Kitabı oku: «Sharpe 3-Book Collection 4», sayfa 13

CHAPTER 7

‘This is splendid, Sharpe, quite splendid.’ Colonel Lawford paced through his new quarters, opening doors and inspecting rooms. ‘The taste in furniture is a little florid, wouldn’t you say? A hint of vulgarity, perhaps? But very splendid, Sharpe. Thank you.’ He stooped to look in a gilt-framed mirror and smoothed down his hair. ‘Is there a cook on the premises?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And stabling, you say?’

‘Out the back, sir.’

‘I shall inspect it,’ Lawford said grandly. ‘Lead on.’ It was evident from his loftily genial manner that he had received no new complaint from Slingsby about Sharpe’s rudeness. ‘I must say, Sharpe, you make a very good quartermaster when you put your mind to it. Maybe we should confirm you in the post. Mister Kiley is not improving, the doctor tells me.’

‘I wouldn’t do that, sir,’ Sharpe said as he led Lawford down through the kitchens, ‘on account that I’m thinking of applying to the Portuguese service. You’d only have to find someone to replace me.’

‘You were thinking of what?’ Lawford asked, shocked by the news.

‘The Portuguese service, sir. They’re still asking for British officers, and so far as I can see they’re not very particular. They probably won’t notice my manners.’

‘Sharpe!’ Lawford spoke brusquely, then stopped abruptly because they had gone into the stable yard where Captain Vicente was trying to calm Sarah Fry, who was now wearing one of Beatriz Ferreira’s dresses, a concoction of black silk that Major Ferreira’s wife had worn when mourning the death of her mother. Sarah had taken the dress gratefully enough, but was repelled by its ugliness and was only placated when she was assured that it was the only garment left in the house. Lawford, oblivious to the dress and noticing simply that she was damned attractive, took off his hat and bowed to her.

Sarah ignored the Colonel, turning on Sharpe instead. ‘They took everything!’

‘Who?’ Sharpe asked. ‘What?’

‘My trunk! My clothes! My books!’ Her money had disappeared too, but she said nothing of that, instead she demanded, in fluent Portuguese from a stable boy whether her trunk really had been left on the cart. It had ‘Everything!’ she said to Sharpe.

‘Allow me to present Miss Fry, sir,’ Sharpe said. ‘This is Colonel Lawford, miss, our commanding officer.’

‘You’re English!’ Lawford said brightly.

‘They took everything!’ Sarah rounded on the stable boy and screamed at him, though it was hardly his fault.

‘Miss Fry, sir, was the governess here,’ Sharpe explained over the noise, ‘and somehow got left behind when the family left.’

‘The governess, eh?’ Lawford’s enthusiasm for Sarah Fry noticeably diminished as he understood her status. ‘You’d best ready yourself to leave the city, Miss Fry,’ he said. ‘The French will be here in a day or two!’

‘I have nothing!’ Sarah protested.

Harper, who had brought the Colonel and his entourage to the house, now led Lawford’s four horses into the yard. ‘You want me to rub Lightning down, sir?’ he asked the Colonel.

‘My fellows will do that. You’d best get back to Captain Slingsby.’

‘Yes, sir, at once, sir, of course, sir,’ Harper said, not moving.

‘Everything!’ Sarah wailed. The cook came into the yard and shouted at the English girl to be silent and Sarah, in fury, turned on her.

‘If you’ll permit it, sir,’ Sharpe said, raising his voice over the din, ‘Major Forrest told me to find some turpentine. He wants it to ruin the salt meat, sir, and Sergeant Harper will be a great help to me.’

‘A help?’ Lawford, distracted by Sarah’s grief and the cook’s protest, was not really paying attention.

‘He’s a better sense of smell than me, sir,’ Sharpe said.

‘He’s a better sense of…’ the Colonel began to ask, then frowned at Sarah who was shouting at the cook in Portuguese. ‘Do whatever you want, Sharpe,’ Lawford said, ‘whatever you want, and for God’s sake take Miss whatever-her-name-is away, will you?’

‘He promised to take the trunk off the wagon!’ Sarah appealed to Lawford. She was angry and, because he was a colonel, she seemed to expect him to do something.

‘I’m sure it can all be sorted out,’ Lawford said, ‘things usually can. Will you escort Miss, er, the lady away, Sharpe? Perhaps the battalion wives can assist her. You really do have to leave, my dear.’ The Colonel knew he would get no sleep while this woman protested about her missing possessions. Any other time he would have been happy enough to entertain her, for she was a pretty young thing, but he needed some rest. He ordered his servants to carry his valise upstairs, told Lieutenant Knowles to post a pair of sentries on the house and another pair in the stable yard, then turned away, immediately looking back. ‘And about that proposition of yours, Sharpe,’ he said. ‘Don’t do anything rash.’

‘About the turpentine, sir?’

‘You know exactly what I mean,’ Lawford said testily. ‘The Portuguese, Sharpe, the Portuguese. Oh, my God!’ This last was because Sarah had begun to cry.

Sharpe tried to soothe her, but she was devastated by the loss of her trunk and her small savings. ‘Miss Fry,’ Sharpe said, and she ignored him. ‘Sarah!’ He put his hands gently on her shoulders. ‘You’ll get everything back!’

She stared up at him, said nothing.

‘I’ll sort Ferragus out,’ Sharpe said, ‘if he’s still here.’

‘He is!’

‘Then calm down, lass, and leave it to me.’

‘My name is Miss Fry,’ Sarah said, offended at the ‘lass’.

‘Then calm down, Miss Fry. We’ll get your things back.’

Harper rolled his eyes at the promise. ‘Turpentine, sir.’

Sharpe turned to Vicente. ‘Where will we find turpentine?’

‘The Lord alone knows,’ Vicente said. ‘A timber yard? Don’t they treat timber with it?’

‘So what are you doing now?’ Sharpe asked him.

‘My Colonel gave me permission to go to my parents’ house,’ Vicente said, ‘just to make sure it’s safe.’

‘Then we’ll come with you,’ Sharpe said.

‘There’s no turpentine there,’ Vicente said.

‘Bugger the turpentine,’ Sharpe said, then remembered a lady was present. ‘Sorry, miss. We’re just keeping you safe, Jorge,’ he added, then turned back to Sarah. ‘I’ll take you down to the battalion wives later,’ he promised her, ‘and they’ll look after you.’

‘The battalion wives?’ she asked.

‘The soldiers’ wives,’ Sharpe explained.

‘There are no officers’ wives?’ Sarah asked, jealous of her precarious position. A governess might be a servant, but she was a privileged one. ‘I expect to be treated with respect, Mister Sharpe.’

‘Miss Fry,’ Sharpe said, ‘you can walk down the hill now and you can find an officer’s wife. There are some. None in our battalion, but you can look, and you’re welcome to try. But we’re looking for turpentine and if you want protection you’d best stay with us.’ He put on his shako and turned away.

‘I’ll stay with you,’ Sarah said, remembering that Ferragus was loose somewhere in the city.

The four of them walked higher into the upper town, going into a district of big, elegant buildings that Vicente explained was the university. ‘It has been here a long time,’ he said reverently, ‘almost as long as Oxford.’

‘I met a man from Oxford once,’ Sharpe said, ‘and killed him.’ He laughed at the shocked expression on Sarah’s face. He was in a strange mood, wanting to work mischief and careless of the consequences. Lawford could go to hell, he thought, and Slingsby with him, and Sharpe just wanted to be free of them. Damn the army, he thought. He had served it well and it had turned on him, so the army could go to hell as well.

Vicente’s house was one of a terrace, all of them shuttered. The door was locked, 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 you’re with Mister Sharpe now, miss. He’ll see you’re all right.’

‘So why did Ferragus lock you in?’ Sharpe asked.

Sarah blushed and looked down at the table. ‘He…’ she began, but did not know how to finish.

‘Was going to?’ Sharpe asked, knowing exactly what she was reluctant to say. ‘Or did?’

‘Was going to,’ she said in a low voice, then she recovered her poise and looked up at him. ‘He said he would sell me in Morocco. He said they give a lot of money for…’ Her voice trailed away.

‘That bastard has got a right bloody treat coming,’ Sharpe said. ‘Sorry, miss. Bad language. What we’ll do is find him, take his money and give it to you. Simple, eh!’ He grinned at her.

‘I said you’d be all right,’ Harper said, as though the deed were already done.

Vicente had taken no part in this conversation, for a big man had come into the tavern and sat next to the Portuguese officer. The two had been talking and Vicente, his face worried, now turned to Sharpe. ‘This man is called Francisco,’ he said, ‘and he tells me there is a warehouse full of food. It is locked away, hidden. The man who owns it is planning to sell it all to the French.’

Sharpe looked at Francisco. A rat, he thought, a street rat. ‘What does Francisco want?’ he asked.

‘Want?’ Vicente did not understand the question.

‘What does he want, Jorge? Why is he telling us?’

There was a brief conversation in Portuguese. ‘He says,’ Vicente translated, ‘that he does not want the French to get any food.’

‘He’s a patriot, is he?’ Sharpe asked sceptically. ‘So how does he know about this food?’

‘He helped deliver it. He is, what do you say? A man with a cart?’

‘A carter,’ Sharpe said. ‘So he’s a patriotic carter?’

There was another brief conversation before Vicente interpreted. ‘He says the man did not pay him.’

That made a lot more sense to Sharpe. Maybe Francisco was a patriot, but revenge was a much more believable motive. ‘But why us?’ he asked.

‘Why us?’ Vicente was again puzzled.

‘There’s at least a thousand soldiers down at the quay,’ Sharpe explained, ‘and more marching through the city. Why does he come to us?’

‘He recognized me,’ Vicente said. ‘He grew up here, like me.’

Sharpe sipped his wine, staring hard at Francisco who looked, he thought, shifty as hell, but everything made sense if he really had been rooked out of his money. ‘Who’s the man storing the food?’

Another conversation. ‘He says the man’s name is Manuel Lopez,’ Vicente said. ‘I’ve not heard of him.’

‘Pity it’s not bloody Ferragus,’ Sharpe said. ‘Sorry, miss. So how far is this warehouse?’

‘Two minutes away,’ Vicente said.

‘If there’s as much as he says,’ Sharpe said, ‘then we’ll have to get a battalion up there, but we’d best have a look at the stuff first.’ He nodded at Harper’s volley gun. ‘Is that toy loaded?’

‘It is, sir. Not primed, though.’

‘Prime her, Pat. If Mister Lopez don’t like us then that should calm him down.’ He gave Vicente some coins for the wine and food, and the Portuguese officer paid while Francisco watched Harper prime the volley gun. Francisco seemed nervous of the weapon, which was hardly surprising for it was fearsome-looking.

‘I need more bullets for this,’ Harper said.

‘How many have you got?’

‘After this load?’ Harper patted the breech, then carefully lowered the flint to make the gun safe. ‘Twenty-three.’

‘I’ll filch some from Lawford,’ Sharpe said. ‘His bloody great horse pistol takes half-inch balls and he never fires the bloody thing. Sorry, miss. He doesn’t like firing it, it’s too powerful. God knows why he keeps it. Perhaps to frighten his wife.’ He looked for Vicente. ‘You’re ready? Let’s find this damn food, then you can report it to your Colonel. That should put you in his good books.’

Francisco was anxious as he led them out of the tavern and down a stepped alleyway. Before arriving at the tavern he had been enquiring about the city for anyone who had seen two men dressed in green uniforms who were with Professor Vicente’s clever son, and it had not taken long to discover they were in the Three Crows. Ferragus would be pleased. ‘Here, senhor,’ Francisco told Vicente and pointed across the street at a great double doorway in a blank stone wall.

‘Why don’t I just tell my Colonel?’ Vicente suggested.

‘Because if you come back here,’ Sharpe said, ‘and find that this bastard has been lying to us, sorry, miss, you’ll look like an idiot. No, we’ll look inside, you go to your Colonel and we’ll take Miss Fry down to battalion.’

The door was padlocked. ‘Shoot it?’ Vicente suggested.

‘You only mangle the works if you do that,’ Sharpe said, ‘and make it harder.’ He felt through his haversack until he found what he wanted. It was a picklock. He had carried one since he was a child, and he unfolded the hooked levers, selected the one he wanted and stooped to the lock.

Vicente looked aghast. ‘You know how to do that?’

‘I was a thief once,’ Sharpe said. ‘Earned my living that way.’ He saw the shock on Sarah’s face. ‘I wasn’t always an officer and a gentleman,’ he told her.

‘But you are now?’ she asked anxiously.

‘He’s an officer, miss,’ Harper said, ‘he’s certainly an officer.’ He unslung the volley gun and cocked it. He glanced up and down the street, but there was no one taking any interest in them. A shopkeeper was stacking clothes on a handcart, a woman was shouting at two children, and a small group of people were struggling with bags, boxes, dogs, goats and cows downhill towards the river.

The lock clicked and Sharpe tugged it out of the staple. Then before opening the door, he took the rifle from his shoulder and cocked it. ‘Grab hold of Francisco,’ he told Harper, ‘because if there’s nothing inside here I’m going to shoot the big bastard. Sorry, miss.’

Francisco tried to pull away, but Harper held him fast as Sharpe dragged one of the huge gates open. He walked through into the darkness, watching for movement, seeing none, and as his eyes became accustomed to the shadows he saw the boxes, barrels and sacks piled up towards the beams and rafters of the high roof. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said in amazement. ‘Sorry, miss.’

‘Blasphemy,’ Sarah said, staring up at the huge stacks, ‘is worse than mere swearing.’

‘I’ll try to remember that, miss,’ Sharpe said, ‘I really will. Good Christ Almighty! Just look at this!’

‘Is it food?’ Vicente asked.

‘Smells like it,’ Sharpe said. He uncocked his rifle, slung it and drew his sword, which he jabbed into a sack. Grain trickled out. ‘Jesus wept, sorry, miss.’ He sheathed the sword and stared round the vast room. ‘Tons of food!’

‘Does it matter?’ Sarah asked.

‘Oh, it matters,’ Sharpe said. ‘An army can’t fight if it doesn’t have food. The trick of this campaign, miss, is to let the Frogs march south, stop them in front of Lisbon, and watch them get hungry. This damn lot could keep them alive for weeks!’

Harper had let go of Francisco who backed away and suddenly darted out into the street and Harper, amazed at the piles of food, did not notice. Sharpe, Vicente and Sarah were walking down the central aisle, gazing up in astonishment. The stores were stacked in neat squares, each pile about twenty feet by twenty feet, and divided by alleys. Sharpe counted a dozen stacks. Some of the barrels were stamped with the British government’s broad arrow, meaning they had been stolen. Harper was following the other three, then remembered Francisco and turned to see men coming from the house across the street. There were half a dozen of them and they were filling the warehouse’s wide entrance and he saw, too, that they carried pistols in their hands. ‘Trouble!’ he shouted.

Sharpe turned, saw the shadows in the entrance, knew instinctively that Francisco had betrayed them and knew too that he was in trouble. ‘Back here, Pat!’ he shouted and at the same time he shoved Sarah hard, pushing her into one of the alleys between the sacks. The warehouse’s open door was being tugged shut, darkening the huge room, and Sharpe was unslinging his rifle as the first shots came from the closing door. A ball thumped into a sack by his head, another ricocheted from an iron barrel hoop to smack into the back wall, and a third hit Vicente who spun back, dropping his rifle. Sharpe kicked the gun towards Sarah and dragged Vicente into the narrow space, then went back into the central aisle and aimed towards the door. He saw nothing, dodged back into cover. Some small light came through a handful of dirty skylights in the high roof, but not much. There was movement at the alley’s far end and he turned, rifle going into his shoulder, but it was Harper who had sensibly avoided the central aisle by running around the flank of the high stacks.

‘There’s six of them, sir,’ Harper said, ‘maybe more.’

‘Can’t stay here,’ Sharpe said. ‘Mister Vicente’s hit.’

‘Christ,’ Harper said.

‘Sorry, miss,’ Sharpe said on Harper’s behalf and glanced at Vicente who was conscious, but hurt. He had fallen when the ball struck him, but that had been shock as much as anything else, and he was on his feet now, leaning against some boxes.

‘It’s bleeding,’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘Left shoulder.’

‘Are you spitting blood?’

‘No.’

‘You’ll live,’ Sharpe said and gave Vicente’s rifle to Harper. ‘Give me the volley gun, Pat,’ he said, ‘and take Mister Vicente and Miss Fry to the back. See if there’s a way out. Wait a second, though.’ Sharpe listened. He could hear small sounds, but they could have been rats or cats. ‘Use the side wall,’ he whispered to Harper, and he went there first and peered round the edge. A shadow in a shadow. Sharpe moved out into the open and the shadow sparked fire and a bullet scored along the wall beside him and he raised the rifle and saw the shadow vanish. ‘Now, Pat.’

Harper shepherded Vicente and Sarah to the back of the warehouse. Pray God there was a door there, Sharpe thought, and he slung the rifle on his left shoulder, put the volley gun on his right, and climbed the nearest stack. He scrambled up, jamming his boots into the spaces between the grain sacks, not caring about the noise he made. He almost lost his footing once, but anger drove him up and he rolled onto the top of the great pile where he took the volley gun from his shoulder. He cocked it, hoping that no one beneath would hear the click. A big cat hissed at him, its back arched and tail up, but then decided not to contest the lumpy plateau on top of the sacks and stalked away.

Sharpe edged across the sacks. He crawled on his belly, listening to a faint muttering of voices and he knew there were men in the alley beyond the sacks and knew they were planning how best to finish what they had started. He knew they would be fearful of the rifles, but they would also be confident.

But evidently not too confident. They wanted to avoid a fight if they could, for Ferragus suddenly shouted, ‘Captain Sharpe!’

No answer. Claws scratched at the far side of the warehouse and wheels clattered on the street cobbles outside.

‘Captain Sharpe!’

Still no answer.

‘Come out!’ Ferragus called. ‘Apologize to me and you can go. That is all I want. An apology!’

Like hell, Sharpe thought. Ferragus wanted this food preserved until the French arrived, and the moment Sharpe or his companions appeared in the open they would be shot down. So it was time to spring an ambush on the ambushers.

He crept forward to the stack’s edge and, very slowly, peered over. There was a knot of men down there. Half a dozen, perhaps, and none was looking up. None had thought to check the high ground, but they should have known they were up against soldiers and soldiers always sought the high ground.

Sharpe brought the volley gun forward. The seven half-inch balls had been rammed down on wadding and powder, but there was always a chance, a good chance, that some would roll out of the barrels the moment he pointed the gun downwards. There was no time to ram more wadding on top of the balls, so the trick of this was to shoot fast, very fast, and that meant he could not aim. He edged back, stood up, then froze as another voice spoke. ‘Captain Sharpe!’ The speaker was not one of the men beneath Sharpe. His voice seemed to come from closer to the great doors. ‘Captain Sharpe. This is Major Ferreira.’

So that bastard was here. Sharpe cradled the volley gun, ready to move forward and fire, but then Ferreira spoke again. ‘You have my word as an officer! No harm will come to you! My brother wants an apology, nothing more!’ Ferreira paused, then spoke in Portuguese, presumably because he knew Jorge Vicente was with Sharpe, and Sharpe reckoned Vicente’s neat, legal and trusting mind might just believe Ferreira and so he gave his own answer. In one fast movement he stepped to the edge, turned the gun’s muzzles down into the alley and pulled the trigger.

Three of the balls were loose and had started to roll, and that reduced the gun’s huge power, but the blast of the shots still echoed from the stone walls like thunder and the recoil of the bunched barrels almost threw the gun up and out of Sharpe’s hands as the smoke billowed in the passage beneath him. There were screams in the passage too, and a hoarse shout of pain and the sound of feet scrambling as men ran from the sudden horror that had belched from above. A pistol fired, shattering a skylight, but Sharpe was already running towards the back of the warehouse. He jumped the next alley, landing on a pile of barrels that wobbled dangerously, but his momentum carried him on, scattering cats, then another jump and he was at the far end. ‘Found anything, Pat?’

‘Bloody great trapdoor, nothing else.’

‘Catch!’ Sharpe threw Harper the volley gun, then scrambled down, fumbling for footholds on the edges of boxes and jumping the last six feet. He looked left and right, but saw no sign of Ferragus or his men. ‘Where the hell are they?’

‘You hit some of them?’ Harper asked in a hopeful voice.

‘Two, maybe. Where’s the trapdoor?’

‘Here.’

‘Jesus, it stinks!’

‘Something nasty down there, sir. Lots of flies.’

Sharpe crouched, thinking. To escape out the front of the warehouse meant going into the alleys between the piles of food, and Ferragus would have men covering all those passages. Sharpe could probably make it, but at what cost? At least one more wound. And he had a woman with him. He could not expose her to more fire. He lifted the trapdoor, letting out a gust of foul-smelling air. Something dead was down in the blackness. A rat? He peered down, saw steps going into darkness, but the shadows suggested there was a cellar down there, and once he was at the base of the steps he could fire up the stone stairway. Ferragus and his men would have to brave that fire to approach, and they would be reluctant to do that. And perhaps there was a way out of the cellar?

There were footsteps on the warehouse’s far side, then more sounds from the top of the stacks. Ferragus had learned quickly and sent men to take the high ground and Sharpe knew he was trapped properly now and the cellar was the only option left. ‘Down,’ he ordered, ‘all of you. Down.’

He went last, clumsily closing the trapdoor behind him, letting the heavy timber down slowly so that Ferragus might not realize his enemies had gone to earth. It was pitch black at the foot of the steps, and so foul-smelling that Sarah gagged. Flies buzzed in the dark. ‘Load the volley gun, Pat,’ Sharpe said, ‘and give me the rifles.’