Sharpe’s Enemy: The Defence of Portugal, Christmas 1812

CHAPTER FOUR

La Entrada de Dios.

The Gateway of God.

It looked it, too, from two hundred feet below on a bright winter morning as Sharpe and Harper walked their patient horses up the track which wound between rocks whose shadows still harboured the night’s frost. Adrados lay just beyond the saddle of the pass, but the pass was the Gateway of God.

To left and right were rocky peaks, a nightmare landscape, savage and sharp. In front of them was the smooth grass of the road through the Sierra. Guarding that road was the Gateway.

To the right of the pass was the castle. The Castillo de la Virgen. El Cid himself had known that castle, had stood on its ramparts before riding out against the curved scimitars of Islam. Legend said that three Muslim Kings had died in the dungeons beneath the Castle of the Virgin, died refusing to profess Christianity, and their ghosts were said to wander wraith-like in the Gateway of God. The castle had stood years beyond number, built before the Wars of God were won, but when the Muslims had been thrown back across the sea, the castle had begun to decay. The Spanish had moved from the high places of refuge, back down the passes into the softer plains. Yet the castle still stood, a refuge for foxes and ravens, its keep and gatehouse still holding the southern edge of the Gateway of God.

And on the northern side, two hundred yards from the castle, was the Convent. It was a huge building, low and square, and its windowless walls seemed to spring from the granite of the Sierra’s rocks. Here was the place where the Virgin had stood, here was where they had built a shrine about her Footfall and a castle to protect it, and the Convent had no windows because the nuns who had once lived in its rich cloisters were supposed not to look upon the world, only at the mystery of the smooth patch of granite in their gold painted chapel.

The nuns had gone, taken in leather-curtained carts to the mother house at Leon, and the soldiers whose surcoats had decorated the walls of the castle had gone too. The road still led through the hills, a road that wound up from the deep ravines rivers of the Portuguese border, but there were newer and better roads to the south. The Gateway of God guarded only Adrados now, a valley of sheep, thorns, and Pot-au-Feu’s desperate band of deserters.

‘They’ll have seen us by now, sir.’

‘Yes.’

Sharpe pulled out the watch that Sir Augustus Farthingdale had lent him. They were early so he stopped the three horses. The third horse carried the gold and, it was hoped, would provide a mount for Lady Farthingdale if Pot-au-Feu kept his word and released her on payment of the ransom. Harper climbed off his horse, stretched his huge muscles, and stared at the buildings on the skyline. ‘They’d be bastards to attack, sir.’

‘True.’

An attack on the Gateway from the west would be an uphill assault, steeply uphill, with no chance of approaching the pass unseen. Sharpe turned. It had taken him and Harper three hours to climb from the river, and for much of that time they would have been visible to a man with a glass on the castle ramparts. The rocks to left and right of the pass were jumbled and steep, impassable to artillery, barely climbable by infantry. Whoever held the Gateway of God barred the one road through the Sierra, and it was fortunate for the British that the French had never needed these hills and so no battle had ever been fought up this impossible slope. The hills had no value because the roads to the south by-passed the Sierra, making a defence of Spain impossible in these hills, but to Pot-au-Feu the old buildings were a perfect refuge.

High above them were birds, circling slowly, and Sharpe saw Patrick Harper staring lovingly at them. Harper loved birds. They were his private retreat from the army.

‘What are they?’

‘Red kite, sir. They’ll be up from the valley looking for carrion.’

Sharpe grunted. He feared that they might provide lunch for the birds. The closer they rode to the high valley the more he believed it was a trap. He did not believe that Farthingdale’s bride would be released. He believed the money would be taken and he wondered whether he or Harper would leave alive. He had told the Sergeant that he need not come, but the big Irishman had jeered at such pusillanimity. If Sharpe was going, he would go.

‘Come on. Let’s go on.’

Sharpe had not liked Sir Augustus Farthingdale. The Colonel had been condescending to the Rifleman, amused when he discovered that Sharpe did not possess a watch and could not, therefore, time his arrival at the Convent to the exact moment stipulated by Pot-au-Feu’s letter. Ten minutes past eleven, exactly. Yet beneath the Colonel’s bored voice Sharpe had detected a panic about his wife. The Colonel was in love. At sixty he had found his bride, and now she was being snatched from him, and though the Colonel tried to hide every emotion beneath a mask of elegant politeness, he could not hide the passion which his bride engendered. Sharpe had not liked him, but Sharpe had felt sorry for him, and he would try to restore the lost bride.

The red kites slid their spread wings and forked tails over the castle ramparts and Sharpe could now see men on the walls. They were on the ramparts of the keep, on the turret of a great gatetower that faced into the pass, and behind the castellations of the wall around the courtyard. Their muskets were tiny lines against the pale blue of the December sky.

The road was zig-zagging now as the pass narrowed. It crossed the saddle of the pass close to the Castle wall, too close, and Sharpe pulled his horse off the road and set it at the steep grass bank of the pass’s last few yards. The Convent was to their left now and Sharpe could see how it had been built on the very edge of the pass so that its eastern wall, facing the village, was just a single storey high while the western wall, looking towards Portugal, was two floors high. In the southern wall, facing across the pass, a big hole had been crudely smashed into the lower floor. The hole was covered by a blanket. Sharpe nodded at it. ‘You’d think they’d put a gun in there.’

‘Good place for one.’ Harper said. The gun would fire straight across the neck of the pass.

They breasted the last few feet, their horses scrambling up the steep turf, and there was the high valley of Adrados. A quarter mile ahead of them was the village itself, a huddle of small, low houses built around one larger house that Sharpe supposed to be the village Inn. The road turned right once it was through the village, sharp right, turning to the south, and Sharpe almost groaned aloud. There was a hill that made the pivot of the turning valley, a hill that was steep, thorn covered, and crowned by an old watchtower. The Castillo de la Virgen guarded the pass, but the watchtower was the sentry post for the whole Sierra. The tower looked old, its summit crowned by castellations like the Castle walls, but at its foot he could see the scars of earthworks and he guessed the Spanish garrison had made new defences there. Whoever controlled the watchtower controlled the whole valley. Guns put at the summit of the watchtower-hill could fire down into the courtyard of the Castle.

‘Let’s keep going.’ They were five minutes early and Sharpe did not turn towards the Convent, instead he led Harper on the track which ran, past a spring, towards the village. He wanted to see the eastern face of the Castle, the face that looked onto the village, but as he rode there was a sudden shout from the gatehouse and then a rattle of musket shots.

‘Friendly.’ Harper grinned. The shots had gone hopelessly wide, intended only as a warning. Sharpe reined in and stared at the Castle. The gatehouse faced him, massively turreted, topped with men who jeered towards the Riflemen. The archway, its gates long gone, was barricaded with two peasant carts, presumably stolen from the village, while the gatehouse turrets above seemed solid and untouched by the passage of time. The keep had not been so fortunate. Sharpe could see daylight through some of the holes in its upper floors, yet the stairways must still wind to the very top for men stood on the ramparts staring at the two horsemen in the valley.

They had ridden far enough to see along the length of the eastern wall, and their excursion had been worthwhile. Most of the wall was gone, nothing now but a heap of rubble marking the line of the old wall. The rubble line would be simple to cross, a ready made breach into Pot-au-Feu’s fastness.

They turned toward the Convent. No one stared from its apparently flat roof, no smoke drifted from its cloisters. It seemed to be abandoned. One doorway faced east, a doorway that was flanked by two small barred windows that Sharpe guessed had been the only normal channels of communication with the outside world. The door itself was huge, decorated with strange heads carved into the stone archway, and Sharpe dismounted beneath their eroded gaze and tied the horses’ reins to the rusting bars of the left hand window. Harper heaved the saddlebags off the third horse, the gold heavy, and Sharpe pushed at one of the doors.

It creaked open.

The watch said ten past eleven, the scroll-worked minute hand precisely pointing to the Roman II.

The door, hinges rusted, swung fully open.

It showed a cloister beyond the entrance tunnel. A century of neglect had made the cloister ragged, but it kept its beauty. The stone pillars that supported the cloister arches were carved, their heads a riot of stone leaves and small birds, while the cloister floor was paved in coloured tiles, green and yellow, now edged with weeds and dead grass. In the centre was a raised pool, empty of water but filled with weeds, and in one corner of the courtyard a young hornbeam had pushed its way through the tiles, cracking them around its bole. The cloister seemed empty. The roof line of the southern and eastern walls was etched in shadow on the tiles.

Sharpe took the rifle from his shoulder. He was a Major now, the ranks long in his past, yet he still carried the rifle. He had always carried a long-arm into battle; a musket when he was a private, a rifle now he was an officer. He saw no reason not to carry a gun. A soldier’s job was to kill. A rifle killed.

He cocked it, the click suddenly loud in the dark entranceway, and he walked on soft feet into the sunlight of the cloister. His eyes searched the shadows of the arches. Nothing moved.

He gestured to Harper.

The huge Sergeant carried the saddlebag into the courtyard. The coins chinked dully inside the leather. His eyes, like Sharpe’s, searched the roofline, the shadows, and saw nothing, nobody.

Beneath the arches doors opened from the cloister and Sharpe pushed them open one by one. They seemed to be storerooms. One was full of sacks and he drew his huge, clumsy sword and slit at the rough cloth. Grain spilled onto the floor. He sheathed the sword.

Harper dropped the saddlebag beside the raised pool and took from his shoulder the seven-barrelled gun and pulled back the flint. The gun was a gift from Sharpe and it fired seven half-inch bullets from its seven barrels. Only a hugely strong man could wield the gun, and they were few in number, so much so that the Royal Navy, for whom the guns had been made, had abandoned the weapon when they found its recoil wounding more of their own men than its bullets wounded of the enemy. Harper adored the gun. At close range it was a fearful weapon and he had become used to the massive kick. He lifted the frizzen and checked with his finger that there was powder in its pan.

On the left of the courtyard there was just the one door beneath a window dark with stained glass. It was a large door, ornate with decoration, larger than the door on the western side which Sharpe had tried, pushed, and found firmly barred from the far side. He tried the lever handle of the decorated door and it moved. Harper shook his head, gestured at the seven-barrelled gun, and took Sharpe’s place. He looked questioningly at his officer.

Sharpe nodded.

Harper shouted as he jumped through the door, a fearful screaming challenge designed to terrify anyone within the building, and he threw himself to one side, crouched, and swept the seven-barrelled gun around the gloom. His voice died away. He was in the chapel and it was empty. ‘Sir?’

Sharpe went inside. He could see little. The stoup that had held holy water was empty and dry, its bowl lined with dust and tiny fragments of stone. The light fell on the tiles of the chapel floor by the doorway and Sharpe could see an untidy brown stain that flaked at the edges of the tiles. Blood.

‘Look, sir.’

Harper was standing at a great iron grille that made the area they were standing in into a kind of ante-chamber to the chapel proper. There was a door pierced in the grille, but the door was padlocked shut. Harper fingered the lock. ‘New, sir.’

Sharpe craned his head back. The grille went to the ceiling where gold paint shone dully on the beams. ‘Why’s it here?’

‘To stop outsiders getting into the chapel, sir. This is as far as anyone could go. Only the nuns were allowed in there, sir. When it was a convent, that is.’

Sharpe pressed his face against the cold bars. The chapel ran left and right, altar to the left, and as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom he saw that the chapel had been defaced. Blood was splashed on the painted walls, statues had been torn from their niches, the light of the Eternal Presence ripped from its hanging chains. It seemed a pointless kind of destruction, but then Pot-au-Feu’s band was desperate, men who had run and had nowhere else to flee to, and such men would wreak their vengeance on anything that was beautiful, valued, and good. Sharpe wondered if Lady Farthingdale was even alive.

Horses’ hooves came faintly from outside the Convent. The two Riflemen froze, listened.

The hooves were coming closer. Sharpe could hear voices. ‘This way!’

They moved quickly, quietly, out into the cloister. The hooves were closer. Sharpe pointed across the courtyard and Harper, astonishingly silent for a huge man, disappeared into the dark shadow beneath the arches. Sharpe stepped backwards, into the chapel, and pulled the door close so that he and his rifle looked through a slit onto the entrance tunnel.

Silence in the courtyard. Not even a wind to stir the dead leaves of the hornbeam on the green and yellow tiles. The hooves stopped outside, the creak of a saddle as a man dismounted, the crunch of boots on the roadway, and then silence.

Two sparrows flew down into the raised pool and pecked among the dead weeds.

Sharpe moved slightly to his right, searching for Harper, but the Irishman was invisible in the shadows. Sharpe crouched so that his shape, if seen through the crack, would be confusing to whoever came out of the dark tunnel.

The gate creaked. Silence again. The sparrows flew upwards, their wings loud in the cloister, and then Sharpe almost jumped in alarm because the silence was shattered by a bellowed shout, a challenge, and a man leaped into the cloister, moving fast, his musket jerking round to cover the dark shadows where assailants might wait, and then the man crouched at the foot of a pillar by the entrance and called softly behind him.

He was a huge man, as big as Harper, and he was dressed in French blue with a single gold ring on his sleeve. The uniform of a French Sergeant. He called again.

A second man appeared, as wary as the first, and this man dragged saddlebags behind him. He was in the uniform of a French officer, a senior officer, his red-collared blue jacket bright with gold insignia. Was this Pot-au-Feu? He carried a cavalry carbine, despite his infantry uniform, and at his side, slung on silver chains, was a cavalry sabre.

The two Frenchmen stared round the cloister. Nothing moved, nobody.

‘Allons.’ The Sergeant took the saddlebag and froze, pointing. He had seen Harper’s bag beside the pool.

‘Stop!’ Sharpe yelled, kicking the door open with his right foot as he stood up. ‘Stop!’ the rifle pointed at them. They turned.

‘Don’t move!’ He could see their eyes judging the distance of the rifle shot fired from the hip. ‘Sergeant!’

Harper appeared to their flank, a vast man moving like a cat, grinning, the huge gun gaping its bunched barrels at them.

‘Keep them there, Sergeant.’

‘Sir!’

Sharpe moved past them, skirting them, and went into the tunnel. Five horses were tied outside the convent beside the three he and Harper had brought and, having noticed them, he pushed the Convent door shut, then went back to look at the two prisoners. The Sergeant was huge, built like an oak tree, with a tanned skin behind his vast black moustache. He stared hatred at Sharpe. His hands looked large enough to strangle an ox.

The man in officer’s uniform had a thin face, sharp eyed and sharp featured, with intelligent eyes. He looked at Sharpe with disdain and condescension.

Sharpe kept the rifle pointing between them. ‘Take their guns, Sergeant.’

Harper came behind them, plucked the carbine from the officer then pulled the musket from the Sergeant. Sharpe sensed the massive resistance of the huge Sergeant, twitched his rifle towards the brute of a man, and the Sergeant reluctantly let the musket go. Sharpe looked back to the officer. ‘Who are you?’

The reply was in good English. ‘My name is not for deserters.’

Sharpe said nothing. Five horses, but just two riders. Saddlebags just as he and Harper had carried. He stepped forward, his eyes on the officer, and kicked the saddlebags. Coins sounded inside. The French officer’s thin face sneered at him. ‘You will find it all there.’

Sharpe stepped back three paces and lowered his rifle. He sensed Harper’s surprise. ‘My name is Major Richard Sharpe, 95th Regiment, an officer of his Britannic Majesty. Sergeant!’

‘Sir?’

‘Put the gun down.’

‘Sir?’

‘Do as I say.’

The French officer watched the seven barrels sink down, then looked at Sharpe. ‘Your honour, M’sieu?’

‘My honour.’

The Frenchman’s heels clicked together. ‘I am Chef du Battalion Dubreton, Michel Dubreton. I have the honour to command a Battalion of the Emperor’s 54th of the Line.’

Chef du Battalion, two heavy gold epaulettes, a full Colonel no less. Sharpe saluted and it felt strange. ‘My apologies, sir.’

‘Not at all. You were rather impressive.’ Dubreton smiled at Harper. ‘Not to mention your Sergeant.’

‘Sergeant Harper.’

Harper nodded familiarly at the French officer. ‘Sir!’

Dubreton smiled. ‘I think mine’s taller.’ He looked from his own Sergeant to Harper and shrugged. ‘Maybe not. You will find his name appropriate. Sergeant Bigeard.’