‘As is this. They’ll cut your throat for a penny.’ Fox twisted through the tiny streets, finally stopping at a great wooden door. ‘Rue Villedot,’ he said, ‘our new home.’
The door was padlocked, but Fox had a key and dragged the heavy door wide. ‘Ride in,’ he said.
It was a warehouse. Rats scampered as the horses entered. ‘This will be home,’ Fox announced when the big doors were safely closed. He dismounted and paced around the huge room’s edges where wooden racks were stacked with paintings. ‘I’m amazed no one stole them,’ Fox said. ‘If anyone does try to break in you have my permission to kill them. In this district corpses are not thought unusual.’
‘You lived here, sir?’ Sharpe asked, surprised that Fox’s lair was in such a district.
‘No, I have a place close to the Tuileries Palace, but I imagine that’s been emptied by the men who arrested me. This is my storeroom.’
‘And they left it alone?’
‘I’m hoping they never learned of this place. And I’ll stay here with you. We need to dispose of the horses and buy food.’
‘Some blankets would be good too,’ Sharpe said.
‘Blankets, food and wine,’ Fox said. ‘There’s a water pump in the yard out the back, and a small room with a stove. We should be comfortable enough.’
‘Smouch!’ Butler put in.
‘Smouch?’ Fox was puzzled.
‘Tea,’ Sharpe translated.
‘I’m sure we can find tea. There’s no coffee, damn it, because of the Royal Navy blockade, but somehow the tea gets through. God knows how. I’ll arrange all that, and perhaps you’d like to explore the district?’ Fox suggested to Sharpe. ‘Turn left out the door and you’re in civilisation soon enough.’
Fox left, and Sharpe ordered his men to stay in the warehouse while he and Harper explored the district. They left their rifles behind, and Sharpe put his cavalry sword on one of the racks. Instead he carried a rifle-bayonet at his waist and had a loaded pistol, that had once belonged to Lucille’s husband, in a deep pocket.
‘Christ, it’s a shit place,’ Harper commented.
‘Just like where I grew up,’ Sharpe said, ‘and you must have slums in Dublin?’
‘We do, God save them, and the sooner I get back to them the better.’
‘You can go back now,’ Sharpe said. ‘You’ve no need to be here.’
Harper grinned. ‘We’ve been together a long time, sir. You wouldn’t want me to miss the end of the story, now would you?’
‘This isn’t the end,’ Sharpe said, ‘this is a bleeding mess. We’re supposed to find these killers. How?’
‘Mister Fox will know.’
Sharpe growled, but said nothing. They were retracing their steps through the foetid streets and alleys where Harper’s sheer size and Sharpe’s scarred face were more than enough to deter the men who watched them pass.
‘Has he told you anything?’ Harper asked.
‘He says he has a man’s name,’ Sharpe answered unhappily, ‘but beyond that?’
They emerged from the slum into a wide and elegant street hard by a great palatial building. They turned eastwards, just wandering, and Sharpe again noted the beggars who sat by every doorway. It would be the same in London, and he had a sudden yearning to be back in Normandy.
‘God save Ireland, but will you look at that?’ Harper interrupted his thoughts, and Sharpe looked up to see they had entered a great open square in the centre of which was an enormous pillar crowned with a statue.
‘Who the hell is that?’
‘Has to be your man!’ Harper said. ‘Napoleon!’
Sharpe grimaced. ‘They’ll have him down from that.’
‘Up against a wall and a firing squad. Where are we going?’
‘Nowhere.’
‘A drink might help that ambition?’
They found a small tavern down a side street and Sharpe ordered beer, which Harper condemned as horse piss, but happily drank. A legless man, still wearing his blue uniform jacket, swung himself to their table on two short crutches and held out a battered tin mug. ‘Where were you wounded?’ Sharpe asked him.
‘Spain, monsieur.’
‘Where?’
‘Salamanca.’
‘I was there,’ Sharpe said.
‘We should have won!’
‘We did,’ Sharpe answered, and gave the man a coin.
‘What was that about?’ Harper asked as the man shuffled away on his short crutches.
‘Poor bastard was at Salamanca.’
‘Christ, that was a miserable fight.’
They left after Sharpe asked the barkeeper for directions which took him further east and north past the élysée Palace. ‘I’m told that’s where Napoleon lived,’ Sharpe said. They could see into a courtyard where men in the uniform of the Imperial Guard lounged, then Sharpe turned onto the Champs-élysées where he again asked directions. ‘This way,’ he told Harper, leading him to the gates of an imposing mansion. A brass plate on the gatepost announced it as the H?tel Mauberges. ‘Lucille will be coming here,’ Sharpe said.
‘Her friend the Dowager Countess?’
‘It’s her house.’
‘The old girl must have money,’ Harper said, ‘and maybe we can move here instead of that shit place in the Rue Villedot?’
‘Mister Fox won’t agree to that.’
‘Why would he care?’
‘He doesn’t want Lucille to know what we’re doing. Thinks she might betray us.’
‘He thinks what?’
‘I told her anyway,’ Sharpe said, ‘but we’ve got a problem here.’
‘That’s a surprise.’
‘The old girl says some deserters have occupied the house. Wants me to get rid of them.’ Sharpe stared at the big house, but could see nothing untoward, but then he would not have expected to. ‘I’d like to help the old girl, she’s been good to Lucille.’
‘We can fillet the buggers,’ Harper said, then grinned, ‘just you and me?’
‘Christ, no. We don’t know how many are there. We’ll bring the lads and do the job properly.’ Sharpe turned to watch a half-dozen cavalrymen coming slowly down the road, heading into the city. All were Cuirassiers, still wearing their steel breastplates, their tired horses smeared with mud.
‘Poor bastards,’ Harper said, ‘they’ve ridden those poor horses close to death.’
Sharpe saw the crusted blood at the horses’ nostrils and saw the blood matted in their coats where musket balls had struck. Some people called out questions to the riders, but they were all too tired, too dispirited to offer answers. They had been defeated. ‘They’re lucky to be alive,’ Sharpe said, remembering the vast cavalry charges that had surged up the slope at Mont-St-Jean to be slaughtered by the Duke’s squares. The horses limped past.
Sharpe followed the horsemen, feeling a sudden fierce anger. ‘Twenty-one years,’ he snarled at Harper.
‘Sir?’
‘Twenty-one years since I first fired a shot in battle,’ he said, ‘and we’ve won, Pat! We shouldn’t be here. We should be in some bloody tavern with the lads. We’ve earned it! Instead we’re expected to kill some more, and I’m tired of it. Bloody tired of it. And I need a file.’
‘A file?’
‘It’s Dan’s rifle,’ Sharpe explained. ‘It’s got notches filed in the stock. I counted them. One hundred and twenty-three. And I killed that bastard in the field outside Valenciennes, so I’ll add a notch. Dan would like that.’