Sharpe 3-Book Collection 2: Sharpe’s Havoc, Sharpe’s Eagle, Sharpe’s Gold Read Online Free PDF Page B

Foreign Office to have James Christopher posted to Portugal. The army, which had not been told what his true business was, nevertheless agreed to brevet him as a lieutenant colonel and appoint him as an aide to General Cradock, and Christopher used the army’s couriers tosend military intelligence to the General and political dispatches to the embassy in Lisbon whence, though they were addressed to the Ambassador, the messages were sent unopened to London. The Prime Minister needed sound advice and James Christopher was supposed to supply the facts that would frame the advice, though of late he had been busy making new facts. He had seen beyond the war’s messy realities to the golden future. James Christopher, in short, had seen the light.
    None of which occupied his thoughts as he rode out of Oporto less than a cannon’s range ahead of the French troops. A couple of musket shots were sent in his direction, but Christopher and his servant were superbly mounted on fine Irish horses and they quickly outran the half-hearted pursuit. They took to the hills, galloping along the terrace of a vineyard and then climbing into a forest of pine and oak where they stopped to rest the horses.
    Christopher gazed back westward. The sun had dried the roads after the night’s heavy rain and a smear of dust on the horizon showed where the French army’s baggage train was advancing toward the newly captured city of Oporto. The city itself, hidden now by hills, was marked by a great plume of dirty smoke spewing up from burning houses and from the busy batteries of cannons that, though muted by distance, sounded like an unceasing thunder. No French troops had bothered to pursue Christopher this far. A dozen laborers were deepening a ditch in the valley and ignored the fugitives on the nearby road as if to suggest that the war was the city’s business, not theirs. There were no British riflemen among the fugitives, Christopher noted, but he would have been surprised to see Sharpe and his men this far from the city. Doubtless by now they were dead or captured. What had Hogan been thinking of in asking Sharpe to accompany him? Was it because the shrewd Irishman suspected something? But how could Hogan know? Christopher worried at the problem for a few moments, then dismissed it. Hogan could know nothing; he was just trying to be helpful. “The French did well today,” Christopher remarked to his Portuguese servant, a young man with receding hair and a thin, earnest face.
    “The devil will get them in the end, senhor ,” the servant answered.
    “Sometimes mere men have to do the devil’s business,” Christopher said. He drew a small telescope from his pocket and trained it on the far hills. “In the next few days,” he said, still gazing through the glass, “you will see some things that will surprise you.”
    “If you say so, senhor ,” the servant answered.
    “But ‘there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ ”
    “If you say so, senhor ,” the servant repeated, wondering why the English officer called him Horatio when his name was Luis, but he thought it was probably better not to ask. Luis had been a barber in Lisbon where he had sometimes cut the hair of men from the British embassy and it had been those men who had recommended him as a reliable servant to Christopher who paid him good wages in real gold, English gold, and if the English were mad and got names wrong they still made the best coinage in the world, which meant that Colonel Christopher could call Luis whatever he wanted so long as he went on paying him thick guineas embossed with the figure of Saint George slaying the dragon.
    Christopher was looking for any sign of a French pursuit, but his telescope was small, old and had a scratched lens and he could see very little better with it than without it. He was meaning to buy another, but he never had the opportunity. He collapsed the glass, put it in his saddle