‘Indeed we will! We must!’
The Captain stood and bowed to the older women. ‘I must check on the sentries, madame.’
‘Do your duty, Capitaine.’
‘As always, madame, as always.’
‘And the Englishman? He is safe?’
‘Sleeping with the mushrooms, madame.’
‘He should be dead!’
‘He has more to tell us, madame.’ He hesitated. ‘He claims he is only here to take the art from the Musée Napoléon.’
‘Then he’s a barbarian as well as a liar. Question him further.’
‘Perhaps you should question him, madame?’
‘Maybe I will. He’s unhurt?’
‘A little bruised and very hungover, madame.’
‘A waste of good brandy,’ she said, then waved the Captain from the room. She sat in thought for a moment, stood, and paused to gaze at a portrait above the mantel. She looked sad, then abruptly turned and followed the Captain from the great parlour.
Sharpe stood, stretching cramped muscles. So Fox was here, a captive, and he was ‘with the mushrooms’? What the hell did that mean?
There was the noise of a door opening and a sudden shuffle of feet on stone and Sharpe realised the officer had come from the front door where the sentries were presumably straightening up and pretending to have been alert. The noise was sufficient to stir the two men at the front of the house, who scrambled to their feet and started pacing again. Sharpe realised he was outlined against the candle-glow through the big window, and ducked down again. He was hidden by two thick bushes. Laurel? He did not know. Lucille would know, he thought. She was amused by his inability to tell an elm from a beech, an oak from a sycamore. He wondered where she was, where the armies were. Surely they must reach Paris soon? Cannon fire had punctuated the sky all day, sounding nearer and always from the north. Fox had told Sharpe that the forts defending Paris were thickest to the north, and he wondered if the Emperor planned a defensive battle somewhere close to those ramparts.
And if there was no battle, or if the Emperor lost, then the allies would be in Paris and la Fraternité would want their revenge, which Sharpe had been ordered to stop. And crouching between two laurel bushes, or whatever they were, would not help. He turned and saw that no sentries were in sight and so, carefully, slowly, he stood again. The parlour was empty, the door ajar, and he leaned his rifle against the wall and clambered over the open window’s sill. His metal scabbard clanged on the stone and he froze, but no one seemed to notice, and he half fell into the room. He leaned from the window and retrieved his rifle, then crossed towards the open door. The portrait above the empty hearth caught his eye and he stopped to look at it. The painting showed a good-looking man in a Cuirassier’s breastplate mounted on horseback. There were French cavalrymen behind him and he seemed to be gesturing them forward. It was a striking portrait.
‘That was my husband,’ a voice said in English behind him, ‘and you must be Colonel Sharpe.’
He turned. The elderly woman was in the doorway, her face resolute, and in her hand was a horse pistol. ‘Sit down, Colonel,’ she said, twitching the gun, ‘now!’
Sharpe sat.
CHAPTER 8
‘My name,’ the old woman said, ‘is Florence Delaunay. And you are Colonel Sharpe.’
‘Yes, madame.’
‘You look dangerous, Colonel,’ she said, evidently amused. She spoke in faultless English. ‘Be assured I can use my husband’s pistol.’
‘A Cuirassier’s pistol, madame?’
‘My husband’s.’ She nodded at the handsome portrait. ‘He carried two into battle, but preferred using his sword.’
‘Most cavalrymen do.’
She crossed the room towards a chair, but always holding the gun steadily, aiming it at Sharpe’s chest. She was a small, thin woman, dressed in a black fabric that had a glossy sheen. ‘Have you ever been shot, Colonel?’
‘More times than I can remember, madame.’
‘But never by a woman?’
‘Indeed, madame. She very nearly killed me.’
‘A Frenchwoman, I hope?’
‘Indeed she was, madame.’
‘Good for her! So she drove you off?’
‘For a time. I hope we’ll be married soon.’
‘Married! Who is this woman?’
‘Her name, madame, is Lucille Lassan.’
The pistol faltered and she looked astonished. ‘Henri and Marie’s girl?’
‘I believe so, madame.’
‘A very pretty girl, I remember.’
‘Your memory is good, madame.’
‘She married well! The Comte de Seleglise. Then he died, poor man.’
‘In Russia, madame.’
The pistol was held firmly again. ‘I met her in ’12, and liked her. I was sorry about her husband, then last year I heard a rumour she’d taken up with an Englishman. I hoped it was not true.’
‘Happily, it is.’
‘Yet she shot you. Why?’
‘She believed I had killed her brother.’
‘And had you?’
‘No, madame, it was a Frenchman who killed him.’
She snorted, evidently unwilling to believe the story. ‘There’s an estate in Normandy, isn’t that right?’
‘Indeed, we live there.’
‘So you speak French?’
‘I’m learning it as well as I can, madame,’ Sharpe answered in French.
‘Which is not very well, apparently,’ Madame Delaunay said in English.
‘Unlike your English, madame,’ Sharpe said politely.
‘I am English, Colonel. I was born and grew up in Hampshire. My father was in the Royal Navy.’ She plainly enjoyed the surprise on Sharpe’s face. ‘I was English,’ she corrected herself, ‘but by marriage and after living here for almost forty years I count myself French. And fortunate in that.’
‘Fortunate, madame?’
‘You fight for King and country, Colonel?’
‘I do, madame.’
‘Then you fight for a lunatic! A mad king! And you would foist a gross fat man onto the throne of France! It’s disgusting. At least the French had the sense to decapitate their king. You should do the same! Or perhaps Lucille will civilise you.’ She looked at the portrait above the mantel. ‘Just as Lieutenant Delaunay civilised me.’
‘By teaching you French?’
‘And he plainly taught me better French than young Lucille has taught you, Colonel!’ She paused to sit, though the pistol never left Sharpe. ‘I thought English gentlemen imbibed French with their mother’s milk?’
‘I’m no gentleman, madame, and never knew my mother.’
Madame Delaunay snorted again. ‘Then who raised you?’
‘A foundling home, madame.’
‘From which you joined the army?’
‘Indeed so, madame.’
‘As a common soldier?’
‘Very common, madame.’
‘Yet you are a Colonel?’
‘A Lieutenant-Colonel, madame.’
‘You must be a remarkable man, Colonel Sharpe.’
‘Thank you, madame.’
‘It will be a pity to shoot you.’
‘You have no reason to shoot me, madame.’
‘You break into my house!’
‘The window was open.’
‘Uninvited! Unwanted! Why are you here?’
‘To see your husband, madame.’