Colonel Gudin agreed. For a time, like the Tippoo, he had been worried that the British bombardment meant that they planned to enter the city at its north-western corner, but now, in the lull after the collapse of the towers, the enemy’s strategy seemed plain. They had not been trying to make a breach, but instead had knocked down the two places where the
Tippoo could mount high guns to plunge their fire onto the flanks of the storming troops. The breach would be made next. ‘It will be where we want it to be, I’m sure,’ Gudin confirmed the Tippoo’s guess.
The man who had planted the flag on the crest of the fallen bastion was brought to the Tippoo on the western wall close to where the towers had fallen. The Tippoo rewarded him with a purse of gold. The man was a Hindu, and that pleased the Tippoo who worried about such men’s loyalties. ‘Is he one of yours?’ he asked Appah Rao who was accompanying the Tippoo on the inspection.
‘No, Your Majesty.’
The Tippoo suddenly turned and gazed up into the tall Appah Rao’s face. He was frowning. ‘Those wretched men of Gudin’s,’ the Tippoo said, ‘wasn’t there a woman with them?’
‘Yes, Your Majesty.’
‘And didn’t she go to your house?’ the Tippoo charged Appah Rao.
‘She did, Highness, but she died.’ Appah Rao told the lie smoothly.
The Tippoo was intrigued. ‘Died?’
‘She was a drab sick creature,’ Appah Rao said carelessly, ‘and just died. As should the men who brought her here.’ He still feared that the arrest of Sharpe and Lawford could lead to his own betrayal and, though he did not truly wish them dead, nor did he wish the Tippoo to believe that he desired them to live.
‘Those two will die,’ the Tippoo promised grimly, his query about Mary apparently forgotten. ‘They will surely die,’ he promised again as he clambered up the ruins of the northwestern bastion. ‘We shall either offer their black souls to avert ill fortune, or we shall sacrifice them as thanks for our victory.’ He would prefer the latter, and he imagined killing the two men on the very same day that he first ascended the
silver steps of his tiger throne, the throne he had sworn never to use until his enemies were destroyed. He felt a fierce pang of anticipation. The redcoats would come to his city and there they would be seared by the fires of vengeance and crushed by falling stone. Their groans would echo through the days of their dying, and then the rains would come and the sluggish Cauvery would swell into its full drowning spate and the remaining British, who were already low on food, would have no choice but to withdraw. They would leave their guns behind and begin their long journey across Mysore and every mile of their retreat would be dogged by the Tippoo’s lancers and sabremen. The vultures would grow fat this year, and a trail of sun-whitened bones would be left across India until the very last red-coated man died. And there, the Tippoo decided, where the last Englishman died, he would erect a high pillar of marble, white and gleaming and crowned with a snarling tiger’s head.
The muezzin’s call echoed across the city, summoning the faithful to prayer. The sound was beautiful in the silence after the guns. The Tippoo, obedient to his God, hurried towards his palace with one last backward glance at the damned. They could make their breach, they could cross the river and they could come to his walls. But once at the walls they would die.
‘T-I-K,’ Sharpe said, scratching the letters in the dust of the cell’s floor where he had cleared a patch of straw. ‘L-O-K.’
‘Picklock,’ Lawford said. ‘Very good, but you’ve left out two CV
‘But I’ve got the picklock, sir,’ Sharpe said, and produced it from his coat pocket. It was a small cluster of metal shafts, some curiously bent at their tips, which he quickly hid once he had shown it to Lawford.
“Why didn’t they find it?’ Lawford asked. Both men had been searched when they had been taken to the palace after