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The Sharpe Fan Fictions of A Lady.

Bernard Cornwell’s

Sir William’s Education

William Lawford
Begins


This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Lawford’s Duty. Copyright © 2026 by A Lady


Lawford’s Education is for
Sable Crow who supports our fanfiction with her website SharpeTales.net.
And
Bernard Cornwell who brought Richard Sharpe into our world.


Chapter 1


26th July 1798.
Durford, Hampshire, England.
/PARAGRAPH ONE

Dublin then I duly arrived in February of ’06, having left Jessica with Mama at Durford, as she had at the time been in the delicate condition to which I have previously alluded, and which had been within the space of a few months to culminate in the birth of our daughter, Eloise, (1) or Eloisa (the first the preferred form of her name by which Jessica chose to call her, the second that of myself) in the September of that year. Durford was conveniently situated for visits from Jessica’s own parents, who lived near Liphook and who could easily undertake the journey by carriage in a morning at a steady walk, so it was not as if she would be finding herself unduly isolated - although I later learned that, after enduring my mother’s trying and unconventional company for a little less than two months, Jessica had decided to return to her parental home for her confinement, and after that, never returned to Durford except, from time to time, to visit. I cannot say that I blamed her. Mama, more and more lost in her laudanum reveries, had most probably barely noticed, in any case.

At this point now I must confess that, although I had an embarrassingly extensive history of romantic entanglements with members of my own sex, affaires which had quite often gone further than mere sentiment, it was in Dublin where, I am sorry to say, little by little, I became truly debauched, for it was here that I was exposed to and subsequently found myself manoeuvred into engaging in practices which I must not describe here, and can barely allude to at all, except in the most adumbrative of terms. This process began almost at once, upon my advent. There was a time, for an example, when, only recently arrived and still finding my feet amongst my new colleagues, I had found myself obliged to be seated at dinner next to a fat and sweating old medical officer whose foot had suddenly pressed itself importunately against mine just as the orderlies had been taking away the first remove; by the time the main course had been served his meaty hand had been on my knee; dessert had arrived, and by this time my thigh had been receiving a comprehensive massage, and the advent of the cheese had clearly been the signal for his fingers to begin their advance down the side of the gully into the dead ground towards what I could only assume was the objective of my crotch, where I received the very strong impression that he had intended to establish his forward position during the circulation of the port. There had been nothing I could do about it (unless I had wished to make a scene, which I had not) except to endure it until by and by we stood for the Loyal Toast, by which time the old lecher’s hand had made a tactical retreat back up the galley, only to carry out a flanking manoeuvre until it had arrived upon the reverse slope of my backside - hidden beneath the tails of my coat and further obscured by the diminishing light of the candles as one by one they had begun to gutter. (2)

When one is a baby Ensign, or even a still-wet-behind-the-ears Lieutenant, one has to learn to harden oneself to that sort of shameful treatment at the hands of the amorous old drunks who frequently blight the atmosphere at occasions such as regimental dinners; but to have to endure it then, in Dublin – I was all of twenty-nine years old by then, recently married, and Major Lawford, after all! – was pretty well insupportable. (4) I confess that I was probably at least partially to blame in that particular instance, as I had discovered upon introduction at the yaw-yaw stage of small talk in advance of dinner that this man had been in charge of the fever hospital in Kingston in the autumn of ’98. Earlier in the evening, against my better judgement (in those days I am sorry to say that I did many things against my better judgement), but having been struck by the idea that he might have noticed Mark, might even have had cause to speak with him (although upon later reflection I saw that that was a ridiculous notion!), I had begun to question him regarding his recollections concerning the 67th. I explained that one of the gardeners from my family’s Hampshire estate had caused something of a stir when he had inexplicably decided to enlist in the summer of ‘98, out of a desire to serve his King and country and to see something of the world, but that unfortunately he had hardly arrived in Kingston with a new draft of the South Hampshires when he had succumbed to the Yellow Fever, which sad news had been relayed back to Durford late in November of that year. I confess this was folly: for one thing, there was no reason on earth why he should have remembered one Redcoat, and a private soldier at that, indistinguishable with his clubbed and powdered hair amongst all the hundreds of others who had regularly arrived with the drafts from England, only to succumb within days to the Yellow Jack, weeks if they had been lucky; for another, it had probably been extremely obvious to him that I had edited the story of the patriotic gardener – indeed, he quizzed me as to why I still dwelt upon this latter-day Adam, who cannot have been in any way more remarkable than the rest of the host of gardeners employed at great houses in those more gracious days which now seemed so very far off, what with the Wars, and Bonaparte, and Nelson, and all of that, eight years later – flustered, I answered that his pineapples had been without peer in the county, and that my mother had been greatly inconvenienced at the loss of him as this had been to the detriment of her reputation as an hostess, at which I saw him curl his lip - and also that he had easily guessed the reason for this, which in turn had encouraged him to pursue his designs upon me - and for yet another, it had very likely given him the false impression that I had actually been interested in him as a potential partner in joy. (This mis-judgement was yet another entry in that notional volume bearing the title William Lawford’s Treasury of Singularly Bad Ideas which I have been compiling in my head now for as long as I can remember.) I cannot remember how I escaped him at the end of the evening. Probably someone else had arrived to claim his attention and I had been able to make good my withdrawal whilst his back had been turned. I do not recall that he ever troubled me again, although there had been other similarly depressing and degrading occasions which had threatened to disinter distressing memories from my childhood, many of which had inevitably involved Charles, which I had far rather remained (very nearly) buried, although from time to time an importunate skeletal finger had poked out above ground again until more earth could be cast upon it; so I had fought hard to keep them so, and for that time, had succeeded.

On one memorable evening (memorable for all the wrong reasons) I had found myself trapped next to a red-faced major of the Provosts (4) who had insisted upon engaging me in conversation upon the topic of the novels of the Marquis de Sade, an author whose works I had never read, and, as a result of his vivid and graphic descriptions as to their subject-matter and enthusiastic recommendations regarding the possibilities of the application of the information which they contained to one’s personal life, never shall. That was the night that serious rioting had broken out in the squalid streets surrounding the Barracks (I cannot recall the occasion of these demonstrations, but frankly those people had seldom needed an excuse) and we had had to cut proceedings short and turn out the Guard, just as the orderlies had been about to carry in the cheese, which I had found most irksome, because in my opinion cheese is usually the best part of any dinner (I had greatly missed our fine English cheeses throughout my time in India, although I did enjoy the smoked bandel we had been able to obtain for the Mess whilst we remained in Madras). At least it had got me safely away from the major of the Provosts, whom I had become convinced by now had been not simply a lecherous old nuisance – I had become more than three-quarters sure that he would have represented an actual danger to me had I accompanied him back to his quarters that evening.

On another occasion I was placed next to ‘one of those brave old commanders Who serv’d through all the glorious wars in Flanders,’ (5) or, in his case, America. He was not old enough to have fought at Blenheim, like Williams’s old general – he would have had to be as old as Great-Great-Grandpapa (who was born in 1651, the second son of a minor Hampshire aristocrat, and was seven years old when that warty old bastard Oliver Cromwell died, and sixty-three when, as one of Marlborough’s heroes and first Earl of Winchester of the fourth creation of 1704 (6) he had seen the first of the Georges crowned: Great-Great-Great-Grandpapa having bought his baronetcy from the first King James (of England, anyway – the sixth of Scotland, of course) in 1623 for that to have been the case! but he had certainly fought with Burgoyne at Saratoga in ’77 – the year of my birth – for that matter he had also fought with Burgoyne at Valencia de Alcantára in ’62 (which as a newly-commissioned young officer would, I suppose, have made him about the same age as the Viscount, my supposed father); indeed, it had apparently been the sight of me which had set him off about Burgoyne, for, he said, he had not seen anyone so well-turned-out or so finely-tailored since the days when he had been privileged to associate with ‘Gentleman Johnny’, although for some reason he preferred to dwell upon the unprecedented defeat of the British by the Colonials in the dark unfriendly forests of North America than he did upon the victory under the sun of Extremadura - and, true to the spirit of Williams’s verse, in narration he was extremely long. I almost fell asleep; it was then he made his move, however, and that certainly woke me up as much as if the Serjeant-Major had shouted for us to stand-to in the middle of the night on the way to Seringapatam in the old days!

The usual ploy, because of the nature of the posting, to a city which was (in theory, at least) one of Britain’s provincial capitals but which was in fact a spawning-ground of potential insurrection and unrest and a nest of would-be traitors, was for one of these predatory older fellows to offer to accompany one back to one’s quarters in the Barracks, which was a large complex of buildings which its architect, Thomas de Burgh, had, I suppose unwittingly, supplied with many lurking-places which were all a gift to any would-be assassin who might have managed to creep in and secrete himself in the deep shadows cast by portico, pilar, deep recess and buttress to await his chance. (These partizano tactics had become the preferred modus operandi since the defeat of the United Irishmen at the Battle of Vinegar Hill, in the June of ’98, at a time a year later when I and my Uncle McCandless had been scampering about hither and yon over the Deccan in pursuit of Doondiah Waugh and his men, a thought I now found it difficult around which to encircle my mind.) It was hard to say no to this gambit, because the danger was real and present – from time to time the bodies of murdered Redcoats and even officers were discovered in the filthy back-alleys and courtyards of Dublin not far from the Barracks, and moreover floating in the Liffey - particularly after Bonaparte’s latest vaunted successes in Europe – the aftermath of Austerlitz and that of Jena, both in ’06, come to mind – these incidents bore it in upon me that I had been vindicated in my insistence upon leaving Jessica and our child Eloisa safely at home in England, notwithstanding what Jessica, at the time, had thought of my decision (I had become quite good at insisting, after my time as a middling officer in India – I think Jessica had nonetheless been secretly impressed by the improvement which my character had undergone during the seven years of my absence from England – Sir Josiah certainly had, and had told me so – his approval always meant a great deal to me, especially after the loss of Uncle Hector). After my period of leave during which I had gone home to see my new-born daughter I regret to say that Jessica and I had parted in anger because I would not have her and Eloisa accompany me back to Dublin; she was stubborn, in accordance with her character, which had long been known to me, and I could not by any means succeed in conveying to her the nature of the peril into which she and the little girl would have been straying had I granted her her wish.

The propaganda surrounding Bonaparte’s successes had indeed given heart to the Irish rebels, who had never ceased to persist even after the putting down of Wolf Tone’s insurrection of ‘98. It had made eminent sense, therefore, for us officers to go about in pairs, especially after dark, although this meant that I sometimes found myself, out of good manners, obliged to lie down for a fellow simply because he had escorted me safely back to my rooms on occasions when it had been known that the natives without the walls had become particularly restless, and it would have seemed ungrateful and churlish to have denied him when he finally made his advance upon me.

These incidents seemed to occur whether or no I had shown any prior interest in the party. Usually the encounters ended early and frequently in embarrassment and chagrin as we had brayed our collective allegiance to King George at the end of the evening; otherwise, as I have said, there would be the offer to see me safely to my quarters, which almost always had resulted in another amorous skirmish. If luck had been truly against me, there would have been no cautious advances during dinner, no offer of an escort, but simply a sudden pounce as the evening had broken up; then often a chiaroscuro pursuit, first flitting through the several squares of the Barracks and dodging amongst the moonlight shadows of its grand colonnades, a flight which, though sometimes ending in escape, nonetheless not infrequently had determined in capture and conquest – for in that event, I had used to tell myself, the only sensible thing to be done was to yield, or there would likely have been a scuffle and a commotion, and all the shame and humiliation attendant upon the inevitable involvement of the kind of soldier-constables, military policemen one might call them, who were very shortly, in the Peninsula anyway, to become organised by Wellesley into the greatly resented band of Provosts (and their red-faced Major) after the model of the French military gendarmes, and that would have been the damndest worst outcome of all, (7) although if I am honest I do wonder whether sometimes, consciously or otherwise, I had willed these denouements, for reasons not always entirely connected with lust. (8) Ah, Lawford, one might have said, having cornered me in a remote quadrangle where owls, bats and officers had hooted and flitted about after half-past-eleven at night, would you care to join me in my quarters for a night-cap? So for the sake of politeness (as I told myself) I would return with him, and then for a little there would be pleasant conversation, designed, I am sure, to lull me. And then, after a while, as I said my good-night and made to rise to take my leave, more often than not and quite suddenly, the mood would change, and it would be that familiar heavy martial hand (they all seemed to have hefty paws on them, which were reliable indicators that they would not likely to have brooked refusal had I then sought to rebuff their advances) upon my kerseymered or buck-skinned thigh again, or sometimes upon my shoulder, actually pressing me back into my seat! and something along the lines of, Now, Lawford, you delightful teaze, you sha’n’t deny me! or, What, off to Madras so soon? (a humourist, that one, who had obviously heard the story of my fictional moonlight flit with the non-existent despatch from Malavelly), or, Come, William, pray do not dissemble, I know that you are more than partial to the seasoned touch of an older man! To which I, the consummate hypocrite, would likely counter, But I promised my wife; and then, the probable response, What is that to me? And so I might have gone on, Nothing, but to me my wife is everything for she is the mother of my child – and then the argument-winning riposte, And your wife is in London (and, the fellow, whoever he might have been, might sometimes have added, and in another man’s bed).

Then there was the one who on a time, as soon as we had arrived in his quarters, without niceties or preliminaries or even the offer of a brandy and a cigar, had very brusquely ordered me to remove my sash, coat, waist-coat, boots, breeches and stockings (which I had done in short order, fearful of what might have happened had I hesitated) but who had then said (as I had stood there at last in nothing but my shirt expecting to be unceremoniously buggered) that he had only desired to look at my feet, which I had found bizarre, to say the least. He had been, as things had turned out, very appreciative and had had the decency to say afterwards that he had considered my toes very lovely, like the rest of me (in which he had actually expressed but small interest) but I confess that I had been very glad when, shortly after that, he had transferred to a regiment which had then been doing duty in India, which had at least spared my further blushes now that I no longer had had to see him about the Barracks day after day.

I do not know why it had been that I had so meekly yielded to this kind of coercion, unless it had had to do with my ingrained habit of obedience to my brother Charles, eight years my senior, which he had frequently reinforced with violence either threatened or actual, when I had been a child at Durford. It had infuriated me that there had seemed to be something in my mind, some internal Charles, one might say, which had compelled compliance when these older men had made such demands of me, their demeanour forbidding me to express unwillingness or even outright distaste.

At any rate, this was one reason why I had been so keen to escape from Dublin and (with the aid of family and other connexions, of course) find a place on Wellesley’s staff in the Peninsula once it had become clear that we had been going back to Portugal after the political embarrassment first of Cintra and then of what had seemed to be the military disaster of La Coruña, and that Wellesley had, beyond expectation, been going to lead the expedition, because I had feared (and friends who had had my best interests at heart had sternly told me so) that I had risked forming an unshakable reputation as Major Anybody’s if I could not have got out of Ireland, and ideally, out of the British realms altogether - if I had not done so already - and that consequently I had needed to be saved from myself; for it stood to common sense – to anyone who has met the Duke (at that time of course he had been still just Sir Arthur, but already there had been something of the Field-Marshal and the Dux Bellorum about him) - that no-one would dare to behave in such a fashion in his vicinity. (9) I had become, frankly, sick of my unwholesome way of life, which had been mortally dangerous to the body and certainly fatal to the spirit, and of the rut (a telling choice of word, I thought, when I read it back in the draft of this memoir) in which I had become trapped.

I had now been at a point at which I would have welcomed death, and not for the first time, nor the last neither. I was Major Lawford of the 47th (the junior Major, of course) but my new regiment had been strange to me (and had remained so; I never saw it fight an honourable action - pursuing insurrectionists - a rag-tag rabble of peasants and students and apprentices and thugs of the criminal classes and masterless men had, it had seemed to me, hardly counted as a worthy use of our time - and had almost never commanded its men, save on the parade-ground, and upon a couple of ignominious occasions involving the pursuit, slaying and capture of parties of United Irishmen with whose cause, the longer I remained in Ireland and the more I saw of how the Ascendancy conducted itself towards the Catholic population and towards those amongst the Protestants – and there were more of those than gentlemen in England probably imagined - who wished for self-governance, I found that I was growing more and more in sympathy). I was married, but I was not a husband. I was a father but only by the expediency of the unconventional intervention of a third party, for I could not else have done the deed. My associates regarded me as gay, brittle and careless, for I had always been ready with a jest and an amusing story at dinner, and it was of course well-known that I was generally game for a pas-de-deux perhaps first contemplated at the beating of retreat, and accomplished after lights-out - and had never had any difficulty in finding a temporary paramour if I had wanted one, either - on account of the not inconsiderable personal beauty which, without self-conceit and in all honesty, I can say that I had still possessed in those days. Occasionally I had even rather liked the look of the hopeful suitor and joined the dance quite willingly once opportunity had presented itself later in the evening. (10) I was a man, after all, and advances, approaches, glances and touches, affected me just as much as they would have any other fellow. But notwithstanding my amorous successes, I had soon become tired of it all – so much meaningless fumbling and coupling which never led to anything of deeper significance, certainly not love (until the unexpected advent in my life of my Stephen, when I had been almost at my wits’ end some years later, and I am not sure that even that association can be so dignified by that name – on his side, certainly, but I am ashamed to confess, not upon mine, notwithstanding my deep affection and fondness for the dear good faithful little fellow) – and so much emptiness afterwards; for following every such encounter I had simply felt more and more of a hollow shell, or husk, as I had known that nothing would ever again match the heights of tender emotion, or come close to comparing with what I had once known with Mark; nor the mutuality of bodily passion which I had shared with Richard, neither. So far as I had know then, all that had once been genuine and authentic and good in my life was as dead as a doornail (literally, in the case of poor Mark, upon whose defenceless head the discus of my selfish folly and indiscipline had rebounded to such lethal effect some ten years earlier. (11) Truly, what dust we dote on when ‘tis man we love!) (12)

I should make it clear that even in the days of my promiscuity I had however taken great exception to the notion that, on account of my being as I was, I should have been considered perpetually at the beck and call of anyone at all who had felt like a little consequence-free rough-and-tumble at dead of night, although I confess that often, when I had been made a target by one of the old Lotharios of the kind I have previously described, I went along with it, thinking fatalistically, what does it matter anyway? and when I was in my worst of moods, in despite of what my friends had enjoined, I did not care if by the end of my time in Dublin I should have come to be considered by some to be little better than the whore of the Officers’ Mess. You could say, I made my situation worse on account of my preference, at that period of my life, for exceptionally close tailoring (13) (a thing which one must learn to relinquish gracefully once middle-age and a soft civilian life have begun to work their regrettable transformative influence upon one’s figure), which I have sometimes been told left very little to the imagination, and perhaps that is a fair criticism. I was however once offered some interesting insights on that score from Mr Thomas Hunter, tailor of Maddox-street, who had a theory that it was likely to be because I had never been properly swaddled or sufficiently held when I had been an infant; I had too high an opinion of that gentleman, regarded as a philosopher as well as a tailor, to consider his observation a mere impertinence. (It was true that my mother had shown me but scant affection in my early years, and there is a reason for that, but the place for further exploration of that theme is not yet.) But at any rate, I had badly needed a way out of that wretched destructive mode of existence - the emptiness, the meaninglessness, literally the vanity of it all. I had needed a reason for going on with the tedious business of living other than just existing to stagger my miserable tipsy and fuddled way from one half-cocked pointless encounter to another - and the transfer to Wellesley’s staff had seemed set fair to provide me with that escape.

One of the foremost reasons (other than the climate, and boredom, and weariness with myself, and my shameful behaviour, to say nothing in regard of increasing disappointment, not to say outright despair, over my career – at least until, somewhat late on in my Dublin sojourn, Colonel Hargreaves (14) decided to make a cause of it) why I was anxious to escape the Dublin posting was redactable to two words: Charles Morris. The threat of assault aside, he remained a menace and a peril to me, although he was now deprived of the services of his pet goblin, Serjeant Obadiah Hakeswill (that horrible individual, whose favourite trick for the undoing of a man was to secrete in his pack an item missed from the pack of another - in my experience of him it worked every time, except on one occasion, at Hurryhur, where the man in question - who, it later turned out, had been a mountebank who had once worked as a showman and a cut-purse at country fairs back in England – had known how to throw his voice; he made it appear that a spirit, as it were speaking from inside Hakeswill’s pack, had denounced the Serjeant as a liar; and this caused the superstitious Hakeswill to take fright and retract his accusation - that was the only occasion (15) on which I am able to recall seeing Hakeswill discomfited and defeated, to the great amusement of the men, but to the terror of the native servants who had witnessed it, and who ran about in a panic for some minutes afterwards, crying of demons and of evil English magic, until Anil, my good wise native servant, had had an opportunity to explain the phenomenon to them, and thus recall them to a state of rationality). (16)

Morris continued as obnoxious and unpleasant as ever; and although I have never been able to prove anything, I am as certain as I can be that he was the source of the damaging gossip (parroted by Hakeswill) concerning my marriage which emerged in Dublin at this time, to waft like a poisonous miasma back across the Irish Sea and into London society (Hakeswill being the probable initial vector): Morris had never forgiven me for the rôle which I had played in the thwarting of the divers attempts made by himself and Hakeswill to undo Richard Sharpe when Sharpe had still been a Private and then a Serjeant in India (he had served once risen to Lance-Corporal in England until drink had unmade him, and in the Tippoo’s army Colonel Gudin had raised him to Corporal in the casual cavalier way of the post-Revolutionary French, so rules had been bent to allow him his three chevrons in the 33rd – another reason, of course, for Hakeswill to resent him), or for the part played by my uncle McCandless and myself in Sharpe’s advancement, at a time when able men who rose from the ranks, albeit on the strength of acts demonstrably of notable valour and resourcefulness, had still been regarded with great suspicion and disdain by the ‘gentlemen’ who inhabited the officers’ mess, as well as, and I always thought somewhat perversely, by the men. Morris also harboured a further grudge: he had angled quite shamelessly for the position of groomsman at my wedding, clearly because, having grown desperate at being out of sight of those with the power to promote his career whilst he remained in the obscurity of the Dublin garrison, he had wished to expose himself in English society for purposes of advancement. He had been bitterly resentful when I asked Bertram Rossendale to perform this rôle in his stead, and had remained at Dublin for another five years before being posted at last to the West Indies, where even the Yellow Jack had declined to honour him with its notice, and was only eventually recalled for service in Europe - in the ‘Hundred Days’ emergency which began in the spring of 1815, when, by some awful mischance, he transferred into the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers! Sharpe later told me of his dealings with Morris in Paris after Waterloo: he had changed but very little from the man he had been in the old days in India and Dublin, it seems, threatening to flog Sharpe’s men and even evincing lascivious designs upon the Vicomtesse de Seleglise, Richard’s own beloved Lucille! (17) Owing to his reprehensible conduct, Morris had ended his time with the Prince of Wales’s Own charged with cowardice in the face of the enemy (a failing at which he certainly had had form, going back to Gawilghur, from what I had heard). A Court of Inquiry had found that there had been a case to answer, but Morris sensibly had resigned his commission before the Court Martial could be held. As I recall, he then spent some years following Napoleon’s downfall doing not much at all in Goose Green, a village in north Essex somewhere between Tendring and a place near Manningtree called Lawford (of which previously I had never heard!) until his friend Simmerson pulled strings at Horse Guards and he was reinstated into the Army at his old rank of Major. Shortly after that he attained the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel (I can only assume that Simmerson must have paid the difference for the commission, or else engineered it with his cousin, Sir Banastre Tarleton – I cannot think that anyone else would have done so, and Morris certainly could not have afforded it himself - although I cannot imagine why). Word said that Morris then accepted a posting as commander of a convict-guard in New South Wales but never arrived in Australia, having died of drink about two-thirds of the way through the passage, indeed as the original but mistaken story had said, some years earlier. I imagine he would likely have ended in the belly of an unfortunate shark somewhere south-east of Madagascar. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Notes

1 Eloise was begotten in strange circumstances. Perceiving that I should never be able to accomplish what was necessary naturally, Jessica, to my great surprise and lasting respect and gratitude, suggested that I engage discreet assistance. This I did. Five minutes in the dressing-room contiguous with my chamber with the hired hand (for the record, this person was not Lord Robert Ovalton, as some malicious tongues have wagged it; neither was it Richard Sharpe, who at that time was in Kent with his Regiment) was all that was required; I lost no time thereafter, and the deed was swiftly done (I am not proud of this: indeed, I feel disgust at myself at the remembrance of it, and my heart goes out to the memory of poor Jessica at the thought of it, for she had put her affectionate loyalty of many years’ standing towards me before her personal amour propre). Fortunately, Jessica most obligingly conceived at once, and after that we observed the terms and conditions of the secret pact which we had made some time before, when she had first begun to see signs which confirmed what she had had cause to suspect about my nature from the occasion of our first meeting when she had been but five years old, and I nine: that upon the birth of a living child, she should be free to see whomever she pleased thereafter, with no questions asked, so long as she was discreet about it; and so should I. It pains me to confess that I never saw Eloise until Easter of ’07, when she had been already a sturdy infant some six months old, having been born towards the end of September in the previous year (I was later to learn that this had been but two months following the birth of Richard Sharpe’s first child – so far as he knew, anyway - a boy, who had sadly died shortly afterwards, along with his mother, a distant cousin of Sir Arthur Wellesley, as he still was at that time; exiled in Dublin as I had been then I had not been aware of the scandalous gossip surrounding that liaison). On that occasion, I do not know how – by inattention or some mental lapse, or perhaps I had just heard the name in the course of conversation concerning our acquaintances – I deeply offended Jessica by referring to our daughter as Eleanor. She had still (quite rightly) not forgiven me when the day came that my leave was up and it had been time for me to return to Dublin. The next time I saw Eloisa – two years later – she was two and a half, walking and, after a fashion, talking (I with my unpractised ear had found it difficult to make out what she had been saying, which vexed her somewhat – she called me foolish Papa - but it was clear that she had developed very decided opinions upon certain topics which had exercised her, even at that age). On neither occasion did I embrace her, feeling constrained by shyness and unfamiliarity, and thinking besides that many years remained yet in which I might do that.

That had been immediately before I went to the Peninsula. The next time I saw Eloisa, three years later (I did not request home-leave all the while when I was in the Peninsula, saying that I did not wish to inconvenience Lord Wellington, who was greatly beset by officers who were forever petitioning him for leave to attend to their affairs at home; but the truth might be guessed at), I had lost my left arm (and had acquired other disfiguring injuries besides) and so never could.
“You have been in the Wars,” said my six-years-old daughter, matter-of-fact and quite peremptory in her sympathy when she had seen me then, just as if I had perhaps bloodied my finger upon the edge of a sheet of paper whilst cutting out dancing dollies for her amusement (she had reminded me then very much of Jessica at a similar age). “Do not mind it, Papa, for you shall grow another presently; that is what Ferris said to me when my tooth fell out as we were eating buttered toast in the nursery last Monday-week. There was blood, but I did not cry, because Bobby and Timmy were there, and I did not wish to appear unsoldierlike before them.” (These two fine little fellows, four and two years old respectively, were Ovalton’s sons: there was never any question of their calling me Papa, with all its potential for awkwardness later on, for Jessica had already trained them to refer to and to address me as Colonel Lawford, although they bore the name which I too had borne throughout my life, howbeit that it was not in decency my own, but good old English law again had insisted that they were my legitimate sons). I must confess, Eloisa’s little speech had pained me greatly, although she had born no blame for her innocent belief in my miraculous powers of regeneration. I had asked her then to show me her chickens (she had been the proprietess of a thriving business involving the selling of hen’s eggs, I had learned, from the last letter I had received from her before we had come up to Rodrigo) but it had seemed that she had now sold up and instead had branched out into quails, which were more profitable. She was proving a true grand-daughter of Josiah Hayles.

2 This was not the first time. There had been an incident almost as soon as I had arrived in Dublin where I am convinced that a drug had been used to render me vulnerable to assault. I remember very little save that as the port had gone round after dinner someone had approached me, saying that he had wished to speak with me regarding the arrangements for tomorrow’s parade, and my attention had been distracted from the conversation in which I had been already engaged. When I had picked up my glass again to drink from it, within a very short time I had become severely affected: my vision had clouded and I had found that I could barely speak, and I must have seemed likely to faint, for a person or persons took hold of me and began to assist me from the Mess. My last memory of that evening was of Charles Morris’s sneering voice saying ‘Lawford! I knew him in India seven years ago and he never could hold his wine!’, and general laughter. I had known no more: but late next morning when I had awoken in my bed, naked and bearing the marks of hard usage, I had understood well enough what had afterwards been done to me that evening. I blamed myself entirely for what had happened, for it seemed I had not learned the lesson of the unpleasant trick played upon me by Fitzroy and Dimmock at Warley in ’95 when they had introduced some noxious thing into my dinner which I then consumed all unawares and had suffered the consequences for many days after.

3 Lawford’s tone of baffled outrage is somewhat disingenuous. Those who knew him at all well almost all witnessed to his remarkable sexual charisma. Some went so far as to assert that the atmosphere of a room changed perceptibly when he entered it, the air seeming to take on a noticeable erotic charge, not because of anything Lawford had said or done, but simply because he was Lawford. He had probably been unaware of this when he had still been a young man, but by the time he had been on the point of returning from India in 1805 it would have been surprising had he remained invincibly ignorant of this invisible power over others which he possessed, and which he might well have discovered by then that he enjoyed wielding. It was this quality in him to which Sharpe had responded, much against his better judgement, that fateful night in Seringapatam. Likewise it also probably lay behind Stephen Murdogh’s decision to begin his nocturnal visits in response - so he naively believed – to his desire to comfort Lawford, having heard him crying out in the night when overcome by terrors related to what we would now call combat-stress, or PTSD. It could even have been what had prompted the young gardener Mark Lucas to make William the fateful gift of the rose in the summer of 1797, the act which had set in train the series of unfortunate events leading to such a sorry set of outcomes a year later. Ed.

4 In a company of terrible wicked old reprobate tom-cats, such as constituted the officers’ mess at Dublin Barracks in the winter of 1806-07, Lawford’s irruption would have had the effect of the sudden introduction of a prime specimen of nepeta cataria. Ed.

5 An anachronistic term. At this point discipline was enforced by experienced cavalry sergeants and there was no dedicated corps of military police as such until 1813 in the Peninsula. The red-faced Major would have been in charge of such a body. Lawford later corrects himself. Ed

6 Sir Charles Hanbury Williams. Isabella. 1740. Ed.

7 Saer de Quincy, 1207; Hugh le Despenser, 1322; Lewis de Bruges, 1472. There was no fourth creation: the existing Earls were promoted to the rank of Marquess. The current Marquess of Winchester resides in South Africa. Sir Charles Lawford, Baronet (later and only a little ludicrously Charles Saer de Quincy Despenser de Bruges Lawford), who commanded his brigade brilliantly at Blenheim and was as a result created Earl of Winchester by a grateful Queen Anne in 1704 – is a creature of fiction. Ed.

8 The very worst outcome of all, of course, would have been if one night Charles Morris had taken it into his head to try his luck with me; unlikely as that might have seemed, given his reputation as a voracious whoremonger in Mysore, I had heard certain things concerning him in Dublin which generally caused me to look for the nearest corner into which to back myself should he have cause ever to come near me, had champagne and brandy been involved in the evening’s proceedings (and usually they had). Also, I recalled with unease a couple of incidents from my time in India when he had walked in upon me when I had been alone in my tent in a state of undress administering a sponge-bath to myself, and on the first occasion I had barely been able to snatch up so much as a small linen napkin in time to spare the worst of my blushes whilst he had stared at me quite brazenly, laughing all the while at what he termed my ‘missishness’. ‘Drop it, William,’ he had said, on the first occasion. ‘I have seen several specimens in my time, and I doubt that yours is likely to prove in any way remarkable, even if it is an Honourable Member, haha.’ His excuse for that first unmannerly intrusion was that he wished to speak with urgency to me about my alleged over-familiarity with the men, for some were saying that I had Jacobin sympathies, which of course was nonsense, and I guessed well enough who had been telling him that tale! It was a very strange experience, to have to stand there almost entirely stark-naked whilst less than four feet away Captain Morris, who had been in full military fig, taller than I in any case by two or three inches, even had he not been wearing boots and I bare-foot, and wearing his sword moreover - was giving me an earful about not being willing to harbour subversives in his Light Company. I cannot remember the pretended occasion for his second visitation, although that time he feigned concern that I spent so many of my hours of leisure alone, avoiding the Mess, which apparently had been bad for morale, and that I was always welcome to seek him out if I felt in need of companionship in the evening. There were no more incidents of that sort as shortly thereafter came the mission to Seringapatam, and after that, everything had changed, of course. At the time I had tried not to think too much about this, thinking him merely boorish, gauche and disrespectful, but in light of what I later heard of Charles Morris in Dublin I was obliged in retrospect to place a different construction on his behaviour towards me during the march to Seringapatam.

9 Often, I think, my conduct was born of a simple urgent wish to hold and to be held, lest I sink into the darkness all around which forever, for as long as I can remember, had threatened to overwhelm me; and the momentary oblivion of the little death afforded welcome if transient relief from mental pain. Those years in the Dublin Barracks truly comprised a most wretchedly unhappy period in my life.

10 On reading back the draft of this memoir, I recall that I emitted a hollow laugh at that, for even fear of Wellesley’s opprobrium, it turned out, did not in the event prove sufficient to prevent the incident at Oporto: it grieved me and made me ashamed that I had not the gift of continence; I envied that aptitude in Stephen, later on, even if, in his constrained, restricted, lonely and half-asphyxiated life to date, he had been obliged to make a virtue of a necessity, for all it caused me at first to fear that perhaps I should never be able to persuade him and win him to me – notwithstanding that, with a great struggle of the spirit, he had finally confessed his long devotion towards me, and also notwithstanding that I perceived that he had been wishing for a consummation as devoutly as had I. There was one in particular, a handsome man of unusually distinguished appearance, somewhat taller than myself, who although then well past the age of fifty-five, and grey-haired, nonetheless possessed a figure still almost in the prime of manhood, and which retained much of its youthful vigour. When after dinner one night he approached me, addressed me as ‘William’ and discreetly enquired whether I should be willing to grant him the honour of waiting upon him in his quarters later that evening, as he had a proposal to make which I might find was to my advantage, I took no offence, as I had the strong impression that this was a thing of far more import than the usual half-drunken, crude and often frankly insulting attempts at hooking me to which I had become inured since I had been in Dublin (“Bring a satchel or cartouche or something of that sort,” he said, when I had given him to understand that I had no objection – “to make it look as if you are on official business, you know the kind of thing, I’m sure – “. As it turned out, I was able to rout out an antique bullion-embroidered kharita [sabretache – Ed.] which made him laugh – “Now, that is what I call real class, Wiliam,” he said, when he saw it – “you bring a despatch delivered by a walloping cavalryman, no less! How their eyes must have stretched as you hurried from ward to ward!”) In fact, I was more than quiescent, for I was already inclined to like him, notwithstanding our great difference as to years (his age was twice my own). I appreciated his candour, reminded of a piece of advice which Richard Sharpe had once given me. In his public manners he was kind, considerate, courteous and pleasant (he frequently asked me how Jessica did, and also remembered to enquire after Eloisa from time to time); in private he proved skilled and ardent in matters of ἓρως (he had formerly been in Jakarta, Penang and Manila, and his lessons added greatly to the store of knowledge which I had had from Abha; indeed, they both taught me much) and yet, for such a physically strong and potent man, surprisingly gentle and capable of great tenderness, notwithstanding that he always insisted upon dominance (I recall his delight when he discovered that, at the advanced age of nearly thirty, I had been still almost a novice when it had come to certain expressions of passion). There was, I discovered, a great deal to be said for taking a lover old enough to be one’s father: for the first time in many years I felt as safe as ever I had for that brief time, a decade before, in which I had felt secure beneath the protecting wings of Richard Sharpe - a defining epoch, such had been its significance to me, notwithstanding that in reality it had endured for little more than a month. I lay with this kind gentleman on divers occasions thereafter, always most willingly, for not only did I discover that we agreed very well together as sparring-partners, but it turned out that he had seen my unhappiness on account of the attitudes of some of my fellow-officers, as described in the main body, and having a genuine interest in my welfare and in the progress of my career wished to see me removed from danger and the threat of a quite ruined reputation, and instead placed in the way of advancement. Moreover he was well-positioned himself to see to it that these objectives were achieved. I believe I owed my eventual transfer to Wellesley’s staff as much to this officer’s Dublin manoeuvring as I did to the activities of other friends who had been putting in the good word for me back in London. An additional advantage was that it went without saying that, once other hopefuls had perceived how things had stood between us, they had let me alone thereafter, for it had been generally understood that I was untouchable beneath his powerful aegis, and so I had ceased to be plagued. (Lawford is certainly referring to General Sir James Hargreaves KCB, then Lieutenant-Colonel, commanding officer of the 2nd/47th [NB at this time Lt-Col Humphrey Dalrymple Bland was the CO of the 2nd/47th – nothing imputed to fictional Hargreaves should be assumed to apply to him – Ed.] choosing not to name him here apparently for reasons of discretion, although he does elsewhere in passages added at a later time when he would seem to have changed his mind – perhaps something had happened to make it no longer necessary to conceal Hargreaves’ identity: surely however Lawford would have been aware that there had been no other credible candidates who might otherwise have been identified as his very puissant lover, who would have been about sixty years old, i.e. nearly twice Lawford’s age, at the time of their affair. When Lawford had been working on his MS, Hargreaves would have been about eighty years old; he died in 1842. Ed.)

11 Lawford is referencing the myth of Hyacinthus. Ed.

12 Alexander Pope. Eloisa to Abelard. 1717.

13 This is a thing difficult to explain. I am a man, the reader must be aware by now, who prefers to lie with men. I am sorry for giving offence in this regard. I did not choose this; it was thrust upon me at unawares when I was still a boy at Eton and at first I did not understand at all what it was that I was beginning to feel for certain of my school-fellows. This is not a preference which may be openly expressed in our society; and in the Army not the least: according to the King’s Regulations the penalty for indulging it is death, and I have known the sentence to be carried out upon men of my kind more times than I care to remember, either by public hanging if they be rankers, or more often, if they be officers, by covert order to go outside the circuit of the camp with a pistol under cover of darkness and blow out their own brains in order to preserve the honour of the Regiment. My years under the military discipline were therefore (for the most part; although, as I have already confessed, I did behave with a surprising degree of recklessness in Dublin, for that was part of the culture in the Garrison) something of a wilderness in that respect. When I felt the yearning come upon me with particular heaviness I did however find some small gratification in dressing to kill, for example, as on the occasion of my visit to Cannock in the April of ’09. I knew I looked good. I knew there were others like myself who, seeing, would be moved, like the little clerk, Stephen, who struck his mark into my consciousness pretty hard then; although Henry, blast the dear man, destroyed my train of thought, or else that very evening might have seen good sport – but I had to wait three years - even though consummation was (almost always) an impossible thing for which to hope. When I was got up to the nines and sure as I could be that the sight of me would provoke admiration and – other reactions - I might not know precisely where – although sometimes I had a fairly good idea - it heartened me, and it even provided a relief, of sorts, to know that persons generally unknown were certainly wishing that they could get to know me better.

14 From our first acquaintance Colonel James Hargreaves had made me think of Olympian Zeus. Twice my age, chiselled features, strong jaw, broad shoulders, deep chest, slender waist, narrow hips, hands which could have been made for hurling thunderbolts, thighs like the pistons of the steam-engine my father-in-law Sir Josiah Hayles had once shown me in action at his works in Tichbourne in the weeks leading up to my wedding to his daughter (I think he had nurtured hopes that I might one day go into business in partnership with his son Alfred; steam-engines and their potentialities then having had a fresh new vogue after Robert Trevithick’s astonishing invention just the previous year of one which could actually move about under its own power, which he called a locomotive), buttocks like 32 pound round-shot – and as hard as you like - and at almost seven inches! (I refer of course to the diameter of a 32 pound round-shot). What a man Hargreaves was, all things considered, and a hero of the American wars, into the bargain, when he had for some time been a prisoner of the French, and had had the scars of ill-treatment to prove it (and that in itself should have given me pause). It was a long time before I could summon the courage to tell Richard about him – in fact, it was only after I had finally left the Army and was back in England with no prospect of returning to my former career that I was able to find the nerve to confess to him concerning this affair. Hargreaves had been irresistible to me. I really had not been able to help myself. Even if it had not been a matter of my being desperate to get out of Dublin, and knowing that James could arrange this for me - and not just this, but even assist me in my quest for advancement - and that all it would take was that I should let him have of me what he said, in fact had declared quite passionately, that he had desired of all things, which at that time had seemed to me so slight and inconsequential a matter, such had been my state of mind, which had been touching upon despair - I should simply have melted before the power of his storm-force erotic charisma. I should have known better – I had known better – but all the same, I fell – so very nearly to my irrecoverable undoing, once I had been in the Peninsula and William Pumphrey of the Foreign Office had tried, and indeed for a time seemed to have succeeded, in getting his hooks into me - although it had been years yet before finally I had begun to understand the connection! Thank God for Daddy Hill, and – I know how perverse this must seem – thank God also For Sir Henry Simmerson, for his cowardice and disgrace got me away from Wellesley’s staff forever and so neutralised my usefulness to those treacherous schemers! This must have been in February ’09 and Wellesley, as Chief Secretary for Ireland once again, had been back in Dublin Castle since his restoration to favour following his exoneration over the Cintra business late in the previous summer. The British Army under Sir John Moore had narrowly escaped complete disaster in Galicia only a month since, eventually being evacuated from La Coruña by the Royal Navy following a battle in which Moore had been killed. With Moore dead and David Baird injured – he had lost an arm, thus becoming yet another member of a sorry club of many former commanders which I had been fated later to join - Wellesley proposed to Castlereagh a course of action regarding the defence of Portugal, which had naturally involved himself being given command of the new expedition; it was while he had been waiting for his appointment to be confirmed that James (via an unnamed contact; how it was managed was all rather opaque to me [it had indeed been Lord William Pumphrey – Ed]) arranged for me to have this crucial interview with him. At our meeting Wellesley evinced displeasure with me and of course referred to the long-ago incident in the mess when I had been startled by his unexpected appearance; he also referred to the musical instrument which I had unwisely brought with me to India; but in any event the interview resulted in my being appointed to the staff which he meant to have with him in the Peninsula, provided I had the means to purchase up to a Lieutenant-Colonelcy at once, for, he said, he needed to have people around him of sufficient rank that he might make credible substitutions in the heat of battle, if necessary (almost as if he had suspected that some of his officers would let him down when it had come to it, and he had not been wrong in that). Fortunately I had, and this I duly did. He also made me pledge myself to future right conduct (he did not refer to any specific misdemeanours but it was clear from his tone and his expression that he knew what I had been about in Dublin). I was given leave to return to England immediately to settle things with Jessica and to see to some family business in Staffordshire (and, naturally enough, to visit my tailor and boot-maker and saddler and so on): Wellesley sailed from Portsmouth in a fast frigate half-way through April and I followed shortly thereafter, once I had had received my new wardrobe.

15 Actually, there was another – there was a cricket-match in the summer of ‘03, between the 33rd and a Sepoy regiment – Richard Sharpe’s particular friend Thomas Garrard was bowling, and, I do not know whether it was by accident or design, but he bowled wide and took Hakeswill, who had happened to be passing by, square in the cods, much to the delight of everyone (except Hakeswill, of course).

16 The original of this soldier-ventriloquist is Josh Heatherington, the real-life associate of Lt John Shipp of the 87th, who is involved in not a few of the merry japes recorded in Shipp’s memoirs: most notably the funeral of Sjt Michael (not Patrick) Connolly, who ‘drank like a whale’ and who had had the supervision of the ‘dying room’ at the hospital in the Irish College at Salamanca, as featured in Sharpe’s Sword. Ed.

17 La veuve Lucille Castineau – Vicomtesse de Lassan, Madame Richard Sharpe, as she eventually became. Ed.

18 See Sharpe’s Assassin.

FOOTNOTES

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