Aboard the Scylla, a frigate moored in the harbour roads, yellow lights showed from the stern cabin where doubtless the frigate’s captain took his breakfast.
“I’ve wrapped you a cheese.” Jane’s voice sounded small and frightened. “It’s in your pack.”
“Thank you.” Sharpe bent to kiss her and wished suddenly that he was not going. A wife, General Craufurd used to say, weakens a soldier. Sharpe held his wife an instant, feeling her ribs beneath the layers of wool and silk, then, suddenly, her slim body jerked as she sneezed again.
“I’m catching a cold.” She was shivering. Sharpe touched her forehead and it was oddly hot.
“You’re not well.”
“I hate rising early.” Jane tried to smile, but her teeth were chattering and she shivered again. “And I’m not certain the fish was entirely to my taste last night.”
“Go home!”
“When you’re gone.”
Sharpe, even though a hundred men watched him, kissed his wife again. “Jane…”
“My dear, you must go.”
“But…“
“It’s only a cold. Everyone gets a cold in winter.”
“Sir!” Sweet William saluted Sharpe and bowed to Jane. “Good morning, ma’am! Somewhat brisk!”
“Indeed, Mr Frederickson.” Jane shivered again.
“Everyone’s aboard, sir.” Frederickson turned to Sharpe.
Sharpe wanted to linger with Jane, he wanted to reassure himself that she had not caught Hogan’s fever, but Frederickson was waiting for him, men were holding the ropes that would swing the gangplank away, and he could not stay. He gave Jane a last kiss, and her forehead was like fire. “Go home to bed.”
“I will.” She was shaking now, hunched and clenched against the bitter wind.
Sharpe paused, wanting to say something memorable, something that would encompass the inchoate, extraordinary love he felt for her, but there were no words. He smiled, then turned to follow Frederickson on to the Amelias deck.
The daylight was thin now, seeping through the hilly landscape behind the port and making the streaked, bubbling, heaving water of the harbour silver. The gangplank crashed on to the stones of the quay.
Far out to sea, like some impossible mountain forming on the face of the waters, an airy structure of dirty grey sails caught the morning daylight. It was the Vengeance getting under way. She looked formidably huge; a great floating weapon that could make the air tremble and the sea shake when she launched her full broadside, but she would be useless in the shoal waters by the Teste de Buch fort. That would have to be taken by men and by hand-held weapons.
“He’s signalling.” Tremgar, master of the Amelie, spat over the side. “Means they’ll be moving us off. Stand by, forrard!” He bellowed the last words.
A topsail dropped from the nearby Scylla’s yards and the movement, suggesting an imminent departure, made Sharpe turn to the quay. Jane, swathed in her powder-blue cloak, was still there. Sharpe could see her shivering. “Go home!”
A voice shouted. “Wait! Wait!” The accent was French and the speaker a dully-dressed man, evidently a servant, who rode a small horse and led a packhorse on a leading rein. ‘Amelie! Wait!“
“Bloody hell.” Tremgar had been packing a pipe with dark tobacco that he now pushed into a pocket of his filthy coat.
Behind the servant and packhorse and, stately as a bishop in procession, rode a tall, elegant man on a tall, elegant horse. The man had a delicate, sensitive face, a white cloak clasped with silver, and a bicorne hat shielded with oiled-cloth against the rain.
The gangplank was rigged again and the man, with a faint shudder as though the stench of the Amelie was too much for a gentleman of his fastidious tastes, came aboard. “I seek Major Sharpe,” he announced in a French accent to the assembled officers who had gathered in the ship’s waist.
“I’m Sharpe.” Sharpe spoke from the poop deck.
The newcomer turned in a movement that would have been elegant on a dance-floor, but seemed somewhat ludicrous on the battered deck of an erstwhile collier. He took a quizzing glass from his sleeve and, with its help, inspected the tattered uniform of Major Richard Sharpe. He bowed, somehow suggesting that he should have been the recipient of such an honour himself, then took off his waterproofed hat to reveal sleek, silver hair that was brushed back to a black velvet bow. He held out a sealed envelope. “Orders.”
Sharpe had jumped down from the poop and now tore open the envelope. “To Major Sharpe. The bearer of this note is the Comte de Maquerre. You will render him every assistance within your power. Bertram Wigram, Colonel.”
Sharpe looked into the narrow face that had been powdered pale. He suddenly remembered that Hogan, in his sick ramblings, had mentioned the name Maquereau, meaning ‘pimp’, and he wondered if the insult was a nickname for this elegant, fastidious man. “You’re the Comte de Maquerre?”
!I have that honour, Monsieur, and I travel to Arcachon with you.“ De Maquerre’s cloak had fallen open to reveal the uniform of the Chasseurs Britannique. Sharpe knew that regiment’s reputation. The officers were Frenchmen loyal to the ancien regime, while its men were deserters from the French Army and all unmitigated scoundrels. They could fight when the mood took them, but it was not a regiment Sharpe would want on his flank in battle.
“Captain Frederickson! Four men to get the Frenchman’s baggage on board! Quick now!”
De Maquerre tugged at his buttoned, kidskin gloves. “You have quarters for my horse? And the packhorse.”
“No horses,” Sharpe said sourly, which only tossed the Comte de Maquerre into a sulky fit of protests in which the name of the Due d’Angouleme, Louis XVIII, and the Lord Wellington featured prominently. In the meantime an angry message came from the Scylla demanding to know why the Amelie had not slipped her moorings at the flood tide, and finally Sharpe had to give way.
Which meant another delay as the Comte’s two horses were coaxed aboard and a section of Frederickson’s Riflemen were moved out of the forward hold to make way for the beasts. Trunks and cases were carried up the gangplank.
“I cannot, of course,” the Comte de Maquerre said, “travel in this ship.”
“Why not?” Sharpe asked.
A wrinkle of the nostril was the only answer and a further delay ensued while a message was sent to the Scylla which demanded that His Excellency the Comte de Maquerre be allowed quarters on board the frigate or, preferably, the Vengeance.
Captain Grant of the Scylla, doubtless under pressure from the Vengeance, returned a short answer. The Comte, disgusted, went below to the cabin he would now have to share with Frederickson.
The light was full now, dissipated by clouds and showing the filth that floated yellow and black in the grey harbour. A dead dog bumped against the Amelias hull as the forward cables were released, then the aft splashed free, and from overhead came the menacing sound of great sails unleashing to the wind’s power. A gull gave its lonely, harsh cry that sailors believed was the sound of a drowned soul in agony.
Sharpe stared at the golden-haired girl in the cloak of silver-blue and he blamed the wind for the tears in his eyes. Jane had a handkerchief to her face and Sharpe prayed that he had not seen the first symptoms of the fever in her. He tried to convince himself that Jane was right, and that she merely suffered from eating bad fish the night before, but goddamn it, he thought, why did she have to visit Hogan?
“Go home!” he shouted across the widening gap.
Jane shivered, but stayed. She watched the Amelie claw clumsily out beyond the bar and Sharpe, staring back to the harbour, saw the tiny signal of her white-waving handkerchief get smaller and smaller and finally disappear as a rain-squall seethed and hissed over the broken sea.
The Vengeance loomed over the other ships. The Amelie, pumps already working, took station astern while the Scylla, fast and impatient, leaped ahead into the squalls. The brig-sloops closed behind the Amelie, and the shore of France was nothing but a dark smear on a grey sea.
A buoy, tarred black and marking God alone knew what hazard in this empty waste, slipped astern and thus the expedition to Arcachon, amidst chaos and uncertainty, was under way.
