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Warning: General Audience


The Sharpe Fan Fictions of A Lady.

Bernard Cornwell’s

Lawford’s Disconcertment

Willian Lawford
In which Sir William and Lady Lawford are treated to an unwelcome Surprise and are subsequently avoided by Mrs Richard Sharpe and her Companion (suggested by a Passage in ‘Sharpe’s Storm’ by Bernard Cornwell). HarperCollins: 2025.


This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Lawford’s Duty. Copyright © 2026 by A Lady


Lawford’s Disconcertment is for
Sable Crow who supports our fanfiction with her website SharpeTales.net.
And
Bernard Cornwell who brought Richard Sharpe into our world.


Chapter 1


November 1813
London, England.
/PARAGRAPH ONE

I must offer a certain amount of background before I embark upon my account of this incident. Sharpe had returned to us from England (1) in the New Year of the year ‘10 inexplicably besotted with Miss Jane Gibbons, niece of my predecessor as Commanding Officer of the South Essex, Sir Henry Simmerson, whom in the course of his recruiting efforts he had met at a public ball which had been held in the Assembly Rooms at the Shire Hall in Chelmsford at Christmas-tide (I know! – the dissonant ideas of Richard Sharpe upon the one hand, and balls upon the other, is very ridiculous - the two have no business appearing in the same sentence within any parameters which might be considered as rational – but yet!). I could not imagine how he had managed that evening, unless they had had a caller, as were sometimes employed at public dances in rural areas where society, such as it was, was far from sophisticated (I have encountered Chelmsford society in my capacity as C.O. of the First South Essex, and I can vouch that St James’s it is not), for I had yet to make sure to give Sharpe some tuition in the commonest combinations of dance-steps later that year when Wellington’s army sat down in comfort behind the Lines of Torres Vedras to enjoy a winter of leisure and social enjoyments, whilst Masséna and his force starved and froze, baffled before the fortifications, which had appeared as if by some sorcerer’s trick (2) across their path, thwarting all their confident plans to drive us into the sea. It turned out that Sharpe had already been carrying Miss Gibbons’s image with him, in any case – a miniature in a silver locket which, he told me, somewhat sheepishly, he had retrieved from the body of her brother, Christian Gibbons, when he had stumbled upon it on the field of Talavera, in the aftermath of battle, some six months earlier. She had been so grateful, he told me, when he had vouchsafed to her that Christian had died a hero – he had been lying, he had told her, as if asleep, his well-made limbs and his noble features composed and serene. (I said nothing to that, but I am not that gullible! – I am almost certain that I had guessed the truth of what had gone on there, even before Richard had finally confessed to me, some years later, what had really occurred that day – as well as upon the previous night.)

At the time, the story – Richard’s public version of it – had indeed been that Gibbons had died a hero’s death, and people had been, on the whole, inclined to believe it rather than to doubt it – or at least, not openly to doubt it - for no-one had wanted to bring further opprobrium upon the South Essex. The recovery of its reputation from the shame inflicted upon it by Simmerson’s actions, both at Talavera de la Reina and earlier at Valdelacasa, had still been very fragile and uncertain, notwithstanding the capture of the Eagle. Any further revelations of misconduct could have wiped that out in half a day of gossip. When Sharpe had eventually explained to me that Gibbons had in fact been a caitiff given to vile habits and villainous conduct unbefitting even a common soldier, let alone an officer of one of His Majesty’s Regiments of Foot, as had also been his toady, Lieutenant John Berry, and that therefore the traditional soldiers’ justice had been meted out to both of them - to Berry during the night under cover of a classic example of a chaotic action in the dark upon the hill called the Medellin, and to Gibbons on the relatively ordered (until Simmerson by his cowardly actions had reduced our line to chaos, of course) field of battle the following day, I had known that that intelligence should go no further, so at the time I had said nothing, and I have continued to say nothing of it until now, when it no longer matters, as the South Essex (or rather, the ‘Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers’, as it long-windedly became in the Year ’13) no longer exists, it having been disbanded a mere four years later, and Sharpe lives in idyllic rural retirement in Normandy. The officers and men who had remained after Waterloo – barely three companies’ worth - had already been transferred to the 44th East Essex in any case. They, of course, bear no blame for anything which Simmerson or his disgusting nephew ever perpetrated.

This attachment of Richard’s to Miss Gibbons I had found entirely baffling save in one respect – she was niece to a Baronet, who, although he occupied only the lowest rung upon the ladder of our English aristocracy, was, notwithstanding, a symbol of the entrenched ruling hierarchy of entitled power which Sharpe had always hated – a perverse attraction, I considered it (and believe me when I write that I know a great deal about the power of perverse attraction). I can only suppose that, consciously or not, it was a form of revenge upon that class, and no wonder, therefore, that, no doubt aware of his scorn for what she represented (to his prejudiced way of thinking), she deserted him so early in their marriage for the handsome, charming, morally bankrupt and utterly worthless Lord John Rossendale, younger brother to that Bertram Rossendale who had served as my groomsman on my wedding-day in the January of the Year ‘06 (Bertram was a solid, dependable sort – decent, rather dull – in fact, he reminded me a great deal of my brother Henry (Henry the Unexpected, the current Earl, Charles having died in Barbados in the September of the Year ’09 before he could inherit) similarly stolid but reliable - so I do not mock him for that: I do not think that I should have got through that most distressing day, which had almost seen me melt, resolve and thaw myself into a dew of utter desperation, when I had indeed wished that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter, without good Bertram Rossendale at my side – although I confess that I should never have wanted to spend an evening on the Town with him).

Bertram had at some point in the intervening seven years since my wedding unfortunately died – I am not sure of what – he had been only a little older than myself. I had heard a riding accident mentioned, but then someone else had said there had been a duel over an accusation of cheating at cards, which I had found hard to believe – he had surely been too honest and level-headed for that - unless he had been the complainant! – but then, I had by that date left Dublin for the Peninsula and I never had succeeded in learning the truth of the matter, for his family had not liked it to be discussed (I had of course written to his mother to express my condolences, and also to enquire as to what could have happened, but she had never replied – obviously the business had pained her extremely, and I, repenting my gauche inquisitiveness, had never pursued the matter). At any rate, therefore upon his wastrel cadet, the mercurial Johnny, had devolved the title, the lands and the money – the latter two attributes of which he had quickly set about losing through gambling and loose living. (Do bear with me: all of this is relevant.)

This was, I had later supposed, why John Rossendale had felt a need to set his larcenous hands upon Sharpe’s fortune (3) shortly after he had laid his adulterous eyes upon Sharpe’s wife (then Sharpe’s fiancée); which thing he first did, it was later discovered, the very night of the Prince Regent’s reception at Carlton House when Sharpe’s friends (the circle of which I had, to my gratitude, been re-admitted, recent events notwithstanding – Sharpe’s victory over Fenner and Simmerson that day had rendered him most magnanimous) (4). I had been returned into civilian life for eighteen months by then, and we had been celebrating the confounding of the scheme of the nefarious pair: the crimping scandal which had been unfolding on the island known as Foulness – Foulness by name and a fitting location for the commission of deeds of Foulness, one might say! in Essex – whence it had turned out that the men of the Second Battalion of the South Essex had been spirited away after they had gone missing from the barracks at Chelmsford – as if snatched by the Pharisees! (5) (The crimping had not in itself been criminal but the scale of it had been astounding, and the detrimental effect upon the Regiment had surely come close to deserving the epithet ‘treasonous’ – the murderous behaviour of the officers who had run the camp at Foulness had in fact been criminal). Foulness was hardly any distance at all down-river from London and almost within sight of the authorities at Horse Guards! Well, I exaggerate – one cannot see Foulness from the Capital even on a day of good visibility (a rarity in London, lying as it does almost always beneath a pall of smoke which obfuscates the sky, unless there has been a freshening wind), situate a little to the north, around the angle created by the south-eastern corner of Essex at the outlet of the estuary, where the Thames widens and empties into the German Ocean (6) – but it is not far – and I therefore suspected that the collusion had gone well beyond Simmerson and Fenner and their immediate circle.

To return to the reception at on the evening of Saturday the 21st of August: I recall that Sharpe had missed Jane at a certain point in the evening and it had later turned out that John Rossendale (he was an aide-de-camp of the Prince of Wales, hence his presence, and his familiarity with Carlton House) had persuaded her to accompany him alone to a room which had been lately tricked out as a kind of orangery or conservatory, as the fashionable were beginning to call the greenhouses which they were installing in their homes (rooms for plants! inside their very houses! I daresay if Mama had still been alive she would have insisted upon having one grafted onto Cannock Hall like an egregious glass carbuncle in order to impress her behind-the-times neighbours in the Staffordshire countryside around, but I felt sure that Henry would be far too sensible to allow such a peculiar innovation, and in any case he preferred his geological specimens (7), which required no close fond attention and were very nearly entirely impervious to sudden changes in humidity and temperature, unlike botanical specimens from the far side of the world.

Rossendale had merely (Jane had apparently explained later) wished to show her a banema plant, from Guinea, Prinny’s latest botanical acquisition, possession of which the tiresome fool (that is, the Prince) had been boasting at tedious length earlier in the evening (if the reader has ever seen the somewhat obscenely suggestive yellow-skinned fruits which grow upon the banema plant he will no doubt be as sceptical of Rossendale’s motives as I am afraid that I was upon hearing this. I had already had my doubts regarding the suitability of Jane Gibbons as a wife for Sharpe, from when it had first impinged upon my notice how matters had likely been tending. These were substantial, given her sordid family background. I do not refer to her father’s having been in trade. My own in-laws had both been in trade: Sir Josiah Hayles was an iron-founder whose own father had made his fortune making the guns for the Army and the Navy which had roared and bellowed their way through more than half a century of those tedious wars with France, and his wife, Maria, Lady Hayles, came from a line of superior grocers proprietors of a celebrated emporium situated in the West End of London (I cannot fathom why prejudice against trade in the class of society into which I was born persists so, given that it is the source of our nation’s wealth - and do not the great majority of the aristocracy of England have at least some degree of interest in the production of West Indian sugar and cotton and tobacco?) No, it was not that. Rather, I found objectionable Miss Gibbons’s connexion with the nefandous Sir Henry Simmerson, a feeling which had begun to grow upon me from that hour when Sharpe had first declared his intention to marry her. However, not wishing to take the shine off Sharpe’s South Essex triumph, achieved that very day, I held my tongue – and I maintained my silence for many years, even following a very odd incident which took place in November that year, three months after the Fenner excitement, concerning which I shall now set down my account. (At last! cries the Reader, with relief, no doubt feeling very much like the Wedding-Guest in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.)

I had come up to London in October, for although Parliament would of course not be in session until the following month, I had felt the need to prepare as meticulously as I could, for now that I had obtained a more senior position (thanks to the skillful manoeuvrings of the Countess Camoynes in the aftermath of the Fenner Affair) I had wished to make a favourable impression in my new junior ministerial role under Henry Addington in the Home Department, and I had known that there was some stiff business coming up about the Fleet Prison, and debtors in the Isle of Man (I had had thoughts about creating myself as a figure in the area of Penal Reform, in which I did have a genuine interest which stemmed from my days in the 33rd in India, when the injustices daily inflicted upon the men had distressed and outraged me so acutely – caveat – this situation had been none of Wellesley’s making).

So, we come to it at last. One day, when there had been no business requiring my attention in the Chamber of the Commons, the 9th of November, a Tuesday, I recollect, I had been squiring Jessica upon one of her shopping expeditions in New-Bond-street. We had used to have a fancy to do that from time to time. It had been a pleasant, cordial way for us to be together in public, engaged in what at least had had the appearance of being a conventional activity which a bona fide married couple might have enjoyed. As I had still been capable of holding a few light parcels, the loss of my left arm notwithstanding - this was before I had allowed Jessica to persuade me to have had made the poseable prosthetic limb which I had later dubbed Cornelius, in honour of my brother-in-law (they had shared the common quality of being fit only for decorative and slightly annoying purposes) - I had continued to resist for some time, out of shame for my former vanity regarding my personal appearance – I was a cripple now and I must accept that, I had thought - the adoption of a false arm would simply have made me appear frivolous and pitiable -), but it had made me feel more contented in myself, that I could feel that I was, still, at least of some use to Jessica, for whom I had learned since the epoch of our marriage to nurture a truly warm and lively affection, in spite of all. I like to think that she had enjoyed my company on such occasions. I hope she had. The dear girl has been dead these nine years now, and so I cannot ask her; I know that Robert Ovalton had not minded my usurping from time to time what had become his customary role on these expeditions throughout my lengthy absences, first in Dublin and then in the Peninsula, for we had, although somewhat against the odds, successfully maintained our old friendship from our school-days - notwithstanding that he had now been Jessica’s lover for seven years.

In any case, I had quite enjoyed the pastime of looking into the windows of the shops – particularly those of the drapers and the haberdashers, the confectioners and the bakers and the purveyors of pleasing fancy-goods, which were all well-stocked with attractive wares (it had reminded me of that distant time when Mama had allowed me to accompany her on her similar forays, both in Petersfield and in Mayfair, when I had been a child) in apparently miraculous defiance of the twenty years of near-continuous war with France and French-dominated Europe (the latest bout) which England had now endured. Of course, we had all known perfectly well where the silks and the lace and the other fancy goods had been coming from all this time, and how these items had found their way into the shops not just of London but of almost every other sizeable town in England, but generally no-one had cared to remark upon it – this had been just one more reason why I had very quickly given up sitting as a magistrate, to the perturbation and disapproval of my Hampshire neighbours (there had been a good deal else about me of which they had disapproved, of course, which I shall not examine here), who had thought it over-nice of me to demonstrate such unreasonable scruples - but I had simply not been able to bear the idea that I might one day whilst sitting on the Bench come face to face with the very man who had brought my fine soap and claret and best brandy from France, and have to commit him to the quarterly Assizes in Winchester, very possibly to hang. Anyway, naturally I pretended an outwardly austere, fitting, manly indifference to such things as Jessica and I perused the windows of the shops together - although I do not think that Jessica had been taken in in the least by my counterfeit sang froid. She had known me too well by then.

Anyway, upon that occasion, Jessica had been wishing to buy a particularly fine white frock of best Indian muslin, which she had identified on a previous promenade in the company of one of her friends, and a pretty new satin sash, in a shade of cerulean blue which complimented our daughter’s eyes, and matching hair-ribbons, for Eloisa, who had now been seven years old and sensible enough at last to know not to tear her gown by romping unrestrainedly, nor to smear grease or chocolate upon her finery. This had been so she could wear these items at the coming family Christmas celebrations planned for Cannock, where we had been engaged to spend the season with Henry and Arabella and their girls, who had been always so charmingly turned-out. (I had already had a discreet exchange of correspondence with Francis, who had agreed to send to Eloisa for Christmas a copy of Madame Jane Marcet’s celebrated Conversations in Chemistry, to act as a counter-balance to this frivolous business of frocks and ribbons and sashes, for neither of us, Jessica nor myself, had wished for our darling girl to be raised in ignorance of all save frills and furbelows. This new century had promised - or threatened, depending upon one’s point of view - revelations of this new thing, called Science, which had required sterner breeding in those who would rise to be the next generation of adults who would lead our nation into the greater future which, it was hopefully believed, awaited us.)

Jessica and I had been proceeding along the side-walk, or pavement, of the thoroughfare, chattering lightly of trifles, like twittering sparrows in a hedge (I had thought – all the while privately comparing, in a parallel mental narrative, our discourse unfavourably with memories of conversational exchanges with my fellow-officers in the Peninsula, which only ten months since had been the standard of what I had thought of as comprising the proper rational intercourse of adults) but nevertheless happily of baubles and gewgaws and pleasing gimcrackery, as I suppose one generally tends to do when one is shopping for items of drapery and haberdashery with one’s wife, when suddenly Jessica had halted, squeezed my elbow as if to alert me to the fact that she had been about to make an announcement, as had been her habit (she had used to say that I could sometimes be maddeningly inattentive, as though my thoughts had strayed over the hills and far away, back to where my former comrades had still been fighting Boney: so she had learned always to take care to signal to me before she had been about to utter), turned to me and said,

“Look, William! is not that Jane Sharpe?” whilst indicating a lady who had just then been stepping back into the street through the door of a jeweller’s establishment on the opposite side of the thoroughfare.
“Jane Sharpe? My dear, it cannot be – Mrs Major Sharpe is currently in Saint-Jean-de-Luz with the other officers’ wives who travel with Lord Wellington’s army – I rather think we might depend upon it! For that was the plan, according to Major Sharpe on the last occasion upon which I spoke with him, at the end of August. She was to accompany him. There was nothing else for it, in any case. She could hardly have gone back to her Uncle Simmerson’s house.”

But –

“Look again, William!” Jessica had persisted, not to be deterred. I had obliged her: I had looked again.

Lord! I thought then - Jessica is not mistaken! It is Jane Sharpe! in London! when she should be in France! And visiting one of London’s premier purveyors of shocking expensive glittering trinkets? And unescorted? What does this portend?

“That lady is very like, I own,” I had said – cautiously - however, already uncomfortably aware of a sensation as if I had received a warning – indeed, as if I had heard the gut-wringing signal the enemy is cavalry sounded by the bugle of a Rifles scout whilst on the march towards the French when we had had no prior expectation of a likely immediate encounter, no cavalry of our own in the vicinity, and no possibility of guns coming up to support us at any time soon.

“It is Jane, I am certain of it, William!” Jessica had exclaimed, then, impatiently. “I recognise the bonnet! I helped her to pick it out – she could not decide between several and was taking too long, and we were due for luncheon with the Frobisher sisters in Grosvenor-street, so I fixed upon it for her - and I helped her to chuse the trim, also! The green ribbon, and those red holly-berries. And that Rifles-green velvet Spencer with the black frogging she is wearing – I recognize it. She had it made on purpose to compliment Major Sharpe’s new dress uniform, I recollect, when she was ordering her wedding clothes and trousseau! But what business could she possibly have in the establishment of Messires Wells and Lambe? Major Sharpe is not at all a wealthy man, you told me.”
“As far as I am aware he is not - although there have been rumours, since what happened after the battle at Vitoria in June, when our army overran the French baggage-park - “
“It was I who brought her with me into that shop in the dying days of August, William, when she was our guest, after she had quitted her uncle’s protection so precipitately, when Major Sharpe had asked her to marry him! That is where I bought that silver-gilt clasp to keep your sleeve secure, collect! I thought I should show her the place, for she had admired the clasp so, on account of its brilliant-cut rubies, which caught the light of the candles, and scintillated so prettily on the night when we sat down to that intimate supper with the two of them, in celebration of their engagement! William, that is Jane Sharpe - or else I am Mary Anne Clarke!” (8)
“Jessica! Hush!” I said to that, scandalized, in case she had been overheard by passers-by.

I had looked again, hoping after all that we had both been mistaken. But with a sensation of heaviness at my heart I had now had to acknowledge that the lady we had espied had indeed been Jane, Mrs Major Richard Sharpe. Seeing her in profile - that pert nose, and the way she had had of carrying her head, as if she had been in sooth the Lady Jane, daughter of a peer, and not merely the daughter of a saddler - however worthy and decent a man he might have been - made that abundantly plain. I looked away in dismay. Then -

“There is a gentleman with her!” Jessica had said then, almost squealing with excitement and (I am sure) faux-horror, and standing now upon her tip-toes - (how women do love to garner grist to fill their burlap-sacks of gossip!) “William, do not stare!” (I had of course interpreted that to mean, “Look! Look!”, and so, reluctantly, once again, I had.) “He is just now effecting egress from the shop! No - he has turned back at the door – a retainer is speaking with him – papers are exchanging – I daresay the receipt was left behind – oh! now I see him plainly! – he is an officer of the Life Guards - if I am not mistook!”

My already-burdened heart had sunk entirely at this. One often reads in over-wrought novels of characters who claim that some trifling thing which has occurred has caused their hearts to sink, but mine had, in truth, at that moment - full fathom five, indeed - because I had known at once what had been coming.

“William, could he be that young man, the one who was at the Prince’s reception that evening in August? – which we attended after all the excitement, that very entertaining day in Hyde Park, when everyone had at first been terrified that Major Sharpe had meant to assassinate the Prince and his entourage - but then the crowd had cheered him and his men to the welkin once they had understood his true intent? Before he was arrested by the Provosts, I mean.”

My soul now full of direst foreboding, I had cast my gaze across the street a third, or was it a fourth, time, and studied the face and figure of the officer, who had now taken Jane Sharpe’s arm in his as they had begun to walk away from the premises of Mr Wells and Mr Lambe. The pair had quickly struck up an intimate conversation, smiling, heads close together. There had been an air of conspiracy about their exchanges, I thought, which had hinted at no good at all.

“It is indeed Captain John Rossendale,” I had said, filled with deepest unease. “Jessica, he – “
“Oh, look, Jane has noticed us at last!” Jessica had said then, delightedly. I looked. Jane had certainly noticed us - for her smiles, her laughter, her animated expression, had all at once vanished! She had appeared, it had seemed to me, vastly displeased to see us. Her face had fallen. A frown had now disfigured her smooth young brow. Her mouth had set into a hard line. The expression which now had had possession of her fair face had not become her at all. Then she had spoken to Rossendale. I had of course grown used to reading speech from the movement of a man’s lips amidst the chaos and cacophony of the battlefield – it was a skill which had often proved life-saving in the Peninsula, especially when one’s sense of hearing had been temporarily disabled in the aftermath of a bombardment of artillery - and so I could see that she had said –

‘Oh, God – it is Sir William and Lady Lawford!’

For a little I had been puzzled - it had been but a year since Henry, from his position in the House of Lords, had operated the necessary levers of influence and had obtained for me that career-enhancing Knight-Bacherlordom (‘War hero, don’t you know,’ he had commented, with a wink, when I had expressed my thanks and also my bemusement – ‘that’s pretty rich, ain’t it?’ I had replied at the time, ‘considering that all I did at Ciudad Rodrigo was to get myself senselessly hoist by a French petard?’ not thinking much at all of what I had done at Talavera by way of saving Wellesley’s skin - Sharpe and Harper had taken an Eagle that day - they had been the real war heroes.) This had of course helped to win me the Knowlton seat, yet I still had not grown used to it: then I remembered that I, that is, we, were indeed Sir William and Lady Lawford. But more to the point, something, I had known, must be very wrong, or else Jane would not have appeared as if horrified. As for Rossendale, he had looked at once alarmed, annoyed and, it had seemed to me, suddenly - guilty. I saw him say,

Damnation - !

“Let us cross the street and speak to them!” Jessica had said, blithely, apparently oblivious to all of this. I had not known why she had failed to see what had been so clear to me, manifested as it had been in their altered demeanours, unless it had had to do with how I had grown up, forever vigilant for signs that things had been about to become unpleasant between myself and my brother Charles as his mood had changed suddenly and often inexplicably for the worse - for happily Jessica had never known what it had been like to have to live every day in fear, one’s position so fragile, one’s sense of safety so brittle, always at the pleasure of a domestic tyrant who had held one’s well-being in the palm of his hand and who had not scrupled at how often he had reminded one of that fact – forever at the mercy of his whims, his unpredictable cruel freaks, his random and unprovoked violent actions.

“Jessica, my dear,” I had protested, alarmed myself now - for I really had had a most unsettling feeling about this business - “I do not – “

Jessica, however, never one to endure having her enthusiasms arbitrarily curtailed by me, had already half-started into the traffic, meaning to cross the street.

“Jessica, have a care!” I had cried, as a curricle, driven at great speed and teetering upon its left wheel until its giddy driver, a young gentleman who looked no older than one-and-twenty (and also, I thought, somewhat the worse for drink), had regained control of it, just then appearing from around the corner at the junction of New-Bond-street with Bruton-street, came bowling towards her. I had dropped the packages which I had been carrying (thankfully they had not encompassed anything breakable; the contents had been embroidery silks, I think - ribbons, lace, silk flowers - trim for ladies’ gowns and bonnets, mainly things of that sort, for Jessica had been planning to prepare small Christmas gifts for her mother Lady Hayles and her sister Mrs Slingsby, and her brother Alfred’s wife Alice, and Henry’s wife Arabella and their daughters Anne, Charlotte and Catherine), not caring that some lurking rogue might have rushed forward, snatched them up and made off with them - and had run after her to pluck her from harm’s way, my solitary arm now disencumbered, fingers primed to seize hold of her pelisse and pull her back upon the pathway, and to safety - but she had been already retreating!

“How odd!” Jessica had said, then, puzzled, stepping back onto the pathway and returning to my side. “Jane has turned away her face! My young friend, seeming so fond of me but three months past, now appears not to wish to acknowledge my existence!”

I too had wondered why the wife of Army-rank only Major Sharpe (he had not held the Regimental rank of Major – his Majority had been entirely a maggot of the Prince of Wales and nobody had really had any idea of what had provoked the sending of those Letters Patent to Spain in the dying days of 1812) had not wished to know Jessica, Lady Lawford, wife of the Honourable Member for Knowlton in the County of Dorset and a junior but rising minister in Lord Liverpool’s administration (and sister-in-law to a Peer of the Realm, to boot) – a lady who had shewn her such attentive kindness when she had been our guest in my family’s house in Upper-Brook-street in those dying days of the summer – and she apparently penniless, a fugitive from her uncle’s circle (all the while as Simmerson, and that bloody idiot – and murderer – Girdwood - had been breathing out threats and declaring that they would go to law against us for Jane’s kidnapping and wrongful imprisonment, and what have you – nothing had come of that, however – they had not dared) and otherwise friendless in London.

Just then I had seen Rossendale say something which I could not catch, for his face had been half-turned away from us; then he had pivoted about and now hurried Jane away as fast as he could. It was no good. They had gone. I had stooped to retrieve the packages which I had had to discard (which thankfully had not been stolen by any opportunist thief), my heart now wretched for Richard, for the situation had now become obvious to me.

“They have just this moment turned down Conduit-street,” Jessica had said, as I had straightened. I had watched the pair for a moment or so as they had quickened their pace once more before they had disappeared entirely from view, vanishing into the crowds of people who, like us, had come to promenade and to browse the enticingly-decked-out windows of the shops, happy thoughts of the coming joyful season of Christmas uppermost in their minds (the War, although, wretchedly, it had still continued, had at this time had widely been said to have been as good as won, now that the great Lord Wellington had chased the French back north across the Pyrenees; that had been far too sanguine an opinion, as I had known very well when expressing my opinion in private amongst my Parliamentary associates, and those others whom I encountered at White’s, but I recall that I had in public gone along with the happy delusion of imminent easy victory throughout that festive season, as I had not wished to act the part of Cassandra and thus ruin Christmas for Jessica and Eloisa, and Arabella and Henry and their girls) so that they had not noticed the playing-out of our small street-drama. Before Jane and Rossendale had quite gone I had seen him place his hand upon the small of Jane’s back, as if to hasten her; the intimacy of the gesture, exactly like that of a lover, had almost made me gasp with incredulity. O God, I had thought, then. Poor Richard! (9)

Perhaps I should have spoken out before Richard married Jane Gibbons. Four Grand Passions in one year – Teresa (and Richard’s tragic loss of her) - the Marquesa – and Anne Camoynes only that very month of August, when as it had turned out he had at pretty much the same time been courting Miss Gibbons (for whom my cynical secret name throughout the period before the wedding, I confess, had indeed been Miss Givings)! As for young Rossendale, I certainly ought to have made further enquiries regarding his circumstances. However, I did not speak, and neither did I take my disquiet at the idea of Jane and Rossendale any further after this, not wishing to intervene in the affairs of my newly-wedded friend, for certainly I knew that I, of all people, had no right to lecture a decent proper man like Sharpe upon the subject of whom he should or should not marry! But, nonetheless, for what they are worth, my thoughts upon the subject of how and why Richard Sharpe’s union with Miss Gibbons was doomed from the beginning are, succinctly, that they were both victims of an delusion – they imagined themselves in love, but they were in fact infatuated with unreal eidolons, one with another: Richard had carried Christian Gibbons’s locket holding Jane’s likeness since the battle of Talavera (odd behaviour which I never did understand, as it had seemed so utterly out of character), and his recruiting mission in England at the end of that year when he had actually met the woman had only confirmed him in his fixation: then four years later they had met again in London in desperate circumstances and Jane had seen, not a difficult problematic man with as many flaws, some serious, as he had virtues, many fine and indicative of a character befitting a natural gentleman, but only the carapace - the gallant, dashing, handsome Major in the fine new uniform of an officer of the celebrated 95th Rifles, who had moreover provided her with her best chance to escape from her cruel uncle, for the swine had beaten her. They had seen each other through distorting lenses as being precisely like characters from each other’s favourite romantic novels, as it were. It was my opinion that neither Jane Gibbons nor Richard Sharpe had ever seen one another as real people – and I feel I am entitled to my opinion, as I know well that I owe Stephen’s otherwise baffling devotion to myself to the same strange delusional phenomenon, for he too appears to view me as his saviour-hero, rescuing him from his servitude in some Nightmare Abbey of his over-active imagination. Novelists have a great deal to answer for, and if I am ever in a position, in office, to do something about it, answer for it they shall - the whole pestilential crew!

So I kept my counsel and tried hard to persuade myself that there must be an innocent explanation for Jane’s behaviour, which became less difficult once I had heard that she had returned to her husband in France. Fool that I was, I even invented a reassuring story for myself that Jane, inspired by Jessica’s present to me, had gone to that jeweller’s emporium to choose a belated wedding gift for her husband and had asked Lord John to accompany her to provide a gentleman’s opinion upon what a man like Richard might appreciate as a present. Disaster, in due course, befell; but one cannot undo what is done, and I do not see that I should bear disproportionate blame for what was to happen the following year.

Notes

1 Sharpe had been in England recruiting for the South Essex. (See Sharpe’s Gold.) Ed.

2 It was darkly rumoured amongst the French that the English magician Jonathan Strange (on Wellington’s staff in an informal and unofficial capacity that winter, and on and off thereafter until Waterloo) had indeed had something to do with the apparently miraculous appearance of, amongst other things, the fortifications at Torres Vedras. (See Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: Susannah Clarke. Bloomsbury Publishing. 2004.) Ed.

3 A stolen fortune, it must be said, appropriated in the aftermath of the battle at Vitoria. Army officers, unlike their Naval counterparts, have small hope of prize money, so no reasonable person would have grudged Sharpe his cartouche or haversack of looted gold and diamonds, no matter how much Wellington might have huffed and puffed about the ransacking of the French baggage wagons. In particular, Wellington had wanted to capture the pay-chests, said to contain the equivalent of five million in gold, in order to fund our own war effort.

4 I do not think that I ever quite succeeded in bringing Sharpe to a full understanding of why I had acted in the way in which I did regarding the Simmerson-Fenner affair. He, with his ineradicably simple ideas of right and wrong (which, although befitting the understanding of the common soldier which he had once been, were hardly adequate to inform the processes of thought of one who had been raised to the estate of an officer) had, perhaps quite reasonably, I suppose, to his way of thinking, expected me, his former Commanding Officer, to take his part. Once upon I time I do believe I should have done so; for in our India days I had been certainly the most naïve subaltern who had ever wondered precisely what he was supposed to do with his sword should the enemy come at him shrieking like a demon and with his shining talwar whirling in his thrawn brown hand above his gorgeously-bejewelled turban, threatening immediate and bitter death! But now I was a soldier no longer, naïve or otherwise. In the months since I had left Spain I had (by who knows what subtle ineluctable degrees) metamorphosed into what is likely that most ambivalent, equivocating, self-preserving, prestidigitating salamander of a creature known to mankind - a politician. To be brief: Sharpe had wanted me to help expose Secretary of State at War Lord Fenner’s malfeasance and was astonished and offended when he had learned that I had not been disposed to oblige him, and that it was my opinion that a more subtle approach should be adopted. Although I had believed his distressing eye-witness account of what had passed at the camp at Foulness, and had understood his desire to expose what was in truth a shocking betrayal of our enlisted men, unlike Sharpe I had understood that the affair had had to be resolved without a scandal if we were not to risk the fall of Lord Liverpool’s government, which would have been disastrous for those of us who had seen the necessity of our continuing to prosecute the war against Bonaparte (the Opposition had wished to end our involvement, because they were croaking Whigs and therefore short-sighted isolationist fools), and hence, disastrous for the whole of Europe, and indeed, the world (and if I am honest, it would indeed have been a great and most likely mortal blow to my nascent political career also).

I had had to work very hard indeed in the aftermath (and also to treat a young person for whom I had recently come to care a great deal rather badly) to restore our friendship to something like it had been before all of that had happened. This falling-out had been at least as great as our quarrel at the time of Busaco occasioned by Richard’s insubordination and also by his rudeness to a fellow-officer (my brother-in-law Cornelius Slingsby, admittedly - the fool had come as close as it had been possible to get to losing my Light Company, and Richard’s anger, scorn and rudeness had been more than justified, but even so I could not have let it pass), and that had only finally been healed during the winter of 1810-1811 when Wellington’s army had been at its leisure in Lisbon, safe behind the Lines of Torres Vedras, and Richard and I had finally found the time and the room in which to make up our differences and regain the trust and the affection which we had formerly held for one another before the vexed matter of Slingsby had come between us. I should confess that it was I who had initiated this renewal of intimacy: when it had become clear that Richard had been feeling very keenly the absence of his lover, Comandante Teresa Moreno, who had remained in the north of Spain, harassing and murdering Frenchmen and Afrancesados wherever she could find them, I had told him that he was more than welcome to spend time with his friends (meaning primarily myself, obviously) instead, although we were but a poor substitute. He had taken me at my word. The consequence had been that that had been - at least for me – a quite idyllic winter.

Perhaps this is an appropriate place for me to record my thoughts regarding Sir Henry Simmerson’s entanglement in all of this. Simmerson had, from his own resources, begun to raise and equip the South Essex in ‘07 – a thing which had not been unusual in those days - and a mightily expensive business such an undertaking had been, too (his family had had interests in the Americas and the West Indies for almost as long as mine had, well over a century, hence his considerable wealth) - and he had been its first commanding officer – again, normal practice in those days. From that command he had been unceremoniously removed at Talavera by myself, on Wellesley’s order, at the very height of the battle - because of his own egregious actions, it is true. The centre of the British line had collapsed because of his cowardice in ordering the South Essex from the field, and it had been all that I could do, aided by the 1st/48th, to repair the damage. I can however only assume that the slight had festered with him, and that he had come to imagine himself due some compensation; hence his involvement with Fenner’s extremely lucrative borderline criminal crimping scheme.

5 Or Farishers. East Anglian term for the Fairies, more specific to Norfolk, but might have occurred in North Essex amongst barge-men who plied up and down the coast between the Thames and the Wash. Ed.

6 The former British name for the North Sea. It was changed at the time of the First World War. Ed.

7 Henry was. He did, however, commission the building of a rockery at Cannock. There was nothing unusual in that at that time, of course, when the great popular twin crazes for geology and botany had been beginning, sparked by the accessible works of the men of science who had just then been coming into prominence. The unique feature of Henry’s rockery, however, had been that it had consisted solely and exclusively of rocks. He had built his heap of Alpine scree but had never moved on to populating it with mountain specimens, for all his interest had been reserved for the boulders and pebbles themselves. People who had seen it remarked upon the fact that there had not been a plant to be seen anywhere upon it. Following Henry’s death it had eventually been dismantled and wheeled away in barrows by a relay of gardeners. For many years its component parts had languished behind the stable block half-hidden in nettles; then when Henry’s great-great-grandson had taken it into his head to build a tennis-court in 1923 it had been used as hard-core. Ed.

8 Mary Anne Clarke was the mistress of Frederick, Duke of York, second son of King George III and Commander-in-Chief of the British Arny. In 1809 there was a great scandal when it was discovered that she had been illegally arranging for the sale of promotions and preferments amongst Army officers at exorbitant prices. Frederick had to stand down as C-i-C for a while until the affair had blown over. Ed.

9 I later heard that Jane had told Richard a cock-and-bull story to account for her absence when he had returned unexpectedly to St-Jean-de-Luz in November 1813 in the course of his duty and found her gone from the lodgings she had shared with a Mrs Susan Lassiter, wife of a senior officer. Mrs Lassiter had told him that Jane had told her that she was returning to England aboard a ship called the Pelican to attend upon her sick mother. Sharpe of course had known perfectly well that Jane’s mother had been dead for years. It had later transpired that a Spanish noblewoman who had become entangled with a French cavalry officer and abandoned by him in France had been to be returned to Spain aboard the Pelican. Jane had clearly wished it to be supposed that she had been sent to chaperone the noblewoman (a girl, in fact, called Donna Alyssa) which was arrant nonsense, as she had been entirely unsuited to such a task. Wellington, recognising this (for he was far more astute when it had come to women than Sharpe ever had been) would far more likely have given the task to a brace of sensible stout-waisted grey-haired middle-aged colonel’s wives, and not to a flighty piece like Jane Sharpe, who was not five-and-twenty years old and who always, notoriously, had had her neck (Lawford means her breasts – a common euphemism then - Ed) exposed beyond the limits of what could have been considered decent. She would have been a ship-board disaster. The clear truth of the matter was that Jane had been nowhere near either the Pelican or Donna Alyssa, but had quite obviously skipped home briefly aboard another vessel during her husband’s absence in the field to keep a tryst with Johnny Rossendale, as her appearance in the dining-cabin of the Pucelle flaunting a necklace of fine diamonds, which (Richard had later discovered) its presentation case had declared to be from the emporium of Wells & Lambe of New-Bond-street, reliably indicated had been the truth of the matter. Sharpe told me later that he thought that the lie about the sick mother had been because the Donna Alyssa mission had been supposed to have been a secret, so he had excused Jane for that untruth, until another six months had passed and by then he could no longer continue believing in her fabrications.

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