lead, and the next, starting with the rearmost ranks, they were a rabble. The front ranks, trapped by the men behind, could not escape and they were easy meat for the savage seventeen-inch blades, but the men at the back fled. Drums rolled down the hill, abandoned by boys too terrified to do anything except escape, and, as they went, the British and Portuguese skirmishers came from the flanks to pursue them. The last of the Frenchmen broke, pursued by redcoats, and some were caught in the village where the blades went to work again and the cobbles and the white stones of the houses were painted with more blood and the screams could be heard down in the valley where Masséna watched, open-mouthed. Some Frenchmen became entangled in the vines and the cazadores caught them there and slit their throats. Riflemen poured bullets after the fugitives. A man shouted for mercy in a village house and the shout turned into a terrible scream as two bayonets took his life.
And then the French were gone. They had been swamped by panic and the slope around the village was littered with abandoned muskets and bodies. Some of the enemy were fortunate. Two riflemen rounded up prisoners and prodded them up towards the windmill where the British gunners had reclaimed their battery. A French captain, who had only kept his life by pretending to be dead, yielded his sword to a lieutenant of the 52nd. The Lieutenant, a courteous man, bowed in acknowledgement and gave the blade back. ‘You will do me the honour of accompanying me up the hill,’ the Lieutenant said, and he then tried to make conversation in his school French. The weather had gone suddenly cold, had it not? The French Captain agreed it had, but he also would have agreed if the Englishman had remarked how warm it was. The Captain was shaking. He was covered in blood, none of it his own, but all from wounds inflicted by canister on men who had climbed near him. He saw his men lying dead, saw others dying, saw them looking up from the ground and trying to call for help he could not give. He remembered the bayonets coming at him and the joy of the killing plain on the faces of the men who held them. ‘It was a storm,’ he said, not knowing what he said.
‘Not now the heat’s broken, I think,’ the Lieutenant said, misunderstanding his captive’s words. The bandsmen of the 43rd and 52nd were collecting the wounded, almost all of them French, and carrying them up to the mill where those that survived would be put on carts and taken to the monastery where the surgeons waited. ‘We were hoping for a game of cricket if tomorrow stays fine,’ the Lieutenant said. ‘Have you had the privilege of watching cricket, monsieur?’
‘Cricket?’ The Captain gaped at the redcoat.
‘The Light Division officers hope to play the rest of the army,’ the Lieutenant said, ‘unless war or the weather intervenes.’
‘I have never seen cricket,’ the Frenchman said.
‘When you get to heaven, monsieur,’ the Lieutenant said gravely, ‘and I pray that will be many happy years hence, you will find that your days are spent in playing cricket.’
Just to the south there was more sudden firing. It sounded like British volleys, for they were regular and fast, but it was four Portuguese battalions that guarded the ridge to the right of the Light Division. The smaller French column, meant to reinforce the success of the two that had climbed through Sula, had swung away from the village and found itself split from the main attack by a deep, wooded ravine, and so the men climbed on their own, going through a grove of pines, and when they emerged onto the open hillside above they saw nothing but Portuguese troops ahead. No redcoats. The column outnumbered the Portuguese. They also knew their enemy for they had beaten the Portuguese before and did not fear the men in brown and blue as they feared the British muskets. This would be a simple victory, a hammer blow against a despised enemy, but then the Portuguese opened fire and the volleys rippled like clockwork and the musket balls were fired low and the guns were reloaded swiftly and the column, like those to the north, found itself assailed from three sides and suddenly the despised enemy was driving the French ignominiously downhill. And so the last French column ran, defeated by men fighting for their homeland, and then the whole ridge was empty of the Emperor’s men except for the dead and the wounded and the captured. A drummer boy cried as he lay in the vines. He was eleven years old and had a bullet in his lung. His father, a sergeant, was lying dead twenty paces away where a bird pecked at his eyes. Now that the guns had stopped the black feathered birds were coming to the ridge and its feast of flesh.
Smoke drifted off the hill. Guns cooled. Men passed round water bottles.
The French were back in the valley. ‘There is a road around the north of the ridge,’ an aide reminded Marshal Masséna, who said nothing. He just stared at what was left of his attacks on the hill. Beaten, all of them. Beaten to nothing. Defeated. And the enemy, hidden once more behind the ridge’s crest, waited for him to try again.
‘You remember Miss Savage?’ Vicente asked Sharpe. They were sitting at the end of the knoll, staring down at the beaten French.
‘Kate? Of course I remember Kate,’ Sharpe said. ‘I often wondered what happened to her.’
‘She married me,’ Vicente said, and looked absurdly pleased with himself.
‘Good God,’ Sharpe said, then decided that probably sounded like a rude response. ‘Well done!’
‘I shaved off my moustache,’ Vicente said, ‘as you suggested. And she said yes.’
‘Never did understand moustaches,’ Sharpe said, ‘must be like kissing a blacking brush.’
‘And we have a child,’ Vicente went on, ‘a girl.’
‘Quick work, Jorge!’
‘We are very happy,’ Vicente said solemnly.
‘Good for you,’ Sharpe said, and meant it. Kate Savage had run away from her home in Oporto, and Sharpe, with Vicente’s help, had rescued her. That had been eighteen months before and Sharpe had often wondered what had happened to the English girl who had inherited her father’s vineyards and port lodge.
‘Kate is still in Porto, of course,’ Vicente said.
‘With her mother?’
‘She went back to England,’ Vicente said, ‘just after I joined my new regiment in Coimbra.’
‘Why there?’
‘It is where I grew up,’ Vicente said, ‘and my parents still live there. I went to the university of Coimbra, so really it is home. But from now on I shall live in Porto. When the war is over.’
‘Be a lawyer again?’
‘I hope so.’ Vicente made the sign of the cross. ‘I know what you think of the law, Richard, but it is the one barrier between man and bestiality.’
‘Didn’t do much to stop the French.’
‘War is above the law, which is why it is so bad. War lets loose all the things which the law restrains.’
‘Like me,’ Sharpe said.
‘You are not such a bad man,’ Vicente said with a smile.
Sharpe looked down into the valley. The French had at last withdrawn to where they had been the previous evening, only now they were throwing up earthworks beyond the stream where infantry dug trenches and used the spoil to make bulwarks. ‘Those buggers think we’re coming down to finish them off,’ he said.
‘Will we?’
‘Christ, no! We’ve got the high ground. No point in giving it up.’
