Wellington listened in silence. He remembered Sharpe as a Sergeant. They had covered many miles together and much time. He saw the distress on Hogan’s face, understood it, but did not know what words to say. He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Hogan. I’m sorry.”

“Yes, sir.” It suddenly struck Hogan that life hereafter would seem anti-climactic, inadequate, and dull. Richard Sharpe was dead.

The surgeons had not lied to Major Hogan. They remembered Patrick Harper, stunned cold by the fall, and they had probed and palpated and found nothing broken and so he had been put into a ward where he could snore until he recovered consciousness.

There was another man involved in the fight on the upper cloister. When he reached the surgeon he was still breathing, but shallowly, and unconsciousness had blessedly released him from his pain. An orderly had stripped off the empty scabbard and sword belt, slit the shirt from the man’s back, and seen the old flogging scars. The body was lifted onto the stained table.

The surgeon, spattered with fresh blood that gleamed over the clotted, coagulated stains from the week’s operations, caught at Sharpe’s overalls, split them down with huge shears, and saw the wound low and right in Sharpe’s abdomen. He shook his head and swore. The blood welled up in the small bullet hole, spilt and pulsed onto the wounded man’s thigh and waist, and the surgeon did not even bother to pick up a knife. He leaned close to the muscled chest and noted that the breathing was shallow, so shallow as to be almost inaudible, and then he picked up the wrist. For a moment he could not find the pulse, was about to give up, and then he felt it; a thready, weak throb of a tiny heartbeat. He nodded at the orderly, then at the wound. “Close it.”

There was not much he could do, except stop the man bleeding to death and sometimes he thought that would be a mercy with this kind of wound. One orderly grasped Sharpe’s feet, held them tight, the second pinched the skin over the wound, pushing the flesh, blood and driven uniform threads together, and keeping his fingers clear of the welling hole. The surgeon crossed to the brazier, took out the poker, and cauterized the puncture. The wounded man jerked, gasped and moaned, but unconsciousness held him, and the bleeding stopped. Smoke hung over the bloody abdomen, the stink of burned flesh was in the surgeon’s nostrils. „put a bandage on. Take him away.“

The orderly who had closed the wound nodded. “No hope, sir?”

“No.” The bullet was inside. The surgeon could take a leg off in ninety seconds, he could probe for a bullet and pluck it from next to a thighbone in sixty, he could set broken limbs, he could even take a bullet from a man’s chest if it had not pierced a lung, but no one on earth, not even Napoleon’s famous Surgeon-General Larrey, could take out a bullet that had lodged in the lower right abdomen. This was a dead man. Already the breathing was shallow, the skin palloring, and the pulse going. The sooner he died, the better, for the rest of his life would be pain. It would be a short life. The wound would abscess, the rot would set in, and he would be buried within the week. The surgeon, irritated with himself for his thoroughness, heaved up Sharpe’s side and saw that there was no exit wound. Instead he saw the flogging scars. A troublemaker come to a bad end. “Take him downstairs. Next!”

They bandaged him, stripped him naked, and his clothes, such as they were, were tossed into a corner where they could be searched at leisure. Many men hid coins in the seams of their clothes and the orderlies reaped a tidy reward for their work. One of them looked at the pale face. “Who is he?”

“Dunno. French, I suppose.” Sharpe’s overalls were French.

“Don’t be stupid. French don’t flog their buggers.”

„They do!“

„They bloody don’t!“

“Doesn’t bloody matter. He’s dying. Give ‘im to Connelley. That’s what the doctor said. ”

Sergeant Harper could have told them that Sharpe was a British officer, but Sergeant Harper was unconscious in a ward, and Sharpe had borne no marks of rank, just the scars of a flogging that had been given him by Obadiah Hakeswill in an Indian village years before. He looked like a private, he was treated as a private, and he was carried down the damp steps to the cellar where the doctors left their hopeless cases to die. The death room.

Sergeant Michael Connelley, dying himself of alcoholic poisoning, heard the steps and turned his huge, fatty bulk round. “What you got?”

“Dunno, Sarge. Could be a frog, could be one of ours, but he ain’t saying.”

Connelley looked at the face, at the bandage, and tapped a quick sign of the cross on his chest. “Poor sod. At least he’s quiet. All right, boys, down the far end. We’ve some wee space left.” Connelley sat down on his bench, tipped the rum bottle to his face, and watched as the new man was carried into the darkness of the dank, bricked cellar. “Any money on him?”

“No, sarge. Poor as a bloody Irishman.”

“You watch yourself!” Connelley growled. He spat on the floor. They should have put me with the officers upstairs. There’s some rare money up there.“ He drank again.

They pushed Sharpe into the wall, laying him on a thin, lumpy straw palliasse, and his head was in the low space where the brick arch met the floor. There was a pile of dirty blankets under the single window, a small grating at the very top of the arch, and the orderly spread one on the naked body that had curled its legs into the foetal position. There you are, Sarge, all yours.“

“And in good hands he is, too.” Connelley was not an unkind man. Few would want his job, yet he did not mind. He tried to make the last hours of his dying charges as gentle as he could, yet even in death he expected men to have standards. Especially if there were Frenchmen dying in his room. Then he would lecture the wounded British, admonish them to die like men, not to disgrace themselves in front of the enemy. “You’ll be getting a proper funeral, will you not?” he would say, “with the whole regiment and reversed arms, the proper honours, and you’re making a noise like a wee girl. Shame on you, man, and will you not die well?”

He gestured to the other end of the room and spoke to the orderlies. “There is a dead one up there.”

It was cold in the death room. Connelley drank steadily. Some men breathed noisily, some moaned, and some talked. The big Sergeant prowled the central aisle from time to time, carrying a water bucket and ladle, and he would feel the feet of the patients to see if they had died. He came to Sharpe and crouched beside him. The breathing was shallow, moaning slightly in his throat, and Connelley put a hand on the naked shoulder and it was cold. “Ah, you poor man. You’ll catch your death!” He lumbered to the window, found another blanket, shook it as if he could free it of the lice that infested its seams, and spread it on top of the other blanket. A man at the far end cried out, caught in sudden pain, and Connelley screwed himself round. “Whoa there, lad! Whoa! Gentle now! Die well, die well.”

A Frenchman cried and Connelley squatted beside him, took the man’s hand, and talked of Ireland. He told the uncomprehending Frenchman of Connaught’s beauty, of its women, of fields so fat that a lamb was full grown in a week, of rivers so thick that the fish begged to be caught, and the Frenchman quieted and Connelley patted his hair and told him he was brave, and he was proud of him, and beyond the small grating the sky darkened into dusk and the orderlies came down again and dragged the Frenchman, who had died, head-bumping up the steps.

The pain was like a dream in Sharpe, and sometimes he floated up through the layers of pain and he cried out and at other times he was deep in its suffocating folds and the dream writhed inside him, separate from him, but part of him, pinned to him like the lance held in the Indian soldier’s hands that had pinned him to the tree outside Seringapatam, except this was dark, dark, and he cried out, sobbing because of the pain.