“I must talk with Jane,” Sharpe had said, and had then gone back to his lodgings where he broke a week’s chill silence, but their discussion about Nairn’s offer had been no happier than the tearful, rage-shredding arguments about the duel. Jane still insisted that they go home, and this time added a new reason for Sharpe to desert the army. Once peace came, she averred, the price of property in England would rise steeply, which made it all the more sensible to sail home now and find a London house. Sharpe had violently protested at such a notion, claiming that he would never live in London; that it was a vile, dirty, crowded and corrupt city, and while he was not averse to buying a house, that house should be in the country. For no very good reason he wanted to live in Dorset. Someone had once extolled that county, and the idea had lodged irreversibly in his head.

In the end, exhausted by the arguments, a reluctant compromise had been agreed. Jane would go home to take advantage of the existing prices of property, but she would seek a country house in Dorset. In the meantime, and if he survived the duel, Sharpe would serve Major-General Nairn.

“But why?” Jane had pleaded tearfully. “You said yourself you feared fighting more battles. You can’t fight and live for ever!” But Sharpe could not really tell her why he refused to go home before the war’s ending. He certainly did not want to be a staff officer, and he readily acknowledged his reluctance to face more battles, but there was a deeper reason that fought those urges and which tugged at his soul like a dark and torrential current. His friends would be in Nairn’s brigade; Nairn himself, Frederickson, and Harper, So many friends had died, and so few were left, and Sharpe knew he would never forgive himself if he deserted those good friends in the last weeks of a long war. So he would stay and fight. But first he would kill a Naval officer, or else be killed himself.