CHAPTER 13

Most Londoners claimed that the Vauxhall Gardens were past their prime, that the delights of London's oldest pleasure garden were faded, mere shadows of outrageous past joys, yet Sharpe had always liked Vauxhall. As a child he had come here from the rookery, sent to pick pockets in its shadowed walks and about its extraordinary pavilions, grottoes, lodges, temples, statues, and porticos. It was lit by a myriad of lamps, mostly shaped as stars or sickle moons, lamps that were strung among the trees at different heights so that, from any part of the garden, it seemed as if a visitor walked like a giant amongst a galaxy.

He had been summoned here, brought by a scented note written in a woman's hand that reminded him of startling green eyes. He had been at the Rose Tavern, reunited with d'Alembord, Price and Harper when the note had come. There was one other piece of mail for him, waiting since the day he had fled London, a great embossed piece of gilded card that ordered Major Richard Sharpe to attend upon His Royal Highness, the Prince Regent, at ten in the forenoon of Saturday, 21st August, at the Reviewing Stand by The Ring in Hyde Park. Sharpe, sourly thinking of the joys of watching garrison troops re-enact a battle at which none had been present, had pushed the card into his pouch. Then had come the scented letter, the mysterious summons to these gaudy, heady, music-filled gardens.

Vauxhall was crowded this night. All kinds of persons came here, from the highest to the lowest, to this place where the titled and rich mixed with anyone who could pay the few pence admission. Many of the women, and a few of the men, wore cheap black masks. Some women carried their masks on short sticks, holding them before a face that would be recognised. Others were masked in the hope that onlookers would think the hidden face famous. It was a place for fantasies, where the dim lights disguised tawdry clothes, and the plaster grotesques fleshed out hopeful dreams.

The letter had named no place in the garden, nor any time for a rendezvous, and Sharpe walked slowly through the great spread of pleasures. He looked at each masked face, but if the woman who had sent him the letter was here, he saw no sign of her. Two soldiers saluted him, but other soldiers in the crowd, seeing an officer approach, pretended not to notice him so that they would not have to diminish themselves in the eyes of their girls by giving a salute. He passed the central pavilion, four storeys high, in which an orchestra played about the base of the great organ. Couples danced beneath the lamps. A woman, on an elevated stage, sang a sentimental song. Beneath the pavilion's canopies one of Vauxhall’s restaurants did brisk business.

He went down one of the long, gravelled walks between the intricate hedges which, within their depths, held small, private chambers where couples could retire. Children learned the arts of stalking among these hedges. He saw them now, creeping into angles of the neatly cut box to watch the lovemaking.

He passed a lodge built beside a fountain. The pool of the fountain was thick with rubbish, but at night, under the coloured lamps, the dirty water was glazed with magical gold. A statue of a naked goddess smiled at him from beside the lodge door, while, from one of the private rooms within, came the sound of a violin. One of those rooms was unshuttered and, through the open windows, Sharpe saw three young women sipping wine and looking invitingly and expensively towards the strollers beyond the fountain.

The pigeons of Vauxhall kept revellers' hours. They strutted on the walks, knowing there were more pickings when the lamps were lit than during the empty hours of daylight. Children chased them fruitlessly. Sharpe turned back towards the beckoning sound of the orchestra in the central pavilion, and, in the warm night, he wondered if it was cold in the high passes of the Pyrenees. Even in summer there could be bitter nights in those hills where the French, so surprisingly, had launched a counter-attack on Wellington. The newspaper had hinted that the attack had been repulsed, but Sharpe wished he was there to know for certain. He wondered what the men left in Pasajes would think if they could see him now, strolling in London's careless pleasures while they listened to the distant guns that besieged San Sebastian.

He shook off the whores who fell into step with him, refused the hawkers who tried to sell him confections or toffeed apples, and stalked like a dark figure through the gaudy crowds. His scarred face, that still bore the marks of Girdwood's cane, was grim in this place of music and discreet sin. He felt as out of place here now as he had in Carlton House. He looked at laughing faces, drunken faces, sad faces, and tried to work out what lives those faces hid. Were they clerks and seamstresses snatching a few hours pleasure from a long, drab life? What worries did they have? Did they care that the French had come south again, that the British had repulsed them, that men died in the Spanish rocks? He thought not. London, like England, welcomed victories but wanted nothing more to do with the war. Even Isabella, Harper's wife, had noticed it. No one was interested. No one cared about the fate of the soldiers. Isabella wanted to go back with her husband, pleading with him not to leave her in this fat, rich city where no one cared and no one understood and where she would be ignorant of her husband's life or death.

Sharpe bought himself some ale and took it to the edge of a pool. He sat and watched the real gentlemen, laughing confidently as they strode, long canes in their gloved hands, among the lesser folk. He was not welcome among their kind. He knew that. He was welcome in Spain, for there he won battles and was judged by the standards of bullet and blade, but here, in London, he was made to feel clumsy beside Sir William Lawford's suaveness. Even in Carlton House, where he had been so flattered by the Prince, he had been nothing more than a freak on show like the Siamese Twins or Bearded Lady of the hiring fair. He was useful because he was ruthless. He saw it sometimes in the faces of men in Spain, men who were appalled by what he did, yet glad that he did it.

'Got a penny, Colonel?

A small boy, no more than six, with a grubby face and torn trousers, stared belligerently at Sharpe. The child, as Sharpe used to do, had climbed the wall, risking the broken glass embedded in its top. Would the boy believe him, he wondered, if he told him that the «Colonel» had once been one of the ragged urchins who came here to steal? 'What do you want it for?

'Something to eat.

'Just one. If you ask me for another I'll clout your head off. And if you send your friends to ask me I'll come and find you and bite your eyes out. Understand?

The boy grinned. 'Tuppence?

Sharpe gave him a penny. 'Now bugger off.

'Want a girl, Colonel?

'I said bugger off! The boy fled, going to buy gin as Sharpe had known he would.

He thought of Jane Gibbons, and the memory of her made him feel guilty that he had come so expectantly to these gardens to meet another woman. He wondered, for the hundredth time, why he was so sure he must marry her. He did not know her, indeed, he had met her now just three times. He knew nothing of her, except that she was beautiful and she had helped him. He recalled her face, mischievous, so full of life, so lovely as she had spoken to him on the boathouse steps, yet what, he asked himself as the parade of fashion and display went past him, could he offer her? Ruthlessness? The talent to demand mens' death to defeat the French?

What use was he? He could send a skirmish chain forward, he could impose their fire on the enemy, and he could kill. Year after year, nineteen years in all, he had killed. He knew when to kill, when not to kill, and he thought, as he looked at the vacuous faces and listened to the empty laughter, that these were the people he fought for. And again, as he watched a young man drunkenly dance some ludicrous steps in front of a laughing girl, he knew that, should he have been born in France instead of England, he would have worn the red epaulettes of the French voltigeurs with the same pride as he wore his green jacket and he would have killed the British officers of the skirmish line with the same skill with which he now made Napoleon's light troops leaderless.