“We were a very good army,” Sharpe said, and then, provoked by Lucille’s continuing curiosity, he told her about Spain, and about his daughter, Antonia, who now lived with relatives on the Portuguese border.

“You never see her?” Lucille asked in a shocked voice.

He shrugged. “It’s being a soldier.”

“That takes preference over love?” she asked, appalled.

“Her mother’s dead,” Sharpe said lamely, then tried to explain that Antonia was better off where she was.

“Her mother’s dead?” Lucille probed, and Sharpe described his first wife, and how she had died in the snows of a high mountain pass.

“Couldn’t your daughter live with your parents?” Lucille asked, and Sharpe had to confess that he had no parents and that, indeed, he was nothing but a fatherless son of a long-dead whore. Lucille was amused by his embarrassed confession. “William the Conqueror was a bastard,” she said, “and he wasn’t a bad soldier.”

“For a Frenchman,” Sharpe allowed.

“He had Viking blood,” Lucille said. “That’s what Norman means. Northman.” When Lucille told him facts like that she made Sharpe feel very ignorant, but he liked listening to her, and some days he would even take one of her books up to the tower and try hard to read what she had recommended. Lucille gave him one of her brother’s favourite books which contained the essays of a dead Frenchman called Montesquieu. Sharpe read most of the essays, though he frequently had to shout down to the yard for the translation of a difficult word.

One night Lucille asked him about his future. “We’ll find Ducos,” Sharpe answered, “but after that? I suppose I’ll go home.”

“To your wife?”

“If I still have a wife,” Sharpe said, and thus for the first time acknowledged his besetting fear. That night there was a thunderstorm as violent as the one which had punctuated Sharpe’s long journey north through France. Lightning slashed the ridge north of the chateau, the dogs howled in the barn, and Sharpe lay awake listening to the rain pour off the roof and slosh in the gutters. He tried to remember Jane’s face, but somehow her features would not come clear in his memory.

In the rinsed daylight next morning the carrier arrived from Caen with a letter addressed to Monsieur Tranchant, which was the name Frederickson had said he would use if he had news for Sharpe. The letter bore a Paris address and had a very simple message. “I’ve found him. I will wait here till you can come. I am known as Herr Friedrich in my lodging house. Paris is wonderful, but we must go to Naples. Write to me if you cannot come within the next fortnight. My respect to Madame.” There was no explanation of how Frederickson had found Ducos’s whereabouts.

“Captain Frederickson sends you his respects,” Sharpe told Lucille.

“He’s a good man,” Lucille said very blandly. She was watching Sharpe grind an edge on to his sword with one of the stones used to sharpen the chateau’s sickles. “So you’re leaving us, Major?”

“Indeed, Madame, but if you have no objections I would like to wait a few days to see if my Sergeant returns.”

Lucille shrugged. „D’accord,“

Harper returned a week later, full of his own happy news. Isabella was still in her native Spain, but now safely provided with money and a rented house. The baby was well. It had taken Harper longer than he had anticipated to find a ship going to Pasajes, so he had temporarily abandoned his plans for taking Isabella back to Ireland. “I thought you and I should finish our business first, sir.”

“That’s kind of you, Patrick. It’s good to see you again.”

“Good to see you, sir. You’re looking grand, so you are.”

“I’m going grey.” Sharpe touched his forelock.

“Just a badger’s streak, sir.” Harper had been about to add that it would attract the women, but then he remembered Jane and he bit the comment off just in time.

The two men walked along the stream which fed the mill-race. Sharpe liked to sit by this stream with a horsehair fishing line and some of Henri Lassan’s old lures. He told Harper of Frederickson’s letter. He said they would leave in the morning, bound first-for Paris, then for Naples. He said he was feeling almost wholly fit and that his leg was very nearly as strong as ever. He added a lot more entirely inconsequential news, and only after a long time did he ask the question that the Irishman dreaded. Sharpe asked it in a very insouciant voice that did not in the least deceive Harper. “Did you manage to see Jane?”

“So Captain d’Alembord didn’t write to you, sir?” Harper had continued to hope that d’Alembord might have broken the bad news to Sharpe.

“No letter reached me. Did he write?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir. It’s just that he and I saw Mrs Sharpe together, sir, so we did.” Harper could not bear telling the truth and tried desperately to return the conversation to its former harmless pattern. He muttered that the cows across the stream looked good and fleshy.

“They don’t give a bad yield, either,” Sharpe said with a surprising enthusiasm. “Madame has her dairymaid rub butterwort on the teats; she says it gives more milk.”

“I must remember that one, sir.” Harper stripped a grass stalk of its seeds which he scattered into a drainage ditch. “And would that be the sluice gate you rebuilt, sir?”

Sharpe proudly showed Harper how he had stripped the worm-gear of rust and smeared it with goose-fat so that the rebuilt blade would once again rise and fall. “See?” The gear was still stiff, but Sharpe managed to close the gate to cut off the stream water.

“That’s grand, sir.” Harper was impressed.

Sharpe wound the gate open again, then sat heavily down on the stream bank. He stared away from Harper, looking across the water towards the beech trees that climbed up the northern spur of the hills. “Tell me about Jane.”

Harper still tried to evade telling the truth. “I didn’t speak to her, sir.”

Sharpe seemed not to hear the evasion. “It isn’t hard to explain, is it?”

“What’s that, sir?”

Sharpe plucked a leaf of watercress from the stream’s edge. “I saw an eel trap once, and I was wondering whether I could put one down by the spillway.” He pointed downstream towards the mill. “But I can’t remember how the damn thing worked exactly.”

Harper sat a pace or two behind Sharpe. “It’s like a cage, isn’t it?”

“Something like that.” Sharpe spat out a shred of leaf. “I suppose she took the money and found herself someone else?”

“I don’t know what she did with the money, sir,” Harper said miserably.

Sharpe turned and looked at his friend. “But she has found another man?”

Harper was pinned to the truth now. He hesitated for a second, then nodded bleakly. “It’s that bugger called Rossendale.”

“Jesus Christ.” Sharpe turned away so that Harper would not see the pain on his face. For a split second that pain was like a red hot steel whip slashing across his soul. It hurt. He had more than half expected this news, and he had thought himself prepared for it, but it still hurt more than he could ever have dreamed. He was a soldier, and soldiers had such high pride, and no wound hurt more than damaged pride. God, it hurt.

“Sir?” Harper’s voice was thick with sympathy.

“You’d better tell me everything.” Sharpe was like a wounded man aggravating his injury in the vain hope that it would not prove so bad as he had at first feared.

Harper told how he had tried to deliver the letter, and how Lord Rossendale had scarred him with his whip. He said he was certain Jane had recognized him. His voice tailed away as he described Jane’s whoop of triumph. “I’m sorry, sir. Jesus, I’d have killed the bugger myself, but Mr d’Alembord threatened to turn me over to the provosts if I did.”

“He was quite right, Patrick. It isn’t your quarrel.” Sharpe pushed his fingers into the soft earth beside a water-rat’s hole. He had watched the otters in this stream, and envied them their playfulness. “I didn’t really think she’d do it,” he said softly.