“No!”
“So you work for him?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you don’t know where he is?”
“No, sir,” she said softly, looking up at Sharpe with huge eyes. She
was lying, he reckoned, but he guessed she had good reason to lie,
perhaps fearing Torrance’s punishment if she told the truth. He
considered soothing the truth out of her, but reckoned it might take
too long. He wondered who she was. She was pretty, despite her
terror, and he guessed she was Torrance’s bibbi. Lucky Torrance, he
thought ruefully.
“I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Ma’am,” he said, then he negotiated
the muslin curtain back into the front room.
The clerk shook his head fiercely.
“You should not have gone in there, sahib! That is private quarters!
Private! I shall be forced to tell Captain Torrance.”
Sharpe took hold of the clerk’s chair and tipped it, forcing the man
off. The men waiting in the room gave a cheer. Sharpe ignored them,
sat on the chair himself and pulled the tangle of ledgers towards
him.
“I
don’t care what you tell Captain Torrance,” he said, ‘so long as you
tell me about the horseshoes first.”
“They are lost!” the clerk protested.
“How were they lost?” Sharpe asked.
The clerk shrugged.
“Things get lost,” he said. Sweat was pouring down his plump face as
he tentatively tried to tug some of the ledgers away from Sharpe, but
he recoiled from the look on the Ensign’s face.
“Things get lost,” the clerk said again weakly.
“It is the nature of things to get lost.”
“Muskets?” Sharpe asked.
“Lost,” the clerk admitted.
“Buckets?”
“Lost,” the clerk said.
“Paperwork,” Sharpe said.
The clerk frowned.
“Paperwork, sahib?”
“If something’s lost,” Sharpe said patiently, ‘there’s a record. This
is the bloody army. You can’t have a piss without someone making a
note of it. to show me the records of what’s been lost.”
The clerk sighed and pulled one of the big ledgers open.
“Here, sahib,” he said, pointing an inky finger.
“One barrel of horseshoes, see?
Being carried on an ox from Jamkandhi, lost in the Godavery on November
12th.”
“How many horseshoes in a barrel?” Sharpe asked.
“A hundred and twenty.” The long-legged cavalry Sergeant had come into
the office and now leaned against the doorpost.
“And there are supposed to be four thousand horseshoes in store?”
Sharpe asked.
“Here!” The clerk turned a page.
“Another barrel, see?”
Sharpe peered at the ill-written entry.
“Lost in the Godavery,” he read aloud.
“And here.” The clerk stabbed his finger again.
“Stolen,” Sharpe read. A drop of sweat landed on the page as the clerk
turned it back.
“So who stole it?”
“The enemy, sahib,” the clerk said.
“Their horsemen are everywhere.”
“Their bloody horsemen run if you so much as look at them,” the tall
cavalry Sergeant said sourly.
“They couldn’t steal an egg from a chicken.”
“The convoys are ambushed, sahib,” the clerk insisted, ‘and things are
stolen.”
Sharpe pushed the clerk’s hand away and turned the pages back, looking
for the date when the battle had been fought at Assaye. He found it,
and discovered a different handwriting had been used for the previous
entries. He guessed Captain Mackay must have kept the ledger himself,
and in Mackay’s neat entries there were far fewer annotations reading
‘stolen’ or ‘lost’. Mackay had marked eight cannonballs as being lost
in a river crossing and two barrels of powder had been marked down as
stolen, but in the weeks since Assaye no fewer than sixty-eight oxen
had lost their burdens to either accidents or thieves. More tellingly,
each of those oxen had been carrying a scarce commodity. The army
would not miss a load of round shot, but it would suffer grievously
when its last reserve of horseshoes was gone.
“Whose handwriting is this?” Sharpe had turned to the most recent
page.
“Mine, sahib.” The clerk was looking frightened.
“How do you know when something is stolen?”
The clerk shrugged.
“The Captain tells me. Or the Sergeant tells me.”
“The Sergeant?”
“He isn’t here,” the clerk said.
“He’s bringing a convoy of oxen north.”
“What’s the Sergeant’s name?” Sharpe asked, for he could find no
record in the ledger.