Sharpe's Escape

through the door as the collapsed telegraph burned itself out, its windblown cinders staining the white flour with black spots.

Slingsby came just as the last sacks were being destroyed. 'Dragoons have gone, Sharpe,' he reported. 'Reckon they saw us and rode off.'

'Good.' Sharpe forced himself to sound civil, then went to join Harper who was watching the dragoons ride away. 'They didn't want to play with us, Pat?'

'Then they've more sense than that big Portuguese fellow,' Harper said. 'Give him a headache, did you?'

'Bastard wanted to bribe me.'

'Oh, it's a wicked world,' Harper said, 'and there's me always dreaming of getting a wee bribe.' He slung the seven-barrel gun on his shoulder. 'So what were those fellows doing up here?'

'No good,' Sharpe said, brushing his hands before pulling on his mended jacket that was now smeared with flour. 'Mister bloody Ferragus was selling that flour to the Crapauds, Pat, and that bloody Portuguese Major was in it up to his arse.'

'Did they tell you that now?'

'Of course they didn't,' Sharpe said, 'but what else were they doing? Jesus! They were flying a white flag to tell the Frogs it was safe up here and if we hadn't arrived, Pat, they'd have sold that flour.'

'God and his saints preserve us from evil,' Harper said in amusement, 'and it's a pity the dragoons didn't come up to play.'

'Pity! Why the hell would we want a fight for no purpose?'

'Because you could have got yourself one of their horses, sir,' Harper said, 'of course.'

'And why would I want a bloody horse?'

'Because Mister Slingsby's getting one, so he is. Told me so himself. The Colonel's giving him a horse, he is.'

'No bloody business of mine,' Sharpe said, but the thought of Lieutenant Slingsby on a horse nevertheless annoyed him. A horse, whether Sharpe wanted one or not, was a symbol of status. Bloody Slingsby, he thought, and stared at the distant hills and saw how low the sun had sunk. Let's go home,' he said.

'Yes, sir,' Harper said. He knew precisely why Mister Sharpe was in a bad mood, but he could not say as much. Officers were supposed to be brothers in arms, not blood enemies.

They marched in the dusk, leaving the hilltop white and smoking. Ahead was the army and behind it the French.

Who had come back to Portugal.

Miss Sarah Fry, she had always disliked her last name, rapped a hand on the table. 'In English,' she insisted, 'in English.'

Tomas and Maria, eight and seven respectively, looked grumpy, but obediently changed from their native Portuguese to English. ' 'Robert has a hoop, ' Tomas read. ' 'Look, the hoop is red. »

'When are the French coming?' Maria asked.

'The French will not come,' Sarah said briskly, 'because Lord Wellington will stop them. What color is the hoop, Maria?'

'Rouge,' Maria answered in French. 'So if the French are not coming why are we loading the wagons?'

'We do French on Tuesdays and Thursdays,' Sarah said briskly, 'and today is?'

'Wednesday,' said Tomas.

'Read on,' Sarah said, and she gazed out of the window to where the servants were putting furniture onto a wagon. The French were coming and everyone had been ordered to leave Coimbra and go south towards Lisbon. Some folk said the French approach was just a rumor and were refusing to leave, others had already gone. Sarah did not know what to believe, only that she had surprised herself by welcoming the excitement. She had been the governess in the Ferreira household for just three months and she suspected that the French invasion might be the means to extricate herself from a position that she now understood had been a mistake. She was thinking about her uncertain future when she realized that Maria was giggling because Tomas had just read that the donkey was blue, and that was nonsense, and Miss Fry was not a young woman to tolerate nonsense. She rapped her knuckles on the crown of Tomas's head. 'What color is the donkey?' she demanded.

'Brown,' Tomas said.

'Brown,' Sarah agreed, giving him another smart tap, 'and what are you?

'A blockhead,' Tomas said, and then, under his breath, added, 'Cadela.'

It meant 'bitch,' and Tomas had said it slightly too loudly and was rewarded with a smart crack on the side of his head. 'I detest bad language,' Sarah said angrily, adding a second slap, 'and I detest rudeness, and if you cannot show good manners then I will ask your father to beat you.'

The mention of Major Ferreira snapped the two children to attention and a gloom descended over the schoolroom as Tomas struggled with the next page. It was essential for a Portuguese child to learn English and French if, when they grew up, they were to be accounted gentlefolk. Sarah wondered why they did not learn Spanish, but when she had suggested it to the Major he had looked at her with utter fury. The Spanish, he had answered, were the offspring of goats and monkeys, and his children would not foul their tongues with their savage language. So Tomas and Maria were being schooled in French and English by their governess who was twenty-two years old, blue-eyed, fair-haired and worried for her future.

Her father had died when Sarah was ten and her mother a year later, and Sarah had been raised by an uncle who had reluctantly paid for her schooling, but refused to provide any kind of dowry when she had reached eighteen, and so, cut off from the more lucrative part of the marriage market, she had become a nursery maid for the children of an English diplomat who had been posted to Lisbon and it was there that Major Ferreira's wife had encountered her and offered to double her salary if she would school her two children. 'I want our children to be polished,' Beatriz Ferreira had said.

And so Sarah was in Coimbra, polishing the children and counting the heavy ticks of the big clock in the hall as, Tomas and Maria took turns to read from Early Joys for Infant Souls. ' 'The cow is sabbler, ' Maria read.

'Sable,' Sarah corrected her.

'What's sable?'

'Black.'

'Then why doesn't it say black?'

'Because it says sable. Read on.'

'Why aren't we leaving?' Maria asked.

'That is a question you must put to your father,' Sarah said, and she wished she knew the answer herself. Coimbra was evidently to be abandoned to the French, but the authorities insisted that the enemy should find nothing in the city except empty buildings. Every warehouse, larder and shop was to be stripped as bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard. The French were to enter a barren land and there starve, but it seemed to Sarah, when she took her two young charges for their daily walks, that most of the storehouses were still full and the riverside quays were thickly heaped with British provisions. Some of the wealthy folk had gone, transporting their possessions on wagons, but Major Ferreira had evidently decided to wait until the last moment. He had ordered his best furniture packed onto a wagon in readiness, but he was curiously reluctant to take the decision to leave Coimbra. Sarah, before the Major had ridden north to join the army, had asked him why he did not send the household to Lisbon and he had turned on her with his fierce gaze, seemed puzzled by her question, then dismissively told her not to worry.

Yet she did, and she was worried about Major Ferreira too. He was a generous employer, but he did not come from the highest rank of Portuguese society. There were no aristocrats in Ferreira's ancestry, no titles and no great landed estates. His father had been a professor of philosophy who had unexpectedly inherited wealth from a distant relative, and that legacy enabled Major Ferreira to live well, but not magnificently. A governess was judged not by how effectively she managed the children in her care, but by the social status of the family for whom she worked, and in Coimbra Major Ferreira possessed neither the advantages of aristocracy, nor the gift of great intelligence which was much admired in the university city. And as for his brother! Sarah's mother, God rest her