And what mattered now was to beat these Frenchmen. The column, much larger than the first,
was surging forward, driven by the drumsticks. The Frenchmen cheered, perhaps to give
themselves confidence, and they must have been encouraged by the fact that the British guns
on the river’s far side could not see them. But then, provoking a British cheer, a spherical
case shot fired by a howitzer exploded just ahead of the column’s center. The British
gunners were firing blind, arching their shots over the seminary, but they were firing well
and their first shot killed the French cheering dead.
“Rifles only!” Sharpe called. “Fire when you’re ready. Don’t waste the patch! Hagman? Go
for that big man with the saber.”
“I see him, sir,” Hagman said and shifted his rifle to aim at the officer who was
striding ahead, setting an example, asking to be rifle meat.
“Look for the ladders,” Sharpe reminded the others, then walked to the parapet, put his
left foot on the coping and the rifle to his shoulder. He aimed at a man with a ladder,
sighting on the man’s head in the expectation that the bullet would fall to take him in the
lower belly or groin. The wind was in Sharpe’s face so would not drift the shot. He fired and
was immediately blinded by the smoke. Hagman fired next, then there was the crackle of the
other rifles. The muskets kept silent. Sharpe went to his left to see past the smoke and saw
that the saber-carrying officer had vanished, as had any other man struck by a bullet.
They had been swallowed by the advancing column that stepped over and past the victims, then
Sharpe saw a ladder reappear as it was snatched up by a man in the fourth or fifth rank. He
felt in his cartridge box for another round and began to reload.
He did not look at the rifle as he reloaded. He just did what he had been trained to do,
what he could do in his sleep, and just as he primed the rifle so the first musket balls were
shot from the garden wall, then the muskets opened fire from the windows and roof, and the
seminary was again wreathed in smoke and noise. The cannon shots rumbled above, so close that
Sharpe almost ducked once, and the case shot banged above the slope. Bullets and musket balls
ripped into the French files. Close to a thousand men were in the seminary now and they were
protected by stone walls and given a wide open target. Sharpe fired another shot down the
hill, then walked up and down behind his men, watching. Slattery needed a new flint and
Sharpe gave him one, then Tarrant’s mainspring broke and Sharpe replaced the weapon with
Williamson’s old rifle which Harper had been carrying ever since they left Vila Real de
Zedes. The enemy’s drums sounded nearer and Sharpe reloaded his own rifle as the first
French musket bullets rattled against the seminary’s stones. “They’re firing blind,” Sharpe
told his men, “firing blind! Don’t waste your shots. Look for targets.” That was difficult
because of the smoke hanging over the slope, but vagaries of wind sometimes stirred the fog
to reveal blue uniforms and the French were close enough for Sharpe to see faces. He aimed at a
man with an enormous mustache, fired and lost sight of the man as the smoke blossomed from his
rifle’s muzzle.
The noise of the fight was awesome. Muskets crackling incessantly, the drumbeats
thumping, the case shots banging overhead, and beneath all that violence was the sound of
men crying in distress. A redcoat slumped down near Harper, blood puddling by his head
until a sergeant dragged the man away from the parapet, leaving a smear of bright red on the
roofs lead. Far off-it had to be on the river’s southern bank-a band was playing “The Drum
Major” and Sharpe tapped his rifle’s butt in time to the tune. A French ramrod came whirling
through the air to clatter against the seminary wall, evidently fired by a conscript who had
panicked and pulled his trigger before he cleared his barrel. Sharpe remembered how, in
Flanders, at his very first battle as a red-coated private, a man’s musket had misfired,
but he had gone on reloading, pulling the trigger, reloading, and when they drilled out his
musket after the battle they found sixteen useless charges crammed down the barrel. What
was the man’s name? He had been from Norfolk, despite being in a Yorkshire regiment, and he
had called everyone “bor.” Sharpe could not remember the name and it annoyed him. A musket
ball whipped past his face, another hit the parapet and shattered a tile. Down in the garden
Vicente’s men and the redcoats were not aiming their muskets, but just pushing the muzzles
into the loopholes, pulling the triggers, and getting out of the way so the next man could
use the embrasure. There were some green-jackets in the garden now and Sharpe guessed a
company of the 60th, the Royal American Rifles, must be attached to Hill’s brigade and was
now joining the fight. They would do better, he thought, to climb to the roof than try to fire
their Bakers through the loopholes. The single tree on the northern slope was thrashing as
though in a gale and there was scarcely one leaf left on its splintered branches. Smoke
drifted through the winter-bare twigs that twitched continually from the bullet
strikes.
Sharpe primed his rifle, put it to his shoulder, looked for a target, saw a knot of blue
uniforms very close to the garden wall and put the bullet into them. The air hissed with
bullets. God damn it, but why didn’t the bastards pull back? A brave group of Frenchmen tried
to run down the seminary’s western face to reach the big gate, but the British guns at the
convent saw them and the shells cracked black and red, smearing blood across the paved terrace
and up the garden wall’s whitewashed stones. Sharpe saw his men grimacing as they tried to
force the new bullets down the powder-fouled barrels. There was no time to clean the rifles,
they just hammered the bullets down and pulled the trigger. Fire and fire again, and the
French were doing the same, a mad duel of bullets, and above the smoke, across the northern
valley, Sharpe saw a horde of new French infantry streaming out of the city.
Two men in shirtsleeves were carrying boxes of ammunition round the roof. “Who needs
it?” they shouted, sounding like London street traders. “Fresh lead! Who needs it? Fresh lead!
New powder!” One of General Hill’s aides was carrying canteens of water to the parapet
while Hill himself, red-faced and anxious, stood close to the redcoats so he was seen to share
their danger. He caught Sharpe’s gaze and offered a grimace as if to suggest that this was
harder work than he had anticipated.
More troops came to the roof, men with fresh muskets and full cartridge boxes, and with
them were the riflemen of the 60th whose officer must have realized he had been in the
wrong place. He gave Sharpe a companionable nod, then ordered his men to the parapet. Flames
jetted down, smoke thickened, and still the French tried to blast their way through stone walls
with nothing but musket fire. Two Frenchmen succeeded in scaling the garden wall, but
hesitated at the top and were seized and dragged across the coping to be battered to death by
musket butts on the path beneath. Seven dead redcoats were laid out on another gravel
path, their hands curling in death and the blood of their wounds slowly hardening and
turning black, but most of the British dead were in the seminary’s corridors, dragged away
from the big windows that made the best targets for the frustrated French.
A whole new column was now climbing the slope, coming to swell the shattered ranks of the
first, but though the beleaguered men in the seminary could not know it, these newcomers
were the symptom of French defeat. Marshal Soult, desperate for fresh troops to attack the
seminary, had stripped the city itself of infantry, and the people of Oporto, finding
themselves unguarded for the first time since the end of March, swarmed down to the river and
dragged their boats out of warehouses, shops and back-yards where the occupiers had kept them
under guard. A swarm of those small craft now rowed across the river, past the shattered
remnants of the pontoon bridge, to the quays of Vila Nova de Gaia where the Brigade of
Guards was waiting. An officer peered anxiously across the Douro to reassure himself that
the French were not waiting in ambush on the opposite quay, then shouted at his men to
embark. The Guards were rowed back to the city and still more boats appeared and more redcoats
crossed. Soult did not know it, but his city was filling with the enemy.
Nor did the men attacking the seminary know it, not till the redcoats appeared at the
city’s eastern edge, and by then the second giant column had climbed into the death storm of
bullets flicking from the seminary’s walls, roof and windows. The noise rivaled that of
Trafalgar, where Sharpe had been dazed by the incessant boom of the great ships’ guns, but
this noise was higher pitched as the muskets’ discharges blended into an eerie, hard-edged
shriek. The higher slope of the seminary hill was sodden with blood and the surviving
Frenchmen were using the bodies of their dead comrades as protection. A few drummers still
tried to drive the broken columns on, but then came a shout of alarm from a French sergeant, and
the shout spread, and suddenly the smoke was dissipating and the slope emptying as the
French saw the Brigade of Guards advancing across the valley.
The French ran. They had fought bravely, going against stone walls with muskets, but now
they panicked and all discipline vanished as they ran for the road going east toward
Amarante. Other French forces, cavalry and artillery among them, were hurrying from the
higher part of the city, escaping the flood of redcoats ferried across the Douro and
fleeing the revenge of the townsfolk who hunted up the alleys and streets to find wounded
Frenchmen whom they attacked with fish-filleting knives or battered with clubs.
There was screaming and howling in Oporto’s streets, but only a strange silence in the
bullet-scarred seminary. Then General Hill cupped his hands. “Follow them!” he shouted.
“Follow them! I want a pursuit!”
“Rifles! To me!” Sharpe called. He held his men back from the pursuit. They had already
endured enough, he reckoned, and it was time to give them a rest. “Clean your guns,” he
ordered them, and so they stayed as the redcoats and riflemen of the 1st Brigade formed ranks
outside the seminary and then marched away eastward.
A score of dead men were left on the roof. There were long streaks of blood showing where
they had been pulled away from the parapet. The smoke about the building slowly cleared until
the air felt clean again. The slopes beneath the seminary were strewn with discarded French
packs and French bodies, not all of them dead. A wounded man crawled away between the
blood-spattered blossoms of ragweed. A dog sniffed at a corpse. Ravens came on black wings to
taste the dead, and women and children hurried from the houses in the valley to begin the
plunder. A wounded man tried to twitch away from a girl who could not have been more than
eleven and she drew a butchering knife from her apron belt, a knife that had been sharpened so
often that its blade was little more than a whisper of thin steel attached to a bone handle,
and she sliced it across the Frenchman’s throat, then grimaced because his blood had splashed
onto her lap. Her little sister was dragging six muskets by their slings. The small fires
started by wadding smoked between the corpses where the plump Portuguese priest, the
blunderbuss still in one hand, made the sign of the cross over the Frenchmen he had helped to
kill.
While the living French, in panicked disarray, ran.
And the city of Oporto had been recaptured.
The letter, addressed to Richard Sharpe, Esq, was waiting on the mantel of the parlor in
the House Beautiful and it was a miracle it had survived because that afternoon a score of
Royal Artillery gunners made the house into their billet and the first thing they did was to
break up the parlor’s furniture to make a fire and the letter was an ideal piece of
kindling, but then Captain Hogan arrived just before the fire was lit and managed to
retrieve the paper. He had come looking for Sharpe and had asked the gunners if any messages
had been left in the house, thinking Sharpe might have left one. “English folk live here,
lads,” he told the gunners as he opened the unsealed letter, “so wipe your feet and clean up
behind yourselves.” He read the brief message, and thought for a while. “I suppose none of
you have seen a tall Rifle officer from the 95th? No? Well, if he shows up, tell him to go to
the Palacio das Carrancas.”
“The what, sir?” a gunner asked.
“Big building down the hill,” Hogan explained. “Headquarters.” Hogan knew Sharpe was alive
for Colonel Waters had told him of meeting Sharpe that morning, but though Hogan roamed the
streets he had not found Sharpe and so a pair of orderlies were sent to search the city for the
stray rifleman.
A new pontoon bridge was already being floated across the Douro. The city was free again
and it celebrated with flags, wine and music. Hundreds of French prisoners were under
guard in a warehouse and a long row of captured French guns was parked on the river’s quay
where the British merchant ships that had been captured when the city fell now flew their own
flags again. Marshal Soult and his army had marched away east toward the bridge at Amarante
that the French had captured so recently and they were blissfully unaware that General
Beresford, the new commander of the Portuguese army, had recaptured the bridge and was
waiting for them.
“If they can’t cross at Amarante,” Wellesley demanded that evening, “then where will they
go?” The question was asked in the blue reception room of the Palacio das Carrancas where
Wellesley and his staff had eaten a meal that had evidently been cooked for Marshal Soult
and which had been found still hot in the palace’s ovens. The meal had been lamb, which Sir
Arthur liked, but so tricked out with onions, scraps of ham and mushrooms that its taste had
been quite spoiled for him. “I thought the French appreciated cooking,” he had grumbled,
then demanded that an orderly bring him a bottle of vinegar from the kitchens. He had
doused the lamb, scraped away the offending mushrooms and onions, and decided the meal was
much improved.