CHAPTER 8

Vygard’s gates were closed, but not locked. At first Sharpe thought the house was deserted, it was so quiet, then he realized no one would leave an empty house with its shutters open. Red roses grew between the windows. The front lawn was newly scythed, the smooth green marked where the blade’s tip had left almost imperceptible wide curves, and the afternoon air was filled with the scent of cut grass.

He walked around the side of the house, past the large stables and coach house, through a flower garden that buzzed with bees, then under an archway cut from a box hedge and found himself on a wide lawn that sloped to a lake. In the middle of the grass, beneath a spreading white parasol, a dark-haired woman lay in a chair. She wore a white dress. A straw hat, decorated with a white ribbon, sat with a discarded newspaper, a handbell and a work basket on a small wicker table. Sharpe stopped, expecting her to challenge him or to call for the servants, but then realized she was asleep. It seemed extraordinary: a woman dreaming away the somnolent afternoon while, not a mile away, cavalrymen were rousting terrified fugitives from ditches and hedgerows.

The back of the house was heavy with wisteria among which a white-painted door stood invitingly open. A basket of pears and crab apples lay on the threshold. Sharpe stepped over it into the cool of a long stone-flagged corridor hung with pictures of churches and castles. A rack held a dozen wlaking sticks and two umbrellas. A dog was sleeping in an alcove. It woke as Sharpe passed, but instead of barking it just thumped its tail on the floor.

He opened a door at random and found himself in a long, elegantly furnished parlor with a white marble chimney breast that made him shudder as he remembered his ordeal in Skovgaard’s flues. The room’s windows overlooked the sleeping woman and Sharpe stood between the thick curtains and wondered who she was. Lavisser’s cousin? She was much too young to be his grandmother. She seemed to have an incongruous musket propped beside her chair, then Sharpe saw it was a pair of crutches. The newspaper on the wicker table, weighted down by the work basket, stirred in the wind.

So where would Lavisser put his gold? Not in this room with its well-stuffed chairs, thick rugs and gilt-framed portraits. Sharpe went into the main hall. A curving white staircase lay to his right and, beyond it, an open door. He peered through the door and found a small parlor that had been turned into a bedroom. Presumably the woman on crutches could not climb the stairs and so a bed had been placed under the window. Books were piled on the white-painted window seat while newspapers lay across the bed and on a heavy leather valise that was overflowing with discarded petticoats. There were initials gilded on the valise’s lid. MLV.

He wondered if the “L” stood for Lavisser, then dismissed the idea, and just then the name Visser came to him. Lavisser, Visser, Madame Visser. And in Skovgaard’s house his last pistol ball had struck someone, provoking a yelp of pain and leaving blood on the floor. The woman in the garden had crutches.

He looked through the valise and found nothing with a name on it. He opened the books, but none was inscribed with an owner’s name, though all, he thought, were in French. He went back to the big parlor and stared through the window at the sleeping woman. She was Lavisser’s accomplice, she was French, she was the enemy. Sharpe reckoned he could spend all day searching the house for gold, but why bother when Madame Visser could probably tell him where it was?

He went back into the passage where the dog thumped its tail in welcome for a second time, crossed the lawn and stood behind the chair where he unslung the rifle from his shoulder. “Madame Visser?” he asked.

“Oui?” She sounded startled, then went silent as she heard the weapon being cocked. She turned very slowly.

“We met last week,” Sharpe said. “I’m the man who shot you.”

“Then I hope you suffer all the torments of hell,” she said calmly. She spoke English well. A disturbingly good-looking woman, Sharpe thought, with an elegant face, dark hair and the eyes of a huntress. Those eyes, instead of showing fear, looked amused now. Her white dress had delicate lace at its neckline and hems and looked so feminine that Sharpe had to remind himself of Ole Skovgaard’s verdict on this woman: merciless, he had said. “So what do you want?” she asked.

“Where is Lavisser’s gold?”

She laughed. Not a pretend laugh, but genuine laughter. “Lieutenant Sharpe, isn’t it? Major Lavisser told me your name. Sharpe. Not very appropriate, is it?” She looked him up and down. “So were you fighting up the hill?”

“Wasn’t much of a fight.”

“I can’t imagine it was. Proper troops against farm boys, what does one expect? But my husband will be very disappointed. He and his friend rode up to watch. Did you see them? Perhaps you shot two gentlemen on horseback while you were culling the peasantry?” She was still twisted awkwardly in the chair. “Why don’t you stand in front of me,” she suggested, “where I can see your face properly.”

Sharpe moved, keeping the rifle pointed at her.

Madame Visser still seemed amused rather than frightened by the weapon’s threat. “Did you really come to find the gold? Major Lavisser probably took it with him and if that’s all you came for then you might as well go away again.”

“I think it’s here,” Sharpe said.

“Then you are a fool,” she said and reached out for the small handbell on the wicker table. She picked it up but did not ring it. “So what are you going to do, fool? Shoot me?”

“I did once, why not again?”

“I don’t think you will,” she said, then rang the bell vigorously. “There,” she exclaimed, “I’m still alive.”

Sharpe found her good looks unsettling. He lowered the rifle’s muzzle. “Where did I shoot you?”

“In the leg,” she said. “You have given me a scar on the thigh and I think I hate you.”

“Should have been in your head,” Sharpe said.

“But the wound does well,” she went on. “Thank you for asking.” She turned as a sleepy-eyed servant girl came from the house. She spoke to the girl in Danish and the maid curtseyed and then ran back indoors. “I’ve sent for help,” Madame Visser said, “so if you have any sense you’ll leave now.”

She was right, Sharpe thought. He should leave, but the gold was a lure and finding it would be a sweet revenge on Lavisser. “I’m looking for the bastard’s gold,” he told her, “and you can send for all the servants you want.” He used the rifle’s muzzle to open the work basket that weighted the newspaper.

“You think I keep a thousand guineas in there?” Madame Visser asked with amusement.

Sharpe had been looking for a pistol, but the only things in the basket were folded papers and a lethally long hatpin. He backed away. “A thousand guineas?” he asked. “What about the other forty-two thousand?”

For the first time since he had woken her Madame Visser looked discomfited. “Forty-two thousand?”

“He stole forty-three thousand guineas,” Sharpe said. “What did he tell you? That it was a thousand?” She said nothing and he knew he had surprised her. “So which room did he use here?” he asked her.

She shrugged. “Upstairs, I suppose.” She frowned at Sharpe. “Forty-three thousand?” She sounded disbelieving.

“All except for fifteen guineas that I stole off him.”

“I imagine he took it to Copenhagen,” Madame Visser said.

“Or hid it here,” Sharpe said.

She nodded. “There are cellars and attics.” She shrugged. “What will you do with it?”

“Return it to the British.”

Madame Visser smiled. “I think, Lieutenant, you will keep it. And my silence will cost you five thousand.”

He backed away. “Cheap, aren’t you?”

She just smiled and blew him a kiss. He still backed away, unsure whether she had a pistol hidden under her skirts, but she did not move, just watched as he went back into the house.