Sharpe's Havoc (43 page)

Sharpe had escaped the rush of oncoming Frenchmen by jumping for the side of the ravine
where a gorse sapling clung to a ledge. Its stem bent under his weight, but it held and he had
managed to find a foothold on the wet rock beneath and then jump down to another boulder
where his feet had shot out from beneath him so that he slid down the big stone’s rounded side
to crash into the river, but the sword was still in his hand and in front of him was Williamson
and beside the deserter was a wet and terrified Christopher. Rain hissed about them as the
dark ravine was garishly lit by a stab of lightning.

“My telescope,” Sharpe said to Christopher.

“Of course, Sharpe, of course.” Christopher pulled his sopping wet coat-tails up, groped in
one of his pockets and took out the glass. “Not damaged!” he said brightly. “I only borrowed
it.”

“Put it on that boulder,” Sharpe ordered.

“Not damaged at all!” Christopher said, putting the precious glass on the boulder. “And
well done, Lieutenant!” Christopher nudged Williamson, who was just watching Sharpe.

Sharpe took a step nearer the two men, who both backed away. Christopher pushed Williamson
again, trying to make him attack Sharpe, but the deserter was wary. The longest blade he had
ever used in a fight was a sword bayonet, but that experience had not trained him to fight
with a saber and especially not against a butcher’s blade like the heavy cavalry sword that
Sharpe held. He stepped back, waiting for an opportunity.

“I’m glad you’re here, Sharpe,” Christopher said. “I was wondering how to get away from the
French. They were keeping a pretty close eye on me, as you can imagine. I have lots to tell
Sir Arthur. He’s done well, hasn’t he?”

“He’s done well,” Sharpe agreed, “and he wants you dead.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Sharpe! We’re English!” Christopher had lost his hat when he jumped
and the rain was flattening his hair. “We don’t assassinate people.”

“I do,” Sharpe said, and he took a step nearer again, and Christopher and Williamson edged
away.

Christopher watched Sharpe pick up the glass. “Not damaged, you see? I took good care of
it.” He had to shout to make himself heard over the seething rain and the crash of the river
thrusting through the rocks. He pushed Williamson forward again, but the man obstinately
refused to attack and Christopher now found himself trapped on a slippery ledge between
cliff and river, and the Colonel, in this last extremity, finally abandoned trying to talk
himself out of trouble and simply shoved the deserter toward Sharpe. “Kill him!” he
shouted at Williamson. “Kill him!”

The hard shove in his back seemed to startle Williamson, who nevertheless raised the saber
and slashed it at Sharpe’s head. There was a great clang as the two blades met, then Sharpe
kicked the deserter’s left knee, a kick that made Williamson’s leg buckle, and Sharpe, who
looked as though he was not making any particular effort, sliced the sword across
Williamson’s neck so that the deserter was knocked back to the right and then the sword lunged
through the rifleman’s green jacket and into his belly. Sharpe twisted the blade to stop it
being trapped by the suction of flesh, ripped it free and watched the dying Williamson topple
into the river. “I hate deserters,” Sharpe said, “I do so hate bloody deserters.”

Christopher had watched his man defeated and seen that Sharpe had not had to fight hard at
all to do it. “No, Sharpe,” he said, “you don’t understand!” He tried to think of the words
that would make Sharpe think, make him step back, but the Colonel’s mind was in panic and the
words would not come.

Sharpe watched Williamson. For a moment the dying man tried to struggle out of the river,
but the blood ran red from his neck and his belly and he suddenly flopped back and his ugly
face sank under the water. “I do so hate deserters,” Sharpe said again, then he looked at
Christopher. “Is that sword good for anything except picking your teeth, Colonel?”

Christopher numbly drew his slender blade. He had trained with a sword. He used to spend
good money that he could scarce afford at Horace Jackson’s Hall of Arms on Jermyn Street
where he had learned the finer graces of fencing and where he had even earned grudging praise
from the great Jackson himself, but fighting on the French-chalked boards of Jermyn Street was
one thing and facing Richard Sharpe in the Misarella’s ravine was altogether another.
“No, Sharpe,” he said as the rifleman stepped toward him, then raised his blade in a panicked
riposte as the big sword flickered toward him.

Sharpe’s lunge had been a tease, a probe to see whether Christopher would fight, but Sharpe
was staring into his enemy’s eyes and he knew this man would die like a lamb. “Fight, you
bastard,” he said, and lunged again, and again Christopher made a feeble riposte, but then
the Colonel saw a boulder in the river’s center and he thought that he might just leap to it
and from there he could reach the opposite bank and so climb to safety. He slashed his sword
in a wild blow to give himself the space to make the jump and then he turned and sprang, but his
broken ankle crumpled, the rock was wet under his boots and he slipped and would have fallen
into the river except that Sharpe seized his jacket and so Christopher fell on the ledge,
the sword useless in his hand and with his enemy above him. “No!” he begged. “No.” He stared up
at Sharpe. “You saved me, Sharpe,” he said, realizing what had just happened and with a
sudden hope surging through him. “You saved me.”

“Can’t pick your pockets, Colonel, if you’re under water,” Sharpe said and then his face
twisted in rage as he rammed the sword down.

Christopher died on the ledge just above the pool where Williamson had drowned. The eddy
above the deserter’s body ran with new red blood, then the red spilled out into the main
stream where it was diluted first to pink and then to nothing. Christopher twitched and
gargled because Sharpe’s sword had taken out his windpipe and that was a mercy for it was a
quicker death than he deserved. Sharpe watched the Colonel’s body jerk and then go still, and
he dipped his blade in the water to clean it, dried it as best he could on Christopher’s coat
and then gave the Colonel’s pockets a quick search and came up with three gold coins, a broken
watch with a silver case and a leather folder crammed with papers that would probably
interest Hogan. “Bloody fool,” Sharpe said to the body, then he looked up into the gathering
night and saw a great shadow at the ravine’s edge above him. For a second he thought it must be
a Frenchman, then he heard Harper’s voice.

“Is he dead?”

“Didn’t even put up a fight. Williamson too.”

Sharpe climbed up the ravine’s side until he was near Harper and the Sergeant lowered his
rifle to haul Sharpe the rest of the way. Sergeant Macedo was there and the three could not
return to the bluff because the French were on the road and so they took shelter from the rain
in a gully formed where one of the great round boulders had been split by a frost. Sharpe told
Harper what had happened, then asked if the Irishman had seen Kate.

“The Lieutenant’s got her, sir,” Harper answered. “The last I saw of her she was having a
good cry and he was holding hard onto her and giving her a nice pat on the back. Women like a
good cry, have you noticed that, sir?”

“I have,” Sharpe said, “I have.”

“Makes them feel better,” Harper said. “Funny how it doesn’t work for us.”

Sharpe gave one of the gold coins to Harper, the second to Macedo and kept the third.
Darkness had fallen. It promised to be a long, cold and hungry night, but Sharpe did not mind.
“Got my telescope back,” he told Harper.

“I thought you would.”

“Wasn’t even broken. At least I don’t think so.” The glass had not rattled when he shook it,
so he assumed it was fine.

The rain eased and Sharpe listened and heard nothing but the scrape of French feet on the
Saltador’s stones, the gusting of the wind, the sound of the river and the fall of the rain.
He heard no gunfire. So that faraway fight at the Ponte Nova was over and he did not doubt
that it was a victory. The French were going. They had met Sir Arthur Wellesley and he had
licked them, licked them good and proper, and Sharpe smiled at that, for though Wellesley was a
cold beast, unfriendly and haughty, he was a bloody good soldier. And he had made havoc for
King Nicolas. And Sharpe had helped. He had done his bit.

Sharpe is once again guilty of stealing another man’s thunder. It was, indeed, a
Portuguese barber who rowed a skiff across the Douro and alerted Colonel Waters to the
existence of three stranded barges on the river’s northern bank, but he did it on his own
initiative and there were no British troops on the northern bank at the time and no riflemen
from the 95th helped in the defense of the seminary. The French believed they had either
destroyed or removed every boat on the river, but they missed those three barges which then
began a cumbersome ferry service that fed redcoats into the seminary, which,
inexplicably, had been left unguarded. The tale of the spherical case shot destroying
the leading French gun team is taken from Oman’s A History of the Peninsular War, Vol II.
General Sir Edward Paget was wounded in the arm in that fight. He lost his arm, returned to
England to recuperate and then came back to the Peninsula as General of the First
Division, but his bad luck continued when he was captured by the French. The British lost
seventy-seven men killed or wounded in the fight at the seminary while French casualties
were at least three or four times as many. The French also failed to destroy the ferry at
Barca d’Avintas which was refloated on the morning of the attack and carried two King’s
German Legion infantry battalions and the 14th Light Dragoons across the river, a force
that could have given the French serious problems as they fled Oporto, but the Genera’ m
charge of the units, George Murray, though he advanced north to the Amarante road, supinely
watched the enemy pass. Later that day General Charles Stewart led the 14th Light Dragoons
in a magnificent charge that broke the French rearguard, but Murray still refused to
advance his infantry and so it was all too little too late. I have probably tradiced Marshal
Soult by suggesting he was talking to his cook when the British crossed the river, but he did
sleep in till nearly eleven o’clock that morning, and whatever his cook provided for
supper was indeed eaten by Sir Arthur Wellesley.

The seminary still stands, though it has now been swallowed by Oporto’s suburbs, but a
plaque records its defense on 12 May 1809. Another plaque, on the quay close to where
Eiffel’s magnificent iron bridge now spans the gorge, records the horrors of 29 March when
the Portuguese refugees crowded onto the broken pontoon bridge. There are two
explanations for the drownings. One claims that retreating Portuguese troops pulled the
drawbridge up to prevent the French from ???? the bridge, while the second explanation,
which I prefer, is that the sheer weight of refugees sank the central pontoons which then
broke under me pressure of the river. Whichever is true the result was horror as hundreds
of people, most of them civilians, were forced off the shattered end to drown in the
Douro.

With his capture of Oporto Marshal Soult had conquered northern Portugal and, as he
gathered his strength for the onward march to Lissabon, he did indeed flirt with the idea of
making himself king. More than once he canvassed his general officers, tried to gain
support among me Portuguese and doubtless encouraged the Diario do Porto, a newspaper
established during the French occupation of the city and edited by a priest who
supported the egregious idea. Quite what Napoleon would have made of such a self-promotion
is not difficult to guess and it was probably the prospect of the Emperor’s displeasure,
as much as anything else, which persuaded Soult against the idea.

But the idea was real and it gave Soult the nickname “King Nicolas“ and very nearly
provoked a mutiny which was to be led by Colonel Donadieu and Colonel Lafitte, plus several
other now unknown officers, and Captain Argenton did make two trips through the lines to
consult with the British. Argenton wanted the British to use their influence on the
Portuguese to persuade them to encourage Soult to declare himself king, for when Soult did
so the mutiny would break out, at which point Donadieu and the others would supposedly lead
the army back to France. The British were asked to encourage this nonsense by blocking the
roads east into Spain, but leaving the northern roads unthreatened. Sir Arthur Wellesley,
arriving at Lisbon to take over from Cradock, met Argenton and dismissed the plot out of
hand. Argenton then returned to Soult, was betrayed and arrested, but was promised his life
if he revealed all that he knew and among those revelations was the fact that the British
army, far from readying itself to withdraw from Portugal, was preparing to attack
northwards. The warning gave Soult a chance to withdraw his advance forces from south of the
Douro who otherwise might have been trapped by an ambitious encircling move that Wellesley
had initiated. Argenton’s career was not over. He managed to escape his captors, reached
the British army and was given a safe passage to England. For some reason he then decided
to return to France where he was again captured and this time shot. It is also worth noting,
while we are discussing sinister plots, that the aspirations Christopher attributes to
Napoleon, aspirations for “a European system, a European code of laws, a European
judiciary and one nation alone in Europe, Europeans,” were indeed articulated by
Bonaparte.

This is a story that begins and ends on bridges and the twin tales of how Major Dulong of
the 31st Leger captured the Ponte Nova and then the Saltador are true. He was a rather
Sharpe-like character who enjoyed an extraordinary reputation for bravery, but he was
wounded at the Saltador and I have been unable to discover his subsequent fate. He almost
single-handedly saved Soult’s army, so he deserved a long life and an easy death, and he
certainly does not deserve to be given a failing role in the fictional story of the
fictional village of Vila Real de Zedes.