He was safe from Sharpe.
CHAPTER 8
The sappers who had em placed the gab ions were too excited to go to
sleep and instead were milling about a pair of smoky fires. Their
laughter rose and fell on the night wind. Major Stokes, pleased with
their work, had produced three jars of arrack as a reward, and the jugs
were being passed from hand to hand.
Sharpe watched the small celebration and then, keeping to the shadows
among Syud Sevajee’s encampment, he went to a small tent where he
stripped off his borrowed Indian robes before crawling under the flap.
In the dark he blundered into Clare who, kept awake by the sound of the
bombardment and then by the voices of the sappers, put up a hand and
felt bare flesh.
“You’re undressed!” She sounded alarmed.
“Not quite,” Sharpe said, then understood her fear.
“My clothes were soaking,” he explained, ‘so I took them off. Didn’t
want to wet the bed, eh? And I’ve still got my shirt on.”
“Is it raining? I didn’t hear it.”
“It was blood,” he said, then rummaged under the blanket he had
borrowed from Syud Sevajee and found Torrance’s pouch.
Clare heard the rattle of stones.
“What is it?”
“Just stones,” he said, ‘pebbles.” He put the twenty jewels he had
retrieved from Kendrick and Lowry into the pouch, stowed it safe under
the blanket, then lay down. He doubted he had found every stone, but
he reckoned he had retrieved most of them. They had been loose in the
two privates’ pockets, not even hidden away in their coat seams. God,
he felt tired and his body had still not recovered from Hakeswill’s
kicking. It hurt to breathe, the bruises were tender and a tooth was
still loose.
“What happened out there?” Clare asked.
“The engineers put the gab ions in place. When it’s light they’ll
scrape the gun platform and make the magazines, and tomorrow night
they’ll bring up the guns.”
“What happened to you?” Clare amended her question.
Sharpe was silent for a while.
“I looked up some old friends,” he said.
But he had missed Hakeswill, damn it, and Hakeswill would be doubly
alert now. Still, a chance would come. He grinned as he remembered
Morris’s scared voice. The Captain was a bully to his men and a to
adie to his superiors.
“Did you kill someone?” Clare asked.
“Two men,” he admitted, ‘but it should have been three.”
“Why?”
He sighed.
“Because they were bad men,” he said simply, then reflected it was a
true answer.
“And because they tried to kill me,” he added, ‘and they robbed me. You
knew them,” he went on.
“Kendrick and Lowry.”
“They were horrid,” Clare said softly.
“They used to stare at me.”
“Can’t blame them for that, love.”
She was silent for a while. The laughter of the sappers was subsiding
as men drifted towards their tents. The wind gusted at the tent’s
entrance and brought the smell of burnt powder from the rocky isthmus
where patches of grass still flamed around the exhausted rocket
tubes.
“Everything’s gone wrong, hasn’t it?” Clare said.
“It’s being put right,” Sharpe replied.
“For you,” she said.
Again she was silent, and Sharpe suspected she was crying.
“I’ll get you home to Madras,” he said.
“And what’ll happen to me there?”
“You’ll be all right, lass. I’ll give you a pair of my magic
pebbles.”
“What I want,” she said softly, ‘is to go home. But I can’t afford
it.”
“Marry a soldier,” Sharpe said, ‘and be carried home with him.” He
thought of Eli Lockhart who had been admiring Clare from a distance.
They would suit each other, Sharpe thought.
She was crying very softly.
“Torrance said he’d pay my way home when I’d paid off the debt,” she
said.
“Why would he make you work for one passage, then give you another?”
Sharpe asked.
“He was a lying bastard.”
“He seemed so kind at first.”
“We’re all like that,” Sharpe said.
“Soft as lights when you first meet a woman, then you get what you want
and it changes. I don’t know.
Maybe not every time.”
“Charlie wasn’t like that,” Clare said.