Sharpe 3-Book Collection 1: Sharpe’s Tiger, Sharpe’s Triumph, Sharpe’s Fortress. Bernard Cornwell
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of the girl. She had black hair, a thin face and dark big eyes that could spark with mischief. Now, though, she looked worried. ‘What did Hakeswill want?’ she asked.
‘You.’
She spat, then crouched again to the body she was searching. ‘He can’t touch you, Richard,’ she said, ‘not if you do your duty.’
‘The army’s not like that. And you know it.’
‘You’ve just got to be clever,’ Mary insisted. She was a soldier’s daughter who had grown up in the Calcutta barrack lines. She had inherited her dark Indian beauty from her mother and learned the ways of soldiers from her father who had been an engineer sergeant in the Old Fort’s garrison before an outbreak of cholera had killed him and his native wife. Mary’s father had always claimed she was pretty enough to marry an officer and so rise in the world, but no officer would marry a half-caste, at least no officer who cared about advancement, and so after her parents’ death Mary had married Sergeant Jem Bickerstaff of the 33rd, a good man, but Bickerstaff had died of the fever shortly after the army had left Madras to climb to the Mysore plateau and Mary, at twenty-two, was now an orphan and a widow. She was also wise to the army’s ways. ‘If you’re made up to sergeant, Richard,’ she told Sharpe now, ‘then Hakeswill can’t touch you.’
Sharpe laughed. ‘Me? A sergeant? That’ll be the day, lass. I made corporal once, but that didn’t last.’
‘You can be a sergeant,’ she insisted, ‘and you should be a sergeant. And Hakeswill couldn’t touch you if you were.’
Sharpe shrugged. ‘It ain’t me he wants to touch, lass, but you.’
Mary had been cutting a tiger-striped tunic from a dead man, but now she paused and looked quizzically up at Sharpe. She had not been in love with Jem Bickerstaff, but she had recognized that the Sergeant was a good, kind man, and she saw the same decency in Sharpe. It was not exactly the same decency, for Sharpe, she reckoned, had ten times Jem Bickerstaff’s fire and he could be as cunning as a snake when it suited him, but Mary still trusted Sharpe. She was also attracted to him. There was something very striking about Sharpe’s lean good looks, something dangerous, she acknowledged, but very exciting. She looked at him for a few seconds, then shrugged. ‘Maybe he won’t dare touch me if we’re married,’ she said. ‘I mean proper married, with the Colonel’s permission.’
‘Married!’ Sharpe said, flustered by the word.
Mary stood. ‘It ain’t easy being a widow in the army, Richard. Every man reckons you’re loot.’
‘Aye, I know it’s hard,’ Sharpe said, frowning. He stared at her as he thought about the idea of getting married. Till now he had only been thinking of desertion, but maybe marriage was not such a bad idea. At least it would make it much harder for Hakeswill to get his hands on Mary’s skin. And a married man, Sharpe reckoned, was more likely to be promoted. But what was the point of rising an inch or two in the dunghill? Even a sergeant was still at the bottom of the heap. It was better to be out of the army altogether and Mary, Sharpe decided, would be more likely to desert with him if she was properly married to him. That thought made him nod slowly. ‘I reckon I might like to be married,’ he said shyly.
‘Me too.’ She smiled and, awkwardly, Sharpe smiled back. For a moment neither had anything to say, then Mary excitedly fished in the pocket of her apron to produce a jewel she had taken from a dead man. ‘Look what I found!’ She handed Sharpe a red stone, half the size of a hen’s egg. ‘You reckon it’s a ruby?’ Mary asked eagerly.
Sharpe tossed the stone up and down. ‘I reckon it’s glass, lass,’ he said gently, ‘just glass. But I’ll get you a ruby for a wedding gift, just you watch me.’
‘I’ll more than watch you, Dick Sharpe,’ she said happily and put her arm into his. Sergeant Hakeswill, a hundred paces away, watched them and his face twitched.
While on the edges of the killing place, where the looted and naked bodies lay scattered, the vultures came down, sidled forward and began to tear at the dead.
The allied armies camped a quarter of a mile short of the place where the dead lay. The camp sprawled across the plain: an instant town where fifty thousand soldiers and thousands of camp followers would spend the night. Tents went up for officers well away from the places where the vast herds of cattle were guarded for the night. Some of the cattle were beeves, being herded and slaughtered for food, some were oxen that carried panniers filled with the eighteen- and twenty-four-pounder cannonballs that would be needed to blast a hole through the walls of Seringapatam, while yet others were bullocks that hauled the wagons and guns, and the heaviest guns, the big siege pieces, needed sixty bullocks apiece. There were more than two hundred thousand cattle with the army, but all were now scrawny for the Tippoo’s cavalry was stripping the land of fodder as the British and Hyderabad armies advanced.
The common soldiers had no tents. They would sleep on the ground close to their fires, but first they ate and this night the feeding was good, at least for the men of the King’s 33rd who had coins taken from the enemy dead to spend with the bhinjarries, the merchant clans that travelled with the army and had their own private guards to protect their goods. The bhinjarries all sold chickens, rice, flour, beans and, best of all, the throat-burning skins of arrack which could make a man drunk even faster than rum. Some of the bhinjarries also hired out whores and the 33rd gave those men good business that night.
Captain Morris expected to visit the famous green tents of Naig, the bhinjarrie whose stock in trade was the most expensive whores of Madras, but for now he was stuck in his own tent where, under the feeble light of a candle that flickered on his table, he disposed of the company’s business. Or rather Sergeant Hakeswill disposed of it while Morris, his coat unbuttoned and silk stock loosened, sprawled in a camp chair. Sweat dripped down his face. There was a small wind, but the muslin screen hanging at the entrance to the tent took away its cooling effects, and if the screen was discarded the tent would fill with savagely huge moths. Morris hated moths, hated the heat, hated India. ‘Guard rosters, sir,’ Hakeswill said, offering the papers.
‘Anything I should know?’
‘Not a thing, sir. Just like last week’s, sir. Ensign Hicks made up the roster, sir. A good man, sir, Ensign Hicks. Knows his place.’
‘You mean he does what you tell him to do?’ Morris asked drily.
‘Learning his trade, sir, learning his trade, just like a good little ensign should. Unlike some as I could mention.’
Morris ignored the sly reference to Fitzgerald and instead dipped his quill in ink and scrawled his name at the foot of the rosters. ‘I assume Ensign Fitzgerald and Sergeant Green have been assigned all the night duty?’ he asked.
‘They needs the practice, sir.’
‘And you need your sleep, Sergeant?’
‘Punishment book, sir,’ Hakeswill said, offering the leather-bound ledger and taking back the guard roster without acknowledging Morris’s last comment.
Morris leafed through the book. ‘No floggings this week?’
‘Will be soon, sir, will be soon.’
‘Private Sharpe escaped you today, eh?’ Morris laughed. ‘Losing your touch, Obadiah.’ There was no friendliness in his use of the Christian name, just scorn, but Sergeant Hakeswill took no offence. Officers were officers, at least those above ensigns were proper officers in Hakeswill’s opinion, and such gentlemen had every right to be scornful of lesser ranks.
‘I ain’t losing nothing, sir,’ Hakeswill answered equably. ‘If the rat don’t die first shake, sir, then you puts the dog in again. That’s how it’s done, sir. Says so in the scriptures. Sick report, sir. Nothing new, except that Sears has the fever, so he won’t be with us long, but he won’t be no loss, sir. No good to man or beast, Private Sears. Better off dead, he is.’
‘Are we done?’ Morris asked when he had signed the sick report, but then a tactful cough sounded at the tent’s