Sharpe primed his rifle, put it to his shoulder, looked for a target, saw a knot of blue uniforms very close to the garden wall and put the bullet into them. The air hissed with bullets. God damn it, but why didn’t the bastards pull back? A brave group of Frenchmen tried to run down the seminary’s western face to reach the big gate, but the British guns at the convent saw them and the shells cracked black and red, smearing blood across the paved terrace and up the garden wall’s whitewashed stones. Sharpe saw his men grimacing as they tried to force the new bullets down the powder-fouled barrels. There was no time to clean the rifles, they just hammered the bullets down and pulled the trigger. Fire and fire again, and the French were doing the same, a mad duel of bullets, and above the smoke, across the northern valley, Sharpe saw a horde of new French infantry streaming out of the city.
Two men in shirtsleeves were carrying boxes of ammunition round the roof. „Who needs it?” they shouted, sounding like London street traders. „Fresh lead! Who needs it? Fresh lead! New powder!” One of General Hill’s aides was carrying canteens of water to the parapet while Hill himself, red-faced and anxious, stood close to the redcoats so he was seen to share their danger. He caught Sharpe’s gaze and offered a grimace as if to suggest that this was harder work than he had anticipated.
More troops came to the roof, men with fresh muskets and full cartridge boxes, and with them were the riflemen of the 60th whose officer must have realized he had been in the wrong place. He gave Sharpe a companionable nod, then ordered his men to the parapet. Flames jetted down, smoke thickened, and still the French tried to blast their way through stone walls with nothing but musket fire. Two Frenchmen succeeded in scaling the garden wall, but hesitated at the top and were seized and dragged across the coping to be battered to death by musket butts on the path beneath. Seven dead redcoats were laid out on another gravel path, their hands curling in death and the blood of their wounds slowly hardening and turning black, but most of the British dead were in the seminary’s corridors, dragged away from the big windows that made the best targets for the frustrated French.
A whole new column was now climbing the slope, coming to swell the shattered ranks of the first, but though the beleaguered men in the seminary could not know it, these newcomers were the symptom of French defeat. Marshal Soult, desperate for fresh troops to attack the seminary, had stripped the city itself of infantry, and the people of Oporto, finding themselves unguarded for the first time since the end of March, swarmed down to the river and dragged their boats out of warehouses, shops and back-yards where the occupiers had kept them under guard. A swarm of those small craft now rowed across the river, past the shattered remnants of the pontoon bridge, to the quays of Vila Nova de Gaia where the Brigade of Guards was waiting. An officer peered anxiously across the Douro to reassure himself that the French were not waiting in ambush on the opposite quay, then shouted at his men to embark. The Guards were rowed back to the city and still more boats appeared and more redcoats crossed. Soult did not know it, but his city was filling with the enemy.
Nor did the men attacking the seminary know it, not till the redcoats appeared at the city’s eastern edge, and by then the second giant column had climbed into the death storm of bullets flicking from the seminary’s walls, roof and windows. The noise rivaled that of Trafalgar, where Sharpe had been dazed by the incessant boom of the great ships’ guns, but this noise was higher pitched as the muskets’ discharges blended into an eerie, hard-edged shriek. The higher slope of the seminary hill was sodden with blood and the surviving Frenchmen were using the bodies of their dead comrades as protection. A few drummers still tried to drive the broken columns on, but then came a shout of alarm from a French sergeant, and the shout spread, and suddenly the smoke was dissipating and the slope emptying as the French saw the Brigade of Guards advancing across the valley.