“Come to inspect us, have you?” the Major demanded cheerfully.
“You’ll discover chaos! Nothing in the right place, records all muddled, woodworm in the timber stacks, damp in the magazines and the paint completely addled.”
“Better that paint is addled than wits,” the newcomer said, then took off his cocked hat to reveal a head of white hair.
Sharpe, who had been sitting on one of the finished gun carriages, shot to his feet, tipping the surprised cat into the Major’s wood shavings.
“Colonel McCandless, sir!”
“Sergeant Sharpe!” McCandless responded. The Colonel shook water from his cocked hat and turned to Stokes.
“And you, sir?”
“Major Stokes, sir, at your service, sir. Horace Stokes, commander of the armoury and, as you see, carpenter to His Majesty.”
“You will forgive me, Major Stokes, if I talk to Sergeant Sharpe?”
McCandless shed his oilskin cape to reveal his East India Company uniform.
“Sergeant Sharpe and I are old friends.”
“My pleasure, Colonel,” Stokes said.
“I have business in the foundry.
They’re pouring too fast. I tell them all the time! Fast pouring just bubbles the metal, and bubbled metal leads to disaster, but they won’t listen. Ain’t like making temple bells, I tell them, but I might as well save my breath.” He glanced wistfully towards the happy men making the giant’s head for the Dusshera festival.
“And I have other things to do,” he added.
“I’d rather you didn’t leave, Major,” McCandless said very formally.
“I suspect what I have to say concerns you. It is good to see you, Sharpe.”
“You too, sir,” Sharpe said, and it was true. He had been locked in the Tippoo’s dungeons with Colonel Hector McCandless and if it was possible for a sergeant and a colonel to be friends, then a friendship existed between the two men. McCandless, tall, vigorous and in his sixties, was the East India Company’s head of intelligence for all southern and western India, and in the last four years he and Sharpe had talked a few times whenever the Colonel passed through Seringapatam, but those had been social conversations and the Colonel’s grim face suggested that this meeting was anything but social.
“You were at Chasalgaon?” McCandless demanded.
“I was, sir, yes.”
“So you saw Lieutenant Dodd?”
Sharpe nodded.
“Won’t ever forget the bastard. Sorry, sir.” He apologized because McCandless was a fervent Christian who abhorred all foul language. The Scotsman was a stern man, honest as a saint, and Sharpe sometimes wondered why he liked him so much. Maybe it was because McCandless was always fair, always truthful and could talk to any man, rajah or sergeant, with the same honest directness.
“I never met Lieutenant Dodd,” McCandless said, ‘so describe him to me.”
“Tall, sir, and thin like you or me.”
“Not like me,” Major Stokes put in.
“Sort of yellow-faced,” Sharpe went on, ‘as if he’d had the fever once. Long face, like he ate something bitter.” He thought for a second.
He had only caught a few glimpses of Dodd, and those had been sideways.
“He’s got lank hair, sir, when he took off his hat. Brown hair.
Long nose on him, like Sir Arthur’s, and a bony chin. He’s calling himself Major Dodd now, sir, not Lieutenant. I heard one of his men call him Major.”
“And he killed every man in the garrison?” McCandless asked.
“He did, sir. Except me. I was lucky.”
“Nonsense, Sharpe!” McCandless said.
“The hand of the Lord was upon you.”
“Amen,” Major Stokes intervened.
McCandless stared broodingly at Sharpe. The Colonel had a hard planed face with oddly blue eyes. He was forever claiming that he wanted to retire to his native Scotland, but he always found some reason to stay on in India. He had spent much of his life riding the states that bordered the land administered by the Company, for his job was to explore those lands and report their threats and weaknesses to his masters. Little happened in India that escaped McCandless, but Dodd had escaped him, and Dodd was now McCandless’s concern.
“We have placed a price on his head,” the Colonel said, ‘of five hundred guineas.”
“Bless me!” Major Stokes said in astonishment.