Sharpe's Havoc Part 43

Dulong gazed at the bridge through a telescope. The beams were both about a meter wide, more than enough, though the rain would doubtless make them slippery. He raised the gla.s.s to see that the Portuguese had dug trenches from which they could fire directly along the beams. But the night would be dark, he thought, and the moon clouded. "I would take a hundred volunteers," he said, "fifty for each beam, and go at midnight." The rain was getting worse and the dusk was cold. The Portuguese muskets, Dulong knew, would be soaked and the men behind them chilled to the bone. "A hundred men," he promised the Marshal, "and the bridge is yours."

Soult nodded. "If you succeed, Major," he said, "then send me word. But if you fail? I do not want to hear." He turned and walked away.

Dulong went back to the 31st Leger and he called for volunteers and was not surprised when the whole regiment stepped forward, so he chose a dozen good sergeants and let them pick the rest and he warned them that the fight would be messy, cold and wet. "We will use the bayonet," he said, "because the muskets won't fire in this weather and, besides, once you have fired one shot you will not have time to reload." He thought about reminding them that they owed him a display of bravery after their reluctance to advance into the rifle fire on the watchtower hill at Vila Real de Zedes, then decided they all knew that anyway and so held his tongue.

The French lit no fires. They grumbled, but Marshal Soult insisted. Across the river the ordenanga believed they were safe and so they made a fire in one of the cottages high above the bridge where their commanders could keep warm. The cottage had one small window and just enough flame light escaped through the unshuttered gla.s.s to reflect off the wet cross beams that spanned the river. The feeble reflections shimmered in the rain, but they served as a guide for Dulong's volunteers.

They went at midnight. Two columns, fifty men in each, and Dulong told them they must run across the bridge and he led the right-hand column, his saber drawn, and the only sounds were the river hissing beneath, the wind shrieking in the rocks, the pounding of their feet and a brief scream as one man slipped and fell into the Cavado. Then Dulong was climbing the slope and found the first trench empty and he guessed the ordenanga had taken shelter in the small hovels that lay just beyond the second trench and the fools had not even left a sentry by the bridge. Even a dog would have served to warn them of a French attack, but men and dogs alike were sheltering from the weather. "Sergeant!" the Major hissed. "The houses! Clean them out!"

The Portuguese were still asleep when the Frenchmen came. They arrived with bayonets and no mercy. The first two houses fell swiftly, their occupants killed scarcely before they were awake, but their screams alerted the rest of the ordenanqa who ran into the darkness to be met by the best-trained infantry in the French army. The bayonets did their work and the cries of the victims completed the victory because the survivors, confused and terrified by the terrible sounds in the dark night, fled. By a quarter past midnight Dulong was warming himself by the fire that had lit his way to victory.

Marshal Soult took the medal of the Legion d'Honneur from his own coat and pinned it to the turnback of Major Dulong's frayed jacket. Then, with tears in his eyes, the Marshal kissed the Major on both cheeks. Because the miracle had happened and the first bridge belonged to the French.

Kate wrapped herself in a damp saddle blanket then stood beside her tired horse and watched dully as French infantry cut down pine trees, slashed off their branches, then carried the trimmed trunks to the bridge. More timber was fetched from the small cottages and the ridge beams were just long enough to span the bridge's roadway, but it all took time, for the rough timbers had to be lashed together if the soldiers, horses and mules were to cross in safety. The soldiers who were not working huddled together against the rain and wind. It felt like winter suddenly. Musket shots sounded far away and Kate knew it was the country people come to shoot at the hated invaders.

A cantiniere, one of the tough women who sold the soldiers coffee, tea, needles, thread and dozens of other small comforts, took pity on Kate and brought her a tin mug of lukewarm coffee laced with brandy. "If they take much longer"-she nodded at the soldiers rebuilding the bridge's roadway-"we'll all be on our backs with an English dragoon on top. So at least we'll get something out of this campaign!" She laughed and went back to her two mules which were laden with her wares. Kate sipped the coffee. She had never been so cold, wet or miserable. And she knew she only had herself to blame.

Williamson stared at the coffee and Kate, unsettled by his gaze, moved to the far side of her horse. She disliked Williamson, disliked the hungry look in his eyes and feared the threat in his naked desire of her.

Were all men animals? Christopher, for all his elegant civility by day, liked to inflict pain at night, but then Kate remembered the single soft kiss that Sharpe had given her and she felt the tears come to her eyes. And Lieutenant Vicente, she thought, was a gentle man. Christopher liked to say how there were two sides in the world, just as there were black pieces and white pieces on a chessboard, and Kate knew she had chosen the wrong side. Worse, she did not know how she was to find her way back to the right one.

Christopher strode back down the stalled column. "Is that coffee?" he asked cheerfully. "Good, I need something warming." He took the mug from her, drained it, then tossed it away. "Another few minutes, my dear," he said, "and we'll be on our way. One more bridge after this, then we'll be over the hills and far away in Spain. You'll have a proper bed again, eh? And a bath. How are you feeling?"

"Cold."

"Hard to believe it's May, eh? Worse than England. Still, don't they say rain's good for the complexion? You'll be prettier than ever, my dearest." He paused as some muskets sounded from the west. The noise rattled loud for a few seconds, echoing back and forth between the defile's steep sides, then faded. "Chasing off bandits," Christopher said. "It's too soon for the pursuit to catch us up."

"I pray they do catch us," Kate said.

"Don't be ridiculous, my dear. Besides, we've got a brigade of good infantry and a pair of cavalry regiments as rearguard."

"We?" Kate asked indignantly. "I'm English!"

Christopher gave her a long-suffering smile. "As am I, dearest, but what we want above all is peace. Peace! And perhaps this retreat will be just the thing to persuade the French to leave Portugal alone. That's what I'm working on. Peace."

There was a pistol bolstered in Christopher's saddle just behind Kate and she was tempted to pull the weapon free, thrust it into his belly and pull the trigger, but she had never fired a gun, did not know if the long-barrelled pistol was loaded, and besides, what would happen to her if Christopher were not here? Williamson would maul her. she thnnaht and for some reason she remembered the letter she had succeeded in leaving for Lieutenant Sharpe, putting it on the House Beautiful's mantel without Christopher seeing what she was doing. She thought now what a stupid letter it was. What was she trying to tell Sharpe? And why him? What did she expect him to do?

She stared up the far hill. There were men on the high crest line and Christopher turned to see what she was looking at. "More of the sc.u.m," he said.

"Patriots," Kate insisted.

"Peasants with rusted muskets," Christopher said acidly, "who torture their prisoners and have no idea, none, what principles are at stake in this war. They are the forces of old Europe," he insisted, "superst.i.tious and ignorant. The enemies of progress." He grimaced, then unbuckled one of his saddlebags to make sure that his black-fronted red uniform jacket was inside. If the French were forced to surrender then that coat was his pa.s.sport. He would take to the hills and if any partisans accosted him he would persuade them he was an Englishman escaping from the French.

"We're moving, sir," Williamson said. "Bridge is up, sir." He knuckled his forehead to Christopher, then turned his leering face on Kate. "Help you onto the horse, ma'am?"

"I can manage," Kate said coldly, but she was forced to drop the damp blanket to climb into the saddle and she knew that both Christopher and Williamson were staring at her legs in their tight hussar breeches.

A cheer came from the bridge as the first cavalrymen led their horses over the precarious roadway. The sound prompted the infantry to stand, pick up their muskets and packs, and shuffle toward the makeshift crossing.

"One more bridge," Christopher a.s.sured Kate, "and we're safe."

Just one more bridge. The Leaper.

And above them, high in the hills, Richard Sharpe was already marching toward it. Toward the last bridge in Portugal. The Saltador.

Chapter 11.

It had been at dawn that Sharpe and Hogan saw their fears were realized. Several hundred French infantry were across the Ponte Nova, the ordenanqa were nothing but bodies in a plundered village, and energetic work parties were remaking the roadway across the Cavado's white water. The long and winding defile echoed with sporadic musket shots as Portuguese peasants, attracted to the beleaguered army like ravens to meat, took long-range shots. Sharpe saw a hundred voltigeurs in open order climb a hill to drive off one brave band that had dared to approach within two hundred paces of the stalled column. There was a flurry of shots, the French skirmishers scoured the hill and then trudged back to the crowded road. There was no sign of any British pursuit, but Hogan guessed that Wellesley's army was still a half-day's march behind the French. "He won't have followed the French directly," he explained, "he won't have crossed the Serra de Santa Catalina like they did. He'll have stayed on the roads, so he went to Braga first and now he's marching eastward. As for us... " He stared down at the captured bridge. "We'd best shift ourselves to the Saltador," he said grimly, "because it's our last chance."

To Sharpe it seemed there was no chance at all. More than twenty thousand French fugitives darkened the valley beneath him and Christopher was lost somewhere in that ma.s.s and how Sharpe was ever to find the renegade he did not know. But he pulled on his threadbare coat and picked up his rifle and followed Hogan who, Sharpe saw, was similarly pessimistic while Harper, perversely, was oddly cheerful, even when they had to wade through a tributary of the Cavado which ran waist deep through a steep defile which fell toward the larger river. Hogan's mule baulked at the cold, fast water and the Captain proposed abandoning the animal, but then Javali smacked the beast hard across the face and, while it was still blinking, picked it up and carried it bodily through the wide stream. The riflemen cheered the display of strength while the mule, safe on the opposite bank, snapped its yellow teeth at the goatherd who simply smacked it again. "Useful lad, that," Harper said approvingly. The big Irish Sergeant was soaked to the skin and as cold and tired as any of the other men, but he seemed to relish the hardship. "It's no worse than herding back home," he maintained as they trudged on. "I remember once my uncle was taking a flock of mutton, prime meat the lot of them, walking them on the hoof to Belfast and half the b.u.g.g.e.rs ran like s.h.i.te when we'd not even got to Letterkenny! Jesus, all that money gone to waste."

"Did you get them back?" Perkins asked.

"You're joking, lad. I searched half the b.l.o.o.d.y night and all I got was a clip round the ear from my uncle. Mind you, it was his fault, he'd never herded so much as a rabbit before and didn't know one end of a sheep from the other, but he was told there was good cash for mutton in Belfast so he stole the flock off a skinflint in Colcarney and set off to make his fortune."

"Do you have wolves in Ireland?" Vicente wanted to know.

"In red coats," Harper said, and saw Sharpe scowl. "My grandfather now," he went on hurriedly, "claimed to see a pack of them at Derrynagrial. Big, they were, he said, and with red eyes and teeth like graveyard stones and he told my grandmother that they chased him all the way to the Glenleheel bridge, but he was a drunk. Jesus, he could soak the stuff up."

Javali wanted to know what they were talking about and immediately had his own tales of wolves attacking his goats and how he had fought one with nothing but a stick and a sharp-edged stone, and then he claimed to have raised a wolf cub and told how the village priest had insisted on killing it because the devil lived in wolves, and Sergeant Macedo said that was true and described how a sentry at Almeida had been eaten by wolves one cold winter's night.

"Do you have wolves in England?" Vicente asked Sharpe.

"Only lawyers."

"Richard!" Hogan chided him.

They were going north now. The road that the French would use from Ponte Nova to the Spanish frontier twisted into the hills until it met another tributary of the Cavado, the Misarella, and the Saltador bridge crossed the upper reaches of that river. Sharpe would rather have gone down to the road and marched ahead of the French, but Hogan would not hear of it. The enemy, he said, would put dragoons across the Cavado as soon as the bridge was repaired and the road was no place to be caught by hors.e.m.e.n, and so they stayed in the high ground that became ever more rugged, stony and difficult. Their progress was painfully slow because they were forced to make long detours when precipices or slopes of scree barred their way, and for every mile they went forward they had to walk three, and Sharpe knew the French were now advancing up the valley and gaining fast, for their progress was signaled by scattered musket shots from the hills about the Misarella's defile. Those shots, fired at too long a range by men activated by hatred, sounded closer and closer until, at mid-morning, the French came into view.

A hundred dragoons led, but not far behind them was infantry, and these men were not a panicked rabble, but marching in good order. Javali, the moment he saw them, growled incoherently, grabbed a handful of powder from his bag, half of which he spilled as he tried to push it into his musket's barrel. He rammed down a bullet, primed his musket and shot into the valley. It was not apparent that he hit an enemy, but he gave a small joyful shuffle and then loaded the musket again. "You were right, Richard," Hogan said ruefully, "we should have used the road." The French were overtaking them now.

"You were right, sir," Sharpe said. "People like him"-he jerked his head toward the wild-bearded Javali-"would have been taking shots at us all morning."

"Maybe," Hogan said. He swayed on the mule's back, then glanced down again at the French. "Pray the Saltador has been broken," he said, but he did not sound hopeful.

They had to clamber down into a saddle of the hills, then climb again to another hog-backed ridge littered with the ma.s.sive rounded boulders. They lost sight of the fast-flowing Misarella and of the French on the road beside it, but they could hear the occasional flurry of musket shots which told of partisans sniping into the valley.

"G.o.d grant the Portuguese have got to the bridge," Hogan said for the tenth or twentieth time since dawn. If all had gone well then the Portuguese forces advancing northward in parallel to Sir Arthur Wellesley's army should have blocked the French at Ruivaens, so cutting the last eastward road to Spain, and then sent a brigade into the hills to plug the final escape route at the Saltador. If all had gone well the Portuguese should now be barring the mountain road with cannon and infantry, but the weather had slowed their march as it had slowed Wellesley's pursuit and the only men waiting for Marshal Soult at the Saltador were more ordenanqa.

There were over a thousand of them, half trained and ill armed, but an English major from the Portuguese staff had ridden ahead to give them advice. His strongest recommendation was to destroy the bridge, but many of the ordenanga came from the hard frontier hills and the soaring arch across the Misarella was the lifeline of their commerce and so they refused to heed Major Warre's advice. Instead they compromised by knocking off the bridge's parapets and narrowing its roadway by breaking the roadway's stones with great sledgehammers, but they insisted on leaving a slim strip of stone to leap the deep ravine, and to defend the ribbon-like arch they barricaded the northern side of the bridge with an abattis made from thorn bushes, and behind that formidable obstacle, and on either side of it, they sc.r.a.ped earthworks behind which they could shelter as they fired at the French with ancient muskets and fowling guns. There was no artillery.

The strip of bridge that remained was just wide enough to let a farm cart cross the river's ravine. It meant that once the French were gone the valley's commerce could resume while the roadway and parapets were rebuilt. But to the French that narrow strip would mean only one thing: safety.

Hogan was the first to see that the bridge was not fully destroyed. He climbed off the mule and swore viciously, then handed Sharpe his telescope and Sharpe stared down at the bridge's remnants. Musket smoke already shrouded both banks as the dragoons of the French vanguard fired across the ravine and the ordenanga in their makeshift redoubts shot back. The sound of the muskets was faint.

"They'll get across," Hogan said sadly, "they'll lose a lot of men, but they'll clear that bridge."

Sharpe did not answer. Hogan was right, he thought. The French were making no effort to take the bridge now, but doubtless they were a.s.sembling an a.s.sault party and that meant he would have to find a place from where his riflemen could shoot at Christopher as he crossed the narrow stone arch. There was nowhere on this side of the river, but on the Misarella's opposite bank there was a high stone bluff where a hundred or more ordenanqa were stationed. The bluff had to be less than two hundred paces from the bridge, too far for the Portuguese muskets, but it would provide a perfect vantage for his rifles, and if Christopher reached the center of the bridge he would be greeted by a dozen rifle bullets.