Sharpe's Havoc Part 2

Hagman shouted a warning as three blue-coated soldiers appeared from an alley, and a dozen rifles swung toward 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 toward the arch.

And once through the arch the press of refugees was even greater as the crews of some thirty British merchant s.h.i.+ps, 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 s.h.i.+ps' 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. Cannonb.a.l.l.s 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 sh.e.l.l streaked toward 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 c.u.mbrous wine barge. Other barges still crossed the river, but they were manned by armed men who only took pa.s.sengers willing to pay. Sharpe knew he could force a pa.s.sage 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 nrmly anch.o.r.ed 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 can-nonb.a.l.l.s 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.

"G.o.d 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 upward by a pair of windla.s.ses that hauled on ropes through pulleys mounted on a pair of thick timber posts stoutly b.u.t.tressed 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 s.h.i.+ps, 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 ma.s.sive 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 gray 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.

"G.o.d 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 toward 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 center 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 endeavor. 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 cannonb.a.l.l.s 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, "G.o.d help them." The orphans, in their dun uniforms, were being pushed into the river. "There's got to be a b.l.o.o.d.y 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 gray 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 b.a.l.l.s were necking the river now and some were striking the fugitives on the broken bridge.

"What the h.e.l.l 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 eastward 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.

"G.o.d 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 armor 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.

"c.r.a.pauds!" 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 bra.s.s 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. d.a.m.n 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 gray-white smoke of the guns and beneath that smoke, in the valley of drowning children, Richard Sharpe was trapped.

Liutenant Colonel James Christopher was neither a lieutenant nor a colonel, though he had once served as a captain in the Lincolns.h.i.+re 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 emba.s.sy in Lisbon whence, though they were addressed to the Amba.s.sador, 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 halfhearted 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 westward. 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 toward 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 laborers 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 gla.s.s, "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 emba.s.sy 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 gla.s.s, 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. Afterward 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 saber and a tall black hat that bore a short silver c.o.c.kade held in place by an enamelled badge.

And the enamelled badge displayed the tricolor 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."