“Couldn’t the embassy do that?” Hogan demanded.
“Not without being noticed,” Pumphrey said, “and not without occasioning some offense to a nation which is, after all, our most ancient ally. And I rather suspect that if you despatch someone from the embassy to ask questions then you will merely fetch the answers people think you want to hear. No, Christopher was supposed to be an English gentleman traveling in north Portugal, but, as you observe, the opportunity went to his head. Cradock was then halfwitted enough to give him brevet rank and so Christopher began hatching his plots.” Lord Pumphrey gazed up at the ceiling which was painted with reveling deities and dancing nymphs. “My own suspicion is that Mister Christopher has been laying bets on every horse in the race. We know he was encouraging a mutiny, but I strongly suspect he betrayed the mutineers. The encouragement was to reassure us that he worked for our interests and the betrayal endeared him to the French. He is determined, is he not, to be on the winning side? But the main intrigue, of course, was to enrich himself at the expense of the Savage ladies.” Pumphrey paused, then offered a seraphic smile. “I’ve always rather admired bigamists. One wife would be altogether too much for me, but for a man to take two!”
“Did I hear you say he wants to come back?” Sharpe asked.
“I surmise as much. James Christopher is not a man to burn his bridges unless he has no alternative. Oh yes, I’m sure he’ll be designing some way to return to London if he finds a lack of opportunity with the French.”
“Now I’m supposed to shoot the shit-faced bastard,” Sharpe said.
“Not precisely how we in the Foreign Office would express the matter,” Lord Pumphrey said severely, “but you are, I see, seized of the essence. Go and shoot him, Richard, and God bless your little rifle.”
“And what are you doing here?” Sharpe thought to ask.
“Other than being exquisitely uncomfortable?” Pumphrey asked. “I was sent to supervise Christopher. He approached General Cradock with news of a proposed mutiny. Cradock, quite properly, reported the affair to London and London became excited at the thought of suborning Bonaparte’s army in Portugal and Spain, but felt that someone of wisdom and good judgment was needed to propel the scheme and so, quite naturally, they asked me to come.”
“And we can forget the scheme now,” Hogan observed.
“Indeed we can,” Pumphrey replied tartly. “Christopher brought a Captain Argenton to talk with General Cradock,” he explained to Sharpe, “and when Cradock was replaced, Argenton made his own way across the lines to confer with Sir Arthur. He wanted promises that our forces wouldn’t intervene in the event of a French mutiny, but Sir Arthur wouldn’t hear of his plots and told him to tuck his tail between his legs and go back into the outer darkness whence he came. So, no plots, no mysterious messengers with cloaks and daggers, just plain old-fashioned soldiering. It seems, alas, that I am surplus to requirements and Mister Christopher, if your lady friend’s note is to be believed, has gone with the French, which must mean, I think, that he believes they will still win this war.”
Hogan had opened the window to smell the rain, but now turned to Sharpe. “We must go, Richard. We have things to plan.”
“Yes, sir.” Sharpe picked up his battered shako and tried to bend the visor back into shape, then thought of another question. “My lord?”
“Richard?” Lord Pumphrey responded gravely.
“You remember Astrid?” Sharpe asked awkwardly.
“Of course I remember the fair Astrid,” Pumphrey answered smoothly, “Ole Skovgaard’s comely daughter.”
“I was wondering if you had news of her, my lord,” Sharpe said. He was blushing.
Lord Pumphrey did have news of her, but none he cared to tell Sharpe, for the truth was that both Astrid and her father were in their graves, their throats cut on Pumphrey’s orders. “I did hear,” his lordship said gently, “that there was a contagion in Copenhagen. Malaria, perhaps? Or was it cholera? Alas, Richard.” He spread his hands.
“She’s dead?”
“I do fear so.”
“Oh,” Sharpe said inadequately. He stood stricken, blinking. He had thought once that he could leave the army and live with Astrid and so make a new life in the clean decencies of Denmark. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“As am I,” Lord Pumphrey said easily, “so very sorry. But tell me, Richard, about Miss Savage. Might one assume she is beautiful?”
“Yes,” Sharpe said, “she is.”
“I thought so,” Lord Pumphrey said resignedly.
“And she’ll be dead,” Hogan snarled at Sharpe, “if you and me don’t hurry.”
“Yes, sir,” Sharpe said, and hurried.
Hogan and Sharpe walked through the night rain, going uphill to a schoolhouse that Sharpe had commandeered as quarters for his men. “You do know,” Hogan said with considerable irritation, “that Lord Pumphrey is a molly?”
“Of course I know he’s a molly.”
“He can be hanged for that,” Hogan observed with indecent satisfaction.
“I still like him,” Sharpe said.
“He’s a serpent. All diplomats are. Worse than lawyers.”
“He ain’t stuck up,” Sharpe said.
“There is nothing,” Hogan said, “nothing in all the world that Lord Pumphrey wants more than to be stuck up with you, Richard.” He laughed, his spirits restored. “And how the hell are we to find that poor wee girl and her rotten husband, eh?”
“We?” Sharpe asked. “You’re coming too?”
“This is far too important to be left to some lowly English lieutenant,” Hogan said. “This is an errand that needs the sagacity of the Irish.”
Once in the schoolhouse, Sharpe and Hogan settled in the kitchen where the French occupiers of the city had left an undamaged table and, because Hogan had left his good map at the General’s headquarters, he used a piece of charcoal to draw a cruder version on the table’s scrubbed top. From the main schoolroom, where Sharpe’s men had spread their blankets, came the sound of women’s laughter. His men, Sharpe reflected, had been in the city less than a day yet they had already found a dozen girls. “Best way to learn the language, sir,” Harper had assured him, “and we’re all very short on education, sir, as you doubtless know.”
“Right!” Hogan kicked the kitchen door shut. “Look at the map, Richard.” He showed how the British had come up the coast of Portugal and dislodged the French from Oporto and how, at the same time, the Portuguese army had attacked in the east. “They’ve retaken Amarante,” Hogan said, “which is good because it means Soult can’t cross that bridge. He’s stuck, Richard, stuck, so he’s got no choice. He’ll have to strike north through the hills to find a wee road up here”-the charcoal scratched as he traced a wiggly line on the table-”and it’s a bastard of a road, and if the Portuguese can keep going in this God-awful weather then they’re going to cut the road here.” The charcoal made a cross. “It’s a bridge called Ponte Nova. Do you remember it?”
Sharpe shook his head. He had seen so many bridges and mountain roads with Hogan that he could no longer remember which was which.
“The Ponte Nova,” Hogan said, “means the new bridge and naturally it’s as old as the hills and one tub of powder will send it crashing down into the gorge and then, Richard, Monsieur Soult is properly buggered. But he’s only buggered if the Portuguese can get there.” He looked gloomy, for the weather was not propitious for a swift march into the mountains. “And if they can’t stop Soult at the Ponte Nova then there’s a half-chance they’ll catch him at the Saltador. You remember that, of course?”
“I do remember that, sir,” Sharpe said.
The Saltador was a bridge high in the mountains, a stone span that leaped across a deep and narrow gorge, and the spectacular arch had been nicknamed the Leaper, the Saltador. Sharpe remembered Hogan mapping it, remembered a small village of low stone houses, but chiefly remembered the river tumbling in a seething torrent beneath the soaring bridge.
“If they get to the Saltador and cross it,“ Hogan said, “then we can kiss them goodbye and wish them luck. They’ll have escaped.” He flinched as a crash of thunder reminded him of the weather. “Ah, well,” he sighed, “we can only do our best.”
“And just what are we doing?” Sharpe wanted to know.
“Now that, Richard, is a very good question,” Hogan said. He helped himself to a pinch of snuff, paused, then sneezed violently. “God help me, but the doctors say it clears the bronchial tubes, whatever the hell they are. Now, as I see it, one of two things can happen.” He tapped the charcoal streak marking the Ponte Nova. “If the French are stopped at that bridge then most will surrender, they’ll have no choice. Some will take to the hills, of course, but they’ll find armed peasants all over the place looking for throats and other parts to cut. So we’ll either find Mister Christopher with the army when it surrenders or more likely he’ll run away and claim to be an escaped English prisoner. In which case we go into the mountains, find him and put him up against a wall.”
“Truly?”
“That worries you?”
“I’d rather hang him.”
“Ah, well, we can discuss the method when the time comes. Now the second thing that might happen, Richard, is that the French are not stopped at the Ponte Nova, in which case we need to reach the Saltador.”
“Why?”
“Think what it was like, Richard,” Hogan said. “A deep ravine, steep slopes everywhere, the kind of place where a few riflemen could be very vicious. And if the French are crossing the bridge then we’ll see him and your Baker rifles will have to do the necessary.”
“We can get close enough?” Sharpe asked, trying to remember the terrain about the leaping bridge.
“There are cliffs, high bluffs. I’m sure you can get within two hundred paces.”
“That’ll do,” Sharpe said grimly.
“So one way or another we have to finish him,” Hogan said, leaning back. “He’s a traitor, Richard. He’s probably not as dangerous as he thinks he is, but if he gets to Paris then no doubt the monsewers will suck his brain dry and so learn a few things we’d rather they didn’t know. And if he got back to London he’s slippery enough to convince those fools that he was always working for their interests. So all things considered, Richard, I’d say he was better off dead.”
“And Kate?”
“We’re not going to shoot her,” Hogan said reprovingly.
“Back in March, sir,” Sharpe said, “you ordered me to rescue her. Does that order still stand?”
Hogan stared at the ceiling which was smoke-blackened and pierced with lethal-looking hooks. “In the short time I’ve known you, Richard,” he said, “I’ve noticed you possess a lamentable tendency to put on shining armor and look for ladies to rescue. King Arthur, God rest his soul, would have loved you. He’d have had you fighting every evil knight in the forest. Is rescuing Kate Savage important? Not really. The main thing is to punish Mister Christopher and I fear that Miss Kate will have to take her chances.”
Sharpe looked down at the charcoal map. “How do we get to the Ponte Nova?”
“We walk, Richard, we walk. We cross the mountains and those tracks aren’t fit for horses. You’d spend half the time leading them, worrying about their feed, looking after their hooves and wishing you didn’t have them. Mules now, I’d saddle some mules and take them, but where will we find mules tonight? It’s either mules or shanks’s pony, but either way we can only take a few men, your best and your fittest, and we have to leave before dawn.”
“What do I do with the rest of my men?”
Hogan thought about it. “Major Potter could use them,” he suggested, “to help guard the prisoners here?”
“I don’t want to lose them back to Shorncliffe,” Sharpe said. He feared that the second battalion would be making inquiries about their lost riflemen. They might not care that Lieutenant Sharpe was missing, but the absence of several prime marksmen would definitely be regretted.
“My dear Richard,” Hogan said, “if you think Sir Arthur’s going to lose even a few good riflemen then you don’t know him half as well as you think. He’ll move hell and high water to keep you here. And you and I have to move like hell to get to Ponte Nova before anyone else.”
Sharpe grimaced. “The French have a day’s start on us.”
“No, they don’t. Like fools they went toward Amarante which means they didn’t know that the Portuguese had recaptured it. By now they’ll have discovered their predicament, but I doubt they’ll start north till dawn. If we hurry, we beat them.” He frowned, looking down at the map. “There’s only one real problem I can see, other than finding Mister Christopher when we get there.”
“A problem?”
“I can find my way to Ponte Nova from Braga,” Hogan said, “but what if the French are already on the Braga road? We’ll have to take to the hills and it’s wild country, Richard, an easy place to get lost. We need a guide and we need to find him fast.”
Sharpe grinned. “If you don’t mind traveling with a Portuguese officer who thinks he’s a philosopher and a poet then I think I know just the man.”
“I’m Irish,” Hogan said, “there’s nothing we love more than philosophy and poetry.”
“He’s a lawyer too.”
“If he gets us to Ponte Nova,” Hogan said, “then God will doubtless forgive him for that.”
The women’s laughter was loud, but it was time to end the party. It was time for a dozen of Sharpe’s best men to mend their boots and fill their cartridge boxes.
It was time for revenge.
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.