„And Kate was saying how the folk in the valleys would send their valuables up here. Coins, jewels, gold. All of it up here, Pat, so that the heathen bastards wouldn’t snatch it. And then there was an earthquake nd the tower fell in and the locals reckon there’s treasure under those tones.”
Harper looked skeptical. „And why wouldn’t they dig it up, sir? The folk in the village don’t strike me as halfwits. I mean, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, if I knew there was a pit of bloody gold up on a hill I wouldn’t be vasting my time with a plough or a harrow.”
„That’s just it,” Sharpe said. He was making up the story as he went ilong and thought desperately for an answer to Harper’s entirely reasonable objection. „There was a child, you see, buried with the gold and the egend says the child will haunt the house of whoever digs up its bones. But only a local house,” he added hastily.
Harper sniffed at that embellishment, then looked back down the path. „So you want a fort here?”
„And we need to bring barrels of water here,” Sharpe said. That was the summit’s weakness, no water. If the French came and he had to retreat to the hilltop then he did not want to surrender just because of thirst. „Miss Savage”-he still did not think of her as Mrs. Christopher-’will find us barrels.”
„Up here? In the sun? Water will go rancid,” Harper warned him.
„A splash of brandy in each one,” Sharpe said, remembering his voyages to and from India and how the water had always tasted faintly of rum. „I’ll find the brandy.”
„And you really expect me to believe there’s gold under those stones, sir?”
„No,” Sharpe admitted, „but I want the men to half believe it. It’s going to be hard work building walls up here, Pat, and dreams of treasure never hurt.”
So they built the fort and never found gold, but in the spring sunlight they made the hilltop into a redoubt where a handful of infantry could grow old under siege. The ancient builders had chosen well, not just selecting the highest peak for miles around to build their watchtower, but also a place that was easily defended. Attackers could only come from the north or the south, and in both cases they would have to pick their way along narrow paths. Sharpe, exploring the southern path one day, found a rusted arrowhead under a boulder and he took it back to the summit and showed it to Kate. She held it beneath the brim of her wide straw hat and turned it this way and that. „It probably isn’t very old,” she said.
„I was thinking it might have wounded a Moor.”
„They were still hunting with bows and arrows in my grandfather’s time,” she said.
„Your family was here then?”
„Savages started in Portugal in 1711,” she said proudly. She had been gazing southwest, in the direction of Oporto, and Sharpe knew she was watching the road in hope of seeing a horseman come, but the passing days brought no sign of her husband, nor even a letter. The French did not come either, though Sharpe knew they must have seen his men toiling on the summit as they piled rocks to make ramparts across the two paths and struggled up those tracks with barrels of water that were put into the great cleared pit on the peak. The men grumbled about being made to work like mules, but Sharpe knew they were happier tired than idle. Some, encouraged by Williamson, complained that they wasted their time, that they should have abandoned this godforsaken hill with its broken tower and found a way south to the army, and Sharpe reckoned they were probably right, but he had his orders and so he stayed.
„What it is,” Williamson told his cronies, „is the bloody frow. We’re humping stone and he’s tickling the Colonel’s wife.” And if Sharpe had heard that opinion he might even have agreed with it too, even though he was not tickling Kate, but he was enjoying her company and had persuaded himself that, orders or no orders, he ought to protect her against the French.
But the French did not come and nor did Colonel Christopher. Manuel Lopes came instead.
He arrived on a black horse, galloping up the driveway and then curbing the stallion so fast that it reared and twisted and Lopes, instead of being thrown off as ninety-nine out of a hundred other riders would have been, stayed calm and in control. He soothed the horse and grinned at Sharpe. „You are the Englishman,” he said in English, „and I hate the English, but not so much as I hate the Spanish, and I hate the Spanish less than I hate the French.” He slid down from the saddle and held out a hand. „I am Manuel Lopes.”
„Sharpe,” Sharpe said.
Lopes looked at the Quinta with the eye of a man sizing it up for plunder. He was an inch less than Sharpe’s six feet, but seemed taller. He was a big man, not fat, just big, with’a strong face and quick eyes and a swift smile. „If I was a Spaniard,” he said, „and I nightly thank the good Lord that I am not, then I would call myself something dramatic. The Slaughterman, perhaps, or the Pig Sticker or the Prince of Death”-he was talking of the partisan leaders who made French life so miserable-”but I am a humble citizen of Portugal so my nickname is the Schoolteacher.”
„The Schoolteacher,” Sharpe repeated.
„Because that is what I was,” Lopes responded energetically. „I owned a school in Braganga where I taught ungrateful little bastards English, Latin, Greek, algebra, rhetoric and horsemanship. I also taught them to love God, honor the King and fart in the face of all Spaniards. Now, instead of wasting my breath on halfwits, I kill Frenchmen.” He offered Sharpe an extravagant bow. „I am famous for it.”
„I’ve not heard of you,” Sharpe said.
Lopes just smiled at the challenge. „The French have heard of me,senhor,”he said, „and I have heard about you. Who is this Englishman who lives safe north of the Douro? Why do the French leave him in peace? Who is the Portuguese officer who lives in his shadow? Why are they here? Why are they making a toy fort on the watchtower hill? Why are they not fighting?”
„Good questions,” Sharpe said dryly, „all of them.”
Lopes looked at the Quinta again. „Everywhere else in Portugal,senhor,where the French have left their dung, they have destroyed places like this. They have stolen the paintings, broken the furniture and drunk the cellars dry. Yet the war does not come to this house?” He turned to stare down the driveway where some twenty or thirty men had appeared. „My pupils,” he explained, „they need rest.