He reckoned the bridge might make an easier escape route. It consisted of a plank roadway laid across eighteen big wine barges that were firmly anchored against the river’s current and against the big surge of tides from the nearby ocean, but the roadway was now crammed with panicked refugees who became even more frantic as the first French cannonballs splashed into the river. Sharpe, turning to look up the hill, saw the green coats of French cavalry appearing beneath the great smoke of the French guns while the blue jackets of French infantry showed in the alleyways lower down the hill.
“God save Ireland,” Patrick Harper said, and Sharpe, knowing that the Irish Sergeant only used that prayer when things were desperate, looked back to the river to see what had caused the three words.
He looked and he stared and he knew they were not going to cross the river by the bridge. No one was, not now, because a disaster was happening. “Sweet Jesus,” Sharpe said softly, “sweet Jesus.”
In the middle of the river, halfway across the bridge, the Portuguese engineers had inserted a drawbridge so that wine barges and other small craft could go upriver. The drawbridge spanned the widest gap between any of the pontoons and it was built of heavy oak beams overlaid with oak planks and it was drawn upward by a pair of windlasses that hauled on ropes through pulleys mounted on a pair of thick timber posts stoutly buttressed with iron struts. The whole mechanism was ponderously heavy and the drawbridge span was wide and the engineers, mindful of the contraption’s weight, had posted notices at either end of the bridge decreeing that only one wagon, carriage or gun team could use the drawbridge at any one time, but now the roadway was so crowded with refugees that the two pontoons supporting the drawbridge’s heavy span were sinking under the weight. The pontoons, like all ships, leaked, and there should have been men aboard to pump out their bilges, but those men had fled with the rest and the weight of the crowd and the slow leaking of the barges meant that the bridge inched lower and lower until the central pontoons, both of them massive barges, were entirely under water and the fast-flowing river began to break and fret against the roadway’s edge. The people there screamed and some of them froze and still more folk pushed on from the northern bank, and then the central part of the roadway slowly dipped beneath the gray water as the people behind forced more fugitives onto the vanished drawbridge which sank even lower.
“Oh Jesus,” Sharpe said. He could see the first people being swept away. He could hear the shrieks.
“God save Ireland,” Harper said again and made the sign of the cross.
The central hundred feet of the bridge were now under water. Those hundred feet had been swept clear of people, but more were being forced into the gap that suddenly churned white as the drawbridge was sheared away from the rest of the bridge by the river’s pressure. The great span of the bridge reared up black, turned over and was swept seawards, and now there was no bridge across the Douro, but the people on the northern bank still did not know the roadway was cut and so they kept pushing and bullying their way onto the sagging bridge and those in front could not hold them back and instead were inexorably pushed into the broken gap where the white water seethed on the bridge’s shattered ends. The cries of the crowd grew louder, and the sound only increased the panic so that more and more people struggled toward the place where the refugees drowned. Gun smoke, driven by an errant gust of wind, dipped into the gorge and whirled above the bridge’s broken center where desperate people thrashed at the water as they were swept downstream. Gulls screamed and wheeled. Some Portuguese troops were now trying to hold the French in the streets of the city, but it was a hopeless endeavor. They were outnumbered, the enemy had the high ground, and more and more French forces were coming down the hill. The screams of the fugitives on the bridge were like the sound of the doomed on the Day of Judgment, the cannonballs were booming overhead, the streets of the city were ringing with musket shots, hooves were echoing from house walls and flames were crackling in buildings broken apart by cannon fire.
“Those wee children,” Harper said, “God help them.” The orphans, in their dun uniforms, were being pushed into the river. “There’s got to be a bloody boat!”
But the men manning the barges had rowed themselves to the south bank and abandoned their craft and so there were no boats to rescue the drowning, just horror in a cold gray river and a line of small heads being swept downstream in the fretting waves and there was nothing Sharpe could do. He could not reach the bridge and though he shouted at folk to abandon the crossing they did not understand English. Musket balls were flecking the river now and some were striking the fugitives on the broken bridge.
“What the hell can we do?” Harper asked.
“Nothing,” Sharpe said harshly, “except get out of here.” He turned his back on the dying crowd and led his men eastward down the river wharf. Scores of other people were doing the same thing, gambling that the French would not yet have captured the city’s inland suburbs. The sound of musketry was constant in the streets and the Portuguese guns across the river were now firing at the French in the lower streets so that the hammering of the big guns was punctuated by the noise of breaking masonry and splintering rafters.
Sharpe paused where the wharf ended to make sure all his men were there and he looked back at the bridge to see that so many folk had been forced off its end that the bodies were now jammed in the gap and the water was piling up behind them and foaming white across their heads. He saw a blue-coated Portuguese soldier step on those heads to reach the barge on which the drawbridge had been mounted. Others followed him, skipping over the drowning and the dead. Sharpe was far enough away that he could no longer hear the screams.
“What happened?” Dodd, usually the quietest of Sharpe’s men, asked.
“God was looking the other way,” Sharpe said and looked at Harper. “All here?”
“All present, sir,” Harper said. The big Ulsterman looked as if he had been weeping. “Those poor wee children,” he said resentfully.
“There was nothing we could do,” Sharpe said curtly, and that was true, though the truth of it did not make him feel any better. “Williamson and Tarrant are on a charge,” he told Harper.
“Again?”
“Again,” Sharpe said, and wondered at the idiocy of the two men who would rather have snatched a drink than escape from the city, even if that drink had meant imprisonment in France. “Now come on!” He followed the civilian fugitives who, arriving at the place where the river’s wharf was blocked by the ancient city wall, had turned up an alleyway. The old wall had been built when men fought in armor and shot at each other with crossbows, and the lichen-covered stones would not have stood two minutes against a modern cannon and as if to mark that redundancy the city had knocked great holes in the old ramparts. Sharpe led his men through one such gap, crossed the remnants of a ditch and then hurried into the wider streets of the new town beyond the walls.
“Crapauds!” Hagman warned Sharpe. “Sir! Up the hill!”
Sharpe looked to his left and saw a troop of French cavalry riding to cut off the fugitives. They were dragoons, fifty or more of them in their green coats and all carrying straight swords and short carbines. They wore brass helmets that, in wartime, were covered by cloth so the polished metal would not reflect the sunlight. “Keep running!” Sharpe shouted. The dragoons had not spotted the riflemen or, if they had, were not seeking a confrontation, but instead spurred on to where the road skirted a great hill that was topped with a huge white flat-roofed building. A school, perhaps, or a hospital. The main road ran north of the hill, but another went to the south, between the hill and the river, and the dragoons were on the bigger road so Sharpe kept to his right, hoping to escape by the smaller track on the Douro’s bank, but the dragoons at last saw him and drove their horses across the shoulder of the hill to block the lesser road where it bordered the river. Sharpe looked back and saw French infantry following the cavalry. Damn them. Then he saw that still more French troops were pursuing him from the
broken city wall. He could probably outrun the infantry, but the dragoons were already ahead of him and the first of them were dismounting and making a barricade across the road. The folk fleeing the city were being headed off and some were climbing to the big white building while others, in despair, were going back to their houses. The cannon were fighting their own battle above the river, the French guns trying to match the bombardment from the big Portuguese battery which had started dozens of fires in the fallen city as the round shot smashed ovens, hearths and forges. The dark smoke of the burning buildings mingled with the gray-white smoke of the guns and beneath that smoke, in the valley of drowning children, Richard Sharpe was trapped.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL James Christopher was neither a lieutenant nor a colonel, though he had once served as a captain in the Lincolnshire Fencibles and still held that commission. He had been christened James Augustus Meredith Christopher and throughout his schooldays had been known as Jam. His father had been a doctor in the small town of Saxilby, a profession and a place that James Christopher liked to ignore, preferring to remember that his mother was second cousin to the Earl of Rochford, and it was Rochford’s influence that had taken Christopher from Cambridge University to the Foreign Office where his command of languages, his natural suavity and his quick intelligence had ensured a swift rise. He had been given early responsibilities, introduced to great men and entrusted with confidences. He was reckoned to be a good prospect, a sound young man whose judgment was usually reliable, which meant, as often as not, that he merely agreed with his superiors, but the reputation had led to his present appointment which was a position as lonely as it was secret. James Christopher’s task was to advise the government whether it would be prudent to keep British troops in Portugal.
The decision, of course, would not rest with James Christopher. He might be a coming man in the Foreign Office, but the decision to stay or withdraw would be taken by the Prime Minister, though what mattered was the quality of advice being given to the Prime Minister. The soldiers, of course, would want to stay because war brought promotion, and the Foreign Secretary wanted the troops to remain because he detested the French, but other men in Whitehall took a more sanguine view and had sent James Christopher to take Portugal’s temperature. The Whigs, enemies of the administration, feared another debacle like that which had led to Corunna. Better, they said, to recognize reality and come to an understanding with the French now, and the Whigs had enough influence in the Foreign Office to have James Christopher posted to Portugal. The army, which had not been told what his true business was, nevertheless agreed to brevet him as a lieutenant colonel and appoint him as an aide to General Cradock, and Christopher used the army’s couriers to send military intelligence to the General and political dispatches to the embassy in Lisbon whence, though they were addressed to the Ambassador, the messages were sent unopened to London. The Prime Minister needed sound advice and James Christopher was supposed to supply the facts that would frame the advice, though of late he had been busy making new facts. He had seen beyond the war’s messy realities to the golden future. James Christopher, in short, had seen the light.
None of which occupied his thoughts as he rode out of Oporto less than a cannon’s range ahead of the French troops. A couple of musket shots were sent in his direction, but Christopher and his servant were superbly mounted on fine Irish horses and they quickly outran the half-hearted pursuit. They took to the hills, galloping along the terrace of a vineyard and then climbing into a forest of pine and oak where they stopped to rest the horses.
Christopher gazed back westward. The sun had dried the roads after the night’s heavy rain and a smear of dust on the horizon showed where the French army’s baggage train was advancing toward the newly captured city of Oporto. The city itself, hidden now by hills, was marked by a great plume of dirty smoke spewing up from burning houses and from the busy batteries of cannons that, though muted by distance, sounded like an unceasing thunder. No French troops had bothered to pursue Christopher this far. A dozen laborers were deepening a ditch in the valley and ignored the fugitives on the nearby road as if to suggest that the war was the city’s business, not theirs. There were no British riflemen among the fugitives, Christopher noted, but he would have been surprised to see Sharpe and his men this far from the city. Doubtless by now they were dead or captured. What had Hogan been thinking of in asking Sharpe to accompany him? Was it because the shrewd Irishman suspected something? But how could Hogan know? Christopher worried at the problem for a few moments, then dismissed it. Hogan could know nothing; he was just trying to be helpful. “The French did well today,” Christopher remarked to his Portuguese servant, a young man with receding hair and a thin, earnest face.
“The devil will get them in the end, senhor,” the servant answered.
“Sometimes mere men have to do the devil’s business,” Christopher said. He drew a small telescope from his pocket and trained it on the far hills. “In the next few days,” he said, still gazing through the glass, “you will see some things that will surprise you.”
“If you say so, senhor,” the servant answered.
“But ‘there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ ”
“If you say so, senhor,” the servant repeated, wondering why the English officer called him Horatio when his name was Luis, but he thought it was probably better not to ask. Luis had been a barber in Lisbon where he had sometimes cut the hair of men from the British embassy and it had been those men who had recommended him as a reliable servant to Christopher who paid him good wages in real gold, English gold, and if the English were mad and got names wrong they still made the best coinage in the world, which meant that Colonel Christopher could call Luis whatever he wanted so long as he went on paying him thick guineas embossed with the figure of Saint George slaying the dragon.
Christopher was looking for any sign of a French pursuit, but his telescope was small, old and had a scratched lens and he could see very little better with it than without it. He was meaning to buy another, but he never had the opportunity. He collapsed the glass, put it in his saddle pouch and took out a fresh toothpick that he thrust between his teeth. “Onwards,” he said brusquely, and he led the servant through the wood, across the hill’s crest and down to a large farmhouse. It was plain that Christopher knew the route well for he did not hesitate on the way, nor was he apprehensive as he curbed his horse beside the farm gate. “Stables are in there,” he told Luis, pointing to an archway, “kitchen is beyond the blue door and the folks here are expecting us. We’ll spend the night here.”
“Not at Vila Real de Zedes, senhor?” Luis asked. “I heard you say we would look for Miss Savage?”
“Your English is getting too good if it lets you eavesdrop,” Christopher said sourly. “Tomorrow, Luis; we shall look for Miss Savage tomorrow.” Christopher slid out of the saddle and threw the reins to Luis. “Cool the horses, unsaddle them, find me something to eat and bring it to my room. One of the servants will let you know where I am.”
Luis walked the two horses to cool them down, then stabled, watered and fed them. Afterward he went to the kitchen where a cook and two maids showed no surprise at his arrival. Luis had become accustomed to being taken to some remote village or house where his master was known, but he had never been to this farmhouse before. He would have felt happier if Christopher had retreated across the river, but the farm was well hidden in the hills and it was possible the French would never come here. The servants told Luis that the house and lands belonged to a Lisbon merchant who had instructed them to do all they could to accommodate Colonel Christopher’s wishes. “He’s been here often then?” Luis asked.
The cook giggled. “He used to come with his woman.”
That explained why Luis had not been brought here before and he wondered who the woman was. “He wants food now,” Luis said. “What woman?”
“The pretty widow,” the cook said, then sighed. “But we have not
seen her in a month. A pity. He should have married her.” She had a chickpea soup on the stove and she ladled some into a bowl, cut some cold mutton and put it on a tray with the soup, red wine and a small loaf of newly baked bread. “Tell the Colonel the meal will be ready for his guest this afternoon.”
“His guest?” Luis asked, bemused.
“One guest for dinner, he told us. Now hurry! Don’t let that soup get cold. You go up the stairs and turn right.”
Luis carried the tray upstairs. It was a fine house, well built and handsome, with some ancient paintings on the walls. He found the door to his master’s bedroom ajar and Christopher must have heard the footsteps for he called out that Luis should come in without knocking. “Put the food by the window,” he ordered.
Christopher had changed his clothes and now, instead of wearing the black breeches, black boots and red tailcoat of an English officer, he was in sky-blue breeches that had black leather reinforcements wherever they might touch a saddle. The breeches were skin tight, made so by the laces that ran up both flanks from the ankles to the waist. The Colonel’s new jacket was of the same sky blue as the breeches, but decorated with lavish silver piping that climbed to curl around the stiff, high red collar. Over his left shoulder was a pelisse, a fake jacket trimmed with fur, while on a side table was a cavalry saber and a tall black hat that bore a short silver cockade held in place by an enamelled badge.
And the enamelled badge displayed the tricolor of France.