“Be careful you’re not arrested.”

“Who’d dare?” Harper grinned and gestured towards the cudgel.

The pie finished and the ale drunk, the two men walked slowly westwards. It was a lovely spring evening. The sky was delicately veined with thin cloud beyond the gauzy pall of London’s smoke, and the new leaves in the squares and wider streets had still not been darkened by soot and so looked spring-bright and full of hope. The beauty of the evening infused Harper with a quite unwarranted optimism. “It’s going to be all right, sir, so it is,” he insisted. “Just wait till Mrs Sharpe sees me! It’ll be grand to see the lass again!” He dropped a coin into the upturned shako of a legless beggar. d’Alembord did not have the heart to tell Harper that the vast majority of wounded indigents were not, despite their remnants of army uniforms, veterans of the war, but were merely taking advantage of the generosity of officers home from France. “Have you thought,” Harper went on, “of writing to Nosey?”

“Nosey‘ was the newly created Duke of Wellington who, for lack of any better government appointment in London, had just been made Ambassador to Paris. ”I’ve written to him,“ d’Alembord said, ”though I’ve had no reply.“

“Nosey won’t let Mr Sharpe down, sir.”

“He won’t defend him if he thinks he’s a murderer.”

“We’ll just have to prove he isn’t.” Harper tossed another penny, this time to a man with empty eye-sockets.

They turned into Cork Street where Harper sniffed his disapproval for the elegant houses. “Mr Sharpe will never live here, sir. She’ll have to change her tune a bit smartish, I can tell you! He’s set on the countryside, so he is.”

“And I tell you she’s set her heart on London.”

“But she’s the woman, isn’t she? So she’ll have to do what he wants.” That was another of Harper’s unshakeable certainties.

“Hold hard.” d’Alembord put a hand on Harper’s arm. “That’s the house, see?” He pointed to the far end of the street where a varnish-gleaming phaeton was drawn up outside Jane’s house. A pair of matching chestnuts were in the carriage shafts and an urchin was earning a few coins by holding the horses’ heads. “See her?” d’Alembord was unable to hide the disgust he felt. Jane was being handed down the steps by a very tall and very thin young man in the glittering uniform of a cavalry Colonel. He wore pale blue breeches, a dark blue jacket, and had a fur lined pelisse hanging from one shoulder. Jane was in a white dress covered by a dark blue cloak. The cavalryman helped her climb into the high, perilous seat of the phaeton which was an open sporting carriage much favoured by the rich and reckless.

“That’s Lord Rossendale,” d’Alembord said grimly.

For the first time since meeting d’Alembord, Harper looked troubled. There was something about Jane’s gaiety which contradicted his pet theory that, at worst, she and Rossendale were mere allies in their attempt to help Sharpe. Nevertheless it was for this meeting with Jane that Harper had come to London, and so he took Sharpe’s letter from a pocket of his new coat and stepped confidently into the roadway to intercept the carriage.

Lord Rossendale was driving the phaeton himself. Like many young aristocrats, he held the professional carriage-drivers in great awe, and loved to emulate their skills. Rossendale tossed the urchin a coin, climbed up beside Jane, and unshipped his long whip. He cracked the thong above the horses’ heads and Jane whooped with feigned and flattering alarm as the well-trained and spirited pair started away. The carriage wheels blurred above the cobbles.

Harper, standing in the roadway, raised his right hand to attract Jane’s attention. He held Sharpe’s letter aloft.

Jane saw him. For a second she was incredulous, then she assumed that if Harper was in Cork Street, her husband could not be far away. And if her husband was in London then her lover was threatened with a duel. That prospect made her scream with genuine fright. “John! Stop him!”

Lord Rossendale saw a huge man holding a cudgel. It was early in the day for a footpad to be on London’s more fashionable streets, but Rossendale nevertheless assumed that the big man was attempting a clumsy ambush. He flicked the reins with his left hand and shouted at the horses to encourage them to greater speed.

“Mrs Sharpe! Ma’am! It’s me!” Harper was shouting and waving. The carriage was twenty yards away and accelerating fast towards him.

“John!” Jane screamed with fright.

Lord Rossendale stood. It was a dangerous thing to do in so precarious a vehicle, but he braced himself against the seat, then slashed the whip forward so that its thong curled above the horses’ heads.

“Sergeant!” d’Alembord shouted from the pavement.

The whip’s thong cracked, and its tip raked Harper’s cheek. If it had struck him one inch higher it would have slashed his right eye into blindness, but instead it merely cut his tanned face to the bone. He fell sideways as the horses’ hooves crashed past him. Harper rolled desperately away, yet even so the phaeton’s wheels were so close that he saw their metal rims flicking sparks up from the flint in the cobbles. He heard a whoop of joy.

It was Jane who had made the triumphant sound. Harper sat up in the road and saw her looking back, and he saw, too, the excitement in her eyes. Blood was streaming down Harper’s face and soaking his new neckcloth and coat. Lord Rossendale had sat again while Jane, her face turned back towards Harper and still registering a mixture of relief and joy, was gripping her lover’s arm.

Harper stood up and brushed the roadway’s horsedung off his trousers. “God save Ireland.” He was disappointed and astonished, rather than angry.

“I did warn you.” d’Alembord picked up Harper’s cudgel and restored it to the Irishman.

“Sweet Mother of God.” Harper stared after the carriage until it slewed into Burlington Gardens. Then, still with an expression of incredulity, he stooped to pick up the fallen letter that was spattered with his blood.

“I’m sorry, Sergeant-Major,” d’Alembord said unhappily.

“Mr Sharpe will kill the bastard.” Harper stared in the direction the carriage had taken. “Mr Sharpe will crucify him! As for her?” He shook his head in wonderment. “Has the woman lost her wits?”

“It all makes me believe,” d’Alembord steered Harper towards the pavement, “that the two of them are hoping the Major never does come home. It would suit them very well if he was arrested and executed for murder in France.”

“I would never have believed it!” Harper was still thinking of Jane’s parting cry of triumph. “She was always kind to me! She was as good as gold, so she was! She never gave herself airs, not that I saw!”

“These things happen, Sergeant-Major.”

“Oh, Christ!” Harper leaned on an area railing. “Who in heaven’s name is to tell Mr Sharpe?”

“Not me,” d’Alembord said fervently, “I don’t even know where he is!”

“You do now, sir.” Harper tore open Sharpe’s letter and gave it to the officer. “The address is bound to be written there, sir.”

But d’Alembord would not take the letter. “You write to him, Sergeant-Major. He’s much fonder of you than he is of me.”

“Jesus. I’m just a numbskull Irishman from Donegal, sir, and I couldn’t write a letter to save my own soul. Besides, I’m going to Spain to fetch my own wife home.”

d’Alembord reluctantly took the letter. “I can’t write to him. I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“You’re an officer, sir. You’ll think of something, so you will.” Harper turned again to stare at the empty street corner. “Why is she doing it? In the name of God, why?”

d’Alembord had pondered that question himself. He shrugged. “She’s like a caged singing bird given freedom. The Major took her out of that awful house, gave her wings, and now she wants to fly free.“

Harper scorned that sympathetic analysis. “She’s rotten to the bloody core, sir, just like her brother.” Jane’s brother had been an officer in Harper’s battalion. Harper had killed him, though no one but he and Sharpe knew the truth of that killing. “Christ, sir.” A foul thought had struck Harper. “It’ll kill Mr Sharpe when he finds out. He thinks the sun never sets on her!”