She fired, this time the ball striking a little nearer the mark. Three more followed – one closer in, two rather wider. She shook her head when they examined the round and chalked the holes.

‘Those are nothing to be dismayed about, Miss Hervey,’ said Acton. ‘Accurate’s not the same as being a marksman. Accurate’s about getting them shots all close together. A marksman, though, hits his target when he’s required to.’

Georgiana seemed reassured.

‘Now, Miss Gildea, your turn if you please.’

Acton was being particularly correct in front of the daughter of his commanding officer, whose coverman he was, the most honoured position for any serjeant of the regiment. He’d first known Annie when she was a chambermaid at the Berkeley Arms at Hounslow, where Colonel Hervey had put up for several months before taking the lease on the former colonel’s house at Heston, and Annie had gone to Heston too as housekeeper’s assistant. She’d always been obliging to him – and to any other dragoon who’d come to the Berkeley: she’d come out with coffee and nice cuts on cold mornings, and then at Heston in the servants’ hall if ever he’d had to wait. There’d been ‘talk’ in the canteen about her going to Heston, how as Mrs Hervey wasn’t there – and why indeed wasn’t the colonel’s lady by his side? – and that Annie must be ‘standing in for her’; but he didn’t reckon it himself. Mind, she was a fine-looking girl. And then, after all, the colonel had asked her to come to India with them …

Well, it may have been the other way round. Annie had a brother who was a soldier, and he’d been posted to Bengal, and she’d thought she’d be able to see a bit more of him here, not really knowing how far distant Bengal was from Madras. In any case, Mrs Hervey had come to India too, so that was that. And Mrs Hervey must have thought highly of Annie, as when young Miss Allegra’s governess said she wanted to go back home, Mrs Hervey promoted Annie in her place, which was why she had to be called ‘Miss Gildea’ now. And Annie was different now, too – not haughty or anything, just … well, quite the lady. (As he supposed she had to be, of course.) She spoke like a lady almost; and she dressed special. A lot of the NCOs were disappointed, naturally. They’d fancied their chances with Annie (he himself had), but it was different now she was ‘Miss Gildea’; even some of the officers – not the Sixth’s, of course, but some of the Foot regiments and the native ones – paid her attention after church parades and the like. To an NCO, he reckoned, she was probably now out of range.

However, Annie was not as naturally disposed to becoming a marksman as Serjeant Acton’s other pupil, her additional charge, was. Colonel Hervey – or more precisely, Colonel Hervey and his wife (she wasn’t exactly sure who’d spoken the words first) – had asked her to take on the care of Georgiana when they’d received word that she was at last bound for India, but not with a governess; with a chaperone only as far as Madras. And as both Colonel Hervey and his daughter were strongly of the mind that a lady abroad should be able to fire a pistol, she found herself here at the butts. Besides, since the affair of the snake she’d discovered in the stillroom, she had herself come to the conclusion that India was indeed a perilous place. (She hadn’t heard Serjeant Stray say ‘Colonel, that lass – Annie: as brave as a lion’, but Mrs Hervey had given her a pearl necklace and said that nothing could truly express her thanks for saving her daughter; and the Colonel himself had left no doubt about his regard.)