Sharpe's Tiger (48 page)

Sharpe fired. The bullet went higher than he intended. He had thought to put it through the Tippoo's heart, but instead it struck the Sultan in the temple. For a second the Tippoo wavered. His head had been whipped back by the bullet's force and blood was soaking into his cloth-padded helmet, but he forced his head forward and stared into Sharpe's eyes. The sword fell from his nerveless hand, he seemed to smile a last time, then he just slumped down.

The booming echo of the musket shot still battered Sharpe's ears so he was not aware that he was talking as he crouched beside the Tippoo. “It's your ruby I want,” Sharpe said, “that bloody great ruby. I wanted it from the very first moment I saw you. Colonel McCandless told me, he did, that it's wealth that makes the world turn and I want my share.” The Tippoo still lived, but he could not move. His expressionless eves stared up at Sharpe, who thought the Tippoo was dead, but then the dying man blinked. “Still here, are you?” Sharpe said. He patted the Tippoo's bloodied cheek. “You're a brave fat bastard, I will say that for you.” He wrenched the huge ruby off the blood-spattered feather plume, then stripped the dying man of every jewel he could find. He took the pearls from the Tippoo's neck, twisted off an armlet bright with gems, tugged off the diamond rings, and unlatched the silver-hung necklace of emeralds. He pulled on the Tippoo's sash to see if the dagger with the great diamond called the Moonstone in its hilt was there, but the sash held nothing except the sword scabbard. Sharpe
took that, but left the tiger-hilted sword. He lifted the blade from a puddle of sewage and placed it in the Tippoo's hand. “You can keep your sword,” he told the dying man, “for you fought proper. Like a proper soldier.” He stood up and then, awkwardly, because of his burden of jewels and because he was suddenly conscious of the dying Sultan's gaze, he saluted the Tippoo. “Take your blade to paradise,” he said; “and tell them you were killed by another proper soldier.”

The Tippoo's eyes closed and he thought of the prayer that he had copied into his notebook that very morning. “I am full of sin,” the Tippoo had written in his beautiful Arabic script, “and Thou, Allah, art a sea of mercy. Where Thy mercy is, where is my sin?” That was a comfort. There was no pain now, not even in his leg, and that was a comfort too, but still he could not move. It was like one of the dreams he copied each morning into his dream-book and he wondered at how peaceful everything suddenly seemed, as peaceful as though he was floating on a gilded barge down a warm river beneath a blessed sun. This must be the way to paradise, he thought, and he welcomed it. Paradise.

Sharpe felt a pang of sorrow for the dying man. He might have been a murderous enemy, but he was a brave one. The Tippoo had fallen with his right arm trapped beneath his body, and though Sharpe suspected there was another jeweled armlet on that hidden sleeve, he did not try to retrieve it. The Tippoo deserved to die in peace and, besides, Sharpe was rich enough already, for his pockets now held a king's ransom while a leather scabbard sewn with sapphires was hidden under his shabby coat, and so he picked up one of his empty muskets and splashed through the tunnel's bloody puddles toward the pile of dead that lay in the smoky sunlight, A sergeant of the 12th, startled by Sharpe's sudden appearance from the tunnel, snatched up his bayonet, then
saw Sharpe's filthy red jacket and let the weapon fall. “Anyone alive in there?” the Sergeant asked.

“Just a fat little fellow dying,” Sharpe said as he climbed over the barrier of the dead.

“Did he have any loot?”

“Nothing,” Sharpe said, “nothing worth the trouble. Place is full of shit, too.”

The Sergeant frowned at Sharpe's unkempt dress and unpowdered hair. “What regiment are you?”

“Not yours,” Sharpe said curtly, and walked away through the crowds of celebrating redcoats and sepoys. Not all were celebrating. Some were massacring trapped enemies. The fight had been brief but nasty, and now the winners took a bloody revenge. On the far side of the inner wall Colonel Wellesley had brought his men into the streets and they now surrounded the palace to preserve it from plunder. The smaller streets were not so fortunate, and the first screams sounded as the sepoys and redcoats found their hungry way into the unprotected alleys. The Tippoo's men, those that still lived and had escaped their pursuers, fled eastward while the Tippoo, left alone in the tunnel, lay dying.

Sergeant Richard Sharpe slung the musket and walked around the base of the inner wall, seeking a passage into the city. He had only a few moments of freedom left before the army took him back into its iron grip, but he had won his victory and he had pockets full of stones to prove it. He went to find a drink.

Next day it rained. It was not the monsoon, though it could have been, for the rain fell with a ferocity that matched the fury of the previous day's assault. The pelting warm rain washed the blood off the city's walls and scoured the hot season's filth out of its streets. The Cauvery swelled to fill its banks, rising so high that no man could have crossed the river
in front of the breach. If the Tippoo's prayers had been answered and the British had waited one more day, then the floods would have defeated them.

But there was no Tippoo in Seringapatam, only the Rajah, who had been restored to his palace where he was surrounded by red-coated guards. The palace, which had been protected from the ravages of the assaulting troops, was now being stripped hare by the victorious officers. Rain drummed on the green-tiled roof and ran into the gutters and puddled in the courtyards as the red-coated officers sawed up the great tiger throne on which the Tippoo had never sat. They turned the handles of the tiger organ and laughed as the mechanical claw savaged the redcoat's face. They tugged down silk hangings, they pried gems out of furniture and marveled at the simple, bare, white-painted room which had been the Tippoo's bedchamber. The six tigers, roaring because they had not been fed and because the rain fell so hard, were shot.

The Tippoo's father, the great Hyder Ali, lay in a mausoleum east of the city and, when the rainstorm had stopped, and while the garden around the mausoleum was still steaming in the sudden sultry sunlight, the Tippoo was carried to rest beside his father. British troops lined the route and reversed their arms as the cortege passed. Muffled drums beat a slow tattoo as the Tippoo was borne on his sad last journey by his own defeated soldiers.

Sharpe, with three bright white stripes newly sewn onto his faded red sleeve, waited close beside the domed mausoleum. “I do wonder who killed him.” Colonel McCandless, restored to a clean uniform and with his hair neatly cut, had come to stand beside Sharpe.

“Some lucky bastard, sir.”

“A rich one by now, no doubt,” the Colonel said.

“Good for him, sir,” Sharpe said, “whoever he is.”

“He'll only waste the plunder,” McCandless said severely. “He'll fritter it on women and drink.”

“Don't sound like a waste to me, sir.”

McCandless grimaced at the Sergeant's levity. “That ruby alone was worth ten years of a general's salary. Ten years!”

“A shame it's vanished, sir,” Sharpe said guilelessly.

“Isn't it, Sharpe?' McCandless agreed. “But I hear you were at the Water Gate?”

“Me, sir? No, sir. Not me, sir. I stayed with Mister Lawford, sir.”

The Colonel gave Sharpe a fierce glance. “A sergeant of the Old Dozen reports he saw a wild-looking fellow come out of the Water Gate.” McCandless's voice was accusing. “He says the man had a coat with scarlet facings and no buttons.” The Colonel looked disapprovingly at Sharpe's red coat on which Sharpe had somehow found time to stitch the sergeant's stripes, but not a single button. “The man seems very certain of what he saw.”

“He was probably confused by the battle, sir. Lost his wits, I wouldn't doubt.”

“So who put Sergeant Hakeswill in with the tigers?” McCandless demanded.

“Only the good Lord knows, sir, and He ain't saying.”

The Colonel, scenting blasphemy, frowned. “Hakeswill says it was you,” he accused Sharpe.

“Hakeswill's mad, sir, and you can't trust a thing he says,” Sharpe said. And Hakeswill was more than mad, he was alive. Somehow he had escaped the tigers. Not one of the beasts had attacked the Sergeant who been discovered babbling in the courtyard, crying for his mother and declaring his fondness for tigers. He liked all pussycats, he had said to his rescuers. “I can't be killed!” he had shouted when the redcoats led him gently away. “Touched by God, I am,” he had claimed, and then he had demanded that Sharpe be arrested
for attempted murder, but Lieutenant Lawford had blushed and sworn that Sergeant Sharpe had never left his side after the mine was blown. Colonel Gudin, a prisoner now, had confirmed the claim. The two men had been discovered in one of the city's brothels where they had been protecting the women from the drunken, rampaging victors.

“Hakeswill's a lucky man,” McCandless said drily, abandoning any further attempt to drag the truth from Sharpe. “Those tigers were man-eaters.”

“But not devil-eaters, sir. One whiff of Hakeswill and they must have gone right off their feed.”

“He still swears it was you who threw him to the tigers,” McCandless said. “I've no doubt he'll try to take his revenge.”

“I've no doubt either, sir, but I'll be ready for him.” And next time, Sharpe thought, he would make certain the bastard died.

McCandless turned as the slow funeral procession appeared at the end of the long road that led to the mausoleum. Opposite him, behind an honor guard of the King's 73rd, Appah Rao, now in the Rajah's service, also watched the cortege approach. Appah Rao's family and household all lived. McCandless had sat in Appah Rao's courtyard, a musket on his lap, and turned back every redcoat or sepoy who had come to the house. Mary had thus survived unscathed and Sharpe had heard that she would now marry her Kunwar Singh, and he was glad for her. He remembered the ruby he had once promised to give her and he smiled at the thought. Some other lass, maybe. The Tippoo's ruby was deep in his pouch, hidden like all the other looted jewels.

The muffled drumbeat came nearer and the red-coated honor guard stiffened to attention. Mourners followed the coffin, most of them the Tippoo's officers. Gudin was among them. McCandless took off his cocked hat. “There'll be more
fighting to come, Sharpe,” the Colonel said softly. “We have other enemies in India.”

“I'm sure we have, sir.”

The Colonel glanced at Sharpe. He saw a young man, hard as flint, and the restless anger in Sharpe's heart made him dangerous as flint and steel, but there was also a kindness in Sharpe. McCandless had seen that kindness in the dungeons, and McCandless believed it betrayed a soul that was well worth saving. “I may have uses for you if you're willing,” the Colonel said.

Sharpe seemed surprised. “I thought you were going home, sir. To Scotland.”

McCandless shrugged. “There's work undone here, Sharpe, work undone. And what will I ever do in Scotland but dream of India? I think I shall stay for a while.”

“And I'd be privileged to help you, sir, so I would,” Sharpe said, then he snatched off his shako as the coffin drew close. His hair, which he had still not clubbed or powdered, fell loose across his scarlet collar as he stood to attention. Far away, beyond the river, rain fell on a green land, but above Sharpe the sun shone, glistening its watery light on the mausoleum's bulging white dome beneath which, in a dark crypt under their silk-draped tombs, the Tippoo's parents lay. Now the Tippoo would join them.

The coffin was carried slowly past Sharpe. The men bearing the Tippoo were dressed in his tiger-striped tunic, while the coffin itself was draped with a great striped tiger pelt. It was a mangy skin, uncured and still bloody, but the best that could be discovered in the chaos following the city's fall, and down one flank there was a long ancient scar and Sharpe, seeing it, smiled. He had seen that scar before. He had seen it every night that he was in the Tippoo's dungeons. And now he saw it again, scored into a tiger skin that covered a brave dead king.

It was Sharpe's tiger.

T
he siege and fall of Seringapatam (now Sriringapatna) in 1 May 1799 ended decades of warfare between the remarkable Muslim dynasty that ruled the state of Mysore and the invading British. The British, under Lord Cornwallis, had captured the city before, in 1792, and at that time they decided to leave the Tippoo on his throne, but mutual antagonisms, and the Tippoo's preference for a French alliance, led to the final Mysore war. The aim of the war was simple: to do what had not been done in 1792, unthrone the Tippoo, to which end the British concocted some very thin reasons to justify an invasion of Mysore, ignored the Tippoo's overtures for peace, and so marched on Seringapatam. It was a brutally naked piece of aggression, but successful, for with the Tippoo's death the most formidable obstacle to British rule in southern India was removed, and with it the increasingly slim chance that Napoleon, then at the head of a French army stranded in Egypt, would intervene in the subcontinent.

The novel's description of the city's fall is mostly accurate. Two Forlorn Hopes, one headed by the unfortunate Sergeant Graham, led two columns of attacking troops across the wide South Cauvery and up the breach, and there the columns separated, one going north about the city's outer ramparts and the other south. Major General David Baird commanded the assault, and he, judging in the heat of battle that the
resistance to the south was more formidable, turned that way. In fact the northern column encountered the stiffest opposition, most probably caused by the Tippoo's own leadership. Many eyewitnesses, from both sides, testified to the Tippoo's personal bravery. He was gaudily dressed and bright with gems, but he insisted on fighting in the front rank of his men. Further difficulties were caused by the defenders firing from the inner wall's sheltered firestep, and it was not until Captain Goodall, the commander of the 12th Regiment's Light Company, had led his men across the buttressing cross-wall and so began the capture of the inner ramparts that the defense collapsed. The fight was short, but exceptionally bloody, causing 1.400 casualties among the attackers and over 6,000 from the Tippoo's troops.