Stokes’s face fell. ‘There is that, there is that. A fellow don’t usually like his ceilings being pulled down to make gun carriages. Still, the Rajah’s usually most obliging if you can get past his damned courtiers. The clock is his. Strikes eight when it should ring nine, or perhaps it’s the other way round. You reckon that quoin’s true?’
Sharpe glanced at the wedge which lowered and raised the cannon barrel. ‘Looks good, sir.’
‘I might just plane her down a shade. I wonder if our templates are out of true? We might check that. Isn’t this rain splendid? The flowers were wilting, wilting! But I’ll have a fine show this year with a spot of rain. You must come and see them.’
‘You still want me to stay here, sir?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Stay here?’ Stokes, who was placing the quoin in a vice, turned to look at Sharpe. ‘Of course I want you to stay here, Sergeant. Best man I’ve got!’
‘I lost six men, sir.’
‘And it wasn’t your fault, not your fault at all. I’ll get you another six.’
Sharpe wished it was that easy, but he could not chase the guilt of Chasalgaon out of his mind. When the massacre was finished he had wandered about the fort in a half-daze. Most of the women and children still lived, but they had been frightened and had shrunk away from him. Captain Roberts, the second in command of the fort, had returned from patrol that afternoon and he had vomited when he saw the horror inside the cactus-thorn wall.
Sharpe had made his report to Roberts who had sent it by messenger to Hurryhur, the army’s headquarters, then dismissed Sharpe. ‘There’ll be an enquiry, I suppose,’ Roberts had told Sharpe, ‘so doubtless your evidence will be needed, but you might as well wait in Seringapatam.’ And so Sharpe, with no other orders, had walked home. He had returned the bag of rupees to Major Stokes, and now, obscurely, he wanted some punishment from the Major, but Stokes was far more concerned about the angle of the quoin. ‘I’ve seen screws shatter because the angle was too steep, and it ain’t no good having broken screws in battle. I’ve seen Frog guns with metalled quoins, but they only rust. Can’t trust a Frog to keep them greased, you see. You’re brooding, Sharpe.’
‘Can’t help it, sir.’
‘Doesn’t do to brood. Leave brooding to poets and priests, eh? Those sorts of fellows are paid to brood. You have to get on with life. What could you have done?’
‘Killed one of the bastards, sir.’
‘And they’d have killed you, and you wouldn’t have liked that and nor would I. Look at that angle! Look at that! I do like a fine angle, I declare I do. We must check it against the templates. How’s your head?’
‘Mending, sir.’ Sharpe touched the bandage that wrapped his forehead. ‘No pain now, sir.’
‘Providence, Sharpe, that’s what it is, providence. The good Lord in His ineffable mercy wanted you to live.’ Stokes released the vice and restored the quoin to the carriage. ‘A touch of paint on that trail and it’ll be ready. You think the Rajah might give me one roof beam?’
‘No harm in asking him, sir.’
‘I will, I will. Ah, a visitor.’ Stokes straightened as a horseman, swathed against the rain in an oilcloth cape and with an oilcloth cover on his cocked hat, rode into the armoury courtyard leading a second horse by the reins. The visitor kicked his feet from the stirrups, swung down from the saddle, then tied both horses’ reins to one of the shed’s pillars. Major Stokes, his clothes just in their beginning stage of becoming dirty and dishevelled, smiled at the tall newcomer whose cocked hat and sword betrayed he was an officer. ‘Come to inspect us, have you?’ the Major demanded cheerfully. ‘You’ll discover chaos! Nothing in the right place, records all muddled, woodworm in the timber stacks, damp in the magazines and the paint completely addled.’
‘Better that paint is addled than wits,’ the newcomer said, then took off his cocked hat to reveal a head of white hair.
Sharpe, who had been sitting on one of the finished gun carriages, shot to his feet, tipping the surprised cat into the Major’s wood shavings. ‘Colonel McCandless, sir!’
‘Sergeant Sharpe!’ McCandless responded. The Colonel shook water from his cocked hat and turned to Stokes. ‘And you, sir?’
‘Major Stokes, sir, at your service, sir. John Stokes, commander of the armoury and, as you see, carpenter to His Majesty.’
‘You will forgive me, Major Stokes, if I talk to Sergeant Sharpe?’ McCandless shed his oilskin cape to reveal his East India Company uniform. ‘Sergeant Sharpe and I are old friends.’
‘My pleasure, Colonel,’ Stokes said. ‘I have business in the foundry. They’re pouring too fast. I tell them all the time! Fast pouring just bubbles the metal, and bubbled metal leads to disaster, but they won’t listen. Ain’t like making temple bells, I tell them, but I might as well save my breath.’ He glanced wistfully towards the happy men making the giant’s head for the Dusshera festival. ‘And I have other things to do,’ he added.
‘I’d rather you didn’t leave, Major,’ McCandless said very formally. ‘I suspect what I have to say concerns you. It is good to see you, Sharpe.’
‘You too, sir,’ Sharpe said, and it was true. He had been locked in the Tippoo’s dungeons with Colonel Hector McCandless and if it was possible for a sergeant and a colonel to be friends, then a friendship existed between the two men. McCandless, tall, vigorous and in his sixties, was the East India Company’s head of intelligence for all southern and western India, and in the last four years he and Sharpe had talked a few times whenever the Colonel passed through Seringapatam, but those had been social conversations and the Colonel’s grim face suggested that this meeting was anything but social.
‘You were at Chasalgaon?’ McCandless demanded.
‘I was, sir, yes.’
‘So you saw Lieutenant Dodd?’
Sharpe nodded. ‘Won’t ever forget the bastard. Sorry, sir.’ He apologized because McCandless was a fervent Christian who abhorred all foul language. The Scotsman was a stern man, honest as a saint, and Sharpe sometimes wondered why he liked him so much. Maybe it was because McCandless was always fair, always truthful and could talk to any man, rajah or sergeant, with the same honest directness.
‘I never met Lieutenant Dodd,’ McCandless said, ‘so describe him to me.’
‘Tall, sir, and thin like you or me.’
‘Not like me,’ Major Stokes put in.
‘Sort of yellow-faced,’ Sharpe went on, ‘as if he’d had the fever once. Long face, like he ate something bitter.’ He thought for a second. He had only caught a few glimpses of Dodd, and those had been sideways. ‘He’s got lank hair, sir, when he took off his hat. Brown hair. Long nose on him, like Sir Arthur’s, and a bony chin. He’s calling himself Major Dodd now, sir, not Lieutenant. I heard one of his men call him Major.’
‘And he killed every man in the garrison?’ McCandless asked.
‘He did, sir. Except me. I was lucky.’
‘Nonsense, Sharpe!’
