Sergeant Macedo was the only man other than Sharpe who fired his three shots within forty-five seconds. Fifteen of the riflemen and twelve of the Portuguese managed a shot every twenty seconds, but the rest were slow and so Sharpe and Vicente set about training them. Williamson, one of the riflemen who had failed, grumbled that it was stupid to make him learn how to fire a smoothbore musket when he was a rifleman. He made the complaint just loud enough for Sharpe to hear and in the expectation that Sharpe would choose to ignore it, then looked aggrieved when Sharpe dragged him back out of the formation. “You’ve got a complaint?” Sharpe challenged him.
“No, sir.” Williamson, his big face surly, looked past Sharpe.
“Look at me,” Sharpe said. Williamson sullenly obeyed. “The reason you are learning to fire a musket like a proper soldier,” Sharpe told him, “is because I don’t want the Portuguese to think we’re picking on them.” Williamson still looked sullen. “And besides,” Sharpe went on, “we’re stranded miles behind enemy lines, so what happens if your rifle breaks? And there’s another reason besides.”
“What’s that, sir?” Williamson asked.
“If you don’t bloody do it,” Sharpe said, “I’ll have you on another charge, then another charge and another after that until you’re so damn fed up with punishment duty that you’ll have to shoot me to be rid of it.”
Williamson stared at Sharpe with an expression which suggested he would like nothing more than to shoot him, but Sharpe just stared into his eyes and Williamson looked away. “We’ll run out of ammunition,” he said churlishly, and in that he was probably right, but Kate Savage unlocked her father’s gun room and found a barrel of powder and a bullet mold so Sharpe was able to have his men make up new cartridges, using pages from the sermon books in the Quinta’s library to wrap the powder and shot. The balls were too small, but they were fine for practice, and for three days his men blasted their muskets and rifles across the driveway. The French must have heard the musketry echoing dully from the hills and they must have seen the powder smoke above Vila Real de Zedes, but they did not come. Nor did Colonel Christopher.
“But the French are going to come,” Sharpe told Harper one afternoon as they climbed the hill behind the Quinta.
“Like as not,” the big man said. “I mean it’s not as if they don’t know we’re here.”
“And they’ll slice us into pieces when they do arrive,” Sharpe said.
Harper shrugged at that pessimistic opinion, then frowned. “How far are we going?”
“The top,” Sharpe said. He had led Harper through the trees and now they were on the rocky slope that led to the old watchtower on the hill’s summit. “Have you never been up here?” Sharpe asked.
“I grew up in Donegal,” Harper said, “and there was one thing we learned there, which was never go to the top of the hills.”
“Why ever not?”
“Because anything valuable will have long rolled down, sir, and all you’ll be doing is getting yourself out of breath by climbing up to find it gone. Jesus Christ, but you can see halfway to heaven from up here.”
The track followed a rocky spine that led to the summit and on either side the slope steepened until only a goat could have found footing on the treacherous scree, yet the path itself was safe enough, winding up toward the watchtower’s ancient stump. “We’re going to make a fort up here,” Sharpe said enthusiastically.
“God save us,” Harper said.
“We’re getting lazy, Pat, soft. Idle. It ain’t good.”
“But why make a fort?” Harper asked. “It’s a fortress already! The devil himself couldn’t take this hill, not if it was defended.”
“There are two ways up here,” Sharpe said, ignoring the question, “this path and another on the south side. I want walls across each path. Stone walls, Pat, high enough so a man can stand behind them and fire over their tops. There’s plenty of stone up here.” Sharpe led Harper through the tower’s broken archway and showed him how the old building had been raised about a natural pit in the hill’s summit and how the crumbling tower had filled the pit with stones.
Harper peered down into the pit. “You want us to move all that masonry and build new walls?” He sounded appalled.
“I was talking to Kate Savage about this place,” Sharpe said. “This old tower was built hundreds of years ago, Pat, when the Moors were here. They were killing Christians then, and the King built the watchtower so they could see when a Moorish raiding party was coming.”
“It’s a sensible thing to do,” Harper said.
“And Kate was saying how the folk in the valleys would send their valuables up here. Coins, jewels, gold. All of it up here, Pat, so that the heathen bastards wouldn’t snatch it. And then there was an earthquake nd the tower fell in and the locals reckon there’s treasure under those tones.”
Harper looked skeptical. “And why wouldn’t they dig it up, sir? The folk in the village don’t strike me as halfwits. I mean, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, if I knew there was a pit of bloody gold up on a hill I wouldn’t be vasting my time with a plough or a harrow.”
“That’s just it,” Sharpe said. He was making up the story as he went ilong and thought desperately for an answer to Harper’s entirely reasonable objection. “There was a child, you see, buried with the gold and the egend says the child will haunt the house of whoever digs up its bones. But only a local house,” he added hastily.
Harper sniffed at that embellishment, then looked back down the path. “So you want a fort here?”
“And we need to bring barrels of water here,” Sharpe said. That was the summit’s weakness, no water. If the French came and he had to retreat to the hilltop then he did not want to surrender just because of thirst. “Miss Savage”-he still did not think of her as Mrs. Christopher-’will find us barrels.”
“Up here? In the sun? Water will go rancid,” Harper warned him.
“A splash of brandy in each one,” Sharpe said, remembering his voyages to and from India and how the water had always tasted faintly of rum. “I’ll find the brandy.”
“And you really expect me to believe there’s gold under those stones, sir?”
“No,” Sharpe admitted, “but I want the men to half believe it. It’s going to be hard work building walls up here, Pat, and dreams of treasure never hurt.”
So they built the fort and never found gold, but in the spring sunlight they made the hilltop into a redoubt where a handful of infantry could grow old under siege. The ancient builders had chosen well, not just selecting the highest peak for miles around to build their watchtower, but also a place that was easily defended. Attackers could only come from the north or the south, and in both cases they would have to pick their way along narrow paths. Sharpe, exploring the southern path one day, found a rusted arrowhead under a boulder and he took it back to the summit and showed it to Kate. She held it beneath the brim of her wide straw hat and turned it this way and that. “It probably isn’t very old,” she said.
“I was thinking it might have wounded a Moor.”
“They were still hunting with bows and arrows in my grandfather’s time,” she said.
“Your family was here then?”
“Savages started in Portugal in 1711,” she said proudly. She had been gazing southwest, in the direction of Oporto, and Sharpe knew she was watching the road in hope of seeing a horseman come, but the passing days brought no sign of her husband, nor even a letter. The French did not come either, though Sharpe knew they must have seen his men toiling on the summit as they piled rocks to make ramparts across the two paths and struggled up those tracks with barrels of water that were put into the great cleared pit on the peak. The men grumbled about being made to work like mules, but Sharpe knew they were happier tired than idle. Some, encouraged by Williamson, complained that they wasted their time, that they should have abandoned this godforsaken hill with its broken tower and found a way south to the army, and Sharpe reckoned they were probably right, but he had hi
s orders and so he stayed.
“What it is,” Williamson told his cronies, “is the bloody frow. We’re humping stone and he’s tickling the Colonel’s wife.” And if Sharpe had heard that opinion he might even have agreed with it too, even though he was not tickling Kate, but he was enjoying her company and had persuaded himself that, orders or no orders, he ought to protect her against the French.
But the French did not come and nor did Colonel Christopher. Manuel Lopes came instead.
He arrived on a black horse, galloping up the driveway and then curbing the stallion so fast that it reared and twisted and Lopes, instead of being thrown off as ninety-nine out of a hundred other riders would have been, stayed calm and in control. He soothed the horse and grinned at Sharpe. “You are the Englishman,” he said in English, “and I hate the English, but not so much as I hate the Spanish, and I hate the Spanish less than I hate the French.” He slid down from the saddle and held out a hand. “I am Manuel Lopes.”
“Sharpe,” Sharpe said.
Lopes looked at the Quinta with the eye of a man sizing it up for plunder. He was an inch less than Sharpe’s six feet, but seemed taller. He was a big man, not fat, just big, with’a strong face and quick eyes and a swift smile. “If I was a Spaniard,” he said, “and I nightly thank the good Lord that I am not, then I would call myself something dramatic. The Slaughterman, perhaps, or the Pig Sticker or the Prince of Death”-he was talking of the partisan leaders who made French life so miserable-”but I am a humble citizen of Portugal so my nickname is the Schoolteacher.”
“The Schoolteacher,” Sharpe repeated.
“Because that is what I was,” Lopes responded energetically. “I owned a school in Braganga where I taught ungrateful little bastards English, Latin, Greek, algebra, rhetoric and horsemanship. I also taught them to love God, honor the King and fart in the face of all Spaniards. Now, instead of wasting my breath on halfwits, I kill Frenchmen.” He offered Sharpe an extravagant bow. “I am famous for it.”
“I’ve not heard of you,” Sharpe said.
Lopes just smiled at the challenge. “The French have heard of me, senhor,” he said, “and I have heard about you. Who is this Englishman who lives safe north of the Douro? Why do the French leave him in peace? Who is the Portuguese officer who lives in his shadow? Why are they here? Why are they making a toy fort on the watchtower hill? Why are they not fighting?”
“Good questions,” Sharpe said dryly, “all of them.”
Lopes looked at the Quinta again. “Everywhere else in Portugal, senhor, where the French have left their dung, they have destroyed places like this. They have stolen the paintings, broken the furniture and drunk the cellars dry. Yet the war does not come to this house?” He turned to stare down the driveway where some twenty or thirty men had appeared. “My pupils,” he explained, “they need rest.”
The “pupils” were his men, a ragged band with which Lopes had been ambushing the French columns that carried ammunition to the gunners who fought against the Portuguese troops still holding the bridge at Amarante. The Schoolteacher had lost a good few men in the fights and admitted that his early successes had made him too confident until, just two days before, French dragoons had caught his men in open ground. “I hate those green bastards,” Lopes growled, “hate them and their big swords.” Nearly half his men had been killed and the rest had been lucky to escape. “So I brought them here,” Lopes said, “to recover, and because the Quinta do Zedes seems like a safe haven.”
Kate bridled when she heard Lopes wanted his men to stay at the house. “Tell him to take them to the village,” she said to Sharpe, and Sharpe carried her suggestion to the Schoolteacher.
Lopes laughed when he heard the message. “Her father was a pompous bastard too,” he said.
“You knew him?”
“I knew of him. He made port but wouldn’t drink it because of his stupid beliefs, and he wouldn’t take off his hat when the sacrament was carried past. What kind of a man is that? Even a Spaniard takes off his hat for the blessed sacraments.” Lopes shrugged. “My men will be happy in the village.” He drew on a filthy-smelling cigar. “We’ll only stay long enough to heal the worst wounds. Then we go back to the fight.”
“Us too,” Sharpe said.
“You?” The Schoolteacher was amused. “Yet you don’t fight now?”
“Colonel Christopher ordered us to stay here.”
“Colonel Christopher?”
“This is his wife’s house,” Sharpe said.
“I did not know he was married,” Lopes responded.
“You know him?”
“He came to see me in Braganga. I still owned the school then and I had a reputation as a man of influence. So the Colonel comes calling. He wanted to know if sentiment in Braganca was in favor of fighting the French and I told him that sentiment in Braganga was in favor of drowning the French in their own piss, but if that was not possible then we would fight them instead. So we do.” Lopes paused. “I also heard that the Colonel had money for anyone willing to fight against them, but we never saw any.” He turned and looked at the house. “And his wife owns the Quinta? And the French don’t touch the place?”
“Colonel Christopher,” Sharpe said, “talks to the French, and right now he’s south of the Douro where he’s taken a Frenchman to speak with the British General.”
Lopes stared at Sharpe for a few heartbeats. “Why would a French officer be talking to the British?” he asked and waited for Sharpe to answer, then did so himself when the rifleman was silent. “For one reason only,” Lopes suggested, “to make peace. Britain is going to run away, leave us to suffer.”
“I don’t know,” Sharpe said.
“We’ll beat them with you or without you,” Lopes said angrily and stalked down the drive, shouting at his men to bring his horse, pick up their baggage and follow him to the village.
The meeting with Lopes only made Sharpe feel more guilty. Other men were fighting while he did nothing and that night, after supper, he asked to speak with Kate. It was late and Kate had sent the servants back to the kitchen and Sharpe waited for her to call one back to act as her chaperone, but instead she led him into the long parlor. It was dark, for no candles were lit, so Kate went to one of the windows and pulled back its curtains to reveal a pale, moonlit night. The wisteria seemed to glow in the silver light. The boots of a sentry crunched on the driveway. “I know what you’re going to say,” Kate said, “that it’s time for you to go.”
“Yes,” Sharpe said, “and I think you should come with us.”
“I must wait for James,” Kate said. She went to a sideboard and, by the light of the moon, poured a glass of port. “For you,” she said.
“How long did the Colonel say he would be?” Sharpe asked.
“A week, maybe ten days.”
“It’s been more than two weeks,” Sharpe said, “very nearly three.”
“He ordered you to wait here,” Kate said.
“Not through eternity,” Sharpe replied. He went to the sideboard and took the port which was Savages’ finest.
“You can’t leave me here,” Kate said.
“I don’t intend to,” Sharpe said. The moon made a shadow of her cheek and glinted from her eyes and he felt a pang of jealousy for Colonel Christopher. “I think you should come.”
“No,” Kate said with a note of petulance, then turned a pleading face to Sharpe. “You can’t leave me here alone!”
“I’m a soldier,” Sharpe said, “and I’ve waited long enough. There’s supposed to be a war in this country, and I’m just sitting here like a lump.”
Kate had tears in her eyes. “What’s happened to him?”
“Maybe he got new orders in Lisbon,” Sharpe suggested.
“Then why doesn’t he write?”
“Because we’re in enemy country now, ma’am,” Sharpe said brutally, “and maybe he can’t get a message to us.” That was very unlikely, Sharpe thought, because Christopher seemed to have plenty of fri
ends among the French. Perhaps the Colonel had been arrested in Lisbon. Or killed by partisans. “He’s probably waiting for you to come south,” he said instead of voicing those thoughts.
“He would send a message,” Kate protested. “I’m sure he’s on his way.”
“Are you?” Sharpe asked.
She sat on a gilt chair, staring out of the window. “He must come back,” she said softly and Sharpe could tell from her tone that she had virtually given up hope.
“If you think he’s coming back,” he said, “then you must wait for him. But I’m taking my men south.” He would leave the next night, he decided. March in the dark, go south, find the river and search its bank for a boat, any boat. Even a tree trunk would do, anything that could float them across the Douro.
“Do you know why I married him?” Kate suddenly asked.
Sharpe was so astounded by the question that he did not answer. He just gazed at her.
“I married him,” Kate said, “because life in Oporto is so dull. My mother and I live in the big house on the hill and the lawyers tell us what happens in the vineyards and the lodge, and the other ladies come to tea, and we go to the English church on Sundays and that is all that ever happens.”
Sharpe still said nothing. He was embarrassed.
“You think he married me for the money, don’t you?” Kate demanded.
“Don’t you?” Sharpe responded.
She stared at him in silence and he half expected her to be angry, but instead she shook her head and sighed. “I dare not believe that,” she said, “though I do believe marriage is a gamble and we don’t know how it will turn out, but we still just hope. We marry in hope, Mister Sharpe, and sometimes we’re lucky. Don’t you think that’s true?”
“I’ve never married,” Sharpe evaded the answer.
“Have you wanted to?” Kate asked.
“Yes,” Sharpe said, thinking of Grace.
“What happened?”
“She was a widow,” Sharpe said, “and the lawyers were making hay with her husband’s will, and we thought that if she married me it would only complicate things. Her lawyers said so. I hate lawyers.” He stopped talking, hurt as he always was by the memory. He drank the port to cover his feelings, then walked to the window and stared down the moonlit drive to where the smoke of the village fires smeared the stars above the northern hills. “In the end she died,” he finished abruptly.