Sharpe 3-Book Collection 2: Sharpe’s Havoc, Sharpe’s Eagle, Sharpe’s Gold (27 page)

“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 screw, 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.”

Sharpe himself went to a large room that he suspected had been the office of the seminary’s master. It was shelved like a library, and it had been plundered like the rest of the building. Torn and broken-spined books lay thick on the floorboards, a large table had been thrown against one wall and a slashed oil painting of a saintly-looking cleric was half burned in the big hearth. The only undamaged object was a crucifix, black as soot, that hung high on the wall above the mantel.

Sharpe threw open the window that was immediately above the seminary’s main door and used the little telescope to search the city that lay so tantalizingly close across the valley. Then, disobeying his own instructions that everyone was to stay hidden, he leaned across the sill in an attempt to see what was happening on the river’s southern bank, but he could see nothing meaningful and then, while he was still craning his neck, a stranger’s voice boomed behind him. “You must be Lieutenant Sharpe. Name’s Waters, Lieutenant Colonel Waters, and well done, Sharpe, bloody well done.”

Sharpe pulled back and turned to see a red-coated officer stepping
through the mess of books and papers. “I’m Sharpe, sir,” he acknowledged.

“Bloody Frogs are dozing,” Waters said. He was a stocky man, bow-legged from too much horse-riding, with a weather-beaten face. Sharpe guessed he was in his low forties, but looked older because his grizzled hair was gray. “They should have had a battalion and a half up here, shouldn’t they? That and a couple of gun batteries. Our enemies are dozing, Sharpe, bloody dozing.”

“You were the man I saw across the river?” Sharpe asked.

“The very same. Your Portuguese fellow came across. Smart man! So he rowed me back and now we’re floating those damned barges.” Waters grinned. “It’s heave-ho, my hearties, and if we can get the damn things afloat then we’ll have the Buffs over first, then the rest of the 1st Brigade. Should be interesting when Marshal Soult realizes we’ve sneaked in his back door, eh? Is there any liquor in the building?”

“All gone, sir.”

“Good man,” Waters said, mistakenly deducing that Sharpe himself must have removed the temptation before the arrival of the redcoats, then he stepped to the window, took a big telescope from a leather satchel hanging from his shoulder and stared at Oporto.

“So what’s happening, sir?” Sharpe asked.

“Happening? We’re running the Frogs out of Portugal! Hop hop, croak croak, and good bloody riddance to the spavined bastards. Look at it!” Waters gestured at the city. “They don’t have the first blind idea that we’re here! Your Portuguese fellow said you’d been cut off. Is that true?”

“Since the end of March.”

“Ye gods,” Waters said, “you must be out of touch!” The Colonel pulled back from the window and perched on the sill where he told Sharpe that Sir Arthur Wellesley had indeed arrived in Portugal. “He came less than three weeks ago,” Waters said, “and he’s put some snap into the troops, by God, he has! Cradock was a decent enough fellow, but he had no snap, none. So we’re on the march, Sharpe, left, right, left, right, and the devil take the hindmost. British army over there.” He pointed through the window, indicating the hidden ground beyond the
high convent on the southern bank. “Bloody Frogs seem to think we’ll come by sea, so all their men are either in the city or guarding the river between the city and the sea.” Sharpe felt a twinge of guilt for not believing the woman in Barca d’Avintas who had told him exactly that. “Sir Arthur wants to get across,” Waters went on, “and your fellows have conveniently provided those three barges, and you say there’s a fourth?”

“Three miles upriver, sir.”

“You ain’t done a bad morning’s work, Sharpe,” Waters said with a friendly grin. “We only have to pray for one thing.”

“That the French don’t discover us here?”

“Exactly. So best remove my red coat from the window, eh?” Waters laughed and crossed the room. “Pray they go on sleeping with their sweet froggy dreams because once they do wake up then the day’s going to be damned hot, don’t you think? And those three barges can take how many men apiece? Thirty? And God alone knows how long each crossing will take. We could be shoving our damned heads into the tiger’s mouth, Sharpe.”

Sharpe forbore to comment that he had spent the last few weeks with his head inside the tiger’s mouth. Instead he stared across the valley, trying to imagine how the French would approach when they did attack. He guessed they would come straight from the city, across the valley and up the slope that was virtually bare of any cover. The northern flank of the seminary looked toward the road in the valley and that slope was just as bare, all except for one solitary tree with pale leaves that grew right in the middle of the climb. Anyone attacking the seminary would presumably try to get to the garden gate or the big front door and that would mean crossing a wide paved terrace where carriages bringing visitors to the seminary could turn around and where attacking infantry would be cut down by musket and rifle fire from the seminary’s windows and its balustraded roof. “A deathtrap!” Colonel Waters was sharing the view and evidently thinking the same thoughts.

“I wouldn’t want to be attacking up that slope,” Sharpe agreed.

“And I’ve no doubt we’ll put some cannon on the other bank to make it all a bit less healthy,” Waters said cheerfully.

Sharpe hoped that was true. He kept wondering why there were no British guns on the wide terrace of the convent that overlooked the river, the terrace where the Portuguese had placed their batteries in March. It seemed an obvious position, but Sir Arthur Wellesley appeared to have chosen to put his artillery down among the port lodges which were out of sight of the seminary.

“What’s the time?” Waters asked, then answered his own question by taking out a turnip watch. “Nearly eleven!”

“Are you with the staff, sir?” Sharpe asked because Waters’s red coat, though decorated with some tarnished gold braid, had no regimental facings.

“I’m one of Sir Arthur’s exploring officers,” Waters said cheerfully. “We ride ahead to scout the land like those fellows in the Bible that Joshua sent ahead to spy out Jericho, remember the tale? And a frow called Rahab gave them shelter? That’s the luck of the Jews, ain’t it? The chosen people get greeted by a prostitute and I get welcomed by a rifleman, but I suppose it’s better than a sloppy wet kiss from a bloody Frog dragoon, eh?”

Sharpe smiled. “Do you know Captain Hogan, sir?”

“The mapping fellow? Of course I know Hogan. A capital man, capital!” Waters suddenly stopped and looked at Sharpe. “My God, of course! You’re his lost rifleman, ain’t you? Ah, I’ve placed you now. He said you’d survive. Well done, Sharpe. Ah, here come the first of the gallant Buffs.”

Vicente and his men had escorted thirty redcoats up the hill, but instead of using the unlocked arched door they had trudged round to the front and now gaped up at Waters and Sharpe who in turn looked down from the window. The newcomers wore the buff facings of the 3rd Regiment of Foot, a Kentish regiment, and they were sweating after their climb under the hot sun. A thin lieutenant led them and he assured Colonel Waters that two more bargeloads of men were already disembarking, then he looked curiously at Sharpe. “What on earth are the Rifles doing here?”

“First on the field,” Sharpe quoted the regiment’s favorite boast, “and last off it.”

“First? You must have flown across the bloody river.” The Lieutenant wiped his forehead. “Any water here?”

“Barrel inside the main door,” Sharpe said, “courtesy of the 95th.”

More men arrived. The barges were toiling to and fro across the river, propelled by the massive sweeps which were manned by local people who were eager to help, and every twenty minutes another eighty or ninety men would toil up the hill. One group arrived with a general, Sir Edward Paget, who took over command of the growing garrison from Waters. Paget was a young man, still in his thirties, energetic and eager, who owed his high rank to his aristocratic family’s wealth, but he had the reputation of being a general who was popular with his soldiers. He climbed to the seminary roof where Sharpe’s men were now positioned and, seeing Sharpe’s small telescope, asked to borrow it. “Lost me own,” he explained, “it’s somewhere in the baggage in Lisbon.”

“You came with Sir Arthur, sir?” Sharpe asked.

“Three weeks ago,” Paget said, staring at the city.

“Sir Edward,” Waters told Sharpe, “is second in command to Sir Arthur.”

“Which doesn’t mean much,” Sir Edward said, “because he never tells me anything. What’s wrong with this bloody telescope?”

“You have to hold the outer lens in place, sir,” Sharpe said.

“Take mine,” Waters said, offering the better instrument.

Sir Edward scanned the city, then frowned. “So what are the bloody French doing?” he asked in a puzzled tone.

“Sleeping,” Waters answered.

“Won’t like it when they wake up, will they?” Paget remarked. “Asleep in the keeper’s lodge with poachers all over the coverts!” He gave the telescope back to Waters and nodded at Sharpe. “Damn pleased to have some riflemen here, Lieutenant. I dare say you’ll get some target practice before the day’s out.”

Another group of men came up the hill. Every window of the
seminary’s brief western facade now had a group of redcoats and a quarter of the windows on the long northern wall were also manned. The garden wall had been loopholed and garrisoned by Vicente’s Portuguese and by the Buffs’ grenadier company. The French, thinking themselves secure in Oporto, were watching the river between the city and the sea while behind their backs, on the high eastern hill, the redcoats were gathering.

Which meant the gods of war were tightening the screws.

And something had to break.

T
WO OFFICERS
were posted in the entrance hall of the Palacio das Carrancas to make sure all visitors took their boots off. “His grace,” they explained, referring to Marshal Nicolas Soult, Duke of Dalmatia, whose nickname was now King Nicolas, “is sleeping.”

The hallway was cavernous, arched, high, beautiful, and hard-heeled boots striding over its tiled floor echoed up the staircase to where King Nicolas slept. Early that morning a hussar had come in hurriedly, his spurs had caught in the rug at the foot of the stairs and he had sprawled with a terrible clatter of saber and scabbard that had woken the Marshal, who had then posted the officers to make certain the rest of his sleep was not disturbed. The two officers were powerless to stop the British artillery firing from across the river, but perhaps the Marshal was not so sensitive to gunfire as he was to loud heels.