“When will the British come, Major?” she asked Dodd.
“Tomorrow, Ma’am. They’ll establish batteries the next day, knock at the wall for two or three days, make their hole and then come in.”
She looked at Dodd beneath the hem of her parasol. Although he was a tall man, Simone could still look him in the eye.
“They’ll take the city that quickly?” she asked, showing a hint of worry.
“Nothing to hold them, Ma’am. Not enough men, too much wall, not enough guns.”
“So how will we escape?”
“By trusting me, Ma’am,” Dodd said, offering Simone a leering smile.
“What you must do, my dear, is pack your luggage, as much as can be carried on whatever packhorses your husband might possess, and be ready to leave. I shall send you warning before the attack, and at that time you go to the north gate where you’ll find your husband. It would help, of course, Ma’am, if I knew where you were lodged?”
“My husband knows, Monsieur,” Simone said coldly.
“So once the rosbifs arrive I need do nothing for three days except pack?”
Dodd noted her use of the French term of contempt for the English, but chose to make nothing of it.
“Exactly, Ma’am.”
“Thank you, Major,” Simone said, and made a gesture so that two servants, whom Dodd had not noticed in the press of people, came to escort her back to her house.
“Cold bitch,” Dodd said to himself when she was gone, ‘but she’ll thaw, she’ll thaw.”
The dark fell swiftly. Torches flared on the city ramparts, lighting the ghostly robes of the Arab mercenaries who patrolled the bastions.
Small offerings of food and flowers were piled in front of the garish gods and goddesses in their candlelit temples. The inhabitants of the city were praying to be spared, while to the south a faint glow in the sky betrayed where a red-coated army had come to bring Ahmednuggur death.
Lieutenant-Colonel Albert Gore had taken command of the King’s 33rd in succession to Sir Arthur Wellesley and it had not been a happy battalion when Gore arrived. That unhappiness was not Sir Arthur’s fault for he had long left the battalion for higher responsibilities, but in his absence the 33rd had been commanded by Major John Shee who was an incompetent drunk. Shee had died, Gore had received command, and now he was slowly mending the damage. That mending could have been a great deal swifter if Gore had been able to rid himself of some of the battalion’s officers, and of all those officers it was the lazy and dishonest Captain Morris of the Light Company whom he would have most liked to dismiss, but Gore was helpless in the matter. Morris had purchased his commission, he was guilty of no of fences against the King’s regulations and thus he had to stay. And with him stayed the malevolent, unsettling, yellow-faced and perpetually twitching Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill.
“Sharpe was always a bad man, sir. A disgrace to the army, sir,” Hakeswill told the Colonel.
“He should never have been made into a sergeant, sir, ‘cos he ain’t the material of what sergeants are made, sir.
He’s nothing but a scrap of filth, sir, what shouldn’t be a corporal, let alone a sergeant. It says so in the scriptures, sir.” The Sergeant stood rigidly at attention, his right foot behind his left, his hands at his sides and his elbows straining towards the small of his back. His voice boomed in the small room, drowning out the sound of the pelting rain.
Gore wondered whether the rain was the late beginning of the monsoon.
He hoped so, for if the monsoon failed utterly then there would be a lot of hungry people in India the following year.
Gore watched a spider crawl across the table. The house belonged to a leather dealer who had rented it to the 33rd while they were based in Arrakerry and the place seethed with insects that crawled, flew, slunk and stung, and Gore, who was a fastidious and elegant man, rather wished he had used his tents.
“Tell me what happened,” Gore said to Morris, ‘again. If you would be so kind.”