Sharpe stepped two paces closer to the curtain. “Ducos! You missed!”
Another bullet twitched the heavy curtain. This one went to Sharpe’s left. The curtain quivered from the bullet’s passing. The new ragged hole had scorched edges. The Dragoons stared at the limping madman who was playing this insane game with death.
Sharpe stepped so close that he could have reached out a hand and touched the green curtain. “You missed again!” He could hear the Frenchman breathing hoarsely beyond the curtain, then he heard the click as another weapon was cocked. Sharpe sensed from the sound that Ducos.was standing well back from the green material and must be firing in blind panic at its heavy folds. “Ducos? Try again!” he called.
The third bullet jerked the cloth. It went to Sharpe’s right, but so close that it could not have missed by more than a sword blade’s thickness. Dust sprang from the curtain’s thick weave to drift in the silvery dawn light. Sharpe laughed. “You missed!”
“Open the door!” Calvet roared angrily through one of the loopholes.
“Ducos?” Sharpe called again, and once again the hidden Frenchman fired one of his stock of pistols, but this time the shot was not greeted by Sharpe’s mockery. Instead the Rifleman screamed foully, gasped in awful pain, then moaned like a soul in sobbing torment.
Ducos shouted his triumph aloud. He ran to the curtain and snatched the heavy cloth aside. And there, at the moment of his personal victory, he stopped short.
He stopped because a sword blade flashed up to dig its point into the skin of his throat.
An unwounded Sharpe, with dog-blood lining the scars on his powder-stained face, stared into Ducos’s eyes.
The Frenchman held a last unfired pistol, but the huge sword was sharp in his throat and the eyes that stared into his were like dark ice. ‘Non, non, non.“ Ducos moaned the words, then his gun dropped on to the floor as his bladder gave way and a stain spread on the white silk of his French Marshal’s breeches.
„Oui, oui, oui,“ Sharpe said, then brought up his left knee in a single, savage kick. The force of it jarred Ducos’s spectacles free, they fell and smashed, and then the Frenchman, clutching the warm stain on his breeches, fell after them and screamed a terrible moaning scream.
And the long chase was done.
Sharpe limped to the door to let in an irate General Calvet. The dawn was full now, flooding the limpid sea with a glitter of silver and gold. The villa was thick with smoke, but oddly silent now that the muskets had stopped firing. It was the silence after battle; the unexpected and oddly disappointing silence when the body still craved excitement and there was nothing now to do but clear up the wounded and dead, and find the plunder. Calvet’s men tramped into the room and disarmed the broken Dragoons. Harper carried Frederickson downstairs and tenderly laid the officer on to a chaise-longue taken from the dismantled barricade. Two of Calvet’s men had been wounded, one of them badly, but none had been killed. The wounded Grenadiers were laid beside Frederickson whose wits were slowly coming back. His face was already blackening and swelling in a vast bruise, but he managed a wry smile when he saw the ludicrously uniformed Pierre Ducos. The Frenchman still gasped from the pain of Sharpe’s kick as Harper tied his wrists and ankles, then pushed him scornfully into a corner of the room to join the captured Dragoons.
General Calvet ripped down the alcove’s curtain. Beyond it, and deep shadowed at the end of an otherwise empty recess, was a great iron box. The keys for the box were found in a pocket of Pierre Ducos’s gaudy uniform. The locks were snapped open, and the lid was lifted on an Emperor’s fortune. Calvet’s men stared in an awed silence. The gems were so bright in the shadowed alcove that it seemed as if they generated their own dazzling light. Sharpe edged past a Grenadier and gazed down at the splendour.
“It all belongs to the Emperor,” Calvet warned.
“I know, but Ducos is mine.”
“You can have him.” Calvet stooped to pick up a handful of pearls. He let them trickle through his stubby fingers so that they glittered like scraps of starlight.
“Sir?” Patrick Harper’s voice was oddly subdued. He had not gone to see the treasure, but had instead cleared a passage through the barricade and now stood on the terrace, staring southwards. “Sir?” he called more loudly. “I think there’s something you should see here, sir.”
Calvet crossed to the terrace with Sharpe. ‘Merde,“ Calvet said.
A battalion of infantry was approaching the villa. Behind them, and still shadowed by a stand of trees, was a squadron of cavalry. The head of the small column was half a mile away, still on the coastal plain, but only a few minutes from the hill on which the captured villa stood. The battalion’s shadow stretched towards the sea, and the dawn’s clear light showed that its marching was. a shambles, its demeanour unprepossessing, but it was nevertheless a complete battalion of infantry with at least six hundred muskets, and its arrival explained why the Cardinal had given Calvet his free rein.
Because Calvet and Sharpe had done the Cardinal’s dirty work, and now the Neapolitans had arrived to reap the work’s reward.
„Merde,“ Sharpe said.
Ducos overcame his pain to crow a vengeful triumph. His friends had come to rescue him, he said, and Sharpe and Calvet would now suffer for their temerity. Harper slapped him to silence.
“We can escape,” Calvet said glumly, “but not with the fortune.”
“We can take a good deal of it,” Sharpe suggested.
“The Emperor wants it all.” Calvet scowled at the Neapolitan battalion which now spread itself into a line of three ranks at the foot of the villa’s hill. The cavalrymen behind the battalion spurred their horses past the infantry. Clearly the Neapolitans planned to surround the hill. There would be a few minutes before that manoeuvre was completed, and Calvet had rightly guessed that those moments would just be sufficient for his small band to scramble northwards into the hills, but they would be forced to travel light and they would doubtless be pursued mercilessly through all the long hot day. They would be weighed down by the treasure they carried, by their wounded, and by their prisoner.
The battalion of Neapolitan infantry waited on the parched grass. So far they had ignored the small village where Calvet’s three men should be guarding a boat, but that did not signify, for the Italian infantry now lay between the villa and Calvet’s seaborne escape. Three of the Neapolitan officers stood their horses a few yards in front of the resting infantry and Sharpe guessed that an envoy would soon be sent up the hill to demand the surrender of the villa’s occupants.
“Ignore the bastards.” Calvet, seeing no solution, turned away and ordered his men to fill their packs, cushion covers and any other receptacle they could find with the Emperor’s treasure. Harper joined the Frenchmen and marvelled at the slew of rubies, emeralds, diamonds and pearls. There were a few bags of gold heaped at one end of the iron chest, and a tangle of candlesticks at the other, but most of the great box was bright with gems. They lay a foot deep in the box, which was itself three feet high, suggesting that much of the treasure had already been squandered. “How much did you waste?” Calvet snapped at Ducos, but the thin-faced Frenchman said nothing. He was waiting for his salvation.
Which salvation appeared to be in the hands of the three Neapolitan officers who spurred their horses up the hill’s steep southern flank. Dust drifted from their hooves towards the sea.
“Bloody hell,” Harper had rejoined Sharpe on the terrace, “the buggers look as if they’re going to their first communion.” The Irishman spat over the balustrade. His disgust was at the uniforms that the officers wore. Neither he nor Sharpe had ever seen uniforms so splendid or so impractical. All three officers were in pristine and dazzling white. Their elegant cutaway coats were faced with cloth of brightest gold, while their cuffs and epaulettes were similarly arrayed with gold cloth that was dangling with gold chain. They wore black riding boots topped with gold turnovers, and on their heads were tall snow-white bearskins with gold chains looped from the crests to the blood-red plumes. “What are we supposed to do,” Harper said, “fight the buggers or kiss them?”
Sharpe did not reply. Instead he limped to that part of the balustrade closest to the approaching officers. All three were sweating because of the weight and constriction of their white fur hats. Their leader, whose rank Sharpe could not recognize, curbed his horse and gave the Rifleman a curt nod. “Are you French?” the man asked in that language.
“My name is Richard Sharpe, and I am a Major in His Brittanic Majesty’s army,” Sharpe said in English.
“My name is Colonel Pannizi.” Pannizi must have understood Sharpe’s reply, though he still spoke in French. He waited, as though expecting Sharpe to offer him a salute, but the filthy, bloodstained Englishman did not move.
