would rule Gawilghur, and whoever ruled Gawilghur could rule all
India.
Dodd touched the stock of the rifle. That would help, and Beny Singh’s
abject terror would render the Killadar harmless. Dodd smiled and
climbed to the ramparts from where, with a telescope, he watched the
British heave the first gun up to the edge of the plateau. A week, he
thought, maybe a day more, and then the British would come to his
slaughter. And make his wildly ambitious dreams come true.
“The fellow was using a rifle!” Major Stokes said in wonderment. “I
do declare, a rifle! Can’t have been anything else at that range. Two
hundred paces if it was an inch, and he fanned my head! A much
underestimated weapon, the rifle, don’t you think?”
“A toy,” Captain Morris said.
“Nothing will replace muskets.”
“But the accuracy!” Stokes declared.
“Soldiers can’t use rifles,” Morris said.
“It would be like giving knives and forks to hogs.” He twisted in the
camp chair and gestured at his men, the 33rd’s Light Company.
“Look at them! Half of them can’t work out which end of a musket is
which. Useless buggers. Might as well arm the bastards with pikes.”
“If you say so,” Stokes said disapprovingly. His road had reached the
plateau and now he had to begin the construction of the breaching
batteries, and the 33rd’s Light Company, which had escorted Stokes
north from Mysore, had been charged with the job of protecting the
sappers who would build the batteries. Captain Morris had been unhappy
with the orders, for he would have much preferred to have been sent
back south rather than be camped by the rock isthmus that promised to
be such a lively place in these next few days. There was a chance that
Gawilghur’s garrison might sally out to destroy the batteries, and even
if that danger did not materialize, it was a certainty that the
Mahratta gunners on the Outer Fort’s walls would try to break down the
new works with cannon fire.
Sergeant Hakeswill approached Stokes’s tent. He looked distracted, so
much so that his salute was perfunctory.
“You heard the news, sir?” He spoke to Morris.
Morris squinted up at the Sergeant.
“News,” he said heavily, ‘news?
Can’t say I have, Sergeant. The enemy has surrendered, perhaps?”
“Nothing so good, sir, nothing so good.”
“You look pale, man!” Stokes said.
“Are you sickening?”
“Heart-sick, sir, that’s what I am in my own self, sir, heart-sick.”
Sergeant Hakeswill sniffed heavily, and even cuffed at a non-existent
tear on his twitching cheek.
“Captain Torrance,” he announced, ‘is dead, sir.” The Sergeant took
off his shako and held it against his breast.
“Dead, sir.”
“Dead?” Stokes said lightly. He had not met Torrance.
“Took his own life, sir, that’s what they do say. He killed his clerk
with a knife, then turned his pistol on himself The Sergeant
demonstrated the action by pretending to point a pistol at his own head
and pulling the trigger. He sniffed again.
“And he was as good an officer as ever I did meet, and I’ve known many
in my time. Officers and gentlemen, like your own good self, sir,” he
said to Morris.
Morris, as unmoved by Torrance’s death as Stokes, smirked.
“Killed his clerk, eh? That’ll teach the bugger to keep a tidy
ledger.”
“They do say, sir,” Hakeswill lowered his voice, ‘that he must have
been unnatural.”
“Unnatural?” Stokes asked.
“With his clerk, sir, pardon me for breathing such a filthy thing.
Him and the clerk, sir.
“Cos he was naked, see, the Captain was, and the clerk was a handsome
boy, even if he was a blackamoor. He washed a lot, and the Captain
liked that.”
“Are you suggesting it was a lovers’ tiff?” Morris asked, then
laughed.
“No, sir,” Hakeswill said, turning to stare across the plateau’s edge
into the immense sky above the Deccan Plain, ‘because it weren’t. The
Captain weren’t ever unnatural, not like that. It weren’t a lovers’
tiff, sir, not even if he was naked as a needle. The Captain, sir, he
liked to go naked. Kept him cool, he said, and kept his clothes clean,
but there weren’t nothing strange in it. Not in him. And he weren’t a