cold bugger would probably blame Sharpe for getting into trouble.
Stokes, maybe? Or the cavalry? Sergeant Lockhart would doubtless
welcome him, but then he had a better idea.
“Take me to wherever you’re camped,” he told Sevajee.
“And in the morning?”
“You’ve got a new recruit,” Sharpe said.
“I’m one of your men for now.”
Sevajee looked amused.
“Why?”
“Why do you think? I want to hide.”
“But why?”
Sharpe sighed.
“D’you think Wellesley will believe me? If I go to Wellesley he’ll
think I’ve got sunstroke, or he’ll reckon I’m drunk. And Torrance will
stand there with a plum in his bloody mouth and deny everything, or
else he’ll blame Hakeswill.”
“Hakeswill?” Sevajee asked.
“A bastard I’m going to kill,” Sharpe said.
“And it’ll be easier if he doesn’t know I’m still alive.” And this
time, Sharpe vowed, he would make sure of the bastard.
“My only worry,” he told Sevajee, ‘is Major Stokes’s horse. He’s a
good man, Stokes.”
“That horse?” Sevajee asked, nodding at the grey mare.
“You reckon a couple of your fellows could return it to him in the
morning?”
“Of course.”
“Tell him I got thrown from the saddle and snatched up by the enemy,”
Sharpe said.
“Let him think I’m a prisoner in Gawilghur.”
“And meanwhile you’ll be one of us?” Sevajee asked.
“I’ve just become a Mahratta,” Sharpe said.
“Welcome,” said Sevajee.
“And what you need now, Sharpe, is some rest.”
“I’ve had plenty of rest,” Sharpe said.
“What I need now are some clothes, and some darkness.”
“You need food too,” Sevajee insisted. He glanced up at the sliver of
moon above the fort. It was waning.
“Tomorrow night will be darker,” he promised, and Sharpe nodded. He
wanted a deep darkness, a shadowed blackness, in which a living ghost
could hunt.
Major Stokes was grateful for the return of his horse, but saddened
over Sharpe’s fate.
“Captured!” he told Sir Arthur Wellesley.
“And my own fault too.”
“Can’t see how that can be, Stokes.”
“I should never have let him ride off on his own. Should have made him
wait till a group went back.”
“Won’t be the first prison cell he’s seen,” Wellesley said, ‘and I
daresay it won’t be the last.”
“I shall miss him,” Stokes said, ‘miss him deeply. A good man.”
Wellesley grunted. He had ridden up the improved road to judge its
progress for himself and he was impressed, though he took care not to
show his approval. The road now snaked up into the hills and one more
day’s work would see it reach the edge of the escarpment. Half the
necessary siege guns were already high on the road, parked in an upland
meadow, while bullocks were trudging up the lower slopes with their
heavy burdens of round shot that would be needed to break open
Gawilghur’s walls. The Mahrattas had virtually ceased their raids on
the road-makers ever since Wellesley had sent two battalions of sepoys
up into the hills to hunt the enemy down. Every once in a while a
musket shot would be fired from a long distance, but the balls were
usually spent before they reached a target.
“Your work won’t end with the road,” Wellesley told Stokes, as the
General and his staff followed the engineer on foot towards some higher
ground from where they could inspect the fortress.
“I doubted it would, sir.”^ “You know Stevenson?”
“I’ve dined with the Colonel.”
“I’m sending him up here. His troops will make the assault. My men
will stay below and climb the two roads.” Wellesley spoke curtly,
almost offhandedly. He was proposing to divide his army into two
again, just as it had been split for most of the war against the
Mahrattas. Stevenson’s part of the army would climb to the plateau and
make the main assault on the fortress. That attack would swarm across
the narrow neck of land to climb the breaches, but to stop the enemy
from throwing all their strength into the defence of the broken wall
Wellesley proposed sending two columns of his own men up the steep
tracks that led directly to the fortress. Those men would have to
approach unbroken walls up slopes too steep to permit artillery to be