“Thank you, sir,” Graham said quietly, and it was almost as though the man beside him knew all about the papers in his boot.
James Lockhart had always been a self-communicating and observant man, but never more so than during his brief spell in the hospital at the big convent on the edge of the plain. Major Fricourt of the engineers, a fussy and much harassed man, was at present engaged in converting the vast, sprawling building into a fort, and, having more than enough to do, he had been embarrassed by the presence of prisoners when Dillon abandoned them to his keeping and rode on across country to Santarém. The major sent Lockhart to the hospital, locked the three sound men in what had been a wine cellar of the convent, and gave the woman the run of the camp on condition she worked as laundress for the officers stationed at the post. After that he quickly forgot all about them and continued his survey, the problems of fortification being the sole aspect of war for which he was trained and in which he was interested.
The sick among the garrison were housed in what had been the buttery, a high-ceilinged building with two narrow windows facing east and a stone floor on which the patients lay about on straw palliasses. They were indifferently fed on haricot beans and an occasional bowl of broth brewed from the garrison’s shrinking supply of goats, supplemented by the occasional mule that had died for want of fodder.
It did not take Lockhart long to decide that the French army now closing in on Lisbon was already on the verge of starvation and had fared little better than had the file during its long trek from the frontier. Every day men were carried into hospital for no more reason than that they were too weak to stand guard duty, and some of the conscripts who had marched down from the French border less than three months before were reduced to skin and bone. Lockhart spoke no word of French and understood nothing of their conversation, but he lay quietly on his straw thinking and watching until his leg was sufficiently healed to enable him to hobble about in the open. He had already formed an opinion that it might not be too difficult to escape from this assembly of scarecrows, and when Gwyneth whispered to him that Graham, Watson and Curle were confined in the adjacent wine cellar he decided it was time to make one of his unhurried reconnaissances and see what prospects of escape presented themselves.
His wound was painful but not serious. The ball, fired from close range, had gone through the fleshy part of his calf and left a neat hole without inflicting permanent damage. The surgeon, who examined it once, said that it would heal in a matter of weeks, but even so Lockhart realized that he personally would be unable to take part in an escape that meant a march across country, even country as flat as that surrounding the convent. With the aid of a crutch, however, he could soon hobble about the flagged courtyard that lay outside the buttery, and it was here, some ten days after their capture, that he located a ground-level grille giving access to the cellars. He limped over and called through the narrow aperture, but there was no response. It was not until later the same day that Gwyneth told him that the cellar was subdivided and that Graham and the others were locked in the farther section beyond a boundary wall. He glanced over the wall on the next occasion when he was alone in the courtyard and could just see a similar grille let into the wall about ten yards nearer the corner of the main building. Having marked the spot, he wasted no further time on exploration but concentrated upon the large barn abutting the courtyard to the south. Lying on his straw he had recognized the intermittent chink of metal coming from this direction, and when he dragged himself around the building out of range of the single apathetic sentry he found what he expected to find, an improvised blacksmith’s shop with half a dozen men busily engaged in the routine work of bayonet sharpening, shot manufacture and the shoeing of officers’ horses. He approached closely and stood near the forge, pretending to warm himself, and all the time his sharp eyes roved among the litter until he spotted a long, tapering file, blunt at one end and sharply pointed at the other, which had been thrown on a bench by one of the smiths working at the bellows.
Nobody took the slightest notice of him or remarked upon his prisoner status. Semistarvation and endless marches across the mountains seemed to have dulled the soldierly instinct of the French, but it remained sharp in a man of Lockhart’s temperament. He had no opportunity to steal the file on that occasion, but when next he returned to the forge it was still lying on the bench. Positioning himself with care and leaning his weight on the crutch, he edged the file along the bench until it fell into a pile of shavings at his feet, but he did not, as most men would have done, press his luck to the extent of picking it up then and there. Instead he limped away to draw his ration of beans, and on the third visit to the forge, when most of the men were engaged in quieting a restive horse, he slithered to the floor, thrust the file into his tunic and then dragged himself to his feet and limped back to the buttery, where he concealed his prize in a chink between the flagstones.
Toward dusk he got up and dragged himself along the corridor and out into the guarded section of the courtyard, where only the shoulder-high wall separated him from the second grille. He had made up his mind to risk being missed when the buttery was locked for the night and to use the hours of darkness to seek a way over the wall and perhaps back again before daylight. He did not know how he could explain his presence in the open when the guard unlocked the big double doors in the morning, but it did not seem to matter very much. He was now a cripple and had no intention of embarrassing the others with his presence when they fled south to the river. His duty, as he saw it, was to get the file to Graham and then let the officer make his own dispositions.
There were only a few minutes of daylight left and he used them to survey the wall along the whole of its length as far as what had been the home farm and piggeries, where the forge was now situated. It was built of loose blocks of stone, far too substantial to be pulled down without a great deal of noise, and the sentry post was sited about twenty yards from where he stood pressed against the wall of the main building. Nearer to him was a jumble of outbuildings marking the limit of the enclosure, but beyond the sentry post, where the wall was much lower, was what appeared to be a lean-to shed, a flimsy structure with holes in its reed thatch. It struck Lockhart that if he could get inside the shed he would have limited cover for surmounting the wall, providing he chose a moment when the sentry was at the far end of his beat. He watched the sentries changed and the new guard settle himself in the angle of the buttress as the duty officer and a squad of infantrymen marched up the slight slope to secure the double doors that gave access to the convent. They passed without seeing him, for he too had found a buttress to crouch behind. When they had gone rain began to fall with the enveloping dusk and he remained in the shadow working out his plan of approach: a stealthy circumlocution of the big courtyard so that he could enter the shed from the extreme end the sentry’s beat.
In the event, he managed it with far less difficulty than he had anticipated. The driving rain kept the sentry close to the wall and disinclined to patrol more than a short section of its length. Lockhart kept him under observation as he sidled around the extremity of the main building, his crutch skidding on the rounded stones and once or twice almost bringing him down. By the time he had reached the shelter of the farm buildings he was dripping with sweat and his reopened wound was causing him a considerable amount of pain, but he observed with satisfaction that the sentry had now abandoned his patrol altogether and was hidden behind the angle of the buttress. All Lockhart could see of him was a faint gleam where the light from a room above the main door reflected on his bayonet tip. He waited for a moment and then flung himself across the slush at the foot of the slope and over the threshold of the shed.
Inside it was pitch dark and rain dripped dolorously through the leaks in the thatch, forming pools where the water was unable to drain away. He groped at the topmost stones and was relieved to find that here they were unmortared and easily dislodged. With infinite care he removed and lowered a dozen, reducing the wall to the hei
ght of his breast. The lower stones were larger and firmly fixed and he was unable to dislodge them, so he laid aside his crutch, gripped the file between his teeth and hoisted himself across the rubble, dragging his wounded leg and projecting himself inch by inch into the far section of the courtyard.
The passage of the breached wall caused him agony and it seemed to him that he made a considerable amount of noise, but at length he passed the point of balance, tipped forward and fell face foremost into the mud on the far side. From here, half on his belly and half on his hands and sound knee, he dragged himself up the incline and then diagonally across to the second grille.
It was Watson’s cough that guided him to the actual spot. Watson had been coughing all the way from Coimbra, and Lockhart remembered its note because it reminded him of a sheep’s cough in summer pastures at home. He found the main wall and then the grille and, lying full length in the pelting rain that cascaded from the steep roof, he called softly, “Watson! It’s me! Lockhart! You there, Watson?” And he tapped gently on the central bar of the semicircular grille.
The coughing ceased instantly and for a moment there was silence, broken by the sough of the wind and the soft hiss of rain. Then, in a voice trembling with excitement, Watson replied from below—from a long way below, it seemed to Lockhart, who heard him squeak, “It’s ’im, sir! He’s aht there callin’ down to us! Lockhart, sir, an’ signaling, be Jesus!”
There was the scrape of feet on stones and Graham’s voice came to him. “Is that you, Lockhart? Is the woman with you?”
“No,” Lockhart said, “but I’ve got a file for ’ee and you can cut through they bars in an hour if youm so minded, sir!”
“Wait, then!” There was a prolonged scuffle, followed by a whispered consultation, and then, like a man rising to the surface of a dark pool, the outline of Graham’s face appeared, followed by a pair of hands that shot out and grasped the inner bars of the grille. Graham seemed very breathless and Lockhart, wondering why, suddenly realized that he was now standing on Watson’s shoulders and that the level of the floor of the cellar was about eight feet below that of the courtyard. This was something he had not realized and it made the business of escape more complicated.
“Give me the file, Lockhart!” Graham said and took it, dropping it behind him on the straw. Then Watson began to cough again and Graham hissed down at him, reaching through the bars and grasping Lockhart by the wrist.
”Where’s the woman?” Is she still here? And you, how were you able to get here and how is your wound?”
“I don’t reckon us c’n waste time on talk, sir,” said Lockhart sententiously, “but the woman is washin’ fer the officers and havin’ the run o’ the place. As fer me, I’m goin’ on well enough, but I come to tell ’ee you c’n get out of here and the woman c’n give ’ee proper directions to the river. She’ll have picked up that workin’ along o’ they Portuguese. I c’n pass any message you’ve a mind to give her!”
“Are there no sentries there?” Graham asked eagerly.
Lockhart briefly described the location of the two courtyards, divided by the wall. “On a night such as this,” he said, “you could rendezvous down by the forge. There baint no sentry there and you could strike clean away across the moor and show ’em clean heels be marnin’!”
“You could meet us by the forge? Tomorrow, about this time?”
“No, zir, I couldn’t, but she could mebbe. I’d be mazed to come along with a leg like this, zir, so you’d best make up your mind to leave me be, they baint a bad lot hereabouts, not fer foreigners, that is!”
“Can you get back to your quarters?” Graham asked.
Lockhart said no but he would wait in the porch until morning and tell the guard he had been locked out while visiting the latrines. “You won’t be gone ’till the marnin’ after that, so they won’t know as I had a hand in the business,” he said. Then, as a wave of giddiness swept over him, he sought and found Graham’s hand and pressed it, saying, “Good luck to ’ee, sir, and my respects to Sergeant Major Corbett when you’m back with the regiment!” And then he was gone, sliding away into the rain and darkness, dragging himself across the slush to the breach in the wall and thence, on his snail-like crawl, around the courtyard to the shelter of the porch.
They found him there in the morning, but he had no need to make excuses for his presence. He was unconscious when they carried him back to the buttery and laid him on his pallet, and one of the conscripts told Gwyneth that the wounded Englishman was dying.
The conscript exaggerated. Lockhart was sick and exhausted after his exertions and a night in the open, but he had an exceptionally tough constitution. After Gwyneth had brought him boards and fresh straw to lie on and fed him a bowl of broth begged from one of the cooks, his fever subsided and he was able to tell her, briefly, of the likelihood of Graham and the others breaking out of the cellar that night and waiting for her behind the forge. Gwyneth extracted this information while redressing his wound. The presence of the sick around her caused her no concern, for none of them understood more than a word or two of English. During the general diversion caused by the midday issue of beans she praised his courage and enterprise, and a faint flush showed under the man’s pallor when she said, “I shall report this to your regimental officer when we get back, Lockhart, for it is a good soldier you are and a sorry thing we do to leave you like this. Have you any money about you or maybe a trinket or two I could use to buy you things you need?”
“Nay, woman, I’ve nothing,” he said gruffly. Then, with a twitch of the mouth which was the nearest Lockhart came to smiling, he added, “I were never yon Lickspittle or Croyde’s kind, I took the shilling and set about earning it, lass!”
She left him then, but he was in her mind for the rest of the day, more so than were the others, for it seemed to her that it was Lockhart who had more urgent need of her. She did not give her full attention to the breakout until she had ransacked an officer’s kit left in an unlocked room and removed from it no more than she needed, a few silver pieces and a double plug of tobacco. If there had been anything likely to be useful to them in the immediate future she would have taken that too, but there was not and, like Lockhart, she practiced a very personal code of morality. The French, within their limits, had been just, and one took from the just no more than was needed.
The touch of Lockhart’s hand and the sound of his voice had relit in Graham’s heart a flame of hope that had been all but extinguished when Dillon’s men had swarmed out of the marsh and taken his sword. Throughout all their adventures in the woods and mountains the sword had been a symbol of his authority and freedom of action, and as long as he could feel the leather scabbard chafing his left leg, or rest his hand for a moment on the heavy brass hilt, there was hope and a sense of purpose. Subconsciously the sword had become for him what Strawbridge’s firelock had been for Strawbridge, and what the sweep’s tin whistle was for Watson. Watson whiled away the dismal hours piping “The Lass of Richmond Hill” and “The British Grenadiers,” but Graham’s sword had not been restored to him, and as he prowled up and down the stone floor of the wine cellar, or around the courtyard during their brief spells of exercise, he found it very difficult to contemplate the present or the future but returned again and again to the moment of capture. The conviction grew upon him that he alone was responsible for what had happened, for in contemplation of Croyde’s death he had disregarded the elementary precautions of a fugitive crossing open ground, and the knowledge of this deepened his sense of personal failure. Watson made pathetic efforts to rouse him, but apart from a casual survey of their prison, or an occasional complaint to the blank-faced jailer about the discomfort and dampness of the cellar, he spent the days in moody contemplation of their communal waste of effort from the moment they had turned their backs on the bridge.
On the fifth day of their isolation the sergeant major in charge of a dozen deserters and recalcitrants penned in the adjoining cellar agreed to the Englishmen taking
a walk around the courtyard, but Graham was too dispirited to use this opportunity to study the prospects of escape or even note the position of the sentries, for almost without realizing it he had set aside the notion of flight. The door was massive, the walls of close-set blocks of stone and the single window secured with inch-thick iron bars, yet these obstacles did not discourage him as much as the fact that they were now in an area heavily patrolled by French troops. He had learned something of his geographical position from Dillon’s remarks. He knew, for instance, that the direction of their march had been fairly accurate and that the Tagus lay no more than a day’s march to the south. He was also aware that the north bank of the river was picketed along twenty miles of its length by the main body of Masséna’s army but that the southerly bank of the river was in British hands. To cross, however, was an impossibility, for even if they were able to break out and find an unguarded spot there were no boats to be had. Wellington had destroyed or taken away every river craft before retiring behind the lines around Lisbon.
There remained the original plan, the one stemming from Castobert’s ironic advice, to march upstream in the opposite direction from Lisbon until they found a bridge or a ford east and north of the French picket lines, but to achieve this they would need food to sustain them for at least a week. When mobile and fully armed forage columns returned to base empty-handed, how was it possible for fugitives to march thirty leagues across rough country already ransacked by a hundred thousand practiced thieves?
Watson bore his confinement with extraordinary cheerfulness, playing tunes on his whistle, sleeping with his mouth wide open and speculating on the immediate future. He asked himself and the others innumerable questions. Were they likely to spend the winter at the convent? Would they be marched back into France? If they were sent to France, would they be distributed among the prisoners of war in one of the fortress towns or would they end up in hulks as did the French prisoners in England? He had heard of places like Bitche, where large communities were penned together in squalid conditions—soldiers, sailors and civilians swept into the imperial net during forays up and down Europe. But there were other places where living conditions were tolerable, and perhaps they might even be exchanged. Graham did nothing to disillusion him. He was now alive to the appalling difficulties of the French in Portugal and thought it very unlikely indeed that they would detach men to escort a tiny column of prisoners across the length and breadth of the Peninsula, and even if they did it seemed probable that prisoners and escort would starve to death en route.
Too Few for Drums Page 17