LITMIR.BIZ

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to make damp rills of pink and white petals in the grass. Still the French did not come and Manuel Lopes reckoned they were simply too busy to bother with Vila Real de Zedes. ‘They’ve got troubles,’ he said happily. ‘Silveira’s giving them a bellyache at Amarante and the road to Vigo has been closed by partisans. They’re cut off! No way home! They’re not going to worry us here.’ Lopes frequently went to the nearby towns where he posed as a pedlar selling religious trinkets and he brought back news of the French troops. ‘They patrol the roads,’ he said, ‘they get drunk at night and they wish they were back home.’

      ‘And they look for food,’ Sharpe said.

      ‘They do that too,’ Lopes agreed.

      ‘And one day,’ Sharpe said, ‘when they’re hungry, they’ll come here.’

      ‘Colonel Christopher won’t let them,’ Lopes said. He was walking with Sharpe along the Quinta’s drive, watched by Harris and Cooper who stood guard at the gate, the closest Sharpe allowed his Protestant riflemen to the village. Rain was threatening. Grey sheets of it fell across the northern hills and Sharpe had twice heard rumbles of thunder which might have been the sound of the guns at Amarante, but seemed too loud. ‘I shall leave soon,’ Lopes announced.

      ‘Back to Bragança?’

      ‘Amarante. My men are recovered. It is time to fight again.’

      ‘You could do one thing before you go,’ Sharpe said, ignoring the implied criticism in Lopes’s last words. ‘Tell those refugees to get out of the village. Tell them to go home. Tell them Saint Joseph is overworked and he won’t protect them when the French come.’

      Lopes shook his head. ‘The French aren’t coming,’ he insisted.

      ‘And when they do,’ Sharpe continued, just as insistently, ‘I can’t defend the village. I don’t have enough men.’

      Lopes looked disgusted. ‘You’ll just defend the Quinta,’ he suggested, ‘because it belongs to an English family.’

      ‘I don’t give a damn about the Quinta,’ Sharpe said angrily. ‘I’ll be up on that hilltop trying to stay alive. For Christ’s sake, there’s less than sixty of us! And the French will send fifteen hundred.’

      ‘They won’t come,’ Lopes said. He reached up to pluck some shrivelled white blossom from a tree. ‘I never did trust Savages’ port,’ he said.

      ‘Trust?’

      ‘An elder tree,’ Lopes said, showing Sharpe the petals. ‘The bad port makers put elderberry juice in the wine to make it look richer.’ He tossed away the flowers and Sharpe had a sudden memory of that day in Oporto, the day the refugees drowned when the French had taken the city, and he remembered how Christopher had been about to write him the order to go back across the Douro and the cannonball had struck the tree to shower pinkish-red petals which the Colonel had thought were cherry blossom. And Sharpe remembered the look on Christopher’s face at the mention of the name Judas.

      ‘Jesus!’ Sharpe said.

      ‘What?’ Lopes was taken aback by the force of the imprecation.

      ‘He’s a bloody traitor,’ Sharpe said.

      ‘Who?’

      ‘The bloody Colonel,’ Sharpe said. It was only instinct that had so suddenly persuaded him that Christopher was betraying his country, an instinct grounded in the memory of the Colonel’s look of outrage when Sharpe said the blossom came from a Judas tree. Ever since then Sharpe had been havering between a half suspicion of Christopher’s treachery and a vague belief that perhaps the Colonel was engaged in some mysterious diplomatic work, but the recollection of that look on Christopher’s face and the realization that there had been fear as well as outrage in it convinced Sharpe. Christopher was not just a thief, but a traitor. ‘You’re right,’ he told an astonished Lopes, ‘it is time to fight. Harris!’ He turned towards the gate.

      ‘Sir?’

      ‘Find Sergeant Harper for me. And Lieutenant Vicente.’

      Vicente came first and Sharpe could not explain why he was so certain that Christopher was a traitor, but Vicente was not inclined to debate the point. He hated Christopher because he had married Kate, and he was as bored as Sharpe at the undemanding life at the Quinta. ‘Get food,’ Sharpe urged him. ‘Go to the village, ask them to bake bread, buy as much salted and smoked meat as you can. I want every man to have five days’ rations by nightfall.’

      Harper was more cautious. ‘I thought you had orders, sir.’

      ‘I do, Pat, from General Cradock.’

      ‘Jesus, sir, you don’t disobey a general’s orders.’

      ‘And who fetched those orders?’ Sharpe asked. ‘Christopher did. So he lied to Cradock just as he’s lied to everyone else.’ He was not certain of that, he could not be certain, but nor could he see the sense in just dallying at the Quinta. He would go south and trust that Captain Hogan would protect him from General Cradock’s wrath. ‘We’ll march at dusk tonight,’ he told Harper. ‘I want you to check everyone’s equipment and ammunition.’

      Harper smelt the air. ‘We’re going to have rain, sir, bad rain.’

      ‘That’s why God made our skins waterproof,’ Sharpe said.

      ‘I was thinking we might do better to wait till after midnight, sir. Give the rain a chance to blow over.’

      Sharpe shook his head. ‘I want to get out of here, Pat. I feel bad about this place suddenly. We’ll take everyone south. Towards the river.’

      ‘I thought the Crapauds had stripped out all the boats?’

      ‘I don’t want to go east’ – Sharpe jerked his head towards Amarante where rumour said a battle still raged – ‘and there’s nothing but Crapauds to the west.’ The north was all mountain, rock and starvation, but to the south lay the river and he knew British forces were somewhere beyond the Douro and Sharpe had been thinking that the French could not have destroyed every boat along its long, rocky banks. ‘We’ll find a boat,’ he promised Harper.

      ‘It’ll be dark tonight, sir. Lucky even to find the way.’

      ‘For God’s sake,’ Sharpe said, irritated with Harper’s pessimism, ‘we’ve been patrolling this place for a bloody month! We can find our way south.’

      By evening they had two sacks of bread, some rock-hard smoked goat meat, two cheeses and a bag of beans that Sharpe distributed among the men, then he had an inspiration and went to the Quinta’s kitchen and stole two large tins of tea. He reckoned it was time Kate did something for her country and there were few finer gestures than donating good China tea to riflemen. He gave one tin to Harper and shoved the other into his pack. It had started to rain, the drops pounding on the stable roof and cascading off the tiles into the cobbled yard. Daniel Hagman watched the rain from the stable door. ‘I feel just fine, sir,’ he reassured Sharpe.

      ‘We can make a stretcher, Dan, if you feel poorly.’

      ‘Lord, no, sir! I’m right as rain, right as rain.’

      No one wanted to leave in this downpour, but Sharpe was determined to use every hour of darkness to make his way towards the Douro. There was a chance, he thought, of reaching the river by midday tomorrow and he would let the men rest while he scouted the river bank for a means to cross. ‘Packs on!’ he ordered. ‘Ready yourselves.’ He watched Williamson for any sign of reluctance, but the man got a move on with the rest. Vicente had distributed wine corks and the men pushed them into the muzzles of their rifles or muskets. The weapons were not loaded because in this rain the priming would turn to grey slush. There was more grumbling when Sharpe ordered them out of the stables, but they hunched their shoulders and followed him out of the courtyard and up into the wood where the oaks and silver birches thrashed under the assault of wind and rain. Sharpe was soaked to the skin before they had gone a quarter-mile, but he consoled himself

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