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

‘Bullet in the hip,’ Sharpe said, ‘he’ll have to stay here.’

‘Won’t miss him,’ Harper said, though before Sharpe had made the Irishman into a sergeant, Harper had been a crony of the troublemakers among whom Tarrant had been a ringleader. Now Harper was the troublemaker’s scourge. It was strange, Sharpe reflected, what three stripes could do.

Sharpe reloaded his rifle, knelt by a laurel tree, cocked the weapon and stared at the French. Most of the dragoons were mounted, though a handful were on foot and trying their luck with their carbines, but at too long a range. But in a minute or two, Sharpe thought, they would have a hundred infantrymen ready to charge. It was time to go.

‘Senhor.’ A very young Portuguese officer appeared beside the tree and bowed to Sharpe.

‘Later!’ Sharpe didn’t like to be so rude, but there was no time to waste on courtesies. ‘Dan!’ He pushed past the Portuguese officer and shouted at Hagman. ‘Have we got Tarrant’s kit?’

‘Here, sir.’ Hagman had the wounded man’s rifle on his shoulder and his cartridge box dangling from his belt. Sharpe would have hated the French to collect a Baker rifle, they were trouble enough already without being given the best weapon ever issued to a skirmisher.

‘This way!’ Sharpe ordered, going north away from the river.

He deliberately left the road. It followed the river, and the open pastures on the Douro’s bank offered few obstacles to pursuing cavalry, but a smaller track twisted north through the trees and Sharpe took it, using the woodland to cover his escape. As the ground became higher the trees thinned out, becoming groves of squat oaks that were cultivated because their thick bark provided the corks for Oporto’s wine. Sharpe led a gruelling pace, only stopping after half an hour when they came to the edge of the oaks and were staring at a great valley of vineyards. The city was still in sight to the west, the smoke from its many fires drifting over the oaks and vines. The men rested. Sharpe had feared a pursuit, but the French evidently wanted to plunder Oporto’s houses and find the prettiest women and had no mind to pursue a handful of soldiers fleeing into the hills.

The Portuguese soldiers had kept pace with Sharpe’s riflemen and their officer, who had tried to talk to Sharpe before, now approached again. He was very young and very slender and very tall and wearing what looked like a brand-new uniform. His officer’s sword hung from a white shoulder sash edged with silver piping and at his belt was a holstered pistol that looked so clean Sharpe suspected it had never been fired. He was good-looking except for a black moustache that was too thin, and something about his demeanour suggested he was a gentleman, and a decent one at that, for his dark and intelligent eyes were oddly mournful, but perhaps that was no surprise for he had just seen Oporto fall to invaders. He bowed to Sharpe. ‘Senhor?’

‘I don’t speak Portuguese,’ Sharpe said.

‘I am Lieutenant Vicente,’ the officer said in good English. His dark-blue uniform had white piping at its hems and was decorated with silver buttons and red cuffs and a high red collar. He wore a barretina, a shako with a false front that added six inches to his already considerable height. The number 18 was emblazoned on the barretina’s brass front plate. He was out of breath and sweat was glistening on his face, but he was determined to remember his manners. ‘I congratulate you, senhor.’

‘Congratulate me?’ Sharpe did not understand.

‘I watched you, senhor, on the road beneath the seminary. I thought you must surrender, but instead you attacked. It was’ – Vicente paused, frowning as he searched for the right word – ‘it was great bravery,’ he went on and then embarrassed Sharpe by removing the barretina and bowing again, ‘and I brought my men to attack the French because your bravery deserved it.’

‘I wasn’t being brave,’ Sharpe said, ‘just bloody stupid.’

‘You were brave,’ Vicente insisted, ‘and we salute you.’ He looked for a moment as though he planned to step smartly back, draw his sword and whip the blade up into a formal salute, but Sharpe managed to head off the flourish with a question about Vicente’s men. ‘There are thirty-seven of us, senhor,’ the young Portuguese answered gravely, ‘and we are from the eighteenth regiment, the second of Porto.’ He gave Oporto its proper Portuguese name. The regiment, he said, had been defending the makeshift palisades on the city’s northern edge and had retreated towards the bridge where it had dissolved into panic. Vicente had gone eastwards in the company of these thirty-seven men, only ten of whom were from his own company. ‘There were more of us,’ he confessed, ‘many more, but most kept running. One of my sergeants said I was a fool to try and rescue you and I had to shoot him to stop him from spreading, what is the word? Desesperança? Ah, despair, and then I led these volunteers to your assistance.’

For a few seconds Sharpe just stared at the Portuguese Lieutenant. ‘You did what?’ he finally asked.

‘I led these men back to give you aid. I am the only officer of my company left, so who else could make the decision? Captain Rocha was killed by a cannonball up on the redoubt, and the others? I do not know what happened to them.’

‘No,’ Sharpe said, ‘before that. You shot your Sergeant?’

Vicente nodded. ‘I shall stand trial, of course. I shall plead necessity.’ There were tears in his eyes. ‘But the Sergeant said you were all dead men and that we were beaten ones. He was urging the men to shed their uniforms and desert.’

‘You did the right thing,’ Sharpe said, astonished.

Vicente bowed again. ‘You flatter me, senhor.’

‘And stop calling me senhor,’ Sharpe said. ‘I’m a lieutenant like you.’

Vicente took a half step back, unable to hide his surprise. ‘You are a … ?’ he began to ask, then understood that the question was rude. Sharpe was older than he was, maybe by ten years, and if Sharpe was still a lieutenant then presumably he was not a good soldier, for a good soldier, by the age of thirty, must have been promoted. ‘But I am sure, senhor,’ Vicente went on, ‘that you are senior to me.’

‘I might not be,’ Sharpe said.

‘I have been a lieutenant for two weeks,’ Vicente said.

It was Sharpe’s turn to look surprised. ‘Two weeks!’

‘I had some training before that, of course,’ Vicente said, ‘and during my studies I read the exploits of the great soldiers.’

‘Your studies?’

‘I am a lawyer, senhor.’

‘A lawyer!’ Sharpe could not hide his instinctive disgust. He came from the gutters of England and anyone born and raised in those gutters knew that most persecution and oppression was inflicted by lawyers. Lawyers were the devil’s servants who ushered men and women to the gallows, they were the vermin who gave orders to the bailiffs, they made their snares from statutes and became wealthy on their victims and when they were rich enough they became politicians so they could devise even more laws to make themselves even wealthier. ‘I hate bloody lawyers,’ Sharpe growled with a genuine intensity for he was remembering Lady Grace and what had happened after she died and how the lawyers had stripped him of every penny he had ever made, and the memory of Grace and her dead baby brought all the old misery back and he thrust it out of mind. ‘I do hate lawyers,’ he said.

Vicente was so dumbfounded by Sharpe’s hostility that he seemed to simply blank it out of his mind. ‘I was a lawyer,’ he said, ‘before I took up my country’s sword. I worked for the Real Companhia Velha, which is responsible for the regulation of the trade of port wine.’

‘If a child of mine wanted to become a lawyer,’ Sharpe said, ‘I’d strangle it with my own hands and then piss on its grave.’

‘So you are married then, senhor?’ Vicente asked politely.

‘No, I’m bloody not married.’

‘I misunderstood,’ Vicente said, then gestured towards his tired troops. ‘So here we are, senhor, and I thought we might join forces.’

‘Maybe,’ Sharpe said grudgingly, ‘but make one thing clear, lawyer. If your commission is two weeks old then I’m the senior man. I’m in charge. No bloody lawyer weaselling around that.’

‘Of course, senhor,’ Vicente said, frowning as though he was offended by Sharpe’s stating of the obvious.

Bloody lawyer, Sharpe thought, of all the bloody ill fortune. He knew he had behaved boorishly, especially as this courtly young lawyer had possessed the courage to kill a sergeant and lead his men to Sharpe’s rescue, and he knew he should apologize for his rudeness, but instead he stared south and west, trying to make sense of the landscape, looking for any pursuit and wondering where in hell he was. He took out his fine telescope which had been a gift from Sir Arthur Wellesley and trained it back the way they had come, staring over the trees, and at last he saw what he expected to see. Dust. A lot of dust being kicked up by hooves, boots or wheels. It could have been fugitives streaming eastwards on the road beside the river, or it could have been the French, Sharpe could not tell.

‘You will be trying to get south of the Douro?’ Vicente asked.

‘Aye, I am. But there’s no bridges on this part of the river, is that right?’

‘Not till you reach Amarante,’ Vicente said, ‘and that is on the River Tamega. It is a … how do you say? A side river? Tributary, thank you, of the Douro, but once across the Tamega there is a bridge over the Douro at Peso da Régua.’

‘And are the Frogs on the far side of the Tamega?’

Vicente shook his head. ‘We were told General Silveira is there.’

Being told that a Portuguese general was waiting across a river was not the same as knowing it, Sharpe thought. ‘And there’s a ferry over the Douro,’ he asked, ‘not far from here?’

Vicente nodded. ‘At Barca d’Avintas.’

‘How close is it?’

Vicente thought for a heartbeat. ‘Maybe a half-hour’s walk? Less, probably.’

‘That close?’ But if the ferry was close to Oporto then the French could already be there. ‘And how far is Amarante?’

‘We could be there tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Sharpe echoed, then collapsed the telescope. He stared south. Was that dust thrown up by the French? Were they on their way to Barca d’Avintas? He wanted to use the ferry because it was so much nearer, but also riskier. Would the French be expecting fugitives to use the ferry? Or perhaps the invaders did not even know it existed. There was only one way to find out. ‘How do we get to Barca d’Avintas?’ he asked Vicente, gesturing back down the track that led through the cork oaks. ‘The same way we came?’