Sharpe's Havoc Part 37

And what mattered now was to beat these Frenchmen. The column, much larger than the first, was surging forward, driven by the drumsticks. The Frenchmen cheered, perhaps to give themselves confidence, and they must have been encouraged by the fact that the British guns on the river's far side could not see them. But then, provoking a British cheer, a spherical case shot fired by a howitzer exploded just ahead of the column's center. The British gunners were firing blind, arching their shots over the seminary, but they were firing well and their first shot killed the French cheering dead.

"Rifles only!" Sharpe called. "Fire when you're ready. Don't waste the patch! Hagman? Go for that big man with the saber."

"I see him, sir," Hagman said and s.h.i.+fted his rifle to aim at the officer who was striding ahead, setting an example, asking to be rifle meat.

"Look for the ladders," Sharpe reminded the others, then walked to the parapet, put his left foot on the coping and the rifle to his shoulder. He aimed at a man with a ladder, sighting on the man's head in the expectation that the bullet would fall to take him in the lower belly or groin. The wind was in Sharpe's face so would not drift the shot. He fired and was immediately blinded by the smoke. Hagman fired next, then there was the crackle of the other rifles. The muskets kept silent. Sharpe went to his left to see past the smoke and saw that the saber-carrying officer had vanished, as had any other man struck by a bullet. They had been swallowed by the advancing column that stepped over and past the victims, then Sharpe saw a ladder reappear as it was s.n.a.t.c.hed up by a man in the fourth or fifth rank. He felt in his cartridge box for another round and began to reload.

He did not look at the rifle as he reloaded. He just did what he had been trained to do, what he could do in his sleep, and just as he primed the rifle so the first musket b.a.l.l.s were shot from the garden wall, then the muskets opened fire from the windows and roof, and the seminary was again wreathed in smoke and noise. The cannon shots rumbled above, so close that Sharpe almost ducked once, and the case shot banged above the slope. Bullets and musket b.a.l.l.s ripped into the French files. Close to a thousand men were in the seminary now and they were protected by stone walls and given a wide open target. Sharpe fired another shot down the hill, then walked up and down behind his men, watching. Slattery needed a new flint and Sharpe gave him one, then Tarrant's mainspring broke and Sharpe replaced the weapon with Williamson's old rifle which Harper had been carrying ever since they left Vila Real de Zedes. The enemy's drums sounded nearer and Sharpe reloaded his own rifle as the first French musket bullets rattled against the seminary's stones. "They're firing blind," Sharpe told his men, "firing blind! Don't waste your shots. Look for targets." That was difficult because of the smoke hanging over the slope, but vagaries of wind sometimes stirred the fog to reveal blue uniforms and the French were close enough for Sharpe to see faces. He aimed at a man with an enormous mustache, fired and lost sight of the man as the smoke blossomed from his rifle's muzzle.

The noise of the fight was awesome. Muskets crackling incessantly, the drumbeats thumping, the case shots banging overhead, and beneath all that violence was the sound of men crying in distress. A redcoat slumped down near Harper, blood puddling by his head until a sergeant dragged the man away from the parapet, leaving a smear of bright red on the roofs lead. Far off-it had to be on the river's southern bank-a band was playing "The Drum Major" and Sharpe tapped his rifle's b.u.t.t in time to the tune. A French ramrod came whirling through the air to clatter against the seminary wall, evidently fired by a conscript who had panicked and pulled his trigger before he cleared his barrel. Sharpe remembered how, in Flanders, at his very first battle as a red-coated private, a man's musket had misfired, but he had gone on reloading, pulling the trigger, reloading, and when they drilled out his musket after the battle they found sixteen useless charges crammed down the barrel. What was the man's name? He had been from Norfolk, despite being in a Yorks.h.i.+re regiment, and he had called everyone "bor." Sharpe could not remember the name and it annoyed him. A musket ball whipped past his face, another hit the parapet and shattered a tile. Down in the garden Vicente's men and the redcoats were not aiming their muskets, but just pus.h.i.+ng the muzzles into the loopholes, pulling the triggers, and getting out of the way so the next man could use the embrasure. There were some green-jackets in the garden now and Sharpe guessed a company of the 60th, the Royal American Rifles, must be attached to Hill's brigade and was now joining the fight. They would do better, he thought, to climb to the roof than try to fire their Bakers through the loopholes. The single tree on the northern slope was thras.h.i.+ng as though in a gale and there was scarcely one leaf left on its splintered branches. Smoke drifted through the winter-bare twigs that twitched continually from the bullet strikes.

Sharpe primed his rifle, put it to his shoulder, looked for a target, saw a knot of blue uniforms very close to the garden wall and put the bullet into them. The air hissed with bullets. G.o.d d.a.m.n it, but why didn't the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds pull back? A brave group of Frenchmen tried to run down the seminary's western face to reach the big gate, but the British guns at the convent saw them and the sh.e.l.ls cracked black and red, smearing blood across the paved terrace and up the garden wall's whitewashed stones. Sharpe saw his men grimacing as they tried to force the new bullets down the powder-fouled barrels. There was no time to clean the rifles, they just hammered the bullets down and pulled the trigger. Fire and fire again, and the French were doing the same, a mad duel of bullets, and above the smoke, across the northern valley, Sharpe saw a horde of new French infantry streaming out of the city.

Two men in s.h.i.+rtsleeves were carrying boxes of ammunition round the roof. "Who needs it?" they shouted, sounding like London street traders. "Fresh lead! Who needs it? Fresh lead! New powder!" One of General Hill's aides was carrying canteens of water to the parapet while Hill himself, red-faced and anxious, stood close to the redcoats so he was seen to share their danger. He caught Sharpe's gaze and offered a grimace as if to suggest that this was harder work than he had antic.i.p.ated.

More troops came to the roof, men with fresh muskets and full cartridge boxes, and with them were the riflemen of the 60th whose officer must have realized he had been in the wrong place. He gave Sharpe a companionable nod, then ordered his men to the parapet. Flames jetted down, smoke thickened, and still the French tried to blast their way through stone walls with nothing but musket fire. Two Frenchmen succeeded in scaling the garden wall, but hesitated at the top and were seized and dragged across the coping to be battered to death by musket b.u.t.ts on the path beneath. Seven dead redcoats were laid out on another gravel path, their hands curling in death and the blood of their wounds slowly hardening and turning black, but most of the British dead were in the seminary's corridors, dragged away from the big windows that made the best targets for the frustrated French.

A whole new column was now climbing the slope, coming to swell the shattered ranks of the first, but though the beleaguered men in the seminary could not know it, these newcomers were the symptom of French defeat. Marshal Soult, desperate for fresh troops to attack the seminary, had stripped the city itself of infantry, and the people of Oporto, finding themselves unguarded for the first time since the end of March, swarmed down to the river and dragged their boats out of warehouses, shops and back-yards where the occupiers had kept them under guard. A swarm of those small craft now rowed across the river, past the shattered remnants of the pontoon bridge, to the quays of Vila Nova de Gaia where the Brigade of Guards was waiting. An officer peered anxiously across the Douro to rea.s.sure himself that the French were not waiting in ambush on the opposite quay, then shouted at his men to embark. The Guards were rowed back to the city and still more boats appeared and more redcoats crossed. Soult did not know it, but his city was filling with the enemy.

Nor did the men attacking the seminary know it, not till the redcoats appeared at the city's eastern edge, and by then the second giant column had climbed into the death storm of bullets flicking from the seminary's walls, roof and windows. The noise rivaled that of Trafalgar, where Sharpe had been dazed by the incessant boom of the great s.h.i.+ps' guns, but this noise was higher pitched as the muskets' discharges blended into an eerie, hard-edged shriek. The higher slope of the seminary hill was sodden with blood and the surviving Frenchmen were using the bodies of their dead comrades as protection. A few drummers still tried to drive the broken columns on, but then came a shout of alarm from a French sergeant, and the shout spread, and suddenly the smoke was dissipating and the slope emptying as the French saw the Brigade of Guards advancing across the valley.

The French ran. They had fought bravely, going against stone walls with muskets, but now they panicked and all discipline vanished as they ran for the road going east toward Amarante. Other French forces, cavalry and artillery among them, were hurrying from the higher part of the city, escaping the flood of redcoats ferried across the Douro and fleeing the revenge of the townsfolk who hunted up the alleys and streets to find wounded Frenchmen whom they attacked with fish-filleting knives or battered with clubs.

There was screaming and howling in Oporto's streets, but only a strange silence in the bullet-scarred seminary. Then General Hill cupped his hands. "Follow them!" he shouted. "Follow them! I want a pursuit!"

"Rifles! To me!" Sharpe called. He held his men back from the pursuit. They had already endured enough, he reckoned, and it was time to give them a rest. "Clean your guns," he ordered them, and so they stayed as the redcoats and riflemen of the 1st Brigade formed ranks outside the seminary and then marched away eastward.

A score of dead men were left on the roof. There were long streaks of blood showing where they had been pulled away from the parapet. The smoke about the building slowly cleared until the air felt clean again. The slopes beneath the seminary were strewn with discarded French packs and French bodies, not all of them dead. A wounded man crawled away between the blood-spattered blossoms of ragweed. A dog sniffed at a corpse. Ravens came on black wings to taste the dead, and women and children hurried from the houses in the valley to begin the plunder. A wounded man tried to twitch away from a girl who could not have been more than eleven and she drew a butchering knife from her ap.r.o.n belt, a knife that had been sharpened so often that its blade was little more than a whisper of thin steel attached to a bone handle, and she sliced it across the Frenchman's throat, then grimaced because his blood had splashed onto her lap. Her little sister was dragging six muskets by their slings. The small fires started by wadding smoked between the corpses where the plump Portuguese priest, the blunderbuss still in one hand, made the sign of the cross over the Frenchmen he had helped to kill.

While the living French, in panicked disarray, ran.

And the city of Oporto had been recaptured.

The letter, addressed to Richard Sharpe, Esq, was waiting on the mantel of the parlor in the House Beautiful and it was a miracle it had survived because that afternoon a score of Royal Artillery gunners made the house into their billet and the first thing they did was to break up the parlor's furniture to make a fire and the letter was an ideal piece of kindling, but then Captain Hogan arrived just before the fire was lit and managed to retrieve the paper. He had come looking for Sharpe and had asked the gunners if any messages had been left in the house, thinking Sharpe might have left one. "English folk live here, lads," he told the gunners as he opened the unsealed letter, "so wipe your feet and clean up behind yourselves." He read the brief message, and thought for a while. "I suppose none of you have seen a tall Rifle officer from the 95th? No? Well, if he shows up, tell him to go to the Palacio das Carrancas."

"The what, sir?" a gunner asked.

"Big building down the hill," Hogan explained. "Headquarters." Hogan knew Sharpe was alive for Colonel Waters had told him of meeting Sharpe that morning, but though Hogan roamed the streets he had not found Sharpe and so a pair of orderlies were sent to search the city for the stray rifleman.

A new pontoon bridge was already being floated across the Douro. The city was free again and it celebrated with flags, wine and music. Hundreds of French prisoners were under guard in a warehouse and a long row of captured French guns was parked on the river's quay where the British merchant s.h.i.+ps that had been captured when the city fell now flew their own flags again. Marshal Soult and his army had marched away east toward the bridge at Amarante that the French had captured so recently and they were blissfully unaware that General Beresford, the new commander of the Portuguese army, had recaptured the bridge and was waiting for them.

"If they can't cross at Amarante," Wellesley demanded that evening, "then where will they go?" The question was asked in the blue reception room of the Palacio das Carrancas where Wellesley and his staff had eaten a meal that had evidently been cooked for Marshal Soult and which had been found still hot in the palace's ovens. The meal had been lamb, which Sir Arthur liked, but so tricked out with onions, sc.r.a.ps of ham and mushrooms that its taste had been quite spoiled for him. "I thought the French appreciated cooking," he had grumbled, then demanded that an orderly bring him a bottle of vinegar from the kitchens. He had doused the lamb, sc.r.a.ped away the offending mushrooms and onions, and decided the meal was much improved.

Now, with the remnants of the meal cleared away, the officers crowded about a hand-drawn map that Captain Hogan had spread on the table. Sir Arthur traced a finger across the map. "They'll want to get back to Spain, of course," he said, "but how?"

He had expected Colonel Waters, the most senior of the exploring officers, to answer the question, but Waters had not ridden the north country and so the Colonel nodded to Captain Hogan, the most junior officer in the room. Hogan had spent the weeks before Soult's invasion mapping the Tras os Montes, the wild northern mountains where the roads twisted and the rivers ran fast and the bridges were few and narrow. Portuguese troops were even now marching to cut off those bridges and so deny the French the roads which would lead them back to their fortresses in Spain, and Hogan now tapped the vacant s.p.a.ce on the map north of the road from Oporto to Amarante. "If Amarante's taken, sir, and our fellows capture Braga tomorrow," Hogan paused and glanced at Sir Arthur who gave an irritable nod, "then Soult is in a pickle, a real pickle. He'll have to cross the Serra de Santa Catalina and there are no carriage roads in those hills."

"What is there?" Wellesley asked, staring at the forbidding vacancy of the map.

"Goat tracks," Hogan said, "wolves, footpaths, ravines and very angry peasants. Once he gets to here, sir"-he tapped the map to the north of the Serra de Santa Catalina-"he's got a pa.s.sable road that will take him home, but to reach that road he'll have to abandon his wagons, his guns, his carriages, in fact everything that can't be carried on a man or a mule's back."

Thunder growled above the city. The sound of rain began, then grew heavier, pelting down onto the terrace and rattling on the tall uncurtained windows. "d.a.m.n b.l.o.o.d.y weather," Wellesley growled, knowing it would slow down his pursuit of the beaten French.

"It rains on the unG.o.dly too, sir," Hogan observed.

"d.a.m.n them as well." Wellesley bridled. He was not sure how much he liked Hogan, whom he had inherited from Cradock. The d.a.m.n man was Irish for a start which reminded Wellesley that he himself had been born in Ireland, a fact of which he was not particularly proud, and the man was plainly not high born and Sir Arthur liked his aides to come from good families, yet he recognized that prejudice as quite unreasonable and he was beginning to suspect that the quiet-spoken Hogan had a good deal of competence, while Colonel Waters, of whom Wellesley did approve, spoke very warmly of the Irishman.

"So," Wellesley summed up the situation, "they're on the road between here and Amarante, and they can't come back without fighting us and they can't go forward without meeting Beresford, so they must go north into the hills. And where do they go after that?"

"To this road here, sir," Hogan answered, pointing a pencil at the map. "It goes from Braga to Chaves, sir, and if he manages to get past the Ponte Nova and reach Ruivaens, which is a village here"-he paused to make a pencil mark on the map-"then there's a track that will take him north across the hills to Montalegre and that's just a stone's throw from the frontier." Sir Arthur's aides were huddled about the dining table, looking down at the candlelit map, though one man, a slight and pale figure dressed in elegant civilian clothes, did not bother to take any interest, but just stretched languidly in an armchair where he managed to convey the insulting impression that he was bored by this talk of maps, roads, hills and bridges.

"And this road, sir," Hogan went on, tracing his pencil from the Ponte Nova to Montalegre, "is a real devil. It's a twister, sir. You have to walk five miles to go a half-mile forward. And better still, sir, it crosses a couple of rivers, small ones, but in deep gorges with quick water, and that means high bridges, sir, and if the Portuguese can cut one of those bridges then Monsieur Soult is lost, sir. He's trapped. He can only lead his men across the mountains and they'll have the devil on their heels all the way."

"G.o.d speed the Portuguese," Wellesley grunted, grimacing at the sound of the rain which he kriew would slow his allies who were advancing inland in an attempt to sever the roads by which the French could reach Spain. They had already cut them off at Amarante, but now they would need to march further north while Wellesley's army, fresh from its triumph at Oporto, would have to chase the French. The British were the beaters driving their game toward the Portuguese guns. Wellesley stared at the map. "You drew this, Hogan?"

"I did, sir."

"And it's reliable?"

"It is, sir."

Sir Arthur grunted. If it were not for the weather, he thought, he would bag Soult and all his men, but the rain would make it a d.a.m.ned difficult pursuit. Which meant the sooner it began the better and so aides were sent with orders that would start the British army on its march at dawn. Then, the orders given, Sir Arthur yawned. He badly needed some sleep before the morning and he was about to turn in when the big doors were thrown open and a very wet, very ragged and very unshaven rifleman entered. He saw General Wellesley, looked surprised and instinctively came to attention.

"Good G.o.d," Wellesley said sourly.

"I think you know Lieutenant... " Hogan began.

"Of course I know Lieutenant Sharpe," Wellesley snapped, "but what I want to know is what the devil is he doing here? The 95th aren't with us."

Hogan removed the candlesticks from the corners of the map and let it roll up. "That's my doing, Sir Arthur," he said calmly. "I found Lieutenant Sharpe and his men wandering like lost sheep and took them into my care, and ever since he's been escorting me on my journeys to the frontier. I couldn't have coped with the French patrols on my own, Sir Arthur, and Mister Sharpe was a great comfort."

Wellesley, while Hogan offered the explanation, just stared at Sharpe. "You were lost?" he demanded coldly.

"Cut off, sir," Sharpe said.

"During the retreat to Corunna?"

"Yes, sir," Sharpe said. In fact his unit had been retreating toward Vigo, but the distinction was not important and Sharpe had long learned to keep replies to senior officers as brief as possible.

"So where the devil have you been these last few weeks?" Wellesley asked tartly. "Skulking?"

"Yes, sir," Sharpe said, and the staff officers stiffened at the whiff of insolence that drifted through the room.

"I ordered the Lieutenant to find a young Englishwoman who was lost, sir," Hogan hurried to explain. "In fact I ordered him to accompany Colonel Christopher."

The mention of that name was like a whip crack. No one spoke though the young civilian who had been pretending to sleep in the armchair and who had opened his eyes wide with surprise when Sharpe's name was first mentioned now paid very close attention. He was a painfully thin young man and pallid, as though he feared the sun, and there was something feline, almost feminine, in his delicate appearance. His clothes, so very elegant, would have been well suited to a London drawing room or a Paris salon, but here, amidst the unwashed uniforms and suntanned officers of Wellesley's staff, he looked like a pampered lapdog among hounds. He was sitting up straight now and staring intently at Sharpe.

"Colonel Christopher." Wellesley broke the silence. "So you've been with him?" he demanded of Sharpe.