“Madame Joubert!” A voice hailed her from outside the window and Simone guiltily swept the diamonds into her small purse, though, because she was on an upper floor, no one could see the gems. She peered down from the window and saw a cheerful Colonel Pohlmann in shirtsleeves and braces standing among the straw in the courtyard of the neighbouring house.
“Colonel,” she responded dutifully.
“I am hiding my elephants,” the Colonel said, gesturing at the three beasts which were being led into the courtyard. The tallest carried Pohlmann’s howdah, while the other two were burdened with the wooden chests in which the Colonel was reputed to keep his gold.
“Might I leave you to guard my menagerie?” the Colonel asked.
“From what?” Simone asked.
“From thieves,” the Colonel said happily.
“Not the British?”
“They will never reach this far, Madame,” Pohlmann said, ‘except as prisoners.” And Simone had a sudden vision of Sergeant Richard Sharpe again. She had been raised to believe that the British were a piratical race, a nation without a conscience who mindlessly impeded the spread of French enlightenment, but perhaps, she thought, she liked pirates.
“I will guard your elephants, Colonel,” she called down.
“And have some dinner with me?” Pohlmann asked.
“I have some cold chicken and warm wine.”
“I have promised to join Pierre,” Simone said, dreading the two-mile ride across the drab fields to where Dodd’s Cobras waited beside the Kaitna.
“Then I shall escort you to his side, Madame,” Pohlmann said courteously. Once the battle was over he reckoned he might mount an assault on Madame Joubert’s virtue. It would be an amusing diversion, but not, he thought, an especially difficult campaign. Unhappy women yielded to patience and sympathy, and there would be plenty of time for both once Wellesley and Stevenson had been destroyed. And there would be a pleasure, too, in beating Major Dodd to the prize of Simone’s virtue.
Pohlmann detailed twenty of his bodyguard to guard the three elephants. He never rode one of the beasts in battle, for an elephant became the target of every enemy gunner, but he looked forward to mounting the howdah for a great victory parade after the campaign. And victory would leave Pohlmann rich, rich enough to start building his great marble palace in which he planned to hang the captured banners of his enemy. From sergeant to princeling in ten years, and the key to that princedom was the gold that he was storing in Assaye. He ordered his bodyguard that no one, not even the Rajah of Berar whose troops were garrisoning the village, should be allowed into the courtyard, then he instructed his servants to detach the golden panels from the howdah and add them to the boxes of treasure.
“If the worst should happen,” he told the sub adar who was in charge of the men guarding the treasure, “I’ll join you here. Not that it will,” he added cheerfully.
A clatter of hooves in the alley outside the courtyard announced the arrival of a patrol of horsemen returning from a foray south of the Kaitna. For three days Pohlmann had kept his cavalry on a tight rein, not wanting to alarm Wellesley as the British General marched north towards the trap, but that morning he had released a few patrols southwards and one of those now returned with the welcome news that the enemy was only four miles south of the Kaitna. Pohlmann already knew that the second British army, that of Colonel Stevenson, was still ten miles off to the west, and that meant that the British had blundered.
Wellesley, in his eagerness to reach Borkardan, had brought his men to the waiting arms of the whole Mahratta army.
The Colonel thought about waiting for Madame Joubert, then decided he could not afford the time and so he mounted the horse he rode in battle and, with those of his bodyguard not deputed to guard his gold, and with a string of aides surrounding him, he galloped south from Assaye to the Kaitna’s bank where his trap was set. He passed the news to Dupont and Saleur, then rode to prepare his own troops. He spoke with his officers, finishing with Major William Dodd.