The Sergeant stopped in one of the grog shops and demanded arrack.
The shop was empty, all but for himself, the owner and a legless beggar who heaved himself towards the Sergeant and received a kick in the rump for his trouble.
“Get out of here, you scabby bastard!” Hakeswill shouted.
“Bringing the flies in, you are. Go on! Piss off.” The shop thus emptied to his satisfaction, Hakeswill sat in a dark corner contemplating life.
“I chide myself,” he muttered aloud, worrying the shop’s owner who feared the look of the twitching man in the red coat.
“Your own fault, Obadiah,” Hakeswill said.
“You should have seen it years ago! Years! Rich as a Jew, he is. Are you listening to me, you heathen darkie bastard?” The shop’s owner, thus challenged, fled into the back room, leaving Hakeswill grumbling at the table.
“Rich as a Jew, Sharpie is, only he thinks he hides it, which he don’t, on account of me having tumbled to him. He don’t even live in barracks! Got himself some rooms over by the Mysore Gate. Got a bleeding servant boy. Always got cash on him, always! Buys drinks.” Hakeswill shook his head at the injustice of it all. The 33rd had spent the last four years patrolling Mysore’s roads and Sharpe, all that while, had been living in Seringapatam’s comforts. It was not right, not fair, not just. Hakeswill had worried about it, wondering why Sharpe was so rich. At first he had assumed that Sharpe had been fiddling the armoury stores, but that could not explain Sharpe’s apparent wealth.
“Only so much milk in a cow,” Hakeswill muttered, ‘no matter how hard you squeeze the teats.” Now he knew why Sharpe was rich, or he thought he knew, and what he had learned had filled Obadiah Hakeswill with a desperate jealousy. He scratched at a mosquito bite on his neck, revealing the old dark scar where the hangman’s rope had burned and abraded his skin. Obadiah Hakeswill had survived that hanging, and as a result he fervently believed that he could not be killed. Touched by God, he claimed he was, touched by God.
But he was not rich. Not rich at all, and Richard Sharpe was rich.
Rumour had it that Richard Sharpe used Lali’s house, and that was an officers-only brothel, so why was Sergeant Sharpe allowed inside?
Because he was rich, that was why, and Hakeswill had at last discovered Sharpe’s secret.
“It was the Tippoo!” he said aloud, then thumped the table with his tin mug to demand more drink.
“And hurry up about it, you black-faced bastard!”
It had to be the Tippoo. Had not Hakeswill seen Sharpe lurking about the area where the Tippoo had been killed? And no soldier had ever claimed the credit for killing the Tippoo. It was widely thought that one of those Suffolk bastards from the south had caught the King in the chaos at the siege’s end, but Hakeswill had finally worked it out. It had been Sharpe, and the reason Sharpe had kept quiet about the killing was because he had stripped the Tippoo of all his gems and he did not want anyone, least of all the army’s senior officers, to knowj that he possessed the jewels.
“Bloody Sharpe!” Hakeswill said aloud.
So all that was needed now was an excuse to have Sharpe brought back to the regiment. No more clean and easy duty for Sharpie! No more merry rides in Lali’s house for him. It would be Obadiah Hakeswill’s turn to live in luxury, and all because of a dead king’s treasure.
“Rubies,” Hakeswill said aloud, lingering over the word, ‘and emeralds and sapphires, and diamonds like stars, and gold thick as butter.” He chuckled. And all it would need, he reckoned, was a little cunning. A little cunning, a confident lie and an arrest.
“And that will be your end, Sharpie, that will be your end,” Hakeswill said, and he could feel the beauty of his scheme unfold like a lotus blossoming in Seringapa-tam’s moat. It would work! His visit to Major Stokes had established that Sharpe was in the town, which meant that the lie could be told and then, just like Major Stokes’s clockwork, everything would go right. Every cog and gear and wheel and spike would slot and click and tick and tock, and Sergeant Hakeswill’s face twitched and his hands contracted as though the tin mug in his grip were a man’s throat. He would be rich.