SHARPE’S REGIMENT

‘Ma!’ he shouted. ‘Ma! Stop it!’

‘Out! And you, Horace and James! Out! Disgrace, you are, disgrace to your families! Playing at soldiers! You think I brought you into this world to see you throw yourself away?’ She cuffed Charlie Weller about the ears. ‘Only a fool joins the army, you fool!’

‘Aye, you’re right,’ Harper said drunkenly.

Havercamp surrendered the three boys gracefully. He had, to console his loss, twenty-eight men in a barn outside town, he had scooped up four today, and he had high hopes of the whores who were working the inns for him. He would have a tidy enough number to take back to Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood. He smiled reassuringly at his recruits as Mrs Weller left, drained his last ale, and ordered them to their feet.

They had taken the King’s Shilling, but they were not quite yet the King’s men. Sharpe lay that night in the broken-down stable behind the Green Man and he stared at the stars through the gaping thatch. He smiled. Six weeks before, in the nights after the battle of Vitoria, he had slept in a great bedroom with the whore of gold, the Marquesa, the woman who was a spy and who had been his lover. He had lain with an aristocrat and now he lay in old, filthy straw. What would she think if she could see him now?

The other recruits snored. In the next stable a horse whinnied softly. Beside Sharpe the straw rustled.

‘You awake?’ Harper whispered.

‘Yes.’

‘What are you thinking of?’

‘Women. Helene.’

‘They come and go, eh?’ Harper chuckled, then pointed at the broken roof. ‘We could go now. Bugger off, eh?’

‘I know.’

But they did not. They were in England, recruited, and going to battle.

CHAPTER 6

In the morning Sergeant Horatio Havercamp had thirty-four men, the last few brought in by the whores whom he had brought from London and who were paid to dazzle young men with unfamiliar spirits and flesh. Twenty-eight of his men were guarded in the barn outside of town, while the nine new recruits were in the Green Man’s stable.

‘On your feet, lads! On your feet!’ Sergeant Havercamp was still genial, for none of these nine recruits were in the bag yet, even though they did have the King’s Shilling. ‘Come on, lads! Up!’

A man in a long, brown, woollen coat and with a tall, brown hat stood next to the Sergeant. His nose dripped. He coughed with a cavernous, retching cough that, each time it exploded in his chest, made him groan afterwards with a hopeless, dying moan. He went round the stable, peering at each man, sometimes asking them to lift up a leg. It was the quickest medical inspection Sharpe had ever seen, and when it was done the doctor was given a handful of coins. Sergeant Havercamp clapped his hands as the doctor left. ‘Right, lads! Follow me! Breakfast!’

The two corporals, magically transformed into redcoats with tall, black shakoes, helped hustle the nine men towards the inn. It was not fully light yet. A cock crowed in the yard and a maid carried a clanking pail from the pump.

‘In here, lads!’

It was not for breakfast. Instead, a magistrate waited in the public room, a grey-haired, savage faced, irascible man with pinched cheeks and a red nose. A clerk sat next to him with a stack of papers, a pot of ink, a quill, and a pile of bank notes.

‘Right! Let’s see you lively!’ Sergeant Havercamp whisked them forward one by one, chivvied them to the table, and stood over them as they were sworn in. Only three of the recruits, one of them the quiet young man in his broadcloth coat, could write.

The others, like Sharpe and Harper, made crosses on the paper. Sharpe noticed that the doctor had already signed the forms, presumably before he came out to the stable to glance at the recruits. He noticed, too, that no one offered the recruits the chance of a seven-year engagement; it was simply not mentioned. The form, that he pretended he could not read, was headed “Unlimited Service”.

He put his cross in the place the clerk showed him. “I, Dick Vaughn” the paper read, “do make Oath that I am or have been ————“, Sharpe declared no occupation and the clerk left it a blank, “and to the best of my Knowledge and Belief was born in the Parish of Shoreditch in the County of Middlesex and that I am the age of 32 Years”. Sharpe decided he would take four years off his age. “That I do not belong to the Militia, or to any other Regiment, or to His Majesty’s Navy or Marines, and that I will serve His Majesty, until I shall be legally discharged. Witness my Hand. X. Dick Vaughn, his mark.

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