“Maybe one day you’ll change the system, sir,” Sharpe said.
“I will!” Dodd said vigorously.
“I bloody will! And if you’ve any sense, lad, you’ll be here helping me. You learn one thing as a miller’s son, Sergeant, and that’s not just how to grind corn, but that a fool and his money are easily parted. And Scindia’s a fool, but given a chance I’ll make the bugger into the Emperor of India.” He turned as a servant beat a gong with a muffled stick.
“Time for our vittles.”
It was a strangely subdued supper, though Pohlmann did his best to amuse his company. Sharpe had tried to manoeuvre himself into a seat beside Simone, but Dodd and a Swedish captain beat him to it and Sharpe found himself next to a small Swiss doctor who spent the whole meal quizzing Sharpe about the religious arrangements in British regiments.
“Your chaplains are godly men, yes?”
“Drunken bastards, sir, most of them.”
“Surely not!”
“I hauled two of them out of a whorehouse not a month ago, sir.
They didn’t want to pay, see?”
“You are not telling me the truth!”
“God’s honour, sir. The Reverend Mister Cooper was one of them, and it’s a rare Sunday that he’s sober. He preached a Christmas sermon at Easter, he was that puzzled.”
Most of the guests left early, Dodd among them, though a few diehards stayed on to give the Colonel a game of cards. Pohlmann grinned at Sharpe.
“You wager, Sharpe?”
I’m not rich enough, sir.”
Pohlmann shook his head in mock exasperation at the answer. ‘I will make you rich, Sharpe. You believe me?”
“I do, sir.”
“So you’ve made up your mind? You’re joining me?”
“I still want to think a bit, sir.”
Pohlmann shrugged.
“You have nothing to think about. You either become a rich man or you die for King George.”
Sharpe left the remaining officers at their cards and walked away into the encampment. He really was thinking, or trying to think, and he sought a quiet place, but a crowd of soldiers were wagering on dog fights, and their cheers, as well as the yelps and snarls of the dogs, carried far through the darkness. Sharpe settled on an empty stretch of ground close to the picketed camels that carried Pohlmann’s supply of rockets, and there he lay and stared up at the stars through the mist of smoke. A million stars. He had always thought there was an answer to all life’s mysteries in the stars, yet whenever he stared at them the answer slipped out of his grasp. He had been whipped in the foundling home for staring at a clear night’s sky through the workshop skylight.
“You ain’t here to gawp at the dark, boy,” the overseer had snapped, ‘you’re here to labour,” and the whip had slashed down across his shoulders and he had dutifully looked down at the great tarry lump of hemp rope that had to be picked apart. The old ropes had been twisted and tightened and tarred into vast knots bigger than Sharpe himself, and they had been used as fenders on the London docks, but when the grinding and thumping of the big ships had almost worn the old fenders through they were sent to the foundling home to be picked apart so that the strands could be sold as furniture stuffing or to be mixed into wall plaster.
“Got to learn a trade, boy,” the master had told him again and again, and so Sharpe had learned a trade, but it was not hemp-picking.
He learned the killing trade. Load a musket, ram a musket, fire a musket. And he had not done much of it, not yet, but he liked doing it.
He remembered Malavelly, remembered firing the volley at the approaching enemy, and he remembered the sheer exultation as all his unhappiness and anger had been concentrated into his musket’s barrel and been gouted out in one explosive rush of flame, smoke and lead.
He did not think of himself as unhappy. Not now. The army had been good to him in these last years, but there was still something wrong in his soul. What that was, he did not know, because Sharpe did not reckon he was any good at thinking. He was good at action, for whenever there was a problem to be solved Sergeant Sharpe could usually find the solution, but he was not much use at simply thinking. But he had to think now, and he stared at the smoke-dimmed stars in the hope that they would help him, but all they did was go on shining. Lieutenant Sharpe, he thought, and was surprised to realize that he saw nothing very odd in that idea. It was ridiculous, of course. Richard Sharpe, an officer? But somehow he could not shake the idea loose.