Yet escape, that Sharpe had planned for tonight, seemed hopeless now. Harper was under arrest, guarded first by Lynch and his two corporals, and soon by a further squad of redcoats who took the huge Irishman back to the camp where, locked in a foul small building that had once been a pigsty, the Irishman waited for the justice that ruled in Foulness and which had already killed one man this summer’s day.
‘They killed him!’ Charlie Weller still seemed unable to believe that Marriott was dead.
‘Served him right.’ Jenkinson, one of the convicts freed to Sergeant Havercamp by Grantham’s magistrates, was scrubbing at the mud on his trousers. The evening inspection was imminent. ‘He was a whining bastard.’
‘He would have made a good soldier.’ Sharpe said it mildly. Oddly, it was true. If Marriott had been in the Rifles, where the discipline was expected to come from within a man rather than without, the boy might have made a fine skirmisher.
Jenkinson said nothing. He was wary of Sharpe, as he had been of Harper, for the two had early stopped the bullying tactics of the released convicts, who, thinking themselves to have found easy victims in the other recruits, had tried to make them into servants.
Weller slapped at the dried mud on his fatigue jacket. ‘What will they do to Paddy?’
‘Flog him.” Sharpe looked to the east where, black against the pale dusk, the geese coasted down to the mudflats. He was wondering how, this night, he was to both rescue Harper and escape. If Jane Gibbons – and the thought of her made his heart give a strange, small leap of warmth – put the food and money he needed into the boathouse then it was unlikely, he conceded, that it would remain hidden all the next day. Tonight. He must escape tonight, not just to save Harper from punishment, but because, with the secret of the Foulness camp uncovered, he was impatient to end Girdwood’s crime and return to Spain.
The bugle sounded for inspection. The squad lined up in front of the tent and listened to the shouts of the sergeants and corporals. ‘Christ!’ Charlie Weller muttered. ‘It’s the bloody Colonel tonight.’ Girdwood’s inspections were always more burdensome than those of the other officers.
‘Silence!’ Corporal Mason shouted from behind.
Sharpe stood to attention. He had noticed, as he fetched cleaning water, how a whole block of the tents was empty this evening and he presumed that the two Companies whose auction he had seen on Sir Henry’s lawn had already marched to their new regiments. The thought of his own men, left in Pasajes, being thus denied the reinforcements they needed, made him suddenly angry as Lieutenant Colonel Girdwood paced in front of Sergeant Lynch’s squad.
The Colonel looked each man up and down. There had not been time to clean all the mud from their uniforms and Girdwood’s eyes showed his disgust. ‘Filthy! Filthy! You’re supposed to be soldiers, not pigs! What’s that?’ He pointed with his cane at a forlorn pile of kit that lay at the tent door.
Sergeant Lynch, immaculate once more, stiffened. ‘Private Marriott’s Necessaries, sir!’
‘Marriott?’ Girdwood frowned. ‘Who’s Marriott?’
‘The deserter, sir!’ Lynch’s eyes flickered towards the kit, then back to the Colonel. ‘Being returned to stores tonight, sir!’
‘You can add the Irishman’s too.’ Girdwood said it with a smile, as though the thought had suddenly cheered him.
‘Sir! Private Vaughn! Fetch the Irish filth’s Necessaries!’
Sharpe frowned, as though not understanding. ‘Sergeant?’
Lynch took one crisp pace forward and pushed his moustached face up to Sharpe’s. ‘Fetch O’Keefe’s kit, Vaughn, and do it now!’
Sharpe obeyed, rolling Harper’s few spare clothes into the blanket, then carrying them outside.
‘Put them there, filth!’ Lynch pointed with his pacing stick at Marriott’s pile. ‘Smartly!’
Sharpe knew he should say nothing, but the thought that Harper might be, like Marriott, dead, or might be dead before the night was done, was too much to keep him silent. He dropped the blanket roll, stood to attention, and looked respectfully towards the Lieutenant Colonel. ‘Is he not coming back, sir?’
Girdwood straightened. He had been rapping the guy ropes of the tent, ensuring they were taut, for in Foulness no guy ropes were allowed to be slack, even in rain. It meant broken tents, but ensured the neatness that Girdwood loved. The Colonel looked towards Sergeant Lynch. ‘Did the filth speak, Sergeant?’