Sharpe watched the small celebration and then, keeping to the shadows among Syud Sevajee's encampment, he went to a small tent where he stripped off his borrowed Indian robes before crawling under the flap. In the dark he blundered into Clare who, kept awake by the sound of the bombardment and then by the voices of the sappers, put up a hand and felt bare flesh.
"You're undressed! " She sounded alarmed.
"Not quite, " Sharpe said, then understood her fear.
"My clothes were soaking, " he explained, 'so I took them off. Didn't want to wet the bed, eh? And I've still got my shirt on."
"Is it raining? I didn't hear it."
"It was blood, " he said, then rummaged under the blanket he had borrowed from Syud Sevajee and found Torrance's pouch.
Clare heard the rattle of stones.
"What is it?"
"Just stones, " he said, 'pebbles." He put the twenty jewels he had retrieved from Kendrick and Lowry into the pouch, stowed it safe under the blanket, then lay down. He doubted he had found every stone, but he reckoned he had retrieved most of them. They had been loose in the two privates' pockets, not even hidden away in their coat seams. God, he felt tired and his body had still not recovered from Hakeswill's kicking. It hurt to breathe, the bruises were tender and a tooth was still loose.
"What happened out there?" Clare asked.
"The engineers put the gab ions in place. When it's light they'll scrape the gun platform and make the magazines, and tomorrow night they'll bring up the guns."
"What happened to you?" Clare amended her question.
Sharpe was silent for a while.
"I looked up some old friends, " he said.
But he had missed Hakeswill, damn it, and Hakeswill would be doubly alert now. Still, a chance would come. He grinned as he remembered Morris's scared voice. The Captain was a bully to his men and a to adie to his superiors.
"Did you kill someone?" Clare asked.
"Two men, " he admitted, 'but it should have been three."
"Why?"
He sighed.
"Because they were bad men, " he said simply, then reflected it was a true answer.
"And because they tried to kill me, " he added, 'and they robbed me. You knew them, " he went on.
"Kendrick and Lowry."
"They were horrid, " Clare said softly.
"They used to stare at me."
"Can't blame them for that, love."
She was silent for a while. The laughter of the sappers was subsiding as men drifted towards their tents. The wind gusted at the tent's entrance and brought the smell of burnt powder from the rocky isthmus where patches of grass still flamed around the exhausted rocket tubes.
"Everything's gone wrong, hasn't it?" Clare said.
"It's being put right, " Sharpe replied.
"For you, " she said.
Again she was silent, and Sharpe suspected she was crying.
"I'll get you home to Madras, " he said.
"And what'll happen to me there?"
"You'll be all right, lass. I'll give you a pair of my magic pebbles."
"What I want, " she said softly, 'is to go home. But I can't afford it."
"Marry a soldier, " Sharpe said, 'and be carried home with him." He thought of Eli Lockhart who had been admiring Clare from a distance.
They would suit each other, Sharpe thought.
She was crying very softly.
"Torrance said he'd pay my way home when I'd paid off the debt, " she said.
"Why would he make you work for one passage, then give you another?" Sharpe asked.
"He was a lying bastard."
"He seemed so kind at first."
"We're all like that, " Sharpe said.
"Soft as lights when you first meet a woman, then you get what you want and it changes. I don't know.
Maybe not every time."
"Charlie wasn't like that, " Clare said.
"Charlie? Your husband?"
"He was always good to me."
Sharpe lay back. The light of the dying fires nickered in the tent's loose weave. If it rained, he thought, the cloth would leak like a pepper pot.
"There are good men and bad, " he said.
"What are you?" Clare asked.
"I think I'm good, " he said, 'but I don't know. All the time I get into trouble, and I only know one way out. I can fight. I can do that all right."
"Is that what you want? To fight?"
"God knows what I want." He laughed softly.
"I wanted to be an officer more than I'd wanted anything in my life! I dreamed of it, I did. I wanted it so bad that it hurt, and then the dream came true and it woke me up and I wondered why I'd wanted it so much." He paused.
Syud Sevajee's horses stamped their feet softly behind the tent.
"Some buggers are trying to persuade me to leave the army. Sell the commission, see? They don't want me."
"Why not?"
"Because I piss in their soup, lass."
"So will you leave?"
He shrugged.
"Don't want to." He thought about it.
"It's like a club, a society. They don't really want me, so they chuck me out, and then I have to fight my way back in. But why do I do it if they don't want me? I don't know. Maybe it'll be different in the Rifles. I'll try 'em, anyway, and see if they're different."
"You want to go on fighting?" Clare asked.
"It's what I'm good at, " Sharpe said.
"And I do enjoy it. I mean I know you shouldn't, but there ain't any other excitement like it."
"None?"
"Well, one." He grinned in the dark.
There was a long silence, and he thought Clare had fallen asleep, but then she spoke again.
"How about your French widow?"
"She's gone, " Sharpe said flatly.
"Gone?"
"She buggered off, love. Took some money of mine and went. Gone to America, I'm told."
Clare lay in silence again.
"Don't you worry about being alone?" she asked after a while.
"No."
"I do."
He turned towards 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 picquets 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 picquet line."
"I did no such thing. Sun's gone to your head." Kenny glowered a
t Morris, then took a snuff box from a pocket and placed a pinch on his hand.
"Who the devil are you, anyway?" he added.
"Morris, sir. 33rd."
"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 tenth 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 honours with an English light company."
"And I've no doubt you'll welcome a chance to assault a breach, Morris?" Wellesley asked drily.
"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 towards the half-completed battery where Captain Morris waited. Both the dead men had slit throats.
Once safe behind the gab ions 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 cut-throats 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 picquet 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 grey 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 grey 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 centre 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 gab ions that blocked the embrasure. Every few seconds the Sergeant climbed onto the trail to see over the gab ions 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 pucka lees 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 touchhole.
"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 gab ions 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 defence was the great central ravine, and so were offering nothing but a token defence 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 enquire 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 gab ions 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 of land 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.
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