LITMIR.BIZ

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didn’t want to draw attention to myself.’

      ‘When you’re my age, my dear, no one pays you any attention at all, so you should take all you can get while you’re young. You say you’re a widow?’

      ‘He was an Englishman,’ Mary said nervously, explaining the lack of the marriage mark on her forehead and worried lest the older woman thought she should have thrown herself onto her husband’s pyre.

      ‘Well, you’re a free woman now, so let’s make you expensive.’ Lakshmi laughed and then, helped by her daughters, she first brushed and then combed Mary’s hair, drawing it back and then gathering it into a bun at the nape of her neck. A cheerful maid brought in an armful of clothes and the women tossed cholis at her. ‘Choose one,’ Lakshmi said. The choli was a brief blouse that covered Mary’s breasts, shoulders and upper arms, but left most of her back naked and Mary instinctively selected the most modest, but Lakshmi would have none of it. ‘That lovely pale skin of yours, show it off!’ she said, and chose a brief choli patterned in extravagant swirls of scarlet flowers and yellow leaves. Lakshmi tugged the short sleeves straight. ‘So why did you run with those two men?’ Lakshmi asked.

      ‘There was a man back in the army. A bad man. He wanted to …’ Mary stopped and shrugged. ‘You know.’

      ‘Soldiers!’ Lakshmi said disapprovingly. ‘But the two men you ran away with, did they treat you well?’

      ‘Yes, oh yes.’ Mary suddenly wanted Lakshmi’s good opinion, and that opinion would not be good if she thought that Mary had run from the army with a lover. ‘One of them’ – she told the lie shyly – ‘is my half-brother.’

      ‘Ah!’ Lakshmi said as though everything was clear now. Her husband had told her that Mary had run with her lover, but Lakshmi decided to accept Mary’s story. ‘And the other man?’ she asked.

      ‘He’s just a friend of my brother’s.’ Mary blushed at the lie, but Lakshmi did not seem to notice. ‘They were both protecting me,’ Mary explained.

      ‘That’s good. That’s good. Now, this.’ She held out a white petticoat that Mary stepped into. Lakshmi laced it tight at the back, then began hunting through the pile of saris. ‘Green,’ she said, ‘that’ll suit you,’ and she unfolded a vast bolt of green silk that was four feet wide and over twenty feet long. ‘You know how to wear a sari?’ Lakshmi asked.

      ‘My mother taught me.’

      ‘In Calcutta?’ Lakshmi hooted. ‘What do they know of saris in Calcutta? Skimpy little northern things, that’s all they are. Here, let me.’ Lakshmi wrapped the first length of sari about Mary’s slender waist and tucked it firmly into the petticoat’s waistband, then she wrapped a further length about the girl, but this she skilfully flicked into pleated folds that were again firmly anchored in the petticoat’s waistband. Mary could easily have done the job herself, but Lakshmi took such pleasure in it that it would have been cruel to have denied her. By the time the pleats were tucked in about half of the sari had been used up, and the rest Lakshmi looped over Mary’s left shoulder, then tugged at the silk so that it fell in graceful folds. Then she stepped back. ‘Perfect! Now you can come and help us in the kitchens. We’ll burn those old clothes.’

      In the mornings Mary taught the General’s three small boys English. They were bright children and learned quickly and the hours passed pleasantly enough. In the afternoons she helped in the household chores, but in the early evening it was her job to light the oil lamps about the house and it was that duty that threw Mary into the company of Kunwar Singh who, at about the same time as the lamps were lit, went round the house ensuring that the shutters were barred and the outer doors and gates either locked or guarded. He was the chief of Appah Rao’s bodyguard, but his duties were more concerned with the household than with the General who had enough soldiers surrounding him wherever he went in the city. Kunwar Singh, Mary learned, was a distant relation of the General, but there was something oddly sad about the tall young man whose manners were so courteous but also so distant.

      ‘We don’t talk about it,’ Lakshmi said to Mary one afternoon when they were both hulling rice.

      ‘I’m sorry I asked.’

      ‘His father was disgraced, you see,’ Lakshmi went on enthusiastically. ‘And so the whole family was disgraced. Kunwar’s father managed some of our land near Sedasseer, and he stole from us! Stole! And when he was found out, instead of throwing himself on my husband’s mercy, he became a bandit. The Tippoo’s men caught him in the end and cut his head off. Poor Kunwar. It’s hard to live down that sort of disgrace.’

      ‘Is it a worse disgrace than having been married to an Englishman?’ Mary asked miserably, for somehow, in this lively house, she did feel obscurely ashamed. She was half English herself, but under Lakshmi’s swamping affection, she kept remembering her mother who had been rejected by her own people for marrying an Englishman.

      ‘A disgrace? Married to an Englishman? What nonsense you do talk, girl!’ Lakshmi said, and the next day she took care to send Mary to deliver a present of food to the young deposed Rajah of Mysore who survived at the Tippoo’s mercy in a small house just east of the Inner Palace. ‘But you can’t go alone,’ Lakshmi said, ‘not with the streets full of soldiers. Kunwar!’ And Lakshmi saw the blush of happiness on Mary’s face as she set off in the tall Kunwar Singh’s protective company.

      Mary was happy, but she felt guilty. She knew she ought to try and find Sharpe for she suspected he must be missing her, but she was suddenly so content in Appah Rao’s household that she did not want to disturb that happiness by returning to her old world. She felt at home and, though the city was surrounded by enemies, she felt oddly safe. One day, she supposed, she would have to find Sharpe, and perhaps everything would turn out well on that day, but Mary did nothing to hasten it. She just felt guilty and made sure that she did not start lighting the lamps until she heard the first shutter bar fall.

      And Lakshmi, who had been wondering just where she might find poor disgraced Kunwar Singh a suitable bride, chuckled.

      Once the British and Hyderabad armies had made their permanent encampment to the west of Seringapatam the siege settled into a pattern that both sides recognized. The allied armies stayed well out of the range of even the largest cannon on the city’s wall and far beyond the reach of any rocket, but they established a picquet line facing an earth-banked aqueduct that wended its way through the fields about a mile west of the city and there they posted some field artillery and infantry to cover the land across which they would dig their approach ditches. The sooner those ditches were begun the sooner the breaching batteries could be built, but to the south of that chosen ground the steeply banked aqueduct made a deep loop that penetrated a half-mile westwards and the inside of that bend was filled by a tope, a thick wood, and from its leafy cover the Tippoo’s men kept up a galling musket fire on the British picquet line, while his rocketmen rained an erratic but troublesome barrage of missiles onto the forward British works. One lucky rocket streaked a thousand yards to hit an ammunition limber and the resultant explosion caused a cheer to sound from the distant walls of the city.

      General Harris endured the rocket bombardment for two days, then decided it was time to capture the whole length of the aqueduct and clear the tope. Orders were written and trickled down from general to colonel to captains, and the captains sought out their sergeants. ‘Get the men ready, Sergeant,’ Morris told Hakeswill.

      Hakeswill was sitting in his own tent, a luxury he alone enjoyed among the 33rd’s sergeants. The tent had belonged to Captain Hughes and should have been auctioned with the rest of the Captain’s belongings after Hughes died of the fever, but Hakeswill had simply claimed the tent and no one had liked to cross him. His servant Raziv, a miserable half-witted creature from Calcutta, was polishing Hakeswill’s boots so the Sergeant had to come bare-footed from his tent to face Morris. ‘Ready, sir?’ he said. ‘They are ready, sir.’ He stared suspiciously about the Light Company’s lines. ‘Better be ready, sir, or we’ll have the skin off the lot of them.’ His face jerked.

      ‘Sixty rounds of ammunition,’ Morris said.

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