others had already gone. Sarah did not know what to believe, only that she had surprised herself by welcoming the excitement. She had been the governess in the Ferreira household for just three months and she suspected that the French invasion might be the means to extricate herself from a position that she now understood had been a mistake. She was thinking about her uncertain future when she realized that Maria was giggling because Tomas had just read that the donkey was blue, and that was nonsense, and Miss Fry was not a young woman to tolerate nonsense. She rapped her knuckles on the crown of Tomas’s head. ‘What colour is the donkey?’ she demanded.
‘Brown,’ Tomas said.
‘Brown,’ Sarah agreed, giving him another smart tap, ‘and what are you?’
‘A blockhead,’ Tomas said, and then, under his breath, added, ‘Cadela.’
It meant ‘bitch’, and Tomas had said it slightly too loudly and was rewarded with a smart crack on the side of his head. ‘I detest bad language,’ Sarah said angrily, adding a second slap, ‘and I detest rudeness, and if you cannot show good manners then I will ask your father to beat you.’
The mention of Major Ferreira snapped the two children to attention and a gloom descended over the schoolroom as Tomas struggled with the next page. It was essential for a Portuguese child to learn English and French if, when they grew up, they were to be accounted gentlefolk. Sarah wondered why they did not learn Spanish, but when she had suggested it to the Major he had looked at her with utter fury. The Spanish, he had answered, were the offspring of goats and monkeys, and his children would not foul their tongues with their savage language. So Tomas and Maria were being schooled in French and English by their governess who was twenty-two years old, blue-eyed, fair-haired and worried for her future.
Her father had died when Sarah was ten and her mother a year later, and Sarah had been raised by an uncle who had reluctantly paid for her schooling, but refused to provide any kind of dowry when she had reached eighteen, and so, cut off from the more lucrative part of the marriage market, she had become a nursery maid for the children of an English diplomat who had been posted to Lisbon and it was there that Major Ferreira’s wife had encountered her and offered to double her salary if she would school her two children. ‘I want our children to be polished,’ Beatriz Ferreira had said.
And so Sarah was in Coimbra, polishing the children and counting the heavy ticks of the big clock in the hall as Tomas and Maria took turns to read from Early Joys for Infant Souls. ‘“The cow is sabbler,”’ Maria read.
‘Sable,’ Sarah corrected her.
‘What’s sable?’
‘Black.’
‘Then why doesn’t it say black?’
‘Because it says sable. Read on.’
‘Why aren’t we leaving?’ Maria asked.
‘That is a question you must put to your father,’ Sarah said, and she wished she knew the answer herself. Coimbra was evidently to be abandoned to the French, but the authorities insisted that the enemy should find nothing in the city except empty buildings. Every warehouse, larder and shop was to be stripped as bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. The French were to enter a barren land and there starve, but it seemed to Sarah, when she took her two young charges for their daily walks, that most of the storehouses were still full and the riverside quays were thickly heaped with British provisions. Some of the wealthy folk had gone, transporting their possessions on wagons, but Major Ferreira had evidently decided to wait until the last moment. He had ordered his best furniture packed onto a wagon in readiness, but he was curiously reluctant to take the decision to leave Coimbra. Sarah, before the Major had ridden north to join the army, had asked him why he did not send the household to Lisbon and he had turned on her with his fierce gaze, seemed puzzled by her question, then dismissively told her not to worry.
Yet she did, and she was worried about Major Ferreira too. He was a generous employer, but he did not come from the highest rank of Portuguese society. There were no aristocrats in Ferreira’s ancestry, no titles and no great landed estates. His father had been a professor of philosophy who had unexpectedly inherited wealth from a distant relative, and that legacy enabled Major Ferreira to live well, but not magnificently. A governess was judged not by how effectively she managed the children in her care, but by the social status of the family for whom she worked, and in Coimbra Major Ferreira possessed neither the advantages of aristocracy, nor the gift of great intelligence which was much admired in the university city. And as for his brother! Sarah’s mother, God rest her soul, would have described Ferragus as being common as muck. He was the black sheep of the family, the wilful, wayward son who had run away as a child and come back rich, not to settle, but to terrorize the city like a wolf finding a home in the sheep pen. Sarah was frightened of Ferragus; everyone except the Major was frightened of Ferragus, and no wonder. The gossip in Coimbra said Ferragus was a bad man, a dishonest man, a crook even, and Major Ferreira was tarred by that brush, and in turn Sarah was smeared by it.
But she was trapped with the family, for she did not have enough money to pay her fare back to England and even if she got there, how was she to secure a new post without a glowing testimonial from her last employers? It was a dilemma, but Miss Sarah Fry was not a timid young woman and she faced the dilemma, as she faced the French invasion, with a sense that she would survive. Life was not to be suffered, it was to be exploited.
‘“Reynard is red,”’ Maria read.
The clock ticked on.
It was not war as Sharpe knew it. The South Essex, withdrawing westwards into central Portugal, was now the army’s rearguard, though two regiments of cavalry and a troop of horse gunners were behind them, serving as a screen to deter the enemy’s forward cavalry units. The French were not pressing hard and so the South Essex had time to destroy whatever provisions they found, whether it was the harvest, an orchard or livestock, for nothing was to be left for the enemy. By rights every inhabitant and every scrap of food should already have gone south to find refuge behind the Lines of Torres Vedras, but it was astonishing how much remained. In one village they found a herd of goats hidden in a barn, and in another a great vat of olive oil. The goats were put to the bayonet and their corpses hurriedly buried in a ditch, and the oil was spilled onto the ground. French armies famously lived off the land, stealing what they needed, so the land was to be ravaged.
There was no evidence of a French pursuit. None of the galloper guns fired and no wounded cavalrymen appeared after a brief clash of sabres. Sharpe continually looked to the east and thought he saw the smear of dust in the sky kicked up by an army’s boots, but it could easily have been a heat haze. There was an explosion at mid morning, but it came from ahead where, in a deep valley, British engineers had blown a bridge. The South Essex grumbled because they had to wade through the river rather than cross it by a roadway, but if the bridge had been left they would have grumbled at being denied the chance to scoop up water as they waded the river.
Lieutenant Colonel the Honourable William Lawford, commanding officer of the first battalion of the South Essex regiment, spent much of the day at the rear of the column where he rode a new horse, a black gelding, of which he was absurdly proud. ‘I gave Portia to Slingsby,’ he told Sharpe. Portia was his previous horse, a mare that Slingsby now rode and thus appeared, to any casual onlooker, to be the commander of the light company. Lawford must have been aware of the contrast because he told Sharpe that officers ought to ride. ‘It gives their men something to look up to, Sharpe,’ he said. ‘You can afford a horse, can’t you?’
What Sharpe could or could not afford was not something he intended to share with the Colonel. ‘I’d prefer they looked up to me instead of at the horse, sir,’ Sharpe commented instead.
