‘You ever done any proper fighting?’ Sharpe retorted.
‘What’s a Havercake doing here?’
‘Come to teach you boys a lesson.’
‘What in? Cooking?’
‘Where I come from,’ Sharpe said, ‘it’s the ones in skirts what does the cooking.’
‘Enough, Sharpe,’ McCandless snapped. The Colonel liked to wear a kilt himself, claiming it was a more suitable garment for India’s heat than trousers. ‘We must pay our respects to the General,’ McCandless said, and turned towards the larger tents in the centre of the encampment.
It had been two years since Sharpe had last seen his old Colonel and he doubted that Major-General Sir Arthur Wellesley would prove any friendlier now than he ever had. Sir Arthur had always been a cold fish, sparing with approval and frightening in his disapproval, and his most casual glance somehow managed to make Sharpe feel both insignificant and inadequate, and so, when McCandless dismounted outside the General’s tent, Sharpe deliberately hung back. The General, still a young man, was standing beside a line of six picketed horses and was evidently in a blazing temper. An orderly, in the blue-and-yellow coat of the 19th Dragoons, was holding a big grey stallion by its bridle and Wellesley was alternately patting the horse and snapping at the half-dozen aides who cowered nearby. A group of senior officers, majors and colonels, stood beside the General’s tent, suggesting that a council of war had been interrupted by the horse’s distress. The grey stallion was certainly suffering. It was shivering, its eyes were rolling white and sweat or spittle was dripping from its drooping head.
Wellesley turned as McCandless and Sevajee approached. ‘Can you bleed a horse, McCandless?’
‘I can put a knife in it, sir, if it helps,’ the Scotsman answered.
‘It does not help, damn it!’ Wellesley retorted savagely. ‘I don’t want him butchered, I want him bled. Where is the farrier?’
‘We’re looking for him, sir,’ an aide replied.
‘Then find him, damn it! Easy, boy, easy!’ These last three words were spoken in a soothing tone to the horse which had let out a feeble whinny. ‘He’s fevered,’ Wellesley explained to McCandless, ‘and if he ain’t bled, he’ll die.’
A groom hurried to the General’s side carrying a fleam and a blood stick, both of which he mutely offered to Wellesley. ‘No good giving them to me,’ the General snapped, ‘I can’t bleed a horse.’ He looked at his aides, then at the senior officers by the tent. ‘Someone must know how to do it,’ Wellesley pleaded. They were all men who lived with horses and professed to love them, though none knew how to bleed a horse, for that was a job left to servants, but finally a Scottish major averred that he had a shrewd idea of how the thing was done, and so he was given the fleam and its hammer. He took off his red coat, chose a fleam blade at random and stepped up to the shivering stallion. He placed the blade on the horse’s neck and drew back the hammer with his right hand.
‘Not like that!’ Sharpe blurted out. ‘You’ll kill him!’ A score of men stared at him while the Scottish Major, the blade unhit, looked rather relieved. ‘You’ve got the blade the wrong way round, sir,’ Sharpe explained. ‘You have to line it up along the vein, sir, not across it.’ He was blushing for having spoken out in front of the General and all the army’s senior officers.
Wellesley scowled at Sharpe. ‘Can you bleed a horse?’
‘I can’t ride the things, sir, but I do know how to bleed them. I worked in an inn yard,’ Sharpe added as though that was explanation enough.
‘Have you actually bled a horse?’ Wellesley demanded. He showed not the slightest surprise at seeing a man from his old battalion in the camp, but in truth he was far too distracted by his stallion’s distress to worry about mere men.
‘I’ve bled dozens, sir,’ Sharpe said, which was true, but those horses had been big heavy carriage beasts, and this white stallion was plainly a thoroughbred.
‘Then do it, damn it,’ the General said. ‘Don’t just stand there, do it!’
Sharpe took the fleam and the blood stick from the Major. The fleam looked like a misshapen penknife, and inside its brass case were folded a dozen blades. Two of the blades were shaped as hooks, while the rest were spoon-shaped. He selected a middle-sized spoon, checked that its edge was keen, folded the other blades away and then approached the horse. ‘You’ll have to hold him hard,’ he told the dragoon orderly.
‘He can be lively, Sergeant,’ the orderly warned in a low voice, anxious not to provoke another outburst from Wellesley.
‘Then hang on hard,’ Sharpe said to the orderly, then he stroked the horse’s neck, feeling for the jugular.
‘How much are you going to let out?’ Wellesley asked.
‘Much as it takes, sir,’ Sharpe said, who really had no idea how much blood he should spill. Enough to make it look good, he reckoned. The horse was nervous and tried to pull away from the orderly. ‘Give him a stroke, sir,’ Sharpe said to the General. ‘Let him know it ain’t the end of the world.’
Wellesley took the stallion’s head from the orderly and gave the beast’s nose a fondling. ‘It’s all right, Diomed,’ he said, ‘we’re going to make you better. Get on with it, Sharpe.’
Sharpe had found the jugular and now placed the sharp curve of the spoon-blade over the vein. He held the knife in his left hand and the blood stick in his right. The stick was a small wooden club that was needed to drive the fleam’s blade through a horse’s thick skin. ‘All right, boy,’ he murmured to the horse, ‘just a prick, nothing bad,’ and then he struck the blade hard with the stick’s blunt head.
The fleam sliced through hair and skin and flesh straight into the vein, and the horse reared up, but Sharpe, expecting the reaction, held the fleam in place as warm blood spurted out over his shako. ‘Hold him!’ he snapped at Wellesley, and the General seemed to find nothing odd in being ordered about by a sergeant and he obediently hauled Diomed’s head down. ‘That’s good,’ Sharpe said, ‘that’s good, just keep him there, sir, keep him there,’ and he skewed the blade slightly to open the slit in the vein and so let the blood pulse out. It ran red down the white horse’s flank, it soaked Sharpe’s red coat and puddled at his feet.
The horse shivered, but Sharpe sensed that the stallion was calming. By relaxing the pressure on the fleam he could lessen the blood flow and after a while he slowed it to a trickle and then, when the horse had stopped shivering, Sharpe pulled the blade free. His right hand and arm were drenched in blood.
He spat on his clean left hand, then wiped the small wound. ‘I reckon he’ll live, sir,’ he told the General, ‘but a bit of ginger in his feed might help.’ That was another trick he had learned at the coaching tavern.
Wellesley stroked Diomed’s nose and the horse, suddenly unconcerned by the fuss all about him, lowered his head and cropped at a miserable tuft of grass. The General smiled, his bad mood gone. ‘I’m greatly obliged to you, Sharpe,’ Wellesley said, relinquishing the bridle into the orderly’s grasp. ‘ ’Pon my soul, I’m greatly obliged to you,’ he repeated enthusiastically. ‘As neat a blood-letting as ever I did see.’ He put a hand into his pocket and brought out a haideri that he offered to Sharpe. ‘Well done, Sergeant.’
‘Thank
