The hallway was cavernous, arched, high, beautiful, and hard-heeled boots striding over its tiled floor echoed up the staircase to where King Nicolas slept. Early that morning a hussar had come in hurriedly, his spurs had caught in the rug at the foot of the stairs and he had sprawled with a terrible clatter of saber and scabbard that had woken the Marshal, who had then posted the officers to make certain the rest of his sleep was not disturbed. The two officers were powerless to stop the British artillery firing from across the river, but perhaps the Marshal was not so sensitive to gunfire as he was to loud heels.
The Marshal had invited a dozen guests to breakfast and all had arrived before nine in the morning and were forced to wait in one of the great reception rooms on the palace’s western side where tall glass doors opened onto a terrace decorated with flowers planted in carved stone urns and with laurel bushes that an elderly gardener was trimming with long shears. The guests, all but one of them men, and all but two of them French, continually strolled onto the terrace which offered, from its southern balustrade, a view across the river and thus a sight of the guns that fired over the Douro. In truth there was not much to see because the British cannon were emplaced in Vila Nova de Gaia’s streets and so, even with the help of telescopes, the guests merely saw gouts of dirty smoke and then heard the crash of the round shots striking the buildings that faced Oporto’s quay. The only other sight worth seeing was the remains of the pontoon bridge which the French had repaired at the beginning of April, but had now blown up because of Sir Arthur Wellesley’s approach. Three scorched pontoons still swung to their anchors, the rest, along with the roadway, had been blasted to smithereens and carried by the tide to the nearby ocean.
Kate was the only woman invited to the Marshal’s breakfast and her husband had been adamant that she wear her hussar uniform and his insistence was rewarded by the admiring glances that the other guests gave to his wife’s long legs. Christopher himself was in civilian clothes, while the other ten men, all officers, were in their uniforms and, because a woman was present, they did their best to appear insouciant about the British cannonade. „What they are doing,” a dragoon major resplendent in aiguillettes and gold braid remarked, „is shooting at our sentries with six-pound shots. They’re swatting at flies with a bludgeon.” He lit a cigar, breathed deep and gave Kate a long appreciative look. „With a butt like that,” he said to his friend, „she should be French.”
„She should be on her back.”
„That too, of course.”
Kate kept herself turned away from the French officers. She was ashamed of the hussar uniform which she thought immodest and, worse, appeared to suggest her sympathies were with the French. „You might make an effort,” Christopher told her.
„I am making an effort,” she answered bitterly, „an effort not to cheer every British shot.”
„You’re being ridiculous.”
„I am?” Kate bridled.
„This is merely a demonstration,” Christopher explained, waving toward the powder smoke that drifted like patchy fog through the red-tiled roofs of Vila Nova. „Wellesley has marched his men up here and he can’t go any further. He’s stuck. There are no boats and the navy isn’t foolish enough to try and sail past the river forts. So Wellesley will hammer a few cannonballs into the city, then turn around and march back to Coimbra or Lisbon. In chess terms, my dear, this is a stalemate. Soult can’t march south because his reinforcements haven’t arrived and Wellesley can’t come further north because he doesn’t have the boats. And if the military can’t force a decision here then the diplomats will have to settle matters. Which is why I am here, as I keep trying to tell you.”
„You’re here,” Kate said, „because your sympathies are with the French.”
„That is an exceptionally offensive remark,” Christopher said haughtily. „I am here because sane men must do whatever they can to prevent this war continuing, and to do that we must talk with the enemy and I cannot talk with them if I am on the wrong side of the river.”