It ain’t natural, ain’t right. A private soldier should know his place, says so in the scriptures.’
‘It says nothing of the sort, Sergeant!’ McCandless would always snap after such an assertion.
And always, every daylight hour of every day, there was the sound of the besiegers’ guns. Their thunderous percussions filled the sky and were echoed by the crack of iron on sun-dried mud as the eighteen-pound round shots struck home, while, nearer, the Tippoo’s own guns answered. Few such cannon had survived on the western walls, but closer to the dungeons, on the northern rampart, the Tippoo’s gunners traded shot for shot with the batteries across the Cauvery and the sound of the weapons punched the warm air incessantly.
‘Working hard, them gunners!’ Hakeswill would say. ‘Doing a proper job, like real soldiers should. Working up a proper muck sweat. Not wasting their time with bleeding letters. C-A-T? Who the hell needs to know that? It’s still a bleeding pussy cat. All you needs to know is how to skin the thing, not how to spell it.’
‘Quiet, Sergeant,’ McCandless would growl.
‘Yes, sir. I shall be quiet, sir. Like a church mouse, sir.’ But a few moments later the Sergeant could be heard grumbling again. ‘Private Morgan, I remembers him, and he could read and he wasn’t nothing but trouble. He always knew more than anyone else, but he didn’t know better than to be flogged, did he? Would never have happened if he hadn’t had his letters. His mother taught him, the silly Welsh bitch. He read his Bible when he should have been cleaning his musket. Died under the lash, he did, and good riddance. A private soldier’s got no business reading. Bad for the eyes, sends you blind.’
Hakeswill even talked at night. Sharpe would wake to hear the Sergeant talking in a low voice to the tiger, and one night even the tiger stopped to listen. ‘You’re not such a bad puss, are you?’ Hakeswill crooned. ‘Down here all alone, you are,
just like me.’ The Sergeant reached a tentative hand through the bars and gave the beast’s back a swift pat. He was rewarded with a low snarl. ‘Don’t you growl at me, puss, or I’ll have your bleeding eyes out. And how will you catch mouses then? Eh? You’ll be a hungry blind pussy cat, that’s what you’ll be. That’s it. Lay you down now and rest your big head, see? Doesn’t hurt, does it?’ And the Sergeant reached out and, with remarkable tenderness, scratched the big cat’s flank and, to Sharpe’s wonder, the huge beast settled itself comfortably against the bars of the Sergeant’s cell. ‘You’re awake, aren’t you, Sharpie?’ Hakeswill called softly as he scratched the tiger. ‘I knows you are, I can tell. So what happened to little Mary BickerstafF, eh? You going to tell me, boy? Some heathen darkie got his filthy hands on her, has he? She’d have done better lifting her skirts to me. Instead she’s being rogered by some blackie, ain’t she? Is that what happened? Still now, still!’ he soothed the tiger. Sharpe pretended to be asleep, but Hakeswill must have sensed his attention. ‘Officer’s pet, Sharpie? Is that what you are? Learning to read so you can be like them, is that what you want? It won’t do you no good, boy. There’s only two sorts of officers in this army, and the one sort’s good and the other sort ain’t. The good sort knows better than to get their hands dirty with you rankers; they leave it all to the sergeants. The bad sort interfere. That young Mister Fitzgerald, he was an interferer, but he’s gone to hell now and hell’s the best place for him, seeing as how he was an upstart Irishman with no respect for sergeants. And your Mister Lawford, he ain’t no good either, no good at all.’ Hakeswill suddenly quietened as Colonel McCandless groaned.
The Colonel’s fever was growing worse, though he tried hard not to complain. Sharpe, abandoning his pretence of sleep, carried the water bucket to him. ‘Drink, sir?’
‘That’s kind of you, Sharpe, kind.’
The Colonel drank, then propped his back against the
stone wall at the back of the cell. ‘We had a rainstorm last month,’ he said, ‘not a severe one, but these cells were flooded all the same. And not all of the flooding was rain, a good deal was sewage. I pray God gets us out of here before the monsoon.’