Were all men animals? Christopher, for all his elegant civility by day, liked to inflict pain at night, but then Kate remembered the single soft kiss that Sharpe had given her and she felt the tears come to her eyes. And Lieutenant Vicente, she thought, was a gentle man. Christopher liked to say how there were two sides in the world, just as there were black pieces and white pieces on a chessboard, and Kate knew she had chosen the wrong side. Worse, she did not know how she was to find her way back to the right one.
Christopher strode back down the stalled column. „Is that coffee?” he asked cheerfully. „Good, I need something warming.” He took the mug from her, drained it, then tossed it away. „Another few minutes, my dear,” he said, „and we’ll be on our way. One more bridge after this, then we’ll be over the hills and far away in Spain. You’ll have a proper bed again, eh? And a bath. How are you feeling?”
„Cold.”
„Hard to believe it’s May, eh? Worse than England. Still, don’t they say rain’s good for the complexion? You’ll be prettier than ever, my dearest.” He paused as some muskets sounded from the west. The noise rattled loud for a few seconds, echoing back and forth between the defile’s steep sides, then faded. „Chasing off bandits,” Christopher said. „It’s too soon for the pursuit to catch us up.”
„I pray they do catch us,” Kate said.
„Don’t be ridiculous, my dear. Besides, we’ve got a brigade of good infantry and a pair of cavalry regiments as rearguard.”
„We?” Kate asked indignantly. „I’m English!”
Christopher gave her a long-suffering smile. „As am I, dearest, but what we want above all is peace. Peace! And perhaps this retreat will be just the thing to persuade the French to leave Portugal alone. That’s what I’m working on. Peace.”
There was a pistol bolstered in Christopher’s saddle just behind Kate and she was tempted to pull the weapon free, thrust it into his belly and pull the trigger, but she had never fired a gun, did not know if the long- barrelled pistol was loaded, and besides, what would happen to her if Christopher were not here? Williamson would maul her. she thnnaht and for some reason she remembered the letter she had succeeded in leaving for Lieutenant Sharpe, putting it on the House Beautiful’s mantel without Christopher seeing what she was doing. She thought now what a stupid letter it was. What was she trying to tell Sharpe? And why him? What did she expect him to do?
She stared up the far hill. There were men on the high crest line and Christopher turned to see what she was looking at. „More of the scum,” he said.
„Patriots,” Kate insisted.
„Peasants with rusted muskets,” Christopher said acidly, „who torture their prisoners and have no idea, none, what principles are at stake in this war. They are the forces of old Europe,” he insisted, „superstitious and ignorant. The enemies of progress.” He grimaced, then unbuckled one of his saddlebags to make sure that his black-fronted red uniform jacket was inside. If the French were forced to surrender then that coat was his passport. He would take to the hills and if any partisans accosted him he would persuade them he was an Englishman escaping from the French.
„We’re moving, sir,” Williamson said. „Bridge is up, sir.” He knuckled his forehead to Christopher, then turned his leering face on Kate. „Help you onto the horse, ma’am?”
„I can manage,” Kate said coldly, but she was forced to drop the damp blanket to climb into the saddle and she knew that both Christopher and Williamson were staring at her legs in their tight hussar breeches.
A cheer came from the bridge as the first cavalrymen led their horses over the precarious roadway. The sound prompted the infantry to stand, pick up their muskets and packs, and shuffle toward the makeshift crossing.
„One more bridge,” Christopher assured Kate, „and we’re safe.”
Just one more bridge. The Leaper.
And above them, high in the hills, Richard Sharpe was already marching toward it. Toward the last bridge in Portugal. The Saltador.
CHAPTER 11
It had been at dawn that Sharpe and Hogan saw their fears were realized. Several hundred French infantry were across the Ponte Nova, the
To Sharpe it seemed there was no chance at all. More than twenty thousand French fugitives darkened the valley beneath him and Christopher was lost somewhere in that mass and how Sharpe was ever to find the renegade he did not know. But he pulled on his threadbare coat and picked up his rifle and followed Hogan who, Sharpe saw, was similarly pessimistic while Harper, perversely, was oddly cheerful, even when they had to wade through a tributary of the Cavado which ran waist deep through a steep defile which fell toward the larger river. Hogan’s mule baulked at the cold, fast water and the Captain proposed abandoning the animal, but then Javali smacked the beast hard across the face and, while it was still blinking, picked it up and carried it bodily through the wide stream. The riflemen cheered the display of strength while the mule, safe on the opposite bank, snapped its yellow teeth at the goatherd who simply smacked it again. „Useful lad, that,” Harper said approvingly. The big Irish Sergeant was soaked to the skin and as cold and tired as any of the other men, but he seemed to relish the hardship. „It’s no worse than herding back home,” he maintained as they trudged on. „I remember once my uncle was taking a flock of mutton, prime meat the lot of them, walking them on the hoof to Belfast and half the buggers ran like shite when we’d not even got to Letterkenny! Jesus, all that money gone to waste.”
„Did you get them back?” Perkins asked.
„You’re joking, lad. I searched half the bloody night and all I got was a clip round the ear from my uncle. Mind you, it was his fault, he’d never herded so much as a rabbit before and didn’t know one end of a sheep from the other, but he was told there was good cash for mutton in Belfast so he stole the flock off a skinflint in Colcarney and set off to make his fortune.”
„Do you have wolves in Ireland?” Vicente wanted to know.
„In red coats,” Harper said, and saw Sharpe scowl. „My grandfather now,” he went on hurriedly, „claimed to see a pack of them at Derrynagrial. Big, they were, he said, and with red eyes and teeth like graveyard stones and he told my grandmother that they chased him all the way to the Glenleheel bridge, but he was a drunk. Jesus, he could soak the stuff up.”
Javali wanted to know what they were talking about and immediately had his own tales of wolves attacking his goats and how he had fought one with nothing but a stick and a sharp-edged stone, and then he claimed to have raised a wolf cub and told how the village priest had insisted on killing it because the devil lived in wolves, and Sergeant Macedo said that was true and described how a sentry at Almeida had been eaten by wolves one cold winter’s night.
„Do you have wolves in England?” Vicente asked Sharpe.
„Only lawyers.”
„Richard!” Hogan chided him.
They were going north now. The road that the French would use from Ponte Nova to the Spanish frontier twisted into the hills until it met another tributary of the Cavado, the Misarella, and the Saltador bridge crossed the upper reaches of that river. Sharpe would rather have gone down to the road and marched ahead of the French,
