Sharpe's Havoc (6 page)

“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 bolstered pistol that
looked so clean Sharpe suspected it had never been fired. He was good-looking except for a
black mustache that was too thin, and something about his demeanor 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 barretinds 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 toward the bridge where it had dissolved into panic. Vicente had gone
eastward 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? Desesperanga? 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 toward 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 eastward 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 Regua.”

“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?”

“There is a quicker path,” Vicente said.

“Then lead on.”

Some of the men were sleeping, but Harper kicked them awake and they all followed Vicente
off the road and down into a gentle valley where vines grew in neatly tended rows. From
there they climbed another hill and walked through meadows dotted with the small haystacks
left from the previous year. Flowers studded the grass and twined about the witch-hat
haystacks, while blossoms filled the hedgerows. There was no path, though Vicente led the men
confidently enough.

“You know where you’re going?” Sharpe asked suspiciously after a while.

“I know this landscape,” Vicente assured the rifleman, “I know it well.”

You grew up here, then?”

Vicente shook his head. “I was raised in Coimbra. That’s far to the south, senhor, but I
know this landscape because I belong”-he checked and corrected himself-”belonged to a
society that walks here.”

“A society that walks in the countryside?” Sharpe asked, amused.

Vicente blushed. “We are philosophers, senhor, and poets.”

Sharpe was too astonished to respond immediately, but finally managed a question.
“You were what?”

“Philosophers and poets, senhor.”

“Jesus bloody Christ,” Sharpe said.

“We believe, senhor,” Vicente went on, “that there is inspiration in the countryside.
The country, you see, is natural, while towns are made by man and so harbor all men’s
wickedness. If we wish to discover our natural goodness then it must be sought in the
country.” He was having trouble finding the right English words to express what he meant.
“There is, I think,” he tried again, “a natural goodness in the world and we seek it.”

“So you come here for inspiration?”

“We do, yes.” Vicente nodded eagerly.

Giving inspiration to a lawyer, Sharpe thought sourly, was like feeding fine brandy to a
rat. “And let me guess,” he said, barely hiding his derision, “that the members of your
society of rhyming philosophers are all men. Not a woman among you, eh?”

“How did you know?” Vicente asked in amazement.

“I told you, I guessed.”

Vicente nodded. “It is not, of course, that we do not like women. You must not think that
we do not want their company, but they are reluctant to join our discussions. They would be
most welcome, of course, but … “ His voice tailed away.

“Women are like that,” Sharpe said. Women, he had found, preferred the company of rogues
to the joys of conversation with sober and earnest young men like Lieutenant Vicente who
harbored romantic dreams about the world and whose thin black mustache had patently been
grown in an attempt to make himself look older and more sophisticated and only
succeeded in making him look younger. “Tell me something, Lieutenant,” he said.

“Jorge,” Vicente interrupted him, “my name is Jorge. Like your saint.”

“So tell me something, Jorge. You said you had some training as a soldier. What kind of
training was it?”

“We had lectures in Porto.”

“Lectures?”

“On the history of warfare. On Hannibal, Alexander and Caesar.”

“Book learning?” Sharpe asked, not hiding his derision.

“Book learning,” Vicente said bravely, “comes naturally to a lawyer, and a lawyer,
moreover, who saved your life, Lieutenant.”

Sharpe grunted, knowing he had deserved that mild reproof. “What did happen back there,”
he asked, “when you rescued me? I know you shot one of your sergeants, but why didn’t the French
hear you do that?”

“Ah!” Vicente frowned, thinking. “I shall be honest, Lieutenant, and tell you it is not
all to my credit. I had shot the Sergeant before I saw you. He was telling the men to strip off
their uniforms and run away. Some did and the others would not listen to me so I shot him. It
was very sad. And most of the men were in the tavern by the river, close to where the French
made their barricade.” Sharpe had seen no tavern; he had been too busy trying to extricate
his men from the dragoons to notice one. “It was then I saw you coming. Sergeant
Macedo”-Vicente gestured toward a squat, dark-faced man stumping along behind-”wanted to
stay hidden in the tavern and I told the men that it was time to fight for Portugal. Most did
not seem to listen, so I drew my pistol, senhor, and I went into the road. I thought I would
die, but I also thought I must set an example.”