“What do I do with the rest of my men?”
Hogan thought about it. “Major Potter could use them,” he suggested, “to help guard the
prisoners here?”
“I don’t want to lose them back to Shorncliffe,” Sharpe said. He feared that the second
battalion would be making inquiries about their lost riflemen. They might not care that
Lieutenant Sharpe was missing, but the absence of several prime marksmen would definitely
be regretted.
“My dear Richard,” Hogan said, “if you think Sir Arthur’s going to lose even a few good
riflemen then you don’t know him half as well as you think. He’ll move hell and high water to
keep you here. And you and I have to move like hell to get to Ponte Nova before anyone
else.”
Sharpe grimaced. “The French have a day’s start on us.”
“No, they don’t. Like fools they went toward Amarante which means they didn’t know that the
Portuguese had recaptured it. By now they’ll have discovered their predicament, but I doubt
they’ll start north till dawn. If we hurry, we beat them.” He frowned, looking down at the map.
“There’s only one real problem I can see, other than finding Mister Christopher when we
get there.”
“A problem?”
“I can find my way to Ponte Nova from Braga,” Hogan said, “but what if the French are
already on the Braga road? We’ll have to take to the hills and it’s wild country, Richard, an
easy place to get lost. We need a guide and we need to find him fast.”
Sharpe grinned. “If you don’t mind traveling with a Portuguese officer who thinks he’s a
philosopher and a poet then I think I know just the man.”
“I’m Irish,” Hogan said, “there’s nothing we love more than philosophy and poetry.”
“He’s a lawyer too.”
“If he gets us to Ponte Nova,” Hogan said, “then God will doubtless forgive him for
that.”
The women’s laughter was loud, but it was time to end the party. It was time for a dozen of
Sharpe’s best men to mend their boots and fill their cartridge boxes.
It was time for revenge.
Kate sat in a corner of the carriage and wept. The carriage was going nowhere. It was not
even a proper carriage, not half as comfortable as the Quinta’s fragile gig that had been
abandoned in Oporto and nothing like as substantial as the one her mother had taken south
across the river in March, and how Kate now wished she had gone with her mother, but instead
she had been stricken by romance and certain that love’s fulfillment would bring her golden
skies, clear horizons and endless joy.
Instead she was in a two-wheeled Oporto hackney with a leaking leather roof, cracked
springs and a broken-down gelding between its shafts, and the carriage was going nowhere
because the fleeing French army was stuck on the road to Amarante. Rain seethed on the roof,
streaked the windows and dripped onto Kate’s lap and she did not care, she just hunched in the
corner and wept.
The door was tugged open and Christopher put his head in. “There are going to be some
bangs,” he told her, “but there’s no need to be alarmed.” He paused, decided he could not cope
with her sobbing, so just closed the door. Then he jerked it open again. “They’re disabling the
guns,” he explained, “that’s what the noise will be.”
Kate could not have cared less. She wondered what would become of her, and the awfulness
of her prospects was so frightening that she burst into fresh tears just as the first guns
were fired muzzle to muzzle.
On the morning after the fall of Oporto Marshal Soult had been woken to the appalling
news that the Portuguese army had retaken Amarante and that the only bridge by which he
could carry his guns, limbers, caissons, wagons and carriages back to the French fortresses
in Spain was therefore in enemy hands. One or two hotheads had suggested fighting their way
across the River Tamega, but scouts reported that the Portuguese were occupying Amarante
in force, that the bridge had been mined and had a dozen guns now dominating its roadway, that
it would take a day of bitter and bloody fighting to get across and even then there would
probably be no bridge left for the Portuguese would doubtless blow it. And Soult did not have
a day. Sir Arthur Wellesley would be advancing from Oporto so that left him only one
option, which was to abandon all the army’s wheeled transport, every wagon, every limber,
every caisson, every carriage, every mobile forge and every gun. They would all have to be
left behind and twenty thousand men, five thousand camp followers, four thousand horses
and almost as many mules must do their best to scramble over the mountains.
But Soult was not going to leave the enemy good French guns to turn against him, and so the
weapons were each loaded with four pounds of powder, were double-shotted and placed muzzle
to muzzle. Gunners struggled to keep their portfires alight in the rain and then, on a word
of command, touched the two reed fuses and the powder flashed down to the overcharged
chambers, the guns fired into each other, leaped back in a wrenching explosion of smoke and
flames and then were left with ripped, torn barrels. Some of the gunners were weeping as they
destroyed their weapons while others just cursed as they used knives and bayonets to rip open
the powder bags that were left to spoil in the rain.
The infantry were ordered to empty their packs and haversacks of everything except food
and ammunition. Some officers ordered inspections and insisted their men throw away the
plunder of the campaign. Cutlery, candlesticks, plate, all had to be abandoned by the
roadside as the army took to the hills. The horses, oxen and mules that hauled the guns,
carriages and limbers were shot rather than be ceded to the enemy. The animals screamed and
thrashed as they died. The wounded who could not walk were left in their wagons and given
muskets so they could at least try to protect themselves against the Portuguese who would
find them soon enough and then attempt to exact revenge on helpless men. Soult ordered the
military chest, eleven great barrels of silver coins, put by the road so the men could help
themselves to a handful apiece as they went past. The women hitched up their skirts, scooped
up the coins, and walked with their men. The dragoons, hussars and chasseurs led their
horses. Thousands of men and women were climbing into the barren hills, leaving behind
wagons loaded with bottles of wine, with port, with crosses of gold stolen from churches and
with ancestral paintings plundered from the walls of northern Portugal’s big houses. The
French had thought they had conquered a country, that they were merely waiting for a few
reinforcements to swell the ranks as they marched on Lisbon, and none understood why they
were suddenly faced with disaster or why King Nicolas was leading them on a shambolic
retreat through torrential rain.
“If you stay here,” Christopher told Kate, “you’ll be raped.”
“I’ve been raped,” she wept, “night after night!”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Kate!” Christopher, dressed in civilian clothes, was standing by the
carriage’s open door with rain dripping from the point of his cocked hat. “I’m not leaving you
here.” He reached in, took her by the wrist and, despite her screams and struggles, hauled her
from the carriage. “Walk, damn you!” he snarled, and dragged her across the verge and up the
slope. She had only been out of the carriage a few seconds and already her blue hussar
uniform, which Christopher had insisted she wore, was soaked through. “This isn’t the end,”
Christopher told her, his grip painful on her thin wrist. “The reinforcements never
arrived, that’s all! But we’ll be back.”
Kate, despite her misery, was struck by the “we.” Did he mean the two of them? Or did he
mean the French? “I want to go home,” she cried.
“Stop being tedious,” Christopher snapped, “and keep walking!” He pulled her on. Her new
leather-soled boots slipped on the path. “The French are going to win this war,” Christopher
insisted. He was no longer certain of that, but when he weighed the balances of power in
Europe he managed to convince himself that it was true.
“I want to go back to Oporto!” Kate sobbed.
“We can’t!”
“Why not?” She tried to pull away from him and though she could not loosen his grip she did
manage to bring him to a halt. “Why not?” she asked.
“We just can’t,” he said, “now come on!” He tugged her into motion again, unwilling to
tell her that he could not go back to Oporto because that damned man Sharpe was alive. Good
Christ in his heaven, but the bastard was only an over-age lieutenant and one, he had now
learned, who was up from the ranks, but Sharpe knew too much that was damning to Christopher
and so the Colonel would need to find a safe haven from where, by the discreet methods that he
knew so well, he could send a letter to London. Then, in quiet, he could judge from the reply
whether London believed his story that he had been forced to demonstrate an allegiance to
the French in order to engineer a mutiny that would have freed Portugal, and that story
sounded convincing to him, except that Portugal was being freed anyway. But all was not
lost. It would be his word against Sharpe’s, and Christopher, whatever else he might be, was a
gentleman and Sharpe was most decidedly not. There would be the delicate problem, of
course, of what to do with Kate if he was called back to London, but he could probably deny
that the marriage had ever taken place. He would put reports of it down to Kate’s vapors.
Women were given to vapors, it was notorious. What had Shakespeare said? “Frailty, thy
name is woman.” So he would truthfully claim that the gabbled service in Vila Real de
Zedes’s small church was not a proper marriage and say that he had undergone it solely to
save Kate’s blushes. It was a gamble, he knew, but he had played cards long enough to know that
sometimes the most outrageous gambles paid the biggest winnings.
And if the gamble failed, and if he could not salvage his London career then it probably
would not matter, for he clung to the belief that the French would surely win in the end and
he would be back in Oporto where, for lack of any other knowledge, the lawyers must account
him as Kate’s husband and he would be wealthy. Kate would come to terms with it. She would
recover when she was restored, as she would be, to comfort and home. Thus far, it was true,
she had been unhappy, her joy at the marriage turning to horror in the bedroom, but young
mares often rebelled against the bridle yet after a whipping or two became docile and
obedient. And Christopher wished that outcome for Kate because her beauty still thrilled
him. He dragged her on to where Williamson, now Christopher’s servant, held his horse. “Get on
its back,” he ordered Kate.
“I want to go home!” she said.
“Get up!” He almost hit her with the riding crop that was tucked under the saddle, but
then she meekly let him help her onto the horse. “Hold on to the reins, Williamson,”
Christopher ordered. He did not want Kate turning the horse and kicking it away westward.
“Hold them tight, man.”
“Yes, sir,” Williamson said. He was still in his rifleman’s uniform, though he had
exchanged his shako for a wide-brimmed leather hat. He had picked up a French musket, a pistol
and a saber in the retreat from Oporto and the weapons made him look formidable, an
appearance that was a comfort to Christopher. The Colonel had needed a servant after his
own had fled, but he wanted a bodyguard even more and Williamson played the role superbly. He
told Christopher tales of tavern brawls, of wild fights with knives and clubs, of bare-fisted
boxing bouts, and Christopher lapped it up almost as eagerly as he listened to Williamson’s
bitter complaints about Sharpe.
In return Christopher had promised Williamson a golden future. “Learn French,” he had
advised the deserter, “and you can join their army. Show that you’re good and they’ll give you
a commission. They ain’t particular in the French army.”
“And if I wants to stay with you, sir?” Williamson had asked.
“I was always a man to reward loyalty, Williamson,” Christopher had said, and so the two
suited each other even if, for now, their fortunes were at a low ebb as, with thousands of
other fugitives, they climbed into the rain, were buffeted by the wind and saw nothing
ahead but the hunger, bleak slopes and wet rocks of the Serra de Santa Catalina.
Behind them, on the road from Oporto to Amarante, a sad trail of abandoned carriages and
wagons stood in the downpour. The wounded French watched anxiously, praying that the
pursuing British would appear before the peasants, but the peasants were closer than the
redcoats, much closer, and soon their dark shapes were seen flitting in the rain and in their
hands were bright knives.
And in the rain the wounded men’s muskets would not fire.
And so the screaming began.
Sharpe would have liked to take Hagman on his pursuit of Christopher, but the old poacher
was not fully recovered from his chest wound, and so Sharpe was forced to leave him behind.
He took twelve men, his fittest and cleverest, and all complained vehemently when they were
rousted out into Oporto’s rain before dawn because their bellies were sour with wine, their
heads sore and their tempers short. “But not as short as mine,” Sharpe warned them, “so don’t
make such a damned fuss.”
Hogan came with them, as did Lieutenant Vicente and three of his men. Vicente had learned
that three mail carriages were going to Braga at first light and told Hogan that the
vehicles were notoriously fast and would be traveling on a good road. The drivers,
carrying sacks of mail that had been waiting for the French to leave before they could be
delivered to Braga, happily made room for the soldiers who collapsed on the mail sacks and
fell asleep.
They passed through the remnants of the city’s northern defenses in the wet halflight of
dawn. The road was good, but the mail coaches were slowed because partisans had felled trees
across the highway and each barricade took a half-hour or more to clear. “If the French had
known Amarante had fallen,” Hogan told Sharpe, “they’d have retreated on this road and we’d
never have caught them! Mind you, we don’t know that their Braga garrison has left with the
rest.”