“None of our gunners have ever done it before,” Wallace told McCandless, ‘and they’ve insisted on putting a round shot down the gun, but I swear my mother told me you should never load shot to open gates. A double powder charge, she instructed me, and nothing else.”
“Your mother told you that, Wallace?” McCandless asked.
“Her father was an artilleryman, you see, and he brought her up properly. But I can’t persuade our gunners to leave out the ball. Stubborn fellows, they are. English to a man, of course. Can’t teach them anything.” Wallace offered McCandless his canteen.
“It’s cold tea, McCandless, nothing that will send your soul to perdition.”
McCandless took a swig of the tea, then introduced Sharpe.
“He was the fellow who blew the Tippoo’s mine in Seringapatam,” he told Wallace.
“I heard about you, Sharpe!” Wallace said.
“A damn fine day’s work, Sergeant, well done.” And the Scotsman leaned across to give Sharpe his hand. He was a middle-aged man, balding, with a pleasant face and a quick smile.
“I can tempt you to some cold tea, Sharpe?”
“I’ve got water, sir, thank you,” Sharpe said, patting his canteen which was filled with rum, a gift from Daniel Hetcher, the General’s orderly.
“You’ll forgive me if I’m about my business,” Wallace said to McCandless, retrieving his canteen.
“I’ll see you inside the city, McCandless. Joy of the day to you both.” Wallace spurred back to the head of his column.
“A very good man,” McCandless said warmly, ‘a very good man indeed.”
Sevajee and his dozen men cantered up to join McCandless. They all wore red jackets, for they planned to ride into the city with McCandless and none wanted to be mistaken for the enemy, yet somehow the unbuttoned jackets, which had been borrowed from a sepoy battalion, made them look more piratical than ever. They all carried naked tulwars, curved sabres that they had honed to a razor’s edge at dawn.
Sevajee reckoned there would be no time for aiming fire locks once they were inside Ahmednuggur. Ride in, charge whoever still put up a fight and cut down hard.
The two escalade parties started forward. Each had a pair of ladders, and each party was led by those men who had volunteered to be first up the rungs. The sun was fully above the horizon now and Sharpe could see the wall more plainly. He reckoned it was twenty foot high, give or take a few inches, and the glint of guns in every embrasure and loophole showed that it would be heavily defended.
“Ever seen an escalade, Sharpe?” McCandless asked.
“No, sir.”
“Risky business. Frail things, ladders. Nasty being first up.”
“Very nasty, sir.”
“And if it fails it gives the enemy confidence.”
“So why do it, sir?”
“Because if it succeeds, Sharpe, it lowers the enemy’s spirits. It will make us seem invincible. Veni, vidi, vici.”
“I don’t speak any Indian, sir, not proper.”
“Latin, Sharpe, Latin. I came, I saw, I conquered. How’s your reading these days?”
“It’s good, sir, very good,” Sharpe answered enthusiastically, though in truth he had not read very much in the last four years other than lists of stores and duty rosters and Major Stokes’s repair orders. But it had been Colonel McCandless and his nephew, Lieutenant Lawford, who had first taught Sharpe to read when they shared a cell in the Tippoo Sultan’s prison. That was four years ago now.
“I shall give you a Bible, Sharpe,” McCandless said, watching the escalade parties march steadily forward.
“It’s the one book worth reading.”
“I’d like that, sir,” Sharpe said straight-faced, then saw that the picquets of the day were running ahead to make a skirmish line that would pepper the wall with musket fire. Still no one fired from the city wall, though by now both the picquets and the two ladder parties were well inside musket range.
“If you don’t mind me asking, sir,” Sharpe said to McCandless, ‘what’s to stop that bugger sorry, sir what’s to stop Mister Dodd from escaping out the other side of the city, sir?”
“They are, Sharpe,” McCandless said, indicating the cavalry that now galloped off on both sides of the city. The British igth Dragoons rode in a tight squadron, but the other horsemen were Mahratta allies or else silladars from Hyderabad or Mysore, and they rode in a loose swarm.