Politics were so very simple, the Cardinal thought, just so long as a man believed no one, double-crossed everyone, kept a full treasury, and inveigled others into doing the dirty work. He waddled down from his throne, plucked his cape about him, then went for some supper.
The optician Joliot had betrayed Ducos’s address to Frederickson, but.the location of the Villa Lupighi still had to be found and it took Frederickson two whole days to discover that the building was not in Naples itself, and another full day to find a carrier who, for the last piece of Harper’s gold, grudgingly offered Frederickson directions. The villa lay a day’s march northwards, close to the sea and secure on a steep hill.
“It will be guarded.” Sharpe observed.
“Of course it will be guarded,” Frederickson snapped.
“So we’ll approach by night,” Sharpe ignored his friend’s short temper.
“And we leave when?” Harper hated the bitterness that he detected between the two officers. He spoke mildly, trying to be a peace-maker.
“Tonight,” Sharpe said. It was already evening. “We should arrive at dawn, we can watch all day, then attack tomorrow night. Do you agree, William?” He asked the question only to placate Frederickson.
“It seems an obvious course of action. Yes, I agree.”
They left the tavern at nightfall. There was a nervous moment as they passed the slovenly blue-uniformed guards at the city outskirts, but none of the soldiers gave the three travellers a second’s notice. Nevertheless Sharpe did not feel secure until they had long left the city’s last houses and were alone in a sultry countryside. It was good to be marching again, to feel a flinty road beneath boot-soles and to know that a task awaited at the road’s end. It was not a task confused by the demands of peace, but a soldier’s task; something best done swiftly and brutally. And when the task was over, Sharpe thought, and his enemy was confounded, then he would have the confusing tasks to face. Jane and Lucille. The names echoed in his head to every scrape and crunch of his boots on the road. What if Jane wanted him back? Which woman did he want himself? He had no answers, only questions.
It was a warm night, cloudless and windless. A bright moon rose above Vesuvius. At first the moon was misted by the volcano’s smoke, but soon it sailed clear across the sea to show the northern road as a white twisting strip against the darker fields. A thousand thousand stars pricked the sky, while a small white surf fretted at the beaches and broke bright about the tree-shrouded headlands. An owl passed close above the three men and Sharpe saw Patrick Harper cross himself. The owl was the bird of death.
An hour before midnight they left the road and climbed a hundred paces into the shelter of an ilex grove. There, in silence, they undid the bundles they each carried. At long last, after weeks of hiding, they could strip off their civilian clothes and pull on their green jackets, Sharpe had debated whether to make the change now, or to wait till the very eve of his attack, but wearing the green would force them to move as silently as ghosts through this strange countryside. He buckled on his sword, then scraped its blade free of the scabbard’s wooden throat so that the long steel shone in the moonlight.
“It feels better, does it not?” Frederickson buckled on his own sword.
“It feels much better,” Sharpe said fervently.
Frederickson drew his blade and whipped it back and forth. “I suspect I may have been somewhat fretful lately.”
Sharpe was immediately embarrassed. “Not at all.”
“I do apologize. Upon my soul, I apologize.”
Sharpe felt a pulse of pleasure that the awkwardness between them was ending, but the pleasure was immediately followed by a pang of guilt about Lucille. “My dear William…” Sharpe began, then stopped, because this was certainly not the moment to make the feared confession. He could see the happiness on Harper’s face that the bad blood between the two officers seemed to be drawn, and Sharpe knew he could not spoil the moment. “I am certain my own behaviour has been aggravating,” he said humbly.
Frederickson smiled. “But now we can fight. Our proper task in life, I fear. We’re not meant for peace, so to war, my friends!” He saluted Sharpe by whipping his sword blade upright.
“To war.” And the battle-cry put Sharpe into unexpected high spirits. For a moment he could forget Jane, forget Rossendale, forget Lucille, he could forget everything except the work at hand, which was the oldest kind of work; that of punishing an enemy.
They left the ilex grove. They had to skirt a straggling village, though the village dogs must have caught their scent for the barking snapped loud as the three Riflemen flitted through an olive grove. Beyond the olive grove, in fields that went down to the sea, there were white marble pillars that Frederickson said had fallen in the days of the Roman Empire. Sharpe did not believe him, and the friendly argument took them well past midnight. The road ran through open country, but in the small hours, when the waning moon was almost beyond the western horizon, they came to the mouth of a ravine which was shadowed as black as Hades.
They stopped where the rock walls narrowed. “A perfect place for an ambush.” Frederickson stared into the darkness.
Sharpe grunted. He had no idea how long it might take to go round the ravine. Such a detour would mean climbing the hills and scouting forward over rough ground. He was only sure of one thing, that to make the detour would take hours, and that the dawn would then find them stranded far from the villa. “I say we should go through-„
“Me too,” Harper offered.
“Why not?” Frederickson said.
The rock walls closed on them. The ravine’s slopes were not bare, but thickly covered with small tough shrubs. Sharpe tried to climb one flank to get a glimpse ahead, but gave up when the brambles tore at his hands. He could have saved himself the discomfort for, just around the next bend, a long view showed where the ravine ended two miles ahead. The road emerged from its rock walls to run gently downhill into a wide and empty lowland that was edged by the sweeping curve of a long moonlit beach. The sight of that empty landscape and their evident loneliness on the deserted road gave all three Riflemen a sense of safety. This was not Spain where an ambush might wait, but a sleepy southern country where they could walk in peace. Beyond the lowland, and dark on the northern horizon, were jagged peaks touched by the moon. Sharpe was certain that the Villa Lupighi must lie among the foothills of those peaks, and that thought made him point towards the far mountains. “Journey’s end,” he said.
Somehow the two words plunged all three Riflemen into a wistful mood. Harper, thinking of the ultimate destination of his travels, began to sing some sad lament of Ireland. Frederickson smiled privately to Sharpe. “You think he’ll be happy out of the army?”
“I think Patrick has the great gift of being content almost wherever he is.”
The two officers had fallen a few paces behind the tall Irishman. “Then he’s a fortunate man,” Frederickson said, “because I sometimes doubt whether I’ll ever find real contentment.”
“Oh, come! That can’t be true,” Sharpe protested.
Frederickson grimaced. “The pig-woman did, so perhaps there’s hope for me.” He walked in silence for a few paces. Harper still sang, and his strong voice echoed eerily from the ravine’s bluffs.
Frederickson shrugged the sling of his rifle into greater comfort on his shoulder. “Harper’s happily married, is he not?”
Sharpe’s heart plunged as he sensed the imminent conversation. “They’re very happy. Isabella’s a tough little creature, despite her pretty face.”
Frederickson found the opening he wanted. “Do you think Madame Castineau is strong?”