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A peddler came to the Quinta with a stock of bone buttons, steel pins and stamped tin medallions showing the Virgin Mary, and he said thePortuguese still held the bridge at Amarante where they were opposed by a big French army. He also claimed the French had gone south toward Lisbon, then reported a rumor which said Marshal Soult was still in Oporto. A friar who called at the Quinta to beg for food brought the same news. „Which is good,” Sharpe told Harper.
„Why’s that, sir?”
„Because Soult isn’t going to linger in Oporto if there’s a chance of Lisbon falling, is he? No, if Soult is in Oporto then that’s as far as the Frogs have got.”
„But they are south of the river?”
„A few bloody cavalrymen maybe,” Sharpe said dismissively, but it was frustrating not to know what was happening and Sharpe, to his surprise, found himself wanting Colonel Christopher to return so he could learn how the war progressed.
Kate doubtless wanted her husband to return even more than Sharpe did. For the first few days after the Colonel’s departure she had avoided Sharpe, but increasingly they began to meet in the room where Daniel Hagman lay. Kate brought the injured man food and then would sit and talk with him and, once she had convinced herself that Sharpe was not the scurrilous rogue she had supposed him to be, she invited him into the front of the house where she made tea in a pot decorated with embossed china roses. Lieutenant Vicente was sometimes invited, but he said almost nothing, just sat on the edge of a chair and gazed at Kate in sad adoration. If she spoke to him he blushed and stammered, and Kate would look away, seemingly equally embarrassed, yet she seemed to like the Portuguese Lieutenant. Sharpe sensed she was a lonely woman, and always had been. One evening, when Vicente was supervising the pic-quets, she spoke of growing up as a single child in Oporto and of being sent back to England for her education. „There were three of us girls in a parson’s house,” she told him. It was a cold evening and she sat close to a fire that had been lit in the tile-edged hearth of the Quinta’s parlor. „His wife made us cook, clean and sew,” Kate went on, „and the clergyman taught us scripture knowledge, some French, a little mathematics and Shakespeare.”
„More than I ever learned,” Sharpe said.
„You are not the daughter of a wealthy port merchant,” Kate said with a smile. Behind her, in the shadows, the cook knitted. Kate, when she was with Sharpe or Vicente, always had one of the women servants to chaper-one her, presumably so that her husband would have no grounds for suspicion. „My father was determined to make me accomplished,” Kate went on, looking wistful.
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