Sharpe's Havoc Read Free Page A

stuffed with lace, silk and satins that the bag could not be closed.
    Colonel Christopher curbed his horse, took the toothpick from his mouth, and stared in

astonishment at Sharpe. “What on earth are you doing here, Lieutenant?”
    “Ordered to stay with you, sir,” Sharpe answered. He glanced again at the valise. Had

Christopher been looting the House Beautiful?
    The Colonel saw where Sharpe was looking and snarled at his servant, “Close it, damn you,

close it.” Christopher, even though his servant spoke good English, used his own fluent

Portuguese, then looked back to Sharpe. “Captain Hogan ordered you to stay with me. Is that

what you’re trying to convey?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And how the devil are you supposed to do that, eh? I have a horse, Sharpe, and you do not.

You and your men intend to run, perhaps?”
    “Captain Hogan gave me an order, sir,” Sharpe answered woodenly. He had learned as a

sergeant how to deal with difficult senior officers. Say little, say it tonelessly, then

say it all again if necessary.
    “An order to do what?” Christopher inquired patiently.
    “Stay with you, sir. Help you find Miss Savage.”
    Colonel Christopher sighed. He was a black-haired man in his forties, but still youthfully

handsome with just a distinguished touch of gray at his temples. He wore black boots, plain

black riding breeches, a black cocked hat and a red coat with black facings. Those black

facings had prompted Sharpe, on his previous meeting with the Colonel, to ask whether

Christopher served in the Dirty Half Hundred, the 50th regiment, but the Colonel had treated

the question as an impertinence. “All you need to know, Lieutenant, is that I serve on

General Cradock’s staff. You have heard of the General?” Cradock was the General in

command of the British forces in southern Portugal and if Soult kept marching then Cradock

must face him. Sharpe had stayed silent after Christopher’s response, but Hogan had later

suggested that the Colonel was probably a “political” soldier, meaning he was no soldier

at all, but rather a man who found life more convenient if he was in uniform. “I’ve no doubt

he was a soldier once,” Hogan had said, “but now? I think Cradock got him from Whitehall.”
    “Whitehall? The Horse Guards?”
    “Dear me, no,” Hogan had said. The Horse Guards were the headquarters of the army and it was

plain Hogan believed Christopher came from somewhere altogether more sinister. “The world

is a convoluted place, Richard,” he had explained, “and the Foreign Office believes that

we soldiers are clumsy fellows, so they like to have their own people on the ground to patch

up our mistakes. And, of course, to find things out.” Which was what Lieutenant Colonel

Christopher appeared to be doing: finding things out. “He says he’s mapping their minds,”

Hogan had mused, “and what I think he means by that is discovering whether Portugal is worth

defending. Whether they’ll fight. And when he knows, he’ll tell the Foreign Office before he

tells General Cradock.”
    “Of course it’s worth defending,” Sharpe had protested.
    “Is it? If you look carefully, Richard, you might notice that Portugal is m a state of

collapse.” There was a lamentable truth in Hogan’s grim words. The Portuguese royal family

had fled to Brazil, leaving the country leaderless, and after their departure there had

been riots in Lisbon, and many of Portugal’s aristocrats were now more concerned with

protecting themselves from the mob than defending their country against the French. Scores

of the army’s officers had already defected, joining the Portuguese Legion that fought

for the enemy, and what officers remained were largely untrained, their men were a rabble

and armed with ancient weapons if they possessed weapons at all. In some places, like Oporto

itself, all civil rule had collapsed and the streets were governed