, as though Essex gave the animals special fighting skills, though in truth it was simply the closest source to Wapping. The crowd streamed out and Sharpe went back to the storeroom. Dan Pierce went with him. ‘I wouldn’t stay, Dan,’ Sharpe said. ‘Likely to be trouble.’
‘Trouble for you, Dick,’ Pierce tried to warn his old friend. ‘He’s never on his own.’
‘I’ll be all right. You can buy me an ale afterwards.’
Pierce left and Sharpe went into the stinking room. The badgers were all in wire cages stacked against one wall while the rest of the room was occupied by a table on which a dim oil lamp burned, and by an incongruous bed that was plump with sheets, blankets and pillows. Lumpy’s girls, the ones who sold gin and hot pies, used the room for their other business, but it would suit Sharpe perfectly. He put his pack and greatcoat on the table, then unsheathed the sabre which he placed on the badger cages with the hilt towards him. The beasts, pungent and sullen, stirred behind their wire.
He waited, listening to the sounds fading in the shed. A year ago he had been living in a house with eight rooms that he and Grace had rented close to Shorncliffe. He had fitted in with the battalion well enough then, for Grace had charmed the other officers, but why should he have ever thought it could last? It had been like a dream. Except Grace’s brothers and their lawyers kept intruding on the dream, demanding she leave Sharpe, even offering her money if she did the decent thing, and other lawyers had tied up her dead husband’s will in a tangle of words, delay and obfuscation. Get her out of your head, he told himself, but she would not leave and when the footsteps sounded outside the storeroom Sharpe’s sight was blurred with tears. He brushed his eyes as the door opened.
Jem Hocking came in with the girl, leaving the door ajar with the two young men just outside. The child was thin, frightened, red-haired and pale. She glanced at Sharpe then began to cry silently. ‘This is Emily,’ Jem Hocking said, tugging the girl’s hand. ‘The nice man wants to play games with you, ain’t that right, Major?’
Sharpe nodded. The anger he was feeling was so huge that he did not trust himself to speak.
‘I don’t want her hurt bad,’ Hocking said. He had a face the colour of beefsteak and a nose erupting with broken veins. ‘I want her back in one piece. Now, Major, the money?’ He patted the satchel that was hanging from his shoulder. ‘Ten pounds.’
‘In the pack,’ Sharpe said, nodding at the table, ‘just open the top flap.’ Hocking turned to the table and Sharpe edged the door closed with his shoulder as he moved to Emily’s side. He picked her up and placed her on the bed, then whipped the blanket up over her head. She cried aloud as she was smothered in woollen darkness and Hocking turned as Sharpe pulled the sabre off the cage tops. Hocking opened his mouth, but the blade was already against his throat. ‘Not a word,’ Sharpe said. He shot the door bolt. ‘All your money, Jem. Put the satchel on the table and empty your pockets into it.’
Jem Hocking, despite the sabre at his throat, did not look alarmed. ‘You’re mad,’ he said calmly.
‘Money, Jem, on the table.’
Jem Hocking shook his head in puzzlement. This was his kingdom and it did not seem possible that anyone would dare challenge him. He took a deep breath, plainly intending to call for help, but the sabre’s tip was suddenly hard in the flesh of his neck, drawing a trickle of blood.
‘On the table, Jem,’ Sharpe said, the softness of his voice belying the anger in his soul.
Hocking still did not obey. He frowned instead. ‘Do I know you?’
‘No,’ Sharpe said.
‘You ain’t getting a penny of mine, son,’ Hocking said.
Sharpe twisted the blade. Hocking stepped back, but Sharpe kept the sabre in his neck. He had only broken Hocking’s skin, nothing more, but he pushed a little harder and twisted again. ‘Money,’ he said, ‘on the table.’
‘Daft as a pudding, boy,’ Hocking said. ‘You ain’t going anywhere, not now. I’ve got lads out there and they’ll cut you into tatters.’
‘Money,’ Sharpe said, and reinforced the demand by whipping the sabre’s tip twice across Hocking’s face to leave long thin cuts in his cheeks and nose. Hocking looked astonished. He touched a finger to his cheek and seemed not to believe the blood he saw.
There was a knock on the door. ‘Mister Hocking?’ a voice called.
‘We’re just settling the money,’ Sharpe shouted, ‘aren’t we, Jem? On the table or I’ll bloody fillet you.’
‘You ain’t an officer, are you? You dress up, don’t you, but you picked the wrong man this time, son.’
‘I’m an officer,’ Sharpe said, and drew blood from Hocking’s neck. ‘A real officer,’ he added. ‘Now empty your pockets.’
Hocking dropped the satchel on the table, then thrust a hand into his greatcoat pocket. Sharpe waited to hear the chink of coins, but there was no such sound and so, as Hocking brought his hand out of the pocket, Sharpe slashed down hard with the sabre. He slit the ball of Hocking’s thumb, then slashed the blade again and Hocking, who had been drawing a small pistol from his coat pocket, let the weapon go to clutch at his wounded fingers. The pistol fell to the floor.
‘Empty your damned pockets,’ Sharpe said.
Hocking hesitated, wondering whether to call for help, but there was an implacability about Sharpe that suggested he had best humour him. He flinched as he used his wounded right hand to pull coins from his pocket. The door rattled as someone tried the latch. ‘Wait!’ Sharpe called. He saw gold coins among the silver and copper. ‘Keep going, Jem,’ he said.
‘You’re a dead man,’ Hocking grumbled, but found more cash that he piled on the table. ‘That’s all,’ he said.
‘Back against the cages, you bastard,’ Sharpe said and prodded Hocking towards the badgers. Then, still holding the sabre in his right hand, Sharpe forced handfuls of the coins into the satchel. He could not look closely at the money, for he needed to watch Hocking, but he reckoned there was at least eighteen or nineteen pounds there.
The click saved Sharpe. It came from behind him and he recognized the sound of a pistol being cocked and he stepped to one side and risked a quick glance to see that there was a hole in the wooden wall. Lumpy’s peephole, no doubt, and one of the young men outside must have seen what was happening and Sharpe stepped to the bed just as a pistol flamed through the hole to mist the room with smoke. Emily screamed from beneath her blanket and Jem Hocking snatched a badger cage and hurled it at Sharpe.
The cage bounced heavily off Sharpe’s shoulder. Hocking was scrabbling for the pistol when Sharpe kicked him in the face, then slashed the sabre across his head. Hocking sprawled by the table. Sharpe snatched up the small pistol and fired it at the wall beside the peephole. The timber splintered, but no shout sounded on the far side. Then he knelt on Hocking’s belly and held the sabre against the big man’s throat. ‘You do know me,’ Sharpe said. ‘You bloody do know me.’
He had not intended to reveal his name. He had told himself he would rob Hocking, but now, smelling the gun smoke, he knew he had always wanted to kill the bastard. No, he had wanted more. He had wanted to see Hocking’s face when the man learned that one of his children had come back, but come back as a jack pudding. Sharpe smiled, and for the first time there was fear on Hocking’s face. ‘I really am an officer, Jem, and my name’s Sharpe. Dick Sharpe.’ He saw the disbelief on Hocking’s face. Disbelief, astonishment and fear. That was reward enough. Hocking stared, wide-eyed, recognizing Sharpe and, at the same time, unable to comprehend that one of his boys was now an officer. Then the incomprehension turned to terror for he understood that the boy wanted revenge. ‘You bastard,’ Sharpe said, ‘you goddamned piece of shit.’ The anger was livid now. ‘Remember whipping me?’ he asked. ‘Whipping me till the blood ran? I remember, Jem. That’s why I came back.’
‘Listen, lad.’
‘Don’t you bloody lad me,’ Sharpe said. ‘I’m grown now, Jem. I’m a soldier, Jem, an officer, and I’ve learned to kill.’
‘No!’
‘Yes,’ Sharpe said, and the bitterness was unassuageable now, drenching him, consuming him, and the years of pain and misery were driving his right arm as he sawed the blade hard and fast across Hocking’s throat. Hocking’s last shout was abruptly cut short as a fountain of blood sprang up. The big man heaved, but Sharpe was snarling and still slicing down with the blade, cutting through muscle and gullet and a flood of blood until the steel juddered against the bone. Hocking’s breath bubbled at his opened neck as Sharpe stood and stabbed the sabre down so hard that the blade flexed as its tip drove into the back of Hocking’s skull. ‘One in the eye, Jem,’ Sharpe snarled, ‘you bastard.’ The door shook as the men outside tried to force the bolt from its seating. Sharpe kicked the door. ‘We ain’t done,’ he shouted.
There was a sudden silence outside. But how many men were out there? And the two pistol shots would have been heard. Men would be watching the rat shed, knowing that there would be pickings to be had from the violence. Bloody fool, Sharpe told himself. Grace had forever told him he had to think before he let his anger rule his actions, and he had not really meant to kill Hocking, only to rob him. No, that was not true, he had wanted to kill Hocking for years, but he had done it clumsily, angrily, and now he was trapped. There were still some coins on the table, one of them a guinea, and he threw them onto the bed. ‘Emily?’
‘Sir?’ a small voice whimpered.
‘That money’s for you. Hide it. And stay hidden yourself now. Lie down.’
Still silence outside, but that meant nothing. Sharpe blew out the oil lamp, then pulled on his coat and pack. He hung the satchel across his chest, dragged the sabre free of Hocking’s face, then went to the door and slid the bolt back as silently as he could. He lifted the latch and eased the door ajar. He reckoned the two men only had one pistol between them, but both would have knives and cudgels and he half expected them to charge when they saw the door crack open, but instead they waited. They knew Sharpe had to come out eventually and so they were waiting for him. He crouched and felt for the badger cage that had been thrown at him. He placed the cage beside the door and slid its hinged flap open.
A small light came from the shed’s far end, just enough to reveal a heavy dark shadow that crept out of the cage and snuffled its way forward. It was a big beast that tried to turn back into the storeroom’s darkness, but Sharpe nudged it with his sabre tip and the animal lumbered out into the larger space.
The pistol banged, flashing the dark with searing light. The badger squealed, then a club broke its spine. Sharpe had pulled the door open and was through it before the men outside realized they were wasting effort on an animal. The sabre hissed and one man yelped, then Sharpe scythed the blade back at the second man who ducked away. Sharpe did not wait, but ran to the back of the shed where he remembered an alley that led to a noxious ditch up which small lighters could be dragged from the Thames. One of the two men was following him, blundering in the shed’s darkness. Sharpe shouldered the door open and ran down the alley. Two men were there, but both stepped aside when they saw the sabre. Sharpe twisted right and ran towards the big warehouse where tobacco was stored and where, in his childhood, a gang of counterfeiters had forged their coins.
‘Catch him!’ a voice shouted and Sharpe heard a rush of feet.
He twisted into another alley. The shouting was loud now. Men were pursuing him, not to avenge Hocking whom they did not even know was dead, but because Sharpe was a stranger in their gutters. The wolves had found their courage and Sharpe ran, the sabre in his hand, as the hue and cry filled the dark behind. The pack, greatcoat and satchel were heavy, the lanes were foot-clogging with mud and dung, and he knew he must find a lair soon, so he twisted into a narrow passage that ran past the Mint’s great wall, twisted left, right, left again and at last saw a dark doorway where he could crouch and catch his breath. He listened as men pounded past the alley’s entrance, then leaned back as the noise of the hunt faded northwards.
He grimaced when he realized his jacket was soaked in blood. That must wait. For now he sheathed the sabre, hid the scabbard beneath his greatcoat and then, with the pack in his hand, he went westwards through alleys and lanes he half remembered from childhood. He felt safer as he passed the Tower where yellow lights flared through high narrow windows, but he constantly looked behind in case anyone followed. Most of his pursuers had stayed as a pack, but some cleverer ones might have stalked him more silently. By now they knew he was worth killing, not just for the value of his sabre and his coat’s silver buttons, but for the coins he had thieved from Hocking. He was any man’s prey. The city streets were empty and twice he thought he heard footsteps behind him, but he saw no one. He went on west.
The streets became busier once he passed Temple Bar and he reckoned he was safer now, though he still looked back. He hurried along Fleet Street, then turned north into a confusing tangle of narrow alleys. It had begun to rain, he was tired. A crowd of men streamed from a tavern and Sharpe instinctively turned away from them, going into a wider street he recognized as High Holborn. He stopped there to catch his breath. Had he been followed?
Yellow light streamed from windows across the street. Go to Seven Dials, he thought, and find Maggie Joyce. The rain was coming down harder now, drumming on the roof of a parked carriage. Another carriage splashed by and its dim lamps showed a green-and-yellow painted board on the building with the glowing windows. Two watchmen, buttons shining on blue coats and with long staves in their hands, walked slowly past. Had the watch heard the hue and cry? They would be looking for a bloodstained army officer if they had and Sharpe decided he should go to earth. The carriage lamps had revealed that the tavern was the French Horn. The place had once been popular with the musicians from the theatre in nearby Drury Lane, but more recently it had been bought by an old soldier who was partial to any officer who happened to be in town, and throughout the army it was now known as the Frog Prick.
Beefsteak, Sharpe thought. Steak and ale, a bed and a warm fire. He had wanted to leave the army, but he was still an officer, so the Frog Prick would welcome him. He hefted the pack, crossed the street and climbed the steps.
No one took any notice of him. Perhaps half the patrons in the half-filled taproom were officers, though many of those in civilian clothes might also have been in the army. Sharpe knew none of them. He found an empty table in a shadowed spot by the wall and dropped his pack and took off his rain-soaked coat. A red-haired woman whose apron straps were decorated with the shako plates of a dozen regiments acknowledged that the tavern had a bed to spare for the night. ‘But you’ll have to share it,’ she went on, ‘and I’ll thank you not to wake the gentleman when you go up there. He went to bed early.’ She suddenly grimaced as she realized there was blood on Sharpe’s green jacket.
‘A thief tried to take this,’ Sharpe explained, patting the satchel. ‘You can give me a pail of cold water?’
‘You’ll want something to clean your boots too?’ she asked.
‘And a pot of ale,’ Sharpe said, ‘and a steak. A thick one.’
‘Haven’t seen many riflemen lately,’ the woman said. ‘I hear they’re going abroad.’
‘I hear the same.’
‘Where to?’ she asked.
‘No one knows,’ he said.
She leaned close to him. ‘Copenhagen, sweetheart,’ she whispered, ‘and just make sure you come home in one piece.’
‘Copen—’ Sharpe began.
‘Shh.’ She put a finger to her lips. ‘You ever got a question about the army, darling, you come to the Frog Prick. We know the answers two days before the Horse Guards ask the questions.’ She grinned and walked away.
Sharpe opened the satchel and tried to guess how much cash was inside. At least twenty pounds, he reckoned. So crime does pay, he told himself, and shifted his chair so that his back was to the room. Twenty pounds. A man could make a good start in a new life with twenty pounds.
Twenty pounds! A decent night’s work, he thought, though he was angry at himself for having botched the killing. He had been lucky to escape unscathed. He doubted he would be in trouble with the law, for Wapping folk were reluctant to call in the constables. Plenty of men had seen that it was a Rifle officer who had been with Hocking and who, presumably, had done the murder in the back of Beaky Malone’s Tavern, but Sharpe doubted the law would care or even know. Hocking’s body would be carried to the river and dumped on the ebbing tide to drift ashore at Dartford or Tilbury. Gulls would screech over his guts and peck out his remaining eye. No one would hang for Jem Hocking.
At least Sharpe hoped no one would hang for Jem Hocking.
But he was still a wanted man. He had run out of Wapping with a small fortune and there were plenty of men who would like to find him and take that fortune away. Hocking’s mastiffs for a start, and they would look for him in just such a tavern as the Frog Prick. So stay here one night, he told himself, then get out of London for a while. Just as he made that decision there was a sudden commotion at the tavern door that made him fear his pursuers had already come for him, but it was only a boisterous group of men and women hurrying out of the rain. The men shook water from umbrellas and plucked cloaks from the women’s shoulders. Sharpe suspected they had come from the nearby theatre, for the women wore scandalously low-cut dresses and had heavily made-up faces. They were actresses, probably, while the men were all army officers, gaudy in scarlet coats, gold braid and red sashes, and Sharpe looked away before any could catch his eye. ‘Good liquor, I stoutly maintain,’ one of the red-coated officers called, ‘gives genius a better discerning!’ That odd statement provoked a cheer. Tables and chairs were shifted to make room for the party which was evidently known to a score of men in the room. ‘You look in the pink of perfection, my dear,’ the officer told one of the women, and was mocked for his gallantry by his fellows.
Sharpe scowled at his ale. Grace had loved the theatre, but it was not his world, not any more, so damn it, he thought. He would not be an officer much longer. He had money now, so he could go into the world and start again. He drank the ale, gulping it down, suddenly aware of how thirsty he was. He needed a wash. He needed to soak his jacket in cold water. All in good time, he thought. Bed first, sleep or try to sleep. Try to sleep instead of thinking about Grace, and in the morning think what to do with the rest of his life.
Then a heavy hand dropped on his shoulder. ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ a harsh voice said, ‘and here you are.’
And Sharpe, trapped, could not move.
CHAPTER THREE
‘I never forget a face,’ Major General Sir David Baird said. He had taken a step back, alarmed by the ferocity of the scowl with which Sharpe had greeted him. ‘It is Sharpe, isn’t it?’ Baird asked, but was now met with a stare of incomprehension. ‘Well, is it or isn’t it?’ Baird demanded brusquely.
Sharpe, recovering from his astonishment, nodded. ‘It is, sir.’
‘I helped save you from a flogging once, and now you’re an officer. The Lord’s providences are incomprehensible, Mister Sharpe.’
‘They are, sir.’
Baird, a huge man, tall and muscled, was in a red uniform coat that was heavy with epaulettes and gold braid. He scowled at his companions, the group who had just arrived with wet umbrellas and painted women. ‘Those young men over there are aides to the Duke of York,’ he said, ‘and His Majesty insisted they take me to the theatre. Why? I cannot tell. Have you ever been forced into a theatre, Sharpe?’
‘Once, sir.’ And everyone had stared at Grace and talked of her behind their hands and she had endured it, but wept afterwards.
‘She Stoops to Conquer, what kind of name for an entertainment is that?’ Baird asked. ‘I was asleep by the end of the prologue so I’ve no idea. But I’ve been thinking of you lately, Mister Sharpe. Thinking of you and looking for you.’
‘For me, sir?’ Sharpe could not hide his puzzlement.
‘Is that blood on your coat? It is! Good God, man, don’t tell me the bloody Frogs have landed.’
‘It was a thief, sir.’
‘Not another one? A captain of the Dirty Half Hundred was killed just two days ago, not a hundred yards from Piccadilly! It must have been footpads, the bastards. I hope you hurt the man?’
‘I did, sir.’
‘Good.’ The General sat opposite Sharpe. ‘I heard you’d been commissioned. I congratulate you. You did a fine thing in India, Sharpe.’
Sharpe blushed. ‘I did my duty, sir.’
‘But it was a hard duty, Sharpe, a very hard duty. Good God! Risking the Tippoo’s cells? I spent enough time in that black bastard’s hands not to wish it on another man. But the fellow’s dead now, God be thanked.’
‘Indeed, sir,’ Sharpe said. He had killed the Tippoo himself, though he had never admitted it, and it had been the Tippoo’s jewels that had made Sharpe a rich man. Once.
‘And I keep hearing your name,’ Baird went on with an indecent relish. ‘Making scandal, eh?’
Sharpe winced at the accusation. ‘Was that what I was doing, sir?’
Baird was not a man to be delicate. ‘You were once a private soldier and she was the daughter of an earl. Yes, Sharpe, I’d say you were making scandal. So what happened?’
‘She died, sir.’ Sharpe felt the tears threatening, so looked down at the table. The silence stretched and he felt an obscure need to fill it. ‘Childbirth, sir. A fever.’
‘And the child with her?’
‘Yes, sir. A boy.’
‘Good Christ, man,’ Baird said bluffly, embarrassed by the tears that dropped onto the table. ‘You’re young. There’ll be others.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You!’ This peremptory demand was to one of the serving girls. ‘A bottle of port and two glasses. And I’ll take some cheese if you’ve anything edible.’
‘Lady Grace’s family,’ Sharpe said, suddenly needing to tell the story, ‘claimed the child wasn’t mine. Said it had been her husband’s, and so the lawyers baked me in a pie. Took everything, they did, because the child died after its mother. They said it was the heir to her husband, see?’ His tears were flowing now. ‘I don’t mind losing everything, sir, but I do mind losing her.’
‘Pull yourself together, man,’ Baird snapped. ‘Stop snivelling.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ Baird said, ‘and you don’t piddle away your damned life because you don’t like His dispositions.’
Sharpe sniffed and looked up into Baird’s scarred face. ‘Piddling away my life?’
‘I’ve been keeping an eye on you, Sharpe,’ Baird said. ‘D’you know how many lives you saved by blowing that mine in Seringapatam? Scores! And my life among them. If it weren’t for you, Sharpe, I’d be dead.’ He emphasized this by stabbing Sharpe’s chest with a big forefinger. ‘Dead and buried, d’you doubt it?’
Sharpe did not, but he said nothing. Baird had led the assault on the Tippoo Sultan’s stronghold and the General had led from the front. The Scotsman would indeed be dead, Sharpe thought, if Sharpe, a private then, had not blown the mine that had been intended to trap and annihilate the storming party. Dust and stones, Sharpe remembered, and flame billowing down a sunlit street and the air filling with smoke and the noise rolling about him like a thousand trundling barrels, and then in the silence afterwards that was not silent at all, the moaning and screaming and the pale flames crackling.
‘Wellesley made you up, didn’t he?’ Baird asked.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Not like Wellesley to do a man a favour,’ the General observed sourly. ‘Tight-fisted, he is.’ Baird had never liked Sir Arthur Wellesley. ‘So why did he do it? For Seringapatam?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Yes, sir, no, sir, what are you, Sharpe? A bloody schoolboy? Why did the man promote you?’
Sharpe shrugged. ‘I was useful to him, sir. At Assaye.’
‘Useful?’
‘He was in trouble,’ Sharpe said. The General had been unhorsed, was surrounded and doomed, but Sergeant Sharpe had been there and it was the Indians who died instead.
‘In trouble?’ Baird sneered at Sharpe’s modesty. ‘It must have been desperate trouble if it persuaded Wellesley to do you a favour. Though how much of a favour was it?’ The question was a shrewd one and Sharpe did not try to answer it, but it seemed Baird knew the answer anyway. ‘Wallace wrote to me after you joined his regiment,’ the General went on, ‘and told me that you were a good soldier, but a bad officer.’
Sharpe bridled. ‘I tried my best, sir.’ Wallace had been the commanding officer of the 74th, a Scottish regiment, and Sharpe had joined it after he had been commissioned by Sir Arthur Wellesley. It had been Wallace who had recommended Sharpe to the 95th, but Sharpe was no happier in the new regiment. Still a failure, he thought.
‘Not easy, coming up from the ranks,’ Baird admitted. ‘But if Wallace says you’re a good soldier, then that’s a compliment. And I need a good soldier. I’ve been ordered to find a man who can look after himself in a difficult situation. Someone who ain’t afraid of a fight. I remembered you, but wasn’t sure where to find you. I should have known to look in the Frog Prick. Eat your steak, man. I can’t abide good meat getting cold.’
Sharpe finished the beef as the General’s port and cheese were put on the table. He let Baird pour him a glass before he spoke again. ‘I was thinking of leaving the army, sir,’ he admitted.
Baird looked at him in disgust. ‘To do what?’
‘I’ll find work,’ Sharpe said. Maybe he would go to Ebenezer Fairley, the merchant who had shown him friendship on the voyage home from India, or perhaps he would thieve. That was how he had started in life. ‘I’ll get by,’ he said belligerently.
Sir David Baird cut the cheese which crumbled under his knife. ‘There are three kinds of soldier, Sharpe,’ he said. ‘There are the damned useless ones, and God knows there’s an endless supply of those. Then there are the good solid lads who get the job done, but would piss in their breeches if you didn’t show them how their buttons worked. And then there’s you and me. Soldiers’ soldiers, that’s who we are.’
Sharpe looked sceptical. ‘A soldier’s soldier?’ he asked.
‘We’re the men who clean up after the parade, Sharpe. The carriages and kings go by, the bands play, the cavalry prances past like bloody fairies, and what’s left is a mess of dung and litter. We clean it up. The politicians get the world into tangles, then ask their armies to make things right. We do their dirty work, Sharpe, and we’re good at it. Very good. You might not be the best officer in King George’s army, but you’re a bloody fine soldier. And you like the life, don’t tell me you don’t.’
‘Being a quartermaster?’ Sharpe sneered.
‘Aye, that too. Someone has to do it, and as often as not they give it to a man up from the ranks.’ He glared at Sharpe and then, unexpectedly, grinned. ‘So you’ve fallen out with Colonel Beckwith too, have you?’
‘I reckon so, sir, yes.’
‘How?’
Sharpe considered the question and decided it could not be answered truthfully. He could not say he did not fit into the mess, it was too vague, too self-pitying, so he answered with a half-truth. ‘They’ve marched off, sir, and left me to clean up the barracks. I’ve fought more battles than any of them, seen more enemies and killed more men than all of them put together, but that don’t count. They don’t want me, sir, so I’m getting out.’
‘Don’t be such a bloody fool,’ Baird growled. ‘In a year or two, Sharpe, there’s going to be enough war for every man jack in this army. So far all we’ve been doing is pissing around the edge of the French, but sooner or later we’re going to have to tackle the bastards head on. We’ll need all the officers we can get then, and you’ll have your chance. You might be a quartermaster now, but ten years from now you’ll be leading a battalion, so just be patient.’
‘I’m not sure Colonel Beckwith will want me back, sir. I’m not supposed to be in London. I’m supposed to be at Shorncliffe.’
‘Beckwith will do what I tell him,’ Baird growled, ‘and I’ll tell him to kiss your bum if you do this job for me.’
Sharpe liked Baird. Most soldiers liked Baird. He might be a general, but he was as tough as any man in the ranks. He could outswear the sergeants, outmarch the Rifles and outfight any man in green or scarlet. He was a fighter, not a bureaucrat. He had risen high enough in the army, but there were rumours that he had enemies higher still, men who disliked his bluntness. ‘What kind of job, sir?’ Sharpe asked.
‘One where you might die, Sharpe,’ Baird said with relish. He drained his glass of port and poured another. ‘We’re sending a guardsman to Copenhagen. Our interest in Copenhagen is supposed to be secret, but I dare say every French agent in London already knows it. This fellow is going there tomorrow and I want someone to keep him alive. He’s not a real soldier, Sharpe, but an aide to the Duke of York. Not one of those’ – he saw Sharpe glancing at the table of theatre-goers – ‘but the same sort of creature. He’s a courtier, Sharpe, not a soldier. You won’t find a better man for standing sentinel over the royal piss pot, but you wouldn’t want to follow him into a breach, not if you wanted to win.’
‘He’s going tomorrow?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Aye, I know, short notice. We had another man ready to hold his hand, but he was the fellow who was murdered two days ago. So the Duke of York tells me to find a replacement. I thought of you, but didn’t know where you were, then God sent me to the theatre and I find you guzzling ale afterwards. Well done, God. And you won’t mind slitting a few Frog throats?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Our bloody guardsman says he doesn’t need a protector. Says there’s no danger, but what does he know? And his master, the Duke, insists he takes a companion, someone who knows how to fight and, by God, Sharpe, you know how to fight. Almost as well as me!’
‘Almost, sir,’ Sharpe agreed.
‘So you’re under orders, Sharpe.’ The General gripped the port bottle by the neck and pushed back his chair. ‘Are you sleeping here?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So am I, and I’ve got a carriage coming at seven o’clock to take us to Harwich.’ Baird stood, then paused. ‘It’s a strange thing, Sharpe, but if you do your job properly you’ll stop a war. Odd thing for a soldier to do, don’t you think? Where’s our advancement if we can’t fight? But all the same I doubt we’ll be beating our swords into ploughshares any time soon, not unless the Frogs suddenly see sense. So till tomorrow, young man.’ Baird gave Sharpe a brusque nod and went back to his companions, while Sharpe, with a start of surprise, realized he had not been told why the guardsman was being sent to Copenhagen, nor been asked whether he was willing to go with him. Baird, it appeared, had taken his assent for granted, and Baird, Sharpe reckoned, was right, for, like it or not, he was a soldier.
The General was in a foul mood at seven o’clock next morning. His aide, a Captain Gordon, mimed the cause of Baird’s ill temper by tipping an imaginary bottle to his lips, thus cautioning Sharpe to tact. Sharpe kept silent, settling on the carriage’s front seat, while Baird grumbled that London stank, the weather was wretched and the coach seats lumpy. The vehicle lurched as the inn servants strapped the General’s luggage on the roof, then there was a further delay as a final passenger appeared and insisted that his own luggage be secured alongside Baird’s. The newcomer was a civilian who looked about thirty years old. He was very thin and had a frail, birdlike face on which, astonishingly, a black velvet beauty patch was glued. He wore a silver coat edged with white lace and carried a gold-topped stick from which a silk handkerchief hung. His hair, black as gunpowder, had been smoothed with a perfumed oil and tied with a silver ribbon. He climbed into the coach and, without a word, sat opposite Sharpe. ‘You’re late, my lord,’ Baird snapped.
The young man raised a gloved hand, fluttered his fingers as if to suggest Baird was being extremely tiresome and then closed his eyes. Baird, denied sport with his lordship, frowned at Sharpe instead. ‘There’s still blood on the coat, Sharpe.’
‘Sorry, sir. Tried to wash it out.’ The carriage jerked forward.
‘Can’t have you going to Denmark in a bloody coat, man.’
‘One supposes, Sir David,’ Captain Gordon cut in smoothly, ‘that Lieutenant Sharpe will not be wearing uniform in Denmark. The object is secrecy.’
‘Object, my arse,’ the General said helpfully. ‘He’s my nephew,’ he informed Sharpe, referring to Captain Gordon, ‘and talks like a bloody lawyer.’
Gordon smiled. ‘Do you have civilian clothes, Sharpe?’
‘I do, sir.’ Sharpe indicated his pack.
‘I suggest you don them once you’re aboard your ship,’ Gordon said.
‘“I suggest you don them.”’ Baird mimicked his nephew’s voice. ‘Bloody hellfire. Doesn’t this bloody carriage move at all?’
‘Traffic, Sir David,’ Gordon said emolliently. ‘Essex vegetables for the Saturday market.’
‘Essex bloody vegetables,’ the General complained. ‘I’m forced into a bloody theatre, Gordon, then subjected to Essex vegetables. I should have you all shot.’ He closed his bloodshot eyes.
The carriage, drawn by six horses, went first to the Tower of London where, after Sir David had sworn at the sentries, they were allowed through the gates to discover a cart guarded by a dozen guardsmen who appeared to be under the command of a very tall and very good-looking man in a pale-blue coat, silk stock, white breeches and black boots. The young man bowed as Baird clambered down from the carriage. ‘I have the gold, Sir David.’
‘I should damn well hope you do,’ Sir David growled. ‘Is there a jakes in this damn place?’
‘That way, sir.’ The young man pointed.
‘This is Sharpe,’ Baird said harshly. ‘He’s replacing Willsen, God rest his soul, and this’ – Baird was talking to Sharpe now – ‘is the man you’re keeping alive. Captain Lavisser, or should I say Captain and Major Lavisser? The bloody Guards need two ranks. Bloody fools.’
Lavisser gave Sharpe a rather startled look when he heard that the rifleman was to replace the dead Willsen, but then, as the General went to find the lavatory, the guardsman smiled and his face, which had looked sour and cynical to Sharpe, was suddenly full of friendly charm. ‘So you’re to be my companion?’ he asked.
‘So it seems, sir.’
‘Then I trust we shall be friends, Sharpe. With all my heart.’ Lavisser thrust out a hand. Sharpe took it clumsily, embarrassed by Lavisser’s effusive friendliness. ‘Poor Willsen,’ the Captain went on, clasping Sharpe’s hand in both of his. ‘To be murdered in the street! And he leaves a widow, it seems, and a daughter too. Just a child, just a child.’ He looked pained, then turned to see his guardsmen struggling to move a great wooden chest from the cart. ‘I think the gold should go inside the carriage,’ he suggested.
‘Gold?’ Sharpe asked.
Lavisser turned to him. ‘You’ve not been told the purpose of our journey?’
‘I’m to keep you alive, sir, that’s all I know.’
‘For which I shall be eternally grateful. But our purpose, Sharpe, is to carry gold to the Danes. Forty-three thousand guineas! We travel rich, eh?’ Lavisser hauled open the carriage door, motioned his men to bring the chest of gold, then noticed the carriage’s last passenger, the pale civilian in the silver coat. Lavisser looked astonished. ‘God, Pumps! Are you here?’
Pumps, if that was his real name, merely fluttered his fingers again, then shifted his elegantly booted feet as the gold was manhandled onto the carriage floor. An escort of twenty dragoons took their places ahead of the carriage, then Sir David Baird came back and complained that the chest took up all the coach’s leg room. ‘I suppose we’ll have to endure it,’ he grumbled, then rapped on the coach’s roof to signal that the journey could begin.
The General’s mood improved as the coach jolted through the soot-grimed orchards and vegetable fields about Hackney where a fitful sun chased shadows over woods and low hills. ‘You know Lord Pumphrey?’ Baird asked Lavisser, indicating the frail young man who still seemed to be asleep.
‘William and I were at Eton together,’ Lavisser answered.
Pumphrey opened his eyes, peered at Lavisser as though surprised to see him, shuddered and closed his eyes again.
‘You and I should have been to Eton,’ Baird said to Sharpe. ‘We’d have learned useful things, like which side of the pot to piss in. Did you have breakfast, Lavisser?’
‘The Lieutenant of the Tower was very hospitable, thank you, sir.’
‘They like guardsmen in the Tower,’ Baird said, implying that real soldiers would not be so welcome. ‘Captain Lavisser’ – he spoke to Sharpe now – ‘is an aide to the Duke of York. I told you that, didn’t I? But did I tell you how useless His Royal Highness is? Bloody man thinks he’s a soldier. He buggered up his campaign in Holland in ’99 and now he’s Commander in Chief. That’s what happens to you, Sharpe, when you’re the King’s son. Fortunately’ – Baird, who was plainly enjoying himself, turned to Lavisser – ‘fortunately for you royal camp-followers the army has still got one or two real soldiers. Lieutenant Sharpe is one of them. He’s a rifleman in case you don’t recognize that bloodstained green rag, and he’s a thug.’
Lavisser, who had taken no offence as his master was insulted, looked puzzled. ‘He’s a what, sir?’
‘You weren’t in India, were you?’ Sir David asked, making the question sound like an accusation. ‘A thug, Lavisser, is a killer; a brute, conscienceless and efficient killer. I’m a thug, Lavisser, and so is Mister Sharpe. You are not, and nor are you, Gordon.’
‘I nightly give thanks to the Almighty for that providence,’ Baird’s aide said happily.
‘Sharpe’s a good thug,’ Baird said. ‘He came up from the ranks and you don’t do that by being delicate. Tell ’em what you did in Seringapatam, Sharpe.’
‘Must I, sir?’
‘Yes,’ Baird insisted, so Sharpe told the story as briefly as he could. Lavisser listened politely, but Lord Pumphrey, whose presence was still a mystery to Sharpe, opened his eyes and paid very close attention, so close that he unsettled Sharpe. His lordship said nothing, however, when the lame tale was done.
Lavisser spoke instead. ‘You impress me, Mister Sharpe,’ he said fulsomely, ‘you impress me mightily.’ Sharpe did not know what to say, so gazed out of the window at a small wheatfield that looked rain-beaten. Beyond the damp wheat stood a haystack, reminding him that Grace had died between haymaking and the harvest a year before. He felt a lump in his throat. God damn it, he thought, God damn it, would it never go? He could see her in his mind’s eye, see her sitting on the terrace with her hands on her swollen belly, laughing at some poor jest. Oh, Christ, he thought, but let it pass.
He became aware that Sir David Baird was now talking about Copenhagen. The Danish King, it seemed, was mad, and the country was ruled instead by the Crown Prince. ‘Is it true you know him?’ Baird demanded of Lavisser.
‘The Crown Prince knows me, sir,’ Lavisser said carefully. ‘My grandfather is one of his chamberlains, so I have that introduction. And my master, the Duke, is his first cousin.’
‘That will be enough?’
‘More than enough,’ Lavisser said firmly. Lord Pumphrey took a watch from his pocket, fumbled with the catch, consulted it and yawned.
‘Boring you, my lord?’ Baird growled.
‘I am forever entertained by your company, Sir David,’ Lord Pumphrey said in a very high-pitched voice. He pronounced each word very distinctly, which imbued the statement with an odd authority. ‘I am enthralled by you,’ he added, tucking the watch away and closing his eyes.
‘Bloody fool,’ Sir David muttered, then looked at Sharpe. ‘We’re talking about the Danish fleet,’ he explained. ‘It’s a damn great fleet that’s holed up in Copenhagen and doing bugger all. Just mouldering away. But the Frogs would like to get their damned hands on it and replace the ships we took from them at Trafalgar. So they’re thinking of invading little Denmark and stealing their ships.’
‘And if the French do invade,’ Lavisser smoothly continued the General’s explanation, ‘then they will dominate the entrance to the Baltic and so cut off Britain’s trade. Denmark is neutral, of course, but such circumstances have hardly deterred Bonaparte in the past.’
‘It’s the Danish fleet he’s after,’ Baird insisted, ‘because the bloody man will use it to invade Britain. So we have to stop him stealing it.’
‘How do you do that, sir?’ Sharpe asked.
Baird grinned greedily. ‘By stealing it first, of course. The Foreign Office have a fellow over there trying to persuade the Danish government to send their ships to British ports, but they’re saying no. Captain Lavisser is going to change their minds.’
‘You can do that?’ Sharpe asked him.
Lavisser shrugged. ‘I intend to bribe the Crown Prince, Sharpe.’ He patted the wooden chest. ‘We are carrying Danegeld, and we shall dazzle His Majesty with glitter and befuddle him with treasure.’
Lord Pumphrey groaned. Everyone ignored him as Baird took up the explanation. ‘Captain Lavisser’s going to bribe the Crown Prince, Sharpe, and if the Frogs catch wind of what he’s doing they’ll do their best to stop him. A knife in the back will do that very effectively, so your job is to protect Lavisser.’
Sharpe felt no qualms at such a task, indeed he rather hoped he would get a chance to tangle with some Frenchmen. ‘What happens if the Danes won’t give us the fleet, sir?’ he asked Baird.
‘Then we invade,’ the General said.
‘Denmark?’ Sharpe was astonished. The woman at the Frog Prick had suggested as much, but it still seemed surprising. Fighting Denmark? Denmark was not an enemy!
‘Denmark,’ Baird confirmed. ‘Our fleet’s ready and waiting in Harwich and the Danes, Sharpe, ain’t got no choice. They either put their fleet under our protection or I’ll bloody take it from them.’
‘You, sir?’
‘Lord Cathcart’s in charge,’ Baird allowed, ‘but he’s an old woman. I’ll be there, Sharpe, and God help the Danes if I am. And your friend Wellesley’ – he said the name sourly – ‘is tagging along to see if he can learn something.’
‘He’s no friend of mine, sir,’ Sharpe said. It was true that Wellesley had made him into an officer, but Sharpe had not seen the General since India. Nor did he relish any such meeting. Grace had been a cousin of Wellesley’s, a very distant cousin, but disapproval of her behaviour had spread into the furthest reaches of her aristocratic family.
‘I’m your friend, Mister Sharpe,’ Baird said wolfishly, ‘and I don’t mind admitting I want you to fail. A fight in Denmark? I could relish that. No more talk of a man who can only fight in India.’ The bitterness was naked. Baird felt he had been unfairly treated in India, mostly because Wellesley had been offered the preferments that Baird believed he deserved. No wonder he wanted war, Sharpe thought.
They reached Harwich in the evening. The fields surrounding the small port were filled with tented camps while the damp pastures were crammed with cavalry and artillery horses. Guns were parked in the town streets and were lined wheel to wheel on the stone quay where, beside a small pile of expensive leather baggage, a man as tall and broad as Baird stood waiting. The man was dressed in servant’s black and Sharpe at first took him to be a labourer wanting a tip for carrying the baggage onto a boat, but then the man bowed his head to Lavisser who clapped him familiarly on the shoulder. ‘This is Barker,’ Lavisser told Sharpe, ‘my man. And this is Lieutenant Sharpe, Barker, who has replaced the unfortunate Willsen.’
Barker turned a flat gaze on Sharpe. Another thug, Sharpe thought, a hardened, scarred and formidable thug. He nodded at the servant who did not return the greeting, but just looked away.
‘Barker was a footpad, Sharpe,’ Lavisser said enthusiastically, ‘before I taught him manners and morals.’
‘Don’t see why you need me,’ Sharpe said, ‘if you’ve got a footpad on your side.’
‘I doubt I do need you, Sharpe,’ Lavisser said, ‘but our masters insist I have a protector, so come you must.’ He gave Sharpe another of his dazzling smiles.
A small crowd had gathered on the quay to gape at the fleet of great warships that lay in the river’s mouth, while transports, frigates and brigs were either anchored or moored nearer the small harbour where a falling tide was exposing long stretches of mud. Closest to the quay were some ungainly ships, much smaller than frigates, with low freeboards and wide hulls. ‘Bomb ships,’ Gordon, Baird’s nephew, remarked helpfully.
‘They’ve got damn great mortars in their bellies,’ Baird explained, then turned to look at the modest town. ‘A dozen well-manned bomb ships could wipe Harwich off the earth in twenty minutes,’ the General said with unholy relish. ‘It will be interesting to see what they do to a city like Copenhagen.’
‘You would not bombard Copenhagen!’ Captain Gordon sounded shocked.
‘I’d bombard London if the King demanded it,’ Baird said.
‘But not Edinburgh,’ Gordon murmured.
‘You spoke, Gordon?’
‘I remarked that time is getting short, sir. I’m sure Captain Lavisser and Lieutenant Sharpe should be embarking soon.’
Their ship was a frigate, newly painted and moored closer to Felixstowe on the river’s northern bank. ‘She’s called the Cleopatra,’ Baird’s aide said, and it was apparent that the frigate’s crew had seen the carriage’s arrival, for a ship’s boat was now pulling across the river.
A score of officers from the tented camps had gathered lower down the quay and Sharpe saw some green jackets among the scarlet. He did not want to be recognized and so he hid himself behind a great pile of herring barrels and stared down at the mud where gulls strutted and fought over fish bones. He was suddenly cold. He did not want to go to sea, and he knew that was because he had met Grace on a ship. It was made worse because a country gentleman, come in his open carriage to see the ships, was telling his daughters which of the far fleet had been at Trafalgar.
‘There, you see? The Mars? She was there.’
‘Which one is she, Papa?’
‘The black-and-yellow one.’
‘They’re all black and yellow, Papa. Like wasps.’
Sharpe stared at the ships, half listening to the girls tease their father and trying not to think of Grace teasing him, when a precise and high-pitched voice spoke behind him. ‘Are you content, Lieutenant?’
Sharpe turned to see it was Lord Pumphrey, the young and taciturn civilian who had spoken so little during the journey. ‘My lord?’
‘I first heard you were involved in this nonsense very late last night,’ Pumphrey said softly, ‘and I confess your qualities were quite unknown to me. I apologize for that, but I am not very familiar with the army list. My father once thought I should be a soldier, but he concluded I was both too clever and too delicate.’ He smiled at Sharpe who did not smile back. Lord Pumphrey sighed. ‘So I took the liberty of waking one or two acquaintances to discover something about you and they informed me that you are a most resourceful man.’
‘Am I, my lord?’ Sharpe wondered who on earth he and Lord Pumphrey knew in common.
‘I too have resources,’ Pumphrey went on. ‘I work for the Foreign Office, though, for the moment, I am reduced to serving as a civilian aide to Sir David. It quite opens one’s eyes, seeing how the military operate. So, Lieutenant, are you content?’
Sharpe shrugged. ‘It all seems a bit abrupt, my lord, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Distressingly abrupt!’ Pumphrey agreed. He was so thin and frail that it looked as though a puff of wind would blow him off the quay and dump him in the filth below, but that apparent weakness was belied by his eyes which were very intelligent. He took out a snuff box, snapped open its lid and offered some to Sharpe. ‘You don’t use it? I find it calming, and we rather need calm heads at present. This alarming excursion, Lieutenant, is being encouraged by the Duke of York. We at the Foreign Office, who might be expected to know rather more about Denmark than His Royal Highness, profoundly disapprove of the whole scheme, but the Duke, alas, has gained the support of the Prime Minister. Mister Canning wants the fleet and would rather avoid a campaign that will inevitably make Denmark into our enemy. He suggests, too, that a successful bribe will spare the Treasury the expense of such a campaign. These are cogent arguments, Lieutenant, do you not think?’
‘If you say so, my lord.’
‘Cogent indeed, and quite egregiously muddle-headed. It will all end in tears, Lieutenant, which is why the Foreign Office in its ineffable wisdom has attached me to the Danish expedition. I am deputed to pick up the pieces, so to speak.’
Sharpe wondered why his lordship wore a beauty patch on his cheek. It was a woman’s affectation, not a man’s, but Sharpe did not like to ask. Instead he watched two gulls squabble over some fish offal in the mud under the quay. ‘You think it won’t work, my lord?’
Pumphrey gazed at the ships. ‘Shall I just say, Lieutenant, that nothing I have heard suggests that the Danish Crown Prince is venal?’
‘Venal?’ Sharpe asked.
A ghost of a smile showed on his lordship’s face. ‘Nothing I have heard, Sharpe, suggests that the Crown Prince is a man amenable to bribery, and in consequence the Foreign Office is acutely concerned that the whole sorry affair might embarrass Britain.’
‘How?’
‘Suppose the Crown Prince is offended by the offer of a bribe and announces the attempt to the world?’
‘That doesn’t seem so bad,’ Sharpe said dourly.
‘It would be clumsy,’ Lord Pumphrey said severely, ‘and clumsiness is the grossest offence against good diplomacy. In truth we are bribing half the crowned heads of Europe, but we have to pretend it is not happening. But there’s worse.’ He glanced behind to make sure no one was overhearing the conversation. ‘Captain Lavisser is known to be indebted. He plays steep at Almack’s. Well, so do many others, but the fact of it is worrying.’
Sharpe smiled down at the birdlike Pumphrey. ‘He’s up to his ears in debt and you’re sending him off with a chest full of money?’
‘The Commander in Chief insists, the Prime Minister concurs and we at the Foreign Office cannot possibly suggest that the Honourable John Lavisser is anything other than scrupulously honest.’ Pumphrey said the last word very sourly, implying the opposite of what he had just stated. ‘We merely must tidy things up, Lieutenant, when the enthusiasm has died down. Nasty thing, enthusiasm. And if things do turn out ill then we would appreciate that no one was to know what happened. We don’t want the Duke and the Prime Minister to look like complete fools, do we?’
‘We don’t, my lord?’
Lord Pumphrey shuddered at Sharpe’s levity. ‘If Lavisser fails, Lieutenant, then I want you to bring him and the money out of Copenhagen to the safety of our army. We do not want the Danish government announcing a failed and clumsy attempt at a bribe.’ He took a piece of paper from his pocket. ‘If you need assistance in Copenhagen then this man may provide it.’ He held the paper out to Sharpe, then pulled it back. ‘I have to tell you, Sharpe, that I have worried greatly about revealing this name to you. The man is valuable. I devoutly hope you won’t need his help.’
‘What treason are you talking, my lord?’ Baird demanded loudly.
‘I was merely remarking on the beauty of the scene, Sir David,’ Lord Pumphrey observed in his high-pitched voice, ‘and noting to Lieutenant Sharpe the delicate tracery of the ships’ rigging. I should like a chance to depict the scene in watercolours.’
‘Good God, man, leave that to the proper bloody artists!’ Baird looked appalled. ‘That’s what the idiots are for.’
Lord Pumphrey pressed the piece of paper into Sharpe’s hand. ‘Guard that name, Lieutenant,’ he said softly. ‘You alone possess it.’
Meaning, Sharpe thought, that Lavisser had not been trusted with the man’s name. ‘Thank you, my lord,’ he said, but Lord Pumphrey had already walked away for the Cleopatra’s launch had come to the jetty that gave access to the deep-water channel. The chest was being loaded into the launch’s belly and Baird held out a hand to Lavisser. ‘I’ll bid you farewell, God speed and good fortune,’ Baird said. ‘I’ll allow I won’t mind if you fail, but there’s no point in real soldiers dying if a handful of gold can keep them alive.’ He shook Sharpe’s hand. ‘Keep our guardsman alive, Sharpe.’
‘I will, sir.’
The two officers did not speak as they were rowed out to the Cleopatra which, in her haste to use a favourable wind and tide, was already hauling her anchor. Sharpe could hear the chant of the seamen as they tramped round the capstan and see the quivering cable shedding drops of water and lumps of mud as it came from the grey river. The topmen were aloft, ready to drop the high sails. Sharpe and Lavisser scrambled up the ship’s side to be met by the dutiful squeal of bosuns’ whistles and by a harassed lieutenant who hurried them aft to the quarterdeck while the hulking Barker carried the baggage down below and a dozen seamen hauled a line to bring the gold on deck. ‘Captain Samuels begs to be excused while we get under way,’ the Lieutenant said, ‘and requests that you keep to the stern rail, gentlemen, until the sails are set.’
Lavisser grinned as the Lieutenant hurried away. ‘Meaning that Captain Samuels don’t want us in the way while he makes a muck of getting under sail. And he’s under the eye of the Admiral, no less! Rather like setting the guard at Windsor Castle. I don’t suppose you’ve ever done that, Sharpe? Placed a guard at Windsor?’
‘I haven’t, sir,’ Sharpe said.
‘You do it perfectly, then some decrepit old fool who last saw action fighting against William the Conqueror informs you that Guardsman Bloggs has an ill-set flint in his musket. And for God’s sake stop calling me “sir”,’ Lavisser said with a smile. ‘You make me feel old, and that’s dreadful unkind of you. So what was on that piece of paper little William gave to you?’
‘Little William?’
‘Lord Pumps. He was a pallid little worm at Eton and he’s no better now.’
‘It’s just his address,’ Sharpe said. ‘He says I should report to him when I get back.’
‘Nonsense,’ Lavisser said, though he did not appear offended that Sharpe had lied to him. ‘If my guess is any good then it’s the name of a man in Copenhagen who might help us, a name, I might add, that the suspicious bastards at the Foreign Office refused to give me. Divide and rule, that’s the Foreign Office way. Aren’t you going to tell me the name?’
‘If I remember it,’ Sharpe said. ‘I threw the paper overboard.’
Lavisser laughed at that untruth. ‘Don’t tell me little Pumps told you to keep it secret! He did? Poor little Pumps, he sees conspiracy everywhere. Well, so long as one of us has the name I suppose it don’t matter.’ He looked upwards as the topsails were released. The canvas shook loudly until the seamen sheeted the sails home. Men slid down shrouds and scrambled along spars to loose the mainsails. It was all so very familiar to Sharpe after his long voyage home from India. Captain Samuels, heavy and tall, stood at the white line which marked off the quarterdeck from the rest of the flush-decked frigate. He said nothing, just watched his men.
‘How long a voyage is it?’ Sharpe asked Lavisser.
‘A week? Ten days? Sometimes much longer. It all depends on Aeolus, our god of the winds. May he blow us swiftly and safely.’
Sharpe grunted an acknowledgement, then just stared ashore where the herring smokers made a haze over the land. He leaned on the stern rail, suddenly wishing he was anywhere but at sea.
Lavisser leaned on the rail beside him. ‘You ain’t happy, Sharpe,’ the guardsman said. Sharpe frowned at the words, which struck him as intrusive. He said nothing, but was acutely aware of Lavisser so close beside him. ‘Let me guess.’ The Guards Captain raised his eyes to the wheeling gulls and pretended to think for a while, then looked at Sharpe again. ‘My guess, Sharpe, is that you met Lady Grace Hale on shipboard and that you’ve not been afloat since.’ He held up a cautionary hand when he saw the anger in Sharpe’s eyes. ‘My dear Sharpe, please don’t mistake me. I feel for you, indeed I do. I met the Lady Grace once. Let me see? It must be a dozen years or more ago and I was only a sprat of fifteen, but I could spot a beauty even then. She was lovely.’
Sharpe said nothing, just watched Lavisser.
‘She was lovely and she was clever,’ the Guards Captain went on softly, ‘and then she was married off to a tedious old bore. And you, Sharpe, forgive my being forward, gave her a time of happiness. Isn’t that something to remember with satisfaction?’ Lavisser waited for Sharpe to respond, but the rifleman said nothing. ‘Am I right?’ Lavisser asked gently.
‘She left me in bloody misery,’ Sharpe admitted. ‘I can’t seem to shake it. And, yes, being on a ship brings it back.’
‘Why should you shake it?’ Lavisser asked. ‘My dear Sharpe, may I call you Richard? That’s kind of you. My dear Richard, you should be in mourning. She deserves it. The greater the affection, the greater the mourning. And it’s been cruel for you. All the gossip! It’s no one’s business what you and Lady Grace did.’
‘It was everyone’s business,’ Sharpe said bitterly.
‘And it will pass,’ Lavisser said gently. ‘Gossip is ephemeral, Richard, it vanishes like dew or smoke. Your grief remains, the rest of the world will forget. They’ve mostly forgotten already.’
‘You haven’t.’
Lavisser smiled. ‘I’ve been racking my brains all day trying to place you. It only came to me as we climbed aboard.’ A rush of feet interrupted them as seamen came aft to secure the mizzen sheets. The great sail banged above their heads, then was brought under control and the frigate picked up speed. Her ensign, blue because the fleet’s commander was an Admiral of the Blue, flapped crisply in the evening wind. ‘The grief will pass, Richard,’ Lavisser went on in a low voice, ‘it will pass. I had a sister who died, a dear thing, and I grieved for her. It’s not the same, I know, but we should not be ashamed of demonstrating our feelings. Not when it is grief for a lovely woman.’
‘It won’t stop me doing my job,’ Sharpe said stoically, fighting off the tears that threatened.
‘Of course it won’t,’ Lavisser said fervently, ‘nor, I trust, will it stop you from enjoying the fleshpots of Copenhagen. They are meagre and few, I can assure you, but such as they are we shall enjoy.’
‘I can’t afford fleshpots,’ Sharpe said.
‘Don’t be so dull, Richard! We’re sailing with forty-three thousand of the government’s guineas and I intend to steal as many of them as I decently can without getting caught.’ He smiled so broadly and with such infectious enjoyment that Sharpe had to laugh. ‘There!’ Lavisser said. ‘You see I shall be good for you!’
‘I hope so,’ Sharpe replied. He was watching the Cleopatra’s rippling wake. The tide was ebbing and the wind was out of the west so that the anchored ships presented their sterns to the frigate’s quarterdeck. The ugly bomb ships sat low in the water. One was called Thunder, another Vesuvius, then there was Aetna with Zebra close by. The frigate sailed so close to Zebra that Sharpe could look down into her welldeck which was stuffed with what looked like coils of rope, put there to cushion the shock of the two great mortars that squatted in the ship’s belly. The mortars were capped with tompions, but Sharpe guessed they threw a shell about a foot across and, because the flash of their firing would blast up into the air to lob the bombs in a high arc, the forward stays of the Zebra were not made of hemp, but of thick chain. Another eight guns, carronades by the look of them, were mounted aft of the mainmast. An ugly vessel, Sharpe thought, but a brute with massive teeth, and there were sixteen of the bomb ships moored or anchored in the river, along with a host of gun brigs that were shallow-draught vessels armed with heavy cannon. These were not ships designed to fight other ships, but to hammer targets ashore.
The Cleopatra was picking up speed now as the crew trimmed the big sails. She leaned to larboard and the water began to gurgle and seethe at her stern. The dusk was drawing in, shadowing the big seventy-fours that were the workhorses of the British fleet. Sharpe recognized some of the ships’ names from Trafalgar: the Mars, the Minotaur, the Orion and the Agamemnon, but most he had never seen before. The Goliath, belying her name, was dwarfed by the Prince of Wales, a 98-gun monster which flew the Admiral’s pennant. A gunport opened at the Prince of Wales’s bow to return the salute that the Cleopatra was firing as she passed. The sound of the guns was huge, the smoke thick and the tremor of the cannon, even though they were unshotted, shook the deck beneath Sharpe’s feet.
Only one ship, another seventy-four, lay beyond the Prince of Wales. She was a good-looking ship and Sharpe had learned enough in his voyage home from India to recognize that she was French-built, one of the many ships that had been captured from the enemy. Water gushed from her pumps as the Cleopatra sailed by and Sharpe looked up to see men pausing in their work to watch the sleek frigate pass. Then the Cleopatra left the seventy-four behind and Sharpe could read the gold-painted name scrolled across her stern. Pucelle. His heart leaped. The Pucelle! His own ship, the ship he had been aboard at Trafalgar and which was captained by his friend, Joel Chase, though whether Chase was still a captain, or aboard the Pucelle or even alive, Sharpe did not know. He just knew that he and Grace had known happiness on board the ship that had been named by her French builders for Joan of Arc, la pucelle or the virgin. He wanted to wave at the ship, but it was too far for him to recognize anyone aboard.
‘You’re welcome, gentlemen.’ Captain Samuels, dark-faced, grey-haired and scowling, had come to greet his guests. ‘Lieutenant Dunbar will show you your quarters.’ He frowned at Sharpe, who had turned to stare at the Pucelle again. ‘You find my remarks tedious, Lieutenant?’
‘I’m sorry, sir. I was aboard that ship once.’
‘The Pucelle?’
‘Didn’t she take the Revenant at Trafalgar, sir?’
‘What if she did? There were easy pickings at that battle, Lieutenant.’ The envy of a man who had not sailed with Nelson was naked in Samuels’s voice.
‘You were there, sir?’ Sharpe asked, knowing it would needle the Captain.
‘I was not, but nor were you, Lieutenant, and now you will show me the courtesy of remarking my words.’ He went on to tell them the rules of the ship, that they were not to smoke aboard, not to climb the rigging and that they must salute the quarterdeck. ‘You will take your meals in the officers’ mess and I’ll thank you not to get in the crew’s way. I’ll do my duty, God knows, but that doesn’t mean I must like it. I’m to put you and your damned cargo ashore by stealth and that I’ll do, but I’ll be glad to see the back of you both and get back to some proper sailoring.’ He left them as abruptly as he had come.
‘I do love feeling welcome,’ Lavisser murmured.
Sharpe stared aft again, but the Pucelle was lost in the dark loom of the land. She was gone and he was sailing away again. Sailing to a war, or to stop a war, or to be tangled in treachery, but whatever it was, he was still a soldier.
Sharpe was a soldier without weapons. He had come aboard the Cleopatra with his official-issue sabre, but nothing else. Nothing useful. He complained of it to Lavisser who said Sharpe could be amply supplied in Vygârd. ‘It’s the house where my mother grew up and it’s rather beautiful.’ He sounded wistful. ‘My grandfather has anything you might need; pistols, swords, everything, though I truly doubt we’ll encounter trouble. I’m sure the French do have agents in Copenhagen, but they’re hardly likely to try murder.’
‘Where’s Vygârd?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Near Køge where our hospitable Captain is supposed to put us ashore.’ They were eleven days out of Harwich, sailing a sunlit sea. Lavisser was leaning on the stern rail where he looked as though he did not have a care in the world. He wore no hat and his golden hair lifted in the wind. He had blue eyes and a sharp-cut face, so that he looked like one of his Viking ancestors who had sailed this same cold sea. ‘You really won’t need weapons, Richard,’ Lavisser went on. ‘We’ll simply borrow a carriage from Vygârd to carry the gold to Copenhagen, conclude our business with the Crown Prince and so have the satisfaction of preserving peace.’
Lavisser had spoken confidently, but Sharpe recalled Lord Pumphrey’s doubts that the Danish Crown Prince was a man open to bribery. ‘What if the Crown Prince refuses?’ he asked.
‘He won’t,’ Lavisser said. ‘My grandfather is his chamberlain and he tells me that the bribe is the Prince’s own suggestion.’ He smiled. ‘He needs money, Sharpe, to rebuild the Christiansborg Palace that got burned down a few years back. It will all be very easy and we shall go home as heroes. Where’s the danger? There are no Frogs in Vygârd, none in my grandfather’s town house in Bredgade, and the Prince’s own guards will keep the bastards well out of our way. You really do not need weapons, Richard. Indeed, I don’t wish to offend you, but your own presence, though utterly welcome, is also superfluous.’
‘Things can go wrong,’ Sharpe said stubbornly.
‘How very true. An earthquake could devastate Copenhagen. Maybe there will be a plague of toads. Perhaps the four horsemen of the apocalypse will ravage Denmark. Richard! I’m going home. I’m calling on a prince to whom I am distantly related. Like me, he’s half English. Did you know that? His mother is King George’s sister.’
Lavisser was persuasive, but Sharpe felt naked without proper weapons and other men who were senior to Lavisser had thought it wise to give the guardsman protection and so Sharpe went below to the tiny cabin that he shared with Lavisser and there pulled open his pack. His civilian clothes were inside, the good clothes that Grace had bought for him, along with the telescope that had been a grudging gift from Sir Arthur Wellesley. But at the very bottom of the canvas pack, hidden and half forgotten, was his old picklock. He pulled it out, then unfolded the slightly rusting picks. Grace had discovered it once and wondered what on earth it was. She had laughed in disbelief when he told her. ‘You could be hanged for possessing such a thing!’ she had declared.
‘I keep it for old times’ sake,’ Sharpe had explained lamely.
‘You’ve never used it, surely?’
‘Of course I’ve used it!’
‘Show me! Show me!’
He had shown her how to pick a lock, a thing he had done scores of times in the past. He was out of practice now, but the picks still made brief work of the padlock which secured the great chest in which the government money was stored. There were plenty of weapons on board the Cleopatra, but to get some Sharpe knew he would have to cross some tar-stained hands with gold.
Sharpe had money of his own. He had taken twenty-four pounds, eight shillings and fourpence halfpenny from Jem Hocking and the bulk of that had been in coppers and small silver which Sergeant Matthew Standfast, the new owner of the Frog Prick, had been happy to exchange for gold. ‘At a price, sir,’ Standfast had insisted.
‘A price?’
‘Filthy stuff!’ Standfast had poked the grimy coppers. ‘I’ll have to boil them in vinegar! What have you been doing, Lieutenant? Robbing poor boxes?’ He had exchanged the twenty-four pounds, eight shillings and fourpence halfpenny for twenty-two shining guineas that were now safely wrapped in one of Sharpe’s spare shirts.
He could have used his own money to get weapons, but he did not see why he should. Britain was sending him to Denmark and it was Britain’s enemies who threatened Lavisser, so Britain, Sharpe reckoned, should pay, and that meant taking gold from the big chest that half filled the cabin that Sharpe and Lavisser shared. Sharpe had to edge one of the hanging cot beds aside to open the chest’s lid. Inside were layers of grey canvas bags secured with wire ties that were sealed with crimped lead tags blobbed with red wax. Sharpe lifted three bags from the top layer and selected a lower bag that he slit with his knife.
Guineas. The golden horsemen of Saint George. Sharpe lifted one, looking at the image of the saint lancing the writhing dragon. Rich, thick, gold coins, and the chest had enough to suborn a kingdom, but it could spare a little for Lieutenant Sharpe and so he stole fifteen of the heavy coins that he secreted in his pockets before restoring the bags. He was just putting the last one in place when there was the thud of feet dropping down the companionway ladder immediately outside the cabin. Sharpe closed the chest lid and sat on it to hide the absence of a padlock. The cabin door opened and Barker came in with a bucket. He saw Sharpe and paused.
Sharpe pretended to be pulling on his boots. He looked up at the hulking Barker who had to stoop beneath the beams. ‘So you were a footpad, Barker?’
‘That’s what the Captain told you.’ Barker put the bucket down.
‘Where?’ Sharpe asked.
Barker hesitated, as if suspecting a trap in the question, then shrugged. ‘Bristol.’
‘Don’t know it,’ Sharpe said airily. ‘And now you’re reformed?’
‘Am I?’
‘Are you?’
Barker grimaced. ‘I’m looking for Mister Lavisser’s coat.’
Sharpe could see the padlock in a corner of the cabin and hoped Barker did not notice it. ‘So what will you do if the French interfere with us?’
Barker scowled at Sharpe. It seemed as if he had not understood the question, or else he just hated talking to Sharpe, but then he sneered. ‘How will they even know we’re there? The master speaks Danish and you and I will keep our gobs shut.’ He plucked a coat from a hook on the back of the door and left without another word.
Sharpe waited for his steps to fade, then restored the padlock to the hasp. He did not like Barker and the feeling was evidently mutual. On the face of it the man made a strange servant for Lavisser, yet Sharpe had met plenty of gentlemen who liked to mix with brutes from the gutter. Such men enjoyed listening to the stories and felt flattered by the friendships, and presumably Lavisser shared their taste. Maybe, Sharpe reflected, that explained why Lavisser was being so friendly to himself.
Next day he used two of the guineas to bribe the ship’s Master-at-Arms who made the gold vanish into a pocket with the speed of a conjurer and an hour later brought Sharpe a well-honed cutlass and two heavy sea-service pistols with a bag of cartridges. ‘I’d be obliged, sir, if Captain Samuels didn’t know about this,’ the Master-at-Arms said, ‘on account that he’s a flogger when he’s aggravated. Keep ’em hidden till you’re ashore, sir.’ Sharpe promised he would. There would be no difficulty in keeping the promise during the voyage, but he did not see how he was to carry the weapons off the ship without Captain Samuels seeing them, then thought of the chest. He asked Lavisser to put them with the gold.
Lavisser laughed when he saw the cutlass and heavy-barrelled guns. ‘You couldn’t wait till we reached Vygârd?’
‘I like to know I’m armed,’ Sharpe said.
‘Armed? You’ll look like Bluebeard if you carry that lot! But if it makes you happy, Richard, why not? Your happiness is my prime concern.’ Lavisser took the chest’s key from a waistcoat pocket and raised the lid. ‘A sight to warm your chill heart, eh?’ he said, indicating the dull grey bags. ‘A fortune in every one. I fetched it myself from the Bank of England and, Lord, what a fuss! Little men in pink coats demanding signatures, enough keys to lock up half the world, and deep suspicion. I’m sure they thought I was going to steal the gold. And why not? Why don’t you and I just divide it and retire somewhere gracious? Naples? I’ve always wanted to visit Naples where I’m told the women are heartbreakingly beautiful.’ Lavisser saw Sharpe’s expression and laughed. ‘For a man up from the ranks, Richard, you’re uncommonly easy to shock. But I confess I’m tempted. I suffer the cruel fate of being the younger son. My wretched brother will become earl and inherit the money while I am expected to fend for myself. You find that risible, yes? Where you come from everyone fends for themselves, so I shall do the same.’ He put Sharpe’s new weapons on the grey bags, then closed the chest. ‘The gold will go to Prince Frederick,’ he said, securing the padlock, ‘and there will be peace on earth and goodwill to all mankind.’
Next evening the frigate passed the northernmost tip of Jutland. The low headland was called the Skaw and it showed dull and misty in the grey twilight. A beacon burned at its tip and the light stayed in view as the Cleopatra turned south towards the Kattegat. Captain Samuels was plainly worried about that narrow stretch of water, in one place only three miles wide, which was the entrance to the Baltic and guarded on its Swedish bank by the great cannon of Helsingborg and on the Danish by the batteries of Helsingør’s Kronborg Castle. The frigate had seen few other ships between Harwich and the Skaw, merely a handful of fishing boats and a wallowing Baltic trader with her main deck heavily laden with timber, but now, sailing into the narrowing gut between Denmark and Sweden, the traffic was heavier. ‘What we don’t know’ – Captain Samuels deigned to speak to Sharpe and Lavisser on the morning after they had passed the Skaw – ‘is whether Denmark is still neutral. We can pass Helsingør by staying close to the Swedish shore, but the Danes will still see us pass and know we’re up to no good.’
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Bernard Cornwell
Richard Sharpe is sent to Copenhagen to deliver a bribe to stop the Danes handing over possession of their battle fleet to the French.It seems very easy. But nothing is easy in a Europe stirred by French ambitions. The Danes possess a battle fleet that could replace every ship the French lost at Trafalgar, and Napoleon's forces are gathering to take it. The British have to stop them, while the Danes insist on remaining neutral.Dragged into a war of spies and brutality, Sharpe finds that he is a sacrificial pawn. But pawns can sometimes change the game, and Sharpe makes his own rules. When he discovers a traitor in his midst, he becomes a hunter in a city besieged by British troops.Soldier, hero, rogue – Sharpe is the man you always want on your side. Born in poverty, he joined the army to escape jail and climbed the ranks by sheer brutal courage. He knows no other family than the regiment of the 95th Rifles whose green jacket he proudly wears.
SHARPE’S
PREY
Richard Sharpe and the Expedition to Copenhagen, 1807
BERNARD CORNWELL
Copyright
This novel is a work of fiction. The incidents and some of the characters portrayed in it, while based on real historical events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2001
Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2001
Map © Ken Lewis
Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007130559
Ebook Edition © JULY 2009 ISBN: 9780007338702
Version: 2017-05-06
Sharpe’s Prey is for Jarl, Gerda, Bo and Christine
‘Bernard Cornwell’s sharp, tough infantryman hero, who chose to fight on his feet, is a man we shall hear more from’
Daily Mail
Table of Contents
Title Page (#ueeefd3a4-e6cb-5835-bf45-f8afd4e5f4b1)
Copyright (#uc13a01a6-fb2c-5f21-833c-8933983f576f)
Dedication (#uad9c8aa0-25f4-55ef-9ec4-79ab7cac025d)
Epigraph (#ueb3002ad-8f63-5e8a-a63b-be20e780080c)
Map (#ufca78627-bcf7-5642-ad8c-8f91a5f7f490)
Chapter One (#u92e45568-bf68-5f2b-ab56-f8618ba1ca45)
Chapter Two (#u81fed046-006d-5888-bd8d-b22793597e6e)
Chapter Three (#u0eadee5f-49f2-549a-bb55-ebeecc2d483b)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Historical Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Sharpe’s Story (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
The SHARPE Series (in chronological order) (#litres_trial_promo)
The SHARPE Series (in order of publication) (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Bernard Cornwell (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
Captain Henry Willsen of His Majesty’s Dirty Half Hundred, more formally the 50th Regiment of West Kent, parried his opponent’s sabre. He did it hurriedly. His right hand was low so that his sabre’s blade was raised in the position known to the fencing masters as the quarte basse and the knowledgeable spectators thought the parry was feeble. A surprised murmur sounded, for Willsen was good. Very good. He had been attacking, but it was apparent he had been slow to see his taller opponent’s counter and now he was in disorganized retreat. The taller man pressed, swatting the quarte basse aside and lunging so that Willsen skittered backwards, his slippers squeaking with a staccato judder on the wooden floor which was liberally scattered with French chalk. The very sound of the slippers on the chalked wood denoted panic. The sabres clashed harshly again, the taller man stamped forward, his blade flickering, clanging, reaching, and Willsen was countering in apparent desperation until, so fast that those watching could scarce follow his blade’s quick movement, he stepped to one side and riposted at his opponent’s cheek. There seemed little power in the riposte, for its force all came from Willsen’s wrist rather than from his full arm, but the sabre’s edge still struck the taller man with such might that he lost his balance. He swayed, right arm flailing, and Willsen gently touched his weapon’s point to his opponent’s chest so that he toppled to the floor.
‘Enough!’ the Master-at-Arms called.
‘God’s teeth.’ The fallen man swept his blade at Willsen’s ankles in a fit of pique. The blow was easily blocked and Willsen just walked away.
‘I said enough, my lord!’ the Master-at-Arms shouted angrily.
‘How the devil did you do that, Willsen?’ Lord Marsden pulled off the padded leather helmet with its wire visor that had protected his face. ‘I had you on your damned arse!’
Willsen, who had planned the whole passage of the fight from the moment he made a deliberately soft quarte basse, bowed. ‘Perhaps I was just fortunate, my lord?’
‘Don’t patronize me, man,’ Lord Marsden snapped as he climbed to his feet. ‘What was it?’
‘Your disengagement from the sixte was slow, my lord.’
‘The devil it was,’ Lord Marsden growled. He was proud of his ability with foil or sabre, yet he knew Willsen had bested him easily by feigning a squeaking retreat. His lordship scowled, then realized he was being ungracious and so, tucking the sabre under his arm, held out a hand. ‘You’re quick, Willsen, damned quick.’
The handful of spectators applauded the show of sportsmanship. They were in Horace Jackson’s Hall of Arms, an establishment on London’s Jermyn Street where wealthy men could learn the arts of pugilism, fencing and pistol shooting. The hall was a high bare room lined with racks of swords and sabres, smelling of tobacco and liniment, and decorated with prints of prize fighters, mastiffs and racehorses. The only women in the place served drinks and food, or else worked in the small rooms above the hall where the beds were soft and the prices high.
Willsen pulled off his helmet and ran a hand through his long fair hair. He bowed to his beaten opponent, then carried both sabres to the weapon rack at the side of the hall where a tall, very thin and extraordinarily handsome captain in the red coat and blue facings of the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards was waiting. The guardsman, a stranger to Willsen, tossed away a half-smoked cigar as Willsen approached. ‘You fooled him,’ the Captain said cheerfully.
Willsen frowned at the stranger’s impertinence, but he answered politely enough. Willsen, after all, was an employee in Horace Jackson’s Hall and the Guards Captain, judging by the elegant cut of his expensive uniform, was a patron. The sort of patron, moreover, who could not wait to prove himself against the celebrated Henry Willsen. ‘I fooled him?’ Willsen asked. ‘How?’
‘The quarte basse,’ the guardsman said, ‘you made it soft, am I right?’
Willsen was impressed at the guardsman’s acuity, but did not betray it. ‘Perhaps I was just fortunate?’ he suggested. He was being modest, for he had the reputation of being the finest swordsman in the Dirty Half Hundred, probably in the whole army and maybe in the entire country, but he belittled his ability, just as he shrugged off those who reckoned he was the best pistol shot in Kent. A soldier, Willsen liked to say, should be a master of his arms and so he practised assiduously and prayed that one day his skill would be useful in the service of his country. Until that time came he earned his captain’s pay and, because that was not sufficient to support a wife, child and mess bill, he taught fencing and pistol-shooting in Horace Jackson’s Hall of Arms. Jackson, an old pugilist with a mashed face, wanted Willsen to leave the army and join the establishment full time, but Willsen liked being a soldier. It gave him a position in British society. It might not be a high place, but it was honourable.
‘There’s no such thing as luck,’ the guardsman said, only now he spoke in Danish, ‘not when you’re fighting.’
Willsen had been turning away, but the change of language made him look back to the golden-haired Guards Captain. His first careless impression had been one of privileged youth, but he now saw that the guardsman was probably in his early thirties and had a cynical, knowing cast to his devil-may-care good looks. This was a man, Willsen thought, who would be at home in a palace or at a prizefight. A formidable man too, and one who was of peculiar importance to Willsen, who now offered the guardsman a half-bow. ‘You, sir,’ he said respectfully, ‘must be Major the Honourable John Lavisser?’
‘I’m Captain Lavisser,’ Captain and Major Lavisser said. The Guards gave their officers dual ranks; the lower one denoted their responsibility in the regiment while the higher was an acknowledgement that any Guards officer was a superior being, especially when compared to an impoverished swordsman from the Dirty Half Hundred. ‘I’m Captain Lavisser,’ the Honourable John Lavisser said again, ‘but you must call me John. Please.’ He still spoke in Danish.
‘I thought we were not to meet till Saturday?’ Willsen said, taking off his fencing slippers and pulling on boots.
‘We’re to be companions for a fair time’ – Lavisser ignored Willsen’s hostility – ‘and it’s better, I think, that we should be friends. Besides, are you not curious about our orders?’
‘My orders are to escort you to Copenhagen and see you safe out again,’ Willsen responded stiffly as he pulled on his red coat. The wool of the coat was faded and its black cuffs and facings were scuffed. He strapped on his seven-guinea sword, unhappily aware of the valuable blade that hung from Lavisser’s slings, but Willsen had long learned to curb his envy at the inequalities of life, even if he could not entirely forget them. He knew well enough that his captaincy in the Dirty Half Hundred was worth £1,500, exactly what it cost to purchase a mere lieutenancy in the Guards, but so be it. Willsen had been taught by his Danish father and English mother to trust in God, do his duty and accept fate, and fate had now decreed he was to be the companion of a man who was the son of an earl, a guardsman, and an aide to Prince Frederick, Duke of York, who was the second son of George III and Commander in Chief of the British army.
‘But don’t you want to know why we are going to Copenhagen?’ Lavisser asked.
‘I have no doubt I shall be informed at the proper time,’ Willsen said, his manner still stiff.
Lavisser smiled and his thin, saturnine face was transformed with charm. ‘The proper time, Willsen, is now,’ he said. ‘Come, at least allow me to buy you supper and reveal the mysteries of our errand.’
In truth Captain Willsen was intrigued. He had served twelve years in the British army and had never heard a shot fired in anger. He yearned to distinguish himself and now, quite suddenly, a chance had arisen because an officer was needed to escort the Duke of York’s aide to Copenhagen. That was all Willsen knew, though his commanding officer had hinted that his facility with small arms might be a great advantage. Willsen had been worried at first, fearing that he would be fighting against his father’s people, but he had been assured that the danger in Copenhagen came from the French, not the Danes, and that assurance had permitted Willsen to accept the responsibility, just as it had piqued his curiosity. Now Lavisser was offering to explain and Willsen, who knew he had been churlish, nodded. ‘Of course. It will be a pleasure to dine with you, sir.’
‘My name is John,’ Lavisser insisted as he led Willsen down the staircase to the street. Willsen half expected to find a carriage waiting, but it appeared Lavisser was on foot even though a small chill rain was falling. ‘Hard to believe it’s July,’ Lavisser grumbled.
‘It will be a bad harvest,’ Willsen remarked.
‘I thought we might get a bite at Almack’s,’ Lavisser suggested, ‘and maybe play a hand afterwards?’
‘I never wager,’ Willsen answered, and even if he did he could never have afforded the high stakes at Almack’s.
‘How very wise you are,’ Lavisser said. They were both speaking English again. ‘And I thought it might please you if we had a word with Hanssen before supper.’
‘Hanssen?’
‘The first secretary at the Danish embassy,’ Lavisser explained. He gave his companion an earnest look. ‘I want to be quite certain that our activities are not prejudicial to Denmark. Hanssen’s a decent man and I’ve always found his advice very sound.’
Willsen shared the desire to avoid upsetting Denmark and so he rather liked the idea of talking to someone from the embassy, but his innate caution came to the fore. ‘Are we supposed to be revealing our purposes to the Danish government?’
‘Of course we’re not and of course we shan’t.’ Lavisser stopped and unleashed his dazzling smile on Willsen. ‘Sir David told me you expressed scruples about visiting Denmark? Is that right? Believe me, my dear Willsen, I feel the same. My mother’s family live there and I will do nothing, nothing, that places them in jeopardy.’ He paused, then his voice became, if anything, even more earnest. ‘If you and I cannot bring Denmark and Britain into a closer friendship, my dear Willsen, then we have no business going there, none. I merely seek general reassurances from Hanssen. I want news of the political situation in Denmark. I want to know what pressures the French are applying. The French are the irritants, but aren’t they always? And of course Hanssen will want to know the purpose of our visit, but we shall merely say we are visiting families. What could be more innocent?’ Lavisser smiled, walked on and Willsen, reassured, followed the tall guardsman across the street. A crossing sweeper, a skinny boy with a running sore on his forehead, sprinted to brush a horse dropping out of Lavisser’s path. The guardsman spun a careless sixpence towards the lad, then led Willsen down an alleyway. ‘Would it offend you if we visited Hanssen by his servants’ entrance?’ Lavisser asked. ‘Only with the Baltic so tremulous you can be sure that the damned Frogs will be watching his front door.’
‘The French? In London?’
‘They have agents everywhere,’ Lavisser said, ‘even London. But not, I think, in this alley.’
The alley was noisome and dark. It culminated in a gate that stood ajar and led into a bleak narrow yard that was made even darker by the day’s dense clouds and the surrounding walls. The yard’s cobbles were half covered in rubbish that was being loaded onto a handcart by a tall, heavy-set man who seemed surprised to see two red-coated officers invade his grubby domain. He hastily stood aside, snatched off his ragged hat and tugged his forelock as the two officers stepped gingerly through the yard’s filth.
‘Would you be averse to feminine company after supper?’ Lavisser asked.
‘I’m a married man, Captain,’ Willsen said severely.
‘Do call me John, please.’
Willsen was made uncomfortable by the invitation to such familiarity. ‘I’ll not stay after supper,’ he said awkwardly, edging past the cart.
Henry Willsen was one of the finest swordsmen in the British army and his skill with a pistol would have been the envy of any duellist, but he had no defence against the attack which erupted as soon as he had passed the rubbish cart. The tall man kicked Willsen in the back of one knee and, as the officer fell, his assailant stabbed upwards with a knife that slid between Willsen’s ribs. The blade sank to the hilt and the man held it there, supporting Willsen who was gasping suddenly as his right hand groped for the hilt of his cheap sword. He managed to take hold of the weapon, though feebly, but Captain Lavisser, who had turned when the tall man attacked, just smiled and knocked Willsen’s hand aside. ‘I don’t think you need that, Harry,’ he said.
‘You …’ Willsen tried to speak, but his lungs were filling with blood. He began to choke and his eyes widened as he shook his head.
‘I do apologize, my dear Willsen,’ Lavisser said, ‘but I’m afraid your presence in Copenhagen would be a most dreadful embarrassment.’ The Guards officer stepped hurriedly back as the big man, who had been supporting Willsen’s weight with his knife, jerked the blade free. Willsen slumped and his attacker dropped beside him and slashed the knife across his throat. Willsen began to make choking noises as he jerked spasmodically on the cobbles. ‘Well done,’ Lavisser said warmly.
‘Easy work,’ the big man grunted. He stood, wiping the blade on his dirty coat. He was very tall, very broad in the chest and had the scarred knuckles of a pugilist. His face was pitted with pox scars, his nose had been broken and ill set at least once, and his eyes were like stones. Everything about him declared that he was from as low a gutter as could bear life and just to look at him was to be glad that the gallows stood tall outside Newgate Prison.
‘He’s still alive.’ Lavisser frowned at Willsen.
‘Not for long, he ain’t,’ the big man said, then stamped hard on Willsen’s chest. ‘Not now, he ain’t.’
‘You are an example to us all, Barker,’ Lavisser said, then stepped close to the lifeless Willsen. ‘He was a very dull man, probably a Lutheran. You’ll take his cash? Make it look like a robbery?’
Barker had already begun cutting the dead man’s pockets open. ‘You think they’ll find another bugger to go with us?’ he asked.
‘They seem tediously intent on giving me company,’ Lavisser said airily, ‘but time is short now, very short, and I doubt they’ll find anyone. But if they do, Barker, then you must deal with the new man just as you dealt with this one.’ Lavisser seemed fascinated by the dead Willsen, for he could not take his eyes from him. ‘You are a great comfort to me, Barker, and you will like it in Denmark.’
‘I will, sir?’
‘They are a very trusting people,’ Lavisser said, still unable to take his gaze from Willsen’s body. ‘We shall be as ravening wolves among the woolliest of baa-lambs.’ He finally managed to look away from the corpse, raised a languid hand and edged past the handcart. He made bleating noises as he went down the alley.
The rain fell harder. It was the end of July, 1807, yet it felt more like March. It would be a poor harvest, there was a new widow in Kent and the Honourable John Lavisser went to Almack’s where he lost considerably more than a thousand guineas, but it no longer mattered. Nothing mattered now. He left worthless notes of hand promising to pay his debts and walked away. He was on his way to glory.
Mister Brown and Mister Belling, the one fat and the other thin, sat side by side and stared solemnly at the green-jacketed army officer across the table. Neither Mister Belling nor Mister Brown liked what they saw. Their visitor – he was not exactly a client – was a tall man with black hair, a hard face and a scar on his cheek and, ominously, he looked like a man who was no stranger to scars. Mister Brown sighed and turned to stare at the rain falling on London’s Eastcheap. ‘It will be a bad harvest, Mister Belling,’ he said heavily.
‘I fear so, Mister Brown.’
‘July!’ Brown said. ‘July indeed! Yet it’s more like March!’
‘A fire in July!’ Mister Belling said. ‘Unheard of!’
The fire, a mean heap of sullen coals, burned in a blackened hearth above which hung a cavalry sabre. It was the only decoration in the panelled room and hinted at the office’s military nature. Messrs Belling and Brown of Cheapside were army agents and their business was to look after the finances of officers who served abroad. They also acted as brokers for men wanting to buy or sell commissions, but this wet, chill July afternoon was bringing them no fees. ‘Alas!’ Mister Brown spread his hands. His fingers were very white, plump and beautifully manicured. He flexed them as though he was about to play a harpsichord. ‘Alas,’ he said again, looking at the green-jacketed officer who glowered from the opposite side of the table.
‘It is the nature of your commission,’ Mister Belling explained.
‘Indeed it is,’ Mister Brown intervened, ‘the nature, so to speak, of your commission.’ He smiled ruefully.
‘It’s as good as anyone else’s commission,’ the officer said belligerently.
‘Oh, better!’ Mister Brown said cheerfully. ‘Would you not agree, Mister Belling?’
‘Far better,’ Mister Belling said enthusiastically. ‘A battlefield commission, Mister Sharpe? ’Pon my soul, but that’s a rare thing. Rare!’
‘An admirable thing!’ Mister Brown added.
‘Most admirable,’ Mister Belling agreed energetically. ‘A battlefield commission! Up from the ranks! Why, it’s a …’ He paused, trying to think what it was. ‘It’s a veritable achievement!’
‘But it is not’ – Mister Brown spoke delicately, his plump hands opening and closing like a butterfly’s wings – ‘fungible.’
‘Precisely.’ Mister Belling’s manner exuded relief that his partner had found the exact word to settle the matter. ‘It is not fungible, Mister Sharpe.’
No one spoke for a few seconds. A coal hissed, rain spattered on the office window and a carter’s whip cracked in the street, which was filled with the rumble, crash and squeal of wagons and carriages.
‘Fungible?’ Lieutenant Richard Sharpe asked.
‘The commission cannot be exchanged for cash,’ Mister Belling explained. ‘You did not buy it, you cannot sell it. You were given it. What the King gives you may give back, but you cannot sell. It is not’ – he paused – ‘fungible.’
‘I was told I could sell it!’ Sharpe said angrily.
‘You were told wrong,’ Mister Brown said.
‘Misinformed,’ Mister Belling added.
‘Grievously so,’ Mister Brown said, ‘alas.’
‘The regulations are plain,’ Mister Belling went on. ‘An officer who purchases a commission is free to sell it, but a man awarded a commission is not. I wish it were otherwise.’
‘We both do!’ Mister Brown said.
‘But I was told …’
‘You were told wrong,’ Mister Belling snapped, then wished he had not spoken so brusquely for Lieutenant Sharpe started forward in his chair as though he was going to attack the two men.
Sharpe checked himself. He looked from the plump Mister Brown to the scrawny Mister Belling. ‘So there’s nothing you can do?’
Mister Belling stared at the smoke-browned ceiling for a few seconds as though seeking inspiration, then shook his head. ‘There is nothing we can do,’ he pronounced, ‘but you might apply to His Majesty’s government for a dispensation. I’ve not heard of such a course ever being followed, but an exception might be made?’ He sounded very dubious. ‘There are senior officers, perchance, who would speak for you?’
Sharpe said nothing. He had saved Sir Arthur Wellesley’s life in India, but he doubted whether the General would help him now. All Sharpe wanted was to sell his commission, take the £450 and get out of the army. But it seemed he could not sell his rank because he had not bought it.
‘Such an appeal would take time,’ Mister Brown warned him, ‘and I would not be sanguine about the outcome, Mister Sharpe. You are asking the government to set a precedent and governments are chary of precedents.’
‘Indeed they are,’ Belling said, ‘and so they should be. Though in your case … ?’ He smiled, raised his eyebrows, then sat back.
‘In my case?’ Sharpe asked, puzzled.
‘I would not be sanguine,’ Mister Brown repeated.
‘You’re saying I’m buggered?’ Sharpe asked.
‘We are saying, Mister Sharpe, that we cannot assist you.’ Mister Brown spoke severely for he had been offended by Sharpe’s language. ‘Alas.’
Sharpe gazed at the two men. Take them both down, he thought. Two minutes of bloody violence and then strip their pockets bare. The bastards must have money. And he had three shillings and threepence halfpenny in his pouch. That was it. Three shillings and threepence halfpenny.
But it was not Brown or Belling’s fault that he could not sell his commission. It was the rules. The regulations. The rich could make more money and the poor could go to hell. He stood, and the clatter of his sabre scabbard on the chair made Mister Brown wince. Sharpe draped a damp greatcoat round his shoulders, crammed a shako onto his unruly hair and picked up his pack. ‘Good day,’ he said curtly, then ducked out of the door, letting in a gust of unseasonably cold air and rain.
Mister Belling let out a great sigh of relief. ‘You know who that was, Mister Brown?’
‘He announced himself as Lieutenant Sharpe of the 95th Rifles,’ Mister Brown said, ‘and I have no reason to doubt him, do I?’
‘The very same officer, Mister Brown, who lived, or should I say cohabited, with the Lady Grace Hale!’
Mister Brown’s eyes widened. ‘No! I thought she took up with an ensign!’
Mister Belling sighed. ‘In the Rifles, Mister Brown, there are no ensigns. He is a second lieutenant. Lowest of the low!’
Mister Brown stared at the closed door. ‘’Pon my soul,’ he said softly, ‘’pon my soul!’ Here was something to tell Amelia when he got home! A scandal in the office! It had been whispered throughout London how the Lady Grace Hale, widow to a prominent man, had moved into a house with a common soldier. True, the common soldier was an officer, but not a proper officer. Not a man who had purchased his commission, but rather a sergeant who had earned a battlefield promotion, which was, in its way, entirely admirable, but even so! Lady Grace Hale, daughter of the Earl of Selby, living with a common soldier? And not just living with him, but having his baby! Or so the gossip said. The Hale family claimed the dead husband had been the child’s father and the date of the baby’s birth was conveniently within nine months of Lord William’s death, but few believed it. ‘I thought the name was somehow familiar,’ Brown said.
‘I scarcely credited it myself,’ Mister Belling admitted. ‘Can you imagine her ladyship enduring such a man? He’s scarce more than a savage!’
‘Did you note the scar on his face?’
‘And when did he last shave?’ Belling shuddered. ‘I fear he is not long for the army, Mister Brown. A curtailed career, would you not say?’
‘Truncated, Mister Belling.’
‘Penniless, no doubt!’
‘No doubt!’ Brown said. ‘And he carried his own pack and greatcoat! An officer doesn’t carry a pack! Never seen such a thing in all my years. And he was reeking of gin.’
‘He was?’
‘Reeking!’ Brown said. ‘Well, I never! So that’s the fellow, is it? What was the Lady Grace thinking of? She must have been quite mad!’ He jumped, startled because the door had been suddenly thrown open. ‘Mister Sharpe?’ he said faintly, wondering if the tall rifleman had returned to exact vengeance for their unhelpfulness. ‘You forgot something, perhaps?’
Sharpe shook his head. ‘Today’s Friday, isn’t it?’ he asked.
Mister Belling blinked. ‘It is, Mister Sharpe,’ he said feebly, ‘it is indeed.’
‘Friday,’ Mister Brown confirmed, ‘the very last day of July.’
Sharpe, dark-eyed, tall and hard-faced, stared suspiciously at each of the two men in turn, then nodded reluctantly. ‘I thought it was,’ he said, then left again.
This time it was Brown who let out a sigh of relief as the door closed. ‘I cannot think,’ he said, ‘that promoting men from the ranks is a wise idea.’
‘It never lasts,’ Belling said consolingly, ‘they ain’t suited to rank, Mister Brown, and they take to liquor and so run out of cash. There is no prudence in the lower sort of men. He’ll be on the streets within the month, rely upon it, within the month.’
‘Poor fellow,’ Mister Brown said and shot the door’s bolt. It was only five o’clock in the evening, and the office was supposed to remain open until six, but somehow it seemed prudent to shut up early. Just in case Sharpe came back. Just in case.
Grace, Sharpe thought, Grace. God help me, Grace. God help me. Three shillings, three pence and a bloody halfpenny, all the money he had left in the world. What do I do now, Grace? He often talked to her. She was not there to listen, not now, but he still talked to her. She had taught him so much, she had encouraged him to read and tried to make him think, but nothing lasts. Nothing. ‘Bloody hell, Grace,’ he said aloud and men on the street gave him room, thinking him either mad or drunk. ‘Bloody hell.’ The anger was welling inside him, thick and dark, a fury that wanted to explode in violence or else drown itself in drink. Three shillings and threepence bloody halfpenny. He could get well drunk on that, but the ale and gin he had taken at midday was already sour in his belly. What he wanted was to hurt someone, anyone. Just a blind, desperate anger.
He had not planned it this way. He thought he would come to London, borrow an advance from an army agent, and then go away. Back to India, he had thought. Other men went there poor and came back rich. Sharpe the nabob and why not? Because he could not sell his rank, that was why not. Some snotty child with a rich father could buy and sell his rank, but a real soldier who had fought his way up the ladder could not. Bugger them all. So what now? Ebenezer Fairley, the merchant who had sailed with Sharpe from India, had offered him a job, and Sharpe supposed he could walk to Cheshire and beg from the man, but he had no urge to start that journey now. He just wanted to vent his anger and so, reassured that it was indeed Friday, he walked towards the Tower. The street stank of the river, coal smoke and horse dung. There was wealth in this part of London that lay so close to the docks and to the Custom House and to the big warehouses crammed with spices, tea and silks. This was a district of counting houses, bankers and merchants, a conduit for the world’s wealth, but the money was not displayed. A few clerks hurried from one office to another, but there were no crossing sweepers and none of the signs of luxury that filled the elegant streets to the city’s west. The buildings here were tall, dark and secret, and it was impossible to tell whether the grey-haired man scuttling with a ledger under his arm was a merchant prince or a worn-out clerk.
Sharpe turned down Tower Hill. There was a pair of red-coated sentries at the Tower’s outer gate and they pretended not to see the sabre scabbard protruding from Sharpe’s greatcoat and he pretended not to see them. He did not care if they saluted him or not. He did not much care if he never saw the army again so long as he lived. He was a failure. Storekeeper to the regiment. A bloody quartermaster. He had come from India, where he had received a commission into a red-coated regiment, to England, where he had been placed in the greenjackets, and at first he had liked the Rifles, but then Grace had gone and everything went wrong. Yet it was not her fault. Sharpe blamed himself, but still did not understand why he had failed. The Rifles were a new kind of regiment, prizing skill and intelligence above blind discipline. They worked hard, rewarded progress and encouraged the men to think for themselves. Officers trained with the men, even drilled with them, and the hours that other regiments wasted in pipe-claying and stock-polishing, in boot-licking and tuft-brushing, the green-jackets spent in rifle practice. Men and officers competed against each other, all trying to make their own company the best. It was exactly the kind of regiment that Sharpe had dreamed of when he had been in India, and he had been recommended to it. ‘I hear you’re just the sort of officer we want,’ Colonel Beckwith had greeted Sharpe, and the Colonel’s welcome was heartfelt, for Sharpe brought the green-jackets a wealth of recent experience in battle, but in the end they did not want him. He did not fit. He could not make small talk. Perhaps he had frightened them. Most of the regiment’s officers had spent the last years training on England’s south coast, while Sharpe had been fighting in India. He had become bored with the training, and after Grace he had become bitter so that the Colonel had taken him away from number three company and put him in charge of the stores. Which was where most officers up from the ranks were placed in the hidebound, red-coated regiments, but the Rifles were supposed to be different.
Now the regiment had marched away, going to fight somewhere abroad, but Sharpe, the morose quartermaster, had been left behind. ‘It’ll be a chance,’ Colonel Beckwith had told Sharpe, ‘to clean out the hutments. Give them a damn good scouring, eh? Have everything ready for our return.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Sharpe had said, and thought Beckwith could go to hell. Sharpe was a soldier, not a damned barracks cleaner, but he had hidden his anger as he watched the regiment march north. No one knew where it was going. Some said Spain, others said they were going to Stralsund, which was a British garrison on the Baltic, though why the British held a garrison on the southern coast of the Baltic no one could explain, and a few claimed the regiment was going to Holland. No one actually knew, but they all expected to fight and they marched in fine spirits. They were the greenjackets, a new regiment for a new century, but with no place for Richard Sharpe. So Sharpe had decided to run. Damn Beckwith, damn the green-jackets, damn the army and damn everything. He had reckoned he would sell his commission, take the money and find a new life. Except he could not sell because of the bloody regulations. God damn it, Grace, he thought, what do I do?
Only he knew what he was going to do. He was still going to run. Yet to start a new life he needed money, which was why he had made certain it was a Friday. Now he edged down the greasy stairs at the foot of Tower Hill and nodded to a waterman. ‘Wapping Steps,’ he said, settling in the boat’s stern.
The waterman shoved off, letting the river current carry him downstream past Traitor’s Gate. The masts were thick on either side of the river where ships and barges were double berthed against wharves crudely protected by bulging fenders made of thick, twisted, tar-soaked rope. Sharpe knew those fenders. The worn-out ones had been carted to the foundling home in Brewhouse Lane where the children had been made to dismantle the matted remnants of tar and hemp. At the age of nine, Sharpe remembered, he had lost the nails on four of his fingers. It had been useless work. Teasing out the hemp strands with small bare and bloody hands. The strands were sold as an alternative for the horsehair that stiffened the plaster used on walls. He looked at his hands now. Still rough, he thought, but no longer black with tar and bloody with ripped nails.
‘Recruiting?’ the waterman asked.
‘No.’
The curt tone might have offended the waterman, but he shrugged it off. ‘It ain’t my business,’ he said, deftly using an oar to keep the boat drifting straight, ‘but Wapping ain’t healthy. Not to an officer, sir.’
‘I grew up there.’
‘Ah,’ the man said, giving Sharpe a puzzled look. ‘Going home, then?’
‘Going home,’ Sharpe agreed. The sky was leaden with cloud and darkened further by the pall of smoke that threaded the spires and towers and masts. A black sky over a black city, broken only by a jagged streak of pink in the west. Going home, Sharpe thought. Friday evening. The small rain pitted the river. Lights glimmered from portholes in the berthed ships which stank of coal dust, sewage, whale oil and spices. Gulls flew like white scraps in the early dark, wheeling and diving about the heavy beam at Execution Dock, where the bodies of two men, mutineers or pirates, hung with broken necks.
‘Watch yourself,’ the waterman said, skilfully nudging his skiff in among the other boats at the Wapping Steps. He was not warning Sharpe against the slippery flight of stairs, but against the folk who lived in the huddled streets above.
Sharpe paid in coppers, then climbed up to the wharf which was edged with low warehouses guarded by ragged dogs and cudgel-bearing thugs. This place was safe enough, but once through the alley and into the streets he was in hungry territory. He would be back in the gutter, but it was his gutter, the place he had started and he felt no particular fear of it.
‘Colonel!’ A whore called to him from behind a warehouse. She lifted her skirt then spat a curse when Sharpe ignored her. A chained dog lunged at him as he emerged onto High Street where a dozen small boys whooped in derision at the sight of an army officer and fell into mocking step behind him. Sharpe let them follow for twenty paces, then whipped round fast and snatched the nearest boy’s shabby coat, lifted and slammed him against the wall. Two of the other boys ran off, doubtless to fetch brothers or fathers. ‘Where’s Maggie Joyce?’ Sharpe asked the boy.
The child hesitated, wondering whether to be brave, then half grinned. ‘She’s gone, mister.’
‘Gone where?’
‘Seven Dials.’
Sharpe believed him. Maggie was his one friend, or he hoped she was, but she must have had the sense to leave Wapping, though Sharpe doubted that the Seven Dials was much safer. But he had not come here to see Maggie. He had come here because it was Friday night and he was poor. ‘Who’s the Master at the workhouse?’ he asked.
The child looked really scared now. ‘The Master?’ he whispered.
‘Who is it, boy?’
‘Jem Hocking, sir.’
Sharpe put the lad down, took the halfpenny from his pocket and spun it down the street so that the boys pursued it between the people, dogs, carts and horses. Jem Hocking. That was the name he had hoped to hear. A name from a black past, a name that festered in Sharpe’s memory as he walked down the centre of the street so that no one emptied a slop bucket over his head. It was a summer evening, the cloud-hidden sun was still above the horizon, but it seemed like winter twilight here. The houses were black, their old bricks patched with crude timbers. Some had fallen down and were nothing but heaps of rubble. Cesspits stank. Dogs barked everywhere. In India the British officers had shuddered at the stench of the streets, but none had ever walked here. Even the worst street in India, Sharpe thought, was better than this foetid place where the people had pinched faces, sunk with hunger, but their eyes were bright enough, especially when they saw the pack in Sharpe’s left hand. They saw a heavy pack, a sabre and assessed the value of the greatcoat draped like a cloak over his broad shoulders. There was more wealth on Sharpe than these folk saw in a half-dozen years, though Sharpe reckoned himself poor. He had been rich once. He had taken the jewels of the Tippoo Sultan, stripping them from the dying king’s body in the shit-stinking tunnel of the Water Gate of Seringapatam, but those jewels were gone. Bloody lawyers. Bloody, bloody lawyers.
But if the folk saw the wealth on Sharpe they also saw that he was very tall and very strong and that his face was scarred and hard and bitter and forbidding. A man would have to be desperately hungry to risk his life in an attempt to steal Sharpe’s coat or pack and so, like wolves that scented blood but feared losing their own, the men watched him pass and, though some followed him as he turned up Wapping Lane, they did not pursue him into Brewhouse Lane. The poorhouse and the foundling home were there and no one went close to those grim high walls unless they were forced.
Sharpe stood in the doorway of the old brewery, long closed down, and stared across the street at the workhouse walls. On the right was the poorhouse that mostly held folk too old to work, or else they were sick or had been abandoned by their children. Landlords turned them onto the street and the parish beadle brought them here, to Jem Hocking’s kingdom, where the men were put in one ward and the women in the other. They died here, husbands forbidden to speak with their wives, and all half starved until their corpses were carried in a knacker’s cart to a pauper’s grave. That was the poorhouse, and it was divided from the foundling home by a narrow, three-storey brick house with white-painted shutters and an elegant wrought-iron lantern suspended above its well-scrubbed front steps. The Master’s house. Jem Hocking’s small palace which overlooked the foundling home which, like the poorhouse, had its own gate: a black slab of heavy timber smeared with tar and surmounted with rusted iron spikes four inches long. A prison, really, for orphans. The magistrates sent pregnant girls here, girls too poor to have a home or too sick to sell their swollen bodies on the streets. Their bastards were born here and the girls, as often as not, died of the fever. Those that survived went back to the streets, leaving their children in the tender care of Jem Hocking and his wife.
It had been Sharpe’s home once. And now it was Friday.
He crossed the street and hammered on the small wicket door set into the foundling home’s larger gate. Grace had wanted to come here. She had listened to Sharpe’s stories and believed she could change things, but there had never been time. So Sharpe would change things now. He lifted his hand to hammer again just as the wicket door opened to reveal a pale and anxious young man who flinched away from Sharpe’s fist. ‘Who are you?’ Sharpe demanded as he stepped through the small opening.
‘Sir?’ The young man had been expecting to ask that same question.
‘Who are you?’ Sharpe asked. ‘Come on, man, don’t bloody dither! And where’s the Master?’
‘The Master’s in his house, but …’ The young man abandoned whatever he had been trying to say and instead attempted to stand in front of Sharpe. ‘You can’t go in there, mister!’
‘Why not?’ Sharpe had crossed the small yard and now pushed open the door to the hall. When he had been a child he had thought it a vast room, big as a cathedral, but now it looked squalid and small. Scarce bigger than a company’s barrack room, he realized. It was supper and some thirty or more children were sitting on the floor among the oakum and the tar-encrusted fenders that was their daily work. They scooped spoons in wooden bowls while another thirty children queued beside a table that held a cauldron of soup and a bread board. A woman, her red arms massive, stood behind the table while a young man, equipped with a riding crop, lolled on the hall’s low dais above which a biblical text arched across the brown-painted wall. Be sure your sin will find you out.
Sixty pairs of eyes stared at Sharpe in astonishment. None of the children spoke for fear of the riding crop or a blow from the woman’s burly arm. Sharpe did not speak either. He was staring at the room, smelling the tar and fighting against the overwhelming memories. It had been twenty years since he had last been under this roof. Twenty years. It smelt the same, though. It smelt of tar and fear and rotten food. He stepped to the table and sniffed the soup.
‘Leek and barley gruel, sir.’ The woman, seeing the silver buttons and the black braid and the sabre, dropped a clumsy curtsey.
‘Looks like lukewarm water to me,’ Sharpe said.
‘Leek and barley, sir.’
Sharpe picked up a random piece of bread. Hard as brick. Hard as ship’s biscuit.
‘Sir?’ The woman held out her hand. She was nervous. ‘The bread is counted, sir, counted.’
Sharpe tossed it down. He was tempted to some extravagant gesture, but what would it do? Upsetting the cauldron merely meant the children would go hungry, while dropping the bread into the soup would achieve nothing. Grace would have known what to do. Her voice would have cracked like a whip and the work-house servants would have been scurrying to fetch food, clothes and soap. But those things cost money and Sharpe only had a pocketful of copper.
‘And what have we here?’ a strong voice boomed from the hall door. ‘What has the east wind blown in today?’ The children whimpered and went very still while the woman dropped another curtsey. Sharpe turned. ‘And who are you?’ the man demanded. ‘Colonel of the regiment, are you?’
It was Jem Hocking. Come like the devil to the heart of hell.
He was no devil to look at. See Jem Hocking in the street and a man might take him for a prosperous farmer up from the Vale of Kent. The years had whitened his hair and stretched his chequered waistcoat taut across a bulging belly, but he was still a bull of a man with wide shoulders, stout legs and a face as flat as a shovel. Thick jowls hung beneath bushy white side whiskers, a golden watch chain held a dozen seals, his tall boots were tasselled, his dark-blue coat was edged with velvet cuffs and he carried a varnished black staff with a silver knob. He was the Master and for a moment Sharpe could not speak. He was overwhelmed by hatred, by the memories of this man’s cruelty, even by fear. Twenty years and a battlefield commission had not taken away that fear. He wanted to imitate the children; he wanted to freeze, pretend not to exist, not even breathe in case he was noticed.
‘Does I know you?’ Hocking demanded. The big man was frowning, trying to discern something familiar in Sharpe’s scarred face, but the memory would not come. He shook his head in puzzlement. ‘So who are you?’
‘My name is Dunnett,’ Sharpe said, using the name of an officer in the greenjackets who held a particular dislike of Sharpe. ‘Major Warren Dunnett,’ he said, promoting Dunnett from captain.
‘A major, eh? And what kind of uniform is that, Major? Red coats I know, and blue I’ve seen, but bless me, I ain’t seen green and black.’ He stepped towards Sharpe, pushing the children’s skinny legs out of the way with his beadle’s staff. ‘Is it a newfangled uniform, eh? Some kind of coat that gives a man the right to trespass on parish property?’
‘I was looking for the Master,’ Sharpe said. ‘I was told he was a man of business.’
‘Business.’ Hocking spat the word. ‘And what business do you have, Major, other than the killing of the King’s enemies?’
‘You want me to talk about it here?’ Sharpe asked. He took one of the pennies from his coat pocket and spun it towards the ceiling. It glittered as it flew, watched by hungry, astonished children, then fell into Sharpe’s hand and vanished.
The sight of the money, even a humble penny, was all the reassurance Hocking needed. The rest of his questions could wait. ‘I has business outside the poorhouse tonight,’ he announced, ‘it being a Friday. You’ll take an ale with me, Major?’
‘That would be a pleasure, Master,’ Sharpe lied.
Or perhaps it was not a lie, for Sharpe was angry and revenge was a pleasure. And this revenge had been simmering in his dreams for twenty years. He glanced a last time at the text on the wall and wondered if Jem Hocking had ever considered the truth of it.
Be sure your sin will find you out.
Jem Hocking should have taken note and been on his knees in prayer.
Because Richard Sharpe had come home.
CHAPTER TWO
The tavern displayed no name. There was not even a painted sign hanging outside, nothing, indeed, to distinguish it from the neighbouring houses except, perhaps, a slight air of prosperity that stood out in Vinegar Street like a duchess in a whorehouse. Some folk called it Malone’s Tavern because Beaky Malone had owned and run it, though Beaky had to be dead by now, and others called it the Vinegar Alehouse because it was in Vinegar Street, while some knew the house simply as the Master’s because Jem Hocking did so much of his business in its taproom.
‘I have interests,’ Jem Hocking said grandly, ‘beyond those of the mere parish. I am a man of parts, Major.’
Meaning, Sharpe thought, that Hocking persecuted more than the workhouse inmates. He had become rich over the years, rich enough to own scores of houses in Wapping, and Friday night was when the tenants brought him the rent. Pennies only, but pennies added up, and Hocking received them in the taproom where they vanished into a leather bag while a cowed white-haired clerk made notes in a ledger. Two young men, both tall, strongly built and armed with cudgels, were the taproom’s only other customers and they watched every transaction. ‘My mastiffs,’ Hocking had explained the two young men.
‘A man of responsibility needs protection,’ Sharpe had said, using two of his three shillings to buy a flagon of ale. The girl brought four tankards. The clerk, it seemed, was not to be treated to Major Dunnett’s largesse. Only Sharpe, Hocking and the two mastiffs were to drink.
‘It takes a man of authority to recognize responsibility,’ Hocking said, then buried his face in the tankard for a few seconds. ‘What you are seeing, Major, is private business.’ He watched a thin woman offer some coppers to the clerk. ‘But in my parish duties,’ Hocking went on, watching the clerk count the coins, ‘I have responsibility for the disbursement of public funds and for the care of immortal souls. I take neither duty lightly, Major.’ The public funds were fourpence three farthing a day for each pauper out of which Jem Hocking managed to purloin twopence, while the rest was grudgingly spent on stale bread, onions, barley and oatmeal. The care of souls yielded no profit, but did not require any outlay either.
‘You have overseers?’ Sharpe asked, pouring himself and Hocking more ale.
‘I have a Board of Visitors,’ Hocking agreed. He watched the ale being poured. ‘The law says we must. So we do.’
‘So where is the responsibility?’ Sharpe asked. ‘With you? Or the Board?’ He saw the question had offended Hocking. ‘I assume it is you, Master, but I have to be sure.’
‘With me,’ Hocking said grandly. ‘With me, Major. The Board is appointed by the parish and the parish, Major, is infested with bleeding orphans. And not just our own! Some even gets stranded here by the ships. Only last week the mudlarks found a girl child, if you can imagine such a thing.’ He shook his head and dipped his nose into the ale’s froth while Sharpe imagined the mudlarks, men and women who combed the Thames foreshore at low tide in search of scraps fallen overboard, bringing a child to Brewhouse Lane. Poor child, to end with Hocking as a guardian. ‘The Board, Major,’ Hocking went on, ‘cannot cope with so many children. They confine themselves to a quarterly examination of the accounts which, you may be sure, add up to the exact penny, and the Board votes me an annual motion of thanks at Christmas time, but otherwise the Board ignores me. I am a man of business, Major, and I spare the parish the trouble of dealing with orphans. I have two score and sixteen of the little bastards in the house now, and what will the Board of Visitors do without me and Mrs Hocking? We are a godsend to the parish.’ He held up a hand to check anything Sharpe might say. This was not to deflect a compliment, but rather because a thin young man had come from the tavern’s back door to whisper in his ear. A raucous cheer sounded from behind the door. The cheers had been sounding ever since Sharpe had arrived in the tavern and he had pretended not to hear them. Now he ignored the young man who tipped a stream of coins into the clerk’s leather bag, then gave Hocking a pile of grubby paper slips that vanished into the big man’s pocket. ‘Business,’ Hocking said gruffly.
‘In Lewes,’ Sharpe said, ‘the parish offers three pounds to anyone who will take an orphan out of the workhouse.’
‘If I had such cash, Major, I could strip Brewhouse Lane of the little bastards in five minutes.’ Hocking chuckled. ‘For a pound apiece! A pound! But we ain’t a rich parish. We ain’t Lewes. We ain’t got the funds to palm the little bastards off onto others. No, we relies on others paying us!’ He sank half the ale, then gave Sharpe a suspicious look. ‘So what does you want, Major?’
‘Drummer boys,’ Sharpe said. The 95th did not employ drummer boys, but he doubted Jem Hocking understood that.
‘Drummer boys,’ Hocking said. ‘I’ve got lads that could beat a drum. They ain’t much good for anything, but they can beat a drum. But why come to me for them, Major? Why not go to Lewes? Why not get three pounds with every lad?’
‘Because the Lewes Board of Visitors won’t let the boys go to be soldiers.’
‘They won’t?’ Hocking could not hide his astonishment.
‘There are women on the Board,’ Sharpe said.
‘Ah, women!’ Hocking exclaimed. He shook his head in exasperation and despair. ‘They’ll be the end of common sense, women will. There are none on our Board, I warrant you that. Women!’
‘And the Canterbury Board insists the boys go before a magistrate,’ Sharpe said.
‘Canterbury?’ Hocking was confused.
‘We have a second battalion at Canterbury,’ Sharpe explained, ‘and we could get the boys from there, only the magistrates interfere.’
Hocking was still confused. ‘Why wouldn’t the bloody magistrates want boys to be soldiers?’
‘The boys die,’ Sharpe said, ‘they die like bloody flies. You have to understand, Mister Hocking, that the Rifles are the troops nearest the enemy. Under their noses, we are, and the boys have to serve as cartridge carriers when they ain’t drumming. Back and forth, they are, and somehow they seem to be targets. Bang, bang. Always killing boys, we are. Mind you, if they live, it’s a fine life. They can become Chosen Men!’
‘A rare opportunity,’ Hocking said, believing every word of Sharpe’s nonsense. ‘And I can assure you, Major, there’ll be no interference from Boards or magistrates here. None! You can take my word for it.’ He poured himself more ale. ‘So what are we talking about here?’
Sharpe leaned back, pretending to think. ‘Two battalions?’ he suggested. ‘Twenty companies? Say we lose four boys a year to the enemy and another six die of fever or manage to grow up? Ten lads a year? They have to be eleven years old, or near enough to pass.’
‘Ten boys a year?’ Hocking managed to hide his enthusiasm. ‘And you’d pay?’
‘The army will pay, Mister Hocking.’
‘Aye, but how much? How much?’
‘Two pounds apiece,’ Sharpe said. He was amazed at his own glibness. He had dreamed of this revenge, plotting it in his imagination without ever thinking he would actually work it, yet now the lines were slipping off his tongue with convincing ease.
Hocking stuffed a clay pipe with tobacco as he considered the offer. Twenty pounds a year was a fine sum, but a little too obvious. A little too tidy. He drew a candle towards him and lit the pipe. ‘The magistrates will want paying,’ he observed.
‘You said there’d be no trouble from magistrates,’ Sharpe objected.
‘That’s because they’ll be paid,’ Hocking pointed out, ‘and there’ll be other costs, Major, other costs. Always are other costs.’ He blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. ‘Have you talked to your Colonel about this?’
‘I wouldn’t be here otherwise.’
Hocking nodded. Which meant Sharpe had negotiated a price with the Colonel and Hocking was damned sure it was not two pounds a boy. Five pounds, more like, with the Colonel creaming a pair off the top and Sharpe taking a single. ‘Four pounds,’ Hocking said.
‘Four!’
‘I don’t need you, Major,’ Hocking said. ‘I’ve got chimney sweeps who like my lads, and those that don’t sweep chimneys can shovel up the pure.’ He meant they could collect dog turds that they delivered to the city’s tanners who used the faeces to cure leather. ‘Some boys go to sea,’ Hocking said grandly, ‘some sweep chimneys, some scoop shit, some dies, and the rest go to the gallows. They’re all scum, Major, but they’re my scum, and if you wants them then you pays my price. And you will, you will.’
‘I will, why?’
‘Because, Major, you don’t need to come to Wapping to get boys. You can find lads anywhere, magistrates or no magistrates.’ Hocking turned his shrewd eyes on Sharpe. ‘No, Major, you came to me on purpose.’
‘I came to you for drummer boys,’ Sharpe said, ‘and no awkward magistrates and no one caring that so many die.’
Hocking still stared at him. ‘Go on,’ he said.
Sharpe hesitated, then seemed to make up his mind. ‘And girls,’ he said.
‘Ah.’ Hocking half smiled. He understood weakness and greed and Sharpe, at last, was making sense.
‘We hear –’ Sharpe began.
‘Who’s we?’
‘The Colonel and me.’
‘And who told you?’ Hocking asked fiercely.
‘No one told me,’ Sharpe said, ‘but someone told the Colonel. He sent me.’
Hocking leaned back and pulled at his bushy side whiskers as he considered the answer. He found it plausible and nodded. ‘Your Colonel likes ’em young, eh?’
‘We both do,’ Sharpe said, ‘young and untouched.’
Hocking nodded again. ‘The boys will be four pounds apiece and the girls ten a time.’
Sharpe pretended to consider the price, then shrugged. ‘I want a taste tonight.’
‘Girl or boy?’ Hocking leered.
‘Girl,’ Sharpe said.
‘You’ve got the money?’
Sharpe patted his pack which stood on the sawdust-strewn floor. ‘Guineas,’ he said.
Another cheer sounded behind the back door and Hocking jerked his head in that direction. ‘I’ve got business in there, Major, and it’ll take me an hour or two to settle it. I’ll have the girl cleaned up while you wait. But I want five pounds now.’
Sharpe shook his head. ‘You’ll see my money when I see the girl.’
‘Getting particular, are we?’ Hocking sneered, though he did not insist on receiving any deposit. ‘What do you want, Major? A redhead? A blackbird? Fat? Skinny?’
‘Just young,’ Sharpe said. He felt dirty even though he was merely pretending.
‘She’ll be young, Major,’ Hocking said and held out his hand to seal the bargain. Sharpe took the hand and suppressed a shudder when Hocking held on to it. Hocking gripped hard, frowning. ‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘but you do look familiar.’
‘I was raised in Yorkshire,’ Sharpe lied. ‘Maybe you were up there once?’
‘I don’t travel to foreign places.’ Hocking let go of Sharpe’s hand and stood. ‘Joe here will show you where to wait, but if I was you, Major, I’d watch the dogs for a while.’
Joe was one of the two young men and he jerked his head to show that Sharpe should follow him through the tavern’s back door. Sharpe knew what to expect there, for when Beaky Malone had been alive Sharpe had helped in that back room which was little more than a long and gloomy shed raised above the yards of three houses. It stank of animals. There were storerooms at either end of the shed, but most of the space had been converted into a makeshift arena of banked wooden benches that enclosed a pit twelve feet in diameter. The pit’s floor was sand and was surrounded by a barrier of planks.
‘It’s in there,’ Joe said, indicating one of the storerooms. ‘It ain’t luxury, but there’s a bed.’
‘I’ll wait out here,’ Sharpe said.
‘When the dogs are done,’ Joe explained, ‘wait in the room.’
Sharpe climbed to the topmost bench where he sat close under the roof beams. Six oil lamps hung above the pit, which was spattered with blood. The shed stank of it, and of gin, tobacco and meat pies. There must have been a hundred men on the benches and a handful of women. Some of the spectators watched Sharpe as he climbed the steps. He did not fit in here and the silver buttons of his uniform coat made them nervous. All uniforms unsettled these folk, and spectators made room for him on the bench just as a tall man with a hooked nose climbed over the plank barrier. ‘The next bout, ladies and gentlemen,’ the man bellowed, ‘is between Priscilla, a two-year-old bitch, and Nobleman, a dog of three years. Priscilla is by way of being the property of Mister Philip Machin’ – the name provoked a huge cheer – ‘while Nobleman,’ the man went on when there was silence, ‘was bred by Mister Roger Collis. You may place your wagers, gentlemen and ladies, and I do bid you all good fortune.’
A boy climbed to Sharpe’s bench, wanting to take his money, but Sharpe waved the lad away. Jem Hocking had appeared on a lower bench now and the wagers were being carried to his clerk. Another man, as thin as the ringmaster, threaded his way up the crowded benches to sit beside Sharpe. He looked about thirty, had hooded eyes, long hair and a flamboyant red handkerchief knotted about his skinny neck. He slid a knife from inside a boot and began cleaning his fingernails. ‘Lumpy wants to know who the hell you are, Colonel,’ he said.
‘Who’s Lumpy?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Him.’ The thin man nodded at the ringmaster.
‘Beaky’s son?’
The man gave Sharpe a very suspicious look. ‘How would you know that, Colonel?’
‘Because he looks like Beaky,’ Sharpe said, ‘and you’re Dan Pierce. Your mother lived in Shadwell and she only had one leg, but that never stopped her whoring, did it?’ The knife was suddenly just beneath Sharpe’s ribs, its point pricking his skin. Sharpe turned and looked at Pierce. ‘You’d kill an old friend, Dan?’
Pierce stared at Sharpe. ‘You’re not …’ he began, then checked. The knife was still in Sharpe’s side. ‘No,’ Pierce said, not trusting his suspicions.
Sharpe grinned. ‘You and me, Dan? We used to run errands for Beaky.’ He turned and looked at the ring where the dog and the bitch were being paraded. The bitch was excited, straining at the leash as she was led about the ring. ‘She looks lively,’ Sharpe said.
‘A lovely little killer,’ Pierce declared, ‘quick as a fish, she is.’
‘But too lively,’ Sharpe said. ‘She’ll waste effort.’
‘You’re Dick Sharpe, aren’t you?’ The knife vanished.
‘Jem doesn’t know who I am,’ Sharpe said, ‘and I want it to stay that way.’
‘I’ll not tell the bastard. Is it really you?’
Sharpe nodded.
‘An officer?’
Sharpe nodded again.
Pierce laughed. ‘Bloody hell. England’s run out of gentlemen?’
Sharpe smiled. ‘That’s about it, Dan. Have you got money on the bitch?’
‘The dog,’ Pierce said. ‘He’s good and steady.’ He stared at Sharpe. ‘You really are Dick Sharpe.’
‘I really am,’ Sharpe said, though it had been twenty years since he had last been in this rat pit. Beaky Malone had always prophesied that Sharpe would end up on the gallows, but somehow he had survived. He had run from London, gone to Yorkshire, murdered, joined the army to escape the law and there found a home. He had been promoted until, one hot day on a dusty battlefield in India, he had become an officer. Sharpe had come from this gutter and earned the King’s commission and now he was going back. The army did not want him, so he would say goodbye to the army, but first he needed money.
He watched as the timekeeper held up a great turnip watch. A coin had been tossed and the bitch was to fight first. The dog was lifted out of the ring and two cages were handed across the planks. A small boy unlatched the cages, tipped them, then vaulted the planks.
Thirty-six rats scuttled about the sand.
‘Are you up and ready?’ the ringmaster shouted. The crowd cheered.
‘Five seconds!’ the timekeeper, a drunken schoolmaster, called, then peered at his watch. ‘Now!’
The bitch was released and Sharpe and Pierce leaned forward. The bitch was good. The first two rats died before the others even realized a predator was among them. She nipped them by the neck, shook them vigorously and dropped them promptly, but then her excitement overtook her and she wasted valuable seconds snapping at three or four rats in turn. ‘Shake them!’ her owner bawled, his voice lost in the crowd’s cheers. She ran into a knot of the rats and started working again, ignoring the beasts that attacked her, but then she would not let go of a big black victim. ‘Drop it! Dead ‘un!’ her owner screamed. ‘Drop it! Drop it, you bastard bitch! It’s a dead ’un!’
‘She’s too young,’ Pierce said. ‘I told Phil to give her another six months. Let her practise, I said, but he wouldn’t listen. Cloth ears, that’s his problem.’ He stared at Sharpe. ‘I can’t believe it. Dick Sharpe a bloody jack pudding.’ He meant officer, for a jack pudding was a motley fool from the fairground, a clown dressed in fake finery and with donkey’s ears pinned to his hair. ‘Hocking didn’t recognize you?’
‘I don’t want him to either.’
‘I won’t tell the bastard,’ Pierce said, then settled back to watch the bitch hunt the last few rats. The sand was speckled with fresh blood. A few of the rats were merely crippled and those who had wagered on the bitch were shouting at her to finish them off. ‘I thought when I first saw her,’ Pierce said, ‘that she’d hunt like her mother did. Christ, but that bitch was a cold-hearted killer. But this one’s too young. She’ll get better.’ He watched her kill a rat that had been particularly elusive. She shook it hard, spraying blood onto the customers closest to the barrier. ‘It ain’t the teeth that kills ’em,’ Pierce said, ‘but the shaking.’
‘I know.’
‘’Course you do, ’course you do.’ Pierce watched as the boy climbed into the ring and shoved the bloodied rats into a sack. ‘Lumpy’s still trying to sell the corpses,’ he said. ‘You’d think someone would want to eat them. Nothing wrong with rat pie, especially if you don’t know what it is. But he can’t sell ’em.’ He looked down at Jem Hocking. ‘Is there to be trouble?’
‘Would you mind?’
Pierce picked at a tooth with a long fingernail. ‘No,’ he said curtly, ‘and Lumpy will be pleased. He wants to run the book here, but Hocking won’t let him.’
‘Won’t let him?’
‘Hocking owns the place now,’ Pierce said. ‘He owns every house in the street, the bastard.’ Two more cages had been tipped into the arena and the new rats, black and slick, scampered about the ring as a roar from the crowd greeted the dog. It was held above the skittering sand for a second, then dropped and began to fight. It went about its business efficiently and Pierce grinned. ‘Jem’s going to lose his shirt on this one.’
The bitch had been good and quick, but the dog was old and experienced. It killed swiftly and the crowd’s cheers got louder. Most, it seemed, had bet on the dog and the pleasure of winning was doubled by the knowledge that Jem Hocking was about to lose. Except that Jem Hocking was not a man to lose. The dog had killed about twenty of the rats when suddenly a spectator on the front bench leaned forward and vomited over the barrier and the dog immediately ran to gobble up the half-digested meat pie. The owner screamed at it, the crowd jeered and Hocking’s face showed nothing.
‘Bastard,’ Pierce said.
‘Old trick that,’ Sharpe said, leaning back. He fingered his sabre’s hilt. He did not like the weapon’s curved blade which was too light to do real damage, but it was the official weapon of Rifle officers. He would have preferred one of the basket-hilted broadswords that the Scots carried into battle, but regulations were regulations and the greenjackets had insisted he equip himself properly. A sword or sabre, they said, was merely decorative and an officer who was forced to use one in battle had already failed so it did not matter that the light cavalry sabre was unhandy, but Sharpe had used enough swords in battle and he had never failed. Go into a breach, he had told Colonel Beckwith, and you’ll be glad enough of a butchering sword, but the Colonel had shaken his head. ‘It is not the business of Rifle officers to be in the breach,’ he had said. ‘Our job is to be outside, killing from a distance. That is why we have rifles, not muskets.’ Not that any of it mattered to Sharpe now. He would make his money, resign his commission, sell the sabre and forget the Rifles.
Lumpy closed the entertainment by announcing that the next evening would be a mixture of cockfighting and badger-baiting. They would be Essex badgers, he boasted, as though Essex gave the animals special fighting skills, though in truth it was simply the closest source to Wapping. The crowd streamed out and Sharpe went back to the storeroom. Dan Pierce went with him. ‘I wouldn’t stay, Dan,’ Sharpe said. ‘Likely to be trouble.’
‘Trouble for you, Dick,’ Pierce tried to warn his old friend. ‘He’s never on his own.’
‘I’ll be all right. You can buy me an ale afterwards.’
Pierce left and Sharpe went into the stinking room. The badgers were all in wire cages stacked against one wall while the rest of the room was occupied by a table on which a dim oil lamp burned, and by an incongruous bed that was plump with sheets, blankets and pillows. Lumpy’s girls, the ones who sold gin and hot pies, used the room for their other business, but it would suit Sharpe perfectly. He put his pack and greatcoat on the table, then unsheathed the sabre which he placed on the badger cages with the hilt towards him. The beasts, pungent and sullen, stirred behind their wire.
He waited, listening to the sounds fading in the shed. A year ago he had been living in a house with eight rooms that he and Grace had rented close to Shorncliffe. He had fitted in with the battalion well enough then, for Grace had charmed the other officers, but why should he have ever thought it could last? It had been like a dream. Except Grace’s brothers and their lawyers kept intruding on the dream, demanding she leave Sharpe, even offering her money if she did the decent thing, and other lawyers had tied up her dead husband’s will in a tangle of words, delay and obfuscation. Get her out of your head, he told himself, but she would not leave and when the footsteps sounded outside the storeroom Sharpe’s sight was blurred with tears. He brushed his eyes as the door opened.
Jem Hocking came in with the girl, leaving the door ajar with the two young men just outside. The child was thin, frightened, red-haired and pale. She glanced at Sharpe then began to cry silently. ‘This is Emily,’ Jem Hocking said, tugging the girl’s hand. ‘The nice man wants to play games with you, ain’t that right, Major?’
Sharpe nodded. The anger he was feeling was so huge that he did not trust himself to speak.
‘I don’t want her hurt bad,’ Hocking said. He had a face the colour of beefsteak and a nose erupting with broken veins. ‘I want her back in one piece. Now, Major, the money?’ He patted the satchel that was hanging from his shoulder. ‘Ten pounds.’
‘In the pack,’ Sharpe said, nodding at the table, ‘just open the top flap.’ Hocking turned to the table and Sharpe edged the door closed with his shoulder as he moved to Emily’s side. He picked her up and placed her on the bed, then whipped the blanket up over her head. She cried aloud as she was smothered in woollen darkness and Hocking turned as Sharpe pulled the sabre off the cage tops. Hocking opened his mouth, but the blade was already against his throat. ‘Not a word,’ Sharpe said. He shot the door bolt. ‘All your money, Jem. Put the satchel on the table and empty your pockets into it.’
Jem Hocking, despite the sabre at his throat, did not look alarmed. ‘You’re mad,’ he said calmly.
‘Money, Jem, on the table.’
Jem Hocking shook his head in puzzlement. This was his kingdom and it did not seem possible that anyone would dare challenge him. He took a deep breath, plainly intending to call for help, but the sabre’s tip was suddenly hard in the flesh of his neck, drawing a trickle of blood.
‘On the table, Jem,’ Sharpe said, the softness of his voice belying the anger in his soul.
Hocking still did not obey. He frowned instead. ‘Do I know you?’
‘No,’ Sharpe said.
‘You ain’t getting a penny of mine, son,’ Hocking said.
Sharpe twisted the blade. Hocking stepped back, but Sharpe kept the sabre in his neck. He had only broken Hocking’s skin, nothing more, but he pushed a little harder and twisted again. ‘Money,’ he said, ‘on the table.’
‘Daft as a pudding, boy,’ Hocking said. ‘You ain’t going anywhere, not now. I’ve got lads out there and they’ll cut you into tatters.’
‘Money,’ Sharpe said, and reinforced the demand by whipping the sabre’s tip twice across Hocking’s face to leave long thin cuts in his cheeks and nose. Hocking looked astonished. He touched a finger to his cheek and seemed not to believe the blood he saw.
There was a knock on the door. ‘Mister Hocking?’ a voice called.
‘We’re just settling the money,’ Sharpe shouted, ‘aren’t we, Jem? On the table or I’ll bloody fillet you.’
‘You ain’t an officer, are you? You dress up, don’t you, but you picked the wrong man this time, son.’
‘I’m an officer,’ Sharpe said, and drew blood from Hocking’s neck. ‘A real officer,’ he added. ‘Now empty your pockets.’
Hocking dropped the satchel on the table, then thrust a hand into his greatcoat pocket. Sharpe waited to hear the chink of coins, but there was no such sound and so, as Hocking brought his hand out of the pocket, Sharpe slashed down hard with the sabre. He slit the ball of Hocking’s thumb, then slashed the blade again and Hocking, who had been drawing a small pistol from his coat pocket, let the weapon go to clutch at his wounded fingers. The pistol fell to the floor.
‘Empty your damned pockets,’ Sharpe said.
Hocking hesitated, wondering whether to call for help, but there was an implacability about Sharpe that suggested he had best humour him. He flinched as he used his wounded right hand to pull coins from his pocket. The door rattled as someone tried the latch. ‘Wait!’ Sharpe called. He saw gold coins among the silver and copper. ‘Keep going, Jem,’ he said.
‘You’re a dead man,’ Hocking grumbled, but found more cash that he piled on the table. ‘That’s all,’ he said.
‘Back against the cages, you bastard,’ Sharpe said and prodded Hocking towards the badgers. Then, still holding the sabre in his right hand, Sharpe forced handfuls of the coins into the satchel. He could not look closely at the money, for he needed to watch Hocking, but he reckoned there was at least eighteen or nineteen pounds there.
The click saved Sharpe. It came from behind him and he recognized the sound of a pistol being cocked and he stepped to one side and risked a quick glance to see that there was a hole in the wooden wall. Lumpy’s peephole, no doubt, and one of the young men outside must have seen what was happening and Sharpe stepped to the bed just as a pistol flamed through the hole to mist the room with smoke. Emily screamed from beneath her blanket and Jem Hocking snatched a badger cage and hurled it at Sharpe.
The cage bounced heavily off Sharpe’s shoulder. Hocking was scrabbling for the pistol when Sharpe kicked him in the face, then slashed the sabre across his head. Hocking sprawled by the table. Sharpe snatched up the small pistol and fired it at the wall beside the peephole. The timber splintered, but no shout sounded on the far side. Then he knelt on Hocking’s belly and held the sabre against the big man’s throat. ‘You do know me,’ Sharpe said. ‘You bloody do know me.’
He had not intended to reveal his name. He had told himself he would rob Hocking, but now, smelling the gun smoke, he knew he had always wanted to kill the bastard. No, he had wanted more. He had wanted to see Hocking’s face when the man learned that one of his children had come back, but come back as a jack pudding. Sharpe smiled, and for the first time there was fear on Hocking’s face. ‘I really am an officer, Jem, and my name’s Sharpe. Dick Sharpe.’ He saw the disbelief on Hocking’s face. Disbelief, astonishment and fear. That was reward enough. Hocking stared, wide-eyed, recognizing Sharpe and, at the same time, unable to comprehend that one of his boys was now an officer. Then the incomprehension turned to terror for he understood that the boy wanted revenge. ‘You bastard,’ Sharpe said, ‘you goddamned piece of shit.’ The anger was livid now. ‘Remember whipping me?’ he asked. ‘Whipping me till the blood ran? I remember, Jem. That’s why I came back.’
‘Listen, lad.’
‘Don’t you bloody lad me,’ Sharpe said. ‘I’m grown now, Jem. I’m a soldier, Jem, an officer, and I’ve learned to kill.’
‘No!’
‘Yes,’ Sharpe said, and the bitterness was unassuageable now, drenching him, consuming him, and the years of pain and misery were driving his right arm as he sawed the blade hard and fast across Hocking’s throat. Hocking’s last shout was abruptly cut short as a fountain of blood sprang up. The big man heaved, but Sharpe was snarling and still slicing down with the blade, cutting through muscle and gullet and a flood of blood until the steel juddered against the bone. Hocking’s breath bubbled at his opened neck as Sharpe stood and stabbed the sabre down so hard that the blade flexed as its tip drove into the back of Hocking’s skull. ‘One in the eye, Jem,’ Sharpe snarled, ‘you bastard.’ The door shook as the men outside tried to force the bolt from its seating. Sharpe kicked the door. ‘We ain’t done,’ he shouted.
There was a sudden silence outside. But how many men were out there? And the two pistol shots would have been heard. Men would be watching the rat shed, knowing that there would be pickings to be had from the violence. Bloody fool, Sharpe told himself. Grace had forever told him he had to think before he let his anger rule his actions, and he had not really meant to kill Hocking, only to rob him. No, that was not true, he had wanted to kill Hocking for years, but he had done it clumsily, angrily, and now he was trapped. There were still some coins on the table, one of them a guinea, and he threw them onto the bed. ‘Emily?’
‘Sir?’ a small voice whimpered.
‘That money’s for you. Hide it. And stay hidden yourself now. Lie down.’
Still silence outside, but that meant nothing. Sharpe blew out the oil lamp, then pulled on his coat and pack. He hung the satchel across his chest, dragged the sabre free of Hocking’s face, then went to the door and slid the bolt back as silently as he could. He lifted the latch and eased the door ajar. He reckoned the two men only had one pistol between them, but both would have knives and cudgels and he half expected them to charge when they saw the door crack open, but instead they waited. They knew Sharpe had to come out eventually and so they were waiting for him. He crouched and felt for the badger cage that had been thrown at him. He placed the cage beside the door and slid its hinged flap open.
A small light came from the shed’s far end, just enough to reveal a heavy dark shadow that crept out of the cage and snuffled its way forward. It was a big beast that tried to turn back into the storeroom’s darkness, but Sharpe nudged it with his sabre tip and the animal lumbered out into the larger space.
The pistol banged, flashing the dark with searing light. The badger squealed, then a club broke its spine. Sharpe had pulled the door open and was through it before the men outside realized they were wasting effort on an animal. The sabre hissed and one man yelped, then Sharpe scythed the blade back at the second man who ducked away. Sharpe did not wait, but ran to the back of the shed where he remembered an alley that led to a noxious ditch up which small lighters could be dragged from the Thames. One of the two men was following him, blundering in the shed’s darkness. Sharpe shouldered the door open and ran down the alley. Two men were there, but both stepped aside when they saw the sabre. Sharpe twisted right and ran towards the big warehouse where tobacco was stored and where, in his childhood, a gang of counterfeiters had forged their coins.
‘Catch him!’ a voice shouted and Sharpe heard a rush of feet.
He twisted into another alley. The shouting was loud now. Men were pursuing him, not to avenge Hocking whom they did not even know was dead, but because Sharpe was a stranger in their gutters. The wolves had found their courage and Sharpe ran, the sabre in his hand, as the hue and cry filled the dark behind. The pack, greatcoat and satchel were heavy, the lanes were foot-clogging with mud and dung, and he knew he must find a lair soon, so he twisted into a narrow passage that ran past the Mint’s great wall, twisted left, right, left again and at last saw a dark doorway where he could crouch and catch his breath. He listened as men pounded past the alley’s entrance, then leaned back as the noise of the hunt faded northwards.
He grimaced when he realized his jacket was soaked in blood. That must wait. For now he sheathed the sabre, hid the scabbard beneath his greatcoat and then, with the pack in his hand, he went westwards through alleys and lanes he half remembered from childhood. He felt safer as he passed the Tower where yellow lights flared through high narrow windows, but he constantly looked behind in case anyone followed. Most of his pursuers had stayed as a pack, but some cleverer ones might have stalked him more silently. By now they knew he was worth killing, not just for the value of his sabre and his coat’s silver buttons, but for the coins he had thieved from Hocking. He was any man’s prey. The city streets were empty and twice he thought he heard footsteps behind him, but he saw no one. He went on west.
The streets became busier once he passed Temple Bar and he reckoned he was safer now, though he still looked back. He hurried along Fleet Street, then turned north into a confusing tangle of narrow alleys. It had begun to rain, he was tired. A crowd of men streamed from a tavern and Sharpe instinctively turned away from them, going into a wider street he recognized as High Holborn. He stopped there to catch his breath. Had he been followed?
Yellow light streamed from windows across the street. Go to Seven Dials, he thought, and find Maggie Joyce. The rain was coming down harder now, drumming on the roof of a parked carriage. Another carriage splashed by and its dim lamps showed a green-and-yellow painted board on the building with the glowing windows. Two watchmen, buttons shining on blue coats and with long staves in their hands, walked slowly past. Had the watch heard the hue and cry? They would be looking for a bloodstained army officer if they had and Sharpe decided he should go to earth. The carriage lamps had revealed that the tavern was the French Horn. The place had once been popular with the musicians from the theatre in nearby Drury Lane, but more recently it had been bought by an old soldier who was partial to any officer who happened to be in town, and throughout the army it was now known as the Frog Prick.
Beefsteak, Sharpe thought. Steak and ale, a bed and a warm fire. He had wanted to leave the army, but he was still an officer, so the Frog Prick would welcome him. He hefted the pack, crossed the street and climbed the steps.
No one took any notice of him. Perhaps half the patrons in the half-filled taproom were officers, though many of those in civilian clothes might also have been in the army. Sharpe knew none of them. He found an empty table in a shadowed spot by the wall and dropped his pack and took off his rain-soaked coat. A red-haired woman whose apron straps were decorated with the shako plates of a dozen regiments acknowledged that the tavern had a bed to spare for the night. ‘But you’ll have to share it,’ she went on, ‘and I’ll thank you not to wake the gentleman when you go up there. He went to bed early.’ She suddenly grimaced as she realized there was blood on Sharpe’s green jacket.
‘A thief tried to take this,’ Sharpe explained, patting the satchel. ‘You can give me a pail of cold water?’
‘You’ll want something to clean your boots too?’ she asked.
‘And a pot of ale,’ Sharpe said, ‘and a steak. A thick one.’
‘Haven’t seen many riflemen lately,’ the woman said. ‘I hear they’re going abroad.’
‘I hear the same.’
‘Where to?’ she asked.
‘No one knows,’ he said.
She leaned close to him. ‘Copenhagen, sweetheart,’ she whispered, ‘and just make sure you come home in one piece.’
‘Copen—’ Sharpe began.
‘Shh.’ She put a finger to her lips. ‘You ever got a question about the army, darling, you come to the Frog Prick. We know the answers two days before the Horse Guards ask the questions.’ She grinned and walked away.
Sharpe opened the satchel and tried to guess how much cash was inside. At least twenty pounds, he reckoned. So crime does pay, he told himself, and shifted his chair so that his back was to the room. Twenty pounds. A man could make a good start in a new life with twenty pounds.
Twenty pounds! A decent night’s work, he thought, though he was angry at himself for having botched the killing. He had been lucky to escape unscathed. He doubted he would be in trouble with the law, for Wapping folk were reluctant to call in the constables. Plenty of men had seen that it was a Rifle officer who had been with Hocking and who, presumably, had done the murder in the back of Beaky Malone’s Tavern, but Sharpe doubted the law would care or even know. Hocking’s body would be carried to the river and dumped on the ebbing tide to drift ashore at Dartford or Tilbury. Gulls would screech over his guts and peck out his remaining eye. No one would hang for Jem Hocking.
At least Sharpe hoped no one would hang for Jem Hocking.
But he was still a wanted man. He had run out of Wapping with a small fortune and there were plenty of men who would like to find him and take that fortune away. Hocking’s mastiffs for a start, and they would look for him in just such a tavern as the Frog Prick. So stay here one night, he told himself, then get out of London for a while. Just as he made that decision there was a sudden commotion at the tavern door that made him fear his pursuers had already come for him, but it was only a boisterous group of men and women hurrying out of the rain. The men shook water from umbrellas and plucked cloaks from the women’s shoulders. Sharpe suspected they had come from the nearby theatre, for the women wore scandalously low-cut dresses and had heavily made-up faces. They were actresses, probably, while the men were all army officers, gaudy in scarlet coats, gold braid and red sashes, and Sharpe looked away before any could catch his eye. ‘Good liquor, I stoutly maintain,’ one of the red-coated officers called, ‘gives genius a better discerning!’ That odd statement provoked a cheer. Tables and chairs were shifted to make room for the party which was evidently known to a score of men in the room. ‘You look in the pink of perfection, my dear,’ the officer told one of the women, and was mocked for his gallantry by his fellows.
Sharpe scowled at his ale. Grace had loved the theatre, but it was not his world, not any more, so damn it, he thought. He would not be an officer much longer. He had money now, so he could go into the world and start again. He drank the ale, gulping it down, suddenly aware of how thirsty he was. He needed a wash. He needed to soak his jacket in cold water. All in good time, he thought. Bed first, sleep or try to sleep. Try to sleep instead of thinking about Grace, and in the morning think what to do with the rest of his life.
Then a heavy hand dropped on his shoulder. ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ a harsh voice said, ‘and here you are.’
And Sharpe, trapped, could not move.
CHAPTER THREE
‘I never forget a face,’ Major General Sir David Baird said. He had taken a step back, alarmed by the ferocity of the scowl with which Sharpe had greeted him. ‘It is Sharpe, isn’t it?’ Baird asked, but was now met with a stare of incomprehension. ‘Well, is it or isn’t it?’ Baird demanded brusquely.
Sharpe, recovering from his astonishment, nodded. ‘It is, sir.’
‘I helped save you from a flogging once, and now you’re an officer. The Lord’s providences are incomprehensible, Mister Sharpe.’
‘They are, sir.’
Baird, a huge man, tall and muscled, was in a red uniform coat that was heavy with epaulettes and gold braid. He scowled at his companions, the group who had just arrived with wet umbrellas and painted women. ‘Those young men over there are aides to the Duke of York,’ he said, ‘and His Majesty insisted they take me to the theatre. Why? I cannot tell. Have you ever been forced into a theatre, Sharpe?’
‘Once, sir.’ And everyone had stared at Grace and talked of her behind their hands and she had endured it, but wept afterwards.
‘She Stoops to Conquer, what kind of name for an entertainment is that?’ Baird asked. ‘I was asleep by the end of the prologue so I’ve no idea. But I’ve been thinking of you lately, Mister Sharpe. Thinking of you and looking for you.’
‘For me, sir?’ Sharpe could not hide his puzzlement.
‘Is that blood on your coat? It is! Good God, man, don’t tell me the bloody Frogs have landed.’
‘It was a thief, sir.’
‘Not another one? A captain of the Dirty Half Hundred was killed just two days ago, not a hundred yards from Piccadilly! It must have been footpads, the bastards. I hope you hurt the man?’
‘I did, sir.’
‘Good.’ The General sat opposite Sharpe. ‘I heard you’d been commissioned. I congratulate you. You did a fine thing in India, Sharpe.’
Sharpe blushed. ‘I did my duty, sir.’
‘But it was a hard duty, Sharpe, a very hard duty. Good God! Risking the Tippoo’s cells? I spent enough time in that black bastard’s hands not to wish it on another man. But the fellow’s dead now, God be thanked.’
‘Indeed, sir,’ Sharpe said. He had killed the Tippoo himself, though he had never admitted it, and it had been the Tippoo’s jewels that had made Sharpe a rich man. Once.
‘And I keep hearing your name,’ Baird went on with an indecent relish. ‘Making scandal, eh?’
Sharpe winced at the accusation. ‘Was that what I was doing, sir?’
Baird was not a man to be delicate. ‘You were once a private soldier and she was the daughter of an earl. Yes, Sharpe, I’d say you were making scandal. So what happened?’
‘She died, sir.’ Sharpe felt the tears threatening, so looked down at the table. The silence stretched and he felt an obscure need to fill it. ‘Childbirth, sir. A fever.’
‘And the child with her?’
‘Yes, sir. A boy.’
‘Good Christ, man,’ Baird said bluffly, embarrassed by the tears that dropped onto the table. ‘You’re young. There’ll be others.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You!’ This peremptory demand was to one of the serving girls. ‘A bottle of port and two glasses. And I’ll take some cheese if you’ve anything edible.’
‘Lady Grace’s family,’ Sharpe said, suddenly needing to tell the story, ‘claimed the child wasn’t mine. Said it had been her husband’s, and so the lawyers baked me in a pie. Took everything, they did, because the child died after its mother. They said it was the heir to her husband, see?’ His tears were flowing now. ‘I don’t mind losing everything, sir, but I do mind losing her.’
‘Pull yourself together, man,’ Baird snapped. ‘Stop snivelling.’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ Baird said, ‘and you don’t piddle away your damned life because you don’t like His dispositions.’
Sharpe sniffed and looked up into Baird’s scarred face. ‘Piddling away my life?’
‘I’ve been keeping an eye on you, Sharpe,’ Baird said. ‘D’you know how many lives you saved by blowing that mine in Seringapatam? Scores! And my life among them. If it weren’t for you, Sharpe, I’d be dead.’ He emphasized this by stabbing Sharpe’s chest with a big forefinger. ‘Dead and buried, d’you doubt it?’
Sharpe did not, but he said nothing. Baird had led the assault on the Tippoo Sultan’s stronghold and the General had led from the front. The Scotsman would indeed be dead, Sharpe thought, if Sharpe, a private then, had not blown the mine that had been intended to trap and annihilate the storming party. Dust and stones, Sharpe remembered, and flame billowing down a sunlit street and the air filling with smoke and the noise rolling about him like a thousand trundling barrels, and then in the silence afterwards that was not silent at all, the moaning and screaming and the pale flames crackling.
‘Wellesley made you up, didn’t he?’ Baird asked.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Not like Wellesley to do a man a favour,’ the General observed sourly. ‘Tight-fisted, he is.’ Baird had never liked Sir Arthur Wellesley. ‘So why did he do it? For Seringapatam?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Yes, sir, no, sir, what are you, Sharpe? A bloody schoolboy? Why did the man promote you?’
Sharpe shrugged. ‘I was useful to him, sir. At Assaye.’
‘Useful?’
‘He was in trouble,’ Sharpe said. The General had been unhorsed, was surrounded and doomed, but Sergeant Sharpe had been there and it was the Indians who died instead.
‘In trouble?’ Baird sneered at Sharpe’s modesty. ‘It must have been desperate trouble if it persuaded Wellesley to do you a favour. Though how much of a favour was it?’ The question was a shrewd one and Sharpe did not try to answer it, but it seemed Baird knew the answer anyway. ‘Wallace wrote to me after you joined his regiment,’ the General went on, ‘and told me that you were a good soldier, but a bad officer.’
Sharpe bridled. ‘I tried my best, sir.’ Wallace had been the commanding officer of the 74th, a Scottish regiment, and Sharpe had joined it after he had been commissioned by Sir Arthur Wellesley. It had been Wallace who had recommended Sharpe to the 95th, but Sharpe was no happier in the new regiment. Still a failure, he thought.
‘Not easy, coming up from the ranks,’ Baird admitted. ‘But if Wallace says you’re a good soldier, then that’s a compliment. And I need a good soldier. I’ve been ordered to find a man who can look after himself in a difficult situation. Someone who ain’t afraid of a fight. I remembered you, but wasn’t sure where to find you. I should have known to look in the Frog Prick. Eat your steak, man. I can’t abide good meat getting cold.’
Sharpe finished the beef as the General’s port and cheese were put on the table. He let Baird pour him a glass before he spoke again. ‘I was thinking of leaving the army, sir,’ he admitted.
Baird looked at him in disgust. ‘To do what?’
‘I’ll find work,’ Sharpe said. Maybe he would go to Ebenezer Fairley, the merchant who had shown him friendship on the voyage home from India, or perhaps he would thieve. That was how he had started in life. ‘I’ll get by,’ he said belligerently.
Sir David Baird cut the cheese which crumbled under his knife. ‘There are three kinds of soldier, Sharpe,’ he said. ‘There are the damned useless ones, and God knows there’s an endless supply of those. Then there are the good solid lads who get the job done, but would piss in their breeches if you didn’t show them how their buttons worked. And then there’s you and me. Soldiers’ soldiers, that’s who we are.’
Sharpe looked sceptical. ‘A soldier’s soldier?’ he asked.
‘We’re the men who clean up after the parade, Sharpe. The carriages and kings go by, the bands play, the cavalry prances past like bloody fairies, and what’s left is a mess of dung and litter. We clean it up. The politicians get the world into tangles, then ask their armies to make things right. We do their dirty work, Sharpe, and we’re good at it. Very good. You might not be the best officer in King George’s army, but you’re a bloody fine soldier. And you like the life, don’t tell me you don’t.’
‘Being a quartermaster?’ Sharpe sneered.
‘Aye, that too. Someone has to do it, and as often as not they give it to a man up from the ranks.’ He glared at Sharpe and then, unexpectedly, grinned. ‘So you’ve fallen out with Colonel Beckwith too, have you?’
‘I reckon so, sir, yes.’
‘How?’
Sharpe considered the question and decided it could not be answered truthfully. He could not say he did not fit into the mess, it was too vague, too self-pitying, so he answered with a half-truth. ‘They’ve marched off, sir, and left me to clean up the barracks. I’ve fought more battles than any of them, seen more enemies and killed more men than all of them put together, but that don’t count. They don’t want me, sir, so I’m getting out.’
‘Don’t be such a bloody fool,’ Baird growled. ‘In a year or two, Sharpe, there’s going to be enough war for every man jack in this army. So far all we’ve been doing is pissing around the edge of the French, but sooner or later we’re going to have to tackle the bastards head on. We’ll need all the officers we can get then, and you’ll have your chance. You might be a quartermaster now, but ten years from now you’ll be leading a battalion, so just be patient.’
‘I’m not sure Colonel Beckwith will want me back, sir. I’m not supposed to be in London. I’m supposed to be at Shorncliffe.’
‘Beckwith will do what I tell him,’ Baird growled, ‘and I’ll tell him to kiss your bum if you do this job for me.’
Sharpe liked Baird. Most soldiers liked Baird. He might be a general, but he was as tough as any man in the ranks. He could outswear the sergeants, outmarch the Rifles and outfight any man in green or scarlet. He was a fighter, not a bureaucrat. He had risen high enough in the army, but there were rumours that he had enemies higher still, men who disliked his bluntness. ‘What kind of job, sir?’ Sharpe asked.
‘One where you might die, Sharpe,’ Baird said with relish. He drained his glass of port and poured another. ‘We’re sending a guardsman to Copenhagen. Our interest in Copenhagen is supposed to be secret, but I dare say every French agent in London already knows it. This fellow is going there tomorrow and I want someone to keep him alive. He’s not a real soldier, Sharpe, but an aide to the Duke of York. Not one of those’ – he saw Sharpe glancing at the table of theatre-goers – ‘but the same sort of creature. He’s a courtier, Sharpe, not a soldier. You won’t find a better man for standing sentinel over the royal piss pot, but you wouldn’t want to follow him into a breach, not if you wanted to win.’
‘He’s going tomorrow?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Aye, I know, short notice. We had another man ready to hold his hand, but he was the fellow who was murdered two days ago. So the Duke of York tells me to find a replacement. I thought of you, but didn’t know where you were, then God sent me to the theatre and I find you guzzling ale afterwards. Well done, God. And you won’t mind slitting a few Frog throats?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Our bloody guardsman says he doesn’t need a protector. Says there’s no danger, but what does he know? And his master, the Duke, insists he takes a companion, someone who knows how to fight and, by God, Sharpe, you know how to fight. Almost as well as me!’
‘Almost, sir,’ Sharpe agreed.
‘So you’re under orders, Sharpe.’ The General gripped the port bottle by the neck and pushed back his chair. ‘Are you sleeping here?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So am I, and I’ve got a carriage coming at seven o’clock to take us to Harwich.’ Baird stood, then paused. ‘It’s a strange thing, Sharpe, but if you do your job properly you’ll stop a war. Odd thing for a soldier to do, don’t you think? Where’s our advancement if we can’t fight? But all the same I doubt we’ll be beating our swords into ploughshares any time soon, not unless the Frogs suddenly see sense. So till tomorrow, young man.’ Baird gave Sharpe a brusque nod and went back to his companions, while Sharpe, with a start of surprise, realized he had not been told why the guardsman was being sent to Copenhagen, nor been asked whether he was willing to go with him. Baird, it appeared, had taken his assent for granted, and Baird, Sharpe reckoned, was right, for, like it or not, he was a soldier.
The General was in a foul mood at seven o’clock next morning. His aide, a Captain Gordon, mimed the cause of Baird’s ill temper by tipping an imaginary bottle to his lips, thus cautioning Sharpe to tact. Sharpe kept silent, settling on the carriage’s front seat, while Baird grumbled that London stank, the weather was wretched and the coach seats lumpy. The vehicle lurched as the inn servants strapped the General’s luggage on the roof, then there was a further delay as a final passenger appeared and insisted that his own luggage be secured alongside Baird’s. The newcomer was a civilian who looked about thirty years old. He was very thin and had a frail, birdlike face on which, astonishingly, a black velvet beauty patch was glued. He wore a silver coat edged with white lace and carried a gold-topped stick from which a silk handkerchief hung. His hair, black as gunpowder, had been smoothed with a perfumed oil and tied with a silver ribbon. He climbed into the coach and, without a word, sat opposite Sharpe. ‘You’re late, my lord,’ Baird snapped.
The young man raised a gloved hand, fluttered his fingers as if to suggest Baird was being extremely tiresome and then closed his eyes. Baird, denied sport with his lordship, frowned at Sharpe instead. ‘There’s still blood on the coat, Sharpe.’
‘Sorry, sir. Tried to wash it out.’ The carriage jerked forward.
‘Can’t have you going to Denmark in a bloody coat, man.’
‘One supposes, Sir David,’ Captain Gordon cut in smoothly, ‘that Lieutenant Sharpe will not be wearing uniform in Denmark. The object is secrecy.’
‘Object, my arse,’ the General said helpfully. ‘He’s my nephew,’ he informed Sharpe, referring to Captain Gordon, ‘and talks like a bloody lawyer.’
Gordon smiled. ‘Do you have civilian clothes, Sharpe?’
‘I do, sir.’ Sharpe indicated his pack.
‘I suggest you don them once you’re aboard your ship,’ Gordon said.
‘“I suggest you don them.”’ Baird mimicked his nephew’s voice. ‘Bloody hellfire. Doesn’t this bloody carriage move at all?’
‘Traffic, Sir David,’ Gordon said emolliently. ‘Essex vegetables for the Saturday market.’
‘Essex bloody vegetables,’ the General complained. ‘I’m forced into a bloody theatre, Gordon, then subjected to Essex vegetables. I should have you all shot.’ He closed his bloodshot eyes.
The carriage, drawn by six horses, went first to the Tower of London where, after Sir David had sworn at the sentries, they were allowed through the gates to discover a cart guarded by a dozen guardsmen who appeared to be under the command of a very tall and very good-looking man in a pale-blue coat, silk stock, white breeches and black boots. The young man bowed as Baird clambered down from the carriage. ‘I have the gold, Sir David.’
‘I should damn well hope you do,’ Sir David growled. ‘Is there a jakes in this damn place?’
‘That way, sir.’ The young man pointed.
‘This is Sharpe,’ Baird said harshly. ‘He’s replacing Willsen, God rest his soul, and this’ – Baird was talking to Sharpe now – ‘is the man you’re keeping alive. Captain Lavisser, or should I say Captain and Major Lavisser? The bloody Guards need two ranks. Bloody fools.’
Lavisser gave Sharpe a rather startled look when he heard that the rifleman was to replace the dead Willsen, but then, as the General went to find the lavatory, the guardsman smiled and his face, which had looked sour and cynical to Sharpe, was suddenly full of friendly charm. ‘So you’re to be my companion?’ he asked.
‘So it seems, sir.’
‘Then I trust we shall be friends, Sharpe. With all my heart.’ Lavisser thrust out a hand. Sharpe took it clumsily, embarrassed by Lavisser’s effusive friendliness. ‘Poor Willsen,’ the Captain went on, clasping Sharpe’s hand in both of his. ‘To be murdered in the street! And he leaves a widow, it seems, and a daughter too. Just a child, just a child.’ He looked pained, then turned to see his guardsmen struggling to move a great wooden chest from the cart. ‘I think the gold should go inside the carriage,’ he suggested.
‘Gold?’ Sharpe asked.
Lavisser turned to him. ‘You’ve not been told the purpose of our journey?’
‘I’m to keep you alive, sir, that’s all I know.’
‘For which I shall be eternally grateful. But our purpose, Sharpe, is to carry gold to the Danes. Forty-three thousand guineas! We travel rich, eh?’ Lavisser hauled open the carriage door, motioned his men to bring the chest of gold, then noticed the carriage’s last passenger, the pale civilian in the silver coat. Lavisser looked astonished. ‘God, Pumps! Are you here?’
Pumps, if that was his real name, merely fluttered his fingers again, then shifted his elegantly booted feet as the gold was manhandled onto the carriage floor. An escort of twenty dragoons took their places ahead of the carriage, then Sir David Baird came back and complained that the chest took up all the coach’s leg room. ‘I suppose we’ll have to endure it,’ he grumbled, then rapped on the coach’s roof to signal that the journey could begin.
The General’s mood improved as the coach jolted through the soot-grimed orchards and vegetable fields about Hackney where a fitful sun chased shadows over woods and low hills. ‘You know Lord Pumphrey?’ Baird asked Lavisser, indicating the frail young man who still seemed to be asleep.
‘William and I were at Eton together,’ Lavisser answered.
Pumphrey opened his eyes, peered at Lavisser as though surprised to see him, shuddered and closed his eyes again.
‘You and I should have been to Eton,’ Baird said to Sharpe. ‘We’d have learned useful things, like which side of the pot to piss in. Did you have breakfast, Lavisser?’
‘The Lieutenant of the Tower was very hospitable, thank you, sir.’
‘They like guardsmen in the Tower,’ Baird said, implying that real soldiers would not be so welcome. ‘Captain Lavisser’ – he spoke to Sharpe now – ‘is an aide to the Duke of York. I told you that, didn’t I? But did I tell you how useless His Royal Highness is? Bloody man thinks he’s a soldier. He buggered up his campaign in Holland in ’99 and now he’s Commander in Chief. That’s what happens to you, Sharpe, when you’re the King’s son. Fortunately’ – Baird, who was plainly enjoying himself, turned to Lavisser – ‘fortunately for you royal camp-followers the army has still got one or two real soldiers. Lieutenant Sharpe is one of them. He’s a rifleman in case you don’t recognize that bloodstained green rag, and he’s a thug.’
Lavisser, who had taken no offence as his master was insulted, looked puzzled. ‘He’s a what, sir?’
‘You weren’t in India, were you?’ Sir David asked, making the question sound like an accusation. ‘A thug, Lavisser, is a killer; a brute, conscienceless and efficient killer. I’m a thug, Lavisser, and so is Mister Sharpe. You are not, and nor are you, Gordon.’
‘I nightly give thanks to the Almighty for that providence,’ Baird’s aide said happily.
‘Sharpe’s a good thug,’ Baird said. ‘He came up from the ranks and you don’t do that by being delicate. Tell ’em what you did in Seringapatam, Sharpe.’
‘Must I, sir?’
‘Yes,’ Baird insisted, so Sharpe told the story as briefly as he could. Lavisser listened politely, but Lord Pumphrey, whose presence was still a mystery to Sharpe, opened his eyes and paid very close attention, so close that he unsettled Sharpe. His lordship said nothing, however, when the lame tale was done.
Lavisser spoke instead. ‘You impress me, Mister Sharpe,’ he said fulsomely, ‘you impress me mightily.’ Sharpe did not know what to say, so gazed out of the window at a small wheatfield that looked rain-beaten. Beyond the damp wheat stood a haystack, reminding him that Grace had died between haymaking and the harvest a year before. He felt a lump in his throat. God damn it, he thought, God damn it, would it never go? He could see her in his mind’s eye, see her sitting on the terrace with her hands on her swollen belly, laughing at some poor jest. Oh, Christ, he thought, but let it pass.
He became aware that Sir David Baird was now talking about Copenhagen. The Danish King, it seemed, was mad, and the country was ruled instead by the Crown Prince. ‘Is it true you know him?’ Baird demanded of Lavisser.
‘The Crown Prince knows me, sir,’ Lavisser said carefully. ‘My grandfather is one of his chamberlains, so I have that introduction. And my master, the Duke, is his first cousin.’
‘That will be enough?’
‘More than enough,’ Lavisser said firmly. Lord Pumphrey took a watch from his pocket, fumbled with the catch, consulted it and yawned.
‘Boring you, my lord?’ Baird growled.
‘I am forever entertained by your company, Sir David,’ Lord Pumphrey said in a very high-pitched voice. He pronounced each word very distinctly, which imbued the statement with an odd authority. ‘I am enthralled by you,’ he added, tucking the watch away and closing his eyes.
‘Bloody fool,’ Sir David muttered, then looked at Sharpe. ‘We’re talking about the Danish fleet,’ he explained. ‘It’s a damn great fleet that’s holed up in Copenhagen and doing bugger all. Just mouldering away. But the Frogs would like to get their damned hands on it and replace the ships we took from them at Trafalgar. So they’re thinking of invading little Denmark and stealing their ships.’
‘And if the French do invade,’ Lavisser smoothly continued the General’s explanation, ‘then they will dominate the entrance to the Baltic and so cut off Britain’s trade. Denmark is neutral, of course, but such circumstances have hardly deterred Bonaparte in the past.’
‘It’s the Danish fleet he’s after,’ Baird insisted, ‘because the bloody man will use it to invade Britain. So we have to stop him stealing it.’
‘How do you do that, sir?’ Sharpe asked.
Baird grinned greedily. ‘By stealing it first, of course. The Foreign Office have a fellow over there trying to persuade the Danish government to send their ships to British ports, but they’re saying no. Captain Lavisser is going to change their minds.’
‘You can do that?’ Sharpe asked him.
Lavisser shrugged. ‘I intend to bribe the Crown Prince, Sharpe.’ He patted the wooden chest. ‘We are carrying Danegeld, and we shall dazzle His Majesty with glitter and befuddle him with treasure.’
Lord Pumphrey groaned. Everyone ignored him as Baird took up the explanation. ‘Captain Lavisser’s going to bribe the Crown Prince, Sharpe, and if the Frogs catch wind of what he’s doing they’ll do their best to stop him. A knife in the back will do that very effectively, so your job is to protect Lavisser.’
Sharpe felt no qualms at such a task, indeed he rather hoped he would get a chance to tangle with some Frenchmen. ‘What happens if the Danes won’t give us the fleet, sir?’ he asked Baird.
‘Then we invade,’ the General said.
‘Denmark?’ Sharpe was astonished. The woman at the Frog Prick had suggested as much, but it still seemed surprising. Fighting Denmark? Denmark was not an enemy!
‘Denmark,’ Baird confirmed. ‘Our fleet’s ready and waiting in Harwich and the Danes, Sharpe, ain’t got no choice. They either put their fleet under our protection or I’ll bloody take it from them.’
‘You, sir?’
‘Lord Cathcart’s in charge,’ Baird allowed, ‘but he’s an old woman. I’ll be there, Sharpe, and God help the Danes if I am. And your friend Wellesley’ – he said the name sourly – ‘is tagging along to see if he can learn something.’
‘He’s no friend of mine, sir,’ Sharpe said. It was true that Wellesley had made him into an officer, but Sharpe had not seen the General since India. Nor did he relish any such meeting. Grace had been a cousin of Wellesley’s, a very distant cousin, but disapproval of her behaviour had spread into the furthest reaches of her aristocratic family.
‘I’m your friend, Mister Sharpe,’ Baird said wolfishly, ‘and I don’t mind admitting I want you to fail. A fight in Denmark? I could relish that. No more talk of a man who can only fight in India.’ The bitterness was naked. Baird felt he had been unfairly treated in India, mostly because Wellesley had been offered the preferments that Baird believed he deserved. No wonder he wanted war, Sharpe thought.
They reached Harwich in the evening. The fields surrounding the small port were filled with tented camps while the damp pastures were crammed with cavalry and artillery horses. Guns were parked in the town streets and were lined wheel to wheel on the stone quay where, beside a small pile of expensive leather baggage, a man as tall and broad as Baird stood waiting. The man was dressed in servant’s black and Sharpe at first took him to be a labourer wanting a tip for carrying the baggage onto a boat, but then the man bowed his head to Lavisser who clapped him familiarly on the shoulder. ‘This is Barker,’ Lavisser told Sharpe, ‘my man. And this is Lieutenant Sharpe, Barker, who has replaced the unfortunate Willsen.’
Barker turned a flat gaze on Sharpe. Another thug, Sharpe thought, a hardened, scarred and formidable thug. He nodded at the servant who did not return the greeting, but just looked away.
‘Barker was a footpad, Sharpe,’ Lavisser said enthusiastically, ‘before I taught him manners and morals.’
‘Don’t see why you need me,’ Sharpe said, ‘if you’ve got a footpad on your side.’
‘I doubt I do need you, Sharpe,’ Lavisser said, ‘but our masters insist I have a protector, so come you must.’ He gave Sharpe another of his dazzling smiles.
A small crowd had gathered on the quay to gape at the fleet of great warships that lay in the river’s mouth, while transports, frigates and brigs were either anchored or moored nearer the small harbour where a falling tide was exposing long stretches of mud. Closest to the quay were some ungainly ships, much smaller than frigates, with low freeboards and wide hulls. ‘Bomb ships,’ Gordon, Baird’s nephew, remarked helpfully.
‘They’ve got damn great mortars in their bellies,’ Baird explained, then turned to look at the modest town. ‘A dozen well-manned bomb ships could wipe Harwich off the earth in twenty minutes,’ the General said with unholy relish. ‘It will be interesting to see what they do to a city like Copenhagen.’
‘You would not bombard Copenhagen!’ Captain Gordon sounded shocked.
‘I’d bombard London if the King demanded it,’ Baird said.
‘But not Edinburgh,’ Gordon murmured.
‘You spoke, Gordon?’
‘I remarked that time is getting short, sir. I’m sure Captain Lavisser and Lieutenant Sharpe should be embarking soon.’
Their ship was a frigate, newly painted and moored closer to Felixstowe on the river’s northern bank. ‘She’s called the Cleopatra,’ Baird’s aide said, and it was apparent that the frigate’s crew had seen the carriage’s arrival, for a ship’s boat was now pulling across the river.
A score of officers from the tented camps had gathered lower down the quay and Sharpe saw some green jackets among the scarlet. He did not want to be recognized and so he hid himself behind a great pile of herring barrels and stared down at the mud where gulls strutted and fought over fish bones. He was suddenly cold. He did not want to go to sea, and he knew that was because he had met Grace on a ship. It was made worse because a country gentleman, come in his open carriage to see the ships, was telling his daughters which of the far fleet had been at Trafalgar.
‘There, you see? The Mars? She was there.’
‘Which one is she, Papa?’
‘The black-and-yellow one.’
‘They’re all black and yellow, Papa. Like wasps.’
Sharpe stared at the ships, half listening to the girls tease their father and trying not to think of Grace teasing him, when a precise and high-pitched voice spoke behind him. ‘Are you content, Lieutenant?’
Sharpe turned to see it was Lord Pumphrey, the young and taciturn civilian who had spoken so little during the journey. ‘My lord?’
‘I first heard you were involved in this nonsense very late last night,’ Pumphrey said softly, ‘and I confess your qualities were quite unknown to me. I apologize for that, but I am not very familiar with the army list. My father once thought I should be a soldier, but he concluded I was both too clever and too delicate.’ He smiled at Sharpe who did not smile back. Lord Pumphrey sighed. ‘So I took the liberty of waking one or two acquaintances to discover something about you and they informed me that you are a most resourceful man.’
‘Am I, my lord?’ Sharpe wondered who on earth he and Lord Pumphrey knew in common.
‘I too have resources,’ Pumphrey went on. ‘I work for the Foreign Office, though, for the moment, I am reduced to serving as a civilian aide to Sir David. It quite opens one’s eyes, seeing how the military operate. So, Lieutenant, are you content?’
Sharpe shrugged. ‘It all seems a bit abrupt, my lord, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Distressingly abrupt!’ Pumphrey agreed. He was so thin and frail that it looked as though a puff of wind would blow him off the quay and dump him in the filth below, but that apparent weakness was belied by his eyes which were very intelligent. He took out a snuff box, snapped open its lid and offered some to Sharpe. ‘You don’t use it? I find it calming, and we rather need calm heads at present. This alarming excursion, Lieutenant, is being encouraged by the Duke of York. We at the Foreign Office, who might be expected to know rather more about Denmark than His Royal Highness, profoundly disapprove of the whole scheme, but the Duke, alas, has gained the support of the Prime Minister. Mister Canning wants the fleet and would rather avoid a campaign that will inevitably make Denmark into our enemy. He suggests, too, that a successful bribe will spare the Treasury the expense of such a campaign. These are cogent arguments, Lieutenant, do you not think?’
‘If you say so, my lord.’
‘Cogent indeed, and quite egregiously muddle-headed. It will all end in tears, Lieutenant, which is why the Foreign Office in its ineffable wisdom has attached me to the Danish expedition. I am deputed to pick up the pieces, so to speak.’
Sharpe wondered why his lordship wore a beauty patch on his cheek. It was a woman’s affectation, not a man’s, but Sharpe did not like to ask. Instead he watched two gulls squabble over some fish offal in the mud under the quay. ‘You think it won’t work, my lord?’
Pumphrey gazed at the ships. ‘Shall I just say, Lieutenant, that nothing I have heard suggests that the Danish Crown Prince is venal?’
‘Venal?’ Sharpe asked.
A ghost of a smile showed on his lordship’s face. ‘Nothing I have heard, Sharpe, suggests that the Crown Prince is a man amenable to bribery, and in consequence the Foreign Office is acutely concerned that the whole sorry affair might embarrass Britain.’
‘How?’
‘Suppose the Crown Prince is offended by the offer of a bribe and announces the attempt to the world?’
‘That doesn’t seem so bad,’ Sharpe said dourly.
‘It would be clumsy,’ Lord Pumphrey said severely, ‘and clumsiness is the grossest offence against good diplomacy. In truth we are bribing half the crowned heads of Europe, but we have to pretend it is not happening. But there’s worse.’ He glanced behind to make sure no one was overhearing the conversation. ‘Captain Lavisser is known to be indebted. He plays steep at Almack’s. Well, so do many others, but the fact of it is worrying.’
Sharpe smiled down at the birdlike Pumphrey. ‘He’s up to his ears in debt and you’re sending him off with a chest full of money?’
‘The Commander in Chief insists, the Prime Minister concurs and we at the Foreign Office cannot possibly suggest that the Honourable John Lavisser is anything other than scrupulously honest.’ Pumphrey said the last word very sourly, implying the opposite of what he had just stated. ‘We merely must tidy things up, Lieutenant, when the enthusiasm has died down. Nasty thing, enthusiasm. And if things do turn out ill then we would appreciate that no one was to know what happened. We don’t want the Duke and the Prime Minister to look like complete fools, do we?’
‘We don’t, my lord?’
Lord Pumphrey shuddered at Sharpe’s levity. ‘If Lavisser fails, Lieutenant, then I want you to bring him and the money out of Copenhagen to the safety of our army. We do not want the Danish government announcing a failed and clumsy attempt at a bribe.’ He took a piece of paper from his pocket. ‘If you need assistance in Copenhagen then this man may provide it.’ He held the paper out to Sharpe, then pulled it back. ‘I have to tell you, Sharpe, that I have worried greatly about revealing this name to you. The man is valuable. I devoutly hope you won’t need his help.’
‘What treason are you talking, my lord?’ Baird demanded loudly.
‘I was merely remarking on the beauty of the scene, Sir David,’ Lord Pumphrey observed in his high-pitched voice, ‘and noting to Lieutenant Sharpe the delicate tracery of the ships’ rigging. I should like a chance to depict the scene in watercolours.’
‘Good God, man, leave that to the proper bloody artists!’ Baird looked appalled. ‘That’s what the idiots are for.’
Lord Pumphrey pressed the piece of paper into Sharpe’s hand. ‘Guard that name, Lieutenant,’ he said softly. ‘You alone possess it.’
Meaning, Sharpe thought, that Lavisser had not been trusted with the man’s name. ‘Thank you, my lord,’ he said, but Lord Pumphrey had already walked away for the Cleopatra’s launch had come to the jetty that gave access to the deep-water channel. The chest was being loaded into the launch’s belly and Baird held out a hand to Lavisser. ‘I’ll bid you farewell, God speed and good fortune,’ Baird said. ‘I’ll allow I won’t mind if you fail, but there’s no point in real soldiers dying if a handful of gold can keep them alive.’ He shook Sharpe’s hand. ‘Keep our guardsman alive, Sharpe.’
‘I will, sir.’
The two officers did not speak as they were rowed out to the Cleopatra which, in her haste to use a favourable wind and tide, was already hauling her anchor. Sharpe could hear the chant of the seamen as they tramped round the capstan and see the quivering cable shedding drops of water and lumps of mud as it came from the grey river. The topmen were aloft, ready to drop the high sails. Sharpe and Lavisser scrambled up the ship’s side to be met by the dutiful squeal of bosuns’ whistles and by a harassed lieutenant who hurried them aft to the quarterdeck while the hulking Barker carried the baggage down below and a dozen seamen hauled a line to bring the gold on deck. ‘Captain Samuels begs to be excused while we get under way,’ the Lieutenant said, ‘and requests that you keep to the stern rail, gentlemen, until the sails are set.’
Lavisser grinned as the Lieutenant hurried away. ‘Meaning that Captain Samuels don’t want us in the way while he makes a muck of getting under sail. And he’s under the eye of the Admiral, no less! Rather like setting the guard at Windsor Castle. I don’t suppose you’ve ever done that, Sharpe? Placed a guard at Windsor?’
‘I haven’t, sir,’ Sharpe said.
‘You do it perfectly, then some decrepit old fool who last saw action fighting against William the Conqueror informs you that Guardsman Bloggs has an ill-set flint in his musket. And for God’s sake stop calling me “sir”,’ Lavisser said with a smile. ‘You make me feel old, and that’s dreadful unkind of you. So what was on that piece of paper little William gave to you?’
‘Little William?’
‘Lord Pumps. He was a pallid little worm at Eton and he’s no better now.’
‘It’s just his address,’ Sharpe said. ‘He says I should report to him when I get back.’
‘Nonsense,’ Lavisser said, though he did not appear offended that Sharpe had lied to him. ‘If my guess is any good then it’s the name of a man in Copenhagen who might help us, a name, I might add, that the suspicious bastards at the Foreign Office refused to give me. Divide and rule, that’s the Foreign Office way. Aren’t you going to tell me the name?’
‘If I remember it,’ Sharpe said. ‘I threw the paper overboard.’
Lavisser laughed at that untruth. ‘Don’t tell me little Pumps told you to keep it secret! He did? Poor little Pumps, he sees conspiracy everywhere. Well, so long as one of us has the name I suppose it don’t matter.’ He looked upwards as the topsails were released. The canvas shook loudly until the seamen sheeted the sails home. Men slid down shrouds and scrambled along spars to loose the mainsails. It was all so very familiar to Sharpe after his long voyage home from India. Captain Samuels, heavy and tall, stood at the white line which marked off the quarterdeck from the rest of the flush-decked frigate. He said nothing, just watched his men.
‘How long a voyage is it?’ Sharpe asked Lavisser.
‘A week? Ten days? Sometimes much longer. It all depends on Aeolus, our god of the winds. May he blow us swiftly and safely.’
Sharpe grunted an acknowledgement, then just stared ashore where the herring smokers made a haze over the land. He leaned on the stern rail, suddenly wishing he was anywhere but at sea.
Lavisser leaned on the rail beside him. ‘You ain’t happy, Sharpe,’ the guardsman said. Sharpe frowned at the words, which struck him as intrusive. He said nothing, but was acutely aware of Lavisser so close beside him. ‘Let me guess.’ The Guards Captain raised his eyes to the wheeling gulls and pretended to think for a while, then looked at Sharpe again. ‘My guess, Sharpe, is that you met Lady Grace Hale on shipboard and that you’ve not been afloat since.’ He held up a cautionary hand when he saw the anger in Sharpe’s eyes. ‘My dear Sharpe, please don’t mistake me. I feel for you, indeed I do. I met the Lady Grace once. Let me see? It must be a dozen years or more ago and I was only a sprat of fifteen, but I could spot a beauty even then. She was lovely.’
Sharpe said nothing, just watched Lavisser.
‘She was lovely and she was clever,’ the Guards Captain went on softly, ‘and then she was married off to a tedious old bore. And you, Sharpe, forgive my being forward, gave her a time of happiness. Isn’t that something to remember with satisfaction?’ Lavisser waited for Sharpe to respond, but the rifleman said nothing. ‘Am I right?’ Lavisser asked gently.
‘She left me in bloody misery,’ Sharpe admitted. ‘I can’t seem to shake it. And, yes, being on a ship brings it back.’
‘Why should you shake it?’ Lavisser asked. ‘My dear Sharpe, may I call you Richard? That’s kind of you. My dear Richard, you should be in mourning. She deserves it. The greater the affection, the greater the mourning. And it’s been cruel for you. All the gossip! It’s no one’s business what you and Lady Grace did.’
‘It was everyone’s business,’ Sharpe said bitterly.
‘And it will pass,’ Lavisser said gently. ‘Gossip is ephemeral, Richard, it vanishes like dew or smoke. Your grief remains, the rest of the world will forget. They’ve mostly forgotten already.’
‘You haven’t.’
Lavisser smiled. ‘I’ve been racking my brains all day trying to place you. It only came to me as we climbed aboard.’ A rush of feet interrupted them as seamen came aft to secure the mizzen sheets. The great sail banged above their heads, then was brought under control and the frigate picked up speed. Her ensign, blue because the fleet’s commander was an Admiral of the Blue, flapped crisply in the evening wind. ‘The grief will pass, Richard,’ Lavisser went on in a low voice, ‘it will pass. I had a sister who died, a dear thing, and I grieved for her. It’s not the same, I know, but we should not be ashamed of demonstrating our feelings. Not when it is grief for a lovely woman.’
‘It won’t stop me doing my job,’ Sharpe said stoically, fighting off the tears that threatened.
‘Of course it won’t,’ Lavisser said fervently, ‘nor, I trust, will it stop you from enjoying the fleshpots of Copenhagen. They are meagre and few, I can assure you, but such as they are we shall enjoy.’
‘I can’t afford fleshpots,’ Sharpe said.
‘Don’t be so dull, Richard! We’re sailing with forty-three thousand of the government’s guineas and I intend to steal as many of them as I decently can without getting caught.’ He smiled so broadly and with such infectious enjoyment that Sharpe had to laugh. ‘There!’ Lavisser said. ‘You see I shall be good for you!’
‘I hope so,’ Sharpe replied. He was watching the Cleopatra’s rippling wake. The tide was ebbing and the wind was out of the west so that the anchored ships presented their sterns to the frigate’s quarterdeck. The ugly bomb ships sat low in the water. One was called Thunder, another Vesuvius, then there was Aetna with Zebra close by. The frigate sailed so close to Zebra that Sharpe could look down into her welldeck which was stuffed with what looked like coils of rope, put there to cushion the shock of the two great mortars that squatted in the ship’s belly. The mortars were capped with tompions, but Sharpe guessed they threw a shell about a foot across and, because the flash of their firing would blast up into the air to lob the bombs in a high arc, the forward stays of the Zebra were not made of hemp, but of thick chain. Another eight guns, carronades by the look of them, were mounted aft of the mainmast. An ugly vessel, Sharpe thought, but a brute with massive teeth, and there were sixteen of the bomb ships moored or anchored in the river, along with a host of gun brigs that were shallow-draught vessels armed with heavy cannon. These were not ships designed to fight other ships, but to hammer targets ashore.
The Cleopatra was picking up speed now as the crew trimmed the big sails. She leaned to larboard and the water began to gurgle and seethe at her stern. The dusk was drawing in, shadowing the big seventy-fours that were the workhorses of the British fleet. Sharpe recognized some of the ships’ names from Trafalgar: the Mars, the Minotaur, the Orion and the Agamemnon, but most he had never seen before. The Goliath, belying her name, was dwarfed by the Prince of Wales, a 98-gun monster which flew the Admiral’s pennant. A gunport opened at the Prince of Wales’s bow to return the salute that the Cleopatra was firing as she passed. The sound of the guns was huge, the smoke thick and the tremor of the cannon, even though they were unshotted, shook the deck beneath Sharpe’s feet.
Only one ship, another seventy-four, lay beyond the Prince of Wales. She was a good-looking ship and Sharpe had learned enough in his voyage home from India to recognize that she was French-built, one of the many ships that had been captured from the enemy. Water gushed from her pumps as the Cleopatra sailed by and Sharpe looked up to see men pausing in their work to watch the sleek frigate pass. Then the Cleopatra left the seventy-four behind and Sharpe could read the gold-painted name scrolled across her stern. Pucelle. His heart leaped. The Pucelle! His own ship, the ship he had been aboard at Trafalgar and which was captained by his friend, Joel Chase, though whether Chase was still a captain, or aboard the Pucelle or even alive, Sharpe did not know. He just knew that he and Grace had known happiness on board the ship that had been named by her French builders for Joan of Arc, la pucelle or the virgin. He wanted to wave at the ship, but it was too far for him to recognize anyone aboard.
‘You’re welcome, gentlemen.’ Captain Samuels, dark-faced, grey-haired and scowling, had come to greet his guests. ‘Lieutenant Dunbar will show you your quarters.’ He frowned at Sharpe, who had turned to stare at the Pucelle again. ‘You find my remarks tedious, Lieutenant?’
‘I’m sorry, sir. I was aboard that ship once.’
‘The Pucelle?’
‘Didn’t she take the Revenant at Trafalgar, sir?’
‘What if she did? There were easy pickings at that battle, Lieutenant.’ The envy of a man who had not sailed with Nelson was naked in Samuels’s voice.
‘You were there, sir?’ Sharpe asked, knowing it would needle the Captain.
‘I was not, but nor were you, Lieutenant, and now you will show me the courtesy of remarking my words.’ He went on to tell them the rules of the ship, that they were not to smoke aboard, not to climb the rigging and that they must salute the quarterdeck. ‘You will take your meals in the officers’ mess and I’ll thank you not to get in the crew’s way. I’ll do my duty, God knows, but that doesn’t mean I must like it. I’m to put you and your damned cargo ashore by stealth and that I’ll do, but I’ll be glad to see the back of you both and get back to some proper sailoring.’ He left them as abruptly as he had come.
‘I do love feeling welcome,’ Lavisser murmured.
Sharpe stared aft again, but the Pucelle was lost in the dark loom of the land. She was gone and he was sailing away again. Sailing to a war, or to stop a war, or to be tangled in treachery, but whatever it was, he was still a soldier.
Sharpe was a soldier without weapons. He had come aboard the Cleopatra with his official-issue sabre, but nothing else. Nothing useful. He complained of it to Lavisser who said Sharpe could be amply supplied in Vygârd. ‘It’s the house where my mother grew up and it’s rather beautiful.’ He sounded wistful. ‘My grandfather has anything you might need; pistols, swords, everything, though I truly doubt we’ll encounter trouble. I’m sure the French do have agents in Copenhagen, but they’re hardly likely to try murder.’
‘Where’s Vygârd?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Near Køge where our hospitable Captain is supposed to put us ashore.’ They were eleven days out of Harwich, sailing a sunlit sea. Lavisser was leaning on the stern rail where he looked as though he did not have a care in the world. He wore no hat and his golden hair lifted in the wind. He had blue eyes and a sharp-cut face, so that he looked like one of his Viking ancestors who had sailed this same cold sea. ‘You really won’t need weapons, Richard,’ Lavisser went on. ‘We’ll simply borrow a carriage from Vygârd to carry the gold to Copenhagen, conclude our business with the Crown Prince and so have the satisfaction of preserving peace.’
Lavisser had spoken confidently, but Sharpe recalled Lord Pumphrey’s doubts that the Danish Crown Prince was a man open to bribery. ‘What if the Crown Prince refuses?’ he asked.
‘He won’t,’ Lavisser said. ‘My grandfather is his chamberlain and he tells me that the bribe is the Prince’s own suggestion.’ He smiled. ‘He needs money, Sharpe, to rebuild the Christiansborg Palace that got burned down a few years back. It will all be very easy and we shall go home as heroes. Where’s the danger? There are no Frogs in Vygârd, none in my grandfather’s town house in Bredgade, and the Prince’s own guards will keep the bastards well out of our way. You really do not need weapons, Richard. Indeed, I don’t wish to offend you, but your own presence, though utterly welcome, is also superfluous.’
‘Things can go wrong,’ Sharpe said stubbornly.
‘How very true. An earthquake could devastate Copenhagen. Maybe there will be a plague of toads. Perhaps the four horsemen of the apocalypse will ravage Denmark. Richard! I’m going home. I’m calling on a prince to whom I am distantly related. Like me, he’s half English. Did you know that? His mother is King George’s sister.’
Lavisser was persuasive, but Sharpe felt naked without proper weapons and other men who were senior to Lavisser had thought it wise to give the guardsman protection and so Sharpe went below to the tiny cabin that he shared with Lavisser and there pulled open his pack. His civilian clothes were inside, the good clothes that Grace had bought for him, along with the telescope that had been a grudging gift from Sir Arthur Wellesley. But at the very bottom of the canvas pack, hidden and half forgotten, was his old picklock. He pulled it out, then unfolded the slightly rusting picks. Grace had discovered it once and wondered what on earth it was. She had laughed in disbelief when he told her. ‘You could be hanged for possessing such a thing!’ she had declared.
‘I keep it for old times’ sake,’ Sharpe had explained lamely.
‘You’ve never used it, surely?’
‘Of course I’ve used it!’
‘Show me! Show me!’
He had shown her how to pick a lock, a thing he had done scores of times in the past. He was out of practice now, but the picks still made brief work of the padlock which secured the great chest in which the government money was stored. There were plenty of weapons on board the Cleopatra, but to get some Sharpe knew he would have to cross some tar-stained hands with gold.
Sharpe had money of his own. He had taken twenty-four pounds, eight shillings and fourpence halfpenny from Jem Hocking and the bulk of that had been in coppers and small silver which Sergeant Matthew Standfast, the new owner of the Frog Prick, had been happy to exchange for gold. ‘At a price, sir,’ Standfast had insisted.
‘A price?’
‘Filthy stuff!’ Standfast had poked the grimy coppers. ‘I’ll have to boil them in vinegar! What have you been doing, Lieutenant? Robbing poor boxes?’ He had exchanged the twenty-four pounds, eight shillings and fourpence halfpenny for twenty-two shining guineas that were now safely wrapped in one of Sharpe’s spare shirts.
He could have used his own money to get weapons, but he did not see why he should. Britain was sending him to Denmark and it was Britain’s enemies who threatened Lavisser, so Britain, Sharpe reckoned, should pay, and that meant taking gold from the big chest that half filled the cabin that Sharpe and Lavisser shared. Sharpe had to edge one of the hanging cot beds aside to open the chest’s lid. Inside were layers of grey canvas bags secured with wire ties that were sealed with crimped lead tags blobbed with red wax. Sharpe lifted three bags from the top layer and selected a lower bag that he slit with his knife.
Guineas. The golden horsemen of Saint George. Sharpe lifted one, looking at the image of the saint lancing the writhing dragon. Rich, thick, gold coins, and the chest had enough to suborn a kingdom, but it could spare a little for Lieutenant Sharpe and so he stole fifteen of the heavy coins that he secreted in his pockets before restoring the bags. He was just putting the last one in place when there was the thud of feet dropping down the companionway ladder immediately outside the cabin. Sharpe closed the chest lid and sat on it to hide the absence of a padlock. The cabin door opened and Barker came in with a bucket. He saw Sharpe and paused.
Sharpe pretended to be pulling on his boots. He looked up at the hulking Barker who had to stoop beneath the beams. ‘So you were a footpad, Barker?’
‘That’s what the Captain told you.’ Barker put the bucket down.
‘Where?’ Sharpe asked.
Barker hesitated, as if suspecting a trap in the question, then shrugged. ‘Bristol.’
‘Don’t know it,’ Sharpe said airily. ‘And now you’re reformed?’
‘Am I?’
‘Are you?’
Barker grimaced. ‘I’m looking for Mister Lavisser’s coat.’
Sharpe could see the padlock in a corner of the cabin and hoped Barker did not notice it. ‘So what will you do if the French interfere with us?’
Barker scowled at Sharpe. It seemed as if he had not understood the question, or else he just hated talking to Sharpe, but then he sneered. ‘How will they even know we’re there? The master speaks Danish and you and I will keep our gobs shut.’ He plucked a coat from a hook on the back of the door and left without another word.
Sharpe waited for his steps to fade, then restored the padlock to the hasp. He did not like Barker and the feeling was evidently mutual. On the face of it the man made a strange servant for Lavisser, yet Sharpe had met plenty of gentlemen who liked to mix with brutes from the gutter. Such men enjoyed listening to the stories and felt flattered by the friendships, and presumably Lavisser shared their taste. Maybe, Sharpe reflected, that explained why Lavisser was being so friendly to himself.
Next day he used two of the guineas to bribe the ship’s Master-at-Arms who made the gold vanish into a pocket with the speed of a conjurer and an hour later brought Sharpe a well-honed cutlass and two heavy sea-service pistols with a bag of cartridges. ‘I’d be obliged, sir, if Captain Samuels didn’t know about this,’ the Master-at-Arms said, ‘on account that he’s a flogger when he’s aggravated. Keep ’em hidden till you’re ashore, sir.’ Sharpe promised he would. There would be no difficulty in keeping the promise during the voyage, but he did not see how he was to carry the weapons off the ship without Captain Samuels seeing them, then thought of the chest. He asked Lavisser to put them with the gold.
Lavisser laughed when he saw the cutlass and heavy-barrelled guns. ‘You couldn’t wait till we reached Vygârd?’
‘I like to know I’m armed,’ Sharpe said.
‘Armed? You’ll look like Bluebeard if you carry that lot! But if it makes you happy, Richard, why not? Your happiness is my prime concern.’ Lavisser took the chest’s key from a waistcoat pocket and raised the lid. ‘A sight to warm your chill heart, eh?’ he said, indicating the dull grey bags. ‘A fortune in every one. I fetched it myself from the Bank of England and, Lord, what a fuss! Little men in pink coats demanding signatures, enough keys to lock up half the world, and deep suspicion. I’m sure they thought I was going to steal the gold. And why not? Why don’t you and I just divide it and retire somewhere gracious? Naples? I’ve always wanted to visit Naples where I’m told the women are heartbreakingly beautiful.’ Lavisser saw Sharpe’s expression and laughed. ‘For a man up from the ranks, Richard, you’re uncommonly easy to shock. But I confess I’m tempted. I suffer the cruel fate of being the younger son. My wretched brother will become earl and inherit the money while I am expected to fend for myself. You find that risible, yes? Where you come from everyone fends for themselves, so I shall do the same.’ He put Sharpe’s new weapons on the grey bags, then closed the chest. ‘The gold will go to Prince Frederick,’ he said, securing the padlock, ‘and there will be peace on earth and goodwill to all mankind.’
Next evening the frigate passed the northernmost tip of Jutland. The low headland was called the Skaw and it showed dull and misty in the grey twilight. A beacon burned at its tip and the light stayed in view as the Cleopatra turned south towards the Kattegat. Captain Samuels was plainly worried about that narrow stretch of water, in one place only three miles wide, which was the entrance to the Baltic and guarded on its Swedish bank by the great cannon of Helsingborg and on the Danish by the batteries of Helsingør’s Kronborg Castle. The frigate had seen few other ships between Harwich and the Skaw, merely a handful of fishing boats and a wallowing Baltic trader with her main deck heavily laden with timber, but now, sailing into the narrowing gut between Denmark and Sweden, the traffic was heavier. ‘What we don’t know’ – Captain Samuels deigned to speak to Sharpe and Lavisser on the morning after they had passed the Skaw – ‘is whether Denmark is still neutral. We can pass Helsingør by staying close to the Swedish shore, but the Danes will still see us pass and know we’re up to no good.’
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Bernard Cornwell
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Richard Sharpe is sent to Copenhagen to deliver a bribe to stop the Danes handing over possession of their battle fleet to the French.It seems very easy. But nothing is easy in a Europe stirred by French ambitions. The Danes possess a battle fleet that could replace every ship the French lost at Trafalgar, and Napoleon′s forces are gathering to take it. The British have to stop them, while the Danes insist on remaining neutral.Dragged into a war of spies and brutality, Sharpe finds that he is a sacrificial pawn. But pawns can sometimes change the game, and Sharpe makes his own rules. When he discovers a traitor in his midst, he becomes a hunter in a city besieged by British troops.Soldier, hero, rogue – Sharpe is the man you always want on your side. Born in poverty, he joined the army to escape jail and climbed the ranks by sheer brutal courage. He knows no other family than the regiment of the 95th Rifles whose green jacket he proudly wears.