The Squirrel swung on its bow anchor, the current hurrying her round until the guns bore and then the tension was taken up on the stern anchor line to steady the ship at a new angle. "Fire a warning shot when you can!" Davies ordered.
There was a pause as the Squirrel steadied, then the gun captain, who had been squinting down the barrel, leaped back and jerked his lanyard. The small cannon recoiled onto its breeching ropes and thick smoke clouded the gunwales. The second gun fired almost immediately, its round shot hissing above the low island to splash into the channel ahead of the fleeing boat.
"They ain't stopping, sir!" the man at the crosstrees called.
"Fire at them, Mister Combes! Directly at them!"
"Aye aye, sir!"
The next shot struck the island and bounced high over the fleeing boat which was traveling fast on the river's current and was helped by the ebbing tide. Sharpe doubted the gunfire would stop the boat. He scrambled a few rungs up the ratlines and used his telescope, but he could see little of the occupants who were obscured by the mist. Yet it had to be the Ferreira brothers. Who else could it be? And he thought, but could not be sure, that one of the men in the boat was unnaturally large. Ferragus, he thought.
"Lieutenant!" he called.
"Mister Sharpe?"
"There are two men in that boat who need to be captured. That's my duty." That was not really true. Sharpe's duty was to return to duty, not to prolong a feud, but Davies did not know that. "Can we borrow one of your boats to pursue them?"
Davies hesitated, wondering if granting such a request would contravene his standing orders. "The gunboats downstream will apprehend them," he pointed out.
"And they won't know they're wanted men," Sharpe said, then paused as the Squirrel's forward guns fired and missed again. "Besides, they're likely to slip ashore before they reach your squadron. And if that happens we need to be put ashore to follow them."
Davies thought for another second, saw that the fugitive boat had almost vanished in the mist, then turned on Midshipman Braithwaite. "The jolly boat, Mister Braithwaite. Look quick now!" He turned back to Sharpe who had regained the deck. "The ladies will stay here." It was not a question.
"We will not," Sarah answered firmly, and hefted her French musket. "We've come this far together and we'll finish it together."
For a second Davies looked as though he would argue, then decided life would be simpler if all his unbidden guests were off the Squirrel. The forward cannon fired a last time and smoke wreathed the deck. "I wish you joy," Davies said.
And they were over the side and in pursuit.
Chapter 12
Marshal Andre Massena was feeling numb. He was saying nothing, just staring. It was shortly after dawn, the day after his first patrols had reached the new British and Portuguese works, and now he crouched behind a low stone wall on which his telescope rested and he slowly panned the glass along the hilltops to the south and everywhere he saw bastions, guns, walls, barricades, more guns, men, telegraph stations, flagpoles. Everywhere.
He had been planning the victory celebrations to be held in Lisbon. There was a fine large square beside the Tagus where half the army could be paraded, and the greatest problem he had anticipated was what to do with the thousands of British and Portuguese prisoners he expected to capture, but instead he was looking at an apparently endless barrier. He saw how the lower slopes of the opposite hills had been steepened, he saw how the enemy guns were protected by stone, he saw flooded approach routes, he saw failure.
He drew in a deep breath and still had nothing to say. He leaned back from the wall and took his one eye from the telescope. He had thought to maneuver here, to show part of his army on the road to draw in the enemy forces who would think an attack imminent, and then launch the greater part of l'Armee de Portugal round to the west in a slashing hook that would cut off Wellington's men. He would have pinned the British and Portuguese against the Tagus and then graciously accepted their surrender, but instead there was nowhere for his army to go except up against those walls and guns and steepened slopes.
"The works extend to the Atlantic," a staff officer reported dryly.
Massena said nothing and one of his aides, knowing what was in his master's mind, asked the question instead. "Not the whole way, surely?"
"Every last kilometer," the staff officer said flatly. He had ridden the width of the peninsula, protected by dragoons and watched all the way by an enemy ensconced in batteries, forts and watchtowers. "And for much of its length," he continued remorselessly, "the works are covered by the River Sizandre, and there is a second line behind."
Massena found his voice and turned furiously on the staff officer. "A second line? How can you tell?"
"Because it's visible, sir. Two lines."
Massena stared again through the glass. Was there something strange about the guns in the bastion immediately opposite? He remembered how, when he had been besieged by the Austrians in Genoa, he had put false guns in his defenses. They had been painted tree trunks jutting from emplacements and, from anything more than two hundred paces, they had more or less looked like cannon barrels, and the Austrians had dutifully avoided the fake batteries. "How far to the sea?" he asked.
"Nearly fifty kilometers, sir." The aide made a wild guess.
Massena did the arithmetic. There were at least two bastions every kilometer, and the bastions he could see all had four cannon, some more, so by a cautious estimate there were eight guns to the kilometer, which meant Wellington must have assembled four hundred cannon for just the first line, and that was a ridiculous assumption. There were not that many guns in Portugal, and that encouraged the Marshal to believe that some of the guns were false. Then he thought of Britain's navy and wondered if they had brought ships' guns ashore. Dear God, he thought, but how had they done this? "Why didn't we know?" he demanded. There was silence in which Massena turned and stared at Colonel Barreto. "Why didn't we know?" he demanded again. "You told me they were building a pair of forts to protect the road! Does that look like a pair of lousy forts!"
"We weren't told," Barreto said bitterly.
Massena stooped to the glass. He was angry, but he curbed his feelings, trying to find a weakness in his enemy's careful defenses. Opposite him, beside the bastion which had the strangely dark guns, there was a valley that curled behind the hill. He could see no defenses there, but that meant little for all of the low ground was obscured by mist. The hilltops, with their forts and windmills, were in the bright sun, but the valleys were shrouded, yet he fancied that small valley, which twisted behind the nearest hill, was bereft of defenses. Any attack up the valley would be harassed by the high guns, of course, if they were real guns, but once through the gap and behind the hill, what was to stop the Eagles? Perhaps Wellington was deceiving him? Perhaps these defenses were more show than real? Perhaps the stone bastions were not properly mortared, the guns fake and the whole elaborate defense a charade to dissuade any attack? Yet Massena knew he must attack. In front of him was Lisbon and its supplies, behind him was a wasteland, and if his army were not to starve then he must go forward. The anger bloomed in him again, but he thrust it away. Anger was a luxury. For the moment he knew he must show sublime confidence or else the very existence of these defenses would grind the heart from his army. "C'est une coquille d'oeuf," he said.
"A what?" An aide thought he had misheard.
"Une coquille d'oeuf," Massena repeated, still gazing through the glass. He meant it was an eggshell. "One tap," he went on, "and it will crack."
There was silence except for the intermittent sound of cannon fire from a British gunboat on the River Tagus that lay a mile or so to the east. The aides and Generals, staring over Massena's head, thought the defensive line a most impressive eggshell.
"They've fortified the hilltops," Massena explained, "but forgotten the valleys between and that, gentlemen, means we shall prise them open. Prise them open like a virgin." He preferred that simile to the eggshell, for he re
peated it. "Like a virgin," he said enthusiastically, then collapsed the glass and stood. "General Reynier?"
"Sir?"
"You see that valley?" Massena pointed across the misted low ground to where the small valley twisted behind one of the fortified hills. "Send your light troops into it. Go fast, go before the mist vanishes. See what's there." He would lose some men, but it would be worth it to discover that the valleys were the weak point in Wellington's defense, and then Massena could pick his valley and time and break this virgin wide open. Massena chuckled at the thought, his spirits restored, and he held his telescope out to an aide and just then one of the dark guns on the opposite hill fired and the ball seared across the valley, struck the slope twenty paces below the wall and bounced up over Massena's head. The British had been watching him, and must have decided that he had spent too long in one place. Massena took off his cocked hat, bowed to the enemy in acknowledgment of their message, and walked back to where the horses waited.
He would attack.
Major Ferreira had not foreseen this. He had thought the boat, which they had bought for too much money south of Castelo Branco, would take them all the way to the wharves of Lisbon, but now he saw that the British navy was blockading the river. It was the last of many difficulties he had faced on the journey. One of the mules had gone lame and that had slowed them, it had taken time to discover a man willing to sell a hidden boat, and then, once on the river, they had become entangled with a fish trap that had held them up for over an hour and next morning some French foragers had used them for target practice, forcing them to row into a tributary of the Tagus and hide there until the French got bored and rode away. Now, with the journey's end not so far away, there was the gunboat.
At first, seeing the boat in midstream, Ferreira had not been alarmed. He had the seniority and uniform to argue his way past any allied officer, but then, unexpectedly, the boat had opened fire. He had not known the Squirrel was warning him, ordering him either to heave to or else ground his boat on the island that edged the smaller channel; instead he believed he was under fire and so he snapped at his brother and his three men to row harder. In truth he panicked. He had been worrying about his reception in Lisbon ever since the army had retreated from Coimbra. Had anyone got wind of the food in the warehouse? He had a guilty conscience and that conscience made him try to outrun the gunfire, and he believed he had done it until he saw, dim through the mist layer that hung above the swathe of land encircled by the river's bend, the thicket of masts denoting a whole squadron of gunboats barring the river. He was standing in the sternsheets now, staring about him, and he saw, with a great pang of relief, the forts that guarded the main road north from Lisbon. A swirl of parting mist showed the forts on the hills and Ferreira saw the Portuguese flag flying above the nearest and so he impulsively pulled on the tiller ropes to carry the boat to shore. Better to deal with Portuguese soldiers, he thought, than British sailors.
"We're being followed," his brother warned him.
Ferreira turned and saw the jolly boat racing down the river's center. "We're going ashore," he said, "they won't follow us there."
"They won't?"
"They're sailors. Hate being on dry land." Ferreira smiled. "We'll go to the fort," he said, jerking his chin towards the new bastions dominating the road, "we'll get horses and we'll be in Lisbon by this afternoon." The boat ran ashore and the five men carried their weapons and French coin up the bank. Ferreira glanced once at the jolly boat and saw it had turned and was making heavy going as it tried to cross the current. He assumed the sailors wanted to take his boat, and they were welcome to it for now he was safe, but when the five men broke through the bushes at the top of the bank they came across a further difficulty. The river was embanked here, but farther south the big earth wall must have been breached to let the water flood the road and Ferreira saw there would be no easy walk to the closest fort because the land was inundated and that meant they would have to go inland to skirt the floods. That was no great matter, but then he felt alarm because, somewhere in the mist ahead of him, a gun sounded. The echo rolled between the hills, but no shot came anywhere near them, and no second shot sounded, which suggested that there was no need to worry. Probably a gunner ranging his piece or testing a rebored touchhole. They walked westwards, following the line of the swamp-edged flood, and after a while, vague in the mist, Ferreira saw a farm standing on higher ground. There was a wide stretch of boggy land between them and the farm, but he reckoned if he could just reach those buildings then he would not be too far from the forts on the southern heights. That thought gave Ferreira a conviction that all would be well, that the tribulations of the last days would be crowned with unmerited but welcome success. He began to laugh.
"What is it?" his brother asked.
"God is good to us, Luis, God is good."
"He is?"
"We sold that food to the French, took their money and the food was destroyed! I shall say we tricked the French and that means we shall be heroes."
Ferragus smiled and patted the leather satchel hanging from his shoulder. "We're rich heroes."
"I'll probably be made Lieutenant Colonel for this," Ferreira said. He would explain that he had heard of the hoarded food and stayed behind to ensure its destruction, and such a feat would surely merit a promotion. "They were a bad few days," he admitted to his brother, "but we made it through. Good God!"
"What?"
"The forts," Ferreira said in astonishment. "Look at all those bastions!" The mist obscured the valley, but it was a low mist and as they breasted a gentle rise Ferreira could see the hilltops and he could see that every height had its small fort and, for the first time, he realized the extent of the new works. He had thought that only the roads were being guarded, but it was plain that the line stretched far inland. Could it cross the peninsula? Go all the way to the sea? And if it did then surely the French would never reach Lisbon. He felt a sudden surge of relief that he had been forced out of Coimbra for if he had stayed, if the warehouse had not been burned, then he would inevitably have found himself recruited by Colonel Barreto. "That damned fire did us a favor," he told his brother, "because we're going to win. Portugal will survive." All he had to do was reach a fort flying the Portuguese flag and it would all be over; the uncertainty, the danger, the fear. It was over and he had won. He turned, looking for the Portuguese flag he had seen flying above the mist, and when he turned he saw the pursuers coming from the river. He saw the
green jackets.
So it was not over, not quite. And clumsily, weighed down by their money, the five men began to run.
General Sarrut assembled four battalions of light infantry. Some were chasseurs and some voltigeurs, but whether they were called hunters or vaulters they were all skirmishers and there was no real distinction between them except that the chasseurs had red epaulettes on their blue coats and the voltigeurs had either green or red. Both considered themselves elite troops, trained to fight against enemy skirmishers in the space between the battle lines.
The four battalions were all from the 2nd regiment that had left France with eighty-nine officers and two thousand six hundred men, but now the four battalions were down to seventy-one officers and just over two thousand men. They did not carry the regiment's Eagle for they were not going to battle. They were carrying out a reconnaissance and General Sarrut's orders were clear. The skirmishers were to advance in loose order across the low land in front of the enemy forts and the fourth battalion, on the left of the line, was to probe the small valley and, if they met no resistance, the third would follow. They would advance only far enough to determine whether the valley was blockaded or otherwise defended and, when that was established, the battalions were to withdraw back to the French-held hills. The mist was both a curse and a blessing. A blessing because it meant the four battalions could advance without being seen from the enemy forts, and a curse because it would obscure the view up the smaller valley, but by the time his first men reached
that valley Sarrut expected the mist would be mostly burned away. Then, of course, he could expect some furious artillery fire from the enemy forts, but as his men would be in skirmish order it would be a most unlucky shot that did any damage.
General Sarrut had been far more worried by the prospect of enemy cavalry, but Reynier had dismissed the concern. "They won't have horsemen saddled and ready," he had claimed, "and it'll take them half a day to get them up. If they bother to fight you in the valley it'll be infantry, so I'll have Soult's brigade ready to deal with the bastards." Soult's brigade was a mix of cavalry: chasseurs, hussars and dragoons, a thousand horsemen who only had six hundred and fifty-three horses between them, but that should be enough to deal with any British or Portuguese skirmishers who tried to stop Sarrut's reconnaissance.
It was mid-morning by the time Sarrut's men were ready to advance and the General was about to order the first battalion out into the mist-shrouded valley when one of General Reynier's aides came galloping down the hill. Sarrut watched the officer negotiate the slope. "It'll be a change of orders," he predicted sourly to one of his own aides. "Now they'll want us to attack Lisbon."
Reynier's aide curbed his horse in a flurry of earth, then leaned forward to pat the beast's neck. "There's a British picquet, sir," he said. "We've just seen it from the hilltop. They're in a ruined barn by the stream."
"No matter," Sarrut said. No mere picquet could stop four battalions of prime light infantry.
"General Reynier suggests we might capture them, sir," the aide said respectfully.
Sarrut laughed. "One sight of us, Captain, and they'll be running like hares!"
"The mist, General," the aide said respectfully. "It's patchy, very patchy, and General Reynier suggests if you head westwards you may slip around them. He feels their officer might have some information about the defenses."