Sharpe 3-Book Collection 2: Sharpe’s Havoc, Sharpe’s Eagle, Sharpe’s Gold (17 page)

Vuillard chuckled. “And what if we don’t conquer Portugal? What happens to you if we withdraw?”

“Then I shall own Savages,” Christopher answered calmly, “and my masters at home will simply calculate that I failed to encourage mutiny in your ranks. But I doubt you’ll lose. What has stopped the Emperor so far?”

“La Manche,”
Vuillard said dryly, meaning the English Channel. He drew on his cigar. “You came to me,” he said, “with news of mutiny, but
you never told me what you wanted in exchange. So tell me now, Englishman.”

“The port trade,” Christopher said, “I want the port trade.”

The simplicity of the answer made Vuillard check his pacing. “The port trade?”

“All of it. Croft, Taylor Fladgate, Burmester, Smith Woodhouse, Dow’s, Savages, Gould, Kopke, Sandeman, all the lodges. I don’t want to own them, I already own Savages, or I will soon, I just want to be the sole shipper.”

Vuillard took a few seconds to understand the scope of the demand. “You’d control half the export trade of Portugal!” he said. “You’d be richer than the Emperor!”

“Not quite,” Christopher said, “because the Emperor will tax me and I can’t tax him. The man who becomes impressively rich, General, is the man who levies the tax, not he who pays it.”

“You’ll still be wealthy.”

“And that, General, is what I want.”

Vuillard stared down at the black lawn. Someone was playing a harpsichord in the House Beautiful and there was the sound of women’s laughter. Peace, he thought, would eventually come and maybe this polished Englishman could help bring it about. “You’re not telling me the names I want,” he said, “and you’ve given me a list of British forces. But how do I know you’re not deceiving me?”

“You don’t.”

“I want more than lists,” Vuillard said harshly. “I need to know, Englishman, that you’re willing to give something tangible to prove that you’re on our side.”

“You want blood,” Christopher said mildly. He had been expecting the demand.

“Blood will do, but not Portuguese blood. British blood.”

Christopher smiled. “There is a village called Vila Real de Zedes,” he said, “where Savages have some vineyards. It has been curiously undisturbed by the conquest.” That was true, but only because Christopher
had arranged it with Argenton’s colonel and fellow plotter whose dragoons were responsible for patrolling that stretch of country. “But if you send a small force there,” Christopher went on, “you will find a token unit of British riflemen. There are only a score of them, but they have some Portuguese troops and some rebels with them. Say a hundred men altogether? They’re yours, but in return I ask one thing.”

“Which is?”

“Spare the Quinta. It belongs to my wife’s family.”

A grumble of thunder sounded to the north and the cypresses were outlined by a flash of sheet lightning. “Vila Real de Zedes?” Vuillard asked.

“A village not far from the Amarante road,” Christopher said, “and I wish I could give you something more, but I offer what I can as an earnest of my sincerity. The troops there will give you no trouble. They’re led by a British lieutenant and he didn’t strike me as particularly resourceful. The man must be thirty if he’s a day and he’s still a lieutenant so he can’t be up to much.”

Another crackle of thunder made Vuillard look anxiously to the northern sky. “We must get back to quarters before the rain comes,” he said, but then paused. “It doesn’t worry you that you betray your country?”

“I betray nothing,” Christopher said, and then, for a change, he spoke truthfully. “If France’s conquests, General, are ruled only by Frenchmen then Europe will regard you as nothing but adventurers and exploiters, but if you share your power, if every nation in Europe contributes to the government of every other nation, then we will have moved into the promised world of reason and peace. Isn’t that what your Emperor wants? A European system, those were his words, a European system, a European code of laws, a European judiciary and one nation alone in Europe, Europeans. How can I betray my own continent?”

Vuillard grimaced. “Our Emperor talks a lot, Englishman. He’s a Corsican and he has wild dreams. Is that what you are? A dreamer?”

“I am a realist,” Christopher said. He had used his knowledge of the mutiny to ingratiate himself with the French, and now he would secure their trust by offering a handful of British soldiers as a sacrifice.

So Sharpe and his men must die, so that Europe’s glorious future could arrive.

T
HE LOSS OF THE TELESCOPE
hurt Sharpe. He told himself it was a bauble, a useful frill, but it still hurt. It marked an achievement, not just the rescue of Sir Arthur Wellesley, but the promotion to commissioned rank afterward. Sometimes, when he scarcely dared believe that he was a King’s officer, he would look at the telescope and think how far he had traveled from the orphanage in Brewhouse Lane and at other times, though he was reluctant to admit it to himself, he enjoyed refusing to explain the plaque on the telescope’s barrel. Yet he knew other men knew. They looked at him, understood he had once fought like a demon under the Indian sun and were awed.

Now bloody Christopher had the glass.

“You’ll get it back, sir,” Harper tried to console him.

“I bloody will, too. I hear that Williamson got into a fight in the village last night?”

“Not much of a fight, sir. I pulled him off.”

“Who was he milling?”

“One of Lopes’s men, sir. As evil a bastard as Williamson.”

“Should I punish him?”

“God, no, sir. I looked after it.”

But Sharpe nevertheless declared the village out of bounds, which he
knew would not be popular with his men. Harper spoke for them, pointing out that there were some pretty girls in Vila Real de Zedes. “There’s one wee slip of a thing there, sir,” he said, “that would bring tears to your eyes. The lads only want to walk down there of an evening to say hello.”

“And to leave some babies behind.”

“That too,” Harper agreed.

“And the girls can’t walk up here?” Sharpe asked. “I hear some do.”

“Some do, sir, I’m told, that’s true.”

“Including one wee slip of a thing that has red hair and can bring tears to your eyes?”

Harper watched a buzzard quartering the broom-clad slopes of the hill on which the fort was being made. “Some of us like to go to church in the village, sir,” he said, studiously not talking about the red-headed girl whose name was Maria.

Sharpe smiled. “So how many Catholics have we got?”

“There’s me, sir, and Donnelly and Carter and McNeill. Oh, and Slattery, of course. The rest of you are all going to hell.”

“Slattery!” Sharpe said. “Fergus isn’t a Christian.”

“I never said he was, sir, but he goes to mass.”

Sharpe could not help laughing. “So I’ll let the Catholics go to mass,” he said.

Harper grinned. “That means they’ll all be Catholic by Sunday.”

“This is the army,” Sharpe said, “so anyone wanting to convert has to get my permission. But you can take the other four to mass and you bring them back by midday, and if I find any of the other lads down there I’ll hold you responsible.”

“Me?”

“You’re a sergeant, aren’t you?”

“But when the lads see Lieutenant Vicente’s men going to the village, sir, they won’t see why they’re not allowed.”

“Vicente’s Portuguese. His men know the local rules. We don’t. And sooner or later there’s going to be a fight over girls that’ll bring tears to your eyes and we don’t need it, Pat.” The problem was not so much the girls, though Sharpe knew they could be a problem if one of his riflemen
became drunk, and that was the true problem. There were two taverns in the village and both served cheap wine out of barrels and half his men would become paralyzed with drink given half a chance. And there was a temptation to relax the rules because the situation of the riflemen was so strange. They were out of touch with the army, not sure what was happening and without enough to do, and so Sharpe invented more work for them. The fort was now sprouting extra stone redoubts and Sharpe found tools in the Quinta’s barn and made his men clear the track through the woods and carry bundles of firewood up to the watchtower, and when that was done he led long patrols into the surrounding countryside. The patrols were not intended to seek out the enemy, but to tire the men so that they collapsed at sundown and slept till dawn, and each dawn Sharpe held a formal parade and put men on a charge if he found a button undone or a scrap of rust on a rifle lock. They moaned at him, but there was no trouble with the villagers.

The barrels in the village taverns were not the only danger. The cellar of the Quinta was full of port barrels and racks of bottled white wine, and Williamson managed to find the key that was supposedly hidden in a kitchen jar, then he and Sims and Gataker got helplessly drunk on Savages’ finest, a carouse that ended well past midnight with the three men hurling stones at the Quinta’s shutters.

The three had ostensibly been on picquet under the eye of Dodd, a reliable man, and Sharpe dealt with him first. “Why didn’t you report them?”

“I didn’t know where they were, sir.” Dodd kept his eyes on the wall above Sharpe’s head. He was lying, of course, but only because the men always protected each other. Sharpe had when he was in the ranks and he did not expect anything else of Matthew Dodd, just as Dodd did not expect anything except a punishment.

Sharpe looked at Harper. “Got work for him, Sergeant?”

“The cook was complaining that all the kitchen copper needed a proper cleaning, sir.”

“Make him sweat,” Sharpe said, “and no wine ration for a week.” The men were entitled to a pint of rum a day and in the absence of the raw
spirit Sharpe was doling out red from a barrel he had commandeered from the Quinta’s cellar. He punished Sims and Gataker by making them wear full uniform and greatcoats and then march up and down the drive with rucksacks filled with stones. They did it under Harper’s enthusiastic eye and when they vomited with exhaustion and the effects of a hangover the Sergeant kicked them to their feet, made them clear the vomit off the driveway with their own hands, and then keep marching.

Vicente arranged for a mason from the village to brick up the wine cellar’s entrance, and while that was being done, and while Dodd scrubbed the coppers with sand and vinegar, Sharpe took Williamson up into the woods. He was tempted to flog the man, for he was very close to hating Williamson, but Sharpe had once been flogged himself and he was reluctant to inflict the same punishment. Instead he found an open space between some laurels and used his sword to scratch two lines in the mossy turf. The lines were a yard long and a yard apart. “You don’t like me, do you, Williamson?”

Williamson said nothing. He just stared at the lines with red eyes. He knew what they were.

“What are my three rules, Williamson?”

Williamson looked up sullenly. He was a big man, heavy-faced with long side whiskers, a broken nose and smallpox scars. He came from Leicester where he had been convicted of stealing two candlesticks from St. Nicholas’s Church and offered the chance to enlist rather than hang. “Don’t thieve,” he said in a low voice, “don’t get drunk and fight proper.”

“Are you a thief?”

“No, sir.”

“You bloody are, Williamson. That’s why you’re in the army. And you got drunk without permission. But can you fight?”

“You know I can, sir.”

Sharpe unbuckled his sword belt and let it and the weapon drop, then took off his shako and green jacket and threw them down. “Tell me why you don’t like me,” he demanded.

Williamson stared off into the laurels.

“Come on!” Sharpe said. “Say what you bloody like. You’re not going to be punished for answering a question.”

Williamson looked back at him. “We shouldn’t be here!” he blurted out.

“You’re right.”

Williamson blinked at that, but carried on. “Ever since Captain Murray died, sir, we’ve been out on our own! We should be back with the battalion. It’s where we belong. You were never our officer, sir. Never!”

“I am now.”

“It ain’t right.”

“So you want to go home to England?”

“The battalion’s there, so I do, aye.”

“But there’s a war on, Williamson. A bloody war. And we’re stuck in it. We didn’t ask to be here, don’t even want to be here, but we are. And we’re staying.” Williamson looked at Sharpe resentfully, but said nothing. “But you can go home, Williamson,” Sharpe said and the heavy face looked up, interested. “There are three ways for you to go home. One, we get orders for England. Two, you get wounded so badly that they send you home. And three, you put your feet on the scratch and you fight me. Win or lose, Williamson, I promise to send you home as soon as I can by the first bloody ship we find. All you have to do is fight me.” Sharpe walked to one of the lines and put his toes against it. This was how the pugilists fought, they toed the line and then punched it out with bare fists until one man dropped in bloody, battered exhaustion. “Fight me properly, mind,” Sharpe said, “no dropping after the first hit. You’ll have to draw blood to prove you’re trying. Hit me on the nose, that’ll do it.” He waited. Williamson licked his lips.

“Come on!” Sharpe snarled. “Fight me!”

“You’re an officer,” Williamson said.

“Not now, I’m not. And no one’s watching. Just you and me, Williamson, and you don’t like me and I’m giving you a chance to thump me. And you do it properly and I’ll have you home by summer.” He did not know how he would keep that promise, but nor did he think he would
have to try, for Williamson, he knew, was remembering the epic fight between Harper and Sharpe, a fight that had left both men reeling, yet Sharpe had won it and the riflemen had watched it and they learned something about Sharpe that day.

And Williamson did not want to learn the lesson again. “I won’t fight an officer,” he said with assumed dignity.

Sharpe turned his back, picked up his jacket. “Then find Sergeant Harper,” he said, “and tell him you’re to do the same punishment as Sims and Gataker.” He turned back. “On the double!”

Williamson ran. His shame at refusing the fight might make him more dangerous, but it would also diminish his influence over the other men who, even though they would never know what had happened in the woods, would sense that Williamson had been humiliated. Sharpe buckled his belt and walked slowly back. He worried about his men, worried that he would lose their loyalty, worried that he was proving a bad officer. He remembered Blas Vivar and wished he had the Spanish officer’s quiet ability to enforce obedience through sheer presence, but perhaps that effortless authority came with experience. At least none of his men had deserted. They were all present, except for Tarrant and the few who were back in Coimbra’s military hospital recovering from the fever.

It was a month now since Oporto had fallen. The fort on the hilltop was almost finished and, to Sharpe’s surprise, the men had enjoyed the hard labor. Daniel Hagman was walking again, albeit slowly, but he was mended enough to work and Sharpe placed a kitchen table in the sun where, one by one, Hagman stripped, cleaned and oiled every rifle. The fugitives who had fled from Oporto had now returned to the city or found refuge elsewhere, but the French were making new fugitives. Wherever they were ambushed by partisans they sacked the closest villages and, even without the provocation of ambush, they plundered farms mercilessly to feed themselves. More and more folk came to Vila Real de Zedes, drawn there by rumors that the French had agreed to spare the village. No one knew why the French should do such a thing, though some
of the older women said it was because the whole valley was under the protection of Saint Joseph whose life-size statue was in the church, and the village’s priest, Father Josefa, encouraged the belief. He even had the statue taken from the church, hung with fading narcissi and crowned with a laurel wreath, and then carried about the village boundary to show the saint the precise extent of the lands needing his guardianship. Vila Real de Zedes, folk believed, was a sanctuary from the war and ordained as such by God.

May arrived with rain and wind. The last of the blossoms were blown from the trees to make damp rills of pink and white petals in the grass. Still the French did not come and Manuel Lopes reckoned they were simply too busy to bother with Vila Real de Zedes. “They’ve got troubles,” he said happily. “Silveira’s giving them a bellyache at Amarante and the road to Vigo has been closed by partisans. They’re cut off! No way home! They’re not going to worry us here.” Lopes frequently went to the nearby towns where he posed as a peddler selling religious trinkets and he brought back news of the French troops. “They patrol the roads,” he said, “they get drunk at night and they wish they were back home.”

“And they look for food,” Sharpe said.

“They do that too,” Lopes agreed.

“And one day,” Sharpe said, “when they’re hungry, they’ll come here.”

“Colonel Christopher won’t let them,” Lopes said. He was walking with Sharpe along the Quinta’s drive, watched by Harris and Cooper who stood guard at the gate, the closest Sharpe allowed his Protestant riflemen to the village. Rain was threatening. Gray sheets of it fell across the northern hills and Sharpe had twice heard rumbles of thunder which might have been the sound of the guns at Amarante, but seemed too loud. “I shall leave soon,” Lopes announced.

“Back to Bragança?”

“Amarante. My men are recovered. It is time to fight again.”

“You could do one thing before you go,” Sharpe said, ignoring the implied criticism in Lopes’s last words. “Tell those refugees to get out of
the village. Tell them to go home. Tell them Saint Joseph is overworked and he won’t protect them when the French come.”

Lopes shook his head. “The French aren’t coming,” he insisted.

“And when they do,” Sharpe continued, just as insistently, “I can’t defend the village. I don’t have enough men.”

Lopes looked disgusted. “You’ll just defend the Quinta,” he suggested, “because it belongs to an English family.”

“I don’t give a damn about the Quinta,” Sharpe said angrily. “I’ll be up on that hilltop trying to stay alive. For Christ’s sake, there’s less than sixty of us! And the French will send fifteen hundred.”

“They won’t come,” Lopes said. He reached up to pluck some shriveled white blossom from a tree. “I never did trust Savages’ port,” he said.

“Trust?”

“An elder tree,” Lopes said, showing Sharpe the petals. “The bad port makers put elderberry juice in the wine to make it look richer.” He tossed away the flowers and Sharpe had a sudden memory of that day in Oporto, the day the refugees drowned when the French had taken the city, and he remembered how Christopher had been about to write him the order to go back across the Douro and the cannonball had struck the tree to shower pinkish-red petals which the Colonel had thought were cherry blossoms. And Sharpe remembered the look on Christopher’s face at the mention of the name Judas.