the civilian fugitives who, arriving at the place where the river’s wharf was blocked by the ancient city wall, had turned up an alleyway. The old wall had been built when men fought in armour and shot at each other with crossbows, and the lichen-covered stones would not have stood two minutes against a modern cannon and as if to mark that redundancy the city had knocked great holes in the old ramparts. Sharpe led his men through one such gap, crossed the remnants of a ditch and then hurried into the wider streets of the new town beyond the walls.
‘Crapauds!’ Hagman warned Sharpe. ‘Sir! Up the hill!’
Sharpe looked to his left and saw a troop of French cavalry riding to cut off the fugitives. They were dragoons, fifty or more of them in their green coats and all carrying straight swords and short carbines. They wore brass helmets that, in wartime, were covered by cloth so the polished metal would not reflect the sunlight. ‘Keep running!’ Sharpe shouted. The dragoons had not spotted the riflemen or, if they had, were not seeking a confrontation, but instead spurred on to where the road skirted a great hill that was topped with a huge white flat-roofed building. A school, perhaps, or a hospital. The main road ran north of the hill, but another went to the south, between the hill and the river, and the dragoons were on the bigger road so Sharpe kept to his right, hoping to escape by the smaller track on the Douro’s bank, but the dragoons at last saw him and drove their horses across the shoulder of the hill to block the lesser road where it bordered the river. Sharpe looked back and saw French infantry following the cavalry. Damn them. Then he saw that still more French troops were pursuing him from the broken city wall. He could probably outrun the infantry, but the dragoons were already ahead of him and the first of them were dismounting and making a barricade across the road. The folk fleeing the city were being headed off and some were climbing to the big white building while others, in despair, were going back to their houses. The cannon were fighting their own battle above the river, the French guns trying to match the bombardment from the big Portuguese battery which had started dozens of fires in the fallen city as the round shot smashed ovens, hearths and forges. The dark smoke of the burning buildings mingled with the grey-white smoke of the guns and beneath that smoke, in the valley of drowning children, Richard Sharpe was trapped.
Lieutenant Colonel James Christopher was neither a lieutenant nor a colonel, though he had once served as a captain in the Lincolnshire Fencibles and still held that commission. He had been christened James Augustus Meredith Christopher and throughout his schooldays had been known as Jam. His father had been a doctor in the small town of Saxilby, a profession and a place that James Christopher liked to ignore, preferring to remember that his mother was second cousin to the Earl of Rochford, and it was Rochford’s influence that had taken Christopher from Cambridge University to the Foreign Office where his command of languages, his natural suavity and his quick intelligence had ensured a swift rise. He had been given early responsibilities, introduced to great men and entrusted with confidences. He was reckoned to be a good prospect, a sound young man whose judgment was usually reliable, which meant, as often as not, that he merely agreed with his superiors, but the reputation had led to his present appointment which was a position as lonely as it was secret. James Christopher’s task was to advise the government whether it would be prudent to keep British troops in Portugal.
The decision, of course, would not rest with James Christopher. He might be a coming man in the Foreign Office, but the decision to stay or withdraw would be taken by the Prime Minister, though what mattered was the quality of advice being given to the Prime Minister. The soldiers, of course, would want to stay because war brought promotion, and the Foreign Secretary wanted the troops to remain because he detested the French, but other men in Whitehall took a more sanguine view and had sent James Christopher to take Portugal’s temperature. The Whigs, enemies of the administration, feared another debacle like that which had led to Corunna. Better, they said, to recognize reality and come to an understanding with the French now, and the Whigs had enough influence in the Foreign Office to have James Christopher posted to Portugal. The army, which had not been told what his true business was, nevertheless agreed to brevet him as a lieutenant colonel and appoint him as an aide to General Cradock, and Christopher used the army’s couriers to send military intelligence to the General and political dispatches to the embassy in Lisbon whence, though they were addressed to the Ambassador, the messages were sent unopened to London. The Prime Minister needed sound advice and James Christopher was supposed to supply the facts that would frame the advice, though of late he had been busy making new facts. He had seen beyond the war’s messy realities to the golden future. James Christopher, in short, had seen the light.
None of which occupied his thoughts as he rode out of Oporto less than a cannon’s range ahead of the French troops. A couple of musket shots were sent in his direction, but Christopher and his servant were superbly mounted on fine Irish horses and they quickly outran the half-hearted pursuit. They took to the hills, galloping along the terrace of a vineyard and then climbing into a forest of pine and oak where they stopped to rest the horses.
Christopher gazed back westwards. The sun had dried the roads after the night’s heavy rain and a smear of dust on the horizon showed where the French army’s baggage train was advancing towards the newly captured city of Oporto. The city itself, hidden now by hills, was marked by a great plume of dirty smoke spewing up from burning houses and from the busy batteries of cannons that, though muted by distance, sounded like an unceasing thunder. No French troops had bothered to pursue Christopher this far. A dozen labourers were deepening a ditch in the valley and ignored the fugitives on the nearby road as if to suggest that the war was the city’s business, not theirs. There were no British riflemen among the fugitives, Christopher noted, but he would have been surprised to see Sharpe and his men this far from the city. Doubtless by now they were dead or captured. What had Hogan been thinking of in asking Sharpe to accompany him? Was it because the shrewd Irishman suspected something? But how could Hogan know? Christopher worried at the problem for a few moments, then dismissed it. Hogan could know nothing; he was just trying to be helpful. ‘The French did well today,’ Christopher remarked to his Portuguese servant, a young man with receding hair and a thin, earnest face.
‘The devil will get them in the end, senhor,’ the servant answered.
‘Sometimes mere men have to do the devil’s business,’ Christopher said. He drew a small telescope from his pocket and trained it on the far hills. ‘In the next few days,’ he said, still gazing through the glass, ‘you will see some things that will surprise you.’
‘If you say so, senhor,’ the servant answered.
‘But “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”’
‘If you say so, senhor,’ the servant repeated, wondering why the English officer called him Horatio when his name was Luis, but he thought it was probably better not to ask. Luis had been a barber in Lisbon where he had sometimes cut the hair of men from the British embassy and it had been those men who had recommended him as a reliable servant to Christopher who paid him good wages in real gold, English gold, and if the English were mad and got names wrong they still made the best coinage in the world, which meant that Colonel Christopher could call Luis whatever he wanted so long as he went on paying him thick guineas embossed with the figure of Saint George slaying the dragon.
Christopher was looking for any sign of a French pursuit, but his telescope was small, old and had a scratched lens and he could see very little better with it than without it. He was meaning to buy another, but he never had the opportunity. He collapsed the glass, put it in his saddle pouch and took out a fresh toothpick that he thrust between his teeth. ‘Onwards,’ he said brusquely, and he led the servant through the wood, across the hill’s crest and down to a large farmhouse. It was plain that Christopher knew the route well for he did not hesitate on the way, nor was he apprehensive as he curbed his horse beside the farm gate. ‘Stables are in there,’ he told Luis, pointing to an archway, ‘kitchen is beyond the blue door and the folks here are expecting us. We’ll spend the night here.’
‘Not
