CHAPTER 6

Sharpe knew he was in an ox cart. He could tell that from the jolting motion and from the terrible squeal of the ungreased axles. The ox carts that followed the army made a noise like the shrieking of souls in perdition.

He was naked, bruised and in pain. It hurt even to breathe. His mouth was gagged and his hands and feet were tied, but even if they had been free he doubted he could have moved for he was wrapped in a thick dusty carpet. Hakeswill! The bastard had ambushed him, stripped him and robbed him. He knew it was Hakeswill, for Sharpe had heard the Sergeant's hoarse voice as he was rolled into the rug.

Then he had been carried out of the tent and slung into the cart, and he was not sure how long ago that had been because he was in too much pain and he kept slipping in and out of a dreamlike daze. A nightmare daze. There was blood in his mouth, a tooth was loose, a rib was probably cracked and the rest of him simply ached or hurt. His head throbbed. He wanted to be sick, but knew he would choke on his vomit because of the gag and so he willed his belly to be calm.

Calm! The only blessing was that he was alive, and he suspected that was no blessing at all. Why had Hakeswill not killed him? Not out of mercy, that was for sure. So presumably he was to be killed somewhere else, though why Hakeswill had run the terrible risk of having a British officer tied hand and foot and smuggled past the picquet line Sharpe could not tell. It made no sense. All he did know was that by now Obadiah Hakeswill would have teased Sharpe's gems from their hiding places. God damn it all to hell. First Simone, now Hakeswill, and Hakeswill, Sharpe realized, could never have trapped Sharpe if Torrance had not helped.

But knowing his enemies would not help Sharpe now. He knew he had as much hope of living as those dogs who were hurled onto the mud flats beside the Thames in London with stones tied to their necks.

The children used to laugh as they watched the dogs struggle. Some of the dogs had come from wealthy homes. They used to be snatched and if their owners did not produce the ransom money within a couple of days, the dogs were thrown to the river. Usually the ransom was paid, brought by a nervous footman to a sordid public house near the docks, but no one would ransom Sharpe. Who would care? Dust from the rug was thick in his nose. Just let the end be quick, he prayed.

He could hear almost nothing through the rug. The axle squealing was the loudest noise, and once he heard a thump on the cart's side and thought he heard a man laugh. It was night-time. He was not sure how he knew that, except that it would make sense, for no one would try to smuggle a British officer out in daylight, and he knew he had lain in the tent for a long time after Hakeswill had hit him. He remembered ducking under the tent's canvas, remembered a glimpse of the brass-bound musket butt, and then it was nothing but a jumble of pain and oblivion. A weight pressed on his waist, and he guessed after a while that a man was resting his feet on the rug. Sharpe tested the assumption by trying to move and the man kicked him. He lay still again. One dog had escaped, he remembered. It had somehow slipped the rope over its neck and had paddled away downstream with the children shrieking along the bank and hurling stones at the frightened head. Did the dog die? Sharpe could not remember. God, he thought, but he had been a wild child, wild as a hawk. They had tried to beat the wildness out of him, beat him till the blood ran, then told him he would come to a bad end. They had prophesied that he would be strung up by the neck at Tyburn Hill. Dick Sharpe dangling, pissing down his legs while the rope burned into his gullet. But it had not happened. He was an officer, a gentleman, and he was still alive, and he pulled at the tether about his wrists, but it would not shift.

Was Hakeswill riding in the cart? That seemed possible, and suggested the Sergeant wanted somewhere safe and private to kill Sharpe. But how? Quick with a knife? That was a forlorn wish, for Hakeswill was not merciful. Perhaps he planned to repay Sharpe by putting him beneath an elephant's foot and he would scream and writhe until the great weight would not let him scream ever again and his bones would crack and splinter like eggshells. Be sure your sin will find you out.

How many times had he heard those words from the Bible? Usually thumped into him at the foundling home with a blow across the skull for every syllable, and the blows would keep coming as they chanted the reference. The Book of Numbers, chapter thirty-two, verse twenty-three, syllable by syllable, blow by blow, and now his sin was finding him out and he was to be punished for all the unpunished of fences So die well, he told himself. Don't cry out. Whatever was about to happen could not be worse than the flogging he had taken because of Hakeswill's lies.

That had hurt. Hurt like buggery, but he had not cried out. So take the pain and go like a man. What had Sergeant Major Bywaters said as he had thrust the leather gag into Sharpe's mouth?

"Be brave, boy. Don't let the regiment down." So he would be brave and die well, and then what?

Hell, he supposed, and an eternity of torment at the hands of a legion of Hakeswills. Just like the army, really.

The cart stopped. He heard feet thump on the wagon boards, the murmur of voices, then hands seized the rug and dragged him off. He banged hard down onto the ground, then the rug was picked up and carried. Die well, he told himself, die well, but that was easier said than done. Not all men died well. Sharpe had seen strong men reduced to shuddering despair as they waited for the cart to be run out from under the gallows, just as he had seen others go into eternity with a defiance so brittle and hard that it had silenced the watching crowd. Yet all men, the brave and the cowardly, danced the gallows dance in the end, jerking from a length of Bridport hemp, and the crowd would laugh at their twitching antics. Best puppet show in London, they said. There was no good way to die, except in bed, asleep, unknowing. Or maybe in battle, at the cannon's mouth, blown to kingdom come in an instant of oblivion.

He heard the footsteps of the men who carried him slap on stone, then heard a loud murmur of voices. There were a lot of voices, all apparently talking at once and all excited, and he felt the rug being jostled by a crowd and then he seemed to be carried down some steps and the crowd was gone and he was thrown onto a hard floor. The voices seemed louder now, as if he was indoors, and he was suddenly possessed by the absurd notion that he had been brought into a cock-fighting arena like the one off Vinegar Street where, as a child, he had earned farthings by carrying pots of porter to spectators who were alternatively morose or maniacally excited.

He lay for a long time. He could hear the voices, even sometimes a burst of laughter. He remembered the fat man in Vinegar Street, whose trade, rat-catching, took him to the great houses in west London that he reconnoitred for his thieving friends.

"You'd make a good snaffler, Dicky, " he'd say to Sharpe, then he would clutch Sharpe's arm and point to the cockerels waiting to fight.

"Which one'll win, lad, which one?"

And Sharpe would make a haphazard choice and, as often as not, the bird did win.

"He's a lucky boy, " the rat-catcher would boast to his friends as he tossed Sharpe a farthing.

"Nipper's got the luck of the devil!»

But not tonight, Sharpe thought, and suddenly the rug was seized, unwound, and Sharpe was spilt naked onto hard stones. A cheer greeted his appearance. Light flared in Sharpe's eyes, dazzling him, but after a while he saw he was in a great stone courtyard lit by the flames of torches mounted on pillars that surrounded the yard. Two white-robed men seized him, dragged him upright and pushed him onto a stone bench where, to his surprise, his hands and feet were loosed and the gag taken from his mouth. He sat flexing his fingers and gasping deep breaths of humid air. He could see no sign of Hakeswill.