“Yes, sir,” Sharpe said.
“And once we have the traitor we take him to Madras, put him on trial and have him hanged,” McCandless said with satisfaction, as though the job was as good as done. His gloomy forebodings of the previous night seemed to have vanished. He had stopped at a bare patch of ground.
“This looks like a fair billet. No more rain in the offing, I think, so we should be comfortable.”
Like hell, Sharpe thought. A bare bed, no rum, a fight in the morning, and God only knew what kind of devils waiting across the wall, but he slept anyway.
And woke when it was still dark to see shadowy men straggling past with long ladders across their shoulders. Dawn was near and it was time for an escalade. Time for ladders and murder.
Sanjit Pandee was kill adar of the city, which meant that he commanded Ahmednuggur’s garrison in the name of his master, Dowlut Rao Scindia, Maharajah of Gwalior, and in principle every soldier in the city, though not in the adjacent fortress, was under Pandee’s command.
So why had Major Dodd ejected Pandee’s troops from the northern gatehouse and substituted his own men? Pandee had sent no orders, but the deed had been done anyway and no one could explain why, and when Sanjit Pandee sent a message to Major Dodd and demanded an answer, the messenger was told to wait and, so far as the kill adar knew, was still waiting.
Sanjit Pandee finally summoned the courage to confront the Major himself. It was dawn, a time when the kill adar was not usually stirring, and he discovered Dodd and a group of his white-coated officers on the southern wall from where the Major was watching the British camp through a heavy telescope mounted on a tripod. Sanjit Pandee did not like to disturb the tall Dodd who was being forced to stoop awkwardly because the tripod was incapable of raising the glass to the level of his eye. The kill adar cleared his throat, but that had no effect, and then he scraped a foot on the fire step and still Dodd did not even glance at him, so finally the kill adar demanded his explanation, though in very flowery terms just in case he gave the Englishman offence. Sanjit Pandee had already lost the battle over the city treasury which Dodd had simply commandeered without so much as a by-your-leave, and the kill adar was nervous of the scowling foreigner.
“Tell the bloody man,” Dodd told his interpreter without taking his eye from the telescope, ‘that he’s wasting my bloody time. Tell him to go and boil his backside.”
Dodd’s interpreter, who was one of his younger Indian officers, courteously suggested to the kill adar that Major Dodd’s attention was wholly consumed by the approaching enemy, but that as soon as he had a moment of leisure, the Major would be delighted to hold a conversation with the honoured kill adar
The kill adar gazed southwards. Horsemen, British and Indian, were ranging far ahead of the approaching enemy column. Not that Sanjit Pandee could see the column properly, only a dark smudge among the distant green that he supposed was the enemy. Their feet kicked up no dust, but that was because of the rain that had fallen the day before.
“Are the enemy truly coming?” he enquired politely.
“Of course they’re not bloody coming,” Dodd said, standing upright and massaging the small of his back.
“They’re running away in terror.”
“The enemy are indeed approaching, sahib,” the interpreter said deferentially.
The kill adar glanced along his de fences and was reassured to see the bulk of Dodd’s regiment on the fire step and alongside them the robed figures of his Arab mercenaries.
“Your regiment’s guns,” he said to the interpreter, ‘they are not here?”
“Tell the interfering little bugger that I’ve sold all the bloody cannon to the enemy,” Dodd growled.
“The guns are placed where they will prove most useful, sahib’ the interpreter assured the kill adar with a dazzling smile, and the kill adar who knew that the five small guns were at the north gate where they were pointing in towards the city rather than out towards the plain, sighed in frustration. Europeans could be so very difficult.