Sharpe's Fortress Page 25

  “No.”

  “I do.”

  He turned toward her, propped himself on an elbow and stroked her hair. She stiffened as he touched her, then relaxed to the gentle pressure of his hand. “You ain’t alone, lass,” Sharpe said. “Or only if you want to be. You got trapped, that’s all. It happens to everyone. But you’re out now. You’re free.” He stroked her hair down to her neck and felt warm bare skin under his hand. She did not move and he softly stroked farther down. “You’re undressed,” he said.

  “I was warm,” she said in a small voice.

  “What’s worse?” Sharpe asked. “Being warm or being lonely?”

  He thought she smiled. He could not tell in the dark, but he thought she smiled. “Being lonely,” she said very softly.

  “We can look after that,” he said, lifting the thin blanket and moving to her side.

  She had stopped crying. Somewhere outside a cock crowed and the eastern cliffs were touched with the first gold of the day. The fires on the rocky neck of land flickered and died, their smoke drifting like patches of thin mist. Bugles called from the main encampment, summoning the redcoats to the morning parade. The night pickets were relieved as the sun rose to flood the world with light.

  Where Sharpe and Clare slept.

  “You abandoned the dead men?” Wellesley growled.

  Captain Morris blinked as a gust of wind blew dust into one of his eyes. “I tried to bring the bodies in,” he lied, “but it was dark, sir. Very dark. Colonel Kenny can vouch for that, sir. He visited us.”

  “I visited you?” Kenny, lean, tall and irascible, was standing beside the General. “I visited you?” he asked again, his inflection rising to outrage.

  “Last night, sir,” Morris answered in plaintive indignation. “On the picket line.”

  “I did no such thing. Sun’s gone to your head.” Kenny glowered at Morris, then took a snuffbox from a pocket and placed a pinch on his hand. “Who the devil are you, anyway?” he added.

  “Morris, sir. Thirty-third.”

  “I thought we had nothing but Scots and sepoys here,” Kenny said to Wellesley.

  “Captain Morris’s company escorted a convoy here,” Wellesley answered.

  “A light company, eh?” Kenny said, glancing at Morris’s epaulettes. “You might even be useful. I could do with another company in the assault party.” He snorted the snuff, stopping one nostril at a time. “It cheers my boys up,” he added, “seeing white men killed.” Kenny commanded the first battalion of the nth Madrassi Regiment.

  “What’s in your assault unit now?” Wellesley asked.

  “Nine companies,” Kenny said. “The grenadiers and two others from the Scotch Brigade, the flankers from my regiment and four others. Good boys, all of them, but I daresay they won’t mind sharing the honors with an English light company.”

  “And I’ve no doubt you’ll welcome a chance to assault a breach, Morris?” Wellesley asked dryly.

  “Of course, sir,” Morris said, cursing Kenny inwardly.

  “But in the meantime,” Wellesley went on coldly, “bring your men’s bodies in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do it now.”

  Sergeant Green took a half-dozen men down the neck of land, but they only found two bodies. They were expecting three, but Sergeant Hakeswill was missing. The enemy, seeing the redcoats among the rocks above the reservoir, opened fire and the musket balls smacked into stones and ricocheted up into the air. Green took a bullet in the heel of his boot. It did not break the skin of his foot, but the blow hurt and he hopped on the short, dry grass. “Just grab the buggers and drag them away,” he said. He wondered why the enemy did not fire their cannon, and just then a gun discharged a barrel of canister at his squad. The balls hissed all about the men, but miraculously none was hit as the soldiers seized Kendrick and Lowry by their feet and ran back toward the half-completed battery where Captain Morris waited. Both the dead men had slit throats.

  Once safe behind the gabions the corpses were treated more decorously by being placed on makeshift stretchers. Colonel Kenny intercepted the stretcher-bearers to examine the corpses which were already smelling foul. “They must have sent a dozen cutthroats out of the fort,” he reckoned. “You say there’s a sergeant missing?”

  “Yes, sir,” Morris answered.

  “Poor fellow must be a prisoner. Be careful tonight, Captain! They’ll probably try again. And I assure you, Captain, if I decide to take a stroll this evening, it won’t be to your picket line.”

  That night the 33rd’s Light Company again formed a screen in front of the new batteries, this time to protect the men dragging up the guns. It was a nervous night, for the company was expecting throat-slitting Mahrattas to come silently through the darkness, but nothing stirred. The fortress stayed silent and dark. Not a gun fired and not a rocket flew as the British cannon were hauled to their new emplacements and as powder charges and round shot were stacked in the newly made ready magazines.

  Then the gunners waited.

  The first sign of dawn was a gray lightening of the east, followed by the flare of reflected sun as the first rays lanced over the world’s rim to touch the summit of the eastern cliffs. The fortress walls showed gray-black. Still the gunners waited. A solitary cloud glowed livid pink on the horizon. Smoke rose from the cooking fires inside the fortress where the flags hung limp in the windless air. Bugles roused the British camp which lay a half-mile behind the batteries where officers trained telescopes on Gawilghur’s northern wall.

  Major Stokes’s job was almost finished. He had made the batteries, and now the gunners must unmake the walls, but first Stokes wanted to be certain that the outermost breach would be made in the right place. He had fixed a telescope to a tripod and now he edged it from side to side, searching the lichen-covered stones just to the right of a bastion in the center of the wall. The wall sloped back slightly, but he was sure he could see a place where the old stones bulged out of alignment, and he watched that spot as the sun rose and cast a hint of shadow where the stones were not quite true. Finally he screwed the telescope’s mount tight shut, so that the tube could not move, then summoned the gun captain of the battery’s eighteen-pounder. A major actually commanded this battery, but he insisted that his sergeant go to the spyglass. “That’s your target,” Stokes told the Sergeant.

  The Sergeant stooped to the telescope, then straightened to see over the glass, then stooped again. He was chewing a wad of tobacco and had no lower front teeth so that the yellow spittle ran down his chin in a continuous dribble. He straightened, then stooped a third time. The telescope was powerful, and all he could see in the glass circle was a vertical joint between two great stones. The joint was some four feet above the wall’s base, and when it gave way the wall would spill forward down the slope to make the ramp up which the attackers could swarm. “Smack on the joint, sir?” the Sergeant asked in a Northumbrian accent so pronounced that Stokes did not at first understand him.

  “Low on the joint,” Stokes said.

  “Low it is, sir,” the Sergeant said, and stooped to squint through the glass once more. “The joint gapes a bit, don’t it?”

  “It does,” Stokes said.

  The Sergeant grunted. For a while, he reckoned, the battering would drive the stones in, sealing the gap, but there was pressure there and the wall must eventually give way as the battered stones weakened. “That bugger’ll burst like an abscess,” the Sergeant said happily, straightening from the telescope. He returned to his gun and barked at his men to make some minute adjustments to its trail. He himself heaved on the elevating screw, though as yet the gun was still masked by some half-filled gabions that blocked the embrasure. Every few seconds the Sergeant climbed onto the trail to see over the gabions, then he would demand that the gun was shifted a half-inch left or a finger’s breadth to the right as he made another finicky adjustment to the screw. He tossed grass in the air to gauge the wind, then twisted the elevation again to raise the barrel a tiny
amount. “Stone cold shot,” he explained to Stokes, “so I’m pointing her a bit high. Maybe a half turn more.” He hammered the screw with the heel of his hand. “Perfect,” he said.

  The puckalees were bringing water which they poured into great wooden tubs. The water was not just to slake the gunners’ thirst and soak the sponges that cleaned out the barrels between shots, but was also intended to cool the great weapons. The sun was climbing, it promised to be a searing hot day, and if the huge guns were not drenched intermittently with water they could overheat and explode the powder charges prematurely. The Sergeant was choosing his shot now, rolling two eighteen-pounder balls up and down a stretch of bare earth to judge which was the more perfect sphere. “That one,” he said, spitting tobacco juice onto his chosen missile.

  Morris’s Light Company trailed back up the road, going to the camp where they would sleep. Stokes watched them pass and thought of Sharpe. Poor Sharpe, but at least, from wherever he was imprisoned inside the fortress, he would hear the siege guns and know that the redcoats were coming. If they got through the breach, Stokes thought gloomily, or if they ever managed to cross the fortress’s central ravine. He tried to suppress his pessimism, telling himself that his job was simply to make the breach, not win the whole victory.

  The chosen shot was rolled into the gun’s muzzle, then rammed down onto the canvas bags of powder. The Sergeant took a length of wire that hung looped on his belt and rammed it through the cannon’s touch-hole, piercing the canvas bag beneath, then selected a priming tube, a reed filled with finely milled powder, and slid it down into the powder charge, but leaving a half-inch of the reed protruding above the touch-hole. “Ready when you are, sir,” he told the Major commanding the battery who, in turn, looked at Stokes.

  Stokes shrugged. “I imagine we wait for Colonel Stevenson’s permission.”

  The gunners in the second breaching battery which lay fifty yards west of the first had trained their telescopes over the gabions to watch where the first shot fell. The scar it left in the wall would be their aiming mark. The two enfilading batteries also watched. Their work would begin properly when the first of the three breaches was made, but till then their twelve-pounders would be aimed at the cannon mounted on Gawilghur’s ramparts, trying to dismount them or tumble their embrasures into rubble.

  “That wall won’t last long,” the battery Major, whose name was Plummer, opined. He was staring at the wall through Stokes’s telescope.

  “We’ll have it opened up today,” Stokes agreed.

  “Thank God there ain’t a glacis,” Plummer said.

  “Thank God, indeed,” Stokes echoed piously, but he had been thinking about that lack and was not so sure now that it was a blessing. Perhaps the Mahrattas understood that their real defense was the great central ravine, and so were offering nothing but a token defense of the Outer Fort. And how was that ravine to be crossed? Stokes feared that he would be asked for an engineering solution, but what could he do? Fill the thing with soil? That would take months.

  Stokes’s gloomy presentiments were interrupted by an aide who had been sent by Colonel Stevenson to inquire why the batteries were silent. “I suspect those are your orders to open fire, Plummer,” Stokes said.

  “Unmask!” Plummer shouted.

  Four gunners clambered up onto the bastion and manhandled the half-filled gabions out of the cannon’s way. The Sergeant squinted down the barrel a last time, nodded to himself, then stepped aside. The other gunners had their hands over their ears. “You can fire, Ned!” Plummer called to the Sergeant, who took a glowing linstock from a protective barrel, reached across the gun’s high wheel and touched the fire to the reed.

  The cannon hammered back a full five yards as the battery filled with acrid smoke. The ball screamed low across the stony neck ofland to crack against the fort’s wall. There was a pause. Defenders were running along the ramparts. Stokes was peering through the glass, waiting for the smoke to thin. It took a full minute, but then he saw that a slab of stone about the size of a soup plate had been chipped from the wall. “Two inches to the right, Sergeant,” he called chidingly.

  “Must have been a puff of wind, sir,” the Sergeant said, “puff of bloody wind, ‘cos there weren’t a thing wrong with gun’s laying, begging your pardon, sir.”

  “You did well,” Stokes said with a smile, “very well.” He cupped his hands and shouted at the second breaching battery. “You have your mark! Fire on!” A billow of smoke erupted from the fortress wall, followed by the bang of a gun and a howl as a round shot whipped overhead. Stokes jumped down into the battery, clutching his hat. “It seems we’ve woken them up,” he remarked as a dozen more Mahratta guns fired. The enemy’s shots smacked into the gabions or ricocheted wildly along the rocky ground. The second British battery fired, the noise of its guns echoing off the cliff face to tell the camp far beneath that the siege of Gawilghur had properly begun.

  Private Tom Garrard of the 33rd’s Light Company had wandered to the edge of the cliff to watch the bombardment of the fortress. Not that there was much to see other than the constantly replenished cloud of smoke that shrouded the rocky neck of land between the batteries and the fortress, but every now and then a large piece of stone would fall from Gawilghur’s wall. The fire from the defenses was furious, but it seemed to Garrard that it was ill aimed. Many of the shots bounced over the batteries, or else buried themselves in the great piles of protective gabions. The British fire, on the other hand, was slow and sure. The eighteen-pound round shots gnawed at the wall and not one was wasted. The sky was cloudless, the sun rising ever higher, and the guns were heating so that after every second shot the gunners poured buckets of water on the long barrels. The metal hissed and steamed, and sweating puckalees hurried up the battery road with yet more skins of water to replenish the great vats.

  Garrard was sitting by himself, but he had noticed a ragged Indian was watching him. He ignored the man, hoping he would go away, but the Indian edged closer. Garrard picked up a fist-sized stone and tossed it up and down in his right hand as a hint that the man should go away, but the threat of the stone only made the Indian edge closer. “Sahib!” the Indian hissed.

  “Bugger off,” Garrard growled.

  “Sahib! Please!”

  “I’ve got nothing worth stealing, I don’t want to buy anything, and I don’t want to roger your sister.”

  “I’ll roger your sister instead, sahib,” the Indian said, and Garrard twisted around, the stone drawn back ready to throw, then he saw that the dirty robed man had pushed back his grubby white head cloth and was grinning at him. “You ain’t supposed to chuck rocks at officers, Tom,” Sharpe said. “Mind you, I always wanted to, so I can’t blame you.”

  “Bloody hell!” Garrard dropped the stone and held out his right hand. “Dick Sharpe!” He suddenly checked his outstretched hand. “Do I have to call you ‘sir’?”

  “Of course you don’t,” Sharpe said, taking Garrard’s hand. “You and me? Friends from way back, eh? Red sash won’t change that, Tom. How are you?”

  “Been worse. Yourself?”

  “Been better.”

  Garrard frowned. “Didn’t I hear that you’d been captured?”

  “Got away, I did. Ain’t a bugger born who can hold me, Tom. Nor you.” Sharpe sat next to his friend, a man with whom he had marched in the ranks for six years. “Here.” He gave Garrard a strip of dried meat.

  “What is it?”

  “Goat. Tastes all right, though.”

  The two sat and watched the gunners at work. The closest guns were in the two enfilading batteries, and the gunners were using their twelve-pounders to systematically bring down the parapets of the ramparts above Gawilghur’s gate. They had already unseated a pair of enemy guns and were now working on the next two embrasures. An ox-drawn limber had just delivered more ammunition, but, on leaving the battery, the limber’s wheel had loosened and five men were now standing about the canted wheel arguing how best to mend it. Garrard pul
led a piece of stringy meat from between his teeth. “Pull the broken wheel off and put on a new one,” he said scornfully. “It don’t take a major and two lieutenants to work that out.”

  “They’re officers, Tom,” Sharpe said chidingly, “only half brained.”

  “You should know.” Garrard grinned. “Buggers make an inviting target, though.” He pointed across the plunging chasm which separated the plateau from the Inner Fort. “There’s a bloody great gun over there. Size of a bloody hay wain, it is. Buggers have been fussing about it for a half-hour now.”

  Sharpe stared past the beleaguered Outer Fort to the distant cliffs. He thought he could see a wall where a gun might be mounted, but he was not sure. “I need a bloody telescope.”

  “You need a bloody uniform.”

  “I’m doing something about that,” Sharpe said mysteriously.

  Garrard slapped at a fly. “What’s it like then?”

  “What’s what like?”

  “Being a Jack-pudding?”

  Sharpe shrugged, thought for a while, then shrugged again. “Don’t seem real. Well, it does. I dunno.” He sighed. “I mean I wanted it, Tom, I wanted it real bad, but I should have known the bastards wouldn’t want me. Some are all right. Major Stokes, he’s a fine fellow, and there are others. But most of them? God knows. They don’t like me, anyway.”

  “You got ‘em worried, that’s why,” Garrard said. “If you can become an officer, so can others.” He saw the unhappiness on Sharpe’s face. “Wishing you’d stayed a sergeant, are you?”

  “No,” Sharpe said, and surprised himself by saying it so firmly. “I can do the job, Tom.”

  “What job’s that, for Christ’s sake? Sitting around while we do all the bloody work? Having a servant to clean your boots and scrub your arse?”

  “No,” Sharpe said, and he pointed across the shadowed chasm to the Inner Fort. “When we go in there, Tom, we’re going to need fellows who know what the hell they’re doing. That’s the job. It’s beating hell out of the other side and keeping your own men alive, and I can do that.”