while that a man was resting his feet on the rug. Sharpe tested the
assumption by trying to move and the man kicked him. He lay still
again. One dog had escaped, he remembered. It had somehow slipped the
rope over its neck and had paddled away downstream with the children
shrieking along the bank and hurling stones at the frightened head. Did
the dog die? Sharpe could not remember. God, he thought, but he had
been a wild child, wild as a hawk. They had tried to beat the wildness
out of him, beat him till the blood ran, then told him he would come to
a bad end. They had prophesied that he would be strung up by the neck
at Tyburn Hill. Dick Sharpe dangling, pissing down his legs while the
rope burned into his gullet. But it had not happened. He was an
officer, a gentleman, and he was still alive, and he pulled at the
tether about his wrists, but it would not shift.
Was Hakeswill riding in the cart? That seemed possible, and suggested
the Sergeant wanted somewhere safe and private to kill Sharpe. But
how? Quick with a knife? That was a forlorn wish, for Hakeswill was
not merciful. Perhaps he planned to repay Sharpe by putting him
beneath an elephant’s foot and he would scream and writhe until the
great weight would not let him scream ever again and his bones would
crack and splinter like eggshells. Be sure your sin will find you
out.
How many times had he heard those words from the Bible? Usually
thumped into him at the foundling home with a blow across the skull for
every syllable, and the blows would keep coming as they chanted the
reference. The Book of Numbers, chapter thirty-two, verse
twenty-three, syllable by syllable, blow by blow, and now his sin was
finding him out and he was to be punished for all the unpunished of
fences So die well, he told himself. Don’t cry out. Whatever was
about to happen could not be worse than the flogging he had taken
because of Hakeswill’s lies.
That had hurt. Hurt like buggery, but he had not cried out. So take
the pain and go like a man. What had Sergeant Major Bywaters said as
he had thrust the leather gag into Sharpe’s mouth?
“Be brave, boy. Don’t let the regiment down.” So he would be brave
and die well, and then what?
Hell, he supposed, and an eternity of torment at the hands of a legion
of Hakeswills. Just like the army, really.
The cart stopped. He heard feet thump on the wagon boards, the murmur
of voices, then hands seized the rug and dragged him off. He banged
hard down onto the ground, then the rug was picked up and carried. Die
well, he told himself, die well, but that was easier said than done.
Not all men died well. Sharpe had seen strong men reduced to
shuddering despair as they waited for the cart to be run out from under
the gallows, just as he had seen others go into eternity with a
defiance so brittle and hard that it had silenced the watching crowd.
Yet all men, the brave and the cowardly, danced the gallows dance in
the end, jerking from a length of Bridport hemp, and the crowd would
laugh at their twitching antics. Best puppet show in London, they
said. There was no good way to die, except in bed, asleep, unknowing.
Or maybe in battle, at the cannon’s mouth, blown to kingdom come in an
instant of oblivion.
He heard the footsteps of the men who carried him slap on stone, then
heard a loud murmur of voices. There were a lot of voices, all
apparently talking at once and all excited, and he felt the rug being
jostled by a crowd and then he seemed to be carried down some steps and
the crowd was gone and he was thrown onto a hard floor. The voices
seemed louder now, as if he was indoors, and he was suddenly possessed
by the absurd notion that he had been brought into a cock-fighting
arena like the one off Vinegar Street where, as a child, he had earned