Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe’s Revenge, Sharpe’s Waterloo, Sharpe’s Devil. Bernard Cornwell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ hill on which the decayed Villa Lupighi stood so that, by the time the work was done, the old house seemed to be perched on a mound of scraped earth on which no intruder could hope to hide.

      The villa itself was a massive ruin. Ducos had restored the living quarters at the building’s western end where he occupied rooms which opened on to a great terrace from which he could stare out to sea. He could not use the terrace from midday onwards for he found that the brilliant sunlight reflecting off the sea hurt his eyes and, until the Joliot Brothers sent him the tinted spectacles, he was forced to spend his afternoons indoors.

      Sergeant Challon and his men had the rooms behind Ducos’s more palatial suite. Their quarters opened on to an internal courtyard built like a cloister. An old fig tree had split one corner of the cloister. Each of the Dragoons had his own woman living in the house, for Challon had insisted to Ducos that his men could not live like monks while they were waiting for the day when it would be safe to leave this refuge. The women were found in Naples and paid with French silver.

      The eastern half of the villa, which looked inland to the olive groves and high mountains, was nothing but a ruined chaos of fallen masonry and broken columns. Some of the ruined walls were three storeys high, while others were just a foot off the ground. At night, when Ducos’s fears were at their highest, two savage dogs were unleashed to roam those fallen stones.

      Sergeant Challon tried to ease Ducos’s fears. No one would find them in the Villa Lupighi, he said, for the Cardinal was their friend. Ducos nodded agreement, but each day he would demand another loophole made in some exterior wall.

      Sergeant Challon had other fears himself. ‘The men are happy enough now,’ he told Ducos, ‘but it won’t last. They can’t wait here for ever. They’ll get bored, sir, and you know how bored soldiers soon become troublemakers.’

      ‘They’ve got their women.’

      ‘That’s their nights taken care of, sir, but what use is a woman in daylight?’

      ‘We have an agreement,’ Ducos insisted, and Challon agreed that they did indeed have an agreement, but now he wanted its terms altered. Now, he suggested, the remaining Dragoons should only stay with Ducos until the year’s end. That was enough time, Challon insisted, and afterwards each man would be free to leave, and to take his share of the gold and jewels.

      Ducos, presented with the ultimatum, agreed. The year’s end was a long way off, and perhaps Challon was right in his belief that by the New Year the dangers would be gone.

      ‘You should enjoy yourself, sir,’ Sergeant Challon said slyly. ‘You’ve got the money, sir, and what else is money for?’

      And Ducos did try to enjoy himself. One week, after a comet had been discovered, he fancied himself as an astronomer and ordered celestial globes and telescopes to be sent from Naples. That enthusiasm died to be replaced with a burning desire to write the history of Napoleon’s wars, which project evaporated after four nights of feverish writing.

      He devised a scheme for irrigating the high fields behind the village which lay between the villa and the sea, then he took up painting and insisted that Sergeant Challon fetched the prettiest girls from the village to stand before his easel. He obsessively worked at mathematical problems, he tried to learn the spinet, he found a fascination in maps on which he refought the campaigns of two decades and, in so doing, pushed the bounds of Empire further than Napoleon had ever done. He took to wearing the uniforms that had been in the Emperor’s baggage, and the villagers spoke of the mad, half-blind French Marshal who paced his vast house dressed in gold braid and with a huge curved sword hanging by his skinny legs. Ducos might call himself the Count Poniatowski, and claim to be a sickly Polish refugee, yet the villagers knew he was as French as their own King who had once been a real French Marshal.

      Sergeant Challon endured all the enthusiasms, for the benefits of indulgence were manifold. There truly was so much money to be divided that this temporary exile was endurable. Challon knew that Ducos could go on spending money like water and there would still be a fortune at the year’s end. Even so, when Ducos insisted that more guards be hired, Challon felt constrained to offer a warning note.

      ‘The lads won’t be too happy to pay them, sir.’

      ‘I’ll pay them.’ That generosity was easy to offer because Ducos had insisted that he himself guard the treasure which was stored in a great iron chest cemented to the floor in Ducos’s rooms. Even Challon was not certain just how much money was in the box, though he knew down to the last sou just how much each man had been promised at the year’s ending. Ducos, to keep faith with the Dragoons, only had to ensure that those shares were faithfully paid when the time came, and in the meantime the balance was his to spend. He knew, even if Challon did not, that the balance was an Emperor’s ransom; more than even the greedy Cardinal might imagine.

      Challon again tried to change Ducos’s mind. ‘There might be trouble, sir, between my lads and these new fellows.’

      ‘You’re a Sergeant, Challon, you know how to prevent trouble.’

      Challon sighed. ‘The new men will want women.’

      ‘They may have them.’

      ‘And weapons, sir.’

      ‘Buy only the best.’

      So Challon went to the waterfront at Naples and found twenty men who had once served as soldiers. They were scum, Challon told Ducos, but they were scum who knew how to fight. They were deserters, jailbirds, murderers, and drunks, yet they would be loyal to a man who could pay good wages.

      The newly hired men moved into the half ruined rooms in the villa’s centre. They brought women, pistols, sabres and their muskets. There was no trouble, for they recognized Challon’s natural authority and were well rewarded for very little effort. They were not allowed on to the western terrace which was the private domain of their new employer who rarely appeared elsewhere outside the building for he said the sun hurt his eyes, though sometimes they would glimpse him strolling through the big internal courtyard in one of his magnificent uniforms. It was rumoured that he rarely had a woman in his rooms, though once, when he did, the girl reported that the Count Poniatowski had done nothing except stare north to where, far beyond the horizon, another imperial exile had his small kingdom in the Mediterranean. The newly hired guards opined that the Count Poniatowski was mad, but his pay was good, his food and wine plentiful, and he did not quibble when a village girl complained of rape. He would simply have the girl or her parents paid in gold, then encourage his men to practise with their weapons and to keep a good look out for strangers in the hot barren landscape. ‘We should have a cannon,’ he said to Challon one day.

      Sergeant Challon, presented with this new evidence of Major Ducos’s fears, sighed. ‘It’s not necessary, sir.’

      ‘It is necessary. Vitally necessary.’ Ducos had decided that his safety depended on artillery, and nothing would change his mind. He showed Challon how a small field gun, mounted in the villa’s southern wall, would dominate the road which approached the hill. ‘Go to Naples, Challon. Someone will know where a gun can be had.’

      So Challon took the money and returned three days later with an old-fashioned grasshopper gun. It was a small field piece which, fifty years before, had been issued to infantry battalions in some armies. The gun was reckoned small enough for two men to carry, which only proved that its inventor had never had to march over rough country with the three-foot brass barrel roped to his shoulder. The barrel was fitted with four stout legs which served as a carriage and, when it was fired, the whole contraption leaped into the air; thus earning the weapon its nickname. Mostly it toppled over СКАЧАТЬ