the Quinta with a stock of bone buttons, steel pins and stamped tin medallions showing the Virgin Mary, and he said the Portuguese still held the bridge at Amarante where they were opposed by a big French army. He also claimed the French had gone south towards Lisbon, then reported a rumour which said Marshal Soult was still in Oporto. A friar who called at the Quinta to beg for food brought the same news. ‘Which is good,’ Sharpe told Harper.
‘Why’s that, sir?’
‘Because Soult isn’t going to linger in Oporto if there’s a chance of Lisbon falling, is he? No, if Soult is in Oporto then that’s as far as the Frogs have got.’
‘But they are south of the river?’
‘A few bloody cavalrymen maybe,’ Sharpe said dismissively, but it was frustrating not to know what was happening and Sharpe, to his surprise, found himself wanting Colonel Christopher to return so he could learn how the war progressed.
Kate doubtless wanted her husband to return even more than Sharpe did. For the first few days after the Colonel’s departure she had avoided Sharpe, but increasingly they began to meet in the room where Daniel Hagman lay. Kate brought the injured man food and then would sit and talk with him and, once she had convinced herself that Sharpe was not the scurrilous rogue she had supposed him to be, she invited him into the front of the house where she made tea in a pot decorated with embossed china roses. Lieutenant Vicente was sometimes invited, but he said almost nothing, just sat on the edge of a chair and gazed at Kate in sad adoration. If she spoke to him he blushed and stammered, and Kate would look away, seemingly equally embarrassed, yet she seemed to like the Portuguese Lieutenant. Sharpe sensed she was a lonely woman, and always had been. One evening, when Vicente was supervising the picquets, she spoke of growing up as a single child in Oporto and of being sent back to England for her education. ‘There were three of us girls in a parson’s house,’ she told him. It was a cold evening and she sat close to a fire that had been lit in the tile-edged hearth of the Quinta’s parlour. ‘His wife made us cook, clean and sew,’ Kate went on, ‘and the clergyman taught us scripture knowledge, some French, a little mathematics and Shakespeare.’
‘More than I ever learned,’ Sharpe said.
‘You are not the daughter of a wealthy port merchant,’ Kate said with a smile. Behind her, in the shadows, the cook knitted. Kate, when she was with Sharpe or Vicente, always had one of the women servants to chaperone her, presumably so that her husband would have no grounds for suspicion. ‘My father was determined to make me accomplished,’ Kate went on, looking wistful. ‘He was a strange man, my father. He made wine, but wouldn’t drink it. He said God didn’t approve. The cellar here is full of good wine and he added to it every year and he never opened a bottle for himself.’ She shivered and leaned towards the fire. ‘I remember it was always cold in England. I hated it, but my parents didn’t want me schooled in Portugal.’
‘Why not?’
‘They feared I might be infected with papism,’ she said, fidgeting with the tassels on the edge of her shawl. ‘My father was very opposed to papism,’ she continued earnestly, ‘which is why, in his will, he insisted I must marry a communicant of the Church of England, or else.’
‘Or else?’
‘I would lose my inheritance,’ she said.
‘It’s safe now,’ Sharpe said.
‘Yes,’ she said, looking up at him, the light from the small fire catching in her eyes, ‘yes, it is.’
‘Is it an inheritance worth keeping?’ Sharpe asked, suspecting the question was indelicate, but driven to it by curiosity.
‘This house, the vineyards,’ Kate said, apparently un-offended, ‘the lodge where the port is made. It’s all held in trust for me at the moment, though my mother enjoys the income, of course.’
‘Why didn’t she go back to England?’
‘She’s lived here for over twenty years,’ Kate said, ‘so her friends are here now. But after this week?’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe she will go back to England. She always said she’d go home to find a second husband.’ She smiled at the thought.
‘She couldn’t marry here?’ Sharpe asked, remembering the good-looking woman climbing into the carriage outside the House Beautiful.
‘They are all papists here, Mister Sharpe,’ Kate said in mock reproof. ‘Though I suspect she did find someone not so long ago. She began to take more trouble with herself. Her clothes, her hair, but maybe I imagined it.’ She was silent for a moment. The cook’s needles clicked and a log collapsed with a shower of sparks. One spat over the wire fireguard and smouldered on a rug until Sharpe leaned forward and pinched it out. The Tompion clock in the hall struck nine. ‘My father,’ Kate went on, ‘believed that the women in his family were prone to wander from the straight and narrow path which is why he always wanted a son to take over the lodge. It didn’t happen, so he tied our hands in the will.’
‘You had to marry a Protestant Englishman?’
‘A confirmed Anglican, anyway,’ Kate said, ‘who was willing to change his name to Savage.’
‘So it’s Colonel Savage now, is it?’
‘He will be,’ Kate said. ‘He said he would sign a paper before a notary in Oporto and then we’ll send it to the trustees in London. I don’t know how we send letters home now, but James will find a way. He’s very resourceful.’
‘He is,’ Sharpe said drily. ‘But does he want to stay in Portugal and make port?’
‘Oh yes!’ Kate said.
‘And you?’
‘Of course! I love Portugal and I know James wants to stay. He declared as much not long after he arrived at our house in Oporto.’ She said that Christopher had come to the House Beautiful in the New Year and he had lodged there for a while, though he spent most of his time riding in the north. She did not know what he did there. ‘It wasn’t my business,’ she told Sharpe.
‘And what’s he doing in the south now? That’s not your business either?’
‘Not unless he tells me,’ she said defensively, then frowned at him. ‘You don’t like him, do you?’
Sharpe was embarrassed, not knowing what to say. ‘He’s got good teeth,’ he said.
That grudging statement made Kate look pained. ‘Did I hear the clock strike?’ she asked.
Sharpe took the hint. ‘Time to check the sentries,’ he said and he went to the door, glancing back at Kate and noticing, not for the first time, how delicate her looks were and how her pale skin seemed to glow in the firelight, and then he tried to forget her as he started on his tour of the picquets.
Sharpe was working the riflemen hard, patrolling the Quinta’s lands, drilling on its driveway, working them long hours so that the little energy they had left was spent in grumbling, but Sharpe knew how precarious their situation was. Christopher had airily ordered him to stay and guard Kate, but the Quinta could never have been defended against even a small French force. It was high on a wooded spur, but the hill rose behind it even higher and there were thick woods on the higher ground which could have soaked up a corps of infantry who would then have been able to attack the manor house from the higher ground with the added advantage of the trees to give them cover. But higher still the trees ended and the hill rose to a rocky summit where an old watchtower crumbled in the winds and from there Sharpe spent hours watching the countryside.
He saw French troops every day. There was a valley north of Vila Real de Zedes that carried a road leading east towards Amarante and enemy artillery, infantry and supply wagons travelled the road each day and, to keep them safe, large squadrons of dragoons patrolled the valley. Some days there were outbreaks of firing, distant, faint, half heard, and Sharpe guessed that the country people were ambushing the invaders and he would stare through his telescope, trying to see where the actions took place, but he never saw the ambushes and none of the partisans