|
Warning: General Audience |
|
|
Lawford’s Duty
A Passage to India: Memories, Impressions, Reflexions.
Lawford’s Duty. Copyright © 2026 by A Lady
Sable Crow who supports our fanfiction with her website SharpeTales.net.
And
Bernard Cornwell who brought Richard Sharpe into our world.
Fort St George, Madras – January 1799.
/
PARAGRAPH ONE
A few days later – it was now almost the end of December - Sergeant Bickerstaff came seeking him out once the morning’s parade had been dismissed.
“Good morning, Sergeant,” said William, beginning to rise to his feet, then realising his mistake and sitting down again. Bickerstaff now looked slightly embarrassed, and William reddened in his turn, for having been the occasion of the Sergeant’s discomfort – but otherwise he was feeling quite chipper that day, as the section for which he was responsible had just put on an unusually good show, which for the first time had earned him, if no overt praise, at least no public rebuke for slackness from Captain Morris, as had happened on two or three occasions since his arrival. His practice at being an officer once again with the Marines on board Néreide over the last several months had definitely paid off. Although he was annoyed with himself for having embarrassed Bickerstaff. “How might I help you?”
“It’s about your horse, sir.”
“My horse?” William said apprehensively, his bubble of cheerful confidence all at once deflating. At once he felt a sensation almost like a physical pain at his heart, for his annoyingly self-willed brain had suddenly presented him with a picture of poor murdered Audax lying in the glade in Durford Wood, dead in his gore. That nightmare image had frequently flashed upon his inner eye, usually when his guard had been down - perhaps as he had lain upon his cot at night waiting for sleep to claim him, during the voyage, and still since his arrival in Madras; or sometimes during the day when his mind had begun to wander whilst he had been about some dull task which Morris had imposed upon him - making lists, say, or compiling rosters, or drafting reports - or when wondering what manner of dead animal (or its inner parts) would be served up for them at dinner that evening in the Mess.
“We’re off to Wallajabad soon, sir, once the Governor-General arrives and we know what’s happening, whether he’s coming with us to Seringapatam or not - so I’ve been told anyway. Sergeant-Major Bywaters says his ship is expected any day. We’ll re-join the Battalion, then it’s off again to the grand muster at Vellore at last, we are. Orders any day now, most like - and you’re going to need a horse, sir,” said Bickerstaff firmly.
“I am?”
“I thought that, since Major Shee said at this morning’s parade that we’re allowed to go out into the town again, now might be the time.”
Following the incident in which some members of the Light Company had disgraced themselves on the evening before William’s arrival, Major Shee had forbidden the remaining companies of the 33rd to leave the fort except on military business. The ban had now lasted for seven days and there had been much low-key chafing and grumbling amongst those who had done nothing to deserve it. William looked at Bickerstaff uncertainly.
“My understanding was that I am not entitled to a horse, Sergeant. This is a Regiment of Foot, after all, and I am very probably one of the most junior of its Lieutenants, if not the most junior. I do not think that Major Shee would be pleased to find that he was obliged to put in for fodder for a superfluous beast belonging to me. I think he would tell me that I should just damn well walk to Seringapatam, like most of the other subs will no doubt have to do, to say nothing of the men.” (1)
“Good luck with that, then, sir, in them boots,” said Bickerstaff, dead-pan but with a twinkle in his eye, nodding meaningfully downwards.
William happened to be wearing a very beautiful pair of Hessian boots. The stitching was exquisitely fine. The boots sported gilded tassels and were lined with the softest kid leather. William had had them made at George Hoby’s famous workshop in York-street, Covent Garden, in advance of his first attempt to reach India more than two and a half years ago now. They were perfect for a royal levée or a reception or a formal dinner, say (provided that there had been no dancing to follow) but, as Bickerstaff had observed, they would not serve him for the almost three-hundred mile march to Seringapatam which he knew they would shortly have to undertake. He had chosen to pull them on that morning in advance of the parade because he loved the look and the feel of them. Moreover, he had been feeling anxious and uncertain about how he would acquit himself, not just on the parade ground that day, but in the coming campaign, and he had recalled that in the past wearing these boots had caused him to stand a little taller, a little straighter, and had generally made him feel better about himself, on those earlier occasions upon which he had worn them. It was possible that they had even contributed to the fine performance which he and his section had put on that morning. He had certainly felt an increase in his confidence on account of them. He had gone on feeling good, afterwards, even if all he had been doing whilst wearing them since coming off parade had been to sit at a table making several copies of Major Shee’s orders of the day, to be carried by Ensign Hicks to all officers as soon as he had finished the task.
“Not in these boots, obviously, Sergeant. But as I was saying, I think I shall just have to foot it to our assignation with our good friend the Tippoo Sultan. Even if Major Shee did not disapprove of my going mounted, I am sure Captain Morris would have something to say about it.”
“Don’t you worry yourself about those two gentlemen, sir,” Bickerstaff said doggedly. “Mr Fitz-Gerald, now, he has a horse, and he’s only acting Lieutenant, on account of poor Mr Raymond dying of the flux.”
“Mr Fitz-Gerald is brother to the Knight of Kerry, the Green Knight, as he’s known. So neither Major Shee nor Captain Morris would dare to suggest to him that he should not ride. And the Fitz-Geralds are, after all, very thick with the Wellesleys.” (2)
“And your grandfather is the Earl of Winchester, sir, know what I’m saying?”
William considered, thinking, Actually, no… Lord, but things were complicated! His grandfather might not be the Earl of Winchester, but his father had most definitely been an Irish peer – Gerald Fitz-Simons, Marquess of Ardara – like the Fitz-Geralds, like the Wellesleys. Strangely, for all the time he had been aboard Néreide William had not thought about his status or his family (the Lawfords were his family, notwithstanding the vexed question of paternity, for his mother had married into them) or the various titles and dignities with which a grateful Queen Anne had once honoured them after the triumph of Blenheim ninety-five years ago, or that his supposed grandfather had a seat in the House of Lords, or anything of that sort. William had been five, nearly six months amongst officers of the Royal Navy and had discovered that they had a refreshing disregard for such things. If they had had a Viscount or a Baronet or an Honourable amongst their number, then what of it? They were all officers together. This, he had suspected, had had had a lot to do with the effect of being isolated from land-based society for long periods of time, forced into close proximity with a body of men of all sorts and conditions which was just about of Battalion strength (or somewhat less if the ship were a frigate like Néreide), voyaging in what, viewed from a Divine perspective, was a tiny relatively fragile vessel almost lost to sight in the immensity of the ocean – a little ark of humanity which could be swallowed by a great wave in an instant and dragged into the depths, where sharks and all manner of abyssal horrors waited to swallow alive all those who had not been fortunate enough to be drowned at once. The thoughts which arose in the mind in such a situation, where all were forced by circumstance to become philosophers, William supposed, would tend to preclude dwelling upon such trivial matters as titles and status. In the Army, however, where it was an impossible, almost inconceivable thing for an entire Battalion or even Half-Battalion to be obliterated in a heartbeat (3), and death was generally a more piecemeal affair and contemplation of it therefore proportionately less awe-inspiring, it was a different matter.
“Ah. I suppose I shall need a horse, in that case.”
“That’s the business, sir. Even in something more walked-in and sensible than them fancy boots you wouldn’t have got far on foot! You’d a-been falling out of the column with raw bloody blisters before we’d gone three mile, sir, so you would. No reflection on you sir – but you’ve been on a ship for months on end, not marching anywhere, and your feet haven’t had time to toughen up.”
“So, Sergeant, that being the case, how do you propose that I should proceed?”
“I’ll come with you into town and find a decent trader, if you’ll permit me, sir. I’m not bad with the horses, and Mary has told me a thing or three – she was brought up in the Army, father a major under William Baillie – died at Polly Lore (4) - but I know a man who really knows them. Sergeant Sinnott, he’s with the Grenadier Company, a rare old fox. ‘If anyone can aid me, ‘tis my brother in the Army.’”
“Your brother?”
“He’s a fine singer, sir. Irish. That’s from one of his favourites. Shall I fetch him?”
“I truly should be most obliged, Sergeant.”
“Right you are, Mr Lawford, sir.”
William was very much inclined to like Bickerstaff. He had been in awe of him back in Flanders, as Bickerstaff had always seemed so calm, so capable, even when men had been falling victim to frostbite and starvation and sickness in those last weeks of the retreat to Bremen, that dreadful trek back to the coast through a frozen landscape as hellish as Dante’s Ninth Circle (that winter had been characterised as the worst in living memory throughout the entirety of northern Europe, and would remain so until January in 1809 when the British Army would again be in retreat, this time through the mountains of Galicia to the ports of Vigo and La Coruña) when it had seemed as if discipline had been perpetually on the point of breaking down entirely. Corporal Bickerstaff, as he had been in those days, had always known what to do, what to say, how to be, how to retrieve a worrying situation, how to calm the men and manage their fears and grievances and render them governable again, even if the officers, suffering and pretty much powerless themselves in the face of the indifference and incompetence of the staff at the British headquarters tens of miles away, had been at their wits’ end. Bickerstaff was an honest man, and an honest worried man at that. William had been surprised by the forthright warning Bickerstaff had given him regarding Hakeswill and Morris almost at once upon the resumption of their acquaintanceship, as if it had been a matter of the greatest urgency, and that had given him pause. If his concerns had been minor or even middling, surely Bickerstaff would have held his tongue. But he had been open in expressing his misgivings to William, and now the situation with the 33rd was causing William himself to feel deeply unsettled, for, reviewing the position, he had been coming to his own unhappy conclusions: his acting Commanding Officer, Major John Shee, was a drunkard, and even had he not been, he was incompetent – Obadiah Hakeswill, the senior Sergeant of the Light Company, was some kind of dangerous madman - and there seemed to be something indefinably degenerate and – well, wrong - about Captain Morris - although, William thought, he barely had the right to criticise anyone else on that account.
Sergeant Bickerstaff proved to be as good as his word. Within a quarter of an hour Sergeant Michael Sinnott turned up, a tall and strong-looking man from County Wexford (5), by his accent (“Although don’t let that worry you, sir,” he told William, with a grim smile, when William had asked him where he came from – he could not help but be worried if he heard that a man hailed from Donegal, on account of what he might have heard concerning him – “I am not about to mount your head on a pike!”); and so he, Sinnott and Bickerstaff went into the town to take forward the laudable project of finding a serviceable horse for Mr Lawford, and, if possible, one that came in comfortably at under one hundred guineas.
“Nothing too fine,” William had insisted, anxiously, aware that if he were going to get away with having a horse at all then he would need to demonstrate an appropriate degree of humility, as well as frugality, and cursing Charles, yet again, for slaughtering Audax. Quite apart from the pain which the loss of the horse, whom he had considered a friend, had caused him, he had hoped that the Viscount would sell the beast and realise a good price which would cover the future expense of obtaining another animal; now instead he was going to have to see the banking agent in Madras and ask him for an advance, and for him to write to the Viscountess’s bankers back in London in order to fund the purchase. William was painfully conscious that as a de facto newcomer to the Battalion he was still really very much small fry, hardly any more exalted in the pecking order than he had been back in Flanders when he had been only another expendable Ensign, a glorified gonfaloneer. He needed only a useful sound-winded horse that had not been ill-used, was not hard-mouthed, that was of respectable appearance, that at least looked more or less the part of a junior officer’s mount and which would not go lame on him or shy at the sound of musket-fire. If it was also inured to the noise of gunnery, so much the better. William hoped that he would be able at least to afford a decent English-bred horse. He had already seen British officers of restricted means - big, beefy, blond, red-faced, long-legged men - mounted on small scrawny native breeds, and had thought that they looked ridiculous, like they were stuck astride a stile or a withy-hurdle. Better indeed to walk than to cut such a sorry figure! Frankly William thought that he would rather trek all the way to the far north, to those mountains the sacred peaks of which were said to touch the hem of the skirts of Heaven, in his beautiful but impractical boots, than be seen riding one of those! There was no chance in the world, of course, that he could be in the market for an Irish horse – no, he would have to be Lieutenant-Colonel Lawford at least, and come into whatever small inheritance would be his, before there would be any likelihood of that! In any case, he still mourned poor martyred Audax, and believed that there was no horse anywhere in the world which could usurp Audax’s place in his affections.
William watched for a little whilst Bickerstaff and Sinnott made their initial selection, and then, when the proceedings were becoming a little too specialised for his comprehension, he wandered off to see the banking agent. After that, because he was feeling relieved to have got that task out of the way, and because he had identified a need in himself for novelty, colour, local interest, some entertaining distraction, having been pent inside the fort for a week with no company but that of his fellow-officers, who on the whole were an offputting collection of political partisans either pro- or anti- the Wellesley brothers (apart from two or three jolly, pleasant ones like Fitz-Gerald, who were not interested in that kind of thing), William decided to visit the local emporium, or pajar, (which was what, he had discovered, they called a bazaar in Kanarese, the language they spoke in Tamil Nadu – he had been pleased to observe that the two words were quite clearly related) where he was overcome all at once by an almost childlike sense of wonder and delight as he wandered amongst stalls selling great varied arrays of spices and vegetables and fruit, most of which he had never seen before, or even heard of. Then, vegetable and spices aside, there were booths which displayed bolts of silks arrayed in arcs, like fans - entire rainbows - and others where glittered constellations of rubies and emeralds and sapphires, and whole galaxies of lustrous milky pearls of all sizes which dazzled the eye - and yet more booths where golden body-ornaments gleamed like the tears of the sun. Other stallholders displayed cooking pots of shining brass, called calashas, and ornate brazen lamps incorporating into their decoration cartouches whereon were depicted in glowing enamels scenes of all kinds, exquisitely depicted in glowing miniature - peacocks displaying their fine plumage, perhaps, or languorous courtesans lounging upon lawns in cool water-gardens, or the nautch, or a fine handsome tiger leaping upon its prey. William thought that the one with the tiger would make a very fine addition to the furnishings of his tent, so he bought it; then, feeling very pleased with the day, with the fine sights and the intriguing aromas, with India and with himself, at the next booth he also bought a large and beautiful and very expensive silken rug. This was in part because it reminded him of the one which Uncle Hector had sent to his mother as a wedding-present so long ago, but mainly because the shop-keeper, who knew all about the weaknesses of naïve young English officers far from home (and, being recently arrived, therefore still flush with money, and who found themselves for the first time left to their own devices for a while in a beguiling and exotic land) had quite literally seen him coming. The man had at once sidled up to him and had begun to extol the glories of the carpet which he had observed William examining, and to praise the Captain-sahib (well had he known how to flatter) for his refined and sophisticated taste, and for his exquisite discernment, and moreover to commend him for his filial piety when William let slip concerning his uncle’s gift to his mother.
The rug, brought with great labour and toil and expense all the way from Kashmir in the north, the shopkeeper had informed William when he had expressed concern about the price, inevitably reminded him of the agonising interview with the Viscount on the morning on which he had left Durford, but as things were to turn out, not four months would pass before it would principally come to serve as a reminder to him forever of the extraordinary events of a certain May evening: but that tale is told elsewhere.
At any rate, after an hour, and thirty guineas the poorer, which included the price of the lamp, and now suffering pangs of guilt on account of such extravagance, and for having succumbed to the blandishments of the cunning carpet salesman, and for having allowed him to identify and to exploit not only his naïveté but also his vanity so effectively, William returned to the horse-dealer, to find that Sinnott, aided by Bickerstaff in the second-opinion department (it turned out that Bickerstaff’s elder sister was married to a horse-trader from Kildare, and young Bickerstaff had learned a fair amount about horses from him in his childhood, as well as from Mary) had narrowed the choice down to three.
“How much did you pay for that carpet, sir, if you don’t mind me asking?” said Bickerstaff, when William mentioned it. (The carpet, meanwhile, was being transported to the Fort by bearers, for which William had had to hand over an additional sum of cash to the proprietor of the stall, wondering how much of it the porters themselves would actually see; he was, he thought, already becoming more worldly-wise.) “You young officers really didn’t ought to be allowed to go wandering about in bazaars by yourselves,” the Sergeant remarked, when William confessed to him how much it had cost. “Lambs to the slaughter, you lot. Sell-His-Own-Mother Arjun caught you proper.”
William, now somewhat crestfallen, watched Sinnott making circuits about the animals, inspecting them, speaking softly to them; it did not matter that Sinnott was speaking in a tongue which William had never heard before, not even amongst the Irish he had so far encountered in the 33rd. It was not Gaelic, the sound of which he had learned to recognise even if he could not understand the sense; but the soothing tone was all-important as Sinnott circled them, feeling their limbs, poking their gums, peering into their eyes. After a time, Sinnott said to him,
“Now you’re after going to the market, sir, I can tell you: my feeling was for this one from the first. Strong, sound-winded, very steady-seeming, he is, and handsome! A true chestnut with no black hairs at all. Would you care to give him a try-out?”
So William gave the horse a try-out, and at once he knew that Sinnott had made a fine choice, and thus the bargain had been concluded. In the event he had been obliged to lay out one hundred and ten guineas, but Sinnott reassured him that the horse was worth it, and besides, having just admitted to Bickerstaff that he had on impulse paid thirty guineas for a lamp and a carpet, neither of which he had set out to buy that day, he felt that he could hardly plead poverty. William decided that Sinnott was indeed an excellent fellow, and moreover resolved to extend that feeling to all Irishmen henceforth (he was to revisit that resolution when he found himself posted to Dublin seven years later, but for the time being, as far as he was concerned, the Irish were amongst the finest people in the world), not least because he knew that the Viscount and Charles both heartily despised the race. Thus began a long and happy relationship with a sweet-natured chestnut gelding, from that hour to be known as Rufus - not that the horse knew about that of course, or would have cared if he had - or how completely and instantly he had filled the Audax-shaped hole that had until then ached, albeit intermittently – for there had been so much else to cause aching, recently - in the heart of his new master.
Sergeants Bickerstaff and Sinnott went happily to their respective quarters that evening, each with a generous gratuity in their pockets.
“What was that you was talking to the horses, Michael?” said Bickerstaff, as he and Sinnott had broken out the arrack, before they had parted. “It wasn’t the Irish. I know the sound of that.”
“The ancient tongue of County Wexford. It’s called Yola. Means old. It’s from when the Normans came to Ireland, hundreds and hundreds of years ago (6). One hundred and three years after they invaded England. When the second Henry was King. That gobshite that had the good Saint Thomas Becket, the Archbishop, murdered.” Sinnott spat on the ground. “English and Normans made the speech together.”
“You live and learn, Michael! I never knew that, about the Normans invading Ireland. I thought all that was just down to the English, although they must have come in on the Normans’ coat-tails. Nor the language neither. Never heard it before.”
“Few people have. It will be gone in fifty years once all those who still speak it have gone, though. The young ones don’t learn it. They see no advantage in it.”
“That will be a pity. I liked the sound of it.”
“Ah well. Ah well. There is nothing permanent under the sun. This is a grand distillation, Jem.”
“Prime! A rum fuddle and no mistake, thanks to Mr Lawford.”
“Your Mr Lawford, now,” said Sinnott, gazing at his glass appreciatively. “The boy Aladdin, with his magic lamp and his magic carpet, haha! No, to be in earnest now, he’s a fine man, or at least, he’ll grow to be one in time, it seems to me.”
“I believe he will, Michael.”
“You’ll be getting on with him amain.”
“Aye. He’s a bit green, a bit silly, of course – so are most of them at first – but no sillier nor greener than others of his sort, when first they come to the Colours – although this isn’t his first time by any means - but he’s a good lad at heart, I do believe; and if he listens to sensible advice he’ll do well. God keep him safe from the practices of men the like of Hakeswill and Morris, is all I ask.”
“Hakeswill! That rare bastard. Mad as a box of frogs, too. ‘I cannot die!’ Always quoting from the Scriptures. Scriptures no Christian never should have read. His scriptures, noted down from that heathen dame of his what taught him the Hanged Man, and the Devil, and Death.”
“And Wands. In his case a bloody great big one with an axe at the head of the shaft. Aye. As righteous a rogue as ever carried a halberd.” (7)
“The which by rights he should not have the more in any case.”
“Nor should he, indeed.”
“You going to be the one to tell him, then, Jem? And risk getting that spike atop of it up your arse unexpected-like, one dark night?”
That evening, having made sure of Rufus’ comfort and security in the line where he was picketed with the rest of the officers’ horses, William returned to his tent. Its interior appeared very splendid in the light of the elaborate brass oil-lamp with its depiction of a tiger, which he had hung from the ridge-pole, for the fine silk carpet now hid the utilitarian groundsheet. Some handsomely-bound books stood upon the shelf of an item of camp furniture, cunningly crafted to serve a multiplicity of purposes. A few pieces of bright silver from William’s travelling canteen gleamed softly upon a small folding table next to a plate of fine porcelain upon which was the remainder of a light supper of flat bread, and cheddar cheese brought all the way from England, and some dates which he had enjoyed earlier. A decanter and a wine-glass, both of heavy brilliantly-cut lead-crystal, scintillated there also in the light cast by the lamp, and by the flame of the candle which stood upon the night-stand in its lantern. The effect was part-library, part drawing-room, part dining-room, and also, on account of the cot and the valet-stand for William’s scarlet coat and other items pertaining to his uniform, part dressing-room. It was all civilised and comfortable and homely, if just a little exotic on account of the lamp with its oriental embellishments, and the carpet with its stylised Mahommetan devices worked in bright silk thread. William was greatly pleased by all of it. The portrait of an unrealistically prim, demure and tight-lipped Jessica, seemingly possessing all the more disagreeable characteristics of English womanhood (he had not seen her now in more than six months, of course, but he thought it did not look much like her – the eyes especially were wrong, as the artist had caught little of the intelligence and nothing of the mischievous sparkle, both of which qualities William genuinely treasured in his fiancée, for they hinted that if nothing else Jessica and he could at least be friends – even on occasion co-conspirators - on his night-stand sounded an inharmonious note, but that could not be helped. Most of the time he avoided its lacklustre gaze. The interior of his tent resembled, he thought, a small piece of England – or at least his England - the England of wealth and elegance and privilege – Durford Abbey in miniature, although it was now also a space where the domestic vernacular of aristocratic England had already acquired something of an Indian accent. William sat down upon his cot and pulled off his boots and his stockings, then placed his bare feet upon the silken rug. Oh, that was blissful! Then his eye fell upon the clavichord where it was set upon the lid of his sea-chest, its brass fittings also gleaming pleasingly in the soft light of the lamp. William took up the decanter and poured himself half a glass of claret (he had several cases of his favourite vintage amongst his baggage) then drew up a stool and, having quickly corrected the tuning, which had slipped even since that morning (the climate of the Coromandel coast was not kind to stringed instruments of European construction) played two or three of the Preludes and Fugues of Sebastian Bach. Oh, this was wonderful indeed! Privacy and freedom and autonomy, and all he had to do in exchange was go on parade in the mornings and perform the odd brainless task for Captain Morris or perhaps take a message to Lord Clive’s office (8) in the town for Major Shee and endure the company of his fellow-officers in the Mess for an hour or so in the evenings. This easy state of affairs could not long continue, he knew, but for the first time in months, William thought, he was beginning to feel something like his former self again – the self before Flanders and the shock of Wilfred Halston’s death, and his long sickness – the self he had thought he had been in peril of losing forever during those four grim weeks when Charles and Dr Madderley had been doing all they could to break him and make him into a cowed and compliant cypher so that he could be spirited off to Yorkshire, and committed to Wanhope Hall as an incurable lunatic, and in due course be snuffed out of existence, and forgotten. But as for the self he had been before he had fallen in love with Mark – no, that he had lost forever. Loving Mark had fundamentally altered his perception of himself, of who and what he was. Notwithstanding his self-imposed custom of piously gazing upon Jessica’s portrait every night before he retired, William knew that almost all of his recent resolutions regarding their future life together must surely come to nothing - save that he would continue to hope for her friendship.
William, as he had suspected, had not long in which to enjoy this pleasant – well, it would have been pleasant had it not been for the oppressive heat and the biting insects – and partially-leisured existence, for shortly after that, as Bickerstaff had predicted, on the 3rd of February Wellesley’s brother the Earl of Mornington issued his orders to George Harris, with his twenty thousand men, the majority of whom were Sepoys (that is, native Indian soldiers) and to James Stuart, who was waiting to lead another army, about one-third the size of Harris’s force, from the Company’s Bombay Presidency in the north - that they were to begin the advance upon Seringapatam. As these orders had been anticipated for several weeks, preparations for the move had been well in-hand for some time before their arrival. Caught up in all of this, William found himself fully occupied for almost all the waking hours of every day now, overseeing the packing-up of the Light Company’s section of the encampment and the loading onto many bullock-carts of its goods and gear. Anil meanwhile oversaw with great dedication the careful crating of William’s cherished and fragile possessions: his silver, his crystal, his china (packed all about with large leaves of the peepul tree) his books, and that odd box-like thing which made the strange noises which sounded like no music which Anil had ever heard before he had come to serve Lieutenant Lawford – the lamp, and of course the famous carpet, which in a short time had become much talked-about: he made an excellent job of it.
On the 11th of February the Governor-General’s orders arrived: now came the test of the logistical arrangements which Arthur Wellesley had, with immense labour and dedication and attention to detail over the last weeks, put in place. When Harris’s army finally set off, at an hour well before first light, the event could not fail to impress itself indelibly upon William’s mind - the sheer scale of their endeavour was momentous, thrilling, unprecedented, even. Perhaps a week after setting out, they had eventually united with the forces of the Nizam of Hyderabad, and then the spectacle had been even more impressive. This was, William saw with rapidly growing understanding, a moment as decisive in the history marking the final transformation of Britain from a nation of pirates and privateers and buccaneering colonising merchants into an Empire which would at its height come to rival Rome under Augustus and Macedonia under Alexander, as anything since Plessey and Buxar.
At first they made good progress through the Baramahal, a broad valley still within the Company’s sphere of influence – what in the Scottish Highlands would have been termed a strath, it occurred to William - mainly flat and fertile but occasionally with stretches which were rocky and steep. General Harris’s army came up to Amboor, the place scheduled for the rendezvous with that of the Nizam of Hyderabad. The Nizam’s army was under the command of Meer Allum (the Nizam’s Prime Minister and, some were saying, possibly also his illegitimate son), and it was at this point that the 33rd was assigned to march with the Nizam’s force upon the left, or southern, flank in order to give it additional credibility – what was colloquially called stiffness. It was flattering that the Nizam had apparently specifically asked for Wellesley and his Havercakes, but the news still caused somewhat of disgruntlement amongst some of the men, who would have much preferred to march with their compatriots upon the right.
The ‘march’, which resumed on the 21st of February, three days after the forces had combined, became a slower affair now, more like a shuffle or a shamble, and not simply because of the additional numbers of soldiers. There had already been the baggage and the draught-oxen and the supplies and the herds of beeves (the Army’s living self-propelling rations) and the sutlers and the Brinjarries (or Binjarrees – these were a people apart, neither Hindoo nor Mahometan, with their own religion and speech and customs, who traded in grain and kept great herds of bullocks – Arthur Wellesley’s logistical master-stroke had been to hire almost every last tribe of them which he had been able to locate in the Carnatic) and the whores and the wives (often for want of a more accurate if less flattering designation) and the inevitable children, who of course had had to come too. Now, further to all of this, there were the Nizam’s camels – and his elephants! William had been astonished at his first sight of these vast gorgeously-accoutred beasts, some with gilded tusks and with silken and bejewelled cloths upon their flanks, and carrying high castles upon their backs - truly, he thought, the stuff of fantastic tales! – until Bickerstaff told him that African elephants were even larger. The first time William turned in his saddle and looked about and saw the now immense horde, together with the baggage train, which shambled westward with the armies – hundreds, perhaps thousands of wagons, and tens of thousands of people, and tens, no, scores, no, hundreds of thousands of beasts – oxen, camels, goats, horses, elephants and all the rest of it - which was creeping along between the two flanks of the host itself, advancing in parallel – he was transported with wonder, and had the oddest sensation, almost as if he had been caught up within a marvellous story, strongly reminded of those days when, as a child, he would hide somewhere within the fabric of the house at Durford and lose himself in the Arabian Nights, and for a little feel as if he had escaped the chilly oppressive world of his family, where he had so often been made to feel inadequate, afraid and unhappy.
The camp-followers were penned within a strung-out cordon of Redcoats (British and Sepoys) seven miles long and three miles broad, with a vanguard and a rearguard (a kind of creeping parallelogram). A great cloud of red dust hung over the whole, stretching for miles to the rear of the column, if one could call it that – no, it was not a column, for that implied precision and discipline - it was a migrating people! There was a reason for this apparently outrageous excess, of course. Seven years before, General Cornwallis had attempted to take control of Seringapatam and might have succeeded had he not been defeated because of the length – two, almost three hundred miles – of his line of communication, which had been vulnerable to attack by the Tippoo’s troopers. He had arrived at Seringapatam and had duly invested it, and indeed had succeeded in taking it, but he had simply been unable to keep his men supplied with the food and ammunition and other supplies which they had needed in order to be confident of being able to remain there. In the end, once a peace treaty had been signed, Cornwallis had had no choice but to leave and return to Madras in something almost like ignominy – by no means his first experience of colossal embarrassing failure, for he was the General who had had to surrender to the Revolutionary Americans at Yorktown in ’81 because of the intervention of the confounded French. This problem of distances in India – the sheer size of the subcontinent – was what had kept the British for the first two hundred years of their presence in the land largely confined to their three coastal footholds of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, and the relatively small areas of hinterland surrounding those ports. William had known this, for Uncle Hector had explained the problem to him when he had once asked him why the whole of India had not yet been claimed for King George and Britannia. Now Arthur Wellesley, previously in his life so often written off as at best mediocre and at worst as an out-and-out dullard, had shown his true brilliance. He had found the solution to the difficulties created by the vast scale of India, and thus the British were now in a position to take with them everything which they, both the King’s Army and that of John Company, had been likely to need, both on the way and once they had at last sat down outside the dazzling white walls of Tippoo’s stronghold. This time the siege would not be raised until the artillery had pounded away sufficiently and there was finally a practical breach in the defences of Seringapatam – Srirangapatna the beautiful, Vishnu’s island city now ruled by what many said was a cruel and capricious devotee of Islam’s fierce Prophet - which lay between the two arms of the great Cauvery river with, in due season, its impassable flood and its monstrous crocodiles - and it would be taken at last.
It was the red dust which would become William’s abiding memory of the westwards trek, at least throughout their passage through the tracts which Tippoo, acting on the word of his French advisors who had suggested to him Harris’s likely route, had had his men reduce to scorched earth. It was a misery, especially to anyone who suffered from any kind of ailment of the lungs, as he often had. It got into everything, covered everything. In part it was on account of the lack of rain as the thirsty land waited upon the arrival of the monsoon, and in part it was the result of Tippoo’s attempt to deny forage to the beasts of Harris’s army. It was not long before the men adopted the practice of tying spare neck-cloths, handkerchiefs, in fact any rag they could find, about their faces, in defiance of regulations. One often could not breath for the dust, else. At first feeling that he ought to set an example of fortitude William resisted this trend for as long as possible but in the end, coughing as he had not done since he had begun to turn a corner at last in his convalescence, and moreover fearing that he was about to suffocate, he too gave in and tied a handkerchief about his face - a very fine one, as it happened, made from a beautiful true cambric fabric, brought from France – he supposed that it had been bought from a merchant who had imported it into England many years ago, before all the bother had begun with Revolutionaries and Jacobins and all official trade with France had been effectively halted - with his monogram, WAHL, elaborately and more or less indecipherably embroidered in cream-hued silk in one corner. When William had pulled it out of his saddle-bag just before they had begun to march shortly before sunrise that day it had been snowy white. By the time they stopped to make camp a little before noon it had become all over the colour of rust. Anil, William reflected ruefully, for all his skill and ingenuity, could surely never make that white again. Then it occurred to William – how did the beasts cope with the horrid inconvenience of the dust?
“Sorry, Rufus, good old boy,” he said, as he left his horse picketed in the lines later that morning when they halted for the day after several hours of marching, patting him on the neck. “I will find some way to make this up to you one day, I promise.”
Rufus sneezed in reply, as if to make a point.
Day after day it was the same. If they achieved eight miles before they made camp, it was a small miracle. Some days they made five if they were lucky. William observed to Sergeant Bickerstaff one morning that Harris’s force resembled more a migrating nation than an army.
“We’re like Israel in the wilderness marching to Canaan, sir - that we are, and no mistake,” remarked Bickerstaff, who was in fact more godly than he usually liked to let on. “Although I’ll leave it to friend Obadiah to quote the Scriptures right about that, like a true Methody.”
Unlike the officers, the men had no tents. Every evening after their meal they would gather in groups about their communal fires - not needed for warmth, but for homely comfort, rather - and to boil their tea, and to cook their rations, and – very importantly - to deter the feared tigers which they believed lurked in large numbers in the encroaching jungle - and for a literal focus around which the various self-selecting groups could socialise, as if they were back in Britain with their families, or in a fondly-remembered public house where they could talk, jest, laugh, drink their arrack (which was really any strong rum-like liquor) - smoke their short clay pipes if they had any tobacco - sing perhaps, if they had a decent musician amongst them who could lead them with confidence - until finally they would fall silent and spread their blankets and then simply lie down on the red earth of India and sleep, just as did the Army’s beasts, on the hard parched ground.
At first, William had had his tent pitched daily by Anil; but as the march progressed he dispensed with that. William had decided that he too would sleep upon the ground, in the open, like the men, at least whilst they were going forward every day. He did not do this out of a desire to curry favour, but out of respect for the men. They uncomplainingly, even cheerfully, accepted the hardship, he reasoned, so why should not he? And besides, he carried with him several small luxuries in mitigation of and in compensation for any inconvenience or discomfort he incurred. They did not, save for a scrip perhaps barely a quarter full with tea-leaves and a little pipe tobacco in leathern pouches.
As the days passed, although William had not intended this, the men began to notice that he had for the most part relinquished his comfortable cot and his shelter, which now remained packed up on the wagon with the rest of his crated gear when they made camp. Their regard for him grew in consequence, just as the likes of Shee and Morris hardened in their disapproval of him, feeling as if by his behaviour he was deliberately trying to cast them in an unfavourable light.
Notwithstanding the skills which William had practised in childhood with the object of avoiding notice and detection and hence persecution by Charles as he had navigated his way about the house at Durford, he had never constitutionally been either sly or cunning by nature. His character, when left to flourish unpersecuted, had always been naturally open and guileless. He had from his earliest childhood found it impossible to tell an outright lie. He had however had past occasion to find that he could be creative with the truth if circumstances demanded it, and he had learned that he could make himself subtle if he needed to be. He had honed this ability in the early days first at Durford Abbey, under the brutal tyranny of Charles, and then at school, and he had found that it had made his life easier and had spared him stripes on numerous occasions. He employed it now in an effort to discover the name of the tall dark-eyed private - the ‘Gypsy’ – whom during the early days of the march into Mysore he had found that he had begun to watch in earnest - mainly, he told himself, to relieve the tedium of what had fast been becoming the dispiriting sameness of the days.
He found the ’Gypsy’ fascinating. He had such an easy grace about him, a presence, a way of inspiring the fellows who were his close companions in the ranks and the files as they marched, and who clearly looked upon him with admiration and affection. William – all his life shy, diffident, lacking confidence, uncertain of himself, inclined to be fearful of his contemporaries – had found that he envied the ‘Gypsy’ this way he had of connecting with his comrades. He wanted to discover how he did this, so (he told himself) that he might put his findings into practice and become more at one with his colleagues, for he still felt very much the outsider; and in order to do this he felt that he must discover more about him, this ‘Gypsy’.
One morning, in an interval on the march, when they had made camp for two days together because the British Generals and the Nizam and Meer Allum and his war-lords had decided to gather together for the purposes of confabulation, William had gathered his courage and resolve and had gone to the tent where the 33rd’s Company Clerks had temporarily set up their bureaucratic system of cabinets and desks and satchels, so that they might carry out some necessary administrative work, and on some pretext had (almost boldly) asked that he might have access to the records of the enlisted men. They had jibbed at this– he was not of sufficiently senior rank to see confidential material! – but he had thought of a plausible story (William had always preferred to use the word ‘story’ to describe a falsehood in place of ‘lie’ when he had been the one telling it) which had contained a grain of truth). Major Shee needed to know the names of likely candidates for making up to lance-corporal (he did: he had told his captains to nominate suitable men from every company, and Captain Morris had tasked William with the compilation of such a list). They would need more NCOs in the coming campaign, men ready for the jump-up to Lance-Corporal and Corporal and Sergeant once the shooting had begun and the butcher’s bills had begun to hit the Battalion’s figurative doormat. Naïve as he was, William nonetheless knew that that was the important thing about lying - he had at least learned that much over the years – that there had to be a grain of truth, the necessary gritty irritant, as it were, at the heart of every good mendacious oyster around which a plausible fictional pearl could form, not just to make it credible, but so that he could live with himself - because in despite of everything that had happened with Mark, which, one should have thought, had seemed to consign William forever to a place in Hell amongst the blackest of sinners, he nonetheless still persisted in wanting to see himself as a good person - and good people, he knew, did not tell lies.
It had not taken long for William to track down the ‘Gypsy’ in the Battalion’s muster-rolls. Six feet tall, hair black, eyes so dark they were effectively black also, swart complexion. Former occupation: ostler’s boy at an inn at Catterick, in Yorkshire’s North Riding; recruited August 1793 in Keighley (some benighted place in the West Riding, as far as William could make out). Born in July 1777 (qualified with a question mark - but Mark’s age, then, a little younger than himself, perhaps six months in it - or it could be eighteen months, for there had still existed in parts of Britain some confusion over the calendar after the changes of ’52, and he suspected that Yorkshire might well be somewhat behind the times in this regard) (9), father unknown. In Wapping, County of Middlesex. (Where? Oh yes, where the wharfs were – there was a scheme to build a secure dock there to put an end to all the thievery that went on, on the London river, but that wasn’t likely to happen, the Viscount had said, the longshoremen would never stand for it; besides, it would probably prove far too costly.) That was a surprise! How had he gone from Wapping to an encounter with a recruiting party from the 33rd in Yorkshire sixteen years later? There was a story there, although he would probably never hear it. William had feared that the young man’s name would be something dull and commonplace, but in the event it proved to have quite a distinguished ring to it. He liked it. He had somehow forgotten that ‘Dick’, owing to the tendency of the English to delight in silly and insulting rhyming word-play, was a common if unlikely nickname for someone called Richard, just as anyone named William was at risk of having his dignity impaired by being reduced bathetically to ‘Bill’ or ‘Billy’. Perhaps he might have liked it less had he known of Jem Hocking’s singular method of naming his orphan charges (10); but William had not known of that, being then entirely ignorant of the modus operandi of the more successful of the nation’s workhouse-masters.
On the 3rd of March Harris’s army reached Ryacotta, a pass which provided a way through the Eastern Ghats, and so the horde had had to change formation, the better to squeeze through the gap in the hills. The greater part of the force now remained in camp until the 5th, whilst some of the light troops dealt with a handful of Tippoo’s garrisoned hill-forts in the area which guarded the approaches to his border. When Cornwallis had made his attempt upon Seringapatam seven years earlier, Bangalore had been the objective, and the British force had made use of it as a strong place, but since then the Tippoo Sultan had slighted it so that it was by now very much destroyed. There was no point to Harris’s heading there so, the outposts now cleared out, they simply kept going westward.
There had previously not been a sign or even a hint of a threat from the Tiger King or his minions, but now the Tippoo’s cavalry scouts were to be seen frequently at a distance, if so far only observing them. William became increasingly conscious within himself of a sense of anxiety which had been growing steadily the further west they travelled; so again he passed the time on the march doing his best to keep Richard Sharpe always somewhere in the middle of his field of vision from his vantage point upon the back of Rufus. The young man’s comely intelligent face, good humour, obvious strength and health, his easy confidence and the way his comrades always seemed to defer to him, looking to him for leadership and reassurance, William himself found deeply reassuring.
Meanwhile William rode on, naively imagining the while that his pursuit of his interest in Sharpe, the good-looking popular soldier, was nothing more than a pleasant and profitable way of passing the time (that it also had questionable implications, being also a secret pleasure and a private delight, he felt not only in his heart but increasingly elsewhere, although he did not wish to reflect upon that), and passed (he fondly imagined) unnoticed by any. Although very early one morning when the sun was not quite up, as he and Rufus were jogging along on the flank of the Light Company, the last in the ranks of the 33rd, which was itself placed about halfway along the thronging column of the Nizam’s soldiers, the lush jungle now pressing close upon them upon either side, and he indulging in a most enjoyable day-dream to the effect that he had Sharpe to himself (Sharpe was actually somewhere in the middle files a few ranks ahead; he could see him laughing and joking with Garrard and Drewett – Tom, Dick and Harry, the Light Company’s Three Jolly Pigeons (11) - heedless of any rebuke which might shortly be directed his way by Sergeant Hakeswill, of whose presence William was dimly and uncomfortably aware, where he marched upon the other flank – he could tell from Hakeswill’s attitude, all hunched aggression and coiled fury and constant suspicious glances to the front and rear, that he hated it that the 33rd were marching with the Nizam’s Sepoy battalions, on the left of the double column, and not with the main body of British battalions to the right, under Harris; the Brinjarrees with their bullocks and all their grain and stores and other paraphernalia, and the camp-followers, still moving along as best they could in the narrowed space between the two columns) and that they were engaging in pleasant conversation as they went forward together, he on Rufus, of course, and Sharpe close by his stirrup, near enough for them to be able to exchange amiable confidences and, as William’s fantasy developed, running away from his control, even the occasional glance - the one unheard and the other unobserved by any save themselves – that was wrong, he knew it was, but it was only a fantasy, after all (but then, Mark had once been only a harmless and beguiling fantasy with which William had whiled away the long lonely spring afternoons of the last days of his convalescence, resting in his chamber – until suddenly the fantasy had become reality, and the reality had in turn led to calamity) - all at once William’s delicate fine-spun shining crystal reverie was shattered as a half-familiar cool precise voice addressed him with typical peremptory lack of preliminary ceremony.
“Lawford!”
William started, and turned in his saddle, apprehension plainly to be read upon his features, or what could be seen of them anyway, it being still not properly light, and they partially concealed in any case by the overhanging terminal of his bicorn felt hat, which he wore fore-and-aft, or en colonne, in the modern style (12), as of course did Wellesley himself. The Colonel! No, no, the Lieutenant-General! Wellesley must have read his mind and had come to accuse him! Oh, God - ! Wellesley had meanwhile come up beside him on his fine Arab gelding. Rufus glanced sideways at Wellesley’s big powerfully-muscled grey, whinnied softly, and dipped his head, probably by chance, for horses of course tossed their heads about all the time for their own obscure reasons, but for all the world it had appeared as if in deference - acknowledging the Lord of Horses! William thought, then, bizarrely. But the Arab, which had been bequeathed to Wellesley by his friend Henry Aston as he had lain dying of a wound received in a duel, which had been fought on a minor point of honour (a truly stupid state of affairs, but by no means uncommon amongst British officers in a situation where imperfectly understood ideas of ‘honour’, irascible egos, compromised mental health on account of an inimical foreign climate and strong liquor habitually imbibed in large quantities regularly combined to create the worst of all possible scenarios) was a fine animal, every inch worthy of its rider. William briefly called to mind the story he had heard of how Wellesley had acquired the beast, because of his friend’s quarrel with a Major James Allen. It had been the talk of the mess at about the time he had arrived at Fort St George at Christmas just past and the affair had caused great dissention amongst the officers of the 12th and the 33rd. He wondered how Wellesley could bear to ride Diomed when to do so must be a perpetual reminder of the circumstances of the death of his lost friend; but then, William told himself, Wellesley was well-known for his iron self-control and no-nonsense attitude to life. He would never let himself be sentimental on account of a dead intimate. That was both a reassurance and a warning about what manner of man he was, William supposed.
“Good boy!” said Wellesley meanwhile, chuckling, to Rufus, reaching to fondle his ears. “This is Diomed,” he said. Was he addressing Rufus or William? “And you are?” (as if, William thought, expecting Rufus to answer him!).
“Rufus, sir,” said William, promptly, thinking fast and deciding it were better to ventriloquise for his horse. The General seemed to be more at home with horses than with people, as far as he could determine.
“Well, Rufus, you might learn a thing or two from Diomed if you take care to pay attention to his excellent example.”
It had Wellesley’s practice, when he had the leisure and could be spared from his more onerous duties, to ride up and down the column of the 33rd (of which he was still Colonel, even though the day to day running of the Battalion had been passed to Major Shee some time since), since it had been assigned to the Nizam’s army - as he was quite aware that this had been a development unpopular amongst the officers and rankers of the Havercakes, and he wished to maintain morale - as it proceeded, seeking out its junior officers, to see how they did and to quiz them regarding their thoughts concerning the march and the coming campaign. This morning, he had asked John Shee to brief him about the Battalion’s most recent arrival, not long since come out to Madras to join them. Wellesley, untypically but probably because of the many extra duties which had recently been foisted upon him, had not remembered the name from the Flanders campaign, and neither had he recognised William’s half-hidden features. The hat also effectively concealed William’s bright hair, which was of a shade, unusual in adults, which suggested the opulent buttery richness of gold of high purity, and which, when it was visible, marked him out even at a distance to observers who sought him amidst a throng of near-identical scarlet coats, in a crowded mess-tent, say, or in a teeming ball-room. Neither had Shee seen fit to remind Wellesley of William’s earlier history as an Ensign in the 33rd, probably having regarded it as irrelevant.
“Now then, Lawford.”
“Sir!” OGodOGodOGod! He was obviously in serious trouble of some kind – what had Morris been saying about him?
“No need to act so shocked, Lieutenant. I’ve only come to see how you do. How are you liking India?”
What? Wellesley had not come as his Nemesis? Now he came to think of it, this bluff friendliness was possibly even worse. William guessed that Lieutenant-General Wellesley was still in the good mood resulting from the taking of the hill-forts from Tippoo’s troops, who had been meant to be guarding his border but who had folded so easily, which had proceeded so smoothly and with very few losses to the British and to the Nizam a few days earlier.
“V- very much, sir. It is an astonishing country, although sometimes I find myself p-puzzled.” Stammering, now, is it? He could stop that at once! How Charles had used to mock him for that.
“In what way puzzling?”
William had wanted to mention the strange atmosphere which upon his arrival he had sensed in the officers’ Mess, which had compelled him to avoid it as far as he could; instinct told him that he should say nothing of that, however.
“Well, sir, I – I still do not rightly understand what it is we do here. Do we protect the rights of the Company, or do we still come to fight the French by proxy, notwithstanding Nelson’s victory at the Nile?”
“Which it is to be hoped has spiked his guns as far as France’s ambitions in Egypt – and further east - are concerned, although time will tell. But yes, France has become more assertive, not merely in Europe but throughout the world, since their Revolution, and their regrettable trouncing of the Allies in Flanders four years ago. It is on account of that, that Tippoo has been stirring again, for he is of course their ally in their war against us. As to John Company, his rights are somewhat bound up with our quarrel with the French, as their stated wish is to destroy England’s trade, in the East as elsewhere, and bring us to our knees in that way if they cannot conquer us by land or sea.”
“I see sir. So we do not in truth come to claim the whole of India in the name of the King, once we have dealt with Tippoo? I have overheard some of the men speculating as much, as they sit about their fires at night.”
Wellesley snorted.
“Ha! As to that, you had do better to enquire of my brother Mornington.” (13)
“I had hoped to have the opportunity of doing so, sir, when I heard that there was a possibility that he would be coming west to Mysore with us. But in the event I do not think that I should have dared. That was a presumptuous thought.”
“Damned presumptuous indeed! No, never a chance of that. I told him to his face that if he was set upon joining this Army then I should quit it at once! What, why start and gasp as though you found that shocking?”
“Why - he is your elder brother, sir! – the Earl of Mornington!”
“What of that? Do you then behave towards your own elder brother with servile Oriental deference?”
William said nothing to that.
“I do his bidding in the field,” Wellesley went on. “That is – almost – all. As to more wide-reaching plans, although I suspicion that Horse Guards would not have consented to consigning regular Regiments of the Line to India to reinforce the Sepoy Battalions of the Company if the thoughts of the Wise at Westminster had not been tending in a certain direction. You recollect the provisions of the India Act? (14) Ah, forgive me, most likely you would barely have been in breeches.”
“I regret, sir, I… I should have to look into a book to remind myself. … Also, sir, I never imagined that marching to war could be like this,” William said, nodding about and casting a glance over his shoulder. “Not like Europe at all. Bullocks. Camels. Mules. Elephants! Fakirs. General merchants. Fortune-tellers. So many men and women and children, to say nothing of the armies themselves! And… the fellow with the green tents.”
“You refer to our immense caravan, part itinerant bordello – I take it you meant our friend Naig? - part travelling circus, part general merchant’s and haberdasher’s shop (for we must not forget the ladies!), part Vauxhall Gardens abroad, part county show on the march. Well, it is a curiosity of its kind, I grant you. I have certainly never found myself caught up in such a proceeding before. It is Bunyan’s town Vanity Fair its very self, on hooves and wheels and sledge-runners. But that aside - you, Lawford, are you well? Heat not getting to you?”
“I find that I can bear it, sir.”
Wellesley stared sceptically at him for a moment or two.
“You wait until the hot season is well under way. See how you bear it then.”
“The hot season, sir? I thought this was the hot season.”
“It is but the beginning of the summer heat. See that article there?” Wellesley said then, obviously now tired of discussing the weather (for notwithstanding the image he laboured so hard to project he was no Englishman) and pointing ahead at the ranks and files of marching men.
“Sir?”
“Private Thomas Atkins. Why, he must be a good five or six inches taller than many of his fellows.”
“Atkins? Was not Private Atkins killed as we retreated towards Bremen in Ninety-Five, sir? I remember seeing the strength returns that day. His name was near the top, as a casualty. That man there is Private Sharpe.”
“I know he’s Private Sharpe, Lieutenant! Ostler’s boy from Catterick. Just as I know the fellow marching to his rear is Timothy Tooley, formerly a Norfolk parson’s servant, and those on either side of him are Thomas Garrard, farmer’s son, and Henry Drewett, shepherd. It’s my business to know the names and at least some of the histories of all the men of the Thirty-Third! If you ever should attain the dignity of Lieutenant-Colonel of a Battalion, learning the names of all your men will be your first task! I was speaking figuratively.”
“Sorry, sir!”
“You were in Flanders, though?” Wellesley went on, in a milder tone, now seeming surprised.
“Yes, sir, I…” He doesn’t remember me! William thought. Well, I suppose that is a relief, all things considered.
“Major Shee left me with the impression that you are new to the Regiment?”
“In a way, sir, I – “
“But as it so happens, yes, Atkins was killed, or rather, died, near Bremen. But I thought at the time that it was an exemplary name for a British soldier. A name for the type. Thomas Atkins, the tool of our trade, our principal instrument. See how he and his comrades must labour along, labour along,” Wellesley said, indicating Sharpe again. “What is your opinion of the nature of the burden which they must carry, Lieutenant?”
“I… it cannot be easy, sir, especially in the heat of India. Those packs look like they must be very heavy. And not easy to wear. I have noticed how the men fidget constantly with the straps.”
“The packs are what they are. Mr Trotter must have a friend at the War Office. A man who has never attempted to trot anywhere whilst wearing an item of his own manufacture, I’ll warrant.” Without warning Wellesley let out a sudden loud neigh of mirth, which made his own horse Diomed twitch his ears somewhat (William supposed that Diomed must have grown inured to this kind of demonstration), whilst Rufus whickered in apparent astonishment and skittered slightly. “In Flanders I observed that the French had better ones. Tant pis. And what about everything else – haversack, musket, ammunition pouch, full canteen?”
“I imagine the weight of it all must be very prodigious, sir.”
“Any idea what it might amount to?”
At that, William was stumped.
“I’m afraid not, sir. I confess I’ve never really thought about it. That is remiss of me.”
“That is what comes of being granted the privilege of having your possessions being hauled about in a cart. Make sure you find out, Lawford (15). It will help you understand the men, and once you understand them you will find that you can do anything with them.”
“Sir?“
“In the field, of course.”
William thought that he had better say something, something which could be interpreted as just a little flattering but not outright obsequious. Some officers, ones like Morris for example, they loved it when one oiled up to them. Ensign Hicks understood that very well: the unctuous little weasel had perfected the art. Look at him now, further up the column, out of his proper place, ostentatiously hanging on Morris’s every word! But not Wellesley. William had the instinctive feeling that he despised that kind of behaviour in his subalterns.
“And you learned that skill in Flanders, sir? How to use the men effectively, I mean.”
Wellesley simply snorted dismissively.
“I learned very little in Flanders, Lawford,” he said, “except what not to do. And typically it is all confusion in any case, for no matter how well one has thought and planned a battle, unless one has great strength of will matters seldom proceed quite in the way one has plotted, once one has made contact with the enemy. You have ten thousand men, say, and your other fellow has twenty thousand. What do you think should be the outcome?”
“The other fellow should win, sir, if I fought him at all.”
“At all, Lieutenant?” Wellesley said, tightly.
“Engaging at such odds would be suicidal, sir, would it not? Unless I had a very great advantage, such as being ensconced in the hights of a mountain pass, a defile through which the enemy could only pass in single order, for example. But I should owe it to the men not to make them fight when there was no hope of overcoming the opposing force, should I not?”
“You would surrender rather, and lead your men into captivity? You would owe it to them to let them rot in some foul prison for the remainder of the war, you are telling me?”
“No, sir,” said William, all at once wrenching around the head of his train of thought as if it had been a rebellious horse in an effort to retrieve what he now saw was his awful faux-pas. “I should of course engage the enemy, if at all practicable. All the same, I should not want my men to lose their lives in vain, if yielding should prove the more humane and sensible option.”
“I think you should hear what Sir David Baird has to say about rotting in prison, perhaps. He is very eloquent upon that subject.”
“Of course I should hate to surrender, sir. Who would not? But the other fellow with twice the numbers at his disposal, he would be bound to win nonetheless, would he not, if we met on open ground?”
“He ought to. But you know how the French fight nowadays, surely?”
“They come in columns, sir. Great close-packed slow-moving blocks of men.”
“And those great blocks of men generally smash their way through their opponents’ deployments, do they not? Well, so far they have, in Europe, against the Austrians, for example. How would you counter that approach?”
William looked at him dumbly.
“I – I do not know, sir.”
“You get into line, outflank them – even with inferior numbers that is possible, when you are in line – no more than two ranks deep, mind, notwithstanding what the old text-books say - for remember that all the men in the line can use their muskets, and that is not at all the case with men in column - and take them out with superior musketry! Once the first ranks of the column are down and those following behind cannot easily clamber over the bodies of the dead and wounded, they are compelled to stop. Then you seize your chance.”
“Fix bayonets and charge, sir?” he had said, as the happy thought had occurred to him.
“Yes, indeed. Then they break and run. The sight of bayonets produces that effect in frightened men more times than one would think. Well, I’d run if I were on the receiving end of that – wouldn’t you?”
“Most probably, sir, if I am honest.”
“With a little luck, I think that is how we will deal with the Tippoo’s men when we first encounter them - for they have been trained by the French. Although there are any number of circumstances which might render that fond scheme nonetheless null and void, of course.”
“Sir? Is war as capricious as that? Are there not reliable schemes which might be followed? Cannot the course of a battle be traced and set down in record and so be used as a plan for a later encounter?”
“One might as well try to write the history of a ball, Lieutenant,” said Wellesley, in such a way as left William in no doubt that the General thought he was the kind of young officer who was probably more naturally at home upon the dance-floor than he was upon the field of battle. “Who danced with whom, and which dances, precisely? What was the name of that haughty-looking young man who never deigned to stand up with a lady all evening? Lord Frederick Foppington danced three times with Lady Susan Scarebeau, but which dances were they? At what time exactly did Mrs Lawrence Lovegold arrive with her five charming daughters, each in search of a husband? How many various wines were served at the supper? What flavour were the ices? Were there two allemandes or three? Did the Duchess of Dalliance arrive before or after the gavotte? Was there a bassoonist in the band? That is to say, can you possibly imagine what I might have to say after a battle regarding dispositions of the troops, so often ad-hoc in the event regardless of pre-existent plans, if a brigade has been held up on the road because the wheel has come off a cart, thus causing a narrow bridge to become blocked, say, or passage through a town is impossible because a house has caught fire and there is chaos and confusion all around. These apparently random things have a tediously regular habit of happening. Battle plans can survive everything except contact with reality, and with the enemy. Yours is at once in tatters and it is then a matter of improvisation, of casting about to fill the gaps in your line as best you can. You must re-write your strategy on the hoof. And then there are the perennial problems with supply lines, and the capriciousness of our so-called allies, and the less said about the commissariat the better.”
“I have only ever been to one grand ball, sir, and that but a public affair in Bath (I have of course attended smaller affairs at the houses of our Hampshire neighbours, but it is not at all the same when one only has to fear the censure of one’s friends and proximal associates should one be guilty of an embarrassing error in the gavotte or the cotillion) but I understand that they can be very confusing occasions. As you say. Loud, with many people pushing about to be first into the supper-room to make sure of obtaining their favourite delicacies, and treading on your feet, and all talking at once. I was concentrating so hard upon my own part in it, not to make a mis-step and thus spoil the enjoyment of the other dancers, that indeed I hardly noticed what they were doing. Yes, sir, a ball might well pass all in a whirl of confusion, as might a battle – and I did find Boxtel confusing – fog, smoke and noise – “
“Wait - you were at Boxtel?” said Wellesley, at once serious and intent.
“Yes, sir.”
“Major Shee told me that you are only lately come to join the Thirty-Third!”
“I had been ill and convalescing in England for some time, sir. Since I arrived at Madras in December it has been like starting afresh. But I first joined the Thirty-Third as an Ensign, when I was seventeen, in Cork in Ninety-Four.”
“Ah. Well, as you were saying - Boxtel.”
“And then I was shot in the thigh, sir, when I was stationed at the end of our line, to see what was happening, because the smoke was so thick in the centre, and to report back. I did not know where the bullet came from at the time (16). We received French cavalry that day, sir, and we were in line. But we were very fortunate for our volley saw them off.”
“I know, Lawford. I was there, remember?”
“Sorry, sir. But Colonel Sherbrooke, he… “ Shut up, you idiot! “Mr Micklewhite said it was a pistol or carbine ball. I could not see how it could have been a pistol ball. I can only surmise that it was a stray ball from the carbine of a dragoon. I only really know from that day what happened in my very small part of the battle, and I suppose that is the same for many who are in such situations. A battle might look like one thing to a man standing in one place, and quite another thing to a man standing in a different place. But if that is so I do not understand how the histories of all the wars can ever have come to be written, if every man must be his own historian.”
“The authors know that people will want to read them, that’s how, and what they don’t know they invent if they cannot trouble themselves to speak to more than a few of those who were there. What do you make of that?” Wellesley went on then, indicating with his riding-crop the jungle, some several hundred yards distant upon the left of the column, yet, to William’s mind, still not half distant enough: for a long time now he had been alarmed by the noises he had heard emanating from it at night, and by the sudden movements of the foliage for which no movement of the air of which he had been aware could be thought to have accounted. For a moment William was baffled.
“The, the trees, sir?” he said, eventually, and then blushed and momentarily shut his eyes. Idiot!
“Aye, Lieutenant, the trees.”
“All very… green. At least, now we have found alternative passage from the waste-land left by the Tippoo’s men. A lot greener than the woods at home. Steaming like laundry on the line on a frosty morning back in England! And they seem to grow even as one looks at them. And thick. And old, I think. Very… close together. I should say a little like parts of the New Forest, but…”
“What kind of danger might there be lurking concealed therein, do you think?” said Wellesley, evidently impatient at this dendrophile rhapsodising.
“It’s probably full of … “ William struggled and then inspiration struck. “ - tigers, most likely. And snakes. And… if there is a river hidden in the forest, there will likely be crocodiles. And monkeys, sir.”
“Monkeys?” cried Wellesley, as if he could not believe his ears. “I ask you to recollect that I requested you to name to me any possible perils which might be concealed within the jungle, not list to me the fauna which are well-known to have their dwelling-places therein.”
“Sorry, sir! I meant, monkeys, they steal our food and gear, sir, when they can, and in that sense they are a nuisance, at least. But they can be hazardous. I was in hospital at the Cape three years ago, and - a – ba - boo…” William trailed off into embarrassed silence, seeing Wellesley’s eye now cold and hard upon him. Fool! Shut up! He cleared his throat. “And the Tippoo Sultan’s lancers, probably. Possibly. They might well be hidden within there. Planning an ambuscade.”
“Lancers? In a jungle where, as you have observed, the trees grow thick - so thickly you could barely get a tulwar between them? What might your exploring officer have told you? Think sensibly now.”
“Sorry, sir,” said Lawford, meekly, blushing scarlet as his coat, but secretly, in the deep shadow cast over his face by his hat. “That was stupid of me. Not lancers, obviously. Men on foot, more probably, hiding, waiting to dart out to harass us – it would be more of a case of constant sudden sorties, in which they would try to pick us off piece-meal, rather than a formal attack. They might have firearms, but in such dense forest I imagine it would be more likely that they would rely upon their blades – not lances, but short-swords, daggers.”
“That is better. You must learn to take account of what your scouts can tell you, and also to read the land for yourself, Lawford. Take nothing for granted. The ghats, for example.”
“The Eastern Ghats, sir, through which we have lately marched via the pass at Ryacotta?”
“What did you think of them?”
“I… I was reminded a little of the Scottish Highlands, sir.”
“Really?” Wellesley said, severely.
“Only a little, sir.”
Wellesley looked at him curiously.
“Go on.”
“I have visited the Highlands, sir. I have relatives there.”
“And there is a resemblance? As to that, I could not say, as I have never been in the Scottish Highlands. They did put me a little in mind of some of the wilder mountains of Ireland, I must say. However, think you that from this observation you might extrapolate the appearance of the Western Ghats - which lie at a considerable distance beyond our objective, so this is rather an academic question, at this point - but nonetheless?”
William could only hazard a guess. When he had had time to read on his passage out in Néreide he had confined his studies mainly to the Madras Presidency and to the country which lay between it and Mysore, and the Tippoo’s city itself. He knew very little about the tracts beyond, apart from the fact that Bombay lay there upon the coast, a good deal further to the north-west.
“Similar, sir?”
“There you would be wrong, Lieutenant. Major Shee tells me that you are from Hampshire – well, you yourself referred just now to the New Forest - this is so?”
“It is, sir.”
“So you know the chalklands of southern England – ridden them with hounds many times in pursuit of the fox, I should not wonder?”
“I have, sir, formerly - ”
“I suppose you hear me refer to the compass points and perhaps have assumed that there is as little difference between the Eastern and Western Ghats of India as there is between the North and South Downs of Sussex and Hampshire?”
“Sir – I – forgive me.”
“They are in fact very different indeed. You would not, for example, be able to fight a sudden unplanned action in the Western Ghats in the same manner as you might in those of the East. Much denser coverage of foliage, much wetter, heavier ground. The terrains are very dissimilar. You need to learn to mark the land, Lieutenant. India is not nearly so predictable as England. Get used to asking yourself questions about it - what might be behind those hills you see before you, given what you already know of them by sight, and from knowledge of any similar hills you might have seen before – actually similar, that is, not superficially so. Similar from direct observation, not merely from names on unreliable maps (maps generally are unreliable, I have found, the farther one finds oneself from England). Think about how the lie of the land itself might assist you. Half the time military success comes when you have allowed the land to help you because you have seen how it is, and disposed yourself accordingly, and not when you have attempted to impose your hide-bound text-book ideas upon it in its despite.”
“I thank you for the lesson, sir.”
“I have no doubt but that you will, one day. I was pleased by the way you were demonstrating signs that you had actually begun to think, by the end of it. There is hope for you. By the way, Lawford, well done for remembering Private Atkins. We owe them that much, to remember the names of the men who fell owing to our actions, and sometimes our inaction. And for knowing Private Sharpe’s name. It seems like a small thing, but you would be surprised how often I have encountered officers who have little idea of the names of the private soldiers under their command, and moreover evince very little desire to make an effort to learn them in the future. I was impressed. It all helps. Good morning,” said Wellesley. He touched his hat, set spurs to Diomed and rode back up the column.
The Past: Durford Abbey, June 1798.
That afternoon at the cottage of the absent Mrs Lucas, during an interval in which they had taken turns at the wash-stand, for, quite apart from all else, it had been an uncommonly hot day – in fact it had been an uncommonly warm spring – all the way through April, May and June the weather in England had been fair that year, so much so that people had remarked upon it when they had gone to visit their neighbours, or had met their friends in the town on market days, comparing it favourably with the wet conditions of the previous year which had persisted throughout the summer of ‘97, glad to have a pleasant topic of conversation. They had not wanted to talk of depressing themes, such as this latest war with France (which had already been five years old), or the high price of daily necessities – of the high price of everything, because of the war, and the way in which England’s trade with Europe was being slowly choked off as the French took country after country, its people being thrown out of work as a consequence. The current events had all been far too distressing, but the fine weather had gone a small way towards making up for all of that.
Then Mark, fresh once more and smelling of his mother’s home-made lavender soap, and reclining upon the now rumpled white bed, had shyly told William of how he had been used to observe him in church, years before. There had been the Family, Mark had said, seated in the House pew at the top of the south aisle, and there had been Mark and his parents, or his mother at any rate, for his father had of course been with the band at the west end (this had been in the days when Matthew Lucas had still lived, head gardener at Durford Park for five years by that time), and Mark’s twin sister Martha, somewhere near the back of the north aisle usually, seated amongst the rest of the Estate workers and those of the indoor servants who had not been detained at the House to prepare for the early-afternoon dinner.
“When I was a child, sir, before you were sent away to school, and after that time when you’d come down to the Hall on Twelfth Night - whenever I saw you on a Sunday morning I used to think to myself, how sad Mr William looks!”
“Did you? Did I?” William had said, as he had splashed tepid water upon himself – there had been no risk of its going quite cold in the can on that hot summer’s day.
Truth to tell, he had felt – not embarrassed – but certainly a little awkward, to be having this conversation here, now. It had seemed to render the situation so normal, so commonplace, somehow, when he had known that it had been anything but that: he had been standing quite naked in the slanting sunshine of the advancing afternoon (he had judged it be about a half after four, from the angle of the sun, a few hesitant beams of which had now succeeded in penetrating the small low window of the chamber which had at first seemed so dim after the brightness of the June day outside - tea-time! he had thought to himself, recalling Mark’s mild jest upon his arrival), in a condition – without his clothes - and performing a function – ablutions - which until that day he had only ever undertaken early in the morning and last thing at night. It had seemed even stranger to be reminiscing about their long-ago attendance, together but apart, at the Parish Church of St Mary and St John, considering what they had just lately been about, which, it had occurred to him, had been an activity as far from innocent piety as it had been possible to imagine.
“You always had your head down, sir,” Mark had gone on, from the shadowy sanctuary of the bed. “You were always looking down at the floor, as if you were ashamed to be looked at! I could never understand why. I used to think, if I had been made as fair as Mr William, I should want to be seen by all! Martha used to think the same – why had you always looked unhappy? I remember, Martha and I, on our way home from church, we sometimes used to say to Mother that we wished that it was within our power to make Mr William glad again, as on that Twelfth Night of Christmas when you came down to the hall.”
“And what did your mother say to that?” William had said, looking about meanwhile to find the napkin which Mark had used, with which to dry himself – although such had been the warmth of the day that had hardly been necessary.
“She would say that it was not our place to have such thoughts, sir, or to wonder about the lives of the gentry, which were so different from our own, in every way. In the end Martha came to agree with her. She told me to stop thinking of you, that it was not fitting nor profitable to contemplate upon one so far above myself, who would probably never address one word more to me, even if I should stay at Durford forever - as if I could ever do you any good service.”
“But you thought otherwise,” William had said in surmise.
“Yes, sir, I did. And I do. For a time it went further and further from my mind – after you had gone, first to school, and then to His Majesty’s Army. And then you came home an invalid, and everyone was saying that you were going to die. That made me sad. I used to pray for you, in secret. Before I went to bed, and in Church on Sundays.”
“You did? Thank you, Mark.”
“Then you began to get well! I thought God had listened to me! People pray for things all the time, but usually he’s too busy governing the Universe to take any notice; but this time it was like he really had paid some heed. We were all pleased, of course. But – I felt the sadness was still in you, that day Collins brought you to the kitchen garden, and it all came back to me. I found that I still wanted to make you happy, then - and I do now.”
William had returned to Mark’s side meanwhile; Mark had smiled in welcome – such a smile as had caused William to melt anew.
“Well then, Mark,” he had said, barely able to speak, the tremor in his voice had betrayed him so, “do so - as you did but a short while since. I promise I shall try to be not so – so – “
“Not so what, sir?”
“So - all - knees and elbows - ”
“Don’t you worry about your knees and elbows, sir.”
In the end, therefore, Mark had made him happy; not just as on that strange and wonderful afternoon, but happy beyond anything he ever could have imagined, in his heart, and in his soul. For a season. The spring of 1798. A wonderful, glorious, marvellous, beautiful, heavenly spring.
And then had come the savage untimely frost.
The Present: Spring 1799.
Private Thomas Garrard said to Private Richard Sharpe one night, “That Mr Lawford, Dick, he’s a proper decent officer, I think, or he will be, in time.”
“What makes you suddenly say that, Tom? The business with Sergeant Hakeswill by the trench, his first day? That was nearly three months ago! Have you been thinking about that all this time?”
“Well, yes. I mean, not all the time, obviously. But it keeps coming to mind. When I think about our officers.”
“Do you think about them much?”
“Of course I do!”
“Why? They aren’t really our business, are they?”
“Oh, Dick! It’ll be largely up to them whether or not we’ll survive what’s coming. Flanders keeps going through my head. Ever since we set off from Vellore. If it hadn’t been for Colonel Wellesley and Colonel Sherbrooke back then at Schyndel we’d have been sunk. We were lucky in those two. I’m not too happy that Major Shee is in charge now. But that business back at the trench that day - weren’t you impressed?”
“I thought he were just a daft new baby Jack-Pudding trying to come it high, trying to make his mark, walking before he could run! And it’s not like he’s done anything much since in that line.”
“I shouldn’t be too sure of that, Dick. It’s clear that there is bad feeling between him and Hakeswill. Hakeswill must have seen that Mr Lawford is wise to his tricks, at a guess.”
“I heard Hakeswill muttering about the fact that Mr Lawford has a horse. ‘He didn’t ought to have it,’ I heard him say.”
“Well, Hakeswill ‘didn’t ought to have’ a halberd! Don’t you remember Mr Lawford from before, Dick - when he was just Ensign Lawford, before he fell sick and they had to put him off the Charlotte at the Cape in Ninety-Six, and send him home, to die, as some were saying? Weak as water, I thought he was, on the whole, in Flanders - but even then he sometimes showed that he wasn’t.”
“I don’t remember him at all from those days.”
“You must do!” said Private Henry Drewett, deciding to have his penny-worth. “There was that time in that church in Saxony, on the way to Bremen, when Lieutenant, what was his name, Halston, the one that dropped dead on parade one morning when we were back in Warley afterwards, sent us to make sure Mr Lawford hadn’t been gutted by those two jumpers, those bastards Donoghue and Bakewell – “
“Well, I remember them all right, Harry! Right pair of King George’s hard bargains, them two,” said Dick. “Why, they’d have given me a run for my money, I don’t doubt, if I’d had bad the bad luck to come across ‘em in a dark alley in Seven Dials, back in the old days.”
“Mr Lawford had caught them robbing from the poor-box – he could have run out and got a couple of Provosts to take them, but he stood up to them - and one of them, Donoghue, I think he said it was, thumped him in the head with the butt of his musket, left him lying, and then they scoured off together – scrambled, the sods! Tommy Atkins (17), you remember him, he told me he saw them just after that – said they was off and he was welcome to join them!”
“So that was Mr Lawford, was it?” Richard had sounded thoughtful. “It was so dark in that church I never got a proper good look at him. Snotty little bugger, I thought, didn’t seem grateful at all – shook me off him like I was something nasty he’d found stuck to the sole of his boot!”
“It was clear to me he was just embarrassed, Dick,” Tom had said, reprovingly – “a boy-officer trying very hard to recover his dignity – not easy to do when you’ve just been bashed in the head and knocked down by two of your own men.”
“You’ve always given people the benefit of the doubt, Tom. I never could. In my experience you give ‘em enough rope and, never mind themselves, they’ll hang you.”
“Then there was that time, a couple of Ensigns, from the Third and the Sixth, I think, pulled that nasty trick on Mr Lawford – after we’d got back from Bremen - they knew he had nervous bowels, and he had only just had the dysentery really bad - and they invited him to supper and slipped him an aperient!”
“A what?”
“What the quack gives you when you’re costive through too much hard biscuit, Dick. A laxative. They did it because they hadn’t been able to make him drunk enough for them to gull him into playing at cards with them, the rumour went. The bastards had planned on cheating and ruining him – I don’t rightly know why they would want to do that, but apparently there was a reason - but he wasn’t having any of that – he had that much sense at least, so Donoghue can’t have shaken up his brains too bad! So they gave him the squits instead. Sick of the Gripes , he’d been at the Devil’s plums.”
“What was that? Sounded like you was quoting something. Was it the Bible?”
“No; just an old book,” (18) Garrard had said, embarrassed as always for having let slip that he could read, and had a certain store of book-learning, when he was talking to this bright but unlettered workhouse boy.
Sharpe laughed then, suddenly and coarsely. “I remember that now! I reckon he got off lightly! What was their names again?”
“Fitzroy was one. He was a right bastard. Can’t remember who the other chinless wonder was.”
“It weren’t Gleadless, were it?”
“No, not Headless Gleadless – he was all right, really – he just turned out to be a suicidal death-or-glory idiot.”
“Well, he got his death, at any rate. One out of two ain’t bad, I suppose. I’ve got it now – Dimmock. Dim by name and dim by nature, we used to say, hahaha!”
“He was one of the ones who died of the flux on the way down from Calcutta,” Garrard said primly.
“P’r’a’ps there is a God after all, then!” said Sharpe, with another sudden harsh laugh. “Mr Lawford though – now I remember! he spent about three days running to the jakes every ten minutes, poor bugger! It came on him first at Church Parade, didn’t it, when he took off sudden-like, like a rat down a drainpipe - like the Provosts was after him on a lively Saturday night in Warley! Wellesley looked like he were going to have a, a what-d’ye-call-it, an apo- apo - stroke! I thought it were right funny at the time.”
“You would, you hard-hearted bastard,” Tom said, laughing, punching Dick lightly on the arm.
William, seated not so far away from them but invisible in the darkness beyond the circle of firelight, thought of Fitzroy and Dimmock. Fitzroy had bullied him relentlessly when they had been at school together, his efforts at times making Charles look like an amateur. William had known about the cards. They had taken him for a flat, thought to fun him, but he had smoked them; been fly to their plan. It had turned out that a favourite uncle of Dimmock’s had once been fleeced at whist by Gerald Fitz-Simons, and ruined, and had blown his brains out because he could not pay the debt; and Dimmock had wanted to take a cruel revenge upon the Marquess’s bastard, for, of course, that had been the elephant in the room wherever William had appeared in society. About the only good piece of advice his f – the Viscount! - had ever given him had been that time when he had ordered him to avoid playing at cards for money – that was the most heart-felt William had ever heard him speak, at least to him - and he had stuck to that through thick and thin, having witnessed the havoc gambling had all too frequently wrought in the lives of his fellows, both at school and amongst the junior officers of the 33rd, notwithstanding the withering effect such abstinence had had upon his social life and his reputation generally, as many (not all, but enough) of his fellow-subs had taken it as evidence of his pusillanimity and lack of spine, of an all-round deficiency of boldness in him. William had sometimes wondered how, if an antagonist ever invited him to a meeting before breakfast, he would break the news that he was unable to accept the challenge because, in addition to his having pledged to the Viscount that he would never indulge in gaming, he had sworn upon the Bible at his mother’s insistence that he would never fight a duel, either. But he had been content to leave all of that nonsense of cards and gaming debts and (probably) duelling to Charles. Henry and Francis had been similarly circumspect, Henry because he had not wished to inconvenience the Viscount financially in the same way that Charles had (and besides, he had preferred to spend his allowance on his law-books and his geological hobby), and Francis because he had known that it did not become a clergyman (which was what he had aspired to be) to play at cards for money.
But William had known that he ought to have been suspicious of that supper invitation. Instead, he had foolishly nurtured the naïve hope that Fitzroy really had been trying to make amends, to re-set their relationship upon a new course of adult camaraderie, now that they were both officers in King George’s Army. He reflected that it had taken him an awfully long time to learn to stop trusting people by default, which, considering his long history with his brothers (Charles in particular, as his tormentor-in-chief) and with his schoolfellows, surprised even himself. He sat there hidden in the black Indian night, his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms clasped tightly about them, on the one hand mortified to hear this incident being brought up as a matter for mirth between common soldiers – he really had hoped that after his lengthy absence from the Battalion it would have been forgotten - (the ghastly five-and-a-half-year-old memory of the new-minted Lieutenant-Colonel Wesley’s outraged glare as he had sprinted ignominiously from the parade ground, doubled over and clutching his guts, his expression agonised, still made him want to run for the privy) yet on the other pleased to learn of the affectionate if slightly condescending regard in which it appeared that he was now held; at least by these two plain-speaking Redcoats.
“So many whey-faced Ensigns, all over the place like bloody little white mice,” Sharpe had been going on in the meantime. “Most of ‘em just seem to die of the vapours if they don’t get theirselves killed trying to be bloody heroes, like Headless Gleadless. But clearly Mr Lawford weren’t one o’ that sort - he actually came back - knowing what it’s like, and all! He could have just said, bugger that for a game of soldiers, and done somewhat else in life, once he was over whatever was wrong with him.”
They were silent together for some time, pondering the mysterious phenomenon which was the existence of the fledgling officers of King George’s Army.
“They have something like them in the Navy, too,” said Tom, after a while. “Midshipmen. My cousin Ben went for a Midshipman. He was with Commander Joel Chase – Captain Chase, as they would have said on board, although he weren’t a real one, not then, anyway – “ (according to Tom there was a huge difference in status between a Captain in the Army, who was little more than a glorified Lieutenant, and Lieutenants weren’t much better than glorified Ensigns, everyone knew that, and an actual Captain in the Navy, as opposed to a merely honorary one, an officer in command of a vessel who was called Captain only so long as he remained aboard it, such as a Lieutenant sent back to England with a prize vessel captured from the Spanish, the Dutch or the French – no, a real Captain was what they called a Post-Captain, and a Post-Captain had a status equivalent to that of a full Colonel on land – the whole business, Sharpe reflected, was really most confusing) – “in the Clotho frigate. She was in the Mediterranean, although we haven’t had news of her for a long time now. Ben could be anywhere in the world, I suppose. He might even be a Lieutenant by now. We heard that he’d passed the examination, but that doesn’t guarantee a promotion. But you have to be clever to be a Midshipman. All that mathematics and astronomy and navigation they have to learn, as well as how a big man-of-war works, with all its complicated parts – ropes – sheets and halyards - and yards and spars and what have you - and how to wield it as one huge machine in a sea-battle – and the guns! A big Seventy-Four is like about ten floating artillery batteries on land! and all the language! To hear the Navy-men talk, they might as well be double-Dutchmen! They don’t seem to teach the baby Jack Puddings anything at all in the Army though.”
“’Cept how to be targets in smart scarlet coats. ‘Here, hold this nice big flag, stand still there and let the Frenchies take pot-shots at you, there’s a good lad.’”
Sharpe laughed suddenly as something occurred to him.
“I wonder if that’s what they used to say to Lieutenant Goodlad when he were an Ensign!”
“Keep your voice down, Dick! Goodlad might hear you.”
“No he won’t. He’s off explaining himself to Wellesley after his latest set-to with Major Shee. They don’t even teach ‘em how to load and fire a musket, and keep it clean and in working-order!” Dick went on heedlessly. “I mean, not really. They go through the motions with them a few times, same as with the evolutions of the drill, but that ain’t the same as being made to practise and practise unto you dream about it at night, like we have to. That surely wouldn’t hurt. At least that’d make ‘em properly useful in a pinch - and keep them out of mischief.”
“I suppose they’re meant to learn by observation – only nobody’s got the time to teach them anything, not when there’s an actual war on,” said Tom.
“Not got the patience, I expect you mean,” offered Harry.
“Officers always seem to have the time to eat big fancy dinners and swig their way through cases of claret and port and brandy, and visit Naig’s tents, though. Well, not all officers, I suppose,” Sharpe allowed, in response to an alarmed raised eyebrow on the part of Tom.
“Careful all the same, Dick. That’s Jacobin talk, that is.”
“Yes, I grant you. Quite a few of ‘em are decent enough, to be fair.”
Just as well for you, Richard Sharpe, William thought, then, that you have a couple of sensible steadying friends in Thomas Garrard and Henry Drewett.
“It’s how quality get rid of their unwanted younger sons, I’ve heard. Buy your idiot offspring a commission and a smart uniform and an impressive-looking sword and send him off to the Army and hope poor daft little bugger don’t come back. But I think you’re right about Mr Lawford, Tom, on consideration, and being just, like. There does seem to be more to him now than what it often looked like in the past.”
“Something must have happened while he’s been away to put some iron into his soul,” said Garrard eventually, thinking again about the incident with Hakeswill and the water-barrel, which had indeed been a hot topic of conversation in the ranks for some days following Lawford’s arrival back at the end of December.
The sentiment Garrard had meant to convey had been more like ‘steel into his spine’; but he had been more accurate than he could have guessed (19).
“Aye. Somewhat must’ve.”
There was a thoughtful pause.
“I could just murder a quarter-yard of plum duff right now,” Sharpe said then, musingly. “Nothing better to chase down a plate of boiled beef and gravy, and roast potatoes. A nice helping of plum duff. With enough custard to float a fucking seventy-four. We used to have that at Christmas in Black Lion Court. Maggie and the girls used to make it.”
“What? What’s brought this on?” said Tom, laughing. “You ate an heroic helping of stewed goat not an hour ago!”
“I have my raisins,” said Sharpe, mock-solemnly. There was a short silence and then Garrard snorted with laughter and fell over sideways.
“Dick! God! How you do make me laugh!”
“I must’ve been because I was thinking about Christmas. It was Christmas when Mr Lawford arrived, I just remembered, but it didn’t feel like it at the time. Especially when we was digging out that fucking latrine. It’s how us lads used to talk at night, Tom, back at Brewhouse Lane,” Sharpe went on, meanwhile. (William’s ears had pricked at this. They had, he remembered, done much the same at his school.) “When we was in bed in the big dormitory. We’d have a contest to see who could dream up the best bill of fare. Must’ve been your mention of Jack Puddings, Tom, as well as me thinking on Christmas! Now I’ve got to thinking of it, I’d sell me boots for some proper English grub, right now, me!”
“No you wouldn’t, Dick! Hakeswill’d come down so hard on you, you wouldn’t get up again before next Tuesday fortnight! He’d do more than just plant a facer on you, like he did in that stable back in Keighley.”
They both laughed at that. Meanwhile, William, listening nearby in the dark, felt a sudden great disquiet, and did not smile. He had managed not to think of him all day, but now he did. Hakeswill.
“Captain, Captain Morris, sir, a word in your shell-like,” Hakeswill was saying, meanwhile, in a tent in another part of the lines.
“What? Talk sense, man!”
“Your ear, sir.”
“Ah! Oh! ’You may speak out; here are none but friends.’”(20)
Taken somewhat aback, Hakeswill now set his eyes roving shiftily about the dim interior of the tent as if distrustfully searching for spies. Morris watched him with a feeling of unease. Hakeswill’s eyes really did swivel so as his head twitched, almost as if they were on stabilising gimbals. He found it most unnerving.
“Sentry outside, Sergeant. There’s no-one else. What have you to tell me?”
Morris thought it was probably not worth explaining his literary allusion, which was a pity, as he did not know much about literature, and now he felt as if he had cast one of the very few pearls he had possessed before an undoubted swine.
“Ah,” said Hakeswill, making an effort to bring his gyring eyeballs to a decorous stasis. “Lady Lawford’s been letting the officers down again, sir. He didn’t ought to lower himself like that.”
“Sergeant, you overstep the mark. You must not call him that.”
“I had it from Sergeant Loxley in the Third Company, sir. Their Lieutenant Fitzroy knows Mr Lawford from some posh school they both went to. Lady Lawford, that’s what they called him there, sir. Used to cry in the night too, he did, according to Mr Fitzroy, Amos, that is, Sergeant Loxley says.”
“You are not to repeat this to anyone else, Sergeant.”
But Hakeswill had been warming to his theme now.
“And piss his bed sometimes.”
“Sergeant! Enough!”
“He’s a bleeding molly, sir.”
“I don’t believe that for a moment, Sergeant. I forbid you to call him that! He’s been to Naig’s tents from time to time, like most of the other officers. I went with him there myself only a fortnight ago.”
“Ha! That bibi he sees there, Anandhi, that juicy little whore. I has it on hexcellent authority that all they do is play chess for the hour! That, and he likes to talk to her about someone called Miss Turnbull.”
“Lawford has a fiancée at home in England, Hakeswill. I daresay she is Miss Turnbull.”
Hakeswill looked unconvinced.
“You should see how he looks at Private Sharpe, though.”
“How does he look at Private Sharpe, Sergeant?” Morris said, with a sigh. He had a feeling that this was going to be a long interview.
“Like he’d like Sharpie to do to him what is more proper for a man to do to a woman, if you knows what I mean. Or vicey-verso. It’s as I said, sir: he’s a hindorser.”
Morris looked at him. He wondered if calling Lawford an indorser was worse than calling him a molly, but he was not learned in the canting speech of England’s under-classes. Hakeswill, noting his hesitation, enlightened him. “Means about the same as molly, sir, but more formal, like,” he said. “Begging your pardon.”
“It is my opinion, Sergeant,” Morris said, eventually, “that, even if pressed, Lieutenant Lawford probably would not be able to find his own arse with both hands at the point of a bayonet, let alone anyone else’s. I’m sure you’re imagining this. Do not call him a molly. And whilst we are still conversing upon this distasteful topic, kindly, do not call him an indorser (21), either.”
“Imagining it, sir? That I am not, sir! Nuts upon Sharpie, he is.”
“Nuts? And who, pray, is ‘Sharpie’? Do you refer perhaps to Private Sharpe?”
“Sweet on him, is Lieutenant Lawford, the soft bugger.”
“Sergeant! I insist you do not call Lieutenant Lawford that either! at least not anywhere the men might hear you.”
“Believe me, sir, I’ve seen a lot of goings-on in my time in the Army, and I knows what I sees going on there. I’ll just call him a sodomite, shall I, and have done with it, then.”
“Hakeswill!” hissed Maurice, scandalised. “For God’s sake! Keep your voice down! And kindly remember that Lieutenant Lawford is a King’s officer, and your superior, notwithstanding your opinion, rightly or wrongly held, of which way his personal proclivities might be thought to incline! But I think you are right about him letting the side down, at least,” Morris went on, thoughtfully. “I’ll talk to him, put a stop to all this Man of the People nonsense. I’ll not have Jacobinism in my Company, if that is what it is. Next you’ll be telling me he’s a bloody Dipper, like Captain Hughes.”
“Methody, sir, not an Anabaptist. Captain Hughes was a soft-touch Wesleyan, and much good did it do him. Dead as a doornail of the flux, just like all those other poor buggers he used to preachify to. He might have shown some loyalty to the King’s own Church and saved himself the misery of never being able to have so much as a swig of arrack.”
“Methodist, Anabaptist. What ever. They are all of them charlatans and hypocrites, and traitors, too - traitors to Property, Church and King.”
Good riddance to that canting Taffy bastard, thought Hakeswill, at that. Shat hisself to death, and a good thing too! - but he only said,
“Shall I pass the word for Mr Lawford, sir?”
“I did not mean I wanted to talk to him right now, Sergeant! Unless he really is a dangerous sectarian of some kind or another, plotting insurrection?”
“He ain’t no splitter, sir, not with his grandad in the House of Lords, and a brother some kind of posh Vicar with his own seat in Winchester Cathedral, and all! I heard him telling Fitz-Gerald that once, trying to impress him, probably. Easily impressed, Irish peers - it don’t take much to impress an Irish peer, sir, given most of ‘em don’t have so much as two shillings to rub together, and Irish shillings at that, only worth elevenpence! But I can give you a few names of those who are, if you like. There’s three or four Sergeants – a brace of Corporals - and a few o’ the men. Enlisted men who can read are always ‘ighly suspect, hin my book, and you know ‘ow them Bible-thumpers likes to go on, waving it in your face, I mean, really waving it in your face, like that sawney bugger – the one on General Harris’s staff what ain’t a proper officer ‘cause ‘e’s with the Heast Hindia Company.”
“Hakeswill, have a care, now,” said Morris coldly. “I know you speak of Colonel McCandless. He is of great value to our cause here in India. He is, as you say, on General Harris’s staff. And you would also do well to bear in mind that he is Lieutenant Lawford’s uncle, and the brother of a Scottish baron or a laird or clan-chief or some barbarian Northern thing of that sort – probably does that King-over-the-Water leger-de-main with his wine-glass when it’s time to toast King George. But he's also the brother-in-law of a future peer of the Realm, and a war hero from two or three decades back – and crucially he’s Harris’s chief intelligencer, so we can assume he’s probably loyal, for all that.”
“Mister Lawford’s uncle? Is he now? There’s a thing,” said Hakeswill to that, having taken care to give his voice an inflexion of surprise – genuine surprise, it seemed to Morris; although of course Hakeswill had already known this, having seen it in a letter he had taken from Morris’s desk some time earlier when word of Lawford’s impending return had first reached the 33rd months before in Madras. Since transferring to the Light Company, whilst they had been at Calcutta, and then at Madras, Hakeswill had got into the habit of rifling through Morris’s desk in the middle of the hot afternoons when he had been confident that Morris had been in his cot behind the muslin screen, fast in his arrack-induced slumbers – unbeknown to Morris, who kept his papers in such disorder that he never noticed a thing which might have been out of place, or even missing. Hakeswill had found out a great deal of valuable information that way. Then he went on, “That’s where they gets their levelling ideas from, that is – from reading the bleeding Bible at ‘ome instead of just listening to the parish clerk reading out the bits the Church wants you to ‘ear of a Sunday. You wants to know who they are, sir?”
“Not now, thank you, Sergeant,” said Morris, who really had no stomach for a witch-hunt at that moment. Hakeswill looked oddly deflated and disappointed.
“Here’s another thing, Hakeswill, concerning Lieutenant Lawford. I’m tired of his absenting himself from the mess night after night after dinner, because he took offence. So Captain Cavill got drunk the first evening Lawford was with us and grabbed his bum and pretended to try to kiss him? He does that to all the young subalterns! Even Hicks! My God, Hicks, can you imagine, all those damned pimples! Cavill don’t mean no harm by it, it’s just his way. Only the missish ones ever take offence and flounce out like Lawford did. It was meant in fun. It was Lawford’s own fault, anyway. He should not have his breeches cut so indecent snug if he don’t want someone’s hands wandering where they shouldn’t. What was he expecting?”
“As you say, sir.”
“I never seem to notice him leaving, either, apart from on that occasion. He seems to have a special talent for vanishing into thin air. He’s a master of the bloody French exit! Why is this, do you know? It’s damned anti-social of him.”
“Well, sir, you said yourself, there was that business with Captain Cavill, fine boisterous gentleman that he is. And intercourse has been constrained in the mess ever since that carry-on with Colonel Aston and Major Allen. That all happened the very week Lady – Lieutenant – Lawford arrived.”
“Hm. You could be right. It had not been much fun in the mess for several weeks before Allen finally shot him, either. Bad business, bad business.” (22)
“And the bad blood between Colonel Wesley, General Wellesley, I should say, and Major Shee ain’t been ‘elping the hambience, neither, I don’t doubt.” (23)
Morris’s eyes narrowed at this. What could Hakeswill know of it? Shee had sent him an indignant note about the matter not three days since, clearly hoping for his moral support. Be damned to that – he wasn’t getting involved. The whole thing was a long way above his salary. He would contrive to lose the wretched note, feign ignorance about it if Shee asked. Where had he put it? It had been here on his desk only that morning – somewhere –
“Looking for something, sir?” said Hakeswill, strangely making the query sound the very essence of innocence. Morris suffered a sensation as if of a sudden dissonance in the music of the spheres. The idea of an innocent Hakeswill was as novel and shocking to him as the idea of a chaste Lady Hamilton or a sweetly-flowing Thames below Westminster.
“Never mind. Where does Lawford get to, Sergeant? It’s not as if he’s hiding in his tent, when he usually won’t have the damn thing erected these days. It’s like he just – evaporates – or disappears up a rope, like a bloody fakir, or something!”
Hakeswill spluttered.
“What is the matter, Hakeswill?”
“Nothing, sir. But there ain’t no mystery there.”
“What do you mean?”
Morris’s eyes narrowed even further. With what disturbing new revelation was Hakeswill about to ruin his already violated evening, with even more comprehensive thoroughness?
“Top-notch at hide-and-seek, is Mr Lawford, sir. I remember once, at the back-end of ’95, back at the barracks in Lymington, when there’d been that cock-up about the Thirty-Third going to the West Indies and there’d been all them men drownded, and they sent those other regiments off again in December, and the same thing happened only worse, and we only got off that time because there wasn’t enough transports after the first lot had got wrecked off Dorset, and there was talk about us going again in the spring, only then they about-faced us and sent us here instead – “ Morris suppressed a wince. He knew full well he had been in part responsible for the debacle to which Hakeswill had just so indelicately alluded. (24) “ – there was a ball in the town one night around Christmas and someone spilled red wine down Lady Lawford’s white silk breeches, accidentally on purpose so to speak, so he spent all evening hiding in the jakes instead of doing his duty come what might and dancing with the ladies, like what it says in the Scriptures.”
“What? What Scriptures? What are you - what in the name of - ! I find that hard to credit! Surely someone could have found him a spare pair. It was only a country dance in any case – these things tend to happen in crowded provincial assembly-rooms – nobody cares! - what did it matter?”
“You wasn’t there, sir, I do recall; I believe you was out on the spree that night with Major Shee and a few others - but without a word of a lie, that’s what he did – hid in the jakes. When there was some young ladies there what didn’t get a dance all flaming night on account of his skulking, while the other officers – even the ensigns! proper gentlemen! did their level best to do their duty. Brought shame on the Regiment, that did. And you’ll no doubt have heard of what he did that time in the mess at Warley, when Colonel Wesley, as he was then, walked in all unannounced - hid under the table like a regular snudge, ‘cause of what had happened on parade two days previous!” (25)
“Hm. And what were you doing in the mess then, anyway, Sergeant?”
“Just bearing tidings, sir, bearing tidings - a message for Captain Hughes (of blessed memory!), I believe it was. But as sure as I’m standing here a-telling you, sir, Mr Lawford fell on his knees like he’d been pole-axed, and crawled under the table! It was a couple of days after he’d had to run off the parade-ground, sir, like I said - his bowels, see. You don’t remember that, sir?”
“No. I have no recollection of the condition of Lieutenant Lawford’s bowels at that or at any other time. Thank God. I never pay much attention to what the subalterns get up to, at any rate – that’s the job of the captains - and Lawford in those days was a complete cypher. Not like he is now. He was sent home to England to die and instead of having the decency to climb into his grave and lie down quiet he’s come back a cocky self-righteous pain in the backside, acting like the champion of the Common Man, blast him. Would Lazarus have behaved so egregious, I ask you?”
“Lazarus wouldn’t lie down quiet, either, sir. Says so in the Scriptures.”
“I’ll wager the resurrected Lazarus never ran about all over Judaea calling for the Romans to have their arses kicked back to the Tiber, though. If ever I knew Lawford had done as you say, I’d long forgotten it.”
“I’d have said it was Bengal Belly ‘cept it happened in bleeding Essex. Too ashamed to look Colonel Wesley (26) in the face, he was, for weeks, after that.”
“Christ God. And they send me him for one of my officers now! That’s what they think of me! Where the hell is he tonight then, Hakeswill? Hiding in the latrine trenches? For I note you still have not answered my question concerning his current whereabouts.”
Hakeswill was silent for a moment as he considered.
“I know he likes to sit outside in the dark watching Sharpie and his crowd round their fire, sir, like he wishes he was one of ‘em. That’s where he must be, on my life, I swear. Sits with his knees drawn up and his arms wrapped round them, as if he’s afraid he’ll be noticed unless he makes himself as small as a mouse. Like a scared kid,” Hakeswill concluded, with a sneer, for to his mind that was precisely what Lawford was: a frightened boy, afraid of everything and everyone, and particularly afraid that someone like Hakeswill would smoke his guilty secret concerning Sharpie. Which, of course, Hakeswill had done, from day one.
“Oh, God,” said Morris, in disgust. “I’ll definitely have to talk to him.”
“Tell him to stop his vanishing tricks, sir, and walk around in plain sight instead, like a Christian? That’s be a good start.”
“That too. Not a word of this outside this tent, though, Sergeant.”
“Consider me the very soul of distraction, sir.” (27)
“As ever you are, Sergeant.”
Notes
1. Lawford had held his Lieutenant’s commission since the spring of 1796, so it is likely that he was not really all that junior, and that others commissioned more recently had come out to join the 33rd in India whilst he still convalesced at home. However, he seems to be thinking in terms of his recent arrival, a late-comer to Madras, and an officer who has to find his feet in the Regiment all over again, as if from scratch.
2. Maurice Fitzgerald, the ‘Green Knight’ of Kerry, comes into the Napoleonic story in the aftermath of Waterloo, playing a part in the bringing of the news of Wellington’s victory to England.
3. Until the explosion at Almeida in 1810, where an entire Battalion was indeed wiped out in a heartbeat; and of course the 33rd itself had lost between about a quarter and a third of its strength in the disasters which hit the transports in the effort to reach the West Indies in the autumn of 1795. The 69th almost in its entirety died over the space of a few minutes at Quatre Bras on 16th June 1815 due to an elementary blunder by an officer, thought by some to have been the Prince of Orange, although the culprit could well have been someone else.
4. Pollilur. 10th September 1780 – a battle of the Second Mysore War. Fateh Ali, later the Tippoo Sultan, was the victor on that occasion. David Baird was amongst the British prisoners and subsequently spent almost four years chained in a cell in Seringapatam, which permanently coloured his view of Hyder Ali and his son Tippoo, and indeed of all Indians.
5. In Wolf Tone’s uprising of 1798, County Wexford had seen particularly severe disturbances, and acts of shocking violence committed against the Anglo-Irish community. Sinnott’s grim jest is a reference to atrocities which were committed in County Wexford during those troubles.
6. 1st May 1169, exactly 600 years before Anglo-Irish soldier and stateman Arthur Wesley was born.
7. cf Butcher in IV:ii of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer. 1706. Regarding Hakeswill’s belief in his own immortality, it is possible that his madness took the form of a particular manifestation of Cotard’s Syndrome, sufferers variously believing that they are dead, or have organs missing, or have no blood, or any number of delusions regarding their existence or non-existence - or indeed, even that they cannot die. Hakeswill was hanged as a juvenile offender at the age of twelve and appeared to strangle to death, but revived when cut down an hour later, so if he became convinced that he had indeed been dead during that time one can see how he might have come to believe that he was now immune to death.
8. This was Edward Clive (son of Robert Clive, ‘Clive of India’) second Earl of Powys. He was Governor of Madras from 1798 until 1803.
9. Not only were eleven days inserted into the year in 1752, New Year’s Day was transferred from 25th March to 1st January, so there was some ambiguity about dates in the first three months of the year for some time following, as to the year in which they rightly belonged.
10. Hocking had made an alphabetical list of surnames gleaned from the memorials in the local churches and graveyards – he said he liked to keep the ambience of the Foundling Home ‘local’ – and named the orphans by rote. Mr Bumble (Oliver Twist) used a similar method. Ed.
11. Theatre-loving Lawford is thinking of Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer.
12. As opposed to athwart, or en bataille, as in former times. Bonaparte preferred to wear his hats en bataille all his life, and almost never changed his style.
13. Richard Wellesley, Arthur Wellesley’s elder brother, succeeded their father as Earl of Mornington in 1781 and was created Marquess Wellesley of Norragh in 1799. He succeeded Charles Cornwallis as Governor-General of Bengal in 1798 and planned the subsequent war of 1799 against the Tippoo Sultan.
14. 1784.
15. Lawford duly did find out, when as Company Clerk Pte Billy Lawford he had to carry his pack and all his kit the twenty miles to Seringapatam after he and Sharpe left Harris’s tent to set out on their mission, not long after this. The experience left him with a healthy respect for the determination and pluck of the British swaddy which he never lost. (Two hundred or so years later ‘swaddy’, which originally denoted an ex-soldier of the ranks, has been transformed into ‘squaddie’, a mildly derogatory name for a serving private soldier, clearly influenced by ‘squad’.)
16. There is some confusion as to whether William had been holding the Regimental colour when he was shot, or whether he had been performing this alternative duty. At some point during this action he had been carrying the colour, likely relinquishing it to another in order to undertake this task instead. This is the version of events which endured into the official report of the day, however. It is likely that the report was made whilst it had still been generally believed that William had been killed, in order to make a stock narrative about his dying whilst clutching the Colour so as to comfort his presumably grieving mother. It is in any case highly possible that William himself had no clear memory of the events of that day, given his treatment at the hands of Surgeon Micklewhite, which had of course involved laudanum. There has also been confusion concerning the role of Wesley contrasted with that of Sherbrooke. Wesley has often been credited with the success at Schyndel/Boxtel, when it seems that it was John Sherbrooke who actually deserved the accolade. Wesley however never objected when he was lauded for this happy outcome, which seems out of character if he was not actually responsible for it. Lawford seems to be agonising about this.
17. See note on ‘Pte Thomas Atkins’ at the conclusion of the chapter ‘Prince of Waterloo’ in Elizabeth Longford’s Wellington: Pillar of the State (the second part of her biography of Wellington (1972). This is a popular legend, and one that Wellington clearly bought into, but there is evidence that ‘Tommy Atkins’ as a generic nickname for a private in a British regiment of the line goes back at least to the 1740s.
18. Garrard is remembering a passage from The Pilgrim’s Progress. At the time at least one copy of Bunyan’s best-seller was to be found in every moderately prosperous Protestant home in the English-speaking world. Tom’s respectable farming family would have had it on their book-shelf alongside the Bible and Shakespeare and two or three other improving volumes, from which Farmer Garrard would have read to them on Sunday afternoons before evening church.
19. Ps. 105: 17-19.
20. Captain Plume in Act 1 of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer. 1706.
21. A word from the world of bare-knuckle boxing, meaning one who cudgels upon the back, borrowed to refer to those who indulge in unorthodox intercourse.
22. There was a notorious lengthy quarrel arising from the preparations being made to advance into Mysore which culminated in a duel in which Colonel Henry Aston of the 12th was fatally shot by a Major Allen. He died on the 23rd of December 1798 at Madras. Major Edward Picton, younger brother of Sir Thomas Picton (later one of Wellington’s Peninsula and Waterloo generals) was also involved. The Hon. Arthur Wellesley had spent much time overseeing the Court of Inquiry which had been held to try to resolve the matter. He inherited Aston’s horse, Diomed. The partisan gossip and intrigue surrounding this affair had clearly left its mark on the officers’ mess of the 33rd.
23.Wellesley had caught out Shee in several instances of dereliction of duty. In response to Shee’s insolent self-justifying letters he had threatened to involve General Hill; to which Shee’s response had been along the lines of ‘bring it on’.
24. Morris had insisted on placing his luggage into the last of the ship’s boats as the transport had been grounding and breaking up off Chesil Beach in Dorset in a fierce westerly gale in September 1795. As a result a dozen men, left behind on the deck of the doomed ship, drowned who might otherwise have been saved. (Morris is a fictional creation of Bernard Cornwell. So also therefore is this incident. It is to be hoped that none of the officers of the 33rd behaved in this way upon this occasion.)
25. A snudge was an accomplice of housebreakers; one who would slip into a house at dusk before the doors were locked and secrete himself, perhaps under a piece of furniture, and then emerge and unbar a window once darkness had fallen and the household were gone to bed.
26. It would be another six months before the Honourable Arthur adopted the new/old spelling of the family name.
27. ‘Discretion’.
Fiction Index | Sharpe Tales Home | .Index | Lawford’s Duty: NEXT CHAPTER # GOES HERE Chapter 8
Host: Psychz Networks
Since: November 25, 2010
©Sable 2025 | Valid CSS
This is not official and I am not Sharpe or Bernard Cornwell, the owner of Sharpe. This website is for entertainment purposes only. If you have any questions or queries please use the Contact Form. Your submissions for contact will not be posted anywhere within this site. Images, etc are copyright their respective owners. No infringement intended.