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‘But you’re a good officer and he’s a jack-pudding. Who the hell is he anyway?’
‘He’s the Colonel’s brother-in-law,’ Knowles explained.
‘I know that,’ Sharpe said impatiently, ‘but who is he?’
‘The man who married Mrs Lawford’s sister,’ Knowles said, refusing to be drawn.
‘That tells you everything you bloody need to know,’ Sharpe said grimly, ‘but he doesn’t seem the kind of fellow Lawford would want as a brother-in-law. Not enough tone.’
‘We don’t choose our relatives,’ Knowles said, ‘and I’m sure he’s a gentleman.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Sharpe grumbled.
‘And he must have been delighted to get out of the 55th,’ Knowles went on, ignoring Sharpe’s moroseness. ‘God, most of that regiment died of the yellow fever in the West Indies. He’s much safer here, even with those fellows threatening.’ Knowles nodded down at the French troops.
‘Then why the hell didn’t he purchase a captaincy?’
‘Six months short of requirements,’ Knowles said. A lieutenant was not allowed to purchase a captaincy until he had served three years in the lower rank, a newly introduced rule that had caused much grumbling among wealthy officers who wanted swifter preferment.
‘But why did he join up so late?’ Sharpe asked. If Slingsby was thirty then he could not have become a lieutenant before he was twenty-seven, by which age some men were majors. Most officers, like young Iliffe, joined long before they were twenty and it was odd to find a man coming to the army so late.
‘I believe …’ Knowles said, then reddened and checked his words. ‘New troops,’ he said instead, pointing down the slope to where a French regiment, its blue coats unnaturally bright, marched past the windmill. ‘I hear the Emperor has sent reinforcements to Spain,’ Knowles went on. ‘The French have nowhere else to fight these days. Austrians out of the war, Prussians doing nothing, which means Boney only has us to beat.’
Sharpe ignored Knowles’s summation of the Emperor’s strategy. ‘You believe what?’ he asked.
‘Nothing. I said too much.’
‘You didn’t say a bloody thing,’ Sharpe protested and waited, but Knowles still remained silent. ‘You want me to slit your skinny throat, Robert,’ Sharpe asked, ‘with a very blunt knife?’
Knowles smiled. ‘You mustn’t repeat this, Richard.’
‘You know me, Robert, I never tell anyone anything. Cross my heart and hope to die, so tell me before I cut your legs off.’
‘I believe Mrs Lawford’s sister was in trouble. She found herself with child, she wasn’t married and the man concerned was apparently a rogue.’
‘Wasn’t me,’ Sharpe said quickly.
‘Of course it wasn’t you,’ Knowles said. He could be pedantically obvious at times.
Sharpe grinned. ‘So Slingsby was recruited to make her respectable?’
‘Exactly. He’s not from the topmost drawer, of course, but his family is more than acceptable. His father’s a rector somewhere on the Essex coast, I believe, but they’re not wealthy, and so Lawford’s family rewarded Slingsby with a commission in the 55th, with a promise to exchange into the South Essex as soon as there was a vacancy. Which there was when poor Herrold died.’
‘Herrold?’
‘Number three company,’ Knowles said, ‘arrived on a Monday, caught fever on Tuesday and was dead by Friday.’
‘So the idea,’ Sharpe said, watching a French gun battery being dragged along the track by the stream below, ‘is that bloody Slingsby gets quick promotion so that he’s a worthy husband for the woman what couldn’t keep her knees together.’
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Knowles said indignantly, then thought for a second. ‘Well, yes, I would say that. But the Colonel wants him to do well. After all, Slingsby did the family a favour and now they’re trying to do one back.’
‘By giving him my bloody job,’ Sharpe said.
‘Don’t be absurd, Richard.’
‘Why else is the bugger here? They move you out of the way, give the bastard a horse and hope to God the French kill me.’ He fell silent, not only because he had said too much, but because Patrick Harper was approaching.
The big Sergeant greeted Knowles cheerfully. ‘We miss you, sir, we do.’
‘I can say the same, Sergeant,’ Knowles responded with real pleasure. ‘You’re well?’
‘Still breathing, sir, and that’s what counts.’ Harper turned to look down into the valley. ‘Look at those daft bastards. Just lining up to be murdered.’
‘They’ll take one look at this hill,’ Sharpe said, ‘and find another road.’
Yet there was no sign that the French would take that good advice for the blue-uniformed battalions still marched steadily from the east and French gun batteries, dust flying from their big wheels, continued to arrive at the lower villages. Some French officers rode to the top of a spur which jutted east from the ridge and gazed through their telescopes at the few British and Portuguese officers visible where the better road crossed the ridge top. That road, the further north of the two, zigzagged up the slope, climbing at first between gorse and heather, then cutting through vineyards beneath the small village perched on the slope. That was the road which led to Lisbon and to the completion of the Emperor’s orders, which were to hurl the British out of Portugal so that the whole coastline of continental Europe would belong to the French.
Lieutenant Slingsby, his red coat newly brushed and his badges polished, came to offer his opinion of the enemy, and Sharpe, unable to stand the man’s company, walked away southwards. He watched the French cutting down trees to make fires or shelters. Some small streams fell from the far hills to join and make a larger stream that flowed south towards the Mondego River which touched the ridge’s southern end, and the bigger stream’s banks were being trampled by horses, some from the gun teams, some cavalry mounts and some the officers’ horses, all being given a drink after their march.
The French were concentrating in two places. One tangle of battalions was around the village from which the better road climbed to the northern end of the ridge, while others were two miles to the south, gathering at another village from which a track, passable to packhorses or men on foot, twisted to the ridge’s crest. It was not a proper road, there were no ruts from carts, and in places the track almost vanished into the heather, but it did show the French that there was a route up the steep slope, and French batteries were now deploying either side of the village so that the guns could rake the track ahead of their advancing troops.
The sound of axes and falling trees came from behind Sharpe. One company from each battalion had been detailed to make a road just behind the ridge’s crest, a road that would let Lord Wellington shift his forces anywhere along the hill’s ten-mile length. Trees were being felled, bushes uprooted, rocks being rolled away and the soil smoothed so that British or Portuguese guns could be pulled swiftly to any danger point. It was a huge piece of work and Sharpe suspected it would all be wasted for the French would surely not be mad enough to climb the hill.
Except some were already climbing. A score of mounted officers, wanting a closer view of the British and Portuguese position, had ridden their horses along the summit of the spur which jutted out from the long ridge. The spur was less than half the height of the ridge, but it provided a platform on which troops could gather for an assault and the British and Portuguese gunners had plainly marked it as a target for, as the French horsemen neared the place where the spur joined the ridge, a cannon fired. The sound was flat and hard, startling a thousand birds up from the trees which grew thick on the ridge’s reverse slope. The gun’s smoke roiled in a grey-white cloud that was carried east on the small wind. The shell left a trace of powder smoke from its burning fuse as it arced down to explode a few paces beyond the French horsemen. One of the horses panicked and bolted back the way it had come, but the others seemed unworried as their riders took out telescopes and stared at the enemy above them.
Then two more guns fired, their sound echoing back from the eastern hills. One was evidently a howitzer for the smoke of its burning fuse went high in the sky before dropping towards the French. This time a horse was flung sideways to leave a smear of blood on the dry, pale heather. Sharpe was watching through his telescope and saw the unsaddled and evidently unwounded Frenchman get to his feet. He brushed himself down, drew a pistol and put his twitching horse out of its misery, then struggled to release the precious saddle. He trudged back eastwards, carrying saddle, saddle cloth and bridle.
More French, some mounted and some on foot, were coming to the spur. It seemed a madness to go where the guns were aiming, but dozens of French were wading through the stream and then climbing the low hill to stare up at the British and Portuguese. The gunfire continued. It was not the staccato fire of battle, but desultory shots as the gunners experimented with powder loads and fuse lengths. Too much powder and a shot would scream over the spur to explode somewhere above the stream, while if the fuse was cut too long the shell would land, bounce and come to rest with the fuse still smoking, giving the French time to skip out of the way before the shell exploded. Each detonation was a puff of dirty smoke, surprisingly small, but Sharpe could not see the deadly scraps of broken shell casing hiss away from each blast.
No more French horses or men were struck. They were well spread out and the shells obstinately fell in the gaps between the small groups of men who looked as carefree as folk out for a walk in a park. They stared up at the ridge, trying to determine where the defences lay thickest, though it was surely obvious that the places where the two roads reached the summit would be the places to defend. Another score of cavalrymen, some in green coats and some in sky blue, splashed through the stream and spurred up the lower hill. The sun glinted on brass helmets, polished scabbards, stirrups and curb chains. It was, Sharpe thought, as though the French were playing cat and mouse with the sporadic shell fire. He saw a shell burst close by a group of infantrymen, but when the smoke cleared they were all standing and it seemed to him, though they were very far away, that they were laughing. They were confident, he thought, sure they were the best troops in the world, and their survival of the gunfire was a taunt to the defenders on the ridge’s top.
The taunting was evidently too much, for a battalion of brown-jacketed Portuguese light troops appeared on the crest and, scattered in a double skirmish chain, advanced down the ridge’s slope towards the spur. They went steadily downhill in two loose lines, one fifty paces behind the other, both spread out, giving a demonstration of how skirmishers went to war. Most troops fought shoulder to shoulder, but skirmishers like Sharpe went ahead of the line and, in the killing ground between the armies, tried to pick off the enemy skirmishers and then kill the officers behind so that when the two armies clashed, dense line against massive column, the enemy was already leaderless. Skirmishers rarely closed ranks. They fought close to the enemy where a bunch of men would make an easy target for enemy gunners, and so the light troops fought in loose formation, in pairs, one man shooting and then reloading as his comrade protected him.
The French watched the Portuguese come. They showed no alarm, nor did they advance any skirmishers of their own. The shells went on arcing down the slope, their detonations echoing dully from the eastern hills. The vast mass of the French were making their bivouacs, ignoring the small drama on the ridge, but a dozen cavalrymen, seeing easy meat in the scattered Portuguese skirmishers, kicked their horses up the hill.
By rights the cavalrymen should have decimated the skirmishers. Men in a loose formation were no match for swift cavalry and the French, half of them dragoons and the other half hussars, had drawn their long swords or curved sabres and were anticipating some practice cuts on helpless men. The Portuguese were armed with muskets and rifles, but once the guns were fired there would be no time to reload before the surviving horsemen reached them, and an empty gun was no defence against a dragoon’s long blade. The cavalry were curving around to assault the flank of the line, a dozen horsemen approaching four Portuguese on foot, but the ridge was too steep for the horses, which began to labour. The advantage of the cavalry was speed, but the ridge stole their speed so that the horses were struggling and a rifle cracked, the smoke jetting above the grass, and a horse stumbled, twisted away and collapsed. Another two rifles fired and the French, realizing that the ridge was their enemy, turned away and galloped recklessly downhill. The unhorsed hussar followed on foot, abandoning his dying horse with its precious equipment to the Portuguese who cheered their small victory.
‘I’m not sure the cazadores had orders to do that,’ a voice said behind Sharpe, who turned to see that Major Hogan had come to the ridge. ‘Hello, Richard,’ Hogan said cheerfully, ‘you look unhappy.’ He held out his hand for Sharpe’s telescope.
‘Cazadores?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Hunters. It’s what the Portuguese call their skirmishers.’ Hogan was staring at the brown-coated skirmishers as he spoke. ‘It’s rather a good name, don’t you think? Hunters? Better than greenjackets.’
‘I’ll stay a greenjacket,’ Sharpe said.
Hogan watched the cazadores for a few moments. Their riflemen had begun firing at the French on the spur, and that enemy prudently backed away. The Portuguese stayed where they were, not going down to the spur where the horsemen could attack them, content to have made their demonstration. Two guns fired, the shells falling into the empty space between the cazadores and the remaining French. ‘The Peer will be very unhappy,’ Hogan said. ‘He detests gunners firing at hopeless targets. It just reveals where his batteries are placed and it does no damn harm to the enemy.’ He turned the telescope to the valley and spent a long time looking at the enemy encampments beyond the stream. ‘We reckon Monsieur Masséna has sixty thousand men,’ he said, ‘and maybe a hundred guns.’
‘And us, sir?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Fifty thousand and sixty,’ Hogan said, giving Sharpe back the telescope, ‘and half of ours are Portuguese.’
There was something in his tone that caught Sharpe’s attention. ‘Is that bad?’ he asked.
‘We’ll see, won’t we?’ Hogan said, then stamped his foot on the turf. ‘But we do have this.’ He meant the ridge.
‘Those lads seem eager enough.’ Sharpe nodded at the cazadores who were now retreating up the hill.
‘Eagerness in new troops is quickly wiped away by gunfire,’ Hogan said.
‘I doubt we’ll find out,’ Sharpe said. ‘The Crapauds won’t attack up here. They’re not mad.’
‘I certainly wouldn’t want to attack up this slope,’ Hogan agreed. ‘My suspicion is that they’ll spend the day staring at us, then go away.’
‘Back to Spain?’
‘Good Lord, no. If they did but know it there’s a fine road that loops round the top of this ridge,’ he pointed north, ‘and they don’t need to fight us here at all. They’ll find that road eventually. Pity, really. This would be a grand place to give them a bloody nose. But they may come. They reckon the Portuguese aren’t up to scratch, so perhaps they’ll think it’s worth an attempt.’
‘Are the Portuguese up to scratch?’ Sharpe asked. The gunfire had ended, leaving scorched grass and small patches of smoke on the spur. The French, denied their game of dare, were drifting back towards their lines.
‘We’ll find out about the Portuguese if the French decide to have at us,’ Hogan said grimly, then smiled. ‘Can you come for supper tonight?’
‘Tonight?’ Sharpe was surprised by the question.
‘I spoke with Colonel Lawford,’ Hogan said, ‘and he’s happy to spare you, so long as the French aren’t being a nuisance. Six o’clock, Richard, at the monastery. You know where that is?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Go north,’ Hogan pointed up the ridge, ‘until you see a great stone wall. Find a gap in it, go downhill through the trees until you discover a path and follow that till you see rooftops. There’ll be three of us sitting down.’
‘Three?’ Sharpe asked suspiciously.
‘You,’ Hogan said, ‘me and Major Ferreira.’
‘Ferreira!’ Sharpe exclaimed. ‘Why’s that slimy piece of traitorous shit having supper with us?’
Hogan sighed. ‘Has it occurred to you, Richard, that the two tons of flour might have been a bribe? Something to exchange for information?’
‘Was it?’
‘Ferreira says so. Do I believe him? I’m not sure. But whatever, Richard, I think he regrets what happened and wants to make his peace with us. It was his idea to have supper, and I must say I think it decent of him.’ Hogan saw Sharpe’s reluctance. ‘Truly, Richard. We don’t want resentments to fester between allies, do we?’
‘We don’t, sir?’
‘Six o’clock, Richard,’ Hogan said firmly, ‘and try to convey the impression that you’re enjoying yourself.’ The Irishman smiled, then walked back to the ridge’s crest where officers were pacing off the ground to determine where each battalion would be positioned. Sharpe wished he had found a good excuse to miss the supper. It was not Hogan’s company he wanted to avoid, but the Portuguese Major, and he felt increasingly bitter as he sat in the unseasonal warmth, watching the wind stir the heather beneath which an army, sixty thousand strong, had come to contest the ridge of Bussaco.
Sharpe spent the afternoon bringing the company books up to date, helped by Clayton, the company clerk, who had the annoying habit of saying the words aloud as he wrote them. ‘Isaiah Tongue, deceased,’ he said to himself, then blew on the ink. ‘Does he have a widow, sir?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘He’s owed four shillings and sixpence halfpenny is why I ask.’
‘Put it in the company fund.’
‘If we ever gets any wages,’ Clayton said gloomily. The company fund was where stray money went, not that there ever was much stray money, but wages owed to the dead were put there and, once in a while, it was spent on brandy, or to pay the company wives for the laundry. Some of those wives had come to the ridge’s crest where, joined by scores of civilians, they were gazing down at the French. The civilians had all been ordered to go south, to find the safety of the countryside around Lisbon that was protected by the Lines of Torres Vedras, but plainly many had disobeyed for there were scores of Portuguese folk gawping at the invaders. Some of the spectators had brought bread, cheese and wine and now sat in groups eating and talking and pointing at the French, and a dozen monks, all with bare feet, were among them.
‘Why don’t they wear shoes?’ Clayton asked.
‘God knows.’
Clayton frowned disapprovingly at a monk who had joined one of the small groups eating on the ridge. ‘Déjeuner à la fourchette,’ he said, sniffing with disapproval.
‘Day-jay what?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Dinner with a fork,’ Clayton explained. He had been a footman in a great house before he joined the South Essex, and had a great knowledge of the gentry’s strange ways. ‘It’s what people of quality do, sir, when they don’t want to spend a lot of money. Give ’em food and a fork and let ’em wander round the grounds sniffing the bloody flowers. All titter and giggle in the garden.’ He frowned at the monks. ‘Shoeless bloody papist monks,’ he said. The gowned men were not monks at all, but friars of the Discalced Carmelite order, two of whom were gravely inspecting a nine-pounder cannon. ‘And you should see inside their bloody monastery, sir,’ Clayton went on. ‘The altar in one of the chapels is smothered with wooden tits.’
Sharpe gaped at Clayton. ‘It’s smothered with what?’
‘Wooden tits, sir, all painted to look real. Got nipples and everything! I took the ration returns down there, sir, and one of the guards showed me. I couldn’t believe my eyes! Mind you, them monks ain’t allowed the real things, are they, so perhaps they make do as best they can. Punishment book now, sir?’
‘See if you can scuff up some tea instead,’ Sharpe suggested.
He drank the tea on the crest. The French were plainly not planning to attack this day for their troops were scattered about the bivouacs near the villages. Their numbers had grown so that the low ground was now dark with men, while nearer the ridge shirtsleeved gunners were piling shot beside the newly placed batteries. The position of those batteries suggested where the French would attack, if indeed they did, and Sharpe saw that the South Essex would be just to the left of any assault aimed up the rough southern track that had been barricaded near its top with felled trees, presumably to deter the French from dragging their artillery up towards the crest. More French guns were crowded close to the road at the northern end of the ridge, which suggested there would be two assaults, and Sharpe supposed they would be like every other French attack he had ever endured: great columns of men advancing to the beat of massed drums, hoping to batter their way through the Anglo-Portuguese line like giant rams. The vast columns were supposed to overawe inexperienced troops and Sharpe looked to his left where the officers of a Portuguese battalion were watching the enemy. Would they stand? The Portuguese army had been reorganized in the last few months, but they were enduring the third invasion of their country in three years, and so far no one could pretend that the Portuguese army had covered itself in glory.
There was a parade and inspection of kit in the late afternoon, and when it was done Sharpe walked north along the ridge until he saw the high stone wall enclosing a great wood. The Portuguese and British soldiers, wanting passage through the wall, had knocked gaps in it and Sharpe negotiated one such breach and went into the trees, eventually finding a path which led downhill. There were odd-looking brick sheds beside the path, equally spaced, each about the size of a gardener’s potting shed, and Sharpe stopped at the first to peer through the door which was made of iron bars. Inside were clay statues, life-size, showing a group of women clustered about a half-naked man and then Sharpe saw the crown of thorns and realized the central figure must be Jesus and that the brick sheds had to be part of the monastery. All of the small buildings had the eerie statues, and at several of the shrines shawled women were kneeling in prayer. A very pretty girl was beside another, listening shyly to an impassioned Portuguese officer who paused, embarrassed, as Sharpe walked by. The officer began his harangue again as soon as Sharpe had gone down a flight of stone steps that led to the monastery. An ancient and gnarled olive tree grew by the entrance and a dozen saddled horses were tethered to its branches, while two redcoats stood guard by the doorway. They ignored Sharpe as he ducked through the low archway into a dark passageway lined with doors that were covered with thick layers of cork. One of the doors was open and Sharpe looked inside to see a shirtsleeved surgeon in a monk’s small cell. The surgeon was sharpening a scalpel. ‘I’m open for trade,’ he said cheerfully.
‘Not today, sir. Do you know where I’ll find Major Hogan?’
‘End of the passage, door on the right.’
The supper was awkward. They ate in one of the small cells that was lined with cork to keep out the cold of the coming winter, and their meal was a stew of goat and beans, with coarse bread, cheese and a plentiful supply of wine. Hogan did his best to keep the conversation moving, but Sharpe had little to say to Major Ferreira who never referred to the events on the hilltop where Sharpe had burned the telegraph tower. Instead he talked of his time in Brazil where he had commanded a fort in one of the Portuguese settlements. ‘The women are beautiful!’ Ferreira exclaimed. ‘The most beautiful women in all the world!’
‘Including the slaves?’ Sharpe asked, causing Hogan, who knew Sharpe was trying to turn the subject to the Major’s brother, to roll his eyes.
‘The slaves are the prettiest!’ Ferreira said. ‘And so obliging.’
‘Not much choice,’ Sharpe observed sourly. ‘Your brother didn’t give them any, did he?’
Hogan tried to intervene, but Major Ferreira stilled his protest. ‘My brother, Mister Sharpe?’
‘He was a slaver, yes?’
‘My brother has been many things,’ Ferreira said. ‘As a child he was beaten because the monks who taught us wanted him to be pious. He is not pious. My father beat him because he would not read his books, but the beating did not make him a reader. He was happiest with the servants’ children, he ran wild with them until my mother could take his wildness no longer and so he was sent to the nuns of Santo Espírito. They tried to beat the spirit from him, but he ran away. He was thirteen then, and he came back sixteen years later. He came back rich and quite determined, Mister Sharpe, that no one would ever beat him again.’
‘I did,’ Sharpe said.
‘Richard!’ Hogan remonstrated.
Ferreira ignored Hogan, staring at Sharpe across the candles. ‘He has not forgotten,’ he said quietly.
