was better than going through that again. ‘Pat? Turn round, go back slowly and tap the walls. We’ll follow you.’
They turned in the dark. Sarah insisted on going behind Sharpe, keeping her hands on his waist. Harper used the hilt of his sword bayonet, the dull clang echoing forlorn in the foetid blackness. Sharpe was hoping against hope that they would find some place where the sewer ran by a cellar, somewhere that was not blanketed by feet of earth and gravel, and if they could not find it then they would have to go back past the warehouse cellar and find some place that the sewer opened to the surface. It would be a long night, he thought, if it was still night time, and then, not ten paces up the sewer, the sound changed. Harper tapped again, and was again rewarded with a hollow noise. ‘Is that what you’re looking for?’ he asked.
‘We’ll break the bloody wall down,’ Sharpe said. ‘Jorge? You’ll have to hold Sergeant Harper’s clothes. Miss Fry? You hold mine. And keep the ammunition out of the sludge.’
They tapped the wall some more, finding that the hollow spot was about ten feet long on the upper curve of the sewer. ‘If there’s anybody up there,’ Harper said, ‘we’re going to give them one hell of a surprise.’
‘What if it falls in on us?’ Sarah asked.
‘Then we get crushed,’ Sharpe said, ‘so if you believe in a God, miss, pray now.’
‘You don’t?’
‘I believe in the Baker rifle,’ Sharpe said, ‘and in the 1796 Pattern heavy cavalry sword, so long as you grind down the back blade so that the point don’t slide off a Frog’s ribs. If you don’t grind down the back blade, miss, then you might as well just beat the bastards to death with it.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ Sarah said.
‘Are you ready, Pat?’
‘Ready,’ Harper said, hefting his rifle.
‘Then let’s give this bastard a walloping.’
They did.
The last British and Portuguese troops left Coimbra at dawn on Monday morning. As far as they knew every scrap of food in the city had been destroyed or burned or tossed into the river, and all the bakers’ ovens had been demolished. The place was supposed to be empty, but more than half of the city’s forty thousand inhabitants had refused to leave, because they reckoned flight was futile and that if the French did not overtake them here then they would catch them in Lisbon. Some, like Ferragus, stayed to protect their possessions, others were too old or too sick or too despairing to attempt escape. Let the French come, those who stayed thought, for they would endure and the world would go on.
The South Essex were the last battalion across the bridge. Lawford rode at the back and glanced behind for a sign of Sharpe or Harper, but the rising sun showed the river’s quay was empty. ‘It isn’t like Sharpe,’ he complained.
‘It’s very like Sharpe,’ Major Leroy observed. ‘He has an independent streak, Colonel. The man’s a rebel. He’s truculent. Very admirable traits in a skirmisher, don’t you think?’
Lawford suspected he was being mocked, but was honest enough to realize that he was being mocked by the truth. ‘He wouldn’t just have deserted?’
‘Not Sharpe,’ Leroy said. ‘He’s got caught up in a mess. He’ll be back.’
‘He mentioned something to me about joining the Portuguese service,’ Lawford said worriedly. ‘You don’t think he will, do you?’
‘I wouldn’t blame him,’ Leroy said. ‘A man needs recognition for his service, Colonel, don’t you think?’
Lawford was saved from answering because Captain Slingsby, mounted on Portia, clattered back across the bridge, wheeled the horse and fell in beside Lawford and Leroy. ‘That Irish Sergeant is still missing,’ he said reproachfully.
‘We were just discussing it,’ Lawford said.
‘I shall mark him in the books as a deserter,’ Slingsby announced. ‘A deserter,’ he repeated vehemently.
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort!’ Lawford snapped with an asperity that even he found surprising. Yet, even as he spoke, he realized that he had begun to find Slingsby annoying. The man was like a yapping dog, always at your heels, always demanding attention, and Lawford had begun to suspect that the new commander of his light company was a touch too fond of drink. ‘Sergeant Harper,’ he explained in a calmer tone, ‘is on detached service with an officer of this battalion, a respected officer, Mister Slingsby, and you will not question the propriety of that service.’
‘Of course not, sir,’ Slingsby said, taken aback at the Colonel’s tone. ‘I just like to have everything Bristol fashion. You know me, sir. Everything in its place and a place for everything.’
‘Everything is in its place,’ the Colonel said, except that it was not. Sharpe and Harper were missing, and Lawford secretly feared it was his fault. He turned again, but there was no sign of the missing men, and then the battalion was off the bridge and marching into the shadows of the small streets about the convent.
Coimbra was strangely silent then, as if the city held its breath. Some folk went to the ancient city gates that pierced the medieval wall and stared nervously down the roads, hoping against hope that the French would not come.
Ferragus did not worry about the French, not yet. He had his own sweet revenge to take first and he led seven men to the warehouse where, before he uncovered the trapdoor, he lit two braziers of coal. It took time for the coal to catch fire from its kindling, and he used the minutes to make barricades from barrels of salt beef so that if the three men came charging up the steps they would be trapped between the barriers behind which his men would be sheltered. Once the coal was billowing foul smoke he ordered his men to uncover the hatch. He listened for any sounds from beneath, but heard nothing. ‘They’re asleep,’ Francisco, the biggest of Ferragus’s men, said.
‘They’ll be asleep for ever soon,’ Ferragus said. Three men held muskets, four took away the barrels and boxes, and when they were all removed Ferragus ordered two of the four to get their muskets, and for the other two men to drag away the paving slabs that had covered the trapdoor. He chuckled when he saw the holes in the wood. ‘They tried, eh? Must have taken them hours! Careful now!’ There was only one slab remaining and he expected the trapdoor to be pushed violently upwards at any second. ‘Fire down as soon as they push it up,’ he told his men, then watched as the last paving slab was hauled away.
Nothing happened.
He waited, watching the closed trapdoor and still nothing happened. ‘They think we’re going to go down,’ Ferragus said. Instead he crept onto the trapdoor, seized its metal handle, nodded to his men to make sure they were ready, then heaved.
The trapdoor lifted a few inches and Francisco pushed his musket barrel beneath and lifted it some more. He was crouching, half expecting a shot to come blasting out of the darkness, but there was only silence. Ferragus stepped to the trapdoor and hauled it all the way back so that it crashed against the warehouse’s rear wall. ‘Now,’ he said, and two men pushed the braziers over so that the burning coals cascaded down the steps to fill the cellar with a thick and choking smoke. ‘They won’t last long now,’ Ferragus said, and drew a pistol. Kill the men first, he thought, and save the woman for later.
He waited to hear coughing,
