‘Easy!’ Baird had answered scornfully. ‘The Tippoo’s only too damned eager for European volunteers, so we dress young Lawford in a private’s uniform and he can pretend to be a deserter. He’ll be welcomed with open arms! They’ll be hanging bloody flowers round his neck and giving him first choice of the bibbis.’
Harris had slowly allowed himself to be persuaded, though Wellesley, once introduced to the idea, had advised against it. Lawford, Wellesley insisted, could never pass himself off as an enlisted man, but Wellesley had been overruled by Baird’s enthusiasm and so Lieutenant Lawford had been summoned to Harris’s tent where he had complicated matters by agreeing with his Colonel. T’d dearly like to help, sir,’ he had told Harris, ‘but I’m not sure I’m capable of the pretence.’
‘Good God, man,’ Baird intervened, ‘spit and swear! It ain’t difficult!’
‘It will be very difficult,’ Harris had insisted, staring at the diffident Lieutenant. He was doubtful whether Lawford had the resources to carry off the deception, for the Lieutenant, while plainly a decent man, seemed guileless.
Then Lawford had complicated matters still further. ‘I think it would be more plausible, sir,’ he suggested respectfully, ‘if I could take another man with me. Deserters usually run in pairs, don’t they? And if the man is the genuine article, a ranker, it’ll be altogether more convincing.’
‘Makes sense, makes sense,’ Baird had put in encouragingly.
‘You have a man-in mind?’ Wellesley had asked coldly.
‘His name is Sharpe, sir,’ Lawford said. ‘They’re probably about to flog him.’
‘Then he’ll be no damned use to you,’ Wellesley said in a tone which suggested the matter was now closed.
‘I’ll go with no one else, sir,’ Lawford retorted stubbornly, addressing himself to General Harris rather than to his Colonel, and Harris was pleased to see this evidence of backbone. The Lieutenant, it seemed, was not quite so diffident as he appeared.
‘How many lashes is this fellow getting?’ Harris asked.
‘Don’t know, sir. He’s standing trial now, sir, and if I wasn’t here I’d be giving evidence on his behalf. I doubt his guilt.’
The argument over whether to employ Sharpe had continued over a midday meal of rice and stewed goat. Wellesley was refusing to intervene in the court martial or its subsequent punishment, declaring that such an act would be prejudicial to discipline, but William Lawford stubbornly and respectfully refused to take any other man. It had, he said, to be a man he could trust. ‘We could send another officer,’ Wellesley had suggested, but that idea had faltered when the difficulties of finding a reliable volunteer were explored. There were plenty of men who might go, but few were steady, and the steady ones would be too sensible to risk their precious commissions on what Wellesley scathingly called a fool’s errand. ‘So why are you willing to go?’ Harris had asked Lawford. ‘You don’t look like a fool.’
‘I trust I’m not, sir. But my uncle gave me the money to purchase my commission.’
‘Did he, by God! That’s damned generous.’
‘And I hope I’m damned grateful, sir.’
‘Grateful enough to die for him?’ Wellesley put in sourly.
Lawford had coloured, but stuck to his guns. ‘I suspect
Private Sharpe is resourceful enough for both of us, sir.’
The decision whether or not to employ Sharpe belonged, in the end, to General Harris who privately agreed with Wellesley that to spare a man his well-earned punishment was to display a dangerous laxity, but at last, persuaded that extraordinary measures were needed to save McCandless, the General surrendered to Baird’s enthusiasm and so, with a heavy heart, Harris had ordered the unfortunate Sharpe fetched to the tent. Which was why, at long last, Private Richard Sharpe limped into the wan, yellow light cast through the tent’s high canvas. He was dressed in a clean uniform, but everyone in the tent could see that he was still in dreadful pain. He moved stiffly, and the stifihess was not just caused by the yards of bandage that circled his torso, but by the agony of every movement of his body. He had tried to wash the blood out of his hair and had succeeded in taking out most of the powder as well so that when Colonel Wellesley told him to take off his shako he appeared with curiously mottled hair.