Sharpe's Havoc Part 34

"So what's happening, sir?" Sharpe asked.

"Happening? We're running the Frogs out of Portugal! Hop hop, croak croak, and good b.l.o.o.d.y riddance to the spavined b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Look at it!" Waters gestured at the city. "They don't have the first blind idea that we're here! Your Portuguese fellow said you'd been cut off. Is that true?"

"Since the end of March."

"Ye G.o.ds," Waters said, "you must be out of touch!" The Colonel pulled back from the window and perched on the sill where he told Sharpe that Sir Arthur Wellesley had indeed arrived in Portugal. "He came less than three weeks ago," Waters said, "and he's put some snap into the troops, by G.o.d, he has! Cradock was a decent enough fellow, but he had no snap, none. So we're on the march, Sharpe, left, right, left, right, and the devil take the hindmost. British army over there." He oointed through the window, indicating the hidden ground beyond the high convent on the southern bank. "b.l.o.o.d.y Frogs seem to think we'll come by sea, so all their men are either in the city or guarding the river between the city and the sea." Sharpe felt a twinge of guilt for not believing the woman in Barca d'Avintas who had told him exactly that. "Sir Arthur wants to get across," Waters went on, "and your fellows have conveniently provided those three barges, and you say there's a fourth?"

"Three miles upriver, sir."

"You ain't done a bad morning's work, Sharpe," Waters said with a friendly grin. "We only have to pray for one thing."

"That the French don't discover us here?"

"Exactly. So best remove my red coat from the window, eh?" Waters laughed and crossed the room. "Pray they go on sleeping with their sweet froggy dreams because once they do wake up then the day's going to be d.a.m.ned hot, don't you think? And those three barges can take how many men apiece? Thirty? And G.o.d alone knows how long each crossing will take. We could be shoving our d.a.m.ned heads into the tiger's mouth, Sharpe."

Sharpe forbore to comment that he had spent the last few weeks with his head inside the tiger's mouth. Instead he stared across the valley, trying to imagine how the French would approach when they did attack. He guessed they would come straight from the city, across the valley and up the slope that was virtually bare of any cover. The northern flank of the seminary looked toward the road in the valley and that slope was just as bare, all except for one solitary tree with pale leaves that grew right in the middle of the climb. Anyone attacking the seminary would presumably try to get to the garden gate or the big front door and that would mean crossing a wide paved terrace where carriages bringing visitors to the seminary could turn around and where attacking infantry would be cut down by musket and rifle fire from the seminary's windows and its balus-traded roof. "A deathtrap!" Colonel Waters was sharing the view and evidently thinking the same thoughts.

"I wouldn't want to be attacking up that slope," Sharpe agreed.

"And I've no doubt we'll put some cannon on the other bank to make it all a bit less healthy," Waters said cheerfully.

Sharpe hoped that was true. He kept wondering why there were no British guns on the wide terrace of the convent that overlooked the river, the terrace where the Portuguese had placed their batteries in March. It seemed an obvious position, but Sir Arthur Wellesley appeared to have chosen to put his artillery down among the port lodges which were out of sight of the seminary.

"What's the time?" Waters asked, then answered his own question by taking out a turnip watch. "Nearly eleven!"

"Are you with the staff, sir?" Sharpe asked because Waters's red coat, though decorated with some tarnished gold braid, had no regimental facings.

"I'm one of Sir Arthur's exploring officers," Waters said cheerfully. "We ride ahead to scout the land like those fellows in the Bible that Joshua sent ahead to spy out Jericho, remember the tale? And a frow called Rahab gave them shelter? That's the luck of the Jews, ain't it? The chosen people get greeted by a prost.i.tute and I get welcomed by a rifleman, but I suppose it's better than a sloppy wet kiss from a b.l.o.o.d.y Frog dragoon, eh?"

Sharpe smiled. "Do you know Captain Hogan, sir?"

"The mapping fellow? Of course I know Hogan. A capital man, capital!" Waters suddenly stopped and looked at Sharpe. "My G.o.d, of course! You're his lost rifleman, ain't you? Ah, I've placed you now. He said you'd survive. Well done, Sharpe. Ah, here come the first of the gallant Buffs."

Vicente and his men had escorted thirty redcoats up the hill, but instead of using the unlocked arched door they had trudged round to the front and now gaped up at Waters and Sharpe who in turn looked down from the window. The newcomers wore the buff facings of the 3rd Regiment of Foot, a Kentish regiment, and they were sweating after their climb under the hot sun. A thin lieutenant led them and he a.s.sured Colonel Waters that two more bargeloads of men were already disembarking, then he looked curiously at Sharpe. "What on earth are the Rifles doing here?"

"First on the field," Sharpe quoted the regiment's favorite boast, "and last off it."

"First? You must have flown across the b.l.o.o.d.y river." The Lieutenant wiped his forehead. "Any water here?"

"Barrel inside the main door," Sharpe said, "courtesy of the 95th."

More men arrived. The barges were toiling to and fro across the river, propelled by the ma.s.sive sweeps which were manned by local people who were eager to help, and every twenty minutes another eighty or ninety men would toil up the hill. One group arrived with a general, Sir Edward Paget, who took over command of the growing garrison from Waters. Paget was a young man, still in his thirties, energetic and eager, who owed his high rank to his aristocratic family's wealth, but he had the reputation of being a general who was popular with his soldiers. He climbed to the seminary roof where Sharpe's men were now positioned and, seeing Sharpe's small telescope, asked to borrow it. "Lost me own," he explained, "it's somewhere in the baggage in Lisbon."

"You came with Sir Arthur, sir?" Sharpe asked.

"Three weeks ago," Paget said, staring at the city.

"Sir Edward," Waters told Sharpe, "is second in command to Sir Arthur."

"Which doesn't mean much," Sir Edward said, "because he never tells me anything. What's wrong with this b.l.o.o.d.y telescope?"

"You have to hold the outer lens in place, sir," Sharpe said.

"Take mine," Waters said, offering the better instrument.

Sir Edward scanned the city, then frowned. "So what are the b.l.o.o.d.y French doing?" he asked in a puzzled tone.

"Sleeping," Waters answered.

"Won't like it when they wake up, will they?" Paget remarked. "Asleep in the keeper's lodge with poachers all over the coverts!" He gave the telescope back to Waters and nodded at Sharpe. "d.a.m.n pleased to have some riflemen here, Lieutenant. I dare say you'll get some target practice before the day's out."

Another group of men came up the hill. Every window of the seminary's brief western facade now had a group of redcoats and a quarter of the windows on the long northern wall were also manned. The garden wall had been loopholed and garrisoned by Vicente's Portuguese and by the Buffs' grenadier company. The French, thinking themselves secure in Oporto, were watching the river between the city and the sea while behind their backs, on the high eastern hill, the redcoats were gathering.

Which meant the G.o.ds of war were tightening the screws.

And something had to break.

Officers were posted in the entrance hall of the Palacio das Carrancas to make sure all visitors took their boots off. "His grace," they explained, referring to Marshal Nicolas Soult, Duke of Dalmatia, whose nickname was now King Nicolas, "is sleeping."

The hallway was cavernous, arched, high, beautiful, and hard-heeled boots striding over its tiled floor echoed up the staircase to where King Nicolas slept. Early that morning a hussar had come in hurriedly, his spurs had caught in the rug at the foot of the stairs and he had sprawled with a terrible clatter of saber and scabbard that had woken the Marshal, who had then posted the officers to make certain the rest of his sleep was not disturbed. The two officers were powerless to stop the British artillery firing from across the river, but perhaps the Marshal was not so sensitive to gunfire as he was to loud heels.

The Marshal had invited a dozen guests to breakfast and all had arrived before nine in the morning and were forced to wait in one of the great reception rooms on the palace's western side where tall gla.s.s doors opened onto a terrace decorated with flowers planted in carved stone urns and with laurel bushes that an elderly gardener was tr.i.m.m.i.n.g with long shears. The guests, all but one of them men, and all but two of them French, continually strolled onto the terrace which offered, from its southern bal.u.s.trade, a view across the river and thus a sight of the guns that fired over the Douro. In truth there was not much to see because the British cannon were emplaced in Vila Nova de Gaia's streets and so, even with the help of telescopes, the guests merely saw gouts of dirty smoke and then heard the crash of the round shots striking the buildings that faced Oporto's quay. The only other sight worth seeing was the remains of the pontoon bridge which the French had repaired at the beginning of April, but had now blown up because of Sir Arthur Wellesley's approach. Three scorched pontoons still swung to their anchors, the rest, along with the roadway, had been blasted to smithereens and carried by the tide to the nearby ocean.

Kate was the only woman invited to the Marshal's breakfast and her husband had been adamant that she wear her hussar uniform and his insistence was rewarded by the admiring glances that the other guests gave to his wife's long legs. Christopher himself was in civilian clothes, while the other ten men, all officers, were in their uniforms and, because a woman was present, they did their best to appear insouciant about the British cannonade. "What they are doing," a dragoon major resplendent in aiguillettes and gold braid remarked, "is shooting at our sentries with six-pound shots. They're swatting at flies with a bludgeon." He lit a cigar, breathed deep and gave Kate a long appreciative look. "With a b.u.t.t like that," he said to his friend, "she should be French."

"She should be on her back."

"That too, of course."

Kate kept herself turned away from the French officers. She was ashamed of the hussar uniform which she thought immodest and, worse, appeared to suggest her sympathies were with the French. "You might make an effort," Christopher told her.

"I am making an effort," she answered bitterly, "an effort not to cheer every British shot."

"You're being ridiculous."

"I am?" Kate bridled.

"This is merely a demonstration," Christopher explained, waving toward the powder smoke that drifted like patchy fog through the red-tiled roofs of Vila Nova. "Wellesley has marched his men up here and he can't go any further. He's stuck. There are no boats and the navy isn't foolish enough to try and sail past the river forts. So Wellesley will hammer a few cannonb.a.l.l.s into the city, then turn around and march back to Coimbra or Lisbon. In chess terms, my dear, this is a stalemate. Soult can't march south because his reinforcements haven't arrived and Wellesley can't come further north because he doesn't have the boats. And if the military can't force a decision here then the diplomats will have to settle matters. Which is why I am here, as I keep trying to tell you."

"You're here," Kate said, "because your sympathies are with the French."

"That is an exceptionally offensive remark," Christopher said haughtily. "I am here because sane men must do whatever they can to prevent this war continuing, and to do that we must talk with the enemy and I cannot talk with them if I am on the wrong side of the river."

Kate did not answer. She no longer believed her husband's complicated explanations of why he was friendly with the French or his high talk of the new ideas controlling Europe's destiny. She clung instead to the simpler idea of being a patriot and all she wanted now was to cross the river and join the men on the far side, but there were no boats, no bridge left and no way to escape. She began to weep and Christopher, disgusted at her display of misery, turned away. He worked at his teeth with an ivory pick and marveled that a woman so beautiful could be so prey to vapors.

Kate cuffed at her tears, then walked to where the gardener was slowly clipping the laurels. "How do I get across the river?" she asked in Portuguese.

The man did not look at her, just clipped away. "You can't."