“Is that good?” Sharpe asked.
Frederickson hooted with laughter at the question. “Violence solved your problem with bloody Bampfylde! If you hadn’t fought the bugger then you can be certain he’d even now be making trouble for you in London. Violence may not be good, my friend, but it has a certain efficiency in the resolution of otherwise insoluble problems.” Frederickson took the bottle ‘I can’t say I’m enamoured of a peacetime army, but there’ll probably be another war before too long.“
“You should get married,” Sharpe said quietly.
Frederickson sneered at that thought. “Why do condemned men always encourage others to join them on the gallows?”
“It isn’t like that.”
“Marriage is an appetite,” Frederickson said savagely, “and once you’ve enjoyed the flesh, all that’s left is a carcass of dry bones.”
“No,” Sharpe protested.
“I do hope it isn’t true,” Frederickson toasted Sharpe with the half empty wine bottle, “and I especially hope it isn’t true for all of my dear friends who have pinned their hopes of peacetime happiness on something as wilfully frail as a wife.”
“It isn’t true,” Sharpe insisted, and he hoped that when he returned to headquarters he would find a letter from Jane.
But there was none, and he remembered their arguments before the duel and he wondered whether his own peacetime happiness had been soured by his stubbornness.
And in the morning the brigade was ordered to advance eastwards. Towards Toulouse.
In finding Sergeant Challon, Major Pierre Ducos had unwittingly found his perfect instrument. Challon liked to have a woman in his bed, meat at his table, and wine in his belly, but most of all Challon liked to have his decisions made for him and he was ready to reward the decision maker with a dogged loyalty.
It was not that Challon was a stupid man; far from it, but the Dragoon Sergeant understood that other men were cleverer than himself, and he quickly discovered that Pierre Ducos was among the cleverest he had ever known. That was a comfort to Challon, for if he was to survive his treachery to the Emperor’s cause, then he would need cleverness.
The nine horsemen had travelled eastwards from Bordeaux. Their route took them far to the north of where Marshal Soult retreated in front of the British army, and far to the south of where the Emperor protected Paris with a dazzling display of defensive manoeuvres. Ducos and his men rode into the deserted uplands of central France. They lived well on their journey. There was money for an inn room each night, and money for those men who wanted whores, and money for food, and money for spare horses, and money for good civilian clothes to replace the Dragoons’ uniforms, though Ducos noted that each man saved his green uniform coat. That was pride; the same pride that made the Dragoons wear their hair long so that, one day, they might again plait it into the distinctive cadenettes. Their possession of money also made the nine men ride circumspectly, for the forests were full of dangers, yet by avoiding the main roads they travelled safely around the places where hungry brigands laid desperate ambushes.
Ducos, Sergeant Challon, and three of the troopers were Frenchmen. One of the other Dragoons was a German; a great hulking Saxon with eyes the colour of a winter’s sky and hands that, despite the loss of two fingers on his right hand, could still break a man’s neck with ease. There was a Pole who sat dark and quiet, yet seemed eager to please Ducos. The other two Dragoons were Italians, recruited in the early heady days of Napoleon’s career. All spoke French, all trusted Challon and, because Challon trusted Ducos, they were happy to offer allegiance to the small bespectacled Major.
After a week’s eastward travel Ducos found a deserted upland farm where for a few days the nine men lay up in seclusion. They were not hiding, for Ducos was happy to let the Dragoons ride to the nearby town so long as they fetched him back whatever old newspapers were available. “If we’re not hiding,” one of the Italians grumbled to Challon, “then what are we doing?” The Italians disliked being stranded in the primitive comforts of the turf- roofed farmhouse, but Challon told them to be patient.
“The Major’s sniffing the wind,” Challon said, and Ducos was indeed sniffing the strange winds that blew across France, and he was beginning to detect a danger in them. After two weeks in the farm Ducos told Challon of his fears. The two men walked down the valley, crossed an uncut meadow and walked beside a quick stream. “You realize,” Ducos said, “that the Emperor will never forgive us?”
“Does it matter, sir?” Challon, ever the soldier, had a carbine in his right hand while his eyes watched the forest’s edge across the stream. “God bless the Emperor, sir, but he can’t last for ever. The bastards will get him sooner rather than later.”
“Did you ever meet the Emperor?” Ducos asked.
“Never had that honour, sir. I saw him often enough, of course, but never met him, sir.”
“He has a Corsican’s sense of honour. If his family is hurt, Sergeant, then Napoleon will never forgive. So long as he has a breath in his body he will seek revenge.”
The grim words made Challon nervous. The four crates that Challon had escorted to Bordeaux had contained property that belonged to the Emperor and to his family, and soon the Emperor would have all the leisure in the world to wonder what had happened to that precious consignment. “Even so, sir, if he’s imprisoned, what can he do?”
“The Emperor of France,” Ducos said pedantically, “is the head of the French State. If he falls from power, Challon, then there will be another head of state. That man, presumably the King, will regard himself as Napoleon’s legitimate heir. I presume that you would like to die of a peaceful old age in France?“
“Yes, sir.”
“So would I.” Ducos was staring over the stream and dark trees towards a tall crag of pale rock about which two eagles circled in the cold wind, but Ducos was not seeing the rock, nor even the handsome birds, but instead was remembering the Teste de Buch fort where, once again, he had been humiliated by an English Rifleman. Sharpe. It was odd, Ducos thought, how often Sharpe had crossed his path, and even odder how often that crude soldier had succeeded in frustrating Ducos’s most careful plans. It had happened again at the benighted fort on the French coast and Ducos, seeking some clever stroke that would give himself and Sergeant Challon freedom, had found himself thinking more and more about Major Richard Sharpe.
At first Ducos had resented the intrusion of Sharpe into his thoughts, but in these last two days he had begun to see that there was a possible purpose to that intrusion. Perhaps it would be possible for Ducos to take revenge on his old enemy as a part of the concealment of the theft. The plan was intricate, but the more Ducos tested it, the more he liked it. What he needed now was Challon’s support, for without the Sergeant’s physical courage, and without the loyalty that the other Dragoons felt for Challon, the intricacy was doomed. So, as they walked beside the stream, Ducos spoke low and urgently to the Sergeant, and what he said revealed a golden bridge to a wonderful future for Sergeant Challon.
“It will mean a visit to Paris,” Ducos warned, “then a killing somewhere in France.”.
Challon shrugged. “That doesn’t sound too dangerous, sir.”
“After which we’ll leave France, Sergeant, till the storm blows out.”
“Very good, sir.” Challon was quite content so long as his duties were clear. Ducos could do the planning, and Challon would doubtless do the killing. Thus, in Challon’s world, it had ever been; he was content to let the officers devise their campaign plans, and he would cut and hack with a blade to make those plans work.
Ducos’s clever mind was racing backwards and forwards, sensing the dangers in his ideas and seeking to pre-empt those risks. “Do any of your men write?”
“Herman’s the only one, sir. He’s a clever bugger for a Saxon.”
“I need an official report written, but not in my own handwriting.” Ducos frowned suddenly. “How can he write? He’s had two fingers chopped off.”
“I didn’t say he wrote so as you can read it, sir,” Challon said chidingly, “but he’s got his letters.”
“It doesn’t matter,” for Ducos could even see a virtue in the Saxon’s illegible handwriting. And that, he realized, was the hallmark of a good plan, when even its apparent frailties turned into real advantages.
So that night, under a flickering rushlight, the nine men made a solemn agreement. The agreement was a thieves’ pact which pledged them to follow Ducos’s careful plan and, to further that plan, the Saxon laboriously wrote a long document to Ducos’s dictation. Afterwards, as the Dragoons slept, Ducos wrote his own long report
