"You're undressed! " She sounded alarmed.
"Not quite, " Sharpe said, then understood her fear.
"My clothes were soaking, " he explained, 'so I took them off. Didn't want to wet the bed, eh? And I've still got my shirt on."
"Is it raining? I didn't hear it."
"It was blood, " he said, then rummaged under the blanket he had borrowed from Syud Sevajee and found Torrance's pouch.
Clare heard the rattle of stones.
"What is it?"
"Just stones, " he said, 'pebbles." He put the twenty jewels he had retrieved from Kendrick and Lowry into the pouch, stowed it safe under the blanket, then lay down. He doubted he had found every stone, but he reckoned he had retrieved most of them. They had been loose in the two privates' pockets, not even hidden away in their coat seams. God, he felt tired and his body had still not recovered from Hakeswill's kicking. It hurt to breathe, the bruises were tender and a tooth was still loose.
"What happened out there?" Clare asked.
"The engineers put the gab ions in place. When it's light they'll scrape the gun platform and make the magazines, and tomorrow night they'll bring up the guns."
"What happened to you?" Clare amended her question.
Sharpe was silent for a while.
"I looked up some old friends, " he said.
But he had missed Hakeswill, damn it, and Hakeswill would be doubly alert now. Still, a chance would come. He grinned as he remembered Morris's scared voice. The Captain was a bully to his men and a to adie to his superiors.
"Did you kill someone?" Clare asked.
"Two men, " he admitted, 'but it should have been three."
"Why?"
He sighed.
"Because they were bad men, " he said simply, then reflected it was a true answer.
"And because they tried to kill me, " he added, 'and they robbed me. You knew them, " he went on.
"Kendrick and Lowry."
"They were horrid, " Clare said softly.
"They used to stare at me."
"Can't blame them for that, love."
She was silent for a while. The laughter of the sappers was subsiding as men drifted towards their tents. The wind gusted at the tent's entrance and brought the smell of burnt powder from the rocky isthmus where patches of grass still flamed around the exhausted rocket tubes.
"Everything's gone wrong, hasn't it?" Clare said.
"It's being put right, " Sharpe replied.
"For you, " she said.
Again she was silent, and Sharpe suspected she was crying.
"I'll get you home to Madras, " he said.
"And what'll happen to me there?"
"You'll be all right, lass. I'll give you a pair of my magic pebbles."
"What I want, " she said softly, 'is to go home. But I can't afford it."
"Marry a soldier, " Sharpe said, 'and be carried home with him." He thought of Eli Lockhart who had been admiring Clare from a distance.
They would suit each other, Sharpe thought.
She was crying very softly.
"Torrance said he'd pay my way home when I'd paid off the debt, " she said.
"Why would he make you work for one passage, then give you another?" Sharpe asked.
"He was a lying bastard."
"He seemed so kind at first."
"We're all like that, " Sharpe said.
"Soft as lights when you first meet a woman, then you get what you want and it changes. I don't know.
Maybe not every time."
"Charlie wasn't like that, " Clare said.
"Charlie? Your husband?"
"He was always good to me."
Sharpe lay back. The light of the dying fires nickered in the tent's loose weave. If it rained, he thought, the cloth would leak like a pepper pot.
"There are good men and bad, " he said.
"What are you?" Clare asked.
"I think I'm good, " he said, 'but I don't know. All the time I get into trouble, and I only know one way out. I can fight. I can do that all right."
"Is that what you want? To fight?"
"God knows what I want." He laughed softly.
"I wanted to be an officer more than I'd wanted anything in my life! I dreamed of it, I did. I wanted it so bad that it hurt, and then the dream came true and it woke me up and I wondered why I'd wanted it so much." He paused.
Syud Sevajee's horses stamped their feet softly behind the tent.
"Some buggers are trying to persuade me to leave the army. Sell the commission, see? They don't want me."
"Why not?"
"Because I piss in their soup, lass."
"So will you leave?"
He shrugged.
"Don't want to." He thought about it.
"It's like a club, a society. They don't really want me, so they chuck me out, and then I have to fight my way back in. But why do I do it if they don't want me? I don't know. Maybe it'll be different in the Rifles. I'll try 'em, anyway, and see if they're different."
"You want to go on fighting?" Clare asked.
"It's what I'm good at, " Sharpe said.
"And I do enjoy it. I mean I know you shouldn't, but there ain't any other excitement like it."
"None?"
"Well, one." He grinned in the dark.
There was a long silence, and he thought Clare had fallen asleep, but then she spoke again.
"How about your French widow?"
"She's gone, " Sharpe said flatly.
"Gone?"
"She buggered off, love. Took some money of mine and went. Gone to America, I'm told."
Clare lay in silence again.
"Don't you worry about being alone?" she asked after a while.
"No."
"I do."
He turned towards her, propped himself on an elbow and stroked her hair. She stiffened as he touched her, then relaxed to the gentle pressure of his hand.
"You ain't alone, lass, " Sharpe said.
"Or only if you want to be. You got trapped, that's all. It happens to everyone. But you're out now. You're free." He stroked her hair down to her neck and felt warm bare skin under his hand. She did not move and he softly stroked farther down.
"You're undressed, " he said.
"I was warm, " she said in a small voice.
"What's worse?" Sharpe asked.
"Being warm or being lonely?"
He thought she smiled. He could not tell in the dark, but he thought she smiled.
"Being lonely, " she said very softly.
"We can look after that, " he said, lifting the thin blanket and moving to her side.
She had stopped crying. Somewhere outside a cock crowed and the eastern cliffs were touched with the first gold of the day. The fires on the rocky neck of land flickered and died, their smoke drifting like patches of thin mist. Bugles called from the main encampment, summoning the redcoats to the morning parade. The night picquets were relieved as the sun rose to flood the world with light.
Where Sharpe and Clare slept.
"You abandoned the dead men?" Wellesley growled.
Captain Morris blinked as a gust of wind blew dust into one of his eyes.
"I tried to bring the bodies in, " he lied, 'but it was dark, sir. Very dark. Colonel Kenny can vouch for that, sir. He visited us."
"I visited you?" Kenny, lean, tall and irascible, was standing beside the General.
"I visited you?" he asked again, his inflection rising to outrage.
"Last night, sir, " Morris answered in plaintive indignation.
"On the picquet line."
"I did no such thing. Sun's gone to your head." Kenny glowered at Morris, then took a snuff box from a pocket and placed a pinch on his hand.
"Who the devil are you, anyway?" he added.
"Morris, sir. 33rd."
"I thought we had nothing but Scots and sepoys here, " Kenny said to Wellesley.