about the dancing girls in Ferdapoor, where there had been no mere
clusters of grapes, but bloody great naked melons. It had been some
sort of festival and the battalion had marched one way and the
half-naked girls had writhed in the opposite direction and Sergeant
Colquhoun had blushed as scarlet as an unfaded coat and shouted at the
men to keep their eyes front. Which had been a pointless order, when a
score of undressed bibb is were hobbling down the highway with silver
bells tied to their wrists and even the officers were staring at them
like starving men seeing a plate of roast beef. And if the men were
not discussing women, they were probably grumbling about all the
marching they had done in the last weeks, crisscrossing the Mahratta
countryside under a blazing sun without a sight or smell of the enemy.
But whatever they were talking about they were making damn sure that
Ensign Richard Sharpe was left out.
Which was fair enough, Sharpe reckoned. He had marched in the ranks
long enough to know that you did not talk to officers, not unless you
were spoken to or unless you were a slick-bellied crawling bastard
looking for favours. Officers were different, except Sharpe did not
feel different. He just felt excluded. I should have stayed a
sergeant, he thought. He had increasingly thought that in the last few
weeks, wishing he was back in the Seringapatam armoury with Major
Stokes. That had been the life! And Simone Joubert, the Frenchwoman
who had clung to Sharpe after the battle at Assaye, had gone back to
Seringapatam to wait for him. Better to be there as a sergeant, he
reckoned, than here as an unwanted officer.
No guns had fired for a while. Perhaps the enemy had packed up and
gone? Perhaps they had hitched their painted cannon to their ox teams,
stowed the canister in its limbers and buggered off northwards? In
which case it would be a quick about-turn, back to the village where
the baggage was stored, then another awkward evening in the officers’
mess.
Lieutenant Cahill would watch Sharpe like a hawk, adding tuppence to
Sharpe’s mess bill for every glass of wine, and Sharpe, as the junior
officer, would have to propose the loyal toast and pretend not to see
when half the bastards wafted their mugs over their canteens. King
over the water. Toasting a dead Stuart pretender to the throne who had
died in Roman exile. Jacobites who pretended George III was not the
proper King. Not that any of them were truly disloyal, and the secret
gesture of passing the wine over the water was not even a real secret,
but rather was intended to goad Sharpe into English indignation. Except
Sharpe did not give a fig. Old King Cole could have been King of
Britain for all Sharpe cared.
Colquhoun suddenly barked orders in Gaelic and the men picked up their
muskets, jumped into the irrigation ditch where they formed ‘3
into four ranks and began trudging northwards. Sharpe, taken by
surprise, meekly followed. He supposed he should have asked Colquhoun
what was happening, but he did not like to display ignorance, and then
he saw that the rest of the battalion was also marching, so plainly
Colquhoun had decided number six company should advance as well.
The Sergeant had made no pretence of asking Sharpe for permission to
move. Why should he? Even if Sharpe did give an order the men
automatically looked for Colquhoun’s nod before they obeyed. That was
how the company worked; Urquhart commanded, Colquhoun came next, and
Ensign Sharpe tagged along like one of the scruffy dogs adopted by the
men.
Captain Urquhart spurred his horse back down the ditch.
“Well done, Sergeant,” he told Colquhoun, who ignored the praise. The
Captain turned the horse, its hooves breaking through the ditch’s crust
to churn up clots of dried mud.
“The rascals are waiting ahead,” Urquhart told Sharpe.
“I thought they might have gone,” Sharpe said.
“They’re formed and ready,” Urquhart said, ‘formed and ready.” ‘, The
Captain was a fine-looking man with a stern face, straight back | and
steady nerve. The men trusted him. In other days Sharpe would have