the lock, indicating that his weapon was already charged.
“How many of the buggers will be waiting for us?” Lockhart asked.
“A dozen?” Sharpe guessed.
Lockhart glanced back at his six men.
“We can deal with a dozen buggers.”
“Right,” Sharpe said, ‘so let’s bloody well make some trouble.” He
grinned, because for the first time since he had become an officer he
was enjoying himself.
Which meant someone was about to get a thumping.
CHAPTER 3
Major General Sir Arthur Wellesley rode northwards among a cavalcade of
officers whose horses kicked up a wide trail of dust that lingered in
the air long after the horsemen had passed. Two troops of East India
Company cavalry provided the General’s escort. Manu Bappoo’s army
might have been trounced and its survivors sent skeltering back into
Gawilghur, but the Deccan Plain was still infested with Mahratta
cavalry ready to pounce on supply convoys, wood-cutting parties or the
grass-cutters who supplied the army’s animals with fodder and so the
two troops rode with sabres drawn. Wellesley set a fast pace,
revelling in the freedom to ride in the long open country.
“Did you visit Colonel Stevenson this morning?” he called back to an
aide.
“I did, sir, and he’s no better than he was.”
“But he can get about?”
“On his elephant, sir.”
Wellesley grunted. Stevenson was the commander of his smaller army,
but the old Colonel was ailing. So was Harness, the commander of one
of Wellesley’s two brigades, but there was no point in asking about
Harness. It was not just physical disease that assaulted Harness, for
the Scotsman’s wits were gone as well. The doctors claimed it was the
heat that had desiccated his brains, but Wellesley doubted the
diagnosis. Heat and rum, maybe, but not the heat alone, though he did
not doubt that India’s climate was bad for a European’s health. Few
men lived long without falling prey to some wasting fever, and
Wellesley was thinking it was time he left himself. Time to go back
home before his health was abraded and, more important, before his
existence was forgotten in London. French armies were unsettling all
Europe and it could not be long before London despatched an army to
fight the old foe, and Wellesley wanted to be a part of it. He was in
his middle thirties and he had a reputation to make, but first he had
to finish off the Mahrattas, and that meant taking Gawilghur, and to
that end he was now riding towards the great rampart of cliffs that
sealed off the plain’s northern edge.
An hour’s ride brought him to the summit of a small rise which offered
a view northwards. The plain looked dun, starved of water by the
failed monsoon, though here and there patches of millet grew tall. In
a good year, Wellesley guessed, the millet would cover the plain from
horizon to horizon, a sea of grain bounded by the Gawilghur cliffs. He
dismounted on the small knoll and took out a telescope that he settled
on his horse’s saddle. It was a brand new glass, a gift from the
merchants of Madras to mark Wellesley’s pacification of Mysore. Trade
now moved freely on India’s eastern flank, and the telescope, which had
been specially ordered from Matthew Berge of London, was a generous
token of the merchants’ esteem, but Wellesley could not get used to
it.
The shape of the eyepiece was less concave than the one he was used to,
and after a moment he snapped the new telescope shut and pulled out his
old glass which, though lower powered, was more comfortable.
He stared for a long time, gazing at the fort which crowned the rock
promontory. The black stone of the fortress walls looked particularly
sinister, even in the sunlight.
“Good God,” the General muttered after a while. Fail up there, he
thought, and there would be no point in going home. He could go to
London with some victories under his belt, and men would respect him
even if the victories had not been against the French, but go with a
defeat and they would despise him. Gawilghur, he thought sourly, had
the look of a career-breaker.