The officer shrugged. ‘The Emperor will protect you.’
That claim provoked jeers, and Sharpe turned away, still hoping for a glimpse of Fox, though the man had vanished, which left Sharpe small choice but to return to the warehouse in the Rue Villedot.
‘The bastard’s gone,’ he told Harper.
‘Do you trust him?’
‘No.’ Sharpe accepted a mug of smouch from Charlie Weller. ‘And he doesn’t trust me either. He says I’m not subtle.’
‘You’re not,’ Harper commented.
Sharpe sipped the smouch. ‘Proper tea,’ he said appreciatively.
‘So what do we do?’ Harper asked.
‘What he told us to do,’ Sharpe sipped the hot tea, ‘wait till he gets back.’
‘The lads are restless. Bored.’
A burst of laughter sounded from across the wide space and Sharpe saw that Finn and Geoghegan had discovered lumps of charcoal and were adding moustaches to some of Fox’s portraits. ‘I’m thinking,’ he said.
‘Go on,’ Harper encouraged him.
‘That bastard Collignon,’ Sharpe said, ‘betrayed Fox.’
‘And we killed him,’ Harper said happily.
‘But he knew all about Fox. Where he lived and what he did.’
‘Probably.’
‘So assume he knew about this place?’
‘Maybe he didn’t.’
‘Fox suggested he might have known,’ Sharpe said harshly, ‘which means Collignon probably told others, and those others will eventually come looking here. And we’ll be like rats in a barrel.’
Harper frowned. ‘But not yet. The bugger hasn’t been dead twenty-four hours.’
‘He could have told them weeks ago,’ Sharpe said, ‘and last night la Fraternité or whatever the hell they’re called lost three men, and Collignon’s house burned down. They’ll know they have enemies in the city, and it’s likely as not they know about this bloody place. We can’t stay here, Pat.’
‘Jesus Christ! Where do we go?’
‘We wait for Fox to come back, then we decide. He knows Paris.’
‘Unless the buggers come first,’ Harper said, and reached for his volley gun.
They waited.
Fox did not return, but nor did anyone else come to the warehouse. Night fell. Sharpe went out at dusk and brought back bread, ham, cheese and wine, a meal they consumed by the light of candle stubs. Every footstep in the street made him reach for his rifle and turn expectantly toward the big doors, but the steps always went past. ‘I hate this,’ he told Harper. ‘That bloody fool. He’s all education and no bloody sense.’
‘Got himself caught?’
‘What else? They caught him and put him in a box.’ Sharpe waited as more footsteps sounded in the street. They went past. ‘And we can’t stay here.’
‘So where do we go?’
‘I have an idea,’ Sharpe said, ‘but getting there?’
‘We walk.’
‘With rifles and muskets?’ A dozen men walking the streets of Paris with rifles slung on their shoulders would be asking for trouble. Sharpe had no doubt that the city was filled with deserters, and the authorities would be looking for them, and men carrying weapons would be too noticeable. ‘We’ll leave at dawn,’ Sharpe decided, ‘but we have to hide the weapons.’
‘And use what’s left of your man’s wee carriage,’ Harper suggested.
Much of the back of Collignon’s curricle had been broken apart for fuel, but the seat and floor were still intact and would serve as a cart. Sharpe piled the weapons inside and covered them with a canvas made by slicing a huge portrait from its frame. ‘We haven’t got far to go,’ he told his men, then they dragged open the big doors and Sharpe led them towards the river. It was early morning and few folk were around and no one seemed to think it odd that a broken curricle was being pulled by four men. There were other carts in the streets either bringing vegetables from the surrounding country or carrying builders’ supplies, and Collignon’s curricle looked little different. They pulled the curricle to the side of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré as a troop of Dragoons trotted past, going west. The cannon fire was sounding again, dull thuds from the distant north. ‘That’s where we should be,’ Sharpe growled, ‘doing our job instead of this nonsense.’
‘Nosey can’t be far off,’ Harper said.
Sharpe nodded. ‘But that’s not battle gunfire.’ The distant shots were sporadic and desultory, nothing like the incessant and urgent hammering of big guns in battery. Men were doubtless fighting and dying to the north, but Sharpe wondered whether the Emperor really had enough troops to make a fight for the city. Fox had reckoned that at least a hundred thousand men could be mustered, which suggested that there could be a battle before any allied troops entered Paris, but the city’s mood seemed resigned to losing the war. He remembered the jeers he had heard outside the élysée Palace and the huge numbers of maimed beggars wearing their old uniforms. Lucille reckoned the French were tired of war. ‘We have suffered enough,’ she had told him more than once, ‘it is time for peace. A king is a small price to pay for fewer deaths.’
They followed the route Sharpe and Harper had taken on their first day in the city, looking for all the world like a group of workmen. They passed the great palaces and so into the fields, beyond which scattered houses had been built. ‘Here,’ Sharpe said, pushing open the gates of the H?tel Mauberges.
‘The old lady’s house?’
‘Lucille will be coming here,’ Sharpe said, ‘and whoever captured Fox won’t look here.’
‘Nor will Mister Fox.’
‘He’s probably dead, Pat. Silly bugger.’
‘He might be alive?’
‘After what we did to them two nights ago? What would you do?’
‘Slit his throat. Slowly.’
The H?tel Mauberges was enormous; three storeys tall with elegant pillars framing the front entrance and, judging by the windows, all shuttered, spacious enough to house a whole battalion. ‘We go around the back,’ Sharpe decided, and the curricle’s two wheels crunched on gravel as they followed the drive down the side of the house. There was a stable and coach house at the rear. ‘That’ll do us,’ Sharpe said. The coach-house doors were open and they dragged the curricle inside and parked it next to an open carriage with plush seats and a folded leather hood. Two carriage horses were in the stable, both looking hungry. ‘Do you have a carriage?’ Harper asked Sharpe.
‘Me? A carriage?’
‘In Normandy.’
‘We’ve got a dung cart. Does that count?’
Harper traced a finger over the coat of arms painted on the carriage’s door. ‘I thought with Lucille being a proper lady …’
‘She’s poor as a church mouse, Pat. We’re lucky to have a dung cart.’