Sharpe's Regiment (9 page)

‘Who are you?’

‘Where do I find Maggie Joyce?’ He did not raise his voice, but the crippled pimp heard the savagery, the threat, and he covered the knife blade with his left hand to show he meant no harm. ‘You know Bennet’s place?’

‘I know it.’

‘She runs it.’

The news confirmed what Sharpe had learned from a beggar outside the Rose Tavern and, in thanks, he gave the girl a coin. She would be dead, probably, before she was eighteen.

The place stank worse than he remembered. All the filth of these lives was poured into the streets, the dung, urine, and dead mixed with the scum in the gutters. He found, that by not even thinking about it, he could still thread the labyrinth into which criminals disappeared with such ease.

No one dared chase a man into these alleys, not unless he had friends to help him inside. It would have taken an army to flush out these dark, chill places. Here the poor, who had nothing, were lords. This was their miserable kingdom, and their pride was in their reputation for savagery, and their protection lay in the fact that no one, unless he was a fool, would date walk these passages. Here poverty ruled, and crime was its servant, and every night there were murders, and rapes, and thefts, and maimings, and not one criminal would ever be betrayed because the strictest code of the rookery was silence.

Men watched Sharpe pass. They eyed his boots, his sword, his sash, and the cloth of his jacket. Any one of those things could be sold for a shilling or more, and a shilling in St Giles was a treasure worth killing for. They eyed the big leather bag that he carried, a bag that, except during the skirmish at Tolosa when it had been guarded by Isabella, had not left either Sharpe or Harper’s side. The men of the rookery also saw Sharpe’s eyes, his scars, the size of him, and though some men spat close to his boots as he walked slowly through the dark, damp alleys, none raised a hand against him.

He came to a torch that flared in an old, rusted bracket above a brief flight of steps. Women sat on the steps. They had gin bottles in one hand, babies in the other. One had lost an eye, another was bleeding from her scalp, while two clasped sucking children to their bare breasts as Sharpe climbed the stairs and pushed open a much-mended wooden door.

The room he entered was lit by tallow candles that drooped from iron hooks in the ceiling. It was crowded with men and women, children too, all drinking the gin that was the cheapest escape from the rookery. They fell silent as he entered. Their faces were hostile.

He pushed through them. He kept one hand firmly on his pouch in which were a few coins and his other hand gripped the neck of the stiff leather bag which was the reason for his visit to this place. He growled once, when a man refused to move, and when the customers saw that the tall, well-dressed soldier was not afraid of them, they moved reluctantly to let him pass. He went towards the back of the room, pressing through a stink equal to the stench of Carlton House, towards a table, well lit by candles, on which were ranked rows of gin bottles either side of an ale barrel. Two men, with scarred, implacable faces, guarded the table. One carried a bell-mouthed horse-pistol, the other a cudgel. Some of the customers were jeering Sharpe now, shouting at him to get out.

A woman sat behind the table, a massive woman with a face like stone and arms like twisted ropes. She had red hair, going grey, that was twisted back into a bun. Beside her, against the wall, was a second, iron-tipped cudgel. She stared at him with hostility. ‘What do you want, soldier?’ she sneered at him. Officers did not come here to mock the poverty of a rookery with their tailor-made clothes.

‘Maggie?’

She looked at him suspiciously. Knowing her name meant nothing, everyone in the rookery knew Maggie Joyce; gin goddess, midwife, procuress, and eight times a widow. She had grown fat, Sharpe saw, fat as a barrel, but he guessed that the bulk was hard muscle and not soft flesh. Her hair was going white, her face was lined and hard, yet he knew she was no more than three years older than himself. She jerked her head at one of her two guards, making him step closer to the soldier, then glared at Sharpe. ‘Who are you?’

Sharpe smiled. ‘Where’s Tom?’

‘Who are you?’ Her voice was hard as steel.

He took his shako off and smiled chidingly at her. ‘Maggie!’ He said it as if she had wounded him by her forgetfulness.

She frowned at him. She looked at the officer’s sash, the leather bag, the sword, up to his high, black collared neck and to his scarred, hard face, and suddenly, almost alarmingly, she wept. ‘Dear Christ, it’s yourself?’ She had never lost the accent of Kilkenny, the only legacy her parents had given to her, besides a quick wit and an indomitable strength. ‘Dick?’ She said it with utter disbelief.

‘It’s myself.’ He did not know whether to laugh or cry.

She reached over the table, clasped him, and the astonished gin-drinkers watched in awed surprise as the officer held her back. She shook her head. ‘Dear God, look at the man! You an officer?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dear Christ on the cross! They’ll make me into the bloody Pope next! You’ll take some gin.’

‘I’ll take some gin.’ He put his shako on the table. ‘Tom?’

‘He’s dead, darling. Dead these ten winters. Christ, look at yourself! Will you be wanting a bed?’

He smiled. ‘I’m at the Rose.’

She wiped her eyes. ‘There was a time, Dick Sharpe, when my bed was all you ever wanted. Come round here. Leave those sinners to gawp at you.’

He sat beside her on the bench. He put the bag on the floor, stretched his long legs under the crude counter, and Maggie Joyce stared at him in astonishment. ‘Oh Christ! But you look good in yourself!’ She laughed at him, and he let his hand rest in hers. Maggie Joyce had been a mother to him once, rescuing him when he ran away from the foundling home, and he had known her when she had first gone onto the streets. Later, when he had become skilled at opening locked doors, she would come back in the dawn and climb into his bed and teach him the ways of the world. She had been lithe then, as sharp a whip as any in the rookery.

She had tears in her eyes. ‘Christ, and I thought you were long gone to hell!’

‘No.’ He laughed.

They both laughed, perhaps for what had been and what might have been, and while they laughed, and while she took the small coins from her customers and poured gin into their tin cups, the two men who had followed Richard Sharpe from Drury Lane stood unnoticed at the back wall and watched him. Two men, one swathed in a greatcoat despite the warm night, the other a native of this rookery. Both men had weapons, the skill to use them, and much, much patience. They waited.

The two men, by not ambushing Sharpe on his way to Maggie Joyce‘s, had lost a fortune.

In Maggie’s back room Sharpe unlaced the leather bag and spilt, onto her table, a king’s ransom in diamonds. She stared at it, poking at the gems with a finger, as if she could not believe what she saw, ‘Christ in his heaven, Dick! Real?’

‘Real.’

‘Mary, Mother of God!’ She picked up a necklace of filigreed gold, hung with pearls and diamonds. ‘Clean?’

‘Clean.’

Which was not utterly true, yet the owners of the jewellery had no claim on it now. This was part of the plunder of Vitoria, the treasure of an empire that had been abandoned by the French in their panic to escape Wellington’s victory. Men had become rich that day, and none richer than Sharpe and Harper who had taken these diamonds from a field of gold and pearls, silks and silver. Maggie Joyce delved into the heap of treasure that had once dazzled the aristocracy of the Spanish court. ‘You’re a rich man, Dick Sharpe. You know that?’

He laughed. This was a soldier’s luck and that, he knew only too well, could turn sour in the flash of a musket’s pan. ‘Can you sell them for me?’

‘Sure and I can!’ She held a ring to the light of a candle. ‘Would you remember Cross-Eyed Moses?’

‘Green coat and a big stick?’

‘That’s him. His son, now, he’s your man. I’ll have him do it for you. You’ll get a better price if you’re patient.’ She was pushing the jewels back into the bag.

‘Take as long as you like.’

Sharpe could have let Messrs Hopkinson, his army agents, handle the jewels, but he did not trust them to give him full value, any more than he would have trusted the fashionable jewellers of West London. Maggie Joyce, a queen in this kingdom of crime, was one of his own people and it was unthinkable that she would cheat him. She would take her commission on the sale, and that he expected, but rather her than the supercilious merchants who would see the Rifleman as a sheep to be fleeced.

She pushed the bag into a cupboard that seemed filled with rags. ‘Would you be wanting money now, Dick?’

‘No.’ There had been gold at Vitoria too, so much gold that the coins had spilt into the mud to be reddened by the setting sun. He had put a year’s salary of French gold into the army agent’s safe, money that he would live on while in England and which would gather interest when he returned to Spain. He wrote down Messrs Hopkinson’s address for Maggie Joyce. ‘That’s where you put the money, Maggie. In my name.’ He and Harper would split the proceeds later.

She laughed. ‘Christ, Dick, but you always were a lucky bastard! When I first saw you I didn’t know whether to drown you or eat you, you were that skinny, but the good Lord told me to be kind to you. Ah, Christ, and He was right! Now, are you going to get drunk with me?’

He was, and he did; splendidly, laughingly drunk, and even the problems of a lying Lord Fenner disappeared in the haze of gin and half-forgotten stories that were embroidered by Maggie’s Irish skill into great sagas of youthful lawlessness.

He left her late. The city bells were ringing a quarter to three, and his head was spinning with too much gin and too much smoke in a small room. Even the stinking alleyway smelt good to him. ‘You take care of yourself!’ she called after him. ‘And bring yourself back soon!’

It was dark as sin in the alleys. There was a moon, but small light got past the high, narrow houses that seemed to lean together at their tops.

Sharpe was drunk, and he knew it. He was happy, too, made sentimental by a visit to a past he had half forgotten. He crossed a small court, went under an archway, and it seemed to him now that the rookery, instead of being a foul place of poverty and disease, was a warm, intricate warren of friendly, caring people. He laughed aloud. God damn all Lords! Especially lying bastards of politicians. He decided he hated no one, no single evil soul in all the whole mad world, as much as he hated bloody politicians.

The two men who followed him were sensibly cautious, but not apprehensive. They had been astonished when the officer had come into the rookery, for one of them was a killer hired from these very alleyways, and their victim had been foolish enough to come into the one place where his death would be easy and unquestioned. No Bow Street Runner dared enter the St Giles Rookery.

The two men knew who their victim was, but the knowledge did not worry them. These men did not fear a soldier, not even a famous soldier, and certainly not a drunken one. No man, however fast and skilled with weapons, could resist an ambush. Sharpe would be dead before he even knew that he was in danger.

Sharpe was unaware of them. Instead of their footsteps he listened to the crying children. That was a memory that came swamping back. The rookery was always full of children crying, small children, for once they had reached four or five they had learned not to cry. The sound made him think of his own daughter, orphaned in Spain, and that thought was maudlin. He rested against a wall.

There were few people about. The rookery, he knew, was alive and watching, but only a few whores were in the alleys, either against walls or coming home from Drury Lane. Their men, the hard masters who took their pence, stood in small groups where a torch lit a patch of mud and brick.

He took a deep breath. The last time he had been as drunk as this was in Burgos Castle, the night before the explosion, and the war in Spain suddenly seemed a long, long way off, as though it belonged to another man’s life. He walked on, crossing one of the open ditches that ran with sludge thick as blood in the darkness.

He heard feet running behind him and he turned, always knowing to face a strange sound, and he saw a girl come from under the archway, stop, turn, and then walk awkwardly towards him. She had a scarf wrapped about a thin face that was bright-eyed with consumption. It. was odd, he thought, how the dying consumptives went through a period of lucent beauty before their lungs coughed up the bloody lumps and they died in racking agony.

She crossed the ditch, raising her skirts, then clumsily swayed her hips as she came close to him. The smile she gave him was nervous. ‘Lonely?’

‘No.’ He smiled back. He assumed she had seen him pass and had been sent to take some coins from the rich-looking officer to make up her night’s earnings.

To his surprise she put her thin arms up to his neck, her cheek on his cheek, and pressed her body against his. ‘Maggie sent me. Two men followed you and they’re behind you.’ She said it in a garbled rush.

He held her. To his right there was a gateway. He remembered it opened into an entranceway that ran between two houses. At its far end was a stairway that climbed to an old garret. A Jew had lived there, it was odd how the memories came back, a Jew who had worn his hair in long ringlets and had walked about with his nose deep into books. The rookery had left the old man alone, knowing him to be harmless, but after his death it was rumoured that a thousand gold guineas had been found in his room. The rookery was always full of such rumours. ‘Come with me.’

He took her hand. He laughed aloud as if he was carelessly drunk, but the girl’s message had sobered him as fast as a French twelve pounder shot smashing the air close to him. He took her through the gate, into the alley, and into the deep shadows by the wooden stairway.