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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.
The Present: March 1799.
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PARAGRAPH ONE
Through his covert observations, William had, of course, for some time now been growing familiar with the character and habits of Sharpe and his small band of preferred companions, his inner circle as it were, closer to him than those of the wider group of the Light Company with whom he held court – it really seemed, sometimes, as if that was what he was doing - about the fire at night, William thought, as he watched as the men vied to catch Sharpe’s eye, draw his notice, make him laugh. Tom Garrard, his unofficial lieutenant, was always seated upon his right hand and Harry Drewett, Garrard’s equally unofficial deputy, upon his left. (Had William but known it, this replicated the state of affairs in the St Giles rookery once upon a time, when Sharpe had held his position of pre-eminence amongst the up-and-coming rogues of Black Lion Court - Dan Pierce his right-hand man, and Bill Tonkins Dan’s deputy - before he had had to flee for his life after he had inadvertently killed Tim Jackson, the master-thief, in a brawl occasioned by a woman). Harry had another friend with whom he often associated at other times of the day, Tim Tooley (1). William had speculated that these two, Harry from Wiltshire and Tim from Norfolk, stuck together mainly out of solidarity, both being outsiders in this battalion, at least half the ranks of which consisted of Yorkshiremen, although, like all the other regiments of the line, it had its fair share of Irishmen too.
A question then arose in William’s mind. Did Richard Sharpe count as a Yorkshireman? He appeared thoroughly at home in this West Riding regiment, a Havercake lad like all the rest of them, although William knew that Sharpe had been born in London, and had grown up there until for some obscure reason he had gone north at the age of fifteen. He seemed to have become pretty much assimilated, however, having been with the Havercakes now for six years. William could still detect traces of rookery-London in Sharpe’s speech – at least in his vocabulary and in his vocal cadences and in his approach to English grammar (although, thought William, amused by the sudden idea, Sharpe did not so much approach English grammar as sneak up on it as if he had been lying in wait for it in a dark alley, intent upon giving it a good kicking before picking its pockets and running away, leaving it for dead). However, when it came to his accent, Sharpe had by now more or less gone native Tyke – his West Riding was almost as broad as that of so many of his comrades, all of whom gave every sign of having accepted him as one of their own. For that reason his name had been noted down in William’s common-place book on the page where had been recording those of men who would likely make good corporals when the projected coming actions inevitably saw the first casualties of the Seringapatam campaign (at least, those caused by contact with the enemy: they had been leaving a regular and lengthening line of graves behind them across the south of India as they had travelled further and further westward since leaving Vellore: victims of disease, heat-stroke, exhaustion, child-birth, infant mortality and, occasionally, irregular violence both in the ranks and between some of the men and their women). William knew that Sharpe had indeed already once been raised to corporal – that was noted in the Battalion records he had seen. It was to be hoped that, older and wiser, he now knew better and would make sure he was not reduced to the ranks again for drunkenness and insubordination (or for any other reason) the next time opportunity for promotion presented itself. The names of Tom Garrard and Harry Drewett were there now also, together with the names of other rankers whom, upon grounds of their general appearance, bearing and conduct, William considered likely candidates for advancement. These, the more popular, more able, quicker-minded men – the most cheerful, engaged and resourceful, who also often happened to be the finest singers, the wittiest jesters, the best story-tellers - comprised the nearer arcs of the circle which nightly encompassed the fire to either side of Drewett and Garrard. They had long ere this found their higher places in the unofficial hierarchy which had spontaneously arisen amongst them, possibly even before their arrival in India. The rest were out there somewhere in the darkness, either on the side of the fire farther from William, or indeed seated about other fires of lesser prestige. William pondered on this, wondering how it had come about. He could not imagine that the seating arrangements had been settled by conscious design. It seemed to him to be more likely the result of a natural sorting process in which the men themselves had participated, possibly even without consciously realising that they had done so. They had known their proper places in the hierarchy as if by instinct, as William had read that so also did dogs and wolves and apes and elephants, and other non-human creatures of higher intelligence.
Garrard, Sharpe’s favoured companion, was the Private who had doled out the water from the barrel during that very uncomfortable encounter with Sergeant Hakeswill on the day of William’s arrival at Fort St George - the one with whom Sharpe had been sharing jests and sly mocking looks beneath Hakeswill’s very nose, careless of the presence of both Morris and himself; Garrard, who had been the first of the trio to come to his aid as he had lain half out of his wits and helpless in that church in Lower Saxony five years before, he now clearly recalled. Tom, Dick and Harry! That always made him smile. William recalled from his irregular perusal of the records that they had all three been netted together, on the same recruiting expedition, in the same small area of the West Riding, in and around Keighley in the August of 1793, by the Havercakes’ former champion recruiting NCO, Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill, and Corporal Terence Bumfit - Captain Lansdowne Christophers being (in theory, at least) in command of the party: Bumfit and Christophers had been amongst those of the 33rd who had been drowned during the doomed attempt to reach the West Indies in the autumn of ’95, having requested other more active duties, William remembered, sorrowfully. Christophers had been lazy and workshy and altogether something of a shirker, but there had been no malice in him, and he had been good company. He had had an amusing line in jests, and had been good fun in the mess. Bumfit had proved his usefulness in getting the men ready for deployment before they had embarked. He would have made a decent Sergeant, in time. William still regretted the deaths of both of them.
After the loss of so many officers, NCOs and men in the disastrous attempt to reach the West Indies, surely Obadiah Hakeswill should have been transferred at once to a posting with the Regiment down at Lymington, but for some reason he had remained for a further six months over the winter with the recruitment operation up in Halifax. But now the bloody man was here at last, and inexplicably the Light Company’s senior Sergeant. No, not inexplicably, at least in one sense. Morris had brought it about. But why? Therein lay the mystery. The flank companies were the best, and it was therefore vital that their Sergeants also were the best, in order to maintain the men’s performance to the necessary exacting standards. Hakeswill, William knew, was far from being the best. He was not even close. In fact, he was the very opposite. How had his appointment been allowed? William remembered that Fitz-Gerald had mentioned to him that Morris had insisted on having Hakeswill as compensation when he had finally been permitted to purchase the vacant captaincy from Owen Hughes’s estate after the poor man had died (Morris had hoped to get the promotion for nothing as it had occurred during wartime conditions, and it had been necessary that the Light Company have a captain as soon as possible, but he had been swiftly disabused of that idea, mainly because those with the authority to permit it had not been entirely persuaded that he deserved it, and in any case doubts had been expressed in Calcutta that it would ultimately be approved by Horse Guards back in London) and Shee had lazily agreed, to avoid finding himself in a ‘situation’. But again, why? William could not help but wonder about this. It could not have been for Hakeswill’s scintillating wit and conversation. Hakeswill babbled and gibbered like a Bedlamite when the mad fit was upon him! Bickerstaff had told William why that was, and he had had no reason to disbelieve him. William had seen cases of the pox in Flanders which had progressed beyond the early stages, when the madness had just been beginning to show itself. He had seen advanced cases, too, in a hospital in which he had been been a patient in Bremen, albeit briefly, thank God. He shuddered at the memory. For what reason would any officer want a man like that in his company at all, let alone as his senior Sergeant? Did Hakeswill have some kind of hold over Morris, know something potentially explosive about him? The thought of Hakeswill as a kind of barrel packed with black powder and musket-balls and shreds of iron laid at the foundations of Morris’s life intrigued him, and William’s always inventive imagination very much wanted to speculate. He tried not to let it, however. He knew that indulgence in speculation of that kind was always harmful, almost inevitably giving rise to rumour and gossip, and once that sort of thing had begun it had the potential not only to poison the soul of the officers’ mess but that of the whole Battalion. For God’s sake, he had learned to be vigilant for talk of that sort about himself, since his first time in the Havercakes – since he was at school, even! William was sure, however, that Hakeswill’s rise to power within the Light-Bobs could never have come about if Colonel, no, Lieutenant-General Wellesley now, had still had the day-to-day running of the 33rd. Wellesley, William understood from his former slight acquaintance with his way of doing things back in Flanders, knew that it was vital that if a thing should be done properly then the only way one could be assured of achieving that was to do it oneself. One did not simply casually deputise and assume that all would be well. This was one of the many hard lessons Wellesley had taken home with him from Bremen at the end of that dismal failed campaign. Wellesley had a keen and discerning mind. He saw through people, William knew. If he had been able to clasp the 33rd closer to his bosom as they had marched towards Seringapatam, been with them every day, seen how things were going on amongst them, he would have known Hakeswill at once for what he was, William was certain, and would never have permitted a man like that to have so much casual heft in the Light Company. Not Shee, though. Shee was the polar opposite of Wellesley. No wonder there were persistent rumours of a serious falling-out between them. Shee was all for a quiet untroubled life, for lazily leaving things to his subordinates and hoping for the best – a slack practice which he cynically called ‘the Art of Delegation’, as if it were one of those Military Virtues, like frugality, about which the Viscount had liked to lecture William, back home at Durford. William performed the tasks Shee and (further down the line) Morris set him as conscientiously as it was within his power to do so, as did Robert Fitz-Gerald, but he was unconvinced that all of their fellow-subs in the 33rd did likewise, and he had no knowledge of how the other regiments went on. Now Charles Morris, seeming to have caught the habit from John Shee, had given Hakeswill free rein to govern the men as he saw fit.
There were some others apart from Tim Tooley who seemed to drift casually in and out of that inner orbit the gravitational centre of which was Sharpe, but Tom and Harry were his two closest friends, the unchanging core of that shifting band of companions. William remembered having read in the Battalion ledgers that Tom had grown up on a farm near Ripon. That accounted for the well-developed appearance of his upper body (which William had been unable not to notice, that day at the trench). All that forking of dung and bales of hay and sheaves of wheat – no, barley? oats? onto carts and off them again. Ripon was in the very north of the West Riding (2), almost in the North Riding, which was Uttar Yorkshire, so to speak (Yorkshire being a very extensive county). Of course it would be oats, he thought, recalling those oatcakes Yorkshiremen so loved to eat - or at least claimed that they did. The Yorkshire oatcake, or havercake, resembled the wheaten pancakes that William remembered Nell had been used to serve as a treat, with honey or sugar or strawberry jam at nursery tea on Shrove Tuesday, before Lenten gloom had set in (no desserts on week-days, just bread so that he would at least not be hungry, and dull poached fish and boiled peas and boiled potatoes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays), if somewhat coarser. In other parts of the North, and in Scotland, the oatcakes were more like those terrible things they went in for in the Navy, if not so horribly hard. In the Navy the biscuits were so hard that a landsman like himself had had to soak them in rum for an hour before he had judged that they had been soft (and hygienic) enough to chew, but at least that process had killed the weevils which had infested them. William had had literally to force himself to eat the ship’s biscuits during the voyage out to Madras, weevils and all; it had been either that or lose face in front of the astute young Mr Bellingham and his fellow-Mids, some of whom had been about William’s own age, including two who had passed their Lieutenant’s examination some time before, but who for want of patronage had had yet to receive their commissions, and another, a good deal older, who had taken the examination three times and had so far been unable to pass it. The Mids had never passed on a chance to do down the Army, mainly in the spirit of friendly rivalry, of course. The high-hearted young gentlemen had even taught him a song about the weevils -
Ten fine weevils wriggling on the plate!
Ten fine weevils wriggling on the plate!
and should one fine weevil be accidentally ate,
there’d be nine fine weevils wriggling on the plate!
and then the one who had failed the Lieutenants’ examination three times had insisted with a mildly unpleasant air of menace that William sing it, in the face of Bellingham’s objections (for Bellingham, a decent and sympathetic youth, had grown rather protective towards William as the voyage had gone on, perhaps discerning his vulnerability to bullying of that sort, notwithstanding his age relative to Bellingham’s own), making William punctuate each verse by swallowing one of the disgusting things, washing it down with a swig of the evil adulterated beverage which had passed for wine in the Midshipmen’s mess, until there had been no fine weevils left. It had certainly helped that William had already been more than slightly drunk that evening. William winced at the memory, but then smiled to recall it, nevertheless. Worse things had happened. Those flying fish, for example. Worse things would inevitably happen in the future, for that matter. What a head he had had the next morning, though! How he had managed to dress himself decently and finally stagger, only a little late, onto parade with the Marines that day he still could not understand.
Harry Drewett, who had never really said much at these evening gatherings, like Tom, also came from a life of deep rurality, but he had been a shepherd on the chalk downs above Westbury in Wiltshire, and not a farm labourer. That had been a solitary kind of existence, William supposed, Harry spending his days and probably many of his nights on the dry exposed hillsides high above the fertile low-lying riverlands which lay to the north of Salisbury Plain, with the downland grass which grew on the thin poor soil which barely covered the underlying chalk (the chalk inexplicably full of the stony yet friable phantoms of strange creatures which looked as if they had come from the bottom of the ocean, although that was impossible, of course – ), stretching away like a great sea to the horizon, and the huge blue skylark-haunted dome of Heaven overhead. One would necessarily be very isolated and exposed on the top of the downs – circumstances which William imagined might well encourage one to construct a kind of protective tabernacle about oneself woven from the silence - for up there, there would be no music of running water, for there was none, except in the months of cold and darkness when the winterbournes flowed in the grassy hollows, and the rain ran in the chalky gulleys like milk; no rustle of wind in the trees, for there were few enough of those except upon the lower slopes of the more sheltered coombes, those deep folds in the ground which scored the hillsides in innumerable places. In the summer there would be the trilling of the larks as they ascended and descended like Jacob’s angels (again William was put in mind of the West Front of Bath Abbey), but apart from that, no bird-song, and indeed few bird-calls other than the screaming of the red kites as they stooped upon their small scuttling prey, and the nasal, snoring-like grunting of the ground-dwelling bustards, and the harsh cries of crows who mercilessly stalked the woolly white vulnerable young. In the summer there would also be the blathering of the ewes for their lambs, and the bleating of the lambs for their mothers, when the time of separation was come, but that would have been about all. In such a place one might easily begin to imagine strange things, William thought. Indeed, he had once overheard Drewett, who generally, until then, had not been one of the more voluble of the camp-fire circle, solemnly telling his companions about the great White Horse carved out of the chalk on the steep green hillside which in places, he said, had been not far from vertical, which was said sometimes to come alive and trot down at midnight to a coombe below the Plain to drink from one of the many springs that rose, punctuating a line some ten miles long, at the foot of its northern escarpment - this particular one in some village called Bratton, apparently, close to the spot where great King Alfred of Wessex and his thanes and their shield-men and house-carls had beaten the Danes in a big battle more than nine hundred years ago - according to Harry, anyway. Harry had sworn that his grandfather had once with his own eyes seen this miracle of the giant chalk horse take place when he had been a boy. William had been astonished, not so much at the preposterous tale, but at hearing the normally taciturn Drewett string so many words together all at once. The legend had evidently meant a great deal to him.
“King Alfred ain’t real, he’s a made-up story,” a sceptical London voice had challenged him, then.
“He was real, so! You’re thinking of King Arthur.”
“King Arthur’s real right enough!” called someone else. “King Arthur Wellesley!”
The camp-fire crowd erupted in laughter.
“What would a nipper be doing up at midnight?” the Londoner had persisted, undeterred, when the fit had passed.
“It wor Christmas Eve!” Drewett had come back at once, his gentle Wiltshire burr, which had until that night little by little been eroded from years of exposure to the harshly dominant Yorkshire voices of most of his companions, suddenly re-asserting itself as he had risen to the challenge; “He’d gone to watch the kine kneeling in the barn – “
Christmas had been and gone at about the time of William’s arrival at Madras, and he had given barely a thought to it because there had been so much else happening, and besides, the weather had been all wrong, but he had now found himself thinking of those other, long-ago shepherds abiding on Bethlehem Down, keeping watch over their flocks by night, who had once hallucinated not merely a giant chalk horse come trotting down a steep green hillside to drink from a village spring, or a barn-full of pious beasts kneeling to honour the Incarnation, but the entire Heavenly Host singing Gloria in Excelsis Deo.
“Oh, aye, and did they?”
“O’course not! Pudding for brains! But every year he hoped they would!”
This had been greeted by more derisive laughter.
“When I were a kid I were often up at midnight,” Sharpe had put in smartly, then, purposely deflecting attention from the shy Drewett, and thus saving him from further mockery which might have had the effect of daunting him so severely that he might never again dare to speak up in public - William had instantly understood that, approvingly – that was just the sort of thing that a good leader did, he realised, in that moment - “ – you don’t want to know why!” At that, Sharpe had pulled his pick-lock from its hiding-place in his pack and shaken it ostentatiously; it had coruscated in the firelight, and at once had come a great roar of complicit laughter; the former pleasant easy jovial mood now quite restored.
William, who was, frankly, lonely, could not help but be interested in Sharpe and his friends, who were, after all, young men of about his own age; and he did not know any others apart from Fitz-Gerald, whom he liked, but whose confidence and self-assuredness in the role of officer, so much greater than his own, he found intimidating - and Hicks of course: but he distrusted Hicks. Hicks reminded him too much of Fitzroy and Dimmock, and by association of those unhappy days in Flanders. Also, Hicks was patently a dedicated acolyte of Captain Morris, and that in itself had been from the outset an additional warning to William to keep his distance.
William worried that by doing so – by concerning himself, albeit in secret, in the social lives of these young fellows - that he was being disloyal to Mark – as if Mark would care now, in all likelihood! Although it was not as if he were forgetting Mark, far from it. The last thing William did every evening before retiring, if they were to camp in one place for more than a night and he was secure in the relative privacy of his tent (after he had read a passage from the Bible, out of duty to Mama, and paid homage to Jessica’s portrait) was to take off the plain silver locket which he wore always about his neck, hidden beneath his shirt and his neck-cloth – the locket which he had worn ever since the morning upon which he had left Durford - and open it and look at Mark’s likeness, the miniature which he had made himself with such careful devoted skill - and touch the delicate twist of red-golden hair which the locket also contained, even if, increasingly, in this strange red, hot, dusty and so far arid land, Mark – slightly-built and slender, sweet-faced, pale-complexioned, with his wonderful hair and clear green eyes, kindly and quiet and as gentle as English summer rain - was in his mind becoming conflated in memory with the soft, generous, green and subtly beautiful landscape, the understated loveliness of his Hampshire home - of the south of England - which he had left behind him indefinitely and perhaps even forever. But one day William admitted to himself, with a pang of guilt on account of Mark, and also a slight shiver of fear, that he also liked to watch Richard Sharpe not simply because he found the sight of him, with his demeanour of bold easy confidence, reassuring and cheering, but because his lean lithe body and hard, dark, starkly-defined good looks seemed somehow much more in keeping with what he had so far experienced of India. Why, William sometimes thought, Sharpe even looked at least half like a native! Could it really be that Sharpe was in truth a Gypsy, as he had first thought? Had not the Romany people come out of India many centuries ago, in the time of Caesar Augustus, sailing westwards on the merchant-ships which had brought them to the ports of the greater Egypt in the days when Rome’s southern empire had extended to the shores of the Arabian Sea? William thought he might have read that in a book, once, that that was why they were called Gypsies, because the people of Europe had at least been aware that they had come out of Egypt, even if they had not been aware of their more distant heritage. And, crucially, Sharpe was present there before him in the here and now, and was not a mere memory of a young man (however determined William had still been, then, never to allow that memory to fade in the slightest degree) who had been sent half a world away in the opposite direction to the one which Fate had dictated that William must take, to the West Indies rather than to the Indies of the East: to who knew what doom.
William frankly admitted to himself then that he very much liked to watch Sharpe with his companions. It made him feel vicariously happy to observe them going about their mundane activities during the day and enjoying their hours of leisure together in the evenings. Indeed, it almost made him feel as if he had friends of his own - human ones, that is - other than merely his horse. Rufus patently liked him, was always glad to see him, and did not seem to mind it when William shared his random thoughts and speculations and humorous observations with him, although he did have an annoying habit of sometimes whinnying just as he had been about to deliver the punch-line - most often, it seemed, when William had thought the joke rather prime (You are right; it really was not all that amusing, he would tell the horse, wistfully, when that happened); but truth to tell, Rufus had so far not proved himself to be much of a conversationalist - which was probably just as well, considering William had, on more than one occasion, confided to the beast his opinions concerning Major John Shee, Captain Charles Morris, Ensign Timothy Hicks - and Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill.
It had been towards the end of the third week of March – the same day, as it happened, upon which Harris had suddenly turned his force south-west in the direction of that settlement called Cankanelli – when Sergeant James Thomas Bickerstaff, of the Light Company of His Majesty’s 33rd Regiment of Foot, had fallen sick with a fever. William had not thought much about it at first. People were falling ill with various feverish distempers all the time, and were sick for a little and then recovered, and what with the effort they had had to make to get through the densely wooded territory, and then all the excitement of James Stuart’s arrival with his momentous news, to his lasting regret William gave Bickerstaff barely a thought for three of four days. Then by chance he heard from Fitz-Gerald that ‘Old Bickers’ was in a bad way. With a start of guilt he went at once to see him and to his dismay discovered that Fitz-Gerald had greatly understated the severity of the case. William then went to Micklewhite and presented him with a substantial bribe for him to provide a decoction of quinine, but to no avail (in retrospect he suspected that Micklewhite had merely taken his money in return for a stick of cinnamon mulled in brandy).
Bickerstaff suffered for a further three days and three nights, Mary at his side on the covered cart for all of that time with a cloth and a bowl of water, her prayers (Christian - to Jesus and to his Father and to the enigmatic Holy Ghost; to St Michael, Field-Marshal of the Heavenly Host; to the Blessed Virgin; to St Anne her Mother; to St Martin the patron saint of soldiers - and also Hindoo - to Kartikeya and Parvati and Tara, and anyone else who might possibly be persuaded to listen) and her tears; then, in his quiet, efficient, brave, no-nonsense, decent and honourable way, Jem Bickerstaff died. William was more than very sorry. He had liked Bickerstaff from the first; from when he had joined the 33rd in ’94, when Jem had still been a Corporal. He had been more glad of Jem’s welcome on the beach at Madras and of his discreet solicitousness for his welfare since his arrival in India than he had known how to express. Importantly, Bickerstaff had been a useful ally against Hakeswill. William now felt seriously exposed without Bickerstaff ever on the qui vive to warn him of the projected labyrinthine twists and turns of Hakeswill’s schemes and machinations.
It fell to William to command the funeral detail which dug the red and dusty grave. Once again Tom, Dick and Harry and a handful of others set-to with their picks, shovels and entrenching tools. This time however, there was no levity, no surreptitious jesting, no irreverent larking about. Bickerstaff had been a popular Sergeant, level-headed, reasonable and just, as well as very useful in a tight spot when under fire, and the men were genuinely sorry for his death, and for the consequent plight of his widow, the pretty young Anglo-Indian woman, Mary. Morris had given William the duty with the apparent intention of demeaning him (Ensign Hicks could have done it just as well, so long as he had put in the necessary effort to make a proper job of it) but he would gladly have volunteered for it in any case. William had wanted to honour the Sergeant who had been such a support to him. He had searched about at the margins of the camp and had found some small and scrawny marigolds growing nearby, and had made a rather pathetic bunch of them (the season had been almost over), and now, the firing party having released its respectful volley, and the Chaplain (a Church of Scotland minister borrowed for the occasion from the 74th, for the 33rd still had no chaplain of its own following the demise of both the unfortunate Mr Blunt, and his successor, Mr Enderby) having dusted off his hands and walked away from the grave, for he had said all that in his austere Presbyterian opinion it had been appropriate to say, William dropped the sad little bundle of already half-wilted flowers upon Bickerstaff’s corpse, which had been decently shrouded in the Sergeant’s own blanket, whilst the men of the detail began to back-fill the pit. Mary, scattering a handful of earth upon her late husband’s body at the same time, gave him a grateful glance through her tears and her borrowed black widow’s veil, lent her by the kindly wife of an officer (who prudently always carried one in her baggage) which William did not see as his attention was still fixed upon Bickerstaff’s body, now rapidly disappearing from view.
Sergeant Hakeswill meanwhile, prowling upon the periphery of the sorrowful and pathetic scene, twitched and muttered and chuckled to himself, ever and anon casting leering looks towards the desolate young widow. Frowning, William treated him to his best admonitory glare - but Hakeswill only smirked at him knowingly.
The men of Bickerstaff’s unit made him a grave-marker – a crude wooden cross with his rank, his name, his dates and the number of his Regiment burned into it with a heated bayonet – a damaged one, which had been bent when it had been driven into the hard ground in order to secure a tarpaulin to make a shelter one night when it had rained – the first intimation of the coming monsoon - so no-one would be charged for mistreating their weapon. And so there was another sad milestone marking the westward passage of Harris’s host.
Corporal John Green was made up in Bickerstaff’s place: another good, decent man, but uncertain of himself and of his new authority and plainly as afraid of Hakeswill as almost everyone else in the Light Company seemed to be. William put forward Garrard’s name for Morris’s consideration to take his place as Corporal (not Sharpe’s; he was nervous and very wary of showing partisanship towards Sharpe) but Morris ignored it, elevating one of Hakeswill’s suggestions instead, one Private Samuel Kendrick. Within a week Kendrick was broken back down to Private for drunkenness whilst on picquet, so Morris raised another of Hakeswill’s protégées, again passing over William’s suggested man.
Tom, Dick, Harry and their wider circle of friends were good soldiers during the day, William had noted; not at all the drunken rogues and thieving scoundrels British soldiers were often made out to be in the gossip which did the rounds at home and which was amplified in anti-war Whig mouth-pieces such as the Morning Chronicle. Since he had returned to the 33rd he had encountered none like Donaghue and Bakewell, of unlamented memory. Most of the time the men of the Light Company went cheerfully and uncomplainingly about their daily tasks and duties, notwithstanding the shadow cast upon the Company’s life by the ever-present menace of Obadiah Hakeswill. In the evenings they continued variously to sit or lounge about their fires, enjoying each other’s company, talking hilarious nonsense and drinking the ubiquitous arrack, and that was always heartening to observe; although William had begun to notice that at such times Sharpe was often joined now by a pretty young woman from the following, whom upon discreet enquiry he discovered to be Sergeant Bickerstaff’s widow, Mary – he had not laid eyes upon her until Bickerstaff’s funeral, and then her face and most of her figure had been concealed by the borrowed widow’s weeds - and that caused him some pangs which he knew he had no right to feel. He found himself wondering how Tom Garrard felt about this development, because when Mary was present, and she usually was, now, Sharpe always seated her at his right hand, in Tom’s old accustomed place. Tom now sat to the right of Mary. If he had been Tom, William knew, he would have taken a poor view of that. But outwardly, at least, Tom gave no sign of resentment. William reflected that Mary had spent her whole life to date in the company of British soldiers. Most probably she fitted into that friendship group very well, and they felt easy in her presence. Not quite one of the lads, perhaps, but relaxed enough not to be Missish should they let slip a profanity or tell a bawdy joke, or fart out loud (one evening when it had been curried goat for supper they had held a contest, and Mary had laughed almost the loudest of all of them).
William had begun to wonder, too, belatedly, and somewhat uneasily, where Hakeswill went to at night. Earlier in the march it had begun to occur to him that he could not recall ever having seen Hakeswill seated companionably by a fire in the company of the Havercakes’ other non-commissioned officers. Then, with some justification, William began to suspect that Hakeswill went to Morris’s tent with the purpose of fomenting mischief; for he had certainly noticed that a considerable amount of mischief had seemed to be going on in the Light Company these days. This had mainly to do with lost items of kit and obscure grievances which he did not rightly understand, but he had come to the conclusion that there seemed to be a pattern to it. Most of it was low-level irritating nonsense, but at regular intervals, approximately every five days or so, as far as William could make out, when they were encamped somewhere for two nights together, something would happen which would lead in due course to the dismal ceremonial of a punishment parade. A man would be accused of what seemed to William to be a trivial offence, involving perhaps a lost item of equipment, or a flint (all right, that was not so minor, given that the men’s raison d’être was that they were musketeers; muskets were basically what they were, synedoches: but it seemed to occur with surprising and even suspicious frequency, given that the men had had it drilled into them again and again how important it was to take care of their flints and to make sure that they carried spares); or perhaps there would be an unfortunate brawl provoked by a rumour, come from who knew where, of an unfaithful woman; or there would be items missed from someone’s pack, only to be discovered in someone else’s a short while later; and there would be a hearing (two, if the accused were fortunate and Major Shee did not on that occasion lazily decide simply to skip certain irksome stages of due process), and inevitably a wretch would be found guilty, and he would be sentenced to be flogged. William hated it when that happened. He would have to sit there on Rufus like a Jack Pudding, as he knew the men called the worst sort of preening, self-important and basically bloody useless officer – the very thing he had been trying so hard not to be since his arrival at Fort St George on Christmas Eve - and watch the poor bugger have the skin taken off his back and his flesh shredded, sometimes until his ribs and even his spine were exposed. Moreover, at some point during the proceedings the victim would, for him, inevitably turn into Mark; and his loathing for Charles and for what he had done to Mark would rise anew in his brain like a foul black miasma, and all the horror and the misery of those last four weeks at home would come upon him like a squadron of ragged black-robed winged wraiths out of Hades, leaving him utterly unmanned and unable to function properly for hours afterward.
As he lay rolled in his blanket upon the ground, or in his cot, at night, William would often earnestly pray that there was no-one like Hakeswill in the 67th, because by now he was becoming suspicious that Hakeswill himself was somehow acting as a catalyst for all of this. On the latest occasion the prisoner, a boy who could not have been older than seventeen, had lost his composure along with his powers of endurance after the first two-dozen lashes and had spat out the leather gag and had begun to scream aloud and to sob most wretchedly between blows, and he had struggled so hard against his bonds that in the end the triangle had collapsed in a tangle of rope and sergeants’ spontoons, sending him sprawling on his face on the hard-packed dusty red earth of the makeshift parade ground, still with his wrists and ankles seized fast to the weapons’ shafts and thus unable to break his fall with his hands. Fortunately he had then passed out and Micklewhite had called a halt to the business, at least for time being, until the victim was sufficiently recovered to receive the rest of his sentence; but William had sensed that Rufus had become distressed, witnessing the violence, scenting the blood and hearing the boy’s abject cries; so he seriously thought about at least blindfolding the horse and binding his ears the next time the two of them had to witness this brutal rigmarole, although of course in the event, he did not, because inevitably it would have fetched him another ear-bashing from Morris about letting the side down (Morris had some time before remonstrated with him about the tent issue but in that matter William was holding firm in his resolve for the time being, except when they had expected to remain in the same place for more than a day).
The frustrating thing, of course, was that William knew that if Wellesley had still been in immediate command of the 33rd these things would not have been happening, but Wellesley was not: he was forever away now on more important duties. Major Shee had been given oversight of the 33rd in Wellesley’s place. If it had been John Sherbrooke, as it had been in Flanders, William thought, things would have been all right, for Sherbrooke was a decent and competent officer with a firm grasp of what was right and proper. But he too now had a larger command, and Shee was all there was, as far as the 33rd was concerned, and he was lazy and weak and moreover a drunkard, and he simply did not care.
The whole miserable business was depressing in the extreme, and perhaps the worst thing was, William could plainly see who among the officers relished these horrible displays. In some ghastly way it reminded him of school, and the floggings which had happened there with monotonous regularity (although at least these had not been anything like as savage, and had been carried out in private so that the boys had not been made to witness them; they had just had to help the victims to cope with the aftermath). Morris, William noted, always watched with evident satisfaction and the cipher Ensign Hicks, whose middle-class father was a mercer (which was a social climber’s pretentious word for a draper and haberdasher) and did not possess a horse, and who seemed both to resent and envy William for being an Honourable and the son of broad acres (notwithstanding that he was always, when asked, quite open about the fact that he was not due to inherit any of that valuable mud unless he took up the profitable hobby of fratricide) and for owning Rufus, would stand deferentially behind Morris and Major Shee with a sanctimonious and obsequious expression upon his weaselly mean little face (Captain Hughes’s sources had not been wrong about him).
Thankfully, William also learned to identify those who heartily disapproved of the dysfunctional disciplinary regime. Fitz-Gerald would sit his sweetly pretty grey mare Oonagh, with her delicate ears, large eyes and graceful deportment, pointedly gazing up into the sky, watching the ever-present vultures as they circled hopefully – ever hopefully. Sergeant-Major Bywaters, who had to act as a kind of master of ceremonies at these spectacles, had a reputation as a firm disciplinarian but nonetheless managed to come across mainly as a kindly old buffer, and although he kept his countenance, his attitude, stance and tone of voice as he directed the proceedings betrayed the fact that he was profoundly uncomfortable and unhappy in the presence of such wearyingly habitual brutality. And then there was Hakeswill, whose excitement as the drum beat and the thongs of the cat whistled and the carmine drops flew and the red rivulets trickled to the ground, making the ochre dust of India the more intensely incarnadine, and the victim, his cries muffled by the leather gag (if he had not convulsively spat it out as the long agony had gone on and on) moaned and whimpered, was almost palpable.
On perhaps the third such occasion William experienced an epiphany. He suddenly realised that Hakeswill was indeed not just facilitating but somehow engineering these events. There was, as he had previously noticed, an observable pattern. He would spy Hakeswill targeting a man, perhaps over the course of several days, at first just making himself generally unpleasant and intimidating his chosen victim with his size, his physical proximity, his horrible breath (of course) and his typically coarse and abusive speech, and insinuations about the man’s honesty, his morals, his ability to tell the truth, his courage, and, if he had a woman amongst the following, his virility as well. Then his persecution of him would take the form of fault-finding and general harassment as he insisted upon inspecting his weapon, searching his pack, delving into his haversack, making him turn out his pockets. Hakeswill always found something amiss, of course, so that he could punish the man in some way, either with fines or with irksome impositions which made his life, never easy to begin with, that little bit more difficult. Then he would up the ante again and before one knew it the man would find himself charged with a serious breach of the King’s Regulations, and if he were lucky there would be a Court of Inquiry followed by a Court Martial; but more usually, William had already noticed, there would be a single desultory hearing – he had been dismayed to observe how more often than not, under Shee’s oversight (not for nothing did he use that word to himself rather than supervision) disciplinary proceedings in the 33rd were not always done in scrupulous accordance to the book (2) - he had vowed then to himself that if he ever attained the exalted rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in this or any other regiment then they bloody well would be, come Hell or high water - and then William would find himself and Rufus on parade, yet again having to watch whilst another of the poor devils was escorted half-naked into the hollow square, seized up to the triangle and flogged. He wondered why none of the others of his fellow-officers had noticed this, or if they had, why they had seemed not to be interested in questioning what was going on. One day he had mentioned this to Lieutenant Goodlad, a sensible and clear-sighted subaltern who had often, since the start of the campaign, had cause to be at variance with Major Shee for the latter’s serious shortcomings – but even Goodlad had told him in the Mess one evening,
“The main thing is we come up to Seringapatam without delay and deal with Tippoo Sultan, William. That is what we must do, for the good of England, I mean Britain, England and Scotland and Ireland of course. Oh, and Wales. After that we can bother ourselves about due process and justice.”
After the latest gruesome exhibition, however, notwithstanding Goodlad’s warning, William came to a decision: the Battalion probably had had enough of this barbaric behaviour – he and Rufus had certainly had enough, anyway – so he sought out Sergeant Green and quietly asked him for his views on the matter.
“Sergeant,” he said, “I find it hard to believe that it is the usual practice in the British Army to hold quite so many punishment parades as seems to be the case in the Thirty-Third as it is currently constituted. We are given out to be The Pattern, that is, the model upon which other Regiments of the Line are encouraged to form themselves. Surely if that were the case then discipline should have become so firmly established - made a part of the men’s very selves - indeed, second nature in the ranks, one might say - that there would hardly need to be any punishment at all? Yet It happens so regularly that it is almost as if savage retribution has become an acceptable form of public entertainment. I do not recall this being the case before, in Flanders, when I was an Ensign, nor even once we were back in England again, except for that time in the spring of Ninety-Five when we were all marched the better part of a hundred miles from Lymington to Newhaven and made to watch when the ring-leaders of the outrageous looting spree (3) by the Oxford Militia were variously flogged and shot. I suppose that was necessary because of all the violent disorder everywhere at the time, on account of the great dearth of provisions, and the price of bread.”
“Lord, I remember that, sir. A terrible business, but as you say, necessary, to stop our own lads from getting mutinous ideas. Although it did nothing to stop the general commotions, so Englishmen are now forbidden to speak their minds in public. Sorry, sir, I went too far there. Sir, might I say, what are you asking me?”
“I am asking you whether you would you say that this – what is going on in the Thirty-Third - is normal?”
Sergeant Green looked unhappy and dejected for a moment or two; then suddenly came his response, robust and to the point, as if he had arrived all at once at a decision.
“No, I bloody wouldn’t, sir, pardon my language! I am that glad you’ve asked this, that you’ve seen it for yourself. This has been going on ever since Captain Morris brought Hakeswill into the Company! We had this all the way through the voyage to Calcutta back in Ninety-Six and Ninety-Seven, sir, and it’s only got worse since then. Two men died at sea because they took the fever after they was flogged - Greengrass and Fosdyke – and they was only flogged because Hakeswill set them up! They hadn’t done nothing wrong, neither of them!”
The floodgates had opened! William stared at him in consternation.
“You are sure of that, Sergeant?”
“Yes, I am, sir!” Green replied, without hesitation.
“Why, then - the situation is insupportable!”
“And that ain’t the half of it, sir.” Jack Green cast a glance about them both with almost comically theatrical circumspection before continuing, in a low whisper. “It’s worse if the man has a woman.”
“In what way?”
“Hakewsill beats him up, sir. And goes on, every day, until the woman comes to him, to make him stop.”
“And how might a mere woman do that, Sergeant?”
“By – you know, sir, letting him – “
William said nothing as his brain tried to make sense of this. It took him some time, for he was, in many ways, still then very innocent. Then –
“Good God!” he had said, at last as realisation had dawned, genuinely shocked. He could hardly believe what he had heard, yet knew he must. “I shall speak to Captain Morris at the earliest opportunity,” he said, knowing even as he uttered the words how lame this must have sounded.
“Be better if you speak to Major Shee, sir, begging your pardon. Morris and Hakeswill are like that,” said Green, holding up crossed fingers in the immemorial gesture. “Morris won’t ‘peach.”
Of course, that is Hakeswill on top, William thought, glumly. But speak to Major Shee? Major Shee, the de facto acting Colonel? His heart sank at the prospect.
“All right. I shall try.” He had no faith in Shee, with excellent reason. Not only was the man a lazy drunken scrub and a poor administrator, he was serially negligent, as William had observed on more occasions than he could recall. He did not keep on top of his paperwork; worse, William had more than once, with very great disconcertment, seen some men of the 33rd (not in the Light Company, but in another Company) marching without weapons or equipment. He had asked Green how that could be, and Green had said that he had no idea (actually, he had; he suspected that muskets and ammunition and other gear regularly bled their way in a slow trickling diffusion from the British and Company Armies to the Tippoo Sultan’s allies, and that some of his fellow-sergeants, Hakeswill probably included, not only knew about it but were in on it - on the fiddle - in that line of business themselves, and making a pretty penny; but he could offer no tangible proof, so held his tongue), but he was certain sure Wellesley would have had Shee’s head on a spontoon if he had known about it. But it was not, the uncertain Green thought, his place to enlighten him.
“There’s something more, sir,” Green went on, nervously, as if knowing that he could well be standing upon rotten ice when it came to the subject he was about to broach. He had, of course, heard most of what Hakeswill had had to say upon the topic of Private Sharpe and Lieutenant Lawford on several occasions when in his cups in the Sergeants’ mess. He did not believe any of it, but it made him uneasy nonetheless.
“And what is that, Sergeant?” William said, apprehensively.
“It’s Private Sharpe, sir.”
William’s heart sank at once like a brick in a game of ducks and drakes (5). “Sharpe?”
“He’s got a woman, sir, nice little thing, pretty little half-caste, used to be married to Sergeant Bickerstaff. You probably know about Mary. Proper married, sir, by Reverend Enderby. As you know, sir, Reverend Enderby, poor bugger was the Thirty-Third’s Chaplain – second one we’d had since coming out East –- before he went mad and cut his own throat on the voyage down from Calcutta. It was all the deaths from the Bengal Belly, you see, sir; he was a kind-hearted old soul and he couldn’t stomach having to do all the funerals no more, he said so in the note he left. Seems the noise of the pumps got to him, too, going day and night, they was; the Earl Fitz-William, well, that old tub was practically settling, sinking under us, five foot in the well, by the time we was standing off Madras, like I said before – water was a bare two inches short of being over the orlop by the time we heaved to! The one before him, Reverend Blunt, he went mad too, from drink, and disgraced himself – ran around on deck as naked as the hour he was born, shouting about the most indecent scandalous things, Sodom and Gomorrah and all that. Died of shame, he did. This was on that expedition to Manilla that came to nothing.”
“Is such a thing possible, do you think, Sergeant – to die of shame?”
William sounded suddenly so struck by the notion, as if it mattered personally to him, that Green felt uneasy all over again.
“Oh, yes, sir. Parson Blunt was a young man, just come out from England – very quiet, very steady-seeming, didn’t have much to say for himself. Very shy. Much like yourself, sir, as it happens, meaning no offence. But they do say it’s often the quiet shy ones as gives the biggest surprises. Lord knows how such a thing could have happened, but we had our suspicions at the time. We reckoned he must have been led astray by person or persons unknown. But anyway, Colonel Wesley as he was then, he had himself rowed over to the barky Parson Blunt was in – he told the poor reverend gent that we all make mistakes and that he’d get over it, and that people would forget it, or if not forget it, at least remember his drunken antics with affection and sympathy, and laugh about it all, no harm done, like; but he wouldn’t have it. He thought as how he didn’t deserve forgiveness, nor a second chance, which to my mind is strange in a parson, as they’re so keen on telling other folk how you can get away with anything you might have done in the past as long as you let yourself be washed in the blood of the Lamb and all that. Wouldn’t eat or drink for ten days – then the silly bugger just upped and died! Very odd business.” (6)
Something occurred then to William.
“Sergeant – “
“Sir?”
“That transport that Blunt was in – Captain Morris and Sergeant Hakeswill did not happen to be on board too, by any chance?”
“Now, funny you should ask that, sir – but I do believe they was.”
The Past: Durford, June 1798.
Poor Parson Blunt had lost his mind and had died of shame. William recalled his own black despair and agony of grief on account of Mark and the loss of him and the bitter humiliation of those days of his disgrace following the disaster, when, denied food by Charles for lengthy periods, and in any case reluctant even to drink (although he had had unlimited access to iced water, of course) he had been imprisoned in his chamber at Durford – days in which the interminable-seeming hours of light and darkness had passed indifferently, punctuated at random by visits from Charles and the charlatan Madderley from London, and a couple of servants, who upon Charles’s direction would strip him and force him again and again into a bath filled with water chilled by ice from the ice-house, in which he had been made to sit for hours on end. On about the third day of his incarceration he had managed to give the slip to the two watchers outside his door and had escaped the house by way of his dressing-room, which featured a second door opening upon the back stairs, and had got a fair way into the Park; but they had soon noticed that he was missing, and, guessing what had happened, had run him down and haled him back, and when, in a frenzy of rage and hopelessness, he had threatened that the next time he got out he meant to drown himself in the lake, they had forced him into a strait-waistcoat as if he had indeed been a lunatic. Charles had then come to taunt him whilst a workman had nailed the offending door fast shut. What had he imagined he was doing, running wild out of doors, barefoot and in his night-gown?
“Are you indeed mad, William? I have pondered upon this for years. You are so – volatile. So disordered in your feelings and in your desires. So ungovernable in your actions.”
“I am not mad! Though it seems to me that you have used your best endeavours throughout the length of my life to try to make me so!”
“You see how he misinterprets my brotherly concern for him?” Charles had said, to nobody in particular. The workman and the servants who stood by of course had said nothing in reply. “He is indeed delusional. Perhaps you had thought to go in search of Lucas?” Charles had gone on, to William. “But how could you, when you could have had small idea of his whereabouts? That seems to me like the act of a man who is estranged from his wits. I should call that madness.”
William had not been able to answer him. Perhaps he had indeed intended to try to find out for himself what had become of Mark? Charles had not been entirely correct in asserting that he had had no idea of where to find him. The Viscount, William knew, had had form when it came to dealing with miscreants upon the Estate: one of his favourite sanctions had been forced enlistment into the 67th Regiment of Foot, the South Hampshires. William had had good reason to suspect that Mark was being held at the Regiment’s depot in Winchester. But what would have been the use of confronting Charles with his lively suspicion, when Charles would simply have denied it, even if he had correctly smoked the truth of the matter? And if Mark really had been there then he would already have been made to sign his life away. Rescue would have been impossible. In any case, perhaps, William had acknowledged to himself, in those frantic days of lurid and extreme emotion, he might really have crossed the boundary between despair and outright insanity, to and fro, several times. There had been hours, then, when he would willingly have turned his face to the wall and simply given up the ghost, if he had been left in peace to do so. Times when, contrite beyond contrition, he had prayed to God to take his life, miserable offender that he was.
In the early days following the calamity he had begun to refuse food entirely even when it had been offered to him. Then he had tried to resist the temptation to drink, but that had been beyond him. He had found that he could not, for he had soon discovered that thirst was a torment even worse than other forms of physical agony. However, it had eventually struck William’s minders that he had seemed genuinely determined to die; so the Viscount had given them leave to force gruel into him if needs must, not out of love for William, far from it, but with the preservation of Jessica Hayles’s fortune at the forefront of his mind, for if William had died outside of the contingencies of war before the marriage had taken place, then the Viscount had been contracted to repay the dowry: and that could well have ruined him.
In the meantime, every time William had seen Charles, he would doggedly demand to know,
“What has become of Mark Lucas?”
“Oh, my poor lunatic little brother. But do not fear, William. All shall be well with you by and by.”
On a day soon after that, Charles had arrived in William’s chamber with a man he had introduced as an eminent physician from London.
“Here is Doctor Madderley,” Charles had told him, “who oversees the innovative medical régime at Coldbath Fields Prison, of which my good friend Joseph Merceron (7) is Governor, so he comes upon the highest recommendation.”
Upon the tails of Dr Madderley, who had of course turned out to be a charlatan of the worst sort, had come the same two brawny servants, the ones who had been tasked with ensuring that William had not left his room on the night of the catastrophe and thereafter, and who had chased him down in the Park.
Madderley had supervised as they had continued with the régime which Charles had already established, stripping William and forcing him to sit in an ice-bath for what had seemed like hours (8), the object being, so they had told him, to bring him to his senses. He had given up the idea of voluntary fasting, because his mind had begun to emerge from the fog of the idea of dying which had at first enveloped him following the disaster - but now, to his dismay, if he said that he was hungry, they would not bring him food. Instead, they would keep piling the ice upon him as he had crouched there in the tub, naked, and sobbing and shaking because of the cold and the humiliation. Eventually they would go away and leave him in that condition. Then, once alone, barely able to move, William would crawl out of the bath, find a towel, dry himself as best he could, creep into his bed and lie there shuddering and weeping until sleep took him at last.
But then, of course, they would come back the next day and it would all begin again.
“Charles, food, for God’s sake,” William had begged him eventually, after three days without so much as a piece of bread. He had been sustaining himself on iced water only, but he had been becoming to be afraid that he really had been going to die. Now that it had come to it he was not so sure that he wanted to. The animal in man usually trumps the angelical, after all, when it comes to it.
“So you want to eat, now? You are so very capricious.”
“Yes – yes – please, Charles.”
“If you want to eat, you know what you must do. I tell you, you will not eat until you submit. You can stop this, William. Renounce your filthy affections.”
“I shall not eat, then.”
They had come back the next day, and the next. On the latest occasion William had been surprised to be offered a bowl of gruel, for even Charles had begun to be alarmed at the deterioration in his condition, or so it seemed.
“Eat it, you damned fool,” Charles had growled, seeing William’s initial reluctance. “Do you really want to die?”
William had consumed the gruel meekly, notwithstanding that his first thought had indeed been to refuse it. It had still seemed so much easier just to die. He had not eaten all of it, for his shrunken stomach had not been able to manage more than about a third of what had been in the bowl. Charles had watched him carefully, even apprehensively, for it had not, after all, been his intention that William should perish. The matter of Jessica Hayles’ dowry had loomed large in his mind (as it had in the Viscount’s) for one thing. The family simply could not afford to forfeit that. Charles had anticipated a quick capitulation, but he had underestimated his youngest brother, so long despised by him as a weakling and an idiot and latterly as a degenerate. Charles had, as things had turned out, been very surprised by the strength and persistence of William’s resistance.
On the tenth, or perhaps it had been even the eleventh day of this regimen William had begun to think that he would not be able to stand any more of it, and had once again begun to struggle and to try to resist and to escape, but in his weakened state his efforts had just seemed all the more pathetic. Nevertheless, still he would not be coerced into compliance. So now, when he had refused to be silent, and had asked Charles,
“What has become of Mark Lucas?”
Madderley had said to Charles, “Take this cane and strike him upon the back.”
He had cried out in anguish at the blow, but afterwards, he had simply asked, again:
“What has become of Mark Lucas?”
“Strike him again,” Madderley had said, impassively, in response to this act of defiance.
So the cane had left another scarlet weal upon the white skin of his back, which now had had a blueish tinge on account of the ice-bath from which he had lately been dragged.
“What has become of Mark Lucas?” William had demanded, nonetheless, again.
“Six strokes this time, sir,” Madderly had said.
After three or four further blows William ceased to struggle, for he had passed out, so Madderley, having caught him before he had fallen to the floor, had pushed him back into the ice-bath, and the cold-water shock as his face had sunk beneath the surface had revived him.
“Each time he asks this,” Madderly had been saying, as William had arisen from the water gasping and spluttering, “or asks for food, you must beat him.”
“He might not be permitted food - again?” Charles had said, uncertainly now. This had begun to go too far, it had seemed, even for Charles.
“He has lately eaten. He will not die for want of sustenance. You must do this, sir, or else he will be confirmed in his present lamentable condition of moral imbecility. Starving and beating and the ice, sir: that is the only way to drive out the Sodomitical madness. I have extrapolated this from other cases. In the end, sir, he must surely learn to associate the name of – the young person - with physical pain, disgrace, hunger and mortification, and that will assuredly put an end to his wicked way of going on.”
“And what if it does not?”
“Then, sir, I shall advise your father to have him committed for life to the care of dedicated mad-doctors. I can recommend an asylum.”
“Charles, no! You would not encourage the Viscount to do this!” William had cried in horror, from where he had sat in the tub of freezing water. They had ignored his interjection.
“A colleague of mine is the proprietor of such a house, sir, Wanhope Hall (9), situate in a remote part of Yorkshire,” Madderley had said, sounding suddenly most enthusiastic, as well he might, as the colleague in question paid him a good commission for all the patients who arrived there upon his recommendation. “So remote, in fact, that it is practically beyond Yorkshire – imagine that! - in the County of Durham, which is very nearly Scotland! In particular it gladly receives fallen women of otherwise good family who have given birth out of wedlock, and sorry excuses for men like your brother, who have abandoned themselves to the sin of the Cities of the Plain. It is a refuge for moral idiots, in other words. It is far from all other habitations, surrounded by bare moor and mountain for twenty miles around. It is quiet there, and there is no distraction to cause further excitement or agitation to minds which are already excited and agitated to an unconscionable debased degree. Neither is there any escape.”
“Charles, no!”
“If you do not wish to be consigned there, William, then you know what it is that you must do!” Charles had said, rounding upon William and snarling at him. “Swear to give up your obsession, your disgusting perversity! This could be just the thing, Madderley. Have you a copy of the prospectus which I might show to the Viscount?”
“I shall arrange to have one sent to you, sir, if our practices in this present case should in the end prove to be of no avail.”
“What happens to the, the inmates, Madderley?” Charles had said then, as if a genuine reservation had suddenly occurred to him. “How long does it take them, usually, to recover their wits?”
“Recover? Oh, no, sir. Their – friends – do not commit them to Wanhope Hall in expectation of recovery. That is not the purpose of the regime there. Wanhope is not a hospital. It is, as I said, an asylum. A sanctuary, if you prefer. A refuge from the world, where the poor demented souls can find shelter from the cruel buffetings of this mortal life, until - sooner or later – most often sooner – their tribulations determine in a permanent and peaceful resolution.”
“How so?”
“There are draughts, drops, powders, concocted by apothecaries so as to calm and ease the mind. The steps are so few, so short, between rest, and thence to sleep, sir; and thereafter, the passage from sleep to… what lies beyond… it is but to withdraw into the inner chamber, as it were.”
“I see. And what is the usual interval between admission and…”
“It varies, sir, but as a general rule, it is safe to say that deliverance tends to come shortly after word has arrived that the sufferer’s friends have at length tired of paying the fees.”
“Charles, please – !” William had cried, at that. “I hear what is passing between you! You cannot mean – “
Charles had turned to him at last with an expression between a grimace and a smile of triumph.
“Then cease your stubborn tricks and your – exhibitions - sir! – your indecent demonstrations – this – revolting unnatural monomania – ! and take yourself off to India, sir, and die there instead, at least with the appearance of having done your duty! Better than dying a committed lunatic - friendless, alone, in England’s northern wilderness - in ignominy!”
Ignominy. So that is what they are calling Yorkshire nowadays, William had thought.
“But if I die, what about the Hayles’s dowry? Won’t that have to be returned?”
“The Viscount has found a lawyer who has in turn found a loop-hole to the contract. That, it seems, would not present a difficulty,” Charles had lied.
“But, Charles!”
“I care not either way,” Charles had gone on. “You can blame only yourself, as your predicament is entirely of your own making. Live or die. Now choose!”
It had been terrible. It had been torture, all of it - from the extreme violence on the night of the calamity, to the bloody scene in the glade the following day, to being hunted down like an animal and put into restraints as if he had in truth been a madman, to the ice-baths, to the denial of food and the beatings - to hearing the kind of terrifying discourse which had gone on between Charles and Madderley. But now, and unexpectedly, William had become gripped with a new determination: not to give in, not to submit to the evil, not to allow himself to be shut away in a dismal prison in the back of beyond, not to succumb to despair, and die there, which he had been becoming increasingly persuaded was Charles’s true intention now, but to resist them, and show himself better than they, and live - even if only in order to spite Charles! Years before he had come very near to walking off the roof of the House to escape Charles’s remorseless ill-treatment of him. Now he would not give him the satisfaction. Uncle Hector had saved him then; Hector might not be at hand to come to his rescue on this occasion, but somehow William would win through the shame and the pain and the misery; he would endure it all, and then go to India, where Hector was, away from the present scene of his humiliation and suffering, and earn back his honour and his self-respect, at least in his own eyes, and perhaps make McCandless proud of him at least, even if the rest of his family had continued to hold him in the blackest contempt. So upon that ultimate instance upon which he had been beaten for demanding,
“What has become of Mark Lucas?”
William had decided that it would be the final occasion. Honour was surely satisfied. He would play their game so that they could pretend that a perfect cure had been effected. He did not care, for the calendar had been with him now. Only a few more days and it would soon be time to depart.
For the remainder of his time in England therefore, William had presented the outward appearance of compliance and submission and had borne Charles’s gloating and his triumphing and his taunts, and Madderley’s self-aggrandising bloviations. He had successfully simulated defeat, had been quiet and lowly, humble and meek as the Virgin Mary in the face of Gabriel’s terrifying manifestation in her bed-chamber. At any rate, the ice-baths had ceased and the beatings had stopped.
Naked, starving, shuddering with cold and black and blue from the cruel treatment to which he had been subjected, William had chosen. Charles had grunted his assent and then had thrust a capacious and concealing warm robe at him, had caused a fire to be lit in his chamber, and had ordered a visibly shocked housemaid, whom he had just summoned, to bring Mr William a nourishing broth of beef bones, onion and turnip, with a raw egg beaten into it for good measure.
Pathetically, William had felt grateful to his brother for these things, even as he had despised himself for his gratitude.
“Thank you, Charles,” he had said, now sitting in an armchair, wrapped in the warm soft robe and having taken a spoonful of the gloriously savoury beef broth and a bite of fresh crusty white bread spread with rich yellow butter. It had tasted like the food of the Gods after the thin oatmeal gruel which had been all he had been allowed, sporadically, throughout the preceding weeks.
“Oh, I knew that you would thank me,” Charles had said, his tone cold and contemptuous. “I have only ever had your best interests at heart, after all.”
Finally Charles had left him, not in peace, but alone, at least. But Charles had returned later that evening with a draught of laudanum which he had forced William to drink before man-handling him ungently into his bed.
“Sleep,” he had ordered him. “It is the balm of hurt minds. Shakespeare says so.” (10)
At any rate, the watch had been removed from his door. Madderley had gone back to London with his fat fee and the Viscount Petersfield’s glowing endorsement of his methods. High Society beckoned him. Meanwhile, India had beckoned William.
The Present: March 1799.
“Sir?” said Green just then, wondering why the Lieutenant seemed to have gone off into a brown study.
“Oh! Sorry, Sergeant. I was just thinking. Has the Thirty-third a Chaplain now, or any prospect of one?” William asked, the unsettling thought of Mark causing him to wonder whether he ought to make the acquaintance of the clergyman sooner rather than later. After all, Francis, who had been his great comfort and counsellor in former times, back in Hampshire, was several thousand nautical miles away, and there was no-one now other than Rufus to whom he might unburden himself, else.
“No, sir. Sir Arthur don’t have much time for ‘em, truth to tell. Priests or vicars or ministers, whatever they calls themselves, they’re all equally vexatious in his book (11). Which is harsh, but it means he don’t distinguish between Rome or Church or Chapel - or at least when he’s safe away from England - you can say that for him. Here’s a story: Parson Enderby, one Sunday at sea coming down from Calcutta, it’s a Saturday evening the night before really, and he says to the Colonel, he says, Colonel, sir, he says, what would you like my sermon to be about tomorrow morning? And Wellesley, he says, without missing a beat, mind, he says, About ten minutes, Mister Enderby!”
“That’s rather good, Sergeant,” William had said, with a small laugh. “I hope that’s true.”
“True as I’m standing here, sir! But you know, thinking of Mr Enderby, I am put in mind of Sergeant Bickerstaff and his missus, for they was proper married, sir, Colonel Wellesley’s permission and all.”
“And how…?”
“You know how Hakeswill does talk to himself, sir. I don’t know if he thinks he can’t be overheard, or what, I’ve heard him talking in the night about how him and Morris, sorry, sir, Captain Morris, are planning to sell Mary Bickerstaff to Naig, and how Hakeswill’s going to make a mint of money off of her, and Mister Morris is going to have first go – “
“Naig! That pimp! Oh, poor Mary! This must not be! And those poor females in his power!” William was horrified, thinking tangentially of Anandhi and skewered with guilt afresh. He hoped she had not been blamed for his persistent inability to put her through her erotic paces, and so make recommendations to his fellow-officers. But he had always paid her, scrupulously, as if he had had perfect satisfaction. Which he had, although not in any way in accordance with Naig’s business plan.
“Yes, sir, and take a cut of the earnings, going forward. And how first he’s going to make away with Sharpie by getting him charged with a serious flogging offence, get him out of the way, like.”
William stared at him, utterly appalled.
“You are telling the truth, Sergeant?” he said. “You are sure of this? Oh, dear God! This must not, this shall not be!”
“On my honour, sir, it’s as true as I’m standing here!” said Green, sounding hurt this time.
“Thank you, Sergeant. I will do the very best I can.” Oh, Christ and his saints! Poor Mary! “And in the meantime, be vigilant, and if you find out anything more, let me know as soon as you might.”
“I shall, sir.”
“You asked to see me, Lieutenant?” said Major John Shee that evening. He was seated at the folding camp table in his tent, looking as if he had been engaged in important administration, as it was covered with its usual chaos of paperwork; William could tell however that the only business Shee had been undertaking before he had ducked in through the canvas flap and pushed aside the muslin curtain, meant to exclude moths, mosquitos and other flying pests, involved the mug of arrack which the Major had clumsily tried to hide, poorly concealed beneath a hastily-flung handkerchief on a side-stand to his right.
William stood stiffly in front of him, his cocked hat collapsed and tucked beneath his arm, waiting for Shee’s aide to leave the tent. “Yes, sir.”
“Concerning what, Mr Lawford?”
“It’s a delicate matter, sir.”
“I see. Off you go, Clarkson!”
Clarkson, the living token of nominative determinism, disappeared.
“Now, out with it, Lawford. I have a good deal on hand. I’m not sure I have time for delicate matters. I have a feeling that delicate matters more properly belong in Bath, perhaps, or in Lyme Regis, or indeed in Brighton.”
William swallowed awkwardly and then ploughed on regardless.
“It concerns Sergeant Hakeswill, sir.”
“Ah,” said Shee resignedly, a pained expression now manifest upon his face.
Most of what was wrong in the Light Company, as least as far as disciplinary matters were concerned, seemed to involve Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill, but Shee had long ago decided that Hakeswill was one of those problems which came into the category of Too Difficult, which, alongside its evil twin Miscellaneous, was one of his favourite classifications when he periodically undertook the overdue mental filing away of matters which he had been too lazy to think about with the rigor which they had properly merited. As far as he was concerned, the matter of Hakeswill was permanently laid-up with all the other perennial conundra which he kept mothballed in his notional mental baggage park, such as, why is the arrack always gone? And, why is Captain Morris? And for that matter, wherefore Ensign Hicks?
“His conduct towards the men is reprehensible, sir.”
“My guess is that Captain Morris would beg to differ. He regards our Obadiah as vitally essential to the efficient running and discipline of the Light Company.”
William responded warmly.
“Captain Morris - with respect, sir - is mistaken.”
“You know that, Lieutenant. I know that.”
Shee looked at him as if to say, We have now reached the point in this conversation at which you say Goodnight, sir, and bugger off and leave me in peace. But Lawford - earnest, keen, determined bloody Lawford! – persisted!
“Hakeswill persecutes the men, sir. He bullies and intimidates them. He causes them to lose items of kit or to be found with items other men have missed, in order to bring about their unjust punishment. Innocent men have been flogged because of his tricks. I have heard on sound authority that in the past good and blameless men have died because of injuries thus received.” William hesitated, wondering if he dared go on. He dared. “And I have been given to understand that Hakeswill routinely interferes – with - the mens’ women.”
Shee leaned back in his chair and stared at him for several moments.
“Why come to me with this, Lawford? Why not go to Captain Morris? Hakeswill is in his Company. He is his responsibility.”
William looked at him in surprise. And Morris’s Company is in your Battalion and you’re acting Lieutenant-Colonel!, he said, in his head. And had they not just touched upon this point? Morris was a large part of the problem! “Captain Morris is complicit, sir. I have been aware for some time that it was he who brought Hakeswill into the Light Company before the Thirty-Third sailed from England. Hakeswill is his creature.”
“All this is taking a turn for the worse, Lieutenant. I’d think very carefully about what I said next, if I were you, because the waters upon which you have chosen to float your frigate, so to speak, are exceedingly turbid and moreover treacherous with hidden shoals. You’ve only been out here for three months. Give it another three and hopefully you will have come to understand the workings of the Light Company a little better. To stretch the nautical metaphor you have run slightly aground, I think. Time to kedge off?”
William had reached the limit of his courage on this occasion. Never at his best before figures of authority, it had taken him an immense effort of will to say as much as he had.
“I merely wanted to bring the matter to your attention, sir. Before another man is made to suffer unjustly, or another poor female is molested.”
“The matter has indeed been brought to my attention and is duly noted, Mister Lawford. You have done your duty. Well done. Now good night, Lieutenant.”
There was an unsubtly sarcastic emphasis on Lieutenant, as if to remind William of his insignificance in the greater scheme of things.
“Good night, sir.”
Feeling as if he had failed, William, now somewhat crestfallen, nodded in acknowledgement, turned about and ducked out beneath the flap of the tent, upon which he gave an involuntary start before collecting himself in the very moment of resuming his hat - because Sergeant Hakeswill, who had clearly been eavesdropping outside Shee’s tent, was standing there squarely in front of him, blocking his path.
“Good evening, Mr Lawford, sir!” said Hakeswill unpleasantly.
Instinctively shrinking from the looming presence, William said, “Good evening, Sergeant,” cursing himself because he knew he both looked and sounded very much taken flat aback, as he had heard Henry Bellingham put it occasionally during Néreide’s voyage out. He made a show of settling his bicorne upon his head. He did not like the hat. He thought it ridiculous, but at least once it was secure upon his head it made him equivalent in height to Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill.
“All well, sir? Still settling nicely back into Battalion after our lovely long convalescence, are we?”
“Yes, thank you, Sergeant. Now, good night - ” William made to circumvent Hakeswill, but to his astonishment, indignation – and alarm, now - the Sergeant moved to block his way.
“A shame if anything should happen to put a damper on that, sir!”
“What do you mean?” Damn! He could already hear his voice beginning to slide up the scale, like the humming of a ship’s rigging in a rising wind.
“Here’s what it is, sir: telling tales: not a happy road to go down, that one, sir.”
“I have no idea of what it is to which you refer, Sergeant. Now, please let me pass.”
“No idea? Oh, I think you have,” said Hakeswill, stepping forward, so that William was obliged to take a backward step to maintain the distance between them. Furious with himself, he could think of nothing to say in reply. The bloody man had the insolence to threaten him, and he was speechless in the face of it - ! “Very dark nights, Indian nights, sir! on account of India being an ‘eathen land what is full of darkies; says so in the Scriptures. Who knows what might be lurking in the shadows. That’s why I always takes very good care to keep my ‘alberd sharp as a razor, sir!”
“So I have heard, Sergeant Hakeswill,” said William, his voice now the merest squeak of a wet finger on glass. Then he rallied himself. “But halberds are so very old-hat, now, Sergeant. It is all spontoons nowadays, in the Battalion companies, anyway. But this is the Light Company! It seems to me that you should not bear a half-pike as a Sergeant of the Light Company.”
“Should I not indeed, sir? Well, bless me! But there’s a lot of wear left in this old girl. A lot. No cause to go pensioning her off just yet. I finds her very useful, that I do.”
“I am gratified to note your economizing zeal, Sergeant, indeed. Most commendably frugal. Lord Dundas (12) himself would no doubt be delighted to learn of your prudence. Wise, er, virgin.” Bloody hell! What drivel was he spouting out of fright and shock and a sense of whatever the equivalent was of lèse-majesté when one was only an Honourable?
“Like it says in the Scriptures, sir! No doubt Old Pivot (13) would be pleased indeed.”
“Indeed he would. But you don’t need it, Sergeant, nor even a spontoon; not in the Light Company. You should know that. Turn it in at the stores, I should, if I were you, and have yourself issued with a fusil (14). I, er, I do not wish to see you with that halberd again.”
“Oh, you won’t see me with it, sir!” (15) said Hakeswill a sudden disconcerting slyness creeping into his tone, treating William to a ghastly leer as he did so. “You’ll never see me. I gives you my word upon that.”
“I am glad to hear it, Sergeant,” said William. An icy chill of horror then ran belatedly up his spine as suddenly he understood the full import of the Sergeant’s words.
Hakeswill smiled back: a long, slow, wicked smile.
“Fast as a cobra, me. Me and the old girl. Well, I’ll say goodnight, now, sir!”
“Goodnight, Sergeant,” William said, with relief.
“Take care as you go, sir!” said Hakeswill, his head suddenly giving a great involuntary twitch which set his eye-balls gyring in their sockets.
“What do you mean by that?” William said, shocked by this Bedlamite display which had come seemingly out of nowhere. God, but he was squeaking like a schoolboy now!
“Watch out for them guy-ropes, is all. Treacherous buggers in the dark, guy-ropes, sir!” Hakeswill stepped aside. William regarded Hakeswill. Hakeswill stared back at him, and in the gathering darkness his eyes seemed as cold, as blankly devoid of pity and as malevolent as those of the sharks of which William had from time to time caught sight from the deck of Néreide as they had traversed the Indian Ocean.
“Good night, Sergeant,” he said, again, thankful that at least he sounded like a man again, escaping now as fast as he could without actually breaking into a run. Hakeswill watched him go.
“You hear that, Mother?” the twitching Sergeant muttered now, glancing up at the combination of spike and axe-head atop the pole-axe he carried, the bitter edges of which now glimmered in the light of the stars of the sudden Indian night, some of which, those ones low down near the southern horizon, were strange to him, because Biddy, who had taught him the night sky of northern Europe, had never seen them. “He don’t like you! Wants me to lay old Biddy aside, he does!” (Biddy was his secret name for his halberd.) “Well, Christ help his old ma, because he’s going to get what’s coming to him, is Lady fucking Lawford, just you watch. The useless molly won’t know what’s hit him, haha!”
Hakeswill sauntered off, whistling a tune which William did not recognise but which any one of the men could have told him was called The Rogue’s March. (Poor old Soldier! The Devil shall be my sergeant.) Lieutenant the Honourable William bleeding Lawford! He was another one who needed to be taught to show respect, to know his place, like that upstart Irish puppy Mister Robert bleeding Fitz-Gerald (Lieutenant Fitz-Gerald, my arse!). Both of them had too high an opinion of themselves, thought they were so fucking superior, even that they were somehow essential to the functioning of the Light Company: Brevet-Lieutenant Robert Fitz-Gerald, whose brother Maurice was the Knight of Kerry, the so-called Green Knight, and one of Wellesley’s closest Irish muckers by all accounts – and whose cousin Lord Edward Fitz-Gerald had been that United Irish traitor, that treasonous fucker what had stirred up rebellion the previous year and had died in a Dublin gaol having got himself shot resisting arrest, and serve the bastard right! What with Fitz-Gerald and Shee and bleeding Arthur snotty-nosed Wesley, as he had called himself until recently, who was not even thirty years old yet, the bleeding Irish were taking over the Army, which wasn’t right, wasn’t right at all, in Hakeswill’s opinion. And as for the Honourable Mr William fucking Lawford, grandson of the Earl of Winchester – if indeed he was! Hakeswill spat on the ground. Both of them had it coming, he confided to old Biddy. The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, he muttered, thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high; that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground? (14). Obadiah had a divinely-imposed right, no, a beholden duty, to preach the Word of Jehovah, and to deal out justice on his behalf! Biddy, that is, Mother, had seen it in the cards. It was why she had had him christened Obadiah (15). And it said so in the Scriptures. King Jehoshaphat himself had said so, hadn’t he, in the second book of the Chronicles, chapter seventeen! Hakeswill thought of what he would do. Abda, Abda (16), ye must be holy, for ye be the Anointed of the Lord, the Rod of Justice in the hand of El Shaddai! so Uncle Meshach had said to him, often, on the many occasions when he had caught him out in egregious wrongdoing - the last instance being when he had cut him down from the gallows still living when he had been but twelve years of age. Biddy’s point, hard in the guts, would do for Fitz-Gerald, Hakeswill thought, one dark night far from help, twist it slowly, make the bumptious whelp cry for his Irish bitch of a mother as he died. He would most likely get away with one skewered Ensign. Nobody cared about Ensigns; they died like bloody flies and nobody missed them – well, apart from their mothers of course.
The thought of mothers temporarily then gave Hakeswill pause – but only temporarily.
This one was from the Irish peerage, though. Someone might be sufficiently interested to make enquiries, so he would have to choose his moment carefully. But no, Shee wouldn’t be bothered, he had no time for the Irish, despite the fact he was a bloody Teague himself, although doing all he could to disguise the fact after that business with Wolfe Tone just the previous year, just like bloody Wesley; and Morris certainly wouldn’t give a dhobi-wallah’s fart. Lawford, though. Lieutenants did not count for much either, but if they started finding filleted Lieutenants lying about the place… and Lawford was an aristocrat, a real one, an English one, which presented a problem, even though his mother was a Scot, and the Scotch were nearly as bad as the fucking Irish, in Hakeswill’s opinion. In his own person Lawford barely mattered, wasn’t he a fourth son, or something, Captain Morris had said dismissively when Wesley had first adverted him to the fact that the lily-white milksop was on his way to re-join the 33rd - the letter Hakeswill had found on Morris’s desk had later confirmed this - but his grandfather was a prominent Peer, this was the thing, see, Earl of Winchester, and his father, Charles Lawford, Viscount Petersfield, was a member of the Prince of Wales’s circle of intimate friends, so it had said in the same communication, which Hakeswill had stolen to read at his leisure – easily managed, given the almost primaeval chaos that was Morris’s desk - before later putting it back, taking care to hide it under some paperwork so that Morris would think he had simply mislaid it when he eventually re-discovered it there. To cap it all, that Scotch bastard McCandless, on secondment from the Company, on Wellesley’s staff, who had once rebuked him - him, Obadiah! -before the men for taking the Lord’s name in vain – he had not, the old bugger was hard of hearing and had mis-heard him, on his honour! (Hakeswill was a master at dealing out outrageous injustices but he could not endure to be the recipient of one arising from an innocent mistake – McCandless would pay for that one of these days, or his name was not Obadiah Hakeswill, which it was) was Lawford’s bloody uncle!
Hakeswill knew he would have to be extremely cautious when dealing with Lawford. Careful and sly and clever. It would need real cunning – ha! It came to him there and then, a fully-formed plan! Sharpie! Christ, but he was a genius. He knew what Lawford was, even if Morris wouldn’t countenance it; he had seen with his own eyes how Lawford watched Sharpie from afar, could not keep himself from gazing at him as they marched, would likely throw his breeches at the cocky young bastard if only he dared, that soft-eyed yearning look on his face betraying him! So to strike a blow at Lawford all he needed to do was to hurt Sharpie, badly, and the already-extant plan to traffic Mary Bickerstaff to Naig and ruin Sharpe was key to that. Rile up Sharpie, get him on that flogging charge, something real serious, like striking a Sergeant – Hakeswill knew from long experience that he could live with a punch in the face or even a kick in the cods if it was in a good cause – both had happened to him enough times - with a sentence to match, and with any luck Sharpie’d die under the lash and that bugger Lady bloody Lawford, with his soft hands, soft smiles, soft heart and even softer head, would have no choice but to watch while it happened. Sharpie wouldn’t be strutting about like a crow in a gutter no more, at any rate. The scheme was so perfect Hakeswill cackled and would have hugged himself at the prospect - had he not been carrying his razor-sharp halberd, of course.
William only noticed now that he was shaking, just as he had often been left shaking following any kind of interaction with the Viscount or Charles. Furious with himself again for being so susceptible to that sort of intimidation, he walked off in the opposite direction, to fetch his immediately necessary gear (the rest of it was on the wagon) from where he had stowed it in the common pile that forenoon. He was careful to choose his spot for the night three or four yards from a group of about a dozen men and their bright fire. As he set down his bundle and unfolded his blanket the men greeted him in a friendly manner, which he acknowledged (to his own great surprise, William had recently begun to have reason to suspect that he was becoming popular with the rankers), and one of them, who seemed to be their unofficial spokesman, offered him a pull of rum from a tin mug. Under normal circumstances he would have politely declined it, but, frankly, the business with Hakeswill just now had left him feeling so rattled that he decided to accept the offer. Hoping that the rum would help to calm his nerves, he said,
“Mallinson, isn’t it? I think I will. Most kind of you. Thank you.”
The rum did help, a little. At least William managed to get some rest. He knew that he must have slept, in fact, if only for a little, because when he awoke not long before morning he could recall having had a vivid dream of Mark, who in the dream (which had indeed been intensely real – something more than merely a dream, William had often thought, afterwards, for he had felt, could have sworn he had actually felt, Mark take him by his hand, his left hand) had worn a red coat, his beautiful hair now clubbed, and whitened with the horrible flour-paste with which all the rankers were made to plaster their heads for the sake of uniformity on parade. At home at Durford William had tried so often to capture the precise appearance, the very effect, of sunlight on Mark’s hair in pastels and in chalks and in watercolours, in his chamber, in the quiet afternoons: it had been his secret vice. He had contrived - just about - to set down the likeness of Mark’s face, his exquisite features, many times, working from the sketches in his portfolio, but he thought he had never quite succeeded with Mark’s hair; never quite caught the silken sheen and the living fire, although he had come close on occasion. Mark’s hair had been glorious. It had even made him think of St John the Beloved Disciple at Pentecost, when the tongues as of fire had descended upon the heads of the Apostles! That thought should have made him ashamed, but it had not. William had spent almost as much time as they had been able to snatch to be together, especially on that afternoon at the cottage, just stroking Mark’s incomparably beautiful hair, burying his face in it, catching the natural fragrance of Mark, and the faint scents of the hothouse and the herbiary and the kitchen garden and even of the stout leathern apron, which he had inherited from his father and which he had been used to wear when he was working, which had always clung about his hair. In the dream, Mark had regarded him sadly and reproachfully as he had held his hand; but as Mark (or so it had seemed to William) had leaned to embrace him, so William had awoken with one brief sob, to find his own arms outstretched in longing, and to the recollection that it was the twenty-fifth day of March, whilst Mark had fled, like a sad ghost, from the first hint of the returning sun. The moon, four days now past the full and waning gibbous, had meanwhile been setting in the west. In Hampshire in five or perhaps six hours’ time, William had thought, it would be New Year’s Day old style, a date to which many of the country folk still held, in the early days of spring; but for William the rising day brought with it now only darkness blacker than night, and loss, and misery. He turned his face from the growing light and tried desperately to recapture the dream, to find Mark again in sleep, but he could not. Mark! he said, in his head, Mark, come back to me! But there had come no answer. William closed his eyes tightly in an attempt to detain the fading inner vision, but the phantom Mark had gone on gliding intangibly, ineluctably beyond his reach, even as he again stretched forth yearning arms which eventually closed only upon empty air. Had he known then? he had thought, later. Had he known - even before Mama’s letter had come, the one which he had not received until after the Seringapatam adventure had been over?
Then all at once, out of the blackness of the night had come the Reveille. Time to get up and march.
The Past: Durford, March 1798.
Mark had worn a posy of primroses and windflowers in the top button-hole of his best black coat, which would have been fashionable at around the time of the Seven Years’ War (it had belonged to his father, Mark had told him once; Mrs Lucas had done what she could to bring it up to date, but in despite of all, and at the end of the day, it had been a coat which had been forty years old, and it had looked it) in honour of the day. That year, 1798, the twenty-fifth day of March had fallen upon a Sunday, and the weather being fair the young people, clad in their Sabbath best had held an impromptu celebration in the open air after service, upon the green space opposite the gate to the churchyard. Cottages had been dotted randomly about its margins, making of it a rough circle, a small arena, where the people had often gathered then to take part in innocent amusements on the holidays of the Church, and at times of national celebration. There had been an ale-house and a forge, and a bakery amongst the dwellings. On May Day they had danced in the spring there. At Lammas they had danced in the first-fruits of the harvest. They had sung carols there on Christmas Eve. In the freezing weather of January they had skated on the little shallow duck-pond adjacent to the smithy. And on that day, the members of the parish band, freed from the restraint which they had but recently endured under the stern eye of the Rector, had changed their tune from hymns and psalms to contra-dances from Mr Playford’s book (19).
William had lingered to watch and had found the same kind of painful delight in witnessing Mark’s innate graceful lightness of step and refinement of movement as he had taken part in the rustic amusement, as he would when they had both participated in a cricket match against a side from South Harting later that spring, in at the batting together (William as non-striker, being out of form on account of his health). He had privately contrasted Mark’s pleasing more-than-competence with the clumsy self-conscious and almost comical baltering of some of the other young men and had observed to himself that, with a little tuition, Mark could have held his own in any grand ballroom, and that he could certainly have shown up the aristocratic boors such as Charles and his circle of loutish acquaintances; and no sooner had he thought that when he had all at once become aware of Tom Griffiths’s chill blue hostile gaze, causing him to wonder briefly, and not for the first time, what could have given rise to Tom’s apparent animus against him. He had remembered the breathless giggling girl, Tom’s sister Keziah, who had snatched Mark’s old-fashioned tricorne from his head when the dance was done, and how she had run away with it, and how Mark had chased her, both of them laughing, around the great oak, said to have been already two hundred years old when King Edward the First’s edict of the expulsion of the Jews from England had been proclaimed beneath its boughs in the year one thousand two hundred and ninety, that grew in the middle of the green. The tree had still been naked that day, even as what had seemed a verdant mist had almost at that very hour begun to appear on the boughs of ash and elm and beech, and upon the hawthorn and elder along the hedgerows, and upon the hazels in the woodland filbert-brakes. How the others had cheered as Mark had finally caught and kissed her and retrieved his Sunday hat! And how that had, without warning, struck William to the heart – just as, later, had the sight of Richard at the camp-fire, turning to share sweet whispered intimacies with Mary Bickerstaff.
You selfish idiot, he had told himself again, goodness only knew how many times now, you should have learned your lesson that day, that very hour, when you saw the two of them together! That would have turned out well, doubtless, once you were gone. You should have left Mark to Kezzie. Kezzie would have made him a good wife. They would have had children. Mark would have been head-gardener after Potter. They would have been happy, respected, considered amongst the foremost of the people at Durford. Poor girl! There would doubtless be other worthy suitors – perhaps there already had been - but never again another, so uniquely loveable, so luminously beautiful, so kind, so gentle – nor so gifted, so dedicated to his work (he would, William was sure, have made his professional impress upon on his field of endeavour in time) as Mark. They would have been married by now, had it not been for me and my gross, blind selfishness! How he wished he could turn back time to that spring day in England a year since and set right all that he had done wrong!
The Present: March 1799.
Here in India, in the tropics, spring never came, or at least not so as one used to England’s well-defined seasons would notice. March in the Deccan, William anticipated, would just be more of the stultifying same, like it always was when it was not lashing down with rain, as he had read that it did in the monsoon season. The landscape was hot, dry, dusty, red, alien as Mars, or one of those new planets people like the celebrated Bath resident William Herschel, who, not content with being merely the composer of several innovative and impossibly modern-sounding symphonies, had now, together with his sister Charlotte, discovered by means of their unimaginably powerful new optical instruments, the giant distant planet which they had dubbed Uranus, giving the stamp of approval to ideas, long ridiculed by persons of closed and blinkered minds, which Anaximander of Miletus had first propounded more than two millennia earlier.
With the sudden coming of daylight came also William’s servant Anil, with his travelling wash-stand, razor and shaving bowl and a jug which was filled with hot water of precisely the optimum temperature. William washed himself as comprehensively as he always did (deftly achieving this without removing his shirt, as he was lacking the privacy of his tent) and taking a little time to relish the aroma of the bergamot-scented soap which he favoured. He had only just begun the task of shaving (a thing which he preferred to do for himself) when Thomas Elland, one of the company clerks out early upon his rounds, came up to him burdened with a mail-bag.
“Letters, sir,” he said.
“So the post has caught up with us at last! Thank you, Elland.” Meanwhile Anil took the letters and stood by with them. After a little, once William had towelled himself dry, whipped off his used shirt and and slipped the fresh one proffered by Anil over his head (a practised manoeuvre which took him all of two seconds) he took up the first letter and broke the seal. Looking at the direction on the front of the envelope William recognised his mother’s hand. His mouth instantly dried and his heart hopped and skipped in his breast. He was frankly surprised at the strength of his reaction to holding in his hands tidings from Durford, the first he had heard of the place in more than seven months. He had been looking forward to his breakfast (Anil understood English toast and he knew how to boil a proper three-and-a-half-minute hen’s egg, and he brewed a peerless pot of coffee) but now William was not so sure that he wanted it. He glanced around furtively. No-one was watching. The letter bore the elaborate seal of the Viscount Petersfield, a device which signalled aggressive self-regard, arrogance and opulence, which he guessed had inevitably been remarked by many in the Battalion as Elland had carried his bag of post around the encampment (Proper tufty – what’s he doing slumming it with the likes of the Havercakes? How he don’t come to be in the fucking Roast and Boiled (20) beats me, haha! - that had been Private Sharpe, of course).
William noted to himself that he would ask Mama in future to secure her letters with a plain gummed wafer only (she never would comply; she simply insisted that standards had to be maintained and that she would not surrender to vulgarity, for one might as well learn the words of the Marseillaise and go about in one’s shift and have one’s hair cut ragged á la victime). It was dated the tenth day of August 1798, but that was not so surprising, given that it took six or seven months or even longer for the slower ships to sail from England to India; even were the mail passed express from fast cutter to fast cutter it still took a long time, and probably another month or six weeks for the mail to find its way from Madras to Harris’s army. Lady Petersfield had written that everyone was well. Henry and Francis sent their regards. Charles had a new hunter that season, admired everywhere, probably the best in the county. Wasn’t it a pity about Audax? She assumed that William would not need a horse in India, as he was an officer of a Regiment of Foot, and her understanding was that they walked everywhere. (William wondered how it would strike her when she eventually heard from her banker.) It was so strange that Mark Lucas had joined the 67th in a sudden inexplicable fit of patriotic fervour! - such a blow to lose such a good gardener! - they were missing his expertise with the pineapples particularly. They were now in danger of being surpassed as far as the splendour of their dinners went not just by the Fetherstonehaughs of Uppark at South Harting (losing to their people at cricket last spring had still rankled, evidently) but, shockingly, also by Josiah Hayles, who was currently making so much money from his shares in his former business down by Tichbourne on account of the War that it seemed that he was now within a neck of overtaking them in wealth, and that would not do. William must hurry and gain promotion and marry Jessica and make secure her considerable dowry. (Sorry, Mama, he thought, but the rules have changed, and even the grandson of the Earl of Winchester now has to wait out the time with patience before he might purchase up.) Her mind then wandering via several inconsequential meanders back to the subject of the hot-house, Lady Petersfield had written that she had heard that Mark Lucas would sail for Jamaica with the latest draft of the South Hampshires in a fortnight’s time – (he had made the mental calculation – twenty-fourth of August – if the passage had taken four or five weeks then Mark would have been in Kingston for six months already!) could not William contrive to have Colonel Wellesley exert his family’s influence to have Lucas extricated from the Army? (Mama, you really have no idea! he thought, to that - ) It really was such a nuisance to have lost him! Even if it had not been for the lack of pineapples, the singing at Divine Service on a Sunday morning was nothing like it had been now that it was no longer underpinned by the profound tones of his noble bass viol. Mrs Lucas had left the cottage. It was said that she had gone to keep house for her widowed brother, or brother-in-law, it might be, at Portsmouth, or perhaps it was Gosport, or Southsea. Henry was championing the rights of common people in the courts, charging reduced rates or taking no fee at all for at least a third of his cases; so much for all that expensive education, for he would never make his fortune if he persisted in that folly. Francis was a zealous parish priest all out for Abolition and reform of the Poor Law, and she feared he was an Enthusiast, by which she meant a Methodist, and he would be in danger of losing his comfortable Anglican living at the rate at which he was going; and meanwhile dear conscientious Charles was in Barbados seeing to the family’s interests as the Viscount was nowhere near as vigorous as once he had been. (Well, Henry and Francis have not turned out so badly after all, at least, he thought.) Oh, and Mr Johnson was in very good health, William would be reassured to learn, considering the pug’s great age. Yes, he must be all of nine years old, William thought. One of Charles’s boorish friends from Oxford, a guest at Durford at Christmas in, it must have been 1790, William recollected, drunk and not noticing Mr Johnson lolling upon the sofa whilst the Viscountess had been lying down in her chamber after the festive meal, had inadvertently sat on him, and had suffocated him. A substitute pug had been rapidly borrowed from a source in Midhurst even whilst the Viscountess had still been sleeping off her roast goose and plum pudding, and she had never noticed the switch, even though the stand-in had been of the opposite sex to that of the original Mr J. Everyone had been on tenterhooks for several days following until a further swap for another, permanent, pug of the correct sex could be arranged to take place as soon as could be contrived once the holiday was over. William had, of course, been home from school to witness these events: Charles had threatened him with epic retribution if ever he had let on to Mama concerning the terrible truth about MrJohnson’s strange serial metamorphoses.
The second letter which William had received had been from Jessica. It enclosed another miniature portrait, mounted in a silver locket, this time. Guilt instantly surged into his breast like heart-burn as he guessed that she believed that he had become confirmed in the habit of mislaying the miniature portraits she had been sending to him on a regular basis for some years now. He had indeed - so regularly that it was almost as if his subconscious mind had been plotting these careless losses. With a pang of culpability he slipped this new one into the pocket of his breeches as Anil offered them to him, then forgot it at once, and touched instead the locket which he had been wearing about his neck beneath his shirt day and night since the hour of his departure from England, like a talisman. He made a silent prayer for Mark, then let Anil finish getting him ready to confront the business of the day.
Two days passed. It was morning once again, towards the end of March 1799. The day before, the twenty-sixth, they had arrived at a village called Mallavelly, and now the word was that they would most probably have their first meaningful encounter with the Tippoo Sultan’s forces today, the twenty-seventh. Anil brought William his hot water and his breakfast, although again William had little stomach for it. In all likelihood, there was going to be a battle - his second, if one did not count that rearguard action at Kalamangalam, when they had been surprised by Tippoo’s cavalry, and he had had to do precisely nothing, because of Arthur Wesley’s overwhelming competence. Not that his first proper one had been up to much. Boxtel, or, rather, Schyndel, in 1794. Bloody Flanders. All that damn confusion and pointless marching to and fro in the rain and the fog, and then the ignominious retreat to Bremen and withdrawal to England with their tails between their legs. All right, so the 33rd had acquitted itself well that day. But the overall objective of the Flanders campaign had not been achieved. The British and the Dutch and the Austrians had been supposed to be invading France via Flanders to teach the Jacobins a lesson for chopping off the heads of King Louis and his Austrian wife in 1793. That had not happened. Instead, the British had ended up having to retreat through the frozen terrain of northern Europe in the middle of the worst winter in living memory, struggling to get to the sea in the hope of being evacuated by the Royal Navy before the French caught up with them or else they simply starved and froze to death. By the time the Army had reached Bremen it had been all but annihilated as a viable fighting force. The senior generals, who most of the time, in their comfortable headquarters miles away from any action, had throughout the three-year campaign not seemed to care what became of those who had actually been doing the fighting and the marching two and fro in horrible conditions, had scored a great success when it had come to saving their carriages and their horses and their baggage trains. But the men, so many of them, had been utterly destroyed by hunger, exhaustion and exposure to the freezing cold without adequate clothing or other supplies. So much for Flanders.
Anyway, no-one seemed too bothered at the prospect of a spat with Tippoo, if they were not yet dignifying this coming clash with the title of a battle, William supposed. All the same, he was not sure how he felt about actually engaging with this different, alien enemy, this exotic foe, whose taste in gowns Mama and her friends had never slavishly copied from the fashion-dolls and pattern-books regularly sneaked into England from France notwithstanding the long years of conflict, whose language no governess had ever taught in an English school-room - the troops of Fateh Ali, the Tippoo Sultan, who were, he had heard, actually quite something to be reckoned with, now that the French had had a hand in their training.
“Lieutenant-sahib,” said Anil, just then, a warning note sounding in his voice. William glanced up. Here came Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill, smart as paint and seemingly as fresh as the daisies which did not grow on the hot dry Deccan Plain.
“Major Shee’s compliments, Mr Lawford, sir!” said Hakeswill, stamping to attention less than two feet away from him, his breath sour as pig-slurry and foul as a jakes in William’s face. Unable to help himself, William fell back a step. Then, angrily, he thought, I really must not do that again!
“Sergeant?”
“Major Shee’s compliments, as I said, sir, and please will Mr Lawford present himself in Major Shee’s tent as soon as is practicable, sir!”
“Very good, Sergeant. Please convey my regards to Major Shee and inform him that I shall be at his tent in five minutes.”
“Sir!” Hakeswill faced about, stamped ostentatiously and marched away.
“God Almighty!” William groaned, once Hakeswill was out of earshot.
“Please, Mr Lawford will take very good care, Lieutenant-sahib. I do not trust that Sergeant Hakeswill.”
“You are a wise man, Anil.”
“I am one whom Wisdom has followed all the days of my life, sahib. But as a swami who once came to my village when I was yet a boy prophesied concerning me, I shall always outrun her.”
“Anil? Oh, I see! That’s very good! I shall remember that! That’s as good as the one about following Virtue I heard once. I think that must have been my Uncle Hector.”
“Colonel McCandless is also a wise man. I say that from what you have told me concerning him, sir, although I have small knowledge of him, save by excellent repute.”
“Yes, Anil, I believe he is. He has learned much from your people, whose wisdom, he says, has also enhanced his understanding of the teachings of Jesus Christ.”
“Ah, that Lord Isa, whom the Wise say came as a boy to our land a many many hundred years ago to study in the great monasteries of the followers of Gautama! And you follow in the Colonel-sahib’s footsteps, sir, as regards wisdom?”
“I truly wish I did, Anil, but as it happens, I am afraid that I do not. I have read a lot of books, to be sure, but although reading makes one learned, it does not necessarily make one wise. I have found that out by painful trial and error.”
“Then I perceive by your words that you have at least the beginnings of wisdom, sahib. I am not a wise man, either, but I hope that I am at least an observant one. I have observed, for example, that Sergeant Hakeswill is an evil man.”
“I say, Anil, steady on!“
“He is an evil man, sahib. When he dies, the Lord Shiva willing, he will be reborn as a thing fitting to his nature. Sagani jirunde, it may be.”
“Some sort of devil, is that?”
“More properly a dung beetle or a weevil, sahib.”
“Large or small, Anil?”
“Of two weevils, he would no doubt be the lesser, Lieutenant-sahib.”
William laughed delightedly.
“The lesser of two weevils! (21) Oh, haha! I must tell that to them in the mess! It will make them laugh. It is very clever! I shall attribute it to you, Anil, do not fear – they know by now that I am no great wit and could not have thought of that. I had rather Hakeswill become nothing at all, however,” he said, frowning slightly all at once.
“In my religion, after death there is no nothing, sahib.”
“So dung-beetle it is, then, although in my religion, Hakeswill would end up burning in hell forever.”
“Does the Lieutenant-sahib believe that?” asked Anil, curious.
“I’m really not sure, Anil,” said William, after some thought. “When I was yet a child, I believed everything the Dean of Windsor – he was like a sort of important Brahmin – everything he said we should believe in catechism classes at school; but then I grew up and now I don’t know any more. There seem to be so many things which experience tells me now are otherwise than how I was taught.” He sighed. “But now I must go and see Major Shee.”
Notes
1. Tom Tooley was a servant of Parson Woodforde, the diarist. Woodforde recorded that Tooley volunteered for the 33rd.
2.Ripon was only just within the boundary of the West Riding. It was very nearly in the North Riding. It has been in North Yorkshire since 1974 following local government re-organisation.
3. In 1795 the Royal Oxfordshire Militia, stationed at Seaford, mutinied over lack of food and looted the town. The subsequent executions took place at Newhaven. Jane Austen’s brother Henry, an officer in the Royal Oxfordshire Militia, was a witness to these events.
4. As in Richard Sharpe’s own case. The flogging sentence which would certainly have killed him, had it not been stopped by chance, had been imposed without due process.
5. A game played with thin flat stones, involving skimming them across the surface of a pond or river.
6. Poor Blunt indeed died of shame, at least indirectly, having refused to eat or drink out of remorse at his actions.
7. Joseph Merceron was a notorious figure who occupied a twilight niche between respectability within the Establishment, and the criminal underworld. He was known as the Boss of Bethnal Green, but also had credibility as a purveyor of intelligence to the Government, which gave him protected status. As Governor of Coldfield Baths, an allegedly model prison, he permitted medical and surgical experiments to be carried out on the inmates for financial gain.
8.Durford Park had its ice-house – then a great luxury. It still exists, a little-marked half-buried bunker-like structure against the north wall of the kitchen-garden. (Such structures still exist in the grounds of many country houses, but not at Durford Park, which is fictitious, although the mediaeval ruins of Durford Abbey exist, located near Petersfield. One may still walk in Durford Wood.)
9. Wan hope. Inclining towards despair.
10. Macbeth, Act 2 scene ii.
11. Viscount Petersfield’s near neighbour in Hampshire, Admiral John ‘Lucky Jack’ Aubrey, in those days still a Lieutenant and only present on account of the Viscount’s association with his father, General Aubrey, had once related to the company at a dinner at which William had been present an anecdote which might have gone some way to explaining Wellesley’s aversion to Chaplains, which was by no means unique. During a lengthy period on land, Aubrey had come across a former Naval chaplain, now serving in a London church, who was in the habit of having his Churchwardens bar the doors and detain his congregation after Matins whilst he read aloud to them the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England, just as if he had been still at sea and the Articles of War were being read following Divine Service on a Sunday morning.
12. Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, was Secretary of State for War 1794-1801.
13. Hakeswill is confusing Henry Dundas with David Dundas, who wrote the widely-used drill manual studied by all officers and NCOs, previously referred to. There was also Sir Lawrence Dundas, who was partly responsible for the development of Edinburgh’s New Town in the 18th Century.
14. A shorter and handier kind of musket, carried by Light Company sergeants in place of the ceremonial spontoon borne by sergeants of the Battalion companies (companies two to seven, i.e. not the Grenadier or Light flanking Companies) of a Regiment of Foot.
15. Lieutenant Fitz-Gerald certainly did not see Hakeswill with it, that night in the Sultanpetah tope outside Seringapatam.
16. Obadiah verse 3 (the book of the prophet Obadiah consists of one chapter only, and is the shortest book of the Old Testament). The dwellers in the clefts of the rock were the Nabateans (or Edomites) of Petra, the traditional enemies of the Judaeans.
17. Slave of God.
18. The form of the name Obadiah which appears in Nehemiah at 11:17. Both Obadiah and Abda are cognate with Arabic Abdullah.
19. 1651.
20. A nickname for the Life Guards (used in the Peninsula, so possibly anachronistic here), who were popularly thought to regard themselves as beings superior to those in the Line regiments, who in turn imagined that the Life Guards received better rations than they did.
21. Undying thanks to Patrick O’Brian for this immortal jest.
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