“We’ll capture Dodd, sir, I promise.”
“I pray so, I pray so.” The Colonel pointed to his saddlebags in the corner of the hut.
“Would you find my Bible, Sharpe? And perhaps you’d read to me while there’s still a little light? Something from the Book of Job, I think.”
McCandless fell into days of fever and Sharpe into days of isolation.
For all he knew the war might have been won or lost, for he saw no one and no news came to the thatched hovel under its thin-leaved trees. To keep himself busy he cleared out an old irrigation ditch that ran northwards across the woman’s land, and he hacked at the brush, killed snakes and shovelled earth until he was rewarded by a trickle of water.
That done, he tackled the hovel’s roof, laying new palm thatch on the old and binding it in place with twists of frond. He went hungry, for the woman had little food other than the grain Pohlmann had left and some dried beans. Sharpe stripped to the waist when he worked and his skin went as brown as the stock of his musket. In the evenings he played with the woman’s three children, making forts out of the red soil that they bombarded with stones and, in one memorable twilight, when a toy rampart proved impregnable to thrown pebbles, Sharpe laid a fuse of powder and blew a breach with three of his musket cartridges.
He did his best to tend McCandless, washing the Colonel’s face, reading him the scriptures and feeding him spoonfuls of bitter gunpowder diluted in water. He was not sure that the powder helped, but every soldier swore that it was the best medicine for the fever, and so Sharpe forced spoonfuls of the salty mixture down the Colonel’s throat.
He worried about the bullet wound in McCandless’s thigh, for the widow had shyly pushed him aside one day when he was dampening the dressing and had insisted on untying the bandage and putting a poultice of her own making onto the raw wound. There were moss and cobwebs in the poultice, and Sharpe wondered if he had done the right thing by letting her apply the mixture, but as the first week passed the wound did not seem to worsen and, in his more lucid moments, the Colonel claimed the pain was lessening.
Once the irrigation ditch was cleared Sharpe tackled the widow’s well.
He devised a dredge out of a broken wooden bucket and used it to scoop out handfuls of foul-smelling mud from the base of the well, and all the while he thought about his future. He knew Major Stokes would welcome him back to the Seringapatam armoury, but after a time the regiment would surely remember his existence and want him back and that would mean rejoining the Light Company with Captain Morris and Sergeant Hakeswill, and Sharpe shuddered at that thought. Maybe Colonel Gore would transfer him? The lads said that Gore was a decent fellow, not as chilling as Wellesley, and that was good news, yet even so Sharpe often wondered whether he should have accepted Pohlmann’s offer. Lieutenant Sharpe, he muttered it aloud, Lieutenant Sharpe. Why not? And in those moments he would daydream of the joy of going back to the foundling home in Brewhouse Lane. He would wear a sword and a cocked hat, have braid on his jacket and spurs at his heels, and for every lash the bastards had ever laid on small Richard Sharpe he would pay them back tenfold. He felt a terrible anger when he remembered those beatings and he would haul at his makeshift dredge as if he could slake the anger with hard work.
But in all those daydreams he never once returned to Brewhouse Lane in a white coat, or in a purple coat, or in any other coat except a red one.
No one in Britain had ever heard of Anthony Pohlmann, and why should they care that a child had gone from the gutters of Wapping to a commission in the Maharajah of Gwalior’s army? A man might as well claim to be Colonel of the Moon for all anyone would care. Unless it was a red coat, they would condemn him as a flash bastard, and be done with him, but if he walked back in Britain’s scarlet coat then they would take him seriously and that meant he had to become an officer in his own army.