“Not that it helps us,” McCandless said wryly, ‘but at least we’re on his heels.”
“Or he’s on ours,” Sevajee said, then he offered his telescope to Sharpe.
“See for yourself, Sergeant.”
Sharpe rested the glass’s long barrel on a thick cactus leaf. He moved the lens slowly along the line of infantry. Men slept in the shade, some were in their small tents and others sat in groups and he could have sworn a few were gambling. Officers, Indian and European, strolled behind their men, while in front of them the massive line of guns waited with their ammunition limbers. He moved the glass to the very far left of the enemy line and saw the white jackets of Dodd’s men, and saw something else. Two huge guns, much bigger than anything he had seen before.
“They’ve got their siege guns in the line, sir,” he told McCandless, who trained his own telescope.
“Eighteen-pounders,” McCandless guessed, ‘maybe bigger?” The Colonel collapsed his glass.
“Why aren’t they patrolling this side of the river?”
“Because they don’t want to frighten us away,” Sevajee said.
“They want us to stroll up to their guns and die in the river, but they’ll still have some horsemen hidden on this bank, waiting to tell them when we retreat.”
The sound of hooves made Sharpe whip round in expectation of those enemy cavalry, but it was only General Wellesley and his two aides who cantered along the lower ground beneath the crest.
“They’re all there, McCandless,” the General shouted happily.
“So it seems, sir.”
The General reined in, waiting for McCandless to come down from the skyline and join him.
“They seem to presume we’ll make a frontal attack,” Wellesley said wryly, as though he found the idea amusing.
“They’re certainly formed for it, sir.”
“They must assume we’re blockheads. What time is it?”
One of his aides consulted a watch.
“Ten minutes of noon, sir.”
“Plenty of time,” the General murmured.
“Onwards, gentlemen, stay below the skyline. We don’t want to frighten them away!”
“Frighten them away?” Sevajee asked with a smile, but Wellesley ignored the comment as he spurred on eastwards, parallel with the river. Some troops of Company cavalry were scouring the fields and at first Sharpe thought they were looking for concealed enemy picquets, then he saw they were hunting down local farmers and harrying them along in the General’s wake.
Wellesley rode two miles eastwards, a string of horsemen behind him. The farmers were breathless by the time they reached the place where his horse was picketed just beneath a low hill. The General was kneeling on the crest, staring east through a glass.
“Ask those fellows if there are any fords east of here!” he shouted down to his aides.
A hurried consultation followed, but the farmers were quite sure there was no ford. The only crossing places, they insisted, were directly in front of Scindia’s army.
“Find a clever one,” Wellesley ordered, ‘and bring him up here. Colonel? Maybe you’d translate?”
McCandless picked one of the farmers and led him up the hill.
Sharpe, without being asked, followed and Wellesley did not order him back, but just muttered that they should all keep their heads low.
“There’ the General pointed eastwards to a village on the Kaitna’s southern bank ‘that village, what’s it called?”
Teepulgaon,” the farmer said, and added that his mother and two sisters lived in the huddle of mud-walled houses with their thatched roofs.
Peepulgaon lay only a half-mile from the low hill, but it was all of two miles east of Taunklee, the village that was opposite the eastern extremity of the Mahratta line. Both villages were on the river’s southern bank while the enemy waited on the Kaitna’s northern side, and Sharpe did not understand Wellesley’s interest.
“Ask him if he has any relatives north of the river,” the General ordered McCandless.
“He has a brother and several cousins, sir,” McCandless translated.
“So how does his mother visit her son north of the river?” Wellesley asked.
The farmer launched himself into a long explanation. In the dry season, he said, she walked across the river bed, but in the wet season, when the waters rose, she was forced to come upstream and cross at Taunklee. Wellesley listened, then grunted in apparent disbelief. He was staring intently through the glass.