JК
Sharpes Sword :: Корнуэлл Бернард
Страница: 73 из 213Any man, he supposed, could get a tailor to dress him like a lord, but it was not just a question of money. How did a man learn which of a dozen knives and forks to pick up first? Or how to dance? Or how to make light conversation with a Marquesa, joke with a Bishop, or how, even, to give orders to a butler? They said it was in the blood of a man’s birth, ordained by God, yet upstarts like Napoleon Bonaparte had come from low birth to the glittering pinnacle of the richest country on earth. He had asked Major Leroy once, the loyalist American, if there was no social distinction in the fledgling United States, but the Major had laughed, spat out a shred of cheroot, and intoned solemnly to Sharpe. “‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ You know what that is?“
“No.”
“The rebels’ Declaration of Independence.” Leroy had spat another tobacco shred from his tongue. “Half the bastards who signed it had slaves, the other half would run a mile rather than shake the hand of a slaughterman. No. I give them fifty years and they’ll all want titles. Barons of Boston and Dukes of New York. It’ll happen.”
And Sharpe, standing in the shards of a myriad refracted candle flames, guessed Leroy was right. If you took every person in this room and abandoned them, Robinson Crusoe style, on an empty island, then inside a year there would be a duke, five barons, and the rest would be serfs. Even the French had brought back the aristocracy! They had murdered it first, as they murdered La Marquesa’s parents, and now Bonaparte was making his Marshals into Princes of this and Dukes of that and his poor, honest brother had been made into King of Spain!
Sharpe looked at the sweating faces over tight collars, the thick thighs laced tight in military uniforms, the ridiculous costumes of the women. Take away the money, he supposed, and they would look like anyone else, softer perhaps, flabbier, but the money, and the birth, gave them something that he lacked. An assurance? An ease of moving through the rich waters of society? Then should he bother? He could walk away from the army, when the war was done, and Teresa would have a home for him in Casatejada among the wide fields that were her family’s property. He need never say ‘my lord’ again, or ‘sir’, or feel belittled by an elegant fool, and he felt an anger inside him at the unfairness of life and, at the same time, a determination that one day he would have them respecting him.
“No.”
“The rebels’ Declaration of Independence.” Leroy had spat another tobacco shred from his tongue. “Half the bastards who signed it had slaves, the other half would run a mile rather than shake the hand of a slaughterman. No. I give them fifty years and they’ll all want titles. Barons of Boston and Dukes of New York. It’ll happen.”
And Sharpe, standing in the shards of a myriad refracted candle flames, guessed Leroy was right. If you took every person in this room and abandoned them, Robinson Crusoe style, on an empty island, then inside a year there would be a duke, five barons, and the rest would be serfs. Even the French had brought back the aristocracy! They had murdered it first, as they murdered La Marquesa’s parents, and now Bonaparte was making his Marshals into Princes of this and Dukes of that and his poor, honest brother had been made into King of Spain!
Sharpe looked at the sweating faces over tight collars, the thick thighs laced tight in military uniforms, the ridiculous costumes of the women. Take away the money, he supposed, and they would look like anyone else, softer perhaps, flabbier, but the money, and the birth, gave them something that he lacked. An assurance? An ease of moving through the rich waters of society? Then should he bother? He could walk away from the army, when the war was done, and Teresa would have a home for him in Casatejada among the wide fields that were her family’s property. He need never say ‘my lord’ again, or ‘sir’, or feel belittled by an elegant fool, and he felt an anger inside him at the unfairness of life and, at the same time, a determination that one day he would have them respecting him.