‘Suppose she betrays us?’ Lawford asked.
‘Then we’re in trouble,’ Sharpe said brutally. ‘But she won’t. Mary’s a good lass.’
Lawford shrugged. ‘She jilted you.’
‘Easy come, easy go,’ Sharpe said, then belted the tunic. Like most of the Tippoo’s soldiers he now went bare-legged beneath the knee-length garment, though Lawford insisted on keeping his old British trousers. Both men wore their old shakos, though George Hi’s badge had been replaced by a tin tiger with an upraised paw. ‘Listen,’ Sharpe said to a still worried Lawford, ‘I’ve done what you asked, and the lass says she’ll find this Ravi whatever his name is, and all we have to do now is wait. And if we get a chance to run,
we run like buggery. You reckon that musket’s ready for inspection?’
‘It’s clean,’ Lawford said defensively, hefting his big French firelock.
‘Christ, you’d be on a charge for that musket back in the proper army. Give it here.’
Sergeant Rothiere’s daily inspection was not for another half-hour, and after that the two men would be free until mid afternoon when it would be the turn of Gudin’s battalion to stand guard over the Mysore Gate. That guard duty ended at midnight, but Sharpe knew there would be no chance of an escape, for the Mysore Gate did not offer an exit from the Tippoo’s territory, but rather led into the city’s surrounding encampment which, in turn, had a strong perimeter guard. The previous night Sharpe had experimented to see whether his red cord and gold medallion would be authority enough for him to wander through the encampment, maybe allowing him to find a shadowed and quiet stretch of its earthworks over which he could scramble in the dark, but he had been intercepted within twenty yards of the gate and politely but firmly ushered back. The Tippoo, it seemed, was taking no chances.
‘I already had Wazzy clean that,’ Lawford said, nodding at the musket in Sharpe’s hands. Wazir was one of the small boys who hung around the barracks to earn pice for washing and cleaning equipment. ‘I paid him,’ Lawford said indignantly.
‘If you want a job done properly,’ Sharpe said, ‘you do it yourself. Hell!’ He swore because he had pinched his finger on the musket’s mainspring which he had uncovered by unscrewing the lock plate. ‘Look at that rust!’ He managed to unseat the mainspring without losing the trigger mechanism, then began to file the rust off the spring’s edge. ‘Bloody rubbish, these French muskets,’ he grumbled. ‘Nothing like a proper Birmingham bundook.’
‘Do you clean your own musket like that?’ Lawford asked, impressed that Sharpe had unscrewed the lock plate.
‘Course I do! Not that Hakeswill ever cares. He only looks at the outside.’ Sharpe grinned. ‘You remember that day you saved my skin with the flint? Hakeswill had changed it for a bit of stone, but I caught it before he could do any damage. He’s a fly bastard, that one.’
‘He changed it?’ Lawford seemed shocked.
‘Bloody snake, that Obadiah. How much did you pay Wazzy?’
‘An anna.’
‘He robbed you. You want to pass me that oil bottle?’
Lawford obliged, then settled back against the stone water trough in which Sharpe had washed the tunics. He felt strangely content, despite the apparent failure of his mission. There was a pleasure in sharing this intimacy with Sharpe, indeed it felt oddly like a privilege. Many young officers were frightened of the men they commanded, fearing their scorn, and they concealed their apprehension with a display of careless arrogance. Lawford doubted he could ever do that now, for he no longer felt any fear of the crude, hard men who formed the ranks of Britain’s army. Sharpe had cured him of that by teaching him that the crudity was unthinking and the hardness a disguise for conscientiousness. Not that every man was conscientious, any more than all Britain’s soldiers were crude, but too many officers assumed they were all brutes and treated them as such. Now Lawford watched as Sharpe’s capable fingers forced the cleaned mainspring back into its cavity, using his picklock as a lever.
‘Lieutenant?’ a voice called respectfully across the yard. ‘Lieutenant Lawford?’