But Frederickson, while Harper had been performing his charade with the chamber-pot, had been deep in thought. There never had been any gold in the fort, Frederickson now explained, at least not when the Riflemen had captured it. If that fact could be proved, then their troubles would be over. “What we need to do,” he went on, “is find Commandant Lassan. I don’t believe he wrote that statement. I believe Ducos made it up.” Frederickson paused as a man laughed outside the door. “I suspect your brandy is being appreciated, Sergeant.”
“Why do you think the Commandant’s statement was faked?” Sharpe asked.
Frederickson paused to strike a flame in his tinderbox and to light one of his small foul cheroots. “Do you remember his quarters?”
Sharpe thought back to the few hectic days he had spent at the Teste de Buch fortress. “I remember the bastard had a lot of books. He couldn’t fight, but he had a lot of bloody books.”
“Do you remember what the books were about?”
“I had better things to do than read.”
“I looked,” Frederickson said, “and I remember that Commandant Lassan had a very civilized library, which made it a great pity when we turned most of it into cartridge paper and cannon-wadding. I recall some very fine editions of essays, and a large, indeed comprehensive, collection of sermons and other devotional literature. A very devout man, our Commandant Lassan.”
“Then no wonder we beat the bastard to jelly,” Harper said happily.
“And if he is devout,” Frederickson ignored Harper’s cheerful comment, “then my guess is that he may also be honest. It doesn’t always follow, of course, I remember a very sanctimonious chaplain of the Goth who stole the mess ragged and then ran off with a Corporal’s rather rancid woman, but I’m willing to think Lassan may be cut from a rather better cloth. Indeed, I seem to recall that the American told us he was a decent man?”
“Yes, he did,” Sharpe remembered.
“So let’s hope he is decent. Let’s hope that he’ll deny that damned statement and ease us all off a bloody sharp hook. The trick of it is simply to find the man, then persuade him to travel to London.”
Frederickson’s calm words made the task sound oddly easy. Sharpe, turning to the window, saw how the darkness was shrouding the city. There was a slender moon, sharp-edged and low above a tangle of dark masts and rigging which showed over the black rooftops. Candles showed in some windows and torches flickered where link-boys escorted pedestrians about the streets. “Why Arcachon, though?” Sharpe turned back from the window. “You think Lassan lives there?”
“I doubt we shall be so fortunate as that,” Frederickson said, “but because he’s an educated man, and a devout one, it’s likely that he and the local priest would have been on friendly terms. It’s hard to find civilized conversation in a small garrison, let alone someone to play chess with, and I recall that we kindled a fire with a very fine chess-set from Lassan’s quarters. So, my suggestion is that we find the priest of Arcachon and hope he can tell us where to find Lassan. Do you agree?”
“I think it’s a brilliant notion,” Sharpe said admiringly.
“I’m just a humble Rifle Captain,” Frederickson said, “and therefore flattered by the praise of a staff officer.”
“But,” Sharpe said, “if Lassan’s an honourable man, why would Ducos falsify a statement of his? He must know that Lassan could deny it.”
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Frederickson admitted, “but we’ll never know unless we find Lassan.”
“Or get out of here,” Harper said grimly. “Can I have permission to hit a provost?”
“No killing,” Frederickson warned. “If we kill one of the bastards then they’ll have real cause to court-martial us.” He crept close to the door. “I wonder if our brandy is working.”
The three men went silent as they tried to decipher the small sounds from beyond the door. They heard voices, and then, quite distinctly, the sound of liquid being poured. “Another half hour,” Sharpe decided.
The half hour crept by, but at last the first of the town’s clocks rang ten. Sharpe grimaced, seized the door handle, and nodded at Harper. “You first, Sergeant.”
He snatched the door open, and their escape had begun.
Lieutenant-Colonel Wigram was the guest of honour at the dinner which the Transport Board was giving in the prefecture. The officials and their guests had dined well on roast mutton, roast chicken, and baked pears. Now, as the bottles of brandy thickened among the remaining bottles of claret, Wigram was invited to make a speech.
He spoke well. The vast majority of the men about the long table were civilians from London who had come to supervise the onerous task of removing an army from France. Their days were spent in settling accounts with the masters of ships, allocating hull space, and securing supplies for the army’s journey home. Now, in the candlelit splendour of the prefecture’s large hall, they could hear a little of what that army had achieved.
“In the darkest days of the struggle,” Wigram said, “when every man’s voice at home was raised against our endeavours, and when any prudent man might have deemed our cause lost, there would never have been a dinner as splendid as this one you have so generously provided. Then, gentlemen, we lived on very short commons indeed. Many is the night when I have given my horse the last food from my saddlebags, then slept hungry myself. The French were never far away on those cold nights, yet we survived, gentlemen, we survived.” There were murmurs of admiration, and a few guests, overcome both by Wigram’s heroism and the plenitude of the wine, tapped their glasses with their spoons to make a pleasant ringing applause.
“And even later,” Wigram’s glasses reflected the candlelight as he looked up to make sure his voice reached the far end of the table where the more junior guests sat, “when fortune smiled more compassionately upon us, hardship was still our constant companion.” In fact Wigram had slept between sheets every night of his war, and had been known to have a cook flogged because his nightly joint of beef was underdone, but this was no time to quibble. This was a time for every man to garner what credit he could from the war, and Wigram could garner with the best. He bowed to Captain Harcourt, another guest at the dinner, and paid a fulsome tribute to the contribution made by the Royal Navy. Again there was applause.
Finally Wigram turned to a question he had frequently pondered. “I am often asked,” he said, “what qualities arc most desirable in a soldier, and I confess to cause astonishment when I reply that it is not a sturdy arm, nor an adventurous spirit which gains an army its victories. Such qualities are necessary, of course, but without leadership they will inevitably fail. No, gentlemen, it is the man who keeps his mental faculties alert who contributes most to the glorious cause. A soldier must be a thinker. He must be a master of detail. He must be a man whose precision of thinking will render him staunch and steady amidst danger and uncertainty.” It was at that point that Lieutenant-Colonel Wigram paused, his mouth dropped open, and one by one the guests turned to stare with amazement at the apparitions which had appeared in the doorway.
It was commonly said that most men only joined the British Army for drink. The French scornfully accused the British of fighting drunk, indeed of not being able to fight unless they were drunk, though if the charge was true then it was astonishing that the French did not make their own men drunk because, sober, they could never beat the British. There was, nevertheless, a great deal of truth in the charges. The British Army was notorious for drunkenness, and more than one French unit had escaped capture by leaving tempting bottles and casks to waylay their pursuers.
So it was hardly astonishing that the three provosts were drunk. Each had consumed close to a pint and a half of brandy, and they were not merely drunk, but gloriously, happily and carelessly oblivious of being drunk. They were, in truth, in a temporary nirvana so pleasant that none of the three had even noticed when a big Irishman rapped them hard on the skull to introduce a temporary unconsciousness. It was during that bla
nk moment that each of the provosts had been stripped stark naked. Then, to make certain they stayed incapable, Sharpe and Frederickson had poured yet more brandy down their spluttering throats.
Thus it was that Lieutenant-Colonel Wigram’s speech was interrupted by three deliriously drunken men who were as naked as the day on which they were born.
The Provost Sergeant stared about him in blinking astonishment as he found himself in the brilliantly lit banqueting hall. He hiccupped, bowed to the company, and tried to speak. “Fire,” he at last managed to say, then he slid down a wall to fall asleep.
Behind him smoke seeped through the open door.
Wigram stared, aghast.
“Fire!” This time the voice came from outside, and was a huge roar of warning. Wigram panicked, but so did almost every man in the room. Glasses and plates smashed as men fought to escape the tables and cram themselves through one of the room’s two doors. The naked provosts were trampled underfoot. Smoke was thickening in the corridor and billowing up the stairwell. Wigram fought to escape with the rest. He lost his glasses in his panic, but somehow managed to scramble through the door, across the vestibule, and down into the town square where the dinner guests assembled to watch the promised inferno.
There was none. A guard sergeant filled a bucket of water and doused the pile of brandy-soaked uniforms which, heavily sprinkled with gunpowder and then piled with loosely stacked, brandy soaked ledgers, had caused the pungent smoke. There was a nasty scorch-mark on the carpet, which hardly mattered for, being embroidered with the imperial initial ‘N’, it was due for destruction anyway. Most of the ledgers were scorched, and a few had burned to ash, but the fire had not spread and so no real harm had been done. The Sergeant ordered the three drunken provosts to be carried to the yard and dumped in a horse-trough, then, pausing only to steal half a dozen bottles of brandy from the table in the banqueting hall, he went to the front door and reported to the officers that all was well.
Except half an hour later someone thought to look on the top floor of the prefecture and discovered that three Riflemen were missing. Two rifles, a seven-barrelled gun, a bayonet, and six ammunition pouches were also missing from the guardroom.
Colonel Wigram, panicking like a wet hen, wanted to call out the guard, then send cavalry galloping all over France to discover the fugitives. Captain Harcourt was calmer. “There’s no need,” he said.
“No need?”
“My dear Wigram, there are picquets at every exit from the city, and even if Major Sharpe’s party evades those sentries, we know precisely where they’re going.”
“We do?”
“Naturally. That one-eyed Rifleman was entirely correct in his evidence to the tribunal. No men could have removed six tons of gold under enemy fire. Surely you understood that?”
Wigram had understood no such thing, but was unwilling to display such ignorance. “Of course,” he said huffily.
“They could never have carried the gold away, so they must have hidden it at the Teste de Buch, and I warrant you that’s where they’ve gone. And that’s where we’ve had a sloop since last week. Might I trouble you for a single messenger to warn the crew that they’ll have to arrest Major Sharpe and his companions?”
“Of course.” Wigram felt aggrieved that no one had told him about the Navy’s precautions. “You’ve had a sloop there for a week?”
“You don’t want the bloody French to get the gold, do you?”
“But by law it belongs to them!”
“I’ve spent the last twenty years killing the bastards, and don’t intend to hand them a pile of gold just because a peace treaty’s been signed. If it’s necessary we’ll tear that damned fort apart to find the bloody stuff!” Harcourt glanced up at the stars, as if judging the weather, then grinned. “There is one consolation in all this, my dear Colonel. By running away, Major Sharpe and Captain Frederickson have proved their guilt, so when the Navy catches them, you shouldn’t have any trouble in convening a court-martial. Shall we send that messenger? And because the roads are likely to be dangerous, perhaps he’d better be given a cavalry troop as escort? Then perhaps you’d care to finish your speech? I must admit to a great fascination in your theory as to the role of the thinking man in gaining victory.”
But somehow the joy had deserted Wigram’s evening. He did at least find his spectacles, but someone had trampled them in the rush and one lens was broken and an earpiece bent. So he abandoned his speech, cursed all Riflemen, then went to his quarters and slept.
CHAPTER 7
It had been easy enough to escape the prefecture by causing some small chaos, but leaving the city itself would be a harder task. Every exit was guarded by a picquet of redcoats. The soldiers were not there to guard Bordeaux against the marauding bands of the countryside, but rather to apprehend any deserter who might have evaded the provosts at the quays and be trying to take his woman back to Spain and Portugal.
Sharpe had used the stars to find a westward road through the city, but now, so close to the open country, he had been forced to stop. He was staring at a picquet of a dozen soldiers who were silhouetted about a brazier. Sharpe was too far away to distinguish their faces or see what regiment they might be from. He silently cursed the lost telescope.
“If we wait much longer,” Frederickson warned, “they’ll have men after us.”
“Surely they won’t stop officers walking past?” Harper offered.
“Let’s hope not.” Sharpe decided Harper was right, and that rank alone should suffice to see them past the bored guards. He nevertheless wondered just what he should do if the picquet proved obdurate. It was one thing to strip drunken provosts naked, but quite another to use force against a squad of redcoats. “Cock your rifles,” Sharpe said as they walked forward.
“Are you going to shoot them?” Frederickson sounded incredulous.
“Threaten them, anyway.”
“I won’t shoot anyone.” Frederickson left his rifle slung on his shoulder. Harper had fewer scruples and dragged back the cock of his seven barrelled gun. The monstrous click of the heavy lock made the officer commanding the picquet turn towards the approaching Riflemen.
Sharpe was close enough now to see that the picquet’s officer was a tall and dandified man who, like many infantry officers who aspired to high fashion, wore a cavalryman’s fur-edged pelisse over one shoulder. The officer strolled towards the three Riflemen with a languid, almost supercilious, air. The three must have looked strange for, in an army that had swiftly accustomed itself to peace, they were accoutred for war. They had heavy packs, crammed pouches, and were festooned with weapons. The sight of those weapons made the picquet’s sergeant snap an order to his men who unslung their muskets and shuffled into a crude line across the road. The officer calmly waved his hand as if to suggest that the sergeant need not feel any alarm. The officer had now walked thirty yards away from the brazier. He stopped there, folded his arms, and waited for the Riflemen to reach him. “If you haven’t got passes,” he said in a most superior and disdainful voice, “then I’ll have no choice but to arrest you.”
“Shoot the bugger,” Sharpe said gleefully to Harper.
But Harper was grinning, the officer was laughing, and Fortune, the soldier’s fickle goddess, was smiling on Sharpe. The tall and disdainful officer was Captain Peter d’Alembord of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers. He was an old friend who had once served under Sharpe and who now commanded Sharpe’s old light company. d’Alembord also knew Frederickson and Harper well, and was delighted to see both men.
“How are you, Regimental Sergeant Major?” he asked Harper.
“I’m just a Rifleman again now, sir.”
“Quite right, too. You were far too insubordinate to be promoted.” d’Alembord looked back to Sharpe. “Purely out of interest, sir, but do you have a pass?”
“Of course I don’t have a bloody pass, Dally. The bastards want to arrest us.”
It had been pure good luck that had brought Sharp
e to this picquet that was manned by his old battalion. He was close enough now to recognize some of the men about the brazier. He saw Privates Weller and Clayton, both good men, but this was no time to greet old comrades, nor to implicate them in this night’s escapade. “Just get us quietly out of the city, Dally, and forget you ever saw us.”
d’Alembord turned to his picquet. “Sergeant! I’ll be back in an hour or so.”
The Sergeant was curious. The picquet duty had been boring, and now some small excitement broke the tedium, but he was too far from the three Riflemen to recognize them. He took a few steps forward. “Can I say where you’ll be, sir? If I’m asked.”
“In a whorehouse, of course.” d’Alembord sighed. “The trouble with Sergeant Huckfield,” he said to Sharpe, “is that he’s so damned moral. A good soldier, but horribly tedious. We’ll go this way.” He led the three Riflemen into a foetid black alley that reeked with an overwhelming stench of blood. “They put me next to a slaughterhouse,” d’Alembord explained.
“Is there a safe way out of the city?” Sharpe asked.
“There are dozens,” d’Alembord said. “We’re supposed to patrol these alleys, but most of the lads don’t take kindly to arresting women and children. Consequently we tend to do quite a lot of looking the other way these days. The provosts, as you might imagine, are more energetic.” He led the Riflemen away from the butcher’s stink and into a wider alley. Dogs barked behind closed doors. Once a shutter opened from an upper window and a face peered out, but no one called any alarm or query. The alley twisted incomprehensibly, but eventually emerged into a rutted lane edged with sooty hedges where the smell of open country mingled with the city’s malodorous stench. The main road’s that way,“ Dally pointed southwards across dark fields, ”but before you go, sir, would you satisfy my curiosity and tell me just what in God’s name is happening?“
“It’s a long story, Dally,” Sharpe said.
“I’ve got all night.”
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