“Of course.”

It was still a miserable supper, but for Sharpe, as for Frederickson, it had fast become a season of misery.

Harper had disappeared, Jane’s silence was ominous, and in the morning a moody Frederickson left for Paris. Madame Castineau stayed indoors, while, in the chateau’s archway, Sharpe sat alone and scowling.

May had been warm, but June was like a furnace. Sharpe mended in the heat. Lucille Castineau would watch as he exercised his left arm, holding the great cavalry sword outstretched for as long as he could before the muscles became nerveless and, after a moment’s quivering, collapsed. He could not raise the arm very high, but each day he forced it a fraction higher. He drenched himself with sweat as he exercised. He disobeyed the doctor by cutting away the brittle plaster from his right leg and, though he was in agony for three days, the pain slowly ebbed. He stumped doggedly about the yard to strengthen his atrophied thigh muscles. He had let his black hair grow very long so that the missing chunk of his left car would be hidden. One morning, as Sharpe stared into his shaving mirror to judge the success of that vain disguise, he saw a streak of grey in the long black hair.

No news came from London, and none from Frederickson in Paris.

Sharpe looked for tasks about the chateau and took a simple pleasure in their completion. He rehung a door in the dairy, remade the bed of the cider press and repaired the kitchen chairs. When he could not find work he went for long walks, either between the apple trees or up the steep northern ridge where he forced his pace until the sweat ran down his face with the exertion and pain.

Lucille saw the pain on his face that evening. “You shouldn’t try to…” she began, but then said nothing more, for her English was not good enough.

Most of all Sharpe liked to climb up to the tower roof that Frederickson and Harper had mended, and where he would spend hours just staring down the two roads which met at the chateau’s gate. He looked for the return of friends or the coming of his beloved, but no one came.

In late June he struggled to clear a ditch of brambles and weeds, then he repaired the ditch’s long disused sluice gate. The herdsman was so pleased that he sent for Madame Castineau who clapped her hands when she saw the water run clear from the mill-race to irrigate the pasture. “The water, how do you say? No water for years, yes?”

“How many years?” Sharpe was leaning on a billhook. With his long hair and filthy clothes he might have been mistaken for a farm labourer. „Vingt, quarante?“

Sharpe’s French came slowly, but night by night, sitting awkwardly at the supper table, he was forced to communicate with Madame Castineau. By the end of June he could hold a conversation, though there were still annoying misunderstandings, but by the middle of July he was as comfortable in French as he had ever been in Spanish. He and Lucille now discussed everything: the late war, the weather, God, steam power, India, the Americas, Napoleon, gardening, soldiering, the respective merits of England and France, how to keep slugs out of vegetable gardens, how to grow strawberries, the future, the past, aristocrats.

“There were too many aristocrats in France,” Lucille said scornfully. She was sitting in the last of a summer evening’s sunlight, darning one of the big flax sheets. “It wasn’t like England, where only the eldest son inherits. Here, everyone inherited, so we bred aristocrats like rabbits!” She bit the thread and tied off her stitches. “Henri would never use his title, which annoyed Maman. She didn’t care that I ignored mine, but daughters were never important to Maman.”

“You have a title?” Sharpe asked in astonishment.

“I used to have one, before they were all abolished during the revolution. I was only a child, of course; nothing but a little scrap of a child, but I was still formally the Vicomtesse de Seleglise.“ Lucille laughed. ”What a nonsense!“

“I don’t think it’s a nonsense.”

“You’re English, which means you are a fool!” she said dismissively. “It was a nonsense, Major. There were noblemen who were truly nothing but peasants who lived off beans, but still they were accounted aristocrats because their great-great-grandfather had been a viscount or a duke. Look at us!” She gestured about the farmyard. “We call it a chateau, but it’s really nothing more than a large and penniless farmhouse with a very inconvenient ditch around it.”

“It’s a very beautiful farmhouse,” Sharpe said.

“To be sure.” Lucille liked it when Sharpe praised the house. She often said that all she now wanted was to live in the chateau for ever. There had been a time, she admitted, when she had thought that she would like to cut a dash in Paris, but then her husband had died, and her ambition had died with him.

One evening Sharpe asked about Castineau and Lucille fetched his portrait. Sharpe saw a thin, dark-faced man in a well-cut colonel’s uniform which gleamed with gold aigulettes. He carried a brass helmet under his left arm and a sabre in his right hand. “He was very handsome,” Lucille said wistfully. “No one understood why he chose me. It certainly wasn’t for my money!” She laughed.

“How did he die?”

“In battle,” Lucille said curtly, then, with an apologetic shrug, “how do men die in battle, Major?”

“Nastily.” Sharpe said the word in English.

“Very nastily, I’m sure,” Lucille said in the same language, “but do you miss it, Major?”

Sharpe pushed his black hair, with its grey streak, away from his forehead. “The day I heard that peace was signed was one of the happiest of my life.”

“Truly?”

“Truly.”

Lucille paused to thread a needle. This evening she was embroidering one of her old dresses. “My brother said that you were a man who enjoyed war.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe.” Lucille mockingly imitated Sharpe’s scowl. “What is this peut-eire? Did you enjoy it?”

“Sometimes.”

She sighed with exasperation at his obdurate evasion. “So what is enjoyable about war? Tell me, I would like to understand.”

Sharpe had to grope for words if he was to offer an explanation in the unfamiliar language. “It’s very clear-cut. Things are black or white. You have a task and you can measure your success absolutely.”

“A gambler would say the same,” Lucille said scornfully.

“True.”

“And the men you killed? What of them? They were just losers?”

“Just losers,” Sharpe agreed, then he remembered that this woman’s husband had died in battle, and blushed. “I’m sorry, Madame.”

“For my husband?” Lucille instantly understood Sharpe’s contrition. “I sometimes think he died in the way he wished. He went to war with such excitement; for him it was all glory and adventure.” She paused in the middle of a stitch. “He was young.”

“I’m glad he didn’t fight in Spain,” Sharpe said.

“Because that makes you innocent of his death?” Lucille scorned him with a grimace. “Why are soldiers such romantics? You obviously thought nothing of killing Frenchmen, but just a little knowledge of your enemy makes you feel sympathy! Did you never feel sympathy in battle?”

“Sometimes. Not often.”

“Did you enjoy killing?”

“No,” Sharpe said, and he found himself telling her about the battle at Toulouse and how he had decided not to kill anyone, and how he had broken the vow. That battle seemed so far away now, like part of another man’s life, but suddenly he laughed, remembering how he had seen General Calvet on the battlefield and, because it might help Lucille understand, he described his feelings at that moment; how he had forgotten his fear and had desperately wanted to prove himself a better fighter than the doughty Calvet.

“It sounds very childish to me,” Lucille said.

“You never rejoiced when Napoleon won great victories?” Sharpe asked.

Lucille gave a very characteristic shrug. “Napoleon.” She pronounced his name scathingly, but then she relented. “Yes, we did feel pride. We shouldn’t have done, perhaps, but we did. Yet he killed many Frenchmen to give us that pride. But,” she shrugged again, “I’m French, so yes, I rejoiced when we won great victories.” She smiled. “Not that we heard of many great victories in Spain. You will tell me that was because we were foolish enough to fight the English, yes?”