Бернард Корнуэлл - Sharpe's Prey

“Yes, sir.”

“You!” This peremptory demand was to one of the serving girls. “A bottle of port and two glasses. And I’ll take some cheese if you’ve anything edible.”

“Lady Grace’s family,” Sharpe said, suddenly needing to tell the story, “claimed the child wasn’t mine. Said it had been her husband’s, and so the lawyers baked me in a pie. Took everything, they did, because the child died after its mother. They said it was the heir to her husband, see?”

His tears were flowing now. “I don’t mind losing everything, sir, but I do mind losing her.”

“Pull yourself together, man,” Baird snapped. “Stop sniveling.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” Baird said, “and you don’t piddle away your damned life because you don’t like His dispositions.”

Sharpe sniffed and looked up into Baird’s scarred face. “Piddling away my life?”

“I’ve been keeping an eye on you, Sharpe,” Baird said. “D’you know how many lives you saved by blowing that mine in Seringapatam? Scores! And my life among them. If it weren’t for you, Sharpe, I’d be dead.” He emphasized this by stabbing Sharpe’s chest with a big forefinger. “Dead and buried, d’you doubt it?”

Sharpe did not, but he said nothing. Baird had led the assault on the Tippoo Sultan’s stronghold and the General had led from the front. The Scotsman would indeed be dead, Sharpe thought, if Sharpe, a private then, had not blown the mine that had been intended to trap and annihilate the storming party. Dust and stones, Sharpe remembered, and flame billowing down a sunlit street and the air filling with smoke and the noise rolling about him like a thousand trundling barrels, and then in the silence afterward that was not silent at all, the moaning and screaming and the pale flames crackling.

“Wellesley made you up, didn’t he?” Baird asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Not like Wellesley to do a man a favor,” the General observed sourly. “Tight-fisted, he is.” Baird had never liked Sir Arthur Wellesley. “So why did he do it? For Seringapatam?”

“No, sir.”

“Yes, sir, no, sir, what are you, Sharpe? A bloody schoolboy? Why did the man promote you?”

Sharpe shrugged. “I was useful to him, sir. At Assaye.”

“Useful?”

“He was in trouble,” Sharpe said. The General had been unhorsed, was surrounded and doomed, but Sergeant Sharpe had been there and it was the Indians who died instead.

“In trouble?” Baird sneered at Sharpe’s modesty. “It must have been a desperate trouble if it persuaded Wellesley to do you a favor. Though how much of a favor was it?” The question was a shrewd one and Sharpe did not try to answer it, but it seemed Baird knew the answer anyway. “Wallace wrote to me after you joined his regiment,” the General went on, “and told me that you were a good soldier, but a bad officer.”

Sharpe bridled. “I tried my best, sir.” Wallace had been the commanding officer of the 74th, a Scottish regiment, and Sharpe had joined it after he had been commissioned by Sir Arthur Wellesley. It had been Wallace who had recommended Sharpe to the 95th, but Sharpe was no happier in the new regiment. Still a failure, he thought.

“Not easy, coming up from the ranks,” Baird admitted. “But if Wallace says you’re a good soldier, then that’s a compliment. And I need a good soldier. I’ve been ordered to find a man who can look after himself in a difficult situation. Someone who ain’t afraid of a fight. I remembered you, but wasn’t sure where to find you. I should have known to look in the Frog Prick. Eat your steak, man. I can’t abide good meat getting cold.”

Sharpe finished the beef as the General’s port and cheese were put on the table. He let Baird pour him a glass before he spoke again. “I was thinking of leaving the army, sir,” he admitted.

Baird looked at him in disgust. “To do what?”

“I’ll find work,” Sharpe said. Maybe he would go to Ebenezer Fairley, the merchant who had shown him friendship on the voyage home from India, or perhaps he would thieve. That was how he had started in life. “I’ll get by,” he said belligerently.

Sir David Baird cut the cheese which crumbled under his knife. “There are three kinds of soldier, Sharpe,” he said. “There are the damned useless ones, and God knows there’s an endless supply of those. Then there are the good solid lads who get the job done, but would piss in their breeches if you didn’t show them how their buttons worked. And then there’s you and me. Soldiers’ soldiers, that’s who we are.”

Sharpe looked skeptical. “A soldier’s soldier?” he asked.

“We’re the men who clean up after the parade, Sharpe. The carriages and kings go by, the bands play, the cavalry prances past like bloody fairies, and what’s left is a mess of dung and litter. We clean it up . The politicians get the world into tangles, then ask their armies to make things right. We do their dirty work, Sharpe, and we’re good at it. Very good. You might not be the best officer in King George’s army, but you’re a bloody fine soldier. And you like the life, don’t tell me you don’t.”

“Being a quartermaster?” Sharpe sneered.

“Aye, that too. Someone has to do it, and as often as not they give it to a man up from the ranks.” He glared at Sharpe and then, unexpectedly, grinned. “So you’ve fallen out with Colonel Beckwith too, have you?”

“I reckon so, sir, yes.”

“How?”

Sharpe considered the question and decided it could not be answered truthfully. He could not say he did not fit into the mess, it was too vague, too self-pitying, so he answered with a half-truth. “They’ve marched off, sir, and left me to clean up the barracks. I’ve fought more battles than any of them, seen more enemies and killed more men than all of them put together, but that don’t count. They don’t want me, sir, so I’m getting out.”

“Don’t be such a bloody fool,” Baird growled. “In a year or two, Sharpe, there’s going to be enough war for every man jack in this army. So far all we’ve been doing is pissing around the edge of the French, but sooner or later we’re going to have to tackle the bastards head-on. We’ll need all the officers we can get then, and you’ll have your chance. You might be a quartermaster now, but ten years from now you’ll be leading a battalion, so just be patient.”

“I’m not sure Colonel Beckwith will want me back, sir. I’m not supposed to be in London. I’m supposed to be at Shorncliffe.”

“Beckwith will do what I tell him,” Baird growled, “and I’ll tell him to kiss your bum if you do this job for me.”

Sharpe liked Baird. Most soldiers liked Baird. He might be a general, but he was as tough as any man in the ranks. He could outswear the sergeants, outmarch the Rifles and outfight any man in green or scarlet. He was a fighter, not a bureaucrat. He had risen high enough in the army, but there were rumors that he had enemies higher still, men who disliked his bluntness. “What kind of job, sir?” Sharpe asked.

“One where you might die, Sharpe,” Baird said with relish. He drained his glass of port and poured another. “We’re sending a guardsman to Copenhagen. Our interest in Copenhagen is supposed to be secret, but I dare sav every French agent in London already knows it. This fellow is going there tomorrow and I want someone to keep him alive. He’s not a real soldier, Sharpe, but an aide to the Duke of York. Not one of those”—he saw Sharpe glancing at the table of theatergoers—”but the same sort of creature. He’s a courtier, Sharpe, not a soldier. You won’t find a better man for standing sentinel over the royal piss pot, but you wouldn’t want to follow him into a breach, not if you wanted to win.”