"Welcome to Chasalgaon, sir," Leonard said. He was not certain he ought to call the stranger "sir", for the man wore no visible badge of rank on his red coat, but he carried himself like a senior officer and he reacted to Leonard's greeting with a lordly nonchalance.

"You're invited to dine with us, sir," Leonard added, hurrying after the horseman who, having tucked his riding crop under his belt, now led his sepoys straight onto the parade ground. He stopped his horse under the flagpole from which the British flag drooped in the windless air, then waited as his company of red-coated sepoys divided into two units of two ranks each that marched either side of the flagpole. Crosby watched from inside his tent. It was a flamboyant entrance, the Major decided.

"Halt!" the strange officer shouted when his company was in the very centre of the fort. The sepoys halted. "Outwards turn! Ground fire locks! Good morning!" He at last looked down at Captain Leonard. "Are you Crosby?"

"No, sir. I'm Captain Leonard, sir. And you, sir?"

The tall man ignored the question. He scowled about Chasalgaon's fort as though he disapproved of everything he saw. What the hell was this? Leonard wondered. A surprise inspection?

"Shall I have your horse watered, sir?" Leonard offered.

"In good time, Captain, all in good time," the mysterious officer said, then he twisted in, his saddle and growled an order to his company. "Fix bayonets!"

The sepoys pulled out their seventeen-inch blades and slotted them onto the muzzles of their muskets.

"I like to offer a proper salute to a fellow Englishman," the tall man explained to Leonard. "You are English, aren't you?"

"Yes, sir."

"Too many damned Scots in the Company," the tall man grumbled. "Have you ever noticed that, Leonard? Too many Scots and Irish. Glib sorts of fellow, they are, but they ain't English. Not English at all."