Sharpe's Escape (28 page)

Twenty miles to the north the first French troops reached the main road. They had brushed aside the Portuguese militia who had blocked the track looping north around Bussaco's ridge, and now their cavalry patrols galloped into undefended and deserted farmland. The army turned south. Coimbra was next, then Lisbon, and with that would come victory.

Because the Eagles were marching south.

T
HE FIRST IDEA was to break through the trapdoor and then work on whatever had been piled above. "Go through the edge of the hatch," Vicente suggested, "then perhaps we can break through the box above? Take everything out of the box? Then wriggle through?"

Sharpe could think of nothing else that might free them, so he and Harper set to work. They tried raising the trapdoor first, crouching beneath it and heaving up, but the wood did not move a fraction of an inch, and so they started to carve away at the timbers. Vicente, with his wounded shoulder, could not help, so he and Sarah sat in the cellar as far from the two decaying bodies as they could and listened as Sharpe and Harper attacked the trapdoor. Harper used his sword bayonet and, because that was a shorter blade than Sharpe's sword, worked farther up the steps. Sharpe took off his jacket, stripped off his shirt and wrapped the linen round the blade so he could grip the edge without being cut. He told Harper what he was doing and suggested he might want to protect his own hands. "Pity, though," Sharpe said, "this is a new shirt."

"A present from a certain seamstress in Lisbon?" Harper asked.

"It was, yes."

Harper chuckled, then stabbed the blade upwards. Sharpe did the same with his sword and they worked in silence mostly, gouging in the dark, splintering and levering out scraps of tough, ancient wood. Once in a while a blade would encounter a nail and they would swear.

"It's a real language lesson," Sarah said after a while.

"I'm sorry, miss," Sharpe said.

"You sort of don't notice when you're in the army," Harper explained.

"Do all soldiers swear?"

"All of them," Sharpe said, "all of the time. Except for Daddy Hill."

"General Hill, miss," Harper explained, "who's noted for his very clean mouth."

"And Sergeant Read," Sharpe added, "he never swears. He's a Methodist, miss."

"I've heard him swear," Harper said, "when bloody Batten stole eight pages from his Bible to use as…" He stopped suddenly, deciding Sarah did not want to know what use Batten had made of the book of Deuteronomy, then gave a grunt as a great splinter cracked away. "Be through this in no bloody time," he said cheerfully.

The timbers of the trapdoor were at least three inches thick, and reinforced by two sturdy beams on their underside. For the moment Sharpe and Harper were ignoring the beam on their side, reckoning it was best to break through the trapdoor before worrying how to remove the bigger piece of timber. The wood was hard, but they learned to weaken its grain by repeated stabbing, then they scraped and gouged and prised the loosened timber away. The broken wood came in thimblefuls, in dust, scrap by scrap, and the cramped area under the steps gave them little space. They had to rest just to stretch their muscles from time to time, and at other times it seemed that no amount of stabbing and scraping would loosen another piece, for the two weapons were ill suited to the work. The steel was too slender, so could not be used for brutal leverage for fear the blades would snap. Sharpe used his knife for a time, the sawdust sifting down into his eyes, then he rammed the sword up again, his linen-wrapped hand near the tip to brace the steel. And even when they broke through, he thought, they would only have a small hole. God knows how they were to enlarge it, but all battles had to be fought one step at a time. No point in worrying about the future if there was to be no future, so he and Harper worked patiently away. Sweat poured down Sharpe's naked chest, flies crawled on him, the dust was thick in his mouth, and his ribs were hurting.

Time meant nothing in the dark. They could have worked an hour or ten hours, Sharpe did not know, though he sensed that night must have fallen outside in the world that now seemed so far away. He worked doggedly, trying not to think about the passing time, and slowly he chipped and gouged, rammed and scraped, until at last he thrust the sword hard up and the blow jarred down his arm because the tip had hit something more solid than wood. He did it again, then swore viciously. "Sorry, miss."

"What is it?" Vicente asked. He had been asleep and sounded alarmed.

Sharpe did not answer. Instead he used his knife, gnawing at the small hole he had made in the upper part of the broken timber and, when he had widened the hole sufficiently, he probed with the knife blade to scratch at whatever lay immediately above the trapdoor and then swore again. "The bastards have put paving slabs up there," he said. He had broken through, but only to meet immovable stone. "Bastards!"

"Mister Sharpe," Sarah said, though tiredly, as if she knew she was fighting a losing battle.

"They probably are bastards, miss," Harper said, then rammed his sword bayonet up into the splintered hole he had made and was rewarded with the same sound of steel against stone. He uttered his opinion, apologized to Sarah, then slumped down.

"They've done what?" Vicente asked.

"They've put stones on top," Sharpe said, "and other stuff on top of the stones. The bastards aren't as daft as they look." He edged down the steps and sat with his back against the wall. He felt used up, exhausted and it hurt just to breathe.

"We can't get through the trapdoor?" Vicente asked.

"Not a bloody chance," Sharpe said.

"So?" Vicente asked tentatively.

"So we bloody think," Sharpe said, but he could not think of anything else to do. Hell and damnation was all he could think. They were bloody well trapped.

"How do the rats get in?" Sarah asked after a while.

"Those little bastards can get through gaps as small as your little finger," Harper said. "You can't keep a good rat out, not if he wants to get in."

"So where do they get in?" she persisted.

"Round the edge of the trapdoor," Sharpe guessed, "where we can't get out."

They sat in gloomy silence. The flies settled back on the corpses. "If we fired our guns," Vicente said, "someone might hear?"

"Not down here, they won't," Sharpe said, preferring to keep all his firepower for the moment when Ferragus came for them. He leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes, trying to think. The ceiling? Bricks and stones. Hundreds of the buggers. He imagined himself breaking through, then he was suddenly in a field, bright with flowers, a bullet came past him, then another and he was struck on the leg and he woke suddenly, realizing that someone had tapped his right calf. "Was I asleep?" he asked.

"We all were," Harper said. "God knows what time it is."

"Jesus." Sharpe stretched himself, feeling the pain in his arms and legs that had come from working inside the cramped stairway. "Jesus," he said angrily. "We can't afford to sleep. Not with those bastards coming for us."

Harper did not answer. Sharpe could hear the Irishman moving, apparently stretching on the floor. He supposed the Irishman wanted to sleep again, and he did not approve, but he could not think of anything more useful Harper could do and so he said nothing.

"I can hear something," Harper spoke after a while. His voice came from the center of the cellar, from the floor.

"Where?" Sharpe asked.

"Put your ear on the stone, sir."

Sharpe stretched out and put his right ear against the floor. His hearing was not what it was. Too many years of muskets and rifles had dulled it, but he held his breath, listened hard, and heard the faintest hint of water running. "Water?"

"There's a stream down there," Harper said.

"Like the Fleet," Sharpe said.

"The what?" Vicente asked.

"It's a river in London," Sharpe said, "and for a long way it flows underground. No one knows it's there, but it is. They built the city on top of it."

"They've done the same here," Harper said.

Sharpe tapped the floor with the hilt of his sword, but was not rewarded with a hollow sound, yet he was fairly certain the noise of water was there, and Sarah, whose hearing had not been dulled by battle, was quite certain of it. "Right, Pat," Sharpe said, his spirits restored and the pain in his ribs even seeming less biting. "We'll lift a bloody stone."

That was easier said than done. They used their weapons again, scraping away at the edges of a big flagstone to work down between the slab and its neighbors, and Harper found a place where a chip the size of his little finger was missing from the stone's edge, and he delved down there, working the sword bayonet into the foundations. "It's rubble down there," he said.

"Let's just hope the bloody thing isn't mortared into place," Sharpe said.

"No," Harper said scornfully. "Why would you mortar a slab? You just lay the buggers on gravel and stamp them down. Move back, sir."

"What are you doing?"

"I'm going to lift the sod."

"Why don't we lever it up?"

"Because you'll break your sword, sir, and that'll put you in a really bad mood. Just give me space. And be ready to hold it when I've got the bastard up."

Sharpe moved, Harper straddled the stone, got two fingers underneath its edge and heaved. It did not move. He swore, braced himself again, and used all his vast strength and there was a grinding sound and Sharpe, touching the stone's edge with his fingers, felt it move a trifle upwards. Harper grunted, managed to get a third finger underneath and gave another giant pull and suddenly the stone was lifted and Sharpe rammed the muzzle of his rifle under the exposed edge to hold it up. "You can let go now."

"God save Ireland!" Harper said, straightening. The stone was resting on the rifle muzzle and they left it there while Harper caught his breath. "We can both do it now, sir," the Irishman said. "You on the other side? We'll just turn the bugger over. Sorry, miss."

"I'm getting used to it," Sarah said in a resigned voice.

Sharpe got his hands under the edge. "Ready?"

"Now, sir."

They heaved and the stone came up, and kept going to turn on its end so that it fell smack on the nearer corpse with a wet, squashing sound that released a gust of noxious vapor along with an unseen cloud of flies. Sarah gave a noise of disgust, Sharpe and Harper were laughing.

Now they could feel a square patch of rubble, a space of broken bricks, stones and sand, and they used their hands to scoop it out, sometimes loosening the packed rubble first with a blade. Vicente used his right hand to help and Sarah pushed the excavated material aside.

"There's no end to the bloody stuff," Harper said, and the more they pulled out, the more fell in from the sides. They went down two feet and then, at last, the rubble ended as Sharpe's battered and bleeding hands found a curved surface that felt like tiles stacked on edge. They went on scooping until they had bared two or three square feet of the arched surface.

Vicente used his right hand to probe what Sharpe thought were tiles. "Roman bricks," Vicente guessed. "The Romans made their bricks very thin, like tiles." He felt for a while longer, exploring the arched shape. "It's the top of a tunnel."

"A tunnel?" Sharpe asked.

"The stream," Sarah said. "The Romans must have channeled it."

"And we're going to break into it," Sharpe said. He could hear the trickle far more clearly now. So there was water there, and the water flowed to the river through a tunnel, and that thought filled him with a fierce hope.

He knelt at the edge of the hole, balancing on a slab that was unsteady because of the rubble that had fallen from beneath it, and began hammering down with the brass butt of a rifle.

"What you're doing," Vicente said, judging what was happening by the dull sound of the stock striking the bricks, "is hitting at the top of the arch. That will only wedge the bricks tighter."

"What I'm doing," Sharpe said, "is breaking the bugger." He thought Vicente was probably right, but he was too frustrated to work patiently on the old bricks. "And I hope I'm doing it with your rifle," he added. The butt hammered down again, then Harper joined in from the other side and the two rifles cracked and banged on the bricks and Sharpe could hear scraps dropping into the water, then Harper gave an almighty blow and a whole chunk of the ancient brickwork fell away and suddenly, if it was possible, the cellar was filled with an even worse smell, a stink from the foulest depths of hell.

"Oh, shit!" Harper said, recoiling.

"That's what it is," Vicente said in a faint voice. The smell was so bad that it was hard to breathe.

"A sewer?" Sharpe asked in disbelief.

"Jesus Christ!" Harper said, after trying to fill his lungs. Sarah sighed.

"It comes from the upper town," Vicente explained. "Most of the lower town just use pits in their cellars. It's a Roman sewer. They called it a
cloaca
."

"I call it our way out," Sharpe said and hammered the rifle down again, and the bricks fell more easily now and he could feel the hole widening. "It's time to see again," he said.

He retrieved the discarded half of Lawford's copy of
The Times
and found his own rifle, distinguishing it by the chip missing from the cheek rest on the left side of the butt where a French musket ball had snicked out a splinter. He needed his own rifle because he knew it was still unloaded, and now he primed it while Harper twisted the newspaper into a spill. The spill caught on the second try, and the newspaper flared up, then the flames turned a strange blue-green as Harper moved the burning paper close to the hole.

"Oh, no!" Sarah said, looking down.

The sound might be a trickle, but it came from a green-scummed liquid that glistened some seven or eight feet below. Rats, frightened by the sudden light, scuttled along the edge of the slime, scrabbling on the old bricks that were black and furred with growth. Sharpe, judging from the curve of the ancient sewer, reckoned the effluent was about a foot deep, then the flames scorched Harper's fingers and he let the torch drop. It burned blue for a second, then they were in the dark again. Thank God most of the richer folk were gone from Coimbra, Sharpe thought, or else the old Roman sewer would be brimming over its edge with filth.