Sharpe 3-Book Collection 4. Bernard Cornwell
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and loomed in the entrance. ‘I am staying here,’ he had announced.
‘If you think that’s wise, senhor,’ she said in a tone which suggested she did not care what he did.
‘And you will stay with me,’ he went on.
For a heartbeat Sarah thought she had misheard, then she shook her head dismissively. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘I will travel with the British troops.’ She stopped abruptly, distracted by gunshots coming from the lower town. The sound came from the rifles puncturing the first of the rum barrels, but Sarah could not know that and she wondered if the noise presaged the arrival of the French. Everything was so confusing. First had come news of the battle, then an announcement that the French had been defeated, and now everyone was ordered to leave Coimbra because the enemy was coming.
‘You will stay with me,’ Ferragus repeated flatly.
‘I most certainly will not!’
‘Shut your bloody mouth,’ Ferragus said, and saw the shock on her face.
‘I think you had better leave,’ Sarah said. She still spoke firmly, but her fear was obvious now and it excited Ferragus who leaned on her table, making its spindly legs creak.
‘Is that the letter?’ he asked.
‘Which you promised to sign,’ Sarah said.
Instead he had torn it into shreds. ‘Bugger you,’ he said, ‘damn you,’ and he added some other words he had learned in the Royal Navy, and the effect of each was as though he had slapped her around the head. It might well come to that, he thought. Indeed, it almost certainly would and that was the pleasure of teaching the arrogant English bitch a lesson. ‘Your duties now, woman,’ he had finished, ‘are to please me.’
‘You have lost your wits,’ Sarah said.
Ferragus smiled. ‘Do you know what I can do with you?’ he had asked. ‘I can send you with Miguel to Lisbon and he can have you shipped to Morocco or to Algiers. I can sell you there. You know what a man will pay for white flesh in Africa?’ He paused, enjoying the horror on her face. ‘You wouldn’t be the first girl I’ve sold.’
‘You will go!’ Sarah said, clinging to her last shreds of defiance. She was looking for a weapon, any weapon, but there was nothing within reach except the inkpot and she was on the point of snatching it up and hurling it into his eyes when Ferragus tipped the table on its side and she had backed to the window. She had an idea that a good woman should rather die than be dishonoured and she wondered if she ought to throw herself from the window and fall to her death in the stable yard, but the notion was one thing and the reality an impossibility.
‘Take your dress off,’ Ferragus said.
‘You will go!’ Sarah had managed to say, and no sooner had she spoken than Ferragus punched her in the belly. It was a hard, fast blow and it drove the breath from her, and Ferragus, as she bent over, simply tore the blue frock down her back. She had tried to clutch to its remnants, but he was so massively strong, and when she did hold fast to her undergarments he just slapped her round the head so that her skull rang and she fell against the wall and could only watch as he threw her torn clothes out into the yard. Then, blessedly, Miguel had shouted up the stairs saying that the Major, Ferragus’s brother, had arrived.
Sarah opened her mouth to scream to her employer for help, but Ferragus had given her another punch in the belly, leaving her incapable of making a sound. Then he had thrown her bedclothes out of the window. ‘I shall be back, Miss Fry,’ he said, and he had forced her thin arms apart to stare at her. She was weeping with anger, but just then Major Ferreira had shouted up the stairs and Ferragus had let go of her, walked from the room and locked the door.
Sarah shivered with fear. She heard the brothers leave the house and she thought of trying to escape out of the window, but the wall outside offered no handholds, no ledges, just a long drop into the stable yard where Miguel smiled up at her and patted the pistol at his belt. So, naked and ashamed, she had sat on the rope webbing of the bed and had been almost overcome with despair.
Then there had been footsteps on the stairs and she had hunched under the window, clutching her arms about her knees, and heard an English voice. The door had been hammered open and a tall man with a scarred face, a black eye, a green coat and a long sword was staring at her. ‘Your servant, ma’am,’ he had said, and Sarah was safe.
Major Ferreira, having arranged to sell the food to the French, wanted to reassure himself that the quantities he had promised to the enemy truly existed. They did. There was food enough in Ferragus’s big warehouse to feed Masséna’s army for weeks. Major Ferreira followed his brother down the dark alleys between the stacks of boxes and barrels, and again marvelled that his brother had managed to amass so much. ‘They have agreed to pay for it,’ Ferreira said.
‘Good,’ Ferragus said.
‘The Marshal himself assured me.’
‘Good.’
‘And protection will be given when the French arrive.’
‘Good.’
‘The arrangement,’ Ferreira said, stepping over a cat, ‘is that we are to meet Colonel Barreto at the shrine of Saint Vincent south of Mealhada.’ That was less than an hour’s ride north of Coimbra. ‘And he will bring dragoons straight to the warehouse.’
‘When?’
Ferreira thought for a few seconds. ‘Today,’ he said, ‘is Saturday. The British could leave tomorrow and the French arrive on Monday. Possibly not until Tuesday? But they could come Monday, so we should be at Mealhada by tomorrow night.’
Ferragus nodded. His brother, he thought, had done well, and so long as the rendezvous with the French went smoothly then Ferragus’s future was safe. The British would flee back home, the French would capture Lisbon, and Ferragus would have established himself as a man with whom the invaders could do business. ‘So tomorrow,’ he said, ‘you and I ride to Mealhada. What about today?’
‘I must report to the army,’ Ferreira said, ‘but tomorrow I shall find an excuse.’
‘Then I will guard the house,’ Ferragus said, thinking of the pale pleasures waiting on the top floor.
Ferreira examined a pair of wagons parked at the side of the warehouse. They were piled with useful goods, linen and horseshoes, lamp oil and nails, all things the French would value. Then, going further back in the huge building, he grimaced. ‘That smell,’ he said, remembering a man whose death he had witnessed in the warehouse, ‘the body?’
‘Two bodies now,’ Ferragus said proudly, then turned because a wash of light flooded into the warehouse as the outer door was dragged open. A man called his name and he recognized Miguel’s voice. ‘I’m here!’ he shouted. ‘At the back!’
Miguel hurried to the back where he bobbed his head respectfully. ‘The Englishman,’ he said.
‘What Englishman?’
‘The one on the hilltop, senhor. The one you attacked at the monastery.’
Ferragus’s good mood evaporated like the mist from the river. ‘What of him?’
‘He is at the Major’s house.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Ferragus’s hand instinctively went to his pistol.
‘No!’ Ferreira said, earning a malevolent look from his brother. The Major looked at Miguel. ‘Is he alone?’
‘No, senhor.’
‘How many?’
‘Three of them, senhor, and one is a Portuguese officer. They say others are coming because a colonel will use the house.’
‘Billeting,’ Ferreira explained. ‘There will be a dozen men in the house when you get back, and you can’t start a war with the English. Not here, not now.’