Sharpes Sword   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

Curtis smiled gently. “I’m eminent, dreadfully eminent, and I’m asking you to do me a kindness.”

Sharpe did not move, still unwilling to walk into the circle of elegant officers. “Who needs reassurance?”

“An acquaintance. I don’t think you’ll regret the experience. Are you married?”

Sharpe nodded, not understanding. “Yes.”

“By Mother Church, I hope?”

“As it happens, yes.”

“You surprise me, and please me.” Sharpe was not sure whether Curtis was teasing him. The priest’s bushy eyebrows went up. “It does help, you see.”

“Help?”

“Temptations of the flesh, Captain. I am sometimes very grateful to God that he has allowed me to grow old and immune to them. Please come.”

Sharpe followed him, curious, and Curtis stopped suddenly. “I don’t have the pleasure of your name, Captain.”

“Sharpe. Richard Sharpe.”

Curtis smiled. “Really? Sharpe? Well, well!” He did not give Sharpe any time to react to his apparent recognition. “Come on then, Sharpe! And don’t go all jellified!”

With that mysterious injunction Curtis found a way through the horses and Sharpe followed him. There must have been two dozen officers, at least, but they were not, as Sharpe had first thought, crowded around Wellington. They were looking at an open carriage, pointing away from Sharpe, and it was to the side of the carriage that Curtis led him.

Someone, Sharpe thought, was indecently rich. Four white horses stood patiently in the carriage traces, a powdered-wigged driver sat on the bench, a footman, in the same livery, on a platform behind. The horses’ traces were of silver chain. The carriage itself was polished to a sheen that would have satisfied the most meticulous Sergeant Major. The lines of the carriage, which Sharpe supposed was a new-fangled barouche, were picked out in silver paint on dark blue. A coat of arms decorated the door, a shield so often quartered that the small devices contained in its many compartments were indistinguishable except at very close inspection. The occupant, though, would have stunned at full rifle range.

She was fair haired, unusual in Spain, and fair skinned, and she wore a dress of dazzling whiteness so that she seemed to be the brightest, most luminous object in the whole of Salamanca’s golden square. She was leaning back on the cushions, one white arm negligently laid on the carriage side, and her eyes seemed languid and amused, bored even, as though she were used to such daily and lavish adulation.