Chase was living ashore while his ship was cleaned of the weed. “We tip her over, scrape her copper-sheathed bum clean when the tide’s low, and float her off,” he explained as servants brought coffee, boiled eggs, bread rolls, ham, cold chicken and a basket of mangoes. “Bum-scrubbing is a damned nuisance. All the guns have to be shipped and half the contents of the hold dragged out, but she’ll sail like a beauty when it’s done. Have more eggs than that, Sharpe! You must be hungry. I am. Like the house? It belongs to my wife’s first cousin. He’s a trader here, though right now he’s up in the hills doing whatever traders do when they’re making themselves rich. It was his steward who alerted me to Nana Rao’s tricks. Sit down, Sharpe, sit down. Eat.”

They took their breakfast in the shade of a wide verandah that looked out on a small garden, a road and the sea. Chase was gracious, generous and apparently oblivious of the vast gulf that existed between a mere ensign, the lowest of the army’s commissioned ranks, and a post captain who was officially the equivalent of an army colonel, though on board his own ship such a man outranked the very powers of heaven. Sharpe had been conscious of that wide gulf at first, but it had gradually dawned on him that Joel Chase was genuinely good-natured and Sharpe had warmed to the naval officer whose gratitude was unstinting and heartfelt. “Do you realize that bugger Panjit really could have had me in front of the magistrates?” Chase inquired. “Dear God, Sharpe, that would have been a pickle! And Nana Rao would have vanished, and who’d have believed me if I said the dead had come back to life? Do have more ham, please. It would have meant an inquiry at the very least, and almost certainly a court martial. I’d have been damned lucky to have survived with my command intact. But how was I to know he had a private army?”