Sharpe's Escape

CHAPTER 1

Mister Sharpe was in a bad mood. A filthy mood. He was looking for trouble in Sergeant Harper's opinion, and Harper was rarely wrong about Captain Sharpe, and Sergeant Harper knew well enough not to engage his Captain in conversation when Sharpe was in such a black temper, but on the other hand Harper liked to live dangerously. "I see your uniform's been mended, sir," he said cheerily.

Sharpe ignored the comment. He just marched on, climbing the bare Portuguese slope under the searing sun. It was September 1810, almost autumn, yet the heat of late summer hammered the landscape like a furnace. At the top of the hill, another mile or so ahead of Sharpe, stood a barn-like stone building next to a gaunt telegraph station. The station was a black timber scaffolding supporting a high mast from which signaling arms hung motionless in the afternoon's heat.

"It's a rare nice piece of stitching on that jacket," Harper went on, sounding as though he did not have a care in the world, "and I can tell you didn't do it yourself. It looks like a woman's work, so it does?" He inflected the last three words as a question.

Sharpe still said nothing. His long, straight-bladed cavalry sword banged against his left thigh as he climbed. He had a rifle slung on his shoulder. An officer was not supposed to carry a longarm like his men, but Sharpe had once been a private and he was used to carrying a proper gun to war.

"Was it someone you met in Lisbon, now?" Harper persisted.

Sharpe simmered, but pretended he had not heard. His uniform jacket, decently mended as Harper had noticed, was rifle green. He had been a rifleman. No, he still thought of himself as a rifleman, one of the elite men who carried the Baker rifle and wore the dark green instead of the red, but the tides of war had stranded him and a few of his men in a redcoat regiment and now he commanded the light company of the South Essex who were following him up the hill. Most wore the red jackets of the British infantry and carried smoothbore muskets, but a handful, like Sergeant Harper, still kept their old green jackets and fought with the rifle.

"So who was she?" Harper finally asked.

"Sergeant Harper," Sharpe was finally goaded into speaking, "if you want bloody trouble then keep bloody talking."

"Yes, sir," Harper said, grinning. He was an Ulsterman, a Catholic and a sergeant, and as such he was not supposed to be friends with an Englishman, a heathen and an officer, but he was. He liked Sharpe and knew Sharpe liked him, though he was wise enough not to say another word. Instead he whistled the opening bars of the song "I Would That the Wars Were All Done."

Sharpe inevitably thought of the words that accompanied the tune; "In the meadow one morning, all pearly with dew, a fair pretty maiden plucked violets so blue," and Harper's delicate insolence forced him to laugh aloud. He then swore at the Sergeant, who was grinning with triumph.

"It was Josefina," Sharpe admitted.

"Miss Josefina now! How is she?"

"She's well enough," Sharpe said vaguely.

"I'm glad to hear that," Harper said with genuine feeling. "So you took tea with her, did you, sir?"

"I took bloody tea with her, Sergeant, yes."

"Of course you did, sir," Harper said. He walked a few paces in silence, then decided to try his luck again. "And I thought you were sweet on Miss Teresa, sir?"

"Miss Teresa?" Sharpe said, as though the name were quite unknown to him, though in the last few weeks he had hardly stopped thinking about the hawk-faced girl who rode across the frontier in Spain with the partisan forces. He glanced at the Sergeant, who had a look of placid innocence on his broad face. "I like Teresa well enough," Sharpe went on defensively, "but I don't even know if I'll ever see her again!"

"But you'd like to," Harper pointed out.

"Of course I would! But so what? There are girls you'd like to see again, but you don't behave like a bloody saint waiting for them, do you?"

"True enough," Harper admitted. "And I can see why you didn't want to come back to us, sir. There you were, drinking tea while Miss Josefina's sewing, and a fine time the two of you must have been having."

"I didn't want to come back," Sharpe said harshly, "because I was promised a month's bloody leave. A month! And they gave me a week!"

Harper was not in the least sympathetic. The month's leave was supposed to be Sharpe's reward for bringing back a hoard of gold from behind enemy lines, but the whole of the light company had been on that jaunt and no one had suggested that the rest of them be given a month off. On the other hand Harper could well understand Sharpe's moroseness, for the thought of losing a whole month in Josefina's bed would make even a bishop hit the gin.

"One bloody week," Sharpe snarled, "bastard bloody army!" He stepped aside from the path and waited for the company to close up. In truth his foul mood had little to do with his truncated leave, but he could not admit to Harper what was really causing it. He stared back down the column, seeking out the figure of Lieutenant Slingsby. That was the problem. Lieutenant bloody Cornelius bloody Slingsby.

As the company reached Sharpe they sat beside the path. Sharpe commanded fifty-four rank and file now, thanks to a draft from England, and those newly arrived men stood out because they had bright-red coats. The uniforms of the other men had paled under the sun and were so liberally patched with brown Portuguese cloth that, from a distance, they looked more like tramps than soldiers. Slingsby, of course, had objected to that. "New uniforms, Sharpe," he had yapped enthusiastically, "some new uniforms will make the men look smarter. Fine new broadcloth will put some snap into them! We should indent for some." Bloody fool, Sharpe had thought. The new uniforms would come in due time, probably in winter, and there was no point in asking for them sooner and, besides, the men liked their old, comfortable jackets just as they liked their French oxhide packs. The new men all had British packs, made by Trotters, that griped across the chest until, on a long march, it seemed that a red-hot band of iron was constricting the ribs. Trotters' pains, that was called, and the French packs were far more comfortable.

Sharpe walked back down the company and ordered each of the new arrivals to give him their canteen and, as he had expected, every last one was empty. "You're bloody fools," Sharpe said. "You ration it! A sip at a time! Sergeant Read!"

"Sir?" Read, a redcoat and a Methodist, doubled to Sharpe. "Make sure no one gives them water, Sergeant."

"I'll do that, sir, I'll do that."

The new men would be dry as dust by the time the afternoon was done. Their throats would be swollen and their breath rasping, but at least they would never be so stupid again. Sharpe walked on down the column to where Lieutenant Slingsby brought up the rearguard. "No stragglers, Sharpe," Slingsby said with the eagerness of a terrier thinking it had deserved a reward. He was a short man, straight-backed, square-shouldered, bristling with efficiency. "Mister Iliffe and I coaxed them on."

Sharpe said nothing. He had known Cornelius Slingsby for one week and in that week he had developed a loathing for the man that verged on being murderous. There was no reason for that hatred, unless disliking a man on sight was good reason, yet everything about Slingsby annoyed Sharpe, whether it was the back of the man's head, which was as flat as a shovel blade, his protuberant eyes, his black mustache, the broken veins on his nose, the snort of his laughter or the strut of his gait. Sharpe had come back from Lisbon to discover that Slingsby had replaced his Lieutenant, the reliable Robert Knowles, who had been appointed Adjutant to the regiment. "Cornelius is by way of being a relation," Lieutenant Colonel the Honorable William Lawford had told Sharpe vaguely, "and you'll find him a very fine fellow."

"I will, sir?"

"He joined the army late," Lawford had continued, "which is why he's still a lieutenant. Well, he was brevetted captain, of course, but he's still a lieutenant."

"I joined the army early, sir," Sharpe had said, "and I'm still a lieutenant. Brevetted captain, of course, but still a lieutenant."

"Oh, Sharpe." Lawford had sounded exasperated. "There is no one more cognizant of your virtues than I. If there was a vacant captaincy… " He left that notion hanging, though Sharpe knew the answer. He had been made into a lieutenant, and that was something of a miracle for a man who had joined the army as an illiterate private, and he had been brevetted a captain, which meant he was paid as such even though his true rank remained lieutenant, but he could only get the real promotion if he either purchased a vacant captaincy or, much less likely, was promoted by Lawford. "I value you, Sharpe," the Colonel had continued, "but I also have hopes for Cornelius. He's thirty. Or maybe thirty-one. Old for a lieutenant, but he's keen as mustard, Sharpe, and has experience. Lots of experience." That was the trouble. Before joining the South Essex Slingsby had been in the 55th, a regiment serving in the West Indies, and the yellow fever had decimated the officers' ranks and so Slingsby had been brevetted a captain, and captain, moreover, of the 55th's light company, and as a result he reckoned he knew as much about soldiering as Sharpe. Which might have been true, but he did not know as much about fighting. "I want you to take him under your wing," the Colonel had finished. "Bring him on, Sharpe, eh?"

Bring him to an early grave, Sharpe had thought sourly, but he had to hide his thoughts, and was still doing his best to conceal the hatred as Slingsby pointed up to the telegraph station. "Mister Iliffe and I saw men up there, Sharpe. A dozen of them, I think. And one looked as if he was wearing a blue uniform. Shouldn't be anyone up there, should there?"

Sharpe doubted that Ensign Iliffe, an officer newly come from England, had seen a thing, while Sharpe himself had noticed the men and their horses fifteen minutes earlier and he had been wondering ever since what the strangers were doing on the hilltop, for officially the telegraph station had been abandoned. Normally it was manned by a handful of soldiers who guarded the naval Midshipman who operated the black bags which were hoisted up and down the tall mast to send messages from one end of Portugal to the other. But the French had already cut the chain further north and the British had retreated away from these hills, and somehow this one station had not been destroyed. There was no point in leaving it intact for the Frogs to use, and so Sharpe's company had been detached from the battalion and given the simple job of burning the telegraph. "Could it be a Frenchman?" Slingsby asked, referring to the blue uniform. He sounded eager, as if he wanted to charge uphill. He was three inches over five feet, with an air of perpetual alertness.

"Doesn't matter if it is a bloody Crapaud," Sharpe said sourly, "there's more of us than there are of them. I'll send Mister Iliffe up there to shoot him." Iliffe looked alarmed. He was seventeen and looked fourteen, a raw-boned youngster whose father had purchased him a commission because he did not know what else to do with the boy. "Show me your canteen," Sharpe ordered Iliffe.

Iliffe looked scared now. "It's empty, sir," he confessed, and cringed as though he expected Sharpe to punish him.

"You know what I told the men with empty canteens?" Sharpe asked. "That they were idiots. But you're not, because you're an officer, and there aren't any idiot officers."

"Quite correct, sir," Slingsby put in, then snorted. He always snorted when he laughed and Sharpe suppressed an urge to cut the bastard's throat.

"Hoard your water," Sharpe said, thrusting the canteen back at Iliffe. "Sergeant Harper! March on!"

It took another half-hour to reach the hilltop. The barn-like building was evidently a shrine, for a chipped statue of the Virgin Mary was mounted in a niche above its door. The telegraph tower had been built against the shrine's eastern gable which helped support the lattice of thick timbers that carried the platform on which the Midshipman had worked his arcane skill. The tower was deserted now, its tethered signal ropes banging against the tarred mast in the brisk wind that blew around the summit. The black-painted bladders had been taken away, but the ropes used to hoist and lower them were still in place and from one of them hung a square of white cloth and Sharpe wondered if the strangers on the hilltop had raised the makeshift flag as a signal.

Those strangers, a dozen civilians, were standing beside the shrine's door and with them was a Portuguese infantry officer, his blue coat faded to a color very close to the French blue. It was the officer who strode forward to meet Sharpe. "I am Major Ferreira," he said in good English, "and you are?"

"Captain Sharpe."

"And Captain Slingsby." Lieutenant Slingsby had insisted on accompanying Sharpe to meet the Portuguese officer, just as he insisted on using his brevet rank even though he had no right to do so any longer.

"I command here," Sharpe said laconically.

"And your purpose, Captain?" Ferreira demanded. He was a tall man, lean and dark, with a carefully trimmed mustache. He had the manners and bearing of privilege, but Sharpe detected an uneasiness in the Portuguese Major that Ferreira attempted to cover with a brusque manner that tempted Sharpe to insolence. He fought the temptation and told the truth instead.

"We're ordered to burn the telegraph."

Ferreira glanced at Sharpe's men who were straggling onto the hill's summit. He seemed taken aback by Sharpe's words, but then smiled unconvincingly. "I shall do it for you, Captain. It will be my pleasure."

"I carry out my own orders, sir," Sharpe said.

Ferreira scented the insolence and gave Sharpe a quizzical look. For a second Sharpe thought the Portuguese Major intended to offer him a reprimand, but instead Ferreira nodded curtly. "If you insist," he said, "but do it quickly."

"Quickly, sir!" Slingsby intervened enthusiastically. "No point in waiting!" He turned on Harper. "Sergeant Harper! The combustibles, if you please. Quick, man, quick!"

Harper glanced at Sharpe for approval of the Lieutenant's orders, but Sharpe betrayed nothing, and so the big Irishman shouted at the dozen men who were burdened with cavalry forage nets that were stuffed full of straw. Another six men carried jars of turpentine, and now the straw was heaped about the four legs of the telegraph station and then soaked with the turpentine. Ferreira watched them work for a while, then went back to join the civilians who appeared worried by the arrival of British soldiers. "It's all ready, sir," Harper called to Sharpe, "shall I light her up?"

Slingsby did not even give Sharpe time to answer. "Let's not dillydally, Sergeant!" he said briskly. "Fire it up!"

"Wait," Sharpe snarled, making Slingsby blink at the harshness of his tone. Officers were expected to treat each other courteously in front of the men, but Sharpe had snapped angrily and the look he gave Slingsby made the Lieutenant step backwards in surprise. Slingsby frowned, but said nothing as Sharpe climbed the ladder to the mast's platform that stood fifteen feet above the hilltop. Three pock marks in the boards showed where the Midshipman had placed his tripod so he could stare at the neighboring telegraph stations and read their messages. The station to the north had already been destroyed, but looking south Sharpe could just see the next tower somewhere beyond the River Criz and still behind British lines. It would not be behind the lines for long, he thought. Marshal Massena's army was flooding into central Portugal and the British would be retreating to their newly built defensive lines at Torres Vedras. The plan was to retreat to the new fortifications, let the French come, then either kill their futile attacks or watch them starve.

And to help them starve, the British and Portuguese were leaving them nothing. Every barn, every larder, every storehouse was being emptied. Crops were being burned in their fields, windmills were being destroyed and wells made foul with carcasses. The inhabitants of every town and village in central Portugal were being evicted, taking their livestock with them, ordered to go either behind the Lines of Torres Vedras or else up into the high hills where the French would be reluctant to follow. The intention was that the enemy would find a scorched land, bare of everything, even of telegraph ropes.

Sharpe untied one of the signal ropes and pulled down the white flag that turned out to be a big handkerchief of fine linen, neatly hemmed with the initials PAF embroidered in blue into one corner. Ferreira? Sharpe looked down on the Portuguese Major who was watching him. "Yours, Major?" Sharpe asked.

"No," Ferreira called back.

"Mine then," Sharpe said, and pocketed the handkerchief. He saw the anger on Ferreira's face and was amused by it. "You might want to move those horses," he nodded at the beasts picketed beside the shrine, "before we burn the tower."

"Thank you, Captain," Ferreira said icily.

"Fire it now, Sharpe?" Slingsby demanded from the ground.

"Not till I'm off the bloody platform," Sharpe growled. He looked round one last time and saw a small mist of gray-white powder smoke far off to the southeast. He pulled out his telescope, the precious glass that had been given to him by Sir Arthur Wellesley, now Lord Wellington, and he rested it on the balustrade and then knelt and stared towards the smoke. He could see little, but he reckoned he was watching the British rearguard in action. French cavalry must have pressed too close and a battalion was firing volleys, backed up by the cannons of the Royal Horse Artillery. He could just hear the soft thump of the far-off guns. He swept the glass north, the lens traveling over a hard country of hills, rocks and barren pasture, and there was nothing there, nothing at all, until suddenly he saw a hint of a different green and he jerked the glass back, settled it and saw them.

Cavalry. French cavalry. Dragoons in their green coats. They were at least a mile away, in a valley, but coming towards the telegraph station. Reflected sunlight glinted from their buckles, bits and stirrups as Sharpe tried to count them. Forty? Sixty men perhaps, it was hard to tell for the squadron was twisting between rocks in the valley's deep heart and going from sunshine to shadow. They looked to be in no particular hurry and Sharpe wondered if they had been sent to capture the telegraph station which would serve the advancing French as well as it had served the British.

"We've got company, Sergeant!" Sharpe called down to Harper. Decency and courtesy demanded that he should have told Slingsby, but he could barely bring himself to talk to the man, so he spoke to Harper instead. "At least a squadron of green bastards. About a mile away, but they could be here in a few minutes." He collapsed the telescope and went down the ladder and nodded at the Irish Sergeant. "Spark it off," he said.

The turpentine-soaked straw blazed bright and high, but it took some moments before the big timbers of the scaffold caught the flame. Sharpe's company, as ever fascinated by willful destruction, looked on appreciatively and gave a small cheer as the high platform at last began to burn. Sharpe had walked to the eastern edge of the small hilltop, but, denied the height of the platform, he could no longer see the dragoons. Had they wheeled away? Perhaps, if they had hoped to capture the signal tower intact, they would have decided to abandon the effort when they saw the smoke boil off the summit.

Lieutenant Slingsby joined him. "I don't wish to make anything of it," he said in a low tone, "but you spoke very harshly to me just now, Sharpe, very harshly indeed."

Sharpe said nothing. He was imagining the pleasure of disemboweling the little bastard.

"I don't resent it for myself," Slingsby went on, still speaking softly, "but it serves the men ill. Very ill indeed. It diminishes their respect for the King's commission."

Sharpe knew he had deserved the reproof, but he was not willing to give Slingsby an inch. "You think men respect the King's commission?" he asked instead.

"Naturally." Slingsby sounded shocked at the question. "Of course!"

"I didn't," Sharpe said, and wondered if he smelled rum on Slingsby's breath. "I didn't respect the King's commission," he went on, deciding he had imagined the smell, "not when I marched in the ranks. I thought most jack-puddings were overpaid bastards."

"Sharpe," Slingsby expostulated, but whatever he was about to say dried on his tongue, for he saw the dragoons appear on the lower slope. "Fifty or so of them," Sharpe said, "and coming this way."

"We should deploy, perhaps?" Slingsby indicated the eastern slope that was dotted with boulders which would hide a skirmish line very efficiently. The Lieutenant straightened his back and snapped his boot heels together. "Be an honor to lead the men down the hill, Sharpe."

"It might be a bloody honor," Sharpe said sarcastically, "but it would still be bloody suicide. If we're going to fight the bastards," he went on, "then I'd rather be on a hilltop than scattered halfway down a slope. Dragoons like skirmish lines, Slingsby. It gives them sword practice." He turned to look at the shrine. There were two small shuttered windows on the wall facing him and he reckoned they would make good loopholes if he did have to defend the hilltop. "How long till sunset?"

"Ten minutes less than three hours," Slingsby said instantly. Sharpe grunted. He doubted the dragoons would attack, but if they did he could easily hold them off till dusk, and no dragoon would linger in hostile country after nightfall for fear of the partisans. "You stay here," he ordered Slingsby, "watch them and don't do anything without asking me. Do you understand that?"

Slingsby looked offended, as he had every right to be. "Of course I understand it," he said in a tone of protest.

"Don't take men off the hilltop, Lieutenant," Sharpe said, "and that's an order." He strode towards the shrine, wondering whether his men would be able to knock a few loopholes in its ancient stone walls. They did not have the right tools, no sledgehammers or crowbars, but the stonework looked old and its mortar was crumbling.

To his surprise his path to the shrine door was barred by Major Ferreira and one of the civilians. "The door is locked, Captain," the Portuguese officer said.

"Then I'll break it down," Sharpe answered.

"It is a shrine," Ferreira said reprovingly.

"Then I'll say a prayer for forgiveness after I've knocked it down," Sharpe said and he tried to get past the Major who held up a hand to stop him. Sharpe looked exasperated. "There are fifty French dragoons coming this way, Major," Sharpe said, "and I'm using the shrine to protect my men."

"Your work is done here," Ferreira said harshly, "and you should go." Sharpe said nothing. Instead he tried once more to get past the two men, but they still blocked him. "I'm giving you an order, Captain," the Portuguese officer insisted. "Leave now."

The civilian standing with Ferreira had taken off his coat and rolled up his shirtsleeves to reveal massive arms, both tattooed with fouled anchors. So far Sharpe had taken little notice of the man, other than to be impressed by his imposing physical size, but now he looked into the civilian's face and saw pure animosity. The man was built like a prizefighter, tattooed like a sailor, and there was an unmistakable message in his scarred, brutish face which was astonishing in its ugliness. He had a heavy brow, a big jaw, a flattened nose, and eyes that were like a beast's eyes. Nothing showed there except the desire to fight. And he wanted the fight to be man to man, fist against fist, and he looked disappointed when Sharpe stepped a pace backwards.

"I see you are sensible," Ferreira said silkily.

"I'm known for it," Sharpe said, then raised his voice. "Sergeant Harper!"

The big Irishman appeared around the side of the shrine and saw the confrontation. The big man, broader and taller than Harper, who was one of the strongest men in the army, had his fists clenched. He looked like a bulldog waiting to be unleashed, and Harper knew how to treat mad dogs. He let the volley gun slip from his shoulder. It was a curious weapon, made for the Royal Navy, and intended to be used from the deck of a ship to clear enemy marksmen from their fighting tops. Seven half-inch barrels were clustered together, fired by a single flintlock, and at sea the gun had proved too powerful, as often as not breaking the shoulder of the man who fired it, but Patrick Harper was big enough to make the seven-barrel gun look small and now he casually pointed it at the vast brute who blocked Sharpe's path. The gun was not cocked, but none of the civilians seemed to notice that. "You have trouble, sir?" Harper asked innocently.

Ferreira looked alarmed, as well he might. Harper's appearance had prompted some of the other civilians to draw pistols, and the hillside was suddenly loud as flints were clicked back. Major Ferreira, fearing a bloodbath, snapped at them to lower their guns. None obeyed until the big man, the bare-fisted brute, snarled at them and then they hurriedly lowered their flints, holstered their weapons and looked scared of the big man's disapproval. All the civilians were hard-looking rogues, reminding Sharpe of the cutthroats who ruled the streets of East London where he had spent his childhood, yet their leader, the man with the brutish face and muscled body, was the oddest and most frightening of them. He was a street fighter, that much was obvious from the broken nose and the scars on his forehead and cheeks, but he was also wealthy, for his linen shirt was of fine quality, his breeches cut from the best broadcloth and his gold-tasseled boots were made from soft expensive leather. He looked to be around forty years old, in the prime of life, confident in his sheer size. The man glanced at Harper, evidently judging the Irishman as a possible opponent, then unexpectedly smiled and picked up his coat which he brushed down before putting on. "What is in the shrine," the big man stepped towards Sharpe, "is my property." His English was heavily accented and spoken in a voice like gravel.

"And who are you?" Sharpe demanded.

"Allow me to name Senhor… " Ferreira began to answer.

"My name is Ferragus," the big man interrupted.

"Ferragus," Ferreira repeated, then introduced Sharpe. "Capitao Sharpe." He offered Ferragus a shrug as if to suggest that events were beyond his control.

Ferragus towered over Sharpe. "Your work is done here, Captain. The tower is no more, so you may go."

Sharpe stepped back out of the huge man's shadow, sideways to get around him and then went to the shrine and heard the distinctive sound of the volley gun's ratchet scraping as Harper cocked it. "Careful, now," the Irishman said, "it only takes a tremor for this bastard to go off and it would make a terrible mess of your shirt, sir." Ferragus had plainly turned to intercept Sharpe, but the huge gun checked him.

The shrine door was unlocked. Sharpe pushed it open and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust from the bright sunlight to the shrine's black shadows, but then he saw what was inside and swore.

He had expected a bare country shrine like the dozens of others he had seen, but instead the small building was heaped with sacks, so many sacks that the only space left was a narrow passage leading to a crude altar on which a blue-gowned image of the Virgin Mary was festooned with little slips of paper left by desperate peasants who came to the hilltop in search of a miracle. Now the Virgin gazed sadly on the sacks as Sharpe drew his sword and stabbed one. He was rewarded by a trickle of flour. He tried another sack further down and still more flour sifted to the bare earth floor. Ferragus had seen what Sharpe had done and harangued Ferreira who, reluctantly, came into the shrine. "The flour is here with my government's knowledge," the Major said.

"You can prove that?" Sharpe asked. "Got a piece of paper, have you?"

"It is the business of the Portuguese government," Ferreira said stiffly, and you will leave."

"I have orders," Sharpe countered. "We all have orders. There's to be no food left for the French. None." He stabbed another sack, then turned as Ferragus came into the shrine, his bulk shadowing the doorway. He moved ominously down the narrow passage between the sacks, filling it, and Sharpe suddenly coughed loudly and scuffed his feet as Ferreira squeezed into the sacks to let Ferragus past.

The huge man held out a hand to Sharpe. He was holding coins, gold coins, maybe a dozen thick gold coins, bigger than English guineas and probably adding up to three years' salary for Sharpe. "You and I can talk," Ferragus said.

"Sergeant Harper!" Sharpe called past the looming Ferragus. "What are those bloody Crapauds doing?"

"Keeping their distance, sir. Staying well off, they are."

Sharpe looked up at Ferragus. "You're not surprised there are French dragoons coming, are you? Expecting them, were you?"

"I am asking you to go," Ferragus said, moving closer to Sharpe. "I am being polite, Captain."

"Hurts, don't it?" Sharpe said. "And what if I don't go? What if I obey my orders, senhor, and get rid of this food?"

Ferragus was plainly unused to being challenged for he seemed to shiver, as if forcing himself to be calm. "I can reach into your little army, Captain," he said in his deep voice, "and I can find you, and I can make you regret today."

"Are you threatening me?" Sharpe asked in astonishment. Major Ferreira, behind Ferragus, made some soothing noises, but both men ignored him.

"Take the money," Ferragus said.

When Sharpe had coughed and scuffed his feet he had been making enough noise to smother the sound of his rifle being cocked. It hung from his right shoulder, the muzzle just behind his ear, and now he moved his right hand back to the trigger. He looked down at the coins and Ferragus must have thought he had tempted Sharpe for he thrust the gold closer, and Sharpe looked up into his eyes and pressed the trigger.

The shot slammed into the roof tiles and filled the shrine with smoke and noise. The sound deafened Sharpe and it distracted Ferragus for half a second, the half second in which Sharpe brought up his right knee into the big man's groin, following it with a thrust of his left hand, fingers rigid, into Ferragus's eyes and then his right hand, knuckles clenched, into his Adam's apple. He reckoned he had stood no chance in a fair fight, but Sharpe, like Ferragus, reckoned fair fights were for fools. He knew he had to put Ferragus down fast and hurt him so bad that the huge man could not fight back, and he had done it in a heartbeat, for the big man was bent over, filled with pain and fighting for breath, and Sharpe cleared him from the passage by dragging him into the space in front of the altar and then walked past a horrified Ferreira. "You got anything to say to me, Major?" Sharpe asked, and when Ferreira dumbly shook his head Sharpe made his way back into the sunlight. "Lieutenant Slingsby!" he called. "What are those damned dragoons doing?"

"Keeping their distance, Sharpe," Slingsby said. "What was that shot?"

"I was showing a Portuguese fellow how a rifle works," Sharpe said. "How much distance?"

"At least half a mile. Bottom of the hill."

"Watch them," Sharpe said, "and I want thirty men in here now. Mister Iliffe! Sergeant McGovern!"

He left Ensign Iliffe in nominal charge of the thirty men who were to haul the sacks out of the shrine. Once outside, the sacks were slit open and their contents scattered across the hilltop. Ferragus came limping from the shrine and his men looked confused and angry, but they were hugely outnumbered and there was nothing they could do. Ferragus had regained his breath, though he was having trouble standing upright. He spoke bitterly to Ferreira, but the Major managed to talk some sense into the big man and, at last, they all mounted their horses and, with a last resentful look at Sharpe, rode down the westwards track.

Sharpe watched them retreat then went to join Slingsby. Behind him the telegraph tower burned fiercely, suddenly keeling over with a great splintering noise and an explosion of sparks. "Where are the Crapauds?"

"In that gully." Slingsby pointed to a patch of dead ground near the bottom of the hill. "Dismounted now."

Sharpe used his telescope and saw two of the green-uniformed men crouching behind boulders. One of them had a telescope and was watching the hilltop and Sharpe gave the man a cheerful wave. "Not much bloody use there, are they?" he said.

"They could be planning to attack us." Slingsby suggested eagerly.

"Not unless they're tired of life," Sharpe said, reckoning the dragoons had been beckoned westwards by the white flag on the telegraph tower, and now that the flag had been replaced by a plume of smoke they were undecided what to do. He trained his glass farther south and saw there was still gun smoke in the valley where the main road ran beside the river. The rearguard was evidently holding its own, but they would have to retreat soon for, farther east, he could now see the main enemy army that showed as dark columns marching in fields. They were a very long way off, scarce visible even through the glass, but they were there, a shadowed horde coming to drive the British out of central Portugal. L'Armee de Portugal, the French called it, the army that was meant to whip the redcoats clear to Lisbon, then out to sea, so that Portugal would at last be placed under the tricolor, but the army of Portugal was in for a surprise. Marshal Massena would march into an empty land and then find himself facing the Lines of Torres Vedras.

"See anything, Sharpe?" Slingsby stepped closer, plainly wanting to borrow the telescope.

"Have you been drinking rum?" Sharpe asked, again getting a whiff of the spirit.

Slingsby looked alarmed, then offended. "Put it on the skin," he said gruffly, slapping his face, "to keep off the flies."

"You do what?"

"Trick I learned in the islands."

"Bloody hell," Sharpe said, then collapsed the glass and put it into his pocket. "There are Frogs over there," he said, pointing southeast, "thousands of goddamn bloody Frogs."

He left the Lieutenant gazing at the distant army and went back to chivvy the redcoats who had formed a chain to sling the sacks out onto the hillside which now looked as though it were ankle deep in snow. Flour drifted like powder smoke from the summit, fell softly, made mounds, and still more sacks were hurled out the door. Sharpe reckoned it would take a couple of hours to empty the shrine. He ordered ten riflemen to join the work and sent ten of the redcoats to join Slingsby's piquet. He did not want his redcoats to start whining that they did all the work while the riflemen got the easy jobs. Sharpe gave them a hand himself, standing in the line and tossing sacks 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 soul, would have described Ferragus as being common as muck. He was the black sheep of the family, the willful, wayward son who had run away as a child and come back rich, not to settle, but to terrorize the city like a wolf finding a home in the sheep pen. Sarah was frightened of Ferragus; everyone except the Major was frightened of Ferragus, and no wonder. The gossip in Coimbra said Ferragus was a bad man, a dishonest man, a crook even, and Major Ferreira was tarred by that brush, and in turn Sarah was smeared by it.

But she was trapped with the family, for she did not have enough money to pay her fare back to England and even if she got there, how was she to secure a new post without a glowing testimonial from her last employers? It was a dilemma, but Miss Sarah Fry was not a timid young woman and she faced the dilemma, as she faced the French invasion, with a sense that she would survive. Life was not to be suffered, it was to be exploited.

" 'Reynard is red, " Maria read.

The clock ticked on.

It was not war as Sharpe knew it. The South Essex, withdrawing westwards into central Portugal, was now the army's rearguard, though two regiments of cavalry and a troop of horse gunners were behind them, serving as a screen to deter the enemy's forward cavalry units. The French were not pressing hard and so the South Essex had time to destroy whatever provisions they found, whether it was the harvest, an orchard or livestock, for nothing was to be left for the enemy. By rights every inhabitant and every scrap of food should already have gone south to find refuge behind the Lines of Torres Vedras, but it was astonishing how much remained. In one village they found a herd of goats hidden in a barn, and in another a great vat of olive oil. The goats were put to the bayonet and their corpses hurriedly buried in a ditch, and the oil was spilled onto the ground. French armies famously lived off the land, stealing what they needed, so the land was to be ravaged.

There was no evidence of a French pursuit. None of the galloper guns fired and no wounded cavalrymen appeared after a brief clash of sabers. Sharpe continually looked to the east and thought he saw the smear of dust in the sky kicked up by an army's boots, but it could easily have been a heat haze. There was an explosion at mid-morning, but it came from ahead where, in a deep valley, British engineers had blown a bridge. The South Essex grumbled because they had to wade through the river rather than cross it by a roadway, but if the bridge had been left they would have grumbled at being denied the chance to scoop up water as they waded the river.

Lieutenant Colonel the Honorable William Lawford, commanding officer of the first battalion of the South Essex regiment, spent much of the day at the rear of the column where he rode a new horse, a black gelding, of which he was absurdly proud. "I gave Portia to Slingsby," he told Sharpe. Portia was his previous horse, a mare that Slingsby now rode and thus appeared, to any casual onlooker, to be the commander of the light company. Lawford must have been aware of the contrast because he told Sharpe that officers ought to ride. "It gives their men something to look up to, Sharpe," he said. "You can afford a horse, can't you?"

What Sharpe could or could not afford was not something he intended to share with the Colonel. "I'd prefer they looked up to me instead of at the horse, sir," Sharpe commented instead.

"You know what I mean." Lawford refused to be offended. "If you like, Sharpe, I'll cast about and find you something serviceable? Major Pearson of the gunners was talking about selling one of his hacks and I can probably squeeze a fair price from him."

Sharpe said nothing. He was not fond of horses, but he nevertheless felt jealous that bloody Slingsby was riding one. Lawford waited for a response and, when none came, he spurred the gelding so that it picked up its hooves and trotted a few paces ahead. "So what do you think, Sharpe, eh?" the Colonel demanded.

"Think, sir?"

"Of Lightning! That's his name. Lightning." The Colonel patted the horse's neck. "Isn't he superb?"

Sharpe stared at the horse, said nothing.

"Come, Sharpe!" Lawford encouraged him. "Can't you see his quality, eh?"

"He's got four legs, sir," Sharpe said.

"Oh, Sharpe!" the Colonel remonstrated. "Really! Is that all you can say?" Lawford turned to Harper instead. "What do you make of him, Sergeant?". .

"He's wonderful, sir," Harper said with genuine enthusiasm, "just wonderful. Would he be Irish now?"

"He is!" Lawford was delighted. "He is! Bred in County Meath. I can see you know your horses, Sergeant." The Colonel fondled the gelding's ears. "He takes fences like the wind. He'll hunt magnificently. Can't wait to get him home and set him at a few damn great hedgerows." He leaned towards Sharpe and lowered his voice. "He cost me a few pennies, I can tell you."

"I'm sure he did, sir," Sharpe said, "and did you pass on my message about the telegraph station?"

"I did," Lawford said, "but they're busy at headquarters, Sharpe, damned busy, and I doubt they'll worry too much about a few pounds of flour. Still, you did the right thing."

"I wasn't thinking of the flour, sir," Sharpe said, "but about Major Ferreira."

"I'm sure there's an innocent explanation," Lawford said airily, then rode ahead, leaving Sharpe scowling. He liked Lawford, whom he had known years before in India and who was a clever, genial man whose only fault, perhaps, was a tendency to avoid trouble. Not fighting trouble: Lawford had never shirked a fight with the French, but he hated confrontations within his own ranks. By nature he was a diplomat, always trying to smooth the corners and find areas of agreement, and Sharpe was hardly surprised that the Colonel had shied away from accusing Major Ferreira of dishonesty. In Lawford's world it was always best to believe that yapping dogs were really sleeping.

So Sharpe put the confrontation of the previous day out of his mind and trudged on, half his thoughts conscious of what every man in the company was doing and the other half thinking of Teresa and Josefina, and he was still thinking of them when a horseman rode past him in the opposite direction, wheeled around in a flurry of dust and called to him. "In trouble again, Richard?"

Sharpe, startled out of his daydream, looked up to see Major Hogan looking indecently cheerful. "I'm in trouble, sir?"

"You do sound grim," Hogan said. "Get out of bed the wrong side, did you?"

"I was promised a month's leave, sir. A bloody month! And I got a week."

"I'm sure you didn't waste it," Hogan said. He was an Irishman, a Royal Engineer whose shrewdness had taken him away from engineering duties to serve Wellington as the man who collected every scrap of information about the enemy. Hogan had to sift rumors brought by peddlers, traders and deserters, he had to appraise every message sent by the partisans who harried the French on both sides of the frontier between Spain and Portugal, and he had to decipher the dispatches, captured by the partisans from French messengers, some of them still stained with blood. He was also an old friend of Sharpe, and one who now frowned at the rifleman. "A gentleman came to headquarters last night," he said, "to lodge an official complaint about you. He wanted to see the Peer, but Wellington's much too busy fighting the war, so the man was fobbed off on me. Luckily for you."

"A gentleman?"

"I stretch the word to its uttermost limits," Hogan said. "Ferragus."

"That bastard."

"Illegitimacy is probably the one thing he cannot be accused of," Hogan said.

"So what did he say?"

"That you hit him," Hogan said.

"He can tell the truth, then," Sharpe admitted.

"Good God, Richard!" Hogan examined Sharpe. "You don't seem hurt. You really hit him?"

"Flattened the bastard," Sharpe said. "Did he tell you why?"

"Not precisely, but I can guess. Was he planning to sell food to the enemy?"

"Close on two tons of flour," Sharpe said, "and he had a bloody Portuguese officer with him."

"His brother," Hogan said, "Major Ferreira."

"His brother!"

"Not much alike, are they? But yes, they're brothers. Pedro Ferreira stayed home, went to school, joined the army, married decently, lives respectably, and his brother ran away in search of sinks of iniquity. Ferragus is a nickname, taken from some legendary Portuguese giant who was reputed to have skin that couldn't be pierced by a sword. Useful, that. But his brother is more useful. Major Ferreira does for the Portuguese what I do for the Peer, though I fancy he isn't quite as efficient as I am. But he has friends in the French headquarters."

"Friends?" Sharpe sounded skeptical.

"More than a few Portuguese joined the French," Hogan said. "They're mostly idealists who think they're fighting for liberty, justice, brotherhood and all that airy nonsense. Major Ferreira somehow stays in touch with them, which is damned useful. But as for Ferragus!" Hogan paused, staring uphill to where a hawk hovered above the pale grass. "Our giant is a bad lot, Richard, about as bad as they come. You know where he learned English?"

"How would I?"

"He joined a ship as a seaman when he ran away from home," Hogan said, ignoring Sharpe's surly response, "and then had the misfortune to be pressed into the Royal Navy. He learned lower-deck English, made a reputation as the fiercest bare-knuckle fighter in the Atlantic fleet, then deserted in the West Indies. He apparently joined a slave ship and rose up through the ranks. Now he calls himself a merchant, but I doubt he trades in anything legal."

"Slaves?"

"Not any longer," Hogan said, "but that's how he made his money. Shipping the poor devils from the Guinea coast to Brazil. Now he lives in Coimbra where he's rich and makes his money in mysterious ways. He's quite an impressive man, don't you think, and not without his advantages?"

"Advantages?"

"Major Ferreira claims his brother has contacts throughout Portugal and western Spain, which sounds very likely."

"So you let him get away with treason?"

"Something like that," Hogan agreed equably. "Two tons of flour isn't much, not in the greater scheme of things, and Major Ferreira persuades me his brother is on our side. Whatever, I apologized to our giant, said you were a crude man of no refinement, assured him that you would be severely reprimanded, which you may now consider done, and promised that he would never see you again." Hogan beamed at Sharpe. "So the matter is closed."

"So I do my duty," Sharpe said, "and land in the shit."

"You have at last seized the essence of soldiering," Hogan said happily, "and Marshal Massena is landing in the same place."

"He is?" Sharpe asked. "I thought we were retreating and he was advancing?"

Hogan laughed. "There are three roads he could have chosen, Richard, two very good ones and one quite rotten one, and in his wisdom he chose this one, the bad one." It was indeed a bad road, merely two rutted wheel tracks either side of a strip of grass and weeds, and littered with rocks large enough to break a wagon or gun wheel. "And this bad road," Hogan went on, "leads straight to a place called Bussaco."

"Am I supposed to have heard of it?"

"A very bad place," Hogan went on, "for anyone attacking it. And the Peer is gathering troops there in hope of giving Monsieur Massena a bloody nose. Something to look forward to, Richard, something to anticipate." He raised a hand, kicked back his heels and rode ahead, nodding to Major Forrest who came the other way.

"Two ovens in the next village, Sharpe," Forrest said, "and the Colonel would like your lads to deal with them."

The ovens were great brick caves in which the villagers had baked their bread. The light company used pickaxes to reduce them to rubble so the French could not use them. They left the precious ovens destroyed and then marched on.

To a place called Bussaco.

CHAPTER 2

Robert Knowles and Richard Sharpe stood on the Bussaco ridge and stared at l'Armee de Portugal that, battalion by battalion, battery by battery and squadron by squadron, streamed from the eastern hills to fill the valley.

The British and Portuguese armies had occupied a great ridge that ran north and south and so blocked the road on which the French were advancing towards Lisbon. The ridge, Knowles guessed, was almost a thousand feet above the surrounding countryside, and its eastward flank, which faced the French, was precipitously steep. Two roads zigzagged their way up that slope, snaking between heather, gorse and rocks, the better road reaching the ridge's crest towards its northern end just above a small village perched on a ledge of the ridge. Down in the valley, beyond a glinting stream, lay a scatter of other small villages and the French were making their way along farm tracks to occupy those lower settlements.

The British and Portuguese had a bird's-eye view of the enemy who came from a wooded defile in the lower hills, then marched past a windmill before turning south to take up their positions. They, in turn, could look up the high, bare slope and see a handful of British and Portuguese officers watching them. The army itself, with most of its guns, was hidden from the French. The ridge was ten miles long, a natural rampart, and General Wellington had ordered that his men were to stay well back from its wide crest so that the arriving French would have no idea which part of the high ground was most heavily defended. "Quite a privilege," Knowles said reverently.

"A privilege?" Sharpe asked sourly.

"To see such a thing," Knowles explained, gesturing at the enemy, and it was, in truth, a fine sight to see so many thousands of men at one time. The infantry marched in loose formations, their blue uniforms pale against the green of the valley, while the horsemen, released from the discipline of the march, galloped beside the stream to leave plumes of dust. And still they came from the defile, the might of France. A band was playing close to the windmill and, though the music was too far away to be heard, Sharpe fancied he could hear the thump of the bass drum like a distant heartbeat. "A whole army!" Knowles enthused. "I should have brought my sketching pad. It would make a fine picture."

"What would make a fine picture," Sharpe said, "is to see the buggers march up this hill and get slaughtered."

"You think they won't?"

"I think they'd be mad to try," Sharpe said, then frowned at Knowles. "Do you like being Adjutant?" he asked abruptly.

Knowles hesitated, sensing that the conversation was approaching dangerous ground, but he had been Sharpe's Lieutenant before becoming Adjutant and he liked his old company commander. "Not excessively," he admitted.

"It's always been a captain's job," Sharpe said, "so why is he giving it to you?"

"The Colonel feels the experience will be advantageous to me," Knowles said stiffly.

"Advantageous," Sharpe said bitterly. "It ain't your advantage he wants, Robert. He wants that piece of gristle to take over my company. That's what he wants. He wants bloody Slingsby to be Captain of the light company." Sharpe had no evidence for that, the Colonel had never said as much, but it was the only explanation that made sense to him. "So he had to get you out of the way," Sharpe finished, knowing he had said too much, but the rancor was biting at him and Knowles was a friend who would be discreet about Sharpe's outburst

Knowles frowned, then flapped at an insistent fly. "I truly believe," he said after thinking for a moment, "that the Colonel believes he's doing you a favor."

"Me! A favor? By giving me Slingsby!"

"Slingsby has experience, Richard," Knowles said, "much more than I do."

"But you're a good officer and he's a jack-pudding. Who the hell is he anyway?"

"He's the Colonel's brother-in-law," Knowles explained.

"I know that," Sharpe said impatiently, "but who is he?"

"The man who married Mrs. Lawford's sister," Knowles said, refusing to be drawn.

"That tells you everything you bloody need to know," Sharpe said grimly, "but he doesn't seem the kind of fellow Lawford would want as a brother-in-law. Not enough tone."

"We don't choose our relatives," Knowles said, "and I'm sure he's a gentleman."

"Bloody hell," Sharpe grumbled.

"And he must have been delighted to get out of the 55th," Knowles went on, ignoring Sharpe's moroseness. "God, most of that regiment died of the yellow fever in the West Indies. He's much safer here, even with those fellows threatening." Knowles nodded down at the French troops.

"Then why the hell didn't he purchase a captaincy?"

"Six months short of requirements," Knowles said. A lieutenant was not allowed to purchase a captaincy until he had served three years in the lower rank, a newly introduced rule that had caused much grumbling among wealthy officers who wanted swifter preferment.

"But why did he join up so late?" Sharpe asked. If Slingsby was thirty then he could not have become a lieutenant before he was twenty-seven, by which age some men were majors. Most officers, like young Iliffe, joined long before they were twenty and it was odd to find a man coming to the army so late.

"I believe… " Knowles said, then reddened and checked his words.

New troops," he said instead, pointing down the slope to where a French regiment, its blue coats unnaturally bright, marched past the windmill. "I hear the Emperor has sent reinforcements to Spain," Knowles went on. "The French have nowhere else to fight these days. Austrians out of the war, Prussians doing nothing, which means Boney only has us to beat."

Sharpe ignored Knowles's summation of the Emperor's strategy. "You believe what?" he asked.

"Nothing. I said too much."

"You didn't say a bloody thing," Sharpe protested and waited, but Knowles still remained silent. "You want me to slit your skinny throat, Robert," Sharpe asked, "with a very blunt knife?"

Knowles smiled. "You mustn't repeat this, Richard."

"You know me, Robert, I never tell anyone anything. Cross my heart and hope to die, so tell me before I cut your legs off."

"I believe Mrs. Lawford's sister was in trouble. She found herself with child, she wasn't married and the man concerned was apparently a rogue."

"Wasn't me," Sharpe said quickly.

"Of course it wasn't you," Knowles said. He could be pedantically obvious at times.

Sharpe grinned. "So Slingsby was recruited to make her respectable?"

"Exactly. He's not from the topmost drawer, of course, but his family is more than acceptable. His father's a rector somewhere on the Essex coast, I believe, but they're not wealthy, and so Lawford's family rewarded Slingsby with a commission in the 55th, with a promise to exchange into the South Essex as soon as there was a vacancy. Which there was when poor Herrold died."

"Herrold?"

"Number three company," Knowles said, "arrived on a Monday, caught fever on Tuesday and was dead by Friday."

"So the idea," Sharpe said, watching a French gun battery being dragged along the track by the stream below, "is that bloody Slingsby gets quick promotion so that he's a worthy husband for the woman what couldn't keep her knees together."

"I wouldn't say that," Knowles said indignantly, then thought for a second. "Well, yes, I would say that. But the Colonel wants him to do well. After all, Slingsby did the family a favor and now they're trying to do one back."

"By giving him my bloody job," Sharpe said.

"Don't be absurd, Richard."

"Why else is the bugger here? They move you out of the way, give the bastard a horse and hope to God the French kill me." He fell silent, not only because he had said too much, but because Patrick Harper was approaching.

The big Sergeant greeted Knowles cheerfully. "We miss you, sir, we do."

"I can say the same, Sergeant," Knowles responded with real pleasure. "You're well?"

"Still breathing, sir, and that's what counts." Harper turned to look down into the valley. "Look at those daft bastards, just lining up to be murdered."

"They'll take one look at this hill," Sharpe said, "and find another road."

Yet there was no sign that the French would take that good advice for the blue-uniformed battalions still marched steadily from the east and French gun batteries, dust flying from their big wheels, continued to arrive at the lower villages. Some French officers rode to the top of a spur which jutted east from the ridge and gazed through their telescopes at the few British and Portuguese officers visible where the better road crossed the ridge top. That road, the farther north of the two, zigzagged up the slope, climbing at first between gorse and heather, then cutting through vineyards beneath the small village perched on the slope. That was the road which led to Lisbon and to the completion of the Emperor's orders, which were to hurl the British out of Portugal so that the whole coastline of continental Europe would belong to the French.

Lieutenant Slingsby, his red coat newly brushed and his badges polished, came to offer his opinion of the enemy, and Sharpe, unable to stand the man's company, walked away southwards. He watched the French cutting down trees to make fires or shelters. Some small streams fell from the far hills to join and make a larger stream that flowed south towards the Mondego River which touched the ridge's southern end, and the bigger stream's banks were being trampled by horses, some from the gun teams, some cavalry mounts and some the officers' horses, all being given a drink after their march.

The French were concentrating in two places. One tangle of battalions was around the village from which the better road climbed to the northern end of the ridge, while others were two miles to the south, gathering at another village from which a track, passable to packhorses or men on foot, twisted to the ridge's crest. It was not a proper road, there were no ruts from carts, and in places the track almost vanished into the heather, but it did show the French that there was a route up the steep slope, and French batteries were now deploying either side of the village so that the guns could rake the track ahead of their advancing troops.

The sound of axes and falling trees came from behind Sharpe. One company from each battalion had been detailed to make a road just behind the ridge's crest, a road that would let Lord Wellington shift his forces anywhere along the hill's ten-mile length. Trees were being felled, bushes uprooted, rocks being rolled away and the soil smoothed so that British or Portuguese guns could be pulled swiftly to any danger point. It was a huge piece of work and Sharpe suspected it would all be wasted for the French would surely not be mad enough to climb the hill.

Except some were already climbing. A score of mounted officers, wanting a closer view of the British and Portuguese position, had ridden their horses along the summit of the spur which jutted out from the long ridge. The spur was less than half the height of the ridge, but it provided a platform on which troops could gather for an assault and the British and Portuguese gunners had plainly marked it as a target for, as the French horsemen neared the place where the spur joined the ridge, a cannon fired. The sound was flat and hard, startling a thousand birds up from the trees which grew thick on the ridge's reverse slope. The gun's smoke roiled in a gray-white cloud that was carried east on the small wind. The shell left a trace of powder smoke from its burning fuse as it arced down to explode a few paces beyond the French horsemen. One of the horses panicked and bolted back the way it had come, but the others seemed unworried as their riders took out telescopes and stared at the enemy above them.

Then two more guns fired, their sound echoing back from the eastern hills. One was evidently a howitzer for the smoke of its burning fuse went high in the sky before dropping towards the French. This time a horse was flung sideways to leave a smear of blood on the dry, pale heather. Sharpe was watching through his telescope and saw the unsaddled and evidently unwounded Frenchman get to his feet. He brushed himself down, drew a pistol and put his twitching horse out of its misery, then struggled to release the precious saddle. He trudged back eastwards, carrying saddle, saddlecloth and bridle.

More French, some mounted and some on foot, were coming to the spur. It seemed a madness to go where the guns were aiming, but dozens of French were wading through the stream and then climbing the low hill to stare up at the British and Portuguese. The gunfire continued. It was not the staccato fire of battle, but desultory shots as the gunners experimented with powder loads and fuse lengths. Too much powder and a shot would scream over the spur to explode somewhere above the stream, while if the fuse was cut too long the shell would land, bounce and come to rest with the fuse still smoking, giving the French time to skip out of the way before the shell exploded. Each detonation was a puff of dirty smoke, surprisingly small, but Sharpe could not see the deadly scraps of broken shell casing hiss away from each blast.

No more French horses or men were struck. They were well spread out and the shells obstinately fell in the gaps between the small groups of men who looked as carefree as folk out for a walk in a park. They stared up at the ridge, trying to determine where the defenses lay thickest, though it was surely obvious that the places where the two roads reached the summit would be the places to defend. Another score of cavalrymen, some in green coats and some in sky blue, splashed through the stream and spurred up the lower hill. The sun glinted on brass helmets, polished scabbards, stirrups and curb chains. It was, Sharpe thought, as though the French were playing cat and mouse with the sporadic shell fire. He saw a shell burst close by a group of infantrymen, but when the smoke cleared they were all standing and it seemed to him, though they were very far away, that they were laughing. They were confident, he thought, sure they were the best troops in the world, and their survival of the gunfire was a taunt to the defenders on the ridge's top.

The taunting was evidently too much, for a battalion of brown-jacketed Portuguese light troops appeared on the crest and, scattered in a

I Bernard Cornwell

double skirmish chain, advanced down the ridge's slope towards the spur. They went steadily downhill in two loose lines, one fifty paces behind the other, both spread out, giving a demonstration of how skirmishers went to war. Most troops fought shoulder to shoulder, but skirmishers like Sharpe went ahead of the line and, in the killing ground between the armies, tried to pick off the enemy skirmishers and then kill the officers behind so that when the two armies clashed, dense line against massive column, the enemy was already leaderless. Skirmishers rarely closed ranks. They fought close to the enemy where a bunch of men would make an easy target for enemy gunners, and so the light troops fought in loose formation, in pairs, one man shooting and then reloading as his comrade protected him.

The French watched the Portuguese come. They showed no alarm, nor did they advance any skirmishers of their own. The shells went on arcing clown the slope, their detonations echoing dully from the eastern hills. The vast mass of the French were making their bivouacs, ignoring the small drama on the ridge, but a dozen cavalrymen, seeing easy meat in the scattered Portuguese skirmishers, kicked their horses up the hill.

By rights the cavalrymen should have decimated the skirmishers. Men in a loose formation were no match for swift cavalry and the French, half of them dragoons and the other half hussars, had drawn their long swords or curved sabers and were anticipating some practice cuts on helpless men. The Portuguese were armed with muskets and rifles, but once the guns were fired there would be no time to reload before the surviving horsemen reached them, and an empty gun was no defense against a dragoon's long blade. The cavalry were curving around to assault the flank of the line, a dozen horsemen approaching four Portuguese on foot, but the ridge was too steep for the horses, which began to labor. The advantage of the cavalry was speed, but the ridge stole their speed so that the horses were struggling and a rifle cracked, the smoke jetting above the grass, and a horse stumbled, twisted away and collapsed. Another two rifles fired and the French, realizing that the ridge was their enemy, turned away and galloped recklessly downhill. The unhorsed hussar followed on foot, abandoning his dying horse with its precious equipment to the Portuguese who cheered their small victory.

"I'm not sure the cazadores had orders to do that," a voice said behind Sharpe, who turned to see that Major Hogan had come to the ridge. "Hello, Richard," Hogan said cheerfully, "you look unhappy." He held out his hand for Sharpe's telescope.

"Cazadores?" Sharpe asked.

"Hunters. It's what the Portuguese call their skirmishers." Hogan was staring at the brown-coated skirmishers as he spoke. "It's rather a good name, don't you think? Hunters? Better than greenjackets."

"I'll stay a greenjacket," Sharpe said.

Hogan watched the cazadores for a few moments. Their riflemen had begun firing at the French on the spur, and that enemy prudently backed away. The Portuguese stayed where they were, not going down to the spur where the horsemen could attack them, content to have made their demonstration. Two guns fired, the shells falling into the empty space between the cazadores and the remaining French. "The Peer will be very unhappy," Hogan said. "He detests gunners firing at hopeless targets. It just reveals where his batteries are placed and it does no damn harm to the enemy." He turned the telescope to the valley and spent a long time looking at the enemy encampments beyond the stream. "We reckon Monsieur Massena has sixty thousand men," he said, "and maybe a hundred guns."

"And us, sir?" Sharpe asked.

"Fifty thousand and sixty," Hogan said, giving Sharpe back the telescope, "and half of ours are Portuguese."

There was something in his tone that caught Sharpe's attention. "Is that bad?" he asked.

"We'll see, won't we?" Hogan said, then stamped his foot on the turf. "But we do have this." He meant the ridge.

"Those lads seem eager enough." Sharpe nodded at the cazadores who were now retreating up the hill.

"Eagerness in new troops is quickly wiped away by gunfire," Hogan said.

"I doubt we'll find out," Sharpe said. "The Crapauds won't attack up here. They're not mad."

"I certainly wouldn't want to attack up this slope " Hogan agreed. "My suspicion is that they'll spend the day staring at us, then go away."

"Back to Spain?"

"Good Lord, no. If they did but know it there's a fine road that loops round the top of this ridge," he pointed north, "and they don't need to fight us here at all. They'll find that road eventually. Pity, really. This would be a grand place to give them a bloody nose. But they may come. They reckon the Portuguese aren't up to scratch, so perhaps they'll think it's worth an attempt."

"Are the Portuguese up to scratch?" Sharpe asked. The gunfire had ended, leaving scorched grass and small patches of smoke on the spur. The French, denied their game of dare, were drifting back towards their lines.

"We'll find out about the Portuguese if the French decide to have at us," Hogan said grimly, then smiled. "Can you come for supper tonight?"

"Tonight?" Sharpe was surprised by the question.

"I spoke with Colonel Lawford," Hogan said, "and he's happy to spare you, so long as the French aren't being a nuisance. Six o'clock, Richard, at the monastery. You know where that is?"

"No, sir."

"Go north," Hogan pointed up the ridge, "until you see a great stone wall. Find a gap in it, go downhill through the trees until you discover a path and follow that till you see rooftops. There'll be three of us sitting down."

"Three?" Sharpe asked suspiciously.

"You," Hogan said, "me and Major Ferreira."

"Ferreira!" Sharpe exclaimed. "Why's that slimy piece of traitorous shit having supper with us?"

Hogan sighed. "Has it occurred to you, Richard, that the two tons of flour might have been a bribe? Something to exchange for information?"

"Was it?"

"Ferreira says so. Do I believe him? I'm not sure. But whatever, Richard, I think he regrets what happened and wants to make his peace with us. It was his idea to have supper, and I must say I think it decent of him." Hogan saw Sharpe's reluctance. "Truly, Richard. We don't want resentments to fester between allies, do we?"

"We don't, sir?"

"Six o'clock, Richard," Hogan said firmly, "and try to convey the impression that you're enjoying yourself." The Irishman smiled, then walked back to the ridge's crest where officers were pacing off the ground to determine where each battalion would be positioned. Sharpe wished he had found a good excuse to miss the supper. It was not Hogan's company he wanted to avoid, but the Portuguese Major, and he felt increasingly bitter as he sat in the unseasonable warmth, watching the wind stir the heather beneath which an army, sixty thousand strong, had come to contest the ridge of Bussaco.

Sharpe spent the afternoon bringing the company books up to date, helped by Clayton, the company clerk, who had the annoying habit of saying the words aloud as he wrote them. "Isaiah Tongue, deceased," he said to himself, then blew on the ink. "Does he have a widow, sir?"

"Don't think so."

"He's owed four shillings and sixpence halfpenny is why I ask."

"Put it in the company fund."

"If we ever gets any wages," Clayton said gloomily. The company fund was where stray money went, not that there ever was much stray money, but wages owed to the dead were put there and, once in a while, it was spent on brandy, or to pay the company wives for the laundry. Some of those wives had come to the ridge's crest where, joined by scores of civilians, they were gazing down at the French. The civilians had all been ordered to go south, to find the safety of the countryside around Lisbon that was protected by the Lines of Torres Vedras, but plainly many had disobeyed for there were scores of Portuguese folk gawping at the invaders. Some of the spectators had brought bread, cheese and wine and now sat in groups eating and talking and pointing at the French, and a dozen monks, all with bare feet, were among them.

"Why don't they wear shoes?" Clayton asked.

"God knows."

Clayton frowned disapprovingly at a monk who had joined one of the small groups eating on the ridge. "Dejeuner a la fourchette," he said, sniffing with disapproval.

"Day-jay what?" Sharpe asked.

"Dinner with a fork," Clayton explained. He had been a footman in a great house before he joined the South Essex, and had a great knowledge of the gentry's strange ways. "It's what people of quality do, sir, when they don't want to spend a lot of money. Give 'em food and a fork and let 'em wander round the grounds sniffing the bloody flowers. All titter and eissle in the garden." He frowned at the monks. "Shoeless bloody papist monks," he said. The gowned men were not monks at all, but friars of the Discalced Carmelite order, two of whom were gravely inspecting a nine-pounder cannon. "And you should see inside their bloody monastery, sir," Clayton went on. "The altar in one of the chapels is smothered with wooden tits."

Sharpe gaped at Clayton. "It's smothered with what?"

"Wooden tits, sir, all painted to look real. Got nipples and everything! I took the ration returns down there, sir, and one of the guards showed me. I couldn't believe my eyes! Mind you, them monks ain't allowed the real things, are they, so perhaps they make do as best they can. Punishment book now, sir?"

"See if you can scuff up some tea instead," Sharpe suggested.

He drank the tea on the crest. The French were plainly not planning to attack this day for their troops were scattered about the bivouacs near the villages. Their numbers had grown so that the low ground was now dark with men, while nearer the ridge shirt sleeved gunners were piling shot beside the newly placed batteries. The position of those batteries suggested where the French would attack, if indeed they did, and Sharpe saw that the South Essex would be just to the left of any assault aimed up the rough southern track that had been barricaded near its top with felled trees, presumably to deter the French from dragging their artillery up towards the crest. More French guns were crowded close to the road at the northern end of the ridge, which suggested there would be two assaults, and Sharpe supposed they would be like every other French attack he had ever endured: great columns of men advancing to the beat of massed drums, hoping to batter their way through the Anglo-Portuguese line like giant rams. The vast columns were supposed to overawe inexperienced troops and Sharpe looked to his left where the officers of a Portuguese battalion were watching the enemy. Would they stand? The Portuguese army had been reorganized in the last few months, but they were enduring the third invasion of their country in three years, and so far no one could pretend that the Portuguese army had covered itself in glory.

There was a parade and inspection of kit in the late afternoon, and when it was done Sharpe walked north along the ridge until he saw the high stone wall enclosing a great wood. The Portuguese and British soldiers, wanting passage through the wall, had knocked gaps in it and Sharpe negotiated one such breach and went into the trees, eventually finding a path which led downhill. There were odd-looking brick sheds beside the path, equally spaced, each about the size of a gardener's potting shed, and Sharpe stopped at the first to peer through the door which was made of iron bars. Inside were clay statues, life-size, showing a group of women clustered about a half-naked man and then Sharpe saw the crown of thorns and realized the central figure must be Jesus and that the brick sheds had to be part of the monastery. All of the small buildings had the eerie statues, and at several of the shrines shawled women were kneeling in prayer. A very pretty girl was beside another, listening shyly to an impassioned Portuguese officer who paused, embarrassed, as Sharpe walked by. The officer began his harangue again as soon as Sharpe had gone down a flight of stone steps that led to the monastery. An ancient and gnarled olive tree grew by the entrance and a dozen saddled horses were tethered to its branches, while two redcoats stood guard by the doorway. They ignored Sharpe as he ducked through the low archway into a dark passageway lined with doors that were covered with thick layers of cork. One of the doors was open and Sharpe looked inside to see a shirt sleeved surgeon in a monk's small cell. The surgeon was sharpening a scalpel. "I'm open for trade," he said cheerfully.

"Not today, sir. Do you know where I'll find Major Hogan?"

"End of the passage, door on the right."

The supper was awkward. They ate in one of the small cells that was lined with cork to keep out the cold of the coming winter, and their meal was a stew of goat and beans, with coarse bread, cheese and a plentiful supply of wine. Hogan did his best to keep the conversation moving, but Sharpe had little to say to Major Ferreira who never referred to the events on the hilltop where Sharpe had burned the telegraph tower. Instead he talked of his time in Brazil where he had commanded a fort in one of the Portuguese settlements. "The women are beautiful!" Ferreira exclaimed. "The most beautiful women in all the world!"

"Including the slaves?" Sharpe asked, causing Hogan, who knew Sharpe was trying to turn the subject to the Major's brother, to roll his eyes.

"The slaves are the prettiest!" Ferreira said. "And so obliging."

"Not much choice," Sharpe observed sourly. "Your brother didn't give them any, did he?"

Hogan tried to intervene, but Major Ferreira stilled his protest. "My brother, Mister Sharpe?"

"He was a slaver, yes?"

"My brother has been many things," Ferreira said. "As a child he was beaten because the monks who taught us wanted him to be pious. He is not pious. My father beat him because he would not read his books, but the beating did not make him a reader. He was happiest with the servants' children, he ran wild with them until my mother could take his wildness no longer and so he was sent to the nuns of Santo Espirito. They tried to beat the spirit from him, but he ran away. He was thirteen then, and he came back sixteen years later. He came back rich and quite determined, Mister Sharpe, that no one would ever beat him again."

"I did," Sharpe said.

"Richard!" Hogan remonstrated.

Ferreira ignored Hogan, staring at Sharpe across the candles. "He has not forgotten," he said quietly.

"But it's all cleared up," Hogan said. "An accident! Apologies have been made. Try some of this cheese, Major." He pushed a chipped plate of cheese across the table. "Major Ferreira and I, Richard, have been questioning deserters all afternoon."

"French?"

"Lord, no. Portuguese." Hogan explained that, following the fall of Almeida, scores of that fortress's Portuguese garrison had volunteered into the Portuguese Legion, a French unit. "It seems they did it," Hogan explained, "because it gave them a chance to get near our lines and desert. Over thirty came in this evening. And they're all saying that the French will attack in the morning."

"You believe them?"

"I believe they are telling the truth as they know it," Hogan said, "and their orders were to make ready for an attack. What they don't know, of course, is whether Massena will change his mind."

"Monsieur Massena," Ferreira remarked acidly, "is too busy with his mistress to think sensibly about battle."

"His mistress?" Sharpe asked.

"Mademoiselle Henriette Leberton," Hogan said, amused, "who is eighteen years old, Richard, while Monsieur Massena is what? Fifty-one? No, fifty-two. Nothing distracts an old man so effectively as young flesh, which makes Mademoiselle Leberton one of our more valued allies. His Majesty's government should pay her an allowance. A guinea a night, perhaps?"

When the supper was eaten Ferreira insisted on showing Hogan and Sharpe the shrine where, as Clayton had said, wooden breasts lay on an altar. A score of small candles flickered around the weird objects and dozens of other candles had burned down to wax puddles. "Women bring the breasts," Ferreira explained, "to be cured of diseases. Women's diseases." He yawned, then pulled a watch from his waistcoat pocket. "I must get back to the ridge top," he said. "An early night, I think. Perhaps the enemy will come at dawn."

"Let's hope so," Hogan said.

Ferreira made the sign of the cross, bowed to the altar and left. Sharpe listened as the sound of the Major's spurred boots faded down the passage. "What the hell was that all about?" he asked Hogan.

"What was what about, Richard?"

"That supper!"

"He was being friendly. Showing you there are no hard feelings."

"But there are! He said his brother hadn't forgotten."

"Not forgotten, but persuaded to let the matter rest. And so should you."

"I wouldn't trust that bugger as far as I can spit," Sharpe said, then had to step back because the door had been pushed wide open and a noisily cheerful group of British officers stepped into the small room. One man alone was not in uniform, wearing instead a blue top coat and a white silk stock. It was Lord Wellington, who glanced at Sharpe, but appeared not to notice him.

Instead the General nodded to Hogan. "Come to worship, Major?" he asked.

"I was showing Mister Sharpe the sights, my lord."

"I doubt Mister Sharpe needs to see replications," Wellington said. "He probably sees more of the real article than most of us, eh?" He spoke genially enough, but with an edge of scorn, then looked directly at Sharpe. "I hear you did your duty three days ago, Mister Sharpe," he said. Sharpe was confused, first by the sudden change of tone and then by the statement, which seemed strange after Hogan's earlier reproof. "I hope so, my lord," he answered carefully.

"Can't leave food for the French," the General said, turning back to the modeled breasts, "and I would have thought I had made that stratagem entirely clear." The last few words were said harshly and left the other officers silent. Then Wellington smiled and gestured at the votive breasts. "Can't quite imagine these things in Saint Paul's," he went on, "can you, Hogan?"

"They might improve the place, my lord."

"Indeed they might. I shall advert the matter to the Dean." He gave his horse neigh of a laugh, then abruptly looked at Hogan again. "Any news from Trant?"

"None, my lord."

"Let us hope that is good news." The General nodded at Hogan, ignored Sharpe again and led his guests back to wherever they were having supper.

"Trant?" Sharpe asked.

"There's a road round the top of the ridge," Hogan said, "and we have a cavalry vedette there and, I trust, some Portuguese militia under Colonel Trant. They are under orders to alert us if they see any sign of the enemy, but no word has come, so we must hope Massena is ignorant of the route. If he thinks his only road to Lisbon is up this hill, then up this hill he must come. I must say, unlikely as it seems, that he probably will attack."

"And maybe at dawn," Sharpe said, "so I must get some sleep." He grinned at Hogan. "So I was right about bloody Ferragus and you were wrong?"

Hogan returned the grin. "It is very ungentlemanly to gloat, Richard."

"How did Wellington know?"

"I suppose Major Ferreira complained to him. He said he didn't, but… " Hogan shrugged.

"You can't trust that Portuguese bugger," Sharpe said. "Get one of your nasties to slit his throat."

"You're the only nasty I know," Hogan said, "and it's past your bedtime. So good night, Richard."

It was not late yet, probably no more than nine o'clock, but the sky was black dark and the temperature had fallen sharply. A wind had come from the west to bring cold air from the distant sea and a mist was forming among the trees as Sharpe climbed back to the path where the strange statues were housed in their brick huts. The path was deserted now. The bulk of the army was up on the ridge and any troops bivouacking behind the line were encamped around the monastery where their fires offered some small light that filtered through the wood to throw Sharpe's monstrous shadow flickering across tree trunks, but that small light faded as Sharpe climbed higher. There were no fires on the ridge top because Wellington had ordered that none were to be lit so that their glow could not betray to the French where the allied army was concentrated, though Sharpe suspected the enemy must have guessed. The lack of campfires made the upper hill bleakly dark. The mist thickened. Far off, beyond the wall that encircled the monastery and its forest, Sharpe could hear singing coming from the British and Portuguese encampments, but the loudest noise was his own footsteps on the pine needles that carpeted the path. The first of the shrines came into sight, lit from inside by votive candles that cast a small hazy glow through the chill mist. A black-gowned monk knelt in prayer by the last shrine and, as Sharpe passed, he thought of offering the man a greeting, then decided against interrupting the monk's devotions, but just then the cowled man lashed out, catching Sharpe behind his left knee, and two more men came from behind the shrine, one with a cudgel that smacked into Sharpe's belly. He went down hard, his metal scabbard clanging against the ground. He twisted away, trying to draw the sword, but the two men who had come from behind the shrine seized his arms and dragged him into the building where there was a small space in front of the statues. They kicked some candles aside to make more room. One drew Sharpe's sword and tossed it onto the path outside, while the cowled monk pushed back his hood.

It was Ferragus, vast and tall, filling the shrine with his menace. "You cost me a lot of money," he said in his strongly accented English. Sharpe was still on the ground. He tried to stand up, but one of Ferragus's two companions kicked him in the shoulder and forced him back. "A lot of money," Ferragus said heavily. "You wish to pay me now?" Sharpe said nothing. He needed a weapon. He had a folding knife in one pocket, but he knew he would never have time to pull it out, let alone extract the blade. "How much money do you have?" Ferragus asked. Sharpe still said nothing. "Or would you rather fight me?" Ferragus went on. "Bare knuckles, Captain, toe to toe."

Sharpe made a curt suggestion of what Ferragus could do and the big man smiled and spoke to his men in Portuguese. They attacked with their boots, kicking Sharpe, who drew up his knees to shield his belly. He guessed they were ordered to disable him and thus leave him to Ferragus's mercies, but the shrine was small, the space left by the statues cramped and the two men got in each other's way. Their kicks still hurt. Sharpe tried to lunge up at them, but a boot caught him on the side of the face and he fell back heavily, rocking the kneeling image of Mary Magdalene, and that gave him his weapon. He hammered the statue with his right elbow, smacking its knee so hard that the clay shattered and Sharpe snatched up one shard that was nearly a foot long and ended in a wicked point. He stabbed the makeshift dagger at the nearest man, aiming at his groin, but the man twisted aside so that the clay sliced into his inner thigh. The man grunted. Sharpe was up from the floor now, using his head as a battering ram that he thumped into the wounded man's belly. A fist caught him on the side of the nose, a boot slammed into his ribs, but he lunged the clay dagger at Ferragus, slicing it along the big man's jawbone, then a mighty blow on the side of his head threw him back and he fell against Christ's clay lap. Ferragus ordered his men to get out of the shrine, to give him room, and he punched Sharpe again, delivering a ringing blow on the temple, and Sharpe let go of his makeshift knife, put his arm round the Son of God's neck and jerked it hard so that the whole head came clean off. Ferragus threw a straight left jab and Sharpe dodged it, then came off the ground to ram the broken head with its crown of thorns up into Ferragus's face. The hollow clay skull cracked apart as it hit, its jagged edges gouging deep cuts in the big man's cheeks, and Sharpe twisted to his left as Ferragus recoiled. Sharpe scrambled through the door, trying to reach his sword, but the two men were outside and they fell on him. Sharpe heaved, managed to half turn over, and then got a kick in the belly that drove all the wind out of him.

Ferragus had kicked him, and now he ordered his two men to pull Sharpe up. "You can't fight," he told Sharpe, "you're feeble," and he began punching, using short, hard blows that looked to have little force in them, but they felt to Sharpe as if he was being kicked by a horse. The blows started at his belly, worked up his chest, then one slammed into his cheek and blood started inside Sharpe's mouth. He tried to free himself from the two men's grip, but they held him too tight and he was dazed, confused, half conscious. A fist caught him in the throat and now he could hardly breathe, gagging for air, and Ferragus laughed. "My brother said I shouldn't kill you, but why not? Who'll miss you?" He spat into Sharpe's face. "Let him go," he said to the two men in Portuguese, then changed to English. "Let's see if this Englishman can fight."

The two men stepped away from Sharpe who spat blood, blinked, and staggered two paces backwards. His sword was out of reach, and even if he could have fetched it he doubted he would have the strength to use it. Ferragus smiled at his weakness, stepped towards him and Sharpe staggered again, this time half falling sideways, and he put his hand down to steady himself and there was a stone there, a big stone, the size of a ration biscuit, and he picked it up just as Ferragus threw a right fist intended to knock Sharpe down for ever. Sharpe, still half aware, reacted instinctively, blocking the fist with the stone, and Ferragus's knuckles cracked on the rock and the big man flinched and stepped back, astonished by the sudden pain. Sharpe tried to step towards him and use the stone again, but a left jab banged into his chest and threw him back down onto the path.

"Now you're a dead man," Ferragus said. He was massaging his broken knuckles, and was in such pain from them that he wanted to kick Sharpe to death. He began by aiming a massive boot at Sharpe's groin but the blow landed short, on the thigh, because Sharpe had managed to twist feebly to one side, and Ferragus kicked his leg away, drew his boot back again and suddenly there was a light on the path behind him and a voice calling.

"What's going on!" the voice shouted. "Hold still! Whoever you are, hold still!" The boots of two or three men sounded on the path. The approaching men must have heard the fight, but they could surely see nothing in the thickening mist and Ferragus did not wait for them. He shouted at his two men and they ran past Sharpe, down through the trees, and Sharpe curled up on the ground, trying to squeeze the pain from his ribs and belly. There were thick gobs of blood in his mouth and his nose was bleeding. The light came nearer, a lantern held by a redcoat. "Sir?" one of the three men asked. He was a sergeant and had the dark-blue facings of the provosts, the army's policemen.

"I'm all right," Sharpe grunted.

"What happened?"

"Thieves," Sharpe said. "God knows who they were. Just thieves. Jesus. Help me up."

Two of them lifted him while the Sergeant retrieved his sword and shako. "How many were there?" the Sergeant asked.

"Three. Bastards ran away."

"You want to see a surgeon, sir?" The Sergeant flinched as he saw Sharpe's face in the lantern light. "I think you should."

"Christ, no." He sheathed the sword, put his shako on his bruised skull and leaned against the shrine. "I'll be all right," he said.

"We can take you to the monastery, sir."

"No. I'll make my way up to the ridge." He thanked the three men, wished them a peaceful night, waited until he had recovered some strength, and then limped back uphill, through the wall and down the ridge to find his company.

Colonel Lawford had pitched a tent close to the new road that had been hacked along the ridge top. The tent flaps were open, revealing a candlelit table on which silver and crystal gleamed, and the Colonel heard a sentry challenge Sharpe, heard Sharpe's muffled response and shouted through the open flaps, "Sharpe! Is that you?"

Sharpe thought briefly about pretending not to have heard, but he was plainly within earshot so he turned towards the tent. "Yes, sir."

"Come and have some brandy." Lawford was entertaining Majors Forrest and Leroy, and with them was Lieutenant Slingsby. All had on greatcoats for, after the last few days of brutal heat, the night was suddenly winter cold.

Forrest made space on a bench made out of wooden ammunition crates, then stared up at Sharpe. "What happened to you?"

"Took a tumble, sir," Sharpe said. His voice was thick, and he leaned to one side and spat out a glutinous gobbet of blood. "Took a tumble."

"A tumble?" Lawford was gazing at Sharpe with an expression of horror. "Your nose is bleeding."

"Mostly stopped, sir," Sharpe said, sniffing blood. He remembered the handkerchief that had been used as a white flag at the telegraph station and fished it out. It seemed a pity to stain the fine linen with blood, but he put it over his nose, flinching at the pain. Then he noticed his right hand was cut, presumably by the makeshift clay dagger.

"A tumble?" Major Leroy echoed the Colonel's question.

"Treacherous path down there, sir."

"You've got a black eye too," Lawford said.

"If you're not up to scratch," Slingsby said, "then I'll happily command the company tomorrow, Sharpe." Slingsby was high-colored and sweating, as if he had drunk too much. He looked to Colonel Lawford and, because he was nervous, gave a snort of laughter. "Be honored to command, sir," he added quickly.

Sharpe gave the Lieutenant a look that would have killed. "I was hurt worse than this," he said icily, "when Sergeant Harper and I took that damned Eagle on your badge."

Slingsby stiffened, appalled at Sharpe's tone, and the other officers looked embarrassed.

"Have some brandy, Sharpe," Lawford said emolliently, pouring it from a decanter and pushing the glass across the trestle table. "How was Major Hogan?"

Sharpe was hurting. His ribs were like strips of fire and it took him a moment to comprehend the question and find an answer. "He's confident, sir."

"I should hope so," Lawford said. "Aren't we all? Did you see the Peer?"

"The Peer?" Slingsby asked. He stumbled slightly on the word, then tossed down the rest of his brandy and helped himself to more.

"Lord Wellington," Lawford explained. "So did you see him, Sharpe?"

"Yes, sir."

"I hope you remembered me to him?"

"Of course, sir." Sharpe told the required lie and forced himself to add another. "And he asked me to present his regards."

"Very civil of him," Lawford said, plainly pleased. "And does he think the French will come up and dance tomorrow?"

"He didn't say, sir."

"Perhaps this fog will deter them," Major Leroy said, peering out of the tent where the haze was perceptibly thickening.

"Or it will encourage them," Forrest said. "Our gunners can't aim into fog."

Leroy was watching Sharpe. "Do you need a doctor?"

"No, sir," Sharpe lied. His ribs hurt, his skull was throbbing and one of his upper teeth was loose. His belly was a mass of pain, his thigh hurt and he was angry. "Major Hogan," he forced himself to change the subject, "thinks the French will attack."

"Then we'd best keep a keen eye in the morning," Lawford said, hinting that the evening was over. The officers took the hint, standing and thanking the Colonel, who held out a hand to Sharpe. "Stay a moment, if you will, Sharpe."

Slingsby, who looked the worse for drink, drained his glass, banged it down and clicked his heels. "Thank you, William," he said to Lawford, presuming on their relationship to use the Colonel's Christian name.

"Good night, Cornelius," Lawford said, and waited until the three officers had gone from the tent and were lost in the mist. "He drank rather a lot. Still, I suppose on the eve of a man's first battle a little fortification isn't out of order. Sit, Sharpe, sit. Drink some brandy." He took a glass himself. "Was it really a tumble? You look as if you've been in the wars."

"Dark in the trees, sir," Sharpe said woodenly, "and I missed my footing on some steps."

"You must take more care, Sharpe," Lawford said, leaning forward to light a cigar from one of the candles. "It's gone damned cold, hasn't it?" He waited for a response, but Sharpe said nothing and the Colonel sighed. "I wanted to talk to you," he went on between puffs, "about your new fellows. Young Iliffe shaping up well, is he?"

"He's an ensign, sir. If he survives a year he might have a chance of growing up."

"We were all ensigns once," Lawford said, "and mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow, eh?"

"He's still a bloody small acorn," Sharpe said.

"But his father's a friend of mine, Sharpe. He farms a few acres near Benfleet and he wanted me to look after his son."

"I'll look after him," Sharpe said.

"I'm sure you will," Lawford said, "and what about Cornelius?"

"Cornelius?" Sharpe asked, wanting time to think. He swilled his bloody mouth out with brandy, spat it onto the ground, then drank some and fancied it took away some of the hurt.

"How's Cornelius doing?" Lawford asked pleasantly. "Being useful, is he?"

"He has to learn our ways," Sharpe said warily.

"Of course he must, of course. But I particularly wanted him to be with you."

"Why, sir?"

"Why?" The Colonel seemed taken aback by the direct question, but then waved the cigar as if to say the answer was obvious. "I think he's a capital fellow, and I'll be honest with you, Sharpe, I'm not sure young Knowles possesses the right verve for skirmishing."

"He's a good officer," Sharpe said indignantly, and then wished he had not spoken so forcibly for the pain in his ribs seemed to stab right to his heart.

"Oh, none finer!" Lawford agreed hastily. "And an admirable character, but you skirmishers aren't dull fellows, are you? You're the whippers-in! I need my light company to be audacious! Aggressive! Astute!" Each quality was accompanied by a thump that rattled the glass and silverware on the table, but the Colonel paused after the third, evidently realizing that astuteness lacked the force of audacity and aggression. He thought for a few seconds, trying to find a more impressive word, then carried on without thinking of it. "I believe Cornelius has those qualities and I look to you, Sharpe, to bring him on." Lawford paused again, as if expecting Sharpe to respond, but when the rifleman said nothing the Colonel looked acutely embarrassed. "The nub of the matter is, Sharpe, that Cornelius seems to think you don't like him."

"Most people think that, sir," Sharpe said woodenly.

"Do they?" Lawford looked surprised. "I suppose they might. Not everyone knows you as well as I do." He paused to draw on his cigar. "Do you ever miss India, Sharpe?"

"India," Sharpe responded cautiously. He and Lawford had served there together when Lawford had been a lieutenant and Sharpe a private. "I liked it well enough."

"There are regiments in India that could use an experienced officer," Lawford said casually and Sharpe felt a stab of betrayal because the words suggested the Colonel did want to be rid of him. He said nothing, and Lawford seemed unaware of having given any offence. "So I can reassure Cornelius that all is well?"

"Yes, sir," Sharpe said, then stood. "I must go and inspect the picquets, sir."

"Of course you must," Lawford said, not hiding his frustration with the conversation. "We should talk more often, Sharpe."

Sharpe took his battered shako and walked out into the fog-shrouded night. He picked his way through the thick darkness, going across the ridge's wide crest and then some short way down the eastern slope until he could just see the mist-blurred string of enemy fires in the valley's deep darkness. Let them come, he thought, let them come. If he could not murder Ferragus then he would take out his anger on the French. He heard footsteps behind him, but did not turn round. "Evening, Pat," he said.

"What happened to you?" Harper must have seen Sharpe inside the Colonel's tent and had followed him down the slope.

"That bloody Ferragus and two of his coves."

"Tried to kill you?"

Sharpe shook his head. "Bloody nearly succeeded. Would have done, except three provosts came along."

"Provosts! Never thought they'd be useful. And how is Mister Ferragus?"

"I hurt him, but not enough. He beat me, Pat. Beat me bloody."

Harper thought about that. "And what did you tell the Colonel?"

"That I had a tumble."

"So that's what I'll tell the lads when they notice you're better-looking than usual. And tomorrow I'll keep an eye open for Mister Ferragus. You think he'll be back for more?"

"No, he's buggered off."

"We'll find him, sir, we'll find him."

"But not tomorrow, Pat. We're going to be busy tomorrow. Major Hogan reckons the Frogs are coming up this hill."

Which was a comforting thought to end the day, and the two sat, listening to the singing from the dark encampments behind. A dog began barking somewhere in the British lines and immediately dozens of others echoed the sound, prompting angry shouts as the beasts were told to be quiet, and slowly peace descended again, all but for one dog that would not stop. On and on it went, barking frantically, until there was the sudden harsh crack of a musket or pistol.

"That's the way to do it," Harper said.

Sharpe said nothing. He just gazed down the hill to where the French fires were a dull, hazed glow in the mist. "But what will we do about Mister Ferragus?" Harper asked. "He can't be allowed to get away with assaulting a rifleman."

"If we lose tomorrow," Sharpe said, "we'll have to retreat through Coimbra. That's where he lives."

"So we'll find him there," Harper said grimly, "and give him what he deserves. But what if we win tomorrow?"

"God only knows," Sharpe said, and nodded down the hill to the misted firelight. There were thousands of fires. "Follow those bastards back to Spain, I suppose," he went on, "and fight them there." And go on fighting them, he thought, month after month, year after year, until the very crack of doom. But it would begin tomorrow, with sixty thousand Frenchmen who wanted to take a hill. Tomorrow.

Marshal Ney, second in command of l'Armee de Portugal, reckoned the whole of the enemy army was on the ridge. There were no fires in the high darkness to betray their presence, but Ney could smell them. A soldier's instinct. The bastards were laying a trap, hoping the French would stroll up the hill to be slaughtered, and Ney reckoned they should be obliged. Send the Eagles up the hill and beat the bastards into mincemeat, but Ney was not the man to make that decision and so he summoned an aide, Captain D'Esmenard, and told him to find Marshal Massena. "Tell his highness," Ney said, "that the enemy's waiting to be killed. Tell him to get back here fast. Tell him there's a battle to be fought."

Captain D'Esmenard had a journey of more than twenty miles and he had to be escorted by two hundred dragoons who clattered into the small town of Tondella long after nightfall. A tricolor flew above the porch of the house where Massena lodged. Six sentries stood outside, their muskets tipped by bayonets that reflected the firelight of the brazier that offered a small warmth in the sudden cold.

D'Esmenard climbed the stairs and hammered on the Marshal's door. There was silence.

D'Esmenard knocked again. This time there was a woman's giggle followed by the distinct sound of a hand slapping flesh, then the woman laughed. "Who is it?" the Marshal called.

"A message from Marshal Ney, your highness." Marshal Andre Massena was Duke of Rivoli and Prince of Essling.

"From Ney?"

"The enemy has definitely stopped, sir. They're on the ridge."

The girl squealed.

"The enemy has what?"

"Stopped, sir," D'Esmenard shouted through the door. "The Marshal believes you should come back." Massena had been in the valley beneath the ridge for a few moments in the afternoon, given his opinion that the enemy would not stand and fight, and ridden back to Tondela. The girl said something and there was the sound of another slap followed by more giggling.

"Marshal Ney believes they are offering battle, sir," D'Esmenard said.

"Who are you?" the Marshal asked.

"Captain D'Esmenard, sir."

"One of Ney's boys, eh?"

"Yes, sir."

"Have you eaten, D'Esmenard?"

"No, sir."

"Go downstairs, Captain, tell my cook to give you supper. I shall join you."

"Yes, sir." D'Esmenard paused. He heard a grunt, a sigh, then the sound of bedsprings rhythmically squeaking.

"Are you still there, Captain?" the Prince of Essling shouted.

D'Esmenard crept downstairs, timing his steps on the creaking stair treads to the regular bounce of the bedsprings. He ate cold chicken. And waited.

Pedro and Luis Ferreira had always been close. Luis, the oldest, the rebel, the huge, uncontrollable boy, had been the brighter of the two, and if he had not been exiled from his family, if he had not been sent to the nuns who beat and mocked him, if he had not run away from Coimbra to see the world, he might have secured an education and become a scholar, though in truth that would have been an unlikely fate for Luis. He was too big, too belligerent, too careless of his own and other men's reelings, and so he had become Ferragus. He had sailed the world, killed men in Africa, Europe and America, had seen the sharks eat the dying slaves thrown overboard off the Brazilian coast, and then he had come home to his younger brother and the two of them, so different and yet so close, had embraced. They were brothers. Ferragus had come home rich enough to set himself up in business, rich enough to own a score of properties about the city, but Pedro insisted that he have a room in his house to use when he wished. "My house is your house," he had promised Ferragus, and though Major Ferreira's wife might wish otherwise she dared not protest.

Ferragus rarely used the room in his brother's house, but on the day when the two armies faced each other at Bussaco, after his brother had promised to lure Captain Sharpe to a beating among the trees, Ferragus had promised Pedro that he would return to Coimbra and there guard the Ferreira household until the pattern of the French campaign was clear. Folk were supposed to be fleeing the city, going to Lisbon, but if the French were stopped then no such flight would be necessary, and whether they were stopped or not, there was unrest in the streets because people were unhappy with the orders to abandon their homes. Ferreira's house, grand and rich, bought with the legacy of his father's wealth, would be a likely place for thieves to plunder, though none would dare touch it if Ferragus and his men were there and so, after his failure to kill the impudent rifleman, the big man rode to keep his promise.

The journey from the ridge of Bussaco to the city of Coimbra was less than twenty miles, but the mist and the darkness slowed Ferragus and his men, so it was just before dawn that they rode past the imposing university buildings and down the hill to his brother's house. There was a squeal from the hinges of the gates to the stable yard where Ferragus dismounted, abandoned his horse and pushed into the kitchen to thrust his injured hand into a vat of cool water. Sweet Jesus, he thought, but the damned rifleman had to die. Had to die. Ferragus brooded on the unfairness of life as he used a cloth to wipe the wounds on his jawbone and cheeks. He winced at the pain, though it was not as bad as the throbbing in his groin that persisted from their confrontation at the shrine. Next time, Ferragus promised himself, next time he would face Mister Sharpe with nothing but fists and he would kill the Englishman as he had killed so many other men, by pulverizing him into a bloody, whimpering mess. Sharpe had to die, Ferragus had sworn it, and if he did not keep the oath then his men would think he was weakening.

He was being weakened anyway. The war had seen to that. Many of his victims had fled Coimbra and its surrounding farmlands, gone to take shelter in Lisbon. That temporary setback would pass, and, anyway, Ferragus hardly needed to go on extorting money. He was rich, but he liked to keep cash flowing for he did not trust the banks. He liked land, and the vast profits of his slaving years had been invested in vineyards, farms, houses and shops. He owned every brothel in Coimbra and scarcely a student at the university did not live in a house owned by Ferragus. He was rich, rich beyond his childhood dreams, but he could never be rich enough. He loved money. He yearned for it, loved it, caressed it, dreamed of it.

He rinsed his jaw again and saw how the water dripped pink from the cloth. Capitao Sharpe. He said the name aloud, feeling the pain in his mouth. He looked at his hand that was hurting. He reckoned he had cracked some knuckle bones, but he could still move his fingers so the damage could not be that bad. He dipped the knuckles in the water, then turned suddenly as the kitchen door opened and his brother's governess, Miss Fry, dressed in a nightdress and a heavy woolen gown, came into the kitchen. She was carrying a candle and gave a small start of surprise when she saw her employer's brother. "I am sorry, senhor," she said, and made to leave.

"Come in," Ferragus growled.

Sarah would rather have gone back to her room, but she had heard the horses clattering in the stable yard and, hoping it might be Major Ferreira with news of the French advance, she had come to the kitchen. "You're hurt," she said.

"I fell from my horse," Ferragus said. "Why are you up?"

"To make tea," Sarah said. "I make it every morning. And I wondered, senhor," she took a kettle off the shelf, "whether you have news of the French."

"The French are pigs," Ferragus said, "which is all you need to know, so make your tea and make some for me too."

Sarah put down the candle, opened the stove and fed kindling onto the embers. When the kindling was blazing she put more wood onto the fire. By the time the fire was properly burning there were other servants busy around the house, opening shutters and sweeping the corridors, but none came into the kitchen where Sarah hesitated before filling the kettle. The water in the big vat was bloodstained. "I'll draw some from the well," she said.

Ferragus watched her through the open door. Miss Sarah Fry was a symbol of his brother's aspirations. To Major Ferreira and his wife an English governess was as prized a possession as fine porcelain or crystal chandeliers or gilt furniture. Sarah proclaimed their good taste, but Ferragus regarded her as a priggish waste of his brother's money. A typical, snobbish Englishwoman, he reckoned, and what would she turn Tomas and Maria into? Little stuck-up copies of herself? Tomas did not need manners or to know English; he needed to know how to defend himself. And Maria? Her mother could teach her manners, and so long as she was pretty, what else mattered? That was Ferragus's view, anyway, but he had also noticed, ever since Miss Fry had come to his brother's house, that she was pretty, more than just pretty, beautiful. Fair-skinned, fair-haired, blue-eyed, tall, elegant. "How old are you?" he asked as she came back to the kitchen.

"Is it any business of yours, senhor?" Sarah asked briskly.

Ferragus smiled. "My brother sent me here to protect you all. I like to know what I'm protecting."

"I'm twenty-two, senhor." Sarah set the kettle on the stove, then stood the big brown English teapot close by so that the china would warm. She took down the tin caddy, then had nothing to do because the pot was still cold and the kettle would take long minutes to boil on the newly awakened fire so, abhorring idleness, she began polishing some spoons.

"Are Tomas and Maria learning properly?" Ferragus addressed her back.

"When they apply themselves," Sarah said briskly. "Tomas tells me you hit him."

"Of course I hit him," Sarah said, "I am his governess."

"But you don't hit Maria?"

"Maria does not use bad language," Sarah said, "and I detest bad language."

"Tomas will be a man," Ferragus said, "so he will need bad language."

"Then he may learn it from you, senhor," Sarah retorted, looking Ferragus in the eye, "but I shall teach him not to use it in front of ladies. If he learns that alone then I shall have been useful."

Ferragus gave a grunt that might have been amusement. He was challenged by her gaze, which showed no fear of him. He was accustomed to his brother's other servants shrinking when he passed; they dropped their eyes and tried to become invisible, but this English girl was brazen. But also beautiful, and he marveled at the line of her neck which was shadowed by unruly fair hair. Such white skin, he thought, so delicate. "You teach them French. Why?" he asked.

"Because the Major's wife expects it," Sarah said, "because it is the language of diplomacy. Because possession of French is a requisite of gentility."

Ferragus made a growling noise in his throat that was evidently a verdict on gentility, then shrugged. "The language will at least be useful if the French come here," he said.

"If the French come here," Sarah said, "then we should be long gone. Is that not what the government has ordered?"

Ferragus flinched as he moved his right hand. "But perhaps they won't come now. Not if they lose the battle."

"The battle?"

"Your Lord Wellington is at Bussaco. He hopes the French will attack him."

"I pray they do," Sarah said confidently, "because then he will beat them."

"Perhaps," Ferragus said, "or perhaps your Lord Wellington will do what Sir John Moore did at La Corufia. Fight, win and run away."

Sarah sniffed to show her opinion of that statement.

"Os ingleses," Ferragus said savagely, "por mar."

The English, he had said, are for the sea. It was a general belief in Portugal. The British were opportunists, looking for victory, but running from any possible defeat. They had come, they had fought, but they would not stay to the end. Os ingleses por mar.

Sarah half feared Ferragus was right, but would not admit it. "You say your brother sent you to protect us?" she asked instead.

"He did. He can't be here. He has to stay with the army."

"Then I shall rely on you, senhor, to make certain I am long gone to safety if, as you say, the English take to the sea. I cannot stay here if the French come."

"You cannot stay here?"

"Indeed not. I am English."

"I shall protect you, Miss Fry," Ferragus said.

"I am glad to hear it," she said briskly and turned back to the kettle.

Bitch, Ferragus thought, stuck-up English bitch. "Forget my tea," he said and stalked from the kitchen.

And then, from far off, half heard, there was a noise like thunder. It rose and fell, faded to nothing, came again, and at its loudest the windows shook softly in their frames. Sarah stared into the yard and saw the cold gray mist and she knew it was not thunder she heard from so far away.

It was the French.

Because it was dawn and, at Bussaco, the guns were at work.

CHAPTER 3

Sharpe slept badly. The ground was damp, it got colder as the night wore on and he was hurting. His damaged ribs stabbed like knives every time he moved, and when he finally abandoned sleep and stood in the pre-dawn darkness, he wanted to lie down again because of the pain. He fingered his ribs, wondering if the injury was worse than he feared. His right eye was swollen, tender to the touch and half shut.

"You awake, sir?" a voice called from nearby.

"I'm dead," Sharpe said.

"Mug of tea, then, sir?" It was Matthew Dodd, a rifleman in Sharpe's company who had been newly made up to corporal while Sharpe was away. Knowles had given Dodd the extra stripe and Sharpe approved of the promotion.

"Thanks, Matthew," Sharpe said and grimaced with pain as he stooped to collect some damp scraps of wood to help make a fire. Dodd had already used a steel and flint to light some kindling that he now blew into bright flame.

"Are we supposed to have fires, sir?" Dodd asked.

"We weren't supposed to last night, Matthew, but in this damned fog who could see one? Anyway, I need some tea, so get her going." Sharpe added his wood, then listened to the crack and hiss of the new flames as Dodd filled a kettle with water and threw in a handful of tea leaves that he kept loose in his pouch. Sharpe added some of his own, then fed the fire with more wood.

"Damp old morning," Dodd said.

"Bloody mist." Sharpe could see the fog was still thick.

"Be reveille soon," Dodd said, settling the kettle in the flames.

"Can't even be half past two yet," Sharpe said. Here and there along the ridge other men were lighting fires that made glowing, misted patches in the fog, but most of the army still slept. Sharpe had picquets out at the ridge's eastern edge, but he did not need to check them for another few minutes.

"Sergeant Harper said you fell down some steps, sir," Dodd said, looking at Sharpe's bruised face.

"Dangerous things, steps, Matthew. Especially in the dark when it's slippery."

"Sexton back home died like that," Dodd said, his gaunt face lit by the flames. "He went up the church tower to fasten a new rope on the big tenor bell and he slipped. Some said he was pushed, mind, because his wife was sweet on another man."

"You, Matthew?"

"Mister Sharpe!" Dodd said, shocked. "Not me, no!" The tea brewed quickly enough and Sharpe scooped some out with his tin mug and then, after thanking Dodd, went across the ridge top towards the French. He did not go down the slope, but found a small spur that jutted out close to the road. The spur, which protruded like a bastion from the ridge's top, extended out for a hundred paces before ending in a knoll crowned with a ragged jumble of scattered boulders and it was there he expected to find the sentries. He stamped his feet as he went, wanting to alert the picquets to his presence.

"Who's there? " The challenge came smartly enough, but Sharpe had expected it because Sergeant Read was doing duty.

"Captain Sharpe."

"Countersign, Captain?" Read demanded.

"A sip of hot tea, Sergeant, if you don't shoot me," Sharpe said. Read was a stickler for following the rules, but even a Methodist could be persuaded to ignore a missing password by an offer of tea.

"The password's Jessica, sir," he told Sharpe reprovingly.

"The Colonel's wife, eh? Mister Slingsby forgot to tell me." He handed Read the mug of tea. "Anything nasty about?"

"Not a thing, sir, not a thing."

Ensign Iliffe, who was nominally in charge of the picquet, though under standing orders to do nothing without his Sergeant's agreement, came and gawped at Sharpe.

"Good morning, Mister Iliffe," Sharpe said.

"Sir," the boy stammered, too scared to make conversation.

"All quiet?"

"I think so, sir," Iliffe said and stared at Sharpe's face, not quite sure he believed the damage he saw in the half light and much too nervous to ask what had caused it.

The eastern slope dropped into the fog and darkness. Sharpe crouched, wincing at the pain in his ribs, closed his eyes and listened. He could hear men stirring on the slope above him, the clang of a kettle, the crackle of small fires being revived. A horse thumped the ground with its foot and somewhere a baby cried. None of those sounds concerned him. He was listening for something from below, but all was quiet. "They won't come till dawn," he said, knowing that the French needed some light to find the track up the hill.

"And you think they will come, sir?" Read asked apprehensively.

"That's what their deserters say. How's your priming?"

"In this fog? I don't trust it," Read said, then frowned at Sharpe. "You hurt yourself, sir?"

"I fell down some steps," Sharpe said. "Wasn't watching out. You'd best blow the guns out at reveille," he went on, "and I'll warn the battalion. The six men of the picquet had stood guard on the rocky promontory through the darkness with loaded muskets and rifles. By now the damp air would have penetrated the priming in the lock pans and the odds were that the sparks would not light the powder. So, when the army was woken by bugle calls, the picquets would put a fresh pinch of dry powder in their pans and fire the musket to clear out the old charge and, if folk were not warned, they might think the shots meant the French had climbed through the fog. "Keep your eyes open till then," he said.

"We're being relieved at reveille?" Read asked anxiously.

"You can get a couple of hours' sleep after stand-to," Sharpe said. "But sharpen your bayonets before you put your heads down."

"You think… " Ensign Iliffe started the question, but did not finish it.

"I don't know what to expect," Sharpe answered him anyway, "but you don't face battle with a blunt blade, Mister Iliffe. Show me your saber."

Iliffe, as befitted an officer in a skirmishing company, wore a light cavalry saber. It was an old one, bought cheap back home, with a tarnished hilt and a worn leather grip. The Ensign gave the weapon to Sharpe who ran a thumb down its curved fore blade, then down the sharpened upper edge of the back blade. "Half a mile back," he told Iliffe, "there's a regiment of Portuguese dragoons, so when it's light go back there, find their smith, and give him a shilling to put an edge on that blade. You couldn't skin a cat with that saber." He gave the blade back, then half drew his own.

Sharpe, perversely, did not carry the light cavalry saber. Instead he wore a heavy cavalry sword, a long and straight-bladed weapon that was ill-balanced and too heavy, but a brutal instrument in a strong man's hands. It seemed sharp enough when he felt the fore blade, but he would still have a keener edge ground onto the sword. Money well spent, he reckoned.

He went back up to the ridge top and scrounged another mug of tea just a moment before the first bugle sounded. It was muffled, far off, for it came from the valley beneath, from the invisible French, but within a moment scores of bugles and trumpets were blasting the ridge with their clamor. "Stand to! Stand to!" Major Leroy shouted. He saw Sharpe through the mist. "Morning, Sharpe! Damned cold one, eh? What happened to summer?"

"I've told the picquets to empty their guns, sir."

"I won't be alarmed," Leroy said, then brightened. "Is that tea, Sharpe?"

"I thought Americans didn't drink tea, sir."

"The loyal Americans do, Sharpe." Leroy, the son of parents who had fled the rebel victory in the Thirteen Colonies, stole Sharpe's mug. "The rebellious sort feed their tea to the codfish." He drank and looked disgusted. "Don't you use sugar?"

"Never."

Leroy took a sip and grimaced. "It tastes like warm horse piss," he said, but drained the mug nonetheless. "Good morning, lads! Time to shine! Fall in!"

Sergeant Harper had led the new picquet towards the rocks on the small spur where Sergeant Read ordered his men to shoot their guns out into the foggy void. Leroy called that the sound should be ignored. Lieutenant Slingsby, despite having been drunk the night before, now looked as fresh and smart as though he were mounting guard on Windsor Castle. He came from his tent, plucked his red coat straight, adjusted the angle of his saber scabbard, then marched after the picquet. "You should have waited for me, Sergeant!" he called to Harper.

"I told him to go," Sharpe said.

Slingsby swiveled around, his bulging eyes showing surprise at seeing Sharpe. "Morning, Sharpe!" The Lieutenant sounded indecently cheerful. "My word, but that's a rare black eye! You should have put a beefsteak on it last night. Beefsteak!" Slingsby, finding that advice funny, snorted with laughter. "How are you feeling? Better, I trust?"

"Dead," Sharpe said, and turned back to the ridge top where the battalion was forming into line. They would stay there through the dull moments of dawn, through the dangerous time when the enemy might make a surprise attack. Sharpe, standing ahead of the light company, looked down the line and felt an unexpected surge of affection for the battalion. It was nearly six hundred men strong, most from the small villages of southern Essex, but a good few from London and a lot from Ireland, and they were mostly thieves, drunks, murderers and fools, but they had been hammered into soldiers. They knew each other's weaknesses, liked each other's jokes, and reckoned no battalion in God's world was half as good as theirs. They might not be as wild as the Connaught Rangers, who were now moving up to take post to the left of the South Essex, and they were certainly not as fashionable as the Guards battalions farther north, but they were dependable, stubborn, proud and confident. A ripple of laughter went through number four company and Sharpe knew, even without hearing its cause, that Horace Pearee had just made a jest and he knew his men would want the joke passed down. "Silence in the ranks!" he called and wished he had kept silent because of the pain.

A Portuguese unit was formed to the battalion's right and beyond them was a battery of Portuguese six-pounders. Useless guns, Sharpe thought, but he had seen enough nine-pounders on the ridge to know that the cannons could do some slaughter this day. He reckoned the mist was clearing, for he could see the small six-pounders more clearly with every passing minute, and when he turned north and stared at the tops of the trees beyond the monastery's far wall he saw the whiteness thinning and shredding.

They waited the best part of an hour, but no French came. The mist drained from the ridge top, but still filled the valley like a great white river. Colonel Lawford, mounted on Lightning, rode down the battalion's front, touching his hat in answer to the companies' salutes. "We shall do well today," he told each company, "and add luster to our reputation. Do your duty, and let the Frenchmen know they've met better men!" He repeated this encouragement to the light company at the left of the line, ignored the man who asked what luster was, then smiled down at Sharpe. "Come and have breakfast with me, will you, Sharpe?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good man." A bugle sounded from half a mile north and Lawford twisted in his saddle to find Major Forrest. "We can stand down, Major. Half and half, though, I think."

Half the men stayed in line, the others were released to make tea, to eat and relieve themselves, but none was permitted to go beyond the newly made road and so vanish from the battalion's sight. If the French came then the men were expected to be in line within half a minute. Two of the light company wives sat by a fire honing bayonets with sharpening stones and cackling with laughter at a joke told by Rifleman Hagman. Sergeant Read, off duty for the moment, was on one knee, a hand on his musket, praying. Rifleman Harris, who claimed to believe in none of the gods, was making certain that his lucky, rabbit's foot was in his pouch, while Ensign Iliffe was trying to hide behind the Colonel's tent where he was being sick. Sharpe called to him. "Mister Iliffe!"

"Sir." Iliffe, strands of yellowish liquid straggling from his unshaven chin, came nervously to Sharpe, who drew his sword.

"Take that, Mister Iliffe," Sharpe said, pretending not to notice that the Ensign had been vomiting. "Find the Portuguese cavalry smith and have an edge put on it. A proper edge. One I can shave with." He gave the boy two shillings, realizing that his earlier advice, that Iliffe should pay a shilling himself, had been impractical because Iliffe probably did not have a penny to spare. "Go on with you. Bring it back to me as soon as you can."

Robert Knowles, stripped to his waist, was shaving outside Lawford's tent. The skin of his chest and back was milk white while his face was as dark as old wood. "You should grow a mustache, Robert," Sharpe said.

"What a ghastly notion," Knowles said, peering into the mirror that was propped against the water bowl. "I had an uncle with a mustache and he went bankrupt. How are you feeling?"

"Horrible."

Knowles paused, face half lathered, razor poised by his cheek, and stared at Sharpe. "You look horrible. You're to go in, Richard, the Colonel's expecting you."

Sharpe thought of borrowing the razor, but his jaw was still tender where he had been kicked and he reckoned he could go a day without a shave, though at the end of it his chin would be black as powder. He ducked into the tent to find Lawford sitting at a trestle table covered with fine linen and expensive porcelain. "Boiled eggs," the Colonel greeted him warmly. "I do so relish a properly boiled egg. Sit yourself down, Sharpe. The bread's not too hard. How are your wounds?"

"Hardly notice them, sir," Sharpe lied.

"Good man." The Colonel spooned some runny egg into his mouth, then gestured through the canvas towards the east. "Fog's lifting. You think the French will come?"

"Major Hogan seemed sure of it, sir."

"Then we shall do our duty," Lawford said, "and it will be good practice for the battalion, eh? Real targets! That's coffee, very good coffee as well. Do help yourself."

It seemed that Sharpe was to be Lawford's only guest, for there were no plates or silverware for another man. He poured himself coffee, helped himself to an egg and a slice of bread, and ate in silence. He felt uncomfortable. He had known Lawford for over ten years, yet he could think of nothing to say. Some men, like Hogan or Major Forrest, were never short of conversation. Put them down among a group of strangers and they could chatter away like magpies, but Sharpe was always struck dumb except with those he knew really well. The Colonel did not seem to mind the silence. He ate steadily, reading a four-week-old copy of The Times. "Good Lord," he said at one point.

"What's that, sir?"

"Tom Dyton's dead. Poor old chap. Of an advanced age, it says here. He must have been seventy if he was a day!"

"I didn't know him, sir."

"Had land in Surrey. Fine old fellow, married a Calloway, which is always a sensible thing to do. Consols are holding steady, I see." He folded the paper and pushed it across the table. "Like to read it, Sharpe?"

"I would, sir."

"All yours, then."

Sharpe would not read it, but the paper would be useful anyway. He cracked the top off another egg and wondered what Consols were. He knew they had something to do with money, but just what he had no idea.

"So you think the French will come?" Lawford asked, forcing a heartiness into his voice and apparently unaware that he had voiced the identical question just minutes before.

Sharpe sensed a nervousness in the Colonel and wondered what caused it. "I think we have to assume they'll come, sir."

"Quite so, quite so. Prepare for the worst, eh, and hope for the best? Very wise that, Sharpe." Lawford buttered a slice of bread. "So let's assume there's going to be a scrap, shall we? Wellington and Massena playing King of the Castle, eh? But it shouldn't be a difficult day, should it?"

Was Lawford nervous of a battle? It seemed unlikely, for the Colonel had been in enough actions to know what must be coming, but Sharpe attempted to reassure him anyway. "It never does to underestimate the Crapauds, sir," he said carefully, "and they'll keep coming whatever we chuck at them, but no, it shouldn't be difficult. That hill will slow them and we'll kill them."

"That's rather what I thought, Sharpe," Lawford said, offering a dazzling smile. "The hill will slow them and then we'll kill them. So, all in all, the fox is running, the scent's high, we're mounted on a damned fine horse and the going's firm."

"We should win, sir," Sharpe said, "if that's what you mean. And if the Portuguese fight well."

"Ah yes, the Portuguese. Hadn't thought of them, but they seem fine fellows. Do have that last egg."

"I'm full, sir."

"You're sure? Very kind. I never say no to a well-boiled egg. My father, God rest him, always believed he would be met at the gates of heaven by an angel carrying two decently boiled eggs on a silver salver. I do hope it turned out that way for him." Sharpe decided there was nothing to say to that so stayed silent as the Colonel sliced off the egg's top, sprinkled it with salt and dug in his spoon. "The thing is, Sharpe," Lawford went on, but hesitantly now, "if the going is firm and we don't need to be over-anxious, then I'd like to spread some experience through the battalion. Know what I mean?"

"The French do that, sir," Sharpe said.

"Do they?" Lawford seemed surprised.

"Every time they fight us, sir, they shovel experience all over us."

"Ah, I see your drift!" Lawford ate some egg, then dabbed his lips with a napkin. "I mean real experience, Sharpe, the kind that will serve the regiment well. Fellows don't learn their duties by watching, do they? But by doing. Don't you agree?"

"Of course, sir."

"So I've decided, Sharpe," Lawford was not looking at Sharpe any more, but concentrating on his egg, "that Cornelius ought to command the light company today. He's not taking it over, don't think that for a moment, but I do want him to stretch his wings. Want to see how he does, eh? And if it ain't going to be a tricky business, then today will blood him gently." He spooned more egg into his mouth and dared to give Sharpe a quizzical look. Sharpe said nothing. He was furious, humiliated and helpless. He wanted to protest, but to what end? Lawford had plainly made up his mind and to fight the decision would only make the Colonel dig in his heels. "And you, Sharpe," Lawford smiled now he felt the worst was over, "I think you probably need a rest. That tumble you took did some damage, eh? You look battered. So let Cornelius show us his stuff, eh? And you can use his horse and serve as my eyes. Advise me."

"My advice, sir," Sharpe could not help saying, "is to let your best man command the light company."

"And if I do that," Lawford said, "I'll never know what potential Cornelius has. No, Sharpe, let him have his canter, eh? You've already proved yourself." Lawford stared at Sharpe, wanting his approval of the suggestion, but again Sharpe said nothing. He felt as though the bottom had dropped from his world.

And just then a gun fired from the valley.

The shell screamed through the fog, burst into sunlight above the ridge where, showing as a black ball against a clear sky, it arched over the troops to fall close beside the newly made road which linked the British and Portuguese troops along the ridge. It exploded after its first bounce, doing no harm, but a scrap of shell casing, almost spent, rapped against Lawford's tent, making the taut gray canvas shudder. "Time to go, Sharpe," Lawford said, throwing down his egg-stained napkin.

Because the French were coming.

Thirty-three French battalions formed into four columns were launched across the stream and up the far slope that was thickly obscured by fog. This was only the first attack. The second attack was still assembling, their twenty-two battalions forming into two more great columns which would advance on either side of the better road that led towards the northern end of the ridge while a third, smaller column would follow behind them to exploit their success. Together the two attacks made a hammer and an anvil. The first assault, the heaviest, would follow the lesser road up to the lowest part of the ridge, capture its wide summit, then turn north to drive in the defenders desperately fending off the second blow. Marshal Massena, waiting close to the troops who would deliver that second thunderous strike, imagined the English and Portuguese troops reduced to panic; he saw them fleeing from the ridge, throwing down packs and weapons, discarding anything that would slow them, and then he would release his cavalry to sweep across the ridge's northern end and slaughter the fugitives. He drummed his fingers against his saddle's pommel in time to the fog-muffled rhythm of the drums that sounded to the south. Those drums were driving the first attack up the slope. "What's the time?" he asked an aide.

"A quarter to six, sir."

"The fog's lifting, don't you think?" Massena stared into the vapor with his one eye. The Emperor had taken the other in a shooting accident while they were hunting, and, ever since, Massena had worn a patch.

"Perhaps a little, sir," the aide said doubtfully.

Tonight, Massena thought, he would sleep in the monastery said to be on the ridge's far slope. He would send a troop of dragoons to escort Henriette from Tondela from where he had been so abruptly summoned the previous night, and he smiled as he recalled her white arms reaching playfully for him as he dressed. He had slept an hour or two with the army, and risen early to find a cold, foggy dawn, but the fog, he reckoned, was France's friend. It would let the troops get most of the way up the slope before the British and Portuguese could see them, and once the Eagles were close to the summit the business should not take long. Victory by midday, he thought, and he imagined the bells ringing out in Paris to announce the triumph of the Eagles. He wondered what new honors would come to him. He was already the Prince of Essling, but by tonight, he thought, he might have earned a dozen other royal titles. The Emperor could be generous in such things, and the Emperor expected great things of Massena. The rest of Europe was at peace, cowed into submission by the armies of France, and so Napoleon had sent reinforcements into Spain, had formed this new Army of Portugal that had been entrusted to Massena, and the Emperor expected Lisbon to be captured before the leaves fell. Victory, Massena thought, victory by midday, and then the enemy's remnants would be pursued all the way to Lisbon.

"You're sure there's a monastery across the ridge?" he enquired of one of his Portuguese aides, a man who fought for the French because he believed they represented reason, liberty, modernity and rationality.

"There is, sir."

"We shall sleep there tonight," Massena announced, and turned his one eye to another aide. "Have two squadrons ready to escort Mademoiselle Leberton from Tondela." That essential comfort assured, the Marshal spurred his horse forward through the fog. He stopped close to the stream and listened. A single cannon sounded to the south, the signal that the first attack was under way, and when the cannon's reverberating echo had died away Massena could hear the drums fading in the distance as the four southern columns climbed the slope. It was the sound of victory. The sound of the Eagles going into battle.

It had taken over two hours to form the four columns. The men had been roused in the dark, and the reveille had been sounded an hour later to fool the British into thinking that the French had slept longer, but the columns had been forming long before the bugles sounded. Sergeants with flaming torches served as guides, and the men formed on them, company by company, but it had all taken much longer than expected. The fog confused the newly woken men. Officers gave orders, sergeants bellowed, shoved, and used their musket stocks to force men into the ranks, and some fools mistook their orders and joined the wrong column, and they had to be pulled out, cursed, and sent to their proper place, but eventually the thirty-three battalions were assembled in their four assault columns in the small meadows beside the stream.

There were eighteen thousand men in the four columns. If those men had been paraded in a line of three ranks, which was how the French made their lines, they would have stretched for two miles, but instead they had been concentrated into the four tight columns. The two largest led the attack, while the two smaller came behind, ready to exploit whatever opening the first two made. Those two larger columns had eighty men in their front ranks, but there were eighty more ranks behind and the great blocks made two battering rams, almost two miles of infantry concentrated into two moving squares that were designed to be hammered against the enemy line and overwhelm it by sheer weight.

"Stay close!" the sergeants shouted as they began to ascend the ridge. A column was no good if it lost cohesion. To work it had to be like a machine, every man in step, shoulder to shoulder, the rear ranks pushing the front rank on into the enemy guns. That front rank would probably die, as would the one behind, and the one behind that, but eventually the impetus of the massive formation should force it across its own dead and through the enemy line and then the real killing could begin. The battalions' drummers were concentrated at the center of each column and the boys played the fine rhythm of the charge, pausing every so often to let the men call out the refrain, "Vive l'Empereur!"

That refrain became breathless as the columns climbed. The ridge was horribly steep, lung-sapping, and men tired and so began to lag and stray. The fog was still thick. Scattered gorse bushes and stunted trees obstructed the columns which split to pass them, and after a while the fragments did not join up again, but just struggled up through the silent fog, wondering what waited for them at the summit. Before they were halfway up the hill both the leading columns had broken into groups of tired men, and the officers, swords drawn, were shouting at the groups to form ranks, to hurry, and the officers shouted from different parts of the hill and only confused the troops more so that they went first one way and then the other. The drummer boys, following the broken ranks, beat more slowly as they grew more tired.

Ahead of the columns, way ahead, and scattered in their loose formation, the French skirmishers climbed towards the light. The fog thinned as they neared the ridge's top. There was a swarm of French light troops, over six hundred voltigeurs in front of each column, and their job was to drive away the British and Portuguese skirmishers, force them back over the ridge top and then start shooting at the defending lines. That skirmish fire was designed to weaken those lines ready for the hammer blows coming behind.

Above the disordered columns, unseen in the fog, the Eagles flew. Napoleon's Eagles, the French standards, the gilt statuettes shining on their poles. Two had their tricolor flags attached, but most regiments took the flags off the poles and stored them at the depot in France, relying on the Emperor's Eagle to be the mark of honor. "Close on the Eagle!" an officer shouted, and the scattered men tried to form their ranks and then, from above them, they heard the first staccato snapping as the skirmishers began their fight. A gun fired from the valley, then another, and suddenly two batteries of French artillery were firing blind into the fog, hoping their shells would rake the defenders at the ridge top.

"God's teeth!" The exclamation was torn from Colonel Lawford who, peering down the slope, saw the horde of French skirmishers break out of the fog. The voltigeurs far outnumbered the British and Portuguese light companies, but those redcoats, cazadores and greenjackets fired first. Puffs of smoke jetted from the hillside. A Frenchman twisted and fell back and then the voltigeurs went down onto one knee and aimed their muskets. The volley splintered the morning, thickening the fog with powder smoke, and Sharpe saw two redcoats and a Portuguese go down. The second men of the allied skirmishing pairs fired, but the voltigeurs were too numerous and their musket fire was almost continuous and the red, green and brown jackets were falling back. The voltigeurs advanced in short rushes, at least two of them for every allied skirmisher, and it was plain the French were winning this early contest by sheer weight of numbers.

Lieutenant Slingsby and the South Essex light troops had deployed ahead of the battalion and now found themselves on the flank of the French advance. Ahead of them was mostly empty hillside, but the voltigeurs were thick to their right and for a few moments the company was able to stand and drive in that enemy flank, but a French officer saw what was happening and shouted for two companies to chase the redcoats and greenjackets away. "Back away now," Sharpe muttered. He was mounted on Portia, Slingsby's horse, and the extra height gave him a clear view of the fight that was some three hundred paces away. "Back off!" he said louder, and the Colonel gave him an irritated look. But then Slingsby understood the danger and gave eight whistle blasts. That told the light company to retreat while inclining to their left, an order that would bring them back up the slope towards the battalion, and it was the right order, the one Sharpe would have given, but Slingsby had his blood up and did not want to fall too far back too soon and thus yield the fight to the French and so instead of slanting back up the hill as he had ordered he ran straight across the slope's face.

The men had started back up the ridge, but seeing the Lieutenant stay lower down, they hesitated. "Keep firing!" Slingsby shouted at them. "Don't bunch! Smartly now!" A ball struck a rock by his right foot and ricocheted up to the sky. Hagman shot the French officer who had led the move against the South Essex and Harris put down an enemy sergeant who fell into a gorse bush, but the other Frenchmen kept advancing and Slingsby slowly backed away, yet instead of being between the French and the South Essex he was now on the enemy's flank, and another French officer, reckoning that the South Essex's light company had been brushed aside, shouted at the voltigeurs to climb straight up the hill towards the right flank of the South Essex line. Cannon opened fire from the ridge top, shooting from the left of the battalion down into the fog behind the voltigeurs. "They must have seen something," Lawford said, patting Lightning's neck to calm the stallion, which had been frightened by the sudden crash of the six-pounders. "Hear the drums?"

"I can hear them," Sharpe said. It was the old sound, the French pas de charge, the noise of attacking Eagles. "Old trousers," he said. That was the British nickname for the pas de charge.

"Why do we call it that?"

"It's a song, sir."

"Do I want to hear it?"

"Not from me, sir. Can't sing."

Lawford smiled, though he had not really been listening. He took off his cocked hat and ran a hand through his hair. "Their main body can't be far off now," he said, wanting the confrontation over. The voltigeurs were no longer advancing, but shooting at the line to weaken it before the column arrived.

Sharpe was watching Slingsby who, seeing the French turn away from him, now seemed momentarily bereft. He had not done badly. All his men were alive, including Ensign Iliffe who, when he had returned Sharpe's sword, had been pale with nervousness. The boy had stood his ground, though, and that was all that could be expected of him, while the rest of Slingsby's men had scored some hits on the enemy, but now that enemy climbed away from the company. What Slingsby should do, Sharpe thought, was climb the hill and spread his men across the face of the South Essex, but just then the first of the columns came into view from the fog.

They were shadows first, then dark shapes, and Sharpe could make no sense of it, for the column was no longer a coherent mass of men, but rather groups of men who emerged ragged from the whiteness. Two more cannons opened fire from the ridge, their round shot banging through files of men to spray the fog with blood, and still more men came, hundreds of men, and as they came into the light they hurried together, trying to reform the column, and the cannons, reloaded with canister, blasted great jagged holes in the blue uniforms.

Slingsby was still out on the flank, but the sight of the column prompted him to order his men to open fire. The voltigeurs saw what was happening and dozens ran to cut off the light company. "For Christ's sake!" Sharpe said aloud, and this time Lawford did not look irritated, just worried, but Slingsby saw the danger and shouted at his men to retreat as quickly as they could. They scrambled up the slope. It was not a dignified withdrawal, they were not firing as they backed, but just running for their lives. One or two, farthest down the slope, ran downhill to hide in the fog, but the rest managed to scramble their way back to the ridge's summit where Slingsby barked at them to spread along the battalion's face.

"Too late," Lawford said quietly, "too damn late. Major Forrest! Call in skirmishers."

The bugle sounded and the light company, panting from their near escape, formed at the left of the line. The voltigeurs who had chased the light company off the column's flank were firing at the South Essex now and the bullets hissed close to Sharpe, for most of the Frenchmen were aiming at the colors and at the group of mounted officers clustered beside the two flags. A man went down in number four company. "Close ranks!" a sergeant shouted, and a corporal, appointed as a file closer, dragged the wounded man back from the ranks.

"Take him to the surgeon, Corporal," Lawford said, then watched as the great mass of Frenchmen, thousands of them now visible at the swirling margins of the fog, turned towards his ranks. "Make ready!"

Close to six hundred men cocked their muskets. The voltigeurs knew what was coming and fired at the battalion. Bullets twitched the heavy yellow silk of the regimental color. Two more men were hit in front of Sharpe and one was screaming in pain. "Close up! Close up!" a corporal shouted.

"Stop your bleeding noise, boy!" Sergeant Willetts of five company growled.

The column was two hundred paces away, still ragged, but in sight of the crest now. The voltigeurs were closer, just a hundred paces away, kneeling and firing, standing to reload and then firing again. Slingsby had let his riflemen go a few paces forward of the line and those men were hurting the voltigeurs, taking out their officers and sergeants, but a score of rifles could not blunt this attack. That would be a job for the redcoats. "When you fire," Lawford called, "aim low! Don't waste His Majesty's lead! You will aim low!" He rode along the right of his line, repeating the message. "Aim low! Remember your training! Aim low!"

The column was coalescing, the ranks shuffling together as if for protection. A nine-pounder round shot seared through it, sending up a long fast spray of blood. The drummers were beating frantically. Sharpe glanced left and saw the Connaught Rangers were closing on the South Essex, coming to add their volleys, then a voltigeur's bullet slapped off the top of his horse's left ear and twitched at the sleeve of his jacket. He could see the faces of the men in the column's front rank, see their mustaches, see their mouths opening to cheer their Emperor. A canister from a nine-pounder tore into them, twitching files red and ragged, but they closed up, stepped over the dead and dying, and came on with their long bayonets gleaming. The Eagles were bright in the new sunlight. Still more cannons opened fire, blasting the column with canisters loaded over round shot, and the French, sensing that there was no artillery off to their left, slanted that way, climbing now towards the Portuguese battalion on the right of the South Essex. "Offering themselves to us," Lawford said. He had ridden back to the battalion's center and now watched as the French turned away to reveal their right flank to his muskets. "I think we should join the dance, Sharpe, don't you? Battalion!" He took a deep breath. "Battalion will advance!"

Lawford marched the South Essex forward, only twenty yards, but the movement scared the voltigeurs who thought they might be the target of a regimental volley and so they hurried away to join the column that now marched slantwise across the front of the South Essex. "Present!" Lawford shouted, and nearly six hundred muskets went into men's shoulders.

"Fire!"

The massive volley pumped out a long cloud of gun smoke that smelled like rotting eggs, and then the musket stocks thumped onto the ground and men took new cartridges and began to reload. "Platoon fire now!" Lawford called to his officers, and he took off his hat again and wiped sweat from his forehead. It was still cold, the wind blowing chill from the far-off Atlantic, yet Lawford was hot. Sharpe heard the splintering crack of the Portuguese volley, then the South Essex began their own rolling fire, shooting half company by half company from the center of the line, the bullets never ending, the men going through the well-practiced motions of loading and firing, loading and firing. The enemy was invisible now, hidden from the battalion by its own gun smoke. Sharpe rode along the right of the line, deliberately not going left so no one could accuse him of interfering with Slingsby. "Aim low!" he called to the men. "Aim low!" A few bullets were coming back out of the smoke, but they were nearly all high. Inexperienced men usually shot high and the French, who were being flayed by the Portuguese and by the South Essex, were trying to fire uphill into a cloud of smoke and they were taking a terrible punishment from muskets and cannons. Some of the enemy must be panicking because Sharpe saw two ramrods go wheeling overhead, evidence that the men were too scared to remember their musket drill. He stopped by the grenadier company and watched the Portuguese and he reckoned they were firing as efficiently as any redcoat battalion. Their half-company volleys were steady as clockwork, the smoke rolling out from the battalion's center, and he knew the bullets must be striking hard into the disintegrating column's face.

More muskets flared as the 88th, the feared Connaught Rangers, wheeled forward of the line to blast at the wounded French column, but somehow the French held on. Their outer ranks and files were being killed and injured, but the mass of men inside the column still lived and more were climbing the hill to replace the dead, and the whole mass, in no good order, but crowding together, tried to advance into the terrible volleys. More red- and brown-jacketed troops were moving towards the fight, adding their musketry, but still the French pushed against the storm. The column was dividing again, torn by the slashing round shots and ripped by canister, so now it seemed as though disorganized groups of men were struggling uphill past piles of dead. Sharpe could hear the officers and sergeants shouting them on, could hear the rattle of the frantic drums, which was now challenged by a British band that was playing "Men of Harlech."

"Not very appropriate!" Major Forrest had joined Sharpe and had to shout to make himself heard over the dense sound of musketry. "We're hardly in a hollow."

"You're wounded," Sharpe said.

"A scratch." Forrest glanced at his right sleeve, which was torn and bloodstained. "How are the Portuguese?"

"Good!"

"The Colonel was wondering where you were," Forrest said.

"Did he think I'd gone back to the light company?" Sharpe asked sourly.

"Now, now, Sharpe," Forrest chided him.

Sharpe clumsily turned his horse and kicked it back to Lawford. "The buggers aren't moving!" the Colonel greeted him indignantly. Lawford was leaning forward in his saddle, trying to see through the smoke and, between the half-company volleys, when the foul-smelling cloud thinned a little, he could just make out the huge groups of stubborn Frenchmen clinging to the hillside beneath the crest. "Will bayonets shift them?" he asked Sharpe. "By God, I've a mind to try steel. What do you think?"

"Two more volleys?" Sharpe suggested. It was chaos down the slope. The French column, broken again, was now clumps of men who fired uphill into the smoke, while more men, perhaps another column altogether or else stragglers from the first, were continually joining the groups. French artillery was adding to the din. They must have brought their howitzers to the foot of the slope and the shells, shot blind into the fog, were screaming overhead to crash onto the rear area where women, campfires, tents and tethered horses were the only casualties. A group of French voltigeurs had taken the rocky spur where Sharpe had placed his picquet in the night. "We should move those fellows away," Sharpe said, pointing to them.

"They're not harming us," Lawford shouted above the din, "but we can't let those wretches stay here!" He pointed to the smoke-wreathed Frenchmen. "That's our land!" He took a breath. "Fix bayonets! Fix bayonets!"

Colonel Wallace, commander of the 88th, must have had the same thought, for Sharpe was aware that the Irishmen had stopped firing, and they would only do that to fix the seventeen-inch blades on their muskets. Clicks sounded all along the South Essex line as the two ranks slotted their bayonets onto blackened muzzles. The French, with extraordinary bravery, used the lull in the musket fire to try and advance again. Men clambered over dead and dying bodies, officers shouted them forward, the drummers redoubled their efforts and suddenly the Eagles were moving again. The leading Frenchmen were among the bodies of the dead voltigeurs now and must have been convinced that one more hard push would break through the thin line of Portuguese and British troops, yet the whole hilltop must have seemed ripples of flame and rills of smoke to them. "South Essex!" Lawford shouted. "Advance!" The cannons jetted more powder smoke and flaming scraps of wadding deep into the tight French ranks. Sharpe could hear the screaming of wounded men now. Musket shots hammered from a knot of Frenchmen to the right, but the South Essex and the men of Connaught were going forward, bayonets bright, and Sharpe kicked the horse forward, following the battalion, which suddenly broke into the double and shouted their challenge. The Portuguese, seeing the redcoats advance, cheered and fixed their own blades.

The charge struck home. The French were not formed properly, most did not have loaded muskets and the British line closed on the clumps of blue-coated infantry and then wrapped around them as the redcoats lunged with bayonets. The enemy fought back and Sharpe heard the crack of muskets clashing, the scrape of blades, the curses and shouts of wounded soldiers. The enemy dead obstructed the British, but they clambered over the bodies to rip with long blades at the living. "Hold your lines! Hold your lines!" a sergeant bellowed, and in some places the companies had split because some files were attacking one French group and the rest another, and Sharpe saw two French soldiers break clear through such a gap and start uphill. He turned the horse towards them and drew his sword, and the two men, hearing the blade's long scrape against the scabbard's throat, immediately threw down their muskets and spread their hands. Sharpe pointed the sword uphill, indicating they were prisoners now and should go to the South Essex color party. One obediently set off, but the other snatched up his musket and fled downhill. Sharpe let him go. He could see the Eagles were being hurried down the slope, being carried away from the danger of capture, and more Frenchmen, seeing their standards retreat, broke from the unequal fight. The allied cannons had stopped their fire because their targets were masked by their own men, but the French guns still shot through the thinning fog and then, off to Sharpe's right, more cannons opened and he saw a second column, even larger than the first, appearing on the lower slope.

The first French attack broke from the back. Most of the men in the front ranks could not escape because they were trapped by their comrades behind, and those men were being savaged by Portuguese and British bayonets, but the French rear ranks followed the Eagles and, as the pressure eased, the remnants of the column fled. They ran, leaping over the dead and wounded that marked their passage up the hill, and the redcoats and Portuguese pursued them. A man from the grenadier company rammed his bayonet into the small of a Frenchman's back, stabbed him again when he fell, then kicked him and stabbed him a third time when the man obstinately refused to die. A drum, painted with a French Eagle, rolled downhill. A drummer boy, his arm shot off by a cannonball, hunched in misery beside a gorse bush. British redcoats and blue-jacketed Portuguese ran past him, intent on pursuing and killing the fleeing enemy. "Come back!" Lawford shouted angrily. "Come back!" The men did not hear him, or did not care; they had won and now they simply wanted to kill. Lawford looked for Sharpe. "Get them, Sharpe!" the Colonel snapped. "Fetch them back!"

Sharpe wondered how the hell he was to stop such a chaotic pursuit, but he obediently kicked his borrowed horse, which immediately bolted downhill so violently that he was nearly thrown off the back of the saddle. He yanked the reins to slow the mare and she swerved to her left and Sharpe heard a bullet flutter past him and looked up to see that scores of voltigeurs still held the rocky knoll and were firing at him. The horse ran on, Sharpe clinging to the saddle's pommel for dear life, then she stumbled and he felt himself flying. By a miracle his feet came clear of the stirrups and he landed on the slope with an almighty thump, rolled for a few yards and then banged against a boulder. He was sure he must have broken a dozen bones, but when he picked himself up he found he was only bruised. Ferragus had hurt him much worse, but the fall from the horse had exacerbated those injuries. He thought the mare must have been shot, but when he turned round to look for his fallen sword he saw the horse trotting calmly uphill without any apparent damage except her bullet-cropped ear. He swore at the mare, abandoned her, picked up his sword and rifle and went on downhill.

He shouted at redcoats to get back to the ridge. Some were Irishmen from the 88th, many of them busy plundering the bodies of French dead and, because he was an officer they did not know, they snarled, swore or simply ignored him, implicitly daring him to tangle with them. Sharpe let them be. If there was one regiment in the army that could look after itself it was the men of Connaught. He ran on down, shouting at troops to get the hell up to the ridge top, but most were halfway down the long slope, almost to where the fog had retreated, and Sharpe had to run hard to get within shouting distance and it was then, as the fog swirled away, that he saw two more French columns climbing from the valley. There was another column, he knew, somewhere near the summit, but these were new troops making a fresh attack. "South Essex!" he shouted. He had been a sergeant once and still had a voice that could carry halfway across a city, though using it caused his ribs to bang pain into his lungs

"South Essex! Back! Back!" A shell struck the hill not five paces away, bounced up and exploded in jets of hissing smoke. Two scraps of casing spun past his face so close that he felt the momentary warmth and the slap of the hot air. French cannon were at the foot of the slope, just visible in the thinning fog, and they were firing at the men who had pursued the broken column, but who now had checked their reckless downhill run to watch the new columns advance. "South Essex!" Sharpe roared, and the anger in his voice was harsh, and at last men turned to trudge uphill. Slingsby, his saber drawn, was watching the columns, but, hearing Sharpe, he suddenly snapped at men to turn around and go back to the ridge top. Harper was one of them and, seeing Sharpe, the big man angled across the slope. His seven-barreled gun was slung on his back and in his hand was his rifle with its twenty-three-inch sword bayonet reddened to its brass handle. The rest of the light company, at last aware that more columns were attacking, hurried after Harper.

Sharpe waited to make sure that every redcoat and rifleman had turned back. French shells and round shot were banging onto the hill, but using artillery against such scattered targets was a waste of powder. One cannonball, spent after its bouncing impact, rolled down the hill to make Harper skip aside, then he grinned at Sharpe. "Gave it to them proper, sir."

"You should have stayed up top."

"It's a hell of a climb," Harper said, surprised to see how far down the hill he had gone. He fell in beside Sharpe and the two climbed together. "Mister Slingsby, sir," the Irishman said, then fell silent.

"Mister Slingsby what?"

"He said you weren't well, sir, and he was taking command."

"Then he's a lying bastard," Sharpe said, careless that he ought not to say such a thing of another officer.

"Is he now?" Harper said tonelessly.

"The Colonel told me to step aside. He wants Mister Slingsby to have a chance."

"He had that right enough," Harper said.

"I should have been there," Sharpe said.

"And so you should," Harper said, "but the lads are all alive. Except Dodd."

"Matthew? Is he dead?"

"Dead or alive, I don't know," Harper said, "but I couldn't see him anywhere. I was keeping an eye on the boys, but I can't find Matthew. Maybe he went back up the hill."

"I didn't see him," Sharpe said. They both turned and counted heads and saw the light company were all present except for Corporal Dodd. "We'll look for him as we climb," Sharpe said, meaning they would look for his body.

Lieutenant Slingsby, red-faced and saber drawn, hurried over to Sharpe. "Did you bring orders, Sharpe?" he demanded.

"The orders are to get back to the top of the hill as quick as you can," Sharpe said.

"Quick, men!" Slingsby called, then turned back to Sharpe. "Our fellows did well!"

"Did they?"

"Outflanked the voltigeurs, Sharpe. Outflanked them, by God! We turned their flank."

"Did you?"

"Pity you didn't see us." Slingsby was excited, proud of himself. "We slipped past them, drove in their wing, then hurt them."

Sharpe thought the light company had been led to one side where it had been about as much use as a ettle with a hole in it, and had then been ignominiously chased away, but he kept silent. Harper unclipped his sword bayonet, cleaned the blade on the jacket of a French corpse, then quickly ran his hands over the man's pockets and pouches.

He ran to catch up with Sharpe and offered a half sausage. "I know you like Crapaud sausage, sir."

Sharpe put it into his pouch, saving it for dinner. A bullet whispered past him, almost spent, and he looked up to see puffs of smoke from the rocky knoll. "Pity the voltigeurs took that," he said.

"No trouble to us," Slingsby said dismissively. "Turned their flank, by God, turned their damn flank and then punished them!"

Harper glanced at Sharpe, looked as though he would start laughing, and managed to keep a straight face. The big British and Portuguese guns were hammering at the second big column, the one that had arrived just after the first had been defeated. That column was fighting at the top of the ridge and the two fresh columns, both smaller than the first pair, were climbing behind. Another bullet from the voltigeurs in their rocky nest whipped past Sharpe and he angled away from them.

"You still have my horse, Sharpe?" Slingsby demanded.

"Not here," Sharpe said, and Harper made a choking sound which he turned into a cough.

"You said something, Sergeant Harper?" Slingsby demanded crisply.

"Smoke in my throat, sir," Harper said. "It catches something dreadful, sir. I was always a sickly child, sir, on account of the peat smoke in our cottage. My mother made me sleep outside, God rest her soul, until the wolves came for me."

"Wolves?" Slingsby sounded cautious.

"Three of them, sir, big as you'd like, with slobbery great tongues the color of your coat, sir, and I had to sleep inside after that, and I just coughed my way through the nights. It was all that smoke, see?"

"Your parents should have built a chimney," Slingsby said disapprovingly.

"Now why didn't we think of that?" Harper enquired innocently and Sharpe laughed aloud, earning a vicious look from the Lieutenant.

The rest of the light company was close now and Ensign Iliffe was among them. Sharpe saw the boy's saber was red at the tip. Sharpe nodded at it. "Well done, Mister Iliffe."

"He just came at me, sir." The boy had suddenly found his voice. "A big man!"

"He was a sergeant," Harris explained, "and he was going to stick Mister Iliffe, sir."

"He was!" Iliffe was excited.

"But Mister Iliffe stepped past him neat as a squirrel, sir, and gave him steel in the belly. It was a good stroke, Mister Iliffe," Harris said, and the Ensign just blushed.

Sharpe tried to recall the first time he had been in a fight, steel against steel, but the trouble was he had been brought up in London and almost born to that kind of savagery. But for Mister Iliffe, son of an impoverished Essex gentleman, there had to be a shock in realizing that some great brute of a Frenchman was trying to kill him and Sharpe, remembering how sick the boy had been, reckoned he had done very well. He grinned at Iliffe. "Only the one Crapaud, Mister Iliffe?"

"Only one, sir."

"And you an officer, eh? You're supposed to kill two a day!"

The men laughed. Iliffe just looked pleased with himself.

"Enough chatter!" Slingsby took command of the company. "Hurry up!" The South Essex colors had moved south along the ridge top, evidently going towards the fight with the second leading column, and the light company slanted that way. The French shells had stopped their futile harassment of the slope and were instead firing at the ridge top now, their fuses leaving small pencil traces in the sky above the light company. The sound of the second column was loud now, a cacophony of drums, war cries and the stutter of the skirmishers' muskets.

Sharpe went with the light company to the ridge top where he reluctantly let Slingsby take them again while he looked for Lawford. The fog, which had cleared almost to the valley bottom, was thickening again now, a great billow of it hiding the two smaller columns and rolling southwards to where, by the rough track that climbed the ridge, the second French column was advancing. That second column, larger than the first, had climbed more slowly, and had been given an easier time than their defeated comrades for they had been able to follow the track that twisted its way up the ridge's slope, and the track gave them a guide in the fog so that when they erupted into the sunlight they had managed to keep their ranks. Eight thousand men, driven by one hundred and sixty-three drummers, closed on the crest and there, under the flail of fire, they stopped.

The first battalion of the 74th Highlanders had been waiting and beside them was a whole brigade of Portuguese and on their right flank were two batteries of nine-pounders. The guns struck first, flaying the column with round shot and canister, making the heather slick with blood, and then the Highlanders opened fire. The range was very long, more suited for riflemen than redcoats, but the bullets slapped home and then the Portuguese opened fire and the column, like a bull confused by an unexpected attack by terriers, stalled Columns were again meeting lines and, though the column outnumbered the line, the line would always outshoot the column. Only the men at the front of the column and a handful along the edge could use their muskets, but every man in the British and Portuguese line could fire his weapon and the column was being driven in, turned red, hammered, yet it did not retreat. The voltigeurs, who had chased away the Scottish and Portuguese skirmishers, retreated to the column's front rank which now tried to return the musket fire. French officers shouted at the men to march, the drummers persisted with the pas de charge, but the front ranks would not press up into the relentless pelting of the musket balls. Instead, feebly, they returned the fire, but the men in the column's front rank were dying every second, and then more Portuguese cannons came to the right flank of the 74th. The guns slewed around, their horses were taken back out of musket range, and the gunners rammed canister over round shot. The new guns crashed back and the leading left corner of the column began to resemble the devil's butcher's shop. It was a sodden tangle of broken bodies, blood and screaming men. And still the guns recoiled, jetting a spew of smoke with every discharge, their barrels depressed to fire down into the crowded mass of Frenchmen. Every round shot had to be wedged in the barrel with a circle of rope to stop the ball trickling down the barrel, and the rope loops burned in the air like crazed fireballs as they spun in mad whorls. More allied troops were coming to the fight, marching along the newly made road from the southern end of the long ridge. That southern end was quiet, apparently under no threat from the French, and the arriving men formed south of the guns and added their own musket fire.

The column shuddered under the onslaught of the merciless guns and then began to edge northwards. The French officers could see there was an empty space on the ridge beyond the Portuguese brigade and they shouted at their men to go right. A voltigeur officer sent a company ahead to occupy the skyline as, behind them, the cumbersome mass edged its way towards the opening, leaving a right-angled line of bodies, the remnants of their left flank and front lines, thick on the rocky slope.

Lieutenant Colonel Lawford saw the column approaching and, more urgently, the voltigeurs running to claim the open ground. "Mister Slingsby!" Lawford called. "You will deploy the light company! Send those miscreants back where they belong. Battalion! Battalion will move to the right!" Lawford was marching the South Essex into the open space, going to seal it off, and Slingsby had the job of throwing back the enemy skirmishers. Sharpe, back on Slingsby's horse which had been rescued by Major Forrest, rode behind the color party and counted the Eagles in the shuffling column. He could see fifteen. The noise of splintering dominated the air, the sound of muskets like dry thorns burning, and the incessant crackling was echoing from the distant side of the valley. The powder smoke drifted above the fog which had crept back up the slope almost to the ridge's top. Every now and then the great white vaporous mass twitched as a French round shot or shell punched through. The hillside was dotted with bodies, all blue-coated. A man crawled downhill, trailing a broken leg. A dog ran to and fro, barking, trying to rouse its dead master. A French officer, sword discarded, held his hands to his face as blood oozed between his fingers. The cannons hammered and bucked, and then came the distinctive crack of the rifles as Sharpe's company went into action. He hated just watching them, but he also admired them. They were good. They had taken the enemy voltigeurs by surprise and the riflemen had already put down two officers and now the muskets took up the fight.

Slingsby, holding his saber scabbard clear of the rough ground, strutted up and down behind them. He was doubtless snapping his orders and Sharpe felt a surge of hatred for the man. The bastard was going to take his job and all because he had married Lawford's sister-in-law. The hatred was like bile and Sharpe instinctively reached for his rifle, took it from his shoulder and pulled the flint to half cock. He used his thumb to push the strike plate forward and the frizzen leaped away on its spring. He felt in the pan, making certain the priming was still there after his tumble from the horse. He confirmed the powder was there, gritty under his dirty thumb and, staring all the while at Slingsby, he pulled the frizzen back into place and then cocked the gun fully. He raised it to his shoulder. The horse stirred and he growled at it to be still.

He aimed at Slingsby's back. At the small of his back. At the place where two brass buttons were sewn above the red jacket's vent. Sharpe wanted to pull the trigger. Who would know? The Lieutenant was a hundred paces away, a reasonable shot for a rifle. Sharpe imagined Slingsby arching his back as his spine was shot through, shuddering as he fell, the clang of his scabbard chains as he struck the ground and the quiver of life fighting to stay in a dying body. The strutting little bastard, Sharpe thought, and he tightened his finger on the rifle's trigger. No one was watching him, they were all staring at the column which edged ever closer, or if some men were watching him then they must assume he was aiming at a voltigeur. It would not be Sharpe's first murder and he doubted it would be his last, and then a sudden spasm of hatred coursed through him, a spasm so fierce that he shivered and, almost involuntarily, pulled the trigger all the way back. The rifle banged into his shoulder, startling his horse, which twitched away to one side.

The ball spun across the heads of number four company, missed Lieutenant Slingsby's left arm by an inch, struck a rock on the edge of the hillside and ricocheted up to hit a voltigeur beneath the chin. The man had managed to get very near to Slingsby and had just stood to shoot his musket at close range and Sharpe's bullet lifted him off the ground so that the dead man looked as if he was being propelled backwards by a jet of blood, then the Frenchman collapsed in a crash of musket, bayonet and body.

"Good God, Richard! That was fine shooting!" Major Leroy had been watching. "That fellow was stalking Slingsby! I've been watching him."

"So was I, sir," Sharpe lied.

"Bloody fine shooting! And from horseback! Did you see that, Colonel?" "Leroy?"

"Sharpe just saved Slingsby's life. Damnedest piece of shooting I've ever seen!"

Sharpe slung the unloaded rifle. He was suddenly ashamed of himself. Slingsby might be an irritant, he might be a cocky man, but he had never set out to harm Sharpe. It was not Slingsby's fault that his laugh, his presence and his very appearance galled Sharpe to the quick, and a new misery descended on Sharpe, the misery of knowing he had let himself down, and even Lawford's energetic and undeserved congratulations did nothing to lift his spirits. He turned away from the battalion, staring blankly at the back area where two men were holding a wounded grenadier on the table outside the surgeon's tent. Blood sprang from the saw that was being whipped to and fro across the man's thigh bone. A few yards away a wounded man and two of the battalion's wives, all with French muskets, were guarding a dozen prisoners. A toddler played with a French bayonet. Monks were leading a dozen mules loaded with barrels of water that they were distributing to the allied troops. A Portuguese battalion, followed by five companies of redcoats, marched north on the new road, evidently going to reinforce the northern end of the ridge. A mounted galloper, carrying a message from one general to another, pounded along the new road, leaving a plume of dust in his wake. The toddler swore at the horseman who had scared him by riding too close and the women laughed. The monks dropped a water barrel behind the South Essex, then went on towards the Portuguese brigade.

"They're too far away to charge!" Lawford called to Sharpe.

Sharpe turned and saw that the column had stalled again. The ground they had wanted to take had been occupied by the South Essex and now the vast mass of men was content to spread slowly outwards to form a thick line and then trade musket shots with the troops on top of the hill. The attack had been stopped and not all the drumming in the world was going to start it back into motion. "We need a pair of guns here," Sharpe said and he looked to his left to see whether any batteries were nearby and he saw that the South Essex, in moving to block the column's advance, had left a great gap on the hilltop between themselves and the Connaught Rangers, and that the gap was being rapidly filled by a cloud of voltigeurs. Those voltigeurs had come from the rocky knoll and, seeing the ridge ahead deserted, they had advanced to occupy the abandoned ground. Then the fog shuddered, was swept aside by a gust of wind, and Sharpe saw it was not just voltigeurs who were filling the gap in the British line, but that the last two French columns had climbed to the same place. They had been shielded by the fog so the Portuguese and British gunners had spared them and now, hurrying, they were scrambling the last few yards to the ridge's empty crest. Their Eagles reflected the sun, victory was just yards away and there was nothing in front of the French but bare grass and vacancy. And Sharpe was seeing disaster.

CHAPTER 4

Strangely, on the morning that the guns began to fire and make the windows, glasses and chandeliers vibrate throughout Coimbra, Ferragus announced that his brother's household, which had readied itself to go south to Lisbon, was to stay in Coimbra after all. He made the announcement in his brother's study, a gloomy room lined with unread books, where the family and the servants had gathered on Ferragus's summons.

Beatriz Ferreira, who was scared of her brother-in-law, crossed herself. "Why are we staying?" she asked.

"You hear that?" Ferragus gestured towards the sound of the guns that was like an unending muted thunder. "Our army and the English troops are giving battle. My brother says that if there is a battle then the enemy will be stopped. Well, there is a battle, so if my brother is right then the French will not come."

"God and the saints be thanked," Beatriz Ferreira said, and the servants murmured agreement.

"But suppose they do come?" It was Sarah who asked.

Ferragus frowned because he thought the question impertinent, but he supposed that was because Miss Fry was an arrogant English bitch who knew no better. "If they are not stopped," he said irritably, "then we shall know, because our army must retreat through Coimbra. We shall leave then. But for the moment you will assume we are staying." He nodded to show that his announcement was done and the household filed from the room.

Ferragus was uncomfortable in his brother's house. It was too full of their parents' belongings, too luxurious. His own quarters in Coimbra were above a brothel in the lower town where he kept little more than a bed, table and chair, but Ferragus had promised to keep a watchful eye on his brother's house and family, and that watchful eye extended past the battle. If it were won, then the French would presumably retreat, yet Ferragus was also plotting what he should do if the battle were lost. If Lord Wellington could not hold the great, gaunt ridge of Bussaco against the French, then how would he defend the lower hills in front of Lisbon? A defeated army would be in no mood to face the victorious French again, and so a loss at Bussaco would surely mean that Lisbon itself would fall inside a month. Os ingleses por mar. His brother had tried to deny that, to persuade Ferragus that the English would stay, but in his heart Ferragus knew that Portugal's allies would run back to the sea and go home. And why, if that happened, should he be trapped in Lisbon with the conquering French? Better to be caught here, in his own town, and Ferragus was planning how he would survive in that new world in which the French, at last, captured all of Portugal.

He had never discounted such a capture. Ferreira had warned him of the possibility, and the tons of flour that Sharpe had destroyed on the hilltop had been a token offer to the invaders, an offer to let them know that Ferragus was a man with whom negotiations could be conducted. It had been insurance, for Ferragus had no love for the French; he certainly did not want them in Portugal, but he knew it would be better to be a partner of the invaders rather than their victim. He was a wealthy man with much to lose, and if the French offered protection he would stay wealthy. If he resisted, even if he did nothing except flee to Lisbon, the French would strip him bare. He had no doubt that he would lose some of his wealth if the French came, but if he cooperated with them he would retain more than enough. That was just common sense and, as he sat in his brother's study and listened to the shudder of distant gunfire, he was thinking that it had been a mistake to even consider fleeing to Lisbon. If this battle were won then the French would never come here, and if it were lost, all would be lost. Best therefore to stay near his property and so protect it.

His elder brother was the key. Pedro Ferreira was a respected staff officer and his contacts stretched across the gap between the armies to those Portuguese officers who had allied themselves with the French. Ferragus, through his brother, could reach the French and offer them the one thing they most wanted: food. In his warehouse in the lower town he had hoarded six months' worth of hard biscuit, two months' supply of salt beef, a month's supply of salt cod and a stack of other food and materials. There was lamp oil, boot leather, linen, horseshoes and nails. The French would want to steal it, but Ferragus had to devise a way to make them buy it. That way Ferragus would survive.

He opened the study door, shouted for a servant and sent her to summon Miss Fry to the study. "I cannot write," he explained to her when she arrived, holding up his bruised right hand to prove the incapacity. In truth he could write, though his knuckles were still sore and to flex his fingers was painful, but he did not want to write. He wanted Sarah. "You will write for me," he went on, "so sit."

Sarah bridled at his abrupt tone, but obediently sat at the Major's desk where she pulled paper, inkwell and sand shaker towards her. Ferragus stood close behind her. "I am ready," she said.

Ferragus said nothing. Sarah looked at the wall opposite that was filled with leather-bound books. The room smelled of cigar smoke. The gunfire was persisting, a grumble from far away like thunder in the next county. "The letter," Ferragus said, startling her with his gravelly voice, "is for my brother." He moved even closer so that Sarah was aware of his big presence just behind the chair. "Give him my regards," Ferragus said, "and tell him that all is well in Coimbra."

Sarah found a steel-nibbed pen, dipped it in ink and began writing. The nib made a scratching noise. "Tell him," Ferragus went on, "that the matter of honor is not settled. The man escaped."

"Just that, senhor?" Sarah asked.

"Just that," Ferragus said in his deep voice: Damn Sharpe, he thought. The wretched rifleman had destroyed the flour, and so Ferragus's token gift to the French had stayed ungiven, and the French had been expecting the flour and they would now think Ferragus could not be trusted, and that left Ferragus and his brother with a problem. How to reassure the enemy? And would the enemy need reassurance? Would they even come? "Tell my brother," he went on, "that I rely on his judgment whether or not the enemy will be stopped at Bussaco."

Sarah wrote. As the ink began to thin on the nib she dipped the pen again and then froze because Ferragus's fingers were touching the nape of her neck. For a heartbeat she did not move, then she slapped the pen down. "Senhor, you are touching me."

"So?"

"So stop! Or do you wish me to call Major Ferreira's wife?"

Ferragus chuckled, but took his fingers away. "Pick up your pen, Miss Fry," he said, "and tell my brother that I pray the enemy will be stopped."

Sarah added the new sentence. She was blushing, not from embarrassment, but out of rage. How dare Ferragus touch her? She pressed too hard on the pen and the ink spattered in tiny droplets across the words. "But tell him," the harsh voice persisted behind her, "that if the enemy is not stopped, then I have decided to do what we discussed. Tell him he must arrange protection."

"Protection for what, senhor?" Sarah asked in a tight voice.

"He will know what I mean," Ferragus said impatiently. "You just write, woman." He listened to the pen's tiny noise and sensed, from the force of the nib on the paper, the extent of the girl's anger. She was a proud one, he thought. Poor and proud, a dangerous mixture, and Ferragus saw her as a challenge. Most women were frightened of him, terrified even, and he liked that, but Miss Fry seemed to think that because she was English she was safe. He would like to see terror replace that confidence, see her coldness warm into fear. She would fight, he thought, and that would make it even better and he considered taking her right there, on the desk, muffling her screams as he raped her white flesh, but there was still a terrible pain in his groin from the kick Sharpe had given him and he knew he would not be able to finish what he began and, besides, he would rather wait until his brother's wife was gone from the house. In a day or two, he thought, he would take Miss Fry's English pride and wipe his arse on it. "Read what you have written," he ordered her.

Sarah read the words in a small voice. Ferragus, satisfied, ordered her to write his name and seal the letter. "Use this." He gave her his own seal and, when Sarah pressed it into the wax, she saw the image of a naked woman. She ignored it, rightly suspecting that Ferragus had been trying to embarrass her. "You can go now," he told her coldly, "but send Miguel to me."

Miguel was one of his most trusted men and he was ordered to carry the letter to where the cannons sounded. "Find my brother," Ferragus instructed, "give this to him and bring me his answer."

The next few days, Ferragus thought, would be dangerous. Some money and lives would be lost, but if he was clever, and just a little bit lucky, much could be gained.

Including Miss Fry. Who did not matter. In many ways, he knew, she was a distraction and distractions were dangerous, but they also made life interesting. Captain Sharpe was a second distraction, and Ferragus wryly noted the coincidence that he was suddenly obsessed by two English folk. One, he was sure, would live and scream while the other, the one who wore the green jacket, must scream and die.

It would just take luck and a little cleverness.

The French strategy was simple. A column must gain the ridge, turn north and fight its way along the summit. The British and Portuguese, turning to meet that threat, would be hammered by the second attack at the ridge's northern end and, thus pincered, Wellington's troops would collapse between the two French forces. Massena's cavalry, released to the pursuit, would harry the defeated enemy all the way to Coimbra. Once Coimbra was captured the march on Lisbon could not take long.

Lisbon would then fall. British shipping would be ejected from the Tagus and other French forces would advance north to capture Porto and so deny the British another major harbor. Portugal would belong to the French, and what remained of the British army would be marched into captivity and the forces that had defeated it would be free to capture Cadiz and maul the scattered Spanish armies in the south. Britain would face a decision then, whether to sue for peace or face years of futile war, and France, once Spain and Portugal were pacified, could turn her armies to whatever new lands the Emperor wished to bless with French civilization. It was all so very simple, really, just so long as a column reached the ridge of Bussaco.

And two columns were there. Both were small columns, just seven battalions between them, fewer than four thousand men, but they were there, on top, in the sunlight, staring at the smoky remnants of British campfires, and more Frenchmen were coming up behind, and the only immediate threat was a Portuguese battalion that was marching north on the new road made just behind the ridge's crest. That unsuspecting battalion was met by the closest French column with a blast of musketry and, because the Portuguese were in column of companies, in march order rather than fighting order, the volley drove into their leading troops, and the French, seeing an opportunity, began to deploy into a ragged line, thus unmasking the files in the center of the column who could now add their fire. Voltigeurs had advanced across the summit, almost to the newly made road, and they began firing at the flank of the embattled Portuguese. British and Portuguese women fled from the voltigeurs, scrambling away with their children.

The Portuguese edged back. An officer tried to deploy them into line, but a French general, mounted on a big gray stallion, ordered his men to fix bayonets and advance. "En avant! En avant!" The drums beat frantically as the French line lurched forward and the Portuguese, caught as they deployed, panicked as the leading companies, already decimated by the French volleys, broke. The rear companies kept their ranks and tried to shoot past their own comrades at the French.

"Oh, sweet Jesus," Lawford had said when he saw the French athwart the ridge. He had seemed stunned by the sight, and no wonder, for he was seeing a battle lost. He was seeing an enemy column occupy the land where his battalion had been posted. He was seeing disaster, even personal disgrace. The French General, Sharpe presumed he was a general for the man's blue coat had as much gold decoration as the frock of a successful Covent Garden whore, had hoisted his plumed hat on his sword as a signal of victory. "Dear God!" Lawford said.

"About turn," Sharpe said quietly, not looking at the Colonel and sounding almost as though he were talking to himself, "then right wheel 'em."

Lawford gave no sign of having heard the advice. He was staring at the unfolding horror, watching the Portuguese being cut down by bullets. For a change it was the French who outflanked an allied column and they were giving to the blue-coated troops what they themselves usually received. The French were not in proper line, not in their three ranks, it was more like a thick line of seven or eight ranks, but enough of them could use their muskets and the men behind jostled forward to fire at the hapless Portuguese. "Call in the skirmishers," Lawford said to Forrest, then gave an anxious glance at Sharpe. Sharpe remained expressionless. He had made his suggestion, it was unorthodox, and it was up to the Colonel now. The Portuguese were running now, some streaming down the reverse slope of the ridge, but most hurrying back to where a half-battalion of redcoats had halted. The French had more ground to exploit and, even better, they could attack the exposed left flank of the South Essex. "Do it now," Sharpe said, maybe not quite loud enough for the Colonel to hear.

"South Essex!" Lawford shouted loud above the splintering noise of muskets. "South Essex! About turn!"

For a second no one moved. The order was so strange, so unexpected, that the men did not believe their ears, but then the company officers took it up. "About turn! Smartly now!"

The battalion's two ranks about-turned. What had been the rear rank was now the front rank, and both ranks had their backs to the slope and to the big, stalled column that was still exchanging fire with the ridge top. "Battalion will right wheel on number nine company!" Lawford shouted. "March!"

This was a test of a battalion's ability. They would swing like a giant door, just two ranks thick, swing around across rough country and across the bodies of their wounded comrades and the dying fires, and they must do it holding their ranks and files while under fire, and when they had finished, if they finished at all, they would form a musket line facing the new French columns. Those Frenchmen, seeing the danger, had checked their charge and started firing at the South Essex, allowing the Portuguese to reform on the half-battalion of redcoats who had been marching behind them on the road. "Dress on number nine!" Lawford shouted. "Start firing when you're in position!"

Number nine company, which had been the battalion's left flank when it had been facing downhill, was now the right flank company and, because it formed the hinge of the door, it had the smallest distance to march. It took only seconds for the company to be reformed and James Hooper, its Captain, ordered the men to load. The light company, which normally paraded outside number nine, was running behind the swinging battalion. "Get your fellows in front, Mister Slingsby!" Lawford shouted. "In front! Not behind, for God's sake!"

"Number nine company!" Hooper bellowed. "Fire!"

"Number eight company!" The next was in line. "Fire!" The outer companies were running, holding on to open cartridge boxes as they scrambled over the uneven turf. A man was hurled backwards, twitching from a bullet's strike. Lawford was riding up behind the swinging door, the colors following him. Musket balls hissed past him as the voltigeurs, closest to the battalion, shot at its officers. The light company, slightly downhill and on the flank of the battalion, began firing at the French, who suddenly saw that the South Essex would form an outflanking line that would soak them with dreaded British musketry, and the columns' officers began shouting at men to deploy into three ranks. The General on the white horse was shoving at men to hurry them into place and a ragged procession of French infantry, all of them remnants of the failed first attack, was coming up the hill to join the seven battalions that had breached the British line. The drummers were still beating their instruments and the Eagles had gained the heights.

"South Essex!" Lawford was standing in his stirrups. "Half-company fire from the center!"

The Portuguese who had broken in the face of the devastating French musketry were coming back to join the South Essex's line. Redcoats were also forming on that left flank. More battalions, brought from the peaceful southern end of the ridge, were hurrying towards the gap, but Lawford wanted to seal it himself. "Fire!" he shouted.

The South Essex had lost a score of men as they clumsily wheeled around on the summit's ridge, but they were in their ranks now and this was what they had been trained to do. To fire and reload. That was the essential skill. To tear off the ends of the thick cartridge paper, prime the gun, close the frizzen, upend the musket, pour the powder, put in the ball, ram the ball and paper, drop the ramrod into the barrel rings, bring the musket to the shoulder, pull the doghead to full cock, aim at the smoke, remember to aim low, wait for the order. "Fire!" The muskets smashed back into bruised shoulders and the men, without thinking, found a new cartridge, tore the end off with their blackened teeth, began again, and all the while the French balls came back and every now and then there would be a sickening thud as a ball found flesh, or a smack as it struck a musket stock, or a hollow pop as it punctured a shako. Then the musket was back up in the shoulder, the dog-head was back, the command came, and the flint drove onto the strike plate, flying the frizzen open as the sparks flashed down and there would be a pause, less than the time it took for a sparrow's heart to beat, before the powder in the gun fired and the redcoat's cheek would be burning because of the scraps of fiery powder thrown up from the pan, and the brass stock would hammer back into his shoulder, and the corporals were bellowing behind, "Close up! Close up!" Which meant a man was dead or wounded.

All the while the sound of the musketry flared out from the center, an unending noise like breaking sticks, but louder, much louder, and the French muskets were banging away, but the men could not see those because the powder smoke was thicker than the fog that had wreathed the ridge at dawn. And every man was thirsty because when they bit open the cartridges they got scraps of saltpeter from the gunpowder in their mouths and the saltpeter dried a man's tongue and throat so that he had no spit at all. "Fire!" and the muskets flamed, making the cloud of powder smoke suddenly lurid with fire, and the hooves of the Colonel's horse thumped close behind the rearward rank as he tried to see across the smoke, and somewhere else, way behind the ranks, a band was playing "The Grenadiers' March," but no one was really aware of it, only of the need to pull a new cartridge out and tear off the tip and get the damn musket loaded and get the damn thing done.

They were thieves and murderers and fools and rapists and drunkards. Not one had joined for love of country, and certainly not for love of their King. They had joined because they had been drunk when the recruiting sergeant came to their village, or because a magistrate had offered them a choice between the gallows and the ranks, or because a girl was pregnant and wanted to marry them, or because a girl did not want to marry them, or because they were witless fools who believed the recruiter's outrageous lies or simply because the army gave them a pint of rum and three meals a day, and most had been hungry ever since. They were flogged on the orders of officers who were mostly gentlemen who would never be flogged. They were cursed as drunken halfwits, and they were hanged without trial if they stole so much as a chicken. At home, in Britain, if they left the barracks respectable people crossed the street to avoid them. Some taverns refused them service. They were paid pitifully, fined for every item they lost, and the few pennies they managed to keep they usually gambled away. They were feckless rogues, as violent as hounds and as coarse as swine, but they had two things.

They had pride.

And they had the precious ability to fire platoon volleys. They could fire those half-company volleys faster than any other army in the world. Stand in front of these redcoats and the balls came thick as hail. It was death to be in their way and seven French battalions were now in death's forecourt and the South Essex was tearing them to ribbons. One battalion against seven, but the French had never properly deployed into line and now the outside men tried to get back into the column's protection and so the French formation became tighter and the balls struck it relentlessly, and more men, Portuguese and British, had extended the South Essex line, and then the 88th, the Connaught Rangers, came from the north and the Frenchmen who had gained the ridge were being assailed on two sides by enemies who knew how to fire their muskets. Who had practiced musketry until they could do it blindfolded, drunk or mad. They were the red-coated killers and they were good.

"Can you see anything, Richard?" Lawford shouted over the sound of the volleys.

"They won't hold, sir." Thanks to a vagary of the wind, a small gust that had moved the sluggish smoke a few yards, he had a better view than the Colonel.

"Bayonet?"

"Not yet." Sharpe could see the French were being hit brutally. The South Essex alone was shooting close to fifteen hundred musket balls every minute and they were now one of four or five battalions who had closed on the two French columns. Smoke thickened above the ridge, ringing the Frenchmen who stubbornly stayed on the summit. As ever, Sharpe was astonished by the amount of punishment a column could endure. It seemed to shudder under the blows, yet it did not retreat, it just shrank as the outer ranks and files died, and die they did under the terrible flail of the British and Portuguese musketry.

A big man, dressed in a shabby black coat, with a stub of dead cigar between yellowed teeth and a grubby tasseled nightcap on his head, rode up behind the South Essex. He was followed by a half-dozen aides, the only sign that the big, disheveled man in civilian dress might be someone of importance. He watched the French die, watched the South Essex platoon fire, took the cigar from between his teeth, looked at it morosely and spat out a shred of tobacco. "You must have Welshmen in your bloody battalion, Lawford," he growled.

Lawford, surprised by the man's voice, turned and threw a hasty salute. "Sir!"

"Well, man? Do you have bloody Welshmen?"

"I'm sure we have some, sir."

"They're good!" the man in the nightcap said. He gestured at the ranks with his dead cigar. "Too good to be English, Lawford. Maybe there's a Welsh settlement in Essex?"

"I'm sure there is, sir."

"You're sure of nothing of the bloody sort," the big man said. His name was Sir Thomas Picton and he was the General commanding this portion of the ridge. "I saw what you did, Lawford," he went on, "and I thought you'd lost your bloody mind! About turn and right wheel, eh? In the middle of a bloody battle? Gone soft in the head, I thought, but you did well, man, bloody well. Proud of you. You must have Welsh blood. Do you have any fresh cigars, Lawford?"

"No, sir."

"Not much bloody use, are you?" Picton nodded curtly and rode off, followed by his aides who were as well uniformed as their master was ill clothed. Lawford preened, looked back to the French and saw they were crumbling.

Major Leroy had listened to the General, now he rode to Sharpe. "We've pleased Picton," he said, drawing his pistol, "pleased him so much that he reckons Lawford must have Welsh blood." Sharpe laughed. Leroy aimed the pistol and fired into the remnants of the nearest French column. "When I was a youngster, Sharpe," Leroy said, "I used to shoot raccoons."

Sharpe saw a musket fail to fire in four company. Shattered flint, he suspected, and he pulled a spare one from his pocket and shouted the man's name. "Catch it!" he bellowed, and tossed the flint over the rear rank before looking at Leroy. "What's a raccoon?"

"A useless damn animal, Sharpe, that God put on earth to improve a boy's marksmanship. Why don't the bastards move?"

"They will."

"Then they might take your company with them," Leroy said, and jerked his head towards the slope as if advising Sharpe to go and see for himself.

Sharpe rode to the flank of the line and saw that Slingsby had taken the company down the slope and to the north from where, in skirmish line, they were shooting uphill at the French left flank while a handful of his men were shooting downhill to prevent a scatter of hesitant Frenchmen from reinforcing the column. Did Slingsby want to be a hero? Did he think that the company could cut off the French column by itself? In a moment, Sharpe knew, the French would break and close to six thousand men would spill over the crest and rush down the hill to escape the slaughter and they would sweep the light company away like so much chaff. That moment came even closer when he heard the crack of a cannon from the far side of the fight. It was canister, the tin can that splintered apart at the cannon's mouth and spread its charge of musket balls like a blast from the devil's shotgun. Sharpe did not have a moment, he had seconds, and so he kicked the horse down the hill. "Back to the line!" he shouted at his men. "Back! Fast!"

Slingsby gave him an indignant look. "We're holding them," he protested, "can't go back now!"

Sharpe dropped from the horse and gave its reins to Slingsby. "Back to battalion, Slingsby, that's an order! Now!"

"But…»

"Do it!" Sharpe bellowed like a sergeant.

Slingsby reluctantly mounted and Sharpe shouted at his men. "Form on the battalion!"

And just then the French broke.

They had lasted longer than any general could ask. They had gained the hilltop and for a splendid moment it seemed as if victory had to be theirs, but they had not received the massive reinforcement they needed and the British and Portuguese battalions had reformed, outflanked them and then doused them with rolling volleys. No army in the world could have stood against those volleys, but the French had endured them until bravery alone would not suffice and their only impulse left was to survive and Sharpe saw the blue uniforms come like a breaking wave across the skyline. He and his men ran. Slingsby was well clear, kicking his horse up towards James Hooper's company, and the men who had been on the left of the skirmish line were safe enough, but most of the skirmishers could not escape the rush.

"Form on me!" Sharpe bellowed. "Rally square!"

It was a desperate maneuver, one that broken infantry used in their dying moments against rampaging cavalry, but it served. Thirty or forty men ran to Sharpe, faced outwards and fixed bayonets. "Edge south lads," Sharpe said calmly, "away from them."

Harper had unslung his volley gun. The tide of Frenchmen parted to avoid the clump of redcoats and riflemen, streaming to either side, but Sharpe kept the men moving, a yard at a time, trying to escape the torrent. One Frenchman did not see Sharpe's men and ran onto Perkins's sword bayonet and stayed there until the boy pulled the trigger to blow the man off the long blade with a gout of blood. "Go slow," Sharpe said quietly, "go slow," and just then the General on the white horse, his sword drawn and gold braid bright, came straight at the rally square and he seemed astonished to find an enemy in front of him and he instinctively lowered his sword to make the straight-armed lunge and Harper pulled his trigger, as did four or five other men, and the horse's head and the man behind vanished in a cockade of blood. Both went down, the horse sliding down the hill, hooves flailing, and Sharpe bellowed at his men to hurry leftwards and so just avoided the dying beast. The rider, a bullet hole in his forehead, slid to a halt at the men's feet. "He's a bloody general, sir," Perkins said in amazement.

"Just keep calm," Sharpe said, "edge left." They were out of the stream of Frenchmen now that was running desperately downhill, leaping over corpses, intent on nothing except escaping the musket balls. The British and Portuguese battalions were following them, not in pursuit, but to make a line on the crest from where they harried the fugitives, and some balls whistled over Sharpe's head. "Break now!" he told his men and they ran away from the square and up towards the battalion.

"That was close," Harper said.

"You were in the wrong bloody place."

"It wasn't healthy," Harper said, then looked to see if any man had been left behind. "Perkins! What the hell is that you've got?"

"It's a French general, Sergeant," Perkins said. He had dragged the corpse all the way up the hill and now knelt by the body and began searching the pockets.

"Leave that body alone!" It was Slingsby, back again, on foot now, striding towards the company. "Form on number nine company, look sharp now! I told you to leave that alone!" he snapped at Perkins who had ignored the order. "Take that man's name, Sergeant!" he ordered Huckfield.

"Perkins!" Sharpe said. "Search that body properly. Lieutenant!"

Slingsby looked wide-eyed at Sharpe. "Sir?"

"Come with me." Sharpe stalked off to the left, well out of earshot of the company, then turned on Slingsby and all his pent-up rage exploded. "Listen, you goddamn bastard, you bloody well nearly lost the company there. Lost them! Every damned man of them! And they know it. So shut your damned mouth until you've learned how to fight."

"You're being offensive, Sharpe!" Slingsby protested.

"I mean to be."

"I take exception," Slingsby said stiffly. "I will not be insulted by your kind, Sharpe."

Sharpe smiled and it was not a pretty smile. "My kind, Slingsby? I'll tell you what I am, you sniveling little bastard, I'm a killer. I've been killing men for damn near thirty years. You want a duel? I don't mind. Sword, pistol, knives, anything you bloody well like, Slingsby. Just let me know when and where. But till then, shut your damned mouth and bugger off." He walked back to Perkins who had virtually stripped the French officer naked. "What did you find?"

"Cash, sir." Perkins glanced at an outraged Slingsby, then back to Sharpe. "And his scabbard, sir." He showed Sharpe the scabbard that was sheathed in blue velvet studded with small golden N's.

"They're probably brass," Sharpe said, "but you never know. Keep half the cash and share the other half."

All the Frenchmen had retreated now, except those who were dead or wounded. The voltigeurs who had held the rocky knoll had stayed, though, and those men had been reinforced by some of the survivors from the defeated columns, the rest of whom had stopped halfway down the ridge from where they just stared upwards. None had gone all the way back to the valley that was now clear of fog so that the French gunners could aim their shells which came up the hill, trailing wisps of smoke, to bang among the scatter of dead bodies. British and Portuguese skirmish companies were going down among the shell bursts to form a picquet line, but Sharpe, without any orders from Lawford or anyone else, took his own men to where the hill jutted out towards the boulder-strewn promontory held by the French. "Rifles," he ordered, "keep their heads down."

He let his riflemen shoot at the French who, armed with muskets, could not reply. Meanwhile Sharpe searched the lower slopes with his telescope, looking for a green-jacketed body among the drifts of dead French, but he could see no sign of Corporal Dodd.

Sharpe's riflemen kept up their desultory target practice. He sent the redcoats back a few paces so they would not be an inviting target for the French gunners at the foot of the slope. The rest of the British troops had also marched back, denying the enemy artillery a plain target, but the presence of the skirmish chain on the forward slope told the defeated enemy infantry that the volleys were still waiting just out of sight. None tried to advance and then, one by one, the French cannon fell silent and the smoke slowly drifted off the hill.

Then the guns started a mile to the north. For a few seconds it was just one or two guns, and then whole batteries opened and the thunder started again. The next French attack was coming.

Lieutenant Slingsby did not rejoin the company, going back to the battalion instead. Sharpe did not care.

He rested on the hillside, watched the French, and waited.

"The letter," Ferragus instructed Sarah, "is to a Senhor Verzi." He paced up and down behind her, the floorboards creaking beneath his weight. The sound of the guns reverberated softly on the big window through which, at the end of a street that ran downhill, Sarah could just see the River Mondego. "Tell Senhor Verzi that he is in my debt," Ferragus ordered her.

The pen scratched. Sarah, summoned to write a second letter, had wrapped a scarf about her neck so that no skin was exposed between her hair and the blue dress's high embroidered collar.

"Tell him he may discharge all his debts to me with a favor. I require accommodation on one of his boats. I want a cabin for my brother's wife, children and household."

"Not too fast, senhor," Sarah said. She dipped the nib and wrote. "For your brother's wife, children and household," she said as she finished.

"I am sending the family and their servants to Lisbon," Ferragus went on, "and I ask, no, I require Senhor Verzi to give them shelter on a suitable vessel."

"On a suitable vessel," Sarah repeated.

"If the French come to Lisbon," Ferragus continued, "the vessel may carry them to the Azores and wait there until it is safe to return. Tell him to expect my brother's wife within three days of receipt of this letter." He waited. "And say, finally, that I know he will treat my brother's people as though they were his own." Verzi had better treat them well, Ferragus thought, if he did not want his guts punched into a liquid mess in some Lisbon alley. He stopped and stared down at Sarah's back. He could see her spine against the thin blue material. He knew she was aware of his gaze and could sense her indignation. It amused him. "Read me the letter."

Sarah read and Ferragus gazed out of the window. Verzi would oblige him, he knew that, and so Major Ferreira's wife and family would be far away if the French came. They would escape the rape and slaughter that would doubtless occur, and when the French had settled, when they had slaked their appetites, it would be safe for the family to return.

"You sound certain the French will come, senhor," Sarah said when she had finished reading.

"I don't know whether they will or not," Ferragus said, "but I know preparations must be made. If they come, then my brother's family is safe; if they do not, then Senhor Verzi's services will not be needed."

Sarah sprinkled sand on the paper. "How long would we wait in the Azores?" she asked.

Ferragus smiled at her misapprehension. He had no intention of letting Sarah go to the Azores, but this was not the time to tell her. "As long as necessary," he said.

"Perhaps the French will not come," Sarah suggested just as a renewed bout of gunfire sounded louder than ever.

"The French," Ferragus said, giving her the seal, "have conquered every place in Europe. No one fights them now, except us. Over a hundred thousand Frenchmen have reinforced the armies in Spain. They have how many soldiers south of the Pyrenees? Three hundred thousand? Do you really believe, Miss Fry, that we can win against so many? If we win today then they will come back, even more of them."

He sent three men with the letter. The road to Lisbon was safe enough, but he had heard there was trouble in the city itself. The people there believed the British planned to abandon Portugal and so leave them to the French and there had been riots in the streets, so the letter had to be guarded. And no sooner was the letter gone than two others of his men came with more news of trouble. A feitor had arrived at the warehouse and was insisting the stores be destroyed.

Ferragus buckled on a knife belt, thrust a pistol into a pocket, and stalked across town. Many folk were in the streets, listening to the far-off gunfire as though they could tell from the rise and fall of the sound how the battle went. They made way for Ferragus, the men pulling off their hats as he passed. Two priests, loading the treasures of their church onto a handcart, made the sign of the cross when they saw him and Ferragus retaliated by giving them the devil's horns with his left hand, then spitting on the cobbles. "I gave thirty thousand vintens to that church a year ago," Ferragus said to his men. That was a small fortune, close to a hundred pounds of English money. He laughed. "Priests," he sneered, "are like women. Give and they hate you."

"So don't give," one of his men said.

"You give to the church," Ferragus said, "because that is the way to heaven. But with a woman you take. That too is the way to heaven." He turned down a narrow alley and pushed through a door into a vast warehouse that was dimly lit by dusty skylights. Cats hissed at him, then scampered away. There were dozens of the beasts, kept to protect the warehouse's contents from rats. At night, Ferragus knew, the warehouse was a bloody battlefield as the rats fought against the hungry cats, but the cats always won and so protected the barrels of hard-baked biscuit, the sacks of wheat, barley and maize, the tin containers filled with rice, the jars of olive oil, the boxes of salt cod and the vats of salt meat. There was enough food here to feed Massena's army all the way to Lisbon and enough hogsheads of tobacco to keep it coughing all the way back to Paris. He stooped to tickle the throat of a great one-eyed torn cat, scarred from a hundred fights. The cat bared its teeth at Ferragus, but submitted to the caress, then Ferragus turned to two of his men who were standing with the feitor who wore a green sash to show he was on duty. "What is the trouble?" Ferragus demanded.

A feitor was an official storekeeper, appointed by the government to make certain there were sufficient rations for the Portuguese army. Every sizable town in Portugal had a feitor, answerable to the Junta of Provisions in Lisbon, and Coimbra's storekeeper was a middle-aged, corpulent man called Rafael Pires who snatched off his hat when he saw Ferragus and seemed about to drop to one knee.

"Senhor Pires," Ferragus greeted him affably enough. "Your wife and family are well?"

"God be praised, senhor, they are."

"They are still here? You have not sent them south?"

"They left yesterday. I have a sister in Bemposta." Bemposta was a small place nearer to Lisbon, the kind of town the French might ignore in their advance.

"Then you are fortunate. They won't starve on the streets of Lisbon, eh? So what brings you here?"

Pires fidgeted with his hat. "I have orders, senhor."

"Orders?"

Pires gestured with his hat at the great heaps of food. "It is all to be destroyed, senhor. All of it."

"Who says so?"

"The Captain-Major."

"And you take orders from him?"

"I am directed to do so, senhor."

The Captain-Major was the military commander of Coimbra and its surrounding districts. He was in charge of recruiting and training the ordenanqa, the "armed inhabitants," who could reinforce the army if the enemy came, but the Captain-Major was also expected to enforce the government's decrees.

"So what will you do?" Ferragus asked Pires. "Eat it all?"

"The Captain-Major is sending men here," Pires said.

"Here?" Ferragus's voice was dangerous now.

Pires took a breath. "They have my files, senhor," he explained. "They know you have been buying food. How can they not know? You have spent much money, senhor. I am ordered to find it."

"And?" Ferragus asked.

"It is to be destroyed," Pires insisted and then, as if to show that he was helpless in this situation, he invoked a higher power. "The English insist."

"The English," Ferragus snarled. "Os ingleses por mar" he shouted at Pires, then calmed down. The English were not the problem. Pires was. "You say the Captain-Major took your papers?"

"Indeed."

"But he does not know where the food is stored?"

"The papers only say how much food is in the town," Pires said, "and who owns it."

"So he has my name," Ferragus asked, "and a list of my stores?"

"Not a complete list, senhor." Pires glanced at the massive stacks of food and marvelled that Ferragus had accumulated so much. "He merely knows you have some supplies stored and he says I must guarantee their destruction."

"So guarantee it," Ferragus said airily.

"He will send men to make sure of it, senhor" Pires said. "I am to bring them here."

"So you don't know where the stores are," Ferragus said.

"I am to make a search this afternoon, senhor, every warehouse in the city!" Pires shrugged. "I came to warn you," he said in helpless appeal.

"I pay you, Pires," Ferragus said, "to keep my food from being taken at a thief's price to feed the army. Now you will lead men here to destroy it?"

"You can move it, perhaps?" Pires suggested.

"Move it!" Ferragus shouted. "How, in God's name, do I move it? It would take a hundred men and twenty wagons."

Pires just shrugged.

Ferragus stared down at the feitor. "You came to warn me," he said in a low voice, "because you will bring the soldiers here, yes? And you do not want me to blame you, is that it?"

"They insist, senhor, they insist!" Pires was pleading now. "And if our own troops don't come, the British will."

"Os ingleses por mar," Ferragus snarled, and he used his left hand to punch Pires in the face. The blow was swift and extraordinarily powerful, a straight jab that broke the feitor's nose and sent him staggering back with blood pouring from his nostrils. Ferragus followed fast, using his wounded right hand to thump Pires in the belly. The blow hurt Ferragus, but he ignored the pain because that was what a man must do. Pain must be endured. If a man could not take pain then he should not fight, and Ferragus backed Pires against the warehouse wall and systematically punched him, left and right, each blow traveling a short distance, but landing with hammer force. The fists drove into the feitor's body, cracking his ribs and breaking his cheekbones, and blood spattered on Ferragus's hands and sleeves, but he was oblivious of the blood just as he was oblivious of the pain in his hand and groin. He was doing what he loved to do and he hit even harder, silencing the feitor's pathetic screams and yelps, seeing the man's breath come bubbling and pink as his huge fists crunched the broken ribs into the lungs. It took awesome strength to do this. To kill a man with bare hands without strangling him.

Pires slumped against the wall. He no longer resembled a man, though he lived. His visible flesh was swollen, bloody, pulpy. His eyes had closed, his nose was destroyed, his face was a mask of blood, his teeth were broken, his lips were split to ribbons, his chest was crushed, his belly was pounded, yet still he managed to stay upright against the warehouse wall. His ruined face looked blindly from side to side, then a fist caught him on the jaw and the bone broke with an audible crack and Pires tottered, groaned and fell at last.

"Hold him up," Ferragus said, stripping off his coat and shirt.

Two men seized Pires under his arms and hauled him upright and Ferragus stepped in close and punched with a vicious intensity. His fists did not travel far, these were not wild swinging clouts, but short, precise blows that landed with sickening force. He worked on the man's belly, then moved up to his chest, pounding it so that Pires's head flopped with every strike and his bloody mouth sprayed drops of reddened spittle onto Ferragus's chest. He went on punching until the man's head jerked back and then flopped sideways like a puppet whose crown-string had snapped. There was a rattling noise from the battered throat, Ferragus hit him one last time and then stepped back. "Put him in the cellar," Ferragus ordered, "and slit his belly."

"Slit his belly?" one of the men asked, thinking he had misheard.

"Give the rats something to work on," Ferragus said, "because the sooner they're done with him, the sooner he's gone." He crossed to Miguel who gave him a rag with which he wiped the blood and spittle from his chest and arms that were covered in tattoos. There were anchors wrapped in chains on both his forearms, three mermaids on his chest, and snakes encircling his vast upper arms. On his back was a warship under full sail, its skyscrapers aloft, studding sails spread, and at its stern a British flag. He pulled on his shirt, then a coat, and watched the corpse being dragged to the back of the warehouse where a trapdoor opened into a cellar. There was already one belly-slitted corpse rotting in that darkness, the remnants of a man who had tried to betray Ferragus's hoard to the authorities. Now another had tried, failed and died.

Ferragus locked the warehouse. If the French did not come, he thought, then this food could be sold legally and at a profit, and if they did come, then it might mean a greater profit. The next few hours would reveal all. He made the sign of the cross, then went to find a tavern because he had killed a man and was thirsty.

No one came from battalion to give Sharpe orders, which suited him just fine. He was standing guard on the rocky knoll where, he reckoned, a hundred French infantry were keeping their heads well down because of his desultory rifle fire. He wished he had enough men to shift the voltigeurs off the hill, for their presence was an invitation to the enemy to try for the summit again. They could throw a couple of battalions up to the knoll and use them to attack along the spur, and such a move might be encouraged by the new French attack that was heating up a mile to the north. Sharpe went a small way along the spur, too far probably because a couple of musket shots whirred past him as he crouched and took out his telescope. He ignored the voltigeurs, knowing they were shooting far beyond a musket's accurate range, and he stared at the vast French columns climbing the better road that twisted up to the village just beneath the ridge's northern crest. A stone windmill, its sails and vanes taken away and machinery dismantled like every other mill in central Portugal, stood near the crest itself and there was a knot of horsemen beside the stumpy tower, but Sharpe could not see any troops except for the two French columns that were halfway up the road and a third, smaller column, some way behind. The huge French formations looked dark against the slope. British and Portuguese guns were blasting shot from the crest, blurring his view with their gray-white smoke.

"Sir! Mister Sharpe, sir!" It was Patrick Harper who called.

Sharpe collapsed the telescope and walked back, seeing as he went what had prompted Harper's call. Two companies of brown-coated cazadores were approaching the spur and Sharpe supposed the Portuguese troops had orders to clear the rocky knoll of the enemy. A pair of nine-pounders were being repositioned to support their attack, but Sharpe did not hold out much chance for it. The cazadores numbered about the same as the voltigeurs, but the French had cover and it would be a nasty fight if they decided to make a stand.

"I didn't want you in the way when those gunners started firing," Harper explained, jerking his head towards the pair of nine-pounders.

"Decent of you, Pat."

"If you died, sir, then Slingsby would take over," Harper said without a trace of insubordination.

"You wouldn't want that?" Sharpe asked.

"I'm from Donegal, sir, and I put up with whatever the good Lord sends to trouble me."

"He sent me, Pat, he sent me."

"Mysterious are the ways of the Lord," Harris put in. The cazadores were waiting fifty paces behind Sharpe. He ignored them, instead asking again if any of the men had seen Dodd. Mister Iliffe, who had not heard Sharpe ask before, nodded nervously. "He was running, sir."

"Where?"

"When we were almost cut off, sir? Down the hill. Going like a hare." Which matched what Carter, Dodd's partner, had thought. The two men had very nearly been trapped by the voltigeurs and Dodd had elected the fast way out, downhill, while Carter had been lucky to escape uphill with nothing more serious than a musket ball in his pack, which he claimed had only helped him along. Sharpe reckoned Dodd would rejoin later. He was a countryman, could read ground, and doubtless he would avoid the French and climb up the southern part of the ridge. Whatever, there was nothing Sharpe could do about him now.

"So are we going to help the Portuguese boys?" Harper asked.

"Not on your bloody life," Sharpe said, "not unless they bring a whole bloody battalion."

"He's coming to ask you," Harper said in warning, nodding towards a slim Portuguese officer who approached the light company. His brown uniform had black facings and his high-fronted shako had a long black plume. Sharpe noted that the officer wore a heavy cavalry sword and, unusually, carried a rifle. Sharpe could think of only one officer who was so armed, himself, and he felt irritated that there should be another officer with the same weapons, but then the approaching man took off his black-plumed barretina and smiled broadly.

"Good God," Sharpe said.

"No, no, it's only me." Jorge Vicente, whom Sharpe had last seen in the wild country north east of Oporto, held out his hand. "Mister Sharpe," he said.

"Jorge!"

"Capitao Vicente now." Vicente clasped Sharpe and then, to the rifleman's embarrassment, gave his friend a kiss on both cheeks. "And you, Richard, a major by now, I expect?"

"Bloody hell, no, Jorge. They don't promote the likes of me. It might spoil the army's reputation. How are you?"

"I am-how do you say? — flourishing. But you?" Vicente frowned at Sharpe's bruised face. "You are wounded?"

"Fell down some steps," Sharpe said.

"You must be careful," Vicente said solemnly, then smiled. "Sergeant Harper! It is good to see you."

"No kissing, sir, I'm Irish."

Vicente greeted the other men he had known in the wild pursuit of Soult's army across the northern frontier, then turned back to Sharpe. "I've orders to knock those things out of the rocks." He gestured towards the French.

"It's a good idea," Sharpe said, "but there aren't enough of you."

"Two Portuguese are equal to one Frenchman," Vicente said airily, "and you might do the honor of helping us?"

"Bloody hell," Sharpe said, then evaded an answer by nodding at the Baker rifle on Vicente's shoulder. "And what are you doing carrying a rifle?"

"Imitating you," Vicente said frankly, "and besides, I am now the captain of a atirador company, the how do you say? marksmen. We carry rifles, the other companies have muskets. I transferred from the 18th when we raised the cazador battalions. So, shall we attack?"

"What do you think?" Sharpe countered.

Vicente smiled uncertainly. He had been a soldier for less than two years; before that he had been a lawyer and when Sharpe first met him the young Portuguese had been a stickler for the supposed rules of warfare. That might or might not have changed, but Sharpe suspected Vicente was a natural soldier, brave and decisive, no fool, yet he was still nervous of showing his skills to Sharpe who had taught him most of what he knew about fighting. He glanced at Sharpe, then shadowed his eyes to stare at the French. "They won't stand," he suggested.

"They might," Sharpe said, "and there are at least a hundred of the bastards. How many are we? A hundred and thirty? If it was up to me, Jorge, I'd send in your whole battalion."

"My Colonel ordered me to do it."

"Does he know what he's doing?"

"He's English," Vicente said dryly. The Portuguese army had been reorganized and trained in the last eighteen months and huge numbers of British officers had volunteered into its ranks for the reward of a promotion.

"I'd still send in more men," Sharpe said.

Vicente had no chance to answer because there was the sudden thump of hooves on the springy turf and a stentorian voice shouting at him. "Don't hang about, Vicente! There are Frogs to kill! Get on with it, Captain, get on with it! Who the devil are you?" This last question was directed at Sharpe and came from a horseman who had trouble curbing his gelding as he tried to rein in beside the two officers. The rider's voice betrayed he was English, though he was wearing Portuguese brown to which he had added a black cocked hat that sported a pair of golden tassels. One tassel shadowed his face that looked to be red and glistening.

"Sharpe, sir," Sharpe answered the man's bad-tempered question.

"95th?"

"South Essex, sir."

"That bloody mob of yokels," the officer said. "Lost a color a couple of years back, didn't you?"

"We took one back at Talavera," Sharpe said harshly.

"Did you now?" The horseman did not seem particularly interested.

He took out a small telescope and stared at the rocky knoll, ignoring some musket balls which, fired at extreme range, fluttered impotently by. "Allow me to name Colonel Rogers-Jones," Vicente said, "my Colonel."

"And the man, Vicente," Rogers-Jones said, "who ordered you to turf those buggers out of the rocks. I didn't tell you to stand here and chatter, did I?"

"I was seeking Captain Sharpe's advice, sir," Vicente said.

"Reckon he's got any to offer?" The Colonel sounded amused.

"He took a French Eagle," Vicente pointed out.

"Not by standing around talking, he didn't," Rogers-Jones said. He collapsed his telescope. "I'll tell the gunners to open fire," he went on, "and you advance, Vicente. You'll help him, Sharpe." He added the order carelessly. "Winkle them out, Vicente, then stay there to make sure the bastards don't come back." He turned his horse and spurred away.

"Jesus bloody wept," Sharpe said. "Does he know how many of them there are?"

"I still have my orders," Vicente said bleakly.

Sharpe took the rifle off his shoulder and loaded it. "You want advice?"

"Of course."

"Send our rifles up the middle," Sharpe said, "in skirmish order. They're to keep firing, hard and fast, no patches, just keeping the bastards' heads down. The rest of our lads will come up behind in line. Bayonets fixed. Straight-forward battalion attack, Jorge, with three companies, and I hope your bastard Colonel is satisfied."

"Our lads?" Vicente picked those two words out of Sharpe's advice.

"Not going to let you die alone, Jorge," Sharpe said. "You'd probably get lost trying to find the pearly gates." He glanced northwards and saw the cannon smoke thickening as the French attack closed on the village beneath the ridge's summit, then the first of the guns close to the knoll fired and a shell banged smoke and casing scraps just beyond the rocky 'knoll. "So let's do it," Sharpe said.

It was not wise, he thought, but it was war. He cocked the rifle and shouted at his men to close up. Time to fight.

CHAPTER 5

The village of Sula, which was perched on the eastward slope of the ridge very close to where the northernmost road crossed the summit, was a small and unremarkable place. The houses were cramped, the dung heaps large, and for a long time the village had not even possessed a church, which had meant that a priest must be fetched from Moura, at the ridge's foot, or else a friar summoned from the monastery, to give extreme unction to the dying, but the sacraments had usually arrived too late and so the dead of Sula had gone to their long darkness unshriven, which was why the local people liked to claim that the tiny hamlet was haunted by specters.

On Thursday, 27th September 1810, the village was haunted by skirmishers. The whole first battalion of the 95th Rifles were in and around the hamlet, and with them were the 3rd Cazadores, many of whom were also armed with the Baker rifle, which meant that more than a thousand skirmishers in green and brown opened fire on the two advancing French columns, which had deployed almost as many skirmishers themselves, but the French had muskets and were opposed by rifles, and so the voltigeurs were the first to die in the small walled paddocks and terraced vineyards beneath the village. The sound of the fight was like dry brush burning, an unending crackle of muskets and rifles, which was augmented by the bass notes of the artillery on the crest that fired shell and shrapnel over the Portuguese and British skirmishers to tear great holes in the two columns struggling up the slope behind the voltigeurs.

To the French officers in the column, scanning the ridge above, it seemed they were opposed only by skirmishers and artillery. The artillery had been placed on a ledge beyond the village and just below the skyline, and near the guns was a scatter of horsemen who watched from beside the white-painted stump of the windmill's tower. The artillery was hurting the columns, smashing round shot through tight ranks and exploding shells above the files, but two batteries could never stop these great columns. The horsemen by the mill were no danger. There were only four or five riders visible when the cannon smoke thinned, and all wore cocked hats, which meant they were not cavalrymen, so it seemed that the British and Portuguese skirmishers, supported by cannon, were supposed to defeat the attack. Which meant the French must win, for there were no redcoats in sight, no damned lines to envelop a column with volley fire. The drummers beat the pas de charge and the men gave their war cry, "Vive l'Empereur!" One of the two columns divided into two smaller units to negotiate an outcrop of rock, then rejoined on the road as two shells exploded right over their front ranks. A dozen men were thrown down, the dusty road was suddenly red and sergeants dragged the dead and wounded aside so that the ranks behind would not be obstructed. Ahead of the column the sound of the skirmishing grew in intensity as the voltigeurs closed the range and opened on the riflemen with their muskets. There were so many skirmishers now that the noise of their battle was a continuous crackling. Smoke drifted off the hillside. "Vive l'Empereur!" the French shouted and the first riflemen began picking at the columns' front ranks. A bullet smacked an Eagle, ripping off the tip of a wing, and an officer went down in the front rank, gasping with pain as the files tramped round him. The voltigeurs, outranged by the rifles, were being driven back onto the columns and so Marshal Ney, who commanded this attack, ordered that more companies were to deploy as skirmishers to drive the riflemen and cazadores back up the slope.

The drummers kept up their monotonous rhythm. A round of shrapnel, designed to burst in the air and slam its load of bullets down and forward, exploded above the right-hand column and the drums momentarily ceased as a dozen boys went down and the men behind were spattered with their blood. "Close up!" a sergeant shouted and a shell banged behind him and a hat went spiraling up in the air and fell on the road with a heavy thump because half the man's head was still inside. A drummer boy, both legs broken and his belly slit by shell fragments, sat and kept up his drumming as the files went past him. The men patted his head for luck, leaving him to die among the vines.

Ahead of the columns the new French skirmishers deployed and their officers shouted them up the hill to close the range and so swamp the hated greenjackets with musket fire. The Baker rifle was a killer, but a slow one. To fire it accurately a man was supposed to wrap each ball in a greased leather patch, then ram it down on the charge, and ramming a patched bullet was hard work and made a rifle slow to load. A man could shoot a musket three times while a rifleman reloaded. Time could be saved by forgetting the patch, but then the ball did not grip the seven lands and grooves spiraling inside the barrel and the weapon became little more accurate than a musket. The reinforced voltigeurs climbed and the sheer weight of their fire forced the riflemen and cazadores back, then more Portuguese skirmishers joined the fight, the whole of the 1st cazadores, but the French countered with three more companies of blue-jacketed troops who ran out of the columns and broke down the vines to climb up to where the powder smoke dotted the hillside. Their muskets added more smoke and their bullets pressed the brown- and green-jacketed men back. A rifleman, shot in the lungs, was draped over one of the chestnut stakes holding the vines and a voltigeur drew his bayonet and stabbed the wounded man until he stopped twitching, then searched his pockets for coins or plunder. A sergeant pushed the voltigeur away from the corpse. "Kill the others first!" he shouted. "Get uphill!" The French fire was overwhelming now, a drenching of lead, and the cazadores and riflemen scrambled up to the village itself where they took cover behind low stone walls or in the windows of the small cottages from which shards of broken tiles cascaded as the roofs were spattered by French musketry and by the fragments of shell casing fired by the French guns in the valley. The voltigeurs were shouting, encouraging each other, advancing in rushes, pointing out targets. "Sauterelle! Sauterelle!" a sergeant shouted, pointing at a rifleman of the 95th. The shout meant "grasshopper," the French nickname for the green pests who dodged and shot, moved and reloaded, shot and moved again. A dozen muskets fired at the man who vanished in an alley as the tile pieces clattered behind him. The French skirmishers were all about the village's eastern margin, enveloping it in musketry, and small groups ran up to the houses and fired at shadows in the smoke. The road was blocked with handcarts where it entered the village, but a company of French troops charged the makeshift barricade which spat smoke and flame as rifles fired from behind the carts. Three Frenchmen went down, but the rest reached the obstacle and fired at the greenjackets. A shell exploded overhead, driving down two more Frenchmen and shattering tiles on a roof. The first handcart was pulled away and the French poured through the gap. Rifles and muskets spat at them from windows and doors. More voltigeurs climbed garden walls or charged into alleyways and over dung heaps. British, Portuguese and French shells were exploding among the houses, smashing walls and filling the narrow lanes with smoke and with shrieking shards of metal and broken tile, but the voltigeurs outnumbered the riflemen and the cazadores and, because they were inside the village, the rifles lost the advantage of long-range accuracy, and the blue-coated men pushed forward, advancing group by group, clearing houses and gardens. The road was cleared as the last carts were dragged away. The column was close to the village now and the voltigeurs were hunting the last cazadores and riflemen from the upper houses. One cazador, trapped in an alley, swung his unloaded musket like a club and put down two Frenchmen before a third lunged a bayonet into his belly. The village had been abandoned by its inhabitants and the voltigeurs plundered the small houses, taking whatever small possessions the villagers had left in their haste to leave. One man fought another for possession of a wooden bucket, a thing not worth a sou, and both died when cazadores shot them through a window.

The smoke from the British guns made leprous clouds on the ridge top as the columns reached the village. The shells banged at the columns, but the files closed up and the men marched on and the drummers worked their sticks, pausing only so that the shout of "Vive l'Empereur" could tell Marshal Massena, down in the valley where the French gunners hammered their own shells up towards the ridge's crest, that the attack continued.

The windmill on the ledge below the crest lay a third of a mile from the village. The voltigeurs cleared the last enemy skirmishers from Sula's western edge, sending them scurrying up the more open ground that lay between the village and the mill. One column skirted the village, pushing down fences and clambering over two stone walls, but the other marched right through Sula's center. At least half a dozen roofs were burning, their rafters set alight by shells. Another shell exploded in the heart of the main street, flinging aside half a dozen infantrymen in smoke, blood and flame, and smearing the whitewashed walls of the houses with spatters of blood. "Close up!" the sergeants shouted. "Close up!" The drums echoed from the bloodied walls, while up on the ridge the British officers heard the rousing cheer, "Vive l'Empereur!" The voltigeurs were climbing ever closer, and were now so thick on the ground that their musketry was almost as dense as volley fire. The British and Portuguese skirmishers had vanished, gone northwards into some trees that crowned the northern crest, and all that seemed to be ahead of the French was the ledge where the horsemen stood close to the mill. Bullets began smacking against the mill's white-painted stones. One of the artillery batteries was near the mill and its smoke helped to hide the horsemen, among whom was a small, scowling, black-haired, dark-faced man who was perched atop an oversize saddle on a horse that seemed much too big for him. He stared indignantly at the French as if their very presence offended him. Musket balls hummed past him, but he ignored them. An aide, worried by the intensity of the voltigeurs' fire, considered suggesting that the small man should ride back a few paces, but checked himself from speaking. Such advice to Black Bob Craufurd, commander of the Light Division, would be construed as arrant weakness.

The columns were in the open ground beneath the mill now and the voltigeurs were being whipped by blasts of canister that flattened the grass as if a sudden gale gusted from the west. More canisters were fired, each taking its handful of casualties, and the voltigeur officers ordered their men back to the columns. Their job was done. The British and Portuguese skirmishers had been driven back and victory waited at the ridge top, and that victory was close, so very close, because the ridge was empty except for the two batteries of guns and the handful of horsemen.

Or so the French thought. But behind the ledge, where a path ran parallel to the ridge's top, was dead ground, invisible from below, and in the concealment, lying down to protect themselves from the French artillery, were the 43rd and the 52nd. They were two light infantry battalions, the 43rd from Monmouthshire and the 52nd from Oxfordshire, and they reckoned themselves the best of the best. They had a right to that opinion, for they had been drilled to a savage hardness by the small black-jowled man who scowled at the French from beside the mill. A gunner spun back from the muzzle of his nine-pounder, struck in the ribs by a French musket ball. He spat up blood, then his Sergeant dragged him away from the gun's high wheel and rammed a canister home. "Fire!" the gun Captain shouted, and the huge weapon slammed back, bucking up on its trail to spew a thundercloud of smoke in which the canister was torn apart to loose its load of musket balls into the French ranks. "Close up," the French sergeants shouted, and wounded men, leaving snails' traces of blood, crawled back to the village where the stone walls would protect them from the gut-slitting blasts of canister. Yet there was not enough canister to finish the columns. They were too big.

The outer ranks soaked up the punishment, left their dead and dying, while the ranks behind stepped over the corpses. The hidden redcoats could hear the drums getting closer, could hear the shouts of the infantry and the sound of the musket balls whickering close overhead. They waited, understanding from the swelling noise that Black Bob was letting the enemy get close, very close. This was not to be a firefight at extreme musket range, but a sudden, astonishing slaughter, and then they saw the gunners of one British battery, who were taking a drenching of musketry from the front rank of the left-hand column, abandon their pieces and run back to safety. There was an odd silence then. Not a real silence, of course, for the drums were still beating and the blue-coated French were shouting their war cry, but one British battery was deserted, its guns left to the enemy, and the other was reloading and so for a moment it seemed strangely quiet.

Then the French, who had been ripped by the round shot and torn by the dreadful canister, realized that the battery had been abandoned. They gave a great cheer and scrambled over rocks to touch the hot cannon, and officers shouted at them to ignore the guns. The guns could be taken away later, but for now all that mattered was to reach the crest and so win Portugal. Beneath them Marshal Massena wondered whether Henriette would find the beds in the monastery comfortable, and whether he would be named Prince of Portugal and whether his cook could find something palatable among the discarded British rations to make for supper. Pertinent questions all, for the Army of Portugal was on the very brink of victory.

Then Black Bob took a breath.

"Forward!" Sharpe called. He had concentrated the riflemen, British and Portuguese, on the spur's center from where they could pour an accurate fire on the voltigeurs crouching among the knoll's jumbled rocks. "Make it fast," he shouted. He knelt and fired his rifle, the smoke hiding whatever damage he did. "Forward! Forward!" If this damned attack was to be done, he thought, then do it quickly, and he chivvied the riflemen on, then beckoned at the redcoats and the rest of the Portuguese who advanced in a two-deep line behind. The guns helped. One was firing canister, the balls rattling on the rocks, while the second was cutting its fuses desperately short so that the shells exploded just above the knoll. It would be hell there, Sharpe thought. The French were being assailed by rifle fire, canister and shell fragments, yet they stubbornly clung to the promontory.

He slung his rifle. He did not have time to reload and, besides, he wanted the attack over quickly and so, in anticipation, he drew his sword. Why the hell did the bastards not run? "Forward!" he shouted and felt a ball smack past his cheek, the wind of it like a small hot puff of air. More smoke showed among the rocks as the voltigeurs opened on the riflemen, but none of the musket balls hit for the range was long. The rifles made a deeper, quicker noise than the muskets. "Forward!" Sharpe shouted again, conscious that Vicente had brought the three-company line close behind the skirmishers. The riflemen darted forward, knelt, aimed and fired, and a musket ball whipped through the heather to Sharpe's left. A Frenchman firing low, he thought, a man with experience, and he was a hundred paces from the knoll now and fear had dried his mouth. The enemy was hidden, his own men were in the open, and another ball went close enough for him to feel the wind of its passing. A cazador was down, clutching his right thigh, his rifle fallen in the heather. "Leave him!" Sharpe shouted at two men going to help the man. "Keep firing! Forward! Forward!" The noise of the big attack to the north was at full intensity, guns and muskets, then the two artillery pieces supporting

Sharpe's attack fired together and he saw a shell burst right at the edge of the rocks and heard the canister strike stone and a Frenchman seemed to stand up slowly, his blue coat turning red before he jerked back down.

"Aim true!" Sharpe shouted at his men. In the excitement of battle there was a temptation to snatch at shots, to waste bullets, and he was close enough now to see the crouching enemy. Hagman fired, then took a loaded rifle from young Perkins and fired again. More musket smoke puffed from the rocks. God, they were stubborn! The riflemen ran another ten paces forward, knelt, fired and reloaded. Another cazador was hit, this time in the shoulder and the man stumbled down the spur's side. A ball hit Sharpe's shako, jerking it back on its cords so that it hung from his neck. Harper fired his rifle, then unslung the seven-barreled gun, anticipating the order to rush the rocks and Sharpe turned to find Vicente almost on his heels.

"Let me give one volley," the Portuguese said.

"Rifles!" Sharpe bellowed. "Down! Down!"

The riflemen flattened themselves, Vicente halted his men. "Present!" The orders in the Portuguese army were given in English, a concession to the many British officers. Sharpe edged into their ranks.

"Fire!" Vicente shouted, and the volley cracked on the spur, pumping out smoke, just as the two cannon fired and the knoll was suddenly a tangled hell of bullets, shell scraps and blood.

"Charge!" Sharpe shouted and he ran ahead, saw Ensign Iliffe off to his left with his saber drawn. The Portuguese were shouting as they advanced, their words indistinguishable, but plainly full of hate for the French. They all began to run. It was all fury now, fury and hate and terror and anger, and smoke showed in the rocks as the French fired and a man screamed behind Sharpe who found Harper beside him, the big man running clumsily, and they were just ten paces from the nearest rocks when suddenly a rank of a dozen Frenchmen stood up, an officer in their center, and presented muskets.

Harper had the volley gun low, at his hip, but he instinctively pulled the trigger and the seven bullets smacked into the row of Frenchmen, blasting a hole in the center of their small line. The officer was hit hard, falling backwards, and the others seemed more shocked by the noise of the gun than by its bullets, for suddenly they were turning and running. One or two shot first, but no bullet came anywhere near Sharpe who jumped onto the rocks and saw that the voltigeurs had taken enough. They were spilling over the spur's steep edges while the wounded French officer, who had been hit by Harper's bullet, was screaming at them to stay and fight. Sharpe silenced the man with a back blow of the sword that half stunned him. Cazadores and riflemen and redcoats were scrambling onto the knoll now, desperate to catch the French before they escaped. Some of the enemy were slow and they screamed as they were caught by the bayonets. A sergeant, reckoning escape was impossible, turned and lunged his own bayonet at Harper, who knocked it aside with the seven-barrel gun and then hit the man on the jaw with a fist and the French Sergeant went back as if he had been hit by a nine-pounder ball. Harper made sure of him by banging the volley gun's butt on his forehead.

A score of Frenchmen were still on the knoll, some trapped by fear of the drop off its eastern edge. "Put your guns down!" Sharpe roared at them, but none spoke English and instead they turned, bayonets leveled, and Sharpe cracked a musket aside with the heavy sword and then stabbed it forward into a man's belly, twisting the steel so the flesh did not grip the blade, and then yanking the weapon back so that blood splashed onto the stones. He slipped on the blood, heard a musket bang, swept the sword at another Frenchman and Vicente was there, his own big sword hacking down on a corporal. Sharpe pushed himself up, saw a Frenchman standing on the edge of the rocks and lunged the sword at the man's back so that he seemed to dive off the cliff. There was a heartbeat's silence after the man vanished, then a sound from far below like a sack of offal falling onto stone from a high roof.

And silence again, blessed silence, except for the percussive sound of the guns to the north. The French were gone from the knoll. They were running down the ridge, pursued by rifle fire, and Vicente's Portuguese began to cheer.

"Sergeant Harper!" Sharpe shouted.

"Sir?" Harper was searching a dead man's clothes.

"Butcher's bill," Sharpe ordered. He wiped his sword on a blue jacket, then thrust it back into his scabbard. A French shell exploded harmlessly below the rocks as Sharpe sat, suddenly tired, and remembered the half sausage in his pouch. He ate it, then pushed his bullet-riddled shako into some kind of order before putting the hat back on. It was strange, he thought, but in the last few minutes he had been quite unaware of his damaged ribs, but now the pain stabbed at him. There was a dead voltigeur at his feet and the corpse was wearing one of the old-fashioned short sabers that all French skirmishers used to carry, but had abandoned because the blades were useful for nothing except reaping crops. The man looked oddly peaceful, not a mark visible on his body, and Sharpe wondered if he was feigning death and prodded him with his boot. The man did not react. A fly crawled on the voltigeur's eyeball and Sharpe reckoned the man had to be dead.

Harper picked his way back through the rocks. "Mister Iliffe, sir," he said.

"What about him?"

"He's dead, sir," Harper said, "and none of the others are even scratched."

"Iliffe? Dead?" For some reason it did not make sense to Sharpe.

"He wouldn't have felt a thing, sir." Harper tapped his forehead. "Straight in."

Sharpe swore. He had not liked Iliffe until today, but in battle the boy had shown courage. He had been terrified, so terrified he had vomited at the prospect of fighting, but once the bullets began to fly he had conquered that fear and that was admirable. Sharpe walked to the body, took off his hat and stared down at Iliffe who looked vaguely surprised. "He would have made a good soldier," Sharpe said, and the men of the light company murmured agreement.

Sergeant Read took four men and carried Iliffe's body back to battalion. Lawford would not be pleased, Sharpe thought, then wondered why the hell it could not have been Slingsby shot through the forehead. That would have been a good morning's work for a voltigeur, Sharpe thought, and wondered why the hell his own bullet had missed. He glanced up at the sun and realized it was still mid-morning. He felt as if he had been fighting all day, but back in England some folk would not even have finished their breakfasts yet.

It was a pity about Iliffe, he thought, then drank some water, listened to the guns, and waited.

"Now!" General Craufurd shouted and the two battalions stood, appearing to the French as though they had suddenly sprung from the bare ground. "Ten paces forward!" Craufurd bellowed, and they marched smartly, hefting loaded muskets. "Fifty-second!" Craufurd called to the battalion nearest him in a voice that was raw with anger and savage with resolve. "Avenge Moore!" The 52nd had been at Corunna where, in defeating the French, they had lost their beloved general, Sir John Moore.

"Present!" the Colonel of the 52nd shouted.

The enemy were close, less than twenty-five yards away. They were staring upwards where the long red line had so unexpectedly appeared. Even the novices in the battered French ranks knew what was coming. The British line overlapped the columns, every musket was aimed at the leading French files, and a French officer made the sign of the cross as the red line seemed to take a quarter turn to the right as the guns went up into men's shoulders.

"Fire!"

The ledge vanished in smoke as over a thousand musket balls thumped into the columns. Dozens of men fell and the living, still marching upwards in obedience to the drumbeats, found they could not get across the writhing pile of injured men. Ahead of them they could hear the scrape of ramrods going into musket barrels. The British gunners of the remaining battery shot four barrel-loads of canister that tore into the survivors, clouding the columns' head with sprays of blood. "Fire by half companies!" a voice shouted.

"Fire!"

The volley fire began: the rippling, merciless, incessant clock-work drill of death. The British and Portuguese skirmishers had reformed on the left and added their own fire so that the heads of the columns were ringed by flame and smoke, pummeled by bullets, flayed by the canister spitting down from the ledge. A hundred fires began in the grass as flaming wadding spat from the barrels.

The fire was not just coming from the front. The skirmishers and the outer companies of the 43rd and the 52nd had wheeled down the slope to wrap themselves around the beleaguered French, who were now being shot at from three sides. The smoke of the half-company volleys rippled up and down the red lines, the balls slapped into flesh and banged into muskets, and the French advance had been stopped. No troops could advance into the bank of smoke that was ripped by flame as the volleys flared.

"Bayonets! Bayonets!" Craufurd shouted. There was a pause as men took out the seventeen-inch blades and slotted them over blackened musket muzzles. "Now kill them!" Black Bob shouted. He was feeling exultant, watching his hard-trained men tear four times their number into ruin.

The men with loaded muskets fired, and the redcoats were going down the hill, steadily at first, but then the two ranks met the French dead and they lost their cohesion as they negotiated the bodies, and there, just yards away, were the living. The British gave a great shout of rage and charged. "Kill them!" Black Bob was right behind the ranks, sword drawn, glaring at the French as the redcoats lunged with their blades.

It was slaughterhouse work. Most of the French in the leading ranks who had survived the musketry and the canister were wounded. They were also crammed together, and now the redcoats came at them with bayonets. The long blades stabbed forward, were twisted and pulled back. The loudest noise on the ridge was screaming now, men shouting for mercy, calling for God, cursing the enemy, and still the half-company volleys whipped in from the flanks so that no Frenchmen could deploy into line. They had been marched up a hill of death and were penned like sheep just below its summit and the bullets killed them from the flanks and the blades took them at the front, and the only escape from the torment was back down the hill.

They broke. One moment they were a mass of men cowering under an onslaught of steel and lead, and the next, starting with the rearmost ranks, they were a rabble. The front ranks, trapped by the men behind, could not escape and they were easy meat for the savage seventeen-inch blades, but the men at the back fled. Drums rolled down the hill, abandoned by boys too terrified to do anything except escape, and, as they went, the British and Portuguese skirmishers came from the flanks to pursue them. The last of the Frenchmen broke, pursued by redcoats, and some were caught in the village where the blades went to work again and the cobbles and the white stones of the houses were painted with more blood and the screams could be heard down in the valley where Massena watched, open-mouthed. Some Frenchmen became entangled in the vines and the cazadores caught them there and slit their throats. Riflemen poured bullets after the fugitives. A man shouted for mercy in a village house and the shout turned into a terrible scream as two bayonets took his life.

And then the French were gone. They had been swamped by panic and the slope around the village was littered with abandoned muskets and bodies. Some of the enemy were fortunate. Two riflemen rounded up prisoners and prodded them up towards the windmill where the British gunners had reclaimed their battery. A French captain, who had only kept his life by pretending to be dead, yielded his sword to a lieutenant of the 52nd. The Lieutenant, a courteous man, bowed in acknowledgment and gave the blade back. "You will do me the honor of accompanying me up the hill," the Lieutenant said, and he then tried to make conversation in his school French. The weather had gone suddenly cold, had it not? The French Captain agreed it had, but he also would have agreed if the Englishman had remarked how warm it was. The Captain was shaking. He was covered in blood, none of it his own, but all from wounds inflicted by canister on men who had climbed near him. He saw his men lying dead, saw others dying, saw them looking up from the ground and trying to call for help he could not give. He remembered the bayonets coming at him and the joy of the killing plain on the faces of the men who held them. "It was a storm," he said, not knowing what he said.

"Not now the heat's broken, I think," the Lieutenant said, misunderstanding his captive's words. The bandsmen of the 43rd and 52nd were collecting the wounded, almost all of them French, and carrying them up to the mill where those that survived would be put on carts and taken to the monastery where the surgeons waited. "We were hoping for a game of cricket if tomorrow stays fine," the Lieutenant said. "Have you had the privilege of watching cricket, monsieur?"

"Cricket?" The Captain gaped at the redcoat.

"The Light Division officers hope to play the rest of the army," the Lieutenant said, "unless war or the weather intervenes."

"I have never seen cricket," the Frenchman said.

"When you get to heaven, monsieur," the Lieutenant said gravely, "and I pray that will be many happy years hence, you will find that your days are spent in playing cricket."

Just to the south there was more sudden firing. It sounded like British volleys, for they were regular and fast, but it was four Portuguese battalions that guarded the ridge to the right of the Light Division. The smaller French column, meant to reinforce the success of the two that had climbed through Sula, had swung away from the village and found itself split from the main attack by a deep, wooded ravine, and so the men climbed on their own, going through a grove of pines, and when they emerged onto the open hillside above they saw nothing but Portuguese troops ahead. No redcoats. The column outnumbered the Portuguese. They also knew their enemy for they had beaten the Portuguese before and did not fear the men in brown and blue as they feared the British muskets. This would be a simple victory, a hammer blow against a despised enemy, but then the Portuguese opened fire and the volleys rippled like clockwork and the musket balls were fired low and the guns were reloaded swiftly and the column, like those to the north, found itself assailed from three sides and suddenly the despised enemy was driving the French ignominiously downhill. And so the last French column ran, defeated by men fighting for their homeland, and then the whole ridge was empty of the Emperor's men except for the dead and the wounded and the captured. A drummer boy cried as he lay in the vines. He was eleven years old and had a bullet in his lung. His father, a sergeant, was lying dead twenty paces away where a bird pecked at his eyes. Now that the guns had stopped the black feathered birds were coming to the ridge and its feast of flesh.

Smoke drifted off the hill. Guns cooled. Men passed round water bottles.

The French were back in the valley. "There is a road around the north of the ridge," an aide reminded Marshal Massena, who said nothing. He just stared at what was left of his attacks on the hill. Beaten, all of them. Beaten to nothing. Defeated. And the enemy, hidden once more behind the ridge's crest, waited for him to try again.

"You remember Miss Savage?" Vicente asked Sharpe. They were sitting at the end of the knoll, staring down at the beaten French.

"Kate? Of course I remember Kate," Sharpe said. "I often wondered what happened to her."

"She married me," Vicente said, and looked absurdly pleased with himself.

"Good God," Sharpe said, then decided that probably sounded like a rude response. "Well done!"

"I shaved off my mustache," Vicente said, "as you suggested. And she said yes."

"Never did understand mustaches," Sharpe said, "must be like kissing a blacking brush."

"And we have a child," Vicente went on, "a girl."

"Quick work, Jorge!"

"We are very happy," Vicente said solemnly.

"Good for you," Sharpe said, and meant it. Kate Savage had run away from her home in Oporto, and Sharpe, with Vicente's help, had rescued her. That had been eighteen months before and Sharpe had often wondered what had happened to the English girl who had inherited her father's vineyards and port lodge.

"Kate is still in Porto, of course," Vicente said.

"With her mother?"

"She went back to England," Vicente said, "just after I joined my new regiment in Coimbra."

"Why there?"

"It is where I grew up," Vicente said, "and my parents still live there. I went to the university of Coimbra, so really it is home. But from now on I shall live in Porto. When the war is over."

"Be a lawyer again?"

"I hope so." Vicente made the sign of the cross. "I know what you think of the law, Richard, but it is the one barrier between man and bestiality."

"Didn't do much to stop the French."

"War is above the law, which is why it is so bad. War lets loose all the things which the law restrains."

"Like me," Sharpe said.

"You are not such a bad man," Vicente said with a smile.

Sharpe looked down into the valley. The French had at last withdrawn to where they had been the previous evening, only now they were throwing up earthworks beyond the stream where infantry dug trenches and used the spoil to make bulwarks. "Those buggers think we're coming down to finish them off," he said.

"Will we?"

"Christ, no! We've got the high ground. No point in giving it up."

"So what do we do?"

"Wait for orders, Jorge, wait for orders. And I reckon mine are coming now." Sharpe nodded towards Major Forrest who was riding his horse along the spine of the spur.

Forrest stopped by the rocks and looked down at the French dead, sounding tired.

"Major Forrest," Sharpe said, "let me introduce you to Captain Vicente. I fought with him at Oporto."

"Honored," Forrest said, "honored." His red sleeve was dark with blood from the musket ball that had struck him. He hesitated, trying to think of something complimentary to say to Vicente, but nothing occurred to him, so he looked back to Sharpe. "The Colonel wants the company now, Sharpe," he said.

"On your feet, lads!" Sharpe stood himself and shook Vicente's hand. "Keep a look out for us, Jorge," he said, "we might need your help again. And give my regards to Kate."

Sharpe walked the company back across ground scorched by musket and rifle fire. The ridge was quiet now, no guns firing, just the wind sighing on the grass. Forrest rode beside Sharpe, but said nothing until they reached the battalion's lines. The South Essex were in ranks, but sitting and sprawling on the grass, and Forrest gestured to the left-hand end of the line as if to order the light company to take their place.

"Lieutenant Slingsby will command them for the moment," Forrest said.

"He'll do what?" Sharpe asked, shocked.

"For the moment," Forrest said placatingly, "because right now the Colonel wants you, Sharpe, and I daresay he isn't pleased."

That was an understatement. The Honorable William Lawford was in a temper, though, being a man of exquisite politeness, the anger only showed as a slight tightening of the lips and a distinctly unfriendly glance as Sharpe arrived at his tent. Lawford ducked out into the sunlight and nodded at Forrest. "You'll stay, Major," he said, and waited as Forrest dismounted and gave his reins to Lawford's servant, who led the horse away. "Knowles!" Lawford summoned the Adjutant from the tent. Knowles gave Sharpe a sympathetic look, which only made Lawford angrier. "You had best stay, Knowles," he said, "but keep other folk away. I don't want what is said here bruited about the battalion."

Knowles put on his hat and stood a few yards away. Forrest hovered to one side as Lawford looked at Sharpe. "Perhaps, Captain," he spoke icily, "you can explain yourself?"

"Explain myself, sir?"

"Ensign Iliffe is dead."

"I regret it, sir."

"Good God! The boy is entrusted to my care! Now I have to write to his father and say the lad's life was tossed away by an irresponsible officer who committed his company to an attack without any authorization from me!" Lawford paused, evidently too angry to frame his next words, then slapped his hand against his sword scabbard. "I command this battalion, Sharpe!" he said. "Perhaps you have never realized that? Do you think you can swan around as you like, killing men as you see fit, without reference to me?"

"I had orders, sir," Sharpe said woodenly.

"Orders?" Lawford demanded. "I gave no order!"

"I was ordered by Colonel Rogers-Jones, sir."

"Who the devil is Colonel Rogers-Jones?"

"I believe he commands a battalion of cazadores," Forrest put in quietly.

"God damn it, Sharpe," Lawford snapped, "Colonel Rogers bloody Jones does not command the South Essex!"

"I had orders from a colonel, sir," Sharpe insisted, "and I obeyed." He paused. "And I recalled your advice, sir."

"My advice?" Lawford asked.

"Last night, sir, you told me you wanted your skirmishers to be audacious and aggressive. So we were."

"I also want my officers to be gentlemen," Lawford said, "to show courtesy."

Sharpe sensed that they had reached the real point of this meeting. Lawford, it was true, had a genuine grievance that Sharpe had committed the light company to an attack without his permission, but no officer could truly object to a man fighting the enemy. The complaint had been merely a ranging shot for the assault that was about to come. Sharpe said nothing, but just stared fixedly at a spot between the Colonel's eyes.

"Lieutenant Slingsby," the Colonel said, "tells me that you insulted him. That you invited him to a duel. That you called him illegitimate. That you swore at him."

Sharpe cast his mind back to the brief confrontation on the ridge's forward slope just after he had pulled the company out of the French panic. "I doubt I called him illegitimate, sir," he said. "I wouldn't use that sort of word. I probably called him a bastard."

Knowles stared westwards. Forrest looked down at the grass to hide a smile. Lawford looked astonished. "You called him what?"

"A bastard, sir."

"That is entirely unacceptable between fellow officers," Lawford said.

Sharpe said nothing. It was usually the best thing to do.

"Have you nothing to say?" Lawford demanded.

"I have never done a thing," Sharpe was goaded into speaking "except for the good of this battalion."

That vehement statement rather took Lawford aback. He blinked. "No one is decrying your service, Sharpe," he said stiffly. "I am, rather, attempting to inculcate the manners of an officer into your behavior. I will not tolerate crass rudeness to a fellow officer."

"You'd tolerate losing half your light company, sir?" Sharpe asked.

"Half my light company?"

"My fellow officer," Sharpe did not bother to hide his sarcasm, "had the light company in skirmish order underneath the French. When they broke, sir, which they did, he'd have lost them all. They'd have been swept away. Luckily for the battalion, sir, I was there and did what had to be done."

"That is not what I observed," Lawford said.

"It happened," Sharpe said bluntly.

Forrest cleared his throat and stared pointedly at a blade of grass by his right toe. Lawford took the hint. "Major?"

"I rather think Lieutenant Slingsby had taken the light company a bit too far, sir," Forrest observed mildly.

"Audacity and aggression," Lawford said, "are not reprehensible in an officer. I applaud Lieutenant Slingsby for his enthusiasm, and that is no reason, Sharpe, for you to insult him."

Time to bite his tongue again, Sharpe thought, so he kept quiet.

"And I will not abide dueling between my officers"-Lawford was back in stride-"and I will not abide gratuitous insults. Lieutenant Slingsby is an experienced and enthusiastic officer, an undoubted asset to the battalion, Sharpe, an asset. Is that understood, Sharpe?"

"Yes, sir."

"So you will apologize to him."

I bloody well will not, Sharpe thought, and kept staring at the spot between Lawford's eyes.

"Did you hear me, Sharpe?"

"I did, sir."

"So you will apologize?"

"No, sir."

Lawford looked outraged, but for a few seconds was lost for words. "The consequences, Sharpe," he finally managed to speak, "will be dire if you disobey me in this."

Sharpe shifted his gaze so that he was looking at Lawford's right eye. Looking straight at Lawford and making the Colonel feel uncomfortable, Sharpe saw weakness there, then decided that was wrong. Lawford was not a weak man, but he lacked ruthlessness. Most men did. Most men were reasonable, they sought accommodation and found mutual ground. They were happy enough to fire volleys, but shrank from getting in close with a bayonet. But now was the time for Lawford to wield the blade. He had expected Sharpe to apologize to Slingsby, and why not? It was a small enough gesture, it appeared to solve the problem, but Sharpe was refusing and Lawford did not know what to do about it. "I will not apologize," Sharpe said very harshly, "sir." And the last word had all the insolence that could be invested in a single syllable.

Lawford looked furious, but again said nothing for a few seconds. Then, abruptly, he nodded. "You were a quartermaster once, I believe?"

"I was, sir."

"Mister Kiley is indisposed. For the moment, while I decide what to do with you, you will assume his duties."

"Yes, sir," Sharpe responded woodenly, betraying no reaction. Lawford hesitated, as though there was something more to be said, then crammed on his cocked hat and turned away. "Sir," Sharpe said.

Lawford turned, said nothing.

"Mister Iliffe, sir," Sharpe said. "He fought well today. If you're writing to his family, sir, then you can tell them truthfully that he fought very well."

"A pity, then, that he's dead," Lawford said bitterly and walked away, beckoning Knowles to accompany him.

Forrest sighed. "Why not just apologize, Richard?"

"Because he damned well nearly had my company killed."

"I know that," Forrest said, "and the Colonel knows it, and Mister Slingsby knows it and your company knows it. So eat humble pie, Sharpe, and go back to them."

"He"-Sharpe pointed at the retreating figure of the Colonel-"wants rid of me. He wants his goddamned brother-in-law in charge of the skirmishers."

"He doesn't want rid of you, Sharpe," Forrest said patiently. "Good God, he knows how good you are! But he has to bring on Slingsby. Family business, eh? His wife wants him to make Slingsby's career, and what a wife wants, Sharpe, a wife gets."

"He wants rid of me," Sharpe insisted. "And if I apologize, Major, then sooner or later I'd still be out on my ear, so I might as well go now."

"Don't go far," Forrest said with a smile.

"Why not?"

"Mister Slingsby drinks," Forrest said quietly.

"He does?"

"Far too much," Forrest said. "He's holding it in check for now, hoping a new battalion will give him a new beginning, but I fear for him. I had a similar problem myself, Richard, though I'll thank you not to tell anyone. I suspect our Mister Slingsby will revert to his old behavior in the end. Most men do."

"You didn't."

"Not yet, Sharpe, not yet." Forrest smiled. "But think on what I've said. Mutter an apology to the man, eh? And let it all blow over."

When hell froze over, Sharpe thought. Because he would not apologize.

And Slingsby had the light company.

Major Ferreira had read his brother's letter shortly after the last French column had been defeated. "He wants an answer, senhor." Miguel, Ferragus's messenger, had said. "One word."

Ferreira stared through the cannon smoke that hung in skeins over the hillside where so many French had died. This was a victory, he thought, but it would not be long before the French found the road looping about the ridge's northern end. Or perhaps the victorious British and Portuguese would sweep down Bussaco's long hillside and attack the French in the valley? Yet there was no sign of such an attack. No gallopers rode to give generals fresh instructions, and the longer Wellington waited the more time the French had to throw up earthworks beyond the stream. No, the Major thought, this battle was over and Lord Wellington probably intended to fall back towards Lisbon and offer another battle in the hills north of the city.

"One word," Miguel had prompted the Major again.

Ferreira had nodded. "Sim," he said, though he said it heavily. Yes, it meant, and once the fatal word was spoken he turned his horse and spurred northwards past the victorious Light Division, behind the windmill that was pocked with the marks left by musket balls and then down through the small trees growing on the northern end of the ridge. No one remarked his going. He was known to be an occasional explorer, one of the Portuguese officers who, like their British counterparts, rode out to scout the enemy's position, and besides, there were Portuguese militia in the Caramula hills north of the ridge and it was not surprising that an officer rode to check on their position.

Yet Ferreira, even though his departure from the army had appeared quite innocent, rode with trepidation. His whole future, the future of his family, depended on the next few hours. The Major had inherited wealth, but he had never made any. His investments had failed, and it had only been his brother's return that had restored his fortunes, and that fortune would be threatened if the French took over Portugal. What Major Ferreira must do now was change horses, leap from the patriotic-saddle into a French one, yet do it in such a way that no one would ever know, and he would do it only to preserve his name, his fortune and his family's future.

He rode for three hours and it was past midday when he turned eastwards, climbing to a prominent hill. He knew that the Portuguese militia guarding the road about the northern end of the ridge were well behind him, and as far as he knew there were no British or Portuguese cavalry patrols in these hills, but he still made the sign of the cross and composed a silent prayer that he would not be seen by anyone from his own side. And he did think of the British and Portuguese army as his side. He was a patriot, but what use was a penniless patriot?

He stopped at the hilltop. Stopped there for a long time until he was certain that any French cavalry vedettes would have seen him, and then he rode slowly down the hill's eastern face. He stopped halfway down. Now, anyone approaching him could see that he was not luring them to an ambush. There was no dead ground behind him, nowhere for a cavalry unit to hide. There was just Major Ferreira on a long, bare hillside.

And ten minutes after he stopped, a score of green-coated dragoons appeared a half-mile away. The horsemen spread into a line. Some had their carbines out of their holsters, but most had drawn swords and Ferreira dismounted to show them that he was not trying to escape. The officer in charge of the dragoons stared upwards, searching for danger, and finally he must have concluded that all was well for he rode forward with a half-dozen of his men. The horses' hooves left puffs of dust on the dry hillside. Ferreira, as the dragoons came nearer, spread his arms to show he carried no weapons, then stood quite still as the horsemen surrounded him. A blade dipped near his throat, held by the officer, whose uniform had been faded by the sun. "I have a letter of introduction," Ferreira said in French.

"To whom?" It was the officer who answered.

"To you," Ferreira answered, "from Colonel Barreto."

"And who in the name of holy Christ is Colonel Barreto?"

"An aide to Marshal Massena."

"Show me the letter."

Ferreira brought the piece of paper from a pocket, unfolded it and handed it up to the French officer, who leaned from his saddle to take it.

The letter, creased and dirty, explained to any French officer that the bearer could be trusted and should be given every help possible. Barreto had given Ferreira the letter when the Major had been negotiating the gift of the flour, but it came in more useful now. The dragoon officer read it swiftly, glanced once at Ferreira, then tossed the letter back. "So what do you want?"

"To see Colonel Barreto, of course," Ferreira said.

It took an hour and a half to reach the village of Moura where Ney's men, who had attacked towards the windmill above Sula, were resting. The surgeons were busy in the village and Ferreira had to steer his horse past a pile of severed arms and legs that lay just outside an open window. Next to the stream, where the flat stones provided a place for the village women to do their laundry, there was now a heap of corpses. Most had been stripped of their uniforms and their white skin was laced with blood. Ferreira averted his eyes as he followed the dragoons to a small hill just beyond the village where, in the shadow of Moura's windmill, Marshal Massena was eating a meal of bread, cheese and cold chicken. Ferreira dismounted and waited as the dragoon officer threaded his way through the aides, and, as he waited, the Major stared at the ridge and wondered that any general would think to throw his men up such a slope.

"Major Ferreira!" The voice was sour. A tall man in the uniform of a French colonel of dragoons approached him. "Give me one reason, Major," the Colonel said, pointing to the mill, "why we shouldn't put you against that wall and shoot you." The Colonel, though dressed as a Frenchman, was Portuguese. He had been an officer in the old Portuguese army and had seen his home burned and his family killed by the ordenanga, the Portuguese militia that had turned on the privileged classes in the chaos of the first French invasions. Colonel Barreto had joined the French, not because he hated Portugal, but because he saw no future for his country unless it was rid of superstition and anarchy. The French, he believed, would bring the blessings of modernity to Portugal, but only if the French forces were fed. "You promised us flour!" Barreto said angrily. "And instead there was British infantry waiting for us!"

"In war, Colonel, things go wrong," Ferreira said humbly. "The flour was there, my brother was there, and then a British company arrived. I tried to send them away, but they would not go." Ferreira knew he sounded weak, but he was terrified. Not of the French, but in case some officer on the ridge saw him through a telescope. He doubted that would happen. The ridge top was a long way away and his blue Portuguese jacket would look much like a French coat at that distance, but he was still frightened. Treachery was a hard trade.

Barreto seemed to accept the explanation. "I found the remnants of the flour," he admitted, "but it's a pity, Major. This army is hungry. You know what we found in this village? One half barrel of lemons. What damn good is that?"

"Coimbra," Ferreira said, "is full of food."

"Full of food, eh?" Barreto asked skeptically.

"Wheat, barley, rice, beans, figs, salt cod, beef," Ferreira said flatly.

"And how, in God's name, do we reach Coimbra, eh?" Barreto had switched to French because a group of Massena's other aides had come to listen to the conversation. The Colonel pointed to the ridge. "Those bastards, Ferreira, are between us and Coimbra."

"There is a road around the ridge," Ferreira said.

"A road," Barreto said, "which goes through the defile of Caramula, and how many damn redcoats are waiting for us there?"

"None," Ferreira said. "There is only the Portuguese militia. No more than fifteen hundred. In three days, Colonel, you can be in Coimbra."

"And in three days," Barreto said, "the British will empty Coimbra of food."

"My brother guarantees you three months' supply," Ferreira said, "but only… " He faltered and stopped.

"Only what?" a Frenchman asked.

"When your army enters a town, monsieur," Ferreira spoke very humbly, "they do not behave well. There is plundering, theft, murder. It has happened every time."

"So?"

"So if your men get into my brother's warehouses, what will they do?

"Take everything," the Frenchman said.

"And destroy what they cannot take," Ferreira finished the statement. He looked back to Barreto. "My brother wants two things, Colonel. He wants a fair payment for the food he will supply to you, and he wants his property guarded from the moment you enter the city."

"We take what we want," another Frenchman put in, "we don't pay our enemies for food."

"If I do not tell my brother that you agree," Ferreira said, his voice harder now, "then there will be no food when you arrive in Coimbra. You can take nothing, monsieur, or you can pay for something and eat."

There was a moment's silence, then Barreto nodded abruptly. "I will talk to the Marshal," he said and turned away.

One of the French aides, a tall and thin major, offered Ferreira a pinch of snuff. "I hear," he said, "that the British are building defenses in front of Lisbon?"

Ferreira shrugged as if to suggest the Frenchman's fears were trivial. "There are one or two new forts," he admitted, for he had seen them for himself when he was riding north from Lisbon, "but they are small works," he went on. "What they are also building, monsieur, is a new port at Sao Juliao."

"Where's that?"

"South of Lisbon."

"They're building a port?"

"A new harbor, monsieur," Ferreira confirmed. "They fear trying to evacuate their troops through Lisbon. There might be riots. Sao Juliao is a remote place and it will be easy for the British to take to their ships there without trouble."

"And the forts you saw?"

'They overlook the main road to Lisbon," Ferreira said, "but there are other roads."

"And how far were they from Lisbon?"

"Twenty miles," Ferreira guessed.

"And there are hills there?"

"Not so steep as that." Ferreira nodded towards the looming ridge.

"So they hope to delay us in the hills, yes, as they retreat to their new port?"

"I would think so, monsieur."

"So we will need food," the Frenchman concluded. "And what does your brother want besides money and protection?"

"He wants to survive, monsieur."

"It is what we all want," the Frenchman said. He was gazing at the blue bodies that lay on the ridge's eastern slope. "God send us back to France soon."

To Ferreira's surprise the Marshal himself returned with Colonel Barreto. The one-eyed Massena stared hard at Ferreira who returned the gaze, seeing how old and tired the Frenchman looked. Finally Massena nodded. "Tell your brother we will pay him a price and tell him Colonel Barreto will take troops to protect his property. You know where that property is, Colonel?"

"Major Ferreira will tell me," Barreto said.

"Good. It's time my men had a proper meal." Massena walked back to his cold chicken, bread, cheese and wine while Barreto and Ferreira first haggled over the price to be paid, then made arrangements to safeguard the food. And when that was all done Ferreira rode back the way he had come. He rode in the afternoon sun, chilled by an autumn wind, and no one saw him and no one in the British or Portuguese army thought it strange that he had been away since the battle's end.

And on the ridge, and in the valley beneath, the troops waited.