“I suppose you expect me to arrange the ox carts?” Crosby said indignantly.
“I’ll do it myself, sir.”
“Speak the language, do you?” Crosby sneered.
“A sergeant, banker and interpreter, are you?”
“Brought an interpreter with me, sir,” Sharpe said. Which was over egging the pudding a bit, because Davi Lal was only thirteen, an urchin off the streets of Seringapatam. He was a smart, mischievous child whom Sharpe had found stealing from the armoury cook house and, after giving the starving boy a clout around both ears to teach him respect for His Britannic Majesty’s property, Sharpe had taken him to Lali’s house and given him a proper meal, and Lali had talked to the boy and learned that his parents were dead, that he had no relatives he knew of, and that he lived by his wits. He was also covered in lice.
“Get rid of him,” she had advised Sharpe, but Sharpe had seen something of his own childhood in Davi Lal and so he had dragged him down to the River Cauvery and given him a decent scrubbing.
After that Davi Lal had become Sharpe’s errand boy. He learned to pipe clay belts, blackball boots and speak his own version of English which, because it came from the lower ranks, was liable to shock the gentler born.
“You’ll need three carts,” Crosby said.
“Yes, sir,” Sharpe said.
“Thank you, sir.” He had known exactly how many carts he would need, but he also knew it was stupid to pretend to knowledge in the face of officers like Crosby.
“Find your damn carts,” Crosby snapped, ‘then let me know when you’re ready to load up.”
“Very good, sir. Thank you, sir.” Sharpe stiffened to attention, about turned and marched from the tent to find Davi Lal and the six privates waiting in the shade of one of the barracks.
“We’ll have dinner,” Sharpe told them, ‘then sort out some carts this afternoon.”
“What’s for dinner?” Private Atkins asked.
“Whatever Davi can filch from the cook house Sharpe said, ‘but be nippy about it, all right? I want to be out of this damn place tomorrow morning.”
Their job was to fetch eighty thousand rounds of prime musket ii cartridges that had been stolen from the East India Company armoury in Madras. The cartridges were the best quality in India, and the thieves who stole them knew exactly who would pay the highest price for the ammunition. The princedoms of the Mahratta Confederation were forever at war with each other or else raiding the neighbouring states, but now, in the summer of 1803, they faced an imminent invasion by British forces. The threatened invasion had brought two of the biggest Mahratta rulers into an alliance that now gathered its forces to repel the British, and those rulers had promised the thieves a king’s ransom in gold for the cartridges, but one of the thieves who had helped break into the Madras armoury had refused to let his brother join the band and share in the profit, and so the aggrieved brother had betrayed the thieves to the Company’s spies and, two weeks later, the caravan carrying the cartridges across India had been ambushed by sepoys not far from Chasalgaon. The thieves had died or fled, and the recaptured ammunition had been brought back to the fort’s small magazine for safekeeping. Now the eighty thousand cartridges were to be taken to the armoury at Seringapatam, three days to the south, from where they would be issued to the British troops who were readying themselves for the war against the Mahrattas. A simple job, and Sharpe, who had spent the last four years as a sergeant in the Seringapatam armoury, had been given the responsibility.
Spoilage, Sharpe was thinking while his men boiled a cauldron of I river water on a bullock-dung fire. That was the key to the next few days, spoilage. Say seven thousand cartridges lost to damp? No one in Seringapatam would argue with that, and Sharpe reckoned he could sell the seven thousand cartridges on to Vakil Hussein, so long, of course, as there were eighty thousand cartridges to begin with. Still, Major Crosby had not quibbled with the figure, but just as Sharpe was thinking that, so Major Crosby appeared from his tent with a cocked hat on his head and a sword at his side.