them, though none knew how to bleed a horse, for that was a job left to servants, but finally a Scottish major averred that he had a shrewd idea of how the thing was done, and so he was given the fleam and its hammer. He took off his red coat, chose a fleam blade at random and stepped up to the shivering stallion. He placed the blade on the horse’s neck and drew back the hammer with his right hand.
‘Not like that!’ Sharpe blurted out. ‘You’ll kill him!’ A score of men stared at him while the Scottish Major, the blade unhit, looked rather relieved. ‘You’ve got the blade the wrong way round, sir,’ Sharpe explained. ‘You have to line it up along the vein, sir, not across it.’ He was blushing for having spoken out in front of the General and all the army’s senior officers.
Wellesley scowled at Sharpe. ‘Can you bleed a horse?’
‘I can’t ride the things, sir, but I do know how to bleed them. I worked in an inn yard,’ Sharpe added as though that was explanation enough.
‘Have you actually bled a horse?’ Wellesley demanded. He showed not the slightest surprise at seeing a man from his old battalion in the camp, but in truth he was far too distracted by his stallion’s distress to worry about mere men.
‘I’ve bled dozens, sir,’ Sharpe said, which was true, but those horses had been big heavy carriage beasts, and this white stallion was plainly a thoroughbred.
‘Then do it, damn it,’ the General said. ‘Don’t just stand there, do it!’
Sharpe took the fleam and the blood stick from the Major. The fleam looked like a misshapen penknife, and inside its brass case were folded a dozen blades. Two of the blades were shaped as hooks, while the rest were spoon-shaped. He selected a middle-sized spoon, checked that its edge was keen, folded the other blades away and then approached the horse. ‘You’ll have to hold him hard,’ he told the dragoon orderly.
‘He can be lively, Sergeant,’ the orderly warned in a low voice, anxious not to provoke another outburst from Wellesley.
‘Then hang on hard,’ Sharpe said to the orderly, then he stroked the horse’s neck, feeling for the jugular.
‘How much are you going to let out?’ Wellesley asked.
‘Much as it takes, sir,’ Sharpe said, who really had no idea how much blood he should spill. Enough to make it look good, he reckoned. The horse was nervous and tried to pull away from the orderly. ‘Give him a stroke, sir,’ Sharpe said to the General. ‘Let him know it ain’t the end of the world.’
Wellesley took the stallion’s head from the orderly and gave the beast’s nose a fondling. ‘It’s all right, Diomed,’ he said, ‘we’re going to make you better. Get on with it, Sharpe.’
Sharpe had found the jugular and now placed the sharp curve of the spoon-blade over the vein. He held the knife in his left hand and the blood stick in his right. The stick was a small wooden club that was needed to drive the fleam’s blade through a horse’s thick skin. ‘All right, boy,’ he murmured to the horse, ‘just a prick, nothing bad,’ and then he struck the blade hard with the stick’s blunt head.
The fleam sliced through hair and skin and flesh straight into the vein, and the horse reared up, but Sharpe, expecting the reaction, held the fleam in place as warm blood spurted out over his shako. ‘Hold him!’ he snapped at Wellesley, and the General seemed to find nothing odd in being ordered about by a sergeant and he obediently hauled Diomed’s head down. ‘That’s good,’ Sharpe said, ‘that’s good, just keep him there, sir, keep him there,’ and he skewed the blade slightly to open the slit in the vein and so let the blood pulse out. It ran red down the white horse’s flank, it soaked Sharpe’s red coat and puddled at his feet.
The horse shivered, but Sharpe sensed that the stallion was calming. By relaxing the pressure on the fleam he could lessen the blood flow and after a while he slowed it to a trickle and then, when the horse had stopped shivering, Sharpe pulled the blade free. His right hand and arm were drenched in blood.
He spat on his clean left hand, then wiped the small wound. ‘I reckon he’ll live, sir,’ he told the General, ‘but a bit of ginger in his feed might help.’ That was another trick he had learned at the coaching tavern.
Wellesley stroked Diomed’s nose and the horse, suddenly unconcerned by the fuss all about him, lowered his head and cropped at a miserable tuft of grass. The General smiled, his bad mood gone. ‘I’m greatly obliged to you, Sharpe,’ Wellesley said, relinquishing the bridle into the orderly’s grasp. ‘ ’Pon my soul, I’m greatly obliged to you,’ he repeated enthusiastically. ‘As neat a blood-letting as ever I did see.’ He put a hand into his pocket and brought out a haideri that he offered to Sharpe. ‘Well done, Sergeant.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Sharpe said, taking the gold coin. It was a generous reward.
‘Good as new, eh?’ Wellesley said, admiring the horse. ‘He was a gift.’
‘An expensive one,’ McCandless observed drily.
‘A valued one,’ Wellesley said. ‘Poor Ashton left him to me in his will. You knew Ashton, McCandless?’
‘Of course, sir.’ Henry Ashton had been Colonel of the 12th, a Suffolk regiment posted to India, and he had died after taking a bullet in the liver during a duel.
‘A damned shame,’ Wellesley said, ‘but a fine gift. Pure Arab blood, McCandless.’
Most of the pure Arab blood seemed to be on Sharpe, but the General was delighted with the horse’s sudden improvement. Indeed, Sharpe had never seen Wellesley so animated. He grinned as he watched the horse, then he told the orderly to walk Diomed up and down, and he grinned even more widely as he watched the horse move. Then, suddenly aware that the men about him were taking an amused pleasure from his own delight, his face drew back into its accustomed cold mask. ‘Obliged to you, Sharpe,’ he said yet again, then he turned and walked towards his tent. ‘McCandless! Come and give me your news!’
McCandless and Sevajee followed the General and his aides into the tent, leaving Sharpe trying to wipe the blood from his hands. The dragoon orderly grinned at him. ‘That’s a six-hundred-guinea horse you just bled, Sergeant,’ he said.
‘Bloody hell!’ Sharpe said, staring in disbelief at the dragoon. ‘Six hundred!’
‘Must be worth that. Best horse in India, Diomed is.’
‘And you look after him?’ Sharpe asked.
The orderly shook his head. ‘He’s got grooms to look after his horses, and the farrier to bleed and shoe them. My job is to follow him into battle, see? And when one horse gets tired I give him another.’
‘You drag all those six horses around?’ Sharpe asked, astonished.
‘Not all six of them,’ the dragoon said, ‘only two or three. But he shouldn’t have six horses anyway. He only wants five, but he can’t find anyone to buy the spare. You don’t know anyone who wants to buy a horse, do you?’
‘Hundreds of the buggers,’ Sharpe said, gesturing at the encampment. ‘Every bleeding infantryman over there for a start.’
‘It’s theirs if they’ve got four hundred guineas,’ the orderly said. ‘It’s that bay gelding, see?’ He pointed. ‘Six years old and good as gold.’
‘No use looking at me,’ Sharpe said. ‘I hate the bloody things.’
‘You do?’
‘Lumpy, smelly beasts. I’m happier on my feet.’
‘You see the world from a horse’s back,’ the dragoon said, ‘and catch women’s eyes.’
‘So they’re not entirely useless,’ Sharpe said and the orderly grinned. He was a happy, round-faced young man with tousled brown hair and a ready smile. ‘How come you’re the General’s orderly?’ Sharpe asked him.
The dragoon shrugged.