Chapter Text
India, October 1803
Davy paused outside Major General Arthur Wellesley’s tent to drag an already-damp handkerchief across her sweaty brow. Her uniform was stuck to her as though with paste. She wasn’t sure how she was going to get the salt stains out of her ridiculous red wool coat, but that was a problem for later. The problem at hand was far more pressing. Nothing for it but to present her translation and her analysis of it as best as she could. Welly, a man whose mind was even sharper than his beak, was unlikely to be sympathetic to her lack of fluency with the Devanagari script.
Inside, Wellesley was seated behind his desk, alone, without his usual Dragoon Orderly and staff. She saluted. Davy had come through the Battle of Assaye a month ago with fewer injuries than the dead bastard used to deal her on any given Saturday night, but it didn’t make army protocols feel any more natural. An Ensign addressing a Major General directly was simply not done, but when questioned, the sullen Sergeant who’d been sent to fetch her simply raised one underfed shoulder in a shrug. Despite the heat, his shako was pulled down so far over his forehead that she couldn’t make out his face, just a square jaw, unkempt straw-coloured hair tied in a tail, and the general demeanour of a brawler.
“Don’t know, Sir. I were ordered to tell you he wants to see you, so I’m telling you he wants to see you. Sir.”
Yes, the rankers as a rule despised the “young gentlemen”, and from what Davy had seen of most of her fellow Ensigns and Lieutenants, she couldn’t blame the rankers in the slightest. She couldn’t help but respect their way of making “Sir” sound like a deadly insult when it suited them. That Sergeant, as an example, couldn’t possibly know that less than a year ago she’d been scraping out a living in as foul a rookery as ever disgraced an English city.
But Wellesley, and she was sure the man was well aware of the dynamics between the enlisted and the officers, because as far as she could tell the only other men alive who knew as much or more about the inner workings of the army were Hogan and Nairn, was not waiting for Davy to get her thoughts in order. He was waiting for her to share her findings.
“It’s a recipe, Sir, as best as I can make out.”
Wellesley placed the flats of his palms on his desk and leaned forward, waiting for Davy to elaborate. That was a good word, elaborate. She learnt it from one of the books Hogan loaned her to pass some of the time on the ship from London.
“I don’t think anyone would waste ink and paper to write down a spice mix that they could buy in any bleeding market stall.”
Wellesley’s oversized nostrils flared. The letter of introduction Hogan wrote mentioned that “Ensign Davy’s lack of polish is more than made up for by quick wit and courage.” Still, she was on dangerous ground. She hurriedly tried to correct course.
“What I mean, Sir, is that I think each of these ingredients is a stand in for something else.”
His voice took on a dry tone. “Not unlike a children’s nursery rhyme warning of French spies stealing weapons secrets.”
Whatever reaction Nosey was expecting, Davy wasn’t going to give it to him. “Yes, Sir, I imagine something like that. I’m still working on learning my Devanagari writing, but I cross-referenced it with a map and this might be about Scindia’s troop movements. I think he’s heading to Gawilghur to regroup. May I show you on your map?”
He nodded and so she put the note beside the map. “Each of these ingredients begins with the same letter as the beginning of towns on the map, and they trace a course there, with a stop at Argaon, because that’s repeated three times in this list.”
Davy found herself dismissed, to double check, and get an ear to the ground, and with a fresh stack of notes to translate and analyse.
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The Colonel told the Major and the Major told the Captain, who told the Lieutenant, who couldn’t be arsed to do it himself and ordered Sergeant Richard Sharpe to find the new Ensign and tell him that Nosey needed to speak to him. And so Sharpe went in search of this Ensign Davis or…whatever the Lieutenant said. Sharpe didn’t always pay much mind to what the Lieutenants were saying beyond making sure he wasn't going to catch another flogging, on account of how they didn’t tend to be around for long. If the fighting didn’t end them, then illness from this hot climate almost surely did.
Sharpe found the Ensign frowning at a piece of paper in a patch of shade just outside the officer’s mess. The slightly-built young lad looked to be no older than Sharpe had been when first he saw action in Flanders. With a face pretty enough to be a girl and not even his full adult height, Sharpe thought he would be eaten alive by any men he was assigned to. For his own sake, Sharpe hoped the lad could fight.
Yet, the Ensign’s West Country accent bore no trace of the education that the young gentlemen usually had as he asked Sharpe why Welly wanted to see him. Why indeed, as though a Sergeant on his second set of stripes after the first has been stripped from him along with most of the skin on his back, would be privy to any of the whys of the army. On second thought, the Ensign’s first reaction had been to ask Sharpe a question in a way that treated him as worthy of respect. Sharpe found himself hoping that this Ensign would make it through the heat and churn and perhaps get promoted. If he treated the soldiers under him with the same type of respect he’d just shown Sharpe, they might even want him to survive.