‘The Lord alone knows,’ Vicente said. ‘A timber yard? Don’t they treat timber with it?’
‘So what are you doing now?’ Sharpe asked him.
‘My Colonel gave me permission to go to my parents’ house,’ Vicente said, ‘just to make sure it’s safe.’
‘Then we’ll come with you,’ Sharpe said.
‘There’s no turpentine there,’ Vicente said.
‘Bugger the turpentine,’ Sharpe said, then remembered a lady was present. ‘Sorry, miss. We’re just keeping you safe, Jorge,’ he added, then turned back to Sarah. ‘I’ll take you down to the battalion wives later,’ he promised her, ‘and they’ll look after you.’
‘The battalion wives?’ she asked.
‘The soldiers’ wives,’ Sharpe explained.
‘There are no officers’ wives?’ Sarah asked, jealous of her precarious position. A governess might be a servant, but she was a privileged one. ‘I expect to be treated with respect, Mister Sharpe.’
‘Miss Fry,’ Sharpe said, ‘you can walk down the hill now and you can find an officer’s wife. There are some. None in our battalion, but you can look, and you’re welcome to try. But we’re looking for turpentine and if you want protection you’d best stay with us.’ He put on his shako and turned away.
‘I’ll stay with you,’ Sarah said, remembering that Ferragus was loose somewhere in the city.
The four of them walked higher into the upper town, going into a district of big, elegant buildings that Vicente explained was the university. ‘It has been here a long time,’ he said reverently, ‘almost as long as Oxford.’
‘I met a man from Oxford once,’ Sharpe said, ‘and killed him.’ He laughed at the shocked expression on Sarah’s face. He was in a strange mood, wanting to work mischief and careless of the consequences. Lawford could go to hell, he thought, and Slingsby with him, and Sharpe just wanted to be free of them. Damn the army, he thought. He had served it well and it had turned on him, so the army could go to hell as well.
Vicente’s house was one of a terrace, all of them shuttered. The door was locked, but Vicente retrieved a key from beneath a big stone hidden in a space under the stone steps. ‘First place a thief would look,’ Sharpe said.
Yet no thief had been inside. The house smelt musty, for it had been closed up for some weeks, but everything was tidy. The bookshelves in the big front room had been emptied and their contents taken down to the cellar where they were stored in wooden crates, each crate carefully labelled with its contents. Other boxes held vases, pictures and busts of the Greek philosophers. Vicente carefully locked the cellar, hid its key under a floorboard, ignored Sharpe’s advice that it was the first place a thief would look, and went upstairs where the beds lay bare, their blankets piled in cupboards. ‘The French will probably break in,’ he said, ‘but they’re welcome to the blankets.’ He went into his old room and came out with a faded black robe. ‘My student gown,’ he said happily. ‘We used to attach a coloured ribbon to show what discipline we studied and every year, at the end of lectures, we would burn the ribbons.’
‘Sounds like a barrel of fun,’ Sharpe said.
‘They were good times,’ Vicente said. ‘I liked being a student.’
‘You’re a soldier now, Jorge.’
‘Till the French are gone,’ he said, folding the gown away with the blankets.
He locked the house, hid the key and took Sharpe, Harper and Sarah through the university. The students and the teachers had all gone, fled to Lisbon or to the north of the country, but the university servants still guarded the buildings and one of them accompanied Sarah and the three soldiers, unlocking the doors and bowing them into the rooms. There was a library, a fantastic place of gilding, carving and leather-bound books that Sarah gazed at in rapture. She reluctantly left the old volumes to follow Vicente as he showed them the rooms where he had received his lectures, then climbed to the laboratories where clocks, balances and telescopes gleamed on shelves. ‘The French will love this lot,’ Sharpe said scornfully.
‘There are men of learning in the French army,’ Vicente said. ‘They don’t make war on scholarship.’ He stroked an orrery, a glorious device of curved brass strips and crystal spheres which imitated the movement of the planets. ‘Learning,’ he said earnestly, ‘is above war.’
‘It’s what?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Learning is sacred,’ Vicente insisted. ‘It goes above boundaries.’
‘Quite right,’ Sarah chimed in. She had been silent ever since they had left Ferreira’s house, but the university reassured her that there was a world of civilized restraint, far from threats of slavery in Africa. ‘A university,’ she said, ‘is a sanctuary.’
‘Sanctuary!’ Sharpe was amused. ‘You think the Crapauds will get in here, take one look and say it’s sacred?’
‘Mister Sharpe!’ Sarah said. ‘I cannot abide bad language.’
‘What’s wrong with “Crapaud”? It means toad.’
‘I know what it means,’ Sarah said, but blushed, for she had momentarily thought Sharpe had said something else.
‘I think the French are only interested in food and wine,’ Vicente said.
‘I can think of something else,’ Sharpe said, and received a stern look from Sarah.
‘There is no food here,’ Vicente insisted, ‘just higher things.’
‘And the Crapauds will get in here,’ Sharpe said, ‘and they’ll see beauty. They’ll see value. They’ll see something they can’t have. So what will they do, Pat?’
‘Mangle the bloody lot, sir,’ Harper said promptly. ‘Sorry, miss.’
‘The French will guard it,’ Vicente insisted. ‘They have men of honour, men who respect learning.’
‘Men of honour!’ Sharpe said scornfully. ‘I was in a place called Seringapatam once, Jorge. In India. There was a palace there, stuffed with gold! You should have seen it! Rubies and emeralds, golden tigers, diamonds, pearls, more riches than you can dream of! So the men of honour guarded it. The officers, Jorge. They put a reliable guard on it to stop us heathens getting in and stripping it bare. And you know what happened?’
‘It was saved, I hope,’ Vicente said.
‘The officers stripped it bare,’ Sharpe said. ‘Cleaned it up properly. Lord Wellington was one of them and he must have made a penny or two out of that lot. There wasn’t a tiger’s golden whisker left by the time they’d all done.’
‘This will be safe,’ Vicente insisted, but unhappily.
They left the university, going back downhill into the smaller streets of the lower town. Sharpe had the impression that the folk of quality, the university people and most of the richer inhabitants, had left the city, but there were thousands of ordinary men and women left. Some were packing and leaving, but most had fatalistically accepted that the French would come and they just hoped to survive the occupation. A clock struck eleven somewhere and Vicente looked worried. ‘I must get back.’
‘Something to eat first,’ Sharpe said, and pushed into a tavern. It was crowded, and the people inside were not happy to see soldiers, for they did not understand why their city was being abandoned to the French, but they reluctantly made space at a table. Vicente ordered wine, bread, cheese and olives, then again made an attempt to leave. ‘Don’t worry,’ Sharpe said, stopping him, ‘I’ll get Colonel Lawford to explain to your Colonel. Tell him you were on an important mission. You know how to deal with senior officers?’
‘Respectfully,’ Vicente said.