Sharpes Escape   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

Vicente stood and peered over the tree,but saw no enemy. "I think they'll be staying on the river," he said. "They won't have found much food between here and Coimbra, so they'll be wanting to make a bridge somewhere."

"A bridge?" Harper asked.

"To reach this bank," Vicente said. "There will be plenty of food on this bank. And if they do make a bridge it will be at Santarem."

"Where's that?"

"South," Vicente said, nodding downstream, "an old fortress above the river."

"Which we have to pass?" Sharpe asked.

"I suggest we do it tonight," Vicente said. "We should rest here for a while, wait for dark, then float downstream."

Sharpe wondered if that was what the Ferreira brothers would be doing. He constantly stared northwards, half expecting to see them, and worried that he did not. Perhaps they had changed their minds? Maybe they had gone to the northern mountains, or else had crossed the Tagus much higher up and used their money to buy horses to carry them down the eastern bank. He told himself it did not really matter, that the only important thing was to get back to the army, but he wanted to find the brothers. Ferreira, at least, should pay for his treachery and Sharpe had a score to settle with Ferragus.

They lingered till dusk, making a fire ashore and brewing a can of strong, gunpowder-flavored tea with the last leaves from Sharpe and Harper's haversacks. Any dragoons would long have ridden back to their base for fear of the partisans who were at their most dangerous in the darkness, and as the light faded Sharpe and Harper pushed the boat out of their refuge and let it drift downstream again. The rain persisted: a soft drizzle that soaked and chilled them as the last light went. Now they were at the mercy of the stream, unable to see or steer, and they let the boat go where it wanted. Sometimes, far off, there was the misted gleam of a fire high in the western hills, and once there was a bigger fire, much closer, but who had lit it was a mystery. Once or twice they bumped into solid pieces of driftwood, and then they brushed past a fallen tree, and an hour or so later, after it seemed to Sharpe that they had drifted for hours, they saw a cluster of rain-hazed lights high up on the western bank. "Santarem," Vicente said softly.

There were sentries on the high wall, lit up there by fires behind the parapet, and Sharpe assumed they were French. He could hear men singing in the town and he imagined the soldiers in the taverns and wondered if the rape and horror that had raged through Coimbra was being visited on Santarem's townsfolk.