'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.
CHAPTER 4
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.