Anne, the Dowager Countess Camoynes, listened for a few moments to the orchestra playing in the great marbled hall where, this evening, an Earl entertained a few close friends. The friends, numbering some four or five hundred, were vastly impressed by the Earl's largesse. He had built, in his garden, a mock waterfall that led to a plethora of small pools in which, lit by paper lanterns, jewels gleamed. The guests could fish for the jewels with small, ivory handled nets. The Prince Regent, who had fished for half an hour, had declared the entertainment to be capital.

Lady Camoynes, sheathed in purple silk, fanned her face with a lace fan. She smiled at acquaintances, then went to the open air to stand on the garden steps. More than most guests here she needed to fish in the fake pools for the emeralds and rubies that glinted beneath the small golden fish, but she dared not do it for fear of the hidden laughter. All society knew of her debts, and all wondered how she clung onto the perquisites of her rank like the carriage and liveried servants. It was rumoured, in the fashionable houses of the quality, that she must be exchanging her slim body for a bare income, and she could do nothing to fight the rumours for she was too poor to afford that pride and, besides, there was truth in the sn.i.g.g.e.ring whispers.

She sipped from a gla.s.s of champagne and watched the Prince Regent make his stately progress about the tables set on the lawn's edge. He was dressed this night in a coat of silver cloth, edged with gold lace. Lady Camoynes thought with malicious delight of the people of England who, in their good sense, hated this Royal family with its mad King and fat, gaudy, wastrel Princes.

'My dear Anne.' She turned. Lord Fenner stood behind her on the steps of the house. He watched the Prince, then put a pinch of snuff on the back of his hand. 'I have to thank you.'

'For what, Simon?'

Lord Fenner stepped down to her level. He sniffed the powdered tobacco into his hooked nose, arched his eyebrows as he fought the sneeze, then snapped the box shut. 'For your little tete-a-tete with Major Sharpe. I trust it was as satisfying to you as it was to me.' He smiled maliciously. Lady Camoynes said nothing. Her green eyes looked at the waterfall, ignoring Lord Fenner, who laughed. 'I trust you didn't bed him.' She was amused at his jealousy. Lord Fenner had once asked Anne Camoynes to marry him, she had refused, and he had retaliated by buying her dead husband's debts. Still she had refused to be his wife, even though his hold over her forced her to his bed. Now familiarity had bred contempt in Fenner. He no longer wanted her in marriage, just in thrall. 'Well, Anne? Did you bed your peasant hero?'

'Don't be absurd.'

'I just worry what strange pox he might have fetched from Spain. I think you owe me an answer, Anne. Is he poxed?'

'I would have no way of knowing.' She stared at the laughing people who dipped their nets into the jewelled pools.

'If I find I need a physician's services I shall charge it to your account.' Fenner laughed and pushed the snuffbox into a pocket of his waistcoat. 'But thank you for your note.'

Lady Camoynes had written, in the early afternoon, that Sharpe intended to search for the Second Battalion. She sensed how important this matter was to Fenner and she suddenly wondered how she could turn that concern to her own profit. She looked at Fenner. 'What are you going to do with Major Sharpe, Simon?'

'Do? Nothing! My Lord!' He bowed to a man who climbed the steps, then glanced into Lady Camoynes' startling green eyes. 'I've sent him orders that will pack him off to Spain. Tomorrow.'

'That's all?'

He stared at her speculatively. 'Would it concern you if there was more? Would you warn him, Anne?' There was a shriek of laughter at the end of the garden as a choice ruby was fished up from a pool. Lord Fenner stared at the man who had found the ruby and who now placed it, to much laughter, in the cleavage of a young woman who was one of the actresses so loved by the Prince and his circle. 'Would it worry you, Anne, if I said that Major Sharpe will be dead by morning?'

'Will he?'

He looked at her, his eyes shamelessly staring at her body beneath its sheath of silk. 'Did you know, Anne, that there was a report that he was hanged this summer?'

'Hanged?'

'It turned out to be false. So his death is overdue. Does it worry you? Did you like him?'

'I talked to him, that was all.'

'And no doubt he was flattered.' Fenner stared into her eyes. 'Don't try and warn him, Anne. Not unless you want me to foreclose on the Gloucester estate.' He smiled, knowing he had his victory over her, then dropped a bag at her feet. 'I'll let you stoop for that, Anne. It's your payment for talking to the peasant.' He gave her the merest hint of a bow. 'If both my lanterns are lit when you go home, do come to see me.' He walked away from her, going towards the revellers about the waterfall.

Anne, Dowager Countess of Camoynes, moved so that the hem of her dress hid the bag, then, when no one seemed to be watching, she bent quickly and picked it up. It was damp. It must, she thought, contain jewels from the garden pools, jewels that would help her pay off the debt that her husband's death had bequeathed to her and which she paid in Fenner's bed. She paid so that her only son, away at school, could inherit his father's estates. She hated Fenner and she despised herself, and she could see no escape from the trap that her dead husband's profligacy had made for her. No man would marry her, despite her beauty, for her widow's jointure was the monstrous, hateful debt.

She turned back into the house, unable to watch the jewels fetched from the water any longer, and she thought of the Rifleman. She had not meant to take Sharpe to her bed, she had not wanted to show any weakness to the gutter-bred soldier, yet she had been astonished by the sudden need to hold onto a man. She had hated Sharpe last night because she could not possess him for ever, because she wanted him, because he was gentle. He was also, she suddenly thought, Fenner's enemy, and any man who was Lord Fenner's enemy must be her friend.

Tonight, if Fenner was right, Sharpe would die. Lady Camoynes paused, the damp bag of stones in her hand, and dreamed suddenly of revenge. If Sharpe survived this night, if he proved he could win this one battle over her enemy, then perhaps he would be a worthy ally for total victory. She turned to stare into the garden and her embittered, thin face smiled. She would have an ally, a soldier, a hero, so she would take the risk and have her vengeance if only, on this night of laughter and luxury, her soldier lived.

Richard Sharpe walked into a bad place. He did it knowingly, deliberately, and without fear.

It was called a rookery, one of many in London, but this was as foul a rookery as any the city could boast. The houses were tiny, crammed together, and built so flimsily that sometimes, without any apparent cause, they slumped into the alleyways in a thunderous cascade of timber, bricks and tiles that killed the people who lived a dozen to a room. This was a place of disease, poverty, hunger, and filth beyond reason. It was Sharpe's home.

He had lived in this rookery as a child. He had learned his first skills here, how to pick locks and open barred shutters. Here he had coupled with his first woman and killed his first man, and both before he was thirteen.

He walked slowly. It was a dark place, lit intermittently by the flaring torches of the gin shops. The alleys were crowded, the people had suspicious eyes that were sunk in thin, starved, vicious faces. They wore rags. Children cried. Somewhere a woman screamed and a man bellowed at her. There was no privacy in a place such as this, a whole life was lived open to the gaze of predatory neighbours.

'Sir?' A thin hand wavered at a doorway. He shook his head at the girl, walked on, then suddenly turned back. The girl, her head wrapped in a scarf, stood above a stinking, legless man who held a knife. The man jerked his head. 'You can go in the alley with her.'

Sharpe stooped to the man. 'Where do I find Maggie Joyce?'

'Who are you?'

'Where do I find Maggie Joyce?' He did not raise his voice, but the crippled pimp heard the savagery, the threat, and he covered the knife blade with his left hand to show he meant no harm. 'You know Rennet's place?'

'I know it.'

'She runs it.'

The news confirmed what Sharpe had learned from a beggar outside the Rose Tavern and, in thanks, he gave the girl a coin. She would be dead, probably, before she was eighteen.

The place stank worse than he remembered. All the filth of these lives was poured into the streets, the dung, urine, and dead mixed with the sc.u.m in the gutters. He found, that by not even thinking about it, he could still thread the labyrinth into which criminals disappeared with such ease.

No one dared chase a man into these alleys, not unless he had friends to help him inside. It would have taken an army to flush out these dark, chill places. Here the poor, who had nothing, were lords. This was their miserable kingdom, and their pride was in their reputation for savagery, and their protection lay in the fact that no one, unless he was a fool, would dare walk these pa.s.sages. Here poverty ruled, and crime was its servant, and every night there were murders, and rapes, and thefts, and maimings, and not one criminal would ever be betrayed because the strictest code of the rookery was silence.

Men watched Sharpe pa.s.s. They eyed his boots, his sword, his sash, and the cloth of his jacket. Any one of those things could be sold for a shilling or more, and a shilling in St Giles was a treasure worth killing for. They eyed the big leather bag that he carried, a bag that, except during the skirmish at Tolosa when it had been guarded by Isabella, had not left either Sharpe or Harper's side. The men of the rookery also saw Sharpe's eyes, his scars, the size of him, and though some men spat close to his boots as he walked slowly through the dark, damp alleys, none raised a hand against him.

He came to a torch that flared in an old, rusted bracket above a brief flight of steps. Women sat on the steps. They had gin bottles in one hand, babies in the other. One had lost an eye, another was bleeding from her scalp, while two clasped sucking children to their bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s as Sharpe climbed the stairs and pushed open a much-mended wooden door.

The room he entered was lit by tallow candles that drooped from iron hooks in the ceiling. It was crowded with men and women, children too, all drinking the gin that was the cheapest escape from the rookery. They fell silent as he entered. Their faces were hostile.

He pushed through them. He kept one hand firmly on his pouch in which were a few coins and his other hand gripped the neck of the stiff leather bag which was the reason for his visit to this place. He growled once, when a man refused to move, and when the customers saw that the tall, well-dressed soldier was not afraid of them, they moved reluctantly to let him pa.s.s. He went towards the back of the room, pressing through a stink equal to the stench of Carlton House, towards a table, well lit by candles, on which were ranked rows of gin bottles either side of an ale barrel. Two men, with scarred, implacable faces, guarded the table. One carried a bell-mouthed horse-pistol, the other a cudgel. Some of the customers were jeering Sharpe now, shouting at him to get out.

A woman sat behind the table, a ma.s.sive woman with a face like stone and arms like twisted ropes. She had red hair, going grey, that was twisted back into a bun. Beside her, against the wall, was a second, iron-tipped cudgel. She stared at him with hostility. 'What do you want, soldier?' she sneered at him. Officers did not come here to mock the poverty of a rookery with their tailor-made clothes.

'Maggie?'

She looked at him suspiciously. Knowing her name meant nothing, everyone in the rookery knew Maggie Joyce; gin G.o.ddess, midwife, procuress, and eight times a widow. She had grown fat, Sharpe saw, fat as a barrel, but he guessed that the bulk was hard muscle and not soft flesh. Her hair was going white, her face was lined and hard, yet he knew she was no more than three years older than himself. She jerked her head at one of her two guards, making him step closer to the soldier, then glared at Sharpe. 'Who are you?'

Sharpe smiled. 'Where's Tom?'

'Who are you?' Her voice was hard as steel.

He took his shako off and smiled chidingly at her. 'Maggie!' He said it as if she had wounded him by her forgetfulness.

She frowned at him. She looked at the officer's sash, the leather bag, the sword, up to his high, black collared neck and to his scarred, hard face, and suddenly, almost alarmingly, she wept. 'Dear Christ, it's yourself?' She had never lost the accent of Kilkenny, the only legacy her parents had given to her, besides a quick wit and an indomitable strength. 'd.i.c.k?' She said it with utter disbelief.

'It's myself.' He did not know whether to laugh or cry.

She reached over the table, clasped him, and the astonished gin-drinkers watched in awed surprise as the officer held her back. She shook her head. 'Dear G.o.d, look at the man! You an officer?'

'Yes.'

'Dear Christ on the cross! They'll make me into the b.l.o.o.d.y Pope next! You'll take some gin.'

'I'll take some gin.' He put his shako on the table. 'Tom?'

'He's dead, darling. Dead these ten winters. Christ, look at yourself. Will you be wanting a bed?'

He smiled. 'I'm at the Rose.'

She wiped her eyes. 'There was a time, d.i.c.k Sharpe, when my bed was all you ever wanted. Come round here. Leave those sinners to gawp at you.'

He sat beside her on the bench. He put the bag on the floor, stretched his long legs under the crude counter, and Maggie Joyce stared at him in astonishment. 'Oh Christ! But you look good in yourself!' She laughed at him, and he let his hand rest in hers. Maggie Joyce had been a mother to him once, rescuing him when he ran away from the foundling home, and he had known her when she had first gone onto the streets. Later, when he had become skilled at opening locked doors, she would come back in the dawn and climb into his bed and teach him the ways of the world. She had been lithe then, as sharp a whip as any in the rookery.

She had tears in her eyes. 'Christ, and I thought you were long gone to h.e.l.l!'

'No.' He laughed.

They both laughed, perhaps for what had been and what might have been, and while they laughed, and while she took the small coins from her customers and poured gin into their tin cups, the two men who had followed Richard Sharpe from Drury Lane stood unnoticed at the back wall and watched him. Two men, one swathed in a greatcoat despite the warm night, the other a native of this rookery. Both men had weapons, the skill to use them, and much, much patience. They waited.

CHAPTER 4.

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, d.i.c.k! Real?'

'Real.'

'Mary, Mother of G.o.d!' 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, d.i.c.k 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 Hopkinson, 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, d.i.c.k?'

'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 Hopkinson's 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, d.i.c.k, but you always were a lucky b.a.s.t.a.r.d! 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. G.o.d d.a.m.n all Lords! Especially lying b.a.s.t.a.r.ds of politicians. He decided he hated no one, no single evil soul in all the whole mad world, as much as he hated b.l.o.o.d.y 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 wh.o.r.es 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 a.s.sumed she had seen him pa.s.s 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.