Sharpe's Escape (39 page)
"What you do," Vicente told him, "is take your men southwards and attack the French. You'll find foraging parties in the foothills. Kill them. Keep killing them. And in the meantime you give us shoes and clothes for the women, and guides to take us after Major Ferreira."
A woman in the settlement looked at the wound in Vicente's shoulder and said it was healing well, then rewrapped it in moss and a new bandage. Shoes and footcloths were found for Sarah and Joana, but the only dresses were heavy and black, not garments suitable for traveling miles across rough country, and Sarah persuaded the women to give up some boys' breeches, shirts and jackets instead. There was little food in the village, but some hard bread and goat's cheese were wrapped in cloth and given to them and then, near midday, they set off. They had, so far as Vicente could gauge, some sixty miles still to travel before they reached the River Tagus where, he hoped, they could find a boat that would carry them downstream towards Lisbon and the British and Portuguese armies.
"Three days' walking," Sharpe said, "maybe less."
"Twenty miles a day?" Sarah sounded dubious.
"We should do better than that," Sharpe insisted. The army reckoned to march fifteen miles a day, but the army was encumbered with guns, baggage and walking wounded. General Craufurd, vainly trying to reach Talavera in time for the battle, had marched the Light Brigade over forty miles in a day, but that had been on half-decent roads and Sharpe knew his route would be across country, up hill and down dale, following the paths where no French patrol would dare to ride. He would be lucky, he thought, if they reached the river in four days, and that meant he would fail because the Ferreira brothers had mules and would probably complete the journey in two.
He thought about that as they walked eastwards. It was high, bare country, barren and empty, though they could see settlements far below in the valleys. It would be a long unrewarding walk, he thought, because by the time they reached the river and found a boat the brothers would be a long way ahead, probably in Lisbon, and Sharpe knew the army would never give him permission to pursue the feud into the city. "Is Castelo Branco," he asked Vicente, "the only route to the river?"
Vicente shook his head. "It's the safe route," he said. "No French. And this road leads there."
"Call this a road?" It was a track, fit for men and mules, but hardly deserving the name of road. Sharpe turned and saw that the watchtower close to where they had encountered Soriano was still visible. "We'll never catch the bastards," he grumbled.
Vicente stopped and scratched a rough map in the earth with his foot. It showed the Tagus curling east out of Spain, then turning south towards the sea and so narrowing the peninsula on which Lisbon was built. "What they are doing," he said, "is going directly east, but if you want to take a risk we can go south across the Serra da Lousã. Those hills are not so high as these, but the French could be there."
Sharpe looked at the crude map. "But we'd reach the river farther south?"
"We'll reach the Zêzere"— Vicente scratched another river, this one a tributary of the Tagus—"and if we follow the Zêzere then it will come to the Tagus well south of where they're going."
"Save a day?"
"If there are no French." Vicente sounded dubious. "The farther south we go the more likely we are to meet them."
"But it will save a day?"
"Maybe more."
"Then let's do it."
So they turned south and saw no dragoons, no Frenchmen and few Portuguese. On the second day after their encounter with Soriano's men it began to rain: a gray, Atlantic drizzle that soaked them all to the bone and left them chilled and sore, but it was downhill now, going from the bare hilltops into pastureland and vineyards and small walled fields. The three escorts left them, not wanting to go into the Zêzere valley where the French might be, but Sharpe, throwing caution to the wind, followed a road down to the river. It was dusk when they came to the fast-flowing Zêzere which was dappled by rain, and they spent the night in a small shrine beneath the outstretched hand of a plaster saint whose shoulders were thick with bird dung. Next morning they crossed the river at a place where the water foamed white across gaunt and slippery boulders. Harper made a short rope by joining the rifle and musket slings, then they helped each other from stone to stone, wading where they had to, and it took much longer than Sharpe had hoped, but once on the far bank he felt more secure. The French army was on the road to Lisbon and that was now over twenty miles to the west, on the river's opposite bank, and he reckoned any French foraging parties would stay on that side of the Zêzere and so he walked openly on the eastern bank. It was still hard going, for the river flowed fast through high hills, twisting between great rocky shoulders, but it became easier the farther south they went and by the afternoon they were following tracks which led from village to village. A few inhabitants were still in their cottages and they reported seeing no enemy. They were poor folk, but they offered the strangers cheese and bread and fish.
They reached the Tagus that evening. The weather was worse now. The rain was coming out of the west in great gray swathes that lashed the trees and turned small rivulets into streams. The Tagus was wide, a great flood of water being beaten by the seething rain, and Sharpe crouched at its edge and looked for any sign that there were boats and saw none. The Portuguese government had scoured the river, taking away any craft to prevent the French from using boats to circumvent the new defenses at Torres Vedras, but without a boat Sharpe was trapped, and by crossing the Zêzere he had put that river between himself and Lisbon and to recross it, in order to follow the Tagus's right bank down towards the army, he would have to go back upstream to find a place where the smaller river could be forded. "There'll be a boat," he said. "There was at Oporto, remember?"
"We were lucky there," Vicente said.
"It isn't luck, Jorge," Sharpe said. At Oporto the British and Portuguese had destroyed the vessels on the Douro, yet Sharpe and Vicente had found some boats, enough indeed to let the army cross. "It isn't luck," Sharpe said again, "but peasants. They can't afford new boats, so they'll have given the government their old wrecked boats and hidden the good ones, so we just have to find one." Ferreira and his brother, Sharpe thought sourly, would find it easier to secure a boat. They carried money and he stared upriver, praying that he had got ahead of them.
They spent the night in a shed that leaked like a sieve and next morning, cold and damp and tired, they walked upstream, coming to a village where a group of men, all armed, some of them with ancient matchlocks, met them at the end of the street. Vicente talked with them, but it was plain the men were in no mood to be friendly. These river settlements had been harrowed by the Portuguese army to make certain no boats were left for the enemy, and Vicente was unable to persuade them to reveal any that might be hidden, and the men's guns, old as most of them were, convinced Sharpe that they were wasting their time. "They're telling us to go to Abrantes," Vicente said. "They say there will be boats hidden there."
"There are boats hidden here," Sharpe grumbled. "How far is Abrantes?"
"We could be there by midday?" Vicente sounded dubious. And the Ferreira brothers, Sharpe thought, would surely be on the river already and floating south. He was fairly confident that, by following the Zêzere, he had managed to get ahead of them, but at any moment he half expected to see them float past and so escape him.
"I can talk to them." Vicente suggested, gesturing at the men. "If I promise to come back and pay for the boat, perhaps they'll sell us one."
"They won't believe a promise like that," Sharpe said. "No, we keep walking." They left the village, followed by seven men who were cheerful in their victory. Sharpe ignored them. He was going north now, the wrong direction entirely, but he said nothing until the villagers, sure they had seen the threat off, abandoned them with a shouted injunction to stay away. Sharpe waited till they were out of sight. "Time to get nasty," he said. "Those bastards have got a boat and I want it."
He led his companions off the road into the higher ground, then back towards the village, staying hidden in trees or behind the rows of vines that straggled on chestnut stakes. The rain kept coming down. His plan was simple enough: to find something that the villagers valued more than their boats and threaten that thing, but as they crept back towards the houses there was nothing obvious to take. There was no livestock, nothing except some chickens scratching in a fenced garden, but the men who had marched the strangers out of the village were celebrating in the tavern. Their boasting and laughter were loud and Sharpe felt his anger rise. "Fast in," he told Harper, "and scare the hell out of them."
Harper took the seven-barrel gun from his shoulder. "Ready when you are, sir."
"The two of us go in," Sharpe said to Vicente and the women, "and you three stand at the door. And look as if you're ready to use your guns."
He and Harper jumped a fence, ran across some rows of beans and threw open the tavern's back door. A dozen men were gathered in the room, clustered about a barrel of wine, and most still had guns on their shoulders, but Sharpe was across the floor before any could unsling a musket and Harper was bellowing at them from the empty hearth, his volley gun aimed at the group. Sharpe began by snatching muskets off shoulders and, when one man resisted, he slapped him around the face with his rifle's barrel, then he kicked the wine barrel off its small stand so that it crashed onto the stone floor with a noise like a cannon firing. Then, when the men were cowed by the noise, he backed to the front door and pointed the rifle at them. "I need a bloody boat," he snarled.
Vicente took over. He slung his rifle, walked slowly forward and spoke softly. He spoke of the war, of the horrors that had been visited on Coimbra, and he promised the men that the same would happen in their village if the French were not defeated. "Your wives will be violated," he said, "your houses burned, your children murdered. I have seen it. But the enemy can be beaten, will be beaten, and you can help. You must help." He was an advocate suddenly, the tavern his courtroom and the disarmed men his jury, and the speech he gave was impassioned. He had never spoken in a courtroom, his law had been practiced in an office where he enforced the regulations of the port trade, but he had dreamed of being an advocate, and now he spoke with eloquence and honesty. He appealed to the villagers' patriotism, but then, knowing what kind of men they were, he promised that the boat would be paid for. "In full," he said, "but not now. We have no money. But on my honor I shall return here and I shall pay you the price we agree. And when the French are gone," he ended, "you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you helped defeat them." He stopped, turned away and made the sign of the cross, and Sharpe saw that the men had been moved by Vicente's speech. It was still a near thing, for a promise of money in the future was the stuff of dreams, and patriotism struggled with cupidity, but finally a man agreed. He would trust the young officer and sell them his boat.
It was not much of a boat, merely an old skiff that had been used to ferry folk across the mouth of the Zêzere. It was eighteen feet long, big-bellied, with two thwarts for oarsmen and four sets of tholes for oars. It had a high, curving prow and a wide flat stern. The ferryman had hidden the boat by sinking it in the Zêzere, but the men of the village emptied it of stones, floated it, provided the oars and then demanded that Vicente repeat the promise to pay for the craft. Only then did they let Sharpe and his companions board the vessel. "How long to Lisbon?" Vicente asked them.
"It will drift there in a day and a night," the ferryman said, then watched as his boat was unhandily rowed out into the stream. Sharpe and Harper were at the oars and neither was used to such things and at first they were clumsy, but the current was doing the real work by swirling them downstream while they learned to control the long oars and at last they rowed steadily down the center of the Tagus. Vicente was in the bows, watching the river ahead, and Joana and Sarah were in the wide stern. If it had not been raining, if the brisk wind had not been kicking up the river to splash cold water into a boat that was perceptibly leaking, it might have been a jaunt, but instead they shivered beneath a dark sky as their small boat was swept southwards between the rain-darkened flanks of great hills. The river flowed fast, carrying its water from far across Spain to hurry them towards the sea.
And then the French saw them.
THE FORT WAS SIMPLY KNOWN as Work Number 119, and it was not much of a fort, merely a bastion built on the summit of a low hill, then given a stone-roofed magazine and six gun emplacements. The guns were twelve-pounders, taken from a flotilla of Russian warships that had taken shelter in Lisbon from an Atlantic storm and there been captured by the Royal Navy, while the gunners were a mix of Portuguese and British artillerymen who had ranged their unfamiliar weapons, determining that the shots would reach across the wide valley that was spread east and west beneath Work Number 119. To the east were ten more forts, reaching to the Tagus, while to the west, stretching more than twenty miles to the Atlantic, were over a hundred more forts and bastions that snaked in two lines across the hilltops. They were the Lines of Torres Vedras.
Three major roads pierced the lines. The principal road, halfway between the Tagus and the sea, was the main road to Lisbon, but there was another road, running beside the river and thus not far from Work Number 119, and that eastern road offered another route to the Portuguese capital. Masséna, of course, did not have to use either route, nor the third road which pierced the lines at Torres Vedras and was protected by the River Sizandre. He might choose to outflank the three roads and attempt to march overland, attacking through the wilder and lonelier country that lay between the roads, but he would only find more forts and bastions.