Sharpe’s Revenge: The Peace of 1814. Bernard Cornwell

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СКАЧАТЬ to control himself. A voice shouted from a neighbouring house, wanting an explanation for the gunshot, but when Ducos made no reply there was no further question.

      By dawn the body was hidden under compost.

      Ducos had not slept. It was not conscience, nor disgust at Maillot’s death that had kept him awake, but the enormity of what that death represented. Ducos, by pulling the trigger, had abandoned all that had once been most dear to him. He had been raised to believe in the sanctity of the Revolutionary ideals, then had learned that Napoleon’s imperial ambitions were really the same ideals, but transmuted by one man’s genius into a unique and irreplaceable glory. Now, as Napoleon’s glory crumbled, the ideals must live on, only now Ducos recognized that France itself was the embodiment of that greatness.

      Ducos had thus persuaded himself in that damp night that the irrelevant trappings of Imperial France could be sacrificed. A new France would rise, and Ducos would serve that new France from a position of powerful responsibility. For the moment, though, a time of waiting and safety was needed. So, in the morning, he summoned the Dragoon Sergeant Challon to the prefecture where he sat the grizzled sergeant down at the green malachite table across which Ducos pushed the one remaining sheet of the Emperor’s dispatch. ‘Read that, Sergeant.’

      Challon confidently picked up the paper, then, realizing that he could not bluff the bespectacled officer, dropped it again. ‘I don’t read, sir.’

      Ducos stared into the bloodshot eyes. ‘That piece of paper gives you to me, Sergeant. It’s signed by the Emperor himself.’

      ‘Yes, sir.’ Challon’s voice was toneless.

      ‘It means you obey me.’

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      Ducos then took a risk. Spread on the table was a newspaper which he ordered Challon to throw to the floor. The Sergeant was puzzled at the order, but obeyed. Then he went very still. The newspaper had hidden two white cockades; two big cockades of flamboyant white silk.

      Challon stared at the symbols of Napoleon’s enemies, and Ducos watched the pigtailed Sergeant. Challon was not a subtle man, and his leathery scarred face betrayed his thoughts as openly as though he spoke them aloud. The first thing the face betrayed to Ducos was that Sergeant Challon knew what was concealed in the four crates. Ducos would have been astonished if Challon had not known. The second thing that the Sergeant betrayed was that he, just like Ducos, desired those contents.

      Challon looked up at the small Major. ‘Might I ask where Colonel Maillot is, sir?’

      ‘Colonel Maillot contracted a sudden fever which my physician thinks will prove fatal.’

      ‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir,’ Challon’s voice was very wooden, ‘as some of the lads liked the Colonel, sir.’ For a second, as he looked into those hard eyes, Ducos thought he had wildly miscalculated. Then Challon glanced at the incriminating cockades. ‘But some of the lads will learn to live with their grief.’

      The relief washed through Ducos, though he was far too clever to reveal either that relief or the fear which had preceded it. Challon, Ducos now knew, was his man. ‘The fever,’ Ducos said mildly, ‘can be very catching.’

      ‘So I’ve heard, sir.’

      ‘And our responsibility will demand at least six men. Don’t you agree?’

      ‘I think more than that will survive the fever, sir,’ Challon said as elliptically as Ducos. They were now confederates in treachery, and neither could state it openly, though each perfectly understood the other.

      ‘Good.’ Ducos picked up one of the cockades. Challon hesitated, then picked up the other, and thus their pact was sealed.

      Two mornings later there was a sea-fog that rolled from the Garonne estuary to shroud Bordeaux in a white, clinging dampness through which nine horsemen rode eastwards in the dawn. Pierre Ducos led them. He was dressed in civilian clothes with a sword and two pistols at his belt. Sergeant Challon and his men were in the vestiges of their green uniforms, though all the troopers had discarded their heavy metal helmets. Their saddle bags bulged, as did the panniers of the pack horses that three of the troopers led.

      To deceive, cheat, disguise, and outwit; those were the skills Ducos had given to his Emperor; which skills must now serve his own ends. The horses clattered through the city’s outer gate, stirred the fog with their passing, and then were gone.

      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘Of course the Peer knew about it,’ Major-General Nairn was speaking of the duel, ‘but between you and me I don’t think he was unhappy about it. The Navy’s been rather irritating him lately.’

      ‘I expected to be arrested,’ Sharpe said.

      ‘If you’d have killed the bugger, you would have been. Even Wellington can’t absolutely ignore a deceased Naval Captain, but it was clever of you just to crease the man’s bum.’ Nairn gave a joyful bark of laughter at the thought of Bampfylde’s wound.

      ‘I was trying to kill him,’ Sharpe confessed.

      ‘It was much cleverer of you to give him a sore arse. And let me say how very good it is to see you, my dear Sharpe. I trust Jane is well?’

      ‘Indeed, sir.’

      Sharpe’s tone caused Nairn to give the Rifleman an amused look. ‘Do I detect that you are in marital bad odour, Sharpe?’

      ‘I stink, sir.’

      It had taken Sharpe three days to catch up with the advancing army, and another half-day to find Nairn, whose brigade was on the left flank of the advance. Sharpe had eventually discovered the Scotsman on a hilltop above a ford which the British had captured that morning and through which a whole Division now marched. The French were only visible as a few retreating squadrons of cavalry far to the east, though a battery of enemy artillery occasionally fired from a copse of trees about a mile beyond the river.

      ‘You brought Frederickson?’ Nairn now asked.

      ‘His men are at the foot of the hill.’

      ‘Creased his bum!’ Nairn laughed again. ‘Can I assume from your marital odour that Jane is not with you?’

      ‘She sailed for home two days ago, sir.’

      ‘Best place for a woman. I never really did approve of officers carrying wives around like so much baggage. No offence, of course, Jane’s a lovely girl, but she’s still baggage to an army. Hello! Christ!’ These last words were a greeting for a French cannonball that had thumped across the river and bounced uphill to force Nairn into a frantic evasion that almost spilled him from his saddle. The Scotsman calmed his horse, then gestured over the river. ‘You can see what’s happening, Sharpe. The bloody French try to stop us at every river, and we just outflank the buggers and keep moving.’ At the foot of the slope Nairn’s brigade patiently waited their turn to cross the ford. The brigade was composed of one Highland battalion and two English county battalions.

      ‘What exactly do you want me to do?’ Sharpe asked Nairn.

      ‘Damned СКАЧАТЬ