“Glad of your company, McCandless. A great day, is it not?”
“The Lord has been merciful to us,” McCandless agreed. “Praise His name.”
The guns ceased, their smoke drifted northwards and the dying sun shone on the broken walls. There were no defenders visible, nothing but dust and fallen bricks and broken timbers.
“Go, Wallace!” Wellesley called, and the 74th’s lone piper hoisted his instrument and played the redcoats and the sepoys forward. The other battalions watched. Those other battalions had fought all afternoon, they had destroyed an army, and now they sprawled beside the Juah and drank its muddy water to slake their powder-induced thirst. None crossed the river, only a handful of cavalry splashed through the water to chase the laggard fugitives on the farther bank.
Major Blackiston brought Wellesley a captured standard, one of a score that had been abandoned by the fleeing Mahrattas. “They left all their guns, too, sir, every last one of them!”
Wellesley acknowledged the standard with a smile. “I’d rather you brought me some water, Blackiston. Where are my canteens?”
“Sergeant Sharpe still has them, sir,” Campbell answered, holding his own canteen to the General.
“Ah yes, Sharpe.” The General frowned, knowing there was unfinished business there. “If you see him, bring him to me.”
“I will, sir.”
Sharpe was not far away. He had walked north through the litter of the Mahratta battle line, going to where the guns fired on the village and, just as they stopped, so he saw McCandless walking behind the 74th as it advanced on the village. He hurried to catch up with the Colonel and was rewarded with a warm smile from McCandless. “Thought I’d lost you, Sharpe.”
“Almost did, sir.”
“The General released you, did he?”
“He did, sir, in a manner of speaking. We ran out of horses, sir. He had two killed.”
“Two! An expensive day for him! It sounds as if you had an eventful time!”
“Not really, sir,” Sharpe said. “Bit confusing, really.”
The Colonel frowned at the blood staining the light infantry insignia on Sharpe’s left shoulder. “You’re wounded, Sharpe.”
“A scratch, sir. Bastard with—sorry, sir—man with a tulwar tried to tickle me.”
“But you’re all right?” McCandless asked anxiously.
“Fine, sir.” He raised his left arm to show that the wound was not serious.
“The day’s not over yet,” McCandless said, then gestured at the village. “Dodd’s there, Sharpe, or he was. I’m glad you’re here. He’ll doubtless try to escape, but Sevajee’s on the far side of the river and between us we might yet trap the rogue.”
Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill was a hundred paces behind McCandless. He too had seen the Colonel following the 74th and now Hakeswill followed McCandless, for if McCandless wrote his letter, then Hakeswill knew his sergeantcy was imperiled. “It ain’t that I like doing it,” he said to his men as he stalked after the Colonel, “but he ain’t giving me a choice. No choice at all. His own fault. His own fault.” Three of his men were following him, the others had refused to come.
A musket fired from Assaye’s rooftops, showing that not all the defenders had fled. The ball fluttered over Wallace’s head and the Colonel, not wanting to expose his men to any other fire that might come from the village, shouted at his men to double. “Just get in among the houses, boys,” he called. “Get in and hunt them down! Quick now!”
More muskets fired from the houses, but the 74th were running now, and cheering as they ran. The first men scrambled over the makeshift breach blown by the big guns, while others hauled aside a cart that blocked an alleyway and, with that entrance opened, a twin stream of Scotsmen and sepoys hurried into the village. The Arab defenders fired their last shots, then retreated ahead of the redcoat rush. A few were trapped in houses and died under Scottish or Indian bayonets.
“You go ahead, Sharpe,” McCandless said, for his wounded leg was making him limp and he was now far behind the Highlanders. “See if you can spot the man,” McCandless suggested, though he doubted Sharpe would. Dodd would be long gone by now, but there was always a chance he had waited until the end and, if men of the 74th had trapped Dodd, then Sharpe could at least try and make sure that the wretch was taken alive. “Go, Sharpe,” the Colonel ordered, “hurry!”
Sharpe dutifully ran on ahead. He clambered up the dust of the breach and jumped down into the pitiful wreckage of a room. He pushed through the house, stepped over a dead Arab sprawled in the outer door, edged about a dung heap in the courtyard, then plunged into an alleyway. Shots sounded from the river and so he headed that way past houses that were being looted of what little remained after the Mahratta occupation. A sepoy emerged from one house with a broken pot while a Highlander had found a broken brass weighing-scale, but the plunder was nothing like the riches that had been taken in Ahmednuggur. Another volley sounded ahead and Sharpe broke into a run, turned a corner and then stopped above the village’s ford.
Dodd’s regiment was on the far side of the river where two white-coated companies had formed a rear guard. It was just like Ahmednuggur, where Dodd had guarded his escape route with volley fire, and now the Major had done it again. He was safely over the river with Pohlmann’s two elephants, and his men had been firing at any redcoats who dared show on the ford’s southern bank, but then, just as Sharpe arrived at the ford, the rear guard about turned and marched north.
“He got away,” a man said, “the bastard got clean away,” and Sharpe looked at the speaker and saw an East India Company sergeant in a doorway a few yards away. The man was smoking a cheroot and appeared to be standing guard over a group of prisoners in the house behind him.
Sharpe turned to watch Dodd’s regiment march into the shadow of some trees. “The bastard,” Sharpe spat. He could see Dodd on his horse just ahead of the two rear guard companies, and he was tempted to raise his musket and try one last shot, but the range was much too great and then Dodd vanished among the shadows. His rear guard followed him. Sharpe could see Sevajee off to the west, but the Indian was helpless. Dodd had five hundred men in ranks and files, and Sevajee had but ten horsemen. “He bloody got away again,” Sharpe said, and spat towards the river.
“With my gold,” the East India Company sergeant said miserably, and Sharpe looked again at the man.
“Bloody hell,” Sharpe said in astonishment, for he was looking at Anthony Pohlmann who had donned his old sergeant’s uniform. Pohlmann’s “prisoners” were a small group of his bodyguard.
“A pity,” Pohlmann said, spitting a scrap of tobacco from between his teeth. “Ten minutes ago I was one of the richest men in India. Now I suppose I’m your prisoner?”
“I couldn’t care less about you, sir,” Sharpe said, slinging the musket on his shoulder.
“You don’t want to march me to Wellesley?” the Hanoverian asked. “It would be a great feather in your cap.”
“That bastard doesn’t give feathers,” Sharpe said. “He’s a stuck-up, cold-hearted bastard, he is, and I’d rather fillet him than you.”
Pohlmann grinned. “So I can go, Sergeant Sharpe?”
“Do what you bloody like,” Sharpe said. “How many men have you got in there?”
“Five. That’s all he left me. He slaughtered the rest.”
“Dodd did?”
“He tried to kill me, but I hid under some straw. A shameful end to my career as a warlord, wouldn’t you say?” Pohlmann smiled. “I think you did well, Sergeant Sharpe, to turn down my commission.”
Sharpe laughed bitterly. “I know my place, sir. Down in the gutter. Officers don’t want men like me joining them. I might scratch my arse on parade or piss in their soup.” He walked to the small house and peered through the open door. “Better tell your fellows to take their coats off, sir. They’ll be shot otherwise.” Then he went very still for, crouching at the back of the small room, was a woman in a shabby linen dress and a straw hat. It was Simone.
Sharpe pulled off his shako. “Madame?”
She stared at him, seeing only his silhouette against the dazzle of the day’s last sun.
“Simone?” Sharpe said.
“Richard?”
“It’s me, love.” He grinned. “Don’t tell me you got left behind again!”
“He killed Pierre!” Simone cried. “I watched him. He shot him!”
“Dodd?”
“Who else?” Pohlmann asked behind Sharpe.
Sharpe stepped into the room and held his hand towards Simone. “You want to stay here,” he asked her, “or come with me?”
She hesitated a second, then stood and took his hand. Pohlmann sighed. “I was hoping to console the widow, Sharpe.”
“You lost, sir,” Sharpe said, “you lost.” And he walked away with Simone, going to find McCandless to give him the bad news. Dodd had escaped.
Colonel McCandless limped up the breach and into Assaye. He sensed that Dodd was gone, for there was no more fighting in the village, though some shots still sounded from the river bank, but even those shots ended as the Scotsman edged past the dead man in the house doorway and through the courtyard into the street.
And perhaps, he thought, it did not really matter any longer, for this day’s victory would echo throughout all India. The redcoats had broken two armies, they had ruined the power of two mighty princes, and from this day on Dodd would be hunted from refuge to refuge as the British power spread northwards. And it would spread, McCandless knew. Each new advance was declared to be the last, but each brought new frontiers and new enemies and so the redcoats marched again, and maybe they would never stop marching until they reached the great mountains in the very north. And maybe it was there, McCandless thought, that Dodd would at last be trapped and shot down like a dog.
And suddenly McCandless did not care very much. He felt old. The pain in his leg was terrible. He was still weak from his fever. It was time, he thought, to go home. Back to Scotland. He should sell Aeolus, repay Sharpe, take his pension, and board a ship. Go home, he thought, to Lochaber and to the green slopes of Glen Scaddle. There was work to be done in Britain, useful work, for he was corresponding with men in London and Edinburgh who wished to establish a society to spread Bibles throughout the heathen world and McCandless decided he could find a small house in Lochaber, hire a servant, and spend his days translating God’s word into the Indian languages. That, he thought, would be a job worth doing, and he wondered why he had waited so long. A small house, a large fire, a library, a table, a supply of ink and paper and, with God’s help, he could do more for India from that one small house than he could ever achieve by hunting down one traitor.
The thought of the great task cheered him, then he turned a corner and saw Pohlmann’s great elephant wandering free in an alleyway. “You’re lost, boy,” he said to the elephant and took hold of one of its ears. “Someone left the gate open, didn’t they?”
He turned the elephant which followed him happily enough. They walked past a dead horse, and then McCandless saw a dead European in a white jacket, and for an instant he thought it must be Dodd, then he recognized Captain Joubert lying on his back with a bullet hole in his breast. “Poor man,” he said, and he guided the elephant through the gate into the courtyard. “I’ll make sure you’re brought some food,” he told the beast, then he turned and barred the gate.
He left the courtyard through the house, picking his way across the welter of bodies in the kitchen. He pushed open the outer door and found himself staring into Sergeant Hakeswill’s blue eyes.
“I’ve been looking for you, sir,” Hakeswill said.
“You and I have no business, Sergeant,” McCandless said.
“Oh, but we does, sir,” Hakeswill said, and his three men blocked the alley behind him. “I wanted to talk to you, sir,” Hakeswill said, “about that letter you ain’t going to write to my Colonel Gore.”
McCandless shook his head. “I have nothing to say to you, Sergeant.”
“I hates the bleeding Scotch,” Hakeswill said, his face twitching. “All prayers and morals, ain’t you, Colonel? But I ain’t cumbered with morals. It’s an advantage I have.” He grinned, then drew his bayonet and slotted it onto the muzzle of his musket. “They hanged me once, Colonel, but I lived ‘cos God loves me, He does, and I ain’t going to be punished again, not ever. Not by you, Colonel, not by any man. Says so in the scriptures.” He advanced on McCandless with the bayonet. His three men hung back and McCandless reckoned they were nervous, but Hakeswill showed no fear of this confrontation.
“Put up your weapon, Sergeant,” McCandless snapped.
“Oh, I will, sir, I’ll put it up inside you unless you promises me on the holy word of God that you won’t write no letter.”
“I shall write the letter tonight,” McCandless said, then drew his claymore. “Now put up your weapon, Sergeant.”
Hakeswill’s face twitched. He stopped three paces from McCandless. “You’d like to strike me down, wouldn’t you, sir? ‘Cos you don’t like me, sir, do you? But God loves me, sir, he does. He looks after me.”
“You’re under arrest, Sergeant,” McCandless said, “for threatening an officer.”
“Let’s see who God loves most, sir. Me or you.”
“Put up your weapon!” McCandless roared.
“Bloody Scotch bastard,” Hakeswill said, and pulled his trigger. The bullet caught McCandless in the gullet and blew out through the back of his spine, and the Colonel was dead before his body touched the floor. The elephant in the nearby courtyard, startled by the shot, trumpeted, but Hakeswill ignored the beast. “Scotch bastard,” he said, then stepped through the doorway and knelt to the body which he searched for gold. “And if any one of you three says a bleeding word,” he threatened his men, “you’ll join him in heaven. If he’s gone there, which I doubt, on account of God not wanting to clutter paradise with Scotchmen. Says so in the scriptures.” He found gold in McCandless’s sporran and turned to show the coins to his men. “You want it?” he asked. “Then you keeps silent about it.”
They nodded. They wanted gold. Hakeswill tossed them the coins, then led them deeper into the house to see if there was anything worth plundering in its rooms. “And once we’re done,” he said, “we’ll find the General, we will, and have him give us Sharpie. We’re almost there, lads. It’s been a long road, it has, and hard in places, but we’re almost there.”
* * *
Sharpe searched the village for Colonel McCandless, but could not find him in any of the alleys. He took Simone with him as he searched some of the larger houses and, from one high window, he found himself staring down into the courtyard where Pohlmann’s great elephant was penned, but there was no sign of McCandless and Sharpe decided he was wasting his time. “I reckon we’ll give up, love,” he told Simone. “He’ll look for me, like enough, probably down by the river.” They walked back to the ford. Pohlmann had vanished and Dodd’s men had long disappeared. The sun was at the horizon now and the farmlands north of the Juah were stained black by long shadows. The men who had captured the village were filling their canteens from the river, and the first few campfires glittered in the dusk as men boiled water to make themselves tea. Simone clung to him and kept talking of her husband. She felt guilty because she had not loved him, yet he had died because he had gone back into the village to find her, and Sharpe did not know how to console her. “He was a soldier, love,” he told her, “and he died in battle.”
“But I killed him!”
“No, you didn’t,” Sharpe said, and he heard hooves behind him and he turned, hoping to see Colonel McCandless, but instead it was General Wellesley and Colonel Wallace and a score of aides riding up to the ford. He straightened to attention.
“Sergeant Sharpe,” Wellesley said, sounding embarrassed.
“Sir,” Sharpe said woodenly.
The General slid from his saddle. His face was red, and Sharpe supposed that was the effect of the sun. “I have been remiss, Sergeant,”
the General said awkwardly, “for I believe I owe you my life.”
Sharpe felt himself blushing and was glad that the sun was low and the roadway where he stood was in deep shadow. “Just did my best, sir,” he muttered. “This is Madame Joubert, sir. Her husband was killed, sir, fighting for Colonel Pohlmann.”
The General took off his hat and bowed to Simone. “My commiserations, Madame,” he said, then looked back at Sharpe whose long black hair still spilled over his collar. “Do you know where Colonel McCandless is?” he asked.
“No, sir. I’ve been looking for him, sir.”
Wellesley fidgeted with his hat, paused to take a deep breath, then nodded. “Colonel McCandless managed to have a long talk with Colonel Wallace this afternoon,” the General said. “How they found time to have a conversation in battle, I don’t know!” This was evidently a jest, for the General smiled, though Sharpe stayed straight-faced, and his lack of reaction disconcerted Wellesley. “I have to reward you, Sharpe,” Wellesley said curtly.
“For what, sir?”
“For my life,” the General said in a tone of irritation.
“I’m just glad I was there, sir,” Sharpe said, feeling as awkward as Wellesley himself evidently felt.
“I’m rather glad you were there, too,” the General said, then took a step forward and held out his hand. “Thank you, Mister Sharpe.”
Sharpe hesitated, astonished at the gesture, then made himself shake the General’s hand. It was only then that he noticed what Wellesley had said. “Mister, sir?” he asked.
“It is customary in this army, Mister Sharpe, to reward uncommon bravery with uncommon promotion. Wallace tells me you desire a commission, and he has vacancies in the 74th. God knows he has too many vacancies, so if you’re agreeable, Sharpe, you can join the Colonel’s regiment as an ensign.”
For a second Sharpe did not really comprehend what was being said, then he suddenly did and he smiled. There were tears in his eyes, but he reckoned that must be because of the powder smoke that lingered in the village. “Thank you, sir,” he said warmly, “thank you.”
Sharpe's Triumph: Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Assaye, September 1803 Page 36
