Sharpe's Escape (37 page)

And so the surviving inhabitants emerged into a ravaged city. Their churches, schools and streets were filled with bodies and litter. There were hundreds of dead and the wailing of the mourners echoed up and down the alleys. Folk sought revenge, and the convent's whitewashed walls were pitted with musket balls as men and women fired blindly at the building where the French cowered. Some foolhardy folk even tried to attack the convent and were cut down by volleys from windows and doors. After a while the madness ended. The dead lay in the streets outside the convent, and the French were barricaded inside. The small picquets on the outlying streets, none larger than thirty men, fortified themselves in houses and waited for Marshal Masséna to trounce the enemy and send reinforcements back to Coimbra.

Sharpe and his companions left their house soon after dawn. They wore their own uniforms again, but twice in the first five minutes they were cursed by angry women and Sharpe realized that the people of the city did not recognize the green and brown jackets and so, before someone tried a shot from an alleyway, they stripped off their coats, tied their shakoes to their belts and walked in shirtsleeves. They passed a priest who knelt in the street to offer the last rites to three dead men. A crying child clung to one of the dead hands, but the priest eased her grip from the stiff fingers and, with a reproachful glance at the gun on Sharpe's shoulder, hurried the girl away.

Sharpe stopped before the corner that opened onto the small plaza in front of Ferragus's house. He did not know whether the man was in Coimbra or not, but he would take no chances and peered cautiously around the wall. He could see the front door was off its hinges, every piece of window glass was missing and the shutters had been torn away or broken. "He's not there," he said.

"How can you tell?" Vicente asked.

"Because he'd have at least blocked the door," Sharpe said.

"Maybe they killed him," Harper suggested.

"Let's find out." Sharpe took the rifle from his shoulder, cocked it, told the others to wait, then ran across the patch of sunlight, took the house steps three at a time and then was inside the hallway where he crouched at the foot of the stairs, listening.

Silence. He beckoned the others over. The two girls came through the door first and Sarah's eyes widened in shock as she saw the destruction. Harper gazed up the stairwell. "They kicked the living shit out of this place," he said. "Sorry, miss."

"It's all right, Sergeant," Sarah said, "I don't seem to mind any longer."

"It's like sewers, miss," Harper said. "Stay in them long enough and you get used to them. Jesus, they did a proper job here!" Everything that could be broken had been smashed. Pieces of crystal from a chandelier crunched under Sharpe's boots as he explored the hallway and looked into the parlor and study. The kitchen was a mess of broken pots and bent pans. Even the stove had been pulled from the wall and taken apart. In the schoolroom the small chairs, low table and Sarah's desk had been hammered into splinters. They climbed the stairs, looking in every room, finding nothing except destruction and deliberate fouling. There was no sign of Ferragus or his brother.

"Bastards have gone," Sharpe said after opening the cupboards in the big bedroom and finding nothing except a pack of playing cards.

"But Major Ferreira was on the side of the French, wasn't he?" Harper asked, puzzled that the French would have destroyed the house of an ally.

"He doesn't know what side he's on," Sharpe said. "He just wants to be on the winning side."

"But he sold them the food, didn't he?" Harper asked.

"We think he did," Sharpe said.

"And then you burned it," Vicente put in, "and what will the French conclude? That the brothers cheated them."

"So the odds are," Sharpe said, "that the French shot the pair of them. That would be a good day's work for a bloody Frog." He slung his rifle and climbed the last stairs to the attic. He expected to find nothing there, but at least the high windows offered a vantage point from which he could look down at the lower town and see what kind of presence the French were maintaining. He knew they were still in the city for he could hear distant sporadic shots that seemed to come from close to the river, but when he stared through a broken window he could see no enemy, nor even any musket smoke. Sarah had followed him upstairs while the others stayed on the floor below. She leaned on the window sill and gazed south across the river to the far hills.

"So what do we do now?" she asked.

"Join the army."

"Just like that?"

"We have to walk a long way," Sharpe said, "and you're going to need better boots, better clothes. We'll look for them."

"How far will we have to walk?"

"Four days? Five? Maybe a week? I don't know."

"And where will you find me clothes?"

"By the road, my love, by the road."

"The road?"

"When the French left," he explained, "they were carrying all their plunder, but a mile or two of marching changes your mind. You start throwing things away. There'll be hundreds of things on the road south."

She looked down at her dress, torn, dirty and wrinkled. "I look horrid."

"You look wonderful," Sharpe said, then turned because two smart taps had sounded from the floor below and he held his finger to his lips and, moving as softly as he could, edged back to the stairwell. Harper was at the bottom of the flight and the Irishman held up three fingers, then pointed down the next stairs. So three people were in the house. Harper looked back down the stairs, then held up four fingers and rocked his hand from side to side, telling Sharpe there could be more than three. Plunderers, probably. The French had gone through Coimbra once, but there would be pickings left and enough folk ready to come up from the lower town to enrich themselves from the upper.

Sharpe had edged down the top stairs, stepping at the side of the treads, going very slowly. Vicente was behind Harper, his rifle pointing down into the hall while Joana was in the bedroom door, her musket at her shoulder. Sharpe reached Harper's side. He could hear voices now. Someone was angry. Sharpe cocked the rifle, flinching at the small noise the mechanism made, but no one below heard. He pointed to himself, then down the stairs and Harper nodded.

Sharpe took these stairs even more slowly. They were strewn with pieces of balustrade and littered with crystal drops and he had to find a clear space for his foot with every step and transfer his weight gently. He had got halfway down the flight when he heard the footsteps coming from the passage at the bottom of the stairs and he crouched, brought the rifle up, and just then a man came into view, saw Sharpe and gaped at him in astonishment. Sharpe did not fire. If Ferragus had come back then he did not want to alert him, and instead he gestured at the man to drop onto the floor, but instead the man twisted away, shouting a warning. Harper fired, the bullet blasting over Sharpe's shoulder to catch the man in the back and send him sprawling onto the hallway floor. Sharpe was moving now, taking the stairs four at a time. The wounded man was scrambling down the passage. Sharpe kicked him in the back, jumped over him and a second man showed in the dark entrance to the kitchen and Sharpe fired, the flame of the rifle flashing bright in the dim passageway before the smoke filled the space. Harper was downstairs now, the volley gun in his hand. Sharpe leaped down the few steps to the kitchen, found a body at the foot of the steps, ran to the back door and threw himself backwards as a man fired at him from the yard.

Harper ran to the back door, did not pause, but just raised his empty rifle and the threat was enough to send whoever was there running. Sharpe was reloading. Joana came into the kitchen and he took her musket, gave her the half-loaded rifle and ran back up the passage, jumped over the dead man and over the wounded man and pushed into the parlor because its window overlooked the yard. The sash, the broken glass glinting at its edges, was raised and Sharpe ran to it and saw no one beneath him. "Yard's empty," he called to Harper.

Harper appeared from the kitchen door, crossed the yard and closed the gate. "Plunderers?" he asked Sharpe.

"Probably." Sharpe was wishing he had not opened fire. The menace of the rifles would have been enough to frighten off plunderers, but he supposed he had been nervous and so had killed a man who almost certainly did not deserve it. "Bugger," he said in self-reproof, then went to collect his rifle from Joana, but Sarah was crouching beside the wounded man in the passageway.

"It's Miguel," she said.

"Who?"

"Miguel. One of Ferragus's men."

"You're sure?"

"Of course I'm sure."

"Talk to him," Sharpe said to Vicente. "Find out where those damn brothers are." Sharpe stepped over the wounded man and fetched his rifle. He finished reloading it, then went back to the passage where Vicente was questioning Miguel.

"He won't speak," Vicente said, "except to ask for a doctor."

"Where's he shot?"

"The side," Vicente said, pointing to Miguel's waist where the clothes were darkened by blood.

"Ask him where Ferragus is."

"He won't tell me."

Sharpe put his boot on the blood-soaked patch of clothing and Miguel gave a gasp of pain. "Ask him again," Sharpe said.

"Sharpe, you can't…" Vicente began.

"Ask him again!" Sharpe snarled and he stared into Miguel's eyes and then smiled at the wounded man, and there was a wealth of meaning in the smile. Miguel began talking. Sharpe left his boot on the wound, listening to Vicente's translation.

The Ferreira brothers reckoned Sharpe was probably dead, but also that he was unimportant so long as they reached the army first and gave their version of events. And they were trying to reach the army by crossing the hills, going towards Castelo Branco because the road to that city would be free of the French, but they planned to cut south as they neared the river. They wanted to get to Lisbon, because that was where the Major's family and fortune had found temporary refuge, and they had left Miguel and two others to watch over the property in Coimbra.

"Is that all he knows?" Sharpe asked.

"It is all he knows," Vicente said, then moved Sharpe's foot away from Miguel's wound.

"Ask him what else he knows," Sharpe said.

"You can't torture a man," Vicente reproved Sharpe.

"I'm not torturing him," Sharpe said, "but I bloody will if he doesn't tell us everything."

Vicente spoke with Miguel again, and Miguel swore on the blessed Virgin that he had told them everything he knew, but Miguel had lied. He could have warned them about the partisans waiting in the hills, but he reckoned he was dying and, as his final wish, he wanted death for the men who had shot him. Those men bandaged him, and promised they would try to find a physician, but no physician came and Miguel, abandoned in the house, slowly bled to death.

As Sharpe and his companions left the city.

THE BRIDGE WAS UNGUARDED. That astonished Sharpe, but he sensed that the French garrison was tiny, which suggested the enemy had decided to throw all their troops into an assault on Lisbon and risk leaving Coimbra barely protected. Folk on the street told them the convent of Santa Clara was full of troops, but it was easy enough to avoid, and by late morning they were well south of the town on the road to Lisbon.

The verges were indeed strewn with discarded plunder, but scores of people were raking through the leavings and Sharpe did not have time to search for clothes and boots for the women. Nor could he stay on the road, for it would lead only to the French rearguard, and so, when the sun was at its height, they struck eastwards across country. Sarah and Joana, neither of whom had robust shoes, went barefoot.

They climbed into steep hills. The few villages were deserted, and by mid-afternoon they were among trees. They stopped to rest where a great outcrop of rock jutted into the valley like the prow of a monstrous ship, and from its summit Sharpe could see French troops far below. He took out his telescope, found it was undamaged after his adventures, and trained it down into the shadows of the valley where he saw fifty or more dragoons searching a small village for food.

Sarah joined him. "May I?" she asked, reaching for the telescope. Sharpe gave it to her and she stared down. "They're just pouring water onto the ground," she said after a while.

"Looking for food, love."

"How does that help?"

"Peasants can't carry their whole harvest off to safety," Sharpe explained, "so sometimes they bury it. Dig a hole, put the grain in, cover it with soil and put the turf back. You could walk right across and never see it, but pour water on the soil and it drains faster where it's been dug."

"They're not finding anything," she said.

"Good," Sharpe said, and watched her, thinking what a fine face she had, and thinking, too, that she was a spirited creature. Like Teresa, he reflected, and wondered what the Spanish girl did, or whether she even lived.

"They're going," Sarah reported, and collapsed the telescope, noticing the small brass plate attached to the biggest barrel. "
In gratitude
," she read aloud, "
AW
. Who's AW?"

"Wellington."

"Why was he grateful to you?"

"It was a fight in India," Sharpe said, "and I helped him."

"Just that?"

"He'd come off his horse," Sharpe said. "He was in a bit of trouble, really. Still, he got out safe enough."

Sarah handed him the glass. "Sergeant Harper says you're the best soldier in the army."

"Pat's full of Irish wind," Sharpe said. "Mind you, he's a terror himself. No one better in a fight."

"And Captain Vicente says you taught him everything he knows."

"Full of Portuguese wind."

"Yet you think your captaincy is at risk?"

"The army doesn't care if you're good, love."

"I don't believe you."

"I wish I didn't believe me," Sharpe said, then grinned. "I'll get by, love."

Sarah was about to speak, but whatever she wanted to say went unspoken because there was a crackle of gunfire from across the valley. Sharpe turned, saw nothing. The dragoons in the village were remounting their horses and were gazing southwards, but they could evidently see nothing either for they did not move in that direction. The musketry went on, a distant splintering sound, then slowly died away. "There," Sharpe said, and he pointed across the wide valley to where more French horsemen were spilling out of a high saddle in the hills. Sarah gazed and could see nothing until Sharpe gave her back the glass and told her where to look. "They've been ambushed, probably," he said.