“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 Bias 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 Braganca?”
“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.
“Jesus!” Sharpe said.
“What?” Lopes was taken aback by the force of the imprecation.
“He’s a bloody traitor,” Sharpe said.
“Who?”
“The bloody Colonel,” Sharpe said. It was only instinct that had so suddenly persuaded
him that Christopher was betraying his country, an instinct grounded in the memory of the
Colonel’s look of outrage when Sharpe said the blossoms came from a Judas tree. Ever since
then Sharpe had been wavering between a half suspicion of Christopher’s treachery and a
vague belief that perhaps the Colonel was engaged in some mysterious diplomatic work, but
the recollection of that look on Christopher’s face and the realization that there had
been fear as well as outrage in it convinced Sharpe. Christopher was not just a thief, but a
traitor. “You’re right,” he told an astonished Lopes, “it is time to fight. Harris!” He turned
toward the gate.
“Sir?”
“Find Sergeant Harper for me. And Lieutenant Vicente.”
Vicente came first and Sharpe could not explain why he was so certain that Christopher was
a traitor, but Vicente was not inclined to debate the point. He hated Christopher because
he had married Kate, and he was as bored as Sharpe at the undemanding life at the Quinta.
“Get food,” Sharpe urged him. “Go to the village, ask them to bake bread, buy as much salted
and smoked meat as you can. I want every man to have five days’ rations by nightfall.”
Harper was more cautious. “I thought you had orders, sir.”
“I do, Pat, from General Cradock.”
“Jesus, sir, you don’t disobey a general’s orders.”
“And who fetched those orders?” Sharpe asked. “Christopher did. So he lied to Cradock just
as he’s lied to everyone else.” He was not certain of that, he could not be certain, but nor
could he see the sense in just dallying at the Quinta. He would go south and trust that
Captain Hogan would protect him from General Cradock’s wrath. “We’ll march at dusk tonight,”
he told Harper. “I want you to check everyone’s equipment and ammunition.”