Sharpes Escape   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

"You wouldn't go back to England?" Sharpe asked her. "What can I do there? No one wants to learn Portuguese, but plenty of Portuguese want their children to know English. Besides, in England I'm just another young woman with no prospects, no fortune and no future. Here I benefit from the intrigue of being different."

"You intrigue me," Sharpe said, and got slapped again. "You could stay with me," he added.

"And be a soldier's woman?" She laughed.

"Nothing wrong with that," Sharpe said defensively.

"No, there's not," Sarah agreed. She was silent for a while. "Until two days ago," she went on suddenly, "I thought my life depended on other people. On employers. Now I think it depends on me. You taught me that. But I need money."

"Money's easy," Sharpe said dismissively.

"That is not the conventional wisdom," Sarah said dryly.

"Steal the stuff," Sharpe said.

"You were really a thief?"

"Still am. Once a thief, always a thief, only now I steal from the enemy. And some day I'll have enough to stop doing it and then I'll stop others thieving from me."

"You have a simple view of life."

"You're born, you survive, you die," Sharpe said. "What's hard about that?"

"It's an animal's life," Sarah said, "and we are more than animals."

"That's what they tell me," Sharpe said, "but when war comes they're grateful for men like me. At least they were."

"Were?"

He hesitated, then shrugged. "My Colonel wants rid of me. He's got a brother-in-law he wants to have my job, a man called Slingsby. He's got manners."

"A good thing to have."

"Not when fifty thousand Frogs are coming at you. Manners don't get you far then. What you need is sheer bloody-mindedness."

"And you have that?"

"Buckets of it, darling," Sharpe said.

Sarah smiled. "So what happens to you now?"

"I don't know. I go back, and if I don't like what's there then I'll find another regiment. Join the Portuguese, perhaps."

"But you'll stay a soldier?"

Sharpe nodded. He could imagine no other life. There were times when he thought he would like to own a few acres and farm them, but he knew nothing of farming and recognized the wish as a dream. He would stay a soldier, and he supposed, when he thought about it at all, that he would reach a soldier's end, either sweating in a fever ward or dead on a battlefield.

Sarah must have guessed what he was thinking. "I think you'll survive," she said.

"I think you will too.