Yet before he could move, the sound of hooves on gravel was abruptly cut off by the closing of the front door, and voices murmured outside the library. They were close, and coming closer. ‘I shall take your aunt her medicine, Jane.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Grey.’ Jane’s voice was demure.
‘And you will go to bed?’ It was as much an order as a question.
‘I shall fetch my book first, Mrs Grey.’
‘Then goodnight.’ Sharpe heard footsteps on the hall floor. He was staring at the window. If a servant came to bolt the window-doors, then fold and bar the shutters on the night, surely he must see Sharpe behind the door? He held his breath as footsteps sounded in the room again.
‘I’ll lock the windows, Miss Gibbons?’ The voice was just the other side of the door.
‘I’ll do it, King.’
‘Thank you, miss.’
Sharpe was in shadow. The room smelt musty and damp. He heard steps in the room, a key in the lock, then the squeal of a drawer opening. He guessed Jane Gibbons was looking into the bureau from which the books and pistols had been taken. The drawer closed, was locked again, then Sharpe saw her. She walked to the window-doors, closed them and seemed to show no surprise that one leaf had been ajar onto the night. Then, as she stooped to push the lower bolt home, she became completely still.
Sharpe could see her golden hair was in ringlets. She wore a blue dress, white collared, with a tight, old-fashioned waist that showed her slim hips.
She was staring at the floor.
There was mud there, brought in on Sharpe’s boots from the creek bed, mud that led to his hiding place.
She straightened, turned, and raised her eyes slowly, following the trail of dry mud until she was staring into the shadow beside the door.
She jumped when she saw him, but did not cry out. Sharpe stepped sideways, out of the shadow, and they stared at each other, neither saying a word. He smiled.
For a moment he thought she was going to laugh, so mischievous and delighted was her face, then, decisively, she crossed to the door beside him. ‘I have to talk with you!’
‘Here?’
She shook her head. There was a pergola in the garden, built at the corner of the north wall, and she would join him there. ‘You’ll wait?’
‘I’ll wait.’
He waited in the dark shadow of the roses that grew unpruned about the lattice shelter. There was a seat in the pergola that ran around a table made of rough planks. The sea, far off to his right, seethed, faded, then seethed again. He had come here to find the missing Battalion’s accounts, and instead he waited for a girl that he imagined he loved.
He had waited twenty minutes and was beginning to think that she would not come when he heard the creak of a door, and, seconds later, saw a dark-cloaked figure running over the grass. She slid into the shadow, sat, then looked nervously back at the upper windows of the brick house that were glowing with lamplight. ‘I shouldn’t be here.’
He stared at her, suddenly not knowing what to say, and she bit her lower lip and shrugged as if she, too, was suddenly uncertain.
‘Thank you for the food and money,’ Sharpe said.
She smiled and her teeth showed white in the moonlight that filtered through the roses. ‘I stole it.’ She spoke barely above a whisper. She shuddered suddenly, perhaps remembering the man who had died in the marsh that night. ‘I shouldn’t be here.’
He realised that, for all her vivacity, she was frightened. He put his hands slowly over the table and covered hers. ‘I shouldn’t be here either.’
‘No.’ She did not move her hands that were, even though it was a warm night, bitterly cold. ‘No, you shouldn’t.’ She smiled a little uncertainly. ‘Why were you in the house?’
‘I wanted to find the records of the auctions. There must be records? Accounts?’ His voice tailed off, for she was nodding assent.
‘There are. In London.’
‘London?’ In his disappointment he spoke too loudly, and she looked, fear on her face, towards the house. He lowered his voice. ‘I thought Girdwood was taking them out of the drawer.’
‘He keeps some things there. Books, pistols.’ She shrugged. ‘He said he’d been ordered to London, and I suppose he wanted the pistols for the road. What’s happening?’
He told her what he had done that day, how he had stripped Girdwood of his command. He did not tell her that he had no orders to take the camp under his authority. ‘But I need those accounts.’
‘They’re only here for the auctions. I write them and my uncle takes them back.’
‘You write them?’
‘My uncle makes me enter the figures.’ She left her hands in his and, in a low voice, told him of the money that had flowed through Foulness. Sir Henry Simmerson had made more than fifteen thousand pounds, Lord Fenner the same, and Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood about half. They had spent three thousand and eight hundred pounds for expenses. She smiled, as if at her own precision. ‘They’re in two big books, red leather books.’
‘Where?’
‘In my uncle’s town house.’
‘Where in his house?’ Sharpe was wondering if his ancient skills would have to be put to a sterner test.
‘I don’t know. I don’t go to London often.’
‘You don’t go to London?’
She heard the astonishment in his voice, as if he had expected her to dazzle London’s society and as if that expectation had given him the irrational envy people feel about the undiscovered life of someone they desire. She stared at him. ‘You don’t understand, Mr Sharpe.’
‘I don’t understand what?’
She did not answer for a long time. The waves beat at the mudbanks behind Sharpe, water sucked and gurgled in the creek bed, then she pulled her hands free, rubbed her face, and began talking. ‘My mother was the younger daughter. She married badly, at least that’s what my uncle thinks. You see, my father was in trade. He was a saddler. He was successful, but it’s still trade, isn’t it? So I’m not well-born enough to go into society, and I’m not rich enough for society to come here.’ She gave the smile again, rueful and fast. ‘Do you understand?’
‘But your brother ...’
She nodded quickly, understanding the question. Her brother had presented the appearance of aristocratic birth and breeding; it had made him into a loud, arrogant, insensitive and elegant lout. ‘Christian always wanted to be fashionable. He worked hard at it, Mr Sharpe. He aped the accent, the clothes, everything. And he inherited the money and lost most of it.’
‘Lost it?’
‘Horses, clothes.’ She shrugged. ‘But I imagine he made a good soldier.’ She could not have been more wrong, though Sharpe said nothing. Jane pushed hair from her forehead. ‘He wanted to go into the cavalry, but it was too expensive. We weren’t rich. At least, not as rich as Christian would have liked.’ She said her parents had died eleven years before, when she had been thirteen, and she and her brother had come to this house where her mother’s sister was Sir Henry’s wife. Lady Simmerson was ill. Jane shrugged. ‘Or so she says.’
‘What do you mean?’
The quick smile again, shy and dazzling, and she looked behind her as though worried that a servant might be watching from the moon-glossed windows of the house. ‘She doesn’t leave her room, hardly her bed. She says she’s ill. Do you think a person can be so very unhappy that they think they’re ill?’
‘I don’t know.’
She looked at the table top. She pushed a leaf between two of the rough planks and he saw how the white cuff of her dress was darned with small, neat stitches. ‘I don’t think she wanted to marry my uncle, but women don’t have a choice, really.’ She talked very softly, not just because she feared her voice carrying, but because she had never talked like this to anyone. She said she should have been married herself, two years before, but the man had lost his fortune and Sir Henry had called off the wedding.
‘Who was he?’ Sharpe asked with a stab of jealousy.
‘A man from Maldon. It’s not far away.’ Now she had been told she was to marry Bartholomew Girdwood.
‘Told?’
She gave her sudden, enchanting, mischievous smile, that always, Sharpe was noticing, left a residue of sadness on her face. ‘I ran away when it was arranged. My uncle brought me back.’
Sharpe wondered if that was why she had been in the carriage on the day when he and Harper were being marched as recruits to Foulness. ‘Ran away?’
‘I have a cousin who married a vicar. Celia said I should come to them, but my uncle knows the man who owns the living, and you can imagine what happened.’ Doubtless Sir Henry had threatened the vicar with the loss of his parish and livelihood. She smiled at Sharpe. ‘I wasn’t much good at running away.’
‘Are you frightened of Sir Henry?’
She thought about it, her hands linked on the table top, then nodded. ‘Yes. But most of the time he’s in London. He’s only here for a few days at a time.’ She looked out over the moon-washed marshes to where, now at its height, the tide was pushing waves across the drowned mudflats in shimmering, silver sheets that broke in small, bright spurts of foam where they met the river’s push. ‘So here I am. I’m a companion to my aunt, I talk with the housekeeper, and sometimes, when my uncle’s at home, I have to be a hostess for his dinners.’ She smiled. ‘That means soldier’s talk.’
‘Girdwood?’
‘He’s always here.’ She said it with a rueful laugh. ‘My uncle likes him. They talk for hours and hours about battles and tactics?’ She made the last word into a question as though she was not accustomed to using it. ‘But I suppose all soldiers do that?’
He shook his head. ‘Most of the soldiers I know talk about what they’re going to do when the war ends. They want to own a piece of land. I think they dream of never seeing a uniform again.’
‘And you?’
He laughed. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do.’ He remembered his sad thoughts as he had sat on the pool’s parapet in the Vauxhall Gardens, his drab presentiments of a soldier in peacetime.
She sighed. ‘You need the books badly?’
‘Yes. I have to have proof, you see.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘I want to help you, but it’s hard.’
‘Hard?’ He wanted to take her hands once more, but was uncertain whether the gesture would be welcomed. Her head was lowered, and the moonlight cast the shadows of her eyelashes in long, thin lines down her cheeks that abruptly vanished as she looked up at him.
‘I can take the risk, you see. I can try to find them for you. I would like to do that, really. But I shall be punished.’
‘Sir Henry?’
‘He beats me.’ She was not looking at him, but across the marshland to the small waves.
‘He beats you?’
‘Yes.’ She said it as if it was the most normal thing in the world. ‘He let Girdwood watch the last time, because he thought the Colonel should know how to treat a wife. He uses a cane. He doesn’t do it often; not very often, anyway.’ She gave a small laugh, as though indicating that she was not seeking his pity. Sharpe felt inadequate to say anything, and kept silent. She shook her head. ‘There are marks on his study walls. He thrashes, you see, and the cane scratches the plaster. He gets very angry.’ The last words were said limply, as though she could not truly describe the beatings. In the silence that followed her words Sharpe heard a clock chiming in the house. He counted ten beats and, when they were done, she looked up at him. ‘What happens if you don’t have the books?’
He did not know. Everything he had planned for these next few days depended on the accounts. He had been so sure that they would be here, that he could ambush Girdwood and take them, and then march the men to Chelmsford where the Battalion would wait. He had planned to send d‘Alembord to the Rose Tavern, but without the books he had no proof. He had nothing. He looked into her huge eyes, shining with reflected moonlight, and he let his gaze linger on the shadows beneath her cheekbones and on her neck. He smiled. ’Do you remember that you gave your brother a locket with your picture inside?‘
‘Yes.’ She sounded surprised.
‘I wore it after his death.’
She smiled shyly, knowing the message he was giving her, yet not sure what to say in return. She looked down at the table. ‘Do you still have it?’
‘I was taken prisoner earlier this year. A Frenchman has it now.’ Sharpe had worn it as a talisman, as all soldiers have talismans against death. ‘I expect he wonders who you are.’
She smiled at the thought, then looked up at him. ‘I want you to have the books.’ She said it hurriedly. ‘But I’m afraid.’ She was scared because, once Sharpe had the books and his victory, she would be left to her uncle’s revenge.
Sharpe touched her hands again. It seemed, at that moment, as brave an act as climbing the blood-slicked breach at Badajoz. ‘Why do you want to help me?’
She gave the quick, mischievous smile. ‘I never forgot you.’ She said it very softly. ‘I sometimes think that it’s because my uncle hates you so much. If you were his enemy, you had to be my friend?’ She inflected the last word as a question, then gave a low laugh. ‘He envies you.’
‘Envies?’
‘He’d like to be a big, brave soldier!’ she said scornfully. ‘What did happen to him in Spain?’
‘He ran away.’
She laughed. Her hands were still in his, unmoving. ‘He always talks about it as if he was a hero. Did Christian take that Eagle?’
‘He was close.’
‘Meaning he didn’t?’
‘Not really.’
She shook her head, as if remembering all her uncle’s lies. ‘I’ve always wanted to see Spain. There was a girl from Prittlewell who married an artillery Major. She went to Spain with him. Marjory Beller? Do you know her?’
He shook his head. ‘No. But there are a lot of officers’ wives there.’
She was silent for a long time. She looked down at his hands that were still on her hands. ‘I could go to London, but I’d need some money. I know some of the servants in his house because they visit us here. I could perhaps find the books.’