A tall French sergeant came at Sharpe, musket flailing, and Sharpe stepped back, the man tripped, and Vicente reached out with his straight-bladed sword and its tip ripped the Sergeant’s windpipe so he roared like a punctured bellows and collapsed in a spray of pink rain. Vicente stepped back, appalled, but his men went streaming past to spread down into the southern redoubts where they enthusiastically bayoneted the French out of their holes. Sergeant Macedo had left his knife trapped in a Frenchman’s chest and instead was using a French musket as a club and a voltigeur tried to pull the weapon out of his grasp and looked stunned when the Sergeant just let him have it, then kicked him in the belly so that the Frenchman fell back over the edge of the bluff. He screamed as he fell. The scream seemed to last a long time, then there was a wet thump on the rocks far below, the musket clattered, and the sound was swamped as thunder rolled over the sky. The clouds were split by lightning and Sharpe, his sword blade dripping with rain-diluted blood, shouted at his men to check every redoubt. ‘And search the tower!’
Another bolt of lightning revealed a large group of Frenchmen halfway up the southern path. Sharpe reckoned that a small group of fitter men had come on ahead and it was those men that he had encountered. The largest group, who could easily have held the summit against Sharpe and Vicente’s desperate counterattack, had been too late, and Vicente was now putting men into the lower redoubts. A rifleman lay dead by the watchtower. ‘It’s Sean Donnelly,’ Harper said.
‘Pity,’ Sharpe said, ‘a good man.’
‘He was an evil little bastard from Derry,’ Harper said, ‘who owed me four shillings.’
‘He could shoot straight.’
‘When he wasn’t drunk,’ Harper allowed.
Pendleton, the youngest of the riflemen, brought Sharpe his shako. ‘Found it on the slope, sir.’
‘What were you doing on the slope when you should have been fighting?’ Harper demanded.
Pendleton looked worried. ‘I just found it, sir.’
‘Did you kill anyone?’ Harper wanted to know.
‘No, Sergeant.’
‘Not earned your bloody shilling today then, have you? Right! Pendleton! Williamson! Dodd! Sims!’ Harper organized a group to go back down the hill and bring up the discarded packs and food. Sharpe had another two men strip the dead and wounded of their weapons and ammunition.
Vicente had garrisoned the southern side of the fort and the sight of his men was enough to deter the French from trying a second assault. The Portuguese Lieutenant now came back to join Sharpe beside the watchtower where the wind shrieked on the broken stone. The rain was slackening, but the stronger wind gusts still drove drops hard against the ruined walls. ‘What do we do about the village?’ Vicente wanted to know.
‘There’s nothing we can do.’
‘There are women down there! Children!’
‘I know.’
‘We can’t just leave them.’
‘What do you want us to do?’ Sharpe asked. ‘Go down there? Rescue them? And while we’re there, what happens up here? Those bastards take the hill.’ He pointed at the French voltigeurs who were still halfway up the hill, uncertain whether to keep climbing or to give up the attempt. ‘And when you get down there,’ Sharpe went on, ‘what are you going to find? Dragoons. Hundreds of bloody dragoons. And when the last of your men are dead you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you tried to save the village.’ He saw the stubbornness on Vicente’s face. ‘There’s nothing you can do.’
‘We have to try,’ Vicente insisted.
‘You want to take some men on patrol? Then do it, but the rest of us stay up here. This place is our one chance of staying alive.’
Vicente shivered. ‘You will not keep going south?’
‘We get off this hill,’ Sharpe said, ‘and we’re going to have dragoons giving us haircuts with their bloody swords. We’re trapped, Lieutenant, we’re trapped.’
‘You will let me take a patrol down to the village?’
‘Three men,’ Sharpe said. He was reluctant to let even three men go with Vicente, but he could see that the Portuguese Lieutenant was desperate to know what was happening to his countrymen. ‘Stay in cover, Lieutenant,’ Sharpe advised. ‘Stay in the trees. Go very carefully!’
Vicente was back three hours later. There were simply too many dragoons and blue-jacketed infantry around Vila Real de Zedes and he had got nowhere near the village. ‘But I heard screams,’ he said.
‘Aye,’ Sharpe said, ‘you would have done.’
Beneath him, beyond the Quinta, the remnants of the village church burned out in the dark damp night. It was the only light he could see. There were no stars, no candles, no lamps, just the sullen red glow of the burning church.
And tomorrow, Sharpe knew, the French would come for him again.
In the morning the French officers had breakfast on the terrace of the tavern beneath a vine trellis. The village had proved to be full of food and there was newly baked bread, ham, eggs and coffee for breakfast. The rain had gone to leave a damp feel in the wind, but there were shadows in the fields and the promise of warm sunlight in the air. The smoke of the burned-out church drifted northwards, taking with it the stench of roasted flesh.
Maria, the red-headed girl, served Colonel Christopher his coffee. The Colonel was picking his teeth with a sliver of ivory, but he took it from his mouth to thank her. ‘Obrigado, Maria,’ he said in a pleasant tone. Maria shuddered, but nodded a hasty acknowledgement as she backed away.
‘She’s replaced your servant?’ Brigadier Vuillard asked.
‘The wretched fellow’s missing,’ Christopher said. ‘Run away. Gone.’
‘A fair exchange,’ Vuillard said, watching Maria. ‘That one’s much prettier.’
‘She was pretty,’ Christopher allowed. Maria’s face was badly bruised now and the bruises had swollen to spoil her beauty. ‘And she’ll be pretty again,’ he went on.
‘You hit her hard,’ Vuillard said with a hint of reproach.
Christopher sipped his coffee. ‘The English have a saying, Brigadier. A spaniel, a woman and a walnut tree, the more they’re beaten the better they be.’
‘A walnut tree?’
‘They say if the trunk is well thrashed it increases the yield