Sharpe’s Havoc by Bernard Cornwell

Sharpe grimaced. „The French have a day’s start on us.”

„No, they don’t. Like fools they went toward Amarante which means they didn’t know that the Portuguese had recaptured it. By now they’ll have discovered their predicament, but I doubt they’ll start north till dawn. If we hurry, we beat them.” He frowned, looking down at the map. „There’s only one real problem I can see, other than finding Mister Christopher when we get there.”

„A problem?”

„I can find my way to Ponte Nova from Braga,” Hogan said, „but what if the French are already on the Braga road? We’ll have to take to the hills and it’s wild country, Richard, an easy place to get lost. We need a guide and we need to find him fast.”

Sharpe grinned. „If you don’t mind traveling with a Portuguese officer who thinks he’s a philosopher and a poet then I think I know just the man.”

„I’m Irish,” Hogan said, „there’s nothing we love more than philosophy and poetry.”

„He’s a lawyer too.”

„If he gets us to Ponte Nova,” Hogan said, „then God will doubtless forgive him for that.”

The women’s laughter was loud, but it was time to end the party. It was time for a dozen of Sharpe’s best men to mend their boots and fill their cartridge boxes.

It was time for revenge.

CHAPTER 10

Kate sat in a corner of the carriage and wept. The carriage was going nowhere. It was not even a proper carriage, not half as comfortable as the Quinta’s fragile gig that had been abandoned in Oporto and nothing like as substantial as the one her mother had taken south across the river in March, and how Kate now wished she had gone with her mother, but instead she had been stricken by romance and certain that love’s fulfillment would bring her golden skies, clear horizons and endless joy.

Instead she was in a two-wheeled Oporto hackney with a leaking leather roof, cracked springs and a broken-down gelding between its shafts, and the carriage was going nowhere because the fleeing French army was stuck on the road to Amarante. Rain seethed on the roof, streaked the windows and dripped onto Kate’s lap and she did not care, she just hunched in the corner and wept.

The door was tugged open and Christopher put his head in. „There are going to be some bangs,” he told her, „but there’s no need to be alarmed.” He paused, decided he could not cope with her sobbing, so just closed the door. Then he jerked it open again. „They’re disabling the guns,” he explained, „that’s what the noise will be.”

Kate could not have cared less. She wondered what would become of her, and the awfulness of her prospects was so frightening that she burst into fresh tears just as the first guns were fired muzzle to muzzle.

On the morning after the fall of Oporto Marshal Soult had been woken to the appalling news that the Portuguese army had retaken Amarante and that the only bridge by which he could carry his guns, limbers, caissons, wagons and carriages back to the French fortresses in Spain was therefore in enemy hands. One or two hotheads had suggested fighting their way across the River Tamega, but scouts reported that the Portuguese were occupying Amarante in force, that the bridge had been mined and had a dozen guns now dominating its roadway, that it would take a day of bitter and bloody fighting to get across and even then there would probably be no bridge left for the Portuguese would doubtless blow it. And Soult did not have a day. Sir Arthur Wellesley would be advancing from Oporto so that left him only one option, which was to abandon all the army’s wheeled transport, every wagon, every limber, every caisson, every carriage, every mobile forge and every gun. They would all have to be left behind and twenty thousand men, five thousand camp followers, four thousand horses and almost as many mules must do their best to scramble over the mountains.

But Soult was not going to leave the enemy good French guns to turn against him, and so the weapons were each loaded with four pounds of powder, were double-shotted and placed muzzle to muzzle. Gunners struggled to keep their portfires alight in the rain and then, on a word of command, touched the two reed fuses and the powder flashed down to the overcharged chambers, the guns fired into each other, leaped back in a wrenching explosion of smoke and flames and then were left with ripped, torn barrels. Some of the gunners were weeping as they destroyed their weapons while others just cursed as they used knives and bayonets to rip open the powder bags that were left to spoil in the rain.