Harper brought a dozen bottles, each corked and each bearing a small handwritten label which read ‘Félix Collignon. Courvoisier, Bercy, Paris.’
Sharpe pulled the cork from one bottle and tasted it. ‘Good brandy,’ he said. He hurled the bottle down the stairs and it shattered on the cellar’s stone floor. He threw another half-dozen bottles, seeing a pool of brandy spread towards the rear of the cellar. ‘Get me a light, Pat.’
Harper took a rag from beside the kitchen sink, opened the stove door and lit the rag, which he gave to Sharpe who launched it down onto the brandy. Flames immediately sprang up and Collignon called out in alarm. Sharpe hurled another bottle down the steps and was rewarded with a sudden rush of bright flame. ‘Non, monsieur!’ Collignon called.
‘Let’s get the bugger,’ Sharpe said just as Alan Fox came into the kitchen.
‘What are you doing, Colonel?’
‘Burning his bloody house down. Come on, Pat.’
‘This first, sir,’ Harper said, and levelled his seven-barrel gun down towards the blue flames and pulled the trigger.
The report of the gun was immense, like firing a cannon in a closed space, and the smoke belched out to fill the cellar as the pistol balls ricocheted from the stone walls. ‘Now,’ Harper said, confident that the sound alone would have terrified the man below. Sharpe ran down the stairs, jumped into the flickering flames, and twisted towards the rear of the cellar where Collignon was crouched behind a table on which were six pistols. Sharpe ran through the fire, reached over the table and hauled the shivering wretch up and over. He dragged him through the shattered bottles and burning brandy, then up the stairs. Harper was reloading the volley gun. ‘Let me get the other fellows,’ he said.
‘Who’s with you?’
‘Finn, McGurk and O’Farrell.’ All Irish, Sharpe noted. ‘I sent McGurk and O’Farrell round the back,’ Harper said. ‘Finn’s at the front of the house.’
Smoke was drifting in the hallway now so Sharpe closed the cellar door then dragged Collignon into the elegant book-lined room. Finn, a lanky man, climbed through the shattered front window, and Sharpe sent him to look at the two men who had first threatened him. ‘One’s dead, one’s near dead,’ Finn reported.
‘Savages,’ Collignon said, then held out his hands as if warding off evil when Sharpe looked at him.
‘There’s a maid in the kitchen,’ Sharpe told Finn, ‘make sure she’s safe and get her out of the house before it burns down.’
‘We should leave,’ Fox said nervously. ‘The sapeur-pompiers will be here soon.’
‘The what?’ Sharpe asked.
‘They put out fires,’ Fox explained.
‘We’ll leave when we’re ready,’ Sharpe said. He faced Collignon and slowly drew his sword. ‘I guess Mister Collignon received your message this afternoon after all,’ he told Fox.
‘So it seems.’
‘So question him, Mister Fox, and I’ll make sure he tells you the truth.’ Sharpe pushed the point of the sword against Collignon’s chest. ‘You’re not going to lie to me, monsieur.’
The smell of burning had thickened and smoke was seeping under the doors which led to the hallway. ‘We should leave, Colonel,’ Fox said. ‘Good God, man, the house is burning!’
‘Question him!’ Sharpe snapped, then slapped the flat of the blade against Collignon’s cheek and went through into the dark half of the parlour. Doors led to the garden and he threw them open to see Harper and the remaining two Riflemen in the darkness. ‘Pat! I need these two men searched,’ he gestured at the dead man on the floor and the dying man in the chair where Sharpe had clouted him with the musket’s stock. ‘We need to know who they are.’
‘We must leave!’ Fox shouted from the front of the parlour.
‘McGurk, O’Farrell, search those two men. Pat? Make sure Collignon comes with us. Carry him if you have to. Is there a back way out of this garden?’
‘There’s a gate.’
‘Then we go that way.’ Sharpe suspected there would soon be a crowd at the front of the house and, presumably, men attempting to extinguish the flames that were now bright through the kitchen windows. Finn had the maid safe in the garden. Charlotte was clutching the cat.
‘Coming, Mister Fox!’ Sharpe called. ‘With me, Pat.’
They hauled Collignon from his chair and Harper plucked him up and carried him to the back garden. Sharpe paused long enough to rescue the ten golden guineas that were still on the arm of Fox’s chair, then followed. He pushed one of the coins into Charlotte’s hand and the rest into his cartridge pouch. ‘Go,’ he told the girl. ‘Go home, or find another employer.’ She fled.
There was a brick building beside the back gate. Finn, curious, tugged open the door and, in the light of the flames which now sprang from the kitchen windows, Sharpe saw a small carriage inside. ‘That’ll do,’ he told Fox.
‘No horses?’
‘We don’t need horses.’ Sharpe assumed that Collignon hired carriage horses when they were needed, thus saving the expense of grooms, feed and stabling. ‘Bring the bugger here, Pat.’
The carriage was a small two-wheeled vehicle. ‘Good God,’ Fox said, ‘a curricle! Bit sporty for an old fellow like Collignon.’
‘Ideal for us,’ Sharpe said. A curricle was light. ‘In you get, Mister Fox, and give us directions.’
Fox climbed onto the single bench-seat and Collignon was put beside him. Sharpe took McGurk’s sword-bayonet from its scabbard and handed it to Fox. ‘If the bugger gives you trouble stick that through his ribs.’
The two carriage-house doors were swung open and Sharpe, Harper and their three men took hold of the shaft and pulled the curricle out into the night. Sparks drifted overhead and flakes of ash fell into the alley like snow. ‘Go left, then left again,’ Fox called. He had discovered a whip that he cracked over their heads. The carriage burst from the alley, turned left, then left again beside the Champ de l’Alouette. Collignon’s house was now ablaze and a small crowd had gathered in the street to watch the destruction. ‘It’s the books,’ Sharpe said with relish, ‘they make good fires, books.’
Collignon moaned when he saw his house, then yelped as Fox pressed the sword-bayonet against his ribs. Sharpe could hear the two men talking, but as he was at the front of the shaft he could not make out the words, but it was evident Collignon was being voluble.
‘It isn’t right, Mister Sharpe,’ McGurk said beside him.
‘What’s not right?’
‘An officer doing this. You should be in the carriage.’
‘No room,’ Sharpe said.