Sharpe’s Regiment: The Invasion of France, June to November 1813

The two men, by not ambushing Sharpe on his way to Maggie Joyce’s, had lost a fortune.

In Maggie’s back room Sharpe unlaced the leather bag and spilt, onto her table, a king’s ransom in diamonds. She stared at it, poking at the gems with a finger, as if she could not believe what she saw, ‘Christ in his heaven, Dick! Real?’

‘Real.’

‘Mary, Mother of God!’ She picked up a necklace of filigreed gold, hung with pearls and diamonds. ‘Clean?’

‘Clean.’

Which was not utterly true, yet the owners of the jewellery had no claim on it now. This was part of the plunder of Vitoria, the treasure of an empire that had been abandoned by the French in their panic to escape Wellington’s victory. Men had become rich that day, and none richer than Sharpe and Harper who had taken these diamonds from a field of gold and pearls, silks and silver. Maggie Joyce delved into the heap of treasure that had once dazzled the aristocracy of the Spanish court. ‘You’re a rich man, Dick Sharpe. You know that?’

He laughed. This was a soldier’s luck and that, he knew only too well, could turn sour in the flash of a musket’s pan. ‘Can you sell them for me?’

‘Sure and I can!’ She held a ring to the light of a candle. ‘Would you remember Cross-Eyed Moses?’

‘Green coat and a big stick?’

‘That’s him. His son, now, he’s your man. I’ll have him do it for you. You’ll get a better price if you’re patient.’ She was pushing the jewels back into the bag.

‘Take as long as you like.’

Sharpe could have let Messrs Hopkinsons, his army agents, handle the jewels, but he did not trust them to give him full value, any more than he would have trusted the fashionable jewellers of West London. Maggie Joyce, a queen in this kingdom of crime, was one of his own people and it was unthinkable that she would cheat him. She would take her commission on the sale, and that he expected, but rather her than the supercilious merchants who would see the Rifleman as a sheep to be fleeced.

She pushed the bag into a cupboard that seemed filled with rags. ‘Would you be wanting money now, Dick?’

‘No.’ There had been gold at Vitoria too, so much gold that the coins had spilt into the mud to be reddened by the setting sun. He had put a year’s salary of French gold into the army agent’s safe, money that he would live on while in England and which would gather interest when he returned to Spain. He wrote down Messrs Hopkinsons’ address for Maggie Joyce. ‘That’s where you put the money, Maggie. In my name.’ He and Harper would split the proceeds later.

She laughed. ‘Christ, Dick, but you always were a lucky bastard! When I first saw you I didn’t know whether to drown you or eat you, you were that skinny, but the good Lord told me to be kind to you. Ah, Christ, and He was right! Now, are you going to get drunk with me?’

He was, and he did; splendidly, laughingly drunk, and even the problems of a lying Lord Fenner disappeared in the haze of gin and half-forgotten stories that were embroidered by Maggie’s Irish skill into great sagas of youthful lawlessness.

He left her late. The city bells were ringing a quarter to three, and his head was spinning with too much gin and too much smoke in a small room. Even the stinking alleyway smelt good to him. ‘You take care of yourself!’ she called after him. ‘And bring yourself back soon!’

It was dark as sin in the alleys. There was a moon, but small light got past the high, narrow houses that seemed to lean together at their tops.

Sharpe was drunk, and he knew it. He was happy, too, made sentimental by a visit to a past he had half forgotten. He crossed a small court, went under an archway, and it seemed to him now that the rookery, instead of being a foul place of poverty and disease, was a warm, intricate warren of friendly, caring people. He laughed aloud. God damn all Lords! Especially lying bastards of politicians. He decided he hated no one, no single evil soul in all the whole mad world, as much as he hated bloody politicians.

The two men who followed him were sensibly cautious, but not apprehensive. They had been astonished when the officer had come into the rookery, for one of them was a killer hired from these very alleyways, and their victim had been foolish enough to come into the one place where his death would be easy and unquestioned. No Bow Street Runner dared enter the St Giles Rookery.

The two men knew who their victim was, but the knowledge did not worry them. These men did not fear a soldier, not even a famous soldier, and certainly not a drunken one. No man, however fast and skilled with weapons, could resist an ambush. Sharpe would be dead before he even knew that he was in danger.

Sharpe was unaware of them. Instead of their footsteps he listened to the crying children. That was a memory that came swamping back. The rookery was always full of children crying, small children, for once they had reached four or five they had learned not to cry. The sound made him think of his own daughter, orphaned in Spain, and that thought was maudlin. He rested against a wall.

There were few people about. The rookery, he knew, was alive and watching, but only a few whores were in the alleys, either against walls or coming home from Drury Lane. Their men, the hard masters who took their pence, stood in small groups where a torch lit a patch of mud and brick.

He took a deep breath. The last time he had been as drunk as this was in Burgos Castle, the night before the explosion, and the war in Spain suddenly seemed a long, long way off, as though it belonged to another man’s life. He walked on, crossing one of the open ditches that ran with sludge thick as blood in the darkness.

He heard feet running behind him and he turned, always knowing to face a strange sound, and he saw a girl come from under the archway, stop, turn, and then walk awkwardly towards him. She had a scarf wrapped about a thin face that was bright-eyed with consumption. It was odd, he thought, how the dying consumptives went through a period of lucent beauty before their lungs coughed up the bloody lumps and they died in racking agony.

She crossed the ditch, raising her skirts, then clumsily swayed her hips as she came close to him. The smile she gave him was nervous. ‘Lonely?’

‘No.’ He smiled back. He assumed she had seen him pass and had been sent to take some coins from the rich-looking officer to make up her night’s earnings.

To his surprise she put her thin arms up to his neck, her cheek on his cheek, and pressed her body against his. ‘Maggie sent me. Two men followed you and they’re behind you.’ She said it in a garbled rush.

He held her. To his right there was a gateway. He remembered it opened into an entranceway that ran between two houses. At its far end was a stairway that climbed to an old garret. A Jew had lived there, it was odd how the memories came back, a Jew who had worn his hair in long ringlets and had walked about with his nose deep into books. The rookery had left the old man alone, knowing him to be harmless, but after his death it was rumoured that a thousand gold guineas had been found in his room. The rookery was always full of such rumours. ‘Come with me.’

He took her hand. He laughed aloud as if he was carelessly drunk, but the girl’s message had sobered him as fast as a French twelve-pounder shot smashing the air close to him. He took her through the gate, into the alley, and into the deep shadows by the wooden stairway.

‘Here.’ The girl was hoisting her skirts.

‘I don’t need that, love.’ He grinned.

‘You want this.’ At her waist was a belt and, hanging from the leather, a hook. It was an old device for hiding stolen goods, but now the girl had the huge horse-pistol hooked by its trigger guard. It was a fearful weapon with a splayed brass muzzle that, like a blunderbuss, would spray its charge of metal fragments in a widening fan. An ideal weapon, Sharpe supposed, with which the guard cowed Maggie Joyce’s gin rooms. The barrel, Sharpe saw, was stuffed with rags to keep the missiles in place, and he pulled them out, then tapped the butt on the ground to tamp the stones and nails back onto the charge. He thumbed the heavy cock back. It was stiff, but clicked into place.

‘Who are they?’

‘One’s called Jem Lippett, she doesn’t know the other. Jemmy’s a topper.’ She gave the news that one of the men was a professional killer without any tone of alarm. This was a rookery.

Sharpe drew his long battle-sword. ‘Get behind me.’

She crouched low. Sharpe guessed she was fifteen, perhaps fourteen, and he supposed she whored for her living. Few girls escaped the rookery, unless they were startlingly beautiful, and then their men would hawk them further west where the prices were higher. ‘How do you know Maggie?’ He spoke softly, not worrying about silence, because the men, if they were following him, would expect to hear voices from the entranceway.

‘I work for her.’

‘She was beautiful once.’

‘Yes?’ The girl sounded disinterested. ‘She says you grew up here.’

‘Yes.’

‘Born here?’

‘No.’ He was watching the dark shape of the gate. His sword was beside him on the ground. ‘Born in Cat Lane. I came here from a foundling home.’

‘Maggie said you killed a man?’

‘Yes.’ He turned to look at her thin face. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Belle.’

He was silent. He had killed a man who was beating the living daylights out of Maggie. Sharpe had cut the man’s throat, and the blood had soaked into Maggie’s hair and she had laughed and cuffed Sharpe round the head for messing her up. She had sent Sharpe out of the rookery, knowing that the murdered man’s friends would look for revenge, for Sharpe had killed one of the kings of St Giles, one of the leaders of the criminals who lived in such safe squalor in the dark maze. Maggie had saved Sharpe’s life then, and she was doing it again now, even though she could have left him unwarned, hoped for his death, and kept the jewels of Vitoria for herself.

Or perhaps she was not saving his life, for he could neither see nor hear anything untoward. Somewhere a dog barked, fierce and urgent, and then there was a yelp as it was silenced with a blow. A voice sang in an alleyway, there was laughter from a gin shop, and always the cries of babies and the shouts of anger and the screaming of men and women who lived and fought together in the tight filth of the small rooms where two families could share one room with a third in the hallway outside.

The girl coughed, a racking, hollow, dreadful sawing that would kill her before two winters had passed, and Sharpe knew the sound would bring the men into the alley if, indeed, they looked for him.

A bottle broke nearby. The gate of the entranceway creaked open an inch, stopped, and creaked again.