Sharpe's Havoc (15 page)

“They are all papists here, Mister Sharpe,” Kate said in mock reproof. “Though I suspect
she did find someone not so long ago. She began to take more trouble with herself. Her
clothes, her hair, but maybe I imagined it.” She was silent for a moment. The cook’s needles
clicked and a log collapsed with a shower of sparks. One spat over the wire fireguard and
smoldered on a rug until Sharpe leaned forward and pinched it out. The Tompion clock in the
hall struck nine. “My father,” Kate went on, “believed that the women in his family were
prone to wander from the straight and narrow path which is why he always wanted a son to take
over the lodge. It didn’t happen, so he tied our hands in the will.”

“You had to marry a Protestant Englishman?”

“A confirmed Anglican, anyway,” Kate said, “who was willing to change his name to
Savage.”

“So it’s Colonel Savage now, is it?”

“He will be,” Kate said. “He said he would sign a paper before a notary in Oporto and then
we’ll send it to the trustees in London. I don’t know how we send letters home now, but James
will find a way. He’s very resourceful.”

“He is,” Sharpe said dryly. “But does he want to stay in Portugal and make port?”

“Oh yes!” Kate said.

“And you?”

“Of course! I love Portugal and I know James wants to stay. He declared as much not long
after he arrived at our house in Oporto.” She said that Christopher had come to the House
Beautiful in the New Year and he had lodged there for a while, though he spent most of his time
riding in the north. She did not know what he did there. “It wasn’t my business,” she told
Sharpe.

“And what’s he doing in the south now? That’s not your business either?”

“Not unless he tells me,” she said defensively, then frowned at him. “You don’t like him,
do you?”

Sharpe was embarrassed, not knowing what to say. “He’s got good teeth,” he said.

That grudging statement made Kate look pained. “Did I hear the clock strike?” she asked.

Sharpe took the hint. “Time to check the sentries,” he said and he went to the door,
glancing back at Kate and noticing, not for the first time, how delicate her looks were and
how her pale skin seemed to glow in the firelight, and then he tried to forget her as he
started on his tour of the picquets.

Sharpe was working the riflemen hard, patrolling the Quinta’s lands, drilling on its
driveway, working them long hours so that the little energy they had left was spent in
grumbling, but Sharpe knew how precarious their situation was. Christopher had airily
ordered him to stay and guard Kate, but the Quinta could never have been defended against
even a small French force. It was high on a wooded spur, but the hill rose behind it even
higher and there were thick woods on the higher ground vhich could have soaked up a corps of
infantry who would then have )een able to attack the manor house from the higher ground with
the idded advantage of the trees to give them cover. But higher still the trees ;nded and
the hill rose to a rocky summit where an old watchtower crum-jled in the winds and from there
Sharpe spent hours watching the coun-:ryside.

He saw French troops every day. There was a valley north of Vila Real de Zedes that
carried a road leading east toward Amarante and enemy irtillery, infantry and supply
wagons traveled the road each day and, to keep them safe, large squadrons of dragoons
patrolled the valley. Some days there were outbreaks of firing, distant, faint, half heard,
and Sharpe guessed that the country people were ambushing the invaders and he would stare
through his telescope, trying to see where the actions took place, but he never saw the
ambushes and none of the partisans came near Sharpe and nor did the French, though he was
certain they must have known that a stranded squad of British riflemen were at Vila Real de
Zedes. Once he even saw some dragoons trot to within a mile of the Quinta and two of their
officers stared at the elegant house through telescopes, yet they made no move against it.
Had Christopher arranged that?

Nine days after Christopher had left, the headman of the village brought Vicente a
newspaper from Oporto. It was an ill-printed sheet and Vicente was puzzled by it. “I’ve
never heard of the Diario do Porto,” he told Sharpe, “and it is nonsense.”

“Nonsense?”

“It says Soult should declare himself king of Northern Lusitania! It says there are many
Portuguese people who support the idea. Who? Why would they? We have a king already.”

“The French must be paying the newspaper,” Sharpe guessed, though what else the French were
doing was a mystery for they left him alone.

The doctor who came to see Hagman thought Marshal Soult was gathering his forces in
readiness to strike south and did not want to fritter men away in bitter little skirmishes
across the northern mountains. “Once he possesses all Portugal,” the doctor said, “then he
will scour you away.” He wrinkled his nose as he lifted the stinking compress from Hagman’s
chest, then he shook his head in amazement for the wound was clean. Hagman’s breathing was
easier, he could sit up in bed now and was eating better.

Vicente left the next day. The doctor had brought news of General Silveira’s army in
Amarante and how it was valiantly defending the bridge across the Tamega, and Vicente
decided his duty lay in helping that defense, but after three days he returned because
there were too many dragoons patrolling the countryside between Vila Real de Zedes and
Amarante. The failure made him dejected. “I am wasting my time,” he told Sharpe.

“How good are your men?” Sharpe asked.

The question puzzled Vicente. “Good? As good as any, I suppose.”

“Are they?” Sharpe asked, and that afternoon he paraded every man, rifleman and
Portuguese alike, and made them all fire three rounds in a minute from the Portuguese muskets.
He did it in front of the house and timed the shots with the big grandfather clock.

Sharpe had no difficulty in firing the three shots. He had been doing this for half his
life, and the Portuguese musket was British made and familiar to Sharpe. He bit open the
cartridge, tasted the salt in the powder, charged the barrel, rammed down wadding and ball,
primed the pan, cocked, pulled the trigger and felt the kick of the gun into his shoulder and
then he dropped the butt and bit into the next cartridge and most of his riflemen were
grinning because they knew he was good.

Sergeant Macedo was the only man other than Sharpe who fired his three shots within
forty-five seconds. Fifteen of the riflemen and twelve of the Portuguese managed a shot
every twenty seconds, but the rest were slow and so Sharpe and Vicente set about training
them. Williamson, one of the riflemen who had failed, grumbled that it was stupid to make him
learn how to fire a smoothbore musket when he was a rifleman. He made the complaint just
loud enough for Sharpe to hear and in the expectation that Sharpe would choose to ignore it,
then looked aggrieved when Sharpe dragged him back out of the formation. “You’ve got a
complaint?” Sharpe challenged him.

“No, sir.” Williamson, his big face surly, looked past Sharpe.

“Look at me,” Sharpe said. Williamson sullenly obeyed. “The reason you are learning to
fire a musket like a proper soldier,” Sharpe told him, “is because I don’t want the
Portuguese to think we’re picking on them.” Williamson still looked sullen. “And besides,”
Sharpe went on, “we’re stranded miles behind enemy lines, so what happens if your rifle
breaks? And there’s another reason besides.”

“What’s that, sir?” Williamson asked.

“If you don’t bloody do it,” Sharpe said, “I’ll have you on another charge, then another
charge and another after that until you’re so damn fed up with punishment duty that you’ll
have to shoot me to be rid of it.”

Williamson stared at Sharpe with an expression which suggested he would like nothing more
than to shoot him, but Sharpe just stared into his eyes and Williamson looked away. “We’ll run
out of ammunition,” he said churlishly, and in that he was probably right, but Kate Savage
unlocked her father’s gun room and found a barrel of powder and a bullet mold so Sharpe was
able to have his men make up new cartridges, using pages from the sermon books in the
Quinta’s library to wrap the powder and shot. The balls were too small, but they were fine for
practice, and for three days his men blasted their muskets and rifles across the driveway.
The French must have heard the musketry echoing dully from the hills and they must have seen
the powder smoke above Vila Real de Zedes, but they did not come. Nor did Colonel
Christopher.

“But the French are going to come,” Sharpe told Harper one afternoon as they climbed the
hill behind the Quinta.

“Like as not,” the big man said. “I mean it’s not as if they don’t know we’re here.”

“And they’ll slice us into pieces when they do arrive,” Sharpe said.

Harper shrugged at that pessimistic opinion, then frowned. “How far are we going?”

“The top,” Sharpe said. He had led Harper through the trees and now they were on the rocky
slope that led to the old watchtower on the hill’s summit. “Have you never been up here?”
Sharpe asked.

“I grew up in Donegal,” Harper said, “and there was one thing we learned there, which was
never go to the top of the hills.”

“Why ever not?”

“Because anything valuable will have long rolled down, sir, and all you’ll be doing is
getting yourself out of breath by climbing up to find it gone. Jesus Christ, but you can see
halfway to heaven from up here.”

The track followed a rocky spine that led to the summit and on either side the slope
steepened until only a goat could have found footing on the treacherous scree, yet the path
itself was safe enough, winding up toward the watchtower’s ancient stump. “We’re going to
make a fort up here,” Sharpe said enthusiastically.

“God save us,” Harper said.

“We’re getting lazy, Pat, soft. Idle. It ain’t good.”

“But why make a fort?” Harper asked. “It’s a fortress already! The devil himself couldn’t
take this hill, not if it was defended.”

“There are two ways up here,” Sharpe said, ignoring the question, “this path and another
on the south side. I want walls across each path. Stone walls, Pat, high enough so a man can
stand behind them and fire over their tops. There’s plenty of stone up here.” Sharpe led
Harper through the tower’s broken archway and showed him how the old building had been
raised about a natural pit in the hill’s summit and how the crumbling tower had filled the
pit with stones.

Harper peered down into the pit. “You want us to move all that masonry and build new
walls?” He sounded appalled.

“I was talking to Kate Savage about this place,” Sharpe said. “This old tower was built
hundreds of years ago, Pat, when the Moors were here. They were killing Christians then, and
the King built the watchtower so they could see when a Moorish raiding party was
coming.”

“It’s a sensible thing to do,” Harper said.

“And Kate was saying how the folk in the valleys would send their valuables up here. Coins,
jewels, gold. All of it up here, Pat, so that the heathen bastards wouldn’t snatch it. And
then there was an earthquake nd the tower fell in and the locals reckon there’s treasure
under those tones.”

Harper looked skeptical. “And why wouldn’t they dig it up, sir? The folk in the village
don’t strike me as halfwits. I mean, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, if I knew there was a pit of bloody
gold up on a hill I wouldn’t be vasting my time with a plough or a harrow.”

“That’s just it,” Sharpe said. He was making up the story as he went ilong and thought
desperately for an answer to Harper’s entirely reasonable objection. “There was a
child, you see, buried with the gold and the egend says the child will haunt the house of
whoever digs up its bones. But only a local house,” he added hastily.

Harper sniffed at that embellishment, then looked back down the path. “So you want a fort
here?”

“And we need to bring barrels of water here,” Sharpe said. That was the summit’s weakness,
no water. If the French came and he had to retreat to the hilltop then he did not want to
surrender just because of thirst. “Miss Savage”-he still did not think of her as Mrs.
Christopher-’will find us barrels.”

“Up here? In the sun? Water will go rancid,” Harper warned him.

“A splash of brandy in each one,” Sharpe said, remembering his voyages to and from India
and how the water had always tasted faintly of rum. “I’ll find the brandy.”

“And you really expect me to believe there’s gold under those stones, sir?”

“No,” Sharpe admitted, “but I want the men to half believe it. It’s going to be hard work
building walls up here, Pat, and dreams of treasure never hurt.”

So they built the fort and never found gold, but in the spring sunlight they made the
hilltop into a redoubt where a handful of infantry could grow old under siege. The ancient
builders had chosen well, not just selecting the highest peak for miles around to build their
watchtower, but also a place that was easily defended. Attackers could only come from
the north or the south, and in both cases they would have to pick their way along narrow paths.
Sharpe, exploring the southern path one day, found a rusted arrowhead under a boulder and
he took it back to the summit and showed it to Kate. She held it beneath the brim of her wide
straw hat and turned it this way and that. “It probably isn’t very old,” she said.

“I was thinking it might have wounded a Moor.”

“They were still hunting with bows and arrows in my grandfather’s time,” she said.

“Your family was here then?”

“Savages started in Portugal in 1711,” she said proudly. She had been gazing southwest,
in the direction of Oporto, and Sharpe knew she was watching the road in hope of seeing a
horseman come, but the passing days brought no sign of her husband, nor even a letter. The
French did not come either, though Sharpe knew they must have seen his men toiling on the
summit as they piled rocks to make ramparts across the two paths and struggled up those tracks
with barrels of water that were put into the great cleared pit on the peak. The men grumbled
about being made to work like mules, but Sharpe knew they were happier tired than idle. Some,
encouraged by Williamson, complained that they wasted their time, that they should have
abandoned this godforsaken hill with its broken tower and found a way south to the army,
and Sharpe reckoned they were probably right, but he had his orders and so he stayed.