CHAPTER 10

Kate sat in a corner of the carriage and wept. The carriage was going nowhere. It was not even a proper carriage, not half as comfortable as the Quinta’s fragile gig that had been abandoned in Oporto and nothing like as substantial as the one her mother had taken south across the river in March, and how Kate now wished she had gone with her mother, but instead she had been stricken by romance and certain that love’s fulfillment would bring her golden skies, clear horizons and endless joy.

Instead she was in a two-wheeled Oporto hackney with a leaking leather roof, cracked springs and a broken-down gelding between its shafts, and the carriage was going nowhere because the fleeing French army was stuck on the road to Amarante. Rain seethed on the roof, streaked the windows and dripped onto Kate’s lap and she did not care, she just hunched in the corner and wept.

The door was tugged open and Christopher put his head in. “There are going to be some bangs,” he told her, “but there’s no need to be alarmed.” He paused, decided he could not cope with her sobbing, so just closed the door. Then he jerked it open again. “They’re disabling the guns,” he explained, “that’s what the noise will be.”

Kate could not have cared less. She wondered what would become of her, and the awfulness of her prospects was so frightening that she burst into fresh tears just as the first guns were fired muzzle to muzzle.

On the morning after the fall of Oporto Marshal Soult had been woken to the appalling news that the Portuguese army had retaken Amarante and that the only bridge by which he could carry his guns, limbers, caissons, wagons and carriages back to the French fortresses in Spain was therefore in enemy hands. One or two hotheads had suggested fighting their way across the River Tamega, but scouts reported that the Portuguese were occupying Amarante in force, that the bridge had been mined and had a dozen guns now dominating its roadway, that it would take a day of bitter and bloody fighting to get across and even then there would probably be no bridge left for the Portuguese would doubtless blow it. And Soult did not have a day. Sir Arthur Wellesley would be advancing from Oporto so that left him only one option, which was to abandon all the army’s wheeled transport, every wagon, every limber, every caisson, every carriage, every mobile forge and every gun. They would all have to be left behind and twenty thousand men, five thousand camp followers, four thousand horses and almost as many mules must do their best to scramble over the mountains.

But Soult was not going to leave the enemy good French guns to turn against him, and so the weapons were each loaded with four pounds of powder, were double-shotted and placed muzzle to muzzle. Gunners struggled to keep their portfires alight in the rain and then, on a word of command, touched the two reed fuses and the powder flashed down to the overcharged chambers, the guns fired into each other, leaped back in a wrenching explosion of smoke and flames and then were left with ripped, torn barrels. Some of the gunners were weeping as they destroyed their weapons while others just cursed as they used knives and bayonets to rip open the powder bags that were left to spoil in the rain.

The infantry were ordered to empty their packs and haversacks of everything except food and ammunition. Some officers ordered inspections and insisted their men throw away the plunder of the campaign. Cutlery, candlesticks, plate, all had to be abandoned by the roadside as the army took to the hills. The horses, oxen and mules that hauled the guns, carriages and limbers were shot rather than be ceded to the enemy. The animals screamed and thrashed as they died. The wounded who could not walk were left in their wagons and given muskets so they could at least try to protect themselves against the Portuguese who would find them soon enough and then attempt to exact revenge on helpless men. Soult ordered the military chest, eleven great barrels of silver coins, put by the road so the men could help themselves to a handful apiece as they went past. The women hitched up their skirts, scooped up the coins, and walked with their men. The dragoons, hussars and chasseurs led their horses. Thousands of men and women were climbing into the barren hills, leaving behind wagons loaded with bottles of wine, with port, with crosses of gold stolen from churches and with ancestral paintings plundered from the walls of northern Portugal’s big houses. The French had thought they had conquered a country, that they were merely waiting for a few reinforcements to swell the ranks as they marched on Lisbon, and none understood why they were suddenly faced with disaster or why King Nicolas was leading them on a shambolic retreat through torrential rain.

“If you stay here,” Christopher told Kate, “you’ll be raped.”

“I’ve been raped,” she wept, “night after night!”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Kate!” Christopher, dressed in civilian clothes, was standing by the carriage’s open door with rain dripping from the point of his cocked hat. “I’m not leaving you here.” He reached in, took her by the wrist and, despite her screams and struggles, hauled her from the carriage. “Walk, damn you!” he snarled, and dragged her across the verge and up the slope. She had only been out of the carriage a few seconds and already her blue hussar uniform, which Christopher had insisted she wore, was soaked through. “This isn’t the end,” Christopher told her, his grip painful on her thin wrist. “The reinforcements never arrived, that’s all! But we’ll be back.”

Kate, despite her misery, was struck by the “we.” Did he mean the two of them? Or did he mean the French? “I want to go home,” she cried.

“Stop being tedious,” Christopher snapped, “and keep walking!” He pulled her on. Her new leather-soled boots slipped on the path. “The French are going to win this war,” Christopher insisted. He was no longer certain of that, but when he weighed the balances of power in Europe he managed to convince himself that it was true.

“I want to go back to Oporto!” Kate sobbed.

“We can’t!”

“Why not?” She tried to pull away from him and though she could not loosen his grip she did manage to bring him to a halt. “Why not?” she asked.

“We just can’t,” he said, “now come on!” He tugged her into motion again, unwilling to tell her that he could not go back to Oporto because that damned man Sharpe was alive. Good Christ in his heaven, but the bastard was only an over-age lieutenant and one, he had now learned, who was up from the ranks, but Sharpe knew too much that was damning to Christopher and so the Colonel would need to find a safe haven from where, by the discreet methods that he knew so well, he could send a letter to London. Then, in quiet, he could judge from the reply whether London believed his story that he had been forced to demonstrate an allegiance to the French in order to engineer a mutiny that would have freed Portugal, and that story sounded convincing to him, except that Portugal was being freed anyway. But all was not lost. It would be his word against Sharpe’s, and Christopher, whatever else he might be, was a gentleman and Sharpe was most decidedly not. There would be the delicate problem, of course, of what to do with Kate if he was called back to London, but he could probably deny that the marriage had ever taken place. He would put reports of it down to Kate’s vapors. Women were given to vapors, it was notorious. What had Shakespeare said? “Frailty, thy name is woman.” So he would truthfully claim that the gabbled service in Vila Real de Zedes’s small church was not a proper marriage and say that he had undergone it solely to save Kate’s blushes. It was a gamble, he knew, but he had played cards long enough to know that sometimes the most outrageous gambles paid the biggest winnings.

And if the gamble failed, and if he could not salvage his London career then it probably would not matter, for he clung to the belief that the French would surely win in the end and he would be back in Oporto where, for lack of any other knowledge, the lawyers must account him as Kate’s husband and he would be wealthy. Kate would come to terms with it. She would recover when she was restored, as she would be, to comfort and home. Thus far, it was true, she had been unhappy, her joy at the marriage turning to horror in the bedroom, but young mares often rebelled against the bridle yet after a whipping or two became docile and obedient. And Christopher wished that outcome for Kate because her beauty still thrilled him. He dragged her on to where Williamson, now Christopher’s servant, held his horse. “Get on its back,” he ordered Kate.

“I want to go home!” she said.

“Get up!” He almost hit her with the riding crop that was tucked under the saddle, but then she meekly let him help her onto the horse. “Hold on to the reins, Williamson,” Christopher ordered. He did not want Kate turning the horse and kicking it away westward. “Hold them tight, man.”

“Yes, sir,” Williamson said. He was still in his rifleman’s uniform, though he had exchanged his shako for a wide-brimmed leather hat. He had picked up a French musket, a pistol and a saber in the retreat from Oporto and the weapons made him look formidable, an appearance that was a comfort to Christopher. The Colonel had needed a servant after his own had fled, but he wanted a bodyguard even more and Williamson played the role superbly. He told Christopher tales of tavern brawls, of wild fights with knives and clubs, of bare-fisted boxing bouts, and Christopher lapped it up almost as eagerly as he listened to Williamson’s bitter complaints about Sharpe.

In return Christopher had promised Williamson a golden future. “Learn French,” he had advised the deserter, “and you can join their army. Show that you’re good and they’ll give you a commission. They ain’t particular in the French army.”

“And if I wants to stay with you, sir?” Williamson had asked.

“I was always a man to reward loyalty, Williamson,” Christopher had said, and so the two suited each other even if, for now, their fortunes were at a low ebb as, with thousands of other fugitives, they climbed into the rain, were buffeted by the wind and saw nothing ahead but the hunger, bleak slopes and wet rocks of the Serra de Santa Catalina.

Behind them, on the road from Oporto to Amarante, a sad trail of abandoned carriages and wagons stood in the downpour. The wounded French watched anxiously, praying that the pursuing British would appear before the peasants, but the peasants were closer than the redcoats, much closer, and soon their dark shapes were seen flitting in the rain and in their hands were bright knives.

And in the rain the wounded men’s muskets would not fire.

And so the screaming began.

Sharpe would have liked to take Hagman on his pursuit of Christopher, but the old poacher was not fully recovered from his chest wound, and so Sharpe was forced to leave him behind. He took twelve men, his fittest and cleverest, and all complained vehemently when they were rousted out into Oporto’s rain before dawn because their bellies were sour with wine, their heads sore and their tempers short. “But not as short as mine,” Sharpe warned them, “so don’t make such a damned fuss.”

Hogan came with them, as did Lieutenant Vicente and three of his men. Vicente had learned that three mail carriages were going to Braga at first light and told Hogan that the vehicles were notoriously fast and would be traveling on a good road. The drivers, carrying sacks of mail that had been waiting for the French to leave before they could be delivered to Braga, happily made room for the soldiers who collapsed on the mail sacks and fell asleep.

They passed through the remnants of the city’s northern defenses in the wet halflight of dawn. The road was good, but the mail coaches were slowed because partisans had felled trees across the highway and each barricade took a half-hour or more to clear. “If the French had known Amarante had fallen,” Hogan told Sharpe, “they’d have retreated on this road and we’d never have caught them! Mind you, we don’t know that their Braga garrison has left with the rest.”

It had, and the mail arrived along with a troop of British cavalry who were welcomed by cheering inhabitants whose joy could not be dampened by the rain. Hogan, in his engineer’s blue coat, was mistaken for a French prisoner and some horse dung was thrown at him before Vicente managed to persuade the crowd that Hogan was English.

“Irish,” Hogan protested, “please.”

“Same thing,” Vicente said absentmindedly.

“Good God in his heaven,” Harper said, disgusted, then laughed because the crowd insisted on carrying Hogan on their shoulders.

The main road from Braga went north across the frontier to Ponte-vedra, but to the east a dozen tracks climbed into the hills and one of them, Vicente promised, would take them all the way to Ponte Nova, but it was the same road that the French would be trying to reach and so he warned Sharpe that they might have to take to the trackless hills. “If we are lucky,” Vicente said, “we shall be at the bridge in two days.”

“And how long to the Saltador?” Hogan asked.

“Another half-day.”

“And how long will it take the French?”

“Three days,” Vicente said, “it must take them three days.” He made the sign of the cross. “I pray it takes them three days.”

They spent the night in Braga. A cobbler repaired their boots, insisting he would take no money, and he used his best leather to make new soles that were studded with nails to give some grip in the wet high ground. He must have worked all night for in the morning he shyly presented Sharpe with leather covers for the rifles and muskets. The weapons had been protected from the rain by corks shoved into their muzzles and by ragged clouts wrapped about the locks, but the leather sheaths were far better. The cobbler had greased the seams with sheep fat to make the covers waterproof and Sharpe, like his men, was absurdly pleased with the gift. They were given so much food that they ended up giving most of it to a priest who promised to distribute it among the poor, and then, in the rain-lashed dawn, they marched. Hogan rode because the mayor of Braga had presented him with a mule, a sure-footed beast with a vile temper and a wall eye, which Hogan saddled with a blanket and then rode with his feet almost touching the ground. He suggested using the mule to carry their weapons, but of all the party he was the oldest and the least spry, and so Sharpe insisted he ride. “I’ve no idea what we’ll find,” Hogan told Sharpe as they climbed into the rock-strewn hills. “If the bridge at Ponte Nova has been blown, as it should have been by now, then the French will scatter. They’ll just be running for their lives and we’ll be hard put to find Mister Christopher in all that chaos. Still, we must try.”

“And if it hasn’t been blown?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Hogan said, and laughed. “Ah, Jesus, I do hate this rain. Have you ever tried taking snuff in the rain, Richard? It’s like sniffing up cat vomit.”

They walked eastward through a wide valley edged by high, pale hills that were crowned with gray boulders. The road lay to the south of the River Cavado which ran clear and deep through rich pastureland that had been plundered by the French so that no cattle or sheep grazed the spring grass. The villages had once been prosperous, but were now almost deserted and the few folk who remained were wary. Hogan, like Vicente and his men, wore blue and that was also the color of the enemy’s coats, while the riflemen’s green jackets could be mistaken for the uniforms of dismounted French dragoons. Most people, if they expected anything, thought the British wore red and so Sergeant Macedo, anticipating the confusion, had found a Portuguese flag in Braga that he carried on a pole hacked from an ash tree. The flag showed a wreathed crest of Portugal surmounted by a great golden crown and it reassured those folk who recognized the emblem. Not all did, but once the villagers had spoken with Vicente they could not do enough for the soldiers. “For God’s sake,” Sharpe told Vicente, “tell them to hide their wine.”

“They’re friendly, sure enough,” Harper said as they left another small settlement where the dungheaps were bigger than the cottages. “Not like the Spanish. They could be cold. Not all of them, but some were bastards.”

“The Spanish don’t like the English,” Hogan told him.

“They don’t like the English?” Harper asked, surprised. “So they’re not bastards after all then, just wary, eh? But are you saying, sir, that the Portuguese do like the English?”

“The Portuguese,” Hogan said, “hate the Spanish and when you have a bigger neighbor whom you detest then you look for a big friend to help you.”

“So who’s Ireland’s big friend, sir?”

“God, Sergeant,” Hogan said, “God.”

“Dear Lord above,” Harper said piously, staring into the rainy sky, “for Christ’s sake, wake up.”

“Why don’t you fight for the bloody French,” Harris snarled.

“Enough!” Sharpe snapped.

They marched in silence for a while, then Vicente could not contain his curiosity. “If the Irish hate the English,” he asked, “why do they fight for them?” Harper chuckled at the question, Hogan raised his eyes to the gray heavens and Sharpe just scowled.

The road, now that they were far from Braga, was less well maintained. Grass grew down its center between ruts made by ox carts. The French had not scavenged this far and there were a few flocks of bedraggled sheep and some small herds of cattle, but as soon as a herdsman or shepherd saw the soldiers he hustled his beasts away. Vicente was still puzzled and, having failed to elicit an answer from his companions, tried again. “I really do not understand,” he said in a very earnest voice, “why the Irish would fight for the English King.” Harris drew a breath as if to reply, but one savage look from Sharpe made him change his mind. Harper began to whistle “Over the Hills and Far Away,” then could not help laughing at the strained silence that was at last broken by Hogan.

“It’s hunger,” the engineer explained to Vicente, “hunger and poverty and desperation, and because there’s precious little work for a good man at home, and because we’ve always been a people that enjoy a good fight.”

Vicente was intrigued by the answer. “And that is true for you, Captain?” he asked.

“Not for me,” Hogan allowed. “My family’s always had some money. Not much, but we never had to scratch in thin soil to raise our daily bread. No, I joined the army because I like being an engineer. I like practical things and this was the best way to do what I liked. But someone like Sergeant Harper?” He glanced at Harper. “I dare say he’s here because he’d be starving otherwise.”

“True,” Harper said.

“And you hate the English?” Vicente asked Harper.

“Careful,” Sharpe growled.

“I hate the bloody ground the bastards walk on, sir,” Harper said cheerfully, then saw Vicente cast a bewildered glance at Sharpe. “I didn’t say I hated them all,” Harper added.

“Life is complicated,” Hogan said vaguely. “I mean there’s a Portuguese Legion in the French army, I hear?”

Vicente looked embarrassed. “They believe in French ideas, sir.”

“Ah! Ideas,” Hogan said, “they’re much more dangerous than big or little neighbors. I don’t believe in fighting for ideas”-he shook his head ruefully-”and nor does Sergeant Harper.”

“I don’t?” Harper asked.

“No, you bloody don’t,” Sharpe snarled.

“So what do you believe in?” Vicente wanted to know.

“The trinity, sir,” Harper said sententiously.

“The trinity?” Vicente was surprised.

“The Baker rifle,” Sharpe said, “the sword bayonet, and me.”

“Those too,” Harper acknowledged, and laughed.

“What it is,” Hogan tried to help Vicente, “is that it’s like being in a house where there’s an unhappy marriage and you ask a question about fidelity. You cause embarrassment. No one wants to talk about it.”

“Harris!” Sharpe warned, seeing the red-headed rifleman open his mouth.

“I was only going to say, sir,” Harris said, “that there’s a dozen horsemen on that hill over there.”

Sharpe turned just in time to see the horsemen vanish across the crest. The rain was too thick and the light too poor to see if they were in uniform, but Hogan suggested the French might well have sent cavalry patrols far ahead of their retreat. “They’ll be wanting to know whether we’ve taken Braga,” he explained, “because if we hadn’t then they’d turn this way and try to escape up to Pontevedra.”

Sharpe gazed at the far hill. “If there’s bloody cavalry about,” he said, “then I don’t want to be caught on the road.” It was the one place in a nightmare landscape where horsemen would have an advantage.

So to avoid enemy horsemen they struck north into the wilderness. It meant crossing the Cavado which they managed at a deep ford which led only to the high summer pastures. Sharpe continually looked behind, but saw no sign of the horsemen. The path climbed into a wild land. The hills were steep, the valleys deep and the high ground bare of anything except gorse, ferns, thin grass and vast rounded boulders, some balanced on others so precariously that they looked as if a child’s touch would send them bounding down the precipitous slopes. The grass was fit only for a few tangle-haired sheep and scores of feral goats on which the mountain wolves and wild lynx fed. The only village they passed was a poor place with high rock walls about its small vegetable gardens. Goats were hobbled on pastures the size of inn yards and a few bony cattle stared at the soldiers as they passed. They climbed still higher, listening to the goat bells among the rocks and passing a small shrine heaped with faded gorse blossom. Vicente crossed himself as he passed the shrine.

They turned eastward again, following a stony ridge where the great rounded boulders would make it impossible for any cavalry to form and charge, and Sharpe kept watching southwards and saw nothing. Yet there had been horsemen, and there would be more, for he was making a rendezvous with a desperate army that had been bounced from imminent success to abject defeat in one swift day.

It was hard traveling in the hills. They rested every hour, then trudged on. All were soaked, tired and chilled. The rain was relentless and the wind had now gone into the east so that it came straight into their faces. The rifle slings rubbed their wet shoulders raw, but at least the rain lifted that afternoon, even if the wind stayed brisk and cold. At dusk, feeling as weary as he ever had on the terrible retreat to Vigo, Sharpe led them down from the ridge to a small deserted hamlet of low stone cottages roofed with turf. “Just like home,” Harper said happily. The driest places to sleep were two long, coffin-shaped granaries that protected their contents from rats by being raised on mushroom-shaped stone pillars, and most of the men crammed themselves into the narrow spaces while Sharpe, Hogan and Vicente shared the least damaged cottage where Sharpe conjured a fire from damp kindling, and brewed tea.

“The most essential skill of a soldier,” Hogan said when Sharpe brought him the tea.

“What’s that?” Vicente asked, ever eager to learn his new trade.

“Making fire from wet wood,” Hogan said.

“Aren’t you supposed to have a servant?” Sharpe asked.

“I am, but so are you, Richard.”

“I’m not one for servants,” Sharpe said.

“Nor am I,” Hogan said, “but you’ve done a grand job with that tea, Richard, and if His Majesty ever decides he doesn’t want a London rogue to be one of his officers then I’ll give you a job as a servant.”

Picquets were set, more tea brewed and moist tobacco coaxed alight in clay pipes. Hogan and Vicente began an impassioned argument about a man called Hume of whom Sharpe had never heard and who turned out to be a dead Scottish philosopher, but, as it seemed the dead Scotsman had proposed that nothing was certain, Sharpe wondered why anyone bothered to read him, let alone argue about him, yet the notion diverted Hogan and Vicente. Sharpe, bored with the talk, left them to their debate and went to inspect the picquets.

It started to rain again, then peals of thunder shook the sky and lightning whipped into the high rocks. Sharpe crouched with Harris and Perkins in a cave-like shrine where some faded flowers lay in front of a sad-looking statue of the Virgin Mary. “Jesus bloody wept,” Harper announced himself as he splashed through the downpour, “and we could be tucked up with those ladies in Oporto.” He crammed himself in beside the three men. “I didn’t know you were here, sir,” he said. “I brought the boys some picquet juice.” He had a wooden canteen of hot tea. “Jesus,” he went on, “you can’t see a bloody thing out there.”

“Weather like home, Sergeant?” Perkins asked.

“What would you know, lad? In Donegal, now, the sun never stops shining, the women all say yes and both the gamekeepers have wooden legs.” He gave Perkins the canteen and peered into the wet dark. “How are we going to find your fellow in this, sir?”

“God knows if we do.”

“Does it matter now?”

“I want my telescope back.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Harper said, “you’re going to wander into the middle of the French army and ask for it?”

“Something like that,” Sharpe said. All day he had been besieged by a sense of the futility of the effort, but that was no reason not to make the effort. And it seemed right to him that Christopher should be punished. Sharpe believed that a man’s loyalties were at his roots, that they were immovable, but Christopher evidently believed they were negotiable. That was because Christopher was clever and sophisticated. And, if Sharpe had his way, he would soon be dead.

The dawn was cold and wet. They climbed back up to the boulder-strewn heights, leaving behind the valley which was filled with mist. The rain was soft now, but still in their faces. Sharpe led and saw nobody, and still saw nobody even when a musket banged and a cloud of smoke blossomed beside a rock and he dived for cover as the bullet smacked on a boulder and whined into the sky. Everyone else sheltered, except for Hogan who was stranded on his ugly mule, but Hogan had the presence of mind to shout. “Ingles,” he called, “ingles!” He was half on and half off the mule, fearing another bullet, but hoping his claim to be English would prevent it.

A figure in ragged goatskins appeared from behind the rock. The man had a vast beard, no teeth and a wide grin. Vicente called to him and the two had a rapid conversation at the end of which Vicente turned to Hogan. “He calls himself Javali and says he is sorry, but he did not know we were friends. He asks you to forgive him.”

“Javali?” Hogan asked.

“It means wild boar.” Vicente sighed. “Every man in this countryside gives himself a nickname and looks for a Frenchman to kill.”

“There’s just one of him?” Sharpe asked.

“Just the one.”

“Then he’s either bloody stupid or bloody brave,“ Sharpe said, then succumbed to an embrace from Javali and a gust of foul-smelling breath. The man’s musket looked ancient. The wooden stock, which was bound to the barrel by old-fashioned iron hoops, was split and the hoops themselves were rusted and loose, but Javali had a canvas bag filled with loose powder and an assortment of differently sized musket balls and he insisted on accompanying them when he learned there might be Frenchmen to kill. He had a wicked-looking curved knife stuck into his belt and a small axe hanging by a fraying piece of string.

Sharpe walked on. Javali talked incessantly and Vicente translated some of his story. His real name was Andrea and he was a goatherd from Bouro. He had been an orphan since he was six, and he thought he was now twenty-five years old though he looked much older, and he worked for a dozen families by protecting their animals from lynx and wolves, and he had lived with a woman, he said proudly, but the dragoons had come and they had raped her when he was not there, and his woman had possessed a temper, he said, worse than a goat’s, and she must have drawn a knife on her rapists for they had killed her. Javali did not seem very upset by his woman’s death, but he was still determined to avenge her. He patted the knife and then tapped his groin to show what he had in mind.

Javali at least knew the quickest ways through the high ground. They were traveling well to the north of the road they had left when Harris spotted the horsemen, and that road led through the wide valley that now narrowed as it went eastward. The Cavado twisted beside the road, sometimes vanishing in stands of trees, while streams, fed by the rain, tumbled from the hills to swell the river.

Vicente’s estimate of two days was ruined by the weather and they spent the next night high in the hills, half protected from the rain by the great boulders, and in the morning they walked on and Sharpe saw how the river valley had nearly narrowed to nothing. By mid-morning they were overlooking Salamonde and then, looking back up the valley where the last of the morning mist was vanishing, they saw something else.

They saw an army. It came in a swarm along the road and in the fields either side of the road, a great spread of men and horses in no particular order, a horde that was trying to escape from Portugal and from the British army that was now pursuing them from Braga. “We’ll have to hurry,” Hogan said.

“It’ll take them hours to get up that road,” Sharpe said, nodding toward the village that was built where the valley finally narrowed into a defile from where the road, instead of running on level land, twisted beside the river into the hills. For the moment the French could spread themselves in fields and march with a broad front, but once past Salamonde they were restricted to the narrow and deep-rutted road. Sharpe borrowed Hogan’s good telescope and stared down at the French army. Some units, he could see, marched in good order, but most were straggling loosely. There were no guns, wagons or carriages, so that if Marshal Soult did manage to escape he would have to crawl back into Spain and explain to his master how he had lost everything of value. “There must be twenty, thirty thousand down there,” he said in wonderment as he handed back Hogan’s glass. “It’ll take them the best part of the day to get through that village.

“But they’ve got the devil on their heels,” Hogan pointed out, “and that encourages a man to swiftness.”

They pressed on. A weak sun at last lit the pale hills, though gray showers fell to north and south. Behind them the French were a great dark mass pressing up against the valley’s narrow end where, like grains of sand trickling through an hourglass, they streamed through Salamonde. Smoke rose from the village as the passing troops plundered and burned.

The French road to safety began to climb now. It followed the defile made by the white-watered Cavado which twisted out of the hills in great loops and sometimes leaped down series of precipices in misted waterfalls. A squadron of dragoons led the French retreat, riding ahead to smell out any partisans who might try to ambush the vast column. If the dragoons saw Hogan and his men high on the northern hills they made no effort to reach them for the riflemen and Portuguese soldiers were too far away and much too high, and then the French had other things to worry about for, late in the afternoon, the dragoons arrived at the Ponte Nova.

Sharpe was already above the Ponte Nova, gazing down at the bridge. It was here that the French retreat might be stopped, for the tiny village that clung to the high ground just beyond the bridge bristled with men and, on first seeing the Ponte Nova from high in the hills, Hogan had been jubilant. “We’ve done it!” he said. “We’ve done it!” But then he trained his telescope on the bridge and his good mood died. “They’re ordenanqa,” he said, “not a proper uniform there.” He gazed for another minute. “There’s not a single bloody gun,” he said bitterly, “and the bloody fools haven’t even destroyed the bridge.”

Sharpe borrowed Hogan’s glass to stare at the bridge. It possessed two hefty stone abutments, one on each bank, and the river was spanned by two great beams over which a wooden roadway had once been laid. The ordenanqa, presumably not wanting to rebuild the bridge entirely once the French were defeated, had removed the plank roadway, but left the two enormous beams in place. Then, at the edge of the village on the bridge’s eastern side, they had dug trenches from which they could smother the half-dismantled bridge with musket fire. “It might serve,” Sharpe grunted.

“And what would you do if you were the French?” Hogan asked.

Sharpe stared down into the defile, then looked back westward. He could see the dark snake of the French army coming along the road, but further back there was no sign yet of any British pursuit. “Wait till dark,” he said, “then attack across the beams.” The ordenanqa was enthusiastic, but it was little more than a rabble, ill armed and with scarce any training, and such troops might easily be panicked. Worse, there were not many ordenanqa at the Ponte Nova. There would have been more than enough if the bridge had been fully broken, but the twin beams were an invitation to the French. Sharpe trained the telescope on the bridge again. “Those beams are wide enough to walk on,” he said. “They’ll attack in the night. Hope to catch the defenders sleeping.”

“Let’s just hope the ordenanga stay awake,” Hogan said. He slid off the mule. “And what we do,” he said, “is wait.”

“Wait?”

“If they are stopped here,” Hogan explained, “then this is as good a place as any to watch out for Mister Christopher. And if they get across … ?” He shrugged.

“I should go down there,” Sharpe said, “and tell them to get rid of those beams.”

“And how will they accomplish it?” Hogan wanted to know. “With dragoons firing at them from the other bank?” The dragoons had dismounted and spread along the western bank and Hogan could see the white puffs of their carbine smoke. “It’s too late to help, Richard,” he said, “too late. You stay here.”

They made a rough camp in the boulders. Night fell swiftly because the rain had come again and the clouds shrouded the setting sun. Sharpe let his men light fires so they could brew tea. The French would see the fires, but that did not matter for as the darkness shrouded the hills a myriad flames showed in the high grounds. The partisans were gathering, they were coming from all across northern Portugal to help destroy the French army.

An army that was cold, wet, hungry, bone-weary, and trapped.

Major Dulong still smarted from his defeat at Vila Real de Zedes. The bruise on his face had faded, but the memory of the repulse hurt. He sometimes thought of the rifleman who had beaten him and wished the man was in the 31st Leger. He also wished that the 31st Leger could be armed with rifles, but that was like wishing for the moon because the Emperor would not hear of rifles. Too fiddly, too slow, a woman’s weapon, he said. Vive le fusil. Now, at the old bridge called Ponte Nova, where the French retreat was blocked, Dulong had been summoned to Marshal Soult because the Marshal had been told that this was the best and bravest soldier in all his army. Dulong looked it, the Marshal thought, with his ragged uniform and scarred face. Dulong had taken the bright feather plume from his shako, wrapped it in oilcloth and tied it to his saber scabbard. He had hoped to wear that plume when his regiment marched into Lisbon, but it seemed that was not to be. Not this spring, anyway.

Soult walked with Dulong up a small knoll from where they could see the bridge with its two beams, and see and hear the jeering ordenanga beyond. “There are not many of them,” Soult remarked, “three hundred?”

“More,” Dulong grunted.

“So how do you get rid of them?”

Dulong gazed at the bridge through a telescope. The beams were both about a meter wide, more than enough, though the rain would doubtless make them slippery. He raised the glass to see that the Portuguese had dug trenches from which they could fire directly along the beams. But the night would be dark, he thought, and the moon clouded. “I would take a hundred volunteers,” he said, “fifty for each beam, and go at midnight.” The rain was getting worse and the dusk was cold. The Portuguese muskets, Dulong knew, would be soaked and the men behind them chilled to the bone. “A hundred men,” he promised the Marshal, “and the bridge is yours.”

Soult nodded. “If you succeed, Major,” he said, “then send me word. But if you fail? I do not want to hear.” He turned and walked away.

Dulong went back to the 31st Leger and he called for volunteers and was not surprised when the whole regiment stepped forward, so he chose a dozen good sergeants and let them pick the rest and he warned them that the fight would be messy, cold and wet. “We will use the bayonet,” he said, “because the muskets won’t fire in this weather and, besides, once you have fired one shot you will not have time to reload.” He thought about reminding them that they owed him a display of bravery after their reluctance to advance into the rifle fire on the watchtower hill at Vila Real de Zedes, then decided they all knew that anyway and so held his tongue.

The French lit no fires. They grumbled, but Marshal Soult insisted. Across the river the ordenanga believed they were safe and so they made a fire in one of the cottages high above the bridge where their commanders could keep warm. The cottage had one small window and just enough flame light escaped through the unshuttered glass to reflect off the wet cross beams that spanned the river. The feeble reflections shimmered in the rain, but they served as a guide for Dulong’s volunteers.

They went at midnight. Two columns, fifty men in each, and Dulong told them they must run across the bridge and he led the right-hand column, his saber drawn, and the only sounds were the river hissing beneath, the wind shrieking in the rocks, the pounding of their feet and a brief scream as one man slipped and fell into the Cavado. Then Dulong was climbing the slope and found the first trench empty and he guessed the ordenanga had taken shelter in the small hovels that lay just beyond the second trench and the fools had not even left a sentry by the bridge. Even a dog would have served to warn them of a French attack, but men and dogs alike were sheltering from the weather. “Sergeant!” the Major hissed. “The houses! Clean them out!”

The Portuguese were still asleep when the Frenchmen came. They arrived with bayonets and no mercy. The first two houses fell swiftly, their occupants killed scarcely before they were awake, but their screams alerted the rest of the ordenanqa who ran into the darkness to be met by the best-trained infantry in the French army. The bayonets did their work and the cries of the victims completed the victory because the survivors, confused and terrified by the terrible sounds in the dark night, fled. By a quarter past midnight Dulong was warming himself by the fire that had lit his way to victory.

Marshal Soult took the medal of the Legion d’Honneur from his own coat and pinned it to the turnback of Major Dulong’s frayed jacket. Then, with tears in his eyes, the Marshal kissed the Major on both cheeks. Because the miracle had happened and the first bridge belonged to the French.

Kate wrapped herself in a damp saddle blanket then stood beside her tired horse and watched dully as French infantry cut down pine trees, slashed off their branches, then carried the trimmed trunks to the bridge. More timber was fetched from the small cottages and the ridge beams were just long enough to span the bridge’s roadway, but it all took time, for the rough timbers had to be lashed together if the soldiers, horses and mules were to cross in safety. The soldiers who were not working huddled together against the rain and wind. It felt like winter suddenly. Musket shots sounded far away and Kate knew it was the country people come to shoot at the hated invaders.

A cantiniere, one of the tough women who sold the soldiers coffee, tea, needles, thread and dozens of other small comforts, took pity on Kate and brought her a tin mug of lukewarm coffee laced with brandy. “If they take much longer”-she nodded at the soldiers rebuilding the bridge’s roadway-”we’ll all be on our backs with an English dragoon on top. So at least we’ll get something out of this campaign!” She laughed and went back to her two mules which were laden with her wares. Kate sipped the coffee. She had never been so cold, wet or miserable. And she knew she only had herself to blame.

Williamson stared at the coffee and Kate, unsettled by his gaze, moved to the far side of her horse. She disliked Williamson, disliked the hungry look in his eyes and feared the threat in his naked desire of her.

Were all men animals? Christopher, for all his elegant civility by day, liked to inflict pain at night, but then Kate remembered the single soft kiss that Sharpe had given her and she felt the tears come to her eyes. And Lieutenant Vicente, she thought, was a gentle man. Christopher liked to say how there were two sides in the world, just as there were black pieces and white pieces on a chessboard, and Kate knew she had chosen the wrong side. Worse, she did not know how she was to find her way back to the right one.

Christopher strode back down the stalled column. “Is that coffee?” he asked cheerfully. “Good, I need something warming.” He took the mug from her, drained it, then tossed it away. “Another few minutes, my dear,” he said, “and we’ll be on our way. One more bridge after this, then we’ll be over the hills and far away in Spain. You’ll have a proper bed again, eh? And a bath. How are you feeling?”

“Cold.”

“Hard to believe it’s May, eh? Worse than England. Still, don’t they say rain’s good for the complexion? You’ll be prettier than ever, my dearest.” He paused as some muskets sounded from the west. The noise rattled loud for a few seconds, echoing back and forth between the defile’s steep sides, then faded. “Chasing off bandits,” Christopher said. “It’s too soon for the pursuit to catch us up.”

“I pray they do catch us,” Kate said.

“Don’t be ridiculous, my dear. Besides, we’ve got a brigade of good infantry and a pair of cavalry regiments as rearguard.”

“We?” Kate asked indignantly. “I’m English!”

Christopher gave her a long-suffering smile. “As am I, dearest, but what we want above all is peace. Peace! And perhaps this retreat will be just the thing to persuade the French to leave Portugal alone. That’s what I’m working on. Peace.”

There was a pistol bolstered in Christopher’s saddle just behind Kate and she was tempted to pull the weapon free, thrust it into his belly and pull the trigger, but she had never fired a gun, did not know if the long-barrelled pistol was loaded, and besides, what would happen to her if Christopher were not here? Williamson would maul her. she thnnaht and for some reason she remembered the letter she had succeeded in leaving for Lieutenant Sharpe, putting it on the House Beautiful’s mantel without Christopher seeing what she was doing. She thought now what a stupid letter it was. What was she trying to tell Sharpe? And why him? What did she expect him to do?

She stared up the far hill. There were men on the high crest line and Christopher turned to see what she was looking at. “More of the scum,” he said.

“Patriots,” Kate insisted.

“Peasants with rusted muskets,” Christopher said acidly, “who torture their prisoners and have no idea, none, what principles are at stake in this war. They are the forces of old Europe,” he insisted, “superstitious and ignorant. The enemies of progress.” He grimaced, then unbuckled one of his saddlebags to make sure that his black-fronted red uniform jacket was inside. If the French were forced to surrender then that coat was his passport. He would take to the hills and if any partisans accosted him he would persuade them he was an Englishman escaping from the French.

“We’re moving, sir,” Williamson said. “Bridge is up, sir.” He knuckled his forehead to Christopher, then turned his leering face on Kate. “Help you onto the horse, ma’am?”

“I can manage,” Kate said coldly, but she was forced to drop the damp blanket to climb into the saddle and she knew that both Christopher and Williamson were staring at her legs in their tight hussar breeches.

A cheer came from the bridge as the first cavalrymen led their horses over the precarious roadway. The sound prompted the infantry to stand, pick up their muskets and packs, and shuffle toward the makeshift crossing.

“One more bridge,” Christopher assured Kate, “and we’re safe.”

Just one more bridge. The Leaper.

And above them, high in the hills, Richard Sharpe was already marching toward it. Toward the last bridge in Portugal. The Saltador.