Vicente a newspaper from Oporto. It was an ill-printed sheet and Vicente was puzzled by it. ‘I’ve never heard of the Diario do Porto,’ he told Sharpe, ‘and it is nonsense.’
‘Nonsense?’
‘It says Soult should declare himself king of Northern Lusitania! It says there are many Portuguese people who support the idea. Who? Why would they? We have a king already.’
‘The French must be paying the newspaper,’ Sharpe guessed, though what else the French were doing was a mystery for they left him alone.
The doctor who came to see Hagman thought Marshal Soult was gathering his forces in readiness to strike south and did not want to fritter men away in bitter little skirmishes across the northern mountains. ‘Once he possesses all Portugal,’ the doctor said, ‘then he will scour you away.’ He wrinkled his nose as he lifted the stinking compress from Hagman’s chest, then he shook his head in amazement for the wound was clean. Hagman’s breathing was easier, he could sit up in bed now and was eating better.
Vicente left the next day. The doctor had brought news of General Silveira’s army in Amarante and how it was valiantly defending the bridge across the Tamega, and Vicente decided his duty lay in helping that defence, but after three days he returned because there were too many dragoons patrolling the countryside between Vila Real de Zedes and Amarante. The failure made him dejected. ‘I am wasting my time,’ he told Sharpe.
‘How good are your men?’ Sharpe asked.
The question puzzled Vicente. ‘Good? As good as any, I suppose.’
‘Are they?’ Sharpe asked, and that afternoon he paraded every man, rifleman and Portuguese alike, and made them all fire three rounds in a minute from the Portuguese muskets. He did it in front of the house and timed the shots with the big grandfather clock.
Sharpe had no difficulty in firing the three shots. He had been doing this for half his life, and the Portuguese musket was British made and familiar to Sharpe. He bit open the cartridge, tasted the salt in the powder, charged the barrel, rammed down wadding and ball, primed the pan, cocked, pulled the trigger and felt the kick of the gun into his shoulder and then he dropped the butt and bit into the next cartridge and most of his riflemen were grinning because they knew he was good.
Sergeant Macedo was the only man other than Sharpe who fired his three shots within forty-five seconds. Fifteen of the riflemen and twelve of the Portuguese managed a shot every twenty seconds, but the rest were slow and so Sharpe and Vicente set about training them. Williamson, one of the riflemen who had failed, grumbled that it was stupid to make him learn how to fire a smoothbore musket when he was a rifleman. He made the complaint just loud enough for Sharpe to hear and in the expectation that Sharpe would choose to ignore it, then looked aggrieved when Sharpe dragged him back out of the formation. ‘You’ve got a complaint?’ Sharpe challenged him.
‘No, sir.’ Williamson, his big face surly, looked past Sharpe.
‘Look at me,’ Sharpe said. Williamson sullenly obeyed. ‘The reason you are learning to fire a musket like a proper soldier,’ Sharpe told him, ‘is because I don’t want the Portuguese to think we’re picking on them.’ Williamson still looked sullen. ‘And besides,’ Sharpe went on, ‘we’re stranded miles behind enemy lines, so what happens if your rifle breaks? And there’s another reason besides.’
‘What’s that, sir?’ Williamson asked.
‘If you don’t bloody do it,’ Sharpe said, ‘I’ll have you on another charge, then another charge and another after that until you’re so damn fed up with punishment duty that you’ll have to shoot me to be rid of it.’
Williamson stared at Sharpe with an expression which suggested he would like nothing more than to shoot him, but Sharpe just stared into his eyes and Williamson looked away. ‘We’ll run out of ammunition,’ he said churlishly, and in that he was probably right, but Kate Savage unlocked her father’s gun room and found a barrel of powder and a bullet mould so Sharpe was able to have his men make up new cartridges, using pages from the sermon books in the Quinta’s library to wrap the powder and shot. The balls were too small, but they were fine for practice, and for three days his men blasted their muskets and rifles across the driveway. The French must have heard the musketry echoing dully from the hills and they must have seen the powder smoke above Vila Real de Zedes, but they did not come. Nor did Colonel Christopher.
‘But the French are going to come,’ Sharpe told Harper one afternoon as they climbed the hill behind the Quinta.
‘Like as not,’ the big man said. ‘I mean it’s not as if they don’t know we’re here.’
‘And they’ll slice us into pieces when they do arrive,’ Sharpe said.
Harper shrugged at that pessimistic opinion, then frowned. ‘How far are we going?’
‘The top,’ Sharpe said. He had led Harper through the trees and now they were on the rocky slope that led to the old watchtower on the hill’s summit. ‘Have you never been up here?’ Sharpe asked.
‘I grew up in Donegal,’ Harper said, ‘and there was one thing we learned there, which was never go to the top of the hills.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because anything valuable will have long rolled down, sir, and all you’ll be doing is getting yourself out of breath by climbing up to find it gone. Jesus Christ, but you can see halfway to heaven from up here.’
The track followed a rocky spine that led to the summit and on either side the slope steepened until only a goat could have found footing on the treacherous scree, yet the path itself was safe enough, winding up towards the watchtower’s ancient stump. ‘We’re going to make a fort up here,’ Sharpe said enthusiastically.
‘God save us,’ Harper said.
‘We’re getting lazy, Pat, soft. Idle. It ain’t good.’
‘But why make a fort?’ Harper asked. ‘It’s a fortress already! The devil himself couldn’t take this hill, not if it was defended.’
‘There are two ways up here,’ Sharpe said, ignoring the question, ‘this path and another on the south side. I want walls across each path. Stone walls, Pat, high enough so a man can stand behind them and fire over their tops. There’s plenty of stone up here.’ Sharpe led Harper through the tower’s broken archway and showed him how the old building had been raised about a natural pit in the hill’s summit and how the crumbling tower had filled the pit with stones.
Harper peered down into the pit. ‘You want us to move all that masonry and build new walls?’ He sounded appalled.
‘I was talking to Kate Savage about this place,’ Sharpe said. ‘This old tower was built hundreds of years ago, Pat, when the Moors were here. They were killing Christians then, and the King built the watch-tower so they could see when a Moorish raiding party was coming.’
‘It’s a sensible thing to do,’ Harper said.
‘And Kate was saying how the folk in the valleys would send their valuables up here. Coins, jewels, gold. All of it up here, Pat, so that the heathen bastards wouldn’t snatch it. And then there was an earthquake and the tower fell in and the locals reckon there’s treasure under those stones.’
Harper looked sceptical. ‘And why wouldn’t they dig it up, sir? The folk in the village don’t strike me as halfwits. I mean, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, if I knew there was a pit of bloody gold up on a hill I wouldn’t be wasting my time with a plough or a harrow.’
‘That’s just it,’ Sharpe said. He was making up the story as he went along and thought desperately for an answer to Harper’s entirely reasonable objection. ‘There was a child, you see, buried with the gold and the legend says the child will haunt the house of whoever digs up its bones. But only a local house,’ he added hastily.
Harper sniffed at that embellishment, then looked back down the path. ‘So you want a fort here?’