The officer seemed sceptical. 'The only Englishmen we have here, Sergeant, are prisoners or deserters. You're lying.'

Hakeswill spat on the gravel that was soaked with the blood from the decapitated prisoners. 'How can he be a deserter? Officers don't desert! They sell their commissions and bugger off home to Mummy. I tell you, sir, he's an officer! And the other one's a right bastard! Flogged, he was, and quite right too! He should have been flogged to bleeding death, only the General sent for him.'

The mention of the flogging woke a memory in the Tippoo. 'When was he flogged?' The officer translated the Tippoo's question.

'Just before he ran, sir. Raw, he must have been, but not raw enough.'

'And you say the General sent for him?' The officer sounded disbelieving.

'Harris, sir, the bugger what lost a lump out of his skull in America. He sent our Colonel, he did, and Colonel Wellesley stopped the flogging. Stopped it!' Hakeswill's indignation was still keen. 'Stopping a flogging what's been properly ordered! Never seen anything so disgraceful in all me born days! Going to the dogs, the army is, going to the dogs.'

The Tippoo listened to the translation, then stepped back from the railing. He turned to Appah Rao who had once served in the East India Company's army. 'Do British officers desert?'

'None that I've ever heard of, Your Majesty,' Appah Rao said, glad that the shadows of the balcony were hiding his pale and worried face. 'They might resign and sell their commission, but desert? Never.'

The Tippoo nodded down to the kneeling Hakeswill. 'Put that wretch back in the cells,' he ordered, 'and tell Colonel Gudin to meet me at the Inner Palace.'

Guards dragged Hakeswill back to the city. 'And he had a bibbi with him!' Hakeswill shouted as he was pulled away, but no one took any notice. The Sergeant was shedding tears of pure happiness as he was taken back through the Bangalore Gate. 'Thank you, Mother,' he called to the cloudless sky, 'thank you, Mother, for I cannot die!'

The twelve dead men were hidden in a makeshift grave.

The troops marched back to their encampment while the Tippoo, being carried to the Inner Palace beneath the tiger-striped canopy of his palanquin, reflected that the sacrifice of the twelve prisoners had not been in vain for it had revealed the presence of enemies. Allah be thanked, he reflected, for his luck had surely turned.

'You think Mrs. Bickerstaff has gone over to the enemy?' Lawford asked Sharpe for the third or fourth time.

'She's gone to his bed,' Sharpe said bleakly, 'but I reckon she'll still help us.' Sharpe had washed both his and Lawford's tunics and now he patted the cloth to see if it had dried. Looking after kit in this army, he reflected, was a deal easier than in the British. There was no pipeclay here to be caked onto crossbelts and musket slings, no blackball to be used on boots and no grease and powder to be slathered on the hair. He decided the tunics were dry enough and tossed one to the Lieutenant, then pulled his own over his head, carefully freeing the gold medallion so that it hung on his chest. His tunic also boasted a red cord on his left shoulder, the Tippoo's insignia of a corporal. Lawford seemed to resent Sharpe bearing these marks of rank that were denied to him.

'Suppose she betrays us?' Lawford asked.

'Then we're in trouble,' Sharpe said brutally. 'But she won't. Mary's a good lass.'

Lawford shrugged. 'She jilted you.'

'Easy come, easy go,' Sharpe said, then belted the tunic. Like most of the Tippoo's soldiers he now went bare-legged beneath the knee-length garment, though Lawford insisted on keeping his old British trousers. Both men wore their old shakos, though George III's badge had been replaced by a tin tiger with an upraised paw. 'Listen,' Sharpe said to a still-worried Lawford, 'I've done what you asked, and the lass says she'll find this Ravi whatever his name is, and all we have to do now is wait. And if we get a chance to run, we run like buggery. You reckon that musket's ready for inspection?'

'It's clean,' Lawford said defensively, hefting his big French firelock.

'Christ, you'd be on a charge for that musket back in the proper army. Give it here.'

Sergeant Rothiere's daily inspection was not for another half-hour, and after that the two men would be free until mid-afternoon when it would be the turn of Gudin's battalion to stand guard over the Mysore Gate. That guard duty ended at midnight, but Sharpe knew there would be no chance of an escape, for the Mysore Gate did not offer an exit from the Tippoo's territory, but rather led into the city's surrounding encampment which, in turn, had a strong perimeter guard. The previous night Sharpe had experimented to see whether his red cord and gold medallion would be authority enough for him to wander through the encampment, maybe allowing him to find a shadowed and quiet stretch of its earthworks over which he could scramble in the dark, but he had been intercepted within twenty yards of the gate and politely but firmly ushered back. The Tippoo, it seemed, was taking no chances.

'I already had Wazzy clean that,' Lawford said, nodding at the musket in Sharpe's hands. Wazir was one of the small boys who hung around the barracks to earn pice for washing and cleaning equipment. 'I paid him,' Lawford said indignantly.

'If you want a job done properly,' Sharpe said, 'you do it yourself. Hell!' He swore because he had pinched his finger on the musket's mainspring which he had uncovered by unscrewing the lock plate. 'Look at that rust!' He managed to unseat the mainspring without losing the trigger mechanism, then began to file the rust off the spring's edge. 'Bloody rubbish, these French muskets,' he grumbled. 'Nothing like a proper Birmingham bundook.'

'Do you clean your own musket like that?' Lawford asked, impressed that Sharpe had unscrewed the lock plate.

''Course I do! Not that Hakeswill ever cares. He only looks at the outside.' Sharpe grinned. 'You remember that day you saved my skin with the flint? Hakeswill had changed it for a bit of stone, but I caught it before he could do any damage. He's a fly bastard, that one.'

'He changed it?' Lawford seemed shocked.

'Bloody snake, that Obadiah. How much did you pay Wazzy?'

'An anna.'

'He robbed you. You want to pass me that oil bottle?'

Lawford obliged, then settled back against the stone water trough in which Sharpe had washed the tunics. He felt strangely content, despite the apparent failure of his mission. There was a pleasure in sharing this intimacy with Sharpe, indeed it felt oddly like a privilege. Many young officers were frightened of the men they commanded, fearing their scorn, and they concealed their apprehension with a display of careless arrogance. Lawford doubted he could ever do that now, for he no longer felt any fear of the crude, hard men who formed the ranks of Britain's army. Sharpe had cured him of that by teaching him that the crudity was unthinking and the hardness a disguise for conscientiousness. Not that every man was conscientious, any more than all Britain's soldiers were crude, but too many officers assumed they were all brutes and treated them as such. Now Lawford watched as Sharpe's capable fingers forced the cleaned mainspring back into its cavity, using his picklock as a lever.

'Lieutenant?' a voice called respectfully across the yard. 'Lieutenant Lawford?'

'Sir?' Lawford responded without thinking, turning towards the voice and rising to his feet. Then he realized what he had done and blanched.

Sharpe swore.

Colonel Gudin walked slowly across the yard, rubbing his long face as he approached the two Englishmen. 'Lieutenant William Lawford,' he enquired gently, 'of His Majesty's 33rd Regiment of Foot?'

Lawford said nothing.