Author: Bernard Cornwell
Category: Historical
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The barrels in the village taverns were not the only danger. The cellar of the Quinta was full of port barrels and racks of bottled white wine, and Williamson managed to find the key that was supposedly hidden in a kitchen jar, then he and Sims and Gataker got helplessly drunk on Savages’ finest, a carouse that ended well past midnight with the three men hurling stones at the Quinta’s shutters.
The three had ostensibly been on picquet under the eye of Dodd, a reliable man, and Sharpe dealt with him first. “Why didn’t you report them?”
“I didn’t know where they were, sir.” Dodd kept his eyes on the wall above Sharpe’s head. He was lying, of course, but only because the men always protected each other. Sharpe had when he was in the ranks and he did not expect anything else of Matthew Dodd, just as Dodd did not expect anything except a punishment.
Sharpe looked at Harper. “Got work for him, Sergeant?”
“The cook was complaining that all the kitchen copper needed a proper cleaning, sir.”
“Make him sweat,” Sharpe said, “and no wine ration for a week.” The men were entitled to a pint of rum a day and in the absence of the raw spirit Sharpe was doling out red from a barrel he had commandeered from the Quinta’s cellar. He punished Sims and Gataker by making them wear full uniform and greatcoats and then march up and down the drive with rucksacks filled with stones. They did it under Harper’s enthusiastic eye and when they vomited with exhaustion and the effects of a hangover the Sergeant kicked them to their feet, made them clear the vomit off the driveway with their own hands, and then keep marching.
Vicente arranged for a mason from the village to brick up the wine cellar’s entrance, and while that was being done, and while Dodd scrubbed the coppers with sand and vinegar, Sharpe took Williamson up into the woods. He was tempted to flog the man, for he was very close to hating Williamson, but Sharpe had once been flogged himself and he was reluctant to inflict the same punishment. Instead he found an open space between some laurels and used his sword to scratch two lines in the mossy turf. The lines were a yard long and a yard apart. “You don’t like me, do you, Williamson?”
Williamson said nothing. He just stared at the lines with red eyes. He knew what they were.
“What are my three rules, Williamson?”
Williamson looked up sullenly. He was a big man, heavy-faced with long side whiskers, a broken nose and smallpox scars. He came from Leicester where he had been convicted of stealing two candlesticks from St. Nicholas’s Church and offered the chance to enlist rather than hang. “Don’t thieve,” he said in a low voice, “don’t get drunk and fight proper.”
“Are you a thief?”
“No, sir.”
“You bloody are, Williamson. That’s why you’re in the army. And you got drunk without permission. But can you fight?”
“You know I can, sir.”
Sharpe unbuckled his sword belt and let it and the weapon drop, then took off his shako and green jacket and threw them down. “Tell me why you don’t like me,” he demanded.
Williamson stared off into the laurels.
“Come on!” Sharpe said. “Say what you bloody like. You’re not going to be punished for answering a question.”
Williamson looked back at him. “We shouldn’t be here!” he blurted out.
“You’re right.”
Williamson blinked at that, but carried on. “Ever since Captain Murray died, sir, we’ve been out on our own! We should be back with the battalion. It’s where we belong. You were never our officer, sir. Never!”
“I am now.”
“It ain’t right.”
“So you want to go home to England?”
“The battalion’s there, so I do, aye.”
“But there’s a war on, Williamson. A bloody war. And we’re stuck in it. We didn’t ask to be here, don’t even want to be here, but we are. And we’re staying.” Williamson looked at Sharpe resentfully, but said nothing. “But you can go home, Williamson,” Sharpe said and the heavy face looked up, interested. “There are three ways for you to go home. One, we get orders for England. Two, you get wounded so badly that they send you home. And three, you put your feet on the scratch and you fight me. Win or lose, Williamson, I promise to send you home as soon as I can by the first bloody ship we find. All you have to do is fight me.” Sharpe walked to one of the lines and put his toes against it. This was how the pugilists fought, they toed the line and then punched it out with bare fists until one man dropped in bloody, battered exhaustion. “Fight me properly, mind,” Sharpe said, “no dropping after the first hit. You’ll have to draw blood to prove you’re trying. Hit me on the nose, that’ll do it.” He waited. Williamson licked his lips.
“Come on!” Sharpe snarled. “Fight me!”
“You’re an officer,” Williamson said.
“Not now, I’m not. And no one’s watching. Just you and me, Williamson, and you don’t like me and I’m giving you a chance to thump me. And you do it properly and I’ll have you home by summer.” He did not know how he would keep that promise, but nor did he think he would have to try, for Williamson, he knew, was remembering the epic fight between Harper and Sharpe, a fight that had left both men reeling, yet Sharpe had won it and the riflemen had watched it and they learned something about Sharpe that day.
And Williamson did not want to learn the lesson again. “I won’t fight an officer,” he said with assumed dignity.
Sharpe turned his back, picked up his jacket. “Then find Sergeant Harper,” he said, “and tell him you’re to do the same punishment as Sims and Gataker.” He turned back. “On the double!”
Williamson ran. His shame at refusing the fight might make him more dangerous, but it would also diminish his influence over the other men who, even though they would never know what had happened in the woods, would sense that Williamson had been humiliated. Sharpe buckled his belt and walked slowly back. He worried about his men, worried that he would lose their loyalty, worried that he was proving a bad officer. He remembered Blas Vivar and wished he had the Spanish officer’s quiet ability to enforce obedience through sheer presence, but perhaps that effortless authority came with experience. At least none of his men had deserted. They were all present, except for Tarrant and the few who were back in Coimbra’s military hospital recovering from the fever.
It was a month now since Oporto had fallen. The fort on the hilltop was almost finished and, to Sharpe’s surprise, the men had enjoyed the hard labor. Daniel Hagman was walking again, albeit slowly, but he was mended enough to work and Sharpe placed a kitchen table in the sun where, one by one, Hagman stripped, cleaned and oiled every rifle. The fugitives who had fled from Oporto had now returned to the city or found refuge elsewhere, but the French were making new fugitives. Wherever they were ambushed by partisans they sacked the closest villages and, even without the provocation of ambush, they plundered farms mercilessly to feed themselves. More and more folk came to Vila Real de Zedes, drawn there by rumors that the French had agreed to spare the village. No one knew why the French should do such a thing, though some of the older women said it was because the whole valley was under the protection of Saint Joseph whose life-size statue was in the church, and the village’s priest, Father Josefa, encouraged the belief. He even had the statue taken from the church, hung with fading narcissi and crowned with a laurel wreath, and then carried about the village boundary to show the saint the precise extent of the lands needing his guardianship. Vila Real de Zedes, folk believed, was a sanctuary from the war and ordained as such by God.
May arrived with rain and wind. The last of the blossoms were blown from the trees to make damp rills of pink and white petals in the grass. Still the French did not come and Manuel Lopes reckoned they were simply too busy to bother with Vila Real de Zedes. “They’ve got troubles,” he said happily. “Silveira’s giving them a bellyache at Amarante and the road to Vigo has been closed by partisans. They’re cut off! No way home! They’re not going to worry us here.” Lopes frequently went
to the nearby towns where he posed as a peddler selling religious trinkets and he brought back news of the French troops. “They patrol the roads,” he said, “they get drunk at night and they wish they were back home.”
“And they look for food,” Sharpe said.
“They do that too,” Lopes agreed.
“And one day,” Sharpe said, “when they’re hungry, they’ll come here.”
“Colonel Christopher won’t let them,” Lopes said. He was walking with Sharpe along the Quinta’s drive, watched by Harris and Cooper who stood guard at the gate, the closest Sharpe allowed his Protestant riflemen to the village. Rain was threatening. Gray sheets of it fell across the northern hills and Sharpe had twice heard rumbles of thunder which might have been the sound of the guns at Amarante, but seemed too loud. “I shall leave soon,” Lopes announced.
“Back to Bragança?”
“Amarante. My men are recovered. It is time to fight again.”
“You could do one thing before you go,” Sharpe said, ignoring the implied criticism in Lopes’s last words. “Tell those refugees to get out of the village. Tell them to go home. Tell them Saint Joseph is overworked and he won’t protect them when the French come.”
Lopes shook his head. “The French aren’t coming,” he insisted.
“And when they do,” Sharpe continued, just as insistently, “I can’t defend the village. I don’t have enough men.”
Lopes looked disgusted. “You’ll just defend the Quinta,” he suggested, “because it belongs to an English family.”
“I don’t give a damn about the Quinta,” Sharpe said angrily. “I’ll be up on that hilltop trying to stay alive. For Christ’s sake, there’s less than sixty of us! And the French will send fifteen hundred.”
“They won’t come,” Lopes said. He reached up to pluck some shriveled white blossom from a tree. “I never did trust Savages’ port,” he said.
“Trust?”
“An elder tree,” Lopes said, showing Sharpe the petals. “The bad port makers put elderberry juice in the wine to make it look richer.” He tossed away the flowers and Sharpe had a sudden memory of that day in Oporto, the day the refugees drowned when the French had taken the city, and he remembered how Christopher had been about to write him the order to go back across the Douro and the cannonball had struck the tree to shower pinkish-red petals which the Colonel had thought were cherry blossoms. And Sharpe remembered the look on Christopher’s face at the mention of the name Judas.
“Jesus!” Sharpe said.
“What?” Lopes was taken aback by the force of the imprecation.
“He’s a bloody traitor,” Sharpe said.
“Who?”
“The bloody Colonel,” Sharpe said. It was only instinct that had so suddenly persuaded him that Christopher was betraying his country, an instinct grounded in the memory of the Colonel’s look of outrage when Sharpe said the blossoms came from a Judas tree. Ever since then Sharpe had been wavering between a half suspicion of Christopher’s treachery and a vague belief that perhaps the Colonel was engaged in some mysterious diplomatic work, but the recollection of that look on Christopher’s face and the realization that there had been fear as well as outrage in it convinced Sharpe. Christopher was not just a thief, but a traitor. “You’re right,” he told an astonished Lopes, “it is time to fight. Harris!” He turned toward the gate.
“Sir?”
“Find Sergeant Harper for me. And Lieutenant Vicente.”
Vicente came first and Sharpe could not explain why he was so certain that Christopher was a traitor, but Vicente was not inclined to debate the point. He hated Christopher because he had married Kate, and he was as bored as Sharpe at the undemanding life at the Quinta. “Get food,” Sharpe urged him. “Go to the village, ask them to bake bread, buy as much salted and smoked meat as you can. I want every man to have five days’ rations by nightfall.”
Harper was more cautious. “I thought you had orders, sir.”
“I do, Pat, from General Cradock.”
“Jesus, sir, you don’t disobey a general’s orders.”
“And who fetched those orders?” Sharpe asked. “Christopher did. So he lied to Cradock just as he’s lied to everyone else.” He was not certain of that, he could not be certain, but nor could he see the sense in just dallying at the Quinta. He would go south and trust that Captain Hogan would protect him from General Cradock’s wrath. “We’ll march at dusk tonight,” he told Harper. “I want you to check everyone’s equipment and ammunition.”
Harper smelt the air. “We’re going to have rain, sir, bad rain.”
“That’s why God made our skins waterproof,” Sharpe said.
“I was thinking we might do better to wait till after midnight, sir. Give the rain a chance to blow over.”
Sharpe shook his head. “I want to get out of here, Pat. I feel bad about this place suddenly. We’ll take everyone south. Toward the river.”
“I thought the Crapauds had stripped out all the boats?”
“I don’t want to go east”—Sharpe jerked his head toward Amarante where rumor said a battle still raged—“and there’s nothing but Crapauds to the west.” The north was all mountain, rock and starvation, but to the south lay the river and he knew British forces were somewhere beyond the Douro and Sharpe had been thinking that the French could not have destroyed every boat along its long, rocky banks. “We’ll find a boat,” he promised Harper.
“It’ll be dark tonight, sir. Lucky even to find the way.”
“For God’s sake,” Sharpe said, irritated with Harper’s pessimism, “we’ve been patrolling this place for a bloody month! We can find our way south.”
By evening they had two sacks of bread, some rock-hard smoked goat meat, two cheeses and a bag of beans that Sharpe distributed among the men, then he had an inspiration and went to the Quinta’s kitchen and stole two large tins of tea. He reckoned it was time Kate did something for her country and there were few finer gestures than donating good China tea to riflemen. He gave one tin to Harper and shoved the other into his pack. It had started to rain, the drops pounding on the stable roof and cascading off the tiles into the cobbled yard. Daniel Hagman watched the rain from the stable door. “I feel just fine, sir,” he reassured Sharpe.
“We can make a stretcher, Dan, if you feel poorly.”
“Lord, no, sir! I’m right as rain, right as rain.”
No one wanted to leave in this downpour, but Sharpe was determined to use every hour of darkness to make his way toward the Douro. There was a chance, he thought, of reaching the river by midday tomorrow and he would let the men rest while he scouted the river bank for a means to cross. “Packs on!” he ordered. “Ready yourselves.” He watched Williamson for any sign of reluctance, but the man got a move on with the rest. Vicente had distributed wine corks and the men pushed them into the muzzles of their rifles or muskets. The weapons were not loaded because in this rain the priming would turn to gray slush. There was more grumbling when Sharpe ordered them out of the stables, but they hunched their shoulders and followed him out of the courtyard and up into the wood where the oaks and silver birches thrashed under the assault of wind and rain. Sharpe was soaked to the skin before they had gone a quarter-mile, but he consoled himself that no one else was likely to be out in this vile weather. The evening light was fading fast and early, stolen by the black, thick-bellied clouds that scraped against the jagged outcrop of the ruined watchtower. Sharpe was following a path that would lead around the western side of the watchtower’s hill and he glanced up at the old masonry as they emerged from the trees and thought ruefully of all that work.
He called a halt to let the rear of the line catch up. Daniel Hagman was evidently holding up well. Harper, two smoked legs of goat hanging from his belt, climbed up to join Sharpe, who was watching the arriving men from a vantage point a few feet higher than the path. “Bloody rain,” Harper said.
“It’ll stop eventually.”
“Is that so?” Har
per asked innocently.
It was then Sharpe saw the gleam of light in the vineyards. It was not lightning, it was too dull, too small and too close to the ground, but he knew he had not imagined it and he cursed Christopher for stealing his telescope. He gazed at the spot where the light had shown so briefly, but saw nothing.
“What is it?” Vicente had climbed to join him.
“Thought I saw a flash of light,” Sharpe said.
“Just rain,” Harper said dismissively.
“Perhaps it was a piece of broken glass,” Vicente suggested. “I once found some Roman glass in a field near Entre-os-Rios. There were two broken vases and some coins of Septimus Severus.”
Sharpe was not listening. He was watching the vineyards.
“I gave the coins to the seminary in Porto,” Vicente went on, raising his voice to make himself heard over the seething rain, “because the Fathers keep a small museum there.”
“The sun doesn’t reflect off glass when it’s raining,” Sharpe said, but something had reflected out there, more like a smear of light, a damp gleam, and he searched the hedgerow between the vines and suddenly saw it again. He swore.
“What is it?” Vicente asked.
“Dragoons,” Sharpe said, “dozens of the bastards. Dismounted and watching us.” The gleam had been the dull light reflecting from one of the brass helmets. There must have been a tear in the helmet’s protective cloth cover and the man, running along the hedge, had served as a beacon, but now that Sharpe had seen the first green uniform among the green vines, he could see dozens more. “The bastards were going to ambush us,” he said, and he felt a reluctant admiration for an enemy who could use such vile weather, then he worked out that the dragoons must have approached Vila Real de Zedes during the day and somehow he had missed them, but they would not have missed the significance of the work he was doing on the hilltop and they must know that the hog-backed ridge was his refuge. “Sergeant!” he snapped at Harper. “Up the hill now! Now!” And pray they were not too late.