Sharpe’s Triumph: The Battle of Assaye, September 1803. Bernard Cornwell

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СКАЧАТЬ his men had been expecting dinner the fight was almost over. The musket ball had jerked his head back and there had been a stabbing pain either side of his eyes, and the next he knew he was lying with blood crusting on his face and flies crawling down his gullet.

      But maybe he could have snatched his men back. He tortured himself with the thought that he could have saved Davi Lal and a couple of the privates, maybe he could have crossed the cactus-thorn wall and run into the trees, but Davi Lal was dead and all six privates were dead and Sharpe could hear the killers laughing as they carried the ammunition out of the small magazine.

      ‘Subadar!’ the tall officer shouted. ‘Fetch that bloody flag down! I wanted it done an hour ago!’

      Sharpe blinked again because he could not help himself, but no one noticed, and then he closed his eyes because the sun was blinding him, and he wanted to weep out of anger and frustration and hatred. Six men dead, and Davi Lal dead, and Sharpe had not been able to do a damned thing to help them, and he wondered who the tall officer was, and then a voice provided the answer.

      ‘Major Dodd, sahib?’

      ‘Subadar?’

      ‘Everything’s loaded, sahib.’

      ‘Then let’s go before their patrols get back. Well done, Subadar! Tell the men there’ll be a reward.’

      Sharpe listened as the raiders left the fort. Who the hell were they? Major Dodd had been in East India Company uniform, and so had all his men for that matter, but they sure as hell were not Company troops. They were bastards, that’s what they were, bastards from hell and they had done a thorough piece of wicked work in Chasalgaon. Sharpe doubted they had lost a single man in their treacherous attack, and still he lay silent as the sounds faded away. A baby cried somewhere, a woman sobbed, and still Sharpe waited until at last he was certain that Major Dodd and his men were gone, and only then did Sharpe roll onto his side. The fort stank of blood and buzzed with flies. He groaned and got to his knees. The cauldron of rice and kid had boiled dry and so he stood and kicked it off its tripod. ‘Bastards,’ he said, and he saw the surprised look on Davi Lal’s face and he wanted to weep for the boy.

      A half-naked woman, bleeding from the mouth, saw Sharpe stand from among the bloodied heap of the dead and she screamed before snatching her child back into a barracks hut. Sharpe ignored her. His musket was gone. Every damn weapon was gone. ‘Bastards!’ he shouted into the hot air, then he kicked at a dog that was sniffing at Phillips’s corpse. The smell of blood and powder and burned rice was thick in his throat. He gagged as he walked into the cookhouse and there found a jar of water. He drank deep, then splashed the water onto his face and rubbed away the clotted blood. He wet a rag and flinched as he cleaned the shallow wound in his scalp, then suddenly he was overcome with horror and pity and he fell onto his knees and half sobbed. He swore instead. ‘Bastards!’ He said the word again and again, helplessly and furiously, then he remembered his pack and so he stood again and went into the sunlight.

      The ashes of the fire were still hot and the charred canvas remnants of his pack and pouches glowed red as he found a stick and raked through the embers. One by one he found what he had hidden in the fire. The rupees that had been for hiring the carts, then the rubies and emeralds, diamonds and pearls, sapphires and gold. He fetched a sack of rice from the cookhouse and he emptied the grains onto the ground and filled the sack with his treasure. A king’s ransom, it was, and it had been taken from a king four years before in the Water Gate at Seringapatam where Sharpe had trapped the Tippoo Sultan and shot him down before looting his corpse.

      Then, with the treasure clutched to his midriff, he knelt in the stench of Chasalgaon and felt guilty. He had survived a massacre. Anger mingled with his guilt, then he knew he had duties to do. He must find any others who had survived, he must help them, and he must work out how he could take his revenge.

      On a man called Dodd.

      Major John Stokes was an engineer, and if ever a man was happy with his avocation, it was Major John Stokes. There was nothing he enjoyed so much as making things, whether it was a better gun carriage, a garden or, as he was doing now, improvements to a clock that belonged to the Rajah of Mysore. The Rajah was a young man, scarcely more than a boy indeed, and he owed his throne to the British troops who had ejected the usurping Tippoo Sultan and, as a result, relations between the palace and Seringapatam’s small British garrison were good. Major Stokes had found the clock in one of the palace’s antechambers and noted its appalling accuracy, which is why he had brought it back to the armoury where he was happily taking it apart. ‘It isn’t signed,’ he told his visitor, ‘and I suspect it’s local work. But a Frenchman had his hand in it, I can tell that. See the escapement? Typical French work, that.’

      The visitor peered at the tangle of cogwheels. ‘Didn’t know the Frogs had it in them to make clocks, sir,’ he said.

      ‘Oh, indeed they do!’ Stokes said reprovingly. ‘And very fine clocks they make! Very fine. Think of Lépine! Think of Berthoud! How can you ignore Montandon? And Breguet!’ The Major shook his head in mute tribute to such great craftsmen, then peered at the Rajah’s sorry timepiece. ‘Some rust on the mainspring, I see. That don’t help. Soft metal, I suspect. It’s catch as catch can over here. I’ve noticed that. Marvellous decorative work, but Indians make shoddy mechanics. Look at that mainspring! A disgrace.’

      ‘Shocking, sir, shocking.’ Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill did not know a mainspring from a pendulum, and could not have cared less about either, but he needed information from Major Stokes so it was politic to show an interest.

      ‘It was striking nine when it should have struck eight,’ the Major said, poking a finger into the clock’s entrails, ‘or perhaps it was striking eight when it ought to have sounded nine. I don’t recall. One to seven it copes with admirably, but somewhere about eight it becomes wayward.’ The Major, who was in charge of Seringapatam’s armoury, was a plump, cheerful fellow with prematurely white hair. ‘Do you understand clocks, Sergeant?’

      ‘Can’t say as I does, sir. A simple soldier, me, sir, who has the sun as his clock.’ The Sergeant’s face twitched horribly. It was an uncontrollable spasm that racked his face every few seconds.

      ‘You were asking about Sharpe,’ Major Stokes said, peering into the clock. ‘Well, I never! This fellow has made the bearings out of wood! Good Lord above. Wood! No wonder she’s wayward! Harrison once made a wooden clock, did you know? Even the gearings! All from timber.’

      ‘Harrison, sir? Is he in the army, sir?’

      ‘He’s a clockmaker, Sergeant, a clockmaker. A very fine clockmaker too.’

      ‘Not a Frog, sir?’

      ‘With a name like Harrison? Good Lord, no! He’s English, and he makes a good honest clock.’

      ‘Glad to hear it, sir,’ Hakeswill said, then reminded the Major of the purpose of his visit to the armoury. ‘Sergeant Sharpe, sir, my good friend, sir, is he here?’

      ‘He is here,’ Stokes said, at last looking up from the clock, ‘or rather he was here. I saw him an hour ago. But he went to his quarters. He’s been away, you see. Involved in that dreadful business in Chasalgaon.’

      ‘Chiseldown, sir?’

      ‘Terrible business, terrible! So I told Sharpe to clean himself up. Poor fellow was covered in blood! Looked like a pirate. Now that is interesting.’

      ‘Blood, sir?’ Hakeswill asked.

      ‘A СКАЧАТЬ