Sharpe's Escape (33 page)

"She's called Joana Jacinto," Sarah said after a short conversation. "She lives here. Her father worked on the river, but she doesn't know where he is now. And she says to thank you."

"Pretty name, Joana," Harper said, dressed now as a French sergeant, "and she's a useful sort of girl, eh? Knows how to use a bayonet."

Sharpe helped Vicente put on the blue jacket, letting it hang from the left shoulder rather than force Vicente's arm into the sleeve. "She says," Sarah had held another conversation with Joana "that she wants to stay with us."

"Of course she must," Harper said before Sharpe could offer an opinion. Joana's dark brown dress had been torn at the breasts when the soldiers stripped her, and the remnants had been splashed with blood when she killed the second soldier, and so she buttoned one of the dead men's shirts over it, then picked up a musket. Sarah, not wanting to appear less belligerent, shouldered another.

It was not much of a force. Two riflemen, two women and a wounded Portuguese cazador. But Sharpe reckoned it should be enough to break a French dream.

So he slung his rifle, hitched the sword belt higher, and led them downstairs.

MOST OF THE FRENCH INFANTRY in Coimbra were from the 8th Corps, a newly raised unit of young men fresh from the depots of France, and they were half trained, ill disciplined, resentful of an Emperor who had marched them to a war they mostly did not understand and, above all, hungry. Hundreds broke ranks to explore the university, but, finding little that they wanted, they took out their frustration by smashing, mangling and shattering whatever could be broken. Coimbra was renowned for its work on optics, but microscopes were of small use to soldiers and so they hammered the beautiful instruments with muskets, then wrenched apart the fine sextants. A handful of telescopes were saved, for such things were valued, but the larger instruments, too long to carry, were destroyed, while an unparalleled set of finely ground lenses, cushioned by velvet in a cabinet of wide, shallow drawers, was systematically broken. One room was filled with chronometers, all being tested, and they were reduced to bent springs, cogwheels and shattered cases. A fine assembly of fossils was pounded to shards and a collection of minerals, a lifetime's work carefully catalogued into quartzes and spars and ores, was scattered from a window. Fine porcelain was shattered, pictures torn from their frames and if most of the library was spared that was only because there were too many volumes to be destroyed. Some men nevertheless tried, pulling rare books from the shelves and tearing them apart, but they soon got bored and contented themselves with smashing some fine Roman vases that stood on gilded pediments. There was no sense in it, except the anger that the soldiers felt. They hated the Portuguese and so they took their revenge on what their enemy valued.

Coimbra's Old Cathedral had been built by two Frenchmen in the twelfth century and now other Frenchmen whooped with delight because so many women had taken shelter close to its altars. A handful of men tried to protect their wives and daughters, but the muskets fired, the men died and the screaming began. Other soldiers shot at the gilded high altar, aiming at the carved saints guarding the sad-faced Virgin. A six-year-old child tried to pull a soldier off his mother and had his throat cut, and when a woman would not stop screaming a sergeant cut her throat as well. In the New Cathedral, up the hill, voltigeurs took it in turns to piss into the baptismal font and, when it was full, they christened the girls they had captured in the building, giving them all the same name,
Putain
, which meant whore. A sergeant then auctioned the weeping girls, whose hair dripped with urine.

In the church of Santa Cruz, which was older than the Old Cathedral, the troops found the tombs of Portugal's first two kings. The beautifully sculpted sepulchers were wrenched apart, the coffins shattered and the bones of Alfonso the Conqueror, who had liberated Lisbon from the Muslims in the twelfth century, were hauled from their winding cloth and thrown across the floor. His son, Sancho I, had been buried in a white linen shift edged with cloth of gold, and an artilleryman ripped the shroud away and draped it about his shoulders before dancing on the remnants of the corpse. There was a gold cross studded with jewels in Sancho's tomb and three soldiers fought over it. One died, and the other two hacked the cross apart and shared it. There were more women in Santa Cruz and they suffered as the other women were suffering, while their men were taken into the Cloisters of Silence and shot.

Mostly the soldiers wanted food. They broke into houses, kicked open cellars and searched for anything they could eat. There was plenty, for the city had never been properly stripped of foodstuffs, but there were too many soldiers, and anger grew when some men ate and others stayed hungry, and the anger turned into fury when it was fuelled by the lavish supplies of wine discovered in the taverns. A rumor spread that there was a great stock of food in a warehouse in the lower town, and hundreds of men converged on it, only to find the hoard guarded by dragoons. Some stayed, hoping the dragoons would go away, while others went to find women or plunder.

A few men tried to prevent the destruction. An officer attempted to pull two artillerymen off a woman and was kicked to the ground, then stabbed with a sword. A pious sergeant, offended at what went on in the Old Cathedral, was shot. Most officers, knowing it was hopeless to try and stop the orgy of destruction, barricaded themselves in houses and waited for the madness to subside, while others simply joined in.

Marshal Masséna, escorted by hussars and accompanied by his aides and by his mistress, who was fetchingly dressed in a sky-blue hussar's uniform, found a billet in the Archbishop's palace. Two infantry colonels came to the palace and complained of the troops' behavior, but they got small sympathy from the Marshal. "They deserve a little respite," he said. "It's been a hard march, a hard march. And they're like horses. They go better if you ease the curb rein from time to time. So let them play, gentlemen, let them play." He made certain Henriette was comfortable in the Archbishop's bedroom. She disliked the crucifixes hanging on the walls so Masséna jettisoned them through the window, then asked what she would like to eat. "Grapes and wine," she said, and Masséna ordered one of his servants to ransack the palace kitchens and find both.

"And if there are none, sir?" the servant asked.

"Of course there are grapes and wine!" Masséna snapped. "Good Christ Almighty, can nothing be done without questions in this army? Find the damned grapes, find the damned wine, and take them to mademoiselle!" He went back to the palace's dining room where maps had been spread on the Archbishop's table. They were poor maps, inspired more by imagination than by topography, but one of Masséna's aides thought better ones might exist in the university, and he was right, though by the time he found them they had been reduced to ashes.

The army's Generals assembled in the dining room where Masséna planned the next stage of the campaign. He had been rebuffed at Bussaco, but that defeat had not prevented him turning the enemy's left flank and thus chasing the British and Portuguese out of central Portugal. Masséna's army was now on the Mondego and the enemy was retreating towards Lisbon, but that still left the Marshal with other enemies. Hunger assailed his troops, as did the Portuguese irregulars who closed behind his forces like wolves following a flock of sheep. General Junot suggested it was time for a pause. "The British are taking to their ships," he said, "so let them go. Then send a corps to retake the roads back to Almeida."

Almeida was the Portuguese frontier fortress where the invasion had begun, and it lay over a hundred miles eastwards at the end of the monstrously difficult roads across which the French army had struggled. "To what end?" Masséna asked.

"So supplies can get through," Junot declared, "supplies and reinforcements."

"What reinforcements?" The question was sarcastic.

"Drouet's corps?" Junot suggested.

"They won't move," Masséna said sourly, "they won't be permitted to move." The Emperor had ordered that Masséna was to be given 130,000 men for the invasion, but less than half that number had assembled on the frontier and when Masséna had pleaded for more men, the Emperor had sent a message that his present forces were adequate, that the enemy was risible and the task of invading Portugal easy. Yet the Emperor was not here. The Emperor did not command an army of half-starved men whose shoes were falling apart, an army whose supply lines were non-existent because the damned Portuguese peasants controlled the roads winding through the hills to Almeida. Marshal Masséna did not want to return to those hills. Get to Lisbon, he thought, get to Lisbon. "The roads from here to Lisbon," he asked, "are better than those we've traveled?"

"A hundred times better," one of his Portuguese aides answered.

The Marshal went to a window and stared at the smoke rising from buildings burning in the city. "Are we sure the British are making for the sea?"

"Where else can they go?" a general retorted.

"Lisbon?"

"Can't be defended," the Portuguese aide observed.

"To the north?" Masséna turned back to the table and stabbed a finger onto the hatch marks of a map. "These hills?" He was pointing to the terrain north of Lisbon where hills stretched for over thirty-two kilometers between the Atlantic and the wide river Tagus.

"They're low hills," the aide said, "and there are three roads through them and a dozen usable tracks besides."

"But this Wellington might offer battle there."

"He risks losing his army if he does," Marshal Ney intervened.

Masséna remembered the sound of the volleys from the ridge at Bussaco and imagined his men struggling into such fire again, then despised himself for indulging in fear. "We can maneuver him out of the hills," he suggested, and it was a sensible idea, for the enemy's army was surely not large enough to guard a front twenty miles wide. Threaten it in one place, Masséna thought, and launch the Eagles through the hills ten miles away. "There are forts in the hills, yes?" he asked.

"We've heard rumors that he's making forts to guard the roads," the Portuguese aide answered.

"So we march through the hills," Masséna said. That way the new forts could be left to rot while Wellington's army was surrounded, humiliated, and defeated. The Marshal stared at the map and imagined the colors of the defeated army being paraded through Paris and thrown at the feet of the Emperor. "We can turn his flank again," he said, "but not if we give him time to escape. He has to be hurried."

"So we march south?" Ney asked.

"In two days," Masséna decided. He knew he needed that much time for his army to recover from its capture of Coimbra. "Let them stay off the leash today," he said, "and tomorrow we'll whip them back to the Eagles and make sure they're ready for departure on Wednesday."

"And what will the men eat?" Junot asked.

"Whatever they damn well can," Masséna snapped. "And there has to be food here, doesn't there? The English can't have scraped a whole city bare."

"There is food." A new voice spoke and the Generals, resplendent in blue, red and gold, turned from their maps to see Chief Commissary Poquelin looking unusually pleased with himself.

"How much food?" Masséna asked caustically.

"Enough to see us to Lisbon, sir," Poquelin said, "more than enough." For days now he had tried to avoid the Generals for fear of the scorn they heaped on him, but Poquelin's hour had come. This was his triumph. The commissary had done its work. "I need transport," he said, "and a good battalion to help move the supplies, but we have all we need. More! If you remember, sir, you promised to buy these supplies? The man has kept faith. He's waiting outside."

Masséna half remembered making the promise, but now that the food was in his possession he was tempted to break the promise. The army's treasury was not large and it was not the French way to buy supplies that could be stolen. Live off the land, the Emperor always said.

Colonel Barreto, who had come to the palace with Poquelin, saw the indecision on Masséna's face. "If we renege on this promise, sir," he said respectfully, "then no one in Portugal will believe us. And in a week or two we shall be governing here. We shall need cooperation."

"Cooperation." Marshal Ney spat the word. "A guillotine in Lisbon will make them cooperate quickly enough."

Masséna shook his head. Barreto was right, and it was foolish to make new enemies at the very brink of victory. "Pay him," he said, nodding to an aide who kept the key to the money chest. "And in two days," he went on to Poquelin, "you start moving the supplies south. I want a depot at Leiria."

"Leiria?" Poquelin asked.

"Here, man, here!" Masséna stabbed a map with his forefinger, and Poquelin nervously edged through the Generals to look for the town which, he discovered, lay some forty miles south of Coimbra on the Lisbon road.

"I need wagons," Poquelin said.

"You will have every wagon and mule we possess," Masséna promised grandly.

"There aren't enough horses," Junot said sourly.

"There are never enough horses!" Masséna snapped. "So use men. Use these damned peasants." He waved at the window, indicating the town. "Harness them, whip them, make them work!"

"And the wounded?" Junot asked in alarm. Wagons would be needed to carry the wounded southwards if they were to stay with the army and thus be protected from the Portuguese irregulars.

"They can stay here," Masséna decided.

"And who guards them?"

"I shall find men," Masséna said, impatient with such quibbles. What mattered was that he had food, the enemy was retreating, and Lisbon was only a hundred miles to the south. The campaign was half complete, but from now on his army would be marching on good roads, so this was no time for caution, it was time to attack.

And in two weeks, he thought, he would have Lisbon and the war would be won.

SHARPE HAD NO SOONER GONE into the street than a man tried to snatch Sarah away from his side. She hardly looked beguiling for her crumpled black dress was torn at the hem, her hair had come loose and her face was dirty, yet the man seized her arm, then protested wildly as Sharpe pinned him against the wall with his rifle butt. Sarah spat at the man and added a couple of words which she hoped were rude enough to shock him. "You speak French?" Sharpe asked Sarah, careless that the French soldier could overhear him.