What do I do now, Grace? He often talked to her. She was not there to listen, not now, but he still talked to her. She had taught him so much, she had encouraged him to read and tried to make him think, but nothing lasts. Nothing. “Bloody hell, Grace,” he said aloud and men on the street gave him room, thinking him either mad or drunk. “Bloody hell.” The anger was welling inside him, thick and dark, a fury that wanted to explode in violence or else drown itself in drink. Three shillings and threepence bloody halfpenny. He could get well drunk on that, but the ale and gin he had taken at midday was already sour in his belly. What he wanted was to hurt someone, anyone. Just a blind, desperate anger.

He had not planned it this way. He thought he would come to London, borrow an advance from an army agent, and then go away. Back to India, he had thought. Other men went there poor and came back rich. Sharpe the nabob and why not? Because he could not sell his rank, that was why not. Some snotty child with a rich father could buy and sell his rank, but a real soldier who had fought his way up the ladder could not. Bugger them all. So what now? Ebenezer Fairley, the merchant who had sailed with Sharpe from India, had offered him a job, and Sharpe supposed he could walk to Cheshire and beg from the man, but he had no urge to start that journey now. He just wanted to vent his anger and so, reassured that it was indeed Friday, he walked toward the Tower. The street stank of the river, coal smoke and horse dung. There was wealth in this part of London that lay so close to the docks and to the Custom House and to the big warehouses crammed with spices, tea and silks. This was a district of counting houses, bankers and merchants, a conduit for the world’s wealth, but the money was not displayed. A few clerks hurried from one office to another, but there were no crossing sweepers and none of the signs of luxury that filled the elegant streets to the city’s west. The buildings here were tall, dark and secret, and it was impossible to tell whether the gray-haired man scuttling with a ledger under his arm was a merchant prince or a worn-out clerk.