Sharpe's Escape Read Online Free PDF Page A

if, when they grew up, they were to be accounted gentlefolk. Sarah wondered why they did not learn Spanish, but when she had suggested it to the Major he had looked at her with utter fury. The Spanish, he had answered, were the offspring of goats and monkeys, and his children would not foul their tongues with their savage language. So Tomas and Maria were being schooled in French and English by their governess who was twenty-two years old, blue-eyed, fair-haired and worried for her future.
    Her father had died when Sarah was ten and her mother a year later, and Sarah had been raised by an uncle who had reluctantly paid for her schooling, but refused to provide any kind of dowry when she had reached eighteen, and so, cut off from the more lucrative part of the marriage market, she had become a nursery maid for the children of an English diplomat who had been posted to Lisbon and it was there that Major Ferreira's wife had encountered her and offered to double her salary if she would school her two children. "I want our children to be polished," Beatriz Ferreira had said.
    And so Sarah was in Coimbra, polishing the children and counting the heavy ticks of the big clock in the hall as, Tomas and Maria took turns to read from Early Joys for Infant Souls . " 'The cow is sabbler,' " Maria read.
    "Sable," Sarah corrected her.
    "What's sable?"
    "Black."
    "Then why doesn't it say black?"
    "Because it says sable. Read on."
    "Why aren't we leaving?" Maria asked.
    "That is a question you must put to your father," Sarah said, and she wished she knew the answer herself. Coimbra was evidently to be abandoned to the French, but the authorities insisted that the enemy should find nothing in the city except empty buildings. Every warehouse, larder and shop was to be stripped as bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard. The French were to enter a barren land and there starve, but it seemed to Sarah, when she took her two young charges for their daily walks, that most of the storehouses were still full and the riverside quays were thickly heaped with British provisions. Some of the wealthy folk had gone, transporting their possessions on wagons, but Major Ferreira had evidently decided to wait until the last moment. He had ordered his best furniture packed onto a wagon in readiness, but he was curiously reluctant to take the decision to leave Coimbra. Sarah, before the Major had ridden north to join the army, had asked him why he did not send the household to Lisbon and he had turned on her with his fierce gaze, seemed puzzled by her question, then dismissively told her not to worry.
    Yet she did, and she was worried about Major Ferreira too. He was a generous employer, but he did not come from the highest rank of Portuguese society. There were no aristocrats in Ferreira's ancestry, no titles and no great landed estates. His father had been a professor of philosophy who had unexpectedly inherited wealth from a distant relative, and that legacy enabled Major Ferreira to live well, but not magnificently. A governess was judged not by how effectively she managed the children in her care, but by the social status of the family for whom she worked, and in Coimbra Major Ferreira possessed neither the advantages of aristocracy, nor the gift of great intelligence which was much admired in the university city. And as for his brother! Sarah's mother, God rest her soul, would have described Ferragus as being common as muck. He was the black sheep of the family, the willful, wayward son who had run away as a child and come back rich, not to settle, but to terrorize the city like a wolf finding a home in the sheep pen. Sarah was frightened of Ferragus; everyone except the Major was frightened of Ferragus, and no wonder. The gossip in Coimbra said Ferragus was a bad man, a dishonest man, a crook even, and Major Ferreira was tarred by that brush, and in turn Sarah was smeared by it.
    But she was trapped with the family, for she did not have enough money to pay her