The infantry were ordered to empty their packs and haversacks of everything except food and ammunition. Some officers ordered inspections and insisted their men throw away the plunder of the campaign. Cutlery, candlesticks, plate, all had to be abandoned by the roadside as the army took to the hills. The horses, oxen and mules that hauled the guns, carriages and limbers were shot rather than be ceded to the enemy. The animals screamed and thrashed as they died. The wounded who could not walk were left in their wagons and given muskets so they could at least try to protect themselves against the Portuguese who would find them soon enough and then attempt to exact revenge on helpless men. Soult ordered the military chest, eleven great barrels of silver coins, put by the road so the men could help themselves to a handful apiece as they went past. The women hitched up their skirts, scooped up the coins, and walked with their men. The dragoons, hussars and chasseurs led their horses. Thousands of men and women were climbing into the barren hills, leaving behind wagons loaded with bottles of wine, with port, with crosses of gold stolen from churches and with ancestral paintings plundered from the walls of northern Portugal’s big houses. The French had thought they had conquered a country, that they were merely waiting for a few reinforcements to swell the ranks as they marched on Lisbon, and none understood why they were suddenly faced with disaster or why King Nicolas was leading them on a shambolic retreat through torrential rain.
„If you stay here,” Christopher told Kate, „you’ll be raped.”
„I’ve been raped,” she wept, „night after night!”
„Oh, for God’s sake, Kate!” Christopher, dressed in civilian clothes, was standing by the carriage’s open door with rain dripping from the point of his cocked hat. „I’m not leaving you here.” He reached in, took her by the wrist and, despite her screams and struggles, hauled her from the carriage. „Walk, damn you!” he snarled, and dragged her across the verge and up the slope. She had only been out of the carriage a few seconds and already her blue hussar uniform, which Christopher had insisted she wore, was soaked through. „This isn’t the end,” Christopher told her, his grip painful on her thin wrist. „The reinforcements never arrived, that’s all! But we’ll be back.”
Kate, despite her misery, was struck by the „we.” Did he mean the two of them? Or did he mean the French? „I want to go home,” she cried.
„Stop being tedious,” Christopher snapped, „and keep walking!” He pulled her on. Her new leather-soled boots slipped on the path. „The French are going to win this war,” Christopher insisted. He was no longer certain of that, but when he weighed the balances of power in Europe he managed to convince himself that it was true.
„I want to go back to Oporto!” Kate sobbed.
„We can’t!”
„Why not?” She tried to pull away from him and though she could not loosen his grip she did manage to bring him to a halt. „Why not?” she asked.
„We just can’t,” he said, „now come on!” He tugged her into motion again, unwilling to tell her that he could not go back to Oporto because that damned man Sharpe was alive. Good Christ in his heaven, but the bastard was only an over-age lieutenant and one, he had now learned, who was up from the ranks, but Sharpe knew too much that was damning to Christopher and so the Colonel would need to find a safe haven from where, by the discreet methods that he knew so well, he could send a letter to London. Then, in quiet, he could judge from the reply whether London believed his story that he had been forced to demonstrate an allegiance to the French in order to engineer a mutiny that would have freed Portugal, and that story sounded convincing to him, except that Portugal was being freed anyway. But all was not lost. It would be his word against Sharpe’s, and Christopher, whatever else he might be, was a gentleman and Sharpe was most decidedly not. There would be the delicate problem, of course, of what to do with Kate if he was called back to London, but he could probably deny that the marriage had ever taken place. He would put reports of it down to Kate’s vapors. Women were given to vapors, it was notorious. What had Shakespeare said? „Frailty, thy name is woman.” So he would truthfully claim that the gabbled service in Vila Real de Zedes’s small church was not a proper marriage and say that he had undergone it solely to save Kate’s blushes. It was a gamble, he knew, but he had played cards long enough to know that sometimes the most outrageous gambles paid the biggest winnings.