The elephant’s flanks were streaked with dirt, and in places the plaster had flaked away to leave scabrous gaps. It stood on a weed-thick island in the pool, and Sharpe could see the rats moving there. Vignot had said the whole statue was a paradise for rats. ‘It stands where the Bastille was,’ he had told Sharpe, ‘and when it is properly built in bronze it will be magnificent!’ One of the elephant’s forelegs was evidently a house, because candlelight showed dimly through a window. Sharpe shook his head in disbelief. ‘Come on, lads, we have work.’
They passed the monstrous beast and so on up the Rue de Saint-Antoine, then branching left onto the Rue de Montreuil. There were houses on both sides of the street, which led to a gate in the city wall. To his left Sharpe could see vineyards beyond the houses and then, halfway to the city gate, he found the entrance to the Delaunay estate. It was a great iron gate between stone pillars, one of which had a wooden sign on which Delaunay was written. The small moonlight showed a drive curving between neat vineyards towards a big house that was built hard against the city wall. The gate was padlocked.
‘Who has a picklock?’ Sharpe asked.
‘You do,’ Harper said, amused.
Sharpe had to retrieve his rifle from the handcart, then opened the small brass-lidded cavity in the stock where he kept the bullets’ leather patches and a picklock. ‘It’s good for cleaning the mainspring,’ he said.
‘Of course it is, Mister Sharpe,’ Butler said.
Sharpe unfolded the strongest hook and explored the padlock. It was old, simple and stiff, but he found the levers, forced them back, and the lock’s staple fell open. ‘Easy,’ he said, putting the pick back in the rifle’s stock. He pulled the gate open just enough to let his men file through, each now carrying either a rifle or a musket. ‘Don’t cock them!’ Sharpe warned. The last thing he needed was for a man to trip and accidentally alarm the big house by firing a gun.
Lights glowed dimly from one window on the ground floor of the house and as they started up the long curving drive Sharpe saw the silhouette of a man walk in front of the window. The man had a musket slung on a shoulder. ‘Into the vines, boys,’ he muttered.
They approached the house in a leafy corridor of grapevines that climbed gently towards the house and the city wall beyond. The grapes looked almost ripe in the moonlight, but Sharpe doubted they would be harvested for another two months. He plucked one and grimaced at the sour taste. He was crouching, watching the house as he spat the grape out, and saw two men pacing slowly in front of the building that seemed to back onto the city wall. He could see no men on the wall’s top, just the two who paced backwards and forwards, both of them carrying muskets.
Sentries, then. He peered at the upper windows, wondering if anyone watched from there, but the windows were black and he saw nothing. Only the one window was lit, and that on the ground floor.
‘They’re in uniform,’ Harper whispered to him, nodding at the two men, whose white crossbelts showed clearly. ‘And there are two more of the buggers at the front door. Bloody sentries.’
‘We wait,’ Sharpe said, though in truth he did not know what they waited for nor what good waiting would do. He needed to get inside the house and question General Delaunay, but how to do that without killing the sentries he did not know, nor did he want to shoot and so wake the house’s occupants. So he waited.
After a while the sentries seemed to get bored with marching up and down the front of the house and both found places to lean against the wall. One lit a pipe or cigar, the smoke drifting in the small wind. Still Sharpe waited. The two guards at the front door had retreated into a wide pillared porch. Every few minutes one would peer out, then disappear again. Sharpe remembered his own time of sentry duty, usually standing guard at some camp, and how, as the night lengthened and nothing happened, he would feel sleep creeping on him. Charles Morris had been his company commander back in those days, and Sharpe felt a surge of anger that fate had brought Morris back into his life. That was unfinished business, he thought, and his hand instinctively closed about the Baker rifle. If Morris dared flog one man in the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers then Sharpe swore he would take the skin off the bastard’s back. ‘Buggers are asleep,’ Harper whispered.
Sharpe jarred himself fully awake. He could see no one in the front door’s porch, though he supposed both men were still there, while the other two were now slumped at the foot of the wall, a hundred or more paces apart. Sharpe shrugged off the stiff and heavy oilskin coat and dropped it to the ground. ‘Stay here, Pat,’ he ordered. ‘If I need you I’ll shout, or else fire the rifle. If you hear a rifle shot, bring everyone.’
‘Shall I come now?’
‘Stay here, Pat.’ Sharpe slowly got to his feet. No one shouted, the sentries did not move. Sharpe stepped from the vines onto the gravel of the driveway and slowly approached the lighted window. His boots crunched the small stones, but the nearest sentry was oblivious, his head sunk in sleep. Bushes grew beneath the window and Sharpe flinched as they rustled. Then he crouched so that only his head was above the stone sill.
He was gazing into a long parlour, an empty hearth to the right, bookshelves to the left, and the space between filled with deep sofas and elegant tables, all lit by a dozen candelabra. An elderly woman sat just beyond the fireplace, her white hair piled elaborately. She was dressed in black and was talking to someone sitting opposite her, but the man, if it was a man, had his back to Sharpe and all he could see was the top of the man’s head above the sofa’s frame. The man had fair hair so it was not Fox, who, like Sharpe, had dark hair. He could just hear voices, though too faint to be able to distinguish any words. A man and a woman. They laughed, then the man stood and Sharpe saw he was young and dressed in French infantry uniform. The man turned and seemed to gaze straight at Sharpe, who ducked down beneath the sill.
He waited. Then almost jumped in fright as he heard the window above him being opened. ‘There’s not much wind, my lady,’ the man spoke right above Sharpe.
‘It still might cool the room, Capitaine. Leave it open.’
Sharpe froze. He sensed the man was leaning out of the window and half expected to hear a pistol being cocked. He hoped Harper was aiming his rifle at the man, but then he heard the man’s footsteps go back into the room, and he dared raise his head to see the officer take his seat opposite the old woman. Sharpe gazed through the glass, confident that the candles’ reflections would hide him. The open window was just to his right and he could hear the voices clearly now. The old woman was evidently asking the officer about his fiancée. ‘How old is she?’
‘Nineteen.’
‘A good age. She’s pretty?’
‘I think so.’
‘So you should. What is her family?’
‘Grain merchants, milady, in Poitiers.’
‘There’s money?’
‘Ample.’
‘She sounds like a wise choice, Capitaine.’ The old lady sounded anything but sincere to Sharpe. ‘I congratulate you.’
‘Merci, madame.’
‘But in the coming days,’ the old woman spoke sharply, ‘who knows what will happen? Is France to be conquered?’
‘I fear so.’
‘Our enemies will wring us dry,’ she spoke angrily. ‘It is a disgrace!’
‘We will make them regret it, madame.’