Egg lock on a common pistol! I’m sure if you wait, Sergeant, Sharpe will be back soon. He’s a marvellous fellow. Never lets me down.’
Hakeswill forced a smile, for he hated Sharpe with a rare and single-minded venom. ‘He’s one of the best, sir,’ he said, his face twitching. ‘And will he be leaving Seringapatam soon, sir? Off on an errand again, would he be?’
‘Oh no!’ Stokes said, picking up a magnifying glass to look more closely into the clock. ‘I need him here, Sergeant. That’s it, you see! There’s a pin missing from the strike wheel. It engages the cogs here, do you see, and the gearing does the rest. Simple, I suppose.’ The Major looked up, but saw that the strange Sergeant with the twitching face was gone. Never mind, the clock was far more interesting.
Sergeant Hakeswill left the armoury and turned left towards the barracks where he had temporary accommodation. The King’s 33rd was quartered now in Hurryhur, a hundred and fifty miles to the north, and their job was to keep the roads of western Mysore clear of bandits and so the regiment ranged up and down the country and, finding themselves close to Seringapatam where the main armoury was located, Colonel Gore had sent a detachment for replacement ammunition. Captain Morris of the Light Company had drawn the duty, and he had brought half his men and Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill to protect the shipment which would leave the city next morning and be carried on ox carts to Arrakerry where the regiment was currently camped. An easy task, but one that had offered Sergeant Hakeswill an opportunity he had long sought.
The Sergeant stopped in one of the grog shops and demanded arrack. The shop was empty, all but for himself, the owner and a legless beggar who heaved himself towards the Sergeant and received a kick in the rump for his trouble. ‘Get out of here, you scabby bastard!’ Hakeswill shouted. ‘Bringing the flies in, you are. Go on! Piss off.’ The shop thus emptied to his satisfaction, Hakeswill sat in a dark corner contemplating life. ‘I chide myself,’ he muttered aloud, worrying the shop’s owner who feared the look of the twitching man in the red coat. ‘Your own fault, Obadiah,’ Hakeswill said. ‘You should have seen it years ago! Years! Rich as a Jew, he is. Are you listening to me, you heathen darkie bastard?’ The shop’s owner, thus challenged, fled into the back room, leaving Hakeswill grumbling at the table. ‘Rich as a Jew, Sharpie is, only he thinks he hides it, which he don’t, on account of me having tumbled to him. He don’t even live in barracks! Got himself some rooms over by the Mysore Gate. Got a bleeding servant boy. Always got cash on him, always! Buys drinks.’ Hakeswill shook his head at the injustice of it all. The 33rd had spent the last four years patrolling Mysore’s roads and Sharpe, all that while, had been living in Seringapatam’s comforts. It was not right, not fair, not just. Hakeswill had worried about it, wondering why Sharpe was so rich. At first he had assumed that Sharpe had been fiddling the armoury stores, but that could not explain Sharpe’s apparent wealth. ‘Only so much milk in a cow,’ Hakeswill muttered, ‘no matter how hard you squeeze the teats.’ Now he knew why Sharpe was rich, or he thought he knew, and what he had learned had filled Obadiah Hakeswill with a desperate jealousy. He scratched at a mosquito bite on his neck, revealing the old dark scar where the hangman’s rope had burned and abraded his skin. Obadiah Hakeswill had survived that hanging, and as a result he fervently believed that he could not be killed. Touched by God, he claimed he was, touched by God.
But he was not rich. Not rich at all, and Richard Sharpe was rich. Rumour had it that Richard Sharpe used Lali’s house, and that was an officers-only brothel, so why was Sergeant Sharpe allowed inside? Because he was rich, that was why, and Hakeswill had at last discovered Sharpe’s secret. ‘It was the Tippoo!’ he said aloud, then thumped the table with his tin mug to demand more drink. ‘And hurry up about it, you black-faced bastard!’
It had to be the Tippoo. Had not Hakeswill seen Sharpe lurking about the area where the Tippoo had been killed? And no soldier had ever claimed the credit for killing the Tippoo. It was widely thought that one of those Suffolk bastards from the 12th had caught the King in the chaos at the siege’s end, but Hakeswill had finally worked it out. It had been Sharpe, and the reason Sharpe had kept quiet about the killing was because he had stripped the Tippoo of all his gems and he did not want anyone, least of all the army’s senior officers, to know that he possessed the jewels. ‘Bloody Sharpe!’ Hakeswill said aloud.
So all that was needed now was an excuse to have Sharpe brought back to the regiment. No more clean and easy duty for Sharpie! No more merry rides in Lali’s house for him. It would be Obadiah Hakeswill’s turn to live in luxury, and all because of a dead king’s treasure. ‘Rubies,’ Hakeswill said aloud, lingering over the word, ‘and emeralds and sapphires, and diamonds like stars, and gold thick as butter.’ He chuckled. And all it would need, he reckoned, was a little cunning. A little cunning, a confident lie and an arrest. ‘And that will be your end, Sharpie, that will be your end,’ Hakeswill said, and he could feel the beauty of his scheme unfold like a lotus blossoming in Seringapatam’s moat. It would work! His visit to Major Stokes had established that Sharpe was in the town, which meant that the lie could be told and then, just like Major Stokes’s clockwork, everything would go right. Every cog and gear and wheel and spike would slot and click and tick and tock, and Sergeant Hakeswill’s face twitched and his hands contracted as though the tin mug in his grip were a man’s throat. He would be rich.
It took Major William Dodd three days to carry the ammunition back to Pohlmann’s compoo which was camped just outside the Mahratta city of Ahmednuggur. The compoo was an infantry brigade of eight battalions, each of them recruited from among the finest mercenary warriors of north India and all trained and commanded by European officers. Dowlut Rao Scindia, the Maharajah of Gwalior, whose land stretched from the fortress of Baroda in the north to the fastness of Gawilghur in the east and down to Ahmednuggur in the south, boasted that he led a hundred thousand men and that his army could blacken the land like a plague, yet this compoo, with its seven thousand men, was the hard heart of his army.
One of the compoo’s eight battalions was paraded a mile outside the encampment to greet Dodd. The cavalry that had accompanied the sepoys to Chasalgaon had ridden ahead to warn Pohlmann of Dodd’s return and Pohlmann had organized a triumphant reception. The battalion stood in white coats, their black belts and weapons gleaming, but Dodd, riding at the head of his small column, had eyes only for the tall elephant that stood beside a yellow-and-white-striped marquee. The huge beast glittered in the sunlight, for its body and head were armoured with a vast leather cape onto which squares of silver had been sewn in intricate patterns. The silver covered the elephant’s body, continued across its face and then, all but for two circles that had been cut for its eyes, cascaded on down the length of its trunk. Gems gleamed between the silver plates while ribbons of purple silk fluttered from the crown of the animal’s head. The last few inches of the animal’s big curved tusks were sheathed in silver, though the actual points of the tusks were tipped with needle-sharp points of steel. The elephant driver, the mahout, sweated in a coat of old-fashioned chain mail that had been burnished to the same gleaming polish as his animal’s silver armour, while behind him was a howdah made of cedarwood on which gold panels had been nailed and above which fluttered a fringed canopy of yellow silk. Long files of purple-jacketed infantrymen stood to attention on either flank of the elephant. Some of the men carried muskets, while others had long pikes with their broad blades polished to resemble silver.
The elephant knelt when Dodd came within twenty paces and the occupant of the howdah stepped carefully down onto a set of silver-plated steps placed there by one of his purple-coated bodyguards then strolled into the shade of the striped marquee. He was a European, a tall man and big, not fat, and though a casual glance might think him overweight, a second glance would see that most of that weight was solid muscle. He had a round sun-reddened face, big black moustaches and eyes that seemed to take delight in everything he saw. His uniform was of his own devising: white silk breeches tucked into English riding boots, a green coat festooned with gold lace and aiguillettes and, on the coat’s broad shoulders, thick white silk cushions hung with short golden chains. The coat had scarlet facings and loops of scarlet braid about its turned-back cuffs and gilded buttons. The big man’s hat
