Harper took the seven-barrel gun from his shoulder. "Ready when you are, sir."
"The two of us go in," Sharpe said to Vicente and the women, "and you three stand at the door. And look as if you're ready to use your guns."
He and Harper jumped a fence, ran across some rows of beans and threw open the tavern's back door. A dozen men were gathered in the room, clustered about a barrel of wine, and most still had guns on their shoulders, but Sharpe was across the floor before any could unsling a musket and Harper was bellowing at them from the empty hearth, his volley gun aimed at the group. Sharpe began by snatching muskets off shoulders and, when one man resisted, he slapped him around the face with his rifle's barrel, then he kicked the wine barrel off its small stand so that it crashed onto the stone floor with a noise like a cannon firing. Then, when the men were cowed by the noise, he backed to the front door and pointed the rifle at them. "I need a bloody boat," he snarled.
Vicente took over. He slung his rifle, walked slowly forward and spoke softly. He spoke of the war, of the horrors that had been visited on Coimbra, and he promised the men that the same would happen in their village if the French were not defeated. "Your wives will be violated," he said, "your houses burned, your children murdered. I have seen it. But the enemy can be beaten, will be beaten, and you can help. You must help." He was an advocate suddenly, the tavern his courtroom and the disarmed men his jury, and the speech he gave was impassioned. He had never spoken in a courtroom, his law had been practiced in an office where he enforced the regulations of the port trade, but he had dreamed of being an advocate, and now he spoke with eloquence and honesty. He appealed to the villagers' patriotism, but then, knowing what kind of men they were, he promised that the boat would be paid for. "In full," he said, "but not now. We have no money. But on my honor I shall return here and I shall pay you the price we agree. And when the French are gone," he ended, "you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you helped defeat them." He stopped, turned away and made the sign of the cross, and Sharpe saw that the men had been moved by Vicente's speech. It was still a near thing, for a promise of money in the future was the stuff of dreams, and patriotism struggled with cupidity, but finally a man agreed. He would trust the young officer and sell them his boat.
It was not much of a boat, merely an old skiff that had been used to ferry folk across the mouth of the Zezere. It was eighteen feet long, big-bellied, with two thwarts for oarsmen and four sets of tholes for oars. It had a high, curving prow and a wide flat stern. The ferryman had hidden the boat by sinking it in the Zezere, but the men of the village emptied it of stones, floated it, provided the oars and then demanded that Vicente repeat the promise to pay for the craft. Only then did they let Sharpe and his companions board the vessel. "How long to Lisbon?" Vicente asked them.
"It will drift there in a day and a night," the ferryman said, then watched as his boat was unhandily rowed out into the stream. Sharpe and Harper were at the oars and neither was used to such things and at first they were clumsy, but the current was doing the real work by swirling them downstream while they learned to control the long oars and at last they rowed steadily down the center of the Tagus. Vicente was in the bows, watching the river ahead, and Joana and Sarah were in the wide stern. If it had not been raining, if the brisk wind had not been kicking up the river to splash cold water into a boat that was perceptibly leaking, it might have been a jaunt, but instead they shivered beneath a dark sky as their small boat was swept southwards between the rain-darkened flanks of great hills. The river flowed fast, carrying its water from far across Spain to hurry them towards the sea.
And then the French saw them.
The fort was simply known as Work Number 119, and it was not much of a fort, merely a bastion built on the summit of a low hill, then given a stone-roofed magazine and six gun emplacements. The guns were twelve-pounders, taken from a flotilla of Russian warships that had taken shelter in Lisbon from an Atlantic storm and there been captured by the Royal Navy, while the gunners were a mix of Portuguese and British artillerymen who had ranged their unfamiliar weapons, determining that the shots would reach across the wide valley that was spread east and west beneath Work Number 119. To the east were ten more forts, reaching to the Tagus, while to the west, stretching more than twenty miles to the Atlantic, were over a hundred more forts and bastions that snaked in two lines across the hilltops. They were the Lines of Torres Vedras.
Three major roads pierced the lines. The principal road, halfway between the Tagus and the sea, was the main road to Lisbon, but there was another road, running beside the river and thus not far from Work Number 119, and that eastern road offered another route to the Portuguese capital. Massena, of course, did not have to use either route, nor the third road which pierced the lines at Torres Vedras and was protected by the River Sizandre. He might choose to outflank the three roads and attempt to march overland, attacking through the wilder and lonelier country that lay between the roads, but he would only find more forts and bastions.
He would find more than the newly constructed forts. The northward-facing slopes of the hills had been scarped by thousands of laborers who had hacked at the soil to steepen the slopes so that no infantry could possibly attack uphill, and where the slopes were made of rock the engineers had drilled and blasted the stone to create new cliff faces. If the infantry ignored the scarped slopes and endured the artillery bombardment from the crests, they could march into the valleys between the steepened hills, but there they would find huge barriers of thorn bushes filling the low ground like monstrous dams. The thorn bush barricades were strengthened by felled trees, protected where possible by dams that flooded the valleys, and were flanked by smaller bastions so that any attacking column would find itself funneled into a place of death and under the flail of cannon and musket fire.
Forty thousand troops, most of them Portuguese, manned the forts, while the rest of the two armies were deployed behind the lines, ready to march wherever an attack might threaten. Some British troops were stationed in the lines and the South Essex had been given a sector between Work Number 114 and Work Number 119 where Lieutenant Colonel Lawford had summoned his senior officers to show them the extent of their responsibilities. Captain Slingsby was the last to arrive and the other men watched as he negotiated the steep, muddy steps that climbed up to the masonry firestep.
"A guinea says he won't make it," Leroy muttered to Forrest.
"I can't conceive that he's drunk," Forrest said, though without much certainty.
Everyone else believed Slingsby was drunk. He was mounting the steps very slowly, taking exaggerated care to place his feet in the exact center of each tread. He did not look up until he reached the top when, with evident satisfaction, he announced to the assembled officers that there were forty-three steps.
This news took Colonel Lawford aback. He alone had not watched Slingsby's precarious ascent, but now turned with a look of polite surprise. "Forty-three?"
"Important thing to know, sir," Slingsby said. He meant that it was important in case the steps had to be climbed in darkness, but that explanation vanished from his head before he had time to say it. "Very important, sir," he added earnestly.