“Eighteen thousand guineas?”

Frederickson stared at Sharpe. He blinked. At length he spoke. “Jesus wept.”

“We found diamonds at Vitoria, you see,” Sharpe confessed.

“How many?”

“Hundreds of the bloody things.” Sharpe shrugged. “Sergeant Harper found them really, but he shared them with me.”

Frederickson whistled softly. He had heard that much of the Spanish Crown jewels had disappeared when the French baggage was captured at Vitoria, and he had known that Sharpe and Harper had done well from the plunder, but he had never dared to put the two stories together. Sharpe’s fortune was vast. A man could live like a prince for a hundred years on such a fortune.

“She could buy a splendid house for a hundred guineas,” Sharpe said petulantly, “why does she need eighteen thousand?”

Frederickson sat on the stump of the bowsprit. He was still trying to imagine Sharpe as an immensely wealthy man. “Why did you give her the authority?” he asked after a while.

“It was before the duel.” Sharpe shrugged apologetically. “I thought I was going to die. I wanted her to be secure.”

Frederickson tried to reassure his friend. “She’s probably found a better investment.”

“But why hasn’t she written?” And that was the real rub, the blistering rub that so insidiously attacked Sharpe. Why had Jane not written? Her silence was only made worse by this tantalizing evidence which suggested that his wife was a rich woman living in London’s Cork Street. “Where is Cork Street?”

“Somewhere near Piccadilly, I think. It’s a good address.”

“She can afford it, can’t she?”

Frederickson twisted on his makeshift seat to watch a marsh harrier glide eastwards, then he shrugged. “You’ll be home in three weeks, so what does it matter?”

“I suppose it doesn’t.”

“That’s what women do to you,” Frederickson said philosophically. “They choke up your barrel and chip your flint. Which reminds me. Some of these bastards think that just because we’re at peace they don’t have to clean their rifles. Sergeant Harper! Weapon inspection, now!”

Thus they floated towards home.

Later that day, as the barge wallowed between sunlit meadows, Sergeant Harper sat with Sharpe in the bows. “What will you do now, sir?”

“Resign my commission, I suppose.” Sharpe was staring at two fishermen. They wore white blouses and wide straw hats, and looked very peaceful. It was hard to imagine that a month ago this had been a country at war. “And I suppose you’ll go to Spain to fetch Isabella?”

“If I’m allowed to, sir.”

This was Harper’s rub. He, like Sharpe, was a wealthy man, and a married man, too. There was no longer any need for Patrick Harper to wear the King’s badge, which he had only ever assumed out of poverty and hunger. He wanted his precious discharge papers, and Sharpe had failed to secure them. Sharpe had collected all the requisite forms, but he had needed to secure the signatures of a Staff Medical Officer, a Regimental Surgeon of the Goth, and of a General Officer. He would also have needed the imprint of the regimental seal of the Both. Sharpe had blithely assumed that such things would be easily secured, but the army’s regulations had defeated him. The army was no longer run by men who understood that a favour would be repaid by victory on a battlefield, but instead by men who could only read the small print of the regulations. Those bureaucrats understood only too well how many men would try and leave the ranks, and extraordinary precautions were being taken to stop any such desertions. Harper was thus being forced to stay in the army.

“There is another way,” Sharpe said diffidently.

“Sir?”

“Become my servant.”

Harper frowned, not at the prospect of menial servitude, but because he did not see how it would achieve his ambition.

Sharpe explained. “So long as I’m on the active list, then I’m allowed a servant. That servant can travel at my discretion. So as soon as we’re in England we’ll go to Dorset, I’ll report that you were kicked to death by a horse, and then you just go free. The army will cross you off the list, and we won’t need a Regimental Surgeon to testify that you’re dead because you’ll have died outside of regimental lines. We’ll need a civilian doctor, and maybe even a coroner, but there’s bound to be some drunkards in Dorset who’ll take a bribe.”

Harper thought about it, then nodded. “It sounds good to me, sir.”

“There is a small problem.”

“Sir?” Harper sounded guarded.

“King’s Regulations, Sergeant, concerning the interior economy of a regiment, insist that no non-commissioned officer is on any account to be permitted to act as an officer’s servant.”

“You looked the rules up, did you, sir?”

“I just quoted them to you.”

Harper smiled. Then he hooked his big powder-stained fingers into the frayed hems of his Sergeant’s badge. “I never wanted the stripes in the first place.”

“I seem to remember it was one hell of a struggle to make you wear them.”

“Should have saved your breath, sir.” Harper ripped the stripes off his sleeve. He stared ruefully at the patch of dirty cloth for a moment, then threw it overboard. “Busted back to the ranks,” he said, then laughed.

Sharpe watched the drifting stripes, and he thought how many hard years had passed since he had first persuaded Harper to put up that patch of white cloth. It was all coming to an end, Sharpe thought; all that he had held most dear and known best.

And ahead of him. beyond this placid river with its fishermen, herons, moorhens, and reeds, what then? The future was like a great mist, in which even Jane was indistinct. Sharpe touched the crumpled letter in his pocket, and persuaded himself that when he found Jane all would be well. He would discover that her letters had gone astray, nothing more.

Frederickson came forward and saw the bare patch on Harper’s sleeve,

“I demoted Rifleman Harper to the ranks.“ Sharpe explained.

“May one ask why?”

“For being Irish.” Sharpe said, then he thought how much he would miss Patrick Harper’s friendship, but consoled himself that Jane was waiting for him, and thus he had all the happiness in the world to anticipate and then to enjoy.

So they floated on.

The quays at Bordeaux were busier than they had been for years. Wharves which had been kept empty by the Royal Navy’s blockade Were suddenly sprouting with masts and spars. Fat-bellied merchant ships queued in the river for their turn at the stone quays where the soldiers waited between netted mounds of supplies. Cannon barrels were slung into holds, while the gun carriages were broken down to be stacked against bulkheads. Protesting horses were lowered into floating stalls. A British Army, fresh from victory, was being hurried out of France. “The very least they could have done,” Harper grumbled, “was let us march into Paris.”

That was a small grudge against the larger tragedies that were now the daily coin of the Bordeaux quays. Those tragedies were occasioned by an army decree which ruled that only those soldiers’ wives who could prove they had married with the permission of their husband’s commanding officers would be carried home. All other women, and their children, were to be abandoned in Bordeaux.

The abandoned women were mostly Portuguese and Spanish who had left their villages when the army marched through. Some had been sold to a soldier by their families. Sharpe could remember when a strong young girl could be bought for marriage for just five guineas. Most of the women had gone through a camp-marriage, which was no marriage in the eyes of the Church, but many had persuaded a village priest to give a blessing to their union. It did not matter now for, unless the regimental records confirmed a Colonel’s permission, the marriage was reckoned to be false. Thousands of women were thus forcibly taken off the quays, then prevented from rejoining their men by a cordon of provosts armed with loaded muskets. The wailing of the women and their small children was ceaseless.