Christopher stared at his green-jacketed enemy. He did not believe what he saw. He tried to speak, because words had always been Christopher’s best weapon, but now he found he was struck dumb and Sharpe walked toward him and then a surge of Frenchmen came up behind the Colonel and they were going to force him onto Sharpe’s sword and Christopher did not have the courage to draw his own and so, in sheer desperation, he followed Williamson into the rainy dark of the Misarella’s ravine. He jumped.
Vicente, Harper and Sergeant Macedo had followed Sharpe down the hill and now encountered Kate. “Look after her, sir!” Harper called to Vicente and then, with Sergeant Macedo, he hurried toward the bridge just in time to see Sharpe leap off the roadway. “Sir!” Harper shouted. “Oh, Jesus bloody God,” he swore, “the daft bloody bastard!” He led Macedo across the road just as a flood of blue-coated infantrymen spilled off the bridge, but if any of the Frenchmen thought it strange that enemy soldiers were on the Misarella’s bank they showed no sign of it. They just wanted to escape and so they hurried north toward Spain as Harper prowled the bank and stared into the ravine for a sight of Sharpe. He could see dead horses among the rocks and half submerged in the white water and he could see the sprawling bodies of a dozen Frenchmen who had fallen from the Saltador’s high span, but of Christopher’s dark coat and Sharpe’s green jacket he could see nothing.
Williamson had fallen straight into the deepest part of the ravine and by chance had landed in a swirling pool of the river that was deep enough to break his fall and he had pitched forward onto the corpse of a horse that had further cushioned him. Christopher was less fortunate. He fell close to Williamson, but his left leg struck rock and his ankle was suddenly a mass of pain and the river water was cold as ice. He clung to Williamson and looked about desperately and saw no sign of any pursuit and he reasoned that Sharpe could not stay long on the bridge in the face of the retreating French. “Get me to the bank,” he told Williamson. “I think my ankle’s broken.”
“You’ll be all right, sir,” Williamson said. “I’m here, sir,” and he put an arm round the Colonel’s waist and helped him toward the neatest bank.
“Where’s Kate?” Christopher asked.
“She ran, sir, she ran, but we’ll find her, sir. We’ll find her. Here we are, sir, we can climb here.” Williamson hauled Christopher onto rocks beside the water and looked for an easy way to climb the ravine’s side and instead saw Sharpe. He swore.
“What is it?” Christopher was in too much pain to notice much.
“That bloody jacked-up jack pudding,” Williamson said and drew the saber that he had taken from a dead French officer on the road near the seminary. “Bloody Sharpe,” he explained.
Sharpe had escaped the rush of oncoming Frenchmen by jumping for the side of the ravine where a gorse sapling clung to a ledge. Its stem bent under his weight, but it held and he had managed to find a foothold on the wet rock beneath and then jump down to another boulder where his feet had shot out from beneath him so that he slid down the big stone’s rounded side to crash into the river, but the sword was still in his hand and in front of him was Williamson and beside the deserter was a wet and terrified Christopher. Rain hissed about them as the dark ravine was garishly lit by a stab of lightning.
“My telescope,” Sharpe said to Christopher.
“Of course, Sharpe, of course.” Christopher pulled his sopping wet coat-tails up, groped in one of his pockets and took out the glass. “Not damaged!” he said brightly. “I only borrowed it.”
“Put it on that boulder,” Sharpe ordered.
“Not damaged at all!” Christopher said, putting the precious glass on the boulder. “And well done, Lieutenant!” Christopher nudged Williamson, who was just watching Sharpe.
Sharpe took a step nearer the two men, who both backed away. Christopher pushed Williamson again, trying to make him attack Sharpe, but the deserter was wary. The longest blade he had ever used in a fight was a sword bayonet, but that experience had not trained him to fight with a saber and especially not against a butcher’s blade like the heavy cavalry sword that Sharpe held. He stepped back, waiting for an opportunity.
“I’m glad you’re here, Sharpe,” Christopher said. “I was wondering how to get away from the French. They were keeping a pretty close eye on me, as you can imagine. I have lots to tell Sir Arthur. He’s done well, hasn’t he?”
“He’s done well,” Sharpe agreed, “and he wants you dead.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Sharpe! We’re English!” Christopher had lost his hat when he jumped and the rain was flattening his hair. “We don’t assassinate people.”
“I do,” Sharpe said, and he took a step nearer again, and Christopher and Williamson edged away.
Christopher watched Sharpe pick up the glass. “Not damaged, you see? I took good care of it.” He had to shout to make himself heard over the seething rain and the crash of the river thrusting through the rocks. He pushed Williamson forward again, but the man obstinately refused to attack and Christopher now found himself trapped on a slippery ledge between cliff and river, and the Colonel, in this last extremity, finally abandoned trying to talk himself out of trouble and simply shoved the deserter toward Sharpe. “Kill him!” he shouted at Williamson. “Kill him!”
The hard shove in his back seemed to startle Williamson, who nevertheless raised the saber and slashed it at Sharpe’s head. There was a great clang as the two blades met, then Sharpe kicked the deserter’s left knee, a kick that made Williamson’s leg buckle, and Sharpe, who looked as though he was not making any particular effort, sliced the sword across Williamson’s neck so that the deserter was knocked back to the right and then the sword lunged through the rifleman’s green jacket and into his belly. Sharpe twisted the blade to stop it being trapped by the suction of flesh, ripped it free and watched the dying Williamson topple into the river. “I hate deserters,” Sharpe said, “I do so hate bloody deserters.”
Christopher had watched his man defeated and seen that Sharpe had not had to fight hard at all to do it. “No, Sharpe,” he said, “you don’t understand!” He tried to think of the words that would make Sharpe think, make him step back, but the Colonel’s mind was in panic and the words would not come.
Sharpe watched Williamson. For a moment the dying man tried to struggle out of the river, but the blood ran red from his neck and his belly and he suddenly flopped back and his ugly face sank under the water. “I do so hate deserters,” Sharpe said again, then he looked at Christopher. “Is that sword good for anything except picking your teeth, Colonel?”
Christopher numbly drew his slender blade. He had trained with a sword. He used to spend good money that he could scarce afford at Horace Jackson’s Hall of Arms on Jermyn Street where he had learned the finer graces of fencing and where he had even earned grudging praise from the great Jackson himself, but fighting on the French-chalked boards of Jermyn Street was one thing and facing Richard Sharpe in the Misarella’s ravine was altogether another. “No, Sharpe,” he said as the rifleman stepped toward him, then raised his blade in a panicked riposte as the big sword flickered toward him.
Sharpe’s lunge had been a tease, a probe to see whether Christopher would fight, but Sharpe was staring into his enemy’s eyes and he knew this man would die like a lamb. “Fight, you bastard,” he said, and lunged again, and again Christopher made a feeble riposte, but then the Colonel saw a boulder in the river’s center and he thought that he might just leap to it and from there he could reach the opposite bank and so climb to safety. He slashed his sword in a wild blow to give himself the space to make the jump and then he turned and sprang, but his broken ankle crumpled, the rock was wet under his boots and he slipped and would have fallen into the river except that Sharpe seized his jacket and so Christopher fell on the ledge, the sword useless in his hand and with his enemy above him. “No!” he begged. “No.” He stared up at Sharpe. “You saved me, Sharpe,” he said, realizing what had just happened and with a sudden hope surging
through him. “You saved me.”
“Can’t pick your pockets, Colonel, if you’re under water,” Sharpe said and then his face twisted in rage as he rammed the sword down.
Christopher died on the ledge just above the pool where Williamson had drowned. The eddy above the deserter’s body ran with new red blood, then the red spilled out into the main stream where it was diluted first to pink and then to nothing. Christopher twitched and gargled because Sharpe’s sword had taken out his windpipe and that was a mercy for it was a quicker death than he deserved. Sharpe watched the Colonel’s body jerk and then go still, and he dipped his blade in the water to clean it, dried it as best he could on Christopher’s coat and then gave the Colonel’s pockets a quick search and came up with three gold coins, a broken watch with a silver case and a leather folder crammed with papers that would probably interest Hogan. “Bloody fool,” Sharpe said to the body, then he looked up into the gathering night and saw a great shadow at the ravine’s edge above him. For a second he thought it must be a Frenchman, then he heard Harper’s voice.
“Is he dead?”
“Didn’t even put up a fight. Williamson too.”
Sharpe climbed up the ravine’s side until he was near Harper and the Sergeant lowered his rifle to haul Sharpe the rest of the way. Sergeant Macedo was there and the three could not return to the bluff because the French were on the road and so they took shelter from the rain in a gully formed where one of the great round boulders had been split by a frost. Sharpe told Harper what had happened, then asked if the Irishman had seen Kate.
“The Lieutenant’s got her, sir,” Harper answered. “The last I saw of her she was having a good cry and he was holding hard onto her and giving her a nice pat on the back. Women like a good cry, have you noticed that, sir?”
“I have,” Sharpe said, “I have.”
“Makes them feel better,” Harper said. “Funny how it doesn’t work for us.”
Sharpe gave one of the gold coins to Harper, the second to Macedo and kept the third. Darkness had fallen. It promised to be a long, cold and hungry night, but Sharpe did not mind. “Got my telescope back,” he told Harper.
“I thought you would.”
“Wasn’t even broken. At least I don’t think so.” The glass had not rattled when he shook it, so he assumed it was fine.
The rain eased and Sharpe listened and heard nothing but the scrape of French feet on the Saltador’s stones, the gusting of the wind, the sound of the river and the fall of the rain. He heard no gunfire. So that faraway fight at the Ponte Nova was over and he did not doubt that it was a victory. The French were going. They had met Sir Arthur Wellesley and he had licked them, licked them good and proper, and Sharpe smiled at that, for though Wellesley was a cold beast, unfriendly and haughty, he was a bloody good soldier. And he had made havoc for King Nicolas. And Sharpe had helped. He had done his bit.
Historical Note
Sharpe is once again guilty of stealing another man’s thunder. It was, indeed, a Portuguese barber who rowed a skiff across the Douro and alerted Colonel Waters to the existence of three stranded barges on the river’s northern bank, but he did it on his own initiative and there were no British troops on the northern bank at the time and no riflemen from the 95th helped in the defense of the seminary. The French believed they had either destroyed or removed every boat on the river, but they missed those three barges which then began a cumbersome ferry service that fed redcoats into the seminary, which, inexplicably, had been left unguarded. The tale of the spherical case shot destroying the leading French gun team is taken from Oman’s A History of the Peninsular War, Vol II. General Sir Edward Paget was wounded in the arm in that fight. He lost his arm, returned to England to recuperate and then came back to the Peninsula as General of the First Division, but his bad luck continued when he was captured by the French. The British lost seventy-seven men killed or wounded in the fight at the seminary while French casualties were at least three or four times as many. The French also failed to destroy the ferry at Barca d’Avintas which was refloated on the morning of the attack and carried two King’s German Legion infantry battalions and the 14th Light Dragoons across the river, a force that could have given the French serious problems as they fled Oporto, but the Genera’ m charge of the units, George Murray, though he advanced north to the Amarante road, supinely watched the enemy pass. Later that day General Charles Stewart led the 14th Light Dragoons in a magnificent charge that broke the French rearguard, but Murray still refused to advance his infantry and so it was all too little too late. I have probably tradiced Marshal Soult by suggesting he was talking to his cook when the British crossed the river, but he did sleep in till nearly eleven o’clock that morning, and whatever his cook provided for supper was indeed eaten by Sir Arthur Wellesley.
The seminary still stands, though it has now been swallowed by Oporto’s suburbs, but a plaque records its defense on 12 May 1809. Another plaque, on the quay close to where Eiffel’s magnificent iron bridge now spans the gorge, records the horrors of 29 March when the Portuguese refugees crowded onto the broken pontoon bridge. There are two explanations for the drownings. One claims that retreating Portuguese troops pulled the drawbridge up to prevent the French from ???? the bridge, while the second explanation, which I prefer, is that the sheer weight of refugees sank the central pontoons which then broke under me pressure of the river. Whichever is true the result was horror as hundreds of people, most of them civilians, were forced off the shattered end to drown in the Douro.
With his capture of Oporto Marshal Soult had conquered northern Portugal and, as he gathered his strength for the onward march to Lissabon, he did indeed flirt with the idea of making himself king. More than once he canvassed his general officers, tried to gain support among me Portuguese and doubtless encouraged the Diario do Porto, a newspaper established during the French occupation of the city and edited by a priest who supported the egregious idea. Quite what Napoleon would have made of such a self-promotion is not difficult to guess and it was probably the prospect of the Emperor’s displeasure, as much as anything else, which persuaded Soult against the idea.
But the idea was real and it gave Soult the nickname “King Nicolas“ and very nearly provoked a mutiny which was to be led by Colonel Donadieu and Colonel Lafitte, plus several other now unknown officers, and Captain Argenton did make two trips through the lines to consult with the British. Argenton wanted the British to use their influence on the Portuguese to persuade them to encourage Soult to declare himself king, for when Soult did so the mutiny would break out, at which point Donadieu and the others would supposedly lead the army back to France. The British were asked to encourage this nonsense by blocking the roads east into Spain, but leaving the northern roads unthreatened. Sir Arthur Wellesley, arriving at Lisbon to take over from Cradock, met Argenton and dismissed the plot out of hand. Argenton then returned to Soult, was betrayed and arrested, but was promised his life if he revealed all that he knew and among those revelations was the fact that the British army, far from readying itself to withdraw from Portugal, was preparing to attack northwards. The warning gave Soult a chance to withdraw his advance forces from south of the Douro who otherwise might have been trapped by an ambitious encircling move that Wellesley had initiated. Argenton’s career was not over. He managed to escape his captors, reached the British army and was given a safe passage to England. For some reason he then decided to return to France where he was again captured and this time shot. It is also worth noting, while we are discussing sinister plots, that the aspirations Christopher attributes to Napoleon, aspirations for “a European system, a European code of laws, a European judiciary and one nation alone in Europe, Europeans,” were indeed articulated by Bonaparte.
This is a story that begins and ends on bridges and the twin tales of how Major Dulong of the 31st Leger captured the Ponte Nova and then the Saltador are true. He was a rather Sharpe-like character who enjoyed an extraordinary reputation for bravery, but he was wo
unded at the Saltador and I have been unable to discover his subsequent fate. He almost single-handedly saved Soult’s army, so he deserved a long life and an easy death, and he certainly does not deserve to be given a failing role in the fictional story of the fictional village of Vila Real de Zedes.
Hagman’s marksmanship at seven hundred paces sounds a little too good to be believable, but is based on an actual event which occurred the previous year during Sir John Moore’s retreat to Corunna. Tom Plunkett (an “irrepressibly vulgar rifleman,” Christopher Hibbert calls him in his book Corunna) fired the “miracle shot” which killed the French General Colbert at around seven hundred yards. The shot, rightly, became famous among riflemen. I read in a recent publication that the extreme range of the Baker rifle was only three hundred yards, a fact that would have surprised the men in green who reckoned that distance to be middling.
Marshal Soult, still merely the Duke of Dalmatia, was forced to retreat once Wellesley had crossed the Douro and the tale of his retreat is described in the novel. The French should have been trapped and forced to surrender, but it is easy to make such criticisms long after the event. If the Portuguese or British had marched a little faster or if the ordenanqa had destroyed either the Ponte Nova or the Saltador then Soult would have been finished, but a small measure of good fortune and Major Dulong’s singular heroism rescued the French. The weather doubtless had much to do with their escape. The rain and cold of that early May were unseasonably vicious and slowed the pursuit and, as Sir Arthur Wellesley observed in a report to the Prime Minister, an army that abandons all its guns, vehicles and wounded can move a great deal faster than an army that retains its heavy equipment, but the French escape was nevertheless a missed opportunity after the brilliant victory at Oporto.