Sharpe's Fortress Part 61

"I'm a deserter!" Hakeswill hissed.

"I'm on your side!"

Hands seized him and pulled him through the small doorway. A smoking torch burned high on the wall to show Hakeswill the long, narrow entranceway, the dark ramparts, and the dark faces of the men who had him prisoner.

"I'm on your side!" he shouted as the gate was closed behind him and his musket was s.n.a.t.c.hed away.

"I'm on your side!"

A tall, hawk-faced man strode down the stone road.

"Who are you?" he asked in English.

"I'm someone willing to fight for you, sir. Willing and able, sir. Old soldier, sir."

"My name is Manu Bappoo," the man said in a sibilant voice, 'and I command here."

"Very good, sir. Sahib, I mean, very good." Hakeswill bobbed his head.

"Hakeswill, sir, is my name. Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill."

Manu Bappoo stared at the redcoat. He disliked deserters. A man who deserted his flag could not be trusted under any other flag, but the news that a white soldier had run from the enemy ranks could only hearten his garrison. Better, he decided, to leave this man alive as a witness to the enemy's crumbling morale than shoot him out of hand.

"Take him to Colonel Dodd," he ordered one of his men.

"Give him back his firelock. He's on our side."

So Hakeswill was inside Gawilghur and among the enemy. But he was safe from the terror that had turned his life to sudden nightmare.

He was safe from Sharpe.

CHAPTER 8.

The sappers who had em placed the gab ions were too excited to go to sleep and instead were milling about a pair of smoky fires. Their laughter rose and fell on the night wind. Major Stokes, pleased with their work, had produced three jars of arrack as a reward, and the jugs were being pa.s.sed from hand to hand.

Sharpe watched the small celebration and then, keeping to the shadows among Syud Sevajee's encampment, he went to a small tent where he stripped off his borrowed Indian robes before crawling under the flap. In the dark he blundered into Clare who, kept awake by the sound of the bombardment and then by the voices of the sappers, put up a hand and felt bare flesh.

"You're undressed!" She sounded alarmed.

"Not quite," Sharpe said, then understood her fear.

"My clothes were soaking," he explained, 'so I took them off. Didn't want to wet the bed, eh? And I've still got my shirt on."

"Is it raining? I didn't hear it."

"It was blood," he said, then rummaged under the blanket he had borrowed from Syud Sevajee and found Torrance's pouch.

Clare heard the rattle of stones.

"What is it?"

"Just stones," he said, 'pebbles." He put the twenty jewels he had retrieved from Kendrick and Lowry into the pouch, stowed it safe under the blanket, then lay down. He doubted he had found every stone, but he reckoned he had retrieved most of them. They had been loose in the two privates' pockets, not even hidden away in their coat seams. G.o.d, he felt tired and his body had still not recovered from Hakeswill's kicking. It hurt to breathe, the bruises were tender and a tooth was still loose.

"What happened out there?" Clare asked.

"The engineers put the gab ions in place. When it's light they'll sc.r.a.pe the gun platform and make the magazines, and tomorrow night they'll bring up the guns."

"What happened to you?" Clare amended her question.

Sharpe was silent for a while.

"I looked up some old friends," he said.

But he had missed Hakeswill, d.a.m.n it, and Hakeswill would be doubly alert now. Still, a chance would come. He grinned as he remembered Morris's scared voice. The Captain was a bully to his men and a to adie to his superiors.

"Did you kill someone?" Clare asked.

"Two men," he admitted, 'but it should have been three."

"Why?"

He sighed.

"Because they were bad men," he said simply, then reflected it was a true answer.

"And because they tried to kill me," he added, 'and they robbed me. You knew them," he went on.

"Kendrick and Lowry."

"They were horrid," Clare said softly.

"They used to stare at me."

"Can't blame them for that, love."

She was silent for a while. The laughter of the sappers was subsiding as men drifted towards their tents. The wind gusted at the tent's entrance and brought the smell of burnt powder from the rocky isthmus where patches of gra.s.s still flamed around the exhausted rocket tubes.

"Everything's gone wrong, hasn't it?" Clare said.

"It's being put right," Sharpe replied.

"For you," she said.

Again she was silent, and Sharpe suspected she was crying.

"I'll get you home to Madras," he said.