Harper, Macedo and Luis manhandled the skiff over the gunwale and down the glutinous mud into the river. The tide was rising, but it still had some way to go before it reached the barges. Luis took the oars, settled himself on the thwart and, with admirable skill, pulled away from the bank. He looked over his shoulder to judge his direction, then sculled vigorously. Sharpe saw another horseman appear behind the first, the second man also in red coat and black cocked hat, and he felt the bindings of the army reaching out to snare him so he jumped off the barge and waded through the mud to the bank. „You stay here,” he ordered Vicente, „I’ll look up the hill.”
For a moment Vicente seemed ready to argue, then he accepted the arrangement and Sharpe beckoned his riflemen to follow him. As they disappeared into the trees Sharpe looked back to see Luis was almost at the other bank, then Sharpe pushed through a stand of laurel and saw the road in front of him. This was the road by which he had escaped from Oporto and, to his left, he could see the houses where Vicente had saved his bacon. He could see no French. He stared again at the seminary, but nothing moved there. To hell with it, he thought, just go.
He led his men in skirmish order up the hill, which offered little cover. A few straggly trees broke the pasture and a dilapidated shed stood halfway up, but otherwise it was a deathtrap if there were any Frenchmen in the big building. Sharpe knew he should have exercised more caution, but no one fired from the windows, no one challenged him, and he quickened his pace so that he felt the pain in his leg muscles because the slope was so steep.
Then, suddenly, he had arrived safe at the base of the seminary. The ground floor had small barred windows and seven arched doors. Sharpe tried a door and found it locked and so solid that when he kicked it he only succeeded in hurting himself. He crouched and waited for the laggards among his men to catch up. He could see westward across a valley that lay between the seminary and the city and he could see where the French guns, at the top of Oporto’s hill, were shooting across the river, but their target was hidden by a hill on the southern bank. A huge convent stood on the obscuring hill, the same convent, Sharpe remembered, where the Portuguese guns had duelled with the French on the day the city fell.
„All here,” Harper told him.
Sharpe followed the seminary wall which was made of massive blocks of stone. He went westward, toward the city. He would have preferred to go the other way, but he sensed the building’s main entrance would face Oporto. Every door he passed was locked. Why the hell were there no French here? He could see none, not even at the city’s edge a half-mile away, and then the wall turned to his right and he saw a flight of steps climbing to an ornamental door. No sentries guarded the entrance, though he could at last see Frenchmen now. There was a convoy of wagons on a road that ran in the valley which lay to the north of the seminary. The wagons, which were drawn by oxen, were being escorted by dragoons and Sharpe used Christopher’s small telescope to see that the vehicles were filled with wounded men. So was Soult sending his invalids back to France? Or just emptying his hospitals before fighting another battle? And he was surely not now thinking of marching on to Lisbon for the British had come north to the Douro and that made Sharpe think that Sir Arthur Wellesley must have arrived in Portugal to galvanize the British forces.
The seminary entrance was framed by an ornate facade rising to a stone cross that had been chipped by musket fire. The main door, approached by stairs, was wooden, studded with nails and, when Sharpe twisted the great wrought-iron handle, surprised him by being unlocked.
He pushed the door wide open with the muzzle of his rifle to see an empty tiled hallway with walls painted a sickly green. The portrait of a half-starved saint hung askew on one wall, the saint’s body riddled with bullet punctures. A crude painting of a woman and a French soldier had been daubed next to the saint and proved that the French had been in the seminary, though there were none evident now. Sharpe went inside, his boots echoing from the walls. „Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Harper said, making the sign of the cross. „I’ve never seen such a huge building!” He gazed in awe down the shadowed corridor. „How many bloody priests does a country need?”