Sharpe's Havoc (3 page)

“About bloody time,” Williamson grumbled. Sharpe pretended not to have heard. He tended to
ignore a lot of Williamson’s comments, thinking the man might improve but knowing that the
longer he did nothing the more violent would be the solution. He just hoped Williamson knew
the same thing.

“Two files!” Harper shouted. “Stay together!”

A cannonball rumbled above them as they ran out of the front garden and turned down the
steep road that led to the Douro. The road was crowded with refugees, both civilian and
military, all fleeing for the safety of the river’s southern bank, though Sharpe guessed the
French would also be crossing the river within a day or two so the safety was probably
illusory. The Portuguese army was falling back toward Coimbra or even all the way to
Lisbon where Cradock had sixteen thousand British troops that some politicians in London
wanted brought home. What use, they asked, was such a small British force against the mighty
armies of France? Marshal Soult was conquering Portugal and two more French armies were just
across the eastern frontier in Spain. Fight or flee? No one knew what the British would do, but
the rumor that Sir Arthur Wellesley was being sent back to take over from Cradock suggested
to Sharpe that the British meant to fight and Sharpe prayed the rumor was true. He had fought
across India under Sir Arthur’s command, had been with him in Copenhagen and then at Rolica
and Vimeiro and Sharpe reckoned there was no finer General in Europe.

Sharpe was halfway down the hill now. His pack, haversack, rifle, cartridge box and sword
scabbard bounced and banged as he ran. Few officers carried a longarm, but Sharpe had once
served in the ranks and he felt uncomfortable without the rifle on his shoulder. Harper
lost his balance, nailing wildly because the new nails on his boot soles kept slipping on
patches of stone. The river was visible between the buildings. The Douro, sliding toward
the nearby sea, was as wide as the Thames at London, but, unlike London, the river here ran
between great hills. The city of Oporto was on the steep northern hill while Vila Nova de
Gaia was on the southern, and it was in Vila Nova that most of the British had their houses.
Only the very oldest families, like the Savages, lived on the northern bank and all the port
was made on the southern side in the lodges owned by Croft, Savages, Taylor Fladgate,
Burmester, Smith Woodhouse and Gould, nearly all of which were British owned and their exports
contributed hugely to Portugal’s treasury, but now the French were coming and, on the
heights of Vila Nova, overlooking the river, the Portuguese army had lined a dozen cannon
on a convent’s terrace. The gunners saw the French appear on the opposite hill and the
cannon slammed back, their trails gouging up the terrace’s flagstones. The round shots banged
overhead, their sound as loud and hollow as thunder. Powder smoke drifted slowly inland,
obscuring the white-painted convent as the cannonballs smashed into the higher houses.
Harper lost his footing again, this time falling. “Bloody boots,” he said, picking up his
rifle. The other riflemen had been slowed by the press of fugitives.

“Jesus.” Rifleman Pendleton, the youngest in the company, was the first to see what was
happening at the river and his eyes widened as he stared at the throng of men, women,
children and livestock that was crammed onto the narrow pontoon bridge. When Captain Hogan
had led Sharpe and his men north across the bridge at dawn there had been only a few people
going the other way, but now the bridge’s roadway was filled and the crowd could only go at
the pace of the slowest, and still more people and animals were trying to force their way
onto the northern end. “How the hell do we get across, sir?” Pendleton asked.

Sharpe had no answer for that. “Just keep going!” he said and led his men down an alley
that ran like a narrow stone staircase toward a lower street. A goat clattered ahead of him
on sharp hooves, trailing a broken rope from around its neck. A Portuguese soldier was lying
drunk at the bottom of the alley, his musket beside him and a wineskin on his chest. Sharpe,
knowing his men would stop to drink the wine, kicked the skin onto the cobbles and stamped on
it so that the leather burst. The streets became narrower and more crowded as they neared the
river, the houses here were taller and mingled with workshops and warehouses. A
wheelwright was nailing boards over his doorway, a precaution that would only annoy the
French who would doubtless repay the man by destroying his tools. A red painted shutter
banged in the west wind. Abandoned washing was strung to dry between the high houses. A round
shot crashed through tiles, splintering rafters and cascading shards into the street. A dog,
its hip cut to the bone by a falling tile, limped downhill and whined pitifully. A woman
shrieked for a lost child. A line of orphans, all in dull white jerkins like farm laborers’
smocks, were crying in terror as two nuns tried to make a passage for them. A priest ran from
a church with a massive silver cross on one shoulder and a pile of embroidered vestments on
the other. It would be Easter in four days, Sharpe thought.

“Use your rifle butts!” Harper shouted, encouraging the riflemen to force their way
through the crowd that blocked the narrow arched gateway leading onto the wharf. A cart
loaded with furniture had spilled in the roadway and Sharpe ordered his men to pull it aside
to make more space. A spinet, or perhaps it was a harpsichord, was being trampled
underfoot, the delicate inlay of its cabinet shattering into scraps. Some of Sharpe’s men
were pushing the orphans toward the bridge, using their rifles to hold back the adults. A
pile of baskets tumbled and dozens of live eels slithered across the cobbles. French gunners
had got their artillery into the upper city and now unlimbered to return the fire of the
big Portuguese battery arrayed on the convent’s terrace across the valley.

Hagman shouted a warning as three blue-coated soldiers appeared from an alley, and a
dozen rifles swung toward the threat, but Sharpe yelled at the men to lower their guns.
“They’re Portuguese!” he shouted, recognizing the high-fronted shakoes. “And lower your
flints,” he ordered, not wanting one of the rifles to accidentally fire in the press of
refugees. A drunk woman reeled from a tavern door and tried to embrace one of the Portuguese
soldiers and Sharpe, glancing back because of the soldier’s protest, saw two of his men,
Williamson and Tarrant, vanish through the tavern door. It would be bloody Williamson, he
thought, and shouted to Harper to keep going, then followed the two men into the tavern.
Tarrant turned to defy him, but he was much too slow and Sharpe banged him in the belly with a
fist, cracked both men’s heads together, punched Williamson in the throat and slapped
Tarrant’s face before dragging both men back to the street. He had not said a word and still
did not speak to them as he booted them toward the arch.

And once through the arch the press of refugees was even greater as the crews of some thirty
British merchant ships, trapped in the city by an obstinate west wind, tried to escape. The
sailors had waited until the last moment, praying that the winds would change, but now they
abandoned their craft. The lucky ones used their ships’ tenders to row across the Douro, the
unlucky joined the chaotic struggle to get onto the bridge. “This way!” Sharpe led his men
along the arched facade of warehouses, struggling along the back of the crowd, hoping to get
closer to the bridge. Cannonballs rumbled high overhead. The Portuguese battery was
wreathed in smoke and every few seconds that smoke became thicker as a gun fired and there
would be a glow of sudden red inside the cloud, a jet of dirty smoke would billow far across
the river’s high chasm and the thunderous sound of a cannonball would boom overhead as the
shot or shell streaked toward the French.

A pile of empty fish crates gave Sharpe a platform from which he could see the bridge and
judge how long before his men could cross safely. He knew there was not much time. More and
more Portuguese soldiers were flooding down the steep streets and the French could not be far
behind them. He could hear the crackle of musketry like a descant to the big guns’ thunder.
He stared over the crowd’s head and saw that Mrs. Savage’s coach had made it to the south bank,
but she had not used the bridge, instead crossing the river on a cumbrous wine barge. Other
barges still crossed the river, but they were manned by armed men who only took passengers
willing to pay. Sharpe knew he could force a passage on one of those boats if he could only
get near the quayside, but to do that he would need to fight through a throng of women and
children.

He reckoned the bridge might make an easier escape route. It consisted of a plank
roadway laid across eighteen big wine barges that were nrmly anchored against the river’s
current and against the big surge of tides from the nearby ocean, but the roadway was now
crammed with panicked refugees who became even more frantic as the first French can-nonballs
splashed into the river. Sharpe, turning to look up the hill, saw the green coats of French
cavalry appearing beneath the great smoke of the French guns while the blue jackets of
French infantry showed in the alleyways lower down the hill.

“God save Ireland,” Patrick Harper said, and Sharpe, knowing that the Irish Sergeant only
used that prayer when things were desperate, looked back to the river to see what had caused
the three words.

He looked and he stared and he knew they were not going to cross the river by the bridge. No
one was, not now, because a disaster was happening. “Sweet Jesus,” Sharpe said softly,
“sweet Jesus.”

In the middle of the river, halfway across the bridge, the Portuguese engineers had
inserted a drawbridge so that wine barges and other small craft could go upriver. The
drawbridge spanned the widest gap between any of the pontoons and it was built of heavy oak
beams overlaid with oak planks and it was drawn upward by a pair of windlasses that hauled on
ropes through pulleys mounted on a pair of thick timber posts stoutly buttressed with iron
struts. The whole mechanism was ponderously heavy and the drawbridge span was wide and the
engineers, mindful of the contraption’s weight, had posted notices at either end of the
bridge decreeing that only one wagon, carriage or gun team could use the drawbridge at any
one time, but now the roadway was so crowded with refugees that the two pontoons supporting
the drawbridge’s heavy span were sinking under the weight. The pontoons, like all ships,
leaked, and there should have been men aboard to pump out their bilges, but those men had fled
with the rest and the weight of the crowd and the slow leaking of the barges meant that the
bridge inched lower and lower until the central pontoons, both of them massive barges, were
entirely under water and the fast-flowing river began to break and fret against the
roadway’s edge. The people there screamed and some of them froze and still more folk pushed on
from the northern bank, and then the central part of the roadway slowly dipped beneath the
gray water as the people behind forced more fugitives onto the vanished drawbridge which
sank even lower.

“Oh Jesus,” Sharpe said. He could see the first people being swept away. He could hear the
shrieks.

“God save Ireland,” Harper said again and made the sign of the cross.

The central hundred feet of the bridge were now under water. Those hundred feet had been
swept clear of people, but more were being forced into the gap that suddenly churned white
as the drawbridge was sheared away from the rest of the bridge by the river’s pressure. The
great span of the bridge reared up black, turned over and was swept seawards, and now there was
no bridge across the Douro, but the people on the northern bank still did not know the roadway
was cut and so they kept pushing and bullying their way onto the sagging bridge and those in
front could not hold them back and instead were inexorably pushed into the broken gap where
the white water seethed on the bridge’s shattered ends. The cries of the crowd grew louder,
and the sound only increased the panic so that more and more people struggled toward the
place where the refugees drowned. Gun smoke, driven by an errant gust of wind, dipped into the
gorge and whirled above the bridge’s broken center where desperate people thrashed at the
water as they were swept downstream. Gulls screamed and wheeled. Some Portuguese troops were
now trying to hold the French in the streets of the city, but it was a hopeless endeavor.
They were outnumbered, the enemy had the high ground, and more and more French forces were
coming down the hill. The screams of the fugitives on the bridge were like the sound of the
doomed on the Day of Judgment, the cannonballs were booming overhead, the streets of the
city were ringing with musket shots, hooves were echoing from house walls and flames were
crackling in buildings broken apart by cannon fire.

“Those wee children,” Harper said, “God help them.” The orphans, in their dun uniforms,
were being pushed into the river. “There’s got to be a bloody boat!”

But the men manning the barges had rowed themselves to the south bank and abandoned their
craft and so there were no boats to rescue the drowning, just horror in a cold gray river and
a line of small heads being swept downstream in the fretting waves and there was nothing
Sharpe could do. He could not reach the bridge and though he shouted at folk to abandon the
crossing they did not understand English. Musket balls were necking the river now and some
were striking the fugitives on the broken bridge.

“What the hell can we do?” Harper asked.

“Nothing,” Sharpe said harshly, “except get out of here.” He turned his back on the dying
crowd and led his men eastward down the river wharf. Scores of other people were doing the
same thing, gambling that the French would not yet have captured the city’s inland suburbs.
The sound of musketry was constant in the streets and the Portuguese guns across the river
were now firing at the French in the lower streets so that the hammering of the big guns was
punctuated by the noise of breaking masonry and splintering rafters.