Sharpe's Regiment by Bernard Cornwell

be able to say that he had seen Major Sharpe alive. Now he and Harper must take Isabella back to the Southwark house and then, with the inspiration he had gained from watching the actors, they would go to find the Second Battalion of the South Essex.
    It was dawn before Isabella was safely restored to the Southwark house. She accepted the sudden panic gracefully, though even she was curious as Sharpe and Harper stripped themselves of their uniforms and gave their weapons to Harper’s cousin. ‘You keep them for us!’ Harper said.
    ‘They’ll be safe.’
    Mrs Reilly brought them old, ragged clothes, and Sharpe exchanged his comfortable French boots for a pair of broken, gaping shoes. Each man hid a few coins in their rags.
    ‘How do I look?’ Harper asked, laughing.
    ‘Awful,’ Sharpe laughed with him.
    When Harper had come from the Rose Tavern, gripping Isabella in one hand and Sharpe’s belongings in the other, he had brought orders that had been delivered to the tavern during the evening. Sharpe had read them. Lord Fenner ordered him to report instantly to the Chatham depot for transport to Spain. If Lord Fenner had also been behind the murder attempt then these orders, Sharpe surmised, were merely a disguise, or perhaps a precaution against Sharpe’s survival.
    The Reillys had a pen, some ink and old, yellowed paper. Sharpe wrote his own orders on the paper, addressed to d‘Alem bord, which told that officer and Lieutenant Price, to make themselves scarce, to get out of Chelmsford, and to hide in London. “Wait for messages at the Rose Tavern. Do not wear your uniforms and do not report to the Horse Guards.” They would be mystified, but they would obey. Sharpe, thinking ahead, knew he would need d’Alembord and Price, and he dared not run the risk that Lord Fenner would order those two officers, like himself, back to Spain. Sharpe would post the letter express this morning, paying the extra for it to be carried by a horseman.
    The mail office would think it strange that such a vagabond should pay such a sum for a letter, for Sharpe, like Harper, was in rags and for a purpose. Somewhere in Britain there was a hidden Battalion, and Sharpe did not know how to find it. Yet the Battalion was recruiting, and that meant its recruiting sergeants were on the roads of Britain, and those sergeants, Sharpe knew, would take their men back to wherever the Battalion was concealed.
    Sharpe could not find the Battalion, but the Battalion could find him. Major Richard Sharpe and Sergeant Major Patrick Harper, who only the night before had been crowned by the Goddesses of Victory, were going to become recruits again. They had donned the costumes of tramps and must act the parts of the desperate men whose last recourse was to join the ranks. Sharpe and Harper would join the army.

CHAPTER 5
    They walked north from London into a countryside that was heavy with summer and lush with flowers, a countryside that, compared to Spain, gave easy living. No gamekeeper in England could compete with a Spanish peasant at protecting his land, and the two Riflemen lived well.
    There was only one problem in their first days on the road, and that a real one, which was Harper’s inability to drop the word “sir”. ‘It’s not natural, sir!’
    ‘What isn’t?’
    ‘Calling you ...’ he shrugged.
    ‘Dick?’
    ‘I can’t!‘ The big Irishman was blushing.
    ‘You’ve bloody well got to!’
    They slept in the open. They trapped their food, stole it, or, despite the money hidden in their rags, begged in village streets. Four times in the first week they were chased out of parishes that did not want such stout looking trouble-makers in their boundaries. They looked villainous, for neither man shaved. Sharpe wanted them to appear to be old soldiers, discharged legally, who had failed to find jobs or homes outside the army. Patrick Harper, who accepted this turn in his fate philosophically, nevertheless worried at the problem of why the