dignity.
Sharpe turned his back, picked up his jacket. „Then find Sergeant Harper,” he said, „and tell him you’re to do the same punishment as Sims and Gataker.” He turned back. „On the double!”
Williamson ran. His shame at refusing the fight might make him more dangerous, but it would also diminish his influence over the other men who, even though they would never know what had happened in the woods, would sense that Williamson had been humiliated. Sharpe buckled his belt and walked slowly back. He worried about his men, worried that he would lose their loyalty, worried that he was proving a bad officer. He remembered Bias Vivar and wished he had the Spanish officer’s quiet ability to enforce obedience through sheer presence, but perhaps that effortless authority came with experience. At least none of his men had deserted. They were all present, except for Tarrant and the few who were back in Coimbra’s military hospital recovering from the fever.
It was a month now since Oporto had fallen. The fort on the hilltop was almost finished and, to Sharpe’s surprise, the men had enjoyed the hard labor. Daniel Hagman was walking again, albeit slowly, but he was mended enough to work and Sharpe placed a kitchen table in the sun where, one by one, Hagman stripped, cleaned and oiled every rifle. The fugitives who had fled from Oporto had now returned to the city or found refuge elsewhere, but the French were making new fugitives. Wherever they were ambushed by partisans they sacked the closest villages and, even without the provocation of ambush, they plundered farms mercilessly to feed themselves. More and more folk came to Vila Real de Zedes, drawn there by rumors that the French had agreed to spare the village. No one knew why the French should do such a thing, though some of the older women said it was because the whole valley was under the protection of Saint Joseph whose life-size statue was in the church, and the village’s priest, Father Josefa, encouraged the belief. He even had the statue taken from the church, hung with fading narcissi and crowned with a laurel wreath, and then carried about the village boundary to show the saint the precise extent of the lands needing his guardianship. Vila Real de Zedes, folk believed, was a sanctuary from the war and ordained as such by God.
May arrived with rain and wind. The last of the blossoms were blown from the trees to make damp rills of pink and white petals in the grass. Still the French did not come and Manuel Lopes reckoned they were simply too busy to bother with Vila Real de Zedes. „They’ve got troubles,” he said happily. „Silveira’s giving them a bellyache at Amarante and the road to Vigo has been closed by partisans. They’re cut off! No way home! They’re not going to worry us here.” Lopes frequently went to the nearby towns where he posed as a peddler selling religious trinkets and he brought back news of the French troops. „They patrol the roads,” he said, „they get drunk at night and they wish they were back home.”
„And they look for food,” Sharpe said.
„They do that too,” Lopes agreed.
„And one day,” Sharpe said, „when they’re hungry, they’ll come here.”
„Colonel Christopher won’t let them,” Lopes said. He was walking with Sharpe along the Quinta’s drive, watched by Harris and Cooper who stood guard at the gate, the closest Sharpe allowed his Protestant riflemen to the village. Rain was threatening. Gray sheets of it fell across the northern hills and Sharpe had twice heard rumbles of thunder which might have been the sound of the guns at Amarante, but seemed too loud. „I shall leave soon,” Lopes announced.
„Back to Braganca?”
„Amarante. My men are recovered. It is time to fight again.”
„You could do one thing before you go,” Sharpe said, ignoring the implied criticism in Lopes’s last words. „Tell those refugees to get out of the village. Tell them to go home. Tell them Saint Joseph is overworked and he won’t protect them when the French come.”
Lopes shook his head. „The French aren’t coming,” he insisted.
„And when they do,” Sharpe continued, just as insistently, „I can’t defend the village. I don’t have enough men.”
Lopes looked disgusted. „You’ll just defend the Quinta,” he suggested, „because it belongs to an English family.”
„I don’t give a damn about the Quinta,” Sharpe said angrily. „I’ll be up on that hilltop trying to stay alive. For Christ’s sake, there’s less than sixty of us! And the French will send fifteen hundred.”
„They won’t come,” Lopes said. He reached up to pluck some shriveled white blossom from a tree. „I never did trust Savages’ port,” he said.
„Trust?”
„An elder tree,” Lopes said, showing Sharpe the petals. „The bad port makers put elderberry juice in the wine to make it look richer.” He tossed away the flowers and Sharpe had a sudden memory of that day in Oporto, the day the refugees drowned when the French had taken the city, and he remembered how Christopher had been about to write him the order to go back across the Douro and the cannonball had struck the tree to shower pinkish-red petals which the Colonel had thought were cherry blossoms. And Sharpe remembered the look on Christopher’s face at the mention of the name Judas.
„Jesus!” Sharpe said.
„What?” Lopes was taken aback by the force of the imprecation.
„He’s a bloody traitor,” Sharpe said.
„Who?”
„The bloody Colonel,” Sharpe said. It was only instinct that had so suddenly persuaded him that Christopher was betraying his country, an instinct grounded in the memory of the Colonel’s look of outrage when Sharpe said the blossoms came from a Judas tree. Ever since then Sharpe had been wavering between a half suspicion of Christopher’s treachery and a vague belief that perhaps the Colonel was engaged in some mysterious diplomatic work, but the recollection of that look on Christopher’s face and the realization that there had been fear as well as outrage in it convinced Sharpe. Christopher was not just a thief, but a traitor. „You’re right,” he told an astonished Lopes, „it is time to fight. Harris!” He turned toward the gate.
„Sir?”
„Find Sergeant Harper for me. And Lieutenant Vicente.”
Vicente came first and Sharpe could not explain why he was so certain that Christopher was a traitor, but Vicente was not inclined to debate the point. He hated Christopher because he had married Kate, and he was as bored as Sharpe at the undemanding life at the Quinta. „Get food,” Sharpe urged him. „Go to the village, ask them to bake bread, buy as much salted and smoked meat as you can. I want every man to have five days’ rations by nightfall.”
Harper was more cautious. „I thought you had orders, sir.”
„I do, Pat, from General Cradock.”
„Jesus, sir, you don’t disobey a general’s orders.”
„And who fetched those orders?” Sharpe asked. „Christopher did. So he lied to Cradock just as he’s lied to everyone else.” He was not certain of that, he could not be certain, but nor could he see the sense in just dallying at the Quinta. He would go south and trust that Captain Hogan would protect him from General Cradock’s wrath. „We’ll march at dusk tonight,” he told Harper. „I want you to check everyone’s equipment and ammunition.”
Harper smelt the air. „We’re going to have rain, sir, bad rain.”
„That’s why God made our skins waterproof,” Sharpe said.
„I was thinking we might do better to wait till after midnight, sir. Give the rain a chance to blow over.”
Sharpe shook his head. „I want to get out of here, Pat. I feel bad about this place suddenly. We’ll take everyone south. Toward the river.”
„I thought the Crapauds had stripped out all the boats?”
„I don’t want to go east”-Sharpe jerked his head toward Amarante where rumor said a battle still raged-”and there’s nothing but Crapauds to the west.” The north was all mountain, rock and starvation, but to the south lay the river and he knew British forces were somewhere beyond the Douro and Sharpe had been thinking that the French could not have destroyed every boat along its long, rocky banks. „We’ll find a boat,” he promised Harper.
„It’ll be dark tonight, sir. Lucky even to find the way.”
„For God’s sake,” Sharpe said, irritated with Harper’s pessimism, „we’ve been patrolling this place for a bloody month! We can find our way south.”
