Meanwhile Miss Savage was still missing.
Captain Hogan appeared on the front porch of the House Beautiful. He carefully closed the door behind him and then looked up to heaven and swore fluently and impressively. Sharpe buttoned his breeches and his two dozen riflemen inspected their weapons as though they had never seen such things before. Captain Hogan added a few more carefully chosen words, then spat as a French round shot trundled overhead. „What it is, Richard,” he said when the cannon shot had passed, „is a shambles. A bloody, goddamned miserable poxed bollocks of an agglomerated halfwitted shambles.” The round shot landed somewhere in the lower town and precipitated the splintering crash of a collapsing roof. Captain Hogan took out his snuffbox and inhaled a mighty pinch.
„Bless you,” Sergeant Harper said.
Captain Hogan sneezed and Harper smiled.
„Her name,” Hogan said, ignoring Harper, „is Catherine or, rather, Kate. Kate Savage, nineteen years old and in need, my God, how she is in need, of a thrashing! A hiding! A damned good smacking, that’s what she needs, Richard. A copper-sheathed, goddamned bloody good walloping.”
„So where the hell is she?” Sharpe asked.
„Her mother thinks she might have gone to Vila Real de Zedes,” Captain Hogan said, „wherever in God’s holy hell that might be. But the family has an estate there. A place where they go to escape the summer heat.” He rolled his eyes in exasperation.
„So why would she go there, sir?” Sergeant Harper asked.
„Because she’s a fatherless nineteen-year-old girl,” Hogan said, „who insists on having her own way. Because she’s fallen out with her mother. Because she’s a bloody idiot who deserves a ruddy good hiding. Because, oh I don’t know why! Because she’s young and knows everything, that’s why.” Hogan was a stocky, middle-aged Irishman, a Royal Engineer, with a shrewd face, a soft brogue, graying hair and a charitable disposition. „Because she’s a bloody halfwit, that’s why,” he finished.
„This Vila Real de whatever,” Sharpe said, „is it far? Why don’t we just fetch her?”
„Which is precisely what I’ve told the mother you will do, Richard. You will go to Vila Real de Zedes, you will find the wretched girl and you will get her across the river. We’ll wait for you in Vila Nova and if the damned French capture Vila Nova then we’ll wait for you in Coimbra.” He paused as he penciled these instructions on a scrap of paper. „And if the Frogs take Coimbra we’ll wait for you in Lisbon, and if the bastards take Lisbon we’ll be pissing our breeches in London and you’ll be God knows where. Don’t fall in love with her,” he went on, handing Sharpe the piece of paper, „don’t get the silly girl pregnant, don’t give her the thrashing she bloody well deserves and don’t, for the love of Christ, lose her, and don’t lose Colonel Christopher either. Am I plain?”
„Colonel Christopher is coming with us?” Sharpe asked, appalled.
„Didn’t I just tell you that?” Hogan inquired innocently, then turned as a clatter of hooves announced the appearance of the widow Savage’s traveling coach from the stable yard at the rear of the house. The coach was heaped with baggage and there was even some furniture and two rolled carpets lashed onto the rear rack where a coachman, precariously poised between a half-dozen gilded chairs, was leading Hogan’s black mare by the reins. The Captain took the horse and used the coach’s mounting step to hoist himself into the saddle. „You’ll be back with us in a couple of days,” he assured Sharpe. „Say six, seven hours to Vila Real de Zedes? The same back to the ferry at Barca d’Avintas and then a quiet stroll home. You know where Barca d’Avintas is?”
„No, sir.”
„That way.” Hogan pointed eastward. „Four country miles.” He pushed his right boot into its stirrup, then lifted his body to flick out the tails of his blue coat. „With luck you may even rejoin us tomorrow night.”
„What I don’t understand … “ Sharpe began, then paused because the front door of the house had been thrown open and Mrs. Savage, widow and mother of the missing daughter, came into the sunlight. She was a good-looking woman in her forties: dark-haired, tall and slender with a pale face and high arched eyebrows. She hurried down the steps as a cannonball rumbled overhead and then there was a smattering of musket fire alarmingly close, so close that Sharpe climbed the porch steps to stare at the crest of the hill where the Braga road disappeared between a large tavern and a handsome church. A Portuguese six-pounder gun had just deployed by the church and was now firing at the invisible enemy. The bishop’s forces had dug new redoubts on the crest and patched the old medieval wall with hastily erected palisades and earthworks, but the sight of the small gun firing from its makeshift position in the center of the road suggested that those defenses were crumbling fast.