Disclaimer: These are works of fan-fiction created for entertainment. It is not the intention of the author to infringe on anyone's copyright. No rights infringement intended. Warning: General Audience

The Sharpe Fan Fictions of A Lady.

---

Bernard Cornwell’s

William Lawford Home from Spain



This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

William Lawford Copyright © 2025 by A Lady

DEDICATIONS William Lawford is for .

And

Bernard Cornwell who brought Richard Sharpe into our world.

William Lawford

A Novel by “A Lady” Based on Characters created by Bernard Cornwell
Chapter 3





April, 1799

Seringapatam, India


“You hear that, Mother?” the twitching Sergeant muttered, glancing up at the combination of spike and axe-head atop the pole he carried, the bitter edges of which now glimmered in the light of the stars of the sudden Indian night, some of which, those ones low down near the southern horizon, were strange to him, because Biddy, who had taught him the night sky of northern Europe, had never seen them.
“He don’t like you! Wants me to lay old Biddy aside, he does! Well, Christ help his old ma, because he’s going to get what’s coming to him, is Lady fucking Lawford, just you watch.”
Hakeswill sauntered off, whistling a tune which William did not recognise but which any one of the men could have told him was called The Rogue’s March. (Poor old Soldier! The Devil shall be my sergeant.)
Lieutenant the Honourable William bleeding Lawford! He was another one who needed to be taught to show respect, to know his place, like that upstart Irish puppy Mister Robert bleeding Fitzgerald. Both of them had too high an opinion of themselves, thought they were so fucking superior, even that they were somehow essential to the functioning of the Light Company.
Ensign Robert Fitzgerald, whose brother Maurice was the Knight of Kerry, the so-called Green Knight, and one of Wellesley’s closest Irish muckers by all accounts – what with Fitzgerald and Shee and bleeding Arthur snotty-nosed Wesley, as he had called himself until recently, who was not even thirty years old yet, the bleeding Irish were taking over the Army, which wasn’t right, wasn’t right at all.
And Mister fucking Lawford, grandson of the Earl of Winchester – if indeed he was! Hakeswill spat on the ground. Both of them had it coming, he confided to old Biddy, his secret name for his halberd. The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, he muttered, thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high; that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground?
Obadiah had a divinely-imposed right, no, a beholden duty, to preach the Word of Jehovah, and to deal out justice on his behalf! Biddy had seen it in the cards. It was why she had had him christened Obadiah. And it said so in the Scriptures. King Jehoshaphat himself had said so, hadn’t he, in the second book of the Chronicles, chapter seventeen! He thought of what he would do. Abda, Abda, ye must be holy, for ye be the Anointed of the Lord, the Rod of Justice in the hand of El Shaddai! so Uncle Meshach had said to him, often, on the many occasions when he had caught him out in egregious wrongdoing - the last instance being when he had cut him down from the gallows still living when he had been but twelve years of age.
Biddy’s point, hard in the guts, would do for Fitzgerald, he thought, one dark night far from help, twist it slowly, make the bumptious whelp cry for his Irish bitch of a mother as he died. He might get away with one skewered Ensign. Nobody cared about Ensigns; they died like bloody flies and nobody missed them – well, apart from their mothers of course – the thought of mothers temporarily gave Hakeswill pause – but only temporarily. This one was from the Irish peerage, though. Someone might be sufficiently interested to make enquiries, so he would have to choose his moment carefully.
But no, Shee wouldn’t be bothered, he had no time for the Irish, despite the fact he was a bloody Teague himself, although doing all he could to disguise the fact after that business with Wolfe Tone just the previous year, just like bloody Wesley; and Morris certainly wouldn’t give a dhobi-wallah’s fart.
Lawford, though. Lieutenants did not count for much either, but if they started finding filleted Lieutenants lying about the place… and Lawford was an aristocrat, a real one, an English one, which presented a problem, even though his mother was a Scot, and the Scotch were nearly as bad as the fucking Irish, in Hakeswill’s opinion.
In his own person Lawford barely mattered, wasn’t he a fourth son, or something, Captain Morris had said dismissively when Wesley had first adverted him to the fact that the lily-white milksop was on his way to re-join the 33rd. But his grandfather was a prominent Peer, this was the thing, see, Earl of Winchester. And his father, Charles Lawford, Viscount Petersfield, was a member of the Prince of Wales’s circle of intimate friends, so it had said in the same communication, which Hakeswill had stolen to read at his leisure – easily managed, given the almost primaeval chaos that was Morris’s desk - before later putting it back, taking care to hide it under some paperwork so that Morris would think he had simply mislaid it when he eventually re-discovered it there. And to cap it all, that Scotch bastard McCandless on secondment from the Company on Wellesley’s staff, who had once rebuked him, Obadiah, before the men for taking the Lord’s name in vain – he had not, the old bugger was hard of hearing and had mis-heard him, on his honour was Lawford’s bloody uncle! (Hakeswill was a master at dealing out outrageous injustices but he could not endure to be the recipient of one arising from an innocent mistake – McCandless would pay for that one of these days, or his name was not Obadiah Hakeswill, which it was)
Hakeswill knew he would have to be extremely cautious when dealing with Lawford. Careful and sly and clever. It would need real cunning – ha! It came to him there and then, a fully-formed plan. Sharpie! Christ, but he was a genius.
He knew what Lawford was, even if Morris wouldn’t countenance it; he had seen with his own eyes how Lawford watched Sharpie from afar with longing, could not keep himself from gazing at him as they marched, would throw his drawers at the cocky young bastard if only he dared, that soft-eyed yearning look on his face betraying him.
So to strike a blow at Lawford all he needed to do was to hurt Sharpie, badly, and the already-extant plan to traffic Mary Bickerstaff to Naig and ruin Sharpe was key to that. Rile up Sharpie, get him on that flogging charge, something real serious, like striking a Sergeant – Hakeswill knew from long experience that he could live with a punch in the face or even a kick in the cods if it was in a good cause – both had happened to him enough times - with a sentence to match, and with any luck Sharpie’d die under the lash and that bugger Lady bloody Lawford, with his soft hands, soft smiles, soft heart and even softer head, would have no choice but to watch while it happened. Sharpie wouldn’t be strutting about like a crow in a gutter no more, at any rate.
The scheme was so perfect Hakeswill cackled and would have hugged himself at the prospect - had he not been carrying his razor-sharp halberd, of course.


FOOTNOTES
4 Ensign Fitzgerald certainly did not, that night in the Sultanpetah tope outside Seringapatam.
5 Obadiah verse 3 (the book of the prophet Obadiah consists of one chapter only, and is the shortest book of the Old Testament). The dwellers in the clefts of the rock were the Nabateans (or Edomites) of Petra, the traditional enemies of the Judaeans.
6 Slave of God.
7 The form of the name Obadiah which appears in Nehemiah at 11:17. Both Obadiah and Abda are cognate with Arabic Abdullah. The Greek equivalent is Theodoulou.

---

Fiction Index | Sharpe Tales Home | William Lawford Home from Spain. Index |

---