Sharpe’s Triumph: The Battle of Assaye, September 1803

Sharpe dared not move. He listened to women screaming and children crying, then heard hooves and he waited until some horsemen came into view. They were Indians, of course, and all wild-looking men with sabres, matchlocks, spears, lances and even bows and arrows. They slid out of their saddles and joined the hunt for loot.

Sharpe lay like the dead. The crusting blood was thick on his face. The blow of the musket ball had stunned him, so that he did not remember dropping his own musket or falling to the ground, but he sensed that the blow was not deadly. Not even deep. He had a headache, and the skin of his face felt taut with the crusted blood, but he knew head wounds always bled profusely. He tried to make his breathing shallow, left his mouth open and did not even gag when a fly crawled down to the root of his tongue, and then he could smell tobacco, arrack, leather and sweat and a horseman was bending over him with a horrid-looking curved knife with a rusty blade and Sharpe feared his throat was about to be cut, but instead the horseman began slashing at the pockets of Sharpe’s uniform. He found the big key that opened Seringapatam’s main magazine, a key that Sharpe had ordered cut in the bazaar so that he would not always have to fill in the form in the armoury guardhouse. The man tossed the key away, slit another pocket, found nothing valuable and so moved on to another body. Sharpe stared up at the sun.

Somewhere nearby a garrison sepoy groaned, and almost immediately he was bayoneted and Sharpe heard the hoarse exhalation of breath as the man died and the sucking sound as the murderer dragged the blade back from the constricting flesh. It had all happened so fast! And Sharpe blamed himself, though he knew it was not his fault. He had not let the killers into the fort, but he had hesitated for a few seconds to throw his pack, pouches and cartridge box onto the fire, and now he chided himself because maybe he could have used those few seconds to save his six men. Except most of them had already been dead or dying when Sharpe had first realized there was a fight. He had been pissing against the back wall of the cookhouse store hut when a musket ball ripped through the reed-mat wall and for a second or two he had just stood there, incredulous, hardly believing the shots and screams his ears registered, and he had not bothered to button his trousers, but just turned and saw the dying campfire and had thrown his pack onto it, and by the time he had cocked the musket and run back to where his men had been expecting dinner the fight was almost over. The musket ball had jerked his head back and there had been a stabbing pain either side of his eyes, and the next he knew he was lying with blood crusting on his face and flies crawling down his gullet.

But maybe he could have snatched his men back. He tortured himself with the thought that he could have saved Davi Lal and a couple of the privates, maybe he could have crossed the cactus-thorn wall and run into the trees, but Davi Lal was dead and all six privates were dead and Sharpe could hear the killers laughing as they carried the ammunition out of the small magazine.

‘Subadar!’ the tall officer shouted. ‘Fetch that bloody flag down! I wanted it done an hour ago!’

Sharpe blinked again because he could not help himself, but no one noticed, and then he closed his eyes because the sun was blinding him, and he wanted to weep out of anger and frustration and hatred. Six men dead, and Davi Lal dead, and Sharpe had not been able to do a damned thing to help them, and he wondered who the tall officer was, and then a voice provided the answer.

‘Major Dodd, sahib?’

‘Subadar?’

‘Everything’s loaded, sahib.’

‘Then let’s go before their patrols get back. Well done, Subadar! Tell the men there’ll be a reward.’

Sharpe listened as the raiders left the fort. Who the hell were they? Major Dodd had been in East India Company uniform, and so had all his men for that matter, but they sure as hell were not Company troops. They were bastards, that’s what they were, bastards from hell and they had done a thorough piece of wicked work in Chasalgaon. Sharpe doubted they had lost a single man in their treacherous attack, and still he lay silent as the sounds faded away. A baby cried somewhere, a woman sobbed, and still Sharpe waited until at last he was certain that Major Dodd and his men were gone, and only then did Sharpe roll onto his side. The fort stank of blood and buzzed with flies. He groaned and got to his knees. The cauldron of rice and kid had boiled dry and so he stood and kicked it off its tripod. ‘Bastards,’ he said, and he saw the surprised look on Davi Lal’s face and he wanted to weep for the boy.

A half-naked woman, bleeding from the mouth, saw Sharpe stand from among the bloodied heap of the dead and she screamed before snatching her child back into a barracks hut. Sharpe ignored her. His musket was gone. Every damn weapon was gone. ‘Bastards!’ he shouted into the hot air, then he kicked at a dog that was sniffing at Phillips’s corpse. The smell of blood and powder and burned rice was thick in his throat. He gagged as he walked into the cookhouse and there found a jar of water. He drank deep, then splashed the water onto his face and rubbed away the clotted blood. He wet a rag and flinched as he cleaned the shallow wound in his scalp, then suddenly he was overcome with horror and pity and he fell onto his knees and half sobbed. He swore instead. ‘Bastards!’ He said the word again and again, helplessly and furiously, then he remembered his pack and so he stood again and went into the sunlight.

The ashes of the fire were still hot and the charred canvas remnants of his pack and pouches glowed red as he found a stick and raked through the embers. One by one he found what he had hidden in the fire. The rupees that had been for hiring the carts, then the rubies and emeralds, diamonds and pearls, sapphires and gold. He fetched a sack of rice from the cookhouse and he emptied the grains onto the ground and filled the sack with his treasure. A king’s ransom, it was, and it had been taken from a king four years before in the Water Gate at Seringapatam where Sharpe had trapped the Tippoo Sultan and shot him down before looting his corpse.

Then, with the treasure clutched to his midriff, he knelt in the stench of Chasalgaon and felt guilty. He had survived a massacre. Anger mingled with his guilt, then he knew he had duties to do. He must find any others who had survived, he must help them, and he must work out how he could take his revenge.

On a man called Dodd.

Major John Stokes was an engineer, and if ever a man was happy with his avocation, it was Major John Stokes. There was nothing he enjoyed so much as making things, whether it was a better gun carriage, a garden or, as he was doing now, improvements to a clock that belonged to the Rajah of Mysore. The Rajah was a young man, scarcely more than a boy indeed, and he owed his throne to the British troops who had ejected the usurping Tippoo Sultan and, as a result, relations between the palace and Seringapatam’s small British garrison were good. Major Stokes had found the clock in one of the palace’s antechambers and noted its appalling accuracy, which is why he had brought it back to the armoury where he was happily taking it apart. ‘It isn’t signed,’ he told his visitor, ‘and I suspect it’s local work. But a Frenchman had his hand in it, I can tell that. See the escapement? Typical French work, that.’

The visitor peered at the tangle of cogwheels. ‘Didn’t know the Frogs had it in them to make clocks, sir,’ he said.

‘Oh, indeed they do!’ Stokes said reprovingly. ‘And very fine clocks they make! Very fine. Think of Lépine! Think of Berthoud! How can you ignore Montandon? And Breguet!’ The Major shook his head in mute tribute to such great craftsmen, then peered at the Rajah’s sorry timepiece. ‘Some rust on the mainspring, I see. That don’t help. Soft metal, I suspect. It’s catch as catch can over here. I’ve noticed that. Marvellous decorative work, but Indians make shoddy mechanics. Look at that mainspring! A disgrace.’

‘Shocking, sir, shocking.’ Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill did not know a mainspring from a pendulum, and could not have cared less about either, but he needed information from Major Stokes so it was politic to show an interest.

‘It was striking nine when it should have struck eight,’ the Major said, poking a finger into the clock’s entrails, ‘or perhaps it was striking eight when it ought to have sounded nine. I don’t recall. One to seven it copes with admirably, but somewhere about eight it becomes wayward.’ The Major, who was in charge of Seringapatam’s armoury, was a plump, cheerful fellow with prematurely white hair. ‘Do you understand clocks, Sergeant?’

‘Can’t say as I does, sir. A simple soldier, me, sir, who has the sun as his clock.’ The Sergeant’s face twitched horribly. It was an uncontrollable spasm that racked his face every few seconds.

‘You were asking about Sharpe,’ Major Stokes said, peering into the clock. ‘Well, I never! This fellow has made the bearings out of wood! Good Lord above. Wood! No wonder she’s wayward! Harrison once made a wooden clock, did you know? Even the gearings! All from timber.’

‘Harrison, sir? Is he in the army, sir?’

‘He’s a clockmaker, Sergeant, a clockmaker. A very fine clockmaker too.’

‘Not a Frog, sir?’

‘With a name like Harrison? Good Lord, no! He’s English, and he makes a good honest clock.’

‘Glad to hear it, sir,’ Hakeswill said, then reminded the Major of the purpose of his visit to the armoury. ‘Sergeant Sharpe, sir, my good friend, sir, is he here?’

‘He is here,’ Stokes said, at last looking up from the clock, ‘or rather he was here. I saw him an hour ago. But he went to his quarters. He’s been away, you see. Involved in that dreadful business in Chasalgaon.’

‘Chiseldown, sir?’

‘Terrible business, terrible! So I told Sharpe to clean himself up. Poor fellow was covered in blood! Looked like a pirate. Now that is interesting.’

‘Blood, sir?’ Hakeswill asked.

‘A six-toothed scapewheel! With a bifurcated locking piece! Well, I never! That is enriching the pudding with currants. Rather like putting an 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 was a bicorne crested with purple-dyed feathers held in place by a badge showing the white horse of Hanover; his sword’s hilt was made of gold fashioned into the shape of an elephant’s head, and gold rings glinted on his big fingers. Once in the shade of the open-sided marquee he settled himself on a divan where his aides gathered about him. This was Colonel Anthony Pohlmann and he commanded the compoo, together with five hundred cavalry and twenty-six field guns. Ten years before, when Scindia’s army had been nothing but a horde of ragged troopers on half-starved horses, Anthony Pohlmann had been a sergeant in a Hanoverian regiment of the East India Company; now he rode an elephant and needed two other beasts to carry the chests of gold coin that travelled everywhere with him.

Pohlmann stood as Dodd climbed down from his horse. ‘Well done, Major!’ the Colonel called in his German-accented English. ‘Exceedingly well done!’ Pohlmann’s aides, half of them European and half Indian, joined their commander in applauding the returning hero, while the bodyguard made a double line through which Dodd could advance to meet the resplendent Colonel. ‘Eighty thousand cartridges,’ Pohlmann exulted, ‘snatched from our enemies!’

‘Seventy-three thousand, sir,’ Dodd said, beating dust off his breeches.

Pohlmann grinned. ‘Seven thousand spoiled, eh? Nothing changes.’

‘Not spoiled by me, sir,’ Dodd growled.

‘I never supposed so,’ Pohlmann said. ‘Did you have any difficulties?’

‘None,’ Dodd answered confidently. ‘We lost no one, sir, not even a scratch, while not a single enemy soldier survived.’ He smiled, cracking the dust on his cheeks. ‘Not one.’

‘A victory!’ Pohlmann said, then gestured Dodd into the tent. ‘We have wine, of sorts. There is rum, arrack, even water! Come, Major.’

Dodd did not move. ‘My men are tired, sir,’ he pointed out.