Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe's Revenge, Sharpe's Waterloo, Sharpe's Devil (23 page)

‘Run, Maman!’ Henri pushed his mother towards the château. ‘Lucille! The bell! Ring the bell!’ He turned after his mother and tried to shield her with his body.

The tallest of the two men fired first and his bullet entered Lassan’s back between two of his lower ribs. The bullet was deflected upwards, exploding his heart into bloody shreds, then flattened itself on the inside of his breastbone. As he fell he pushed his mother in the small of her back, making her stumble down to her knees.

The Dowager turned to see the second man’s gun pointed at her. She stared defiantly. ‘Animal!’

The second man fired and his bullet smacked through the Dowager’s right eye and into her brain.

Mother and son were dead.

Lucille came to the kitchen door and screamed.

The two men climbed the barricade and walked into the château’s yard. There were other shapes in the darkness behind them.

Lucille ran back into the kitchen where her cousins were struggling to their feet. One of the cousins, less drunk than his companions, drew his pistol, cocked it, and went to the door from where he saw the dark shapes at the far side of the yard. He fired. Lucille pushed him aside and raised the great blunderbuss that was kept loaded and ready above the soap vats. She cocked it, then fired it at the murderers. The butt hammered with brutal pain into her shoulder. One of the two killers shouted with agony as he was hit. The other two cousins pushed past Lucille and ran into the darkness, but a fusillade of gunfire from beyond the moat made them drop to the cobblestones. The bullets smacked into the château’s ancient stone wall. Marie, the kitchen-maid, was screaming. The geese were hissing and stretching their necks. The dogs in the barn were barking fit to wake the dead.

Lucille snatched up an ancient battered horse-pistol, dragged back its cock, and ran towards the dark shapes that crouched over the bodies of her mother and brother. ‘Stop her!’ a deep voice called in French from beyond the moat, and one of her cousins, as if obeying the voice, stood up and caught Lucille about the waist and dragged her down on to the cobbles just as three more weapons fired from beyond the moat. The bullets whiplashed over Lucille and her cousin. She raised her head to see the two men who had killed her family climbing back over the barricade. She had wounded one of them, but not badly. Lucille was crying, screaming for her mother, but she saw in the moonlight that the men who escaped her vengeance wore green coats. The men in green! The English devils who had haunted her brother had come back in an evil night to finish their foul work. She howled like a dog at their retreating shapes, then fired the pistol at the retreating killers. Scraps of exploding powder from the pistol’s pan burned her face, and the flash dazzled her.

The dogs in the barn were scrabbling at the door. Marie was sobbing. A servant ran to the chapel bell and began to toll the alarm. Villagers, alerted by the gunfire and harried by the bell’s frantic noise, swarmed through the château’s main arch. Some carried lanterns, all carried weapons. Those with guns blazed to the east where the attackers had long disappeared. The villagers’ gunfire did more damage to the dairy and the château’s orchards than to the murderers.

Lucille, weeping helplessly, pushed through the villagers to where her mother and brother lay in a pool of lantern-light. The village priest had covered the Dowager’s face with a handkerchief. The old woman’s black dress was soaked with blood that shone in the yellow light.

Henri Lassan lay on his back. His fine suit of clothes had been cut with knives, almost as if his murderers had thought that he kept coins in his coat seams. His old engraved sword had been stolen. Strangest of all was the presence of a short-handled axe beside his body. The cheap axe had been used to hack off two fingers from Henri Lassan’s right hand. The job had been done clumsily, so that his thumb and third finger were half severed as well. There was no sign of the two missing fingers.

The priest thought the disfigurement must have been done in the cause of Satanism. There had been an outbreak of devil worship in the Norman hills not many years before, and the Bishop had warned against a revival of the foul practice. The priest crossed himself, but kept his opinion to himself. Sufficient unto the night was the evil already done.

Lucille, already widowed, and now orphaned and denied her good brother’s life, wept like an inconsolable child while the chapel bell still tolled its useless message to an empty night.

For three days Lucille Castineau wept and would not be comforted. The
curé
tried, the local doctor tried, and her cousins tried. It was all in vain. Only after the funeral did she show some of her old spirit when she saddled her brother’s horse, took his new pistol from his study, and rode to the far side of Seleglise where she fired shot after shot into the thick woodland.

Then she went home where she ordered both wooden bridges over the moat to be dismantled. It was a horrific job, for the timbers were massive, and it was even a pointless job, for the damage had already been done, but the farm workers, with help from the villagers, sawed through the great pieces of wood that were taken away to strengthen barns, byres, and cottages. Then Lucille had a notice posted on the church door, and another posted on the door of the church at Seleglise, which promised a reward of two hundred francs for information which would lead to the capture and death of the Englishmen who had murdered her family.

The villagers believed that the widow Castineau was distraught to temporary madness, for there was no evidence that the killers had been English and, indeed, the kitchen-maid swore she had heard a voice call out in French. A very deep voice, Marie remembered distinctly, a real devil’s voice, she said, but Lucille insisted that it had been Englishmen who had committed the murders, and so the reward notices faded in the sunlight and curled in the night’s dew. Lucille had sworn she would sell the upper orchards to raise the reward money if someone would just lead her to revenge.

One week after the funerals Madame Pellemont arrived with her family lawyer and an impudent claim that half the château’s estate, and half the château itself, properly belonged to her daughter who had gone through a betrothal ceremony with the dead Comte de Lassan. Lucille listened in apparent patience, then, when at last the lawyer politely requested her response, she opened her brother’s drawer, took out the silver-hilted pistol, and threatened to shoot both Madame Pellemont and her lawyer if they did not leave her home immediately. They hesitated, and it was said that Lucille’s voice could be heard in the sexton’s house beyond the blacksmith’s shop as she screamed at them to leave the château.

Madame Pellemont and her lawyer left, and the silver-hilted pistol, which turned out to be unloaded, was thrown after them. It lay in the road for three hours before anyone dared to pick it up.

Lucille’s father-in-law, old General Castineau, came all the way from Bourges to sympathize with her. The General had only one leg; his other had been lost to an Austrian cannonball. He sat for hours with Lucille. He told her she should marry again, that every woman needed a husband, and, because he was a widower, and because he was sentimental, and because he saw in Lucille what his sharp-eyed son had once seen, he offered himself. Lucille turned him down, though so gently that the old General had no chance to take offence.

General Castineau also assured her that it was most unlikely for any Englishmen to have killed Henri and the Dowager.

‘I saw them,’ Lucille insisted.

‘You saw men in green. Every country’s army has men in green coats. Our own dragoons wear green. Or wore green. God knows what they’ll wear now.’

‘Those men were English.’

The General tried to explain that the English were hardly likely to be in Normandy since their army had invaded the south of France and had already been evacuated from Bordeaux. A few Englishmen had been with the allies who reached Paris, but not many. And anyway, why should an Englishman seek out this family? He begged Lucille to give the question her most serious attention.

‘They were English,’ Lucille said stubbornly.

The General sighed. ‘Marie tells me you’re not eating.’

Lucille ignored his concern, preferring her own. ‘I hate the English.’

‘That’s understandable,’ General Castineau said soothingly, though from all he had heard it was better to be captured by the English than by the Russians, and he was about to expatiate on that grisly theme when he remembered that Lucille was hardly in a receptive frame of mind for such reflections. ‘You should eat,’ he said sternly. ‘I’ve ordered a dish of lentil soup for you today.’

‘If the Englishmen come back,’ she said, ‘I’ll kill them.’

‘Quite right, quite right, but if you don’t eat you won’t have the strength to kill them.’

That remark made Lucille look shrewdly at the General, almost as though he had propounded a peculiarly difficult idea, but one which made surprising sense. She nodded agreement. ‘You’re right, Papa,’ and at lunchtime she wolfed down all the lentil soup, then carved herself a thick slice of the ham that the General had been hoping to carry off the next day in his saddlebag.

That evening the General met privately with the doctor and both men agreed that the terrible events had sadly disturbed Madame Castineau’s wits. The doctor could think of no easy cure, unless Madame Castineau could be persuaded to take the waters, which sometimes worked, but which were horribly expensive. Otherwise, he said, nature and time must do the healing. ‘Or marriage,’ the doctor said with a certain wistfulness, ‘Madame needs a man’s touch, if you understand me.’

‘She won’t marry again,’ General Castineau opined. ‘She was too much in love with my son, and now she’d rather wither away than dilute his memory. It’s a sad waste, Doctor.’

General Castineau left next morning, though he made certain that there would always be reliable men from the village in the château in case the brigands should return and, indeed, just two hours after the General had left, five strange horsemen approached from the northern road that dropped off the wooded ridge and the farmworkers ran to the château’s entrance with loaded muskets and hefted pitchforks.

The strange horsemen approached slowly, with their hands held in clear view. They stopped a good few yards from the moat’s bridge and their leader, a plump man, politely requested an audience with Monsieur the Comte de Lassan.

‘He’s dead.’ It was the miller’s son who answered truculently.

Monsieur Roland, the advocate from Paris, eyed the ancient musket in the boy’s hands and chose his next words very carefully. ‘Then I would like to speak with a member of his family, Monsieur? My name is Roland, and I have the honour to be a lawyer in the service of his Most Christian Majesty.’

The words, gently said, impressed the miller’s son who ran to tell Madame Castineau that yet another gentleman had come to see her.

Roland, whose rump had been made excruciatingly sore by long days in the saddle, walked with Lucille in the orchards. His four men patrolled the edges of the trees with drawn pistols to deter any strangers from intruding on the discussion.

Roland explained that he was charged by the Royal Treasury with the recovery of a sum of gold stolen by the English. The coins had been deposited in the Teste de Buch fort, and Roland had come to Normandy to hear Commandant Lassan’s evidence about the loss of the bullion. He was desolated, Roland repeated the word, desolated, to hear of the Commandant’s death.

‘Murder,’ Lucille corrected him.

‘Murder,’ Roland humbly accepted the correction.

‘The English murdered him,’ Lucille said. ‘The men in green coats. The Riflemen.’

Roland stopped his slow pacing and turned an astonished face on the widow. ‘Are you certain, Madame?’

Lucille, galled that no one believed her, turned in fury on the plump lawyer. ‘Monsieur, I am sure! I am sure! I saw them! They were men in green coats, Englishmen just like those my brother feared, and they murdered my mother and my brother. They are animals, Monsieur, animals! My brother had said they might come, and they did! He even knew the Englishman’s name. Sharpe!’

‘I think you are right, Madame,’ Roland said quietly, and Lucille, who till now had not been taken seriously by a single person, could only stare at the Parisian lawyer. ‘In fact I am sure you are right,’ Roland added.

‘You believe me, Monsieur?’ Lucille said in a very relieved and somewhat surprised voice.

‘I do believe you. These are ruthless men, Madame. Believe me, I have met this Sharpe.’ Roland shuddered. ‘He and his comrade have stolen a fortune that belongs to France, and now they will try to kill the men who can testify to that theft. I should have thought to warn your brother. Alas, dear lady, that I did not think to do so.’

Lucille shook her head in denial of the lawyer’s self accusation. ‘Henri mentioned no gold,’ she said after a while.

‘A soldier should carry secrets well, and the existence of this gold was most secret.’ Roland, sweating profusely in the spring sunshine, turned and walked back towards the château. ‘I do not think the Englishmen will return now,’ he said soothingly.

‘I wish they would return.’ Lucille alarmed the lawyer by revealing an enormous brass-muzzled horse-pistol that lay heavy in the wide pocket of her apron. ‘If they do return, Monsieur, I shall kill at least one of them.’

‘Leave the killing to those who know best how to do it.’ Roland, knowing this visit was wasted, was eager to return to Caen where there was at least a vestige of civilization. He feared that Lucille would invite him to luncheon, and that the château’s evident poverty would provide a most meagre meal, but, to his relief, Lucille made no such offer.

Roland mounted his horse at the château’s entrance. He had given Madame Castineau his address, and begged her to write to him if the Englishmen returned, though he admitted he put small faith in such a thing happening. Nevertheless, looking down at the sad Lucille, he felt a pang of sympathy. ‘May I presume to give Madame advice?’