'A good thing to have.'
'Not when fifty thousand Frogs are coming at you. Manners don't get you far then. What you need is sheer bloody-mindedness.'
'And you have that?'
'Buckets of it, darling,' Sharpe said.
Sarah smiled. 'So what happens to you now?'
'I don't know. I go back, and if I don't like what's there then I'll find another regiment. Join the Portuguese, perhaps.'
'But you'll stay a soldier?'
Sharpe nodded. He could imagine no other life. There were times when he thought he would like to own a few acres and farm them, but he knew nothing of farming and recognized the wish as a dream. He would stay a soldier, and he supposed, when he thought about it at all, that he would reach a soldier's end, either sweating in a fever ward or dead on a battlefield.
Sarah must have guessed what he was thinking. 'I think you'll survive,' she said.
'I think you will too.'
Somewhere in the dark a dog howled and the cat arched its back in the doorway and spat at the sound. After a while Sarah fell asleep and Sharpe crouched beside the cat and watched the light slowly creep across the sky. Vicente woke early and joined him.
'How's the shoulder?' Sharpe asked him.
'It hurts less.'
'It's healing then,' Sharpe said.
Vicente sat in silence. 'If the French do leave today,' he said after a while, 'wouldn't it be sensible to go ourselves?'
'Forget Ferragus, you mean?'
Vicente nodded. 'Our duty is to rejoin the army.'
'It is,' Sharpe agreed, 'but we rejoin the army, Jorge, and they'll give us black marks for being absent. Your Colonel won't be pleased. So we have to take them something.'
'Ferragus?'
Sharpe shook his head. 'Ferreira. He's the one they need to know about. But to find him we look for his brother.'
Vicente nodded acceptance. 'So when we go back we haven't just been absent, but doing something useful?'
'And instead of stamping all over us,' Sharpe said, 'they'll be thanking us.'
'So when the French go, we look for Ferreira? Then march him south under arrest?'
'Simple, eh?' Sharpe said with a smile.
'I'm not as good as you at this.'
'At what?'
'At being away from the regiment. At being on my own.'
'You miss Kate, eh?'
'I miss Kate too.'
'You should miss her,' Sharpe said, 'and you're good at this, Jorge. You're as good a damn soldier as any in the army, and if you give the army Ferreira then they'll think you're a hero. Then in two years you'll be a colonel and I'll still be a captain, and you'll wish we'd never had this conversation. Time to make some tea, Jorge.'
The French left. It took most of the day for the guns, wagons, horses and men to cross the Santa Clara bridge, twist through the narrow streets beyond, and so out onto the main road that would lead them south towards Lisbon. All day patrols went through the streets, blowing bugles and shouting for men to rejoin their units, and it was late afternoon before the last bugle sounded and the noise of boots, hooves and wheels faded from Coimbra. The French were not wholly gone. Over three thousand of their wounded were left in the big Saint Clara convent south of the river and such men needed protection. The French had raped, murdered and plundered their way through the city and wounded soldiers made for easy vengeance, and so the injured were guarded by one hundred and fifty French marines reinforced by three hundred convalescents who were not fit enough to march with the army, but could still use their muskets. The small garrison was commanded by a major who was given the grandiose title of Governor of Coimbra, but the tiny number of men under his command gave him no control of the city. He posted most of his force at the convent, for that was where the vulnerable men lay, and put picquets on the main roads out of the city, but everything in between was unguarded.
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 Massena 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.
