Sharpe's Tiger (6 page)

If only he could decide where it would be safe to run.

S
ergeant Obadiah Hakeswill glanced about to see what his men were doing. Just about all of them were plundering, and quite right too. That was a soldier's privilege. Fight the battle then strip the enemy of anything worth a penny. The officers were not looting, but officers never did, at least not so that anyone noticed them, but Hakeswill did see that Ensign Fitzgerald had somehow managed to get himself a jeweled sabre that he was now flashing around like a shilling whore given a guinea fan. Mister bloody Ensign Fitzgerald was getting above himself in Sergeant Hakeswill's considered opinion. Ensigns were the lowest of the low, apprentice officers, lads in silver lace, and Mister bloody-Fitzgerald had no business countermanding Hakeswill's orders so Mister bloody Fitzgerald must be taught his place, but the trouble was that Mister Fitzgerald was Irish and Hakeswill was of the opinion that the Irish were only half civilized and never did understand their place. Most of them, anyway. Major Shee was Irish, and he was civilized, at least when he was sober, and Colonel Wellesley, who was from Dublin, was wholly civilized, but the Colonel had possessed the sense to make himself more English than the English, while Mister bloody Fitzgerald made no pretence about his birth.

“See this, Hakeswill?” Fitzgerald, sublimely unaware of
Hakeswill's glowering thoughts, stepped across a body to show off his new sabre. “See what, sir?”

“Damned blade is made in Birmingham! Will you credit that? Birmingham! Says so on the blade, see? ‘Made in Birmingham.'”

Hakeswill dutifully examined the legend on the blade, then fingered the sabre's pommel which was elegantly set with a ring of seven small rubies. “Looks like glass to me, sir,” he said dismissively, hoping he could somehow persuade Fitzgerald to relinquish the blade.

“Nonsense!” Fitzgerald said cheerfully. “Best rubies! Bit small, maybe, but I doubt the ladies will mind that, Seven pieces of glitter? That adds up to a week of sin, Sergeant. It was worth killing the rascal for that.”

If you did kill him, Hakeswill thought sourly as he stumped away from the exuberant Ensign. More likely picked it up off the ground. And Fitzgerald was right; seven rubies, even small ones, would buy a lot of Naig's ladies. “Nasty” Naig was a merchant from Madras, one of the many traveling with the army, and he had brought his brothel with him. It was an expensive brothel, officers only, or at least only those who could pay an officer's price, and that made Hakeswill think of Mary Bickerstaff, Mrs. Mary Bickerstaff, She was a half and half, half Indian and half British, and that made her valuable. Very valuable. Most of the women who followed the army were dark as Hades, and while Obadiah Hakeswill had no distaste for dark skin he did miss the touch of white flesh. So did many of the officers, and there was a guinea or two to be made out of that lust. Naig would pay well for a skin as pale as Mary Bickerstaff's.

She was a rare beauty, Mary Bickerstaff. A beauty amongst a pack of ugly, rancid women. Hakeswill watched as a group of the battalion's wives ran to take part in the plundering and
almost shuddered as he contemplated their ugliness. About two thirds of the wives were
bibbis
, Indians, and most of those, Hakeswill knew, were not properly married with the Colonel's permission, while the rest were those lucky British women who had won the brutal lottery that had taken place on the night before the battalion had sailed from England. The wives had been gathered in a barrack room, their names had been put into ten shakos, one for each company, and the first ten names drawn from each hat were allowed to accompany their husbands. The rest had to stay in Britain, and what happened to them there was anybody's guess. Most went on the parish, but parishes resented feeding soldiers' wives, so as like as not they were forced to become whores. Barrack-gate whores, for the most part, because they lacked the looks for anything better. But a few, a precious few, were pretty, and none was prettier than Sergeant Bickerstaff's half and half widow.

The women spread out among the dead and dying Mysoreans. If anything they were even more efficient than their men at plundering the dead, for the men tended to hurry and so missed the hiding places where a soldier secreted his money. Hakeswill watched Flora Placket strip the body of a tall tiger-striped corpse whose throat had been slashed to the backbone by the slice of a cavalryman's sabre. She did not rush her work, but searched carefully, garment by garment, then handed each piece of clothing to one of her two children to fold and stack. Hakeswill approved of Flora Placket for she was a large and steady woman who kept her man in good order and made no fuss about a campaign's discomforts. She was a good mother too, and that was why Obadiah did not care that Flora Placket was as ugly as a haversack. Mothers were sacred. Mothers were not expected to be pretty. Mothers were Obadiah Hakeswill's guardian angels, and Flora Placket reminded Obadiah of his own mother who
was the only person in all his life who had shown him kindness. Biddy Hakeswill was long dead now, she had died a year before the twelve-year-old Obadiah had dangled on a scaffold for the trumped-up charge of sheep stealing and, to amuse the crowd, the executioner had not let any of that day's victims drop from the gallows, but had instead hoisted them gently into the air so that they choked slowly as their piss-soaked legs jerked in the death dance of the gibbet. No one had taken much notice of the small boy at the scaffold's end and, when the heavens had opened and the rain come down in bucketfuls to scatter the crowd, no one had bothered when Biddy Hakeswill's brother had cut the boy down and set him loose. “Did it for your mother,” his uncle had snarled. “God rest her soul. Now be off with you and don't ever show your face in the dale again.” Hakeswill had run south, joined the army as a drummer boy, had risen to sergeant and had never forgotten his dying mother's words. “No one will ever get rid of Obadiah,” she had said, “not my Obadiah. Death's too good for him.” The gallows had proved that. Touched by God, he was, indestructible!

A groan sounded near Hakeswill and the Sergeant snapped out of his reverie to see a tiger-striped Indian struggling to turn onto his belly. Hakeswill scurried over, forced the man onto his back again and placed his halberd's spear point at the man's throat. “Money?” Hakeswill snarled, then held out his left hand and motioned the counting of coins. “Money?”

The man blinked slowly, then said something in his own language.

“I'll let you live, you bugger,” Hakeswill promised, leering at the wounded man. “Not that you'll live long. Got a goolie in your belly, see?” He pointed at the wound in the man's belly where the bullet had driven home. “Now where's your money? Money! Pice? Dan? Pagodas? Annas? Rupees?”

The man must have understood for his hand fluttered weakly toward his chest.

“Good boy, now,” Hakeswill said, smiling again, then his face jerked in its involuntary spasms as he pushed the spear point home, but not too quickly for he liked to see the realization of death on a man's face. “You're a stupid bugger, too,” Hakeswill said when the man's death throes had ended, then he cut open the tunic and found that the man had strapped some coins to his chest with a cotton sash. He undid the sash and pocketed the handful of copper change. Not a big haul, but Hakeswill was not dependent on his own plundering to fill his purse. He would take a cut from whatever the soldiers of the Light Company found. They knew they would have to pay up or else face punishment.

He saw Sharpe kneeling beside a body and hurried across. “Got a sword there, Sharpie?” Hakeswill asked. “Stole it, did you?”

“I killed the man, Sergeant.” Sharpe looked up.

“Doesn't bleeding matter, does it, lad? You ain't permitted to carry a sword.
Officer
's weapon, a sword is. Mustn't get above your station, Sharpie. Get above yourself, boy, and you'll be cut down. So I'll take the blade, I will.” Hakeswill half expected Sharpe to resist, but the Private did nothing as the Sergeant picked up the silver-hilted blade. “Worth a few bob, I dare say,” Hakeswill said appreciatively, then he laid the sword's tip against the stock at Sharpe's neck. “Which is more than you're worth, Sharpie. Too clever for your own good, you are.”

Sharpe edged away from the sword and stood up. “I ain't got a quarrel with you, Sergeant,” he said.

“But you do, boy, you do.” Hakeswill grimaced as his face went into spasm. “And you know what the quarrel's about, don't you?”

Sharpe backed away from the sword. “I ain't got a quarrel with you,” he repeated stubbornly.

“I think our quarrel is called Mrs. Bickerstaff,” Hakeswill said, and grinned when Sharpe said nothing. “I almost got you with that flint, didn't I? Would have had you flogged raw, boy, and you'd have died of a fever within a week, A flogging does that in this climate. Wears a man down, a flogging does. But you got a friendly officer, don't you? Mister Lawford. He likes you, does he?” He prodded Sharpe's chest with the sword's tip. “Is that what it is? Officer's pet, are you?”

“Mister Lawford ain't nothing to me,” Sharpe said.

“That's what you say, but my eyes tell different.” Hakeswill giggled. “Sweet on each other, are you? You and Mister Lawford? Ain't that nice, Sharpie, but it don't make you much use to Mrs. Bickerstaff, does it? Reckon she'd be better off with a real man.”

“She ain't your business,” Sharpe said.

“Ain't my business! Oh, listen to it!” Hakeswill sneered, then prodded the sword forward again. He wanted to provoke Sharpe into resisting, for then he could charge him with attacking a superior, but the tall young man just backed away from the blade. “You listen, Sharpie,” Hakeswill said, “and you listen well. She's a sergeant's wife, not the whore of some common ranker like you.”

“Sergeant Bickerstaff's dead,” Sharpe protested.

“So she needs a man!” Hakeswill said. “And a sergeant's widow doesn't get rogered by a stinking bit of dirt like you. It ain't right. Ain't natural. It's beneath her station, Sharpie, and it can't be allowed. Says so in the scriptures.”

“She can choose who she wants,” Sharpe insisted.

“Choose, Sharpie? Choose?” Hakeswill laughed. “Women don't choose, you soft bugger. Women get taken by the strongest. Says so in the scriptures, and if you stand in my way, Sharpie”—he pushed the sword hard forward—”then I'll
have your spine laid open to the daylight. A lost flint? That would have been two hundred lashes, lad, but next time? A thousand. And laid on hard! Real hard! Be blood and bones, boy, bones and blood, and who'll look after your Mrs. Bicker-staff then? Eh? Tell me that. So you takes your filthy hands off her. Leave her to me, Sharpie.” He leered at Sharpe, but still the younger man refused to be provoked and Hakeswill at last abandoned the attempt. “Worth a few guineas, this sword,” the Sergeant said again as he backed away. “Obliged to you, Sharpie.”

Sharpe swore uselessly at Hakeswill's back, then turned as a woman hailed him from among the heaped bodies that had been the leading ranks of the Tippoo's column. Those bodies were now being dragged apart to be searched and Mary Bickerstaff was helping the work along.

He walked toward her and, as ever, was struck by the beauty of the girl. She had black hair, a thin face, and dark big eyes that could spark with mischief. Now, though, she looked worried. “What did Hakeswill want?” she asked.

“You.”

She spat, then crouched again to the body she was searching. “He can't touch you, Richard,” she said, “not if you do your duty.”

“The army's not like that. And you know it.”

“You've just got to be clever,” Mary insisted. She was a soldier's daughter who had grown up in the Calcutta barrack lines. She had inherited her dark Indian beauty from her mother and learned the ways of soldiers from her father who had been an engineer sergeant in the Old Fort's garrison before an outbreak of cholera had killed him and his native wife. Mary's father had always claimed she was pretty enough to marry an officer and so rise in the world, but no officer would marry a half-caste, at least no officer who cared about advancement, and so after her parents' death Mary
had married Sergeant Jem Bickerstaff of the 33rd, a good man, but Bickerstaff had died of the fever shortly after the army had left Madras to climb to the Mysore plateau and Mary, at twenty-two, was now an orphan and a widow. She was also wise to the army's ways. “If you're made up to sergeant, Richard,” she told Sharpe now, “then Hakeswill can't touch you.”

Sharpe laughed. “Me? A sergeant? That'll be the day, lass. I made corporal once, but that didn't last.”

“You can be a sergeant,” she insisted, “and you should be a sergeant. And Hakeswill couldn't touch you if you were.”

Sharpe shrugged. “It ain't me he wants to touch, lass, but you.”

Mary had been cutting a tiger-striped tunic from a dead man, but now she paused and looked quizzically up at Sharpe. She had not been in love with Jem Bickerstaff, but she had recognized that the Sergeant was a good, kind man, and she saw the same decency in Sharpe. It was not exactly the same decency, for Sharpe, she reckoned, had ten times Jem Bickerstaff's fire and he could be as cunning as a snake when it suited him, but Mary still trusted Sharpe. She was also attracted to him. There was something very striking about Sharpe's lean good looks, something dangerous, she acknowledged, but very exciting. She looked at him for a few seconds, then shrugged. “Maybe he won't dare touch me if we're married,” she said. “I mean proper married, with the Colonel's permission.”

“Married!” Sharpe said, flustered by the word.

Mary stood. “It ain't easy being a widow in the army, Richard. Every man reckons you're loot.”