“How many men have you got in there?”
“Five. That’s all he left me. He slaughtered the rest.”
“Dodd did?”
“He tried to kill me, but I hid under some straw. A shameful end to my career as a warlord, wouldn’t you say?” Pohlmann smiled.
“I think you did well, Sergeant Sharpe, to turn down my commission.”
Sharpe laughed bitterly.
“I know my place, sir. Down in the gutter.
Officers don’t want men like me joining them. I might scratch my arse on parade or piss in their soup.” He walked to the small house and peered through the open door.
“Better tell your fellows to take their coats off, sir. They’ll be shot otherwise.” Then he went very still for, crouching at the back of the small room, was a woman in a shabby linen dress and a straw hat. It was Simone. Sharpe pulled off his shako.
“Madame?”
She stared at him, seeing only his silhouette against the dazzle of the day’s last sun.
“Simone?” Sharpe said.
“Richard?”
“It’s me, love.” He grinned.
“Don’t tell me you got left behind again!”
“He killed Pierre!” Simone cried. “I watched him. He shot him!”
“Dodd?”
“Who else?” Pohlmann asked behind Sharpe.
Sharpe stepped into the room and held his hand towards Simone.
“You want to stay here,” he asked her, ‘or come with me?”
She hesitated a second, then stood and took his hand. Pohlmann sighed.
“I was hoping to console the widow, Sharpe.”
“You lost, sir,” Sharpe said, ‘you lost.” And he walked away with Simone, going to find McCandless to give him the bad news. Dodd had escaped.
Colonel McCandless limped up the breach and into Assaye. He sensed that Dodd was gone, for there was no more fighting in the village, though some shots still sounded from the river bank, but even those shots ended as the Scotsman edged past the dead man in the house doorway and through the courtyard into the street.
And perhaps, he thought, it did not really matter any longer, for this day’s victory would echo throughout all India. The redcoats had broken two armies, they had ruined the power of two mighty princes, and from this day on Dodd would be hunted from refuge to refuge as the British power spread northwards. And it would spread, McCandless knew. Each new advance was declared to be the last, but each brought new frontiers and new enemies and so the redcoats marched again, and maybe they would never stop marching until they reached the great mountains in the very north. And maybe it was there,
McCandless thought, that Dodd would at last be trapped and shot down like a dog.
And suddenly McCandless did not care very much. He felt old. The pain in his leg was terrible. He was still weak from his fever. It was time, he thought, to go home. Back to Scotland. He should sell Aeolus, repay Sharpe, take his pension, and board a ship. Go home, he thought, to Lochaber and to the green slopes of Glen Scaddle. There was work to be done in Britain, useful work, for he was corresponding with men in London and Edinburgh who wished to establish a society to spread Bibles throughout the heathen world and McCandless decided he could find a small house in Lochaber, hire a servant, and spend his days translating God’s word into the Indian languages. That, he thought, would be a job worth doing, and he wondered why he had waited so long. A small house, a large fire, a library, a table, a supply of ink and paper and, with God’s help, he could do more for India from that one small house than he could ever achieve by hunting down one traitor.
The thought of the great task cheered him, then he turned a corner and saw Pohlmann’s great elephant wandering free in an alleyway.
“You’re lost, boy,” he said to the elephant and took hold of one of its ears.
“Someone left the gate open, didn’t they?”
He turned the elephant which followed him happily enough. They walked past a dead horse, and then McCandless saw a dead European in a white jacket, and for an instant he thought it must be Dodd, then he recognized Captain Joubert lying on his back with a bullet hole in his breast.