SHARPE’S
HAVOC
Richard Sharpe and the campaign in northern Portugal, Spring 1809
BERNARD CORNWELL

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2003

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2003

Map © Ken Lewis

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

Ebook Edition © July 2009 ISBN: 9780007338689

Version: 2017-05-06

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.

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.

Sharpe’s Havoc is for William T. Oughtred who knows why

‘This book has the same combination of thorough research and narrative drive that distinguished its predecessors. A gripping read’

Independent

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

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

Miss Savage was missing.

And the French were coming.

The approach of the French was the more urgent crisis. The splintering noise of sustained musket fire was sounding just outside the city and in the last ten minutes five or six cannonballs had battered through the roofs of the houses high on the river’s northern bank. The Savage house was a few yards down the slope and for the moment was protected from errant French cannon fire, but already the warm spring air hummed with spent musket balls that sometimes struck the thick roof tiles with a loud crack or else ripped through the dark glossy pines to shower needles over the garden. It was a large house, built of white-painted stone and with dark-green shutters closed over the windows. The front porch was crowned with a wooden board on which were gilded letters spelling out the name House Beautiful in English. It seemed an odd name for a building high on the steep hillside where the city of Oporto overlooked the River Douro in northern Portugal, especially as the big square house was not beautiful at all, but quite stark and ugly and angular, even if its harsh lines were softened by dark cedars which would offer welcome shade in summer. A bird was making a nest in one of the cedars and whenever a musket ball tore through the branches it would squawk in alarm and fly a small loop before returning to its work. Scores of fugitives were fleeing past the House Beautiful, running down the hill towards the ferries and the pontoon bridge that would take them safe across the Douro. Some of the refugees drove pigs, goats and cattle, others pushed handcarts precariously loaded with furniture, and more than one carried a grandparent on his back.

Richard Sharpe, Lieutenant in the second battalion of His Majesty’s 95th Rifles, unbuttoned his breeches and pissed on the narcissi in the House Beautiful’s front flower bed. The ground was soaked because there had been a storm the previous night. Lightning had flickered above the city, thunder had billowed across the sky and the heavens had opened so that the flower beds now steamed gently as the hot sun drew out the night’s moisture. An howitzer shell arched overhead, sounding like a ponderous barrel rolling swiftly over attic floorboards. It left a small grey trace of smoke from its burning fuse. Sharpe looked up at the smoke tendril, judging from its curve where the howitzer had to be emplaced. ‘They’re getting too bloody close,’ he said to no one in particular.

‘You’ll be drowning those poor bloody flowers, so you will,’ Sergeant Harper said, then added a hasty ‘sir’ when he saw Sharpe’s face.

The howitzer shell exploded somewhere above the tangle of alleys close to the river and a heartbeat later the French cannonade rose to a sustained thunder, but the thunder had a crisp, clear, staccato timbre, suggesting that some of the guns were very close. A new battery, Sharpe thought. It must have unlimbered just outside the city, maybe half a mile away from Sharpe, and was probably whacking the big northern redoubt in the flank, and the musketry that had been sounding like the burning of a dry thorn bush now faded to an intermittent crackle, suggesting that the defending infantry was retreating. Some, indeed, were running and Sharpe could hardly blame them. A large and disorganized Portuguese force, led by the Bishop of Oporto, was trying to stop Marshal Soult’s army from capturing the city, the second largest in Portugal, and the French were winning. The Portuguese road to safety led past the front garden of the House Beautiful and the bishop’s blue-coated soldiers were bolting down the hill as fast as their legs could take them, except that when they saw the green-jacketed British riflemen they slowed to a walk as if to prove that they were not panicking. And that, Sharpe reckoned, was a good sign. The Portuguese evidently had pride, and troops with pride would fight well given another chance, though not all the Portuguese troops showed such spirit. The men from the ordenança kept running, but that was hardly surprising. The ordenança was an enthusiastic but unskilled army of volunteers raised to defend the homeland and the battle-hardened French troops were tearing them to shreds.

Meanwhile Miss Savage was still missing.

Captain Hogan appeared on the front porch of the House Beautiful. He carefully closed the door behind him and then looked up to heaven and swore fluently and impressively. Sharpe buttoned his breeches and his two dozen riflemen inspected their weapons as though they had never seen such things before. Captain Hogan added a few more carefully chosen words, then spat as a French round shot trundled overhead. ‘What it is, Richard,’ he said when the cannon shot had passed, ‘is a shambles. A bloody, goddamned miserable poxed bollocks of an agglomerated halfwitted shambles.’ The round shot landed somewhere in the lower town and precipitated the splintering crash of a collapsing roof. Captain Hogan took out his snuff box and inhaled a mighty pinch.

‘Bless you,’ Sergeant Harper said.

Captain Hogan sneezed and Harper smiled.

‘Her name,’ Hogan said, ignoring Harper, ‘is Katherine or, rather, Kate. Kate Savage, nineteen years old and in need, my God, how she is in need, of a thrashing! A hiding! A damned good smacking, that’s what she needs, Richard. A copper-sheathed, goddamned bloody good walloping.’

‘So where the hell is she?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Her mother thinks she might have gone to Vila Real de Zedes,’ Captain Hogan said, ‘wherever in God’s holy hell that might be. But the family has an estate there. A place where they go to escape the summer heat.’ He rolled his eyes in exasperation.

‘So why would she go there, sir?’ Sergeant Harper asked.

‘Because she’s a fatherless nineteen-year-old girl,’ Hogan said, ‘who insists on having her own way. Because she’s fallen out with her mother. Because she’s a bloody idiot who deserves a ruddy good hiding. Because, oh I don’t know why! Because she’s young and knows everything, that’s why.’ Hogan was a stocky, middle-aged Irishman, a Royal Engineer, with a shrewd face, a soft brogue, greying hair and a charitable disposition. ‘Because she’s a bloody halfwit, that’s why,’ he finished.

‘This Vila Real de whatever,’ Sharpe said, ‘is it far? Why don’t we just fetch her?’

‘Which is precisely what I’ve told the mother you will do, Richard. You will go to Vila Real de Zedes, you will find the wretched girl and you will get her across the river. We’ll wait for you in Vila Nova and if the damned French capture Vila Nova then we’ll wait for you in Coimbra.’ He paused as he pencilled these instructions on a scrap of paper. ‘And if the Frogs take Coimbra we’ll wait for you in Lisbon, and if the bastards take Lisbon we’ll be pissing our breeches in London and you’ll be God knows where. Don’t fall in love with her,’ he went on, handing Sharpe the piece of paper, ‘don’t get the silly girl pregnant, don’t give her the thrashing she bloody well deserves and don’t, for the love of Christ, lose her, and don’t lose Colonel Christopher either. Am I plain?’

‘Colonel Christopher is coming with us?’ Sharpe asked, appalled.

‘Didn’t I just tell you that?’ Hogan enquired innocently, then turned as a clatter of hooves announced the appearance of the widow Savage’s travelling coach from the stable yard at the rear of the house. The coach was heaped with baggage and there was even some furniture and two rolled carpets lashed onto the rear rack where a coachman, precariously poised between a half-dozen gilded chairs, was leading Hogan’s black mare by the reins. The Captain took the horse and used the coach’s mounting step to hoist himself into the saddle. ‘You’ll be back with us in a couple of days,’ he assured Sharpe. ‘Say six, seven hours to Vila Real de Zedes? The same back to the ferry at Barca d’Avintas and then a quiet stroll home. You know where Barca d’Avintas is?’

‘No, sir.’

‘That way.’ Hogan pointed eastwards. ‘Four country miles.’ He pushed his right boot into its stirrup, then lifted his body to flick out the tails of his blue coat. ‘With luck you may even rejoin us tomorrow night.’

‘What I don’t understand …’ Sharpe began, then paused because the front door of the house had been thrown open and Mrs Savage, widow and mother of the missing daughter, came into the sunlight. She was a good-looking woman in her forties: dark-haired, tall and slender with a pale face and high arched eyebrows. She hurried down the steps as a cannonball rumbled overhead and then there was a smattering of musket fire alarmingly close, so close that Sharpe climbed the porch steps to stare at the crest of the hill where the Braga road disappeared between a large tavern and a handsome church. A Portuguese six-pounder gun had just been deployed by the church and was now firing at the invisible enemy. The bishop’s forces had dug new redoubts on the crest and patched the old medieval wall with hastily erected palisades and earthworks, but the sight of the small gun firing from its makeshift position in the centre of the road suggested that those defences were crumbling fast.

Mrs Savage sobbed that her baby daughter was lost, then Captain Hogan managed to persuade the widow into the carriage. Two servants laden with bags stuffed with clothes followed their mistress into the vehicle. ‘You will find Kate?’ Mrs Savage pushed open the door and enquired of Captain Hogan.

‘The precious darling will be with you very soon,’ Hogan said reassuringly. ‘Mister Sharpe will see to that,’ he added, then used his foot to close the coach door on Mrs Savage, who was the widow of one of the many British wine merchants who lived and worked in the city of Oporto. She was rich, Sharpe presumed, certainly rich enough to own a fine carriage and the lavish House Beautiful, but she was also foolish for she should have left the city two or three days before, but she had stayed because she had evidently believed the bishop’s assurance that he could repel Marshal Soult’s army. Colonel Christopher, who had once lodged in the strangely named House Beautiful, had appealed to the British forces south of the river to send men to escort Mrs Savage safely away and Captain Hogan had been the closest officer and Sharpe, with his riflemen, had been protecting Hogan while the engineer mapped northern Portugal, and so Sharpe had come north across the Douro with twenty-four of his men to escort Mrs Savage and any other threatened British inhabitants of Oporto to safety. Which should have been a simple enough task, except that at dawn the widow Savage had discovered that her daughter had fled from the house.

‘What I don’t understand,’ Sharpe persevered, ‘is why she ran away.’

‘She’s probably in love,’ Hogan explained airily. ‘Nineteen-year-old girls of respectable families are dangerously susceptible to love because of all the novels they read. See you in two days, Richard, or maybe even tomorrow? Just wait for Colonel Christopher, he’ll be with you directly, and listen.’ He bent down from the saddle and lowered his voice so that no one but Sharpe could hear him. ‘Keep a close eye on the Colonel, Richard. I worry about him, I do.’

‘You should worry about me, sir.’

‘I do that too, Richard, I do indeed,’ Hogan said, then straightened up, waved farewell and spurred his horse after Mrs Savage’s carriage which had swung out of the front gate and joined the stream of fugitives going towards the Douro.

The sound of the carriage wheels faded. The sun came from behind a cloud just as a French cannonball struck a tree on the hill’s crest and exploded a cloud of reddish blossom which drifted above the city’s steep slope. Daniel Hagman stared at the airborne blossom. ‘Looks like a wedding,’ he said and then, glancing up as a musket ball ricocheted off a roof tile, brought a pair of scissors from his pocket. ‘Finish your hair, sir?’

‘Why not, Dan,’ Sharpe said. He sat on the porch steps and took off his shako.

Sergeant Harper checked that the sentinels were watching the north. A troop of Portuguese cavalry had appeared on the crest where the single cannon was firing bravely. A rattle of musketry proved that some infantry was still fighting, but more and more troops were retreating past the house and Sharpe knew it could only be a matter of minutes before the city’s defences collapsed entirely. Hagman began slicing away at Sharpe’s hair. ‘You don’t like it over the ears, ain’t that right?’

‘I like it short, Dan.’

‘Short like a good sermon, sir,’ Hagman said. ‘Now keep still, sir, just keep still.’ There was a sudden stab of pain as Hagman speared a louse with the scissors’ blade. He spat on the drop of blood that showed on Sharpe’s scalp, then wiped it away. ‘So the Crapauds will get the city, sir?’

‘Looks like it,’ Sharpe said.

‘And they’ll march on Lisbon next?’ Hagman asked, cutting away.

‘Long way to Lisbon,’ Sharpe said.

‘Maybe, sir, but there’s an awful lot of them, sir, and precious few of us.’

‘But they say Wellesley’s coming here,’ Sharpe said.

‘As you keep telling us, sir,’ Hagman said, ‘but is he really a miracle worker?’

‘You fought at Copenhagen, Dan,’ Sharpe said, ‘and down the coast here.’ He meant the battles at Rolica and Vimeiro. ‘You could see for yourself.’

‘From the skirmish line, sir, all generals are the same,’ Hagman said, ‘and who knows if Sir Arthur’s really coming?’ It was, after all, only a rumour that Sir Arthur Wellesley was taking over from General Cradock and not everyone believed it. Many thought the British would withdraw, ought to withdraw, that they should give up the game and let the French have Portugal. ‘Turn your head to the right,’ Hagman said. The scissors clicked busily, not even pausing as a round shot buried itself in the church at the hill’s top. A mist of dust showed beside the whitewashed bell tower down which a crack had suddenly appeared. The Portuguese cavalry had been swallowed by the gun smoke and a trumpet called far away. There was a burst of musketry, then silence. A building must have been burning beyond the crest for there was a great smear of smoke drifting westwards. ‘Why would someone call their home the House Beautiful?’ Hagman wondered.

‘Didn’t know you could read, Dan,’ Sharpe said.

‘I can’t, sir, but Isaiah read it to me.’

‘Tongue!’ Sharpe called. ‘Why would someone call their home House Beautiful?’

Isaiah Tongue, long and thin and dark and educated, who had joined the army because he was a drunk and thereby lost his respectable job, grinned. ‘Because he’s a good Protestant, sir.’

‘Because he’s a bloody what?’

‘It’s from a book by John Bunyan,’ Tongue explained, ‘called Pilgrim’s Progress.’

‘I’ve heard of that,’ Sharpe said.

‘Some folk consider it essential reading,’ Tongue said airily, ‘the story of a soul’s journey from sin to salvation, sir.’

‘Just the thing to keep you burning the candles at night,’ Sharpe said.

‘And the hero, Christian, calls at the House Beautiful, sir,’ – Tongue ignored Sharpe’s sarcasm – ‘where he talks with four virgins.’

Hagman laughed. ‘Let’s get inside now, sir.’

‘You’re too old for a virgin, Dan,’ Sharpe said.

‘Discretion,’ Tongue said, ‘Piety, Prudence and Charity.’

‘What about them?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Those were the names of the virgins, sir,’ Tongue said.

‘Bloody hell,’ Sharpe said.

‘Charity’s mine,’ Hagman said. ‘Pull your collar down, sir, that’s the way.’ He snipped at the black hair. ‘He sounds like he was a tedious old man, Mister Savage, if it was him what named the house.’ Hagman stooped to manoeuvre the scissors over Sharpe’s high collar. ‘So why did the Captain leave us here, sir?’ he asked.

‘He wants us to look after Colonel Christopher,’ Sharpe said.

‘To look after Colonel Christopher,’ Hagman repeated, making his disapproval evident by the slowness with which he said the words. Hagman was the oldest man in Sharpe’s troop of riflemen, a poacher from Cheshire who was a deadly shot with his Baker rifle. ‘So Colonel Christopher can’t look after himself now?’

‘Captain Hogan left us here, Dan,’ Sharpe said, ‘so he must think the Colonel needs us.’

‘And the Captain’s a good man, sir,’ Hagman said. ‘You can let the collar go. Almost done.’

But why had Captain Hogan left Sharpe and his riflemen behind? Sharpe wondered about that as Hagman tidied up his work. And had there been any significance in Hogan’s final injunction to keep a close eye on the Colonel? Sharpe had only met the Colonel once. Hogan had been mapping the upper reaches of the River Cavado and the Colonel and his servant had ridden out of the hills and shared a bivouac with the riflemen. Sharpe had not liked Christopher who had been supercilious and even scornful of Hogan’s work. ‘You map the country, Hogan,’ the Colonel had said, ‘but I map their minds. A very complicated thing, the human mind, not simple like hills and rivers and bridges.’ Beyond that statement he had not explained his presence, but just ridden on next morning. He had revealed that he was based in Oporto which, presumably, was how he had met Mrs Savage and her daughter, and Sharpe wondered why Colonel Christopher had not persuaded the widow to leave Oporto much sooner.

‘You’re done, sir,’ Hagman said, wrapping his scissors in a piece of calfskin, ‘and you’ll be feeling the cold wind now, sir, like a newly shorn sheep.’

‘You should get your own hair cut, Dan,’ Sharpe said.

‘Weakens a man, sir, weakens him something dreadful.’ Hagman frowned up the hill as two round shots bounced on the crest of the road, one of them taking off the leg of a Portuguese gunner. Sharpe’s men watched expressionless as the round shot bounded on, spraying blood like a Catherine wheel, to finally bang and stop against a garden wall across the road. Hagman chuckled. ‘Fancy calling a girl Discretion! It ain’t a natural name, sir. Ain’t kind to call a girl Discretion.’

‘It’s in a book, Dan,’ Sharpe said, ‘so it isn’t supposed to be natural.’ He climbed to the porch and shoved hard on the front door, but found it locked. So where the hell was Colonel Christopher? More Portuguese retreated down the slope and these men were so frightened that they did not pause when they saw the British troops, but just kept running. The Portuguese cannon was being attached to its limber and spent musket balls were tearing at the cedars and rattling against the tiles, shutters and stones of the House Beautiful. Sharpe hammered on the locked door, but there was no answer.

‘Sir?’ Sergeant Patrick Harper called a warning to him. ‘Sir?’ Harper jerked his head towards the side of the house and Sharpe backed away from the door to see Lieutenant Colonel Christopher riding from the stable yard. The Colonel, who was armed with a sabre and a brace of pistols, was cleaning his teeth with a wooden pick, something he did frequently, evidently because he was proud of his even white smile. He was accompanied by his Portuguese servant who, mounted on his master’s spare horse, was carrying an enormous valise that was so stuffed with lace, silk and satins that the bag could not be closed.

Colonel Christopher curbed his horse, took the toothpick from his mouth, and stared in astonishment at Sharpe. ‘What on earth are you doing here, Lieutenant?’

‘Ordered to stay with you, sir,’ Sharpe answered. He glanced again at the valise. Had Christopher been looting the House Beautiful?

The Colonel saw where Sharpe was looking and snarled at his servant, ‘Close it, damn you, close it.’ Christopher, even though his servant spoke good English, used his own fluent Portuguese, then looked back to Sharpe. ‘Captain Hogan ordered you to stay with me. Is that what you’re trying to convey?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And how the devil are you supposed to do that, eh? I have a horse, Sharpe, and you do not. You and your men intend to run, perhaps?’

‘Captain Hogan gave me an order, sir,’ Sharpe answered woodenly. He had learned as a sergeant how to deal with difficult senior officers. Say little, say it tonelessly, then say it all again if necessary.

‘An order to do what?’ Christopher enquired patiently.

‘Stay with you, sir. Help you find Miss Savage.’

Colonel Christopher sighed. He was a black-haired man in his forties, but still youthfully handsome with just a distinguished touch of grey at his temples. He wore black boots, plain black riding breeches, a black cocked hat and a red coat with black facings. Those black facings had prompted Sharpe, on his previous meeting with the Colonel, to ask whether Christopher served in the Dirty Half Hundred, the 50th regiment, but the Colonel had treated the question as an impertinence. ‘All you need to know, Lieutenant, is that I serve on General Cradock’s staff. You have heard of the General?’ Cradock was the General in command of the British forces in southern Portugal and if Soult kept marching then Cradock must face him. Sharpe had stayed silent after Christopher’s response, but Hogan had later suggested that the Colonel was probably a ‘political’ soldier, meaning he was no soldier at all, but rather a man who found life more convenient if he was in uniform. ‘I’ve no doubt he was a soldier once,’ Hogan had said, ‘but now? I think Cradock got him from Whitehall.’

‘Whitehall? The Horse Guards?’

‘Dear me, no,’ Hogan had said. The Horse Guards were the headquarters of the army and it was plain Hogan believed Christopher came from somewhere altogether more sinister. ‘The world is a convoluted place, Richard,’ he had explained, ‘and the Foreign Office believes that we soldiers are clumsy fellows, so they like to have their own people on the ground to patch up our mistakes. And, of course, to find things out.’ Which was what Lieutenant Colonel Christopher appeared to be doing: finding things out. ‘He says he’s mapping their minds,’ Hogan had mused, ‘and what I think he means by that is discovering whether Portugal is worth defending. Whether they’ll fight. And when he knows, he’ll tell the Foreign Office before he tells General Cradock.’

‘Of course it’s worth defending,’ Sharpe had protested.

‘Is it? If you look carefully, Richard, you might notice that Portugal is in a state of collapse.’ There was a lamentable truth in Hogan’s grim words. The Portuguese royal family had fled to Brazil, leaving the country leaderless, and after their departure there had been riots in Lisbon, and many of Portugal’s aristocrats were now more concerned with protecting themselves from the mob than defending their country against the French. Scores of the army’s officers had already defected, joining the Portuguese Legion that fought for the enemy, and what officers remained were largely untrained, their men were a rabble and armed with ancient weapons if they possessed weapons at all. In some places, like Oporto itself, all civil rule had collapsed and the streets were governed by the whims of the ordenança who, lacking proper weapons, patrolled the streets with pikes, spears, axes and mattocks. Before the French had come the ordenança had massacred half Oporto’s gentry and forced the other half to flee or barricade their houses though they had left the English residents alone.

So Portugal was in a state of collapse, but Sharpe had also seen how the common people hated the French, and how the soldiers had slowed as they passed the gate of the House Beautiful. Oporto might be falling to the enemy, but there was plenty of fight left in Portugal, though it was hard to believe that as yet more soldiers followed the retreating six-pounder gun down to the river. Lieutenant Colonel Christopher glanced at the fugitives, then looked back at Sharpe. ‘What on earth was Captain Hogan thinking of?’ he asked, evidently expecting no answer. ‘What possible use could you be to me? Your presence can only slow me down. I suppose Hogan was being chivalrous,’ Christopher went on, ‘but the man plainly has no more common sense than a pickled onion. You can go back to him, Sharpe, and tell him that I don’t need assistance in rescuing one damned silly little girl.’ The Colonel had to raise his voice because the sound of cannons and musketry was suddenly loud.

‘He gave me an order, sir,’ Sharpe said stubbornly.

‘And I’m giving you another,’ Christopher said in the indulgent tone he might have used to address a very small child. The pommel of his saddle was broad and flat to make a small writing surface and now he laid a notebook on that makeshift desk and took out a pencil, and just then another of the red-blossomed trees on the crest was struck by a cannonball so that the air was filled with drifting petals. ‘The French are at war with the cherries,’ Christopher said lightly.

‘With Judas,’ Sharpe said.

Christopher gave him a look of astonishment and outrage. ‘What did you say?’

‘It’s a Judas tree,’ Sharpe said.

Christopher still looked outraged, then Sergeant Harper chimed in. ‘It’s not a cherry, sir. It’s a Judas tree. The same kind that Iscariot used to hang himself on, sir, after he betrayed our Lord.’

Christopher still gazed at Sharpe, then seemed to realize that no slur had been intended. ‘So it’s not a cherry tree, eh?’ he said, then licked the point of his pencil. ‘You are hereby ordered’ – he spoke as he wrote – ‘to return south of the river forthwith – note that, Sharpe, forthwith – and report for duty to Captain Hogan of the Royal Engineers. Signed, Lieutenant Colonel James Christopher, on the forenoon of Wednesday, March the 29th in the year of our Lord, 1809.’ He signed the order with a flourish, tore the page from the book, folded it in half and handed it to Sharpe. ‘I always thought thirty pieces of silver was a remarkably cheap price for the most famous betrayal in history. He probably hanged himself out of shame. Now go,’ he said grandly, ‘and “stand not upon the order of your going”?’ He saw Sharpe’s puzzlement, ‘Macbeth, Lieutenant,’ he explained as he spurred his horse towards the gate, ‘a play by Shakespeare. And I really would urge haste upon you, Lieutenant,’ Christopher called back, ‘for the enemy will be here any moment.’

In that, at least, he was right. A great spume of dust and smoke was boiling out from the central redoubts of the city’s northern defences. That was where the Portuguese had been putting up the strongest resistance, but the French artillery had managed to throw down the parapets and now their infantry assaulted the bastions, and the majority of the city’s defenders were fleeing. Sharpe watched Christopher and his servant gallop through the fugitives and turn into a street that led eastwards. Christopher was not retreating south, but going to the rescue of the missing Savage girl, though it would be a close-run thing if he were to escape the city before the French entered it. ‘All right, lads,’ Sharpe called, ‘time to bloody scarper. Sergeant! At the double! Down to the bridge!’

‘About bloody time,’ Williamson grumbled. Sharpe pretended not to have heard. He tended to ignore a lot of Williamson’s comments, thinking the man might improve but knowing that the longer he did nothing the more violent would be the solution. He just hoped Williamson knew the same thing.

‘Two files!’ Harper shouted. ‘Stay together!’

A cannonball rumbled above them as they ran out of the front garden and turned down the steep road that led to the Douro. The road was crowded with refugees, both civilian and military, all fleeing for the safety of the river’s southern bank, though Sharpe guessed the French would also be crossing the river within a day or two so the safety was probably illusory. The Portuguese army was falling back towards Coimbra or even all the way to Lisbon where Cradock had sixteen thousand British troops that some politicians in London wanted brought home. What use, they asked, was such a small British force against the mighty armies of France? Marshal Soult was conquering Portugal and two more French armies were just across the eastern frontier in Spain. Fight or flee? No one knew what the British would do, but the rumour that Sir Arthur Wellesley was being sent back to take over from Cradock suggested to Sharpe that the British meant to fight and Sharpe prayed the rumour was true. He had fought across India under Sir Arthur’s command, had been with him in Copenhagen and then at Rolica and Vimeiro and Sharpe reckoned there was no finer General in Europe.

Sharpe was halfway down the hill now. His pack, haversack, rifle, cartridge box and sword scabbard bounced and banged as he ran. Few officers carried a longarm, but Sharpe had once served in the ranks and he felt uncomfortable without the rifle on his shoulder. Harper lost his balance, flailing wildly because the new nails on his boot soles kept slipping on patches of stone. The river was visible between the buildings. The Douro, sliding towards the nearby sea, was as wide as the Thames at London, but, unlike London, the river here ran between great hills. The city of Oporto was on the steep northern hill while Vila Nova de Gaia was on the southern, and it was in Vila Nova that most of the British had their houses. Only the very oldest families, like the Savages, lived on the northern bank and all the port was made on the southern side in the lodges owned by Croft, Savages, Taylor Fladgate, Burmester, Smith Woodhouse and Gould, nearly all of which were British owned and their exports contributed hugely to Portugal’s exchequer, but now the French were coming and, on the heights of Vila Nova, overlooking the river, the Portuguese army had lined a dozen cannon on a convent’s terrace. The gunners saw the French appear on the opposite hill and the cannon slammed back, their trails gouging up the terrace’s flagstones. The round shots banged overhead, their sound as loud and hollow as thunder. Powder smoke drifted slowly inland, obscuring the white-painted convent as the cannonballs smashed into the higher houses. Harper lost his footing again, this time falling. ‘Bloody boots,’ he said, picking up his rifle. The other riflemen had been slowed by the press of fugitives.

‘Jesus.’ Rifleman Pendleton, the youngest in the company, was the first to see what was happening at the river and his eyes widened as he stared at the throng of men, women, children and livestock that was crammed onto the narrow pontoon bridge. When Captain Hogan had led Sharpe and his men north across the bridge at dawn there had been only a few people going the other way, but now the bridge’s roadway was filled and the crowd could only go at the pace of the slowest, and still more people and animals were trying to force their way onto the northern end. ‘How the hell do we get across, sir?’ Pendleton asked.

Sharpe had no answer for that. ‘Just keep going!’ he said and led his men down an alley that ran like a narrow stone staircase towards a lower street. A goat clattered ahead of him on sharp hooves, trailing a broken rope from around its neck. A Portuguese soldier was lying drunk at the bottom of the alley, his musket beside him and a wineskin on his chest. Sharpe, knowing his men would stop to drink the wine, kicked the skin onto the cobbles and stamped on it so that the leather burst. The streets became narrower and more crowded as they neared the river, the houses here were taller and mingled with workshops and warehouses. A wheelwright was nailing boards over his doorway, a precaution that would only annoy the French who would doubtless repay the man by destroying his tools. A red painted shutter banged in the west wind. Abandoned washing was strung to dry between the high houses. A round shot crashed through tiles, splintering rafters and cascading shards into the street. A dog, its hip cut to the bone by a falling tile, limped downhill and whined pitifully. A woman shrieked for a lost child. A line of orphans, all in dull white jerkins like farm labourers’ smocks, were crying in terror as two nuns tried to make a passage for them. A priest ran from a church with a massive silver cross on one shoulder and a pile of embroidered vestments on the other. It would be Easter in four days, Sharpe thought.

‘Use your rifle butts!’ Harper shouted, encouraging the riflemen to force their way through the crowd that blocked the narrow arched gateway leading onto the wharf. A cart loaded with furniture had spilled in the roadway and Sharpe ordered his men to pull it aside to make more space. A spinet, or perhaps it was a harpsichord, was being trampled underfoot, the delicate inlay of its cabinet shattering into scraps. Some of Sharpe’s men were pushing the orphans towards the bridge, using their rifles to hold back the adults. A pile of baskets tumbled and dozens of live eels slithered across the cobbles. French gunners had got their artillery into the upper city and now unlimbered to return the fire of the big Portuguese battery arrayed on the convent’s terrace across the valley.

Hagman shouted a warning as three blue-coated soldiers appeared from an alley, and a dozen rifles swung towards the threat, but Sharpe yelled at the men to lower their guns. ‘They’re Portuguese!’ he shouted, recognizing the high-fronted shakoes. ‘And lower your flints,’ he ordered, not wanting one of the rifles to accidentally fire in the press of refugees. A drunk woman reeled from a tavern door and tried to embrace one of the Portuguese soldiers and Sharpe, glancing back because of the soldier’s protest, saw two of his men, Williamson and Tarrant, vanish through the tavern door. It would be bloody Williamson, he thought, and shouted to Harper to keep going, then followed the two men into the tavern. Tarrant turned to defy him, but he was much too slow and Sharpe banged him in the belly with a fist, cracked both men’s heads together, punched Williamson in the throat and slapped Tarrant’s face before dragging both men back to the street. He had not said a word and still did not speak to them as he booted them towards the arch.

And once through the arch the press of refugees was even greater as the crews of some thirty British merchant ships, trapped in the city by an obstinate west wind, tried to escape. The sailors had waited until the last moment, praying that the winds would change, but now they abandoned their craft. The lucky ones used their ships’ tenders to row across the Douro, the unlucky joined the chaotic struggle to get onto the bridge. ‘This way!’ Sharpe led his men along the arched facade of warehouses, struggling along the back of the crowd, hoping to get closer to the bridge. Cannonballs rumbled high overhead. The Portuguese battery was wreathed in smoke and every few seconds that smoke became thicker as a gun fired and there would be a glow of sudden red inside the cloud, a jet of dirty smoke would billow far across the river’s high chasm and the thunderous sound of a cannonball would boom overhead as the shot or shell streaked towards the French.

A pile of empty fish crates gave Sharpe a platform from which he could see the bridge and judge how long before his men could cross safely. He knew there was not much time. More and more Portuguese soldiers were flooding down the steep streets and the French could not be far behind them. He could hear the crackle of musketry like a descant to the big guns’ thunder. He stared over the crowd’s head and saw that Mrs Savage’s coach had made it to the south bank, but she had not used the bridge, instead crossing the river on a cumbrous wine barge. Other barges still crossed the river, but they were manned by armed men who only took passengers willing to pay. Sharpe knew he could force a passage on one of those boats if he could only get near the quayside, but to do that he would need to fight through a throng of women and children.

He reckoned the bridge might make an easier escape route. It consisted of a plank roadway laid across eighteen big wine barges that were firmly anchored against the river’s current and against the big surge of tides from the nearby ocean, but the roadway was now crammed with panicked refugees who became even more frantic as the first French cannonballs splashed into the river. Sharpe, turning to look up the hill, saw the green coats of French cavalry appearing beneath the great smoke of the French guns while the blue jackets of French infantry showed in the alleyways lower down the hill.

‘God save Ireland,’ Patrick Harper said, and Sharpe, knowing that the Irish Sergeant only used that prayer when things were desperate, looked back to the river to see what had caused the three words.

He looked and he stared and he knew they were not going to cross the river by the bridge. No one was, not now, because a disaster was happening. ‘Sweet Jesus,’ Sharpe said softly, ‘sweet Jesus.’

In the middle of the river, halfway across the bridge, the Portuguese engineers had inserted a drawbridge so that wine barges and other small craft could go upriver. The drawbridge spanned the widest gap between any of the pontoons and it was built of heavy oak beams overlaid with oak planks and it was drawn upwards by a pair of windlasses that hauled on ropes through pulleys mounted on a pair of thick timber posts stoutly buttressed with iron struts. The whole mechanism was ponderously heavy and the drawbridge span was wide and the engineers, mindful of the contraption’s weight, had posted notices at either end of the bridge decreeing that only one wagon, carriage or gun team could use the drawbridge at any one time, but now the roadway was so crowded with refugees that the two pontoons supporting the drawbridge’s heavy span were sinking under the weight. The pontoons, like all ships, leaked, and there should have been men aboard to pump out their bilges, but those men had fled with the rest and the weight of the crowd and the slow leaking of the barges meant that the bridge inched lower and lower until the central pontoons, both of them massive barges, were entirely under water and the fast-flowing river began to break and fret against the roadway’s edge. The people there screamed and some of them froze and still more folk pushed on from the northern bank, and then the central part of the roadway slowly dipped beneath the grey water as the people behind forced more fugitives onto the vanished drawbridge which sank even lower.

‘Oh Jesus,’ Sharpe said. He could see the first people being swept away. He could hear the shrieks.

‘God save Ireland,’ Harper said again and made the sign of the cross.

The central hundred feet of the bridge were now under water. Those hundred feet had been swept clear of people, but more were being forced into the gap that suddenly churned white as the drawbridge was sheared away from the rest of the bridge by the river’s pressure. The great span of the bridge reared up black, turned over and was swept seawards, and now there was no bridge across the Douro, but the people on the northern bank still did not know the roadway was cut and so they kept pushing and bullying their way onto the sagging bridge and those in front could not hold them back and instead were inexorably pushed into the broken gap where the white water seethed on the bridge’s shattered ends. The cries of the crowd grew louder, and the sound only increased the panic so that more and more people struggled towards the place where the refugees drowned. Gun smoke, driven by an errant gust of wind, dipped into the gorge and whirled above the bridge’s broken centre where desperate people thrashed at the water as they were swept downstream. Gulls screamed and wheeled. Some Portuguese troops were now trying to hold the French in the streets of the city, but it was a hopeless endeavour. They were outnumbered, the enemy had the high ground, and more and more French forces were coming down the hill. The screams of the fugitives on the bridge were like the sound of the doomed on the Day of Judgment, the cannonballs were booming overhead, the streets of the city were ringing with musket shots, hooves were echoing from house walls and flames were crackling in buildings broken apart by cannon fire.

‘Those wee children,’ Harper said, ‘God help them.’ The orphans, in their dun uniforms, were being pushed into the river. ‘There’s got to be a bloody boat!’

But the men manning the barges had rowed themselves to the south bank and abandoned their craft and so there were no boats to rescue the drowning, just horror in a cold grey river and a line of small heads being swept downstream in the fretting waves and there was nothing Sharpe could do. He could not reach the bridge and though he shouted at folk to abandon the crossing they did not understand English. Musket balls were flecking the river now and some were striking the fugitives on the broken bridge.

‘What the hell can we do?’ Harper asked.

‘Nothing,’ Sharpe said harshly, ‘except get out of here.’ He turned his back on the dying crowd and led his men eastwards down the river wharf. Scores of other people were doing the same thing, gambling that the French would not yet have captured the city’s inland suburbs. The sound of musketry was constant in the streets and the Portuguese guns across the river were now firing at the French in the lower streets so that the hammering of the big guns was punctuated by the noise of breaking masonry and splintering rafters.

Sharpe paused where the wharf ended to make sure all his men were there and he looked back at the bridge to see that so many folk had been forced off its end that the bodies were now jammed in the gap and the water was piling up behind them and foaming white across their heads. He saw a blue-coated Portuguese soldier step on those heads to reach the barge on which the drawbridge had been mounted. Others followed him, skipping over the drowning and the dead. Sharpe was far enough away that he could no longer hear the screams.

‘What happened?’ Dodd, usually the quietest of Sharpe’s men, asked.

‘God was looking the other way,’ Sharpe said and looked at Harper. ‘All here?’

‘All present, sir,’ Harper said. The big Ulsterman looked as if he had been weeping. ‘Those poor wee children,’ he said resentfully.

‘There was nothing we could do,’ Sharpe said curtly, and that was true, though the truth of it did not make him feel any better. ‘Williamson and Tarrant are on a charge,’ he told Harper.

‘Again?’

‘Again,’ Sharpe said, and wondered at the idiocy of the two men who would rather have snatched a drink than escape from the city, even if that drink had meant imprisonment in France. ‘Now come on!’ He followed the civilian fugitives who, arriving at the place where the river’s wharf was blocked by the ancient city wall, had turned up an alleyway. The old wall had been built when men fought in armour and shot at each other with crossbows, and the lichen-covered stones would not have stood two minutes against a modern cannon and as if to mark that redundancy the city had knocked great holes in the old ramparts. Sharpe led his men through one such gap, crossed the remnants of a ditch and then hurried into the wider streets of the new town beyond the walls.

‘Crapauds!’ Hagman warned Sharpe. ‘Sir! Up the hill!’

Sharpe looked to his left and saw a troop of French cavalry riding to cut off the fugitives. They were dragoons, fifty or more of them in their green coats and all carrying straight swords and short carbines. They wore brass helmets that, in wartime, were covered by cloth so the polished metal would not reflect the sunlight. ‘Keep running!’ Sharpe shouted. The dragoons had not spotted the riflemen or, if they had, were not seeking a confrontation, but instead spurred on to where the road skirted a great hill that was topped with a huge white flat-roofed building. A school, perhaps, or a hospital. The main road ran north of the hill, but another went to the south, between the hill and the river, and the dragoons were on the bigger road so Sharpe kept to his right, hoping to escape by the smaller track on the Douro’s bank, but the dragoons at last saw him and drove their horses across the shoulder of the hill to block the lesser road where it bordered the river. Sharpe looked back and saw French infantry following the cavalry. Damn them. Then he saw that still more French troops were pursuing him from the broken city wall. He could probably outrun the infantry, but the dragoons were already ahead of him and the first of them were dismounting and making a barricade across the road. The folk fleeing the city were being headed off and some were climbing to the big white building while others, in despair, were going back to their houses. The cannon were fighting their own battle above the river, the French guns trying to match the bombardment from the big Portuguese battery which had started dozens of fires in the fallen city as the round shot smashed ovens, hearths and forges. The dark smoke of the burning buildings mingled with the grey-white smoke of the guns and beneath that smoke, in the valley of drowning children, Richard Sharpe was trapped.

Lieutenant Colonel James Christopher was neither a lieutenant nor a colonel, though he had once served as a captain in the Lincolnshire Fencibles and still held that commission. He had been christened James Augustus Meredith Christopher and throughout his schooldays had been known as Jam. His father had been a doctor in the small town of Saxilby, a profession and a place that James Christopher liked to ignore, preferring to remember that his mother was second cousin to the Earl of Rochford, and it was Rochford’s influence that had taken Christopher from Cambridge University to the Foreign Office where his command of languages, his natural suavity and his quick intelligence had ensured a swift rise. He had been given early responsibilities, introduced to great men and entrusted with confidences. He was reckoned to be a good prospect, a sound young man whose judgment was usually reliable, which meant, as often as not, that he merely agreed with his superiors, but the reputation had led to his present appointment which was a position as lonely as it was secret. James Christopher’s task was to advise the government whether it would be prudent to keep British troops in Portugal.

The decision, of course, would not rest with James Christopher. He might be a coming man in the Foreign Office, but the decision to stay or withdraw would be taken by the Prime Minister, though what mattered was the quality of advice being given to the Prime Minister. The soldiers, of course, would want to stay because war brought promotion, and the Foreign Secretary wanted the troops to remain because he detested the French, but other men in Whitehall took a more sanguine view and had sent James Christopher to take Portugal’s temperature. The Whigs, enemies of the administration, feared another debacle like that which had led to Corunna. Better, they said, to recognize reality and come to an understanding with the French now, and the Whigs had enough influence in the Foreign Office to have James Christopher posted to Portugal. The army, which had not been told what his true business was, nevertheless agreed to brevet him as a lieutenant colonel and appoint him as an aide to General Cradock, and Christopher used the army’s couriers to send military intelligence to the General and political dispatches to the embassy in Lisbon whence, though they were addressed to the Ambassador, the messages were sent unopened to London. The Prime Minister needed sound advice and James Christopher was supposed to supply the facts that would frame the advice, though of late he had been busy making new facts. He had seen beyond the war’s messy realities to the golden future. James Christopher, in short, had seen the light.

None of which occupied his thoughts as he rode out of Oporto less than a cannon’s range ahead of the French troops. A couple of musket shots were sent in his direction, but Christopher and his servant were superbly mounted on fine Irish horses and they quickly outran the half-hearted pursuit. They took to the hills, galloping along the terrace of a vineyard and then climbing into a forest of pine and oak where they stopped to rest the horses.

Christopher gazed back westwards. The sun had dried the roads after the night’s heavy rain and a smear of dust on the horizon showed where the French army’s baggage train was advancing towards the newly captured city of Oporto. The city itself, hidden now by hills, was marked by a great plume of dirty smoke spewing up from burning houses and from the busy batteries of cannons that, though muted by distance, sounded like an unceasing thunder. No French troops had bothered to pursue Christopher this far. A dozen labourers were deepening a ditch in the valley and ignored the fugitives on the nearby road as if to suggest that the war was the city’s business, not theirs. There were no British riflemen among the fugitives, Christopher noted, but he would have been surprised to see Sharpe and his men this far from the city. Doubtless by now they were dead or captured. What had Hogan been thinking of in asking Sharpe to accompany him? Was it because the shrewd Irishman suspected something? But how could Hogan know? Christopher worried at the problem for a few moments, then dismissed it. Hogan could know nothing; he was just trying to be helpful. ‘The French did well today,’ Christopher remarked to his Portuguese servant, a young man with receding hair and a thin, earnest face.

‘The devil will get them in the end, senhor,’ the servant answered.

‘Sometimes mere men have to do the devil’s business,’ Christopher said. He drew a small telescope from his pocket and trained it on the far hills. ‘In the next few days,’ he said, still gazing through the glass, ‘you will see some things that will surprise you.’

‘If you say so, senhor,’ the servant answered.

‘But “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”’

‘If you say so, senhor,’ the servant repeated, wondering why the English officer called him Horatio when his name was Luis, but he thought it was probably better not to ask. Luis had been a barber in Lisbon where he had sometimes cut the hair of men from the British embassy and it had been those men who had recommended him as a reliable servant to Christopher who paid him good wages in real gold, English gold, and if the English were mad and got names wrong they still made the best coinage in the world, which meant that Colonel Christopher could call Luis whatever he wanted so long as he went on paying him thick guineas embossed with the figure of Saint George slaying the dragon.

Christopher was looking for any sign of a French pursuit, but his telescope was small, old and had a scratched lens and he could see very little better with it than without it. He was meaning to buy another, but he never had the opportunity. He collapsed the glass, put it in his saddle pouch and took out a fresh toothpick that he thrust between his teeth. ‘Onwards,’ he said brusquely, and he led the servant through the wood, across the hill’s crest and down to a large farmhouse. It was plain that Christopher knew the route well for he did not hesitate on the way, nor was he apprehensive as he curbed his horse beside the farm gate. ‘Stables are in there,’ he told Luis, pointing to an archway, ‘kitchen is beyond the blue door and the folks here are expecting us. We’ll spend the night here.’

‘Not at Vila Real de Zedes, senhor?’ Luis asked. ‘I heard you say we would look for Miss Savage?’

‘Your English is getting too good if it lets you eavesdrop,’ Christopher said sourly. ‘Tomorrow, Luis; we shall look for Miss Savage tomorrow.’ Christopher slid out of the saddle and threw the reins to Luis. ‘Cool the horses, unsaddle them, find me something to eat and bring it to my room. One of the servants will let you know where I am.’

Luis walked the two horses to cool them down, then stabled, watered and fed them. Afterwards he went to the kitchen where a cook and two maids showed no surprise at his arrival. Luis had become accustomed to being taken to some remote village or house where his master was known, but he had never been to this farmhouse before. He would have felt happier if Christopher had retreated across the river, but the farm was well hidden in the hills and it was possible the French would never come here. The servants told Luis that the house and lands belonged to a Lisbon merchant who had instructed them to do all they could to accommodate Colonel Christopher’s wishes. ‘He’s been here often then?’ Luis asked.

The cook giggled. ‘He used to come with his woman.’

That explained why Luis had not been brought here before and he wondered who the woman was. ‘He wants food now,’ Luis said. ‘What woman?’

‘The pretty widow,’ the cook said, then sighed. ‘But we have not seen her in a month. A pity. He should have married her.’ She had a chickpea soup on the stove and she ladled some into a bowl, cut some cold mutton and put it on a tray with the soup, red wine and a small loaf of newly baked bread. ‘Tell the Colonel the meal will be ready for his guest this afternoon.’

‘His guest?’ Luis asked, bemused.

‘One guest for dinner, he told us. Now hurry! Don’t let that soup get cold. You go up the stairs and turn right.’

Luis carried the tray upstairs. It was a fine house, well built and handsome, with some ancient paintings on the walls. He found the door to his master’s bedroom ajar and Christopher must have heard the footsteps for he called out that Luis should come in without knocking. ‘Put the food by the window,’ he ordered.

Christopher had changed his clothes and now, instead of wearing the black breeches, black boots and red tailcoat of an English officer, he was in sky-blue breeches that had black leather reinforcements wherever they might touch a saddle. The breeches were skin tight, made so by the laces that ran up both flanks from the ankles to the waist. The Colonel’s new jacket was of the same sky blue as the breeches, but decorated with lavish silver piping that climbed to curl around the stiff, high red collar. Over his left shoulder was a pelisse, a fake jacket trimmed with fur, while on a side table was a cavalry sabre and a tall black hat that bore a short silver cockade held in place by an enamelled badge.

And the enamelled badge displayed the tricolour of France.

‘I said you would be surprised,’ Christopher remarked to Luis who was, indeed, gaping at his master.

Luis found his voice. ‘You are …’ he faltered.

‘I am an English officer, Luis, as you very well know, but the uniform is that of a French hussar. Ah! Chickpea soup, I do so like chickpea soup. Peasant food, but good.’ He crossed to the table and, grimacing because his breeches were so tightly laced, lowered himself into the chair. ‘We shall be sitting a guest to dinner this afternoon.’

‘So I was told,’ Luis said coldly.

‘You will serve, Luis, and you will not be deterred by the fact that my guest is a French officer.’

‘French?’ Luis sounded disgusted.

‘French,’ Christopher confirmed, ‘and he will be coming here with an escort. Probably a large escort, and it would not do, would it, if that escort were to return to their army and say that their officer met with an Englishman? Which is why I wear this.’ He gestured at the French uniform, then smiled at Luis. ‘War is like chess,’ Christopher went on, ‘there are two sides and if the one wins then the other must lose.’

‘France must not win,’ Luis said harshly.

‘There are black and white pieces,’ Christopher continued, ignoring his servant’s protest, ‘and both obey rules. But who makes those rules, Luis? That is where the power lies. Not with the players, certainly not with the pieces, but with the man who makes the rules.’

‘France must not win,’ Luis said again. ‘I am a good Portuguese!’

Christopher sighed at his servant’s stupidity and decided to make things simpler for Luis to understand. ‘You want to rid Portugal of the French?’

‘You know I do!’

‘Then serve dinner this afternoon. Be courteous, hide your thoughts and have faith in me.’

Because Christopher had seen the light and now he would rewrite the rules.

Sharpe stared ahead to where the dragoons had lifted four skiffs from the river and used them to make a barricade across the road. There was no way round the barricade which stretched between two houses, for beyond the right-hand house was the river and beyond the left was the steep hill where the French infantry approached, and there were more French infantry behind Sharpe, which meant the only way out of the trap was to go straight through the barricade.

‘What do we do, sir?’ Harper asked.

Sharpe swore.

‘That bad, eh?’ Harper unslung his rifle. ‘We could pick some of those boys off the barricade there.’

‘We could,’ Sharpe agreed, but it would only annoy the French, not defeat them. He could defeat them, he was sure, because his riflemen were good and the enemy’s barricade was low, but Sharpe was also sure he would lose half his men in the fight and the other half would still have to escape the pursuit of vengeful horsemen. He could fight, he could win, but he could not survive the victory.

There really was only one thing to do, but Sharpe was reluctant to say it aloud. He had never surrendered. The very thought was horrid.

‘Fix swords,’ he shouted.

His men looked surprised, but they obeyed. They took the long sword bayonets from their scabbards and slotted them onto the rifle muzzles. Sharpe drew his own sword, a heavy cavalry blade that was a yard of slaughtering steel. ‘All right, lads. Four files!’

‘Sir?’ Harper was puzzled.

‘You heard me, Sergeant! Four files! Smartly, now.’

Harper shouted the men into line. The French infantry who had come from the city were only a hundred paces behind now, too far for an accurate musket shot though one Frenchman did try and his ball cracked into the whitewashed wall of a cottage beside the road. The sound seemed to irritate Sharpe. ‘On the double now!’ he snapped. ‘Advance!’

They trotted down the road towards the newly erected barricade which was two hundred paces ahead. The river slid grey and swirling to their right while on their left was a field dotted with the remnants of last year’s haystacks which were small and pointed so that they looked like bedraggled witches’ hats. A hobbled cow with a broken horn watched them pass. Some fugitives, despairing of passing the dragoons’ roadblock, had settled in the field to await their fate.

‘Sir?’ Harper managed to catch up with Sharpe, who was a dozen paces ahead of his men.

‘Sergeant?’

It was always ‘Sergeant’, Harper noted, when things were grim, never ‘Patrick’ or ‘Pat’. ‘What are we doing, sir?’

‘We’re charging that barricade, Sergeant.’

‘They’ll fillet our guts, if you’ll pardon me saying so, sir. The buggers will turn us inside out.’

‘I know that,’ Sharpe said, ‘and you know that. But do they know that?’

Harper stared at the dragoons who were levelling their carbines across the keels of the upturned skiffs. The carbine, like a musket and unlike a rifle, was smoothbore and thus inaccurate, which meant the dragoons would wait until the last moment to unleash their volley, and that volley promised to be heavy for still more of the green-coated enemy were squeezing onto the road behind the barricade and aiming their weapons. ‘I think they do know that, sir,’ Harper observed.

Sharpe agreed, though he would not say so. He had ordered his men to fix swords because the sight of fixed bayonets was more frightening than the threat of rifles alone, but the dragoons did not seem to be worried by the menace of the steel blades. They were crowding together so that every carbine could join the opening volley and Sharpe knew he would have to surrender, but he was unwilling to do it without a single shot being fired. He quickened his pace, reckoning that one of the dragoons would fire at him too soon and that one shot would be Sharpe’s signal to halt, throw down his sword and so save his men’s lives. The decision hurt, but it was the only option he had unless God sent a miracle.

‘Sir?’ Harper struggled to keep up with Sharpe. ‘They’ll kill you!’

‘Get back, Sergeant,’ Sharpe said, ‘that’s an order.’ He wanted the dragoons to fire at him, not at his men.

‘They’ll bloody kill you!’ Harper said.

‘Maybe they’ll turn and run,’ Sharpe called back.

‘God save Ireland,’ Harper said, ‘and why would they do that?’

‘Because God wears a green jacket,’ Sharpe snarled, ‘of course.’

And just then the French turned and ran.

CHAPTER TWO

Sharpe had always been lucky. Maybe not in the greater things of life, certainly not in the nature of his birth to a Cat Lane whore who had died without giving her only son a single caress, nor in the manner of his upbringing in a London orphanage that cared not a jot for the children within its grim walls, but in the smaller things, in those moments when success and failure had been a bullet’s width apart, he had been lucky. It had been good fortune that took him to the tunnel where the Tippoo Sultan was trapped, and even better fortune that had decapitated an orderly at Assaye so that Richard Sharpe was riding behind Sir Arthur Wellesley when that General’s horse was killed by a pike thrust and Sir Arthur was thrown down among the enemy. All luck, outrageous luck sometimes, but even Sharpe doubted his good fortune when he saw the dragoons twisting away from the barricade. Was he dead? Dreaming? Concussed and imagining things? But then he heard the roar of triumph from his men and he knew he was not dreaming. The enemy really had turned away and Sharpe was going to live and his men would not have to march as prisoners to France.

He heard the firing then, the stuttering chatter of muskets and realized that the dragoons had been attacked from their rear. There was powder smoke hanging thick between the houses that edged the road, and more coming from an orchard halfway up the hill on which the great white flat-topped block of a building stood, and then Sharpe was at the barricade and he leaped up onto the first skiff, his foot half sticking in some new tar that had been smeared on its lower hull. The dragoons were facing away from him, shooting up at the windows, but then a green-coated man turned and saw Sharpe and shouted a warning. An officer came from the door of the house beside the river and Sharpe, jumping down from the boat, skewered the man’s shoulder with his big sword, then shoved him hard against the limewashed wall as the dragoon who had shouted the warning fired at him. The ball plucked at Sharpe’s heavy pack, then Sharpe kneed the officer in the groin and turned on the man who had fired at him. That man was going backwards mouthing ‘non, non’, and Sharpe slammed the sword against his head, drawing blood but doing more damage with the blade’s sheer weight so that the dazed dragoon fell and was trampled by riflemen swarming over the low barricade. They were screaming slaughter, deaf to Harper’s shout to give the dragoons a volley.

Maybe three rifles fired, but the rest of the men kept charging to take their sword bayonets to an enemy that could not stand against an attack from front and back. The dragoons had been ambushed by troops coming from a building some fifty yards down the road, troops who had been hidden in the building and in the garden behind, and the French were now being attacked from both sides. The small space between the houses was veiled in powder smoke, loud with screams and the echo of shots, stinking of blood, and Sharpe’s men were fighting with a ferocity that both astonished and appalled the French. They were dragoons, schooled to fight with big swords from horseback, and they were not ready for this bloody brawl on foot with riflemen hardened by years of tavern fights and barrack-room conflicts. The men in rifle-green jackets were murderous in close combat and the surviving dragoons fled back to a grassy space on the river bank where their horses were picketed and Sharpe roared at his men to keep going eastwards. ‘Let them go!’ he shouted. ‘Drop ’em! Drop ’em!’ The last four words were those used in the rat pit, the instruction shouted to a terrier trying to kill a rat that was already dead. ‘Drop ’em! Keep going!’ There was French infantry close behind, there were more cavalrymen in Oporto and Sharpe’s priority now was to get as far away from the city as he possibly could. ‘Sergeant!’

‘I hear you, sir!’ Harper shouted and he waded down the alley and hauled Rifleman Tongue away from a Frenchman. ‘Come on, Isaiah! Move your bloody bones!’

‘I’m killing the bastard, Sergeant, I’m killing the bastard!’

‘The bastard’s already dead! Now move!’ A brace of carbine bullets rattled in the alleyway. A woman screamed incessantly in one of the nearby houses. A fleeing dragoon stumbled over a pile of woven wicker fish traps and sprawled in the house’s backyard where another Frenchman was lying among a pile of drying washing that he had pulled from a line as he died. The white sheets were red with his blood. Gataker aimed at a dragoon officer who had managed to mount his horse, but Harper pulled him away. ‘Keep running! Keep running!’

Then there was a swarm of blue uniforms to Sharpe’s left and he turned, sword raised, and saw they were Portuguese. ‘Friends!’ he shouted for the benefit of his riflemen. ‘Watch out for the Portuguese!’ The Portuguese soldiers were the ones who had saved him from an ignominious surrender, and now, having ambushed the French from behind, they joined Sharpe’s men in their headlong flight to the east.

‘Keep going!’ Harper bawled. Some of the riflemen were panting and they slowed to a walk until a flurry of carbine shots from the surviving dragoons made them hurry again. Most of the shots went high, one banged into the road beside Sharpe and ricocheted up into a poplar, and another struck Tarrant in the hip. The rifleman went down, screaming, and Sharpe grabbed his collar and kept running, dragging Tarrant with him. The road and river curved leftwards and there were trees and bushes on its bank. That woodland was not far away, too close to the city for comfort, but it would provide cover while Sharpe reorganized his men.

‘Get to the trees!’ Sharpe yelled. ‘Get to the trees!’

Tarrant was in pain, shouting protests and leaving a trail of blood on the road. Sharpe pulled him into the trees and let him drop, then stood beside the road and shouted at his men to form a line at the wood’s edge. ‘Count them, Sergeant,’ he called to Harper, ‘count them!’ The Portuguese infantry mingled with the riflemen and began reloading their muskets. Sharpe unslung his rifle and fired at a cavalryman who was wheeling his horse on the river bank, ready to pursue. The horse reared, throwing its rider. Other dragoons had drawn their long straight swords, evidently intent on a vengeful pursuit, but then a French officer shouted at the cavalrymen to stay where they were. He at least understood that a charge into thick trees where infantry was loaded and ready was tantamount to suicide. He would wait for his own infantry to catch up.

Daniel Hagman took out the scissors that had cut Sharpe’s hair and sliced Tarrant’s breeches away from the wounded hip. Blood spilled down as Hagman cut, then the old man grimaced. ‘Reckon he’s lost the joint, sir.’

‘He can’t walk?’

‘He won’t walk never again,’ Hagman said. Tarrant swore viciously. He was one of Sharpe’s troublemakers, a sullen man from Hertfordshire who never lost a chance to become drunk and vicious, but when he was sober he was a good marksman who did not lose his head in battle. ‘You’ll be all right, Ned,’ Hagman told him, ‘you’ll live.’

‘Carry me,’ Tarrant appealed to his friend, Williamson.

‘Leave him!’ Sharpe snapped. ‘Take his rifle, ammunition and sword.’

‘You can’t just leave him here,’ Williamson said, and obstructed Hagman so that he could not unbuckle his friend’s cartridge box.

Sharpe seized Williamson by the shoulder and hauled him away. ‘I said leave him!’ He did not like it, but he could not be slowed down by the weight of a wounded man, and the French would tend for Tarrant better than any of Sharpe’s men could. The rifleman would go to a French army hospital, be treated by French doctors and, if he did not die from gangrene, would probably be exchanged for a wounded French prisoner. Tarrant would go home, a cripple, and most likely end in the parish workhouse. Sharpe pushed through the trees to find Harper. Carbine bullets pattered through the branches, leaving shreds of leaf sifting down the shafts of sunlight behind them. ‘Anyone missing?’ Sharpe asked Harper.

‘No, sir. What happened to Tarrant?’

‘Bullet in the hip,’ Sharpe said, ‘he’ll have to stay here.’

‘Won’t miss him,’ Harper said, though before Sharpe had made the Irishman into a sergeant, Harper had been a crony of the troublemakers among whom Tarrant had been a ringleader. Now Harper was the troublemaker’s scourge. It was strange, Sharpe reflected, what three stripes could do.

Sharpe reloaded his rifle, knelt by a laurel tree, cocked the weapon and stared at the French. Most of the dragoons were mounted, though a handful were on foot and trying their luck with their carbines, but at too long a range. But in a minute or two, Sharpe thought, they would have a hundred infantrymen ready to charge. It was time to go.

‘Senhor.’ A very young Portuguese officer appeared beside the tree and bowed to Sharpe.

‘Later!’ Sharpe didn’t like to be so rude, but there was no time to waste on courtesies. ‘Dan!’ He pushed past the Portuguese officer and shouted at Hagman. ‘Have we got Tarrant’s kit?’

‘Here, sir.’ Hagman had the wounded man’s rifle on his shoulder and his cartridge box dangling from his belt. Sharpe would have hated the French to collect a Baker rifle, they were trouble enough already without being given the best weapon ever issued to a skirmisher.

‘This way!’ Sharpe ordered, going north away from the river.

He deliberately left the road. It followed the river, and the open pastures on the Douro’s bank offered few obstacles to pursuing cavalry, but a smaller track twisted north through the trees and Sharpe took it, using the woodland to cover his escape. As the ground became higher the trees thinned out, becoming groves of squat oaks that were cultivated because their thick bark provided the corks for Oporto’s wine. Sharpe led a gruelling pace, only stopping after half an hour when they came to the edge of the oaks and were staring at a great valley of vineyards. The city was still in sight to the west, the smoke from its many fires drifting over the oaks and vines. The men rested. Sharpe had feared a pursuit, but the French evidently wanted to plunder Oporto’s houses and find the prettiest women and had no mind to pursue a handful of soldiers fleeing into the hills.

The Portuguese soldiers had kept pace with Sharpe’s riflemen and their officer, who had tried to talk to Sharpe before, now approached again. He was very young and very slender and very tall and wearing what looked like a brand-new uniform. His officer’s sword hung from a white shoulder sash edged with silver piping and at his belt was a holstered pistol that looked so clean Sharpe suspected it had never been fired. He was good-looking except for a black moustache that was too thin, and something about his demeanour suggested he was a gentleman, and a decent one at that, for his dark and intelligent eyes were oddly mournful, but perhaps that was no surprise for he had just seen Oporto fall to invaders. He bowed to Sharpe. ‘Senhor?’

‘I don’t speak Portuguese,’ Sharpe said.

‘I am Lieutenant Vicente,’ the officer said in good English. His dark-blue uniform had white piping at its hems and was decorated with silver buttons and red cuffs and a high red collar. He wore a barretina, a shako with a false front that added six inches to his already considerable height. The number 18 was emblazoned on the barretina’s brass front plate. He was out of breath and sweat was glistening on his face, but he was determined to remember his manners. ‘I congratulate you, senhor.’

‘Congratulate me?’ Sharpe did not understand.

‘I watched you, senhor, on the road beneath the seminary. I thought you must surrender, but instead you attacked. It was’ – Vicente paused, frowning as he searched for the right word – ‘it was great bravery,’ he went on and then embarrassed Sharpe by removing the barretina and bowing again, ‘and I brought my men to attack the French because your bravery deserved it.’

‘I wasn’t being brave,’ Sharpe said, ‘just bloody stupid.’

‘You were brave,’ Vicente insisted, ‘and we salute you.’ He looked for a moment as though he planned to step smartly back, draw his sword and whip the blade up into a formal salute, but Sharpe managed to head off the flourish with a question about Vicente’s men. ‘There are thirty-seven of us, senhor,’ the young Portuguese answered gravely, ‘and we are from the eighteenth regiment, the second of Porto.’ He gave Oporto its proper Portuguese name. The regiment, he said, had been defending the makeshift palisades on the city’s northern edge and had retreated towards the bridge where it had dissolved into panic. Vicente had gone eastwards in the company of these thirty-seven men, only ten of whom were from his own company. ‘There were more of us,’ he confessed, ‘many more, but most kept running. One of my sergeants said I was a fool to try and rescue you and I had to shoot him to stop him from spreading, what is the word? Desesperança? Ah, despair, and then I led these volunteers to your assistance.’

For a few seconds Sharpe just stared at the Portuguese Lieutenant. ‘You did what?’ he finally asked.

‘I led these men back to give you aid. I am the only officer of my company left, so who else could make the decision? Captain Rocha was killed by a cannonball up on the redoubt, and the others? I do not know what happened to them.’

‘No,’ Sharpe said, ‘before that. You shot your Sergeant?’

Vicente nodded. ‘I shall stand trial, of course. I shall plead necessity.’ There were tears in his eyes. ‘But the Sergeant said you were all dead men and that we were beaten ones. He was urging the men to shed their uniforms and desert.’

‘You did the right thing,’ Sharpe said, astonished.

Vicente bowed again. ‘You flatter me, senhor.’

‘And stop calling me senhor,’ Sharpe said. ‘I’m a lieutenant like you.’

Vicente took a half step back, unable to hide his surprise. ‘You are a … ?’ he began to ask, then understood that the question was rude. Sharpe was older than he was, maybe by ten years, and if Sharpe was still a lieutenant then presumably he was not a good soldier, for a good soldier, by the age of thirty, must have been promoted. ‘But I am sure, senhor,’ Vicente went on, ‘that you are senior to me.’

‘I might not be,’ Sharpe said.

‘I have been a lieutenant for two weeks,’ Vicente said.

It was Sharpe’s turn to look surprised. ‘Two weeks!’

‘I had some training before that, of course,’ Vicente said, ‘and during my studies I read the exploits of the great soldiers.’

‘Your studies?’

‘I am a lawyer, senhor.’

‘A lawyer!’ Sharpe could not hide his instinctive disgust. He came from the gutters of England and anyone born and raised in those gutters knew that most persecution and oppression was inflicted by lawyers. Lawyers were the devil’s servants who ushered men and women to the gallows, they were the vermin who gave orders to the bailiffs, they made their snares from statutes and became wealthy on their victims and when they were rich enough they became politicians so they could devise even more laws to make themselves even wealthier. ‘I hate bloody lawyers,’ Sharpe growled with a genuine intensity for he was remembering Lady Grace and what had happened after she died and how the lawyers had stripped him of every penny he had ever made, and the memory of Grace and her dead baby brought all the old misery back and he thrust it out of mind. ‘I do hate lawyers,’ he said.

Vicente was so dumbfounded by Sharpe’s hostility that he seemed to simply blank it out of his mind. ‘I was a lawyer,’ he said, ‘before I took up my country’s sword. I worked for the Real Companhia Velha, which is responsible for the regulation of the trade of port wine.’

‘If a child of mine wanted to become a lawyer,’ Sharpe said, ‘I’d strangle it with my own hands and then piss on its grave.’

‘So you are married then, senhor?’ Vicente asked politely.

‘No, I’m bloody not married.’

‘I misunderstood,’ Vicente said, then gestured towards his tired troops. ‘So here we are, senhor, and I thought we might join forces.’

‘Maybe,’ Sharpe said grudgingly, ‘but make one thing clear, lawyer. If your commission is two weeks old then I’m the senior man. I’m in charge. No bloody lawyer weaselling around that.’

‘Of course, senhor,’ Vicente said, frowning as though he was offended by Sharpe’s stating of the obvious.

Bloody lawyer, Sharpe thought, of all the bloody ill fortune. He knew he had behaved boorishly, especially as this courtly young lawyer had possessed the courage to kill a sergeant and lead his men to Sharpe’s rescue, and he knew he should apologize for his rudeness, but instead he stared south and west, trying to make sense of the landscape, looking for any pursuit and wondering where in hell he was. He took out his fine telescope which had been a gift from Sir Arthur Wellesley and trained it back the way they had come, staring over the trees, and at last he saw what he expected to see. Dust. A lot of dust being kicked up by hooves, boots or wheels. It could have been fugitives streaming eastwards on the road beside the river, or it could have been the French, Sharpe could not tell.

‘You will be trying to get south of the Douro?’ Vicente asked.

‘Aye, I am. But there’s no bridges on this part of the river, is that right?’

‘Not till you reach Amarante,’ Vicente said, ‘and that is on the River Tamega. It is a … how do you say? A side river? Tributary, thank you, of the Douro, but once across the Tamega there is a bridge over the Douro at Peso da Régua.’

‘And are the Frogs on the far side of the Tamega?’

Vicente shook his head. ‘We were told General Silveira is there.’

Being told that a Portuguese general was waiting across a river was not the same as knowing it, Sharpe thought. ‘And there’s a ferry over the Douro,’ he asked, ‘not far from here?’

Vicente nodded. ‘At Barca d’Avintas.’

‘How close is it?’

Vicente thought for a heartbeat. ‘Maybe a half-hour’s walk? Less, probably.’

‘That close?’ But if the ferry was close to Oporto then the French could already be there. ‘And how far is Amarante?’

‘We could be there tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Sharpe echoed, then collapsed the telescope. He stared south. Was that dust thrown up by the French? Were they on their way to Barca d’Avintas? He wanted to use the ferry because it was so much nearer, but also riskier. Would the French be expecting fugitives to use the ferry? Or perhaps the invaders did not even know it existed. There was only one way to find out. ‘How do we get to Barca d’Avintas?’ he asked Vicente, gesturing back down the track that led through the cork oaks. ‘The same way we came?’

‘There is a quicker path,’ Vicente said.

‘Then lead on.’

Some of the men were sleeping, but Harper kicked them awake and they all followed Vicente off the road and down into a gentle valley where vines grew in neatly tended rows. From there they climbed another hill and walked through meadows dotted with the small haystacks left from the previous year. Flowers studded the grass and twined about the witch-hat haystacks, while blossom filled the hedgerows. There was no path, though Vicente led the men confidently enough.

‘You know where you’re going?’ Sharpe asked suspiciously after a while.

‘I know this landscape,’ Vicente assured the rifleman, ‘I know it well.’

‘You grew up here, then?’

Vicente shook his head. ‘I was raised in Coimbra. That’s far to the south, senhor, but I know this landscape because I belong’ – he checked and corrected himself – ‘belonged to a society that walks here.’

‘A society that walks in the countryside?’ Sharpe asked, amused.

Vicente blushed. ‘We are philosophers, senhor, and poets.’

Sharpe was too astonished to respond immediately, but finally managed a question. ‘You were what?’

‘Philosophers and poets, senhor.’

‘Jesus bloody Christ,’ Sharpe said.

‘We believe, senhor,’ Vicente went on, ‘that there is inspiration in the countryside. The country, you see, is natural, while towns are made by man and so harbour all men’s wickedness. If we wish to discover our natural goodness then it must be sought in the country.’ He was having trouble finding the right English words to express what he meant. ‘There is, I think,’ he tried again, ‘a natural goodness in the world and we seek it.’

‘So you come here for inspiration?’

‘We do, yes.’ Vicente nodded eagerly.

Giving inspiration to a lawyer, Sharpe thought sourly, was like feeding fine brandy to a rat. ‘And let me guess,’ he said, barely hiding his derision, ‘that the members of your society of rhyming philosophers are all men. Not a woman among you, eh?’

‘How did you know?’ Vicente asked in amazement.

‘I told you, I guessed.’

Vicente nodded. ‘It is not, of course, that we do not like women. You must not think that we do not want their company, but they are reluctant to join our discussions. They would be most welcome, of course, but …’ His voice tailed away.

‘Women are like that,’ Sharpe said. Women, he had found, preferred the company of rogues to the joys of conversation with sober and earnest young men like Lieutenant Vicente who harboured romantic dreams about the world and whose thin black moustache had patently been grown in an attempt to make himself look older and more sophisticated and only succeeded in making him look younger. ‘Tell me something, Lieutenant,’ he said.

‘Jorge,’ Vicente interrupted him, ‘my name is Jorge. Like your saint.’

‘So tell me something, Jorge. You said you had some training as a soldier. What kind of training was it?’

‘We had lectures in Porto.’

‘Lectures?’

‘On the history of warfare. On Hannibal, Alexander and Caesar.’

‘Book learning?’ Sharpe asked, not hiding his derision.

‘Book learning,’ Vicente said bravely, ‘comes naturally to a lawyer, and a lawyer, moreover, who saved your life, Lieutenant.’

Sharpe grunted, knowing he had deserved that mild reproof. ‘What did happen back there,’ he asked, ‘when you rescued me? I know you shot one of your sergeants, but why didn’t the French hear you do that?’

‘Ah!’ Vicente frowned, thinking. ‘I shall be honest, Lieutenant, and tell you it is not all to my credit. I had shot the Sergeant before I saw you. He was telling the men to strip off their uniforms and run away. Some did and the others would not listen to me so I shot him. It was very sad. And most of the men were in the tavern by the river, close to where the French made their barricade.’ Sharpe had seen no tavern; he had been too busy trying to extricate his men from the dragoons to notice one. ‘It was then I saw you coming. Sergeant Macedo’ – Vicente gestured towards a squat, dark-faced man stumping along behind – ‘wanted to stay hidden in the tavern and I told the men that it was time to fight for Portugal. Most did not seem to listen, so I drew my pistol, senhor, and I went into the road. I thought I would die, but I also thought I must set an example.’

‘But your men followed you?’

‘They did,’ Vicente said warmly, ‘and Sergeant Macedo fought very bravely.’

‘I think,’ Sharpe said, ‘that despite being a bloody lawyer you’re a remarkable bloody soldier.’

‘I am?’ The young Portuguese sounded amazed, but Sharpe knew it must have taken a natural leader to bring men out of a tavern to ambush a party of dragoons.

‘So did all your philosophers and poets join the army?’ Sharpe asked.

Vicente looked embarrassed. ‘Some joined the French, alas.’

‘The French!’

The Lieutenant shrugged. ‘There is a belief, senhor, that the future of mankind is prophesied in French thought. In French ideas. In Portugal, I think, we are old-fashioned and in response many of us are inspired by the French philosophers. They reject the church and the old ways. They dislike the monarchy and despise unearned privilege. Their ideas are very exciting. You have read them?’

‘No,’ Sharpe said.

‘But I love my country more than I love Monsieur Rousseau,’ Vicente said sadly, ‘so I shall be a soldier before I am a poet.’

‘Quite right,’ Sharpe said, ‘best choose something useful to do with your life.’ They crossed a small rise in the ground and Sharpe saw the river ahead and a small village beside it and he checked Vicente with an upraised hand. ‘Is that Barca d’Avintas?’

‘It is,’ Vicente said.

‘God damn it,’ Sharpe said bitterly, because the French were there already.

The river curled gently at the foot of some blue-tinged hills, and between Sharpe and the river were meadows, vineyards, the small village, a stream flowing to the river and the goddamned bloody French. More dragoons. The green-coated cavalrymen had dismounted and now strolled about the village as if they did not have a care in the world and Sharpe, dropping back behind some gorse bushes, waved his men down. ‘Sergeant! Skirmish order along the crest.’ He left Harper to get on with deploying the rifles while he took out his telescope and stared at the enemy.

‘What do I do?’ Vicente asked.

‘Just wait,’ Sharpe said. He focused the glass, marvelling at the clarity of its magnified image. He could see the buckle holes in the girth straps on the dragoons’ horses which were picketed in a small field just to the west of the village. He counted the horses. Forty-six. Maybe forty-eight. It was hard to tell because some of the beasts were bunched together. Call it fifty men. He edged the telescope left and saw smoke rising from beyond the village, maybe from the river bank. A small stone bridge crossed the stream which flowed from the north. He could see no villagers. Had they fled? He looked to the west, back down the road which led to Oporto, and he could see no more Frenchmen, which suggested the dragoons were a patrol sent to harry fugitives. ‘Pat!’

‘Sir?’ Harper came and crouched beside him.

‘We can take these bastards.’

Harper borrowed Sharpe’s telescope and stared south for a good minute. ‘Forty of them? Fifty?’

‘About that. Make sure our boys are loaded.’ Sharpe left the telescope with Harper and scrambled back from the crest to find Vicente. ‘Call your men here. I want to talk to them. You’ll translate.’ Sharpe waited till the thirty-seven Portuguese were assembled. Most looked uncomfortable, doubtless wondering why they were being commanded by a foreigner. ‘My name is Sharpe,’ he told the blue-coated troops, ‘Lieutenant Sharpe, and I’ve been a soldier for sixteen years.’ He waited for Vicente to interpret, then pointed at the youngest-looking Portuguese soldier, a lad who could not have been a day over seventeen and might well have been three years younger. ‘I was carrying a musket before you were born. And I mean carrying a musket. I was a soldier like you. I marched in the ranks.’ Vicente, as he translated, gave Sharpe a surprised look. The rifleman ignored it. ‘I’ve fought in Flanders,’ Sharpe went on, ‘I’ve fought in India, I’ve fought in Spain and I’ve fought in Portugal, and I’ve never lost a fight. Never.’ The Portuguese had just been run out of the great northern redoubt in front of Oporto and that defeat was still sore, yet here was a man telling them he was invincible and some of them looked at the scar on his face and the hardness in his eyes and they believed him. ‘Now you and I are going to fight together,’ Sharpe went on, ‘and that means we’re going to win. We’re going to run these damned Frenchmen out of Portugal!’ Some of them smiled at that. ‘Don’t take any notice of what happened today. That wasn’t your fault. You were led by a bishop! What bloody use is a bishop to anyone? You might as well go into battle with a lawyer.’ Vicente gave Sharpe a swift and reproving glance before translating the last sentence, but he must have done it correctly for the men grinned at Sharpe. ‘We’re going to run the bastards back to France,’ Sharpe continued, ‘and for every Portuguese and Briton they kill we’re going to slaughter a score.’ Some of the Portuguese thumped their musket butts on the ground in approbation. ‘But before we fight,’ Sharpe went on, ‘you’d better know I have three rules and you had all better get used to those rules now. Because if you break these three rules then, God help me, I’ll goddamn break you.’ Vicente sounded nervous as he interpreted the last few words.

Sharpe waited, then held up one finger. ‘You don’t get drunk without my permission.’ A second finger. ‘You don’t thieve from anyone unless you’re starving. And I don’t count taking things off the enemy as thieving.’ That got a smile. He held up the third finger. ‘And you fight as if the devil himself was on your tail. That’s it! You don’t get drunk, you don’t thieve and you fight like demons. You understand?’ They nodded after the translation.

‘And right now,’ Sharpe went on, ‘you’re going to start fighting. You’re going to make three ranks and you’ll fire a volley at some French cavalry.’ He would have preferred two ranks, but only the British fought in two ranks. Every other army used three and so, for the moment, he would too, even though thirty-seven men in three ranks offered a very small frontage. ‘And you won’t pull your trigger until Lieutenant Vicente gives the order. You can trust him! He’s a good soldier, your Lieutenant!’ Vicente blushed and perhaps made some modest changes to his interpretation, but the grins on his men’s faces suggested the lawyer had conveyed the gist of Sharpe’s words. ‘Make sure your muskets are loaded,’ Sharpe said, ‘but not cocked. I don’t want the enemy knowing we’re here because some careless halfwit lets off a cocked musket. Now, enjoy killing the bastards.’ He left them on that bloodthirsty note and walked back to the crest where he knelt beside Harper. ‘Are they doing anything?’ he asked, nodding towards the dragoons.

‘Getting drunk,’ Harper said. ‘Gave them the talk, did you?’

‘Is that what it is?’

‘Don’t get drunk, don’t thieve and fight like the devil. Mister Sharpe’s sermon.’

Sharpe smiled, then took the telescope from the Sergeant and trained it at the village where a score of dragoons, their green coats unbuttoned, were squirting wineskins into their mouths. Others were searching the small houses. A woman with a torn black dress ran from one house, was seized by a cavalryman and dragged back indoors. ‘I thought the villagers were gone,’ Sharpe said.

‘I’ve seen a couple of women,’ Harper said, ‘and doubtless there are plenty more we can’t see.’ He ran a huge hand over the lock of his rifle. ‘So what are we going to do with them?’

‘We’re going to piss up their noses,’ Sharpe said, ‘till they decide to swat us away and then we’re going to kill them.’ He collapsed the glass and told Harper exactly how he planned to defeat the dragoons.

The vineyards gave Sharpe the opportunity. The vines grew in close thick rows that stretched from the stream on their left to some woodland off to the west, and the rows were broken only by a footpath that gave labourers access to the plants which offered dense cover for Sharpe’s men as they crawled closer to Barca d’Avintas. Two careless French sentries watched from the village’s edge, but neither saw anything threatening in the spring countryside and one of them even laid his carbine down so he could pack a small pipe with tobacco. Sharpe put Vicente’s men close to the footpath and sent his riflemen off to the west so that they were closer to the paddock in which the dragoons’ horses were picketed. Then he cocked his own rifle, lay down so that the barrel protruded between two gnarled vine roots and aimed at the nearest sentry.

He fired, and the butt slammed back into his shoulder and the sound was still echoing from the village’s walls when his riflemen began shooting at the horses. Their first volley brought down six or seven of the beasts, wounded as many again and started a panic among the other tethered animals. Two managed to pull their picketing pins out of the turf and jumped the fence in an attempt to escape, but then circled back towards their companions just as the rifles were reloaded and fired again. More horses screamed and fell. A half-dozen of the riflemen were watching the village and began shooting at the first dragoons to run towards the paddock. Vicente’s infantry remained hidden, crouching among the vines. Sharpe saw that the sentry he had shot was crawling up the street, leaving a bloody trail, and, as the smoke from that shot faded, he fired again, this time at an officer running towards the paddock. More dragoons, fearing they were losing their precious horses, ran to unpicket the beasts and the rifle bullets began to kill men as well as horses. An injured mare whinnied pitifully and then the dragoons’ commanding officer realized he could not rescue the horses until he had driven away the men who were slaughtering them and so he shouted at his cavalrymen to advance into the vines and drive the attackers off.

‘Keep shooting the horses!’ Sharpe shouted. It was not a pleasant job. The screams of the wounded beasts tore at men’s souls and the sight of an injured gelding trying to drag itself along by its front legs was heartbreaking, but Sharpe kept his men firing. The dragoons, spared the rifle fire now, ran towards the vineyard in the confident belief that they were dealing with a mere handful of partisans. Dragoons were supposed to be mounted infantry and so they were issued with carbines, short-barrelled muskets, with which they could fight on foot, and some carried the carbines while others preferred to attack with their long straight swords, but all of them instinctively ran towards the track which climbed among the vines. Sharpe had guessed they would follow the track rather than clamber over the entangling vines and that was why he had put Vicente and his men close by the path. The dragoons were bunching together as they entered the vines and Sharpe had an urge to run across to the Portuguese and take command of them, but just then Vicente ordered his men to stand.

The Portuguese soldiers appeared as if by magic in front of the disorganized dragoons. Sharpe watched, approvingly, as Vicente let his men settle, then ordered them to fire. The French had tried to check their desperate charge and swerve aside, but the vines obstructed them and Vicente’s volley hammered into the thickest press of cavalrymen bunched on the narrow track. Harper, off on the right flank, had the riflemen add their own volley so that the dragoons were assailed from both sides. Powder smoke drifted over the vines. ‘Fix swords!’ Sharpe shouted. A dozen dragoons were dead and the ones at the back were already running away. They had been convinced they fought against a few undisciplined peasants and instead they were outnumbered by real soldiers and the centre of their makeshift line had been gutted, half their horses were dead and now the infantry was coming from the smoke with fixed bayonets. The Portuguese stepped over the dead and injured dragoons. One of the Frenchmen, shot in the thigh, rolled over with a pistol in his hand and Vicente knocked it away with his sword and then kicked the gun into the stream. The unwounded dragoons were running towards the horses and Sharpe ordered his riflemen to drive them off with bullets rather than blades. ‘Just keep them running!’ he shouted. ‘Panic them! Lieutenant!’ He looked for Vicente, ‘Take your men into the village! Cooper! Tongue! Slattery! Make these bastards safe!’ He knew he had to keep the Frenchmen in front moving, but he dared not leave any lightly wounded dragoons in his rear and so he ordered the three riflemen to disarm the cavalrymen injured by Vicente’s volley. The Portuguese were in the village now, banging open doors and converging on a church that stood next to the bridge that crossed the small stream.

Sharpe ran towards the field where the horses were dead, dying or terrified. A few dragoons had tried to untie their mounts, but the rifle fire had chased them off. So now Sharpe was the possessor of a score of horses. ‘Dan!’ he called to Hagman. ‘Put the wounded ones out of their misery. Pendleton! Harris! Cresacre! Over there!’ He pointed the three men towards the wall on the paddock’s western side. The dragoons had fled that way and Sharpe guessed they had taken refuge in some trees that stood thick just a hundred paces away. Three picquets were not enough to cope with even a half-hearted counterattack by the French so Sharpe knew he would have to strengthen those picquets soon, but first he wanted to make sure there were no dragoons skulking in the houses, gardens and orchards of the village.

Barca d’Avintas was a small place, a straggle of houses built about the road that ran down to the river where a short jetty should have accommodated the ferry, but some of the smoke Sharpe had seen earlier was coming from a barge-like vessel with a blunt bow and a dozen rowlocks. Now it was smoking in the water, its upper works burned almost to the waterline and its lower hull holed and sunken. Sharpe stared at the useless boat, looked across the river that was over a hundred yards broad and then swore.

Harper appeared beside him, his rifle slung. ‘Jesus,’ he said, staring at the ferry, ‘that’s not a lot of good to man or beast, is it now?’

‘Any of our boys hurt?’

‘Not a one, sir, not even a scratch. The Portuguese are the same, all alive. They did well, didn’t they?’ He looked at the burning boat again. ‘Sweet Jesus, was that the ferry?’

‘It was Noah’s bloody ark,’ Sharpe snapped. ‘What do you goddamned think it was?’ He was angry because he had hoped to use the ferry to get all his men safe across the Douro, but now it seemed he was stranded. He stalked away, then turned back just in time to see Harper making a face at him. ‘Have you found the taverns?’ he asked, ignoring the grimace.

‘Not yet, sir,’ Harper said.

‘Then find them, put a guard on them, then send a dozen more men to the far side of the paddock.’

‘Yes, sir!’

The French had set more fires among sheds on the river bank and Sharpe now ducked beneath the billowing smoke to kick open half-burned doors. There was a pile of tarred nets smouldering in one shed, but in the next there was a black-painted skiff with a fine spiked bow that curved up like a hook. The shed had been fired, but the flames had not reached the skiff and Sharpe managed to drag it halfway out of the door before Lieutenant Vicente arrived and helped him pull the boat all the way out of the smoke. The other sheds were too well alight, but at least this one boat was saved and Sharpe reckoned it could hold about half a dozen men safely, which meant that it would take the rest of the day to ferry everyone across the wide river. Sharpe was about to ask Vicente to look for oars or paddles when he saw that the young man’s face was white and shaken, almost as if the Lieutenant was on the point of tears. ‘What is it?’ Sharpe asked.

Vicente did not answer, but merely pointed back to the village.

‘The French were having games with the ladies, eh?’ Sharpe asked, setting off for the houses.

‘I would not call it games,’ Vicente said bitterly, ‘and there is also a prisoner.’

‘Only one?’

‘There are two others,’ Vicente said, frowning, ‘but this one is a lieutenant. He had no breeches which is why he was slow to run.’

Sharpe did not ask why the captured dragoon had no breeches. He knew why. ‘What have you done with him?’

‘He must go on trial,’ Vicente said.

Sharpe stopped and stared at the Lieutenant. ‘He must what?’ he asked, astonished. ‘Go on trial?’

‘Of course.’

‘In my country,’ Sharpe said, ‘they hang a man for rape.’

‘Not without a trial,’ Vicente protested and Sharpe guessed that the Portuguese soldiers had wanted to kill the prisoner straight away and that Vicente had stopped them out of some high-minded idea that a trial was necessary.

‘Bloody hell,’ Sharpe said, ‘you’re a soldier now, not a lawyer. You don’t give them a trial. You chop their hearts out.’

Most of Barca d’Avintas’s inhabitants had fled the dragoons, but some had stayed and most of them were now crowded about a house guarded by a half-dozen of Vicente’s men. A dead dragoon, stripped of shirt, coat, boots and breeches, lay face down in front of the church. He must have been leaning against the church wall when he was shot for he had left a smear of blood down the limewashed stones. Now a dog sniffed at his toes. The soldiers and villagers parted to let Sharpe and Vicente into the house where the young dragoon officer, fair-haired, thin and sullen-faced, was being guarded by Sergeant Macedo and another Portuguese soldier. The Lieutenant had managed to pull on his breeches, but had not had time to button them and he was now holding them up by the waist. As soon as he saw Sharpe he began gabbling in French. ‘You speak French?’ Sharpe asked Vicente.

‘Of course,’ Vicente said.

But Vicente, Sharpe reflected, wanted to give this fair-haired Frenchman a trial and Sharpe suspected that if Vicente interrogated the man he would not learn the real truth, merely hear the excuses, so Sharpe went to the house door. ‘Harper!’ He waited till the Sergeant appeared. ‘Get me Tongue or Harris,’ he ordered.

‘I will talk to the man,’ Vicente protested.

‘I need you to talk to someone else,’ Sharpe said and he went to the back room where a girl – she could not have been a day over fourteen – was weeping. Her face was red, eyes swollen and her breath came in fitful jerks interspersed with grizzling moans and cries of despair. She was wrapped in a blanket and had a bruise on her left cheek. An older woman, dressed all in black, was trying to comfort the girl who began to cry even louder the moment she saw Sharpe, making him back out of the room in embarrassment. ‘Find out from her what happened,’ he told Vicente, then turned as Harris came through the door. Harris and Tongue were Sharpe’s two educated men. Tongue had been doomed to the army by drink, while the red-haired, ever cheerful Harris claimed to be a volunteer who wanted adventure. He was getting plenty now, Sharpe reflected. ‘This piece of shit,’ Sharpe told Harris, jerking his head at the fair-haired Frenchman, ‘was caught with his knickers round his ankles and a young girl under him. Find out what his excuse is before we kill the bastard.’

He went back to the street and took a long drink from his canteen. The water was warm and brackish. Harper was waiting by a horse trough in the centre of the street and Sharpe joined him. ‘All well?’

‘There’s two more Frogs in there.’ Harper flicked a thumb towards the church behind him. ‘Live ones, I mean.’ The church door was guarded by four of Vicente’s men.

‘What are they doing in there?’ Sharpe asked. ‘Praying?’

The tall Ulsterman shrugged. ‘Looking for sanctuary, I’d guess.’

‘We can’t take the bastards with us,’ Sharpe said, ‘so why don’t we just shoot them?’

‘Because Mister Vicente says we mustn’t,’ Harper said. ‘He’s very particular about prisoners is Mister Vicente. He’s a lawyer, isn’t he?’

‘He seems halfway decent for a lawyer,’ Sharpe admitted grudgingly.

‘The best lawyers are six feet under the daisies, so they are,’ Harper said, ‘and this one won’t let me go and shoot those two bastards. He says they’re just drunks, which is true. They are. Skewed to the skies, they are.’

‘We can’t cope with prisoners,’ Sharpe said. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, then pulled his shako back on. The visor was coming away from the crown, but there was nothing he could do about that here. ‘Get Tongue,’ he suggested, ‘and see if he can find out what these two were up to. If they’re just drunk on communion wine then march them out west, strip them of anything valuable and boot them back where they came from. But if they raped anyone …’

‘I know what to do, sir,’ Harper said grimly.

‘Then do it,’ Sharpe said. He nodded to Harper, then walked on past the church to where the stream joined the river. The small stone bridge carried the road eastwards through a vineyard, past a walled cemetery and then twisted through pastureland beside the Douro. It was all open land and if more French came and he had to retreat from the village then he dared not use that road and he hoped to God he had time to ferry his men over the Douro and that thought made him go back up the street to look for oars. Or maybe he could find a rope? If the rope were long enough he could rig a line across the river and haul the boat back and forth and that would surely be quicker than rowing.

He was wondering if there were bell ropes in the small church that might stretch that far when Harris came out of the house and said that the prisoner’s name was Lieutenant Olivier and he was in the 18th Dragoons and that the Lieutenant, despite being caught with his breeches round his ankles, had denied raping the girl. ‘He said French officers don’t behave like that,’ Harris said, ‘but Lieutenant Vicente says the girl swears he did.’

‘So did he or didn’t he?’ Sharpe asked irritably.

‘Of course he did, sir. He admitted as much after I thumped him,’ Harris said happily, ‘but he still insists she wanted him to. He says she wanted comforting after a sergeant raped her.’

‘Wanted comforting!’ Sharpe said scathingly. ‘He was just second in line, wasn’t he?’

‘Fifth in line,’ Harris said tonelessly, ‘or so the girl says.’

‘Jesus,’ Sharpe swore. ‘Why don’t I just give the bugger a smacking, then we’ll string him up.’ He walked back to the house where the civilians were screaming at the Frenchman, who gazed at them with a disdain that would have been admirable on a battlefield. Vicente was protecting the dragoon and now appealed to Sharpe for help to escort Lieutenant Olivier to safety. ‘He must stand trial,’ Vicente insisted.

‘He just had a trial,’ Sharpe said, ‘and I found him guilty. So now I’ll thump him and then I’ll hang him.’

Vicente looked nervous, but he did not back down. ‘We cannot lower ourselves to their level of barbarity,’ he claimed.

‘I didn’t rape her,’ Sharpe said, ‘so don’t place me with them.’

‘We fight for a better world,’ Vicente declared.

For a second Sharpe just stared at the young Portuguese officer, scarce believing what he had heard. ‘What happens if we leave him here, eh?’

‘We can’t!’ Vicente said, knowing that the villagers would take a far worse revenge than anything Sharpe was proposing.

‘And I can’t take prisoners!’ Sharpe insisted.

‘We can’t kill him’ – Vicente was blushing with indignation as he confronted Sharpe and he would not back down – ‘and we can’t leave him here. It would be murder.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Sharpe said in exasperation. Lieutenant Olivier did not speak English, but he seemed to understand that his fate was in the balance and he watched Sharpe and Vicente like a hawk. ‘And who’s going to be the judge and jury?’ Sharpe demanded, but Vicente got no opportunity to answer for just then a rifle fired from the western edge of the village and then another sounded and then there was a whole rattle of shots.

The French had come back.

Colonel James Christopher liked wearing the hussar uniform. He decided it suited him and he spent a long time admiring himself in the pier glass in the farmhouse’s largest bedroom, turning left and right, and marvelling at the feeling of power conveyed by the uniform. He deduced it came from the long tasselled boots and from the jacket’s high stiff collar that forced a man to stand upright with his head back, and from the fit of the jacket that was so tight that Christopher, who was lean and fit, still had to suck in his belly to fasten the hooks and eyes down its silver-laced front. The uniform made him feel encased in authority, and the elegance of the outfit was enhanced by the fur-edged pelisse that was draped from his left shoulder and by the silver-chained sabre scabbard that chinked as he went downstairs and as he paced up and down the terrace where he waited for his guest. He put a sliver of wood into his mouth, obsessively working it between his teeth as he gazed at the distant smear of smoke which showed where buildings burned in the captured city. A handful of fugitives had stopped at the farm to beg for food and Luis had talked with them and then told Christopher that hundreds if not thousands of people had drowned when the pontoon bridge broke. The refugees claimed that the French had wrecked the bridge with cannon fire and Luis, his hatred of the enemy fuelled by the false rumour, eyed his master with a surly expression until Christopher had finally lost his patience. ‘It is only a uniform, Luis! It is not a sign of a changed allegiance!’

‘A French uniform,’ Luis had complained.

‘You wish Portugal to be free of the French?’ Christopher snapped. ‘Then behave respectfully and forget this uniform.’

Now Christopher paced the terrace, picking at his teeth and constantly watching the road that led across the hill. The clock in the farm’s elegant parlour struck three and no sooner had the last chime faded than a large column of cavalry appeared across the far crest. They were dragoons and they came in force to make sure that no partisans or fugitive Portuguese troops gave trouble to the officer who rode to meet Christopher.

The dragoons, all from the 18th regiment, wheeled away into the fields beneath the farmhouse where a stream offered water for their horses. The cavalrymen’s rose-fronted green coats were white with dust. Some, seeing Christopher in his French hussar’s uniform, offered a hasty salute, but most ignored him and just led their horses towards the stream as the Englishman turned to greet his visitor.

His name was Argenton and he was a captain and the Adjutant of the 18th Dragoons and it was plain from his smile that he knew and liked Colonel Christopher. ‘The uniform becomes you,’ Argenton said.

‘I found it in Oporto,’ Christopher said. ‘It belonged to a poor fellow who was a prisoner and died of the fever and a tailor trimmed it to size for me.’

‘He did well,’ Argenton said admiringly. ‘Now all you need are the cadenettes.’

‘The cadenettes?’

‘The pigtails,’ Argenton explained, touching his temples where the French hussars grew their hair long to mark themselves as elite cavalrymen. ‘Some men go bald and have wigmakers attach false cadenettes to their shakoes or colbacks.’

‘I’m not sure I want to grow pigtails,’ Christopher said, amused, ‘but perhaps I can find some girl with black hair and cut off a pair of tails, eh?’

‘A good idea,’ Argenton said. He watched approvingly as his escort set picquets, then smiled his thanks as a very sullen-looking Luis brought him and Christopher glasses of vinho verde, the golden white wine of the Douro valley. Argenton sipped the wine cautiously and was surprised that it was so good. He was a slight man with a frank, open face and red hair that was damp with sweat and marked where his helmet had been. He smiled easily, a reflection of his trusting nature. Christopher rather despised the Frenchman, but knew he would be useful.

Argenton drained the wine. ‘Did you hear about the drownings in Oporto?’ he asked.

‘My servant says you broke the bridge.’

‘They would say that,’ Argenton said regretfully. ‘The bridge collapsed under the weight of the refugees. It was an accident. A sad accident, but if the people had stayed in their homes and given our men a decent welcome then there wouldn’t have been any panic at the bridge. They’d all be alive now. As it is, we’re being blamed, but it had nothing to do with us. The bridge wasn’t strong enough and who built the bridge? The Portuguese.’

‘A sad accident, as you say,’ Christopher said, ‘but all the same I must congratulate you on your swift capture of Oporto. It was a notable feat of arms.’

‘It would have been still more notable,’ Argenton observed, ‘if the opposition had been better soldiers.’

‘I trust your losses were not extravagant?’

‘A handful,’ Argenton said dismissively, ‘but half of our regiment was sent eastwards and they lost a good few men in an ambush by the river. An ambush’ – he looked accusingly at Christopher – ‘in which some British riflemen took part. I didn’t think there were any British troops in Oporto?’

‘There shouldn’t have been,’ Christopher said, ‘I ordered them south of the river.’

‘Then they disobeyed you,’ Argenton said.

‘Did any of the riflemen die?’ Christopher asked, mildly hoping that Argenton would have news of Sharpe’s death.

‘I wasn’t there. I’m posted to Oporto where I find billets, look for rations and do the errands of war.’

‘Which I am sure you discharge admirably,’ Christopher said smoothly, then led his guest into the farmhouse where Argenton admired the tiles about the dining-room hearth and the simple iron chandelier that hung above the table. The meal itself was commonplace enough: chicken, beans, bread, cheese and a good country red wine, but Captain Argenton was complimentary. ‘We’ve been on short rations,’ he explained, ‘but that should change now. We’ve found plenty of food in Oporto and a warehouse stuffed to the rafters with good British powder and shot.’

‘You were short of those too?’ Christopher asked.

‘We have plenty,’ Argenton said, ‘but the British powder is better than our own. We have no source of saltpetre except what we scrape from cesspit walls.’

Christopher grimaced at the thought. The best saltpetre, an essential element of gunpowder, came from India and he had never considered that there might be a shortage in France. ‘I assume,’ he said, ‘that the powder was a British gift to the Portuguese.’

‘Who have now given it to us,’ Argenton said, ‘much to Marshal Soult’s delight.’

‘Then it is time, perhaps,’ Christopher suggested, ‘that we made the Marshal unhappy.’

‘Indeed,’ Argenton said, ‘indeed,’ and then fell silent because they had reached the purpose of their meeting.

It was a strange purpose, but an exciting one. The two men were plotting mutiny. Or rebellion. Or a coup against Marshal Soult’s army. But however it was described it was a ploy that might end the war.

There was, Argenton now explained, a great deal of dissatisfaction in Marshal Soult’s army. Christopher had heard all this before from his guest, but he did not interrupt as Argenton rehearsed the arguments that would justify his disloyalty. He described how some officers, all devout Catholics, were mortally offended by their army’s behaviour in Spain and Portugal. Churches had been desecrated, nuns raped. ‘Even the holy sacraments have been defiled,’ Argenton said in a horrified tone.

‘I can hardly believe it,’ Christopher said.

Other officers, a few, were simply opposed to Bonaparte. Argenton was a Catholic monarchist, but he was willing to make common cause with those men who still held Jacobin sympathies and believed that Bonaparte had betrayed the revolution. ‘They cannot be trusted, of course,’ Argenton said, ‘not in the long run, but they will join us in resisting Bonaparte’s tyranny.’

‘I pray they do,’ Christopher said. The British government had long known that there was a shadowy league of French officers who opposed Bonaparte. They called themselves the Philadelphes and London had once sent agents in search of their elusive brotherhood, but had finally concluded that their numbers were too few, their ideals too vague and their supporters too ideologically divided for the Philadelphes ever to succeed.

Yet here, in remote northern Portugal, the various opponents of Bonaparte had found a common cause. Christopher had first got wind of that cause when he talked with a French officer who had been taken prisoner on Portugal’s northern border and who had been living in Braga where, having given his parole, his only restriction was to remain within the barracks for his own protection. Christopher had drunk with the unhappy officer and heard a tale of French unrest that sprang from one man’s absurd ambition.

Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult, Duke of Dalmatia, Marshal of France and commander of the army that was now invading Portugal, had seen other men who served the Emperor become princes, even kings, and he reckoned his own dukedom was a poor reward for a career that outshone almost all the Emperor’s other marshals. Soult had been a soldier for twenty-four years, a general for fifteen and a marshal for five. At Austerlitz, the greatest of all the Emperor’s victories so far, Marshal Soult had covered himself with glory, far outfighting Marshal Bernadotte who, nevertheless, was now Prince of Ponte Corvo. Jérôme Bonaparte, the Emperor’s youngest brother, was an idle, extravagant wastrel, yet he was King of Westphalia while Marshal Murat, a hot-headed braggart, was King of Naples. Louis Napoleon, another of the Emperor’s brothers, was King of Holland, and all those men were nonentities while Soult, who knew his own high worth, was a mere duke and it was not enough.

But now the ancient throne of Portugal was empty. The royal family, fearing the French invasion, had fled to Brazil and Soult wanted to occupy the vacant chair. Colonel Christopher, at first, had not believed the tale, but the prisoner had sworn its truth and Christopher had talked with some of the other few prisoners who had been captured in skirmishes on the northern frontier and all claimed to have heard much the same story. It was no secret, they said, that Soult had royal pretensions, but the paroled officers also told Christopher that the Marshal’s ambitions had soured many of his own officers, who disliked the idea that they should fight and suffer so far from home only to put Nicolas Soult on an empty chair. There was talk of mutiny and Christopher had been wondering how he could discover whether that mutinous talk was serious when Captain Argenton approached him.

Argenton, with great daring, had been travelling in northern Portugal, dressed in civilian clothes and claiming to be a wine merchant from Upper Canada. If he had been caught he would have been shot as a spy, for Argenton was not exploring the land ahead of the French armies, but rather trying to discover pliable Portuguese aristocrats who would encourage Soult in his ambitions, for if the Marshal was to declare himself King of Portugal or, more modestly, King of Northern Lusitania, then he first needed to be persuaded that there were men of influence in Portugal who would support that usurpation of the vacant throne. Argenton had been talking with such men and Christopher, to his surprise, discovered there were plenty of aristocrats, churchmen and scholars in northern Portugal who hated their own monarchy and believed that a foreign king from an enlightened France would be of benefit to their country. So letters were being collected that would encourage Soult to declare himself king.

And when that happened, Argenton had promised Christopher, the army would mutiny. The war had to be stopped, Argenton said, or else, like a great fire, it would consume all Europe. It was a madness, he said, a madness of the Emperor who seemed intent on conquering the whole world. ‘He believes he is Alexander the Great,’ the Frenchman said gloomily, ‘and if he doesn’t stop then there will be nothing left of France. Who are we to fight? Everyone? Austria? Prussia? Britain? Spain? Portugal? Russia?’

‘Never Russia,’ Christopher said, ‘even Bonaparte is not that mad.’

‘He is mad,’ Argenton insisted, ‘and we must rid France of him.’ And the start of the process, he believed, would be the mutiny that would surely erupt when Soult declared himself a king.

‘Your army is unhappy,’ Christopher allowed, ‘but will they follow you into mutiny?’

‘I would not lead it,’ Argenton said, ‘but there are men who will. And those men want to take the army back to France and that, I assure you, is what most of the soldiers want. They will follow.’

‘Who are these leaders?’ Christopher asked swiftly.

Argenton hesitated. Any mutiny was a dangerous business and if the identities of the leaders became known then there could be an orgy of firing squads.

Christopher saw his hesitation. ‘If we are to persuade the British authorities that your plans are worth supporting,’ he said, ‘then we must give them names. We must. And you must trust us, my friend.’ Christopher placed a hand over his heart. ‘I swear to you upon my honour that I shall never betray those names. Never!’

Argenton, reassured, listed the men who would lead the revolt against Soult. There was Colonel Lafitte, the commanding officer of his own regiment, and the Colonel’s brother, and they were supported by Colonel Donadieu of the 47th Regiment of the Line. ‘They are respected,’ Argenton said earnestly, ‘and the men will follow them.’ He gave more names that Christopher jotted down in his notebook, but he observed that none of the mutineers was above the rank of colonel.

‘An impressive list,’ Christopher lied, then he smiled. ‘Now give me another name. Tell me who in your army would be your most dangerous opponent.’

‘Our most dangerous opponent?’ Argenton was puzzled by the question.

‘Other than Marshal Soult, of course,’ Christopher went on. ‘I want to know who we should watch. Who, perhaps, we might want to, how can I put it? Render safe?’

‘Ah.’ Argenton understood now and he thought for a short while. ‘Probably Brigadier Vuillard,’ he said.

‘I’ve not heard of him.’

‘A Bonapartiste through and through,’ Argenton said disapprovingly.

‘Spell his name for me, will you?’ Christopher asked, then wrote it down: Brigadier Henri Vuillard. ‘I assume he knows nothing of your scheme?’ he continued.

‘Of course not!’ Argenton said. ‘But it is a scheme, Colonel, that cannot work without British support. General Cradock is sympathetic, is he not?’

‘Cradock is sympathetic,’ Christopher said confidently. He had reported his earlier conversations to the British General who had seen in the proposed mutiny an alternative to fighting the French and so had encouraged Christopher to pursue the matter. ‘But alas,’ Christopher went on, ‘it’s rumoured he will soon be replaced.’

‘And the new man?’ Argenton enquired.

‘Wellesley,’ Christopher said flatly. ‘Sir Arthur Wellesley.’

‘Is he a good general?’

Christopher shrugged. ‘He’s well connected. Younger son of an earl. Eton, of course. He wasn’t thought clever enough for anything except the army, but most people think he did well near Lisbon last year.’

‘Against Laborde and Junot!’ Argenton said scathingly.

‘And he had some successes in India before that,’ Christopher added in warning.

‘Oh, in India!’ Argenton said, smiling. ‘Reputations made in India rarely stand up to a volley in Europe. But will this Wellesley want to fight Soult?’

Christopher thought about that question. ‘I think,’ he said eventually, ‘that he would prefer not to lose. I think,’ he went on, ‘that if he knows the strength of your sentiments, then he will cooperate.’ Christopher was not nearly as certain as he sounded; indeed he had heard that General Wellesley was a cold man who might not look kindly on an escapade that depended for its success on so many assumptions, but Christopher had other fish to fry in this unholy tangle. He doubted whether the mutiny could ever succeed and did not much care what Cradock or Wellesley thought of it, but knew his knowledge of it could be used to great advantage and, for the moment anyway, it was important that Argenton saw Christopher as an ally. ‘Tell me,’ he said to the Frenchman, ‘exactly what you want of us.’

‘Britain’s influence,’ Argenton said. ‘We want Britain to persuade the Portuguese leaders to accept Soult as their king.’

‘I thought you’d found plenty of support already,’ Christopher said.

‘I’ve found support,’ Argenton confirmed, ‘but most won’t declare themselves for fear of the mob’s vengeance. But if Britain encourages them they’ll find their courage. They don’t even have to make their support public, merely write letters to Soult. And then there are the intellectuals’ – Argenton’s sneer as he said the last word would have soured milk – ‘most of whom will back anyone other than their own government, but again they need encouragement before they’ll find the bravery to express support for Marshal Soult.’

‘I’m sure we would be happy to provide encouragement,’ Christopher said. He was not sure at all.

‘And we need an assurance,’ Argenton said firmly, ‘that if we lead a rebellion the British will not take advantage of the situation by attacking us. I shall want your General’s word on that.’

Christopher nodded. ‘And I think he will give it,’ he said, ‘but before he commits himself to any such promise he will want to judge for himself the likelihood of your success and that, my friend, means he will want to hear from you directly.’ Christopher unstoppered a decanter of wine, then paused before pouring. ‘And I think you need to hear his personal assurances. I think you must travel south to see him.’

Argenton looked rather surprised by this suggestion, but he thought about it for a moment and then nodded. ‘You can give me a pass that will see me safe through the British lines?’

‘I will do better, my friend. I shall come with you so long as you provide me with a pass for the French lines.’

‘Then we shall go!’ Argenton said happily. ‘My Colonel will give me permission, once he understands what we are doing. But when? Soon, I think, don’t you? Tomorrow?’

‘The day after tomorrow,’ Christopher said firmly. ‘I have an engagement tomorrow that I cannot avoid, but if you join me in Vila Real de Zedes tomorrow afternoon then we can travel the next day. Will that suit?’

Argenton nodded. ‘You must tell me how to reach Vila Real de Zedes.’

‘I shall give you directions,’ Christopher said, then raised his glass, ‘and I shall drink to the success of our endeavours.’

‘Amen to that,’ Argenton said, and raised his glass to the toast.

And Colonel Christopher smiled, because he was rewriting the rules.

CHAPTER THREE

Sharpe ran across the paddock where the dead horses lay with flies crawling in their nostrils and across their eyeballs. He tripped on a metal picketing pin and, as he stumbled forward, a carbine bullet fluttered past him, the sound suggesting it was almost spent, but even a spent bullet in the wrong place could kill a man. His riflemen were shooting from the field’s far side, the smoke of their Baker rifles thickening along the wall. Sharpe dropped beside Hagman. ‘What’s happening, Dan?’

‘Dragoons are back, sir,’ Hagman said laconically, ‘and there’s some infantry there too.’

‘You sure?’

‘Shot one blue bastard,’ Hagman said, ‘and two greens so far.’

Sharpe wiped sweat from his face, then crawled a few paces along the wall to a place where the powder smoke was not so thick. The dragoons had dismounted and were shooting from the edge of a wood some hundred paces away. Too long a range for their carbines, Sharpe thought, but then he saw some blue uniforms where the road ran through the trees and he reckoned the infantry was forming for an attack. There was an odd clicking noise coming from somewhere nearby and he could not place it, but it seemed to offer no threat so he ignored it. ‘Pendleton!’

‘Sir?’

‘Find Lieutenant Vicente. He’s in the village. Tell him to get his men out on the northern path now.’ Sharpe pointed to the track through the vineyards, the same track by which they had entered Barca d’Avintas and where the dead dragoons of the first fight still lay. ‘And, Pendleton, tell him to hurry. But be polite, though.’

Pendleton, a pickpocket and purse snatcher from Bristol, was the youngest of Sharpe’s men and now looked puzzled. ‘Polite, sir?’

‘Call him sir, damn you, and salute him, but hurry!’

Goddamn it, Sharpe thought, but there would be no escape across the Douro today, no slow shuttling back and forth with the small boat, and no marching back to Captain Hogan and the army. Instead they would have to get the hell out northwards and get out fast. ‘Sergeant!’ He looked left and right for Patrick Harper through the misty patches of rifle smoke along the wall. ‘Harper!’

‘I’m with you, sir.’ Harper came running from behind. ‘I was dealing with those two Frogs in the church.’

‘The moment the Portuguese are into the vineyard we get out of here. Are any of our men left in the village?’

‘Harris is there, sir, and Pendleton, of course.’

‘Send someone to make sure the two of them get out.’ Sharpe levelled his rifle across the wall and sent a bullet spinning towards the infantry who were forming up on the road among the trees. ‘And, Pat, what did you do with those two Frogs?’

‘They’d robbed the poor box,’ Harper said, ‘so I sent them to hell.’ He patted his sheathed sword bayonet.

Sharpe grinned. ‘And if you get the chance, Pat, do the same to that bastard French officer.’

‘Pleasure, sir,’ Harper said, then ran back across the paddock. Sharpe reloaded. The French, he thought, were being too cautious. They should have attacked already, but they must have believed there was a larger force in Barca d’Avintas than two stranded half companies, and the rifle fire must have been disconcerting to the dragoons who were not used to such accuracy. There were bodies lying on the grass at the edge of the wood, evidence that the dismounted French horsemen had been taught about the Baker rifle the hard way. The French did not use rifles, reckoning that the spiralling grooves and lands that spun the bullet in the barrel and so gave the weapon its accuracy also made it much too slow to reload, and so the French, like most British battalions, relied on the quicker-firing, but much less accurate musket. A man could stand fifty yards from a musket and stand a good chance of living, but standing a hundred paces in front of a Baker in the hands of a good man was a death warrant, and so the dragoons had pulled back into the trees.

There was infantry in the wood as well, but what were the bastards doing? Sharpe propped his loaded rifle against the wall and took out his telescope, the fine instrument made by Matthew Berge of London which had been a gift from Sir Arthur Wellesley after Sharpe had saved the General’s life at Assaye. He rested the telescope on the wall’s mossy coping and stared at the leading company of French infantry which was well back in the trees, but Sharpe could see they were formed in three ranks. He was looking for some sign that they were ready to advance, but the men were slouching, musket butts grounded, without even fixed bayonets. He whipped the glass right, suddenly fearing that perhaps the French would try to cut off his retreat by infiltrating the vineyard, but he saw nothing to worry him. He looked back at the trees and saw a flash of light, a distinct white circle, and realized there was an officer kneeling in the leafy shadows staring at the village through a telescope. The man was undoubtedly trying to work out how many enemy were in Barca d’Avintas and how to attack them. Sharpe put his own telescope away, picked up the rifle and levelled it on the wall. Careful now, he thought, careful. Kill that one officer and any French attack is slowed, because that officer is the man who makes the decisions, and Sharpe pulled back the flint, lowered his head so that his right eye was gazing down the sights, found the patch of dark shadow that was the Frenchman’s blue coat and then raised the rifle’s foresight, a blade of metal, so that the barrel hid the target and so allowed the bullet to drop. There was little wind, not enough to drift the bullet left or right. A splintering of noise sounded from the other rifles and a drop of sweat trickled past Sharpe’s left eye as he pulled the trigger and the rifle hammered back into his shoulder and the puff of bitter smoke from the pan made his right eye smart and the specks of burning powder stung his cheek as the cloud of barrel smoke billowed in front of the wall to hide the target. Sharpe twisted to see Lieutenant Vicente’s troops streaming into the vineyard accompanied by thirty or forty civilians. Harper was coming back across the paddock. The odd clicking noise was louder suddenly and Sharpe registered that it was the sound of French carbine bullets striking the other side of the stone wall. ‘We’re all clear of the village, sir,’ Harper said.

‘We can go,’ Sharpe said, and he marvelled that the enemy had been so slow, thus giving him time to extricate his force. He sent Harper with most of the greenjackets to join Vicente and they took a dozen French horses with them, each horse worth a small fortune in prize money if they could ever rejoin the army. Sharpe kept Hagman and six other men and they spread along the wall and fired as fast as their rifles would load, which meant they did not wrap the bullets in leather patches which gripped the rifling, but just tapped the balls down the barrels because Sharpe did not care about accuracy, he just wanted the French to see a thick rill of smoke and hear the shots and thus not know that their enemy was withdrawing.

He pulled the trigger and the flint broke into useless scraps so he slung the rifle and backed out of the smoke to see that Vicente and Harper were both well into the vineyard and so he shouted at his remaining men to hurry back across the paddock. Hagman paused to fire a last bullet, then he ran and Sharpe went with him, the last man to leave, and he could not believe it had been that easy to disengage, that the French had been so supine, and just then Hagman went down.

At first Sharpe thought Hagman had tripped on one of the metal pegs with which the dragoons had picketed their horses, then he saw blood on the grass and saw Hagman let go of his rifle and his right hand slowly clench and unclench. ‘Dan!’ Sharpe knelt and saw a tiny wound high up beside Hagman’s left shoulder blade, just an unlucky carbine bullet that had flicked through the smoke and found its target.

‘Go on, sir.’ Hagman’s voice was hoarse. ‘I’m done for.’

‘You’re bloody not,’ Sharpe snarled and he turned Hagman over onto his back and saw no wound in front, which meant the carbine ball was somewhere inside, then Hagman choked and spat up frothy blood and Sharpe heard Harper yelling at him.

‘The bastards are coming, sir!’

Just one minute before, Sharpe thought, he had been congratulating himself on how easy it had been, and now it was all collapsing. He pulled Hagman’s rifle to him, slung it beside his own and picked up the old poacher who gave a gasp and a whimper and shook his head. ‘Leave me, sir.’

‘I’m not leaving you, Dan.’

‘Hurts, sir, it hurts,’ Hagman whimpered again. His face was deathly pale and there was a trickle of blood spilling from his mouth, and then Harper was at Sharpe’s side and took Hagman out of his arms. ‘Leave me here,’ Hagman said softly.

‘Take him, Pat!’ Sharpe said, and then some rifles fired from the vineyard and muskets banged behind him and the air was whistling with balls as Sharpe pushed Harper on. He followed, walking backwards, watching the blue French uniforms appear in the mist of smoke left by their own ragged volley.

‘Come on, sir!’ Harper shouted, letting Sharpe know he had Hagman in the scanty shelter of the vines.

‘Carry him north,’ Sharpe said when he reached the vineyard.

‘He’s hurting bad, sir.’

‘Carry him! Get him out of here.’

Sharpe watched the French. Three companies of infantry had attacked the pasture, but they made no effort to follow Sharpe north. They must have seen the column of Portuguese and British troops winding through the vineyards accompanied by the dozen captured horses and a crowd of frightened villagers, but they did not follow. It seemed they wanted Barca d’Avintas more than they wanted Sharpe’s men dead. Even when Sharpe established himself on a knoll a half-mile north of the village and stared at the French through his telescope, they did not come near to threaten him. They could easily have chased him away with dragoons, but instead they chopped up the skiff that Sharpe had rescued and then set the fragments alight. ‘They’re closing off the river,’ Sharpe said to Vicente.

‘Closing the river?’ Vicente did not understand.

‘Making sure they’ve got the only boats. They don’t want British or Portuguese troops crossing the river, attacking them in the rear. Which means it’s going to be bloody hard for us to go the other way.’ Sharpe turned as Harper came near, and saw that the big Irish Sergeant’s hands were bloody. ‘How is he?’

Harper shook his head. ‘He’s in a terrible bad way, sir,’ he said gloomily. ‘I think the bloody ball’s in his lung. Coughing red bubbles he is, when he can cough at all. Poor Dan.’

‘I’m not leaving him,’ Sharpe said obstinately. He knew he had left Tarrant behind, and there were men like Williamson who had been friends of Tarrant who would resent that Sharpe was not doing the same with Hagman, but Tarrant had been a drunk and a troublemaker while Dan Hagman was valuable. He was the oldest man among Sharpe’s riflemen and he had a wealth of common sense that made him a steadying influence. Besides, Sharpe liked the old poacher. ‘Make a stretcher, Pat,’ he said, ‘and carry him.’

They made a stretcher out of jackets that had their sleeves threaded onto two poles cut from an ash tree and while it was being fashioned Sharpe and Vicente watched the French and discussed how they were to escape them. ‘What we must do,’ the Portuguese Lieutenant said, ‘is go east. To Amarante.’ He smoothed a patch of bare earth and scratched a crude map with a splinter of wood. ‘This is the Douro,’ he said, ‘and here is Porto. We are here’ – he tapped the river very close to the city – ‘and the nearest bridge is at Amarante.’ He made a cross mark well to the east. ‘We could be there tomorrow or perhaps the day after.’

‘So can they,’ Sharpe said grimly, and he nodded towards the village.

A gun had just appeared from among the trees where the French had waited so long before attacking Sharpe’s men. The cannon was drawn by six horses, three of which were ridden by gunners in their dark-blue uniforms. The gun itself, a twelve-pounder, was attached to its limber which was a light two-wheeled cart that served as a ready magazine and as an axle for the heavy gun’s trail. Behind the gun was another team of four horses, these pulling a coffin-like caisson that carried a spare gun wheel on its stern. The caisson, which was being ridden by a half-dozen gunners, held the cannon’s ammunition. Even from half a mile away Sharpe could hear the clink of the chains and thump of the wheels. He watched in silence as an howitzer came into sight, then a second twelve-pounder, and after that a troop of hussars.

‘Do you think they’re coming here?’ Vicente asked with alarm.

‘No,’ Sharpe said. ‘They’re not interested in fugitives. They’re going to Amarante.’

‘This is not the good road to Amarante. In fact it goes nowhere. They’ll have to strike north to the main road.’

‘They don’t know that yet,’ Sharpe guessed, ‘they’re taking any road east that they can find.’ Infantry had now appeared from the trees, then another battery of artillery. Sharpe was watching a small army march eastwards and there was only one reason to send so many men and guns to the east and that was to capture the bridge at Amarante and so protect the French left flank. ‘Amarante,’ Sharpe said, ‘that’s where the bastards are going.’

‘Then we can’t,’ Vicente said.

‘We can go,’ Sharpe said, ‘we just can’t go on that road. You say there’s a main road?’

‘Up here,’ Vicente said, and scratched the earth to show another road to the north of them. ‘That is the high road,’ Vicente said. ‘The French are probably on that as well. Do you really have to go to Amarante?’

‘I’ve got to cross the river,’ Sharpe said, ‘and there’s a bridge there, and there’s a Portuguese army there, and just because the bloody Frogs are going there doesn’t mean that they’ll capture the bridge.’ And if they did, he thought, then he could go north from Amarante until he found a crossing place, then follow the Tamega’s far bank south until he reached a stretch of the Douro unguarded by the French. ‘So how do we reach Amarante if we don’t go by road? Can we go across country?’

Vicente nodded. ‘We go north to a village here’ – he pointed to an empty space on his map – ‘and then turn east. The village is on the edge of the hills, the beginning of the – what do you call it? The wilderness. We used to go there.’

‘We?’ Sharpe asked. ‘The poets and philosophers?’

‘We would walk there,’ Vicente said, ‘spend the night in the tavern and walk back. I doubt there will be Frenchmen there. It is not on the road to Amarante. Not on any road.’

‘So we go to the village at the edge of the wilderness,’ Sharpe said. ‘What’s it called?’

‘Vila Real de Zedes,’ Vicente said. ‘It is called that because the vineyards there once belonged to the King, but that was long ago. Now they are the property of –’

‘Vila Real de what?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Zedes,’ Vicente said, puzzled by Sharpe’s tone and even more puzzled by the smile on Sharpe’s face. ‘You know the place?’

‘I don’t know it,’ Sharpe said, ‘but there’s a girl I want to meet there.’

‘A girl!’ Vicente sounded disapproving.

‘A nineteen-year-old girl,’ Sharpe said, ‘and believe it or not, it’s a duty.’ He turned to see if the stretcher was finished and suddenly stiffened in anger. ‘What the hell is he doing here?’ he asked. He was staring at the French dragoon, Lieutenant Olivier, who was watching as Harper carefully rolled Hagman onto the stretcher.

‘He is to stand trial,’ Vicente said stubbornly, ‘so he is here under arrest and under my personal protection.’

‘Bloody hell!’ Sharpe exploded.

‘It is a matter of principle,’ Vicente insisted.

‘Principle!’ Sharpe shouted. ‘It’s a matter of bloody stupidity, lawyer’s bloody stupidity! We’re in the middle of a bloody war, not in a bloody assizes town in England.’ He saw Vicente’s incomprehension. ‘Oh, never mind,’ he growled. ‘How long will it take us to reach Vila Real de Zedes?’

‘We should be there tomorrow morning,’ Vicente said coldly, then looked at Hagman, ‘so long as he doesn’t slow us down too much.’

‘We’ll be there tomorrow morning,’ Sharpe said, and then he would rescue Miss Savage and find out just why she had run away. And after that, God help him, he would slaughter the bloody dragoon officer, lawyer or no lawyer.

The Savage country house, which was called the Quinta do Zedes, was not in Vila Real de Zedes itself, but high on a hill spur to the south of the village. It was a beautiful place, its whitewashed walls edged with masonry to trace out the elegant lines of a small manor house which looked across the once royal vineyards. The shutters were painted blue, and the high windows of the ground floor were decorated with stained glass which showed the coats of arms of the family which had once owned the Quinta do Zedes. Mister Savage had bought the Quinta along with the vineyards, and, because the house was high, possessed a thick tiled roof and was surrounded by trees hung with wisteria, it proved blessedly cool in summer and so the Savage family would move there each June and stay till October when they took themselves back to the House Beautiful high on Oporto’s slope. Then Mister Savage had died of a seizure and the house had stayed empty ever since except for the half-dozen servants who lived at the back and tended the small vegetable garden and walked down the long curving drive to the village church for mass. There was a chapel in the Quinta do Zedes and in the old days, when the owners of the coats of arms had lived in the long cool rooms, the servants had been allowed to attend mass in the family chapel, but Mister Savage had been a staunch Protestant and he had ordered the altar to be taken away, the statues removed and the chapel whitewashed for use as a food store.

The servants had been surprised when Miss Kate came to the house, but they curtsied or bowed and then set about making the great rooms comfortable. The dust sheets were pulled from pieces of furniture, the bats were knocked off the beams and the pale-blue shutters were thrown open to let in the spring sun. Fires were lit to take away the lingering winter chill, though on that first evening Kate did not stay indoors beside the fires, but instead sat on a balcony built on top of the Quinta’s porch and stared down the drive which was edged with wisteria hanging from the cedar trees. The evening shadows stretched, but no one came.

Kate almost cried herself to sleep that night, but next morning her spirits were restored and, over the shocked protests of the servants, she swept out the entrance hall which was a glorious space of chequered black and white marble, with a white marble staircase curving up to the bedrooms. Then she insisted on dusting the fireplace in the great parlour which was decorated with painted tiles showing the battle of Aljubarrota where Joao I had humiliated the Castilians. She ordered a second bedroom to be aired, its bed made and the fire lit, then she went back to the balcony above the porch and watched the driveway until, just after the morning bell had rung in Vila Real de Zedes, she saw two horsemen appear beneath the cedars and her soul soared for joy. The leading horseman was so tall, so straight-backed, so darkly handsome, and at the same time there was a touching tragedy about him because his wife had died giving birth to their first baby, and the baby had died as well, and the thought of that fine man enduring such sadness almost brought tears to Kate’s eyes, but then the man stood in his stirrups and waved to her and Kate felt her happiness flood back as she ran down the stairs to greet her lover on the house steps.

Colonel Christopher slid from his horse. Luis, his servant, was riding the spare horse and carrying the great valise filled with Kate’s clothes that Christopher had removed from the House Beautiful once her mother was gone. Christopher threw Luis the reins, then ran to the house, leaped up the front steps and took Kate into his arms. He kissed her and ran his hand from the nape of her neck to the small of her back and felt a tremor go through her. ‘I could not get here last night, my love,’ he told her, ‘duty called.’

‘I knew it would be duty,’ Kate said, her face shining as she looked up at him.

‘Nothing else would keep me from you,’ Christopher said, ‘nothing,’ and he bowed to kiss her forehead, then took a pace back, still holding both her hands, to look into her face. She was, he thought, the most beautiful girl in creation and charmingly modest for she blushed and laughed with embarrassment when he stared at her. ‘Kate, Kate,’ he said chidingly, ‘I shall spend all my years looking at you.’

Her hair was black and she wore it drawn back from her high forehead, but with a pair of deep curls hanging where the French hussars wore their cadenettes. She had a full mouth, a small nose, and eyes that were touchingly serious at one moment and sparkling with amusement the next. She was nineteen years old, leggy as a colt, full of life and trust and, at this moment, full of love for her handsome man, who was dressed in a plain black coat, white riding breeches and a cocked hat from which hung two golden tassels. ‘Did you see my mother?’ she asked.

‘I left her promising that I would search for you.’

Kate looked guilty. ‘I should have told her …’

‘Your mother will want you to marry some man of property who is safe in England,’ Christopher said, ‘not some adventurer like me.’ The real reason Kate’s mother would disapprove was because she had hoped to marry Christopher herself, but then the Colonel had discovered the terms of Mr Savage’s will and had turned his attention to the daughter. ‘It would do no good to ask her blessing,’ he went on, ‘and if you had told her what we planned then she would most certainly have stopped us.’

‘She might not,’ Kate suggested in a small voice.

‘But this way,’ Christopher said, ‘your mother’s disapproval does not matter, and when she knows we are married then I am persuaded she will learn to like me.’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.