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Kartavya: Lawford Confronts his Duty
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.
Kartavya: Lawford Confronts his Duty. Copyright © 2026 by A Lady
DEDICATIONS Kartavya: Lawford Confronts his Duty is for Sable Crow who supports our fanfiction with her website SharpeTales.net.
And
Bernard Cornwell who brought Richard Sharpe into our world.
Kartavya: Lawford Confronts his Duty
A Novel by A Lady Based on Characters created by Bernard Cornwell Chapter 10
April, 1799
Mysore, India
PARAGRAPH ONE The Present: 27th March 1799 – early morning
“You asked to see me, sir,” William said, when he appeared in Shee’s tent five minutes later.
“Ah, Lawford,” said Shee, laying aside some papers which he had been perusing and glancing up at him with a look, William thought, something between surprise and irritation, as if he had momentarily forgotten that he had sent for him. “I did indeed. Do sit down.”
“Sit – sit down, sir?” said William, puzzled.
“Here is what I have learned in my time in the Army, Lawford,” Shee said, his tone bright and friendly now as if attempting to make up for what he must have realised had looked like an unguarded flash of annoyance – and to be honest, he did find Lieutenant William Lawford annoying, with his fidgeting and his perpetual air of timid nervous diffidence, even if not quite so annoying as Ensign Timothy Hicks, with his toadying ways and his incandescent acne – at least Lawford, who, with his flawless near-marmoreal complexion, looked as if he had never suffered from a single adolescent pustule, had proved quite a decorative addition to the Mess (so long as he sat still and kept his mouth shut when he was not actually eating) - “never stand if you can sit; never sit if you can lie down; never stay awake if you can sleep. Now, please sit, the sight of you standing there in those boots is making my feet ache. They are very splendid boots, to be sure, and they are certainly beyond my salary, but I’m sure they must pinch your toes something shocking – you always look so very pained whenever I see you wearing them, haha!”
William remained, if not defiantly vertical, then at least uncertainly so.
“When we came up to this place yesterday, sir, I heard that it was likely that we should make contact with the Tippoo’s forces today, so shouldn’t I be - ”
“Tippoo’s forces are indeed at Mallavelly. Our scouts have seen them, or some of them, anyway, in the hills to the west of the village. A few thousand, as far as we can make out – guns, elephants. No doubt we shall soon learn what General Harris wishes us to do about this state of affairs.”
“Then – should I not be – preparing – in some way? - seeing to the men – making sure they are tending to their weapons - or - or something?“
Shee briefly raised his eyes to the canvas overhead. Or something. Wet behind his bloody ears! Lawford should still have been with his bloody nursemaid!
“All in good time. This won’t take long. Now, for the love of God, sit down, man, and leave that kind of thing to the Sergeants!”
Being asked to sit down was better than being left standing, William supposed, as at least it was reassuring, suggesting that it was less likely that he was about to be upbraided for something. But on the other hand, being asked to sit down, in his experience, had often presaged the announcement of unsettling news. He remembered, for example, being summoned from a monumentally dull Latin class to his tutor’s study one day at school, when he had been about fourteen years old.
“Ah, Lawford,” Dr Watmore had said then. “Do sit down.”
Watmore had then gone on to inform him that his grandmother, Dowager Baroness Kilmonivaig, Ishbel, Lady McCandless, had died. William had not minded over-much, although he had supposed that Mama must have; he had had only the vaguest memory of ever having met his grandmother, notwithstanding he had two years earlier spent the summer staying in her frigid mediaeval towerhouse-keep at Spean Bridge, not far from Fort William in the land of the lochs – Eil, Lochy, Arkaig and Laggan - (he had a dim recollection that she had been very old, and had already been an invalid for many years, and who had by then, for years, already, been keeping mainly to her room; he and his cousins had been discouraged from going to visit her as the prattle of children, they had been told, had confused her, because she had no longer been capable of understanding who they were, sometimes thinking that they were her own children, or even her brothers and sisters, and this had made her irritable) - at a time in his life when for weeks preceding his Highland sojourn everything had seemed dim and sad, as if lit with daylight reflected from a foxed mirror, or mediated through an ivy-occluded window – or sordid and unreal, as if it had been happening at a distance in some miserable place where everyone had been in some small way a failure or a criminal; or in a fog, or under water, or else in some rank, cold, rotten topsy-turvy world cut off from sunshine and warmth, bird-song and colour. Anyway, ever since that day William had associated being summoned and then asked to sit down with the imminent arrival of unfortunate intelligence of some kind.
“Sir,” he said, gingerly sitting down at last on the spindly and uncomfortable gilded chair which had been placed in front of Shee’s desk, presumably for the purpose, by an aide, he assumed. William could not imagine that Shee had placed it there himself. The chair was the kind of object which he could easily picture Shee savagely demolishing with one violent jack-booted kick when in a drunken pet. It struck him as being as out of place in the tent of the commanding officer of a Regiment of Foot preparing to engage Britain’s greatest foe on the Indian subcontinent as a dancer from the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, all got up in satin and tulle, on a Seventy-Four, its decks being cleared for action whilst the drummers of its contingent of Marines beat to quarters. It looked to him like one of those absurd chairs barely fit for purpose, which at home in England had only ever seemed to make an appearance around the margins of grand rooms - part of the set-dressing for balls and receptions and parties, manifesting early in the morning along with the caterers with their ice sculptures packed in hay, and their linen and silverware, and the florists with their vases and garlands of flowers and potted plants and contrived bowers of greenery, and the haberdashers with their jaunty colourful bunting, to disappear just as rapidly after the gala event, whatever it might be, was over. What it was doing here in Shee’s tent on a military campaign in the middle of India more than eleven thousand nautical miles from an assembly-room in some English spa town he could not begin to fathom. The ground was uneven. The fragile chair had rocked alarmingly, even at his slight weight, as he had lowered himself onto it. William was afraid that it would tip over and that he would fall flat upon his arse and look ridiculous, as he had once before when he had missed the target when attempting to sit down at a public ball in the Upper Assembly Rooms at Bath almost three years before.
The Past: Durford Park, April 1796
A new-made Lieutenant but recently transferred to the Light Company (lately rendered even lighter by the loss of more than half its strength to the Yellow Jack in the West Indies, to which duty it and the Grenadier Company had been assigned whilst the Battalion companies had been deployed in Flanders), in a new coat of such a smartly fashionable cut and of such a brilliant immaculate scarlet it had been almost embarrassing (the old deep-cuffed frock-coat of which William had been so proud when first a seventeen-year-old Ensign in ‘94 being long since faded, and stained by mud, and by sea-salt, and by blood – some of it his - and torn - as well as being grown-out-of and additionally quite gone out of style), he had gone to the now not-quite-so fashionable as formerly Somersetshire resort to accompany the Viscountess Petersfield (she having retained a great affection for Bath, which abided until the end of her days) whilst he had been on leave shortly before the embarkation of the 33rd for India, in the spring of ’96, perhaps a week or so after Easter, which that year had fallen early, on the 27th of March. The Viscount had not wished him to go there, being all too well aware, so he had said, of the regrettable modern tendency of young persons to form unwise attachments contrary to the wishes of their friends (1) when thrown together in the extraordinary circumstances obtaining now at popular watering-places in these lax and ill-disciplined times resultant upon the wars, when everyone had seemed to think that every ball, every supper, every stolen kiss in a moonlit shrubbery might very likely be their last - and William must remain always aware of his contracted obligation to Miss Hayles, &c, &c. But on this occasion at least, Mama had been uncharacteristically outspoken –
“William must have at least one ball, Charles!” she had insisted – “Charles, Henry and Francis all had theirs; and William is but nineteen years old, and should not be deprived of amusements suitable and proper to his age and situation.”
“William will find his undoubted Terpsichorean talents called upon almost as part of his regimental responsibilities once he returns to his Battalion, my dear. It is the prime, almost sole duty of subalterns, you know,” the Viscount had gone on, drily, “to dance with girls who might otherwise find themselves in want of a partner throughout the entire duration of a ball, perhaps - the shame-faced objects of the scorn and pity of the other more fortunate young ladies. Indeed, at times, in the Mess, when I was but a callow Captain, I used to hear the Colonel aver that Lieutenants, certainly, existed for almost no other purpose, whilst the function of Ensigns on such occasions was solely to find chairs for the fair ones and bring them their refreshments.”
“A ball - in Cape Town or Calcutta!” Lady Petersfield had exclaimed in a tone of withering contempt. “To dance, it may be, with maroons, and mulattos, and – and - whatever they call those brown-skinned gets of Company men in India! No: William must come with me to Bath. I repeat, Charles, Henry and Francis had their day, and so must William.”
“Charles, Henry and Francis happened not to be engaged to be married, at the time of their epoch of youthful riotousness,” the Viscount had countered. “Not that William is what one might describe as riotous, of course,” he had added. “I do not think that Sir Josiah and Lady Hayles will keep Jessica withering in her bloom as if she were lost in a convent’s solitary gloom, once she is out (2). Besides, William might never return from India. What if he should die in that arid heathen place, his last thought being that he had never danced a quadrille at a public ball in Bath? although I pray God that dismal outcome will never come to pass.”
“Amen,” the Viscount had said, with heavy sarcasm. “Although if that were to be his last thought I should not hold out much hope for his soul’s salvation.”
“I should not have him kept as if in purdah, Charles, forbidden all social enjoyments, before he goes to do his duty, perhaps to die for his King and country, is what I meant.”
“I suppose if William must exhibit himself at a ball, then I had far rather he did it in the Assembly Rooms in Bath than, for example, at one of those monthly subscription affairs in Basingstoke Town Hall of which one hears,” the Viscount had conceded, reluctantly, “notwithstanding Bath is in all likelihood the most dissipated place in the three Kingdoms and the Principality, unless that be Brighton.” But then he had gone on in far less conciliatory wise. “I should perhaps however have kept you in purdah, Madam, in anticipation of an infamous occasion, twenty years ago this Easter, when you had felt a desire to go to Bath, during my absence abroad on business – then most probably we should not now be finding ourselves obliged, once again, to debate these tiresome matters pertaining to your son.”
“Business! Stuff! On that occasion, Charles, as you rightly recollect, you were in Barbados - although far from being engaged exclusively in business, you were doing that upon which I prefer not to dwell, in pursuit of your own degraded pleasures; that being so, had it even been within your power - which it was not - your being four thousand miles and more away - you would still have been in no position to dictate to me – “
It had been at that juncture that William had walked into the breakfast-room, to witness the unedifying sight of the Viscount rising wrathfully to his feet with such vigour that the table had received a glancing blow at his upstanding, causing the china to rattle and clink - his intention apparently being, from what William had been able to make out, to strike his wife - as the Viscountess had leapt up, almost in the same moment (her unfashionably wide-skirted gown knocking over the chair upon which she had lately been seated), snatching up from the now askew table a grapefruit-knife and darting, with surprising agility and speed for one usually so placid and even lethargic in her movements, out of hazard of her husband’s reach.
“Sir! Madam! Pray, what is to do here?” William had exclaimed, quite shocked. He had long been aware of the ill-feeling which had existed between the Viscount and Mama on his account, which had grown ever more poisonous over the last twenty years, but he had never before witnessed a scene of this kind. An awkward silence had then descended. For a moment the two antagonists had stood frozen in their attitudes, the Viscountess aghast, the Viscount nonchalantly defiant. William had hastened to right the capsized chair, glad to have the excuse for action, otherwise he would likely have been similarly stuck in a pose of paralysed horror, perfectly well aware that he had inadvertently witnessed an aspect of the domestic life of Durford Park which he never should have seen. Once he had set the chair upon its legs once more William had given his mother his arm and had seated her upon it, and had then wordlessly held out his hand for the grapefruit-knife, which after a short hesitation she had meekly yielded to him. He had replaced it carefully upon the table, and had then poured for her another cup of chocolate. The cup had tinkled loudly in the saucer as she had taken them into her hands, which, he had observed, had been shaking. (3) There had been a lengthy silence. Then, “A pretty tableau, was that not, sir?” the Viscount had said to William in a tone of savage irony, having noted his appalled expression. “You will at least be relieved to see that no blood was shed in the course of that, our late homage to Melpomene. As good as anything you might pay to see in Drury Lane upon one of your self-indulgent jaunts to London, do not you think?”
“Sir?” William had queried, nervously. The accusation had been unfair. During his current period of leave he had been up in London for one week only, and had stayed quietly at Lawford House in Mayfair. He had visited Henry in his chambers and they had had dined together once in the sober surroundings of the dining-room at Lincoln’s Inn in the company of Henry’s fellow-barristers. He had been to the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, to see, not any bawdy farce, but John Kemble’s ‘King Lear’. The rest of the time he had employed in seeing the sights of the capital and in paying his respects to family friends, and in hearing concerts, and in attending worship in the better sort of churches where ancient music was still honoured and valued and sung well. He had dutifully stayed far away from all the well-known dens of dissipation which the greatest city in the world of those days afforded to young men of means – even of limited means - such as himself.
“Your mother, evidently, has neglected to take her medicine this morning, William,” the Viscount had said, at last, casting a contemptuous glance at his wife. “You must remind her daily, when you are in Bath, or you may find yourself unexpectedly being called upon to play a part in a scene which John Webster might have penned. And as to your own safety, let there be no grapefruit (4) served at breakfast.”
At that point, before William had even been able to begin to articulate a reply, the Viscount had abruptly withdrawn from the room. William had waited until he had been quite sure that Lord Petersfield had departed, and then he had gone to his mother and had wordlessly taken her hand between his own, meaning to speak words of comfort. Before he could think of what to say, however, she had burst into tears, gazing into his face with an unguarded look of pain and longing which had quite horrified him. He had seen it before, when, aged sixteen, he had returned from school for the last time, shortly before Christmas in ’93, having been absent for a half a year and having grown up considerably in the interval which had elapsed since he had last been at home. Then, he had not understood, but now its import had burst upon him like a sudden downpouring of thunderous rain, when, with a wail of -“William, William, you are so – so - like - him!”, she had turned away, sobbing, her face hidden in her hands. That was when it had been brought home to him, fully and finally, that he was Ardara’s son and, moreover, that it could not be hoped for it to be hidden from the world. The pretence, the dissembling, the years of polite glossing over of the matter, all had been useless. He was Gerald Fitz-Simon’s bastard. Everyone in society would know it as soon as they laid eyes on him. There was simply nothing to be done about it now except to grit his teeth and brazen it out as best he could. For the rest of his life.
William had never been sure whether it had been a stupid accident, or whether someone had deliberately removed that chair out from under him in the act of his sitting down. There had been some moderately drunk junior officers of a cavalry regiment in the vicinity, indulging in loud high-jinx and generally boorish behaviour shortly before the incident (as if determined to live up to the adage that cavalrymen were as mad as their horses), and he had always suspected that they had had a hand in it – he had certainly heard them sniggering at him for a lowly infanteer prior to the episode – foot-wabbler was the term he had heard one of them use – “the infantry - such a plodding career!” - and although he could not be certain that it had been one of their company (5), he had thought that he had heard someone declare confidently, “…the dead spit, Ardara redivivus, the pater says!” (6) At any rate, they had found it very amusing when he had landed flat on his backside in front of a knot of giggling young women – a very plain one of whom, having discreetly enquired of the dowagers gathered about Mama concerning her, he had some time before asked for the honour of a dance, aware that she had most likely otherwise have been left sitting disregarded by the wall for the remainder of the night. She had been called Miss Evesham, he remembered (7). The dance had been the cotillion, his favourite. Miss Evesham had performed it well, and he had cut, he had hoped, a creditable figure, his feet fair twinkling - a Lieutenant now, with his solitary shining new epaulette which caught the light of the candles in the chandeliers so prettily, and all. She, a sensible-seeming girl, had probably regarded him at first as nothing more than a mere poodle-faker unaware that she had had no poodles to be faked (she had been quite without fortune, he had been informed, but in the circumstances that had not mattered at all, seeing that he had been betrothed to a fortune ten years earlier in any case). Mistaken identity, she had most likely thought (8). But anyway, by the time he had released her hand and bowed and made his parting courtesies as the notes of the final cadence of the dance had sounded from the band, any remaining echo to be drowned out by the loud announcement that supper was about to be served, and the general sounds of approval consequent upon that, she had smiled at him in such a way as to let him know that she had now been perfectly aware that he had only been trying to be kind to a young woman who would otherwise most likely not have got a dance all evening, and probably not have got anther one throughout the remainder of her stay in Bath. Sometimes William wished he could have met Miss Evesham again. They might have been compatible, she grateful for a titled name – Mrs the Honourable William Lawford! - and a comfortable home; he grateful for an alibi. But then – Oh, God. How could he possibly have forgotten? That monumental burden beneath which he had been bowed down since the age of nine. Jessica. Jessica. Jessica.
The Present: 27th March 1799
Now locking all relevant muscles rigidly, something at which William had become very good over the course of years when made to endure tirades, first from the Viscount and from Charles and, on one eye-watering occasion, his Head Master at Eton, then from various superior officers in the Havercakes, he was sitting upon what now, in his imagination, was the Siege Perilous before the Major’s desk. Shee regarded him for some time, as if weighing certain possibilities, then he said,
“There is some concern about your uncle, Lawford. Colonel McCandless. Harris’s chief exploring officer. Intelligencer.”
“Spy?” William blurted out incontinently, offering his own contribution as if he thought Shee had instigated some kind of synonym-based guessing game. He thought he saw Shee wince at that.
“If you must, Lieutenant. Although ‘intelligencer’ takes the unpalatable edge off it, at least to a degree.” Shee had no time for these distasteful modern practices peripheral to what he in his younger and more hopeful and sober days had thought of as the business of honest soldiering.
“I do not think it so ignoble a calling, sir. Moses had exploring officers,” said William, recalling that Uncle Hector had once expounded to him the Biblical origins of his vocation. “Moses? What are you talking about, man? I do not recall a General Moses. Has this to do with the Second Mysorean War upon which Lieutenant-General Baird is always harping? Or are we back in the time of Marlborough?”
“Moses in the Bible, sir,” said William, suddenly embarrassed, although he did not really know why. It then occurred to him that he had been mercilessly laughed at on his first night at school when he had innocently knelt by his bed in the dormitory in order to say his usual prayers. He had not made that mistake again.
“I know Moses is in the Bible!” said Shee, thinking fast. “I’m not a heathen!”
“No, sir. Perish the thought, sir. But if you recall, sir, Moses sent exploring officers ahead of the Israelite host, into Canaan. He needed to know things about the land they were about to enter – about the terrain - about the strength and disposition of any army they were likely to meet - ”
“Why are you telling me this, Lawford?”
“Because, sir, it just struck me that you seemed to find the idea of – sp – intelligence-gathering - “
“Yes?”
“Undesirable?”
“It is not honourable, in my book. Necessary, perhaps, but not honourable. Even if Moses did it. Well, he was a Jew, anyway, so I dare say honour didn’t really come into it with him.”
William knit his brows at that, then remembered himself and unknit them. It was not for him, he thought, to judge his commanding officer’s evidently poor opinion concerning the Jews, no matter what he personally might have thought of such an attitude. He recollected what some of his contemporaries at Eton had been used to say upon the subject. He had found it sickening, worse than what they had had to say about the Roman Catholics. If the Church of England would not have existed without the Church of Rome behind it, then neither would have existed without the Jews! But just try saying that to some of them. It was disheartening, to say the least.
“So, what did they find? Tell me the story, like you’re Miss Lawford the Rector’s daughter teaching Sunday School and I’m one of your scholars.“
William did his best to disregard Shee’s mocking dismissive tone, and moreover the implications of being described as ‘Miss Lawford’. It was not easy.
“Joshua was Moses’s chief exploring officer, sir. He and Caleb and their scouts returned from their reconnaissance mission with a bunch of grapes so enormous that it required two men to carry it on a pole, together with pomegranates and figs. It’s in the Book of Numbers, sir,” said William, seeing Shee looking sceptical. “In context, this is meant to be read as evidence that the land was extraordinarily fertile. A sign that it truly was the land which God had promised them forty years earlier.”
“Hah. I know a hostelry in London, the Bunch of Grapes, in the Liberty of the Savoy. D’ye know it?”
“No, sir; I have not the honour, although I believe my brother Henry - ”
“First-class establishment! We have no present use for enormous bunches of grapes, however. Enormous bunches of grape-shot, perhaps! That would certainly put the wind up the Tippoo, haha!”
“You mentioned concern regarding my uncle McCandless,” William said, rather tightly. “Why is that, sir? Is he in danger?”
“Not in particular danger at this moment, at least not so far as we know; but the very nature of his work places him constantly in danger of a general kind, and I am told that he has recently embarked upon an especially perilous mission, upon which rests the success of our current enterprise. I must inform you that there is a now a level of concern - currently at medium risk - regarding his welfare, because he has not been heard from for many days now. That could be due to any number of factors, mostly innocent. There is probably nothing to worry about, so far as we know, at this stage. But if anything were to happen to him it would be a significant blow to British interests in India. His head is stuffed with the names and details of almost everyone in Mysore who is willing and able to aid us in our campaign against the Tippoo Sultan, for one thing. If Colonel McCandless were to fall into the Tippoo’s hands - ”
“It would be a calamity,” William said, flatly.
“Of course it bloody would! Mr Lawford, pray do not presume to appraise me of the blindingly bloody obvious. It is speaking for speaking’s sake. You do that a good deal, did you know?”
“I have previously been brought to task on divers occasions for the misdemeanour of chattering, sir, indeed,” said William, reddening, and lowering his eyes as he shifted uneasily on the uncomfortable chair.
“Well, damn well stop doing it, then! And whilst you are at it, stop bloody fidgeting! That’s something else I’ve noticed about you, Lawford. Wellesley has also mentioned it to me. You’re always fidgeting about, can’t seem to sit or stand still. Nerves, is it?”
“Sorry, sir. This chair feels very unsteady, as if it’s about to - ”
“You are gibbering like the damn monkeys in the damn jungle that’s hemming us in on both sides! If you have nothing of import to say, then say nothing! That is what my Captain told me when I was first an Ensign in Eighty-One!”
“Yes, sir. Sor- “
The Major stared at Lawford, who blushed even more deeply and immediately fell silent. Shee referred to his notes. “The reason I sent for you, Lawford, is to put you on notice that if the worst happens and Colonel McCandless is taken, you will very likely be required to take part in a mission to recover him. It would be a matter of very great importance that we got him back, because by now, as well as knowing the names of all our covert friends in Mysore, there is also the likelihood that he knows a very great secret which could win or lose this coming campaign for us, for he has been in the wild for some time meeting his informants. And the reason, according to General Baird anyway, that we need you, Lawford, of all people, to undertake this mission is that your uncle trusts you - or it is assumed that he does; whereas if we were to send someone unknown to him, he would inevitably suspect potential treachery, because that is the way that the minds of – “ William could see that Shee’s lips were beginning to form the word spies, but the Major changed it at the last moment – “exploring officers – are regulated to work. Well, now we have spoken of it, the reason why you are here. I was asked to sound you out on that score and also assess your suitability for such a venture. You are willing?”
William wondered who had asked him. Wellesley? Not likely. Baird? Yes, Baird, probably, the Scotsman, who had known McCandless in India decades earlier, who must have known all about him and his family connections – and most importantly, had long understood how his mind worked.
“Of course I should be willing, sir,” said William.
“I had expected that you would take a few moments to consider,” said Shee, sceptically.
“He is my uncle, sir, and he means a great deal to me.”
“There is more than mere family piety at stake here.”
“I understand that, sir.”
Not unreasonably, William now assumed that he would have a mere subordinate role to play in a standard military operation - fairly perilous, perhaps, for possibly it would involve a night operation of some kind in the event that Uncle Hector really had needed to be rescued, and it was a venerable military axiom that if anything could go wrong in a night action, it generally did. Well, one did not become a soldier if one were totally averse to danger. In any case, William genuinely felt that, if it came to it, he would owe this service to his uncle, who had so generously paid for his commission, and, almost alone amongst his relatives, had been kind to him throughout his life (as far as he had been able, given the remote distances usually involved) and had once gone to great lengths to pull him out of the mire when he had been cast, metaphorically, into a cistern as deep and as muddy as Jeremiah’s when he had been but twelve years old. An added attraction was that, if a rescue mission were found to be necessary, it would mean a welcome chance to get away from Morris and Hakeswill, for a little, at least. Morris was a terrible officer, a lazy drunk rapidly going the same way as Shee, who despised his men and who left Hakeswill far too much to his own unsupervised devices. As for Hakeswill, William was, frankly, afraid of him, and Hakeswill knew this and obviously enjoyed intimidating him; sometimes it even seemed to him that Hakeswill hated him and might even try to kill him if he thought he could get away with it, for he plainly nurtured a fierce resentment on account of the several occasions now on which William had felt compelled to intervene when he had detected the Sergeant in some cunning act of malice or injustice designed to hurt the men, either severally or individually. He had seen it, the murderous impulse, writhing like a malevolent worm in the depths of Hakeswill’s mad blue gaze on more than one occasion. William was on the edge of his seat now, his attention rivetted upon this chance of a mission away from the Morris-Hakeswill axis in the presence of which he was permanently frightened and on the alert for abuse and worse - away from the Havercakes, where he barely mattered - away from Harris’s army in which he was a pathetic non-entity.
“Very well,” said Shee, then. “I must mention this, however. A personal matter, please forgive me.”
“Sir?” said William, at once intensely watchful. Shee looked at him. Rabbit caught in the gaze of a fox, was his thought, noting the Lieutenant’s sudden expression betraying an attitude of extreme vigilance.
“I understand that you have a fiancée in England – a Miss – “ Shee referred to his notes – “a Miss Jane Turnbull?”
“What?” William said, with a sudden start, before he could prevent himself. “I’m sorry, sir – has there been a letter from Miss Turnbull?” Although if that were the case he did not understand the reference to his fiancée. Surely Miss Turnbull could not have written to him, not after fourteen years – ! But it came to him then, along with a surprisingly strong surge of disappointment mingled with old remembered sadness, that someone must have been speaking to Anandhi – that was all. Well, it was not all, if she had told whoever it was who had been snooping and asking questions that all they had ever done together on his few visits to Naig’s tents was play chess and converse upon innocent topics.
“No letter, I’m afraid. But this young lady – she is your intended?”
“Oh, no, sir. I am contracted to a Miss Jessica Hayles.”
“Really?” said Shee, in surprise. “Then who is Miss Jane Turnbull?”
“Miss Turnbull was my – “ William blushed deeply now, agonisingly aware of how this information was doomed to come across – “ – she was my governess, sir.”
Shee stared at him then as if he could not quite believe his ears.
“Your governess,” Shee said, eventually, flatly.
“I have not seen her since I was nine years old, sir. In the year Eighty-Six.”
“Miss Hayles, then,” Shee said, making a note upon the margin of his papers. “Not Miss Turnbull.”
William thought that he sounded disgusted. He hung his head.
“I merely wished to advert you to the likelihood that this mission – should there be a necessity for a mission - ” Shee went on, after an interval, “would doubtless prove perilous - even fatal. You should therefore write to the young lady – this Miss Hayles – by the way, should I know of her family?”
“Her father is Sir Josiah Hayles, sir.”
“Ah, a baronet?” said Shee, his tone brightening, probably thinking a baronet’s daughter a good enough catch for the fourth son of a Viscount with limited prospects.
“No, sir. Her father made his – very substantial - fortune in ironfoundering - in the patriotic service of our nation - in its wars of this last century - as indeed did his father and grandfather before him. This good work won him a knighthood. He is now the Honourable Member for Sway in Hampshire and has great expectations of future - deserved – advancement, to a Government post and even at last to a peerage.”
“Jesus,” muttered Shee, sotto voce. Then, “You should write to the young la – the young person - before you embark upon the mission, to give her fair warning – prepare her for the worst. Send a lock of hair, some verses, no matter how bad – not too hard to find a pattern –
I go to heal our common weal:
If I should die tomorrow
I pray your grief be passing brief,
And short the years of sorrow -
that sort of thing. You strike me as a bookish sort of fellow, Lawford, no doubt you can think of something. If the worst comes she will cherish your memory as if you were Edmund Spenser or Alexander Pope. Well, perhaps not Pope. He was a Papist and a hunchback dwarf, as I’m sure you are aware. And if I were you I should also write to your mother in a similarly sober vein.”
“I see. What else might I be required to do, sir, besides penning terrible verses to serve as my epitaph and thereby spare my sorrowing friends the trouble?”
Shee glared at him. He had been rather proud of that stanza.
“Nothing for the time being. Now, in the meantime, you are, as you have said, aware that there will likely be a battle today, or at least an engagement – an encounter?”
Could the Major still be in thesaurus mode?
“As I have said, sir, I have heard that it is likely that there will be a fight,” said William, then reddened again and bit his lip as Shee looked hard at him.
“Just so,” said Shee, eventually. “Just so. Nothing of any great consequence, most likely, but we’ll have to go through with it nonetheless, bloody the Tippoo Sultan’s nose, show him we mean business. The scouts say the Tippoo has twenty thousand men here waiting for us.”
“Well, that should not present a difficulty, sir. We did pretty well at Kelamangalam, after all.”
“That’s the spirit! We’ll be in contact with them later, this afternoon, most likely. Does that worry you?”
“Not particularly, sir. I should rather like to see their elephants – see how they measure up to the Nizam’s. I’ve seen his - at a distance – and I’ve nearly fallen into piles of their dung when I’ve been walking the cantonment – if that’s the right word – and I’m not sure it is, regardless of its size and appearance of permanence - at night – “
“Ah yes – Sergeant Hakeswill has mentioned that he has seen you wandering after dark. Why do you do that, Lawford? Any particular reason?”
“Just curiosity, sir,” said William, inwardly shuddering at the mention of Hakeswill. God! Hakeswill had been watching him! “General Wellesley himself has likened our progress to a travelling circus, a fair, a county show. I have been interested to see the sights.”
“In the dark? Hm. What’s the fascination with the elephants?”
“I should love to see the Tippoo’s war elephants, sir, in all their fine panoply. Compare them with the Nizam’s.”
“You wouldn’t want to see those bastards up close, I can tell you, haha! I’ve seen what they can do. You ever seen a man gored by a bull, Lawford?”
“Once, sir. I must have been four - ”
“I have,” said Shee, off-handedly. “Elephants, ten times worse. And the Tippoo’s elephants can step on a man’s head at a word of command, I’ve heard, and crush it like an egg. Same way he has strong-men what can twist a man’s head clean off his shoulders. He has a very convincing line in horror, has the Tippoo. What I meant was, does the idea of being in a shooting-match worry you?”
“Well, sir, yes, of course, but it will not be the first time – “
“You have been in a bout before, then?” Shee had sounded surprised.
“Bostkel - but I’ve never really – I mean, it wasn’t all that – although I still stupidly got myself - “
“Boxtel?” said Shee, in some surprise. “You were there?”
“Yes, sir.”
Shee glanced at his notes again.
“Ah, yes. So you were. I keep forgetting, this is your second time around the dance-floor. Hardly our finest hour, I think, Flanders. The campaign as a whole, I mean, of course.”
How would you know? thought William indignantly. You weren’t there (12).
“Arthur Wellesley certainly made a name for himself that day, though. Fine piece of work.”
That was Colonel Sherbrooke, William had wanted to say, although he was not inclined to argue with his current commanding officer. He had witnessed Lieutenant Goodlad of the second company exchanging heated words with Shee in the mess tent less than a week since and Goodlad had definitely come off worse in that encounter; he was not about to take on the hot-tempered Shee and risk being scorched in his turn. However, he had admired John Sherbrooke since he had first encountered him in Cork in the late winter of ’94, before the 33rd had sailed for Ostend. He admired Wellesley greatly as well, of course, but it had always annoyed him to hear that fine action at the village of Schyndel near Bostkel being misattributed by those who had not witnessed it. He admired Sherbrooke all the more for having never shown any signs of bitterness about it. Sherbrooke had brushed it aside and said that what mattered was that the British had been saved and the French discomfited, of course, and not sought personal glory, but all the same, William still found it irksome on his behalf.
Bostkel - Boxtel – or rather, the nearby village of Schyndel: the 14th and 15th of September 1794. They, the 33rd, one regiment in a brigade formed of four, the three others being the 12th, the 42nd and the 44th - all of them without their flanking companies, which had of course been sent to the West Indies to further Pitt’s design of seizing control of the French sugar plantations in the islands of Martinique, St Lucia and Guadeloupe, where the slaves, infected with ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity, had been in any case already in revolt (a disastrous decision which had severely handicapped the Army in Flanders; without their best soldiers it had been like campaigning with one arm tied behind their back, many had said) - along with a brigade of Guards and several squadrons of cavalry, had been caught up in the organised chaos of the not-quite-shambolic British retreat from the line of the river Dommel following their abortive attempt to re-take Boxtel from the French, which had been cancelled on a misunderstanding. This had had been the result of poor communication between Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Abercromby and the Duke of York. They had been pursued meanwhile by units of General Jean-Charles Pichegru’s French cavalry. As they had approached Schyndel, about five miles to the north-west of Boxtel, their immediate goal being to get to safety beyond the river Aa, owing to the narrowness of the causeways between the watercourses the ranks of the Guards had become muddled amongst the British cavalry, who had been surprised by French artillery concealed in a wood on the approach to the village and were consequently in disarray and had needed to retire through the mass of infantry in order to preserve themselves, and it was this which had caused the confusion and the milling about in the constricted place. The French, seeing this, had spotted their chance for slaughter and had prepared to charge. However, Lieutenant-Colonel John Sherbrooke, who had been commanding the 33rd that day (Wellesley having been charged with higher responsibilities – the beginning of a pattern where Wellesley had been concerned which had been repeated over the years) had managed to restore order amongst the infantry of the 33rd and had put them into line, and having first ordered them to part to allow the cavalry through the ranks had with great presence of mind then got them to form line again and had then faced them about, and they had proceeded to see off the French with steady disciplined cool-headed (for the most part) volley-fire, thus preventing a massacre. Their actions had allowed the rest of the British force to escape. The 33rd had actually saved the day, William thought; it had indeed been their finest hour, probably since the founding of the regiment in the Year ’02 - and the fact that they had done this without their elite companies had made their achievement all the more extraordinary. He wished that he had the necessary steel to say so to Shee. This had been probably the most memorable British accomplishment in what had otherwise been the lacklustre and ultimately failed Flanders campaign. Whilst all this had been going on, however, Ensign Lawford had been able to do nothing but stand fast and cling on tightly to the Regimental Colour, which had at first been furled in its protective leather case (it had been his turn to carry it on that section of their march of withdrawal); then a hasty order had come from Sherbrooke to uncase the Colours to encourage the men and give them a rallying-point in the event of their having to run for it, so William had scrabbled and struggled, aided by a sergeant – Edwards! It had been Neds! -before the fateful ball had hit him! - and had finally got the great silk banner, the size of a sheet off a four-poster bed, free of its casing (Ensign Watkins, the cheerful son of a Manchester cloth-merchant, who had been carrying the King’s Colour, had meanwhile been doing the same with the help of another NCO) and somehow they had managed to raise both the Colours - only for another hasty order to arrive almost at once, this time probably from Colonel Wesley, but it had been hard to tell with all those staff officers galloping frantically about, that they should immediately get the flags to safety further up the line of retreat, secure amongst the Guards. William had again been struggling with his heavy encumbrance when all at once he had fallen to the ground, a ball from a carbine belonging to a French dragoon lodged in his thigh: Sergeant Hawthorn had grabbed the Regimental Colour in order to run it to safety, as was right and proper, but William had been left lying bleeding in the roadway, just about the 33rd’s only other casualty of that day. But at least the French hussars had gone. (It had been at about the same time that William fell that Sergeant Edwards, the Viscount’s coachman now for the last four years, had also dropped, his knee skewered by the ramrod which some panic-stricken seventeen-year-old private who looked like a Gypsy had discharged in error from his musket – one yell, one curse, however, and Edwards had stoically shut up so as not to spread alarm amongst the men, or shame himself.) Well, that had been William’s campaign over, and very nearly his life, after Surgeon Micklewhite’s deputy Mr Trevor had been let loose upon him afterwards. He had spent the next few weeks in the back of a cart, one of a sorry convoy of many, along with other sick and wounded as the retreat had gone on and on and they had crossed river after river, making for Bremen and the shore of the German Ocean, and eventual evacuation once the British Government had decided to cut their losses and end the campaign. The weather had become more and more foul, until eventually they had ended encamped for the remainder of the winter by the Waal at a place called Ijzendorn. William had been very ill, at first with fever on account of his wound, and then with a recurrence of the marsh fever which was endemic to that part of Flanders, and then, at Bremen, with dysentery, but had somehow survived, and then some other peculiar malady which had involved sudden lumps to either side of his neck.
He had finally won back to England the following April. Two hundred of his comrades of the 33rd had not: of those two hundred only six had fallen in combat; the rest had died of disease and exposure to the elements in the coldest winter ever to have gripped northern Europe since such things had been first recorded. Very nearly another two hundred had been left behind sick and wounded in hospitals in Bremen. Barely a quarter of the regiment’s original strength had eventually arrived back at the barracks at Warley in Essex, shortly before Rogationtide in 1795. Meanwhile the better part of another two hundred – the Light Company and the Grenadiers – had died of the Yellow Fever in the West Indies in an attempt to seize those French sugar plantations.
William realised all at once then that he had been too honest regarding his relative lack of experience, recent or at all, in battle, because Shee cut him off decisively.
“Nothing to worry about really, as far as we can tell. In the normal way of things you’d be assisting Captain Morris, leading a section of the Light Company, but in light of what we’ve been discussing we think it best if on this occasion you keep to the rear.”
“The rear, sir? But what will the men think?”
“It doesn’t matter what the men think, Lieutenant,” said Shee impatiently. “Not right at the rear. You and Sergeant Green will be leading the hinder ranks as we come up. It should be a relatively safe station. All being well, the first ranks as they deploy into line will be enough to see off the Tippoo’s rabble, in any event. It’s important that you stay out of trouble as far as possible, because afterwards, of course, we may well have to see about retrieving your uncle, if we have indeed heard that he has been taken, and if we do, as I have adumbrated, you will be pivotal to our efforts in that regard. It’s vital to our cause that if your uncle needs our help that we have you to send in, because, as I’ve said, he’ll trust you. Your thoughts about how you might achieve this, in the event, would be appreciated, so give the matter your best consideration as you loiter about in the rear with Sergeant Green. And meanwhile,” Shee had concluded, with a sudden most alarming smile which reminded William of a picture of a crocodile which he had seen in one of his books about India which he had studied during the voyage to Madras, “don’t get yourself killed – that’s an order, William. Haha!”
William started. Almost no-one had addressed him by his Christian name since that terrible last month at home, when Charles had taken such horrible pleasure in tormenting him with his terrifyingly intimate pretence of caring about him, his obscene pantomime of having his best interests at heart. With a sinking sensation at his stomach, William feared the worst - that is, that Shee was being pleasant to him now so as to make it all the more unpleasant when he hit him with bad news later. William had, of course, grown up taking this kind of rubbish on a regular basis, from Charles. Hearing it now, from someone who had so far shown him little friendship, inevitably unsettled him. It occurred to him that this sudden familiarity had been intended to make him feel that he had finally been accepted into the officers’ fellowship. This had never really been the case in all the time when he had been an Ensign – his own tongue-tied diffidence had seen to that – until Lieutenant Wilfred Halston - tall, dark, good-looking, with kind eyes and a heart-ensnaring smile and a sense of humour before which William, always nervous in the company of keen-witted people and their jokes (because in his life until that point the jests had almost always been at his expense) had been entirely helpless – constantly taken by surprise, outflanked, wiped out and left gasping and floored with laughter – sometimes literally - had taken him, all too briefly, under his mentoring wing, guiding William from the hour of his arrival at the encampment in Cork in the spring of ’94 (the handsome substantial barracks which had now existed had not then been built), when he had found himself completely at a loss in the midst of what had seemed to him very much like chaos (although it had not been so, as he had soon learned). Subsequently Halston had shown him first how to play the officer - teaching him his duty, teaching him how to comport himself, how to speak, how to act – even how to stand, so, Halston had said with a disarming smile, he looked more as if he were poised to face down the insubordination of the worst hard-bargains amongst the Havercakes, and less like he was about to dance a gavotte with a parcel of curates and other people’s maiden aunts at a subscription ball in Dublin – and then, gradually, with the invaluable discreet help of Sergeant Edwards, how to be one – spending time with him, showing him with painted wooden blocks how to manoeuvre a battalion, quizzing him on Dundas’s Principles of Military Movements, testing his knowledge of the evolutions, and the correct terms of command with the aid of an old pack of playing-cards which had the words and diagrams inscribed on the backs, which Halston had once taken the trouble to make for the express purpose of tutoring Ensigns. In short, Halston had been kind to William and by being so had inadvertently but, given William’s characteristic tendencies, inevitably, wounded his vulnerable heart, so apt for love, and so often in his life either denied it, or else, having found it, having it then abruptly and brutally rent away from him.
Now William supposed that Shee’s tactic of appearing friendly had been designed with the intention that he would be grateful, and therefore compliant with any plan they had devised which might involve sending him into danger; but all the same he did feel grateful, pathetically so. So far the 33rd had this time around often felt like a very lonely, unfriendly – even hostile - confusing and at times frightening - place to be for William, worse than Eton had seemed to him at the age of twelve or thirteen (if still not as bad as Durford Park); and so of course he would comply.
Later on that day, the 27th of March, had indeed come the expected engagement at Malavelly. Well, William thought afterwards, that went well! If he had been writing about it to Jessica there would have been another sketch in the margin of the letter of him wearing his Ironic Face. The Light Company had been in the act of deploying to the left of the line when suddenly a commotion had broken out. Sergeant Hakeswill had started screaming at Private Sharpe, something to do with the flint of his musket. Morris had come to add his penny-worth. William, having had a bad feeling about the developing incident, had rushed to poke in his nose too, in defiance both of the blathering Sergeant and of bloviating Captain Morris. He had thought he had managed to sort it out, but before he had known what had been happening, Morris had been yelling at him and had sent him from the field, warning him to expect a Court of Inquiry and a charge of insubordination! Of course, the victory had been so easy that nobody had cared about that afterwards and he had only been summoned for a dressing-down in Morris’s tent that evening and dismissed with a warning, but…
William lay that night tossing on his camp-cot, kept wakeful by puzzlement and unease. What the bloody hell had all that been about? Just as they had been about to go into action! Shoot ourselves in the foot time! It had been ridiculous! In addition, it had been such a low-grade matter it should not have excited his interest, even. Ruefully he felt that he should have left Hakeswill and Morris to sort it out, for it had only ended badly for him, being dismissed in that manner. Well, that had at least worked out well regarding the mission Shee had had in mind for him, and perhaps Morris had been in on it and that was why the situation had been engineered - yet William doubted it. Anyway, Sharpe had already got himself out of that scrape in any case, thanks to his lively wits. And yet. And yet. William had had a feeling that all had not been as it should have been, and that he really had needed to intervene, in order to save Sharpe, and so he had. After the – one could hardly call it a battle – it had been more like a bloody brawl, so unexpectedly one-sided that it had been almost embarrassing - William’s thoughts had inevitably returned to Sharpe (they had hardly left the subject since), and he worried that perhaps he should not have interfered, and that he might only have succeeded in making things worse for the ‘Gypsy’ - as indeed was to prove to be the case. Ah, well. He had seen war elephants up close and, if not personal, at least at the distance of less than a furlong. He imagined himself telling Mama about this. Then he imagined her response. She would probably assert that elephants were mythical beasts, not real, because she had never seen any on the South Downs. He sighed. At least Morris seemed to have forgotten about his supposed offence, for he had not been summoned to explain himself to his commanding officer afterwards, or (so far, at least) threatened with a Court of Inquiry concerning his alleged insubordination either, as he had feared would be the case. Blessed be the arrack.
But then, he recollected, that very night he had compounded his blunder by interfering yet again, this time concerning Sharpe’s attempt to obtain permission to marry Mary Bickerstaff! Oh, you fool, you fool! he told himself, over and over, as he lay sleepless in the hot tropical suffocating blackness. Morris had sneered at what he had had to say when he had steeled himself to make his representation, almost openly mocking him for his concern for the enlisted man, even going so far as to imply by his manner and tone (so it had seemed to William, at any rate) that he was beginning to suspect the Lieutenant’s motives in his persistent championing of Sharpe.
“I’d be starting to think Sergeant Hakeswill was right about you,” he had said to him, nastily, at the conclusion of their interview, “if I didn’t know that that could not possibly be the case. Now, Mr Lawford, I am sure you must have somewhere to be.”
“Sir?”
“How much plainer must I make myself? Please go away, Lieutenant! I have work to do.”
William had taken his departure without another word. He had known for some time that Morris disliked and despised him; it had taken him a space to think of a reason why that could be, but as Morris had dismissed him just then it had suddenly come to him: Morris - tall, fair-haired, still good-looking despite his years (mid-thirties perhaps?) with fine regular features (features, albeit, which had already begun to show the particular signs of coarsening and reddening which tell an unmistakeable tale of decline into drink) - could almost have been an older, raddled version of himself. When the Captain looked at Lawford, so William now imagined, he was seeing an image of the young, hopeful Charles Morris from ten years earlier, an ambitious Charles Morris, with bright dreams of advancement and prosperity, picturing a shining future, before persistent cruel disappointment on account of lack of wealth and connections, and consequent yielding to the deceptive consolations of drink and dissipation, had set him on the road to ruination, and it pierced him to his soul to think that Lawford, with his access to his family’s money (at the whim of his elders, certainly, but…) and his aristocratic caché to give him such an unfair advantage, had still in addition his health, his youth, his looks, and above all, his hope withal, and he hated him for it. But it was not for William to worry about the likes of Morris.
Work to do? Rum to drink, more likely, William, for his part, had muttered under his breath once he been sufficiently far from Morris’s tent to be confident that the Captain would not overhear him. What had he meant about Sergeant Hakeswill being right about him? Why would Morris have paid attention to any tattle from that source? And It had been humiliating to be dismissed like that, as if he had been a tiresome schoolboy bothering his house-master over some trifling thing - a quibble with a class-mate over an exercise in translating a passage from Virgil perhaps, and interrupting his evening! That was how Morris saw him, it was so very obvious.
William wondered about the officers in the other companies of the 33rd. Was this the impression that they too had of him? So low was his mood now that he had begun to think that he had come all this way to India just to find that he was about as welcome in the 33rd as a dose of the cholera, and as useful, as they continued to trudge past the swathes of tropical jungle, which lay close upon their way to either hand, as a set of snow-shoes. What was the point of his persisting with the Army? Uncle Hector had been right to have doubts about his suitability for the military life, as long ago as 1789! He was not wanted! Ensign Fitz-Gerald – no, Acting-Lieutenant Fitz-Gerald, to give him his due - was competent and confident and was already making a better job of being an officer than William ever could, he was certain. Fitz-Gerald deserved his place as second-in-command of the Light Company. William suspected that he himself was regarded as a nuisance by proper, competent officers, barely tolerated, de trop, and that the men probably regarded him as nothing more than an amusing diversion. William feared what might happen when John Raymond’s permanent replacement finally arrived in the Company. He would surely be beaten into last place, the third wheel on the curricle, a complete cypher. And yet, and yet, if he sold his commission and went home, once again defeated by life, what would there be waiting for him in England? Nothing, nothing at all. He was in disgrace at home. Quite possibly if he dared to show his face at Durford he would be turned away, perhaps even physically thrown out, kicked down the steps if Charles had anything to do with it (he had threatened to do exactly that on the night before William’s departure), finally disowned, denounced as a bastard and a degenerate – and, O God! there would be the servants and the tenants to be faced there – Collins, Mrs Milland – formerly they had always been so kind to him, so well-disposed towards him. Now, surely they would blame him, and rightly, for the loss of Mark, who had been generally and greatly beloved both amongst the outdoor workers and in the servants’ hall at the House; all at Durford had known him, even if they had only ever seen him, a distant figure working in the gardens, or nearer to, playing his viol in the band at Church – nobody would have believed Charles’s fiction about Mark’s patriotic desire to serve with the 67th – the Durford folk might be uneducated rustics, most of whom could neither read nor write (of course the upper servants were literate, and Joseph Wright and Mrs Milland had both been astute book-keepers) - but they had their own methods of garnering information and they were neither ignorant nor stupid!
And then there was Jessica. Without a home or a family or the income generated by Jessica’s dowry, or a profession, William knew that he could never marry her, and the old iron-master would no doubt demand his money back and there would be endless legal trouble and inevitably a horrible public scandal. Neither could William countenance embarrassing either Henry in his chambers, or Francis at his commodious, recently refurbished and redecorated and tastefully furnished and altogether very pleasantly-appointed rectory at Langbourne Worthy by turning up and claiming sanctuary. Francis had his parish, his bass viol and his orchids, and for all William knew, he might even be married by now! He could not imagine it, but stranger things had happened in the history of the Church of England. And William could not go causing a headache for the McCandlesses in their icy chateau up at Spean Bridge, either for that matter - although from the perspective of Mysore, which even in March he was finding almost unbearably hot, the thought of Cousin Sandy’s austere retreat in the remote and chilly Scottish Highlands exerted an undeniably frigid appeal.
Well, it seemed that he had no choice, then: he would have to remain in India and see it through (whatever ‘it’ turned out to be) - succeed, become somebody, even, one day, a proper officer, one whom the men could respect and rely upon to see them right – or at least one for whom they would feel no pressing desire to shoot in the back in order to enhance their own chances of survival in battle - even if his fellow-officers did persist in regarding him as pointless. Or failing that, William thought, perhaps he would be killed in the coming investing and storming of Seringapatam, or die of wounds afterwards, or of disease, and then all his woes would be over forever (that seemed to him to resemble a plan, at any rate – one he would dust off and re-use, some thirteen years later, with disastrous consequences). In the meantime, there were still his worries concerning Sharpe - Richard Sharpe, the ‘Gypsy’. He must stop obsessing over that enlisted man! he told himself sternly. Proper officers did not allow themselves the indulgence of such distractions: they acted in the best interests of all the men under them, never in those of particular individuals simply because they – liked – them, were drawn to them. And especially, as in this case, not if Obadiah Hakeswill were a factor! Nothing good could come of further embroiling himself in that developing drama, William knew for certain. And then, within the space of five minutes, he nonetheless caught himself worrying once again about Private Sharpe.
Then the next day, the 28th of March, came the blow. Anil brought him the news first thing that morning along with his hot water. Unbelievably, late last evening, Private Sharpe had been arrested on a charge of assaulting Sergeant Hakeswill! Anil said that there had been two witnesses, which, he said, had seemed to him suspicious in itself, and the fact that those witnesses were Captain Morris and Ensign Hicks was enough to suggest to William in turn that Sergeant Hakeswill’s sweaty hand-prints were all over this. It seemed that there would be no time that day to hold the investigation, for the combined British regiments upon the one flank, and the 33rd, the Company Sepoys and the Hyderabad horde upon the other nonetheless had to variously march, shuffle, shamble, creep and roll on towards Seringapatam, which still lay ten miles off; but the day after the next would be a rest day, and Anil duly came again later with news that there was to be a Court of Inquiry the following morning, the thirtieth, and that from what he had been able to glean Sharpe would inevitably be flogged that following afternoon, because they were bound to cut out the Court-Martial part of the process and pre-emptively (and illegally, but that was normal with Major Shee, and in any case who cared about that when waiting for them in Seringapatam was an uppity Sultan who urgently needed to be taught a long-overdue lesson?) find him guilty, because of pressing time; and they always did find the poor buggers guilty, of course.
The triangle, as usual constructed from the lashed-together spontoons of three of the battalion company sergeants, would soon be in place, Anil told him, when he arrived with the can of hot water on the morning of the 30th of March. Oh, and this time there was also something else, a message, a note for the Lieutenant-sahib. William was so distracted by the news concerning Sharpe that he opened and read the folded sealed paper, barely taking in the substance of it, not noticing at first whose signature was upon it, or, when he had finally registered the odd circumstance of having been asked a favour by a General, why David Baird had thought fit to single out a mere lieutenant for notice. His recent interview with Shee flashed briefly across his consciousness. But what did it mean? There was one cryptic sentence: Lawford – I am told that you are already aware that we might need you to carry out a task – it turns out that we do – it concerns your uncle - will you oblige us? Anil was still standing by, so William, in a state of distraction, told him to go at once to Baird and tell him yes, of course he would oblige him, thinking that no doubt he would learn concerning precisely how in due course, but suspecting that it had to do with the conventional extraction party which he had persuaded himself was the plan; and then he promptly forgot all about it, in order to concentrate upon his priority activity of worrying helplessly about Private Sharpe instead, wondering what on earth he could possibly say on his behalf at the hearing that day to mitigate the punishment they were bound to inflict upon him.
When Anil came again later that morning, he said that no less a person than General Harris was wanting to see Lieutenant Lawford in his tent right away, chop-chop.
“Chop-chop? What?” William had not heard the phrase before.
“My cousin Duleep, he is foretop-captain in the Company ship Henrietta that plies between Calcutta and Canton - he once told me that it means ‘hurry at once’.”
“Very good. Chop-chop it is, then,” said William, still all astonishment. First Major Shee had wanted to see him, then General Baird had sent soliciting his agreement to do something for him, and now he was summoned by General Harris? What was going on? This was so much more than what he had envisaged at his interview with Major Shee! “But I must go to the Court of Inquiry first, and speak for Private Sharpe; at least speak as to his character.” “I am very sorry, Lieutenant-sahib, but you are to attend General Harris, now. That is what chop-chop means.”
So was this it, then? William thought. Had Uncle Hector indeed been taken by the Tippoo Sultan’s troopers? And now - O God! Now he could not speak for Sharpe at the hearing! The little, the pathetic little, he had hoped that he might have been able to do for him, even that had been snatched beyond his reach. The only thing that William could do now, on his panic-stricken way to Harris’s tent, was to search out Captain Fillmore, whom he knew had been appointed to defend the prisoner. Fortunately William found him without too much difficulty. Fillmore, however, appeared to be not too pleased to be waylaid by this diffident Lieutenant who stammered almost incomprehensibly as he attempted to convey his message, to impress upon him what he seemed to think was so vitally important for Fillmore to know about Sharpe. He was at first unwilling to stay and listen to him, but nevertheless William persisted and briefed him haltingly but as best he could as to Sharpe’s character for purposes of mitigation; but as he had not witnessed the alleged assault on Hakeswill there was precious little of fact he could add to the case for the defence. Now utterly torn, breakfastless and his empty stomach in knots, half-frantic with anxiety for Sharpe, as well as for his uncle, William went to Harris. He met Hakeswill on the way, or rather, in the way – for Hakeswill had a knack of engineering these meetings, he had noticed - so that he was obliged to stop and acknowledge him. Hakeswill leered at him.
“Red-letter day, Lieutenant Lawford, sah!” Hakeswill said to him, grinning like a gargoyle. “A fine day, a very fine day indeed for the promotion of virtue and the punishment of vice!”
“How do you mean, Sergeant?” “Seems like the Army ain’t just planning on flogging your pet, Sharpie, today – “
William felt his body beginning to buzz with outrage and anger, and he fought to control himself.
“Sergeant, you forget yourself. Private Sharpe is not my ‘pet’ - whatever you might have meant by that. Also, as far as I am aware, the hearing has not yet been begun, let alone concluded; therefore no sentence can yet have been passed.”
Hakeswill dealt him such a look at that, that for a moment or two William feared that the loathsome man was about to spit at his feet; but he simply continued,
“I was just speaking to Sergeant McKinnon, sah! He’s a right sawney bastard, he is, of the Seventy-Fourth, fine man, fine man - and he’s got his work cut out – can you credit it, sah! They caught a pair of buggers in the act – the very act! oh, must have been eight, nine days since.” Hakeswill paused and glanced slyly at William as if to see what effect this intelligence might be having upon him; he was gratified to see that William indeed appeared suddenly very rattled.
“Caught them doing what, Sergeant?” William said, having recovered his composure a little, although a wavering in his voice betrayed the fact that he knew very well what it was that they must have been caught doing.
“Joining giblets, sah!” said Hakeswill, with relish. “Sodomites doing what them filthy bleeders does, sah!” the Sergeant had gone on, with horrible satisfaction, almost smacking his lips over the words. “Buggers, like what I just said.”
“Sergeant Hakeswill, I really don’t - ! – “ William bit his lip, something which he had been learning to do a lot since he had rejoined the 33rd. “I suppose, then, that they must be punished. Another flogging?”
“No, more’s the pity, sah!” Hakeswell said, well-pleased at what he had just observed of Lady bleeding Lawford’s reaction. The molly had turned quite pale. Better still, he looked shaken – frightened, even. “They contrived to hold the court-martial at last, yesterday, since we was halted again. Only took five minutes. Guilty! The Court of Hinquiry had already established the facts, you see, no need to hang about. ‘Hang about’, haha! They’re going to hang them, you see. McKinnon told me,” Hakeswill concluded. He sounded, William thought, not merely disappointed, however, but offended.
“Hang - ?” Oh, of course they would hang! William thought of all the times he had heard the Articles of War being read, both at sea and since he had arrived in India. Navy or Army, it made no difference. That awful penalty repeated over and over, a refrain like the tenor-stroke of doom, that those found guilty of all manner of proscribed activities ‘shall suffer death’. “At least that should be quick,” William said, belatedly trying hard not to show his utter dismay at the news; he knew in his heart, with absolute certainty, that these two wretched miscreants must be the pair that he had unwittingly glimpsed by starlight having to do with each other with such gentle loving tenderness on that night not long since past.
“I doubt it, sah! Only kids, he said, they was – skinny, undergrown, your typical beggarly worthless Scotch; can barely speak a word of the King’s English, neither.”
Neither can half the King’s family, for that matter, thought William, to that.
“So they’ll dangle there kicking for half an hour, I reckon,” Hakeswill went on, gleefully, “doing the Highland Fling for all they’re worth - only it’ll be more of an Irish jig with their arms pinioned, I don’t wonder, haha! That’ll be a good show for the lads, teach them a lesson – not half as good as a flogging, though. If you ask me, they should be flogged raw, first.”
“Why? To shorten the duration of their dying, as the Romans did with those condemned to be crucified?”
“Romans, sah! I did not know but they was such soft buggers! Their bleeding Empire deserved to fall, then. Should never‘ve risen in the first place, if they were truly such great Nellies. Who cares about making it quicker? It would make it more of a hedifying spectacle, is what I ‘ad in mind. But that won’t ‘appen. Pressure of time, see, sir. You can never do a proper job punishing on the march, that’s what I always says. Apart from Black Bob Craufurd. He always knows how to make time for it, he does. Now, there’s a proper officer for you. None of your lenient Mary-Janes like Wellesley though, oh, no; nor yet your Colonel Charles O’Hara! They should flog the caitiffs along at the cart’s tail ‘til we camp somewhere nice and convenient and can take our time over it. Good day to you, Mr Lawford, sah!”
“Sergeant.”
Hakeswill walked away chuckling to himself. “Soft-hearted molly,” he said, contemptuously, under his breath, as he went; then, “That was a good night’s work, Obadiah! Peached on ‘em good and proper! Waited for ‘em to get hard down to it then called out in righteous hindignation for Sergeant McKinnon! Ha! Lawford’s bleeding lucky I didn’t peach on him about that other time when I seen him watching ‘em at it but failed in his duty. No surprise there, no, no! No, I won’t peach on him for that - not yet, anyway. But I knows what he is, haha! Bound to come to a bad end, is Lady fucking Lawford. Useless fucking cunt.”
As William drew close to Harris’s tent he was a little taken aback at what he saw. He was receiving a general impression of a crowded, eager milling about of finely-tailored scarlet coats, of bullion and gold lace and crimson sashes (almost like brightly-coloured ornamental carp in a pond at feeding time, it struck him); for several officers, not all of whom were from the 33rd, were nonchalantly loitering, as if quite by chance, in a cluster close by. Someone on Harris’s staff had plainly sent out the word that an entertainment of some kind was expected, with possibilities of high drama. No doubt there would be an hilarious low-life (for comic relief) featured in it somewhere, and it would be punctuated by Patriotic Songs, William observed to himself sarcastically within the privacy of his own head, and the whole would likely conclude with Rule, Britannia! and God Save the King in full chorus! This cloud of witnesses watched William with a mixture of condescension, disdain and open curiosity as he drew closer to his goal. It suddenly struck him forcefully that he was about to be the junior lead in this dramatic-comedic confection upon which the curtain was about to open. His stomach accordingly gave a great lurch. Glancing about nervously meanwhile in an attempt to gauge the situation as he approached, he heard one of these flaneurs say,
“Who’s this, then? Of the Thirty-third, I see.”
There then commenced a general vortex of speculation.
“Ain’t that, what’s his name, Cillian Wexford or some such?”
“Irish, eh?”
“No; you’re thinking of Gilliand Waterford.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Oh, you know, Ballyvolane’s second boy. Was supposed to be a clergyman but got himself sent down from Trinity for throwing his tailor in the Liffy when he came asking for payment of his bill, outstanding for two years.”
Then someone else said,
“That’s Walter Walford – some recent baronet’s Spare, from somewhere up near Peterborough, I heard.”
“A younger son, at any rate, from his creep-mouse mien. Seems very junior.”
“Youngest of four, actually - Earl of Winchester’s grandson,” then said a voice belonging to someone who gave the impression of actually knowing what he was talking about.
“Peer’s grandson, eh? An Honourable in a Regiment of Foot? That makes him something of a rarity. I wonder how that came about.”
“There are various conflicting theories doing the rounds. His father – if you can call him that, haha! – is the Viscount Petersfield. And the boy is Colonel McCandless’s nephew.”
“Colonel who?”
“Hector McCandless. The ‘intelligence’ fellow: the John Company wallah, on Harris’s staff. The one who’s been careless enough to be taken by Tippoo Sultan. Didn’t show much ‘intelligence’ there, haha!”
“Oh, him.”
“That he is this young spark’s uncle at least is not open to question. That’s why he’s been called for.”
“Ah. This would be Wilbert Crawford then?”
“William Lawford.” “Looks more like a Wilbert to me, hahaha!”
Another dozen yards or so finally brought William to the entrance to Harris’s tent. With his mind in turmoil still on account of the grim news which Hakeswill had so gleefully imparted to him not five minutes earlier, he ducked beneath the muslin screen – redundant, since two sides of the tent had been brailed up against the heat, and insects weren’t fools – and found himself within the demarcated notionally private space of General Harris and his two deputies, Baird and Wellesley.
“Light Company wings?” came a voice from amongst those gathered without, the comment following him inside. “I thought you were at least supposed to know your arse from your elbow to be in the Light Company. Intelligent, even. He looks like he was born yesterday!”
“Quiet, there,” cried Harris just then in a loud voice. “The lot of you, be about your business! This is a private meeting!”
Some of the audience outside deemed it prudent to leave and began to drift away; the remainder retired to a safer distance, only for some of them to creep discreetly back to their former stations once again as the conference within got under way. There were no officers of the 33rd there amongst them, of course. They were all currently otherwise engaged, knowing that, most likely, shortly they would find themselves obliged to attend the inevitable punishment parade once Private Sharpe had been found guilty of assaulting Sergeant Hakeswill.
William, who had at first imagined that Harris’s first irritable shouted order had been directed at him, had been unable to keep himself from flinching, and was now miserably aware that his cheeks were burning with embarrassment and that one of the other two senior officers in the tent was staring at him with a look of naked disdain upon his face. That officer was Lieutenant-General Arthur Wellesley. O God. As it happened, Wellesley’s foul mood was not entirely on account of anything William might have said or done. Just the fact that he was currently being forced to be in a tent with David Baird, and under an obligation to be civil to him, had been enough to sour his temper. But William was not to know that. One look at Wellesley’s thunderous face and William had simply wanted to run for it. But that was out of the question. His days of running and/or hiding when he found himself in threatening situations were long over. He looked longingly at Harris’s map-spread table, thinking of that long-ago night in the mess at Warley when his survival instinct, honed to a nicety during the many years at Durford when he had had to endure Charles and his vagaries, had taken him over at the unexpected sight of Colonel Wesley and he had simply ducked beneath the boards without thinking, to his everlasting shame. But no, he could not do that.
“Startled rabbit caught in the carriage-lamps,” Wellesley said then, to Harris, all too audibly. “I’ve already told you that I think this is a mistake.”
“Now, now, Arthur. Don’t rush to judgement. I confess I did set fire to powder and boom rather then, just as he was walking into my sights, as it were. Besides, Lieutenant Lawford is one of yours. I’d hoped you’d give him some credit?”
“How is he ever going to be able to pull off this absurd stunt Baird is proposing? Look at him!”
“I remind you, Arthur, that it was McCandless who proposed it, in that letter he left behind, to be opened in the event of his capture – well, the basic idea anyway. Of course, he never suggested we specifically send Lawford in after him. That was David’s idea.”
“For the love of - ! And what took you so long, Lieutenant?” said Wellesley, now turning his ire upon William. “You were summoned urgently by General Harris half an hour ago – you should have arrived at the double! You do not appear to have exerted yourself over-much.”
“I – I – sir – I’m sorry - I had to find Captain Fillmore – there was something I had to – “
Baird, who had until now been striding about the tent in impatience – at the heat, at Wellesley’s provoking presence (the two, famously, did not get on), at Lawford’s tardiness – at the thought of being obliged to be drawing so close to Seringapatam of loathsome memory, and its hated Sultan – halted his pacing.
“He’ll do it because he’s McCandless’s nephew!” he exclaimed, addressing Wellesley. “He’s a Scot, and Scotsmen are capable of anything. I’d never have asked him otherwise. You are a Scot, ain’t you, Lawford?”
“Sir? Oh, yes – or at least, half a Scot, sir, on my mother’s side,” ventured William. Hitherto he had never in his life thought of himself as a Scot. The idea, suddenly thrown at him like that by Baird, whom, truth to tell, he found quite overwhelming, even terrifying, was a confusing one. Even when at the age of twelve he had spent that summer at Spean Bridge with his McCandless cousins he had not felt in the least bit Scottish. But he was desperate to please all these important senior officers to whose presence he had been summoned, and to say the right thing; so, attempting to sound bold and confident – and, it went without saying, falling somewhat short on that score - because at once he had thought, asked me what? Is this to do with the note he sent me? O God! What is it that it would appear that I have agreed to undertake? – oh…” his thought ran on further, now recollecting his conversation with Major Shee.
“The better half, I’d wager,” said Baird, forcing a grin. He looked at the boy (for boy William seemed to him) and, in spite of all, at once felt his heart sinking at the sight of him, for William struck him now as anxiety incarnate. His face exhibited an unhealthy pallor - although hopefully that was merely the effect of the off-colour illumination inside the tent, which cast an isabelline pall across everyone and everything within it where the harsh sunlight was mediated through the grubby canvas overhead. His posture spoke of worry, of nervousness, of discomfort, of agitation. “You gave us to understand that you’re up for passing yourself off as a deserter in order to infiltrate the city and by that daring ruse rescue Colonel McCandless – you are still willing?”
William gaped at him but said nothing. He, a mere Lieutenant, could not possibly take issue with General Baird. He nodded helplessly, thinking What? Did I say that to Major Shee? I have no recollection of saying any such thing! I know I wasn’t thinking straight, though – I never can when I’m put on the spot by Majors and the like! Perhaps I did? I really can’t recall –
“Splendid! Silence gives assent! See, gentlemen, Wullie Lawford here is a true doughty Scot, however he protests his sorry half-Sassenach status.”
“So, Lieutenant,” said Harris, in a sceptical tone (he had initially thought the scheme ridiculous; Baird had persuaded him otherwise with his enthusiastic vouching for Lawford’s suitability, but now he was wavering again) addressing William, “and by the by, you may sit down -“ he indicated a chair which had been placed opposite to that which was currently occupied by Wellesley – another of those flimsy gilded sit-upons which looked as if it had been liberated from a ballroom in an English spa-resort, which might as well have been the twin of the one he had recently encountered in Major Shee’s tent (perhaps the War Office had had crate-loads of the things shipped out to India under a lucrative Government contract courtesy of one of Mr Trotter’s associates); William obediently sat, again thinking helplessly of ignominy in Bath three years since – “ - I should be obliged if you would explain to us in detail how you propose to pull off this mission of extraction, this feat, this – masquerade?”
“Masquerade, sir?”
William’s heart was thudding. He was still shocked. He had been completely blind-sided by Baird’s extraordinary lie – was it a lie? His mind was in such disarray he genuinely had no idea. Had he agreed to such a thing and then just casually forgotten? He remembered the bad old days, when he had spent weeks not knowing what day it was, when Mama had been having him drugged with laudanum, to prevent him from ratting on Charles and his abuses.
“When one pretends, guises, acts a part.”
Oh. Was it thesaurus time again?
“I ought to confess at once that I am really not very good at pretending, sir.”
“Why does the sorry milksop believe that?” someone very audibly remarked from beyond the rear wall of the tent this time, just then - a voice William suddenly thought that he recognised. “He pretends to be an officer every day, after all, hahaha!”
“You were ordered to clear the area!” boomed Baird at that, making everyone inside the tent start terribly, William not the least.
“And a – a deserter, sir?” William said, balking at the word and blushing to his ears again meanwhile. His head was spinning. A deserter? Officers did not desert! But for the time being he was quite unable to articulate what he was feeling. All he could think of was the ignominy inherent in the idea. “I don’t really – what if it got out that I’d – it would be shameful. I doubt my ability to play such a part. Indeed, I am not confident that I could act any part if my life depended upon it.“
“Oh, stuff!” said Baird dismissively. “You’d be surprised to discover what you could do if your life depended on it, Lawford. Twenty years ago I was a prisoner of the Tippoo Sultan, rather, that fat little bugger’s father, Hyder Ali - James Dalrymple and me! Nearly four years we were in that fucking dungeon in Seringapatam – biting insects – rats – the cell flooding with stinking water in the monsoon whenever the drains overflowed - our food contaminated – chained to each other - chained to the bloody wall! Damn fucking manacles! We damn near fucking drowned a couple of times because of the irons! Bloody bilboes! Like criminals! And those bastards used to beat us! And worse! Take us away one by one and have their fun! We were their sport! It was hell!”
“Oh, do stop going on about all that ancient history, man!” Wellesley snapped impatiently, exhibiting a rare display of open temper. Baird stared in surprise at his rival’s forthright interjection; but Wellesley had heard all of this so often at meetings of this sort that by now he thought that he could probably have just about recited Baird’s litany of ancient wrongs verbatim himself. He considered Baird’s often-aired grievances against Hyder Ali – indeed, against all Indians - to be nothing but unmanly self-pitying indulgence, unworthy of his Scottish heritage. “At least Hyder Ali didn’t make you and Dalrymple wear women’s clothes and dance like nautch girls, like it’s said he did with some of the drummer-boys he captured.”
“As if you would know what Hyder Ali did!” Baird blasted back at him. “You weren’t even at Eton then! I doubt you were even in breeches!”
“David, Arthur, please,” said Harris mildly, wishing that his two lieutenants would make the effort to become more civilly disposed towards each other. Celts, he supposed, indulgently - a Scot and an Irishman forced to react together as in a retort, the result being like one of those volatile outcomes the men of science were nowadays always so busily observing and describing and writing about in their learned journals. But this was a crucial campaign. He could not afford the unwanted vexation of finding himself in the position of having to preside over a divided household. The winner in such a situation, he thought, could surely only be Satan, or, for present purposes, his vicar on earth, the Tippoo Sultan. (13) Baird bridled, but eventually subsided. Wellesley snorted like a horse disgusted at having been offered a nose-bag of mouldering oats, and turned his head away, not wishing to look at his antagonist whilst his blood had still been up. William meanwhile glanced nervously from one to the other, his heart thudding irregularly. The situation felt too much like being at home at Durford Park for comfort, even though he told himself that nobody here was about to pull a grapefruit-knife on anyone, or slam a door.
“At any rate, I knew my life depended upon maintaining a bloody-minded determination not to die,” muttered Baird, in a petulant undertone, after a few moments had passed. “So I bloody well didn’t.”
Harris had been watching William closely during Baird’s bitter tirade, noting his look of alarm and intense watchfulness, and then his sudden pallor at the mention of chains and beatings and the other horrors attendant upon dungeon life.
“It’s all right, Lieutenant,” Harris said then, soothingly, returning to the former subject. “You’d only be a deserter from the point of view of the enemy – hopefully, provided you are able to fool them into believing that is what you are. Obviously we know officers don’t desert, and most likely they do as well. Can’t afford it, for one thing; you’d be cashiered, what! haha! And then shot, most probably! Hahahaha! For the purposes of this mission you would need to pass yourself off as a private soldier.”
“I see.”
William stared at him. How could he possibly convince anybody that he was a ranker? Tippoo’s French advisers would smoke him at once, probably. Even the Indians would see through that lie. They would only have to look at his hands. Like the other officers he wore gloves, and his hands were white, soft and unstained, unlike those of the men, whose hands were brown as mahogany from the sun, stained with powder, their nails torn, bloody and broken.
“Meanwhile, the story on our side of the fence would be that you’d been sent with an important despatch to Madras, Exploring Officer-level derring-do, desperate heroics, fighting off Mahratta bandits, sabre flashing in the fierce light of the tropical sun, pistols blazing away, and all that.”
“Important despatch, sir?” said William, unable to keep the scepticism from his voice. “Concerning what?”
“Oh, I’m sure General Harris could get one of his aides to work up the Malavelly encounter into something exciting and significant,” put in Wellesley sarcastically. “Get him to write us a proper up-and-down victory. You might even feature in it, if Harris’s aide can be persuaded to make a thorough job of it.”
“Arthur,” said Harris, with a sudden growl of warning.
“It was barely a spat, sir, let alone a battle, notwithstanding all those native dead,” opined Lawford, with impertinent honesty, meanwhile. “It was hardly a victory. It reminded me of Boxtel, truth be told – well, up to a point. One volley and a bayonet charge and they just ran away – the ones who weren’t dead, anyway. And I wasn’t even there, not really. Captain Morris sent me off the field after the volley, because – “
“Because what, Lieutenant?” said Harris, his eyes narrowing.
“There was an incident, sir, a stupid incident, concerning a musket belonging to – to a Private - Private Sharpe. I’d intervened on Sharpe’s behalf, you see, because I could see that it was all nonsense, and that he was not at fault.”
“Sharpe?” said Wellesley, with evident distaste. “The Private currently the subject of investigation for an alleged assault upon a Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir,” said William, briefly turning towards him. “Captain Morris did not like it that I had acted in the matter on my own initiative, without his permission, sir,” William went on, to Harris. “I was sent off the field – not in disgrace – not quite - at least, I think not - but he was quite angry with me. Like I’d disrupted some plan, or, or…”
Harris, Wellesley and Baird exchanged glances.
“Nonetheless, that circumstance has suited our plans very well,” observed Baird, after a little. “It put you effectively out of harm’s way. Indeed, I daresay that was why Captain Morris ordered you to retire. Major Shee must have briefed him. Captain Morris simply took the serendipitous opportunity to make the situation appear plausible to onlookers, most probably. I’ll have a word with him later on that score, commend him for his quick thinking.”
William looked at him sceptically, but he only said,
“So, one way or the other, sirs, I had no part in any victory that day.”
“You know that, and I know that, too, now, Lieutenant, but Horse Guards don’t need to,” said Harris, brightly. “The tale of your patriotic exploit, when it finally reaches London, will fill a column in the Times and the Post and perhaps even the Morning Chronicle (should Mr Perry be in a magnanimous mood) in the most satisfying way; contemplate upon that. Contemplate upon Mr Pitt commending your deeds in Parliament!”
“I am not sure whether my grandfather approves of Mr Pitt, sir,” said William, miserably. It sounded to him as if he were being set up to take part in a thoroughly ignoble charade.
“I am not sure whether the amphibious Mr Pitt approves of your grandfather neither, Lawford. But that kind of thing usually comes with a promotion at the end of it, you know, if I can offer a further inducement.”
“But it would not have been honestly earned. I should be a fraud.”
“Which would have been properly earned, Lawford, albeit in a somewhat different manner from that given out in the official story - if your true mission turns out successfully, of course.”
William sat in silence, considering this. Eventually he said,
“So… It would be no lie? I should have achieved something worthwhile indeed? Most importantly, I should not have to endure to be despised as a deserter?”
“No, of course not.”
“Nor lie about any illusory despatch-rider heroics? I should not have to repeat this farrago to anyone? Just rely upon official briefings to tell the story?”
“You would not be required to tell falsehoods, Lawford, especially seeing that the idea of it evidently pains you so. We should come clean about everything - after the event – eventually - and your fame would shine all the brighter for it.”
“I am not sure that I ought to wish for fame, sir - ”
“Nonsense, Lawford! Are these your hereditary Scottish Presbyterian scruples coming to the fore? Every young fellow wants to be famous! A hero! That’s why they ask their fathers to buy them commissions!”
“…in the cavalry, perhaps,” came the stage whisper from outside, again in that unsettlingly familiar voice.
“I shan’t warn you again, whoever that is who keeps interrupting!” yelled Baird. “False modesty will get you nowhere, at least in the Infantry, it is true, Lieutenant,“ he went on, in a milder tone of voice.
“Neither will true modesty, for that matter,” put in Wellesley, somewhat bitterly, making a rare positive contribution to this discussion. He had been staring intently at William for some time. The young fellow was holding his hat on his knee and his features, unobscured, were clear to him now. Something, some memory was stirring in him. That golden hair, unusual in adults - and that striking profile – he was sure he had seen it before, but it had been still half-formed then, demonstrating the soft and indistinct contours of the features of a pretty boy barely out of childhood. It was not so soft now: a few extra years had served to taughten the topography, straighten and define the lines.
“It’s not often a Lieutenant – and a junior one at that – “ (14) went on Harris, with a pointed look here at William – “ in a Regiment of Foot gets a real chance for renown. Grasp it with both hands, I should. Such an opportunity might never come your way again, or at least, not soon. You will really not be required to tell untruths about anything, Lawford, at least not to our friends, if that is all that is holding you back.”
“That is a great relief, sir. If I am killed, as seems quite likely, I should not want my – friends – at home to be left to think of me in such a way.”
“Neither should they be required to do so, Lieutenant.”
“Could I not – “ William began, feeling that he must speak what was in his heart, for he really was so very unhappy with the whole business as it was developing.
“What is it?” said Harris. Just as he had expected! “Are you getting cold feet?”
“Not – not exactly, sir; but – could I not just attempt to get into the city - as myself? There must be ways - ”
“What? You mean, walk up to the gate, knock and ask if you can come in and fetch your uncle out of the Tippoo Sultan’s Clink? As if you were a polite little chap meekly asking a neighbour for your ball back that you had accidentally kicked over the hedge and into his garden?”
William hung his head. It was hopeless.
And then suddenly, gloriously, it wasn’t! Out of nowhere, like a burning rock from a place in the great void beyond the courses of the nearer planets, an idea flashed just then into his head. William surprised Harris then with a radiant smile, which in the circumstances struck the General as distinctly odd, given the Lieutenant’s hang-dog demeanour up to that point.
“Proclus, sir!” William said, now immensely pleased by the satisfying realisation which had struck him as if from the blue.
“Eh?” “The story of Odysseus and Diomedes, sir.”
“Homer?”
“No, sir; not from Homer, but from the Little Iliad. The work itself is lost, but the adumbration of the tale is preserved in the chrestomathy of Proclus…?”
Wellesley meanwhile, no classicist and bored by all of this, stopped listening and then suddenly nailed the memory he had been attempting to grasp – Flanders – Warley – Lymington - the Princess Charlotte! Of course! The former Ensign William Lawford! Ardara’s bastard! He thought he had known those striking family features! He had seen the infamous blackguard’s nephew, the current Marquess, around in Dublin society often enough when he had been back in Ireland after Flanders to know that Fitz-Simons look. They were all of them blond in various degrees, all of them tall, or at least, not short, and all of them comely – some of them indeed indecently good-looking, like this present example (looking at him, Wellesley knew from experience that there would be no peace in any provincial garrison or officer’s mess with a face and figure like that a fixture in it). And all the Fitz-Simon men were degenerate in one way or another, so ran the gossip. Wellesley stared at young Lawford again, sizing him up. There could be no mistake. It literally was as plain as the nose on the Lieutenant’s face! At first, when Shee had said ‘William Lawford - Petersfield’s youngest - Winchester’s grandson’ he had not made the connection. He had forgotten! He had only thought, ‘another bloody Honourable who’ll never inherit, so they think to foist him onto me to try to make his fortune for him!’ Well, why should he have remembered one more silly insipid timid Ensign who had stammered and blushed if you had so much as looked at him, and who had had Expendability written all over his formerly soft girlish features, and who, it had been generally assumed, had been sent back to England halfway through the voyage to India only to die, if he had not died at the Cape first - and good riddance? Nobody had imagined then that Lawford would ever appear again amongst them, and besides, Wellesley had had a great deal on his mind over the last three years. He had completely forgotten him. But now it was all coming back to him. The incident in the mess when the boy had – the time he had had to run off the square because he - Wellesley passed his hand over his face – oh, and earlier in the march from Vellore! Good Lord! That had been Lawford! He had not remembered the name at the time. And now Harris seemed to think that the shoulders of this same useless, soft, naïve, young dilletante, only in the 33rd that first time around because his family had not been able to think what else to do with a superfluous fourth son but send him to the Army, and now come back again to haunt him for God knows what reason, could bear the weight of a crucial, a vital mission upon which the success of the campaign against the Tippoo Sultan absolutely depended! “Christ God!” William distinctly heard him mutter, “The benefits of a classical education!” (15) William flinched, and reddened again, but he pressed on, anyway.
“They disguised themselves as beggars, sir,” he said, to Harris. “Some sources say that Odysseus had his men whip him bloody first, to make him appear more convincing as a deserter, an ill-used soldier with a grudge, sir. Then he and Diomedes, sir, they crept into Troy by night, by a postern gate, it might be - I cannot remember how – perhaps they had learned the password from a captured Trojan in return for his life - and stole the Palladium.”
“Which was?”
“For God’s sake, does it matter?” said Wellelsley.
“It was an image of the goddess Athene,” said William, doggedly forging ahead regardless now. “The Trojans believed that it protected their city, so its loss was terribly bad for their morale. Thus contributing to the shortening of the siege, and the winning of the war, sir,” Lawford had continued, less confidently, because Harris had been staring at him now for some time in silence.
“Interesting. But I note that you are sirring me most assiduously, Lawford. Your enthusiasm for the classics appears to have caused you to regress to the condition of a precocious and somewhat over-excited schoolboy.”
“Sorry, sir – oh, sorry… but that was what they are said to have done, s- oh, sorry.”
“Is it, by Jove?” said Harris, thinking it was all very well that the subalterns of the coming generation of officers were better-educated than the current bunch of generals had ever been, scholarly, even (many of his contemporaries had had their Ensigncies bought for them at the age of thirteen and had never seen the inside of a classroom at Eton or Harrow or anywhere else); but this kind of thing was not going to rescue McCandless, far less bring down the walls of Seringapatam. “That was dashed unsporting of them.”
“Bastards deserved it,” Baird muttered then, possibly thinking less of Troy and more of his long-ago ordeal in Hyder Ali’s dark dank rat-infested dungeon.
“It was Zeus, sir,” said William, distracted and not really thinking about to what he was committing himself, still keenly, agonisingly aware meanwhile that he should have been speaking for Private Sharpe at the hearing which was even then taking place, and not sitting here agreeing to take part in this seemingly hare-brained scheme devised by his elders and betters.
“What?” said Harris.
“The Romans called him Jove. The Greeks called him… sorry, sir.” Shut up, you idiot! thought William, berating himself, as he often had done in the past when his tendency to blather on when anxious had threatened to run away with him, and had been doing even more frequently since he had returned to the 33rd, now furious with himself. But the thought of Sharpe combined with the recollection of the tale of Odysseus and Diomedes was just then causing what was striking him as a truly marvellous idea, sprouted not two minutes since, to take root, shoot and blossom with lightning rapidity in his imagination. Astonished at himself, his tongue altogether now running away from him, William said, with resolve, “They did indeed disguise themselves in order to infiltrate Troy, sir; and, like Odysseus, I believe I shall need a second man with me.”
“A second man? Why is that?”
“If I am to present myself successfully as a deserter, sir, it is this. Deserters most often, or so I have heard the men say, run in pairs. Friend runs with friend. And if I am to pretend to be a deserter, ideally the second man should be a genuine common soldier, to lend authenticity to the scheme. Officers do not run, sir; as you said, they would be cashiered, lose the price of their commission, at the very least; obviously therefore I cannot run as an officer. But, even if I should try to play the part of a common soldier, and go alone, I should be swiftly found out, I know it. They would smoke me as an officer at once. The Tippoo Sultan’s people are bound to know about the value of British commissions, that officers do not desert, on account of that. As well as out of honour of course,” he added, when Wellesley glowered at him. “The French would surely have told them that it’s one of our weakne… I mean, they would, they would go on about their Army being a meritocracy, the moral superiority of that - it’s just propaganda, I know… “ (Shut up, you idiot!) “I am beginning to feel that after all I have a selfish interest in attempting to make a success of this venture, besides a patriotic and familial duty – advancement - I should of course also wish to attempt it for its own sake, as it is the right thing to do - but to do that I am sure that I shall need a ranker as a comrade.”
Baird, Wellesley and Harris glanced at one another. Perhaps Lawford is not so naïve, so soft, so useless and therefore expendable, as he has often appeared, after all, those surprised looks seemed to say.
“Go on,” said Harris, his curiosity piqued.
“I am certain that it would make the charade more convincing had I a real private soldier with me, sir,” William said, becoming more animated and confident now with every passing moment. “By myself I’d never pass muster, but I think, if I could travel on the coat-tails of the genuine article, in a manner of speaking, then there would be a greater chance of success.”
Harris looked at him, taking in the Lieutenant’s appearance and demeanour. That, he concluded fairly quickly, was indisputable.
“My hair is wrong, sir,” said William just then, a frown of doubt appearing on his face.
“Wrong? In what way?”
“If I’m to be a common soldier, the regulations insist that my hair be clubbed and powdered; and it isn’t long enough. I had to have it cut when I had the fever and whilst I was convalescing; and then on the passage out it had to be cut again, because of the sea-sickness. It got into my hair, matted – “
“All right, all right, no need for details! Long hair ain’t too hygienic in this climate anyway, so in the normal run of things you oughtn’t to regret the loss of your crowning glory,” said the notoriously close-cropped Wellesley.
“I am afraid the ship’s barber did not make a very good fist of it,” said William. It is only just now growing out at last.”
“Hm. I was wondering why you had been sporting that Victim-of-the-Terror look, so fashionable five years ago.”
William said nothing to that, and was simply silently thankful that for most of the time he was required by regulations to wear what he had always regarded as a ridiculously over-large hat.
“I shouldn’t worry about your hair, Lawford,” said Harris. “The Company barber can provide you with a false queue - as you say, all enlisted men must wear a queue and powder their hair, and a lot of the men don’t have enough of their own, for whatever reason, and have to rely on hair-pieces.”
“Indeed, sir. But it’s not just the matter of my hair. I’ve never properly loaded and fired a musket in my life. I mean, I have been taught the drill, as all officers are taught, so I am familiar with the theory, but, sir, you know the officers are subject to the training for a little only, until they have become reasonably familiar with the actions. They are never made to repeat and repeat those actions until they are second nature, as the men are. That would certainly give me away.”
“But your father has taken you on shoots, surely!”
“Oh, yes, sir. I was eight when I was first allowed to go along with him and my brothers on a shooting-party. Ducks. Although always with a servant loading for me, sir. If they were to take me into the Sultan’s army, which I gather is the plan, my lack of proficiency at the very thing which is practically all that the enlisted men have to do would hole that lie below the waterline before I even uttered it. But if I had that other man there, sir, a private…”
“Hm. One who could provide you with discreet coaching in how to make love properly to Brown Bess!” said Harris, wondering vaguely then why Lawford had so suddenly reddened once again. “And generally tutor you in how to pass yourself off as low-life scum, eh? Haha!”
“Have you any particular enlisted man in mind, Lawford?” asked Wellesley, annoyed by all this levity and wanting to steer the meeting back to its proper course and get it over with – he was, after all, a busy man.
“I have, sir - Private Sharpe - Richard Sharpe – he would be just the ticket.”
“Sharpe?” snapped Wellesley. “But that’s the fellow who – “
“Fetched that rat-catcher’s dog Sergeant Hakeswill a right dinger on the Mary Rose, the night of Malavelly, I hear, haha!” said Harris.
“And about to flogged for it right now, they’re saying,” came a comment from without.
“Right, I’ve had just about enough of you!” roared Baird, leaping up and racing out of the tent in pursuit of the impertinent owner of the voice which kept interrupting the proceedings.
“For Christ’s sake,” said Wellesley, rolling his eyes.
“General Harris, sir!” said William, his stomach having given another great lurch. What? They had concluded the proceedings already?
“Yes, what is it, Lieutenant?”
“I think – I think the Court of Inquiry has come to a decision about Sharpe. I just heard – “
Looks – amused looks, concerned looks, annoyed looks – passed rapidly to and fro.
“Sharpe of the Thirty-Third’s Light Company,” said William, raising his voice a little to be heard, hoping that he did not sound as if he were coming it too high, as Baird returned, red in the face and muttering. His quarry had scarpered before he could catch whoever it had been. “He’s strong and resourceful, fast, quick-witted, shows initiative. The other men instinctively look to him for leadership. I believe that’s one of the reasons why Sergeant Ha – certain sergeants - dislike him so. I’ve seen Sharpe encouraging the enlisted men, keeping up their spirits, in adverse conditions. I’ve seen him fight, too – briefly – but he fought like he meant it; he didn’t just fire off his round and then wave his musket about for the look of the thing, as some do if they think no-one has an eye on them. He’s a good man, sir, one to watch, in my opinion. But we had better hurry, for I fear he’s about to be flogged for assaulting Sergeant Hakeswill. No doubt but that he is already sent to the halberds, (16) and the sentence is likely to be severe, sir. He might already be undergoing the punishment.”
“Pshaw! Matters would need to proceed to a Court-Martial first, Lawford, you know that,” said Baird.
“With respect, sir, Major Shee does not always – I mean, the protocols cannot always be observed as scrupulously as one might wish when conflicting necessities prove so very pressing, sir; and we are about to come up to Seringapatam.”
Harris fixed him with a look. You fool, William said to himself then, angrily, you bloody fool! You damn nearly criticised your commanding officer in front of three bloody generals!
However, Harris let that pass.
“This man Sharpe,” he said. “He assaults a Sergeant, you say - and yet you want him to accompany you on this mission?”
“I have good reason to believe that Sharpe was severely provoked, and that he is not by nature a man to be violent without cause, sir.” William mentally crossed his fingers as he said that. Over the last three months it had become pretty clear to him, again, that many if not most of the enlisted men had a history in which violence and criminality had featured prominently; it tended to be why they found themselves in the Army in the first place. Why should Sharpe be any different?
The senior officers looked at each other, looked blackly at William (although Baird then gave him a conspiratorial wink when the other two were looking elsewhere), and conferred. Then to William’s astonishment and utmost inner distress Harris decided to adjourn for luncheon!
It went without saying that William could eat no luncheon. His guts revolted at the merest idea of stewed goat and rice, a dish he could in any case only bring himself to eat if Anil, who knew what he was doing with the spices, had prepared it. There was an acid fountain playing in his breast by the time the council of senior staff reconvened at approximately two o’clock that afternoon. Yet his immediate fear, that his request would be denied, proved to be groundless, as it was granted, albeit from what appeared on the face of it for the most absurd of reasons. From what William was able to make out, the deciding factor in favour of his insistence upon Sharpe seemed to be that Harris had sometimes hunted with the Earl of Winchester, William’s grandfather (for the sake of argument), which was a ridiculous rationale upon which to grant him his petition, as Wellesley rightly observed, with another horse-like trumpeting of disapprobation down his eagle’s nose; but at least it was the right outcome; and so finally they told off Wellesley to extricate this Sharpe from the punishment which he was by now probably already undergoing. At this, Wellesley had first looked as if he were about to have a seizure.
“Why don’t you send him?” he demanded of Harris, with an abrupt nod of his head indicating William, who very nearly fell off his ridiculous spindly gilded chair in fright at being thus suddenly noticed by Wellesley – that parade in England four years since when his bowels had shamefully threatened to betray him and he had had to run for the privy still preyed on his mind, and he knew, he simply knew, that Wellesley had not forgotten, and, indeed, had probably been thinking of it even then - and at the prospect that, in front of the entire Battalion, he might have to interrupt the punishment parade and tell Major Shee to order Sergeant-Major Bywaters to call a halt to the proceedings.
“Because he’d most likely cry,” one of the voices to the rear of the tent muttered to another, who laughed and replied,
“Or piss himself.”
“Who is that!” Wellesley had exclaimed in exasperation. “If I hear another interjection of that nature – in fact, if I hear another interjection! - the culprit will regret it very much indeed!”
William glanced about. That familiar voice again. With a sinking feeling he suddenly recognised it and remembered to whom it belonged: Captain Fitzroy of the 6th Company. Duncan Fitzroy. Fitzroy, at Eton. O God!
At that moment Harris said,
“Shee probably wouldn’t take any notice of a mere Lieutenant, Arthur, and a very lowly one at that - certainly not upon an occasion such as that; he’d only have to come back to fetch one of us, so it’d save time, if you would be so kind.”
So Wellesley was after all obliged to go. He set off with a bad grace, plainly not happy with being treated as if he were Harris’s messenger boy.
“Hair-trigger tripes,” he muttered, as he strode testily past William; then stopped and returned to stand in front of him. “What can you do to the damn Tippoo Sultan - give him a volley from where the sun don’t shine, eh?”
“Sir!” William said, weakly, hurt.
“Don’t think I don’t remember you, now, Lawford. Your name meant nothing to me that day upon the march when you were blithering about lancers hiding in a jungle where you could not hope to get a spontoon point-first between the trees, but I know who you are now – and it is not merely on account of that business in the mess back in England when the unexpected sight of me caused you to hide under the table because you had had to flee the parade-ground a few days earlier on account of your guts. Oh, yes, don’t look like that, of course I noticed! Your grandfather laughed fit to burst when Mornington (17) told him that story as they found themselves in an antechamber waiting to see the King upon a time. You were the one they had to take off the Princess Charlotte at the Cape in Ninety-Six, too, weren’t you? They had to sway you down the side strapped to a litter! I observed the opening act of the pantomime from the stern-sheets of the gig as I was being rowed out to join her. And something else is ringing a bell – ah yes, you’re the one arrived at Madras last December with a clavichord wrapped in a tarpaulin!”
“Yes, sir…”
“Gave the raft-men no end of trouble!”
“Sorry, sir, I never thought – I had not imagined that we should have to be rafted ashore.“
“Of course you had not. You should have paid more attention to your Uncle McCandless on the occasions when he was home on leave, perhaps.”
“I thought – I thought perhaps there would have been built a harbour, or a quay, or a, a wharf, by now – “
“We have Francis Day to thank for the impractical situation of Fort St George – I suppose you knew that?”
William did. He had read it in a book. He blushed helplessly. “It’s said he chose the situation so that he could be close to – to – “
“The village where dwelt his mistress, a short way inland, Lawford, and you really should give over that Missish trick of yours. You are far too old to be still blushing like a maiden at any mention of such topics. In the Year Sixteen-Thirty-Four; one hundred and sixty-five years ago, and there is still no harbour, quay nor wharf – even the French did not bother, notwithstanding that they had won possession fifty-odd years ago – I suppose they knew they would not be in residence for long.”
“I should not have – “
“No, Lawford, you should not. Now, regarding that clavichord, take my advice and burn the thing. Better still, give it to the men for kindling. Music is all very well when you are at home in a gracious drawing-room in England, being obliged to make yourself pleasant to the ladies – one may tinkle and jingle all one wants, then - but there is no time for that kind of nonsense in the Army, especially when you are on campaign. I was once no mean musician myself, but I burned my fiddle in Ninety-Three when I decided that my time was too precious for such dilettante distractions. Should have done it years before.”
William stared at him in horror. Colonel Wellesley had burned his own violin? That seemed to him like the act of a barbarian – a Jacobin - a sans-culottes! It was the sort of thing that Charles had sometimes done to him in nightmares, as if what Charles had used to do to him in waking life had not been bad enough. “Music was my own father’s undoing,” Wellesley went on, meanwhile. “He taught the subject at Trinity College, did you know? Trinity College in Dublin, for the avoidance of doubt.” William simply shook his head, too astonished to speak. The Earl of Mornington, compelled to work as a glorified music master? Such a thing would be unthinkable in England! Still, he supposed it was less humiliating than a Marquess being reduced to getting his living by card-sharping. “A frivolous and careless person,” Wellesley was going on, meanwhile. “Never had any money, and then the thoughtless wastrel died. I was deemed a duffer, so had to leave Eton early in order that my brother Gerald could benefit from schooling instead. At least he showed some promise where I had not. I was certainly no loss to academia. That’s why I ended up an Ensign in the Seventy-Third when I was seventeen. (18) A dreaming impecunious composer of parlour ballads for a parent, notwithstanding he was an Earl – that’s the Irish peerage for you, Lawford – gilded potatoes, the lot of them! - and too many brothers. A position with which you might well sympathise.” What did he mean? William thought uneasily. Did he mean having too many brothers, or, what he said about the Irish peerage – was that meant as a pointed remark about - ? “Didn’t do me any harm in the long run though,” Wellesley was running on meanwhile. “For heaven’s sake, Lawford, stop looking at me as if I’d just recommended you chop your own balls off! If you want to get anywhere in His Majesty’s Army, give the jingling Spinnet - “ (19)
“Clavichord, sir – “ William blurted nervously.
“That damn box of tinkling nonsense; and how dare you presume to interrupt me when I am quoting poetry! - to the men for kindling, as I just recommended!”
“Yes, sir! Sorry, sir!”
“Come, Arthur,” said Harris then, mildly. “You’re hardly being fair. What about that great trunk of books you brought with you from England?”
“Those were to improve my mind, make me familiar with India, render me fit for the purpose of commanding,” said Wellesley, tartly, “not to indulge a dilletante amateur sensibility to no profitable end.” Harris recollected not a few racy and notorious titles which he had seen amongst the books of Wellesley’s travelling library, but said nothing. “They’d thank you for it, Lawford ,” Wellesley had gone on. “Save them some time they would otherwise have had to spend grubbing around in the brush. And for the second time, do try to stop blushing like a girl! Your face is disagreeing with your coat most raucous. Matches your sash, though. Oh, by the way, your mentioning of the Chrestomathy of Proclus - ”
“I’m sorry, sir, I said too much, my besetting fault, I must have seemed a very pompous ass indeed, sir - ” William said, with a sinking heart, certain that he was about to be taken to task for his usual sin of ‘chattering’ when agitated - straying from the point, trying to conceal his alarm and anxiety under cover of a cannister-round of words.
“I was actually impressed,” Wellesley said then, suddenly mild, if not kindly. Was that the ghost of a smile upon his lips? William did not dare to believe it. “You clearly knew the subject. You spoke from memory, you made no sly reference to notes – I took this to mean that you had thought of it there and then and had not planned it to impress? – and, crucially, without stammering. I recall you had a tendency to stammer in the past; I clearly recollect now that you did so in the barracks in Lymington over the winter of ’95; but you did not do so just then. You were engaged with the plan, invested in it. You contributed something of value. You have shown improvement – only a little, it is true – but improvement nonetheless, since last you graced the Thirty-Third with your presence.”
Wellesley did not wait for William’s thanks. He stumped off now, muttering to himself. There was a shocked silence.
“Thank you, sirs,” ventured William, mortified, to Harris, and to Baird, after a little.
“Don’t thank us, boy,” said Harris. Harris looked at him for a couple of heartbeats and then growled something at Baird which to William in his heightened nervous state did not manage to catch. Then, “How’s he going to steal McCandless away from under the Tippoo’s long nose?” Harris said to Baird in an undertone. “He looks as if he couldn’t even pick his own pocket!”
“That’s all right – no doubt this enlisted man of his would most obliging pick it for him. They’re all thieves of one kind or another, you know - they rush to enlist rather than wait to be made to swing for their crimes. Well, the ones that aren’t runaway murderers and seducers of women, anyway.”
Baird smiled at William encouragingly as he said this, then turned to address Harris once more. “Lawford will have this Sharpe with him, George. What is he, I wonder – a rogue and a thief, goes without saying - and worse, no doubt, like almost all the rest of them!” Now turning to William, he said, “Do you really think you can trust him, Lawford? Do you know anything about him? His background? Is he at least of the respectable poor? One always lives in hope.”
“Don’t seem likely,” said Harris, “seeing as how the fellow was being flogged for striking a Sergeant. Act of a desperate rogue, if ever there was one.”
“I – er – I’ve seen – “ William began, unthinkingly, then closed his eyes in horror at his near-indiscretion.
“Oh, yes? Seen what?” said Harris, onto him at once.
Damn! Now he was going to have to confess that he had read Sharpe’s service history! Take very great care how you frame your next few remarks! William told himself. “I… asked to see his entry in the Company records, sir. Captain Morris had asked me to identify the men of the Light Company fit for possible promotion. I thought to do this – sir, I confess, I anticipated the order.”
“Before Captain Morris gave you permission to do this, I take it?”
“I am afraid that I took the initiative myself. I am sorry that I neglected to seek the permission of Captain Morris, sir, before I asked to see the Company ledgers. That was wrong of me. I apologise. I was passing the tent which housed the Company Clerks and their apparatus and the idea came to me very suddenly. I acted upon it without thinking. I am afraid… when they asked me if I had sought Major Shee’s permission, I…”
“You lied.”
William’s face flushed an even more horrible shade of red, and he stared at the ground.
“Not long ago you gave us to understand that you find that the telling of lies is very disagreeable to you.”
“Yes, sir. I very much regret my actions, and my dishonesty.”
“Now that you have been found out. No matter now. Go on.”
“It is the usual kind of thing with Private Sharpe, I am afraid, sir. He is indeed not respectable. He was born in the County of Middlesex (20) and grew up an orphan in the foundling home attached to the parish workhouse in Wapping: but by the age of fifteen it seems that he was being employed as an ostler’s boy at an inn at a village called Catterick, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, somewhat to the left-hand side of the Great North Road, as you look at the map beginning at London. I could not determine how such a thing could have come about – how he should have got from London to Yorkshire alone at such a young age. I could only assume that he must have fled from authorities who presumably were seeking him in connection with some serious crime which he had committed. And then he seemed to have left his position at the inn somewhat precipitously - again, I suspect from necessity - and then enlisted when he encountered one of the Thirty-Third’s recruiting parties in a town called Keighley, this time in the West Riding of Yorkshire.”
“Running from the Law again?”
“Reading between the lines, sir, yes.”
“Then - why choose him?”
“I surmised from the nature of his employment that he has at least a certain understanding of horses, which would make him useful in many situations. As I said, he came there from London, which for a youth of fifteen, as he then was, suggests an enterprising nature. Also, I, er, I understand that ‘he glories in a Bastard’s glowing Name,’ (21) so if the mission should go awry, there will be no grieving parent in England to whom Major Shee need trouble himself to write a letter of condolence.”
“No doubt but that you surmise Major Shee would be glad to be spared the fagging inconvenience,” said Harris drily; but William wisely let that pass.
“’Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,’ Fitzroy, outside the tent, muttered to his companion, loud enough to be heard by those within. “That’s sure to ‘make the gruel thick and slab’.”
“Who is quoting from the Scottish Play?” Baird demanded loudly, addressing the persistent hecklers lurking outside the tent. “Do you wish to bring down a curse upon this vital endeavour? Cease your insolent interruptions, sir!”
“’Macbeth!’” squeaked someone in the vicinity, then. A sound of muffled laughter was heard coming from beyond the tent’s canvas rear wall. Baird ignored it.
“Sharpe will be the tool and Lawford’ll be the brains,” (22) he went on brightly. “They’ll make a success of it together, I have no doubt.”
William imagined how that speech had run on to its conclusion in the privacy of Baird’s brain: Or if not, at least they’re both expendable.
They spent another long hour waiting for the escort to return with Sharpe whilst William continued to fidget miserably on the Siege Perilous. He had to excuse himself and leave the tent twice, his bowels were so unstable and his bladder so nervous, which gave Harris further pause. Man’s as skittish as a governess in a gunroom, he thought. If he’s like this now, what will he be like when he’s trying to pretend to be someone else, blagging his way into the Tippoo Sultan’s army? This whole plan is just madness, it’ll never work, despite what David just said. This Sharpe might well be a cunning resourceful rogue, but he ain’t a gentleman – far from it - he’ll have no subtlety, no finesse; and McCandless won’t appreciate it that we’ve sent his untried nephew on such a mission with such a blackguardly companion. And what if he just cuts Lawford’s throat and runs for it – deserts in truth? He’s assaulted a Sergeant - what’s to stop him murdering an officer? Meanwhile William was hovering between gratitude for Wellesley’s absence – he did find the Colonel, or now Lieutenant-General, rather, so intimidating, notwithstanding that Wellesley was, at twenty-nine, only seven years his senior - and worry on Sharpe’s account - perhaps he’s too badly hurt, perhaps he’s even –
But just as he was thinking the unthinkable, Wellesley, together with a small escort, arrived with Private Sharpe at bayonet-point, as for the time being he was still technically a prisoner. They had wound him in bandages and put a clean shirt on him but the blood was already showing again on his back. He staggered on the uneven ground as he was led into Harris’s tent and appeared as if he would faint. William could not help himself. He gasped in horror at this bloody evidence of Sharpe’s ordeal, and at the undisguised look of raw suffering, and the naked hatred on the young man’s face, as he glanced around at the gathered officers. William quailed as their eyes briefly met, for he could see that, all former goodwill between them forgotten in that moment, Sharpe hated him, too, and saw him simply as another of his privileged enemies. William tried to draw a breath of fresh air, but there was none to be had in the stifling atmosphere of Harris’s tent, even with two of its sides brailed up, so he made an indecorous choking noise which he turned into a cough instead.
“How did that other sordid business go, with the Seventy-Fourth?” William overheard someone still hanging around outside asking then, put in mind of the sorry affair by the sight of Sharpe, evidently.
“Wretchedly. They were twenty-one and twenty. Questioned separately, each claimed to have been the seducer and to have been solely culpable, it seems. They begged for mercy, each for the other, and to die in his place. Neither could speak English to any intelligible degree, however, and those of their comrades with the Gaelic declined to act as translators, so deeply was their Presbyterian faith affronted by the pair’s heinous crime, so it was deemed convenient to treat them both as the senior guilty party. They were hanged, of course. They both wept as the halters were placed about their necks.”
“Hmph. Good riddance, I say. That fellow who just went in looked half-dead, by the way,” said the first speaker.
That was no less than the truth. Sharpe was swaying on his feet, weak from the terrible pain and loss of blood, traumatised by the horror of the ordeal which he had just undergone, confused regarding the circumstances surrounding why his punishment had been halted, or perhaps just suspended – were they playing some cruel game? had they just brought him here to mock him before sending him back to the hollow square to be flogged to the death? and suffering the onset of physical shock.
“What possible use can he be to our scheme?” said Harris, not without a note of sympathy in his voice. “He’s utterly done for, by the look of him.”
But the broken bloody young man was still collected sufficiently to identify the significant person in the gathering. His unsteady wandering eye first found Wellesley’s. Sharpe stared contemptuously at him for perhaps a heartbeat, then his gaze moved on to Harris’s eye, and held it.
“Use, sir?” he said; “Use for what? Why have I been brought here? I would know!” Harris, although at first given pause by Sharpe’s effrontery in looking him in the face and daring to address him at all, let alone so peremptorily, was all at once converted. Fresh from a ghastly agony which could have killed him, and still might, if the fever took hold of him, Private Sharpe had nonetheless summoned the presence of mind, to say nothing of undaunted insolence, to dare to look a General in the face and question him.
“Lawford,” said Harris then, turning to the Lieutenant, grateful to have the excuse to withdraw eye-contact from Sharpe. It had been making him feel profoundly uncomfortable.
“Sir?” William at once bounded to his feet. The damned chair fell over. He turned to pick it up.
“Don’t bother with the blasted chair, Lieutenant!” William snatched his hands away from the gilded out-of-place thing as if its spindly frame were red-hot. “Explain the mission to Private Sharpe.”
“I, sir?”
“That way we shall be confident that you yourself have grasped its essentials.”
“Oh. Of course, sir.”
William briefly adumbrated the plan, carefully choosing words he judged might make better sense to the Private than the ones which had been used by Harris when explaining the mission to him, sensibly omitting all mention of the Chrestomathy of Proclus and also attempting to take into account Sharpe’s current evidently compromised state of mind. When he had done, he looked nervously at Sharpe, who appeared to be considering. For a time there was silence; then Sharpe said,
“Is there anything in this for me? Assuming we succeed, and we don’t both get ourselves killed?” Private Sharpe spoke slowly, brokenly, with difficulty, breathing hard, evidently suffering extreme bodily anguish. Unconsciously meanwhile William modulated his breathing to match Sharpe’s own. He could not bear to imagine what Sharpe suffered. He had seen too much of that kind of thing since he had arrived in India.
“Private?” said Harris, dangerously calm.
“I mean, sir, you stand to get the information you need to win the campaign. Mr Lawford stands to get his uncle back, and a leg-up to a Captaincy, I don’t doubt. What do I get out of it?”
“You have already had your sentence commuted!” said Wellesley, coldly. “What you get out of it is that I don’t send you straight back to the triangle and have the drummers finish the damn job!”
“Steady on, Arthur,” said Harris. “He has a point, you know. We are asking a great deal of a man not trained in subterfuge or methods of intelligence, and moreover currently in great physical distress, which I suspect is to put it but mildly - do you not agree, Private Sharpe?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Much bravery, skill and resourcefulness will be demanded of him – of both of them, for that matter – and I am willing to be generous and assume that Private Sharpe indeed possesses all three in a degree quite out of the common – but subtlety… I think that would be where Lawford would come in. Lawford?”
William had been surreptitiously picking up the little gilded chair and had been about to settle himself back onto it. Taken by surprise, he started. The chair fell once more to the ground.
“Er…” he said.
“Yes or no, Lieutenant! Decisiveness will also be required in this mission upon which you are about to embark. Can you be subtle?”
“Yes, sir – um - ” said William, desperately hoping that cunning and slyness, forged in the fire of necessity in childhood, qualities which he feared he did in fact possess, were at least not too far away from subtlety, a more wholesome attribute which he was very much afraid he entirely lacked.
“Good. Private Sharpe – what would you wish as a reward, assuming you are successful?”
“My stripes, sir,” Sharpe said, decisively. “But you already have your stripes, in abundance even, one could say, what? Haha!”
At this there came answering laughter from Fitzroy and the other eavesdroppers still clustered about the rear of the tent.
“I meant, sir, I should want to be raised to Sergeant,” said Private Sharpe, with an impressive quiet dignity which now silenced most of those who had lately laughed at him, it struck William (who was once again doggedly attempting to retrieve the chair without drawing attention to himself). At any rate there were no more interjections from outside. “I should have made Sergeant, by now, if I hadn’t been broken from Corporal back in England. I want my stripes back - and an extra one.”
He thinks he has nothing to lose! was William’s thought, at this, as he finally succeeded in sitting down again. Shut up, shut up, you beautiful utterly desirable bloody idiot – dear God, did I just think that? Oh, Mark - !
“You were broken down from Corporal?” asked Harris.
“Yes, sir.”
“Deservedly so, I have no doubt, Private Sharpe.”
“Yes, sir, it was deserved. I earned the punishment, no two ways about it.”
“What had you done?” “It were Christmas night, sir, back in Lymington, the Year Ninety-Five. Drunk on piquet, I was, sir; that, and insolent to the Sergeant what called me out for it. I were lucky I weren’t flogged for it, sir. But I’ve learned better now. I know now what it takes to be a Corporal, and I didn’t have it then, sir. I didn’t have the stiffness in me, the discipline. But I reckon I could make a good fist of being a Sergeant now, sir. Besides, if I succeed in helping Mr Lawford to carry out your scheme, against all these odds, it’ll be proof enough of that, I’d have hoped, sir.”
“He has a point, sir,” ventured William, glancing at Baird and at Harris and at once feeling his face reddening again at his own temerity, so that he did not glance at Wellesley, fearing another tart rebuke.
“Seems reasonable to me,” said Baird, after a short silence whilst they had considered.
There was silence again in the tent as for a time it seemed that Wellesley, by the look in his eye and by the spasms generated by his still-outraged sense that justice had been thwarted flickering ever and anon across his face, had been about to spontaneously combust; but in the end, he said,
“Oh, very well! Sergeant Sharpe it is – provided you succeed in this venture.”
“Thank you, sir!”
“You don’t have it yet. Your hair is a disgrace, Private Sharpe, by the way,” went on Wellesley, coldly, and he was not wrong.
“Yes, sir, sorry, sir; I was told I had to wash out the blood before they would bring me here, sir; but the flour went all in clumps, sir, with the water and all, sir. I know I must look a right bloody mess, sir. Sorry, sir, I shouldn’t have said that.”
Innocently spoken, impudently intended, no doubt. Wellesley felt anger rise within him anew; then he looked at the young man again; now with sudden intense interest, as if it had at that moment occurred to him that perhaps Lawford was not such a fool, and that the British Army might have just identified, hidden until recently within its ranks of anonymous scoundrels and rogues and dullards, a man who could, now, and perhaps for many years to come - if Mars, that fickle God of soldiers, chose to favour him - prove himself to be its invaluable secret weapon.
“See that you remedy the matter as soon as may be,” was all he said.
“Yes, sir. A Sergeant’s stripes, sir?”
“I have said so, have I not?” Wellesley snapped irritably.
(23) *“A Sergeant’s stripes, Sharpe, if you succeed,” said Baird.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Sharpe said.
Baird dismissed him.
“Go with Lieutenant Lawford now, Sharpe, he’ll tell you what to do. And one other thing – “ the Scotsman’s voice became urgent. “For God’s sake, man, don’t tell another soul what you’re doing.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, sir,” Sharpe said, flinching as he stood up.
“Go, then,” Baird said.*
“Take care tonight, Lawford,” said Harris. “There isn’t much of a moon left. Waning crescent. But enough to be spotted by, to any as has their night’s eyes. You may depend upon it that the Tippoo’s men have eyes like cats. Or tigers! Haha. Oh, and most important – best to leave your commission in the safe-keeping of Captain Morris. If that was to be found on you by the Tippoo’s people, all would be up in an instant!”
“Yes, sir,” said William, his heart sinking, now that it came to it at last. He very much did not want to leave his commission in Morris’s far-from-safe keeping. He had seen the state of Morris’s desk often enough for him at once to take great alarm at the thought. He feared, with justification, that he might never see the precious parchment again if he entrusted it to the careless custody of that drunken indolent scrub of a Jack-Pudding.
“By the bye, there’s a name you should commit to memory, Lawford, when you go into Seringapatam to retrieve Colonel McCandless,” said Harris “It is important. It is Ravi Shekhar. Remember it now. Ravi Shekhar.”
“Who is?”
“A merchant of the city. He deals in metals of all kinds. Not quite like your future father-in-law, the ironfounder, I imagine. The utilitarian ones rather than the precious ones, but those have great value at this time. Because his business is scavenging after military engagements here and there he has contacts who bring him, along with what they have retrieved of iron and brass, steel and bronze, all kinds of shreds and patches of news which he pieces together into usually reliable accounts of what is afoot in Mysore. Shekhar has a true feeling for this work. Sometimes it is mere twittering nonsense that his many small sparrows chirrup to him, of course, and then he discounts it, having sifted it very fine for the merest hints and possibilities. But sometimes large pieces of fresh meat fall from a height, from the beak of an eagle, indeed, and not the customary half-rotten rubbish a vulture might let drop, if you will allow me my extravagant metaphor. At the moment we are anxious to receive tidings of these larger, fresher gobbets. Now, what was his name again?” “Shekhar, sir - Ravi Shekhar.”
Just then Sharpe raised his head, turned his gaze upon Wellesley and looked him straight in the eye. William, seeing what he did, directed his own eyes nervously towards Sharpe for a moment - looked away - looked back – Sharpe was still staring at Wellesley. What could he mean by that? It would take very little, William knew, for Wellesley to take mortal offence and insist on the ranker being sent back to the triangle, up-ending their plans and worse still - ! William was regarding Sharpe with fear and apprehension now - for a moment, perhaps two, three moments longer than was needful he watched Sharpe’s face, shocked at the burning hostility which he saw still written upon it and terrified for him as he sensed Wellesley’s rising wrath. He knew that Sharpe understood very well that Wellesley had disapproved of his reprieve, had wanted him returned to the hollow square, would not have cared at all if the outcome of that had been Sharpe’s death. In Sharpe’s face William had read incipient mutiny. Dreadful anxiety on Sharpe’s behalf was plain to be read in William’s features, and to a greater degree than mere legitimate concern of a junior officer for the fate of a man of his company might have warranted. I see, thought Baird cannily, watching Lawford watching Sharpe. So that’s how things stand with our young Wullie. That needs to be nipped in the bud! Well, maybe the Tiger King with his pointy teeth will be just the one to do the nipping.
What! Wellesley was thinking meanwhile. Now the fellow is having the temerity to look me in the face, too! He looked about to see if the others in the tent were aware of Sharpe’s insolence. Harris was preoccupied with squaring off the papers which had lain before him upon his folding table. (End of awkward meeting. Deo gracias.) Baird looked as if something surprising had just occurred to him. Lawford - Oh, for God’s sake, Lawford! Wellesley thought, for at that moment, it struck him, Lawford looked for all the world like he was newly in love! Furious as he felt, however, he knew that the mad scheme had to go ahead now. But Sharpe - ! Sharpe was still glaring aggressively at him. At some point, Wellesley told himself, he would have to have something done about that, but right now that could not be a priority – McCandless was taken and they had to get him back or the Tippoo Sultan would have won and Britain would have been humiliated in the eyes of the world, and as for him, Arthur Wellesley, all would be over for him, and probably for his brother Mornington and for their cadet Henry, the plum of India snatched from the grasp of their family, the humiliating fate of impeachment before Parliament even a possibility, as had happened to Warren Hastings a little over ten years before. This scheme had to succeed! Wellesley looked at Sharpe once more. Just then all at once he had the strong sense that he would never have to ask this terrible man his name ever again, though. It was fated, he was sure, to be etched forever into his consciousness. His name was Sharpe, after all - Richard Sharpe - and this ludicrous caper, intended to topple the Tippoo as much as to rescue Colonel Hector McCandless, somehow, Wellesley just knew it, was going to be Sharpe’s own secret mission, in which Lawford, even if he could somehow manage to avoid being an outright bloody liability and a Martin Mar-All (which Wellesley doubted – a bloody clavichord!) seemed doomed to become a mere foot-note. The Tippoo Sultan, Wellesley instinctively guessed, if the business was to turn out an unlikely success, was destined to become, not Lawford’s trophy, but Sharpe’s. Fateh Ali Sahab Tippoo, or Sher-e-Mysore, or whatever these bold, clever, canny, dark-skinned (24) fine-looking heathens cared to call him, would shortly garner another title, although one no doubt which would be little to his liking: for he would be Sharpe’s Tiger. Notes
1.A common usage, inclusive of family.
2.Pope. Eloisa to Abelard. 1717. The Viscountess had been a great reader in her youth. At this point Jessica Hayles was fourteen years old and a pupil at a boarding-school for young ladies in Reading.
3.Cups commonly then did not have handles.
4.The grapefruit is a citrus hybrid which originated in Barbados in the seventeenth century. It was sometimes called the forbidden fruit.
5.Owing to the circumstances – his betrothal to Jessica, combined with his habitual kindness towards the disregarded and despised – William had spent much of his time at balls in his youth dancing with plain young women who (unless they had £5,000 at least) must otherwise have been left sitting, disregarded by the other gentlemen, by the wall all the night, a thing which his compassionate heart could never bear. He had not minded; he had done his duty by the unfortunate maidens – but inevitably he had, however inadvertently, probably left many a wounded heart in his wake, as, sighing and sore-footed, the young ladies had eventually climbed into their beds as dawn had been breaking the morning after the ball.
6.The speaker is saying that his father says that William is the image of his father – the late Marquess of Ardara, Gerald Fitz-Simons.
7.Miss Eversham never married (notwithstanding her very respectable £10,000 - but then she had never wanted to) but carried always in her heart the affectionate memory of that kindly young Lieutenant of the 33rd. She died, a contented spinster beloved and regretted by her several nephews and nieces and their children, in 1857, each of whom received a modest legacy, which made them all quite happy.
8.An officer, usually newly-commissioned, who paid exaggerated attention to unmarried young women for purposes of fortune-hunting.
9.Sherbrooke was in command of the 33d that day, not Wellesley.
10.This would have been the case with a Midshipman in the Royal Navy of the day. The Army was not so fastidious. It is to be hoped that any regiment under the direction of the Hon. Arthur Wellesley would have followed a similar practice for the training of its junior officers, however.
11.The family name of the Earl of Mornington was still spelled thus in 1794.
12.John Shee became a Major in the 33rd Regiment of Foot on 1st December 1794, almost three months after the battle at Boxtel.
13.See St Matthew 12:26.
14.Harris is probably unaware of Lawford’s earlier history in the Havercakes.
15.At school Wellesley had shown little aptitude for the Classics, which might have left him with a degree of resentment and impatience towards those who had.
16.The military equivalent of the civilian expression to push the tumbril, a reference to the time long past when felons were whipped through the streets at the cart’s tail, a practice which fell out of use at the end of the 16th century in favour of carrying out the sentence at static locations within prisons.
17.Richard Wellesley, second Earl of Mornington, Arthur Wellesley’s eldest brother.
18.Wellesley left Eton in 1784 when he was 15 – limited funds meant that the education of his more academically able younger brother Gerald (the only one of the five Wellesley brothers who failed to become a member of the House of Lords owing to his marital irregularities – a clergyman, he was repeatedly denied a Bishopric) was prioritised over his. He then spent a pointless year living with his mother in Brussels and then a more profitable year at the Royal Academy of Equitation in Angers. His family purchased his Ensigncy in the 73rd, a Highland regiment, shortly before his eighteenth birthday.
19.James Miller. Harlequin-Horace; or, The Art of Modern Poetry. 1731.
20.Middlesex, no longer a county since 1965, included within its borders the east London boroughs of Wapping, Bethnal Green, Bow, Stratford, Poplar, Stepney and Hackney, amongst others.
21.Richard Savage. The Bastard. 1728.
22.As things were to turn out, it would prove to a large extent to be the other way round, after Sharpe somehow took command of the enterprise, whilst Lawford was revealed, on that occasion at least, to be a not inconsiderable tool (Contemporary 21st century British slang for a naïve person easily manipulated by others).
23.The section marked * to * is taken from Chapter 4 of Sharpe’s Tiger.
24.This is meant to reflect the typical attitude and values of a white upper-class British man, particularly an army officer serving abroad, at the end of the 18th century, and not those of the author, writing in the third decade of the 21st. NB Regarding Sharpe’s Court of Inquiry and punishment, this is highly irregular and ought not to have been conducted in this manner (and in real life probably would not have been). The British Army was in fact very punctilious in administering justice by the book. The punishments were often savage but at least they were – usually - arrived at by due process.
FOOTNOTES
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FOOTNOTES
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