Sharpe 3-Book Collection 4: Sharpe’s Escape, Sharpe’s Fury, Sharpe’s Battle. Bernard Cornwell

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      Harper came back and looked startled for a second at the sight of Sharpe in enemy blue, then he grinned. ‘Suits you, sir.’ Vicente and the two girls followed. Sharpe saw that the Portuguese girl was young, perhaps fifteen, with bright eyes and long dark hair. She saw the trace of blood on the shirt of the man who had been about to rape her, then spat on him and, before anyone could stop her, she snatched up a bayonet and stabbed the neck of one of the other two, making blood spurt high up the wall. Vicente opened his mouth to protest, then fell silent. Eighteen months before, when Sharpe had first met him, Vicente’s legal mind had baulked at such summary punishment of rapists. Now he said nothing as the girl spat on the man she had killed, then went to the second, who was lying on his back and breathing with a hoarse sound from his broken jaw. She stood over him, poising the bayonet above his twisted mouth.

      ‘I never did like rapists,’ Sharpe said mildly.

      ‘Scum,’ Harper agreed, ‘pure bloody scum.’

      Sarah watched, not wanting to watch, but unable to take her eyes off the bayonet that the girl held two-handed. The girl paused, revelling in the moment, then stabbed down. ‘Get yourselves dressed,’ Sharpe told Vicente and Harper. The dying man gurgled behind him and his heels briefly drummed against the floor. ‘Ask her name,’ Sharpe told Sarah.

      ‘She’s called Joana Jacinto,’ Sarah said after a short conversation. ‘She lives here. Her father worked on the river, but she doesn’t know where he is now. And she says to thank you.’

      ‘Pretty name, Joana,’ Harper said, dressed now as a French sergeant, ‘and she’s a useful sort of girl, eh? Knows how to use a bayonet.’

      Sharpe helped Vicente put on the blue jacket, letting it hang from the left shoulder rather than force Vicente’s arm into the sleeve. ‘She says,’ Sarah had held another conversation with Joana ‘that she wants to stay with us.’

      ‘Of course she must,’ Harper said before Sharpe could offer an opinion. Joana’s dark brown dress had been torn at the breasts when the soldiers stripped her, and the remnants had been splashed with blood when she killed the second soldier, and so she buttoned one of the dead men’s shirts over it, then picked up a musket. Sarah, not wanting to appear less belligerent, shouldered another.

      It was not much of a force. Two riflemen, two women and a wounded Portuguese cazador. But Sharpe reckoned it should be enough to break a French dream.

      So he slung his rifle, hitched the sword belt higher, and led them downstairs.

      Most of the French infantry in Coimbra were from the 8th Corps, a newly raised unit of young men fresh from the depots of France, and they were half trained, ill disciplined, resentful of an Emperor who had marched them to a war they mostly did not understand and, above all, hungry. Hundreds broke ranks to explore the university, but, finding little that they wanted, they took out their frustration by smashing, mangling and shattering whatever could be broken. Coimbra was renowned for its work on optics, but microscopes were of small use to soldiers and so they hammered the beautiful instruments with muskets, then wrenched apart the fine sextants. A handful of telescopes were saved, for such things were valued, but the larger instruments, too long to carry, were destroyed, while an unparalleled set of finely ground lenses, cushioned by velvet in a cabinet of wide, shallow drawers, was systematically broken. One room was filled with chronometers, all being tested, and they were reduced to bent springs, cogwheels and shattered cases. A fine assembly of fossils was pounded to shards and a collection of minerals, a lifetime’s work carefully catalogued into quartzes and spars and ores, was scattered from a window. Fine porcelain was shattered, pictures torn from their frames and if most of the library was spared that was only because there were too many volumes to be destroyed. Some men nevertheless tried, pulling rare books from the shelves and tearing them apart, but they soon got bored and contented themselves with smashing some fine Roman vases that stood on gilded pediments. There was no sense in it, except the anger that the soldiers felt. They hated the Portuguese and so they took their revenge on what their enemy valued.

      Coimbra’s Old Cathedral had been built by two Frenchmen in the twelfth century and now other Frenchmen whooped with delight because so many women had taken shelter close to its altars. A handful of men tried to protect their wives and daughters, but the muskets fired, the men died and the screaming began. Other soldiers shot at the gilded high altar, aiming at the carved saints guarding the sad-faced Virgin. A six-year-old child tried to pull a soldier off his mother and had his throat cut, and when a woman would not stop screaming a sergeant cut her throat as well. In the New Cathedral, up the hill, voltigeurs took it in turns to piss into the baptismal font and, when it was full, they christened the girls they had captured in the building, giving them all the same name, Putain, which meant whore. A sergeant then auctioned the weeping girls, whose hair dripped with urine.

      In the church of Santa Cruz, which was older than the Old Cathedral, the troops found the tombs of Portugal’s first two kings. The beautifully sculpted sepulchres were wrenched apart, the coffins shattered and the bones of Afonso the Conqueror, who had liberated Lisbon from the Muslims in the twelfth century, were hauled from their winding cloth and thrown across the floor. His son, Sancho I, had been buried in a white linen shift edged with cloth of gold, and an artilleryman ripped the shroud away and draped it about his shoulders before dancing on the remnants of the corpse. There was a gold cross studded with jewels in Sancho’s tomb and three soldiers fought over it. One died, and the other two hacked the cross apart and shared it. There were more women in Santa Cruz and they suffered as the other women were suffering, while their men were taken into the Cloisters of Silence and shot.