Sharpe’s Havoc: The Northern Portugal Campaign, Spring 1809

And the French were coming.

The approach of the French was the more urgent crisis. The splintering noise of sustained musket fire was sounding just outside the city and in the last ten minutes five or six cannonballs had battered through the roofs of the houses high on the river’s northern bank. The Savage house was a few yards down the slope and for the moment was protected from errant French cannon fire, but already the warm spring air hummed with spent musket balls that sometimes struck the thick roof tiles with a loud crack or else ripped through the dark glossy pines to shower needles over the garden. It was a large house, built of white-painted stone and with dark-green shutters closed over the windows. The front porch was crowned with a wooden board on which were gilded letters spelling out the name House Beautiful in English. It seemed an odd name for a building high on the steep hillside where the city of Oporto overlooked the River Douro in northern Portugal, especially as the big square house was not beautiful at all, but quite stark and ugly and angular, even if its harsh lines were softened by dark cedars which would offer welcome shade in summer. A bird was making a nest in one of the cedars and whenever a musket ball tore through the branches it would squawk in alarm and fly a small loop before returning to its work. Scores of fugitives were fleeing past the House Beautiful, running down the hill towards the ferries and the pontoon bridge that would take them safe across the Douro. Some of the refugees drove pigs, goats and cattle, others pushed handcarts precariously loaded with furniture, and more than one carried a grandparent on his back.

Richard Sharpe, Lieutenant in the second battalion of His Majesty’s 95th Rifles, unbuttoned his breeches and pissed on the narcissi in the House Beautiful’s front flower bed. The ground was soaked because there had been a storm the previous night. Lightning had flickered above the city, thunder had billowed across the sky and the heavens had opened so that the flower beds now steamed gently as the hot sun drew out the night’s moisture. An howitzer shell arched overhead, sounding like a ponderous barrel rolling swiftly over attic floorboards. It left a small grey trace of smoke from its burning fuse. Sharpe looked up at the smoke tendril, judging from its curve where the howitzer had to be emplaced. ‘They’re getting too bloody close,’ he said to no one in particular.

‘You’ll be drowning those poor bloody flowers, so you will,’ Sergeant Harper said, then added a hasty ‘sir’ when he saw Sharpe’s face.

The howitzer shell exploded somewhere above the tangle of alleys close to the river and a heartbeat later the French cannonade rose to a sustained thunder, but the thunder had a crisp, clear, staccato timbre, suggesting that some of the guns were very close. A new battery, Sharpe thought. It must have unlimbered just outside the city, maybe half a mile away from Sharpe, and was probably whacking the big northern redoubt in the flank, and the musketry that had been sounding like the burning of a dry thorn bush now faded to an intermittent crackle, suggesting that the defending infantry was retreating. Some, indeed, were running and Sharpe could hardly blame them. A large and disorganized Portuguese force, led by the Bishop of Oporto, was trying to stop Marshal Soult’s army from capturing the city, the second largest in Portugal, and the French were winning. The Portuguese road to safety led past the front garden of the House Beautiful and the bishop’s blue-coated soldiers were bolting down the hill as fast as their legs could take them, except that when they saw the green-jacketed British riflemen they slowed to a walk as if to prove that they were not panicking. And that, Sharpe reckoned, was a good sign. The Portuguese evidently had pride, and troops with pride would fight well given another chance, though not all the Portuguese troops showed such spirit. The men from the ordenança kept running, but that was hardly surprising. The ordenança was an enthusiastic but unskilled army of volunteers raised to defend the homeland and the battle-hardened French troops were tearing them to shreds.

Meanwhile Miss Savage was still missing.

Captain Hogan appeared on the front porch of the House Beautiful. He carefully closed the door behind him and then looked up to heaven and swore fluently and impressively. Sharpe buttoned his breeches and his two dozen riflemen inspected their weapons as though they had never seen such things before. Captain Hogan added a few more carefully chosen words, then spat as a French round shot trundled overhead. ‘What it is, Richard,’ he said when the cannon shot had passed, ‘is a shambles. A bloody, goddamned miserable poxed bollocks of an agglomerated halfwitted shambles.’ The round shot landed somewhere in the lower town and precipitated the splintering crash of a collapsing roof. Captain Hogan took out his snuff box and inhaled a mighty pinch.

‘Bless you,’ Sergeant Harper said.

Captain Hogan sneezed and Harper smiled.

‘Her name,’ Hogan said, ignoring Harper, ‘is Katherine or, rather, Kate. Kate Savage, nineteen years old and in need, my God, how she is in need, of a thrashing! A hiding! A damned good smacking, that’s what she needs, Richard. A copper-sheathed, goddamned bloody good walloping.’

‘So where the hell is she?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Her mother thinks she might have gone to Vila Real de Zedes,’ Captain Hogan said, ‘wherever in God’s holy hell that might be. But the family has an estate there. A place where they go to escape the summer heat.’ He rolled his eyes in exasperation.

‘So why would she go there, sir?’ Sergeant Harper asked.

‘Because she’s a fatherless nineteen-year-old girl,’ Hogan said, ‘who insists on having her own way. Because she’s fallen out with her mother. Because she’s a bloody idiot who deserves a ruddy good hiding. Because, oh I don’t know why! Because she’s young and knows everything, that’s why.’ Hogan was a stocky, middle-aged Irishman, a Royal Engineer, with a shrewd face, a soft brogue, greying hair and a charitable disposition. ‘Because she’s a bloody halfwit, that’s why,’ he finished.

‘This Vila Real de whatever,’ Sharpe said, ‘is it far? Why don’t we just fetch her?’

‘Which is precisely what I’ve told the mother you will do, Richard. You will go to Vila Real de Zedes, you will find the wretched girl and you will get her across the river. We’ll wait for you in Vila Nova and if the damned French capture Vila Nova then we’ll wait for you in Coimbra.’ He paused as he pencilled these instructions on a scrap of paper. ‘And if the Frogs take Coimbra we’ll wait for you in Lisbon, and if the bastards take Lisbon we’ll be pissing our breeches in London and you’ll be God knows where. Don’t fall in love with her,’ he went on, handing Sharpe the piece of paper, ‘don’t get the silly girl pregnant, don’t give her the thrashing she bloody well deserves and don’t, for the love of Christ, lose her, and don’t lose Colonel Christopher either. Am I plain?’

‘Colonel Christopher is coming with us?’ Sharpe asked, appalled.

‘Didn’t I just tell you that?’ Hogan enquired innocently, then turned as a clatter of hooves announced the appearance of the widow Savage’s travelling coach from the stable yard at the rear of the house. The coach was heaped with baggage and there was even some furniture and two rolled carpets lashed onto the rear rack where a coachman, precariously poised between a half-dozen gilded chairs, was leading Hogan’s black mare by the reins. The Captain took the horse and used the coach’s mounting step to hoist himself into the saddle. ‘You’ll be back with us in a couple of days,’ he assured Sharpe. ‘Say six, seven hours to Vila Real de Zedes? The same back to the ferry at Barca d’Avintas and then a quiet stroll home. You know where Barca d’Avintas is?’

‘No, sir.’

‘That way.’ Hogan pointed eastwards. ‘Four country miles.’ He pushed his right boot into its stirrup, then lifted his body to flick out the tails of his blue coat. ‘With luck you may even rejoin us tomorrow night.’

‘What I don’t understand …’ Sharpe began, then paused because the front door of the house had been thrown open and Mrs Savage, widow and mother of the missing daughter, came into the sunlight. She was a good-looking woman in her forties: dark-haired, tall and slender with a pale face and high arched eyebrows. She hurried down the steps as a cannonball rumbled overhead and then there was a smattering of musket fire alarmingly close, so close that Sharpe climbed the porch steps to stare at the crest of the hill where the Braga road disappeared between a large tavern and a handsome church. A Portuguese six-pounder gun had just been deployed by the church and was now firing at the invisible enemy. The bishop’s forces had dug new redoubts on the crest and patched the old medieval wall with hastily erected palisades and earthworks, but the sight of the small gun firing from its makeshift position in the centre of the road suggested that those defences were crumbling fast.

Mrs Savage sobbed that her baby daughter was lost, then Captain Hogan managed to persuade the widow into the carriage. Two servants laden with bags stuffed with clothes followed their mistress into the vehicle. ‘You will find Kate?’ Mrs Savage pushed open the door and enquired of Captain Hogan.

‘The precious darling will be with you very soon,’ Hogan said reassuringly. ‘Mister Sharpe will see to that,’ he added, then used his foot to close the coach door on Mrs Savage, who was the widow of one of the many British wine merchants who lived and worked in the city of Oporto. She was rich, Sharpe presumed, certainly rich enough to own a fine carriage and the lavish House Beautiful, but she was also foolish for she should have left the city two or three days before, but she had stayed because she had evidently believed the bishop’s assurance that he could repel Marshal Soult’s army. Colonel Christopher, who had once lodged in the strangely named House Beautiful, had appealed to the British forces south of the river to send men to escort Mrs Savage safely away and Captain Hogan had been the closest officer and Sharpe, with his riflemen, had been protecting Hogan while the engineer mapped northern Portugal, and so Sharpe had come north across the Douro with twenty-four of his men to escort Mrs Savage and any other threatened British inhabitants of Oporto to safety. Which should have been a simple enough task, except that at dawn the widow Savage had discovered that her daughter had fled from the house.

‘What I don’t understand,’ Sharpe persevered, ‘is why she ran away.’

‘She’s probably in love,’ Hogan explained airily. ‘Nineteen-year-old girls of respectable families are dangerously susceptible to love because of all the novels they read. See you in two days, Richard, or maybe even tomorrow? Just wait for Colonel Christopher, he’ll be with you directly, and listen.’ He bent down from the saddle and lowered his voice so that no one but Sharpe could hear him. ‘Keep a close eye on the Colonel, Richard. I worry about him, I do.’

‘You should worry about me, sir.’

‘I do that too, Richard, I do indeed,’ Hogan said, then straightened up, waved farewell and spurred his horse after Mrs Savage’s carriage which had swung out of the front gate and joined the stream of fugitives going towards the Douro.

The sound of the carriage wheels faded. The sun came from behind a cloud just as a French cannonball struck a tree on the hill’s crest and exploded a cloud of reddish blossom which drifted above the city’s steep slope. Daniel Hagman stared at the airborne blossom. ‘Looks like a wedding,’ he said and then, glancing up as a musket ball ricocheted off a roof tile, brought a pair of scissors from his pocket. ‘Finish your hair, sir?’

‘Why not, Dan,’ Sharpe said. He sat on the porch steps and took off his shako.

Sergeant Harper checked that the sentinels were watching the north. A troop of Portuguese cavalry had appeared on the crest where the single cannon was firing bravely. A rattle of musketry proved that some infantry was still fighting, but more and more troops were retreating past the house and Sharpe knew it could only be a matter of minutes before the city’s defences collapsed entirely. Hagman began slicing away at Sharpe’s hair. ‘You don’t like it over the ears, ain’t that right?’

‘I like it short, Dan.’

‘Short like a good sermon, sir,’ Hagman said. ‘Now keep still, sir, just keep still.’ There was a sudden stab of pain as Hagman speared a louse with the scissors’ blade. He spat on the drop of blood that showed on Sharpe’s scalp, then wiped it away. ‘So the Crapauds will get the city, sir?’

‘Looks like it,’ Sharpe said.

‘And they’ll march on Lisbon next?’ Hagman asked, cutting away.

‘Long way to Lisbon,’ Sharpe said.

‘Maybe, sir, but there’s an awful lot of them, sir, and precious few of us.’

‘But they say Wellesley’s coming here,’ Sharpe said.

‘As you keep telling us, sir,’ Hagman said, ‘but is he really a miracle worker?’

‘You fought at Copenhagen, Dan,’ Sharpe said, ‘and down the coast here.’ He meant the battles at Rolica and Vimeiro. ‘You could see for yourself.’

‘From the skirmish line, sir, all generals are the same,’ Hagman said, ‘and who knows if Sir Arthur’s really coming?’ It was, after all, only a rumour that Sir Arthur Wellesley was taking over from General Cradock and not everyone believed it. Many thought the British would withdraw, ought to withdraw, that they should give up the game and let the French have Portugal. ‘Turn your head to the right,’ Hagman said. The scissors clicked busily, not even pausing as a round shot buried itself in the church at the hill’s top. A mist of dust showed beside the whitewashed bell tower down which a crack had suddenly appeared. The Portuguese cavalry had been swallowed by the gun smoke and a trumpet called far away. There was a burst of musketry, then silence. A building must have been burning beyond the crest for there was a great smear of smoke drifting westwards. ‘Why would someone call their home the House Beautiful?’ Hagman wondered.

‘Didn’t know you could read, Dan,’ Sharpe said.

‘I can’t, sir, but Isaiah read it to me.’

‘Tongue!’ Sharpe called. ‘Why would someone call their home House Beautiful?’

Isaiah Tongue, long and thin and dark and educated, who had joined the army because he was a drunk and thereby lost his respectable job, grinned. ‘Because he’s a good Protestant, sir.’

‘Because he’s a bloody what?’

‘It’s from a book by John Bunyan,’ Tongue explained, ‘called Pilgrim’s Progress.’

‘I’ve heard of that,’ Sharpe said.

‘Some folk consider it essential reading,’ Tongue said airily, ‘the story of a soul’s journey from sin to salvation, sir.’

‘Just the thing to keep you burning the candles at night,’ Sharpe said.

‘And the hero, Christian, calls at the House Beautiful, sir,’ – Tongue ignored Sharpe’s sarcasm – ‘where he talks with four virgins.’