Williamson stared at the coffee and Kate, unsettled by his gaze, moved to the far side of
her horse. She disliked Williamson, disliked the hungry look in his eyes and feared the threat
in his naked desire of her.
Were all men animals? Christopher, for all his elegant civility by day, liked to inflict
pain at night, but then Kate remembered the single soft kiss that Sharpe had given her and
she felt the tears come to her eyes. And Lieutenant Vicente, she thought, was a gentle man.
Christopher liked to say how there were two sides in the world, just as there were black pieces
and white pieces on a chessboard, and Kate knew she had chosen the wrong side. Worse, she did
not know how she was to find her way back to the right one.
Christopher strode back down the stalled column. “Is that coffee?” he asked cheerfully.
“Good, I need something warming.” He took the mug from her, drained it, then tossed it away.
“Another few minutes, my dear,” he said, “and we’ll be on our way. One more bridge after
this, then we’ll be over the hills and far away in Spain. You’ll have a proper bed again, eh?
And a bath. How are you feeling?”
“Cold.”
“Hard to believe it’s May, eh? Worse than England. Still, don’t they say rain’s good for the
complexion? You’ll be prettier than ever, my dearest.” He paused as some muskets sounded
from the west. The noise rattled loud for a few seconds, echoing back and forth between the
defile’s steep sides, then faded. “Chasing off bandits,” Christopher said. “It’s too soon
for the pursuit to catch us up.”
“I pray they do catch us,” Kate said.
“Don’t be ridiculous, my dear. Besides, we’ve got a brigade of good infantry and a pair of
cavalry regiments as rearguard.”
“We?” Kate asked indignantly. “I’m English!”
Christopher gave her a long-suffering smile. “As am I, dearest, but what we want above all
is peace. Peace! And perhaps this retreat will be just the thing to persuade the French to
leave Portugal alone. That’s what I’m working on. Peace.”
There was a pistol bolstered in Christopher’s saddle just behind Kate and she was
tempted to pull the weapon free, thrust it into his belly and pull the trigger, but she had
never fired a gun, did not know if the long-barrelled pistol was loaded, and besides, what
would happen to her if Christopher were not here? Williamson would maul her. she thnnaht and
for some reason she remembered the letter she had succeeded in leaving for Lieutenant
Sharpe, putting it on the House Beautiful’s mantel without Christopher seeing what she was
doing. She thought now what a stupid letter it was. What was she trying to tell Sharpe? And
why him? What did she expect him to do?
She stared up the far hill. There were men on the high crest line and Christopher turned to
see what she was looking at. “More of the scum,” he said.
“Patriots,” Kate insisted.
“Peasants with rusted muskets,” Christopher said acidly, “who torture their prisoners
and have no idea, none, what principles are at stake in this war. They are the forces of old
Europe,” he insisted, “superstitious and ignorant. The enemies of progress.” He
grimaced, then unbuckled one of his saddlebags to make sure that his black-fronted red
uniform jacket was inside. If the French were forced to surrender then that coat was his
passport. He would take to the hills and if any partisans accosted him he would persuade
them he was an Englishman escaping from the French.
“We’re moving, sir,” Williamson said. “Bridge is up, sir.” He knuckled his forehead to
Christopher, then turned his leering face on Kate. “Help you onto the horse, ma’am?”
“I can manage,” Kate said coldly, but she was forced to drop the damp blanket to climb
into the saddle and she knew that both Christopher and Williamson were staring at her legs in
their tight hussar breeches.
A cheer came from the bridge as the first cavalrymen led their horses over the
precarious roadway. The sound prompted the infantry to stand, pick up their muskets and
packs, and shuffle toward the makeshift crossing.
“One more bridge,” Christopher assured Kate, “and we’re safe.”
Just one more bridge. The Leaper.
And above them, high in the hills, Richard Sharpe was already marching toward it. Toward
the last bridge in Portugal. The Saltador.
It had been at dawn that Sharpe and Hogan saw their fears were realized. Several hundred
French infantry were across the Ponte Nova, the ordenanqa were nothing but bodies in a
plundered village, and energetic work parties were remaking the roadway across the
Cavado’s white water. The long and winding defile echoed with sporadic musket shots as
Portuguese peasants, attracted to the beleaguered army like ravens to meat, took long-range
shots. Sharpe saw a hundred voltigeurs in open order climb a hill to drive off one brave band
that had dared to approach within two hundred paces of the stalled column. There was a
flurry of shots, the French skirmishers scoured the hill and then trudged back to the crowded
road. There was no sign of any British pursuit, but Hogan guessed that Wellesley’s army was
still a half-day’s march behind the French. “He won’t have followed the French directly,” he
explained, “he won’t have crossed the Serra de Santa Catalina like they did. He’ll have
stayed on the roads, so he went to Braga first and now he’s marching eastward. As for us … “
He stared down at the captured bridge. “We’d best shift ourselves to the Saltador,” he said
grimly, “because it’s our last chance.”
To Sharpe it seemed there was no chance at all. More than twenty thousand French fugitives
darkened the valley beneath him and Christopher was lost somewhere in that mass and how
Sharpe was ever to find the renegade he did not know. But he pulled on his threadbare coat and
picked up his rifle and followed Hogan who, Sharpe saw, was similarly pessimistic while
Harper, perversely, was oddly cheerful, even when they had to wade through a tributary of
the Cavado which ran waist deep through a steep defile which fell toward the larger river.
Hogan’s mule baulked at the cold, fast water and the Captain proposed abandoning the
animal, but then Javali smacked the beast hard across the face and, while it was still
blinking, picked it up and carried it bodily through the wide stream. The riflemen cheered
the display of strength while the mule, safe on the opposite bank, snapped its yellow teeth
at the goatherd who simply smacked it again. “Useful lad, that,” Harper said approvingly.
The big Irish Sergeant was soaked to the skin and as cold and tired as any of the other men, but
he seemed to relish the hardship. “It’s no worse than herding back home,” he maintained as
they trudged on. “I remember once my uncle was taking a flock of mutton, prime meat the lot
of them, walking them on the hoof to Belfast and half the buggers ran like shite when we’d not
even got to Letterkenny! Jesus, all that money gone to waste.”
“Did you get them back?” Perkins asked.
“You’re joking, lad. I searched half the bloody night and all I got was a clip round the ear
from my uncle. Mind you, it was his fault, he’d never herded so much as a rabbit before and
didn’t know one end of a sheep from the other, but he was told there was good cash for mutton
in Belfast so he stole the flock off a skinflint in Colcarney and set off to make his
fortune.”
“Do you have wolves in Ireland?” Vicente wanted to know.
“In red coats,” Harper said, and saw Sharpe scowl. “My grandfather now,” he went on
hurriedly, “claimed to see a pack of them at Derrynagrial. Big, they were, he said, and
with red eyes and teeth like graveyard stones and he told my grandmother that they chased him
all the way to the Glenleheel bridge, but he was a drunk. Jesus, he could soak the stuff
up.”
Javali wanted to know what they were talking about and immediately had his own tales of
wolves attacking his goats and how he had fought one with nothing but a stick and a
sharp-edged stone, and then he claimed to have raised a wolf cub and told how the village priest
had insisted on killing it because the devil lived in wolves, and Sergeant Macedo said that
was true and described how a sentry at Almeida had been eaten by wolves one cold winter’s
night.
“Do you have wolves in England?” Vicente asked Sharpe.
“Only lawyers.”
“Richard!” Hogan chided him.
They were going north now. The road that the French would use from Ponte Nova to the
Spanish frontier twisted into the hills until it met another tributary of the Cavado,
the Misarella, and the Saltador bridge crossed the upper reaches of that river. Sharpe
would rather have gone down to the road and marched ahead of the French, but Hogan would not hear
of it. The enemy, he said, would put dragoons across the Cavado as soon as the bridge was
repaired and the road was no place to be caught by horsemen, and so they stayed in the high
ground that became ever more rugged, stony and difficult. Their progress was painfully slow
because they were forced to make long detours when precipices or slopes of scree barred their
way, and for every mile they went forward they had to walk three, and Sharpe knew the French
were now advancing up the valley and gaining fast, for their progress was signaled by
scattered musket shots from the hills about the Misarella’s defile. Those shots, fired at
too long a range by men activated by hatred, sounded closer and closer until, at
mid-morning, the French came into view.
A hundred dragoons led, but not far behind them was infantry, and these men were not a
panicked rabble, but marching in good order. Javali, the moment he saw them, growled
incoherently, grabbed a handful of powder from his bag, half of which he spilled as he
tried to push it into his musket’s barrel. He rammed down a bullet, primed his musket and
shot into the valley. It was not apparent that he hit an enemy, but he gave a small joyful
shuffle and then loaded the musket again. “You were right, Richard,” Hogan said ruefully,
“we should have used the road.” The French were overtaking them now.
“You were right, sir,” Sharpe said. “People like him”-he jerked his head toward the
wild-bearded Javali-”would have been taking shots at us all morning.”
“Maybe,” Hogan said. He swayed on the mule’s back, then glanced down again at the French.
“Pray the Saltador has been broken,” he said, but he did not sound hopeful.
They had to clamber down into a saddle of the hills, then climb again to another
hog-backed ridge littered with the massive rounded boulders. They lost sight of the
fast-flowing Misarella and of the French on the road beside it, but they could hear the
occasional flurry of musket shots which told of partisans sniping into the valley.
“God grant the Portuguese have got to the bridge,” Hogan said for the tenth or twentieth
time since dawn. If all had gone well then the Portuguese forces advancing northward in
parallel to Sir Arthur Wellesley’s army should have blocked the French at Ruivaens, so
cutting the last eastward road to Spain, and then sent a brigade into the hills to plug the
final escape route at the Saltador. If all had gone well the Portuguese should now be
barring the mountain road with cannon and infantry, but the weather had slowed their march
as it had slowed Wellesley’s pursuit and the only men waiting for Marshal Soult at the
Saltador were more ordenanqa.
There were over a thousand of them, half trained and ill armed, but an English major from
the Portuguese staff had ridden ahead to give them advice. His strongest recommendation
was to destroy the bridge, but many of the ordenanga came from the hard frontier hills and
the soaring arch across the Misarella was the lifeline of their commerce and so they
refused to heed Major Warre’s advice. Instead they compromised by knocking off the
bridge’s parapets and narrowing its roadway by breaking the roadway’s stones with great
sledgehammers, but they insisted on leaving a slim strip of stone to leap the deep ravine,
and to defend the ribbon-like arch they barricaded the northern side of the bridge with an
abattis made from thorn bushes, and behind that formidable obstacle, and on either side of
it, they scraped earthworks behind which they could shelter as they fired at the French with
ancient muskets and fowling guns. There was no artillery.
The strip of bridge that remained was just wide enough to let a farm cart cross the river’s
ravine. It meant that once the French were gone the valley’s commerce could resume while the
roadway and parapets were rebuilt. But to the French that narrow strip would mean only one
thing: safety.
Hogan was the first to see that the bridge was not fully destroyed. He climbed off the mule
and swore viciously, then handed Sharpe his telescope and Sharpe stared down at the bridge’s
remnants. Musket smoke already shrouded both banks as the dragoons of the French vanguard
fired across the ravine and the ordenanga in their makeshift redoubts shot back. The sound of
the muskets was faint.
“They’ll get across,” Hogan said sadly, “they’ll lose a lot of men, but they’ll clear that
bridge.”
Sharpe did not answer. Hogan was right, he thought. The French were making no effort to
take the bridge now, but doubtless they were assembling an assault party and that meant he
would have to find a place from where his riflemen could shoot at Christopher as he crossed
the narrow stone arch. There was nowhere on this side of the river, but on the Misarella’s
opposite bank there was a high stone bluff where a hundred or more ordenanqa were
stationed. The bluff had to be less than two hundred paces from the bridge, too far for the
Portuguese muskets, but it would provide a perfect vantage for his rifles, and if
Christopher reached the center of the bridge he would be greeted by a dozen rifle
bullets.
The problem was reaching the bluff. It was not far away, perhaps a half-mile, but between
Sharpe and that enticing high ground was the Misarella. “We have to cross that river,”
Sharpe said.
“How long will that take?” Hogan asked.
“As long as it takes,” Sharpe said. “We don’t have a choice.”