Sharpe’s Waterloo: The Waterloo Campaign, 15–18 June, 1815

‘Because of him,’ Isabella knew her man, ‘and because you can’t resist joining a fight.’

‘I’m not in the army, woman. I just want to make a few pennies by selling some horseflesh. Where’s the harm in that?’

In the end Harper had sworn a sacred oath on the Holy Mother and on all the bleeding wounds of Christ that he would not go into battle, that he would remember he was a husband and a father, and that if he so much as heard a musket shot he would turn tail and run away.

‘Did you hear there was a wee scrap down south today?’ Harper’s voice had a note of relish as he spoke of the fighting to Lucille.

‘A battle?’ Lucille sounded alarmed.

‘Probably just a skirmish, ma’am.’ Harper thrust aside the beggars who shuffled and reached towards Lucille. ‘I expect the Emperor’s getting bored with the waiting and decided to see if anyone was awake on this side of the border.’

‘Perhaps that’s why I haven’t heard from Richard today.’

‘If he’s got a choice between a battle and a dance, ma’am, then begging your presence, he’ll take the battle any day.’ Harper laughed. ‘He’s never been much of a man for dancing, not unless he’s drunk and then he’ll dance with the best of them.’ Harper suddenly realized that he might be betraying some confidences. ‘Not that I’ve ever seen him drunk, ma’am.’

Lucille smiled. ‘Of course not, Patrick.’

‘But we’ll hear from him soon enough.’ Harper raised the cudgel to drive away the beggars who swarmed ever more threateningly the closer they got to the Duke and Duchess of Richmond’s rented house. There were beggars throughout Europe. Peace had not brought prosperity, but higher prices, and the normal ranks of the indigent had been swollen by discharged soldiers. By day a woman could safely walk Brussels’ streets, but at night the pavements became dangerous. ‘Get back, you bastards! Get back!’ Harper thrust two ragged men aside. Beyond the gutter shouting children pursued the polished carriages that rattled towards the rue de la Blanchisserie, but the coachmen were experts with their long whips which snapped sharply back to drive the urchins off.

A squadron of British Hussars were on duty in the rue de la Blanchisserie to keep the beggars away from the wealthy. A helpful corporal with a drawn sabre rode his horse in front of Harper to help clear Lucille’s passage to the big house.

‘I’ll wait for you, ma’am,’ Harper told Lucille when they were safely in the courtyard.

‘You don’t have to, Patrick. I’m sure Richard will escort me home.’

‘I’ll wait here, ma’am,’ Harper insisted.

Lucille was nervous as she climbed the steps. A gorgeously dressed footman inspected her ticket, then bowed her into the hallway which was brilliant with candles and thronged with people. Lucille already felt dowdy. She glanced about the hall, hoping against hope that Richard would be waiting for her, but there was no sign of Sharpe, nor of any of the Prince of Orange’s staff. Lucille felt friendless in an enemy country, but then was relieved to see the Dowager Countess of Mauberges who, like so many other Belgian aristocracy, thought of herself as French and wanted the world to know it. The old lady was defiantly wearing her dead husband’s Legion d’honneur about her neck. ‘Your husband was a member of the Legion, was he not?’ she greeted Lucille.

‘Indeed he was.’

‘Then you should wear his medal.’

Not that the ball needed an extra medal for, to Lucille, it seemed as though a jewel shop had been exploded into extravagant shards of light and colour. The colour came from the men’s uniforms, gorgeous uniforms, uniforms of scarlet and gold, royal blue and saffron, silver and black; uniforms of Hussars, Dragoons, Guards, Jaegers and kilted Highlanders. There were plumes, froggings, epaulettes, aigulettes, and gold-furnished scabbards. There were fur-edged dolmans, silk-lined pelisses, and gorgets of pure gold. There were princes, dukes, earls, and counts. There were plenipotentiaries in court uniforms so decked with gold that their coats seemed like sheets of light. There were jewelled stars and enamelled crosses worn on sashes of brilliant silk, and all lit by the glittering chandeliers which had been hoisted to the ceilling with their burdens of fine white candles.

The women wore paler colours; white or washed yellow or delicate blue. Those ladies slim and brave enough to wear the high fashion were etheral in gauzy dresses that clung to their bodies as they moved. The candlelight glinted from pearls and rubies, diamonds and gold. The room smelt of scents – orange water or eau de cologne, beneath which were the sharper smells of hair powder and sweat. ‘I don’t know’, the Dowager Countess leaned close to Lucille, ‘why some of them bother to dress at all! Look at that creature!’

The Countess jabbed her walking cane in the direction of a girl with bright gold ringlets and eyes as radiant as sapphires. The girl was undeniably beautiful, and clearly knew it for she was wearing no petticoat and a diaphanous dress of pale gold that did little to hide her body. ‘She might as well be stark naked!’ the Countess said.

‘It’s the fashion.’ Lucille felt very drab.

‘When I was a girl it took twelve yards of cloth just to make an underskirt for a ball gown. Now they simply unfold some cheese-cloth and throw it over their shoulders!’ Hardly that even, for most of the women’s shoulders were bared, just as most bosoms were almost naked. ‘And see how they walk! Just like men.’ In the Countess’s childhood, before the Revolution, and before Belgium had been liberated from Austrian rule by the French, women had been taught to glide along a floor, their feet hidden by wide skirts and their slippers barely leaving the polished boards. The effect was graceful, suggesting effortless motion, while now the girls seemed not to care. The Countess shook her head with disgust. ‘You can tell they’re Protestants! No manners, no grace, no breeding.’

Lucille diverted the old lady by showing her the supper room which, like the ballroom, had been draped with the Belgian colours of black, gold and scarlet. Beneath the silk hangings the long tables were covered in white linen and were thick with silver and fine china.

‘They’ll lose all the spoons tonight!’ the Countess said with undisguised satisfaction, then turned as applause greeted the stately polonaise which had progressed from the far side of the house, advanced through the entrance hall and now entered the ballroom to open the dancing formally. Lucille and the Countess sat by the supper room entrance. The uniformed officers and their ladies stepped delicately in the dancing line, they bowed and curtseyed. The music rang sweetly. A child, allowed to stay up and watch the ball’s beginning, stared wide-eyed from a balcony, while the Countess tapped her stick on the parquet floor in time to the music.

After the polonaise, the first waltz brightened the room with its jaunty rhythm. The windows were black with night, but sheeted with the reflections of a thousand candles sparkling on ten thousand jewels. Champagne and laughter ruled the room, while the dancers whirled in glittering joy.

Lucille watched the pretty girl in the diaphanous golden dress who danced with a tall and handsome officer in British cavalry uniform. Lucille noted how the girl refused all partners but that one man and she felt a surge of sympathy because she knew the girl must be in love, just as she herself was in love. Lucille thought the girl and the cavalry officer made a very fine couple, but she wished the girl would smile rather than hold her face in such a cold and supercilious expression.

Then Lucille forgot the girl as the ballroom was swamped by a sudden and prolonged applause, which forced the orchestra to pause.

The Duke of Wellington had appeared with his staff. He stood in the ballroom entrance and acknowledged the applause with a small bow. He was not a tall man, but something about his confidence and reputation gave him an impressive stature. He was dressed in the scarlet and gold of a British field marshal with a tactful Netherlands decoration worn on an orange sash.

Lucille, politely applauding with the rest of the room, wondered whether this man truly was the greatest soldier of his time. Many, including Sharpe, insisted that he was. No one, not even the Emperor, had fought so many battles, and no other General had won all the battles he had ever fought, though the Duke, as every person in the ballroom was aware, had never fought the Emperor. In Vienna, where the Duke had travelled as Britain’s ambassador to the Congress, society had greeted him with outrageous flattery, calling him ‘le vainqueur du vainqueur du monde’, but Lucille guessed that Bonaparte might have other ideas of the Duke’s military stature.

Now the conqueror of the world’s conqueror gestured to stop the applause. ‘He has a good leg,’ the Dowager Countess confided in Lucille.

‘He’s a handsome man,’ Lucille agreed.

‘And he’s not in a corset. You can tell that by the way they bow. My husband never wore a corset, not like some here tonight.’ The Countess cast a scathing eye at the dancers who were beginning yet another waltz, then looked back to the Duke. ‘He’s a young man.’

‘Forty-six,’ Lucille told her, ‘the same age as the Emperor.’

‘Generals are getting younger. I’m sure the soldiers don’t like it. How can a man have confidence in a stripling?’

The Countess fell into a disapproving silence as a young and handsome British officer offered Lucille a low and evidently uncorseted bow. ‘My dear Lucille!’ Captain Peter d’Alembord was resplendent in scarlet coat and white breeches.

‘Captain!’ Lucille responded with a genuine pleasure. ‘How nice to see a friendly face.’

‘My Colonel received an invitation, didn’t know what to do with such a thing, so gave it to me. I can’t believe you’ve persuaded Sharpe to attend, or have you turned him into a dancing man?’

‘He’s supposed to be accompanying the Prince.’ Lucille named d’Alembord to the Dowager Countess of Mauberges who gave the officer a very suspicious examination.

‘Your name is French!’ the Countess accused him.

‘My family were Huguenots, my lady, and therefore unwanted in la belle France.’ D’Alembord’s contemptuous scorn for France made the Countess bridle, but he had already turned back to Lucille. ‘You’ll do me the honour of dancing?’

Lucille would. D’Alembord was an old friend who had dined frequently with Sharpe and Lucille since they had come to the Netherlands. Both men had served in the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers where d’Alembord had succeeded Sharpe to the command of the first battalion’s light company. That battalion was now bivouacked in a village to the west of Brussels where d’Alembord had heard no news of any skirmishes on the frontier. Instead his day had been spent indulging the Colonel’s passion for cricket. ‘I think he plans to kill us all with boredom,’ d’Alembord told Lucille as they took the floor.

‘Poor Peter.’

‘Not at all, I am the most fortunate of men. Except for Sharpe, of course.’

Lucille smiled at the dutiful but pleasing compliment. ‘Of course. And how is Anne?’

‘Very well. She writes to tell me that her father has found a house that will be suitable for us. Not too large, but with adequate stabling and a few acres of grazing.’

‘I’m glad for you.’

D’Alembord smiled. ‘I’m rather glad for me, too.’

‘So stay alive to enjoy it, Peter!’

‘Don’t even tempt fate to suggest I won’t.’ D’Alembord was newly engaged, and filled with a touching happiness at the prospect of his marriage. Lucille rather envied him, wishing that she could marry Sharpe. That admission made her smile to herself. Who would ever have believed that Lucille, Vicomtesse de Seleglise and widow of Colonel Xavier Castineau, would be mother to a half-English bastard?

She turned lithely to the music and saw that the blue-eyed girl in the golden dress was watching her very coldly. Was it the dowdy grey dress that had earned the girl’s scorn? Lucille suddenly felt very shabby and uncomfortable. She turned her back to the girl.