Kitabı oku: «Sharpe 3-Book Collection 2», sayfa 9
CHAPTER 4
‘Spider webs,’ Hagman whispered, ‘and moss. That’ll do it, sir.’
‘Spider webs and moss?’ Sharpe asked.
‘A poultice, sir, of spider webs, moss and a little vinegar. Back it with brown paper and bind it on tight.’
‘The doctor says you should just keep the bandage damp, Dan, nothing else.’
‘We knows better than a doctor, sir.’ Hagman’s voice was scarcely audible. ‘My mother always swore by vinegar, moss and webs.’ He fell silent, except that every breath was a wheeze. ‘And brown paper,’ he said after a long while. ‘And my father, sir, when he was shot by a gatekeeper at Dunham on the Hill, he was brought back by vinegar, moss and spider silk. She was a wonderful woman, my mother.’
Sharpe, sitting beside the bed, wondered if he would be different if he had known his mother, if he had been raised by a mother. He thought of Lady Grace, dead these three years, and how she had once told him he was full of rage and he wondered if that was what mothers did, took the rage away, and then his mind sheered away from Grace as it always did. It was just too painful to remember and he forced a smile. ‘You were talking about Amy in your sleep, Dan. Is she your wife?’
‘Amy!’ Hagman blinked in surprise. ‘Amy? I haven’t thought of Amy in years. She was the rector’s daughter, sir, the rector’s daughter, and she did things no rector’s daughter ought to have even known about.’ He chuckled and it must have hurt him for the smile vanished and he groaned, but Sharpe reckoned Hagman had a chance now. For the first two days he had been feverish, but the sweat had broken. ‘How long are we staying here, sir?’
‘Long as we need to, Dan, but the truth is I don’t know. The Colonel gave me orders so we’ll just stay till he gives us more.’ Sharpe had been reassured by the letter from General Cradock, and even more by the news that Christopher was going to meet the General. Plainly the Colonel was up to his neck in strange work, but Sharpe now wondered whether he had misconstrued Captain Hogan’s words about keeping a close eye on Christopher. Perhaps Hogan had meant that he wanted Christopher protected because his work was so important. Whatever, Sharpe had his orders now and he was satisfied that the Colonel had the authority to issue them, yet even so he felt guilty that he and his men were resting in the Quinta do Zedes while a war went on somewhere to the south and another to the east.
At least he assumed there was fighting for he had no real news in the next few days. A pedlar came to the Quinta with a stock of bone buttons, steel pins and stamped tin medallions showing the Virgin Mary, and he said the Portuguese still held the bridge at Amarante where they were opposed by a big French army. He also claimed the French had gone south towards Lisbon, then reported a rumour which said Marshal Soult was still in Oporto. A friar who called at the Quinta to beg for food brought the same news. ‘Which is good,’ Sharpe told Harper.
‘Why’s that, sir?’
‘Because Soult isn’t going to linger in Oporto if there’s a chance of Lisbon falling, is he? No, if Soult is in Oporto then that’s as far as the Frogs have got.’
‘But they are south of the river?’
‘A few bloody cavalrymen maybe,’ Sharpe said dismissively, but it was frustrating not to know what was happening and Sharpe, to his surprise, found himself wanting Colonel Christopher to return so he could learn how the war progressed.
Kate doubtless wanted her husband to return even more than Sharpe did. For the first few days after the Colonel’s departure she had avoided Sharpe, but increasingly they began to meet in the room where Daniel Hagman lay. Kate brought the injured man food and then would sit and talk with him and, once she had convinced herself that Sharpe was not the scurrilous rogue she had supposed him to be, she invited him into the front of the house where she made tea in a pot decorated with embossed china roses. Lieutenant Vicente was sometimes invited, but he said almost nothing, just sat on the edge of a chair and gazed at Kate in sad adoration. If she spoke to him he blushed and stammered, and Kate would look away, seemingly equally embarrassed, yet she seemed to like the Portuguese Lieutenant. Sharpe sensed she was a lonely woman, and always had been. One evening, when Vicente was supervising the picquets, she spoke of growing up as a single child in Oporto and of being sent back to England for her education. ‘There were three of us girls in a parson’s house,’ she told him. It was a cold evening and she sat close to a fire that had been lit in the tile-edged hearth of the Quinta’s parlour. ‘His wife made us cook, clean and sew,’ Kate went on, ‘and the clergyman taught us scripture knowledge, some French, a little mathematics and Shakespeare.’
‘More than I ever learned,’ Sharpe said.
‘You are not the daughter of a wealthy port merchant,’ Kate said with a smile. Behind her, in the shadows, the cook knitted. Kate, when she was with Sharpe or Vicente, always had one of the women servants to chaperone her, presumably so that her husband would have no grounds for suspicion. ‘My father was determined to make me accomplished,’ Kate went on, looking wistful. ‘He was a strange man, my father. He made wine, but wouldn’t drink it. He said God didn’t approve. The cellar here is full of good wine and he added to it every year and he never opened a bottle for himself.’ She shivered and leaned towards the fire. ‘I remember it was always cold in England. I hated it, but my parents didn’t want me schooled in Portugal.’
‘Why not?’
‘They feared I might be infected with papism,’ she said, fidgeting with the tassels on the edge of her shawl. ‘My father was very opposed to papism,’ she continued earnestly, ‘which is why, in his will, he insisted I must marry a communicant of the Church of England, or else.’
‘Or else?’
‘I would lose my inheritance,’ she said.
‘It’s safe now,’ Sharpe said.
‘Yes,’ she said, looking up at him, the light from the small fire catching in her eyes, ‘yes, it is.’
‘Is it an inheritance worth keeping?’ Sharpe asked, suspecting the question was indelicate, but driven to it by curiosity.
‘This house, the vineyards,’ Kate said, apparently un-offended, ‘the lodge where the port is made. It’s all held in trust for me at the moment, though my mother enjoys the income, of course.’
‘Why didn’t she go back to England?’
‘She’s lived here for over twenty years,’ Kate said, ‘so her friends are here now. But after this week?’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe she will go back to England. She always said she’d go home to find a second husband.’ She smiled at the thought.
‘She couldn’t marry here?’ Sharpe asked, remembering the good-looking woman climbing into the carriage outside the House Beautiful.
‘They are all papists here, Mister Sharpe,’ Kate said in mock reproof. ‘Though I suspect she did find someone not so long ago. She began to take more trouble with herself. Her clothes, her hair, but maybe I imagined it.’ She was silent for a moment. The cook’s needles clicked and a log collapsed with a shower of sparks. One spat over the wire fireguard and smouldered on a rug until Sharpe leaned forward and pinched it out. The Tompion clock in the hall struck nine. ‘My father,’ Kate went on, ‘believed that the women in his family were prone to wander from the straight and narrow path which is why he always wanted a son to take over the lodge. It didn’t happen, so he tied our hands in the will.’
‘You had to marry a Protestant Englishman?’
‘A confirmed Anglican, anyway,’ Kate said, ‘who was willing to change his name to Savage.’
‘So it’s Colonel Savage now, is it?’
‘He will be,’ Kate said. ‘He said he would sign a paper before a notary in Oporto and then we’ll send it to the trustees in London. I don’t know how we send letters home now, but James will find a way. He’s very resourceful.’
‘He is,’ Sharpe said drily. ‘But does he want to stay in Portugal and make port?’
‘Oh yes!’ Kate said.
‘And you?’
‘Of course! I love Portugal and I know James wants to stay. He declared as much not long after he arrived at our house in Oporto.’ She said that Christopher had come to the House Beautiful in the New Year and he had lodged there for a while, though he spent most of his time riding in the north. She did not know what he did there. ‘It wasn’t my business,’ she told Sharpe.
‘And what’s he doing in the south now? That’s not your business either?’
‘Not unless he tells me,’ she said defensively, then frowned at him. ‘You don’t like him, do you?’
Sharpe was embarrassed, not knowing what to say. ‘He’s got good teeth,’ he said.
That grudging statement made Kate look pained. ‘Did I hear the clock strike?’ she asked.
Sharpe took the hint. ‘Time to check the sentries,’ he said and he went to the door, glancing back at Kate and noticing, not for the first time, how delicate her looks were and how her pale skin seemed to glow in the firelight, and then he tried to forget her as he started on his tour of the picquets.
Sharpe was working the riflemen hard, patrolling the Quinta’s lands, drilling on its driveway, working them long hours so that the little energy they had left was spent in grumbling, but Sharpe knew how precarious their situation was. Christopher had airily ordered him to stay and guard Kate, but the Quinta could never have been defended against even a small French force. It was high on a wooded spur, but the hill rose behind it even higher and there were thick woods on the higher ground which could have soaked up a corps of infantry who would then have been able to attack the manor house from the higher ground with the added advantage of the trees to give them cover. But higher still the trees ended and the hill rose to a rocky summit where an old watchtower crumbled in the winds and from there Sharpe spent hours watching the countryside.
He saw French troops every day. There was a valley north of Vila Real de Zedes that carried a road leading east towards Amarante and enemy artillery, infantry and supply wagons travelled the road each day and, to keep them safe, large squadrons of dragoons patrolled the valley. Some days there were outbreaks of firing, distant, faint, half heard, and Sharpe guessed that the country people were ambushing the invaders and he would stare through his telescope, trying to see where the actions took place, but he never saw the ambushes and none of the partisans came near Sharpe and nor did the French, though he was certain they must have known that a stranded squad of British riflemen were at Vila Real de Zedes. Once he even saw some dragoons trot to within a mile of the Quinta and two of their officers stared at the elegant house through telescopes, yet they made no move against it. Had Christopher arranged that?
Nine days after Christopher had left, the headman of the village brought Vicente a newspaper from Oporto. It was an ill-printed sheet and Vicente was puzzled by it. ‘I’ve never heard of the Diario do Porto,’ he told Sharpe, ‘and it is nonsense.’
‘Nonsense?’
‘It says Soult should declare himself king of Northern Lusitania! It says there are many Portuguese people who support the idea. Who? Why would they? We have a king already.’
‘The French must be paying the newspaper,’ Sharpe guessed, though what else the French were doing was a mystery for they left him alone.
The doctor who came to see Hagman thought Marshal Soult was gathering his forces in readiness to strike south and did not want to fritter men away in bitter little skirmishes across the northern mountains. ‘Once he possesses all Portugal,’ the doctor said, ‘then he will scour you away.’ He wrinkled his nose as he lifted the stinking compress from Hagman’s chest, then he shook his head in amazement for the wound was clean. Hagman’s breathing was easier, he could sit up in bed now and was eating better.
Vicente left the next day. The doctor had brought news of General Silveira’s army in Amarante and how it was valiantly defending the bridge across the Tamega, and Vicente decided his duty lay in helping that defence, but after three days he returned because there were too many dragoons patrolling the countryside between Vila Real de Zedes and Amarante. The failure made him dejected. ‘I am wasting my time,’ he told Sharpe.
‘How good are your men?’ Sharpe asked.
The question puzzled Vicente. ‘Good? As good as any, I suppose.’
‘Are they?’ Sharpe asked, and that afternoon he paraded every man, rifleman and Portuguese alike, and made them all fire three rounds in a minute from the Portuguese muskets. He did it in front of the house and timed the shots with the big grandfather clock.
Sharpe had no difficulty in firing the three shots. He had been doing this for half his life, and the Portuguese musket was British made and familiar to Sharpe. He bit open the cartridge, tasted the salt in the powder, charged the barrel, rammed down wadding and ball, primed the pan, cocked, pulled the trigger and felt the kick of the gun into his shoulder and then he dropped the butt and bit into the next cartridge and most of his riflemen were grinning because they knew he was good.
Sergeant Macedo was the only man other than Sharpe who fired his three shots within forty-five seconds. Fifteen of the riflemen and twelve of the Portuguese managed a shot every twenty seconds, but the rest were slow and so Sharpe and Vicente set about training them. Williamson, one of the riflemen who had failed, grumbled that it was stupid to make him learn how to fire a smoothbore musket when he was a rifleman. He made the complaint just loud enough for Sharpe to hear and in the expectation that Sharpe would choose to ignore it, then looked aggrieved when Sharpe dragged him back out of the formation. ‘You’ve got a complaint?’ Sharpe challenged him.
‘No, sir.’ Williamson, his big face surly, looked past Sharpe.
‘Look at me,’ Sharpe said. Williamson sullenly obeyed. ‘The reason you are learning to fire a musket like a proper soldier,’ Sharpe told him, ‘is because I don’t want the Portuguese to think we’re picking on them.’ Williamson still looked sullen. ‘And besides,’ Sharpe went on, ‘we’re stranded miles behind enemy lines, so what happens if your rifle breaks? And there’s another reason besides.’
‘What’s that, sir?’ Williamson asked.
‘If you don’t bloody do it,’ Sharpe said, ‘I’ll have you on another charge, then another charge and another after that until you’re so damn fed up with punishment duty that you’ll have to shoot me to be rid of it.’
Williamson stared at Sharpe with an expression which suggested he would like nothing more than to shoot him, but Sharpe just stared into his eyes and Williamson looked away. ‘We’ll run out of ammunition,’ he said churlishly, and in that he was probably right, but Kate Savage unlocked her father’s gun room and found a barrel of powder and a bullet mould so Sharpe was able to have his men make up new cartridges, using pages from the sermon books in the Quinta’s library to wrap the powder and shot. The balls were too small, but they were fine for practice, and for three days his men blasted their muskets and rifles across the driveway. The French must have heard the musketry echoing dully from the hills and they must have seen the powder smoke above Vila Real de Zedes, but they did not come. Nor did Colonel Christopher.
‘But the French are going to come,’ Sharpe told Harper one afternoon as they climbed the hill behind the Quinta.
‘Like as not,’ the big man said. ‘I mean it’s not as if they don’t know we’re here.’
‘And they’ll slice us into pieces when they do arrive,’ Sharpe said.
Harper shrugged at that pessimistic opinion, then frowned. ‘How far are we going?’
‘The top,’ Sharpe said. He had led Harper through the trees and now they were on the rocky slope that led to the old watchtower on the hill’s summit. ‘Have you never been up here?’ Sharpe asked.
‘I grew up in Donegal,’ Harper said, ‘and there was one thing we learned there, which was never go to the top of the hills.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because anything valuable will have long rolled down, sir, and all you’ll be doing is getting yourself out of breath by climbing up to find it gone. Jesus Christ, but you can see halfway to heaven from up here.’
The track followed a rocky spine that led to the summit and on either side the slope steepened until only a goat could have found footing on the treacherous scree, yet the path itself was safe enough, winding up towards the watchtower’s ancient stump. ‘We’re going to make a fort up here,’ Sharpe said enthusiastically.
‘God save us,’ Harper said.
‘We’re getting lazy, Pat, soft. Idle. It ain’t good.’
‘But why make a fort?’ Harper asked. ‘It’s a fortress already! The devil himself couldn’t take this hill, not if it was defended.’
‘There are two ways up here,’ Sharpe said, ignoring the question, ‘this path and another on the south side. I want walls across each path. Stone walls, Pat, high enough so a man can stand behind them and fire over their tops. There’s plenty of stone up here.’ Sharpe led Harper through the tower’s broken archway and showed him how the old building had been raised about a natural pit in the hill’s summit and how the crumbling tower had filled the pit with stones.
Harper peered down into the pit. ‘You want us to move all that masonry and build new walls?’ He sounded appalled.
‘I was talking to Kate Savage about this place,’ Sharpe said. ‘This old tower was built hundreds of years ago, Pat, when the Moors were here. They were killing Christians then, and the King built the watch-tower so they could see when a Moorish raiding party was coming.’
‘It’s a sensible thing to do,’ Harper said.
‘And Kate was saying how the folk in the valleys would send their valuables up here. Coins, jewels, gold. All of it up here, Pat, so that the heathen bastards wouldn’t snatch it. And then there was an earthquake and the tower fell in and the locals reckon there’s treasure under those stones.’
Harper looked sceptical. ‘And why wouldn’t they dig it up, sir? The folk in the village don’t strike me as halfwits. I mean, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, if I knew there was a pit of bloody gold up on a hill I wouldn’t be wasting my time with a plough or a harrow.’
‘That’s just it,’ Sharpe said. He was making up the story as he went along and thought desperately for an answer to Harper’s entirely reasonable objection. ‘There was a child, you see, buried with the gold and the legend says the child will haunt the house of whoever digs up its bones. But only a local house,’ he added hastily.
Harper sniffed at that embellishment, then looked back down the path. ‘So you want a fort here?’
‘And we need to bring barrels of water here,’ Sharpe said. That was the summit’s weakness, no water. If the French came and he had to retreat to the hilltop then he did not want to surrender just because of thirst. ‘Miss Savage’ – he still did not think of her as Mrs Christopher – ‘will find us barrels.’
‘Up here? In the sun? Water will go rancid,’ Harper warned him.
‘A splash of brandy in each one,’ Sharpe said, remembering his voyages to and from India and how the water had always tasted faintly of rum. ‘I’ll find the brandy.’
‘And you really expect me to believe there’s gold under those stones, sir?’
‘No,’ Sharpe admitted, ‘but I want the men to half believe it. It’s going to be hard work building walls up here, Pat, and dreams of treasure never hurt.’
So they built the fort and never found gold, but in the spring sunlight they made the hilltop into a redoubt where a handful of infantry could grow old under siege. The ancient builders had chosen well, not just selecting the highest peak for miles around to build their watchtower, but also a place that was easily defended. Attackers could only come from the north or the south, and in both cases they would have to pick their way along narrow paths. Sharpe, exploring the southern path one day, found a rusted arrowhead under a boulder and he took it back to the summit and showed it to Kate. She held it beneath the brim of her wide straw hat and turned it this way and that. ‘It probably isn’t very old,’ she said.
‘I was thinking it might have wounded a Moor.’
‘They were still hunting with bows and arrows in my grandfather’s time,’ she said.
‘Your family was here then?’
‘Savages started in Portugal in 1711,’ she said proudly. She had been gazing southwest, in the direction of Oporto, and Sharpe knew she was watching the road in hope of seeing a horseman come, but the passing days brought no sign of her husband, nor even a letter. The French did not come either, though Sharpe knew they must have seen his men toiling on the summit as they piled rocks to make ramparts across the two paths and struggled up those tracks with barrels of water that were put into the great cleared pit on the peak. The men grumbled about being made to work like mules, but Sharpe knew they were happier tired than idle. Some, encouraged by Williamson, complained that they wasted their time, that they should have abandoned this godforsaken hill with its broken tower and found a way south to the army, and Sharpe reckoned they were probably right, but he had his orders and so he stayed.
‘What it is,’ Williamson told his cronies, ‘is the bloody frow. We’re humping stone and he’s tickling the Colonel’s wife.’ And if Sharpe had heard that opinion he might even have agreed with it too, even though he was not tickling Kate, but he was enjoying her company and had persuaded himself that, orders or no orders, he ought to protect her against the French.
But the French did not come and nor did Colonel Christopher. Manuel Lopes came instead.
He arrived on a black horse, galloping up the driveway and then curbing the stallion so fast that it reared and twisted and Lopes, instead of being thrown off as ninety-nine out of a hundred other riders would have been, stayed calm and in control. He soothed the horse and grinned at Sharpe. ‘You are the Englishman,’ he said in English, ‘and I hate the English, but not so much as I hate the Spanish, and I hate the Spanish less than I hate the French.’ He slid down from the saddle and held out a hand. ‘I am Manuel Lopes.’
‘Sharpe,’ Sharpe said.
Lopes looked at the Quinta with the eye of a man sizing it up for plunder. He was an inch less than Sharpe’s six feet, but seemed taller. He was a big man, not fat, just big, with a strong face and quick eyes and a swift smile. ‘If I was a Spaniard,’ he said, ‘and I nightly thank the good Lord that I am not, then I would call myself something dramatic. The Slaughterman, perhaps, or the Pig Sticker or the Prince of Death’ – he was talking of the partisan leaders who made French life so miserable – ‘but I am a humble citizen of Portugal so my nickname is the Schoolteacher.’
‘The Schoolteacher,’ Sharpe repeated.
‘Because that is what I was,’ Lopes responded energetically. ‘I owned a school in Bragança where I taught ungrateful little bastards English, Latin, Greek, algebra, rhetoric and horsemanship. I also taught them to love God, honour the King and fart in the face of all Spaniards. Now, instead of wasting my breath on halfwits, I kill Frenchmen.’ He offered Sharpe an extravagant bow. ‘I am famous for it.’
‘I’ve not heard of you,’ Sharpe said.
Lopes just smiled at the challenge. ‘The French have heard of me, senhor,’ he said, ‘and I have heard about you. Who is this Englishman who lives safe north of the Douro? Why do the French leave him in peace? Who is the Portuguese officer who lives in his shadow? Why are they here? Why are they making a toy fort on the watchtower hill? Why are they not fighting?’
‘Good questions,’ Sharpe said drily, ‘all of them.’
Lopes looked at the Quinta again. ‘Everywhere else in Portugal, senhor, where the French have left their dung, they have destroyed places like this. They have stolen the paintings, broken the furniture and drunk the cellars dry. Yet the war does not come to this house?’ He turned to stare down the driveway where some twenty or thirty men had appeared. ‘My pupils,’ he explained, ‘they need rest.’
