ran across the paddock where the dead horses lay with flies crawling in their nostrils and across their eyeballs. He tripped on a metal picketing pin and, as he stumbled forward, a carbine bullet fluttered past him, the sound suggesting it was almost spent, but even a spent bullet in the wrong place could kill a man. His riflemen were shooting from the field’s far side, the smoke of their Baker rifles thickening along the wall. Sharpe dropped beside Hagman. ‘What’s happening, Dan?’
‘Dragoons are back, sir,’ Hagman said laconically, ‘and there’s some infantry there too.’
‘You sure?’
‘Shot one blue bastard,’ Hagman said, ‘and two greens so far.’
Sharpe wiped sweat from his face, then crawled a few paces along the wall to a place where the powder smoke was not so thick. The dragoons had dismounted and were shooting from the edge of a wood some hundred paces away. Too long a range for their carbines, Sharpe thought, but then he saw some blue uniforms where the road ran through the trees and he reckoned the infantry was forming for an attack. There was an odd clicking noise coming from somewhere nearby and he could not place it, but it seemed to offer no threat so he ignored it. ‘Pendleton!’
‘Sir?’
‘Find Lieutenant Vicente. He’s in the village. Tell him to get his men out on the northern path now.’ Sharpe pointed to the track through the vineyards, the same track by which they had entered Barca d’Avintas and where the dead dragoons of the first fight still lay. ‘And, Pendleton, tell him to hurry. But be polite, though.’
Pendleton, a pickpocket and purse snatcher from Bristol, was the youngest of Sharpe’s men and now looked puzzled. ‘Polite, sir?’
‘Call him sir, damn you, and salute him, but hurry!’
Goddamn it, Sharpe thought, but there would be no escape across the Douro today, no slow shuttling back and forth with the small boat, and no marching back to Captain Hogan and the army. Instead they would have to get the hell out northwards and get out fast. ‘Sergeant!’ He looked left and right for Patrick Harper through the misty patches of rifle smoke along the wall. ‘Harper!’
‘I’m with you, sir.’ Harper came running from behind. ‘I was dealing with those two Frogs in the church.’
‘The moment the Portuguese are into the vineyard we get out of here. Are any of our men left in the village?’
‘Harris is there, sir, and Pendleton, of course.’
‘Send someone to make sure the two of them get out.’ Sharpe levelled his rifle across the wall and sent a bullet spinning towards the infantry who were forming up on the road among the trees. ‘And, Pat, what did you do with those two Frogs?’
‘They’d robbed the poor box,’ Harper said, ‘so I sent them to hell.’ He patted his sheathed sword bayonet.
Sharpe grinned. ‘And if you get the chance, Pat, do the same to that bastard French officer.’
‘Pleasure, sir,’ Harper said, then ran back across the paddock. Sharpe reloaded. The French, he thought, were being too cautious. They should have attacked already, but they must have believed there was a larger force in Barca d’Avintas than two stranded half companies, and the rifle fire must have been disconcerting to the dragoons who were not used to such accuracy. There were bodies lying on the grass at the edge of the wood, evidence that the dismounted French horsemen had been taught about the Baker rifle the hard way. The French did not use rifles, reckoning that the spiralling grooves and lands that spun the bullet in the barrel and so gave the weapon its accuracy also made it much too slow to reload, and so the French, like most British battalions, relied on the quicker-firing, but much less accurate musket. A man could stand fifty yards from a musket and stand a good chance of living, but standing a hundred paces in front of a Baker in the hands of a good man was a death warrant, and so the dragoons had pulled back into the trees.
There was infantry in the wood as well, but what were the bastards doing? Sharpe propped his loaded rifle against the wall and took out his telescope, the fine instrument made by Matthew Berge of London which had been a gift from Sir Arthur Wellesley after Sharpe had saved the General’s life at Assaye. He rested the telescope on the wall’s mossy coping and stared at the leading company of French infantry which was well back in the trees, but Sharpe could see they were formed in three ranks. He was looking for some sign that they were ready to advance, but the men were slouching, musket butts grounded, without even fixed bayonets. He whipped the glass right, suddenly fearing that perhaps the French would try to cut off his retreat by infiltrating the vineyard, but he saw nothing to worry him. He looked back at the trees and saw a flash of light, a distinct white circle, and realized there was an officer kneeling in the leafy shadows staring at the village through a telescope. The man was undoubtedly trying to work out how many enemy were in Barca d’Avintas and how to attack them. Sharpe put his own telescope away, picked up the rifle and levelled it on the wall. Careful now, he thought, careful. Kill that one officer and any French attack is slowed, because that officer is the man who makes the decisions, and Sharpe pulled back the flint, lowered his head so that his right eye was gazing down the sights, found the patch of dark shadow that was the Frenchman’s blue coat and then raised the rifle’s foresight, a blade of metal, so that the barrel hid the target and so allowed the bullet to drop. There was little wind, not enough to drift the bullet left or right. A splintering of noise sounded from the other rifles and a drop of sweat trickled past Sharpe’s left eye as he pulled the trigger and the rifle hammered back into his shoulder and the puff of bitter smoke from the pan made his right eye smart and the specks of burning powder stung his cheek as the cloud of barrel smoke billowed in front of the wall to hide the target. Sharpe twisted to see Lieutenant Vicente’s troops streaming into the vineyard accompanied by thirty or forty civilians. Harper was coming back across the paddock. The odd clicking noise was louder suddenly and Sharpe registered that it was the sound of French carbine bullets striking the other side of the stone wall. ‘We’re all clear of the village, sir,’ Harper said.
‘We can go,’ Sharpe said, and he marvelled that the enemy had been so slow, thus giving him time to extricate his force. He sent Harper with most of the greenjackets to join Vicente and they took a dozen French horses with them, each horse worth a small fortune in prize money if they could ever rejoin the army. Sharpe kept Hagman and six other men and they spread along the wall and fired as fast as their rifles would load, which meant they did not wrap the bullets in leather patches which gripped the rifling, but just tapped the balls down the barrels because Sharpe did not care about accuracy, he just wanted the French to see a thick rill of smoke and hear the shots and thus not know that their enemy was withdrawing.
He pulled the trigger and the flint broke into useless scraps so he slung the rifle and backed out of the smoke to see that Vicente and Harper were both well into the vineyard and so he shouted at his remaining men to hurry back across the paddock. Hagman paused to fire a last bullet, then he ran and Sharpe went with him, the last man to leave, and he could not believe it had been that easy to disengage, that the French had been so supine, and just then Hagman went down.
At first Sharpe thought Hagman had tripped on one of the metal pegs with which the dragoons had picketed their horses, then he saw blood on the grass and saw Hagman let go of his rifle and his right hand slowly clench and unclench. ‘Dan!’ Sharpe knelt and saw a tiny wound high up beside Hagman’s left shoulder blade, just an unlucky carbine bullet that had flicked through the smoke and found its target.
‘Go on, sir.’ Hagman’s voice was hoarse. ‘I’m done for.’
‘You’re bloody not,’ Sharpe snarled and he turned Hagman over onto his back and saw no wound in front, which
