Читать книгу Sharpe’s Triumph: The Battle of Assaye, September 1803 - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 7

It was not Sergeant Richard Sharpe’s fault. He was not in charge. He was junior to at least a dozen men, including a major, a captain, a subadar and two jemadars, yet he still felt responsible. He felt responsible, angry, hot, bitter and scared. Blood crusted on his face where a thousand flies crawled. There were even flies in his open mouth.

But he dared not move.

The humid air stank of blood and of the rotted egg smell made by powder smoke. The very last thing he remembered doing was thrusting his pack, haversack and cartridge box into the glowing ashes of a fire, and now the ammunition from the cartridge box exploded. Each blast of powder fountained sparks and ashes into the hot air. A couple of men laughed at the sight. They stopped to watch it for a few seconds, poked at the nearby bodies with their muskets, then walked on.

Sharpe lay still. A fly crawled on his eyeball and he forced himself to stay absolutely motionless. There was blood on his face and more blood had puddled in his right ear, though it was drying now. He blinked, fearing that the small motion would attract one of the killers, but no one noticed.

Chasalgaon. That’s where he was. Chasalgaon: a miserable, thorn-walled fort on the frontier of Hyderabad, and because the Rajah of Hyderabad was a British ally the fort had been garrisoned by a hundred sepoys of the East India Company and fifty mercenary horsemen from Mysore, only when Sharpe arrived half the sepoys and all of the horsemen had been out on patrol.

Sharpe had come from Seringapatam, leading a detail of six privates and carrying a leather bag stuffed with rupees, and he had been greeted by Major Crosby who commanded at Chasalgaon. The Major proved to be a plump, red-faced, bilious man who disliked the heat and hated Chasalgaon, and he had slumped in his canvas chair as he unfolded Sharpe’s orders. He read them, grunted, then read them again. ‘Why the hell did they send you?’ he finally asked.

‘No one else to send, sir.’

Crosby frowned at the order. ‘Why not an officer?’

‘No officers to spare, sir.’

‘Bloody responsible job for a sergeant, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Won’t let you down, sir,’ Sharpe said woodenly, staring at the leprous yellow of the tent’s canvas a few inches above the Major’s head.

‘You’d bloody well better not let me down,’ Crosby said, pushing the orders into a pile of damp papers on his camp table. ‘And you look bloody young to be a sergeant.’

‘I was born late, sir,’ Sharpe said. He was twenty-six, or thought he was, and most sergeants were much older.

Crosby, suspecting he was being mocked, stared up at Sharpe, but there was nothing insolent on the Sergeant’s face. A good-looking man, Crosby thought sourly. Probably had the bibbis of Seringapatam falling out of their saris, and Crosby, whose wife had died of the fever ten years before and who consoled himself with a two-rupee village whore every Thursday night, felt a pang of jealousy. ‘And how the devil do you expect to get the ammunition back to Seringapatam?’ he demanded.

‘Hire ox carts, sir.’ Sharpe had long perfected the way to address unhelpful officers. He gave them precise answers, added nothing unnecessary and always sounded confident.

‘With what? Promises?’

‘Money, sir.’ Sharpe tapped his haversack where he had the bag of rupees.

‘Christ, they trust you with money?’

Sharpe decided not to respond to that question, but just stared impassively at the canvas. Chasalgaon, he decided, was not a happy place. It was a small fort built on a bluff above a river that should have been overflowing its banks, but the monsoon had failed and the land was cruelly dry. The fort had no ditch, merely a wall made of cactus thorn with a dozen wooden fighting platforms spaced about its perimeter. Inside the wall was a beaten-earth parade ground where a stripped tree served as a flagpole, and the parade ground was surrounded by three mud-walled barracks thatched with palm, a cookhouse, tents for the officers and a stone-walled magazine to store the garrison’s ammunition. The sepoys had their families with them, so the fort was overrun with women and children, but Sharpe had noted how sullen they were. Crosby, he thought, was one of those crabbed officers who were only happy when all about them were miserable.

‘I suppose you expect me to arrange the ox carts?’ Crosby said indignantly.

‘I’ll do it myself, sir.’

‘Speak the language, do you?’ Crosby sneered. ‘A sergeant, banker and interpreter, are you?’

‘Brought an interpreter with me, sir,’ Sharpe said. Which was over-egging the pudding a bit, because Davi Lal was only thirteen, an urchin off the streets of Seringapatam. He was a smart, mischievous child whom Sharpe had found stealing from the armoury cookhouse and, after giving the starving boy a clout around both ears to teach him respect for His Britannic Majesty’s property, Sharpe had taken him to Lali’s house and given him a proper meal, and Lali had talked to the boy and learned that his parents were dead, that he had no relatives he knew of, and that he lived by his wits. He was also covered in lice. ‘Get rid of him,’ she had advised Sharpe, but Sharpe had seen something of his own childhood in Davi Lal and so he had dragged him down to the River Cauvery and given him a decent scrubbing. After that Davi Lal had become Sharpe’s errand boy. He learned to pipeclay belts, blackball boots and speak his own version of English which, because it came from the lower ranks, was liable to shock the gentler born.

‘You’ll need three carts,’ Crosby said.

‘Yes, sir,’ Sharpe said. ‘Thank you, sir.’ He had known exactly how many carts he would need, but he also knew it was stupid to pretend to knowledge in the face of officers like Crosby.

‘Find your damn carts,’ Crosby snapped, ‘then let me know when you’re ready to load up.’

‘Very good, sir. Thank you, sir.’ Sharpe stiffened to attention, about-turned and marched from the tent to find Davi Lal and the six privates waiting in the shade of one of the barracks. ‘We’ll have dinner,’ Sharpe told them, ‘then sort out some carts this afternoon.’

‘What’s for dinner?’ Private Atkins asked.

‘Whatever Davi can filch from the cookhouse,’ Sharpe said, ‘but be nippy about it, all right? I want to be out of this damn place tomorrow morning.’

Their job was to fetch eighty thousand rounds of prime musket cartridges that had been stolen from the East India Company armoury in Madras. The cartridges were the best quality in India, and the thieves who stole them knew exactly who would pay the highest price for the ammunition. The princedoms of the Mahratta Confederation were forever at war with each other or else raiding the neighbouring states, but now, in the summer of 1803, they faced an imminent invasion by British forces. The threatened invasion had brought two of the biggest Mahratta rulers into an alliance that now gathered its forces to repel the British, and those rulers had promised the thieves a king’s ransom in gold for the cartridges, but one of the thieves who had helped break into the Madras armoury had refused to let his brother join the band and share in the profit, and so the aggrieved brother had betrayed the thieves to the Company’s spies and, two weeks later, the caravan carrying the cartridges across India had been ambushed by sepoys not far from Chasalgaon. The thieves had died or fled, and the recaptured ammunition had been brought back to the fort’s small magazine for safekeeping. Now the eighty thousand cartridges were to be taken to the armoury at Seringapatam, three days to the south, from where they would be issued to the British troops who were readying themselves for the war against the Mahrattas. A simple job, and Sharpe, who had spent the last four years as a sergeant in the Seringapatam armoury, had been given the responsibility.

Spoilage, Sharpe was thinking while his men boiled a cauldron of river water on a bullock-dung fire. That was the key to the next few days, spoilage. Say seven thousand cartridges lost to damp? No one in Seringapatam would argue with that, and Sharpe reckoned he could sell the seven thousand cartridges on to Vakil Hussein, so long, of course, as there were eighty thousand cartridges to begin with. Still, Major Crosby had not quibbled with the figure, but just as Sharpe was thinking that, so Major Crosby appeared from his tent with a cocked hat on his head and a sword at his side. ‘On your feet!’ Sharpe snapped at his lads as the Major headed towards them.

‘Thought you were finding ox carts?’ Crosby snarled at Sharpe.

‘Dinner first, sir.’

‘Your food, I hope, and not ours? We don’t get rations to feed King’s troops here, Sergeant.’ Major Crosby was in the service of the East India Company and, though he wore a red coat like the King’s army, there was little love lost between the two forces.

‘Our food, sir,’ Sharpe said, gesturing at the cauldron in which rice and kid meat, both stolen from Crosby’s stores, boiled. ‘Carried it with us, sir.’

A havildar shouted from the fort gate, demanding Crosby’s attention, but the Major ignored the shout. ‘I forgot to mention one thing, Sergeant.’

‘Sir?’

Crosby looked sheepish for a moment, then remembered he was talking to a mere sergeant. ‘Some of the cartridges were spoiled. Damp got to them.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir,’ Sharpe said straight-faced.

‘So I had to destroy them,’ Crosby said. ‘Six or seven thousand as I remember.’

‘Spoilage, sir,’ Sharpe said. ‘Happens all the time, sir.’

‘Exactly so,’ Crosby said, unable to hide his relief at Sharpe’s easy acceptance of his tale, ‘exactly so,’ then he turned towards the gate. ‘Havildar?’

‘Company troops approaching, sahib!’

‘Where’s Captain Leonard? Isn’t he officer of the day?’ Crosby demanded.

‘Here, sir, I’m here.’ A tall, gangling captain hurried from a tent, tripped on a guy rope, recovered his hat, then headed for the gate.

Sharpe ran to catch up with Crosby who was also walking towards the gate. ‘You’ll give me a note, sir?’

‘A note? Why the devil should I give you a note?’

‘Spoilage, sir,’ Sharpe said respectfully. ‘I’ll have to account for the cartridges, sir.’

‘Later,’ Crosby said, ‘later.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Sharpe said. ‘And sod you backwards, you miserable bastard,’ he added, though too softly for Crosby to hear.

Captain Leonard clambered up to the platform beside the gate where Crosby joined him. The Major took a telescope from his tail pocket and slid the tubes open. The platform overlooked the small river that should have been swollen by the seasonal rains into a flood, but the failure of the monsoon had left only a trickle of water between the flat grey rocks. Beyond the shrunken river, up on the skyline behind a grove of trees, Crosby could see red-coated troops led by a European officer mounted on a black horse, and his first thought was that it must be Captain Roberts returning from patrol, but Roberts had a piebald horse and, besides, he had only taken fifty sepoys whereas this horseman led a company almost twice that size. ‘Open the gate,’ Crosby ordered, and wondered who the devil it was. He decided it was probably Captain Sullivan from the Company’s post at Milladar, another frontier fort like Chasalgaon, but what the hell was Sullivan doing here? Maybe he was marching some new recruits to toughen the bastards, not that the skinny little brutes needed any toughening, but it was uncivil of Sullivan not to warn Crosby of his coming. ‘Jemadar,’ Crosby shouted, ‘turn out the guard!’

‘Sahib!’ The Jemadar acknowledged the order. Other sepoys were dragging the thorn gates open.

He’ll want dinner, Crosby thought sourly, and wondered what his servants were cooking for the midday meal. Kid, probably, in boiled rice. Well, Sullivan would just have to endure the stringy meat as a price for not sending any warning, and damn the man if he expected Crosby to feed his sepoys as well. Chasalgaon’s cooks had not expected visitors and would not have enough rations for a hundred more hungry sepoys. ‘Is that Sullivan?’ he asked Leonard, handing the Captain the telescope.

Leonard stared for a long time at the approaching horseman. ‘I’ve never met Sullivan,’ he finally said, ‘so I couldn’t say.’

Crosby snatched back the telescope. ‘Give the bastard a salute when he arrives,’ Crosby ordered Leonard, ‘then tell him he can join me for dinner.’ He paused. ‘You too,’ he added grudgingly.

Crosby went back to his tent. It was better, he decided, to let Leonard welcome the stranger, rather than look too eager himself. Damn Sullivan, he thought, for not sending warning, though there was a bright side, inasmuch as Sullivan might have brought news. The tall, good-looking Sergeant from Seringapatam doubtless could have told Crosby the latest rumours from Mysore, but it would be a chill day in hell before Crosby sought news from a sergeant. But undoubtedly something was changing in the wider world, for it had been nine weeks since Crosby last saw a Mahratta raider, and that was decidedly odd. The purpose of the fort at Chasalgaon was to keep the Mahratta horse raiders out of the Rajah of Hyderabad’s wealthy territory, and Crosby fancied he had done his job well, but even so he found the absence of any enemy marauders oddly worrying. What were the bastards up to? He sat behind his table and shouted for his clerk. He would write the damned armoury Sergeant a note explaining that the loss of seven thousand cartridges was due to a leak in the stone roof of Chasalgaon’s magazine. He certainly could not admit that he had sold the ammunition to a merchant.

‘What the bastard did,’ Sharpe was saying to his men, ‘was sell the bloody stuff to some heathen bastard.’

‘That’s what you were going to do, Sergeant,’ Private Phillips said.

‘Never you bleeding mind what I was going to do,’ Sharpe said. ‘Ain’t that food ready?’

‘Five minutes,’ Davi Lal promised.

‘A bloody camel could do it faster,’ Sharpe grumbled, then hoisted his pack and haversack. ‘I’m going for a piss.’

‘He never goes anywhere without his bleeding pack,’ Atkins commented.

‘Doesn’t want you thieving his spare shirt,’ Phillips answered.

‘He’s got more than a shirt in that pack. Hiding something he is.’ Atkins twisted round. ‘Hey, Hedgehog!’ They all called Davi Lal ‘Hedgehog’ because his hair stuck up in spikes; no matter how greasy it was or how short it was cut, it still stuck up in unruly spikes. ‘What does Sharpie keep in the pack?’

Davi Lal rolled his eyes. ‘Jewels! Gold. Rubies, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires and pearls.’

‘Like sod he does.’

Davi Lal laughed, then turned back to the cauldron. Out by the fort’s gate Captain Leonard was greeting the visitors. The guard presented arms as the officer leading the sepoys rode through the gate. The visitor returned the salute by touching a riding crop to the brim of his cocked hat which, worn fore and aft, shadowed his face. He was a tall man, uncommonly tall, and he wore his stirrups long so that he looked much too big for his horse, which was a sorry, sway-backed beast with a mangy hide, though there was nothing odd in that. Good horses were a luxury in India, and most Company officers rode decrepit nags. ‘Welcome to Chasalgaon, sir,’ Leonard said. He was not certain he ought to call the stranger ‘sir’, for the man wore no visible badge of rank on his red coat, but he carried himself like a senior officer and he reacted to Leonard’s greeting with a lordly nonchalance. ‘You’re invited to dine with us, sir,’ Leonard added, hurrying after the horseman who, having tucked his riding crop under his belt, now led his sepoys straight onto the parade ground. He stopped his horse under the flagpole from which the British flag drooped in the windless air, then waited as his company of red-coated sepoys divided into two units of two ranks each that marched either side of the flagpole. Crosby watched from inside his tent. It was a flamboyant entrance, the Major decided.

‘Halt!’ the strange officer shouted when his company was in the very centre of the fort. The sepoys halted. ‘Outwards turn! Ground firelocks! Good morning!’ He at last looked down at Captain Leonard. ‘Are you Crosby?’

‘No, sir. I’m Captain Leonard, sir. And you, sir?’ The tall man ignored the question. He scowled about Chasalgaon’s fort as though he disapproved of everything he saw. What the hell was this? Leonard wondered. A surprise inspection? ‘Shall I have your horse watered, sir?’ Leonard offered.

‘In good time, Captain, all in good time,’ the mysterious officer said, then he twisted in his saddle and growled an order to his company. ‘Fix bayonets!’ The sepoys pulled out their seventeen-inch blades and slotted them onto the muzzles of their muskets. ‘I like to offer a proper salute to a fellow Englishman,’ the tall man explained to Leonard. ‘You are English, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Too many damned Scots in the Company,’ the tall man grumbled. ‘Have you ever noticed that, Leonard? Too many Scots and Irish. Glib sorts of fellow, they are, but they ain’t English. Not English at all.’ The visitor drew his sword, then took a deep breath. ‘Company!’ he shouted. ‘Level arms!’

The sepoys brought their muskets to their shoulders and Leonard saw, much too late, that the guns were aimed at the troops of the garrison. ‘No!’ he said, but not loudly, for he still did not believe what he saw.

‘Fire!’ the officer shouted, and the parade ground air was murdered by the double ripple of musket shots, heavy coughing explosions that blossomed smoke across the sun-crazed mud and slammed lead balls into the unsuspecting garrison.

‘Hunt them now!’ the tall officer called. ‘Hunt them! Fast, fast, fast!’ He spurred his horse close to Captain Leonard and, almost casually, slashed down with his sword, ripping the blade hard back once it had bitten into the Captain’s neck so that its edge sawed fast and deep through the sinew, muscle and flesh. ‘Hunt them! Hunt them!’ the officer shouted as Leonard fell. He drew a pistol from his saddle holster and rode towards the officers’ tents. His men were screaming their war cries as they spread through the small fort to chase down every last sepoy of Chasalgaon’s garrison. They had been ordered to leave the women and children to the last and hunt down the men first.

Crosby had been staring in horror and disbelief, and now, with shaking hands, he started to load one of his pistols, but suddenly the door of his tent darkened and he saw that the tall officer had dismounted from his horse. ‘Are you Crosby?’ the officer demanded.

Crosby found he could not speak. His hands quivered. Sweat was pouring down his face.

‘Are you Crosby?’ the man asked again in an irritated voice.

‘Yes,’ Crosby managed to say. ‘And who the devil are you?’

‘Dodd,’ the tall man said, ‘Major William Dodd, at your service.’ And Dodd raised his big pistol so that it pointed at Crosby’s face.

‘No!’ Crosby shouted.

Dodd smiled. ‘I assume you’re surrendering the fort to me, Crosby?’

‘Damn you,’ Crosby riposted feebly.

‘You drink too much, Major,’ Dodd said. ‘The whole Company knows you’re a sot. Didn’t put up much of a fight, did you?’ He pulled the trigger and Crosby’s head was snatched back in a mist of blood that spattered onto the canvas. ‘Pity you’re English,’ Dodd said. ‘I’d much rather shoot a Scotsman.’ The dying Major made a terrible gurgling sound, then his body jerked uncontrollably and was finally still. ‘Praise the Lord, pull down the flag and find the pay chest,’ Dodd said to himself, then he stepped over the Major’s corpse to see that the pay chest was where he expected it to be, under the bed. ‘Subadar!’

‘Sahib?’

‘Two men here to guard the pay chest.’

‘Sahib!’

Major Dodd hurried back onto the parade ground where a small group of redcoats, British redcoats, were offering defiance, and he wanted to make sure that his sepoys took care of them, but a havildar had anticipated Dodd’s orders and was leading a squad of men against the half-dozen soldiers. ‘Put the blades in!’ Dodd encouraged them. ‘Hard in! Twist them in! That’s the way! Watch your left! Left!’ His voice was urgent, for a tall sergeant had suddenly appeared from behind the cookhouse, a white man with a musket and bayonet in his hands, but one of the sepoys still had a loaded musket of his own and he twisted, aimed and fired and Dodd saw another mist of bright blood sparkle in the sunlight. The sergeant had been hit in the head. He stopped, looked surprised as the musket fell from his hands and as blood streamed down his face, then he fell backwards and was still.

‘Search for the rest of the bastards!’ Dodd ordered, knowing that there must still be a score of the garrison hidden in the barracks. Some of the men had escaped over the thorn wall, but they would be hunted down by the Mahratta horsemen who were Dodd’s allies and who should by now have spread either side of the fort. ‘Search hard!’ He himself went to look at the horses of the garrison’s officers and decided that one of them was marginally better than his own. He moved his saddle to the better horse, then led it into the sunlight and picketed it to the flagpole. A woman ran past him, screaming as she fled from the red-coated killers, but a sepoy caught and tripped her and another pulled the sari off her shoulder. Dodd was about to order them away from the woman, then he reckoned that the enemy was well beaten and so his men could take their pleasure in safety. ‘Subadar?’ he shouted.

‘Sahib?’

‘One squad to make sure everyone’s dead. Another to open the armoury. And there are a couple of horses in the stable. Pick one for yourself, and we’ll take the other back to Pohlmann. And well done, Gopal.’

‘Thank you, sahib,’ Subadar Gopal said.

Dodd wiped the blood from his sword, then reloaded his pistol. One of the fallen redcoats was trying to turn himself over, so Dodd crossed to the wounded man, watched his feeble efforts for a moment, then put a bullet into the man’s head. The man jerked in spasm, then was still. Major Dodd scowled at the blood that had sprayed his boots, but he spat, stooped and wiped the blood away. Sharpe watched the tall officer from the corner of his eye. He felt responsible, angry, hot, bitter and scared. The blood had poured from the wound in his scalp. He was dizzy, his head throbbed, but he was alive. There were flies in his mouth. And then his ammunition began to explode and the tall officer whipped round, thinking it was trouble, and a couple of men laughed at the sight of the ashes bursting into the air with each small crack of powder.

Sharpe dared not move. He listened to women screaming and children crying, then heard hooves and he waited until some horsemen came into view. They were Indians, of course, and all wild-looking men with sabres, matchlocks, spears, lances and even bows and arrows. They slid out of their saddles and joined the hunt for loot.

Sharpe lay like the dead. The crusting blood was thick on his face. The blow of the musket ball had stunned him, so that he did not remember dropping his own musket or falling to the ground, but he sensed that the blow was not deadly. Not even deep. He had a headache, and the skin of his face felt taut with the crusted blood, but he knew head wounds always bled profusely. He tried to make his breathing shallow, left his mouth open and did not even gag when a fly crawled down to the root of his tongue, and then he could smell tobacco, arrack, leather and sweat and a horseman was bending over him with a horrid-looking curved knife with a rusty blade and Sharpe feared his throat was about to be cut, but instead the horseman began slashing at the pockets of Sharpe’s uniform. He found the big key that opened Seringapatam’s main magazine, a key that Sharpe had ordered cut in the bazaar so that he would not always have to fill in the form in the armoury guardhouse. The man tossed the key away, slit another pocket, found nothing valuable and so moved on to another body. Sharpe stared up at the sun.

Somewhere nearby a garrison sepoy groaned, and almost immediately he was bayoneted and Sharpe heard the hoarse exhalation of breath as the man died and the sucking sound as the murderer dragged the blade back from the constricting flesh. It had all happened so fast! And Sharpe blamed himself, though he knew it was not his fault. He had not let the killers into the fort, but he had hesitated for a few seconds to throw his pack, pouches and cartridge box onto the fire, and now he chided himself because maybe he could have used those few seconds to save his six men. Except most of them had already been dead or dying when Sharpe had first realized there was a fight. He had been pissing against the back wall of the cookhouse store hut when a musket ball ripped through the reed-mat wall and for a second or two he had just stood there, incredulous, hardly believing the shots and screams his ears registered, and he had not bothered to button his trousers, but just turned and saw the dying campfire and had thrown his pack onto it, and by the time he had cocked the musket and run back to where his men had been expecting dinner the fight was almost over. The musket ball had jerked his head back and there had been a stabbing pain either side of his eyes, and the next he knew he was lying with blood crusting on his face and flies crawling down his gullet.

But maybe he could have snatched his men back. He tortured himself with the thought that he could have saved Davi Lal and a couple of the privates, maybe he could have crossed the cactus-thorn wall and run into the trees, but Davi Lal was dead and all six privates were dead and Sharpe could hear the killers laughing as they carried the ammunition out of the small magazine.

‘Subadar!’ the tall officer shouted. ‘Fetch that bloody flag down! I wanted it done an hour ago!’

Sharpe blinked again because he could not help himself, but no one noticed, and then he closed his eyes because the sun was blinding him, and he wanted to weep out of anger and frustration and hatred. Six men dead, and Davi Lal dead, and Sharpe had not been able to do a damned thing to help them, and he wondered who the tall officer was, and then a voice provided the answer.

‘Major Dodd, sahib?’

‘Subadar?’

‘Everything’s loaded, sahib.’

‘Then let’s go before their patrols get back. Well done, Subadar! Tell the men there’ll be a reward.’

Sharpe listened as the raiders left the fort. Who the hell were they? Major Dodd had been in East India Company uniform, and so had all his men for that matter, but they sure as hell were not Company troops. They were bastards, that’s what they were, bastards from hell and they had done a thorough piece of wicked work in Chasalgaon. Sharpe doubted they had lost a single man in their treacherous attack, and still he lay silent as the sounds faded away. A baby cried somewhere, a woman sobbed, and still Sharpe waited until at last he was certain that Major Dodd and his men were gone, and only then did Sharpe roll onto his side. The fort stank of blood and buzzed with flies. He groaned and got to his knees. The cauldron of rice and kid had boiled dry and so he stood and kicked it off its tripod. ‘Bastards,’ he said, and he saw the surprised look on Davi Lal’s face and he wanted to weep for the boy.

A half-naked woman, bleeding from the mouth, saw Sharpe stand from among the bloodied heap of the dead and she screamed before snatching her child back into a barracks hut. Sharpe ignored her. His musket was gone. Every damn weapon was gone. ‘Bastards!’ he shouted into the hot air, then he kicked at a dog that was sniffing at Phillips’s corpse. The smell of blood and powder and burned rice was thick in his throat. He gagged as he walked into the cookhouse and there found a jar of water. He drank deep, then splashed the water onto his face and rubbed away the clotted blood. He wet a rag and flinched as he cleaned the shallow wound in his scalp, then suddenly he was overcome with horror and pity and he fell onto his knees and half sobbed. He swore instead. ‘Bastards!’ He said the word again and again, helplessly and furiously, then he remembered his pack and so he stood again and went into the sunlight.

The ashes of the fire were still hot and the charred canvas remnants of his pack and pouches glowed red as he found a stick and raked through the embers. One by one he found what he had hidden in the fire. The rupees that had been for hiring the carts, then the rubies and emeralds, diamonds and pearls, sapphires and gold. He fetched a sack of rice from the cookhouse and he emptied the grains onto the ground and filled the sack with his treasure. A king’s ransom, it was, and it had been taken from a king four years before in the Water Gate at Seringapatam where Sharpe had trapped the Tippoo Sultan and shot him down before looting his corpse.

Then, with the treasure clutched to his midriff, he knelt in the stench of Chasalgaon and felt guilty. He had survived a massacre. Anger mingled with his guilt, then he knew he had duties to do. He must find any others who had survived, he must help them, and he must work out how he could take his revenge.

On a man called Dodd.

Major John Stokes was an engineer, and if ever a man was happy with his avocation, it was Major John Stokes. There was nothing he enjoyed so much as making things, whether it was a better gun carriage, a garden or, as he was doing now, improvements to a clock that belonged to the Rajah of Mysore. The Rajah was a young man, scarcely more than a boy indeed, and he owed his throne to the British troops who had ejected the usurping Tippoo Sultan and, as a result, relations between the palace and Seringapatam’s small British garrison were good. Major Stokes had found the clock in one of the palace’s antechambers and noted its appalling accuracy, which is why he had brought it back to the armoury where he was happily taking it apart. ‘It isn’t signed,’ he told his visitor, ‘and I suspect it’s local work. But a Frenchman had his hand in it, I can tell that. See the escapement? Typical French work, that.’

The visitor peered at the tangle of cogwheels. ‘Didn’t know the Frogs had it in them to make clocks, sir,’ he said.

‘Oh, indeed they do!’ Stokes said reprovingly. ‘And very fine clocks they make! Very fine. Think of Lépine! Think of Berthoud! How can you ignore Montandon? And Breguet!’ The Major shook his head in mute tribute to such great craftsmen, then peered at the Rajah’s sorry timepiece. ‘Some rust on the mainspring, I see. That don’t help. Soft metal, I suspect. It’s catch as catch can over here. I’ve noticed that. Marvellous decorative work, but Indians make shoddy mechanics. Look at that mainspring! A disgrace.’

‘Shocking, sir, shocking.’ Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill did not know a mainspring from a pendulum, and could not have cared less about either, but he needed information from Major Stokes so it was politic to show an interest.

‘It was striking nine when it should have struck eight,’ the Major said, poking a finger into the clock’s entrails, ‘or perhaps it was striking eight when it ought to have sounded nine. I don’t recall. One to seven it copes with admirably, but somewhere about eight it becomes wayward.’ The Major, who was in charge of Seringapatam’s armoury, was a plump, cheerful fellow with prematurely white hair. ‘Do you understand clocks, Sergeant?’

‘Can’t say as I does, sir. A simple soldier, me, sir, who has the sun as his clock.’ The Sergeant’s face twitched horribly. It was an uncontrollable spasm that racked his face every few seconds.

‘You were asking about Sharpe,’ Major Stokes said, peering into the clock. ‘Well, I never! This fellow has made the bearings out of wood! Good Lord above. Wood! No wonder she’s wayward! Harrison once made a wooden clock, did you know? Even the gearings! All from timber.’

‘Harrison, sir? Is he in the army, sir?’

‘He’s a clockmaker, Sergeant, a clockmaker. A very fine clockmaker too.’

‘Not a Frog, sir?’

‘With a name like Harrison? Good Lord, no! He’s English, and he makes a good honest clock.’

‘Glad to hear it, sir,’ Hakeswill said, then reminded the Major of the purpose of his visit to the armoury. ‘Sergeant Sharpe, sir, my good friend, sir, is he here?’

‘He is here,’ Stokes said, at last looking up from the clock, ‘or rather he was here. I saw him an hour ago. But he went to his quarters. He’s been away, you see. Involved in that dreadful business in Chasalgaon.’

‘Chiseldown, sir?’

‘Terrible business, terrible! So I told Sharpe to clean himself up. Poor fellow was covered in blood! Looked like a pirate. Now that is interesting.’

‘Blood, sir?’ Hakeswill asked.

‘A six-toothed scapewheel! With a bifurcated locking piece! Well, I never! That is enriching the pudding with currants. Rather like putting an Egg lock on a common pistol! I’m sure if you wait, Sergeant, Sharpe will be back soon. He’s a marvellous fellow. Never lets me down.’

Hakeswill forced a smile, for he hated Sharpe with a rare and single-minded venom. ‘He’s one of the best, sir,’ he said, his face twitching. ‘And will he be leaving Seringapatam soon, sir? Off on an errand again, would he be?’

‘Oh no!’ Stokes said, picking up a magnifying glass to look more closely into the clock. ‘I need him here, Sergeant. That’s it, you see! There’s a pin missing from the strike wheel. It engages the cogs here, do you see, and the gearing does the rest. Simple, I suppose.’ The Major looked up, but saw that the strange Sergeant with the twitching face was gone. Never mind, the clock was far more interesting.

Sergeant Hakeswill left the armoury and turned left towards the barracks where he had temporary accommodation. The King’s 33rd was quartered now in Hurryhur, a hundred and fifty miles to the north, and their job was to keep the roads of western Mysore clear of bandits and so the regiment ranged up and down the country and, finding themselves close to Seringapatam where the main armoury was located, Colonel Gore had sent a detachment for replacement ammunition. Captain Morris of the Light Company had drawn the duty, and he had brought half his men and Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill to protect the shipment which would leave the city next morning and be carried on ox carts to Arrakerry where the regiment was currently camped. An easy task, but one that had offered Sergeant Hakeswill an opportunity he had long sought.

The Sergeant stopped in one of the grog shops and demanded arrack. The shop was empty, all but for himself, the owner and a legless beggar who heaved himself towards the Sergeant and received a kick in the rump for his trouble. ‘Get out of here, you scabby bastard!’ Hakeswill shouted. ‘Bringing the flies in, you are. Go on! Piss off.’ The shop thus emptied to his satisfaction, Hakeswill sat in a dark corner contemplating life. ‘I chide myself,’ he muttered aloud, worrying the shop’s owner who feared the look of the twitching man in the red coat. ‘Your own fault, Obadiah,’ Hakeswill said. ‘You should have seen it years ago! Years! Rich as a Jew, he is. Are you listening to me, you heathen darkie bastard?’ The shop’s owner, thus challenged, fled into the back room, leaving Hakeswill grumbling at the table. ‘Rich as a Jew, Sharpie is, only he thinks he hides it, which he don’t, on account of me having tumbled to him. He don’t even live in barracks! Got himself some rooms over by the Mysore Gate. Got a bleeding servant boy. Always got cash on him, always! Buys drinks.’ Hakeswill shook his head at the injustice of it all. The 33rd had spent the last four years patrolling Mysore’s roads and Sharpe, all that while, had been living in Seringapatam’s comforts. It was not right, not fair, not just. Hakeswill had worried about it, wondering why Sharpe was so rich. At first he had assumed that Sharpe had been fiddling the armoury stores, but that could not explain Sharpe’s apparent wealth. ‘Only so much milk in a cow,’ Hakeswill muttered, ‘no matter how hard you squeeze the teats.’ Now he knew why Sharpe was rich, or he thought he knew, and what he had learned had filled Obadiah Hakeswill with a desperate jealousy. He scratched at a mosquito bite on his neck, revealing the old dark scar where the hangman’s rope had burned and abraded his skin. Obadiah Hakeswill had survived that hanging, and as a result he fervently believed that he could not be killed. Touched by God, he claimed he was, touched by God.

But he was not rich. Not rich at all, and Richard Sharpe was rich. Rumour had it that Richard Sharpe used Lali’s house, and that was an officers-only brothel, so why was Sergeant Sharpe allowed inside? Because he was rich, that was why, and Hakeswill had at last discovered Sharpe’s secret. ‘It was the Tippoo!’ he said aloud, then thumped the table with his tin mug to demand more drink. ‘And hurry up about it, you black-faced bastard!’

It had to be the Tippoo. Had not Hakeswill seen Sharpe lurking about the area where the Tippoo had been killed? And no soldier had ever claimed the credit for killing the Tippoo. It was widely thought that one of those Suffolk bastards from the 12th had caught the King in the chaos at the siege’s end, but Hakeswill had finally worked it out. It had been Sharpe, and the reason Sharpe had kept quiet about the killing was because he had stripped the Tippoo of all his gems and he did not want anyone, least of all the army’s senior officers, to know that he possessed the jewels. ‘Bloody Sharpe!’ Hakeswill said aloud.

So all that was needed now was an excuse to have Sharpe brought back to the regiment. No more clean and easy duty for Sharpie! No more merry rides in Lali’s house for him. It would be Obadiah Hakeswill’s turn to live in luxury, and all because of a dead king’s treasure. ‘Rubies,’ Hakeswill said aloud, lingering over the word, ‘and emeralds and sapphires, and diamonds like stars, and gold thick as butter.’ He chuckled. And all it would need, he reckoned, was a little cunning. A little cunning, a confident lie and an arrest. ‘And that will be your end, Sharpie, that will be your end,’ Hakeswill said, and he could feel the beauty of his scheme unfold like a lotus blossoming in Seringapatam’s moat. It would work! His visit to Major Stokes had established that Sharpe was in the town, which meant that the lie could be told and then, just like Major Stokes’s clockwork, everything would go right. Every cog and gear and wheel and spike would slot and click and tick and tock, and Sergeant Hakeswill’s face twitched and his hands contracted as though the tin mug in his grip were a man’s throat. He would be rich.

It took Major William Dodd three days to carry the ammunition back to Pohlmann’s compoo which was camped just outside the Mahratta city of Ahmednuggur. The compoo was an infantry brigade of eight battalions, each of them recruited from among the finest mercenary warriors of north India and all trained and commanded by European officers. Dowlut Rao Scindia, the Maharajah of Gwalior, whose land stretched from the fortress of Baroda in the north to the fastness of Gawilghur in the east and down to Ahmednuggur in the south, boasted that he led a hundred thousand men and that his army could blacken the land like a plague, yet this compoo, with its seven thousand men, was the hard heart of his army.

One of the compoo’s eight battalions was paraded a mile outside the encampment to greet Dodd. The cavalry that had accompanied the sepoys to Chasalgaon had ridden ahead to warn Pohlmann of Dodd’s return and Pohlmann had organized a triumphant reception. The battalion stood in white coats, their black belts and weapons gleaming, but Dodd, riding at the head of his small column, had eyes only for the tall elephant that stood beside a yellow-and-white-striped marquee. The huge beast glittered in the sunlight, for its body and head were armoured with a vast leather cape onto which squares of silver had been sewn in intricate patterns. The silver covered the elephant’s body, continued across its face and then, all but for two circles that had been cut for its eyes, cascaded on down the length of its trunk. Gems gleamed between the silver plates while ribbons of purple silk fluttered from the crown of the animal’s head. The last few inches of the animal’s big curved tusks were sheathed in silver, though the actual points of the tusks were tipped with needle-sharp points of steel. The elephant driver, the mahout, sweated in a coat of old-fashioned chain mail that had been burnished to the same gleaming polish as his animal’s silver armour, while behind him was a howdah made of cedarwood on which gold panels had been nailed and above which fluttered a fringed canopy of yellow silk. Long files of purple-jacketed infantrymen stood to attention on either flank of the elephant. Some of the men carried muskets, while others had long pikes with their broad blades polished to resemble silver.

The elephant knelt when Dodd came within twenty paces and the occupant of the howdah stepped carefully down onto a set of silver-plated steps placed there by one of his purple-coated bodyguards then strolled into the shade of the striped marquee. He was a European, a tall man and big, not fat, and though a casual glance might think him overweight, a second glance would see that most of that weight was solid muscle. He had a round sun-reddened face, big black moustaches and eyes that seemed to take delight in everything he saw. His uniform was of his own devising: white silk breeches tucked into English riding boots, a green coat festooned with gold lace and aiguillettes and, on the coat’s broad shoulders, thick white silk cushions hung with short golden chains. The coat had scarlet facings and loops of scarlet braid about its turned-back cuffs and gilded buttons. The big man’s hat was a bicorne crested with purple-dyed feathers held in place by a badge showing the white horse of Hanover; his sword’s hilt was made of gold fashioned into the shape of an elephant’s head, and gold rings glinted on his big fingers. Once in the shade of the open-sided marquee he settled himself on a divan where his aides gathered about him. This was Colonel Anthony Pohlmann and he commanded the compoo, together with five hundred cavalry and twenty-six field guns. Ten years before, when Scindia’s army had been nothing but a horde of ragged troopers on half-starved horses, Anthony Pohlmann had been a sergeant in a Hanoverian regiment of the East India Company; now he rode an elephant and needed two other beasts to carry the chests of gold coin that travelled everywhere with him.

Pohlmann stood as Dodd climbed down from his horse. ‘Well done, Major!’ the Colonel called in his German-accented English. ‘Exceedingly well done!’ Pohlmann’s aides, half of them European and half Indian, joined their commander in applauding the returning hero, while the bodyguard made a double line through which Dodd could advance to meet the resplendent Colonel. ‘Eighty thousand cartridges,’ Pohlmann exulted, ‘snatched from our enemies!’

‘Seventy-three thousand, sir,’ Dodd said, beating dust off his breeches.

Pohlmann grinned. ‘Seven thousand spoiled, eh? Nothing changes.’

‘Not spoiled by me, sir,’ Dodd growled.

‘I never supposed so,’ Pohlmann said. ‘Did you have any difficulties?’

‘None,’ Dodd answered confidently. ‘We lost no one, sir, not even a scratch, while not a single enemy soldier survived.’ He smiled, cracking the dust on his cheeks. ‘Not one.’

‘A victory!’ Pohlmann said, then gestured Dodd into the tent. ‘We have wine, of sorts. There is rum, arrack, even water! Come, Major.’

Dodd did not move. ‘My men are tired, sir,’ he pointed out.

‘Then dismiss them, Major. They can take refreshment at my cook tent.’

Dodd went to dismiss his men. He was a gangling Englishman with a long sallow face and a sullen expression. He was also that rarest of things, an officer who had deserted from the East India Company, and deserted moreover with one hundred and thirty of his own sepoy troops. He had come to Pohlmann just three weeks before and some of Pohlmann’s European officers had been convinced that Lieutenant Dodd was a spy sent by the British whose army was readying to attack the Mahratta Confederation, but Pohlmann had not been so sure. It was true that no other British officer had ever deserted like Dodd, but few had reasons like Dodd, and Pohlmann had also recognized Dodd’s hunger, his awkwardness, his anger and his ability. Lieutenant Dodd’s record showed he was no mean soldier, his sepoys liked him, and he had a raging ambition, and Pohlmann had believed the Lieutenant’s defection to be both wholehearted and real. He had made Dodd into a major, then given him a test. He had sent him to Chasalgaon. If Dodd proved capable of killing his old comrades then he was no spy, and Dodd had passed the test triumphantly and Scindia’s army was now better off by seventy-three thousand cartridges.

Dodd came back to the marquee and was given the chair of honour on the right side of Pohlmann’s divan. The chair on the left was occupied by a woman, a European, and Dodd could scarcely keep his eyes from her, and no wonder, for she was a rare-looking woman to discover in India. She was young, scarce more than eighteen or nineteen, with a pale face and very fair hair. Her lips were maybe a trifle too thin and her forehead perhaps a half inch too wide, yet there was something oddly attractive about her. She had a face, Dodd decided, in which the imperfections added up to attractiveness, and her appeal was augmented by a timid air of vulnerability. At first Dodd assumed the woman was Pohlmann’s mistress, but then he saw that her white linen dress was frayed at the hem and some of the lace at its modest collar was crudely darned, and he decided that Pohlmann would never allow his mistress to appear so shabbily.

‘Let me introduce Madame Joubert to you,’ Pohlmann said, who had noticed how hungrily Dodd had stared at the woman. ‘This is Major William Dodd.’

‘Madame Joubert?’ Dodd stressed the ‘Madame’, half rising and bowing from his chair as he acknowledged her.

‘Major,’ she said in a low voice, then smiled nervously before looking down at the table that was spread with dishes of almonds.

Pohlmann snapped his fingers for a servant, then smiled at Major Dodd. ‘Simone is married to Captain Joubert, and that is Captain Joubert.’ He pointed into the sunlight where a short captain stood to attention in front of the paraded battalion that stood so stiff and still in the biting sun.

‘Joubert commands the battalion, sir?’ Dodd asked.

‘No one commands the battalion,’ Pohlmann answered. ‘But until three weeks ago it was led by Colonel Mathers. Back then it had five European officers; now it has Captain Joubert and Lieutenant Sillière.’ He pointed to a second European, a tall thin young man, and Dodd, who was observant, saw Simone Joubert blush at the mention of Sillière’s name. Dodd was amused. Joubert looked at least twenty years older than his wife, while Sillière was only a year or two her senior. ‘And we must have Europeans,’ Pohlmann went on, stretching back on the divan that creaked under his weight. ‘The Indians are fine soldiers, but we need Europeans who understand European tactics.’

‘How many European officers have you lost, sir?’ Dodd asked.

‘From this compoo? Eighteen,’ Pohlmann said. ‘Too many.’ The men who had gone were the British officers, and all had possessed contracts with Scindia that excused them from fighting against their own countrymen, and to make matters worse the East India Company had offered a bribe to any British officer who deserted the Mahrattas and, as a result, some of Pohlmann’s best men were gone. It was true that he still had some good officers left, most of them French, with a handful of Dutchmen, Swiss and Germans, but Pohlmann knew he could ill afford the loss of eighteen European officers. At least none of his artillerymen had deserted and Pohlmann put great faith in the battle-winning capacity of his guns. Those cannon were served by Portuguese, or by half-breed Indians from the Portuguese colonies in India, and those professionals had stayed loyal and were awesomely proficient.

Pohlmann drained a glass of rum and poured himself another. He had an extraordinary capacity for alcohol, a capacity Dodd did not share, and the Englishman, knowing his propensity for getting drunk, restrained himself to sips of watered wine. ‘I promised you a reward, Major, if you succeeded in rescuing the cartridges,’ Pohlmann said genially.

‘Knowing I’ve done my duty is reward enough,’ Dodd said. He felt shabby and ill-uniformed among Pohlmann’s gaudy aides and had decided that it was best to play the bluff soldier, a role he thought would appeal to a former sergeant. It was said that Pohlmann kept his old East India Company uniform as a reminder of just how far he had risen.

‘Men do not join Scindia’s army merely for the pleasures of doing their duty,’ Pohlmann said, ‘but for the rewards such service offers. We are here to become rich, are we not?’ He unhooked the elephant-hilted sword from his belt. The scabbard was made of soft red leather and was studded with small emeralds. ‘Here.’ Pohlmann offered the sword to Dodd.

‘I can’t take your sword!’ Dodd protested.

‘I have many, Major, and many finer. I insist.’

Dodd took the sword. He drew the blade from the scabbard and saw that it was finely made, much better than the drab sword he had worn as a lieutenant these last twenty years. Many Indian swords were made of soft steel and broke easily in combat, but Dodd guessed this blade had been forged in France or Britain, then given its beautiful elephant hilt in India. That hilt was of gold, the elephant’s head made the pommel, while the handguard was the beast’s curved trunk. The grip was of black leather bound with gold wire. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said feelingly.

‘It is the first of many rewards,’ Pohlmann said airily, ‘and those rewards will shower on us when we beat the British. Which we shall, though not here.’ He paused to drink rum. ‘The British will attack any day now,’ he went on, ‘and they doubtless hope I’ll stay and fight them here, but I don’t have a mind to oblige them. Better to make the bastards march after us, eh? The rains may come while they pursue us and the rivers will hold them up. Disease will weaken them. And once they are weak and tired, we shall be strong. All Scindia’s compoos will join together and the Rajah of Berar has promised his army, and once we are all gathered we shall crush the British. But that means I have to give up Ahmednuggur.’

‘Not an important city,’ Dodd commented. He noticed that Simone Joubert was sipping wine. She kept her eyes lowered, only occasionally glancing up at her husband or at Lieutenant Sillière. She took no notice of Dodd, but she would, he promised himself, she would. Her nose was too small, he decided, but even so she was a thing of pale and fragile wonder in this hot, dark-skinned land. Her blonde hair, which was hung with ringlets in a fashion that had prevailed ten years before in Europe, was held in place by small mother-of-pearl clips.

‘Ahmednuggur is not important,’ Pohlmann agreed, ‘but Scindia hates losing any of his cities and he stuffed Ahmednuggur full of supplies and insisted I post one regiment inside the city.’ He nodded towards the white-coated troops. ‘That regiment, Major. It’s probably my best regiment, but I am forced to quarter it in Ahmednuggur.’

Dodd understood Pohlmann’s predicament. ‘You can’t take them out of the city without upsetting Scindia,’ he said, ‘but you don’t want to lose the regiment when the city falls.’

‘I can’t lose it!’ Pohlmann said indignantly. ‘A good regiment like that? Mathers trained it well, very well. Now he’s gone to join our enemies, but I can’t lose his regiment as well, so whoever takes over from Mathers must know how to extricate his men from trouble.’

Dodd felt a surge of excitement. He liked to think that it was not just for the money that he had deserted the Company, nor because of his legal troubles, but for the long overdue chance of leading his own regiment. He could do it well, he knew that, and he knew what Pohlmann was leading up to.

Pohlmann smiled. ‘Suppose I give you Mathers’s regiment, Major? Can you pull it out of the fire for me?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Dodd said simply. Simone Joubert, for the first time since she had been introduced to Dodd, looked up at him, but without any friendliness.

‘All of it?’ Pohlmann asked. ‘With its cannon?’

‘All of it,’ Dodd said firmly, ‘and with every damned gun.’

‘Then from now it is Dodd’s regiment,’ Pohlmann said, ‘and if you lead it well, Major, I shall make you a colonel and give you a second regiment to command.’

Dodd celebrated by draining his cup of wine. He was so overcome with emotion that he hardly dared speak, though the look on his face said it all. His own regiment at last! He had waited so long for this moment and now, by God, he would show the Company how well their despised officers could fight.

Pohlmann snapped his fingers so that a servant girl brought him more rum. ‘How many men will Wellesley bring?’ he asked Dodd.

‘No more than fifteen thousand infantry,’ the new commander of Dodd’s regiment answered confidently. ‘Probably fewer, and they’ll be split into two armies. Boy Wellesley will command one, Colonel Stevenson the other.’

‘Stevenson’s old, yes?’

‘Ancient and cautious,’ Dodd said dismissively.

‘Cavalry?’

‘Five or six thousand? Mostly Indians.’

‘Guns?’

‘Twenty-six at most. Nothing bigger than a twelve-pounder.’

‘And Scindia can field eighty guns,’ Pohlmann said, ‘some of them twenty-eight-pounders. And once the Rajah of Berar’s forces join us, we’ll have forty thousand infantry and at least fifty more guns.’ The Hanoverian smiled. ‘But battles aren’t just numbers. They’re also won by generals. Tell me about this Major General Sir Arthur Wellesley.’

‘Boy Wellesley?’ Dodd responded scathingly. The British General was younger than Dodd, but that was not the cause of the derisory nickname. Rather it was envy, for Wellesley had connections and wealth, while Dodd had neither. ‘He’s young,’ Dodd said, ‘only thirty-four.’

‘Youth is no barrier to good soldiering,’ Pohlmann said chidingly, though he well understood Dodd’s resentment. For years Dodd had watched younger men rise up through the ranks of the King’s army while he had been stuck in the Company’s hidebound ranks. A man could not buy promotion in the Company, nor were promotions given by merit, but only by seniority, and so forty-year-old men like Dodd were still lieutenants while, in the King’s army, mere boys were captains or majors. ‘Is Wellesley good?’ Pohlmann asked.

‘He’s never fought a battle,’ Dodd said bitterly, ‘not unless you count Malavelly.’

‘One volley?’ Pohlmann asked, half recalling stories of the skirmish.

‘One volley and a bayonet charge,’ Dodd said, ‘not a proper battle.’

‘He defeated Dhoondiah.’

‘A cavalry charge against a bandit,’ Dodd said scornfully. ‘My point, sir, is that Boy Wellesley has never faced artillery and infantry on a real battlefield. He was jumped up to major general solely because his brother is Governor General. If his name had been Dodd instead of Wellesley he’d be lucky to command a company, let alone an army.’

‘He’s an aristocrat?’ Pohlmann enquired.

‘Of course. What else?’ Dodd asked. ‘His father was an earl.’

‘So…’ Pohlmann put a handful of almonds in his mouth and paused to chew them. ‘So,’ he went on, ‘he’s the younger son of a nobleman, sent into the army because he wasn’t good for anything else, and his family purchased him up the ranks?’

‘Exactly, sir, exactly.’

‘But I hear he is efficient?’

‘Efficient?’ Dodd thought about it. ‘He’s efficient, sir, because his brother gives him the cash. He can afford a big bullock train. He carries his supplies with him, so his men are well fed. But he still ain’t ever seen a cannon’s muzzle, not facing him, not alongside a score of others and backed by steady infantry.’

‘He did well as Governor of Mysore,’ Pohlmann observed mildly.

‘So he’s an efficient governor? Does that make him a general?’

‘A disciplinarian, I hear,’ Pohlmann said.

‘He sets a lovely parade ground,’ Dodd agreed sarcastically.

‘But he isn’t a fool?’

‘No,’ Dodd admitted, ‘not a fool, but not a general either. He’s been promoted too fast and too young, sir. He’s beaten bandits, but he took a beating himself outside Seringapatam.’

‘Ah, yes. The night attack.’ Pohlmann had heard of that skirmish, how Arthur Wellesley had attacked a wood outside Seringapatam and there been roundly thrashed by the Tippoo’s troops. ‘Even so,’ he said, ‘it never serves to underestimate an enemy.’

‘Overestimate him as much as you like, sir,’ Dodd said stoutly, ‘but the fact remains that Boy Wellesley has never fought a proper battle, not with more than a thousand men under his command, and he’s never faced a real army, not a trained field army with gunners and disciplined infantry, and my guess is that he won’t stand. He’ll run back to his brother and demand more men. He’s a careful man.’

Pohlmann smiled. ‘So let us lure this careful man deep into our territory where he can’t retreat, eh? Then beat him.’ He smiled, then hauled a watch from his fob and snapped open the lid. ‘I have to be going soon,’ he said, ‘but some business first.’ He took an envelope from his gaudy coat’s pocket and handed the sealed paper to Dodd. ‘That is your authority to command Mathers’s regiment, Major,’ he said, ‘but remember, I want you to bring it safely out of Ahmednuggur. You can help the defence for a time, but don’t be trapped there. Young Wellesley can’t invest the whole city, he doesn’t have enough men, so you should be able to escape easily enough. Bloody his nose, Dodd, but keep your regiment safe. Do you understand?’

Dodd understood well enough. Pohlmann was setting Dodd a difficult and ignoble task, that of retreating from a fight with his command intact. There was little glory in such a manoeuvre, but it would still be a difficult piece of soldiering and Dodd knew he was being tested a second time. The first test had been Chasalgaon, the second would be Ahmednuggur. ‘I can manage it,’ he said dourly.

‘Good!’ Pohlmann said. ‘I shall make things easier for you by taking your regiment’s families northwards. You might march soldiers safely from the city’s fall, but I doubt you can manage a horde of women and children too. And what about you, Madame?’ He turned and laid a meaty hand on Simone Joubert’s knee. ‘Will you come with me?’ He talked to her as though she were a child. ‘Or stay with Major Dodd?’

Simone seemed startled by the question. She blushed and looked up at Lieutenant Sillière. ‘I shall stay here, Colonel,’ she answered in English.

‘Make sure you bring her safe home, Major,’ Pohlmann said to Dodd.

‘I shall, sir.’

Pohlmann stood. His purple-coated bodyguards, who had been standing in front of the tent, hurried to take their places on the elephant’s flanks while the mahout, who had been resting in the animal’s capacious shade, now mounted the somnolent beast by gripping its tail and clambering up its backside like a sailor swarming up a rope. He edged past the gilded howdah, took his seat on the elephant’s neck and turned the beast towards Pohlmann’s tent. ‘Are you sure’ – Pohlmann turned back to Simone Joubert – ‘that you would not prefer to travel with me? The howdah is so comfortable, as long as you do not suffer from seasickness.’

‘I shall stay with my husband,’ Simone said. She had stood and proved to be much taller than Dodd had supposed. Tall and somewhat gawky, he thought, but she still possessed an odd attraction.

‘A good woman should stay with her husband,’ Pohlmann said, ‘or someone’s husband, anyway.’ He turned to Dodd. ‘I shall see you in a few days, Major, with your new regiment. Don’t let me down.’

‘I won’t, sir, I won’t,’ Dodd promised as, holding his new sword, he watched his new commander climb the silver steps to the howdah. He had a regiment to save and a reputation to make, and by God, Dodd thought, he would do both things well.