„Can’t pick your pockets, Colonel, if you’re under water,” Sharpe said and then his face twisted in rage as he rammed the sword down.
Christopher died on the ledge just above the pool where Williamson had drowned. The eddy above the deserter’s body ran with new red blood, then the red spilled out into the main stream where it was diluted first to pink and then to nothing. Christopher twitched and gargled because Sharpe’s sword had taken out his windpipe and that was a mercy for it was a quicker death than he deserved. Sharpe watched the Colonel’s body jerk and then go still, and he dipped his blade in the water to clean it, dried it as best he could on Christopher’s coat and then gave the Colonel’s pockets a quick search and came up with three gold coins, a broken watch with a silver case and a leather folder crammed with papers that would probably interest Hogan. „Bloody fool,” Sharpe said to the body, then he looked up into the gathering night and saw a great shadow at the ravine’s edge above him. For a second he thought it must be a Frenchman, then he heard Harper’s voice.
„Is he dead?”
„Didn’t even put up a fight. Williamson too.”
Sharpe climbed up the ravine’s side until he was near Harper and the Sergeant lowered his rifle to haul Sharpe the rest of the way. Sergeant Macedo was there and the three could not return to the bluff because the French were on the road and so they took shelter from the rain in a gully formed where one of the great round boulders had been split by a frost. Sharpe told Harper what had happened, then asked if the Irishman had seen Kate.
„The Lieutenant’s got her, sir,” Harper answered. „The last I saw of her she was having a good cry and he was holding hard onto her and giving her a nice pat on the back. Women like a good cry, have you noticed that, sir?”
„I have,” Sharpe said, „I have.”
„Makes them feel better,” Harper said. „Funny how it doesn’t work for us.”
Sharpe gave one of the gold coins to Harper, the second to Macedo and kept the third. Darkness had fallen. It promised to be a long, cold and hungry night, but Sharpe did not mind. „Got my telescope back,” he told Harper.
„I thought you would.”
„Wasn’t even broken. At least I don’t think so.” The glass had not rattled when he shook it, so he assumed it was fine.
The rain eased and Sharpe listened and heard nothing but the scrape of French feet on the Saltador’s stones, the gusting of the wind, the sound of the river and the fall of the rain. He heard no gunfire. So that faraway fight at the Ponte Nova was over and he did not doubt that it was a victory. The French were going. They had met Sir Arthur Wellesley and he had licked them, licked them good and proper, and Sharpe smiled at that, for though Wellesley was a cold beast, unfriendly and haughty, he was a bloody good soldier. And he had made havoc for King Nicolas. And Sharpe had helped. He had done his bit.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Sharpe is once again guilty of stealing another man’s thunder. It was, indeed, a Portuguese barber who rowed a skiff across the Douro and alerted Colonel Waters to the existence of three stranded barges on the river’s northern bank, but he did it on his own initiative and there were no British troops on the northern bank at the time and no riflemen from the 95th helped in the defense of the seminary. The French believed they had either destroyed or removed every boat on the river, but they missed those three barges which then began a cumbersome ferry service that fed redcoats into the seminary, which, inexplicably, had been left unguarded. The tale of the spherical case shot destroying the leading French gun team is taken from Oman’s A History of the Peninsular War, Vol II. General Sir Edward Paget was wounded in the arm in that fight. He lost his arm, returned to England to recuperate and then came back to the Peninsula as General of the First Division, but his bad luck continued when he was captured by the French. The British lost seventy-seven men killed or wounded in the fight at the seminary while French casualties were at least three or four times as many. The French also failed to destroy the ferry at Barca d’Avintas which was refloated on the morning of the attack and carried two King’s German Legion infantry battalions and the 14th Light Dragoons across the river, a force that could have given the French serious problems as they fled Oporto, but the Genera’ m charge of the units, George Murray, though he advanced north to the Amarante road, supinely watched the enemy pass. Later that day General Charles Stewart led the 14th Light Dragoons in a magnificent charge that broke the French rearguard, but Murray still refused to advance his infantry and so it was all too little too late. I have probably tradiced Marshal Soult by suggesting he was talking to his cook when the British crossed the river, but he did sleep in till nearly eleven o’clock that morning, and whatever his cook provided for supper was indeed eaten by Sir Arthur Wellesley.