Sharpe's Escape

  "Time to get dressed, Jorge," Sharpe said. He fetched Sarah's bundle and took it to her. "I need my boots," he said, turning his back.

  She sat down to take the boots off. "Here," she said, and Sharpe turned to see she was still almost naked as she held the boots up. There was a challenge in her eyes, almost as if she was astonished at her own daring.

  Sharpe crouched. "You're going to be all right," he said. "Anyone as tough as you will survive this."

  "From you, Mister Sharpe, is that a compliment?"

  "Yes," he said, "and so's this," and he leaned forward to kiss her. She returned the kiss and smiled as he rocked back. "Sarah," he said.

  "I think we've been introduced properly now," she allowed.

  "Good," Sharpe said, then left her to dress.

  "So what do we do now?" Harper asked when they were all clothed again.

  "We get the hell out of here," Sharpe said. He twisted as he heard boots in the street, then saw feet going past the small window. "The army's still here," he said, "so we get out and make sure Ferragus loses all that food in the warehouse." He buckled on the sword belt and shouldered the rifle. "And then we arrest him," he went on, "stand him against a wall and shoot the bastard, though no doubt you'd like him to have a trial first, Jorge."

  "You can just shoot him," Vicente said.

  "Well said," Sharpe commented and crossed the room to where some wooden steps climbed to a door. It was locked, evidently bolted on the far side, but the hinges were inside the cellar and their screws were sunk into rotted wood. He rammed his sword under one of the hinges, levered it cautiously in case the hinge was stronger than it looked, then gave it a good heave that splintered the screws out of the jamb. A troop of cavalry clattered past outside. "They must be leaving," Sharpe said, moving the sword to the lower hinge, "so let's hope the French aren't too close."

  The second hinge tore out of the frame and Sharpe pulled on it to force the door inwards. It tilted on the bolt, but opened far enough for him to see down a passageway that had a heavy door at its far end and, just as Sharpe was about to step through the half-blocked opening, someone began thumping that far door. He could see it shaking, could see the dust jarring off its timbers, and he held up a hand to caution his companions to silence as he backed away. "What day is it?" he asked.

  Vicente thought for a second. "Monday?" he guessed. "October the first?"

  "Jesus," Sharpe said, wondering whether the horses in the street had been French and not British. "Sarah? Get up close to the window and tell me if you can see a horse."

  She scrambled up, pressed her face against the grimy glass, and nodded. "Two horses," she said.

  "Do they have docked tails?"

  "Docked?"

  "Are their tails cut off?" The door at the passageway's end was shaking with the blows and he knew it must give way at any second.

  Sarah looked through the glass again. "No."

  "Then it's the French," Sharpe said. "See if you can block the window, love. Push a piece of leather against it. Then hide! Go back to Pat."

  The cellar went dark again as Sarah propped a stiff piece of leather over the small window, then she went back to join Harper and Vicente in the far corner where they were concealed by one of the massive heaps of hides. Sharpe stayed, watching the far door shake, then it splintered inwards and he saw the blue uniform and white crossbelt and he backed away down the steps. "Frogs," he said grimly, and crossed the cellar and crouched with the others.

  There was a cheer as the French broke into the house. Footsteps were loud on the floorboards above, then someone kicked at the half-broken cellar door and Sharpe could hear voices. French voices and not happy voices. The men evidently paused at the cellar door and one made a sound of disgust, presumably at the stench of sewage. "Merde," one of the voices said.

  "Cest un puisard." Another spoke.

  "He says it's a cesspit," Sarah whispered in Sharpe's ear, then there was a splashing sound as one of the soldiers urinated down the steps. There was a burst of laughter, then the Frenchmen went away. Sharpe, crouching close beside Sarah in the cellar's darkest corner, heard the distant sounds of boots and hooves, voices and screaming. A shot sounded, then another. It was not the sound of battle, for that was many shots melding together to make an unending crackle, but single shots as men blew off padlocks or just fired for the hell of it.

  "The French are here?" Harper asked in disbelief.

  "The whole damn army," Sharpe said. He loaded his rifle, shoved the ramrod back in its hoops, then waited. He heard boots clattering down the stairs in the house above, more boots in the passageway and then there was silence and he decided the French had gone to find a wealthier place to plunder. "We're going up," he said, "to the attic." Perhaps it was because he had been underground too long, or perhaps it was just an instinct to get high, but he knew they could not stay here. Eventually some Frenchmen would search the whole cellar and so he led them through the stacked hides and up the steps. The outer door was open, showing sunlight in the streets, but there was no one in sight and so he ran down the passage, saw stairs to his right and took them two at a time.

  The house was empty. The French had searched it and found nothing except some heavy tables, stools and beds, so they had gone to look for richer pickings. At the top of the second flight of stairs was a broken door, its padlock split away, and above it was a narrow staircase that climbed to a set of attic rooms that seemed to extend across three or four houses. The largest room, long, low and narrow, had a dozen low wooden beds. "Student quarters," Vicente said.

  There were screams from nearby houses, the sound of shots, then voices down below and Sharpe reckoned more troops had come to the house. "The window," he said, and pushed the closest one open and climbed through to find himself in a gutter that ran just behind a low stone parapet. The others followed Sharpe who found a refuge at the northern gable end that was not overlooked by any of the attic windows. He peered over the parapet into a narrow, shadowed alley. A French cavalryman, a woman across his pommel, rode beneath Sharpe. The woman screamed and the man slapped her rump, then hauled up her black dress and slapped it again. "They're having fun and games," Sharpe said sourly.

  He could hear the French in the attic rooms, but none came out onto the roof and Sharpe sat back on the tiles and stared uphill. The great university buildings dominated the skyline, and beneath them were thousands of roofs and church towers. The streets were flooding with the invaders, but none were up high, though here and there Sharpe could see frightened people who, like him, had taken refuge on the tiles. He was trying to find Ferragus's warehouse. He knew it was not far away, knew it had a high, pitched roof, and finally reckoned he had spotted it a hundred or more paces up the hill.

  He looked across the alley. The houses on the far side had the same kind of parapet protecting their roof and he reckoned he could jump the gap easily enough, but Vicente, with his wounded shoulder, might be clumsy, and Sarah's long, torn frock would hamper her. "You're going to stay here, Jorge," he told Vicente, "and look after Miss Fry. Pat and I are going exploring."

  "We are?"

  "Got anything better to do, Pat?"

  "We can come with you," Vicente said.

  "Better if you stay here, Jorge," Sharpe said, then took out his pocket knife and unfolded the blade. "Have you ever looked after wounds?" he asked Sarah.

  She shook her head.

  "Time to learn," Sharpe said. "Take the bandage off Jorge's shoulder and find the bullet. Take it out. Take out any scraps of his shirt or jacket. If he tells you to stop because it's hurting, dig harder. Be ruthless. Dig out the bullet and anything else, then clean up the wound. Use this." He gave her his canteen that still had a little water in it. "Then make a new bandage," he went on, before laying Vicente's loaded rifle beside her, "and if a Frog comes out here, shoot him. Pat and I will hear and we'll come back." Sharpe doubted that he or Harper could recognize a rifle's bark amidst all the other shots, but he reckoned Sarah might need
the reassurance. "Think you can do all that?" She hesitated, then nodded. "I can."

  "It's going to hurt like hell, Jorge," Sharpe warned, "but God knows if we can find you a doctor in this town today, so let Miss Fry do her best."

  He straightened up and turned to Harper. "Can you jump that alley, Pat?"

  "God save Ireland." Harper looked at the gap between the houses. "It's a terrible long way, sir."

  "So make sure you don't fall," Sharpe said, then stood on the parapet where it made a right angle to the alleyway. He gave himself a few paces to build up speed, then ran and made a desperate leap across the void. He made it easily, clearing the far parapet and crashing into the roof tiles so that agony flared in his ribs. He scrambled aside and watched as Harper, bigger and less lithe, followed him. The Sergeant landed right across the parapet, winding himself as its edge drove into his belly, but Sharpe grabbed his jacket and hauled him over.

  "I said it was a long way," Harper said.

  "You eat too much."

  "Jesus, in this army?" Harper said, then dusted himself off and followed Sharpe along the next gutter. They passed skylights and windows, but no one was inside to see them. In places the parapet had crumbled away and Sharpe scrambled up to the roof ridge because it gave them safer footing. They negotiated a dozen chimneys, then slid down to another alley and another jump. "This one's narrower," Sharpe said to encourage Harper.

  "Where are we going, sir?"

  "The warehouse," Sharpe said, pointing to its great stone gable.

  Harper eyed the gap. "It would be easier to go through the sewer," he grumbled.

  "If you want to, Pat. Meet me there."

  "I've come this far," Harper said, and winced as Sharpe made the leap. He followed, arriving safely, and the two clambered up the next roof and along its ridge until they arrived at the street which divided the block of houses from the building Sharpe reckoned was the warehouse.

  Sharpe slid down the tile slope to the gutter by the parapet, then peered over. He pulled back instantly. "Dragoons," he said.

  "How many?"

  "Dozen? Twenty?" He was sure it was the warehouse. He had seen the big double doors, one of them ajar, and from the roof ridge he had just seen the skylights on the warehouse which was slightly higher up the hill. The street was too wide to be jumped, so there was no way of reaching those skylights from this roof, but then Sharpe peered again and saw that the dragoons were not plundering. Every other Frenchman in the city seemed to have been let off the leash, but these dragoons were sitting on their horses, their swords drawn, and he realized they must have been posted to guard the warehouse. They were turning French infantrymen away, using the flat of their swords if any became too insistent. "They've got the bloody food, Pat."

  "And they're welcome to it."

  "No, they're bloody not," Sharpe said savagely.

  "So how in Christ are we supposed to take it away from them?"

  "I'm not sure," Sharpe said. He knew the food had to be taken away if the French were to be beaten, yet for a moment he was tempted to let the whole thing slide. To hell with it. The army had treated him badly, so why the hell should he care? Yet he did care, and he would be damned before Ferragus helped the French win the war. The noise in the city was getting louder, the noise of screaming, of disorder, of chaos let loose, and the frequent musket shots were startling hundreds of pigeons into the air. He peered a third time at the dragoons and saw how they had formed two lines to block the ends of the small street to keep the French infantry away from the warehouse. Scores of men were protesting to the dragoons and Sharpe guessed that the horsemen's presence had started a rumor that there was food in the street, and the infantry, who had become ever more hungry as they marched through a stripped land, were probably desperate with hunger. "I'm not sure," Sharpe said again, "but I've got an idea."

  "An idea for what, sir?"

  "To keep those bastards hungry," Sharpe said, which was what Wellington wanted, so Sharpe would give it to his lordship. He would keep the bastards hungry.

  Chapter 9

  The chief commissary came to inspect the food. He was a small man named Laurent Poquelin, short, stocky and bald as an egg, but with long mustaches that he twisted nervously whenever he was worried, and he had been much worried in the last few weeks, for l'Armee de Portugal had found itself in a land emptied of food and he was responsible for feeding sixty-five thousand men, seventeen thousand cavalry horses and another three thousand assorted horses and mules. It could not be done in a wasted land, in a place where every orchard had been stripped of fruit, where the larders had been emptied, the storehouses despoiled, the wells poisoned, the livestock driven away, the mills disassembled and the ovens broken. The Emperor himself could not do it! All the forces of heaven could not do it, yet Poquelin was expected to work the miracle, and his mustache tips were ragged with nerves. He had been ordered to carry three weeks of supplies with the army, and those supplies had existed in the depots of Spain, but there were not nearly enough draught animals to carry such an amount, and even though Massena had reluctantly cut each division's artillery from twelve guns to eight, and released those horses to haul wagons instead of cannon, Poquelin had still only managed to supply the army for a week. Then the hunger had set in. Dragoons and hussars had been sent miles away from the army's line of march to search for food, and each such foray had worn out more horses, and the cavalry moaned at him because there were no replacement horseshoes, and some cavalrymen died each time because the Portuguese peasantry ambushed them in the hills. It did not seem to matter how many such peasants were hanged or shot, because more came to harass the foraging parties, which meant more horsemen had to be sent to protect the foragers, and more horseshoes were needed, and there were no more horseshoes and Poquelin got the blame. And the foragers rarely did find food, and if they did they usually ate most of it themselves, and Poquelin got the blame for that too. He had begun to wish he had followed his mother's tearful advice and become a priest, anything would be better than serving in an army that was sucking on a dry teat and accusing him of inefficiency.

  Yet now the miracle had happened. At a stroke, Poquelin's troubles were over.

  There was food. Such food! Ferragus, a surly Portuguese merchant who made Poquelin shiver with fear, had provided a warehouse that was as crammed with supplies as any depot in France. There was barley, wheat, rice, biscuits, rum, cheese, maize, dried fish, lemons, beans, salt meat, enough to feed the army for a month! There were other valuables too. There were barrels of lamp oil, coils of twine, boxes of horseshoes, bags of nails, casks of gunpowder, a sack of horn buttons, stacks of candles and bolts of cloth, none of them as essential as food, but all profitable because, though Poquelin would issue the food, the other things he could sell for his own enrichment.

  He explored the warehouse, followed by a trio of fourriers, quartermaster-corporals, who noted the list of supplies that Ferragus was selling. It was impossible to list all of it, for the food was in stacks that would take a score of men hours to dismantle, but Poquelin, a thorough man, did order the fourriers to remove grain sacks from the top of one pile to make certain that the center of the heap was not composed of bags of sand. He did the same with some barrels of salt beef and both times was assured that all was well, and as the estimates of the food rose, so Poquelin's spirits soared. There were even two wagons inside the warehouse and, for an army short of all wheeled transport, those two vehicles were almost as valuable as food.

  Then he began to worry at the frayed ends of his mustaches. He had food, and thus the army's problems seemed solved, but, as ever, there was a cockroach in the soup. How could these new supplies be moved? It would be no use issuing several days' rations to the troops, for they would gorge themselves on the whole lot in the first hour, then complain of hunger by nightfall, and Poquelin had far too few horses and mules to carry this vast amount. Still, he had to try. "Have the city searched for carts," he ordered one of the fourriers, "any cart. Handcarts, wh
eelbarrows, anything! We need men to haul the carts. Round up civilians to push the carts."

  "I'm to do all that?" the fourrier asked in amazement, his voice muffled because he was eating a piece of cheese.

  "I shall talk to the Marshal," Poquelin said grandly, then scowled. "Are you eating?"

  "Got a sore tooth, sir," the man mumbled. "All swollen up, sir. Doctor says he wants to pull it. Permission to go and have tooth pulled, sir."

  "Refused," Poquelin said. He was tempted to draw his sword and beat the man for insolence, but he had never drawn the weapon and was afraid that if he tried then he would discover that the blade had rusted to the scabbard's throat. He contented himself with striking the man with his hand. "We must set an example," he snapped. "If the army is hungry, we are hungry. We don't eat the army's food. You are a fool. What are you?"

  "A fool, sir," the fourrier dutifully replied, but at least he was no longer quite such a hungry fool.

  "Take a dozen men and search for carts. Anything with wheels," Poquelin ordered, confident that Marshal Massena would approve of his idea to use Portuguese civilians as draught animals. The army was expected to march south in a day or two, and the rumor was that the British and Portuguese would make a last stand in the hills north of Lisbon, so Poquelin only needed to make a new depot some forty or fifty miles to the south. He had some transport, of course, enough to carry perhaps a quarter of the food, and those existing mules and wagons could come back for more, which meant the warehouse needed to be protected while its precious contents were laboriously moved closer to Lisbon. Poquelin hurried back to the warehouse door and looked for the dragoon Colonel who was guarding the street. "Dumesnil!"

  Colonel Dumesnil, like all French soldiers, despised the commissary. He turned his horse with insolent slowness, rode to Poquelin so that he towered above him, then let his drawn sword drop so that it vaguely threatened the small man. "You want me?"

  "You have checked that there are no other doors to the warehouse?"