Sharpe's Triumph: Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Assaye, September 1803 Page 19

  The aide considered for a moment. “Captain Mackay could certainly use some assistance, sir.”

  “Very well.” Wellesley pointed the pen’s steel nib at Hakeswill. “You’ll attach yourself to Captain Mackay. Captain Mackay commands our bullock train and you will do whatever he desires until Colonel McCandless relieves you of that duty. Dismissed.”

  “Sir!” Hakeswill said dutifully, but inwardly he was furious that the General had not shared his indignation about Sharpe. He about-turned, stamped from the tent, and went to find his men. “Going to the dogs,” he said bitterly.

  “Sergeant?” Flaherty asked.

  “The dogs. Time was in this army when even a general officer respected sergeants. Now we’re to be bullock guards. Pick up your bleeding firelocks!”

  “Sharpe ain’t here, Sergeant?”

  “Of course he ain’t here! If he was here we wouldn’t be ordered to wipe bullocks’ arses, would we? But he’s coming back. General’s word on it. Just a few days, lads, just a few days and he’ll be back with all his glittering stones hidden away.” Hakeswill’s fury was abating. At least he had not been ordered to attach himself to a fighting battalion, and he was beginning to realize that any duty attached to the baggage animals would give him a fine chance to fillet the army stores. Pickings were to be made there, and more than just the pickings of stores, for the baggage always traveled with the army’s tail of women and that meant more opportunity. It could be worse, Hakeswill thought, so long as this Captain Mackay was no martinet. “You know what the trouble is with this army?” Hakeswill demanded.

  “What?” Lowry asked.

  “Full of bleeding Scotchmen.” Hakeswill glowered. “I hates Scotchmen. Not English, are they? Peasant bleeding Scotchmen. Sawney creatures, they are, sawney! Should have killed them all when we had the chance, but we takes pity on them instead. Scorpions in our bosoms, that’s what they are. Says so in the scriptures. Now get a bleeding move on!”

  But it would only be a few days, the Sergeant consoled himself, only a few days, and Sharpe would be finished.

  Colonel Pohlmann’s bodyguard carried McCandless to a small house that lay at the edge of the encampment. A widow and three children lived there, and the woman shrank away from the Mahratta soldiers who had raped her, stolen all her food and fouled her well with their sewage. The Swiss doctor left Sharpe with strict instructions that the dressing on the Colonel’s leg was to be kept damp. “I’d give you some medicine for his fever, but I have none,” the doctor said, “so if the fever gets worse just keep him warm and make him sweat.” The doctor shrugged. “It might help.”

  Pohlmann left food and a leather bag of silver coins. “Tell McCandless that’s for his horses,” he told Sharpe.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The widow will look after you,” Pohlmann said, “and when the Colonel’s well enough you can move him to Aurungabad. And if you change your mind, Sharpe, you know I’ll welcome you.” The Colonel shook Sharpe’s hand, then mounted the silver steps to his howdah. A horseman unfurled his banner of the white horse of Hanover. “I’ll spread word that you’re not to be molested,” Pohlmann called back, then his mahout tapped the elephant’s skull and the great beast set off northwards.

  Simone Joubert was the last to say farewell. “I wish you were staying with us,” she said unhappily.

  “I can’t.”

  “I know, and maybe it’s for the best.” She looked left and right to make certain no one was watching, then leaned swiftly forward and kissed Sharpe on the cheek. “Au revoir, Richard.”

  He watched her ride away, then went back into the hovel which was nothing but a palm thatch roof set above walls made of decayed reed mats. The interior of the hut was blackened by years of smoke, and its only furniture was the rope cot on which McCandless lay. “She’s an outcast,” the Colonel told Sharpe, indicating the woman. “She refused to jump onto her husband’s funeral fire, so her family sent her away.” The Colonel flinched as a stab of pain scythed through his thigh. “Give her the food, Sergeant, and some cash out of that bag. How much did Pohlmann leave us?”

  The coins in Pohlmann’s bag were of silver and copper, and Sharpe sorted and counted each different denomination, and McCandless then translated their rough worth into pounds. “Sixty!” He announced the total bitterly. “That might just buy one cavalry hack, but it won’t buy a horse that can stay over country for days on end.”

  “How much did your gelding cost, sir?” Sharpe asked.

  “Five hundred and twenty guineas,” McCandless said ruefully. “I bought him four years ago, when you and I were released from Seringapatam, and I prayed he’d be the last horse I’d ever buy. Except for the mare, of course, but she was just a remount. Even so she cost me a hundred and forty guineas. A bargain, too! I bought her in Madras, fresh off the boat and she was just skin and bones then, but two months of pasture put some muscle on her.”

  The figures were almost incomprehensible to Sharpe. Five hundred and twenty guineas for a horse? A man could live his whole life on five hundred and forty-six pounds, and live well. Ale every day. “Won’t the Company replace the horses, sir?” he asked.

  McCandless smiled sadly. “They might, Sharpe, but I doubt it. I doubt it very much.”

  “Why not, sir?”

  “I’m an old man,” the Scotsman said, “and my salary is a heavy impost on the Company’s debit column. I told you they’d like me to retire, Sharpe, and if I indent for the value of two horses they might well insist on my retirement.” He sighed. “I knew this pursuit of Dodd was doomed. I felt it in my bones.”

  “We’ll get you another horse, sir,” Sharpe said.

  McCandless grimaced. “How, pray?”

  “We can’t have you walking, sir. Not a full colonel. Besides, it was my fault, really.”

  “Your fault? Don’t be absurd, Sharpe.”

  “I should have been with you, sir. But I wasn’t. I was off thinking.”

  The Colonel looked at him steadily for what seemed a long while. “I should imagine, Sergeant,” he said at last, “that you had a lot to think about. How was your elephant ride with Colonel Pohlmann?”

  “He showed me Aurungabad, sir.”

  “I think he took you to the mountain top and showed you the kingdoms of this world,” the Colonel said. “What did he offer you? A lieutenancy?”

  “Yes, sir.” Sharpe blushed to admit as much, but it was dark inside the widow’s hovel and the Colonel did not see.

  “He told you of Benoît de Boigne,” McCandless asked, “and of that rogue George Thomas? And he said you could be a rich man in two or three years, aren’t I right?”

  “Something like that, sir.”

  McCandless shrugged. “I won’t deceive you, Sharpe, he’s right. Everything he told you is true. Out there”—he waved towards the setting sun which glinted through the chinks in the reed-mat walls—“is a lawless society that for years has rewarded the soldier with gold. The soldier, mark me, not the honest farmer or the hard-working merchant. The princedoms grow fat, Sharpe, and the people grow lean, but there is nothing to stop you serving those princes. Nothing but the oath you took to serve your King.”

  “I’m still here, sir, aren’t I?” Sharpe said indignantly.

  “Yes, Sharpe, you are,” McCandless said, then he closed his eyes and groaned. “I fear the fever is going to come. Maybe not.”

  “So what do we do, sir?”

  “Do? Nothing. Nothing helps the fever except a week of shivering in the heat.”

  “I meant about getting you back to the army, sir. I could go to Aurungabad and see if I can find someone to take a message.”

  “Not unless you speak their language, you won’t,” McCandless said, then he lay for a while in silence. “Sevajee will find us,” he went on eventually. “News carries far in this countryside, and Sevajee will smell us out in the end.” Again he fell silent, and Sharpe thought he had fallen asleep, but then he saw the Colonel shake his head. “Doomed,” t
he Colonel said. “Lieutenant Dodd is going to be the end of me.”

  “We’ll capture Dodd, sir, I promise.”

  “I pray so, I pray so.” The Colonel pointed to his saddlebags in the corner of the hut. “Would you find my Bible, Sharpe? And perhaps you’d read to me while there’s still a little light? Something from the Book of Job, I think.”

  McCandless fell into days of fever and Sharpe into days of isolation. For all he knew the war might have been won or lost, for he saw no one and no news came to the thatched hovel under its thin-leaved trees. To keep himself busy he cleared out an old irrigation ditch that ran northwards across the woman’s land, and he hacked at the brush, killed snakes and shoveled earth until he was rewarded by a trickle of water. That done, he tackled the hovel’s roof, laying new palm thatch on the old and binding it in place with twists of frond. He went hungry, for the woman had little food other than the grain Pohlmann had left and some dried beans. Sharpe stripped to the waist when he worked and his skin went as brown as the stock of his musket. In the evenings he played with the woman’s three children, making forts out of the red soil that they bombarded with stones and, in one memorable twilight, when a toy rampart proved impregnable to thrown pebbles, Sharpe laid a fuse of powder and blew a breach with three of his musket cartridges.

  He did his best to tend McCandless, washing the Colonel’s face, reading him the scriptures and feeding him spoonfuls of bitter gunpowder diluted in water. He was not sure that the powder helped, but every soldier swore that it was the best medicine for the fever, and so Sharpe forced spoonfuls of the salty mixture down the Colonel’s throat. He worried about the bullet wound in McCandless’s thigh, for the widow had shyly pushed him aside one day when he was dampening the dressing and had insisted on untying the bandage and putting a poultice of her own making onto the raw wound. There were moss and cobwebs in the poultice, and Sharpe wondered if he had done the right thing by letting her apply the mixture, but as the first week passed the wound did not seem to worsen and, in his more lucid moments, the Colonel claimed the pain was lessening.

  Once the irrigation ditch was cleared Sharpe tackled the widow’s well. He devised a dredge out of a broken wooden bucket and used it to scoop out handfuls of foul-smelling mud from the base of the well, and all the while he thought about his future. He knew Major Stokes would welcome him back to the Seringapatam armory, but after a time the regiment would surely remember his existence and want him back and that would mean rejoining the Light Company with Captain Morris and Sergeant Hakeswill, and Sharpe shuddered at that thought. Maybe Colonel Gore would transfer him? The lads said that Gore was a decent fellow, not as chilling as Wellesley, and that was good news, yet even so Sharpe often wondered whether he should have accepted Pohlmann’s offer. Lieutenant Sharpe, he muttered it aloud, Lieutenant Sharpe. Why not? And in those moments he would daydream of the joy of going back to the foundling home in Brewhouse Lane. He would wear a sword and a cocked hat, have braid on his jacket and spurs at his heels, and for every lash the bastards had ever laid on small Richard Sharpe he would pay them back tenfold. He felt a terrible anger when he remembered those beatings and he would haul at his makeshift dredge as if he could slake the anger with hard work.

  But in all those daydreams he never once returned to Brewhouse Lane in a white coat, or in a purple coat, or in any other coat except a red one. No one in Britain had ever heard of Anthony Pohlmann, and why should they care that a child had gone from the gutters of Wapping to a commission in the Maharajah of Gwalior’s army? A man might as well claim to be Colonel of the Moon for all anyone would care. Unless it was a red coat, they would condemn him as a flash bastard, and be done with him, but if he walked back in Britain’s scarlet coat then they would take him seriously and that meant he had to become an officer in his own army.

  So one night, when the rain was beating on the widow’s repaired thatch and the Colonel was sitting on the rope bed declaring that his fever was abating, Sharpe asked McCandless how a man became an officer in Britain’s army. “I mean I know it can be done, sir,” he said awkwardly, “because we had a Mister Devlin back in England and he came up from the ranks. He’d been a shepherd’s boy on the dales before he took the shilling, but he was Lieutenant Devlin when I knew him.”

  And was most likely to die as an old and embittered Lieutenant Devlin, McCandless thought, but he did not say as much. Instead he paused before saying anything. He was even tempted to evade the question altogether by pretending that his fever had suddenly taken a turn for the worse for he understood only too well what lay behind Sharpe’s question. Most officers would have mocked the ambition, but Hector McCandless was not a mocker. But he also knew that for a man to aspire to rise from the ranks to the officers’ mess was to risk two disappointments: the disappointments of both failure and success. The most likely outcome was failure, for such promotions were as scarce as hens’ teeth, but a few men did make the leap and their success inevitably led to unhappiness. They lacked the education of the other officers, they lacked their manners and they lacked their confidence. They were generally disdained by the other officers, and set to work as quartermasters in the belief that they could not be trusted to lead men in battle. And there was even some truth to that belief, for the men themselves did not like their officers to have come from the ranks, but McCandless decided Sharpe knew all that for himself and so he spared him the need to listen to it all over again. “There are two ways, Sharpe,” McCandless said. “First you can buy a commission. The rank of ensign will cost you four hundred pounds, but you’ll need another hundred and fifty to equip yourself, and even that will only buy a barely adequate horse, a four-guinea sword and a serviceable uniform, and you’ll still need a private income to cover your mess bills. An ensign earns close to ninety-five pounds a year, but the army stops some of that for expenses and more for the income tax. Have you heard of that new tax, Sharpe?”

  “No, sir.”

  “A pernicious thing. Taking from a man what he has honestly earned! It’s thievery, Sharpe, disguised as government.” The Colonel scowled. “So an ensign is lucky to see seventy pounds out of his salary, and even if he lives frugal that won’t cover his mess bills. Most regiments charge an officer two shillings for dinner every day, a shilling for wine, though of course you could go without wine well enough and water’s free, but there’s sixpence a day for the mess servant, another sixpence for breakfast and sixpence for washing and mending. You can’t live as an officer without at least a hundred pounds a year on top of your salary. Have you got the money?”

  “No, sir,” Sharpe lied. In truth he had enough jewels sewn into his red coat to buy himself a majority, but he did not want McCandless to know that.

  “Good,” McCandless said, “because that isn’t the best way. Most regiments won’t look at a man buying himself out of the ranks. Why should they? They’ve got plenty of young hopefuls coming from the shires with their parents’ cash hot in their purses, so the last thing they need is some half-educated ranker who can’t meet his mess bills. I’m not saying it’s impossible. Any regiment posted to the West Indies will sell you an ensign’s post cheap, but that’s because they can’t get anyone else on account of the yellow fever. A posting to the West Indies is a death sentence. But if a man wants to get into anything other than a West-Indies-bound regiment, Sharpe, then he must hope for the second route. He must be a sergeant and he must be able to read and write, but there’s a third requirement, too. The fellow must perform a quite impossibly gallant act. Leading a Forlorn Hope will do the trick, but any act, so long as it’s suicidal, will serve, though of course he must do it under the General’s eye or else it’s all a waste of time.”

  Sharpe sat in silence for a while, daunted by the obstacles that lay in the way of his daydream’s fulfillment. “Do they give him a test, sir?” he asked. “In reading?” That thought worried him for, although his reading was improving night by night, he still stumbled over quite simple words. He claimed that the Bible’
s print was too small, and McCandless was kind enough to believe the excuse.

  “A test in reading? Good Lord, no! For an officer!” McCandless smiled tiredly. “They take his word, of course.” The Colonel paused for a second. “But I’ve often wondered, Sharpe,” he went on, “why a man from the ranks would want to be an officer?”

  So he could go back to Brewhouse Lane, Sharpe thought, and kick some teeth in. “I was just wondering about it, sir,” he said instead. “Just thinking, sir.”

  “Because in many ways,” McCandless said, “sergeants have more influence with the men. Less formal prestige, perhaps, but certainly more influence than any junior officer. Ensigns and lieutenants, Sharpe, are very insignificant creatures. They’re really of very little use most of the time. It’s not till a man reaches his captaincy that he begins to be valuable.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, sir,” Sharpe said lamely. “I was just thinking.”

  That night the Colonel relapsed into fever, and Sharpe sat in the hut doorway and listened to the rain beat on the land. He could not shake the daydream, could not drive away the picture of him ducking through the gate in Brewhouse Lane and seeing the faces he hated. He wanted it, he wanted it terribly, and so he dreamed on, dreaming the impossible, but unable to check the dream. He did not know how, but he would somehow make the leap. Or else die in the attempt.

  CHAPTER•7

  Dodd called his new gelding Peter. “Because it’s got no balls, Monsewer,” he informed Pierre Joubert, and he repeated the poor joke a dozen times in the next two days just to make certain that its insult was understood. Joubert smiled and said nothing, and the Major would launch himself into a panegyric on Peter’s merits. His old horse had whistling lungs, while this one could be ridden all day and still had its head up and a spring in its long stride. “A thoroughbred, Captain,” he told Joubert, “an English thoroughbred. Not some screw-backed old French nag, but a proper horse.”