‘She can go to the kitchen. The rest we chuck out.’
They drove the intruders at bayonet point out of the front door. Three were badly wounded and Sharpe made the others carry them. He and Harper prodded them down the driveway and out onto the road. ‘Come back,’ Sharpe told them, ‘and we kill you.’
‘Give us clothes!’ one of the women demanded.
‘Va te faire foutre,’ Sharpe said, and slammed the heavy gate shut.
Vignot, the steward, was waiting at the front door looking nervous. ‘They’re gone?’
‘And they won’t come back,’ Sharpe said, ‘and tomorrow you start cleaning the house. It’s a mess.’ He translated what he had said for Harper’s benefit.
‘And what do we do tomorrow?’ Harper asked.
‘We clean up an even bigger mess,’ Sharpe said, though how he was to do that without Fox’s help he did not know. Only that it must be done. ‘Till then, Pat? Sleep.’
CHAPTER 7
Vignot and his staff insisted on making breakfast the next morning, and afterwards Sharpe took Charlie Weller on a walk through the city. ‘Where are we going?’ Weller asked.
‘Back to the warehouse, Charlie.’
‘We left something there?’
‘We’re just looking. And we need to buy some tobacco.’ Butler and Finn were moaning about lacking tobacco for their pipes.
Sharpe turned left onto the Rue de Richelieu. Both he and Weller were in civilian clothes and attracted no attention from the Parisians on the busy pavement. They walked up the eastern side and stopped outside a millinery store to gaze down the Rue Villedot. ‘Damn,’ Sharpe said mildly.
‘Good job we moved, sir,’ Weller said.
There were French troops in the street and they were going in and out of Fox’s warehouse, some carrying the pictures that were being hurled into a wagon. ‘Light Infantry,’ Sharpe said. The soldiers’ collars were red, and instead of bayonets they carried the short swords that were not unlike a Rifleman’s sword-bayonet. ‘We’d best go home,’ Sharpe said.
‘Is that what you came to see?’
‘I hoped I wouldn’t see it.’ The presence of the troops confirmed what he feared, that la Fraternité knew of the warehouse and, most probably, now knew that British soldiers were already in the city.
They stopped at a tobacconist then walked back to the H?tel Mauberges. ‘They’re hunting us,’ Sharpe told Harper.
‘So they must have captured Mister Fox?’
‘Silly bugger wasn’t subtle enough,’ Sharpe said, ‘but we should be safe enough here.’
‘So we just stay here?’
Sharpe was tempted to say yes, but he had his orders and the only clues he possessed were the names Fox had mentioned. Lanier and Delaunay. ‘Delaunay?’ Harper asked when Sharpe mentioned the names.
‘He’s a General and Fox went looking for him.’
‘And I think I’ve found him,’ Harper said happily.
‘Found him?’
‘Follow me.’
Harper led him to the back door of the house and into the kitchen. ‘When you were gone, sir, me and the lads had a wee look around.’ He pushed open a door from the kitchen and Sharpe found himself in a room racked high with wine bottles. ‘You found what you were looking for then?’ he said sourly.
‘God is good, sir, so he is, but look here.’
There were some wooden crates piled at the end of the room, and Harper pointed to one of them. ‘Isn’t that the name?’ he asked, and Sharpe saw that the name Delaunay had been stencilled on the box’s side. ‘Vin Delaunay,’ he read. ‘That’s not our man. That’s a winemaker, our fellow is a General.’
‘Maybe same family?’
‘Could be, I suppose.’ Sharpe went back to the kitchen and shouted for Vignot. ‘Where does the wine Delaunay come from?’ he asked.
‘The city, monsieur!’
‘From a wine shop?’
‘Non, monsieur, from the Delaunay vineyard.’
‘Which is where?’
‘In the Rue de Montreuil, monsieur.’
‘That’s in Paris?’ It sounded unlikely to Sharpe.
‘The eastern end of the city, monsieur,’ Vignot said. ‘There are four or five vineyards there, but Delaunay makes the best wine.’
‘And it’s a family business?’
Vignot nodded. ‘The old Général and his wife, monsieur.’
‘Bull’s eye,’ Sharpe said in English.
‘Monsieur?’
‘Thank you,’ Sharpe said, and looked at Harper. ‘You’re not entirely useless, Pat.’
‘I wish you’d tell my mother that!’
‘One day, Pat, one day. We go tonight.’
‘All of us?’
‘All of us.’
That night Sharpe wore his uniform beneath the long coat that Fox had bought him. He insisted all his men wore their uniform jackets, so that if they were captured they could claim to be soldiers, not spies, but it seemed strange to be walking the evening streets of Paris with a sword at his side. His rifle and the long guns of his men were being pushed in a handcart that belonged to the garden of the H?tel Mauberges. They received a few curious glances, but no one challenged them as they followed the directions Vignot had given them; finding the Rue de Saint-Antoine. ‘If you see the elephant,’ Vignot had said, ‘you’re on the right street.’
‘The elephant?’
‘You’ll see it, monsieur!’
And so they did. At first Sharpe had just seen a white mass in the distance and thought it must be moonlight reflected from a vast white wall, but as he walked closer it began to resemble a small snow-covered hill. It was not till he walked into the great open space that he saw it was a gigantic elephant, taller than a house, that stood in a pool of shallow water. ‘What the …’ Harper said, gazing in awe.
‘You’ve never seen an elephant?’ Sharpe said. ‘I saw a lot in India.’
‘This isn’t bloody India,’ Harper retorted.
‘It’s a statue,’ Sharpe said. Vignot had described it and Sharpe had not really believed what he heard, but the reality was bigger and stranger than anything he could have imagined. The vast beast loomed over the open space. ‘The Emperor ordered it,’ Sharpe said, ‘and they haven’t had time to make it out of bronze, so that big bugger is plaster over wood.’
‘The man’s insane,’ Harper murmured.