‘No, Your Grace.’
‘Brigadier Lanier now, and in the royal service. They’ve made him the Commandant of a military training establishment.’
‘He’s good,’ Sharpe said.
‘So were you, Sharpe. You were a damned fine Rifleman.’ The Duke had started strolling back towards the house, driven by the first few drops of rain.
‘I liked the Rifles,’ Sharpe said.
The Duke began to hurry, but then stopped at the lawn’s edge. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘did you intend to kill or just to wound?’
Sharpe hesitated. He knew exactly what the Duke was talking about, but still suspected his answer could get him into trouble. Then decided he would part from the Duke with the truth. ‘I meant to kill, Your Grace.’
‘Thought so. But it was a damned fine miss. Well done, Sharpe. You know the bloody fool now claims he won the battle?’ He was talking of William, Prince of Orange.
‘I heard that, Your Grace.’
‘And he’s thinking of putting a damn great monument at the place where he was wounded.’ The Duke started across the gravel towards an open door. ‘Do you know what won the battle, Sharpe?’
‘You did, Your Grace.’
‘No,’ the Duke said sharply, ‘it was you, the finest infantry in the world, and God knows how many times that infantry got me out of trouble.’
A dozen men had shared the lunch, and insisted on hearing Sharpe’s recollections of old battles, which accounts were interrupted when a message arrived for the Duke. He tore open the ornate envelope, read the contents, and looked at Sharpe. ‘The Pope thanks you, Sharpe. Maybe he’ll make you a Cardinal?’
‘Me, Your Grace?’ Sharpe said, flustered.
The Duke gestured with the message, which had an elaborate seal at its foot. ‘It seems Mister Fox sent his holiness a list of the paintings which have been recovered, and which we’ll now return. You had a hand in that, did you not?’
‘A very minor part,’ Sharpe said.
Major Vincent, seated to Sharpe’s left, shook his head. ‘Poor Fox,’ he said, ‘not much of a spy.’
‘Clever fellow, though,’ the Duke said, his tone suggesting that was not a compliment.
Sharpe had left feeling flattered and pleased, and wealthier too. Major Vincent had walked him to the stables where Sharpe discovered the big black stallion that Fox had ridden south from Péronne. ‘The Duke is eager you should have him,’ Vincent said. ‘He’s called Tempest.’
‘Good God,’ Sharpe had said, looking at the magnificent beast. ‘I’m happy enough with my old nag.’
‘Take your old horse back too. And if you sell Tempest don’t take anything less than two hundred guineas.’
Now Tempest was in his Normandy pasture. Charlie Weller reckoned there were too many horses for sale and prices were unnaturally low. ‘Keep him a year or two, Colonel, till the price recovers. He’s still young!’
Pat Harper would be jealous of the horse, but Harper was two countries away in Ireland. Once in a while a letter would come, evidently dictated to a young priest, which gave news. Isabella had given him a son. ‘We’re calling him Richard and I’ll murder the little bastard if he joins the British army.’
‘We must go to Ireland,’ Sharpe told Lucille. ‘Patrick can meet Richard Harper.’
‘I’d like that.’ She had taken off her shoes and was trailing her feet in the stream. ‘When I was first married,’ she said wistfully, remembering her dead husband, ‘I would swim here.’
‘You can now. No one’s watching.’
‘You are!’
‘And I always will.’ He stripped off his boots, overalls and shirt, then leaped into the water. ‘Come on, girl,’ he said, and waited for Lucille to join him in the chill pool of the stream where he floated, unaccountably happy, and home at last.
HISTORICAL NOTE
The Battle of Waterloo was fought on 18 June 1815. Three weeks later the British and the Prussians were in Paris, Napoleon had abdicated, and his troops ordered to retire southwards beyond the River Loire. Those three weeks were not peaceful. The Prussians had fought a number of small actions against the French rearguard, while the main Prussian army, remembering the atrocities committed by the French on Prussia in 1806, sought revenge by ravaging France. Wellington, advancing south to the west of the Prussians, marched more slowly and fought only two minor actions to capture the fortress towns of Cambrai and Péronne. The Duke insisted on strict discipline, fearing that any thefts or assaults committed against the French population would result in guérilla warfare against his troops. On 3 July 1815, the Convention of Saint-Cloud ended the conflict. French forces were ordered south of the Loire, the Provisional Government recognised Louis XVIII as King of France, and Paris was yielded to the victorious allies. There was no action at Ham. The chateau in that small town had once been a formidable fortress, with outer works designed by the famous military engineer, Vauban, but by 1815 those outworks had gone. The chateau was used as a prison for much of the nineteenth century, but was largely destroyed by the Germans in the First World War, and all that remains today is the great square gatehouse.
La Fraternité is a novelist’s invention, though there were plots to assassinate the Duke of Wellington while he was in Paris. Probably the best known was an attempt to shoot the Duke by an ex-soldier named Marie André Cantillon, who narrowly missed his target. He was imprisoned, but doubtless consoled by the bequest of 10,000 francs left to him in Napoleon’s will. A far more dramatic attempt occurred in June 1816, when Wellington gave a ball in his Paris mansion and a fire was discovered in the cellars. Servants extinguished the blaze, but discovered stashes of gunpowder and cartridges, which had happily failed to ignite, but which inspired the story in this book. The house, the grandly named H?tel Grimod de La Reynière, was on the site of what is now the American Embassy.
The ‘prayer’ that Private Pat Bee said over Hagman’s grave is an ancient Latin Christmas carol taught to Italian children, while Lanier’s quotation from the Psalms is a slightly edited version of Psalm 144, verse 1; ‘Blessed be the Lord who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.’