but Vicente retrieved a key from beneath a big stone hidden in a space under the stone steps. ‘First place a thief would look,’ Sharpe said.
Yet no thief had been inside. The house smelt musty, for it had been closed up for some weeks, but everything was tidy. The bookshelves in the big front room had been emptied and their contents taken down to the cellar where they were stored in wooden crates, each crate carefully labelled with its contents. Other boxes held vases, pictures and busts of the Greek philosophers. Vicente carefully locked the cellar, hid its key under a floorboard, ignored Sharpe’s advice that it was the first place a thief would look, and went upstairs where the beds lay bare, their blankets piled in cupboards. ‘The French will probably break in,’ he said, ‘but they’re welcome to the blankets.’ He went into his old room and came out with a faded black robe. ‘My student gown,’ he said happily. ‘We used to attach a coloured ribbon to show what discipline we studied and every year, at the end of lectures, we would burn the ribbons.’
‘Sounds like a barrel of fun,’ Sharpe said.
‘They were good times,’ Vicente said. ‘I liked being a student.’
‘You’re a soldier now, Jorge.’
‘Till the French are gone,’ he said, folding the gown away with the blankets.
He locked the house, hid the key and took Sharpe, Harper and Sarah through the university. The students and the teachers had all gone, fled to Lisbon or to the north of the country, but the university servants still guarded the buildings and one of them accompanied Sarah and the three soldiers, unlocking the doors and bowing them into the rooms. There was a library, a fantastic place of gilding, carving and leather-bound books that Sarah gazed at in rapture. She reluctantly left the old volumes to follow Vicente as he showed them the rooms where he had received his lectures, then climbed to the laboratories where clocks, balances and telescopes gleamed on shelves. ‘The French will love this lot,’ Sharpe said scornfully.
‘There are men of learning in the French army,’ Vicente said. ‘They don’t make war on scholarship.’ He stroked an orrery, a glorious device of curved brass strips and crystal spheres which imitated the movement of the planets. ‘Learning,’ he said earnestly, ‘is above war.’
‘It’s what?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Learning is sacred,’ Vicente insisted. ‘It goes above boundaries.’
‘Quite right,’ Sarah chimed in. She had been silent ever since they had left Ferreira’s house, but the university reassured her that there was a world of civilized restraint, far from threats of slavery in Africa. ‘A university,’ she said, ‘is a sanctuary.’
‘Sanctuary!’ Sharpe was amused. ‘You think the Crapauds will get in here, take one look and say it’s sacred?’
‘Mister Sharpe!’ Sarah said. ‘I cannot abide bad language.’
‘What’s wrong with “Crapaud”? It means toad.’
‘I know what it means,’ Sarah said, but blushed, for she had momentarily thought Sharpe had said something else.
‘I think the French are only interested in food and wine,’ Vicente said.
‘I can think of something else,’ Sharpe said, and received a stern look from Sarah.
‘There is no food here,’ Vicente insisted, ‘just higher things.’
‘And the Crapauds will get in here,’ Sharpe said, ‘and they’ll see beauty. They’ll see value. They’ll see something they can’t have. So what will they do, Pat?’
‘Mangle the bloody lot, sir,’ Harper said promptly. ‘Sorry, miss.’
‘The French will guard it,’ Vicente insisted. ‘They have men of honour, men who respect learning.’
‘Men of honour!’ Sharpe said scornfully. ‘I was in a place called Seringapatam once, Jorge. In India. There was a palace there, stuffed with gold! You should have seen it! Rubies and emeralds, golden tigers, diamonds, pearls, more riches than you can dream of! So the men of honour guarded it. The officers, Jorge. They put a reliable guard on it to stop us heathens getting in and stripping it bare. And you know what happened?’
‘It was saved, I hope,’ Vicente said.
‘The officers stripped it bare,’ Sharpe said. ‘Cleaned it up properly. Lord Wellington was one of them and he must have made a penny or two out of that lot. There wasn’t a tiger’s golden whisker left by the time they’d all done.’
‘This will be safe,’ Vicente insisted, but unhappily.
They left the university, going back downhill into the smaller streets of the lower town. Sharpe had the impression that the folk of quality, the university people and most of the richer inhabitants, had left the city, but there were thousands of ordinary men and women left. Some were packing and leaving, but most had fatalistically accepted that the French would come and they just hoped to survive the occupation. A clock struck eleven somewhere and Vicente looked worried. ‘I must get back.’
‘Something to eat first,’ Sharpe said, and pushed into a tavern. It was crowded, and the people inside were not happy to see soldiers, for they did not understand why their city was being abandoned to the French, but they reluctantly made space at a table. Vicente ordered wine, bread, cheese and olives, then again made an attempt to leave. ‘Don’t worry,’ Sharpe said, stopping him, ‘I’ll get Colonel Lawford to explain to your Colonel. Tell him you were on an important mission. You know how to deal with senior officers?’
‘Respectfully,’ Vicente said.
‘Confuse them,’ Sharpe said. ‘Except for the ones who can’t be confused like Wellington.’
‘But isn’t he leaving?’ Sarah asked. ‘Going back to England?’
‘Lord love you, no, miss,’ Sharpe said. ‘He’s got a surprise ready for the Frogs. A chain of forts, miss, clear across the land north of Lisbon. They’ll break their heads there and we’ll sit back and watch them. We’re not leaving.’
‘I thought you were going back to England,’ Sarah said. She had conceived an idea of travelling with the army, preferably with a family of quality, and making a new start. Quite how she would do that without money, clothes or a written character, she did not know, but nor was she willing to give in to the despair she had felt earlier in the morning.
‘We’re not going home till the war’s won,’ Sharpe said, ‘but what are we going to do with you? Send you home?’
Sarah shrugged. ‘I have no money, Mister Sharpe. No money, no clothes.’
‘You’ve got family?’
‘My parents are dead. I have an uncle, but I doubt he’ll be willing to help me.’
‘The more I see of families,’ Sharpe said, ‘the happier I am to be an orphan.’
‘Sharpe!’ Vicente said reprovingly.
‘You’ll be all right, miss,’ Harper intervened.
‘How?’ Sarah demanded.
‘Because
