been proud to serve a man like Urquhart, but the Captain seemed
irritated by Sharpe’s presence.
“We’ll be wheeling to the right soon,” Urquhart called to Colquhoun,
‘forming line on the right in two ranks.”
“Aye, sir.”
Urquhart glanced up at the sky.
“Three hours of daylight left?” he guessed.
“Enough to do the job. You’ll take the left files, Ensign.”
‘ “Yes, sir,” Sharpe said, and knew that he would have nothing to do
there. The men understood their duty, the corporals would close the
files and Sharpe would simply walk behind them like a dog tied to a
cart.
” There was a sudden crash of guns as a whole battery of enemy cannon
opened fire. Sharpe heard the round shots whipping through the millet,
but none of the missiles came near the 74th. The battalion’s pipers
had started playing and the men picked up their feet and hefted their
muskets in preparation for the grim work ahead. Two more guns fired,
and this time Sharpe saw a wisp of smoke above the seed heads and he
knew that a shell had gone overhead. The smoke trail from the burning
fuse wavered in the windless heat as Sharpe waited for the explosion,
but none sounded.
“Cut his fuse too long,” Urquhart said. His horse was nervous, or
perhaps it disliked the treacherous footing in the bottom of the
ditch.
Urquhart spurred the horse up the bank where it trampled the millet.
“What is this stuff?” he asked Sharpe.
“Maize?”
“Colquhoun says it’s millet,” Sharpe said, ‘pearl millet.”
Urquhart grunted, then kicked his horse on towards the front of the
company. Sharpe cuffed sweat from his eyes. He wore an officer’s red
tail coat with the white facings of the 74th. The coat had belonged to
a Lieutenant Blaine who had died at Assaye and Sharpe had purchased the
coat for a shilling in the auction of dead officers’ effects, then he
had clumsily sewn up the bullet hole in the left breast, but no amount
of scrubbing had rid the coat of Blaine’s blood which stained the faded
red weave black. He wore his old trousers, the ones issued to him when
he was a sergeant, red leather riding boots that he had taken from an
Arab corpse in Ahmednuggur, and a tasselled red officer’s sash that he
had pulled off a corpse at Assaye. For a sword he wore a light cavalry
sabre, the same weapon he had used to save Wellesley’s life at the
battle of Assaye. He did not like the sabre much. It was clumsy, and
the curved blade was never where you thought it was. You struck with
the sword, and just when you thought it would bite home, you found that
the blade still had six inches to travel. The other officers carried
claymores, big, straight-bladed, heavy and lethal, and Sharpe should
have equipped himself with one, but he had baulked at the auction
prices.
He could have bought every claymore in the auction if he had wished,
but he had not wanted to give the impression of being wealthy. Which
he was. But a man like Sharpe was not supposed to have money. He was
up from the ranks, a common soldier, gutter-born and gutter-bred, but
he had hacked down a half-dozen men to save Wellesley’s life and the
General had rewarded Sergeant Sharpe by making him into an officer, and
Ensign Sharpe was too canny to let his new battalion know that he
possessed a king’s fortune. A dead king’s fortune: the jewels he had
taken from the Tippoo Sultan in the blood and smoke-stinking Water Gate
at Seringapatam.
Would he be more popular if it was known he was rich? He doubted it.
Wealth did not give respectability, not unless it was inherited.
Besides, it was not poverty that excluded Sharpe from both the
officers’ mess and the ranks alike, but rather that he was a stranger.
The 74th had taken a beating at Assaye. Not an officer had been left
unwounded, and companies that had paraded seventy or eighty strong
before the battle now had only forty to fifty men. The battalion had
been ripped through hell and back, and its survivors now clung to each