Sharpe's Fortress Part 63

"What's worse?" Sharpe asked.

"Being warm or being lonely?"

He thought she smiled. He could not tell in the dark, but he thought she smiled.

"Being lonely," she said very softly.

"We can look after that," he said, lifting the thin blanket and moving to her side.

She had stopped crying. Somewhere outside a c.o.c.k crowed and the eastern cliffs were touched with the first gold of the day. The fires on the rocky neck of land flickered and died, their smoke drifting like patches of thin mist. Bugles called from the main encampment, summoning the redcoats to the morning parade. The night picquets were relieved as the sun rose to flood the world with light.

Where Sharpe and Clare slept.

"You abandoned the dead men?" Wellesley growled.

Captain Morris blinked as a gust of wind blew dust into one of his eyes.

"I tried to bring the bodies in," he lied, 'but it was dark, sir. Very dark. Colonel Kenny can vouch for that, sir. He visited us."

"I visited you?" Kenny, lean, tall and irascible, was standing beside the General.

"I visited you?" he asked again, his inflection rising to outrage.

"Last night, sir," Morris answered in plaintive indignation.

"On the picquet line."

"I did no such thing. Sun's gone to your head." Kenny glowered at Morris, then took a snuff box from a pocket and placed a pinch on his hand.

"Who the devil are you, anyway?" he added.

"Morris, sir. 33rd."

"I thought we had nothing but Scots and sepoys here," Kenny said to Wellesley.

"Captain Morris's company escorted a convoy here," Wellesley answered.

"A light company, eh?" Kenny said, glancing at Morris's epaulettes.

"You might even be useful. I could do with another company in the a.s.sault party." He snorted the snuff, stopping one nostril at a time.

"It cheers my boys up," he added, 'seeing white men killed." Kenny commanded the first battalion of the tenth Madra.s.si Regiment.

"What's in your a.s.sault unit now?" Wellesley asked.

"Nine companies," Kenny said.

"The grenadiers and two others from the Scotch Brigade, the flankers from my regiment and four others.

Good boys, all of them, but I daresay they won't mind sharing the honours with an English light company."

"And I've no doubt you'll welcome a chance to a.s.sault a breach, Morris?" Wellesley asked drily.

"Of course, sir," Morris said, cursing Kenny inwardly.

"But in the meantime," Wellesley went on coldly, 'bring your men's bodies in."

"Yes, sir."

"Do it now."

Sergeant Green took a half-dozen men down the neck of land, but they only found two bodies. They were expecting three, but Sergeant Hakeswill was missing. The enemy, seeing the redcoats among the rocks above the reservoir, opened fire and the musket b.a.l.l.s smacked into stones and ricocheted up into the air. Green took a bullet in the heel of his boot. It did not break the skin of his foot, but the blow hurt and he hopped on the short, dry gra.s.s.

"Just grab the b.u.g.g.e.rs and drag them away," he said. He wondered why the enemy did not fire their cannon, and just then a gun discharged a barrel of canister at his squad.

The b.a.l.l.s hissed all about the men, but miraculously none was. .h.i.t as the soldiers seized Kendrick and Lowry by their feet and ran back towards the half-completed battery where Captain Morris waited. Both the dead men had slit throats.

Once safe behind the gab ions the corpses were treated more decorously by being placed on makeshift stretchers. Colonel Kenny intercepted the stretcher-bearers to examine the corpses which were already smelling foul.

"They must have sent a dozen cut-throats out of the fort," he reckoned.

"You say there's a sergeant missing?"

"Yes, sir," Morris answered.

"Poor fellow must be a prisoner. Be careful tonight, Captain! They'll probably try again. And I a.s.sure you, Captain, if I decide to take a stroll this evening, it won't be to your picquet line."

That night the 33rd's Light Company again formed a screen in front of the new batteries, this time to protect the men dragging up the guns. It was a nervous night, for the company was expecting throat-slitting Mahrattas to come silently through the darkness, but nothing stirred.

The fortress stayed silent and dark. Not a gun fired and not a rocket flew as the British cannon were hauled to their new emplacements and as powder charges and round shot were stacked in the newly made ready magazines.

Then the gunners waited.

The first sign of dawn was a grey lightening of the east, followed by the flare of reflected sun as the first rays lanced over the world's rim to touch the summit of the eastern cliffs. The fortress walls showed grey black Still the gunners waited. A solitary cloud glowed livid pink on the horizon. Smoke rose from the cooking fires inside the fortress where the flags hung limp in the windless air. Bugles roused the British camp which lay a half-mile behind the batteries where officers trained telescopes on Gawilghur's northern wall.

Major Stokes's job was almost finished. He had made the batteries, and now the gunners must unmake the walls, but first Stokes wanted to be certain that the outermost breach would be made in the right place.

He had fixed a telescope to a tripod and now he edged it from side to side, searching the lichen-covered stones just to the right of a bastion in the centre of the wall. The wall sloped back slightly, but he was sure he could see a place where the old stones bulged out of alignment, and he watched that spot as the sun rose and cast a hint of shadow where the stones were not quite true. Finally he screwed the telescope's mount tight shut, so that the tube could not move, then summoned the gun captain of the battery's eighteen-pounder. A major actually commanded this battery, but he insisted that his sergeant go to the spygla.s.s.

"That's your target," Stokes told the Sergeant.

The Sergeant stooped to the telescope, then straightened to see over the gla.s.s, then stooped again. He was chewing a wad of tobacco and had no lower front teeth so that the yellow spittle ran down his chin in a continuous dribble. He straightened, then stooped a third time. The telescope was powerful, and all he could see in the gla.s.s circle was a vertical joint between two great stones. The joint was some four feet above the wall's base, and when it gave way the wall would spill forward down the slope to make the ramp up which the attackers could swarm.

"Smack on the joint, sir?" the Sergeant asked in a Northumbrian accent so p.r.o.nounced that Stokes did not at first understand him.

"Low on the joint," Stokes said.

"Low it is, sir," the Sergeant said, and stooped to squint through the gla.s.s once more.