Free Sharpe's Tiger by Bernard Cornwell

influence.
    â€œSo when will you free Mrs. Bickerstaff of Sharpe?” Morris asked, buckling his sword belt.
    â€œTonight, sir. With your help. You’ll be back here by midnight, I dare say?”
    â€œI might.”
    â€œIf you are, sir, we’ll do him. Tonight, sir.”
    Morris clapped the cocked hat on his head, made sure his purse was in his coattail pocket, and ducked under the muslin. “Carry on, Sergeant,” he called back.
    â€œSir!” Hakeswill stood to attention for a full ten secondsafter the Captain was gone, and then, with a sly grin twitching on his lumpy face, followed Morris into the night.
    Nineteen miles to the south lay a temple. It was an ancient place, deep in the country, one of the many Hindu shrines where the country folk came on high days and holidays to do honor to their gods and to pray for a timely monsoon, for good crops and for the absence of warlords. For the rest of the year the temple lay abandoned, its gods and altars and richly carved spires home to scorpions, snakes, and monkeys.
    The temple was surrounded by a wall through which one gate led, though the wall was not high and the gate was never shut. Villagers left small offerings of leaves, flowers, and food in niches of the gateposts, and sometimes they would go into the temple itself, cross the courtyard, and climb to the inner shrine where they would place their small gifts beneath the image of a god, but at night, when the Indian sky lay black over a heat-exhausted land, no one would ever dream of disturbing the gods.
    But this night, the night after battle, a man entered the temple. He was tall and thin, with white hair and a harsh, suntanned face. He was over sixty years old, but his back was still straight and he moved with the ease of a much younger man. Like many Europeans who had lived a long time in India he was prone to bouts of debilitating fever, but otherwise he was in sterling health, and Colonel Hector McCandless ascribed that good health to his religion and to a regimen that abjured alcohol, tobacco, and meat. His religion was Calvinism for Hector McCandless had grown up in Scotland and the godly lessons that had been whipped into his young, earnest soul had never been forgotten. He was an honest man, a tough man, and a wise one.
    His soul was old in experience, but even so it was offended by the idols that reflected the small light of the lantern hehad lit once he was through the temple’s ever-open gate. He had lived in India for over sixteen years now and he was more accustomed to these heathen shrines than to the kirks of his childhood, but still, whenever he saw these strange gods with their multiplicity of arms, their elephant heads, their grotesquely colored faces, and their cobra-hooded masks, he felt a stab of disapproval. He never let that disapproval show, for that would have imperiled his duty, and McCandless was a man who believed that duty was a master second only to God.
    He wore the red coat and the tartan kilt of the King’s Scotch Brigade, a Highland regiment that had not seen McCandless’s stern features for sixteen years. He had served with the brigade for over thirty years, but lack of funds had obstructed his promotion and so, with his Colonel’s blessing, he had accepted a job with the army of the East India Company which governed those parts of India that were under British rule. In his time he had commanded battalions of sepoys, but McCandless’s first love was surveying. He had mapped the Carnatic coast, he had charted the Sundarbans of the Hoogli, and he had once ridden the length and breadth of Mysore, and while he had been so engaged he had learned a half-dozen Indian languages and met a score of princes, rajahs, and nawabs. Few men understood India as McCandless did, which was why the Company had promoted him to Colonel and attached him to the British army as its chief of intelligence. It was McCandless’s task to advise General Harris of