Sharpe bent and kissed her. "Till tomorrow night, my love. Nosey will look after you till then." He let go of her shoulders and took a pace backwards. "Let's be moving, Patrick!"

"Whenever you're ready." Harper, tactfully waiting just inside the stable door, appeared with his weapons and pack. He was wearing his old Rifleman's uniform, less its sergeant's stripes. He had insisted on accompanying Sharpe to Quatre Bras, not to fight, he said, but just for the chance of glimpsing the Emperor.

"You take care of yourself, Patrick!" Lucille called in English.

"You'll not catch me anywhere near the fighting, ma'am. I've got too much sense for that, so I have." He had all his old weapons about him, all of them lovingly cleaned and oiled and ready.

Lucille reached up and touched Sharpe's cheek. "Go with G.o.d."

"And with your love?"

"You know you have that."

He hated such a parting. Words were hopeless. Sharpe suddenly feared the loss of Lucille and he thought how love made a man fearful and vulnerable. His throat felt thick, so he just turned away and took the reins that Harper held ready. He gripped the pommel, pushed his left boot into the cold stirrup iron, and heaved up into the Hussar saddle with its high spoon that offered support during long hours of riding. His sore thighs complained at being back on a horse. He fiddled his right boot into its stirrup, touched the rifle stock superst.i.tiously, pushed the sword into a comfortable position, then rolled the cloak into a bundle that he jammed under the rifle holster's strap. He looked for a last time at Lucille. "Kiss the child for me."

"I'll see you tomorrow night." She forced a confident smile.

The dog whined a protest as Sharpe rode away. The Rifleman ducked under the arch, then waited as Harper closed the two heavy gates. The Irishman swung himself into the saddle, then followed Sharpe in the footsteps of the Highlanders.

Sharpe and Harper were going back to war.

In the same short darkness of that midsummer night Lord John Rossendale took a road leading west from Brussels towards a rendezvous with the Earl of Uxbridge and the British cavalry. Lord John did not ride his horse, but rather drove in a gleaming open cabriolet that he had brought from London. Harris, his coachman, was up on the driving box, while Lord John's groom and valet were bringing on the saddle horses behind. Captain Christopher Manvell had ridden on ahead. Lord John had hoped that his friend would accompany him, but he sensed how much Manvell despised him for so easily surrendering to Sharpe's threat.

Rossendale closed his eyes and silently cursed. He was in turmoil, trapped between honour and beauty. It was not Manvell's displeasure that worried him, but Jane's anger. She had lacerated Lord John for his cowardice. He remembered a time when Jane had feared a duel as much as he, but now she seemed more eager to protect her money than Lord John's life.

"And you have no right to promise him any money!" Jane had reminded Lord John when they had regained the privacy of their hotel suite. "It is not your money, but mine!"

In truth, if the money belonged to anyone, it was the property of the Emperor's brother, Joseph Bonaparte, erstwhile King of Spain and the Indies, who had lost his fortune with the battle of Vitoria. King Joseph had fled and the British had swarmed over his supply wagons where some men, Sharpe and Harper among them, had become rich. Sharpe had taken a royal fortune off the battlefield, and it was that fortune which Jane had stolen from him, and much of which she had already spent on a London house and on silks and on furniture and on jewels and on Lord John's debts, and on silverware and gold plate and Chinese wallpaper and on lapdogs and satin and on the cabriolet in which Lord John now rode towards the cavalry and battle. It was that same fortune which, to save his life, Lord John had promised to return to Sharpe.

"You will not!" Jane had said after the shameful confrontation at the ball.

"You'd have me fight him?" Lord John had asked.

"If you were a man," Jane had sneered, "you would not ask the question."

Lord John, recognizing the horrid truth in her mockery, had wondered why love's happiness was so easily soured. "I can fight him, if you insist."

"I don't insist!"

"I can fight him, though." Lord John had sounded hopeless for he knew he would lose a duel against Sharpe.

Jane had suddenly staunched her anger and melted Lord John with a smile. "All I want", she had said, "is the chance to marry you. And once we are married the money will be yours by right. But we cannot marry until.'

She did not need to go on. Lord John knew that litany. They could not marry while Sharpe lived. Therefore Sharpe must die, and if he was not to be killed in a duel, then he must be taken care of in another way and, in the darkness as Lord John had said his farewells, Jane had urged him to the other way.

"Harris?" Lord John now called to his coachman.

"I can hear you, my lord!" Harris shouted from the cabriolet's driving seat.

"Did you ever hear of officers being murdered in battle?"

Harris, who had been a cavalry trooper before a French cannon-ball had crushed his left foot at the battle of Corunna, laughed at the naivety of the question. "You hear about it all the time, my lord." Harris paused for a few seconds while he negotiated the cabriolet over some deep ruts in the high road. "I remember a major who begged us not to kill him, my lord. He knew we couldn't abide his ways, and he was sure one of us was going to take a hack at him, so he begged for the honour of being killed by the enemy instead."

"Was he?"

"No. A mucky little devil called Shaughnessy shoved a sword into his back." Harris laughed at the memory. "Clean old job he made of it, straight out of the drill book!"

"And no one saw?"

"No one who was going to make a malarkey out of it, my lord. Why should they? No one liked the Major. Not that you need worry, my lord."

"I wasn't concerned for myself, Harris."

Harris plucked a bugle from the seat beside him and sounded a blaring note of warning. A battalion of infantry that was marching towards the cabriolet shuffled onto the gra.s.s verge. The men, their faces sallow in the small light of the cabriolet's twin lamps, stared reproachfully at the wealthy officer whose carriage clipped by so smartly behind its matched pair of bays. The battalion's officers, under the misapprehension that such an equipage must contain a senior officer, saluted.

Lord John said nothing more of murder. He knew he had behaved badly this night, that he should have faced Sharpe and accepted the challenge. He had lost face, he had lost honour, yet now he flirted with the thought of murder, which was beyond all honour, and he did it solely for a woman.

Lord John leaned his head back on the cabriolet's folded leather hood. Some of his friends said he was bewitched, but if he was, it was a willing enthrallment. He remembered how fondly Jane had said farewell after her anger had abated, and the memory made him lift his hand to see, in the first creeping light of dawn, the small smear of rouge that still remained on his forefinger. He kissed it. Marriage, he thought, would solve everything. No more deception, no more circ.u.mspection, no more begging Jane for funds, and no more disdain from society for a golden girl who surely deserved the rewards of marriage. Jane's happiness would take just one death; one death on a field of slaughter, one more corpse among the battalions of the dead.

And if it was done properly, no one need ever know.

And if, in the morning, Lord John withdrew his promise to repay the money and accepted the challenge of a duel, then the world would accept him as a man of brave honour. And if Sharpe was to die in battle before the duel could be fought, then the honour would be untarnished. Lord John had behaved badly this night, but he knew that all could be repaired, all won, and all made good, and all for a girl of winsome, heart-breaking beauty.

Behind Lord John the first beam of sunlight struck like a golden lance across the world's rim. It was dawn in Belgium. Clouds still heaped in the west, but over the crossroads at Quatre Bras, and above a stream just north of Fleurus, the sky was clear as gla.s.s. Larks tumbled in song above the roads where three hundred and thirty-eight thousand men, in the armies of Prussia, Britain and France, converged on death.

"G.o.d save Ireland." Harper reined in at Quatre Bras. In front of him, and smeared across the southern sky, was the smoke of thousands of camp-fires. The smoke betrayed an army encamped. The French troops were hidden by the folds of ground and by the woods and high crops, but the smoke was evidence enough that thousands of men had closed on Frasnes in the night to support the battalion of French skirmishers who had been baulked the previous evening.

Closer to Sharpe and Harper, around the crossroads of Quatre Bras, more men had gathered; all of them Dutch-Belgians of the Prince of Orange's Corps. There was a smattering of musket-fire from far beyond the stream, evidence that the rival picquet lines of skirmishers were bidding each other a lethal good morning. The Baron Rebecque, waiting with a group of the Prince's aides at the crossroads, seemed relieved to see Sharpe. "We're concentrating the corps here, instead of at Nivelles."

"Quite right, too!" Sharpe said fervently.

Rebecque unfolded a sketch map he had made. "The French are in Frasnes, and we're holding all the farms beyond the stream. Except this one by the ford. We'll only garrison that if we're forced back to it."

"I'd garrison it now," Sharpe recommended,

"Not enough men." Rebecque folded his map. "So far only eight thousand infantry have arrived, with sixteen guns and no cavalry."

Sharpe cast a professional eye at the smoke of the French cooking fires. "They've got twenty thousand, Rebecque."

"I was hoping you wouldn't tell me that." Rebecque, accepting Sharpe's experienced estimate without question, smiled grimly.

"So if I can make a suggestion?"

My dear Sharpe, anything."

"Tell our skirmishers to hold their fire. We don't want to provoke the c.r.a.pauds into nastiness, do we?" There was no sense in inviting battle from a much stronger enemy; it was better to delay any fighting in the hope of more allied troops arriving to even the numbers who faced each other south of Frasnes.

The sky above Quatre Bras was dirtied by the camp-fires, but to the east the rising sun betrayed a much vaster quant.i.ty of rising woodsmoke. That larger smear in the sky showed where the Prussian army faced the main force of the French and where the day's real battle would be fought. The French would be trying to defeat the Prussians before the British and Dutch could come to their aid, while the Prussians, to be certain of victory, needed Wellington's troops to march from Quatre Bras and a.s.sault the Emperor's left flank. But that rescue mission had been stopped dead by the presence of the twenty thousand Frenchmen encamped in Frasnes who had been sent by the Emperor to make sure that the allied armies did not combine. All that the French needed to do was take the crossroads at Quatre Bras. Sharpe reckoned it could not take the enemy longer than an hour to overrun the fragile line of Dutch-Belgian troops, and in one further hour they could have fortified the crossroads to make them impa.s.sable to the British.