“Want?” Sharpe was surprised.
“To be cast adrift in the middle of the biggest adventure in the world? Why ever not?” Louisa laughed. “When I was a child, Lieutenant, I was told it was perilous to cross the village green in case the gypsies took me. And if soldiers ever appeared in the village—‘ she shook her head to demonstrate the enormity of such an occasion’s danger. ”Now I’m in the middle of a war and accompanied only by soldiers!“ She smiled at the predicament, then gave Sharpe a look which mingled curiosity and warmth. ”Don Bias says you’re the best soldier he’s ever known.“
Sharpe thought it odd that she used Vivar’s Christian name, then supposed it was the polite usage of an hidalgo. ‘He exaggerates.“
“What he actually said, ”Louisa spoke more slowly, and Sharpe sensed she was delivering a message to him, “was that if you had more confidence in yourself, you’d be the best. I suppose I shouldn’t have told you that?” He wondered if the criticism were true and Louisa, mistaking his silence for hurt, apologized.
“I’m sure it is true,” Sharpe said hastily.
“Do you like being a soldier?”
“I always dreamed of having a farm. God knows why, because I know nothing of the business. I’d probably plant the turnips upside down.” He stared at the campfires in the deep valley; tiny sparks of warmth and light in an immensity of cold darkness. “I imagined I’d have a couple of horses in a stable, a stream to fish,” he paused, shrugged, “children.”
Louisa smiled. “I used to dream of living in a great castle. There would be secret passages, dungeons, and mysterious horsemen bringing messages in the night. I think I should have preferred to have lived in the days of Queen Elizabeth. Catholic priests in the shrubbery and Spaniards in the channel? Except those old enemies are now our friends, aren’t they?”
“Even the priests?”
“They aren’t the ogres I thought they were.” She was silent for a second. “But if you’re brought up too firmly in one persuasion then you’re bound to be curious about the enemy, are you not? And we English were always taught to hate Catholics.”
“I wasn’t.”
“But you know what I mean. Aren’t you curious about the French?”
“Not really.”
Louisa frowned. “I find myself curious about the Catholics. I even find myself with a most unProtestant affection for them now. I’m sure Mr Bufford would be scandalized.”
“Will he ever know?” Sharpe asked.
Louisa shrugged. “I shall have to describe my adventures to him, shall I not? And I shall have to confess that the Inquisition didn’t torture me or try to burn me at the stake.” She stared into the night. “One day this will all seem like a dream?”
“Will it?”
“Not for you,” she said ruefully. “But one day I will find it hard to believe that any of this even happened. I will be Mrs Bufford of Godalming, a most respectably dull lady.”
“You could stay here,” Sharpe said, and felt immensely brave for saying it.
“Could I?” Louisa turned to him. There was a glow to their left where a Rifleman drew on his pipe, but they both ignored it. She turned away and traced some indeterminate pattern on the parapet. “Are you saying that the British army will stay in Portugal?”
The question surprised Sharpe, who thought he had broken through to a more intimate layer of conversation. “I don’t know.”
“I think the Lisbon garrison must have gone already,” Louisa said flatly. “And if not, what possible use would such a small garrison be when the French march south? No, Lieutenant, the Emperor has taught us a smart lesson, and I fear we’ll not dare risk our army again.”
Sharpe wondered where she had gained such firm opinions on strategy. “What I meant when I said you could stay here…“ he began clumsily.
“Forgive me, I know,” Louisa interrupted him quickly, and there was a very awkward silence between them until she spoke again. “I do know what you’re saying, and I am very sensible of the honour you do me, but I do not want you to ask anything of me.” The formal words were said in a very small voice.
Sharpe had wanted to say that he would offer her everything that was in his power. It might not be much; in terms of money it was nothing, yet in slavish adoration it was everything. He had not said that, yet Louisa, out of his incoherence, had understood everything and now he felt embarrassed and rejected.
Louisa must have sensed that embarrassment, and regretted causing it. “I don’t want you to ask anything of me yet, Lieutenant. Will you give me until the city’s captured?”
“Of course.” Hope flared again in Sharpe, to mingle with the shame left by his clumsy proposal. He supposed he had spoken too soon, and too impetuously, yet Louisa’s evident desire to stay in Spain and avoid the fate of matrimony to Mr Bufford had provoked his words.
The sentry paced further away from them, the smell of his tobacco drifting back along the ramparts. The fire in the courtyard blazed bright as a man threw a log onto it. Louisa turned to watch the sparks whirl up to the height of the tower’s crenellations. From somewhere deep in the fortress came the wailing noise of one of the Galician bagpipes that inevitably provoked cries of feigned horror from Sharpe’s men. She smiled at the sound of the dutiful protests, then frowned accusingly at Sharpe. “You don’t think Don Bias will succeed in taking the city, do you?”
“Of course I…“
“No,” she interrupted him. “I listen to you. You think there are too many Frenchmen in Santiago. And in private you say that this is Don Bias’s madness.”
Sharpe was somewhat disconcerted by the accusation. He had not admitted his real fears to Louisa, yet she had truly perceived them. “It is madness,” he said defensively. “Even Major Vivar says it is.”
“He says it is God’s madness, which is different,” Louisa said in gentle reproof. “But it would work better, wouldn’t it, if there were less Frenchmen in the city?”
“It would work better,” Sharpe said drily, “if I had four Battalions of good redcoats, two batteries of nine pounders, and two hundred more Rifles.”
“Suppose,” Louisa began, then checked her.words.
“Go on.”
“Suppose the French thought that you had marched to a hiding place near the city. A place where you planned to wait during the day so you could attack just after dark? And suppose,” she hurried on to prevent him interrupting, “that the French knew where you were hiding?”
Sharpe shrugged. “They’d send men out to slaughter us, of course.”
“And if you were in another place entirely,” Louisa spoke now with the same enthusiasm with which she had greeted the mystery of the strongbox, “you could attack while they were out of the city!”
“It’s all very complicated,” Sharpe said in muted criticism.
“But supposing I was to tell them that?”
Sharpe, astonished, said nothing. Then he shook his head abruptly. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
“No, truly! If I went to Santiago,” Louisa rode over his protest by raising her voice, “if I went there and said that’s what you were doing, they’d believe me! I’d say that you wouldn’t let me come with you, and that you insisted I had to go on my own to Portugal, but I preferred to find my aunt and uncle. They’d believe me!”
“Never!” Sharpe wanted to stop this outburst of nonsense. “Major Vivar’s already played that trick on them. He spread rumours that he’d travelled with me, which sent the French haring off south. They won’t fall for it again.” He regretted extinguishing such enthusiasm, but her idea was quite hopeless. “Even if you tell the French that we’re hiding somewhere, they won’t send cavalry out to find us until after dawn. And by then it will be too late to attack. If there was a way of stripping the garrison at night…“ He shrugged, intimating that there was no way.