“Yes,” Sharpe said defiantly.

“But I don’t,” Calvet disarmingly confessed. “So tell me.”

“Go to hell, General.”

“You’re determined to die like a cornered rat, aren’t you? You’ll die snarling, full of defiance. Except I’m under the orders of a fat Cardinal to return you to Naples. Have you seen the prison in Naples? You might survive it, Major, but so crippled with disease and hunger and filth that you’ll wish you’d never been born. But if you tell me what I wish to know, Englishman, then I’ll consider letting you walk away from this miserable kingdom.” Calvet twitched the musket so that the cold barrel knocked against Sharpe’s jawbone. “Where is Pierre Ducos, Major?”

“I should have killed you at Toulouse,” Sharpe said.

“So that was you?” Calvet laughed. “The Englishman who can kill me has not been born, Major, but I will shoot you down like a rabid dog if you don’t tell me where Pierre Ducos is hiding.” He twitched the musket again to jar its foresight against Sharpe’s chin. “Tell me, Englishman.”

Sharpe stared into the Frenchman’s eyes, then, with a speed that equalled Calvet’s earlier quickness, he slapped the General’s face. The blow sounded like a pistol shot.

Calvet’s head was jerked to one side. He stepped back, brought the musket into his shoulder and aimed it between Sharpe’s eyes. “Bastard,” he snarled.

“Bugger off,” Sharpe said in English.

Calvet pulled the trigger.

Sharpe twisted away, reached for his sword hilt, and he had drawn a clear foot of the steel clear of the scabbard before he realized that the musket had not been loaded. Calvet laughed. “You can stop pissing your breeches, Major, the gun wasn’t loaded. So pick up your bloody rifles and take me to Ducos.” He turned away from Sharpe and ordered his men to fall in. The moustached veterans obediently made two ragged ranks, but the three Riflemen did not move. Calvet turned on them with feigned astonishment. “Don’t just stand there! Move!”

Still none of the three Riflemen shifted. “You expect us to take you to Ducos?” Sharpe asked.

“Listen, you Goddamn fool.” Calvet, who was plainly enjoying himself, walked back and planted himself squarely in front of Sharpe. “Why should I send you to the Cardinal? All he wants to do is steal the gold for himself. And the Emperor wants it back, and that’s my task, Major, and to help me fulfil it I’m offering you an alliance. You tell me where Ducos is hiding, and I will let you live. Indeed, I will even offer you the greater privilege of fighting under my command. For a change, Englishman, you and I will be on the same side. We are allies. Except that I am a General of Imperial France and you are a piece of English toadshit, which means that I give the orders and you obey them like a lilywhite-arsed conscript. So stop gawping like a novice nun in a gunners’ bath-house and tell me where we’re going!”

“I don’t think we have very much choice,” Frederickson observed drily.

Nor did they. And thus Sharpe was under orders again, back in an army’s discipline, but this time serving a new master: the Emperor of Elba himself, Napoleon.

CHAPTER 13

“Of course the Cardinal wants the money, he’s nothing but a tub of greed, but what high churchman isn’t?” General Calvet spoke quietly to Sharpe. The two men were lying at the crest of a steep ridge from where they could observe the Villa Lupighi which lay on yet a higher hill a mile to the west. They were hidden and shaded by a thick growth of ilex and cypress. Frederickson, Harper and the General’s twelve men were resting among the gnarled trunks of an ancient olive grove that grew in a small valley behind the ilex-covered ridge. “And like every other churchman,” Calvet went on, “the Cardinal wants someone else to do his dirty work for him. In this case, us.”

The Cardinal had done everything he could to make Calvet’s task easier, except betray Ducos’s hiding place. The Cardinal had provided a house in which Calvet and his men could wait for Sharpe’s arrival in Naples. That arrival had been reported by the customs’ officials who had been warned by the Frenchman to expect a tall, black-haired man and a shorter, one-eyed companion. The house where Calvet waited had been very close to the place where the Frenchman had ambushed the three Riflemen. A messenger had come from the city to warn Calvet that three, not two, Englishmen had left on the northern road, and it had been a simple matter for Calvet to wait at the ravine’s northern end. “You’ll notice, though,” Calvet went on, “that the Cardinal has left us alone now.”

“Why?”

Calvet said nothing for a few seconds, but just stared at the Villa Lupighi through an ancient battered telescope. Finally he grunted. “Why? So we conveniently kill Ducos, then the Cardinal can arrest us and keep the money. Which is why, Englishman, we shall have to outguess the bastard.”

Calvet’s idea for outguessing the Cardinal had the virtues of extreme simplicity. The Cardinal must surely plan to waylay Calvet as he withdrew from the villa, and the likeliest places for that ambush would be on any of the roads leading away from the half-ruined house. So Calvet would not leave the villa by road. Instead three of his men would be detached from the assault and sent to the west of the villa where a small village lay on the sea-shore. The three men’s task was to sequester one of the bright-painted and high-prowed fishing boats from the tiny harbour. Two of the three men had been sailors before the collapse of the French Navy had persuaded Napoleon to turn seamen into soldiers, and though their detachment meant sacrificing three precious men from the assault, Calvet was certain the ploy would outwit the Cardinal. “We’ll also attack at night,” Calvet had decided, “because if that fat fool has sent troops, then you can be certain they’re almost as useless as you are.” Raw troops were easily confused by night fighting, which was why, Calvet continued, he had not launched his brigade of conscripts against the Teste de Buch fort during the night. “If I’d had my veterans, Englishman, we’d have gobbled you up that very first night.”

“Many French veterans have tried to kill me,” Sharpe said mildly, “and I’m still here.”

“That’s just the luck of the devil.” Calvet spotted some movement at the villa and went silent as he gazed through the glass. “How did you learn French?” he asked after a while.

“From Madame Castineau.”

“In her bed?”

“No,” Sharpe protested.

“Is she beautiful?” Calvet asked greedily.

Sharpe hesitated. He knew he could deflect Calvet’s impudent enquiries by describing Lucille as very‘ plain, but he suddenly found that he could not so betray her. “I think so,” he said very lamely.

Calvet chuckled at the answer. „I’ll never understand women. They’ll turn down a score of prinked-up thoroughbreds, then flop on to their backsides when some chewed-up mongrel like you or me hangs out his tongue. Mind you, I’m not complaining. I bedded an Italian duchess once, and thought I’d shock her by telling her I was the son of a ditch-digger, but it only made her drag me back to the sheets.“ He shook his head at the memory. ”It was like being mauled by a troop of Cossacks.“

“I told you,” Sharpe lied with fragile dignity, “that I didn’t go to Madame Castineau’s bed.”

“Then why should she try to protect you?” Calvet demanded. He had already confessed to Sharpe that it was Madame Castineau’s unwitting letter that had alerted Napoleon to Ducos’s treachery, and he now described how that letter had tried to exonerate the Riflemen. “She was insistent you were as innocent as a stillborn baby. Why would she say that?”

“Because we are innocent,” Sharpe said, but he felt a thrill of gratitude at such evidence of Lucille’s protective care. Then, to change the subject, he asked whether Calvet was married.