“Charlie? Your husband?”
“He was always good to me.”
Sharpe lay back. The light of the dying fires nickered in the tent’s
loose weave. If it rained, he thought, the cloth would leak like a
pepper pot.
“There are good men and bad,” he said.
“What are you?” Clare asked.
“I think I’m good,” he said, ‘but I don’t know. All the time I get
into trouble, and I only know one way out. I can fight. I can do that
all right.”
“Is that what you want? To fight?”
“God knows what I want.” He laughed softly.
“I wanted to be an officer more than I’d wanted anything in my life! I
dreamed of it, I did. I wanted it so bad that it hurt, and then the
dream came true and it woke me up and I wondered why I’d wanted it so
much.” He paused.
Syud Sevajee’s horses stamped their feet softly behind the tent.
“Some buggers are trying to persuade me to leave the army. Sell the
commission, see? They don’t want me.”
“Why not?”
“Because I piss in their soup, lass.”
“So will you leave?”
He shrugged.
“Don’t want to.” He thought about it.
“It’s like a club, a society. They don’t really want me, so they chuck
me out, and then I have to fight my way back in. But why do I do it if
they don’t want me? I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be different in the
Rifles. I’ll try ’em, anyway, and see if they’re different.”
“You want to go on fighting?” Clare asked.
“It’s what I’m good at,” Sharpe said.
“And I do enjoy it. I mean I know you shouldn’t, but there ain’t any
other excitement like it.”
“None?”
“Well, one.” He grinned in the dark.
There was a long silence, and he thought Clare had fallen asleep, but
then she spoke again.
“How about your French widow?”
“She’s gone,” Sharpe said flatly.
“Gone?”
“She buggered off, love. Took some money of mine and went. Gone to
America, I’m told.”
Clare lay in silence again.
“Don’t you worry about being alone?” she asked after a while.
“No.”
“I do.”
He turned towards her, propped himself on an elbow and stroked her
hair. She stiffened as he touched her, then relaxed to the gentle
pressure of his hand.
“You ain’t alone, lass,” Sharpe said.
“Or only if you want to be. You got trapped, that’s all. It happens
to everyone. But you’re out now. You’re free.” He stroked her hair
down to her neck and felt warm bare skin under his hand. She did not
move and he softly stroked farther down.
“You’re undressed,” he said.
“I was warm,” she said in a small voice.
“What’s worse?” Sharpe asked.
“Being warm or being lonely?”
He thought she smiled. He could not tell in the dark, but he thought
she smiled.
“Being lonely,” she said very softly.
“We can look after that,” he said, lifting the thin blanket and moving
to her side.
She had stopped crying. Somewhere outside a cock crowed and the
eastern cliffs were touched with the first gold of the day. The fires
on the rocky neck of land flickered and died, their smoke drifting like
patches of thin mist. Bugles called from the main encampment,
summoning the redcoats to the morning parade. The night picquets were
relieved as the sun rose to flood the world with light.
Where Sharpe and Clare slept.
“You abandoned the dead men?” Wellesley growled.
Captain Morris blinked as a gust of wind blew dust into one of his
eyes.
“I tried to bring the bodies in,” he lied, ‘but it was dark, sir. Very
dark. Colonel Kenny can vouch for that, sir. He visited us.”
“I visited you?” Kenny, lean, tall and irascible, was standing beside
the General.
“I visited you?” he asked again, his inflection rising to outrage.
“Last night, sir,” Morris answered in plaintive indignation.
“On the picquet line.”
“I did no such thing. Sun’s gone to your head.” Kenny glowered at
Morris, then took a snuff box from a pocket and placed a pinch on his
hand.
“Who the devil are you, anyway?” he added.
“Morris, sir. 33rd.”
“I thought we had nothing but Scots and sepoys here,” Kenny said to