She nodded, her eyes suddenly bright with mischievous delight. 'And you'll stop the auctions?'

'I'll stop them. With your help.' He smiled at her, and it seemed like a miracle that their heads were so close. He could smell her scent, like a clean thing in a foul land.

She looked at the dog in her lap. She seemed embarra.s.sed suddenly, then her big eyes came back to Sharpe and she hesitated. 'I want . . .' But whatever she was to say could not be said, for there was a sudden yelping coming from the lawn.

'Jane!' It was the petulant, peremptory voice that had haunted Sharpe through the summer before Talavera. 'Where are you, girl? Jane!' Anger flecked Sir Henry's voice. Sharpe imagined him, portly and red-faced, striding over the lawn. 'Jane!'

She scrambled backwards up the steps. 'I was looking for Rascal, uncle. He got out of the house!' She was at the top of the steps now, and Sharpe was shrinking back into the tunnel. Sir Henry's voice was desperately close.

'Lock him up, for G.o.d's sake, girl! You know Colonel Girdwood doesn't like dogs! Now hurry!'

'I'm coming, uncle!'

She turned, walked away without a backward glance, and Sharpe, muddy and undiscovered in the boathouse, wanted to shout his luck aloud. His heart was still beating in extraordinary, tremulous excitement and he was filled with a crazy, idiotic happiness that made him want to laugh out loud, to shout his good news across these lonely marshes, to forget that he was trapped in this crimping business of Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood's Battalion.

She remembered him! He had thought so often of her. Even when he was married, and the dreams had seemed unworthy, he had thought of her and tried to convince himself that her behaviour to him in that small, cool church where they had met so briefly had shown that she liked him. And now this!

She remembered him, she trusted him! She would help him! She had given him the key to escape. He knew, from their first meeting, that her parents were dead, that she lived with her aunt and uncle, and he had a.s.sumed that she would be long married, but he had seen no ring on her ringer. Instead he had seen delight on her face as she, surely, must have seen it on his.

The happiness was on him, the foolish, crazy, insane happiness of a man who believes himself, despite the lack of evidence, to be in love, and the happiness made him laugh aloud as he leaned down to pick up his shovel and as he wondered how he and Harper would escape from Foulness this night.

Then the happiness went.

He had not noticed it till this moment, so bound up was he by her sudden appearance and by the shock of her words on all his hopes, but Giles Marriott, whom Sharpe had ordered to go away, had obeyed. He had gone.

CHAPTER 9.

Sharpe shifted responsibility from himself by claiming that Marriott had left to talk with the corporal.

'Filth!' Sergeant Lynch glared at Sharpe. 'You're lying, filth!' 'Sarge! He said he wanted to talk to the corporal!' Sergeant Lynch stalked around Sharpe, but the Rifleman stood, rigid and unblinking, the very image of a soldier who might know what his superior wants to know, but who will never lose his att.i.tude of dumb, outraged innocence. It was a pose Sergeant Lynch knew well, and it convinced him of the futility of pursuing the charge of complicity. 'So when did you miss him, filth?'

Sharpe blinked and frowned. 'Twenty minutes, Sarge? No more.' 'And you said nothing!' Lynch screamed the words. 'He said he'd gone to the corporal!' The two men stood by the entrance of the boathouse. The rest of the squad, terrified, stood in the flooding mud of the incoming tide. Corporal Mason, in whose party Harper worked, watched nervously from further down the creek bed.

'Sergeant Lynch?' It was Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood's voice, coming from the top of the wall that raised Sir Henry's garden above the level of the marsh. 'What the devil's this noise about?'

'Deserter, sir!' Sergeant Lynch's fox-like face was tight with embarra.s.sment and anger. 'One of the filth scrambled, sir!'

'How? For G.o.d's sake, how, man?' Sharpe heard the note of alarm in Girdwood's voice, and he understood it. Girdwood might sell men to other regiments, but there they came under the discipline of men who, by attending the auctions, were thus implicated in the crime and had an interest in keeping its details hidden. A deserter, though, loose in England, might just tell a strange story to the wrong ears. Sharpe kept his back to the wall, hoping that Sir Henry would not come and investigate the sudden alarm. Girdwood did not wait for Lynch to answer his question, instead he ordered the Sergeant to form his work-party into a cordon that should search the marshland eastwards as far as the River Roach. 'You know what to do with the sc.u.m, Sergeant Lynch!'

'Yes, sir!'

The search was intense. Men of the two Companies who were the permanent guards at Foulness were fetched from the camp and formed into a second cordon well to the west of Sir Henry's house. There were also men from the militia cavalry searching; hors.e.m.e.n who rode into the marshland beside the River Crouch and who combed the small yards and barns of the inland farms. Sharpe, looking back from the eastern bogland, could see a group of men armed with telescopes on the leads of Sir Henry's house beneath the proud eagle weathervane. It occurred to Sharpe that this was a practised manoeuvre, a well-rehea.r.s.ed specific against the danger of men deserting from Foulness.

Sergeant Lynch's squad struggled eastwards across the marshland towards the North Sea, and to Sharpe it seemed an unlikely direction for Marriott to have taken. It was possible, Sharpe supposed, that the young clerk did not know the lie of the land, or that, in the desperation of his lovelorn unhappiness, he had fled into the emptiness of the marsh in search of any refuge, but capture, in this direction, seemed certain. The marsh was water-locked, the going was treacherous, and the boy would have been forced to stay clear of the few tussocky patches of higher ground where the footing was firm, but from which he could have been seen for miles over the flat land.

Sergeant Lynch's squad straggled over the glutinous, sucking ground and through the intricate, shallow creeks that mazed the wetland. A corporal was at either end of the line, while Sergeant Lynch was in its centre, all three men with loaded muskets. Every man, even Sergeant Lynch, was smeared filthy with mud and green slime. The sun baked the squad and seemed to make the smell of the marsh ga.s.ses, when they were disturbed by trampling feet, even more noxious than usual.

There was no sign of Marriott. As the afternoon wore on, and as they worked their way even deeper into the marshland, Sharpe guessed their search was pointless. He supposed that Marriott, sensibly, must have gone west towards the firmer, higher ground that lay inland and Sharpe found himself, for the first time ever, wishing a deserter well. He had found Marriott insufferable and pompous, but not even on Marriott would he wish Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood's vengeance.

They came, in the early afternoon, to a deeper, faster running stream that flowed north into the wider Crouch. The water of this small river, that spread itself across the marshland at its banks, was turbulent where the freshwater current met the incoming tide. The clash of waters made swirls of muddy violence and even, as the wind gusted from the north, small explosions of spray as sea fought river. It was the end of their search for, on the far bank, Sharpe could see uniformed men across the marshes and he realised that he stared into Foulness itself. Two miles away he could see the white tents of the camp, and then he saw Marriott.

The fool had fled east. He had crossed this river, presumably when the tide was low, only to find himself on the island from which he had wanted to escape. Now he was clinging to the stark, dark ribs of a boat's skeleton that was grounded on the mud where the smaller River Roach met the larger Crouch.

As Sharpe saw him, so did Sergeant Lynch. The Sergeant fired his musket into the air, startling waterfowl up with flapping, loud wings, and the hammering shot, ranging far over the flat land, brought the attention of the men on the island.

Lynch held the musket above his head, pointing with it, and the corporal at the northern end of the search line, to add urgency to the signal, fired his own musket into the air and the second shot seemed to spur Marriott from his paltry refuge.

He ran.

He did not run further east, perhaps realising at last that only the sea lay in that direction. Instead, half ducking to let the sea-rushes hide him from the men on the island, he ran down the far bank of the River Roach. He was running in front of Sergeant Lynch's squad, trying to escape south.

The river was too deep, and the flowing tide made it too fast for any man to cross. A good swimmer, stripped of his clothes, might have crossed the small channel, but neither Sergeant Lynch, nor his two corporals, attempted it. Instead the Sergeant shouted at the fugitive. 'Stand still, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d! Stand still!'

Marriott ignored the command. The squad watched him in silence. He was thirty yards from them, running down the far bank towards a bend in the channel that would take him out of their sight. Sergeant Lynch ran opposite him, bellowing at him, splashing through the shallow river margin, screaming at him to halt, yet still Marriott ran.

'Your musket!' Lynch shouted to the second corporal, standing beside Harper, and the corporal held out his unfired gun. 'Stop, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d!' Lynch, with a quick, practised motion, brought the musket into his shoulder, c.o.c.ked it, and Sharpe, at the far end of the line from Sergeant Lynch, supposed that the Sergeant intended only to put a shot in front of Marriott that would check the deserter's panicked flight.

Sharpe was wrong. He realised it as he saw Lynch leading the musket on the target, he opened his mouth as if he was an officer shouting at a man to hold his fire, but before he could utter a sound, Lynch fired.

The range was forty yards, a long shot for a smooth-bore musket, but the ball went perilously close to Marriott. It must, Sharpe guessed, have missed the small of the boy's back by inches, for he saw the flicker of the rushes beyond as the ball crashed home. It would have been murder, nothing less, for Marriott was already trapped by Girdwood's converging forces.

Lynch swore when he missed, threw the fired musket at the corporal, and shouted at his squad to follow the fugitive. They ran, stumbling in the marsh at the river's edge, and Sharpe saw that the sound of the three shots had attracted hors.e.m.e.n from the direction of Sir Henry's house and he prayed that Sir Henry was not among them.

'The wee b.a.s.t.a.r.d tried to kill him!' Harper had waited for Sharpe to catch up with him, and his voice was incredulous.

'I saw it.'

'G.o.d help him one day.' Harper said it with relish.

Marriott's day of reckoning, if not Sergeant Lynch's, was close. The officer of the bridge guard had sent a squad of men north and they were ahead of Marriott. He saw them, knew that he was blocked in front and from both flanks, but he was panicked, his eyes wide and wild, and, though he was cornered, he refused to abandon his hopeless quest for freedom. He turned again.

He ran north, then saw that other men, advancing along the low sea wall that d.y.k.ed Foulness against the tides, had headed him off. He stopped. Sergeant Lynch and his corporals were reloading their muskets. Marriott saw the ramrods thrusting down and, in panic and desperation, threw himself into the Roach and splashed out as though he would swim, not just to the opposite bank where Sergeant Lynch waited, but clean out to the wide, wind-fretted, tide-treacherous waters of the Crouch estuary.

And he floundered. He choked. His arms flayed the water and he called out desperately, flailed with his hands, and Sharpe, who had learned to swim in India, kicked off his mud-heavy shoes and plunged into the river, struggling through the muddy shallows towards the dark whorls of the seething deeper channel where, his footing gone, he splashed clumsily towards the drowning man.

He clutched Marriott. He had never tried to bring a drowning man out of water before, nor had he dreamed it could be so difficult. He thought that Marriott would pull him down, so viciously did the young man thrash and fight, and Sharpe, gulping great mouthfuls of salt-tainted river water, fought back to suppress Marriott's struggles.

'Let me go!' Marriott wailed at Sharpe. He kicked, hit, and Sharpe flinched from one blow, then let go his hold in desperation as the boy's fingers clawed at his eyes. Sharpe was swallowing water, choking, but suddenly, from the bank, he heard Harper's voice raised in a shout of anger as though, instead of Private O'Keefe, he was once again Sergeant Major Patrick Harper and on a battlefield.

'Hold your fire! Don't shoot!'

Harper was stumbling through the shallow river margin, shouting his order again at Sergeant Lynch. Harper had shouted because he had seen Lynch bring his reloaded musket into his shoulder, and the musket, Harper knew, could just as easily strike Sharpe as Marriott. 'Hold your fire!'

Lynch glanced at the huge man, ignored him for the moment, then looked back down the length of the musket's browned barrel.

Sharpe had let go of Marriott and a whorl of the clashing currents had swept the boy away from him, carrying Marriott close to the western bank where, shin deep in the muddy water, Sergeant Lynch waited.

'Don't fire!' Harper was still shouting, still too far from the Sergeant to do anything but shout, and the obstinate river current brought Marriott closer still to the bank. The boy thrust with his feet on the river bed, pushing himself towards the wider Crouch and, as Harper shouted his futile order yet once more, Lynch fired.

The bullet smashed Marriott's skull. Blood spurted eighteen inches into the air, fell to redden the river, spurted again, then mercifully the head rolled the wound beneath the water to hide the obscene, heart-pumped fountain. Marriott's hands splashed once, as if, from beneath the water, he tried to haul himself from its grasp, then he was still, floating calm in a great swirl of blood that drifted with the muddy water towards the sea. Charlie Weller, who had seen much blood on his father's farm, had never seen a man shot. He vomited, and Lynch laughed as he splashed back from the shallows.

Harper had checked at the shot. His temper, slow to rouse, but dreadful once it had been goaded, made his voice loud and terrible. 'You murderous b.a.s.t.a.r.d! You traitorous, murderous b.a.s.t.a.r.d!' He moved towards the Sergeant, the other recruits shrinking back as Lynch reversed the musket to strike at the huge man, when a new voice made them all turn.

'Sergeant!' It was Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood. He was spurring his horse over the marsh, picking his way carefully. 'You got him, Sergeant?' Sir Henry Simmerson was close behind, his horse following Girdwood's path.

Sharpe was hauling the body to the bank. He thought he tasted Marriott's blood in the water, then huge hands reached for him, hands that pulled the weight of Marriott from him. Harper, turning away from Lynch, had plunged to his waist in the river and now dragged both Sharpe and the corpse to the bank. Sharpe, spitting water and blood, did not see the hors.e.m.e.n.

'Mud.' Harper hissed it. Sharpe did not seem to understand. 'Sir!' The Irishman hoped that word would attract Sharpe's attention, but still Sharpe had not seen Sir Henry, so Harper, in desperation, scooped up a handful of the sticky, black mud and, his action hidden from Lynch and the officers by his body, slapped it onto Sharpe's face. He smeared more on his own.

'Well done!' a voice said. Sharpe knew that voice. As his vision cleared he saw two horses ahead of him and on one of them, the closer one, he saw Sir Henry Simmerson. Sir Henry glanced at Sharpe, then peered down at the body. 'Well done, Sergeant! A head shot!'

'Thank you, sir.' Lynch was reloading the musket.

Sir Henry barked at Sharpe. 'Stand back, man! Let me look!'

'Stand back, filth!' Lynch echoed. Sharpe stepped back, keeping his head low, but Sergeant Lynch shouted again. 'Look smart now, there's an officer present! Head up, man! Attention!'

Sharpe obeyed, hoping that Harper's quick thinking with the mud would suffice. He found Sir Henry staring at him.

Sharpe had won battles by letting the enemy see what they expected to see, by lulling them to false security. He had once hoisted old rags onto two bare staffs and, because the enemy expected to see a full Battalion with Colours flying, they saw in the ragged symbols of Sharpe's rain-obscured garments evidence of an overpowering force instead of the ammunitionless half-Battalion which, in reality, was all that barred their escape. He had once let his Riflemen lie in the open, without support, close to an overwhelming enemy, but, because the French expected to see dead men where the crumpled bodies lay, they gave the Riflemen no thought until the bullets tore their gun-team apart and gave the victory to Sharpe.

Men see what they expect to see, and though his niece had recognised Sharpe, Sir Henry did not. The mud clung to Sharpe's face, he let his mouth loll open and Sir Henry, who had spent a whole summer locked into a mutual dislike with Sharpe, and who now stared with distaste at his old enemy, saw only what he expected to see; a muddy, gawping recruit. Jane Gibbons, perhaps because she had thought of Sharpe as frequently as he of her, had recognised him instantly, while Sir Henry, who had been a.s.sured by Lord Fenner that Major Sharpe had been killed in London and thus prevented from carrying on with his inconvenient search for replacements, did not expect to see Sharpe and so did not. 'You're filthy, man. Clean yourself up!'

Sir Henry tugged at his reins and, as he turned away, Sharpe heard him complain querulously to Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood that this business had delayed his journey to London. 'Still, it's over! Bury him, Girdwood! Where he is!'

Girdwood wished Sir Henry a safe journey then, when Simmerson was on his way back to the house and out of earshot, he looked down on Sergeant Lynch. 'How in G.o.d's name did it happen, Sergeant?'

Sergeant Lynch was standing rigid, his trousers muddied to his thighs. 'My belief is that he had help, sir. O'Keefe!' The mention of the Irish name was sufficient to cause Girdwood to make the odd, growling sound in his throat.

'Help, Sergeant?'

'O'Keefe tried to stop me apprehending the filth, sir! Tried to hit me, sir!'

'Hit you?' Girdwood repeated the words with disbelief.

Lynch smiled with satisfaction. 'Tried to strike me, sir. a.s.sault, sir.' He stared at Harper, knowing that he had said enough to ensure a terrible revenge for Harper's defiance.

Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood urged his horse closer to Harper. He looked down with hatred, staring at the huge, drenched man as if he saw a foul beast that had lurched up from the mud of the river bank. 'You thought to hit a Sergeant, did you, filth?'

'Because he's a murdering b.a.s.t.a.r.d, sir.' Harper, all caution gone to the wind, said it scornfully. 'A murdering, traitorous b.a.s.t.a.r.d!'

For a second Sharpe thought that Girdwood would strike Harper with the cane, and he feared that Harper would strike back, and Sharpe was planning how to seize the musket from Corporal Mason before Harper was shot. The other recruits stood in frozen fear, the wind lifting their hair and stirring the pale gra.s.ses about Marriott's still body. Girdwood stared down at the huge Irishman, and perhaps it was Harper's size, or perhaps it was the implacable look of dangerous ferocity on the huge man's face that made the Lieutenant Colonel tuck the silver-topped cane into his armpit. 'This filth is under arrest, Sergeant Lynch.'

'Yes, sir.'

'And bury that sc.u.m!' Girdwood tugged at his reins, gave one last malevolent glance at Harper, then spurred his horse after the far figure of Sir Henry Simmerson.

They buried Marriott in the marsh, using the tools with which the squad had half cleared Sir Henry's creek, burying him without benefit of prayer or clergy, as though he was a criminal. Doubtless, Sharpe thought as they forced the body into the wet, gurgling hole in which Marriott floated obscenely until they had forced mud onto his corpse, Girdwood would claim in his records, that the boy had drowned and been swept to sea. No one knew of the Foulness Camp, no one cared what happened here. No one ever would care unless Sharpe and Harper managed to escape from this place to take their story to the authorities.

Yet escape, that Sharpe had planned for tonight, seemed hopeless now. Harper was under arrest, guarded first by Lynch and his two corporals, and soon by a further squad of redcoats who took the huge Irishman back to the camp where, locked in a foul small building that had once been a pigsty, the Irishman waited for the justice that ruled in Foulness and which had already killed one man this summer's day.

'They killed him!' Charlie Weller still seemed unable to believe that Marriott was dead.

'Served him right.' Jenkinson, one of the convicts freed to Sergeant Havercamp by Grantham's magistrates, was scrubbing at the mud on his trousers. The evening inspection was imminent. 'He was a whining b.a.s.t.a.r.d.'

'He would have made a good soldier.' Sharpe said it mildly. Oddly, it was true. If Marriott had been in the Rifles, where the discipline was expected to come from within a man rather than without, the boy might have made a fine skirmisher.

Jenkinson said nothing. He was wary of Sharpe, as he had been of Harper, for the two had early stopped the bullying tactics of the released convicts, who, thinking themselves to have found easy victims in the other recruits, had tried to make them into servants.

Weller slapped at the dried mud on his fatigue jacket. 'What will they do to Paddy?'

'Flog him." Sharpe looked to the east where, black against the pale dusk, the geese coasted down to the mudflats. He was wondering how, this night, he was to both rescue Harper and escape. If Jane Gibbons - and the thought of her made his heart give a strange, small leap of warmth - put the food and money he needed into the boathouse then it was unlikely, he conceded, that it would remain hidden all the next day. Tonight. He must escape tonight, not just to save Harper from punishment, but because, with the secret of the Foulness camp uncovered, he was impatient to end Girdwood's crime and return to Spain.

The bugle sounded for inspection. The squad lined up in front of the tent and listened to the shouts of the sergeants and corporals. 'Christ!' Charlie Weller muttered. 'It's the b.l.o.o.d.y Colonel tonight.' Girdwood's inspections were always more burdensome than those of the other officers.

'Silence!' Corporal Mason shouted from behind.

Sharpe stood to attention. He had noticed, as he fetched cleaning water, how a whole block of the tents was empty this evening and he presumed that the two Companies whose auction he had seen on Sir Henry's lawn had already marched to their new regiments. The thought of his own men, left in Pasajes, being thus denied the reinforcements they needed, made him suddenly angry as Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood paced in front of Sergeant Lynch's squad.

The Colonel looked each man up and down. There had not been time to clean all the mud from their uniforms and Girdwood's eyes showed his disgust. 'Filthy! Filthy! You're supposed to be soldiers, not pigs! What's that?' He pointed with his cane at a forlorn pile of kit that lay at the tent door.

Sergeant Lynch, immaculate once more, stiffened. 'Private Marriott's Necessaries, sir!'

'Marriott?' Girdwood frowned. 'Who's Marriott?'

'The deserter, sir!' Lynch's eyes flickered towards the kit, then back to the Colonel. 'Being returned to stores tonight, sir!'

'You can add the Irishman's too.' Girdwood said it with a smile, as though the thought had suddenly cheered him.

'Sir! Private Vaughn! Fetch the Irish filth's Necessaries!'

Sharpe frowned, as though not understanding. 'Sergeant?'

Lynch took one crisp pace forward and pushed his moustached face up to Sharpe's. 'Fetch O'Keefe's kit, Vaughn, and do it now!'

Sharpe obeyed, rolling Harper's few spare clothes into the blanket, then carrying them outside.

'Put them there, filth!' Lynch pointed with his pacing stick at Marriott's pile. 'Smartly!'