Читать книгу Sharpe 3-Book Collection 2 - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 9

Miss Savage was missing.

And the French were coming.

The approach of the French was the more urgent crisis. The splintering noise of sustained musket fire was sounding just outside the city and in the last ten minutes five or six cannonballs had battered through the roofs of the houses high on the river’s northern bank. The Savage house was a few yards down the slope and for the moment was protected from errant French cannon fire, but already the warm spring air hummed with spent musket balls that sometimes struck the thick roof tiles with a loud crack or else ripped through the dark glossy pines to shower needles over the garden. It was a large house, built of white-painted stone and with dark-green shutters closed over the windows. The front porch was crowned with a wooden board on which were gilded letters spelling out the name House Beautiful in English. It seemed an odd name for a building high on the steep hillside where the city of Oporto overlooked the River Douro in northern Portugal, especially as the big square house was not beautiful at all, but quite stark and ugly and angular, even if its harsh lines were softened by dark cedars which would offer welcome shade in summer. A bird was making a nest in one of the cedars and whenever a musket ball tore through the branches it would squawk in alarm and fly a small loop before returning to its work. Scores of fugitives were fleeing past the House Beautiful, running down the hill towards the ferries and the pontoon bridge that would take them safe across the Douro. Some of the refugees drove pigs, goats and cattle, others pushed handcarts precariously loaded with furniture, and more than one carried a grandparent on his back.

Richard Sharpe, Lieutenant in the second battalion of His Majesty’s 95th Rifles, unbuttoned his breeches and pissed on the narcissi in the House Beautiful’s front flower bed. The ground was soaked because there had been a storm the previous night. Lightning had flickered above the city, thunder had billowed across the sky and the heavens had opened so that the flower beds now steamed gently as the hot sun drew out the night’s moisture. An howitzer shell arched overhead, sounding like a ponderous barrel rolling swiftly over attic floorboards. It left a small grey trace of smoke from its burning fuse. Sharpe looked up at the smoke tendril, judging from its curve where the howitzer had to be emplaced. ‘They’re getting too bloody close,’ he said to no one in particular.

‘You’ll be drowning those poor bloody flowers, so you will,’ Sergeant Harper said, then added a hasty ‘sir’ when he saw Sharpe’s face.

The howitzer shell exploded somewhere above the tangle of alleys close to the river and a heartbeat later the French cannonade rose to a sustained thunder, but the thunder had a crisp, clear, staccato timbre, suggesting that some of the guns were very close. A new battery, Sharpe thought. It must have unlimbered just outside the city, maybe half a mile away from Sharpe, and was probably whacking the big northern redoubt in the flank, and the musketry that had been sounding like the burning of a dry thorn bush now faded to an intermittent crackle, suggesting that the defending infantry was retreating. Some, indeed, were running and Sharpe could hardly blame them. A large and disorganized Portuguese force, led by the Bishop of Oporto, was trying to stop Marshal Soult’s army from capturing the city, the second largest in Portugal, and the French were winning. The Portuguese road to safety led past the front garden of the House Beautiful and the bishop’s blue-coated soldiers were bolting down the hill as fast as their legs could take them, except that when they saw the green-jacketed British riflemen they slowed to a walk as if to prove that they were not panicking. And that, Sharpe reckoned, was a good sign. The Portuguese evidently had pride, and troops with pride would fight well given another chance, though not all the Portuguese troops showed such spirit. The men from the ordenança kept running, but that was hardly surprising. The ordenança was an enthusiastic but unskilled army of volunteers raised to defend the homeland and the battle-hardened French troops were tearing them to shreds.

Meanwhile Miss Savage was still missing.

Captain Hogan appeared on the front porch of the House Beautiful. He carefully closed the door behind him and then looked up to heaven and swore fluently and impressively. Sharpe buttoned his breeches and his two dozen riflemen inspected their weapons as though they had never seen such things before. Captain Hogan added a few more carefully chosen words, then spat as a French round shot trundled overhead. ‘What it is, Richard,’ he said when the cannon shot had passed, ‘is a shambles. A bloody, goddamned miserable poxed bollocks of an agglomerated halfwitted shambles.’ The round shot landed somewhere in the lower town and precipitated the splintering crash of a collapsing roof. Captain Hogan took out his snuff box and inhaled a mighty pinch.

‘Bless you,’ Sergeant Harper said.

Captain Hogan sneezed and Harper smiled.

‘Her name,’ Hogan said, ignoring Harper, ‘is Katherine or, rather, Kate. Kate Savage, nineteen years old and in need, my God, how she is in need, of a thrashing! A hiding! A damned good smacking, that’s what she needs, Richard. A copper-sheathed, goddamned bloody good walloping.’

‘So where the hell is she?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Her mother thinks she might have gone to Vila Real de Zedes,’ Captain Hogan said, ‘wherever in God’s holy hell that might be. But the family has an estate there. A place where they go to escape the summer heat.’ He rolled his eyes in exasperation.

‘So why would she go there, sir?’ Sergeant Harper asked.

‘Because she’s a fatherless nineteen-year-old girl,’ Hogan said, ‘who insists on having her own way. Because she’s fallen out with her mother. Because she’s a bloody idiot who deserves a ruddy good hiding. Because, oh I don’t know why! Because she’s young and knows everything, that’s why.’ Hogan was a stocky, middle-aged Irishman, a Royal Engineer, with a shrewd face, a soft brogue, greying hair and a charitable disposition. ‘Because she’s a bloody halfwit, that’s why,’ he finished.

‘This Vila Real de whatever,’ Sharpe said, ‘is it far? Why don’t we just fetch her?’

‘Which is precisely what I’ve told the mother you will do, Richard. You will go to Vila Real de Zedes, you will find the wretched girl and you will get her across the river. We’ll wait for you in Vila Nova and if the damned French capture Vila Nova then we’ll wait for you in Coimbra.’ He paused as he pencilled these instructions on a scrap of paper. ‘And if the Frogs take Coimbra we’ll wait for you in Lisbon, and if the bastards take Lisbon we’ll be pissing our breeches in London and you’ll be God knows where. Don’t fall in love with her,’ he went on, handing Sharpe the piece of paper, ‘don’t get the silly girl pregnant, don’t give her the thrashing she bloody well deserves and don’t, for the love of Christ, lose her, and don’t lose Colonel Christopher either. Am I plain?’

‘Colonel Christopher is coming with us?’ Sharpe asked, appalled.

‘Didn’t I just tell you that?’ Hogan enquired innocently, then turned as a clatter of hooves announced the appearance of the widow Savage’s travelling coach from the stable yard at the rear of the house. The coach was heaped with baggage and there was even some furniture and two rolled carpets lashed onto the rear rack where a coachman, precariously poised between a half-dozen gilded chairs, was leading Hogan’s black mare by the reins. The Captain took the horse and used the coach’s mounting step to hoist himself into the saddle. ‘You’ll be back with us in a couple of days,’ he assured Sharpe. ‘Say six, seven hours to Vila Real de Zedes? The same back to the ferry at Barca d’Avintas and then a quiet stroll home. You know where Barca d’Avintas is?’

‘No, sir.’

‘That way.’ Hogan pointed eastwards. ‘Four country miles.’ He pushed his right boot into its stirrup, then lifted his body to flick out the tails of his blue coat. ‘With luck you may even rejoin us tomorrow night.’

‘What I don’t understand …’ Sharpe began, then paused because the front door of the house had been thrown open and Mrs Savage, widow and mother of the missing daughter, came into the sunlight. She was a good-looking woman in her forties: dark-haired, tall and slender with a pale face and high arched eyebrows. She hurried down the steps as a cannonball rumbled overhead and then there was a smattering of musket fire alarmingly close, so close that Sharpe climbed the porch steps to stare at the crest of the hill where the Braga road disappeared between a large tavern and a handsome church. A Portuguese six-pounder gun had just been deployed by the church and was now firing at the invisible enemy. The bishop’s forces had dug new redoubts on the crest and patched the old medieval wall with hastily erected palisades and earthworks, but the sight of the small gun firing from its makeshift position in the centre of the road suggested that those defences were crumbling fast.

Mrs Savage sobbed that her baby daughter was lost, then Captain Hogan managed to persuade the widow into the carriage. Two servants laden with bags stuffed with clothes followed their mistress into the vehicle. ‘You will find Kate?’ Mrs Savage pushed open the door and enquired of Captain Hogan.

‘The precious darling will be with you very soon,’ Hogan said reassuringly. ‘Mister Sharpe will see to that,’ he added, then used his foot to close the coach door on Mrs Savage, who was the widow of one of the many British wine merchants who lived and worked in the city of Oporto. She was rich, Sharpe presumed, certainly rich enough to own a fine carriage and the lavish House Beautiful, but she was also foolish for she should have left the city two or three days before, but she had stayed because she had evidently believed the bishop’s assurance that he could repel Marshal Soult’s army. Colonel Christopher, who had once lodged in the strangely named House Beautiful, had appealed to the British forces south of the river to send men to escort Mrs Savage safely away and Captain Hogan had been the closest officer and Sharpe, with his riflemen, had been protecting Hogan while the engineer mapped northern Portugal, and so Sharpe had come north across the Douro with twenty-four of his men to escort Mrs Savage and any other threatened British inhabitants of Oporto to safety. Which should have been a simple enough task, except that at dawn the widow Savage had discovered that her daughter had fled from the house.

‘What I don’t understand,’ Sharpe persevered, ‘is why she ran away.’

‘She’s probably in love,’ Hogan explained airily. ‘Nineteen-year-old girls of respectable families are dangerously susceptible to love because of all the novels they read. See you in two days, Richard, or maybe even tomorrow? Just wait for Colonel Christopher, he’ll be with you directly, and listen.’ He bent down from the saddle and lowered his voice so that no one but Sharpe could hear him. ‘Keep a close eye on the Colonel, Richard. I worry about him, I do.’

‘You should worry about me, sir.’

‘I do that too, Richard, I do indeed,’ Hogan said, then straightened up, waved farewell and spurred his horse after Mrs Savage’s carriage which had swung out of the front gate and joined the stream of fugitives going towards the Douro.

The sound of the carriage wheels faded. The sun came from behind a cloud just as a French cannonball struck a tree on the hill’s crest and exploded a cloud of reddish blossom which drifted above the city’s steep slope. Daniel Hagman stared at the airborne blossom. ‘Looks like a wedding,’ he said and then, glancing up as a musket ball ricocheted off a roof tile, brought a pair of scissors from his pocket. ‘Finish your hair, sir?’

‘Why not, Dan,’ Sharpe said. He sat on the porch steps and took off his shako.

Sergeant Harper checked that the sentinels were watching the north. A troop of Portuguese cavalry had appeared on the crest where the single cannon was firing bravely. A rattle of musketry proved that some infantry was still fighting, but more and more troops were retreating past the house and Sharpe knew it could only be a matter of minutes before the city’s defences collapsed entirely. Hagman began slicing away at Sharpe’s hair. ‘You don’t like it over the ears, ain’t that right?’

‘I like it short, Dan.’

‘Short like a good sermon, sir,’ Hagman said. ‘Now keep still, sir, just keep still.’ There was a sudden stab of pain as Hagman speared a louse with the scissors’ blade. He spat on the drop of blood that showed on Sharpe’s scalp, then wiped it away. ‘So the Crapauds will get the city, sir?’

‘Looks like it,’ Sharpe said.

‘And they’ll march on Lisbon next?’ Hagman asked, cutting away.

‘Long way to Lisbon,’ Sharpe said.

‘Maybe, sir, but there’s an awful lot of them, sir, and precious few of us.’

‘But they say Wellesley’s coming here,’ Sharpe said.

‘As you keep telling us, sir,’ Hagman said, ‘but is he really a miracle worker?’

‘You fought at Copenhagen, Dan,’ Sharpe said, ‘and down the coast here.’ He meant the battles at Rolica and Vimeiro. ‘You could see for yourself.’

‘From the skirmish line, sir, all generals are the same,’ Hagman said, ‘and who knows if Sir Arthur’s really coming?’ It was, after all, only a rumour that Sir Arthur Wellesley was taking over from General Cradock and not everyone believed it. Many thought the British would withdraw, ought to withdraw, that they should give up the game and let the French have Portugal. ‘Turn your head to the right,’ Hagman said. The scissors clicked busily, not even pausing as a round shot buried itself in the church at the hill’s top. A mist of dust showed beside the whitewashed bell tower down which a crack had suddenly appeared. The Portuguese cavalry had been swallowed by the gun smoke and a trumpet called far away. There was a burst of musketry, then silence. A building must have been burning beyond the crest for there was a great smear of smoke drifting westwards. ‘Why would someone call their home the House Beautiful?’ Hagman wondered.

‘Didn’t know you could read, Dan,’ Sharpe said.

‘I can’t, sir, but Isaiah read it to me.’

‘Tongue!’ Sharpe called. ‘Why would someone call their home House Beautiful?’

Isaiah Tongue, long and thin and dark and educated, who had joined the army because he was a drunk and thereby lost his respectable job, grinned. ‘Because he’s a good Protestant, sir.’

‘Because he’s a bloody what?’

‘It’s from a book by John Bunyan,’ Tongue explained, ‘called Pilgrim’s Progress.’

‘I’ve heard of that,’ Sharpe said.

‘Some folk consider it essential reading,’ Tongue said airily, ‘the story of a soul’s journey from sin to salvation, sir.’

‘Just the thing to keep you burning the candles at night,’ Sharpe said.

‘And the hero, Christian, calls at the House Beautiful, sir’ – Tongue ignored Sharpe’s sarcasm – ‘where he talks with four virgins.’

Hagman laughed. ‘Let’s get inside now, sir.’

‘You’re too old for a virgin, Dan,’ Sharpe said.

‘Discretion,’ Tongue said, ‘Piety, Prudence and Charity.’

‘What about them?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Those were the names of the virgins, sir,’ Tongue said.

‘Bloody hell,’ Sharpe said.

‘Charity’s mine,’ Hagman said. ‘Pull your collar down, sir, that’s the way.’ He snipped at the black hair. ‘He sounds like he was a tedious old man, Mister Savage, if it was him what named the house.’ Hagman stooped to manoeuvre the scissors over Sharpe’s high collar. ‘So why did the Captain leave us here, sir?’ he asked.

‘He wants us to look after Colonel Christopher,’ Sharpe said.

‘To look after Colonel Christopher,’ Hagman repeated, making his disapproval evident by the slowness with which he said the words. Hagman was the oldest man in Sharpe’s troop of riflemen, a poacher from Cheshire who was a deadly shot with his Baker rifle. ‘So Colonel Christopher can’t look after himself now?’

‘Captain Hogan left us here, Dan,’ Sharpe said, ‘so he must think the Colonel needs us.’

‘And the Captain’s a good man, sir,’ Hagman said. ‘You can let the collar go. Almost done.’

But why had Captain Hogan left Sharpe and his riflemen behind? Sharpe wondered about that as Hagman tidied up his work. And had there been any significance in Hogan’s final injunction to keep a close eye on the Colonel? Sharpe had only met the Colonel once. Hogan had been mapping the upper reaches of the River Cavado and the Colonel and his servant had ridden out of the hills and shared a bivouac with the riflemen. Sharpe had not liked Christopher who had been supercilious and even scornful of Hogan’s work. ‘You map the country, Hogan,’ the Colonel had said, ‘but I map their minds. A very complicated thing, the human mind, not simple like hills and rivers and bridges.’ Beyond that statement he had not explained his presence, but just ridden on next morning. He had revealed that he was based in Oporto which, presumably, was how he had met Mrs Savage and her daughter, and Sharpe wondered why Colonel Christopher had not persuaded the widow to leave Oporto much sooner.

‘You’re done, sir,’ Hagman said, wrapping his scissors in a piece of calfskin, ‘and you’ll be feeling the cold wind now, sir, like a newly shorn sheep.’

‘You should get your own hair cut, Dan,’ Sharpe said.

‘Weakens a man, sir, weakens him something dreadful.’ Hagman frowned up the hill as two round shots bounced on the crest of the road, one of them taking off the leg of a Portuguese gunner. Sharpe’s men watched expressionless as the round shot bounded on, spraying blood like a Catherine wheel, to finally bang and stop against a garden wall across the road. Hagman chuckled. ‘Fancy calling a girl Discretion! It ain’t a natural name, sir. Ain’t kind to call a girl Discretion.’

‘It’s in a book, Dan,’ Sharpe said, ‘so it isn’t supposed to be natural.’ He climbed to the porch and shoved hard on the front door, but found it locked. So where the hell was Colonel Christopher? More Portuguese retreated down the slope and these men were so frightened that they did not pause when they saw the British troops, but just kept running. The Portuguese cannon was being attached to its limber and spent musket balls were tearing at the cedars and rattling against the tiles, shutters and stones of the House Beautiful. Sharpe hammered on the locked door, but there was no answer.

‘Sir?’ Sergeant Patrick Harper called a warning to him. ‘Sir?’ Harper jerked his head towards the side of the house and Sharpe backed away from the door to see Lieutenant Colonel Christopher riding from the stable yard. The Colonel, who was armed with a sabre and a brace of pistols, was cleaning his teeth with a wooden pick, something he did frequently, evidently because he was proud of his even white smile. He was accompanied by his Portuguese servant who, mounted on his master’s spare horse, was carrying an enormous valise that was so stuffed with lace, silk and satins that the bag could not be closed.

Colonel Christopher curbed his horse, took the toothpick from his mouth, and stared in astonishment at Sharpe. ‘What on earth are you doing here, Lieutenant?’

‘Ordered to stay with you, sir,’ Sharpe answered. He glanced again at the valise. Had Christopher been looting the House Beautiful?

The Colonel saw where Sharpe was looking and snarled at his servant, ‘Close it, damn you, close it.’ Christopher, even though his servant spoke good English, used his own fluent Portuguese, then looked back to Sharpe. ‘Captain Hogan ordered you to stay with me. Is that what you’re trying to convey?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And how the devil are you supposed to do that, eh? I have a horse, Sharpe, and you do not. You and your men intend to run, perhaps?’

‘Captain Hogan gave me an order, sir,’ Sharpe answered woodenly. He had learned as a sergeant how to deal with difficult senior officers. Say little, say it tonelessly, then say it all again if necessary.

‘An order to do what?’ Christopher enquired patiently.

‘Stay with you, sir. Help you find Miss Savage.’

Colonel Christopher sighed. He was a black-haired man in his forties, but still youthfully handsome with just a distinguished touch of grey at his temples. He wore black boots, plain black riding breeches, a black cocked hat and a red coat with black facings. Those black facings had prompted Sharpe, on his previous meeting with the Colonel, to ask whether Christopher served in the Dirty Half Hundred, the 50th regiment, but the Colonel had treated the question as an impertinence. ‘All you need to know, Lieutenant, is that I serve on General Cradock’s staff. You have heard of the General?’ Cradock was the General in command of the British forces in southern Portugal and if Soult kept marching then Cradock must face him. Sharpe had stayed silent after Christopher’s response, but Hogan had later suggested that the Colonel was probably a ‘political’ soldier, meaning he was no soldier at all, but rather a man who found life more convenient if he was in uniform. ‘I’ve no doubt he was a soldier once,’ Hogan had said, ‘but now? I think Cradock got him from Whitehall.’

‘Whitehall? The Horse Guards?’

‘Dear me, no,’ Hogan had said. The Horse Guards were the headquarters of the army and it was plain Hogan believed Christopher came from somewhere altogether more sinister. ‘The world is a convoluted place, Richard,’ he had explained, ‘and the Foreign Office believes that we soldiers are clumsy fellows, so they like to have their own people on the ground to patch up our mistakes. And, of course, to find things out.’ Which was what Lieutenant Colonel Christopher appeared to be doing: finding things out. ‘He says he’s mapping their minds,’ Hogan had mused, ‘and what I think he means by that is discovering whether Portugal is worth defending. Whether they’ll fight. And when he knows, he’ll tell the Foreign Office before he tells General Cradock.’

‘Of course it’s worth defending,’ Sharpe had protested.

‘Is it? If you look carefully, Richard, you might notice that Portugal is in a state of collapse.’ There was a lamentable truth in Hogan’s grim words. The Portuguese royal family had fled to Brazil, leaving the country leaderless, and after their departure there had been riots in Lisbon, and many of Portugal’s aristocrats were now more concerned with protecting themselves from the mob than defending their country against the French. Scores of the army’s officers had already defected, joining the Portuguese Legion that fought for the enemy, and what officers remained were largely untrained, their men were a rabble and armed with ancient weapons if they possessed weapons at all. In some places, like Oporto itself, all civil rule had collapsed and the streets were governed by the whims of the ordenança who, lacking proper weapons, patrolled the streets with pikes, spears, axes and mattocks. Before the French had come the ordenança had massacred half Oporto’s gentry and forced the other half to flee or barricade their houses though they had left the English residents alone.

So Portugal was in a state of collapse, but Sharpe had also seen how the common people hated the French, and how the soldiers had slowed as they passed the gate of the House Beautiful. Oporto might be falling to the enemy, but there was plenty of fight left in Portugal, though it was hard to believe that as yet more soldiers followed the retreating six-pounder gun down to the river. Lieutenant Colonel Christopher glanced at the fugitives, then looked back at Sharpe. ‘What on earth was Captain Hogan thinking of?’ he asked, evidently expecting no answer. ‘What possible use could you be to me? Your presence can only slow me down. I suppose Hogan was being chivalrous,’ Christopher went on, ‘but the man plainly has no more common sense than a pickled onion. You can go back to him, Sharpe, and tell him that I don’t need assistance in rescuing one damned silly little girl.’ The Colonel had to raise his voice because the sound of cannons and musketry was suddenly loud.

‘He gave me an order, sir,’ Sharpe said stubbornly.

‘And I’m giving you another,’ Christopher said in the indulgent tone he might have used to address a very small child. The pommel of his saddle was broad and flat to make a small writing surface and now he laid a notebook on that makeshift desk and took out a pencil, and just then another of the red-blossomed trees on the crest was struck by a cannonball so that the air was filled with drifting petals. ‘The French are at war with the cherries,’ Christopher said lightly.

‘With Judas,’ Sharpe said.

Christopher gave him a look of astonishment and outrage. ‘What did you say?’

‘It’s a Judas tree,’ Sharpe said.

Christopher still looked outraged, then Sergeant Harper chimed in. ‘It’s not a cherry, sir. It’s a Judas tree. The same kind that Iscariot used to hang himself on, sir, after he betrayed our Lord.’

Christopher still gazed at Sharpe, then seemed to realize that no slur had been intended. ‘So it’s not a cherry tree, eh?’ he said, then licked the point of his pencil. ‘You are hereby ordered’ – he spoke as he wrote – ‘to return south of the river forthwith – note that, Sharpe, forthwith – and report for duty to Captain Hogan of the Royal Engineers. Signed, Lieutenant Colonel James Christopher, on the forenoon of Wednesday, March the 29th in the year of our Lord, 1809.’ He signed the order with a flourish, tore the page from the book, folded it in half and handed it to Sharpe. ‘I always thought thirty pieces of silver was a remarkably cheap price for the most famous betrayal in history. He probably hanged himself out of shame. Now go,’ he said grandly, ‘and “stand not upon the order of your going”.’ He saw Sharpe’s puzzlement, ‘Macbeth, Lieutenant,’ he explained as he spurred his horse towards the gate, ‘a play by Shakespeare. And I really would urge haste upon you, Lieutenant,’ Christopher called back, ‘for the enemy will be here any moment.’

In that, at least, he was right. A great spume of dust and smoke was boiling out from the central redoubts of the city’s northern defences. That was where the Portuguese had been putting up the strongest resistance, but the French artillery had managed to throw down the parapets and now their infantry assaulted the bastions, and the majority of the city’s defenders were fleeing. Sharpe watched Christopher and his servant gallop through the fugitives and turn into a street that led eastwards. Christopher was not retreating south, but going to the rescue of the missing Savage girl, though it would be a close-run thing if he were to escape the city before the French entered it. ‘All right, lads,’ Sharpe called, ‘time to bloody scarper. Sergeant! At the double! Down to the bridge!’

‘About bloody time,’ Williamson grumbled. Sharpe pretended not to have heard. He tended to ignore a lot of Williamson’s comments, thinking the man might improve but knowing that the longer he did nothing the more violent would be the solution. He just hoped Williamson knew the same thing.

‘Two files!’ Harper shouted. ‘Stay together!’

A cannonball rumbled above them as they ran out of the front garden and turned down the steep road that led to the Douro. The road was crowded with refugees, both civilian and military, all fleeing for the safety of the river’s southern bank, though Sharpe guessed the French would also be crossing the river within a day or two so the safety was probably illusory. The Portuguese army was falling back towards Coimbra or even all the way to Lisbon where Cradock had sixteen thousand British troops that some politicians in London wanted brought home. What use, they asked, was such a small British force against the mighty armies of France? Marshal Soult was conquering Portugal and two more French armies were just across the eastern frontier in Spain. Fight or flee? No one knew what the British would do, but the rumour that Sir Arthur Wellesley was being sent back to take over from Cradock suggested to Sharpe that the British meant to fight and Sharpe prayed the rumour was true. He had fought across India under Sir Arthur’s command, had been with him in Copenhagen and then at Rolica and Vimeiro and Sharpe reckoned there was no finer General in Europe.

Sharpe was halfway down the hill now. His pack, haversack, rifle, cartridge box and sword scabbard bounced and banged as he ran. Few officers carried a longarm, but Sharpe had once served in the ranks and he felt uncomfortable without the rifle on his shoulder. Harper lost his balance, flailing wildly because the new nails on his boot soles kept slipping on patches of stone. The river was visible between the buildings. The Douro, sliding towards the nearby sea, was as wide as the Thames at London, but, unlike London, the river here ran between great hills. The city of Oporto was on the steep northern hill while Vila Nova de Gaia was on the southern, and it was in Vila Nova that most of the British had their houses. Only the very oldest families, like the Savages, lived on the northern bank and all the port was made on the southern side in the lodges owned by Croft, Savages, Taylor Fladgate, Burmester, Smith Woodhouse and Gould, nearly all of which were British owned and their exports contributed hugely to Portugal’s exchequer, but now the French were coming and, on the heights of Vila Nova, overlooking the river, the Portuguese army had lined a dozen cannon on a convent’s terrace. The gunners saw the French appear on the opposite hill and the cannon slammed back, their trails gouging up the terrace’s flagstones. The round shots banged overhead, their sound as loud and hollow as thunder. Powder smoke drifted slowly inland, obscuring the white-painted convent as the cannonballs smashed into the higher houses. Harper lost his footing again, this time falling. ‘Bloody boots,’ he said, picking up his rifle. The other riflemen had been slowed by the press of fugitives.

‘Jesus.’ Rifleman Pendleton, the youngest in the company, was the first to see what was happening at the river and his eyes widened as he stared at the throng of men, women, children and livestock that was crammed onto the narrow pontoon bridge. When Captain Hogan had led Sharpe and his men north across the bridge at dawn there had been only a few people going the other way, but now the bridge’s roadway was filled and the crowd could only go at the pace of the slowest, and still more people and animals were trying to force their way onto the northern end. ‘How the hell do we get across, sir?’ Pendleton asked.

Sharpe had no answer for that. ‘Just keep going!’ he said and led his men down an alley that ran like a narrow stone staircase towards a lower street. A goat clattered ahead of him on sharp hooves, trailing a broken rope from around its neck. A Portuguese soldier was lying drunk at the bottom of the alley, his musket beside him and a wineskin on his chest. Sharpe, knowing his men would stop to drink the wine, kicked the skin onto the cobbles and stamped on it so that the leather burst. The streets became narrower and more crowded as they neared the river, the houses here were taller and mingled with workshops and warehouses. A wheelwright was nailing boards over his doorway, a precaution that would only annoy the French who would doubtless repay the man by destroying his tools. A red painted shutter banged in the west wind. Abandoned washing was strung to dry between the high houses. A round shot crashed through tiles, splintering rafters and cascading shards into the street. A dog, its hip cut to the bone by a falling tile, limped downhill and whined pitifully. A woman shrieked for a lost child. A line of orphans, all in dull white jerkins like farm labourers’ smocks, were crying in terror as two nuns tried to make a passage for them. A priest ran from a church with a massive silver cross on one shoulder and a pile of embroidered vestments on the other. It would be Easter in four days, Sharpe thought.

‘Use your rifle butts!’ Harper shouted, encouraging the riflemen to force their way through the crowd that blocked the narrow arched gateway leading onto the wharf. A cart loaded with furniture had spilled in the roadway and Sharpe ordered his men to pull it aside to make more space. A spinet, or perhaps it was a harpsichord, was being trampled underfoot, the delicate inlay of its cabinet shattering into scraps. Some of Sharpe’s men were pushing the orphans towards the bridge, using their rifles to hold back the adults. A pile of baskets tumbled and dozens of live eels slithered across the cobbles. French gunners had got their artillery into the upper city and now unlimbered to return the fire of the big Portuguese battery arrayed on the convent’s terrace across the valley.

Hagman shouted a warning as three blue-coated soldiers appeared from an alley, and a dozen rifles swung towards the threat, but Sharpe yelled at the men to lower their guns. ‘They’re Portuguese!’ he shouted, recognizing the high-fronted shakoes. ‘And lower your flints,’ he ordered, not wanting one of the rifles to accidentally fire in the press of refugees. A drunk woman reeled from a tavern door and tried to embrace one of the Portuguese soldiers and Sharpe, glancing back because of the soldier’s protest, saw two of his men, Williamson and Tarrant, vanish through the tavern door. It would be bloody Williamson, he thought, and shouted to Harper to keep going, then followed the two men into the tavern. Tarrant turned to defy him, but he was much too slow and Sharpe banged him in the belly with a fist, cracked both men’s heads together, punched Williamson in the throat and slapped Tarrant’s face before dragging both men back to the street. He had not said a word and still did not speak to them as he booted them towards the arch.

And once through the arch the press of refugees was even greater as the crews of some thirty British merchant ships, trapped in the city by an obstinate west wind, tried to escape. The sailors had waited until the last moment, praying that the winds would change, but now they abandoned their craft. The lucky ones used their ships’ tenders to row across the Douro, the unlucky joined the chaotic struggle to get onto the bridge. ‘This way!’ Sharpe led his men along the arched facade of warehouses, struggling along the back of the crowd, hoping to get closer to the bridge. Cannonballs rumbled high overhead. The Portuguese battery was wreathed in smoke and every few seconds that smoke became thicker as a gun fired and there would be a glow of sudden red inside the cloud, a jet of dirty smoke would billow far across the river’s high chasm and the thunderous sound of a cannonball would boom overhead as the shot or shell streaked towards the French.

A pile of empty fish crates gave Sharpe a platform from which he could see the bridge and judge how long before his men could cross safely. He knew there was not much time. More and more Portuguese soldiers were flooding down the steep streets and the French could not be far behind them. He could hear the crackle of musketry like a descant to the big guns’ thunder. He stared over the crowd’s head and saw that Mrs Savage’s coach had made it to the south bank, but she had not used the bridge, instead crossing the river on a cumbrous wine barge. Other barges still crossed the river, but they were manned by armed men who only took passengers willing to pay. Sharpe knew he could force a passage on one of those boats if he could only get near the quayside, but to do that he would need to fight through a throng of women and children.

He reckoned the bridge might make an easier escape route. It consisted of a plank roadway laid across eighteen big wine barges that were firmly anchored against the river’s current and against the big surge of tides from the nearby ocean, but the roadway was now crammed with panicked refugees who became even more frantic as the first French cannonballs splashed into the river. Sharpe, turning to look up the hill, saw the green coats of French cavalry appearing beneath the great smoke of the French guns while the blue jackets of French infantry showed in the alleyways lower down the hill.

‘God save Ireland,’ Patrick Harper said, and Sharpe, knowing that the Irish Sergeant only used that prayer when things were desperate, looked back to the river to see what had caused the three words.

He looked and he stared and he knew they were not going to cross the river by the bridge. No one was, not now, because a disaster was happening. ‘Sweet Jesus,’ Sharpe said softly, ‘sweet Jesus.’

In the middle of the river, halfway across the bridge, the Portuguese engineers had inserted a drawbridge so that wine barges and other small craft could go upriver. The drawbridge spanned the widest gap between any of the pontoons and it was built of heavy oak beams overlaid with oak planks and it was drawn upwards by a pair of windlasses that hauled on ropes through pulleys mounted on a pair of thick timber posts stoutly buttressed with iron struts. The whole mechanism was ponderously heavy and the drawbridge span was wide and the engineers, mindful of the contraption’s weight, had posted notices at either end of the bridge decreeing that only one wagon, carriage or gun team could use the drawbridge at any one time, but now the roadway was so crowded with refugees that the two pontoons supporting the drawbridge’s heavy span were sinking under the weight. The pontoons, like all ships, leaked, and there should have been men aboard to pump out their bilges, but those men had fled with the rest and the weight of the crowd and the slow leaking of the barges meant that the bridge inched lower and lower until the central pontoons, both of them massive barges, were entirely under water and the fast-flowing river began to break and fret against the roadway’s edge. The people there screamed and some of them froze and still more folk pushed on from the northern bank, and then the central part of the roadway slowly dipped beneath the grey water as the people behind forced more fugitives onto the vanished drawbridge which sank even lower.

‘Oh Jesus,’ Sharpe said. He could see the first people being swept away. He could hear the shrieks.

‘God save Ireland,’ Harper said again and made the sign of the cross.

The central hundred feet of the bridge were now under water. Those hundred feet had been swept clear of people, but more were being forced into the gap that suddenly churned white as the drawbridge was sheared away from the rest of the bridge by the river’s pressure. The great span of the bridge reared up black, turned over and was swept seawards, and now there was no bridge across the Douro, but the people on the northern bank still did not know the roadway was cut and so they kept pushing and bullying their way onto the sagging bridge and those in front could not hold them back and instead were inexorably pushed into the broken gap where the white water seethed on the bridge’s shattered ends. The cries of the crowd grew louder, and the sound only increased the panic so that more and more people struggled towards the place where the refugees drowned. Gun smoke, driven by an errant gust of wind, dipped into the gorge and whirled above the bridge’s broken centre where desperate people thrashed at the water as they were swept downstream. Gulls screamed and wheeled. Some Portuguese troops were now trying to hold the French in the streets of the city, but it was a hopeless endeavour. They were outnumbered, the enemy had the high ground, and more and more French forces were coming down the hill. The screams of the fugitives on the bridge were like the sound of the doomed on the Day of Judgment, the cannonballs were booming overhead, the streets of the city were ringing with musket shots, hooves were echoing from house walls and flames were crackling in buildings broken apart by cannon fire.

‘Those wee children,’ Harper said, ‘God help them.’ The orphans, in their dun uniforms, were being pushed into the river. ‘There’s got to be a bloody boat!’

But the men manning the barges had rowed themselves to the south bank and abandoned their craft and so there were no boats to rescue the drowning, just horror in a cold grey river and a line of small heads being swept downstream in the fretting waves and there was nothing Sharpe could do. He could not reach the bridge and though he shouted at folk to abandon the crossing they did not understand English. Musket balls were flecking the river now and some were striking the fugitives on the broken bridge.

‘What the hell can we do?’ Harper asked.

‘Nothing,’ Sharpe said harshly, ‘except get out of here.’ He turned his back on the dying crowd and led his men eastwards down the river wharf. Scores of other people were doing the same thing, gambling that the French would not yet have captured the city’s inland suburbs. The sound of musketry was constant in the streets and the Portuguese guns across the river were now firing at the French in the lower streets so that the hammering of the big guns was punctuated by the noise of breaking masonry and splintering rafters.

Sharpe paused where the wharf ended to make sure all his men were there and he looked back at the bridge to see that so many folk had been forced off its end that the bodies were now jammed in the gap and the water was piling up behind them and foaming white across their heads. He saw a blue-coated Portuguese soldier step on those heads to reach the barge on which the drawbridge had been mounted. Others followed him, skipping over the drowning and the dead. Sharpe was far enough away that he could no longer hear the screams.

‘What happened?’ Dodd, usually the quietest of Sharpe’s men, asked.

‘God was looking the other way,’ Sharpe said and looked at Harper. ‘All here?’

‘All present, sir,’ Harper said. The big Ulsterman looked as if he had been weeping. ‘Those poor wee children,’ he said resentfully.

‘There was nothing we could do,’ Sharpe said curtly, and that was true, though the truth of it did not make him feel any better. ‘Williamson and Tarrant are on a charge,’ he told Harper.

‘Again?’

‘Again,’ Sharpe said, and wondered at the idiocy of the two men who would rather have snatched a drink than escape from the city, even if that drink had meant imprisonment in France. ‘Now come on!’ He followed the civilian fugitives who, arriving at the place where the river’s wharf was blocked by the ancient city wall, had turned up an alleyway. The old wall had been built when men fought in armour and shot at each other with crossbows, and the lichen-covered stones would not have stood two minutes against a modern cannon and as if to mark that redundancy the city had knocked great holes in the old ramparts. Sharpe led his men through one such gap, crossed the remnants of a ditch and then hurried into the wider streets of the new town beyond the walls.

‘Crapauds!’ Hagman warned Sharpe. ‘Sir! Up the hill!’

Sharpe looked to his left and saw a troop of French cavalry riding to cut off the fugitives. They were dragoons, fifty or more of them in their green coats and all carrying straight swords and short carbines. They wore brass helmets that, in wartime, were covered by cloth so the polished metal would not reflect the sunlight. ‘Keep running!’ Sharpe shouted. The dragoons had not spotted the riflemen or, if they had, were not seeking a confrontation, but instead spurred on to where the road skirted a great hill that was topped with a huge white flat-roofed building. A school, perhaps, or a hospital. The main road ran north of the hill, but another went to the south, between the hill and the river, and the dragoons were on the bigger road so Sharpe kept to his right, hoping to escape by the smaller track on the Douro’s bank, but the dragoons at last saw him and drove their horses across the shoulder of the hill to block the lesser road where it bordered the river. Sharpe looked back and saw French infantry following the cavalry. Damn them. Then he saw that still more French troops were pursuing him from the broken city wall. He could probably outrun the infantry, but the dragoons were already ahead of him and the first of them were dismounting and making a barricade across the road. The folk fleeing the city were being headed off and some were climbing to the big white building while others, in despair, were going back to their houses. The cannon were fighting their own battle above the river, the French guns trying to match the bombardment from the big Portuguese battery which had started dozens of fires in the fallen city as the round shot smashed ovens, hearths and forges. The dark smoke of the burning buildings mingled with the grey-white smoke of the guns and beneath that smoke, in the valley of drowning children, Richard Sharpe was trapped.

Lieutenant Colonel James Christopher was neither a lieutenant nor a colonel, though he had once served as a captain in the Lincolnshire Fencibles and still held that commission. He had been christened James Augustus Meredith Christopher and throughout his schooldays had been known as Jam. His father had been a doctor in the small town of Saxilby, a profession and a place that James Christopher liked to ignore, preferring to remember that his mother was second cousin to the Earl of Rochford, and it was Rochford’s influence that had taken Christopher from Cambridge University to the Foreign Office where his command of languages, his natural suavity and his quick intelligence had ensured a swift rise. He had been given early responsibilities, introduced to great men and entrusted with confidences. He was reckoned to be a good prospect, a sound young man whose judgment was usually reliable, which meant, as often as not, that he merely agreed with his superiors, but the reputation had led to his present appointment which was a position as lonely as it was secret. James Christopher’s task was to advise the government whether it would be prudent to keep British troops in Portugal.

The decision, of course, would not rest with James Christopher. He might be a coming man in the Foreign Office, but the decision to stay or withdraw would be taken by the Prime Minister, though what mattered was the quality of advice being given to the Prime Minister. The soldiers, of course, would want to stay because war brought promotion, and the Foreign Secretary wanted the troops to remain because he detested the French, but other men in Whitehall took a more sanguine view and had sent James Christopher to take Portugal’s temperature. The Whigs, enemies of the administration, feared another debacle like that which had led to Corunna. Better, they said, to recognize reality and come to an understanding with the French now, and the Whigs had enough influence in the Foreign Office to have James Christopher posted to Portugal. The army, which had not been told what his true business was, nevertheless agreed to brevet him as a lieutenant colonel and appoint him as an aide to General Cradock, and Christopher used the army’s couriers to send military intelligence to the General and political dispatches to the embassy in Lisbon whence, though they were addressed to the Ambassador, the messages were sent unopened to London. The Prime Minister needed sound advice and James Christopher was supposed to supply the facts that would frame the advice, though of late he had been busy making new facts. He had seen beyond the war’s messy realities to the golden future. James Christopher, in short, had seen the light.

None of which occupied his thoughts as he rode out of Oporto less than a cannon’s range ahead of the French troops. A couple of musket shots were sent in his direction, but Christopher and his servant were superbly mounted on fine Irish horses and they quickly outran the half-hearted pursuit. They took to the hills, galloping along the terrace of a vineyard and then climbing into a forest of pine and oak where they stopped to rest the horses.

Christopher gazed back westwards. The sun had dried the roads after the night’s heavy rain and a smear of dust on the horizon showed where the French army’s baggage train was advancing towards the newly captured city of Oporto. The city itself, hidden now by hills, was marked by a great plume of dirty smoke spewing up from burning houses and from the busy batteries of cannons that, though muted by distance, sounded like an unceasing thunder. No French troops had bothered to pursue Christopher this far. A dozen labourers were deepening a ditch in the valley and ignored the fugitives on the nearby road as if to suggest that the war was the city’s business, not theirs. There were no British riflemen among the fugitives, Christopher noted, but he would have been surprised to see Sharpe and his men this far from the city. Doubtless by now they were dead or captured. What had Hogan been thinking of in asking Sharpe to accompany him? Was it because the shrewd Irishman suspected something? But how could Hogan know? Christopher worried at the problem for a few moments, then dismissed it. Hogan could know nothing; he was just trying to be helpful. ‘The French did well today,’ Christopher remarked to his Portuguese servant, a young man with receding hair and a thin, earnest face.

‘The devil will get them in the end, senhor,’ the servant answered.

‘Sometimes mere men have to do the devil’s business,’ Christopher said. He drew a small telescope from his pocket and trained it on the far hills. ‘In the next few days,’ he said, still gazing through the glass, ‘you will see some things that will surprise you.’

‘If you say so, senhor,’ the servant answered.

‘But “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”’

‘If you say so, senhor,’ the servant repeated, wondering why the English officer called him Horatio when his name was Luis, but he thought it was probably better not to ask. Luis had been a barber in Lisbon where he had sometimes cut the hair of men from the British embassy and it had been those men who had recommended him as a reliable servant to Christopher who paid him good wages in real gold, English gold, and if the English were mad and got names wrong they still made the best coinage in the world, which meant that Colonel Christopher could call Luis whatever he wanted so long as he went on paying him thick guineas embossed with the figure of Saint George slaying the dragon.

Christopher was looking for any sign of a French pursuit, but his telescope was small, old and had a scratched lens and he could see very little better with it than without it. He was meaning to buy another, but he never had the opportunity. He collapsed the glass, put it in his saddle pouch and took out a fresh toothpick that he thrust between his teeth. ‘Onwards,’ he said brusquely, and he led the servant through the wood, across the hill’s crest and down to a large farmhouse. It was plain that Christopher knew the route well for he did not hesitate on the way, nor was he apprehensive as he curbed his horse beside the farm gate. ‘Stables are in there,’ he told Luis, pointing to an archway, ‘kitchen is beyond the blue door and the folks here are expecting us. We’ll spend the night here.’

‘Not at Vila Real de Zedes, senhor?’ Luis asked. ‘I heard you say we would look for Miss Savage?’

‘Your English is getting too good if it lets you eavesdrop,’ Christopher said sourly. ‘Tomorrow, Luis; we shall look for Miss Savage tomorrow.’ Christopher slid out of the saddle and threw the reins to Luis. ‘Cool the horses, unsaddle them, find me something to eat and bring it to my room. One of the servants will let you know where I am.’

Luis walked the two horses to cool them down, then stabled, watered and fed them. Afterwards he went to the kitchen where a cook and two maids showed no surprise at his arrival. Luis had become accustomed to being taken to some remote village or house where his master was known, but he had never been to this farmhouse before. He would have felt happier if Christopher had retreated across the river, but the farm was well hidden in the hills and it was possible the French would never come here. The servants told Luis that the house and lands belonged to a Lisbon merchant who had instructed them to do all they could to accommodate Colonel Christopher’s wishes. ‘He’s been here often then?’ Luis asked.

The cook giggled. ‘He used to come with his woman.’

That explained why Luis had not been brought here before and he wondered who the woman was. ‘He wants food now,’ Luis said. ‘What woman?’

‘The pretty widow,’ the cook said, then sighed. ‘But we have not seen her in a month. A pity. He should have married her.’ She had a chickpea soup on the stove and she ladled some into a bowl, cut some cold mutton and put it on a tray with the soup, red wine and a small loaf of newly baked bread. ‘Tell the Colonel the meal will be ready for his guest this afternoon.’

‘His guest?’ Luis asked, bemused.

‘One guest for dinner, he told us. Now hurry! Don’t let that soup get cold. You go up the stairs and turn right.’

Luis carried the tray upstairs. It was a fine house, well built and handsome, with some ancient paintings on the walls. He found the door to his master’s bedroom ajar and Christopher must have heard the footsteps for he called out that Luis should come in without knocking. ‘Put the food by the window,’ he ordered.

Christopher had changed his clothes and now, instead of wearing the black breeches, black boots and red tailcoat of an English officer, he was in sky-blue breeches that had black leather reinforcements wherever they might touch a saddle. The breeches were skin tight, made so by the laces that ran up both flanks from the ankles to the waist. The Colonel’s new jacket was of the same sky blue as the breeches, but decorated with lavish silver piping that climbed to curl around the stiff, high red collar. Over his left shoulder was a pelisse, a fake jacket trimmed with fur, while on a side table was a cavalry sabre and a tall black hat that bore a short silver cockade held in place by an enamelled badge.

And the enamelled badge displayed the tricolour of France.

‘I said you would be surprised,’ Christopher remarked to Luis who was, indeed, gaping at his master.

Luis found his voice. ‘You are …’ he faltered.

‘I am an English officer, Luis, as you very well know, but the uniform is that of a French hussar. Ah! Chickpea soup, I do so like chickpea soup. Peasant food, but good.’ He crossed to the table and, grimacing because his breeches were so tightly laced, lowered himself into the chair. ‘We shall be sitting a guest to dinner this afternoon.’

‘So I was told,’ Luis said coldly.

‘You will serve, Luis, and you will not be deterred by the fact that my guest is a French officer.’

‘French?’ Luis sounded disgusted.

‘French,’ Christopher confirmed, ‘and he will be coming here with an escort. Probably a large escort, and it would not do, would it, if that escort were to return to their army and say that their officer met with an Englishman? Which is why I wear this.’ He gestured at the French uniform, then smiled at Luis. ‘War is like chess,’ Christopher went on, ‘there are two sides and if the one wins then the other must lose.’

‘France must not win,’ Luis said harshly.

‘There are black and white pieces,’ Christopher continued, ignoring his servant’s protest, ‘and both obey rules. But who makes those rules, Luis? That is where the power lies. Not with the players, certainly not with the pieces, but with the man who makes the rules.’

‘France must not win,’ Luis said again. ‘I am a good Portuguese!’

Christopher sighed at his servant’s stupidity and decided to make things simpler for Luis to understand. ‘You want to rid Portugal of the French?’

‘You know I do!’

‘Then serve dinner this afternoon. Be courteous, hide your thoughts and have faith in me.’

Because Christopher had seen the light and now he would rewrite the rules.

Sharpe stared ahead to where the dragoons had lifted four skiffs from the river and used them to make a barricade across the road. There was no way round the barricade which stretched between two houses, for beyond the right-hand house was the river and beyond the left was the steep hill where the French infantry approached, and there were more French infantry behind Sharpe, which meant the only way out of the trap was to go straight through the barricade.

‘What do we do, sir?’ Harper asked.

Sharpe swore.

‘That bad, eh?’ Harper unslung his rifle. ‘We could pick some of those boys off the barricade there.’

‘We could,’ Sharpe agreed, but it would only annoy the French, not defeat them. He could defeat them, he was sure, because his riflemen were good and the enemy’s barricade was low, but Sharpe was also sure he would lose half his men in the fight and the other half would still have to escape the pursuit of vengeful horsemen. He could fight, he could win, but he could not survive the victory.

There really was only one thing to do, but Sharpe was reluctant to say it aloud. He had never surrendered. The very thought was horrid.

‘Fix swords,’ he shouted.

His men looked surprised, but they obeyed. They took the long sword bayonets from their scabbards and slotted them onto the rifle muzzles. Sharpe drew his own sword, a heavy cavalry blade that was a yard of slaughtering steel. ‘All right, lads. Four files!’

‘Sir?’ Harper was puzzled.

‘You heard me, Sergeant! Four files! Smartly, now.’

Harper shouted the men into line. The French infantry who had come from the city were only a hundred paces behind now, too far for an accurate musket shot though one Frenchman did try and his ball cracked into the whitewashed wall of a cottage beside the road. The sound seemed to irritate Sharpe. ‘On the double now!’ he snapped. ‘Advance!’

They trotted down the road towards the newly erected barricade which was two hundred paces ahead. The river slid grey and swirling to their right while on their left was a field dotted with the remnants of last year’s haystacks which were small and pointed so that they looked like bedraggled witches’ hats. A hobbled cow with a broken horn watched them pass. Some fugitives, despairing of passing the dragoons’ roadblock, had settled in the field to await their fate.

‘Sir?’ Harper managed to catch up with Sharpe, who was a dozen paces ahead of his men.

‘Sergeant?’

It was always ‘Sergeant’, Harper noted, when things were grim, never ‘Patrick’ or ‘Pat’. ‘What are we doing, sir?’

‘We’re charging that barricade, Sergeant.’

‘They’ll fillet our guts, if you’ll pardon me saying so, sir. The buggers will turn us inside out.’

‘I know that,’ Sharpe said, ‘and you know that. But do they know that?’

Harper stared at the dragoons who were levelling their carbines across the keels of the upturned skiffs. The carbine, like a musket and unlike a rifle, was smoothbore and thus inaccurate, which meant the dragoons would wait until the last moment to unleash their volley, and that volley promised to be heavy for still more of the green-coated enemy were squeezing onto the road behind the barricade and aiming their weapons. ‘I think they do know that, sir,’ Harper observed.

Sharpe agreed, though he would not say so. He had ordered his men to fix swords because the sight of fixed bayonets was more frightening than the threat of rifles alone, but the dragoons did not seem to be worried by the menace of the steel blades. They were crowding together so that every carbine could join the opening volley and Sharpe knew he would have to surrender, but he was unwilling to do it without a single shot being fired. He quickened his pace, reckoning that one of the dragoons would fire at him too soon and that one shot would be Sharpe’s signal to halt, throw down his sword and so save his men’s lives. The decision hurt, but it was the only option he had unless God sent a miracle.

‘Sir?’ Harper struggled to keep up with Sharpe. ‘They’ll kill you!’

‘Get back, Sergeant,’ Sharpe said, ‘that’s an order.’ He wanted the dragoons to fire at him, not at his men.

‘They’ll bloody kill you!’ Harper said.

‘Maybe they’ll turn and run,’ Sharpe called back.

‘God save Ireland,’ Harper said, ‘and why would they do that?’

‘Because God wears a green jacket,’ Sharpe snarled, ‘of course.’

And just then the French turned and ran.