“You’re not such an idiot after all, are you?” Sharpe said. “In fact you’re a bloody genius, Ronnie.”
There was a boat. Sharpe had seen the ferry burned and sunk on his first visit to Barca d’Avintas, but now realized there must have been two craft and this was the second. It was a flat, wide and cumbersome vessel, the kind of boat that could carry a small flock of sheep or even a carriage and its horses, and it had been weighted with stones and sunk in this wide ditch-like creek that jutted under the trees to make a small backwater. Sharpe wondered why the villagers had not shown it to him before and guessed that they feared all soldiers and so they had hidden their most valuable boat until peaceful times returned. The French had destroyed every other boat and had never guessed that this second ferry still existed. “You’re a bloody genius,” Sharpe told Ronnie again, and he gave him the last of his bread, which was the only gift he had.
But he also had a boat.
And then he had something else for the thunder he had heard so distantly the previous day sounded again. Only this time it was close and it was unmistakable and it was not thunder at all and Christopher had lied and there was no peace in Portugal.
It was cannon fire.
Chapter 8
THE SOUND OF THE FIRING was coming from the west, channeled up the steep-sided river valley, and Sharpe could not tell whether the battle was being fought on the northern or southern bank of the Douro. Nor could he even tell whether it was a battle. Perhaps the French had established batteries to protect the city against an attack from the sea and those batteries might just be firing at inquisitive frigates. Or maybe the guns were merely practice firing. But one thing was certain, he would never know what the guns were doing unless he got closer.
He ran back to the village, followed by the shambling Ronnie who was bellowing his inarticulate achievement to the world. Sharpe found Vicente. “The ferry’s still here,” Sharpe said, “he showed me.” He pointed to Ronnie.
“But the guns?” Vicente was bemused.
“We’re going to find out what they’re doing,” Sharpe said, “but ask the villagers to raise the ferry. We might yet need it. But we’ll go toward the city.”
“All of us?” Vicente asked.
“All of us. But tell them I want that boat floating by mid-morning.”
Ronnie’s mother, a shrunken and bent woman swathed in black, retrieved her son from Sharpe’s side and berated him in a shrill voice. Sharpe gave her the last chunk of cheese from Harper’s pack, explained that Ronnie was a hero, then led his motley group westward along the river bank.
There was plenty of cover. Orchards, olive groves, cattle sheds and small vineyards were crowded on the narrow piece of level land beside the Douro’s northern bank. The cannons, hidden by the loom of the great hill on which the flat-roofed building stood, were sporadic. Their firing would swell to a battle intensity then fade away. For minutes at a time there would be no shots, or just a single gun would fire and the sound of it would echo off the southern hills, rebound from the northern and bounce its way down the valley.
“Perhaps,” Vicente suggested, pointing up to the great white building, “we should go to the seminary.”
“Frogs will be there,” Sharpe said. He was crouching beside a hedge and for some reason kept his voice very low. It seemed extraordinary that there were no French picquets, not one, but he was certain the French must have put men into the big building that dominated the river east of the city as effectively as a castle. “What did you say it was?”
“A seminary.” Vicente saw Sharpe was puzzled. “A place where priests are trained. I thought of becoming a priest once.”
“Good God,” Sharpe said, surprised, “you wanted to be a priest?”
“I thought of it,” Vicente said defensively. “Do you not like priests?”
“Not much.”
“Then I’m glad I became a lawyer,” Vicente said with a smile.
“You’re no lawyer, Jorge,” Sharpe said, “you’re a bloody soldier like the rest of us.” He offered that compliment and then turned as the last of his men came across the small meadow to crouch behind the hedge. If the French did have men in the seminary, he thought, then either they were fast asleep or, more likely, they had seen the blue and green uniforms and confused them with their own jackets. Did they think the Portuguese blue were French coats? The Portuguese blue was darker than the French infantry coats and the Rifle green was much darker than the dragoons’ coats, but at a distance the uniforms might be confused. Or was there no one in the building? Sharpe took out the small telescope and stared for a long time. The seminary was huge, a great white block, four stories high, and there had to be at least ninety windows in the south wall alone, but he could see no movement in any of them, nor was anyone on the flat roof which had a red tile coping and surely provided the best lookout post east of the city.
“Shall we go there?” Vicente prompted Sharpe.
“Maybe,” Sharpe responded cautiously. He was tempted because the building would offer a marvelous view of the city, but he still could not believe the French would leave the seminary empty. “We’ll go further along the bank first, though.”
He led with his riflemen. Their green jackets blended better with the leaves, offering them a small advantage if there was a French picquet ahead, but they saw no one. Nor did Sharpe see any activity on the southern bank, yet the guns were still firing and now, over the loom of the seminary hill, he could see a dirty white cloud of gun smoke being pumped into the river valley.
There were more buildings now, many of them small houses built close to the river, and their gardens were a maze of fences, vines and olive trees that hid Sharpe’s men as they went on westward. Above Sharpe, to his right, the seminary was a great threat in the sky, its serried windows blank and black, and Sharpe could not rid himself of the fear that a horde of French soldiers were hidden behind that sun-glossed cliff of stone and glass, yet every time he looked he saw no movement.
Then, suddenly, there was a single French soldier just ahead. Sharpe had turned a corner and there the man was. He was in the middle of a cobbled slipway that led from a boat builder’s shed to the river, and he was crouching to play with a puppy. Sharpe desperately beckoned for his men to stop. The enemy was an infantryman, and he was only seven or eight paces away, utterly oblivious, his back to Sharpe and his shako and musket on the cobblestones, letting the puppy playfully nip his right hand. And if there was one French soldier there had to be more. Had to be! Sharpe stared past the man to where a stand of poplars and thick bushes edged the slipway’s far side. Was there a patrol there? He could see no sign of one, nor any activity among the boatyard’s tumbledown sheds.
Then the Frenchman either heard the scuff of a boot or else sensed he was being watched for he stood and turned, then realized his musket was still on the ground and he stooped for it, then froze when Sharpe’s rifle pointed at his face. Sharpe shook his head, then jerked the rifle to indicate that the Frenchman should stand up straight. The man obeyed. He was a youngster, scarce older than Pendleton or Perkins, with a round, guileless face. He looked scared and took an involuntary step back as Sharpe came fast toward him, then he whimpered as Sharpe tugged him by the jacket back around the corner. Sharpe pushed him to the ground, took his bayonet from its scabbard and threw it into the river. “Tie him up,” he ordered Tongue.
“Slit his throat,” Tongue suggested, “it’s easier.”
“Tie him up,” Sharpe insisted, “gag him, and make a good job of it.” He beckoned Vicente forward. “He’s the only one I’ve seen.”
“There must be more,” Vicente declared.
“God knows where they are.”
Sharpe went back to the corner, peered around and saw nothing except the puppy which was now trying to drag the Frenchman’s musket across the cobbles by its sling. He gestured for Harper to join him. “I can’t see anyone,” Sharpe whispered.
“He can’t have been alone,” Harper said.
/> Yet still no one moved. “I want to get into those trees, Pat,” Sharpe hissed, nodding across the slipway.
“Run like shit, sir,” Harper said, and the two of them sprinted across the open space and threw themselves into the trees. No musket flared, no one shouted, but the puppy, thinking it was a game, followed them. “Go back to your mother!” Harper hissed at the dog which just barked at him.
“Jesus!” Sharpe said, not because of the noise the dog was making, but because he could see boats. The French were supposed to have destroyed or taken every vessel along the Douro, but in front of him, stranded by the falling tide on the muddy outer bank of a great bend in the river, were three huge wine barges. Three! He wondered if they had been holed and, while Harper kept the puppy quiet, he waded through the sticky mud and hauled himself aboard the nearest barge. He was hidden from anyone on the north bank by thick trees, which was perhaps why the French had somehow missed the three vessels and, better still, the barge Sharpe had boarded seemed quite undamaged. There was a good deal of water in its bilge, but when Sharpe tasted it he found it was fresh, so it was rainwater, not the salty tidewater that swept twice daily up the Douro. Sharpe splashed through the flooded bilge and found no gaping rents torn by axes, then he heaved himself up onto a side deck where six great sweeps were lashed together with fraying lengths of rope. There was even a small skiff stored upside down at the stern with a pair of ancient oars, cracked and bleached, lodged halfway beneath its hull.
“Sir!” Harper hissed from the bank. “Sir!” He was pointing across the river and Sharpe looked over the water and saw a red coat. A single horseman, evidently British, stared back at him. The man had a cocked hat so was an officer, but when Sharpe waved he did not return the gesture. Sharpe guessed the man was confused by his green coat.
“Get everyone here, now,” Sharpe ordered Harper, then looked back to the horseman. For a second or two he wondered if it was Colonel Christopher, but this man was heavier and his horse, like most British horses, had a docked tail while Christopher, aping the French, had left his horse’s tail uncut. The man, who was sitting his horse beneath a tree, turned and looked as if he was speaking to someone, though Sharpe could see no one else on the opposite bank, then the man looked back to Sharpe and gestured vigorously toward the three boats.
Sharpe hesitated. It was a safe bet that the man was senior to him and if he crossed the river he would find himself back in the iron discipline of the army and no longer free to act as he wished. If he sent any of his men it would be the same, but then he thought of Luis and he summoned the barber, helping him up over the barge’s heavy gunwale. “Can you manage a small boat?” he asked.
Luis looked momentarily alarmed, then nodded firmly. “I can, yes.”
“Then go over the river and find out what that British officer wants. Tell him I’m reconnoitering the seminary. And tell him there’s another boat at Barca d’Avintas.” Sharpe was making a swift guess that the British had advanced north and had been stopped by the Douro. He assumed the cannonade was from the guns firing at each other across the river, but without boats the British would be helpless. Where the hell was the bloody navy?
Harper, Macedo and Luis manhandled the skiff over the gunwale and down the glutinous mud into the river. The tide was rising, but it still had some way to go before it reached the barges. Luis took the oars, settled himself on the thwart and, with admirable skill, pulled away from the bank. He looked over his shoulder to judge his direction, then sculled vigorously. Sharpe saw another horseman appear behind the first, the second man also in red coat and black cocked hat, and he felt the bindings of the army reaching out to snare him so he jumped off the barge and waded through the mud to the bank. “You stay here,” he ordered Vicente, “I’ll look up the hill.”
For a moment Vicente seemed ready to argue, then he accepted the arrangement and Sharpe beckoned his riflemen to follow him. As they disappeared into the trees Sharpe looked back to see Luis was almost at the other bank, then Sharpe pushed through a stand of laurel and saw the road in front of him. This was the road by which he had escaped from Oporto and, to his left, he could see the houses where Vicente had saved his bacon. He could see no French. He stared again at the seminary, but nothing moved there. To hell with it, he thought, just go.
He led his men in skirmish order up the hill, which offered little cover. A few straggly trees broke the pasture and a dilapidated shed stood halfway up, but otherwise it was a deathtrap if there were any Frenchmen in the big building. Sharpe knew he should have exercised more caution, but no one fired from the windows, no one challenged him, and he quickened his pace so that he felt the pain in his leg muscles because the slope was so steep.
Then, suddenly, he had arrived safe at the base of the seminary. The ground floor had small barred windows and seven arched doors. Sharpe tried a door and found it locked and so solid that when he kicked it he only succeeded in hurting himself. He crouched and waited for the laggards among his men to catch up. He could see westward across a valley that lay between the seminary and the city and he could see where the French guns, at the top of Oporto’s hill, were shooting across the river, but their target was hidden by a hill on the southern bank. A huge convent stood on the obscuring hill, the same convent, Sharpe remembered, where the Portuguese guns had duelled with the French on the day the city fell.
“All here,” Harper told him.
Sharpe followed the seminary wall which was made of massive blocks of stone. He went westward, toward the city. He would have preferred to go the other way, but he sensed the building’s main entrance would face Oporto. Every door he passed was locked. Why the hell were there no French here? He could see none, not even at the city’s edge a half-mile away, and then the wall turned to his right and he saw a flight of steps climbing to an ornamental door. No sentries guarded the entrance, though he could at last see Frenchmen now. There was a convoy of wagons on a road that ran in the valley which lay to the north of the seminary. The wagons, which were drawn by oxen, were being escorted by dragoons and Sharpe used Christopher’s small telescope to see that the vehicles were filled with wounded men. So was Soult sending his invalids back to France? Or just emptying his hospitals before fighting another battle? And he was surely not now thinking of marching on to Lisbon for the British had come north to the Douro and that made Sharpe think that Sir Arthur Wellesley must have arrived in Portugal to galvanize the British forces.
The seminary entrance was framed by an ornate facade rising to a stone cross that had been chipped by musket fire. The main door, approached by stairs, was wooden, studded with nails and, when Sharpe twisted the great wrought-iron handle, surprised him by being unlocked. He pushed the door wide open with the muzzle of his rifle to see an empty tiled hallway with walls painted a sickly green. The portrait of a half-starved saint hung askew on one wall, the saint’s body riddled with bullet punctures. A crude painting of a woman and a French soldier had been daubed next to the saint and proved that the French had been in the seminary, though there were none evident now. Sharpe went inside, his boots echoing from the walls. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Harper said, making the sign of the cross. “I’ve never seen such a huge building!” He gazed in awe down the shadowed corridor. “How many bloody priests does a country need?”
“Depends how many sinners there are,” Sharpe said, “and now we search the place.”
He left six men in the entrance hall to serve as a picquet, then went downstairs to unbolt one of the arched doors facing the river. That door would be his bolt hole if the French came to the seminary and, once that retreat was secure, he searched the dormitories, bathrooms, kitchens, refectory and lecture rooms of the vast building. Broken furniture littered every room and in the library a thousand books lay strewn and torn across the hardwood floor, but there were no people. The chapel had been violated, the altar chopped for firewood and the choir used as a lavatory. “Bastards,” Harper said softly. Gataker, his trigger guard dangling by one last scr
ew, gaped at an amateur painting of two women curiously joined to three French dragoons that had been daubed on the whitewashed wall where once a great triptych of the holy birth had surmounted the altar. “Good that,” he said in a tone as respectful as he might have used at the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition.
“I like my women a bit plumper,” Slattery said.
“Come on!” Sharpe snarled. His most urgent task now was to find the seminary’s store of wine—he was certain there would be one—but when at last he discovered the cellar he saw, with relief, that the French had already been there and nothing remained but broken bottles and empty barrels. “Real bastards!” Harper said feelingly, but Sharpe would have destroyed the bottles and barrels himself to prevent his men from drinking themselves insensible. And that thought made him realize that he had already unconsciously decided that he would stay in this big building as long as he could. The French doubtless wanted to hold Oporto, but whoever held the seminary dominated the city’s eastern flank.
The long facade with its myriad windows facing the river was deceptive, for the building was very narrow; scarce a dozen windows looked straight toward Oporto, though at the rear of the seminary, furthest from the city, a long wing jutted north. In the angle of the two wings was a garden where a score of apple trees had been cut down for firewood. The two sides of the garden not cradled by the building were protected by a high stone wall pierced by a pair of fine iron gates that opened toward Oporto. In a shed, hidden beneath a pile of netting that had once been used to keep birds from the fruit bushes, Sharpe found an old pickaxe that he gave to Cooper. “Start making loopholes,” he said, pointing to the long wall. “Patrick! Find some more tools. Detail six men to help Coops, and the rest of the men are to go to the roof, but they’re not to show themselves. Understand? They’re to stay hidden.”