„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 by the whims of the ordenanqa who, lacking proper weapons, patrolled the streets with pikes, spears, axes and mattocks. Before the French had come the ordenanqa had massacred half of Oporto’s gentry and forced the other half to flee or barricade their houses though they had left the English residents alone.