Sarah sprinkled sand on the paper. ‘How long would we wait in the Azores?’ she asked.
Ferragus smiled at her misapprehension. He had no intention of letting Sarah go to the Azores, but this was not the time to tell her. ‘As long as necessary,’ he said.
‘Perhaps the French will not come,’ Sarah suggested just as a renewed bout of gunfire sounded louder than ever.
‘The French,’ Ferragus said, giving her the seal, ‘have conquered every place in Europe. No one fights them now, except us. Over a hundred thousand Frenchmen have reinforced the armies in Spain. They have how many soldiers south of the Pyrenees? Three hundred thousand? Do you really believe, Miss Fry, that we can win against so many? If we win today then they will come back, even more of them.’
He sent three men with the letter. The road to Lisbon was safe enough, but he had heard there was trouble in the city itself. The people there believed the British planned to abandon Portugal and so leave them to the French and there had been riots in the streets, so the letter had to be guarded. And no sooner was the letter gone than two others of his men came with more news of trouble. A feitor had arrived at the warehouse and was insisting the stores be destroyed.
Ferragus buckled on a knife belt, thrust a pistol into a pocket, and stalked across town. Many folk were in the streets, listening to the far-off gunfire as though they could tell from the rise and fall of the sound how the battle went. They made way for Ferragus, the men pulling off their hats as he passed. Two priests, loading the treasures of their church onto a handcart, made the sign of the cross when they saw him and Ferragus retaliated by giving them the devil’s horns with his left hand, then spitting on the cobbles. ‘I gave thirty thousand vinténs to that church a year ago,’ Ferragus said to his men. That was a small fortune, close to a hundred pounds of English money. He laughed. ‘Priests,’ he sneered, ‘are like women. Give and they hate you.’
‘So don’t give,’ one of his men said.
‘You give to the church,’ Ferragus said, ‘because that is the way to heaven. But with a woman you take. That too is the way to heaven.’ He turned down a narrow alley and pushed through a door into a vast warehouse that was dimly lit by dusty skylights. Cats hissed at him, then scampered away. There were dozens of the beasts, kept to protect the warehouse’s contents from rats. At night, Ferragus knew, the warehouse was a bloody battlefield as the rats fought against the hungry cats, but the cats always won and so protected the barrels of hard-baked biscuit, the sacks of wheat, barley and maize, the tin containers filled with rice, the jars of olive oil, the boxes of salt cod and the vats of salt meat. There was enough food here to feed Masséna’s army all the way to Lisbon and enough hogsheads of tobacco to keep it coughing all the way back to Paris. He stooped to tickle the throat of a great one-eyed tom cat, scarred from a hundred fights. The cat bared its teeth at Ferragus, but submitted to the caress, then Ferragus turned to two of his men who were standing with the feitor who wore a green sash to show he was on duty. ‘What is the trouble?’ Ferragus demanded.
A feitor was an official storekeeper, appointed by the government to make certain there were sufficient rations for the Portuguese army. Every sizable town in Portugal had a feitor, answerable to the Junta of Provisions in Lisbon, and Coimbra’s storekeeper was a middle-aged, corpulent man called Rafael Pires who snatched off his hat when he saw Ferragus and seemed about to drop to one knee.
‘Senhor Pires,’ Ferragus greeted him affably enough. ‘Your wife and family are well?’
‘God be praised, senhor, they are.’
‘They are still here? You have not sent them south?’
‘They left yesterday. I have a sister in Bemposta.’ Bemposta was a small place nearer to Lisbon, the kind of town the French might ignore in their advance.
‘Then you are fortunate. They won’t starve on the streets of Lisbon, eh? So what brings you here?’
Pires fidgeted with his hat. ‘I have orders, senhor.’
‘Orders?’
Pires gestured with his hat at the great heaps of food. ‘It is all to be destroyed, senhor. All of it.’
‘Who says so?’
‘The Captain-Major.’
‘And you take orders from him?’
‘I am directed to do so, senhor.’
The Captain-Major was the military commander of Coimbra and its surrounding districts. He was in charge of recruiting and training the ordenança, the ‘armed inhabitants’, who could reinforce the army if the enemy came, but the Captain-Major was also expected to enforce the government’s decrees.
‘So what will you do?’ Ferragus asked Pires. ‘Eat it all?’
‘The Captain-Major is sending men here,’ Pires said.
‘Here?’ Ferragus’s voice was dangerous now.
Pires took a breath. ‘They have my files, senhor,’ he explained. ‘They know you have been buying food. How can they not know? You have spent much money, senhor. I am ordered to find it.’
‘And?’ Ferragus asked.
‘It is to be destroyed,’ Pires insisted and then, as if to show that he was helpless in this situation, he invoked a higher power. ‘The English insist.’
‘The English,’ Ferragus snarled. ‘Os ingleses por mar,’ he shouted at Pires, then calmed down. The English were not the problem. Pires was. ‘You say the Captain-Major took your papers?’
‘Indeed.’
‘But he does not know where the food is stored?’
‘The papers only say how much food is in the town,’ Pires said, ‘and who owns it.’
‘So he has my name,’ Ferragus asked, ‘and a list of my stores?’
‘Not a complete list, senhor.’ Pires glanced at the massive stacks of food and marvelled that Ferragus had accumulated so much. ‘He merely knows you have some supplies stored and he says I must guarantee their destruction.’
‘So guarantee it,’ Ferragus said airily.
‘He will send men to make sure of it, senhor,’ Pires said. ‘I am to bring them here.’
‘So you don’t know where the stores are,’ Ferragus said.
‘I am to make a search this afternoon, senhor, every warehouse in the city!’ Pires shrugged. ‘I came to warn you,’ he said in helpless appeal.
‘I pay you, Pires,’ Ferragus said, ‘to keep my food from being taken at a thief’s price to feed the army. Now you will lead men here to destroy it?’
‘You can move it, perhaps?’ Pires suggested.
‘Move it!’ Ferragus shouted. ‘How, in God’s name, do I move it? It would take a hundred men and twenty wagons.’
Pires
