Sharpe's Tiger by Bernard Cornwell Page B

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.”
    â€œMarried!” 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.”
    â€œAye, I know it’s hard,” Sharpe said, frowning. He stared at her as he thought about the idea of getting married. Till now he had only been thinking of desertion, but maybe marriage was not such a bad idea. At least it would make it muchharder for Hakeswill to get his hands on Mary’s skin. And a married man, Sharpe reckoned, was more likely to be promoted. But what was the point of rising an inch or two in the dunghill? Even a sergeant was still at the bottom of the heap. It was better to be out of the army altogether and Mary, Sharpe decided, would be more likely to desert with him if she was properly married to him. That thought made him nod slowly. “I reckon I might like to be married,” he said shyly.
    â€œMe too.” She smiled and, awkwardly, Sharpe smiled back. For a moment neither had anything to say, then Mary excitedly fished in the pocket of her apron to produce a jewel she had taken from a dead man. “Look what I found!” She handed Sharpe a red stone, half the size of a hen’s egg. “You reckon it’s a ruby?” Mary asked eagerly.
    Sharpe tossed the stone up and down. “I reckon it’s glass, lass,” he said gently, “just glass. But I’ll get you a ruby for a wedding gift, just you watch me.”
    â€œI’ll more than watch you, Dick Sharpe,” she said happily and put her arm into his. Sergeant Hakeswill, a hundred paces away, watched them and his face twitched.
    While on the edges of the killing place, where the looted and naked bodies lay scattered, the vultures came down, sidled forward, and began to tear at the dead.
    The allied armies camped a quarter of a mile short of the place where the dead lay. The camp sprawled across the plain: an instant town where fifty thousand soldiers and thousands of camp followers would spend the night. Tents went up for officers well away from the places where the vast herds of cattle were guarded for the night. Some of the cattle were beeves, being herded and slaughtered for food, some were oxen that carried panniers filled with the eighteen-and twenty-four-pounder cannonballs that would be needed toblast a hole through the walls of Seringapatam, while yet others were bullocks that hauled the wagons and guns, and the heaviest guns, the big siege pieces, needed sixty bullocks apiece. There were more than two hundred thousand cattle with the army, but all were now scrawny for the Tippoo’s cavalry was stripping the land of fodder as the British and Hyderabad armies advanced.
    The common soldiers had no tents. They would sleep on the ground close to their fires, but first they ate and this night the feeding was good, at least for the men of the King’s 33rd who had coins taken from the enemy dead to spend with the
bhinjarries
, the merchant clans that traveled with the army and had their own private guards to protect their goods. The
bhinjarries
all sold chickens, rice, flour, beans, and, best of all, the throat-burning skins of arrack which could make a man drunk even faster than rum. Some of the
bhinjarries
also hired out whores and the 33rd gave those