Sharpe's Escape

by Bernard Cornwell

  "No bloody business of mine," Sharpe said, but the thought of Lieutenant Slingsby on a horse nevertheless annoyed him. A horse, whether Sharpe wanted one or not, was a symbol of status. Bloody Slingsby, he thought, and stared at the distant hills and saw how low the sun had sunk. Let's go home," he said.

  "Yes, sir," Harper said. He knew precisely why Mister Sharpe was in a bad mood, but he could not say as much. Officers were supposed to be brothers in arms, not blood enemies.

  They marched in the dusk, leaving the hilltop white and smoking. Ahead was the army and behind it the French.

  Who had come back to Portugal.

  Miss Sarah Fry, she had always disliked her last name, rapped a hand on the table. "In English," she insisted, "in English."

  Tomas and Maria, eight and seven respectively, looked grumpy, but obediently changed from their native Portuguese to English. " 'Robert has a hoop,' " Tomas read. " 'Look, the hoop is red.' "

  "When are the French coming?" Maria asked.

  "The French will not come," Sarah said briskly, "because Lord Wellington will stop them. What color is the hoop, Maria?"

  "Rouge," Maria answered in French. "So if the French are not coming why are we loading the wagons?"

  "We do French on Tuesdays and Thursdays," Sarah said briskly, "and today is?"

  "Wednesday," said Tomas.

  "Read on," Sarah said, and she gazed out of the window to where the servants were putting furniture onto a wagon. The French were coming and everyone had been ordered to leave Coimbra and go south towards Lisbon. Some folk said the French approach was just a rumor and were refusing to leave, others had already gone. Sarah did not know what to believe, only that she had surprised herself by welcoming the excitement. She had been the governess in the Ferreira household for just three months and she suspected that the French invasion might be the means to extricate herself from a position that she now understood had been a mistake. She was thinking about her uncertain future when she realized that Maria was giggling because Tomas had just read that the donkey was blue, and that was nonsense, and Miss Fry was not a young woman to tolerate nonsense. She rapped her knuckles on the crown of Tomas's head. "What color is the donkey?" she demanded.

  "Brown," Tomas said.

  "Brown," Sarah agreed, giving him another smart tap, "and what are you?

  "A blockhead," Tomas said, and then, under his breath, added, "Cadela."

  It meant "bitch," and Tomas had said it slightly too loudly and was rewarded with a smart crack on the side of his head. "I detest bad language," Sarah said angrily, adding a second slap, "and I detest rudeness, and if you cannot show good manners then I will ask your father to beat you."

  The mention of Major Ferreira snapped the two children to attention and a gloom descended over the schoolroom as Tomas struggled with the next page. It was essential for a Portuguese child to learn English and French if, when they grew up, they were to be accounted gentlefolk. Sarah wondered why they did not learn Spanish, but when she had suggested it to the Major he had looked at her with utter fury. The Spanish, he had answered, were the offspring of goats and monkeys, and his children would not foul their tongues with their savage language. So Tomas and Maria were being schooled in French and English by their governess who was twenty-two years old, blue-eyed, fair-haired and worried for her future.

  Her father had died when Sarah was ten and her mother a year later, and Sarah had been raised by an uncle who had reluctantly paid for her schooling, but refused to provide any kind of dowry when she had reached eighteen, and so, cut off from the more lucrative part of the marriage market, she had become a nursery maid for the children of an English diplomat who had been posted to Lisbon and it was there that Major Ferreira's wife had encountered her and offered to double her salary if she would school her two children. "I want our children to be polished," Beatriz Ferreira had said.

  And so Sarah was in Coimbra, polishing the children and counting the heavy ticks of the big clock in the hall as, Tomas and Maria took turns to read from Early Joys for Infant Souls. " 'The cow is sabbler,' " Maria read.

  "Sable," Sarah corrected her.

  "What's sable?"

  "Black."

  "Then why doesn't it say black?"

  "Because it says sable. Read on."

  "Why aren't we leaving?" Maria asked.

  "That is a question you must put to your father," Sarah said, and she wished she knew the answer herself. Coimbra was evidently to be abandoned to the French, but the authorities insisted that the enemy should find nothing in the city except empty buildings. Every warehouse, larder and shop was to be stripped as bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard. The French were to enter a barren land and there starve, but it seemed to Sarah, when she took her two young charges for their daily walks, that most of the storehouses were still full and the riverside quays were thickly heaped with British provisions. Some of the wealthy folk had gone, transporting their possessions on wagons, but Major Ferreira had evidently decided to wait until the last moment. He had ordered his best furniture packed onto a wagon in readiness, but he was curiously reluctant to take the decision to leave Coimbra. Sarah, before the Major had ridden north to join the army, had asked him why he did not send the household to Lisbon and he had turned on her with his fierce gaze, seemed puzzled by her question, then dismissively told her not to worry.

  Yet she did, and she was worried about Major Ferreira too. He was a generous employer, but he did not come from the highest rank of Portuguese society. There were no aristocrats in Ferreira's ancestry, no titles and no great landed estates. His father had been a professor of philosophy who had unexpectedly inherited wealth from a distant relative, and that legacy enabled Major Ferreira to live well, but not magnificently. A governess was judged not by how effectively she managed the children in her care, but by the social status of the family for whom she worked, and in Coimbra Major Ferreira possessed neither the advantages of aristocracy, nor the gift of great intelligence which was much admired in the university city. And as for his brother! Sarah's mother, God rest her soul, would have described Ferragus as being common as muck. He was the black sheep of the family, the willful, wayward son who had run away as a child and come back rich, not to settle, but to terrorize the city like a wolf finding a home in the sheep pen. Sarah was frightened of Ferragus; everyone except the Major was frightened of Ferragus, and no wonder. The gossip in Coimbra said Ferragus was a bad man, a dishonest man, a crook even, and Major Ferreira was tarred by that brush, and in turn Sarah was smeared by it.

  But she was trapped with the family, for she did not have enough money to pay her fare back to England and even if she got there, how was she to secure a new post without a glowing testimonial from her last employers? It was a dilemma, but Miss Sarah Fry was not a timid young woman and she faced the dilemma, as she faced the French invasion, with a sense that she would survive. Life was not to be suffered, it was to be exploited.

  " 'Reynard is red,' " Maria read.

  The clock ticked on.

  It was not war as Sharpe knew it. The South Essex, withdrawing westwards into central Portugal, was now the army's rearguard, though two regiments of cavalry and a troop of horse gunners were behind them, serving as a screen to deter the enemy's forward cavalry units. The French were not pressing hard and so the South Essex had time to destroy whatever provisions they found, whether it was the harvest, an orchard or livestock, for nothing was to be left for the enemy. By rights every inhabitant and every scrap of food should already have gone south to find refuge behind the Lines of Torres Vedras, but it was astonishing how much remained. In one village they found a herd of goats hidden in a barn, and in another a great vat of olive oil. The goats were put to the bayonet and their corpses hurriedly buried in a ditch, and the oil was spilled onto the ground. French armies famously lived off the land, stealing what they needed, so the land was to be ravaged.

  There was no evidence of a French pursuit. None of the galloper guns fired and no wounded cavalr
ymen appeared after a brief clash of sabers. Sharpe continually looked to the east and thought he saw the smear of dust in the sky kicked up by an army's boots, but it could easily have been a heat haze. There was an explosion at mid-morning, but it came from ahead where, in a deep valley, British engineers had blown a bridge. The South Essex grumbled because they had to wade through the river rather than cross it by a roadway, but if the bridge had been left they would have grumbled at being denied the chance to scoop up water as they waded the river.

  Lieutenant Colonel the Honorable William Lawford, commanding officer of the first battalion of the South Essex regiment, spent much of the day at the rear of the column where he rode a new horse, a black gelding, of which he was absurdly proud. "I gave Portia to Slingsby," he told Sharpe. Portia was his previous horse, a mare that Slingsby now rode and thus appeared, to any casual onlooker, to be the commander of the light company. Lawford must have been aware of the contrast because he told Sharpe that officers ought to ride. "It gives their men something to look up to, Sharpe," he said. "You can afford a horse, can't you?"

  What Sharpe could or could not afford was not something he intended to share with the Colonel. "I'd prefer they looked up to me instead of at the horse, sir," Sharpe commented instead.

  "You know what I mean." Lawford refused to be offended. "If you like, Sharpe, I'll cast about and find you something serviceable? Major Pearson of the gunners was talking about selling one of his hacks and I can probably squeeze a fair price from him."

  Sharpe said nothing. He was not fond of horses, but he nevertheless felt jealous that bloody Slingsby was riding one. Lawford waited for a response and, when none came, he spurred the gelding so that it picked up its hooves and trotted a few paces ahead. "So what do you think, Sharpe, eh?" the Colonel demanded.

  "Think, sir?"

  "Of Lightning! That's his name. Lightning." The Colonel patted the horse's neck. "Isn't he superb?"

  Sharpe stared at the horse, said nothing.

  "Come, Sharpe!" Lawford encouraged him. "Can't you see his quality, eh?"

  "He's got four legs, sir," Sharpe said.

  "Oh, Sharpe!" the Colonel remonstrated. "Really! Is that all you can say?" Lawford turned to Harper instead. "What do you make of him, Sergeant?" . . .

  "He's wonderful, sir," Harper said with genuine enthusiasm, "just wonderful. Would he be Irish now?"

  "He is!" Lawford was delighted. "He is! Bred in County Meath. I can see you know your horses, Sergeant." The Colonel fondled the gelding's ears. "He takes fences like the wind. He'll hunt magnificently. Can't wait to get him home and set him at a few damn great hedgerows." He leaned towards Sharpe and lowered his voice. "He cost me a few pennies, I can tell you."

  "I'm sure he did, sir," Sharpe said, "and did you pass on my message about the telegraph station?"

  "I did," Lawford said, "but they're busy at headquarters, Sharpe, damned busy, and I doubt they'll worry too much about a few pounds of flour. Still, you did the right thing."

  "I wasn't thinking of the flour, sir," Sharpe said, "but about Major Ferreira."

  "I'm sure there's an innocent explanation," Lawford said airily, then rode ahead, leaving Sharpe scowling. He liked Lawford, whom he had known years before in India and who was a clever, genial man whose only fault, perhaps, was a tendency to avoid trouble. Not fighting trouble: Lawford had never shirked a fight with the French, but he hated confrontations within his own ranks. By nature he was a diplomat, always trying to smooth the corners and find areas of agreement, and Sharpe was hardly surprised that the Colonel had shied away from accusing Major Ferreira of dishonesty. In Lawford's world it was always best to believe that yapping dogs were really sleeping.

  So Sharpe put the confrontation of the previous day out of his mind and trudged on, half his thoughts conscious of what every man in the company was doing and the other half thinking of Teresa and Josefina, and he was still thinking of them when a horseman rode past him in the opposite direction, wheeled around in a flurry of dust and called to him. "In trouble again, Richard?"

  Sharpe, startled out of his daydream, looked up to see Major Hogan looking indecently cheerful. "I'm in trouble, sir?"

  "You do sound grim," Hogan said. "Get out of bed the wrong side, did you?"

  "I was promised a month's leave, sir. A bloody month! And I got a week."

  "I'm sure you didn't waste it," Hogan said. He was an Irishman, a Royal Engineer whose shrewdness had taken him away from engineering duties to serve Wellington as the man who collected every scrap of information about the enemy. Hogan had to sift rumors brought by peddlers, traders and deserters, he had to appraise every message sent by the partisans who harried the French on both sides of the frontier between Spain and Portugal, and he had to decipher the dispatches, captured by the partisans from French messengers, some of them still stained with blood. He was also an old friend of Sharpe, and one who now frowned at the rifleman. "A gentleman came to headquarters last night," he said, "to lodge an official complaint about you. He wanted to see the Peer, but Wellington's much too busy fighting the war, so the man was fobbed off on me. Luckily for you."

  "A gentleman?"

  "I stretch the word to its uttermost limits," Hogan said. "Ferragus."

  "That bastard."

  "Illegitimacy is probably the one thing he cannot be accused of," Hogan said.

  "So what did he say?"

  "That you hit him," Hogan said.

  "He can tell the truth, then," Sharpe admitted.

  "Good God, Richard!" Hogan examined Sharpe. "You don't seem hurt. You really hit him?"

  "Flattened the bastard," Sharpe said. "Did he tell you why?"

  "Not precisely, but I can guess. Was he planning to sell food to the enemy?"

  "Close on two tons of flour," Sharpe said, "and he had a bloody Portuguese officer with him."

  "His brother," Hogan said, "Major Ferreira."

  "His brother!"

  "Not much alike, are they? But yes, they're brothers. Pedro Ferreira stayed home, went to school, joined the army, married decently, lives respectably, and his brother ran away in search of sinks of iniquity. Ferragus is a nickname, taken from some legendary Portuguese giant who was reputed to have skin that couldn't be pierced by a sword. Useful, that. But his brother is more useful. Major Ferreira does for the Portuguese what I do for the Peer, though I fancy he isn't quite as efficient as I am. But he has friends in the French headquarters."

  "Friends?" Sharpe sounded skeptical.

  "More than a few Portuguese joined the French," Hogan said. "They're mostly idealists who think they're fighting for liberty, justice, brotherhood and all that airy nonsense. Major Ferreira somehow stays in touch with them, which is damned useful. But as for Ferragus!" Hogan paused, staring uphill to where a hawk hovered above the pale grass. "Our giant is a bad lot, Richard, about as bad as they come. You know where he learned English?"

  "How would I?"

  "He joined a ship as a seaman when he ran away from home," Hogan said, ignoring Sharpe's surly response, "and then had the misfortune to be pressed into the Royal Navy. He learned lower-deck English, made a reputation as the fiercest bare-knuckle fighter in the Atlantic fleet, then deserted in the West Indies. He apparently joined a slave ship and rose up through the ranks. Now he calls himself a merchant, but I doubt he trades in anything legal."

  "Slaves?"

  "Not any longer," Hogan said, "but that's how he made his money. Shipping the poor devils from the Guinea coast to Brazil. Now he lives in Coimbra where he's rich and makes his money in mysterious ways. He's quite an impressive man, don't you think, and not without his advantages?"

  "Advantages?"

  "Major Ferreira claims his brother has contacts throughout Portugal and western Spain, which sounds very likely."

  "So you let him get away with treason?"

  "Something like that," Hogan agreed equably. "Two tons of flour isn't much, not in the greater scheme of things, and Major Ferreira persuades me his broth
er is on our side. Whatever, I apologized to our giant, said you were a crude man of no refinement, assured him that you would be severely reprimanded, which you may now consider done, and promised that he would never see you again." Hogan beamed at Sharpe. "So the matter is closed."

  "So I do my duty," Sharpe said, "and land in the shit."

  "You have at last seized the essence of soldiering," Hogan said happily, "and Marshal Massena is landing in the same place."

  "He is?" Sharpe asked. "I thought we were retreating and he was advancing?"

  Hogan laughed. "There are three roads he could have chosen, Richard, two very good ones and one quite rotten one, and in his wisdom he chose this one, the bad one." It was indeed a bad road, merely two rutted wheel tracks either side of a strip of grass and weeds, and littered with rocks large enough to break a wagon or gun wheel. "And this bad road," Hogan went on, "leads straight to a place called Bussaco."

  "Am I supposed to have heard of it?"

  "A very bad place," Hogan went on, "for anyone attacking it. And the Peer is gathering troops there in hope of giving Monsieur Massena a bloody nose. Something to look forward to, Richard, something to anticipate." He raised a hand, kicked back his heels and rode ahead, nodding to Major Forrest who came the other way.

  "Two ovens in the next village, Sharpe," Forrest said, "and the Colonel would like your lads to deal with them."

  The ovens were great brick caves in which the villagers had baked their bread. The light company used pickaxes to reduce them to rubble so the French could not use them. They left the precious ovens destroyed and then marched on.

  To a place called Bussaco.

  Chapter 2

  Robert Knowles and Richard Sharpe stood on the Bussaco ridge and stared at l'Armee de Portugal that, battalion by battalion, battery by battery and squadron by squadron, streamed from the eastern hills to fill the valley.

  The British and Portuguese armies had occupied a great ridge that ran north and south and so blocked the road on which the French were advancing towards Lisbon. The ridge, Knowles guessed, was almost a thousand feet above the surrounding countryside, and its eastward flank, which faced the French, was precipitously steep. Two roads zigzagged their way up that slope, snaking between heather, gorse and rocks, the better road reaching the ridge's crest towards its northern end just above a small village perched on a ledge of the ridge. Down in the valley, beyond a glinting stream, lay a scatter of other small villages and the French were making their way along farm tracks to occupy those lower settlements.