Hervey looked at Armstrong.
‘I’ve five dollars, sir, but it’ll have to be a chitty for the ten!’
Hervey grimaced: the conditional tense would have been more agreeable to hear at that moment. Then he smiled wryly. ‘Be sure not to sell Jessye too quickly, Corporal!’
Colonel Shaw turned again and nodded, obliged, to the owner of the skiff, then back to Hervey. ‘Interesting fellow: a barber. He was supposed to leave his boat on the other side, where his shop is, but he lives here and so hid it instead. Our good fortune indeed. Oh, and he says there’s a snatching current a quarter of the way across. To make yon barges we need to strike fifty yards upstream to begin with. Rather longer exposed, but there’s nought to do about it.’ He slapped the sides of the skiff. ‘Pull away then, Mr Hervey!’
Hervey dug in the oars carefully, wanting to see how his boat handled, before rowing with any strength. The skiff was wide enough to be stable without needing the oars to balance it, but he might still pitch them out if he ‘caught a crab’ in the barber’s snatching current.
Only now, as they left the cover of the reeds, did he wonder if he exceeded his orders. He frowned: what did it matter? There was probably a tirailleur drawing a bead on them this very moment! And even if they weren’t sniped off the water, why did the colonel not imagine they would be helped ashore by French hands? He frowned again: happy alternatives indeed – shot, captured or cashiered! But he hoped nevertheless that he himself would have seized the opportunity even if Colonel Shaw had not been there. Could a man be faulted very greatly for advancing on the enemy, even if by unconventional means? ‘A cavalry soldier if properly mounted should never fall into the hands of the enemy’ – that was what Joseph Edmonds said. But he wasn’t mounted, properly or improperly. He wondered ruefully if he might plead history in mitigation, that a dragoon had first been a foot soldier whose horse took him from place to place . . .
He felt the snatch mid-stroke. The bow swung downstream before he could correct with the right oar, and he struggled for a few seconds to use it as a rudder so that he could push back with the left and then take up the stroke again across the current.
Colonel Shaw sat impassive, telescope to his eye. ‘You may let us down a hundred yards, Hervey,’ he said by and by.
Hervey was glad of it. The water was slackening but it taxed him hard enough. He expected shots at any moment, yet Colonel Shaw looked for all the world as if he were taking a pleasant turn about an ornamental lake.
‘Fifty yards to run, Hervey, no more.’ Colonel Shaw lowered his telescope: they were under the heights now, and at this range the naked eye was better to detect movement at the water’s edge.
Hervey glanced over his shoulder to look for his landing. He saw the four barges, high in the water, a useful gap between the middle two, just wide enough if he boated the oars. He kept glancing every two or three strokes, the current now so weak that he was barely having to correct. Five yards out, he swung the oars inboard and turned to fend off the barges as the skiff ran in. When they touched the staithe he realized he would have done better to turn and run the skiff in stern first, but it was too late now. He would have to inch forward himself and try to get a hand to what might pass for a mooring.
A face appeared above them, then another, and then two more. ‘Boa tarde, senhores.’
To Hervey, the Portuguese sounded ominously laconic. He could not catch what followed.
‘You were left behind, eh, senhores?’
A pistol appeared, then another three, the faces now gleeful.
Hervey, balancing precariously, with one hand grasping a piece of rope just above the waterline, reached for his own pistol.
But Colonel Shaw had more than the measure of the situation. ‘Good morning to you too, gentlemen. But we are not the last of the French; we are the first of the English!’
The glee turned at once to delight. ‘Sim, senhores? You are very welcome to our city!’
Helping hands stretched out to the skiff.
Colonel Shaw began the instant his foot touched the top of the wharf: ‘Where are the French? In what strength? What do they do? How many cannon? Where is Soult?’
His interlocutors were uncertain on all points. There were many French, they explained, but for some days now they had not been able to speak as freely with them as before. A week ago there had been ten thousand; that much was known because of the requisitions of food and fuel. Of guns they knew nothing. One of them, who supplied the headquarters with wine, said the French were afraid of being caught between the English and General Silveira’s Portuguese marching from the south-east, cutting off their withdrawal into Spain. There was even talk, he said, of a landing by the English north of the city, for they knew the Royal Navy commanded the entire coast; most of the French cavalry had been sent there to watch.
Colonel Shaw translated it all for Hervey’s benefit (at any moment a French bullet could strike him dead, in which case it would fall to a cornet of light dragoons to take this valuable intelligence to Sir Arthur Wellesley). ‘You see, Hervey, Soult’s in all likelihood so panical, a rousing assault here would bolt him!’ He turned again and fired off more questions.
The answers sounded very certain.
‘I asked why there are no sentries. They say there are, but downstream, nearer the bridge. And we would have been taken for French: there’ve been officers crossing by boat since the bridge was destroyed.’
Colonel Shaw turned once more, this time with less of an enquiry in his voice.
Suddenly agitated, the men began gabbling among themselves, until the supplier of wine spoke up for them, and stern-faced. ‘Sim, senhor. We will take the boats across. We will gather twenty men more – half an hour, that is all – and then we will take the boats to Senhor Sir Wellesley!’
Colonel Shaw merely smiled, and nodded.
The men smiled too as their confidence swelled.
It was an anxious half-hour for the two of them, crouched waiting in one of the barges. Colonel Shaw explained what he intended. He wanted the barges to cross to the south side as soon as the men returned, for although the French would see, and stand-to-arms, and they would lose surprise, he couldn’t wait on this side until the infantry were ready to cross, risking discovery by a French patrol. He told Hervey he wanted him to take charge of the boats, while he slipped into the city to discover Soult’s intentions. ‘And, Mr Hervey, I shall commend you in very decided terms to Sir Arthur Wellesley. You and your dragoons.’
It was as much as any cornet could wish to hear, and with Sir Edward Lankester’s words of but a few hours before, it promised certain advancement. This, indeed, was the fortune of war; and he had never expected to be favoured by it, let alone so soon. Daniel Coates used to speak of the bullet’s brute chance: was there such a thing as a lucky soldier, a man whom fortune naturally favoured? Was that why they had found the boat hidden in the reeds? Perhaps that was Colonel Shaw’s luck, though, not theirs. Such a man, who devilled behind the enemy’s lines, needed it in the largest measure. But lucky they had been, as well, to be his escort. Hervey smiled: such notions were absurd – but they were agreeable. ‘We are honoured, Colonel.’
When the men returned, it was with nearer fifty than twenty, and all of them armed.
‘Well, Mr Hervey,’ said Colonel Shaw, allowing himself to look gratified. ‘Here is your command. You will never have another like it!’
Hervey could not know it, but his luck was greater than he supposed. As the Porto boatmen and the other willing hands began paddling the barges across the still-silent Douro, the commander-in-chief himself stood watching from the terrace-heights of the Serra convent. He said not a word, while about him artillerymen manhandled four six-pounders and a howitzer into position, and below and a little further upstream, taking the greatest care to conceal themselves from any sharp-eyed sentry on the heights opposite, men of the 3rd (East Kent) Regiment – the Buffs – were assembling in the narrow streets. It had been the work of but an hour; the work and good fortune, for Corporal Collins had ridden straight into Sir Arthur Wellesley and his staff not a mile from Villa Nova. Later, Collins would recount how the commander-in-chief had at once seen the possibilities in Colonel Shaw’s despatch, sending gallopers to the advance guard, and how the horse artillery had come careering past them not twenty minutes later, gunners hanging on to the limbers for dear life; and then the Buffs, doublemarching, sweating like pigs but grinning ear to ear, knowing they would be first at the enemy.