Sharpe’s Fortress: The Siege of Gawilghur, December 1803

‘Muskets!’ A man tried to attract the clerk’s attention.

‘Horseshoes!’ an East India Company lieutenant shouted.

‘Buckets,’ a gunner said.

‘Come back tomorrow,’ the clerk said. ‘Tomorrow!’

‘You said that yesterday,’ the gunner said, ‘and I’m back.’

‘Where’s Captain Torrance?’ Sharpe asked.

‘He’s ill,’ the clerk said disapprovingly, as though Sharpe had risked the Captain’s fragile health even by asking the question. ‘He cannot be disturbed. And why is that boy here? He is an Arab!’

‘Because I told him to be here,’ Sharpe said. He walked round the table and stared down at the ledgers. ‘What a bleeding mess!’

‘Sahib!’ The clerk had now realized Sharpe was an officer. ‘Other side of the table, sahib, please, sahib! There is a system here, sahib. I stay this side of the table and you remain on the other. Please, sahib.’

‘What’s your name?’ Sharpe asked.

The clerk seemed affronted at the question. ‘I am Captain Torrance’s assistant,’ he said grandly.

‘And Torrance is ill?’

‘The Captain is very sick.’

‘So who’s in charge?’

‘I am,’ the clerk said.

‘Not any longer,’ Sharpe said. He looked up at the East India Company lieutenant. ‘What did you want?’

‘Horseshoes.’

‘So where are the bleeding horseshoes?’ Sharpe asked the clerk.

‘I have explained, sahib, I have explained,’ the clerk said. He was a middle-aged man with a lugubrious face and pudgy ink-stained fingers that now hastily tried to close all the ledgers so that Sharpe could not read them. ‘Now please, sahib, join the queue.’

‘Where are the horseshoes?’ Sharpe insisted, leaning closer to the sweating clerk.

‘This office is closed!’ the clerk shouted. ‘Closed till tomorrow! All business will be conducted tomorrow. Captain Torrance’s orders!’

‘Ahmed!’ Sharpe said. ‘Shoot the bugger.’

Ahmed spoke no English, but the clerk did not know that. He held his hands out. ‘I am closing the office! Work cannot be done like this! I shall complain to Captain Torrance! There will be trouble! Big trouble!’ The clerk glanced at a door that led to the inner part of the house.

‘Is that where Torrance is?’ Sharpe asked, gesturing at the door.

‘No, sahib, and you cannot go in there. The Captain is sick.’

Sharpe went to the door and pushed it open. The clerk yelped a protest, but Sharpe ignored him. A muslin screen hung on the other side of the door and entangled Sharpe as he pushed into the room where a sailor’s hammock hung from the beams. The room seemed empty, but then a whimper made him look into a shadowed corner. A young woman crouched there. She was dressed in a sari, but she looked European to Sharpe. She had been sewing gold braid onto the outer seams of a pair of breeches, but now stared in wide-eyed fright at the intruder. ‘Who are you, Ma’am?’ Sharpe asked.

The woman shook her head. She had very black hair and very white skin. Her terror was palpable. ‘Is Captain Torrance here?’ Sharpe asked.

‘No,’ she whispered.

‘He’s sick, is that right?’

‘If he says so, sir,’ she said softly. Her London accent confirmed that she was English.

‘I ain’t going to hurt you, love,’ Sharpe said, for fear was making her tremble. ‘Are you Mrs Torrance?’

‘No!’

‘So you work for him?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And you don’t know where he is?’

‘No, sir,’ she said softly, looking up at Sharpe with huge eyes. She was lying, he reckoned, but he guessed she had good reason to lie, perhaps fearing Torrance’s punishment if she told the truth. He considered soothing the truth out of her, but reckoned it might take too long. He wondered who she was. She was pretty, despite her terror, and he guessed she was Torrance’s bibbi. Lucky Torrance, he thought ruefully. ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Ma’am,’ he said, then he negotiated the muslin curtain back into the front room.

The clerk shook his head fiercely. ‘You should not have gone in there, sahib! That is private quarters! Private! I shall be forced to tell Captain Torrance.’

Sharpe took hold of the clerk’s chair and tipped it, forcing the man off. The men waiting in the room gave a cheer. Sharpe ignored them, sat on the chair himself and pulled the tangle of ledgers towards him. ‘I don’t care what you tell Captain Torrance,’ he said, ‘so long as you tell me about the horseshoes first.’

‘They are lost!’ the clerk protested.

‘How were they lost?’ Sharpe asked.

The clerk shrugged. ‘Things get lost,’ he said. Sweat was pouring down his plump face as he tentatively tried to tug some of the ledgers away from Sharpe, but he recoiled from the look on the Ensign’s face. ‘Things get lost,’ the clerk said again weakly. ‘It is the nature of things to get lost.’

‘Muskets?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Lost,’ the clerk admitted.

‘Buckets?’

‘Lost,’ the clerk said.

‘Paperwork,’ Sharpe said.

The clerk frowned. ‘Paperwork, sahib?’

‘If something’s lost,’ Sharpe said patiently, ‘there’s a record. This is the bloody army. You can’t have a piss without someone making a note of it. So show me the records of what’s been lost.’

The clerk sighed and pulled one of the big ledgers open. ‘Here, sahib,’ he said, pointing an inky finger. ‘One barrel of horseshoes, see? Being carried on an ox from Jamkandhi, lost in the Godavery on November 12th.’

‘How many horseshoes in a barrel?’ Sharpe asked.

‘A hundred and twenty.’ The long-legged cavalry Sergeant had come into the office and now leaned against the doorpost.

‘And there are supposed to be four thousand horseshoes in store?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Here!’ The clerk turned a page. ‘Another barrel, see?’

Sharpe peered at the ill-written entry. ‘Lost in the Godavery,’ he read aloud.

‘And here.’ The clerk stabbed his finger again.

‘Stolen,’ Sharpe read. A drop of sweat landed on the page as the clerk turned it back. ‘So who stole it?’

‘The enemy, sahib,’ the clerk said. ‘Their horsemen are everywhere.’

‘Their bloody horsemen run if you so much as look at them,’ the tall cavalry Sergeant said sourly. ‘They couldn’t steal an egg from a chicken.’

‘The convoys are ambushed, sahib,’ the clerk insisted, ‘and things are stolen.’

Sharpe pushed the clerk’s hand away and turned the pages back, looking for the date when the battle had been fought at Assaye. He found it, and discovered a different handwriting had been used for the previous entries. He guessed Captain Mackay must have kept the ledger himself, and in Mackay’s neat entries there were far fewer annotations reading ‘stolen’ or ‘lost’. Mackay had marked eight cannonballs as being lost in a river crossing and two barrels of powder had been marked down as stolen, but in the weeks since Assaye no fewer than sixty-eight oxen had lost their burdens to either accidents or thieves. More tellingly, each of those oxen had been carrying a scarce commodity. The army would not miss a load of round shot, but it would suffer grievously when its last reserve of horseshoes was gone. ‘Whose handwriting is this?’ Sharpe had turned to the most recent page.

‘Mine, sahib.’ The clerk was looking frightened.

‘How do you know when something is stolen?’

The clerk shrugged. ‘The Captain tells me. Or the Sergeant tells me.’

‘The Sergeant?’

‘He isn’t here,’ the clerk said. ‘He’s bringing a convoy of oxen north.’

‘What’s the Sergeant’s name?’ Sharpe asked, for he could find no record in the ledger.

‘Hakeswill,’ the cavalry Sergeant said laconically. ‘He’s the bugger we usually deal with, on account of Captain Torrance always being ill.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Sharpe said, and pushed the chair back. Hakeswill! Obadiah bloody Hakeswill! ‘Why wasn’t he sent back to his regiment?’ Sharpe asked. ‘He isn’t supposed to be here at all!’

‘He knows the system,’ the clerk explained. ‘Captain Torrance wanted him to stay, sahib.’

And no bloody wonder, Sharpe thought. Hakeswill had worked himself into the army’s most profitable billet! He was milking the cow, but making sure it was the clerk’s handwriting in the ledger. No flies on Obadiah. ‘How does the system work?’ he asked the clerk.

‘Chitties,’ the clerk said.

‘Chitties?’

‘An ox driver is given a chitty, sahib, and when he has delivered his load the chitty is signed and brought here. Then he is paid. No chitty, no money. It is the rule, sahib. No chitty, no money.’

‘And no bloody horseshoes either,’ put in the lean Sergeant of the 19th.

‘And Sergeant Hakeswill pays the money?’ Sharpe asked.

‘If he is here, sahib,’ the clerk said.

‘That doesn’t get me my damned horseshoes,’ the Company Lieutenant protested.

‘Or my buckets,’ the gunner put in.

‘The bhinjarries have all the essentials,’ the clerk insisted. He made shooing gestures. ‘Go and see the bhinjarries! They have necessaries! This office is closed till tomorrow.’

‘But where did the bhinjarries get their necessaries, eh? Answer me that?’ Sharpe demanded, but the clerk merely shrugged. The bhinjarries were merchants who travelled with the army, contributing their own vast herds of pack oxen and carts. They sold food, liquor, women and luxuries, and now, it seemed, they were offering military supplies as well, which meant that the army would be paying for things that were normally issued free, and doubtless, if bloody Hakeswill had a finger in the pot, things which had been stolen from the army in the first place. ‘Where do I go for horseshoes?’ Sharpe asked the clerk.

The clerk was reluctant to answer, but he finally spread his hands and suggested Sharpe ask in the merchants’ encampment. ‘Someone will tell you, sahib.’

‘You tell me,’ Sharpe said.

‘I don’t know!’

‘So how do you know they have horseshoes?’

‘I hear these things!’ the clerk protested.

Sharpe stood and bullied the clerk back against the wall. ‘You do more than hear things,’ he said, leaning his forearm against the clerk’s neck, ‘you know things. So you bloody well tell me, or I’ll have my Arab boy chop off your goolies for his breakfast. He’s a hungry little bugger.’

The clerk fought for breath against the pressure of Sharpe’s arm. ‘Naig.’ He offered the name plaintively when Sharpe relaxed his arm.

‘Naig?’ Sharpe asked. The name rang a distant bell. A long-ago bell. Naig? Then he remembered a merchant of that name who had followed the army to Seringapatam. ‘Naig?’ Sharpe asked again. ‘A fellow with green tents?’

‘The very one, sahib.’ The clerk nodded. ‘But I did not tell you this thing! These gentlemen are witnesses, I did not tell you!’

‘He runs a brothel!’ Sharpe said, remembering, and he remembered too how Naig had been a friend to Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill four years before. Sharpe had been a private then and Hakeswill had trumped up charges that had fetched Sharpe a flogging. ‘Nasty Naig’ had been the man’s nickname, and back then he had sold pale-skinned whores who travelled in green-curtained wagons. ‘Right!’ Sharpe said. ‘This office is closed!’ The gunner protested and the cavalry Sergeant looked disappointed. ‘We’re going to see Naig,’ Sharpe announced.

‘No!’ the clerk said too loud.

‘No?’ Sharpe asked.

‘He will be angry, sahib.’

‘Why should he be angry?’ Sharpe demanded. ‘I’m a customer, ain’t I? He’s got horseshoes, and we want horseshoes. He should be delighted to see us.’

‘He must be treated with respect, sahib,’ the clerk said nervously. ‘He is a powerful man, Naig. You have money for him?’

‘I just want to look at his horseshoes,’ Sharpe said, ‘and if they’re army issue then I’ll ram one of them down his bloody throat.’

The clerk shook his head. ‘He has guards, sahib. He has jettis!’

‘I think I might let you go on your own,’ the East India Company Lieutenant said, backing away.

‘Jettis?’ The light dragoon Sergeant asked.

‘Strongmen,’ Sharpe explained. ‘Big buggers who kill you by wringing your neck like a chicken.’ He turned back to the clerk. ‘Where did Naig get his jettis? From Seringapatam?’

‘Yes, sahib.’

‘I killed enough of the buggers,’ Sharpe said, ‘so I don’t mind killing a few more. Are you coming?’ he asked the cavalry Sergeant.

‘Why not?’ The man grinned.

‘Anyone else?’ Sharpe asked, but no one else seemed to want a fight that afternoon.

‘Please, sahib,’ the clerk said weakly.

Sharpe ignored him and, followed by Ahmed and the cavalryman, went back into the sunlight. ‘What’s your name?’ Sharpe asked the Sergeant.

‘Lockhart, sir. Eli Lockhart.’

‘I’m Dick Sharpe, Eli, and you don’t have to call me “sir”, I’m not a proper bleeding officer. I was made up at Assaye, and I wish the buggers had left me a sergeant now. They sent me to be a bloody bullock driver, because I’m not fit for anything else.’ He looked at Lockhart’s six troopers who were still waiting. ‘What are they doing here?’

‘Didn’t expect me to carry the bloody horseshoes myself, did you?’ Lockhart said, then gestured at the troopers. ‘Come on, boys. We’re going to have a scrap.’

‘Who said anything about a scrap?’ Sharpe asked.

‘He’s got horseshoes,’ Lockhart explained, ‘but we don’t have money. So there’s only one way to get them off him.’

‘True,’ Sharpe said, and grinned.

Lockhart suddenly looked oddly shy. ‘Was you in the Captain’s quarters, sir?’

‘Yes, why?’

The tough-looking Sergeant was actually blushing now. ‘You didn’t see a woman there, did you, sir?’

‘Dark-haired girl. Pretty?’

‘That’s her.’

‘Who is she?’

‘Torrance’s servant. A widow. He brought her and her husband out from England, but the fellow died and left her on her own. Torrance won’t let her go.’

‘And you’d like to take her off his hands, is that it?’

‘I’ve only ever seen her at a distance,’ the Sergeant admitted. ‘Torrance was in another regiment, one of the Madrassi’s, but we camped together often enough.’

‘She’s still there,’ Sharpe said drily, ‘still alive.’

‘He keeps her close, he does,’ Lockhart said, then kicked a dog out of his path. The eight men had left the village and entered the sprawling encampment where the merchants with their herds, wagons and families were camped. Great white oxen with painted horns were hobbled by pegs, and children scurried among the beasts collecting their dung which they slapped into cakes that would be dried for fuel. ‘So tell me about these jettis,’ Lockhart asked.

‘Like circus strongmen,’ Sharpe said, ‘only it’s some kind of religious thing. Don’t ask me. None of it makes bleeding sense to me. Got muscles like mountains, they have, but they’re slow. I killed four of the buggers at Seringapatam.’

‘And you know Hakeswill?’

‘I know bloody Hakeswill. Recruited me, he did, and he’s been persecuting me ever since. He shouldn’t even be with this army, he’s supposed to be with the Havercakes down south, but he came up here with a warrant to arrest me. That didn’t work, so he’s just stayed, hasn’t he? And he’s working the bleeding system! You can wager your last shilling that he’s the bastard who supplies Naig, and splits the profit.’ Sharpe stopped to look for green tents. ‘How come you don’t carry your own spare horseshoes?’

‘We do. But when they’ve gone you have to get more from the supplies. That’s how the system’s supposed to work. And yesterday’s pursuit left half the hooves wrecked. We need shoes.’

Sharpe had seen a cluster of faded green tents. ‘That’s where the bastard is,’ he said, then looked at Lockhart. ‘This could get nasty.’

Lockhart grinned. He was as tall as Sharpe and had a face that looked as though it had survived a lifetime of tavern brawls. ‘Come this far, ain’t I?’

‘Is that thing loaded?’ Sharpe nodded at the pistol at Lockhart’s belt. A sabre also hung there, just like the one at Sharpe’s hip.

‘It will be.’ Lockhart drew the pistol and Sharpe turned to Ahmed and mimed the actions of loading the musket. Ahmed grinned and pointed to the lock, indicating that his weapon was already charged.

‘How many of the buggers will be waiting for us?’ Lockhart asked.

‘A dozen?’ Sharpe guessed.

Lockhart glanced back at his six men. ‘We can deal with a dozen buggers.’

‘Right,’ Sharpe said, ‘so let’s bloody well make some trouble.’ He grinned, because for the first time since he had become an officer he was enjoying himself.

Which meant someone was about to get a thumping.

CHAPTER THREE

Major General Sir Arthur Wellesley rode northwards among a cavalcade of officers whose horses kicked up a wide trail of dust that lingered in the air long after the horsemen had passed. Two troops of East India Company cavalry provided the General’s escort. Manu Bappoo’s army might have been trounced and its survivors sent skeltering back into Gawilghur, but the Deccan Plain was still infested with Mahratta cavalry ready to pounce on supply convoys, wood-cutting parties or the grass-cutters who supplied the army’s animals with fodder and so the two troops rode with sabres drawn. Wellesley set a fast pace, revelling in the freedom to ride in the long open country. ‘Did you visit Colonel Stevenson this morning?’ he called back to an aide.

‘I did, sir, and he’s no better than he was.’

‘But he can get about?’

‘On his elephant, sir.’

Wellesley grunted. Stevenson was the commander of his smaller army, but the old Colonel was ailing. So was Harness, the commander of one of Wellesley’s two brigades, but there was no point in asking about Harness. It was not just physical disease that assaulted Harness, for the Scotsman’s wits were gone as well. The doctors claimed it was the heat that had desiccated his brains, but Wellesley doubted the diagnosis. Heat and rum, maybe, but not the heat alone, though he did not doubt that India’s climate was bad for a European’s health. Few men lived long without falling prey to some wasting fever, and Wellesley was thinking it was time he left himself. Time to go back home before his health was abraded and, more important, before his existence was forgotten in London. French armies were unsettling all Europe and it could not be long before London despatched an army to fight the old foe, and Wellesley wanted to be a part of it. He was in his middle thirties and he had a reputation to make, but first he had to finish off the Mahrattas, and that meant taking Gawilghur, and to that end he was now riding towards the great rampart of cliffs that sealed off the plain’s northern edge.

An hour’s ride brought him to the summit of a small rise which offered a view northwards. The plain looked dun, starved of water by the failed monsoon, though here and there patches of millet grew tall. In a good year, Wellesley guessed, the millet would cover the plain from horizon to horizon, a sea of grain bounded by the Gawilghur cliffs. He dismounted on the small knoll and took out a telescope that he settled on his horse’s saddle. It was a brand new glass, a gift from the merchants of Madras to mark Wellesley’s pacification of Mysore. Trade now moved freely on India’s eastern flank, and the telescope, which had been specially ordered from Matthew Berge of London, was a generous token of the merchants’ esteem, but Wellesley could not get used to it. The shape of the eyepiece was less concave than the one he was used to, and after a moment he snapped the new telescope shut and pulled out his old glass which, though lower powered, was more comfortable. He stared for a long time, gazing at the fort which crowned the rock promontory. The black stone of the fortress walls looked particularly sinister, even in the sunlight. ‘Good God,’ the General muttered after a while. Fail up there, he thought, and there would be no point in going home. He could go to London with some victories under his belt, and men would respect him even if the victories had not been against the French, but go with a defeat and they would despise him. Gawilghur, he thought sourly, had the look of a career-breaker.

Colonel Wallace, Wellesley’s healthy brigade commander, had also dismounted and was inspecting the fortress through his own glass. ‘Devil of a place, Sir Arthur,’ Wallace said.

‘How high is it, Blackiston?’ Wellesley called to one of his aides, an engineer.

‘I took a triangulation yesterday, sir,’ Blackiston said, ‘and discovered the fortress walls are eighteen hundred feet above the plain.’

‘Is there water up there?’ Colonel Butters, the chief engineer, asked.

‘We hear there is, sir,’ Blackiston said. ‘There are tanks in the fort; huge things like lakes.’

‘But the water level must be low this year?’ Butters suggested.

‘I doubt it’s low enough, sir,’ Blackiston murmured, knowing that Butters had been hoping that thirst might defeat the garrison.

‘And the rascals will have food, no doubt,’ Wellesley commented.

‘Doubtless,’ Wallace agreed drily.

‘Which means they’ll have to be prised out,’ the General said, then bent to the glass again and lowered the lens to look at the foothills below the bluff. Just south of the fort was a conical hill that rose almost halfway up the flank of the great promontory. ‘Can we get guns on that near hill?’ he asked.

There was a pause while the other officers decided which hill he was referring to. Colonel Butters flinched. ‘We can get them up there, sir, but I doubt they’ll have the elevation to reach the fort.’

‘You’ll get nothing bigger than a twelve-pounder up there,’ Wallace said dubiously, then slid the telescope’s view up the bluff to the walls. ‘And you’ll need bigger shot than twelve-pounders to break down that wall.’

‘Sir Arthur!’ The warning call came from the officer commanding the East India Company cavalry who was pointing to where a group of Mahratta horsemen had appeared in the south. They had evidently been following the lingering dust cloud left by the General’s party and, though the approaching horsemen only numbered about twenty men, the sepoy cavalry wheeled to face them and spread into a line.

‘It’s all right,’ Wellesley called, ‘they’re ours. I asked them to meet us here.’ He had inspected the approaching horsemen through his telescope and now, waving the sepoy cavalry back, he walked to greet the silladars. ‘Syud Sevajee,’ Wellesley acknowledged the man in the shabby green and silver coat who led the cavalrymen, ‘thank you for coming.’

Syud Sevajee nodded brusquely at Wellesley, then stared up at Gawilghur. ‘You think you can get in?’

‘I think we must,’ Wellesley said.

‘No one ever has,’ Sevajee said with a sly smile.

Wellesley returned the smile, but slowly, as if accepting the implied challenge, and then, as Sevajee slid down from his saddle, the General turned to Wallace. ‘You’ve met Syud Sevajee, Wallace?’

‘I’ve not had that pleasure, sir.’

Wellesley made the introduction, then added that Syud Sevajee’s father had been one of the Rajah of Berar’s generals.

‘But is no longer?’ Wallace asked Sevajee.

‘Beny Singh murdered him,’ Sevajee said grimly, ‘so I fight with you, Colonel, to gain my chance to kill Beny Singh. And Beny Singh now commands that fortress.’ He nodded towards the distant promontory.

‘So how do we get inside?’ Wellesley asked.

The officers gathered around Sevajee as the Indian drew his tulwar and used its tip to draw a figure eight in the dust. He tapped the lower circle of the eight, which he had drawn far larger than the upper. ‘That’s what you’re looking at,’ he said, ‘the Inner Fort. And there are only two entrances. There’s a road that climbs up from the plain and goes to the Southern Gate.’ He drew a squiggly line that tailed away from the bottom of the figure eight. ‘But that road is impossible. You will climb straight into their guns. A child with a pile of rocks could keep an army from climbing that road. The only possible route into the Inner Fort is through the main entrance.’ He scratched a brief line across the junction of the two circles.