Sharpes Escape   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

The three escorts left them, not wanting to go into the Zezere valley where the French might be, but Sharpe, throwing caution tothe wind, followed a road down to the river. It was dusk when they came to the fast-flowing Zezere which was dappled by rain, and they spent the night in a small shrine beneath the outstretched hand of a plaster saint whose shoulders were thick with bird dung. Next morning they crossed the river at a place where the water foamed white across gaunt and slippery boulders. Harper made a short rope by joining the rifle and musket slings, then they helped each other from stone to stone, wading where they had to, and it took much longer than Sharpe had hoped, but once on the far bank he felt more secure. The French army was on the road to Lisbon and that was now over twenty miles to the west, on the river's opposite bank, and he reckoned any French foraging parties would stay on that side of the Zezere and so he walked openly on the eastern bank. It was still hard going, for the river flowed fast through high hills, twisting between great rocky shoulders, but it became easier the farther south they went and by the afternoon they were following tracks which led from village to village. A few inhabitants were still in their cottages and they reported seeing no enemy. They were poor folk, but they offered the strangers cheese and bread and fish.

They reached the Tagus that evening. The weather was worse now. The rain was coming out of the west in great gray swathes that lashed the trees and turned small rivulets into streams. The Tagus was wide, a great flood of water being beaten by the seething rain, and Sharpe crouched at its edge and looked for any sign that there were boats and saw none. The Portuguese government had scoured the river, taking away any craft to prevent the French from using boats to circumvent the new defenses at Torres Vedras, but without a boat Sharpe was trapped, and by crossing the Zezere he had put that river between himself and Lisbon and to re-cross it, in order to follow the Tagus's right bank down towards the army, he would have to go back upstream to find a place where the smaller river could be forded. "There'll be a boat," he said. "There was at Oporto, remember?"

"We were lucky there," Vicente said.

"It isn't luck, Jorge," Sharpe said. At Oporto the British and Portuguese had destroyed the vessels on the Douro, yet Sharpe and Vicente had found some boats, enough indeed to let the army cross. "It isn't luck," Sharpe said again, "but peasants. They can't afford new boats, so they'll have given the government their old wrecked boats and hidden the good ones, so we just have to find one." Ferreira and his brother, Sharpe thought sourly, would find it easier to secure a boat.