„Come on!” Sharpe snarled. „Fight me!”
„You’re an officer,” Williamson said.
„Not now, I’m not. And no one’s watching. Just you and me, Williamson, and you don’t like me and I’m giving you a chance to thump me. And you do it properly and I’ll have you home by summer.” He did not know how he would keep that promise, but nor did he think he would have to try, for Williamson, he knew, was remembering the epic fight between Harper and Sharpe, a fight that had left both men reeling, yet Sharpe had won it and the riflemen had watched it and they learned something about Sharpe that day.
And Williamson did not want to learn the lesson again. „I won’t fight an officer,” he said with assumed dignity.
Sharpe turned his back, picked up his jacket. „Then find Sergeant Harper,” he said, „and tell him you’re to do the same punishment as Sims and Gataker.” He turned back. „On the double!”
Williamson ran. His shame at refusing the fight might make him more dangerous, but it would also diminish his influence over the other men who, even though they would never know what had happened in the woods, would sense that Williamson had been humiliated. Sharpe buckled his belt and walked slowly back. He worried about his men, worried that he would lose their loyalty, worried that he was proving a bad officer. He remembered Bias Vivar and wished he had the Spanish officer’s quiet ability to enforce obedience through sheer presence, but perhaps that effortless authority came with experience. At least none of his men had deserted. They were all present, except for Tarrant and the few who were back in Coimbra’s military hospital recovering from the fever.
It was a month now since Oporto had fallen. The fort on the hilltop was almost finished and, to Sharpe’s surprise, the men had enjoyed the hard labor. Daniel Hagman was walking again, albeit slowly, but he was mended enough to work and Sharpe placed a kitchen table in the sun where, one by one, Hagman stripped, cleaned and oiled every rifle. The fugitives who had fled from Oporto had now returned to the city or found refuge elsewhere, but the French were making new fugitives. Wherever they were ambushed by partisans they sacked the closest villages and, even without the provocation of ambush, they plundered farms mercilessly to feed themselves. More and more folk came to Vila Real de Zedes, drawn there by rumors that the French had agreed to spare the village. No one knew why the French should do such a thing, though some of the older women said it was because the whole valley was under the protection of Saint Joseph whose life-size statue was in the church, and the village’s priest, Father Josefa, encouraged the belief. He even had the statue taken from the church, hung with fading narcissi and crowned with a laurel wreath, and then carried about the village boundary to show the saint the precise extent of the lands needing his guardianship. Vila Real de Zedes, folk believed, was a sanctuary from the war and ordained as such by God.
May arrived with rain and wind. The last of the blossoms were blown from the trees to make damp rills of pink and white petals in the grass. Still the French did not come and Manuel Lopes reckoned they were simply too busy to bother with Vila Real de Zedes. „They’ve got troubles,” he said happily. „Silveira’s giving them a bellyache at Amarante and the road to Vigo has been closed by partisans. They’re cut off! No way home! They’re not going to worry us here.” Lopes frequently went to the nearby towns where he posed as a peddler selling religious trinkets and he brought back news of the French troops. „They patrol the roads,” he said, „they get drunk at night and they wish they were back home.”
„And they look for food,” Sharpe said.
„They do that too,” Lopes agreed.
„And one day,” Sharpe said, „when they’re hungry, they’ll come here.”
„Colonel Christopher won’t let them,” Lopes said. He was walking with Sharpe along the Quinta’s drive, watched by Harris and Cooper who stood guard at the gate, the closest Sharpe allowed his Protestant riflemen to the village. Rain was threatening. Gray sheets of it fell across the northern hills and Sharpe had twice heard rumbles of thunder which might have been the sound of the guns at Amarante, but seemed too loud. „I shall leave soon,” Lopes announced.