“C’est 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 hors
emen’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
A 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’Armée 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 Masséna 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, wheelbarrows, 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 Masséna 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?”
“Of course I haven’t,” Dumesnil said sarcastically.
“No one must get in, you understand? No one! The army is saved, Colonel, saved!”
“Alléluia,” Dumesnil said dryly.
“I shall inform Marshal Masséna that you are responsible for the safety of these supplies,” Poquelin said pompously.
Dumesnil leaned from the saddle. “Marshal Masséna himself gave me my orders, little man,” he said, “and I obey my orders. I don’t need more from you.”
“You need more men,” Poquelin said, worried because the two squads of dragoons, barring the street on either side of the warehouse doors, were already holding back crowds of hungry soldiers. “Why are those men here?” he demanded petulantly.
“Because rumor says there’s food in there,” Dumesnil flicked his sword towards the warehouse, “and because they’re hungry. But for Christ’s sake stop fretting! I have enough men. You do your job, Poquelin, and stop telling me how to do mine.”
Poquelin, content that he had done his duty by stressing to Dumesnil how important the food was, went to find Colonel Barreto who was waiting with Major Ferreira and the alarming Ferragus beside the warehouse doors. “It is all good,” Poquelin told Barreto. “There is even more than you told us!”
Barreto translated for Ferragus who, in turn, asked a question. “The gentleman,” Barreto said to Poquelin, his sarcasm obvious, “wishes to know when he will be paid.”
“Now,” Poquelin said, though it was not in his power to issue payment. Ye
t he wanted to convey the good news to Masséna, and the Marshal would surely pay when he heard that the army had more than enough food to see it to Lisbon. That was all that was needed. Just to reach Lisbon, for even the British could not empty that great city of all its supplies. A treasure trove waited in Lisbon and now the Emperor’s Army of Portugal had been given the means to reach it.
The dragoons moved aside to let Poquelin and his companions through. Then the horsemen closed up again. Scores of hungry infantrymen had heard about the food and they were shouting that it should be distributed now, but Colonel Dumesnil was quite ready to kill them if they attempted to help themselves. He sat, hard-faced, unmoving, his long sword drawn, a soldier with orders, which meant the food was in secure hands and the Army of Portugal was safe.
SHARPE AND HARPER made the return run to the roof where Vicente and Sarah waited. Vicente was bent over in apparent pain, while Sarah, her black silk dress gleaming with spots of fresh blood, looked pale. “What happened?” Sharpe asked.
In reply she showed Sharpe the bloodstained knife blade. “I did get the bullet out,” she said in a small voice.
“Well done.”
“And lots of cloth scraps,” she added more confidently.
“Even better,” Sharpe said.
Vicente leaned back against the tiles. He was barechested and a new bandage, torn from his shirt, was crudely wrapped about his shoulder. Blood had oozed through the cloth.
“Hurts, eh?” Sharpe asked.
“It hurts,” Vicente said dryly.
“It was difficult,” Sarah said, “but he didn’t make a noise.”
“That’s because he’s a soldier,” Sharpe said. “Can you move your arm?” he asked Vicente.