Sharpe's Prey

by Bernard Cornwell

  “But it is not”-Mister Brown spoke delicately, his plump hands opening and closing like a butterfly’s wings-“fungible.”

  “Precisely.” Mister Selling’s manner exuded relief that his partner had found the exact word to settle the matter. “It is not fungible, Mister Sharpe.”

  No one spoke for a few seconds. A coal hissed, rain spattered on the office window and a carter’s whip cracked in the street, which was filled with the rumble, crash and squeal of wagons and carriages.

  “Fungible?” Lieutenant Richard Sharpe asked.

  “The commission cannot be exchanged for cash,” Mister Belling explained. “You did not buy it, you cannot sell it. You were given it. What the King gives, you may give back but you cannot sell. It is not”-he paused-“fungible.”

  “I was told I could sell it!” Sharpe said angrily.

  “You were told wrong,” Mister Brown said.

  “Misinformed,” Mister Belling added.

  “Grievously so,” Mister Brown said, “alas.”

  “The regulations are plain,” Mister Belling went on. “An officer who purchases a commission is free to sell it, but a man awarded a commission is not. I wish it were otherwise.”

  “We both do!” Mister Brown said.

  “But I was told... “

  “You were told wrong,” Mister Belling snapped, then wished he had not spoken so brusquely for Lieutenant Sharpe started forward in his chair as though he was going to attack the two men.

  Sharpe checked himself. He looked from the plump Mister Brown to the scrawny Mister Belling. “So there’s nothing you can do?”

  Mister Belling stared at the smoke-browned ceiling for a few seconds as though seeking inspiration, then shook his head. “There is nothing we can do,” he pronounced, “but you might apply to His Majesty’s government for a dispensation. I’ve not heard of such a course ever being followed, but an exception might be made?” He sounded very dubious. “There are senior officers, perchance, who would speak for you?”

  Sharpe said nothing. He had saved Sir Arthur Wellesley’s life in India, but he doubted whether the General would help him now. All Sharpe wanted was to sell his commission, take the œ550 and get out of the army. But it seemed he could not sell his rank because he had not bought it.

  “Such an appeal would take time,” Mister Brown warned him, “and I would not be sanguine about the outcome, Mister Sharpe. You are asking the government to set a precedent and governments are chary of precedents.”

  “Indeed they are,” Belling said, “and so they should be. Though in your case... ?” He smiled, raised his eyebrows, then sat back.

  “In my case?” Sharpe asked, puzzled.

  “I would not be sanguine,” Mister Brown repeated.

  “You’re saying I’m buggered?” Sharpe asked.

  “We are saying, Mister Sharpe, that we cannot assist you.” Mister Brown spoke severely for he had been’offended by Sharpe’s language. “Alas.”

  Sharpe gazed at the two men. Take them both down, he thought. Two minutes of bloody violence and then strip their pockets bare. The bastards must have money. And he had three shillings and threepence halfpenny in his pouch. That was it. Three shillings and threepence halfpenny.

  But it was not Brown or Belling’s fault that he could not sell his commission. It was the rules. The regulations. The rich could make more money and the poor could go to hell. He stood, and the clatter of his saber scabbard on the chair made Mister Brown wince. Sharpe draped a damp greatcoat round his shoulders, crammed a shako onto his unruly hair and picked up his pack. “Good day,” he said curtly, then ducked out of the door, letting in a gust of unseasonably cold air and rain.

  Mister Belling let out a great sigh of relief. “You know who that was, Mister Brown?”

  “He announced himself as Lieutenant Sharpe of the 95th Rifles,” Mister Brown said, “and I have no reason to doubt him, do I?”

  “The very same officer, Mister Brown, who lived, or should I say cohabited, with the Lady Grace Hale!”

  Mister Brown’s eyes widened. “No! I thought she took up with an Ensign!” Mister Belling sighed. “In the Rifles, Mister Brown., there are no ensigns. He is a Second Lieutenant. Lowest of the low!”

  Mister Brown stared at the closed door. “’pon my soul,” he said softly, “‘pon my soul!” Here was something to tell Amelia when he got home! A scandal in the office! It had been whispered throughout London how the Lady Grace Hale, widow to a prominent man, had moved into a house with a common soldier. True, the common soldier was an officer, but not a proper officer. Not a man who had purchased his commission, but rather a sergeant who had earned a battlefield promotion, which was, in its way, entirely admirable, but even so! Lady Grace Hale, daughter of the Earl of Selby, living with a common soldier? And not just living with him, but having his baby! Or so the gossip said. The Hale family claimed the dead husband had been the child’s father and the date of the baby’s birth was conveniently within nine months of Lord William’s death, but few believed it. “I thought the name was somehow familiar,” Brown said.

  “I scarcely credited it myself,” Mister Belling admitted. “Can you imagine her ladyship enduring such a man? He’s scarce more than a savage!”

  “Did you note the scar on his face?”

  “And when did he last shave?” Belling shuddered. “I fear he is not long for the army, Mister Brown. A curtailed career, would you not say?”

  “Truncated, Mister Belling.”

  “Penniless, no doubt!”

  “No doubt!” Brown said. “And he carried his own pack and greatcoat! An officer doesn’t carry a pack! Never seen such a thing in all my years. And he was reeking of gin.”

  “He was?”

  “Reeking!” Brown said. “Well, I never! So that’s the fellow, is it? What was the Lady Grace thinking of? She must have been quite mad!” He jumped, startled because the door had been suddenly thrown open. “Mister Sharpe?” he said faintly, wondering if the tall rifleman had returned to exact vengeance for their unhelpfulness. “You forgot something, perhaps?”

  Sharpe shook his head. “Today’s Friday, isn’t it?” he asked.

  Mister Belling blinked. “It is, Mister Sharpe,” he said feebly, “it is.”

  “Friday,” Mister Brown confirmed, “the very last day of July.”

  Sharpe, dark-eyed, tall and hard-faced, stared suspiciously at each of the two men in turn, then nodded reluctantly. “I thought it was,” he said, then left again.

  This time it was Brown who let out a sigh of relief as the door closed. “I cannot think,” he said, “that promoting men from the ranks is a wise idea.”

  “It never lasts,” Belling said consolingly, “they ain’t suited to rank, Mister Brown, and they take to liquor and so run out of cash. There is no prudence in the lower sort of men. He’ll be on the streets within the month, rely upon it, within the month.”

  “Poor fellow,” Mister Brown said and shot the door’s bolt. It was only five o’clock in the evening, and the office was supposed to remain open until six, but somehow it seemed prudent to shut up early. Just in case Sharpe came back. Just in case.

  Grace, Sharpe thought, Grace. God help me, Grace. God help me. Three shillings, three pence and a bloody halfpenny, all the money he had left in the world. What do I do now, Grace? He often talked to her. She was not there to listen, not now, but he still talked to her. She had taught him so much, she had encouraged him to read and tried to make him think, but nothing lasts. Nothing. “Bloody hell, Grace,” he said aloud and men on the street gave him room, thinking him either mad or drunk. “Bloody hell.” The anger was welling inside him, thick and dark, a fury that wanted to explode in violence or else drown itself in drink. Three shillings and threepence bloody halfpenny. He could get well drunk on that, but the ale and gin he had taken at midday was already sour in his belly. What he wanted was to hurt someone, anyone. Just a blind, desperate anger.

  He had not planned it this way. He thoug
ht he would come to London, borrow an advance from an army agent, and then go away. Back to India, he had thought. Other men went there poor and came back rich. Sharpe the nabob and why not? Because he could not sell his rank, that was why not. Some snotty child with a rich father could buy and sell his rank, but a real soldier who had fought his way up the ladder could not. Bugger them all. So what now? Ebenezer Fairley, the merchant who had sailed with Sharpe from India, had offered him a job, and Sharpe supposed he could walk to Cheshire and beg from the man, but he had no urge to start that journey now. He just wanted to vent his anger and so, reassured that it was indeed Friday, he walked toward the Tower. The street stank of the river, coal smoke and horse dung. There was wealth in this part of London that lay so close to the docks and to the Custom House and to the big warehouses crammed with spices, tea and silks. This was a district of counting houses, bankers and merchants, a conduit for the world’s wealth, but the money was not displayed. A few clerks hurried from one office to another, but there were no crossing sweepers and none of the signs of luxury that filled the elegant streets to the city’s west. The buildings here were tall, dark and secret, and it was impossible to tell whether the gray-haired man scuttling with a ledger under his arm was a merchant prince or a worn-out clerk.

  Sharpe turned down Tower Hill. There was a pair of red-coated sentries at the Tower’s outer gate and they pretended not to see the saber scabbard protruding from Sharpe’s greatcoat and he pretended not to see them. He did not care if they saluted him or not. He did not much care if he never saw the army again so long as he lived. He was a failure. Storekeeper to the regiment. A bloody quartermaster. He had come from India, where he had received a commission into a red-coated regiment, to England, where he had been placed in the greenjackets, and at first he had liked the Rifles, but then Grace had gone and everything went wrong. Yet it was not her fault. Sharpe blamed himself, but still did not understand why he had failed. The Rifles were a new kind of regiment, prizing skill and intelligence above blind discipline. They worked hard, rewarded progress and encouraged the men to think for themselves. Officers trained with the men, even drilled with them, and the hours that other regiments wasted in pipe-claying and stock-polishing, in bootlicking and tuft-brushing, the greenjackets spent in rifle practice. Men and officers competed against each other, all trying to make their own company the best. It was exactly the kind of regiment that Sharpe had dreamed of when he had been in India, and he had been recommended to it. “I hear you’re just the sort of officer we want,” Colonel Beckwith had greeted Sharpe and the Colonel’s welcome was heartfelt, for Sharpe brought the greenjackets a wealth of experience in battle, but in the end they did not want him. He did not fit. He could not make small talk. Perhaps he had frightened them. Most of the regiment’s officers had spent the last years training on England’s south coast, while Sharpe had been fighting in India. He had become bored with the training, and after Grace he had become bitter so that the Colonel had taken him away from number three company and put him in charge of the stores. Which was where most officers up from the ranks were placed in the hidebound, red-coated regiments, but the Rifles were supposed to be different.

  Now the regiment had marched away, going to fight somewhere abroad, but Sharpe, the morose quartermaster, had been left behind. “It’ll be a chance,” Colonel Beckwith had told Sharpe, “to clean out the hutments. Give them a damn good scouring, eh? Have everything ready for our return.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sharpe had said, and thought Beckwith could go to hell. Sharpe was a soldier, not a damned barracks cleaner, but he had hidden his anger as he watched the regiment march north. No one knew where it was going. Some said Spain, others said they were going to Stralsund, which was a British garrison on the Baltic, though why the British held a garrison on the southern coast of the Baltic no one could explain, and a few claimed the regiment was going to Holland. No one actually knew, but they all expected to fight and they marched in fine spirits. They were the green jackets, a new regiment for a new century, but with no place for Richard Sharpe. So Sharpe had decided to run. Damn Beckwith, damn the greenjackets, damn the army and damn everything. He had reckoned he would sell his commission, take the money and find a new life. Except he could not sell because of the bloody regulations. God damn it, Grace, he thought, what do I do?

  Only he knew what he was going to do. He was still going to run. Yet to start a new life he needed money, which was why he had made certain it was a Friday. Now he edged down the greasy stairs at the foot of Tower Hill and nodded to a waterman. “Wapping Steps,” he said, settling in the boat’s stern.

  The waterman shoved off, letting the river current carry him downstream past Traitor’s Gate. The masts were thick on either side of the river where ships and barges were double-berthed against wharves crudely protected by bulging fenders made of thick, twisted, tar-soaked rope. Sharpe knew these fenders. The worn-out ones had been carted to the foundling home in Brewhouse Lane

  where the children had been made to dismantle the matted remnants of tar and hemp. At the age of nine, Sharpe remembered, he had lost the nails on four of his fingers. It had been useless work. Teasing out the hemp strands with small bare and bloody hands. The strands were sold as an alternative for the horsehair that stiffened the plaster used on walls. He looked at his hands now. Still rough, he thought, but no longer black with tar and bloody with ripped nails. “Recruiting?” the waterman asked.

  “No.”

  The curt tone might have offended the waterman, but he shrugged it off. “It ain’t my business,” he said, deftly using an oar to keep the boat drifting straight, “but Wapping ain’t healthy. Not to an officer, sir.”

  “I grew up there.”

  “Ah,” the man said, giving Sharpe a puzzled look. “Going home, then?”

  “Going home,” Sharpe agreed. The sky was leaden with cloud and darkened further by the pall of smoke that threaded the spires and towers and masts. A black sky over a black city, broken only by a jagged streak of pink in the west. Going home, Sharpe thought. Friday evening. The small rain pitted the river. Lights glimmered from portholes in the berthed ships which stank of coal dust, sewage, whale oil and spices. Gulls flew like white scraps in the early dark, wheeling and diving about the heavy beam at Execution Dock, where the bodies of two men, mutineers or pirates, hung with broken necks.

  “Watch yourself,” the waterman said, skillfully nudging his skiff in among the other boats at the Wapping Steps. He was not warning Sharpe against the slippery flight of stairs, but against the folk who lived in the huddled streets above.

  Sharpe paid in coppers, then climbed up to the wharf which was edged with low warehouses guarded by ragged dogs and cudgel-bearing thugs. This place was safe enough, but once through the alley and into the streets he was in hungry territory. He would be back in the gutter, but it was his gutter, the place he had started and he felt no particular fear of it.

  “Colonel!” A whore called to him from behind a warehouse. She lifted her skirt and then spat a curse when Sharpe ignored her. A chained dog lunged at him as he emerged onto High Street where a dozen small boys whooped in derision at the sight of an army officer and fell into mocking step behind him. Sharpe let them follow for twenty paces, then whipped round fast and snatched the nearest boy’s shabby coat, lifted and slammed him against the wall. Two of the other boys ran off, doubtless to fetch brothers or fathers. “Where’s Maggie Joyce?” Sharpe asked the boy.

  The child hesitated, wondering whether to be brave, then half grinned. “She’s gone, mister.”

  “Gone where?”

  “Seven Dials.”

  Sharpe believed him. Maggie was his one friend, or he hoped she was, but she must have had the sense to leave Wapping, though Sharpe doubted that the Seven Dials was much safer. But he had not come here to see Maggie. He had come here because it was Friday night and he was poor. “Who’s the Master at the workhouse?” he asked.

  The child looked really scared now. “The Ma
ster?” he whispered.

  “Who is it, boy?”

  “Jem Hocking, sir.”

  Sharpe put the lad down, took the halfpenny from his pocket and spun it down the street so that the boys pursued it between the people, dogs, carts and horses. Jem Hocking. That was the name he had hoped to hear. A name from a black past, a name that festered in Sharpe’s memory as he walked down the center of the street so that no one emptied a slop bucket over his head. It was a summer evening, the cloud-hidden sun was still above the horizon, but it seemed like winter twilight here. The houses were black, their old bricks patched with crude timbers. Some had fallen down and were nothing but heaps of rubble. Cesspits stank. Dogs barked everywhere. In India the British officers had shuddered at the stench of the streets, but none had ever walked here. Even the worst street in India, Sharpe thought, was better than this fetid place where the people had pinched faces, sunk with hunger, but their eyes were bright enough, especially when they saw the pack in Sharpe’s left hand. They saw a heavy pack, a saber, and assessed the value of the greatcoat draped like a cloak over his broad shoulders. There was more wealth on Sharpe than these folk saw in a half-dozen years, though Sharpe reckoned himself poor. He had been rich once. He had taken the jewels of the Tippoo Sultan, stripping them from the dying king’s body in the shit-stinking tunnel of the water gate of Seringapatam, but those jewels were gone. Bloody lawyers. Bloody, bloody lawyers.

  But if the folk saw the wealth on Sharpe they also saw that he was very tall and very strong and that his face was scarred and hard and bitter and forbidding. A man would have to be desperately hungry to risk his life in an attempt to steal Sharpe’s coat or pack and so, like wolves that scented blood but feared losing their own, the men watched him pass and, though some followed him as he turned up Wapping Lane

  , they did not pursue him into Brewhouse Lane

  . The poorhouse and the foundling home were there and no one went close to those grim high walls unless they were forced.