LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      ‘What it is,’ Williamson told his cronies, ‘is the bloody frow. We’re humping stone and he’s tickling the Colonel’s wife.’ And if Sharpe had heard that opinion he might even have agreed with it too, even though he was not tickling Kate, but he was enjoying her company and had persuaded himself that, orders or no orders, he ought to protect her against the French.

      But the French did not come and nor did Colonel Christopher. Manuel Lopes came instead.

      He arrived on a black horse, galloping up the driveway and then curbing the stallion so fast that it reared and twisted and Lopes, instead of being thrown off as ninety-nine out of a hundred other riders would have been, stayed calm and in control. He soothed the horse and grinned at Sharpe. ‘You are the Englishman,’ he said in English, ‘and I hate the English, but not so much as I hate the Spanish, and I hate the Spanish less than I hate the French.’ He slid down from the saddle and held out a hand. ‘I am Manuel Lopes.’

      ‘Sharpe,’ Sharpe said.

      Lopes looked at the Quinta with the eye of a man sizing it up for plunder. He was an inch less than Sharpe’s six feet, but seemed taller. He was a big man, not fat, just big, with a strong face and quick eyes and a swift smile. ‘If I was a Spaniard,’ he said, ‘and I nightly thank the good Lord that I am not, then I would call myself something dramatic. The Slaughterman, perhaps, or the Pig Sticker or the Prince of Death’ – he was talking of the partisan leaders who made French life so miserable – ‘but I am a humble citizen of Portugal so my nickname is the Schoolteacher.’

      ‘The Schoolteacher,’ Sharpe repeated.

      ‘Because that is what I was,’ Lopes responded energetically. ‘I owned a school in Bragança where I taught ungrateful little bastards English, Latin, Greek, algebra, rhetoric and horsemanship. I also taught them to love God, honour the King and fart in the face of all Spaniards. Now, instead of wasting my breath on halfwits, I kill Frenchmen.’ He offered Sharpe an extravagant bow. ‘I am famous for it.’

      ‘I’ve not heard of you,’ Sharpe said.

      Lopes just smiled at the challenge. ‘The French have heard of me, senhor,’ he said, ‘and I have heard about you. Who is this Englishman who lives safe north of the Douro? Why do the French leave him in peace? Who is the Portuguese officer who lives in his shadow? Why are they here? Why are they making a toy fort on the watchtower hill? Why are they not fighting?’

      ‘Good questions,’ Sharpe said drily, ‘all of them.’

      Lopes looked at the Quinta again. ‘Everywhere else in Portugal, senhor, where the French have left their dung, they have destroyed places like this. They have stolen the paintings, broken the furniture and drunk the cellars dry. Yet the war does not come to this house?’ He turned to stare down the driveway where some twenty or thirty men had appeared. ‘My pupils,’ he explained, ‘they need rest.’

      The ‘pupils’ were his men, a ragged band with which Lopes had been ambushing the French columns that carried ammunition to the gunners who fought against the Portuguese troops still holding the bridge at Amarante. The Schoolteacher had lost a good few men in the fights and admitted that his early successes had made him too confident until, just two days before, French dragoons had caught his men in open ground. ‘I hate those green bastards,’ Lopes growled, ‘hate them and their big swords.’ Nearly half his men had been killed and the rest had been lucky to escape. ‘So I brought them here,’ Lopes said, ‘to recover, and because the Quinta do Zedes seems like a safe haven.’

      Kate bridled when she heard Lopes wanted his men to stay at the house. ‘Tell him to take them to the village,’ she said to Sharpe, and Sharpe carried her suggestion to the Schoolteacher.

      Lopes laughed when he heard the message. ‘Her father was a pompous bastard too,’ he said.

      ‘You knew him?’

      ‘I knew of him. He made port but wouldn’t drink it because of his stupid beliefs, and he wouldn’t take off his hat when the sacrament was carried past. What kind of a man is that? Even a Spaniard takes off his hat for the blessed sacraments.’ Lopes shrugged. ‘My men will be happy in the village.’ He drew on a filthy-smelling cigar. ‘We’ll only stay long enough to heal the worst wounds. Then we go back to the fight.’

      ‘Us too,’ Sharpe said.

      ‘You?’ The Schoolteacher was amused. ‘Yet you don’t fight now?’

      ‘Colonel Christopher ordered us to stay here.’

      ‘Colonel Christopher?’

      ‘This is his wife’s house,’ Sharpe said.

      ‘I did not know he was married,’ Lopes responded.

      ‘You know him?’

      ‘He came to see me in Bragança. I still owned the school then and I had a reputation as a man of influence. So the Colonel comes calling. He wanted to know if sentiment in Bragança was in favour of fighting the French and I told him that sentiment in Bragança was in favour of drowning the French in their own piss, but if that was not possible then we would fight them instead. So we do.’ Lopes paused. ‘I also heard that the Colonel had money for anyone willing to fight against them, but we never saw any.’ He turned and looked at the house. ‘And his wife owns the Quinta? And the French don’t touch the place?’

      ‘Colonel Christopher,’ Sharpe said, ‘talks to the French, and right now he’s south of the Douro where he’s taken a Frenchman to speak with the British General.’

      Lopes stared at Sharpe for a few heartbeats. ‘Why would a French officer be talking to the British?’ he asked and waited for Sharpe to answer,

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