‘It was confusing, weren’t it?’ Sharpe said, trying to console his companion. ‘What with the Tippoo being there. Fat little bugger, ain’t he? But you’re doing all right, sir.’ Sharpe spoke feelingly, knowing that the young Lieutenant desperately needed encouragement. ‘And you were clever as hell, sir, saying you wore an apron. I should have splashed some ink on your uniform, shouldn’t I? But I never thought of it, but you got us out of that one.’
‘I was thinking of Private Brookfield,’ Lawford said, not without some pride at the memory of his inspired lie. ‘You know Brookfield?’
‘The clerk of Mister Stanbridge’s company, sir? Fellow who wears spectacles? Does he wear a pinny?’
‘He says it keeps the ink off him.’
‘He always was an old woman,’ Sharpe said scornfully, ‘but you did well. And I’ll tell you something else. We have to get out of here soon because I know why we came now. We don’t have to find your merchant fellow, we just have to get out. Unless you think we ought to rescue your uncle, but if you don’t, then we can just run, because I know why we came now.’
Lawford gaped at him. “You know?’
‘The Colonel spoke to me, sir, while we was going through that pantomime back there in the palace. He says we’re to tell General Harris to avoid the west wall. Nothing else, just that.’
Lawford stared at Sharpe, then glanced across the angle of the city walls towards the western defences, but nothing he could see there looked strange or suspicious. ‘You’d better stop calling me “sir”,’ he said. ‘Are you sure about what he said?’
‘He said it twice. Avoid the west wall.’
A bellow from the next cavalier made them turn. Rothiere
was pointing south, suggesting that the two Englishmen watch that direction as they were supposed to instead of gaping like yokels towards the west. Sharpe obediently stared southwards, though there was nothing to be seen there except some women carrying loads on their heads and a thin naked boy herding some scrawny came along the river bank. His duty now, Sharpe thought, was to escape this place and get back to the British army, but how in God’s name was he ever to do that? If he were to jump off the wall now, Sharpe reckoned, he would stand a half-chance of breaking a leg, and even if he survived the jump he would only land in the glacis ditch, and if he managed to cross the glacis he would merely reach the military encampment that was built hard around the city’s southern and eastern walls, and if he was lucky enough to escape the hundreds of soldiers who would converge on him, he would still need to cross the river, and meanwhile every gun on the encampment wall would be hammering at his heels, and once he had crossed the river, if he ever did, the Tippoo’s lancers would be waiting on the far bank. The sheer impossibility of escaping the city made him smile. ‘God knows how we ever get out of here,’ he said to Lawford.
‘Maybe at night?’ Lawford suggested vaguely.
‘If they ever let us stand guard at night,’ Sharpe said dubiously, then thought of Mary. Could he leave her in the city?
‘So what do we do?’ Lawford asked.
‘What we always do in the army,’ Sharpe said stoically. ‘Hurry up and do nothing. Wait for the opportunity. It’ll come, it’ll come. And in the meantime, maybe we can find out just what the devils are doing in the west of the city, eh?’
Lawford shuddered. ‘I’m glad I brought you, Sharpe.’
‘You are?’ Sharpe grinned at that compliment. ‘I’ll tell you when I’ll be glad. When you take me back home to the army.’ And suddenly, after weeks of thinking about desertion, Sharpe realized that what he had just said was true. He did want to go back to the army, and that knowledge surprised him. The
army had bored Richard Sharpe, then done its best to break his spirits. It had even flogged him, but now, standing on Seringapatam’s battlements, he missed the army.
For at heart, as Richard Sharpe had just discovered for himself, he was a soldier.