Sharpe’s Tiger: The Siege of Seringapatam, 1799. Bernard Cornwell

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      SHARPE’S

      TIGER

      Richard Sharpe and the Siege of

      Seringapatam, 1799

      BERNARD CORNWELL

       Copyright

      This novel is a work of fiction. The incidents and some of the characters portrayed in it, while based on real historical events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1997

      Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 1997

      Map © Ken Lewis

      Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018. Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

      Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780006490357

      Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2010 ISBN: 9780007334537

      Version: 2018-04-17

      Sharpe’s Tiger is for Muir Sutherland and Malcolm Craddock, with many thanks

      ‘Cornwell’s combination of breakneck action and pigheaded man behaving badly – but with dazzling brio – is unbeatable. His historical setting is well observed, adding a degree of poignancy: an ancient civilisation destroyed by an army of brutalised illiterates, confused and far from home, but dogged and unquestionably brave’

       Daily Telegraph

      Contents

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Dedication

       Praise

       Map

       Chapter One

       Chapter Two

       Chapter Three

       Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Chapter Eleven

       Keep Reading

       Historical Note

       Sharpe’s Story

       About the Author

       The SHARPE Series (in chronological order)

       The SHARPE Series (in order of publication)

       Also by Bernard Cornwell

       About the Publisher

      CHAPTER ONE

      It was funny, Richard Sharpe thought, that there were no vultures in England. None that he had seen, anyway. Ugly things they were. Rats with wings.

      He thought about vultures a lot, and he had a lot of time to think because he was a soldier, a private, and so the army insisted on doing a lot of his thinking for him. The army decided when he woke up, when he slept, when he ate, when he marched, and when he was to sit about doing nothing and that was what he did most of the time – nothing. Hurry up and do nothing, that was the army’s way of doing things, and he was fed up with it. He was bored and thinking of running.

      Him and Mary. Run away. Desert. He was thinking about it now, and it was an odd thing to worry about right now because the army was about to give Richard Sharpe his first proper battle. He had been in one fight, but that was five years ago and it had been a messy, confused business in fog, and no one had known why the 33rd Regiment was in Flanders or what they were supposed to be doing there, and in the end they had done nothing except fire some shots at the mist-shrouded French and the whole thing had been over almost before young Richard Sharpe had known it had begun. He had seen a couple of men killed. He remembered Sergeant Hawthorne’s death best because the Sergeant had been hit by a musket ball that drove a rib clean out of his red coat. There was hardly a drop of blood to be seen, just the white rib sticking out of the faded red cloth. ‘You could hang your hat on that,’ Hawthorne had said in a tone of wonder, then he had sobbed, and after that he had choked up blood and collapsed. Sharpe had gone on loading and firing, and then, just as he was beginning to enjoy himself, the