“How does it look?” she asked.
“Like a piece of expensive snot.”
She stuck her tongue out at him.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. She peered at the diamond that still had its black velvet backing so that the stone would shine more brightly, then she opened her purse.
“Are you sure?”
“Go on, girl, take them.”
“How do I explain them to Pierre?”
“You say you found them on a dead body after the fight. He’ll believe that.” He watched her put the diamonds in the purse.
“I have to hide the rest,” he explained to her. He reckoned some of the stones could go in his canteen, where they would rattle a bit when it was dry, and he would have to take care when drinking in case he swallowed a fortune, but that still left a mound of gems unhidden. He used his knife to slit open a seam of his red coat and began feeding the small rubies into the slot, but the stones bunched along the bottom hem and the bulge was an advertisement to every soldier that he was carrying plunder.
“See what I mean?” He showed Simone the bulging seam.
She took the coat, fetched Sharpe’s sewing kit from the bedroom, and then began to trap each gem in its own small pouch of the opened seam.
The job took her all afternoon, and when she was finished the red coat was twice as heavy. The most difficult stone to hide was the huge ruby, but Sharpe solved that by unwinding his long hair from the shot weighted bag that clubbed it, then slitting open the bag and emptying the shot. He filled the bag with the ruby and with whatever small stones were left, then Simone rewound his hair about the bag. By nightfall the jewels had vanished.
They ate by lamplight. The bath had never been filled, but Simone said she had taken one a week before so it did not matter. Sharpe had made a brief excursion in the dusk and had returned with two clay bottles filled with arrack, and they drank the liquor in the gloom. They talked, they laughed, and at last the oil in the lamp ran dry and the flame flickered out to leave the room lit by shafts of moonlight coming through the filigree shutters. Simone had fallen silent and Sharpe knew she was thinking of bed.
“I brought you some sheets.” He pointed to the saris.
She looked up at him from under her fringe.
“And where will you sleep, Sergeant Sharpe?”
“I’ll find a place, love.”
It was the first time he had slept in silk, not that he noticed, so showing her the gems had not been such a bad idea after all.
He woke to the crowing of cockerels and the bang of a twelve pounder gun, a reminder that the world and the war went on.
Major Stokes had decided that the real problem with the Rajah’s clock was its wooden bearings. They swelled in damp weather, and he was happily contemplating the problem of making a new set of bearings out of brass when the twitching Sergeant reappeared in his office.
“You again,” the Major greeted him.
“Can’t remember your name.”
“Hakeswill, sir. Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill.”
“Punishment on Edom, eh?” the Major said, wondering whether to cast or drill the brass.
“Edom, sir? Edom?”
“The prophet Obadiah, Sergeant, foretells punishment on Edom,” the Major said.
“He threatened it with fire and captivity, as I recall.”
“He doubtless had his reasons, sir,” Hakeswill said, his face jerking in its uncontrollable spasms, ‘like I have mine. It’s Sergeant Sharpe I’m after, sir.”
“Not here, Sergeant, alas. The place falls apart!”
“He’s gone, sir?” Hakeswill demanded.
“Summoned away, Sergeant, by higher authority. Not my doing, not my doing at all. If it was up to me I’d keep Sharpe here for ever, but a Colonel McCandless demanded him and when colonels demand, mere majors comply. So far as I know, which isn’t much, they went to join General Wellesley’s forces.” The Major was now rummaging through a wooden chest.
“We had some fine augers, I know. Same ones we use on touch-holes. Not that we ever did. Haven’t had to rebore a touch-hole yet.”