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
