Sharpe’s Trafalgar. Bernard Cornwell
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‘And this is Ensign Sharpe, Hopper, and he is to be treated as a most honoured friend.’
‘Aye aye, sir,’ Hopper said, grinning.
‘Hopper commands my barge crew,’ Chase explained to Sharpe, ‘and those battered gentlemen are his oarsmen. This night may not go down as one of our greater victories, gentlemen’ – Chase was now addressing his bruised and bleeding men – ‘but a victory it still is, and I thank you.’
The yard was cleared, chairs were fetched from the house, and terms discussed.
It had been a guinea, Sharpe thought, exceedingly well spent.
‘I rather liked the fellows,’ Chase said.
‘Panjit and Nana Rao? They’re rogues,’ Sharpe said. ‘I liked them too.’
‘Took their defeat like gentlemen!’
‘They got off light, sir,’ Sharpe said. ‘Must have made a fortune on that fire.’
‘Oldest trick in the bag,’ Captain Chase said. ‘There used to be a fellow on the Isle of Dogs who claimed thieves had cleaned out his chandlery on the night before some foreign ship sailed, and the victims always fell for it.’ Chase chuckled and Sharpe said nothing. He had known the man Chase spoke of, and had even helped him clear the warehouse one night, but he thought it best to be silent. ‘But you and I are all right, Sharpe, other than a scratch and a bruise,’ Chase went on, ‘and that’s all that matters, eh?’
‘We’re all right, sir,’ Sharpe agreed. The two men, followed by Chase’s barge crew, were walking back through the pungent alleys of Bombay and both were carrying money. Chase had originally contracted with Rao to supply his ship with rum, brandy, wine and tobacco, and now, instead of the two hundred and sixteen guineas he had paid the merchant, he was carrying three hundred, while Sharpe had two hundred rupees, so all in all, Sharpe reckoned, it had been a good evening’s work, especially as Panjit had promised to supply Sharpe with the bed, blankets, bucket, lantern, chest, arrack, tobacco, soap and filter machine, all to be delivered to the Calliope at dawn and at no cost to Sharpe. The two Indians had been eager to placate the Englishmen once they realized that Chase and Sharpe had no intention of telling the rest of the fleeced victims that Nana Rao still lived, and so the merchants had fed their unwanted guests, plied them with arrack, paid the money, sworn eternal friendship and bid them good night. Now Chase and Sharpe groped their way through the dark city.
‘God, this place stinks!’ Chase said.
‘You’ve not been here before?’ Sharpe asked, surprised.
‘I’ve been five months in India,’ Chase said, ‘but always at sea. Now I’m living ashore for a week, and it stinks. My God, how the place stinks!’
‘No more than London,’ Sharpe said, which was true, but here the smells were different. Instead of coal fumes there was bullock-dung smoke and the rich odours of spices and sewage. It was a sweet smell, ripe even, but not unpleasant, and Sharpe was thinking back to when he had first arrived and how he had recoiled from the smell that he now thought homely and even enticing. ‘I’ll miss it,’ he admitted. ‘I sometimes wish I wasn’t going back to England.’
‘Which ship are you on?’
‘The Calliope.’
Chase evidently found that amusing. ‘So what do you make of Peculiar?’
‘Peculiar?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Peculiar Cromwell, of course, the Captain.’ Chase looked at Sharpe. ‘Surely you’ve met him!’
‘I haven’t. Never heard of him.’
‘But the convoy must have arrived two months ago,’ Chase said.
‘It did.’
‘Then you should have made an effort to see Peculiar. That’s his real name, by the way, Peculiar Cromwell. Odd, eh? He was navy once, most of the East Indiamen captains were navy, but Peculiar resigned because he wanted to become rich. He also believed he should have been made admiral without spending tedious years as a mere captain. He’s an odd soul, but he sails a tidy ship, and a fast one. I can’t believe you didn’t make the effort to meet him.’
‘Why should I?’ Sharpe asked.
‘To make sure you get some privileges aboard, of course. Can I assume you’ll be travelling in steerage?’
‘I’m travelling cheap, if that’s what you mean,’ Sharpe said. He spoke bitterly, for though he had paid the lowest possible rate, his passage was still costing him one hundred and seven pounds and fifteen shillings. He had thought the army would pay for the voyage, but the army had refused, saying that Sharpe was accepting an invitation to join the 95th Rifles and if the 95th Rifles refused to pay his passage then damn them, damn their badly coloured coats, and damn Sharpe. So he had cut one of the precious diamonds from the seam of his red coat and paid for the voyage himself. He still had a king’s ransom in the precious stones that he had taken from the Tippoo Sultan’s body in a dank tunnel at Seringapatam, but he resented using the loot to pay the East India Company. Britain had sent Sharpe to India, and Britain, Sharpe reckoned, should fetch him back.
‘So the clever thing to have done, Sharpe,’ Chase said, ‘would have been to introduce yourself to Peculiar while he was living ashore and given the greedy bugger a present, because then he’d have assigned you to decent quarters. But if you haven’t crossed Peculiar’s palm with silver, Sharpe, he’ll like as not have you down in lower steerage with the rats. Main-deck steerage is much better and doesn’t cost a penny more, but the lower steerage is nothing but farts, vomit and misery all the way home.’ The two men had left the narrow alleys and were leading the barge crew down a street that was edged with sewage-filled ditches. It was a tinsmithing quarter and the forges were already burning bright as the sound of hammers rattled the night. Pale cows watched the sailors pass and dogs barked frantically, waking the homeless poor who huddled between the ditches and the house walls. ‘It’s a pity you’re sailing in convoy,’ Chase said.
‘Why, sir?’
‘Because a convoy goes at the speed of its slowest boat,’ Chase explained. ‘Calliope could make England in three months if she was allowed to fly, but she’ll have to limp. I wish I was sailing with you. I’d offer you passage myself as thanks for your rescue tonight, but alas, I am ghost-hunting.’
‘Ghost-hunting, sir?’
‘You’ve heard of the Revenant?’
‘No, sir.’
‘The ignorance of you soldiers,’ Chase said, amused. ‘The Revenant, my dear Sharpe, is a French seventy-four that is haunting the Indian Ocean. Hides herself in Mauritius, sallies out to snap up prizes, then scuttles back before we can catch her. I’m here to stifle her ardour, only before I can hunt her I have to scrape the bottom. My ship’s too slow after eight months at sea, so we scour off the barnacles to quicken her up.’
‘I wish you good fortune, sir,’ Sharpe said, then frowned. ‘But what’s that to do with ghosts?’ He usually did not like asking such questions. Sharpe had once marched in the ranks of a redcoat battalion, but he had been made into an officer and so found himself in a world where almost every man was educated except himself. He had become accustomed to allowing small mysteries to slide past him, but Sharpe decided he did not mind revealing his ignorance to a man as good-natured as Chase.
‘Revenant is the Frog word for ghost,’ Chase said. ‘Noun, masculine. I had a tutor for these things who flogged the language into me and I’d like to flog it out of him now.’ In a nearby yard a cockerel crowed and Chase glanced up at the sky. ‘Almost dawn,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’ll permit me to give you breakfast? Then my lads will take you out to the Calliope. God speed your way home, eh?’
Home. It seemed an odd word to Sharpe, for he did not have a home other than the army and he had not seen England in six years. Six