“Slit his throat,” Tongue suggested, “it’s easier.”
“Tie him up,” Sharpe insisted, “gag him, and make a good job of it.” He beckoned Vicente
forward. “He’s the only one I’ve seen.”
“There must be more,” Vicente declared.
“God knows where they are.”
Sharpe went back to the corner, peered around and saw nothing except the puppy which was
now trying to drag the Frenchman’s musket across the cobbles by its sling. He gestured for
Harper to join him. “I can’t see anyone,” Sharpe whispered.
“He can’t have been alone,” Harper said.
Yet still no one moved. “I want to get into those trees, Pat,” Sharpe hissed, nodding across
the slipway.
“Run like shit, sir,” Harper said, and the two of them sprinted across the open space and
threw themselves into the trees. No musket flared, no one shouted, but the puppy, thinking
it was a game, followed them. “Go back to your mother!” Harper hissed at the dog which just
barked at him.
“Jesus!” Sharpe said, not because of the noise the dog was making, but because he could
see boats. The French were supposed to have destroyed or taken every vessel along the Douro,
but in front of him, stranded by the falling tide on the muddy outer bank of a great bend in
the river, were three huge wine barges. Three! He wondered if they had been holed and, while
Harper kept the puppy quiet, he waded through the sticky mud and hauled himself aboard the
nearest barge. He was hidden from anyone on the north bank by thick trees, which was perhaps
why the French had somehow missed the three vessels and, better still, the barge Sharpe had
boarded seemed quite undamaged. There was a good deal of water in its bilge, but when Sharpe
tasted it he found it was fresh, so it was rainwater, not the salty tidewater that swept
twice daily up the Douro. Sharpe splashed through the flooded bilge and found no gaping rents
torn by axes, then he heaved himself up onto a side deck where six great sweeps were lashed
together with fraying lengths of rope. There was even a small skiff stored upside down at the
stern with a pair of ancient oars, cracked and bleached, lodged halfway beneath its hull.
“Sir!” Harper hissed from the bank. “Sir!” He was pointing across the river and Sharpe
looked over the water and saw a red coat. A single horseman, evidently British, stared back
at him. The man had a cocked hat so was an officer, but when Sharpe waved he did not return
the gesture. Sharpe guessed the man was confused by his green coat.
“Get everyone here, now,” Sharpe ordered Harper, then looked back to the horseman. For a
second or two he wondered if it was Colonel Christopher, but this man was heavier and his
horse, like most British horses, had a docked tail while Christopher, aping the French, had
left his horse’s tail uncut. The man, who was sitting his horse beneath a tree, turned and
looked as if he was speaking to someone, though Sharpe could see no one else on the opposite
bank, then the man looked back to Sharpe and gestured vigorously toward the three boats.
Sharpe hesitated. It was a safe bet that the man was senior to him and if he crossed the
river he would find himself back in the iron discipline of the army and no longer free to act
as he wished. If he sent any of his men it would be the same, but then he thought of Luis and he
summoned the barber, helping him up over the barge’s heavy gunwale. “Can you manage a small
boat?” he asked.
Luis looked momentarily alarmed, then nodded firmly. “I can, yes.”
“Then go over the river and find out what that British officer wants. Tell him I’m
reconnoitering the seminary. And tell him there’s another boat at Barca d’Avintas.”
Sharpe was making a swift guess that the British had advanced north and had been stopped by the
Douro. He assumed the cannonade was from the guns firing at each other across the river,
but without boats the British would be helpless. Where the hell was the bloody navy?
Harper, Macedo and Luis manhandled the skiff over the gunwale and down the glutinous mud
into the river. The tide was rising, but it still had some way to go before it reached the
barges. Luis took the oars, settled himself on the thwart and, with admirable skill, pulled
away from the bank. He looked over his shoulder to judge his direction, then sculled
vigorously. Sharpe saw another horseman appear behind the first, the second man also in
red coat and black cocked hat, and he felt the bindings of the army reaching out to snare him
so he jumped off the barge and waded through the mud to the bank. “You stay here,” he ordered
Vicente, “I’ll look up the hill.”
For a moment Vicente seemed ready to argue, then he accepted the arrangement and Sharpe
beckoned his riflemen to follow him. As they disappeared into the trees Sharpe looked back
to see Luis was almost at the other bank, then Sharpe pushed through a stand of laurel and saw
the road in front of him. This was the road by which he had escaped from Oporto and, to his
left, he could see the houses where Vicente had saved his bacon. He could see no French. He
stared again at the seminary, but nothing moved there. To hell with it, he thought, just
go.
He led his men in skirmish order up the hill, which offered little cover. A few straggly
trees broke the pasture and a dilapidated shed stood halfway up, but otherwise it was a
deathtrap if there were any Frenchmen in the big building. Sharpe knew he should have
exercised more caution, but no one fired from the windows, no one challenged him, and he
quickened his pace so that he felt the pain in his leg muscles because the slope was so
steep.
Then, suddenly, he had arrived safe at the base of the seminary. The ground floor had
small barred windows and seven arched doors. Sharpe tried a door and found it locked and so
solid that when he kicked it he only succeeded in hurting himself. He crouched and waited
for the laggards among his men to catch up. He could see westward across a valley that lay
between the seminary and the city and he could see where the French guns, at the top of
Oporto’s hill, were shooting across the river, but their target was hidden by a hill on the
southern bank. A huge convent stood on the obscuring hill, the same convent, Sharpe
remembered, where the Portuguese guns had duelled with the French on the day the city
fell.
“All here,” Harper told him.
Sharpe followed the seminary wall which was made of massive blocks of stone. He went
westward, toward the city. He would have preferred to go the other way, but he sensed the
building’s main entrance would face Oporto. Every door he passed was locked. Why the hell
were there no French here? He could see none, not even at the city’s edge a half-mile away, and
then the wall turned to his right and he saw a flight of steps climbing to an ornamental
door. No sentries guarded the entrance, though he could at last see Frenchmen now. There was
a convoy of wagons on a road that ran in the valley which lay to the north of the seminary.
The wagons, which were drawn by oxen, were being escorted by dragoons and Sharpe used
Christopher’s small telescope to see that the vehicles were filled with wounded men. So was
Soult sending his invalids back to France? Or just emptying his hospitals before fighting
another battle? And he was surely not now thinking of marching on to Lisbon for the
British had come north to the Douro and that made Sharpe think that Sir Arthur Wellesley must
have arrived in Portugal to galvanize the British forces.
The seminary entrance was framed by an ornate facade rising to a stone cross that had
been chipped by musket fire. The main door, approached by stairs, was wooden, studded with
nails and, when Sharpe twisted the great wrought-iron handle, surprised him by being
unlocked.
He pushed the door wide open with the muzzle of his rifle to see an empty tiled hallway
with walls painted a sickly green. The portrait of a half-starved saint hung askew on one
wall, the saint’s body riddled with bullet punctures. A crude painting of a woman and a
French soldier had been daubed next to the saint and proved that the French had been in the
seminary, though there were none evident now. Sharpe went inside, his boots echoing from the
walls. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Harper said, making the sign of the cross. “I’ve never seen
such a huge building!” He gazed in awe down the shadowed corridor. “How many bloody priests
does a country need?”
“Depends how many sinners there are,” Sharpe said, “and now we search the place.”
He left six men in the entrance hall to serve as a picquet, then went downstairs to unbolt
one of the arched doors facing the river. That door would be his bolt hole if the French came
to the seminary and, once that retreat was secure, he searched the dormitories, bathrooms,
kitchens, refectory and lecture rooms of the vast building. Broken furniture littered
every room and in the library a thousand books lay strewn and torn across the hardwood floor,
but there were no people. The chapel had been violated, the altar chopped for firewood and
the choir used as a lavatory. “Bastards,” Harper said softly. Gataker, his trigger guard
dangling by one last screw, gaped at an amateur painting of two women curiously joined to
three French dragoons that had been daubed on the whitewashed wall where once a great triptych
of the holy birth had surmounted the altar. “Good that,” he said in a tone as respectful as
he might have used at the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition.
“I like my women a bit plumper,” Slattery said.
“Come on!” Sharpe snarled. His most urgent task now was to find the seminary’s store of
wine-he was certain there would be one-but when at last he discovered the cellar he saw, with
relief, that the French had already been there and nothing remained but broken bottles and
empty barrels. “Real bastards!” Harper said feelingly, but Sharpe would have destroyed
the bottles and barrels himself to prevent his men from drinking themselves insensible.
And that thought made him realize that he had already unconsciously decided that he would
stay in this big building as long as he could. The French doubtless wanted to hold Oporto,
but whoever held the seminary dominated the city’s eastern flank.
The long facade with its myriad windows facing the river was deceptive, for the
building was very narrow; scarce a dozen windows looked straight toward Oporto, though at
the rear of the seminary, furthest from the city, a long wing jutted north. In the angle of
the two wings was a garden where a score of apple trees had been cut down for firewood. The
two sides of the garden not cradled by the building were protected by a high stone wall
pierced by a pair of fine iron gates that opened toward Oporto. In a shed, hidden beneath a
pile of netting that had once been used to keep birds from the fruit bushes, Sharpe found an
old pickaxe that he gave to Cooper. “Start making loopholes,” he said, pointing to the long
wall. “Patrick! Find some more tools. Detail six men to help Coops, and the rest of the men are
to go to the roof, but they’re not to show themselves. Understand? They’re to stay
hidden.”
Sharpe himself went to a large room that he suspected had been the office of the
seminary’s master. It was shelved like a library, and it had been plundered like the rest of
the building. Torn and broken-spined books lay thick on the floorboards, a large table had
been thrown against one wall and a slashed oil painting of a saintly-looking cleric was half
burned in the big hearth. The only undamaged object was a crucifix, black as soot, that
hung high on the wall above the mantel.
Sharpe threw open the window that was immediately above the seminary’s main door and
used the little telescope to search the city that lay so tantalizingly close across the
valley. Then, disobeying his own instructions that everyone was to stay hidden, he leaned
across the sill in an attempt to see what was happening on the river’s southern bank, but he
could see nothing meaningful and then, while he was still craning his neck, a stranger’s
voice boomed behind him. “You must be Lieutenant Sharpe. Name’s Waters, Lieutenant Colonel
Waters, and well done, Sharpe, bloody well done.”
Sharpe pulled back and turned to see a red-coated officer stepoine through the mess of
books and papers. “I’m Sharpe, sir,” he acknowledged.
“Bloody Frogs are dozing,” Waters said. He was a stocky man, bow-legged from too much
horse-riding, with a weather-beaten face. Sharpe guessed he was in his low forties, but
looked older because his grizzled hair was gray. “They should have had a battalion and a
half up here, shouldn’t they? That and a couple of gun batteries. Our enemies are dozing,
Sharpe, bloody dozing.”
“You were the man I saw across the river?” Sharpe asked.
“The very same. Your Portuguese fellow came across. Smart man! So he rowed me back and now
we’re floating those damned barges.” Waters grinned. “It’s heave-ho, my hearties, and if we can
get the damn things afloat then we’ll have the Buffs over first, then the rest of the 1st
Brigade. Should be interesting when Marshal Soult realizes we’ve sneaked in his back door,
eh? Is there any liquor in the building?”
“All gone, sir.”
“Good man,” Waters said, mistakenly deducing that Sharpe himself must have removed the
temptation before the arrival of the redcoats, then he stepped to the window, took a big
telescope from a leather satchel hanging from his shoulder and stared at Oporto.
“So what’s happening, sir?” Sharpe asked.
“Happening? We’re running the Frogs out of Portugal! Hop hop, croak croak, and good
bloody riddance to the spavined bastards. Look at it!” Waters gestured at the city. “They
don’t have the first blind idea that we’re here! Your Portuguese fellow said you’d been cut
off. Is that true?”
“Since the end of March.”
“Ye gods,” Waters said, “you must be out of touch!” The Colonel pulled back from the window
and perched on the sill where he told Sharpe that Sir Arthur Wellesley had indeed arrived in
Portugal. “He came less than three weeks ago,” Waters said, “and he’s put some snap into the
troops, by God, he has! Cradock was a decent enough fellow, but he had no snap, none. So we’re
on the march, Sharpe, left, right, left, right, and the devil take the hindmost. British army
over there.” He oointed through the window, indicating the hidden ground beyond the high
convent on the southern bank. “Bloody Frogs seem to think we’ll come by sea, so all their men
are either in the city or guarding the river between the city and the sea.” Sharpe felt a
twinge of guilt for not believing the woman in Barca d’Avintas who had told him exactly
that. “Sir Arthur wants to get across,” Waters went on, “and your fellows have conveniently
provided those three barges, and you say there’s a fourth?”