“Will it?”

“Not for you,” she said ruefully. “But one day I will find it hard to believe that any of this even happened. I will be Mrs Bufford of Godalming, a most respectably dull lady.”

“You could stay here,” Sharpe said, and felt immensely brave for saying it.

“Could I?” Louisa turned to him. There was a glow to their left where a Rifleman drew on his pipe, but they both ignored it. She turned away and traced some indeterminate pattern on the parapet. “Are you saying that the British army will stay in Portugal?”

The question surprised Sharpe, who thought he had broken through to a more intimate layer of conversation. “I don’t know.”

“I think the Lisbon garrison must have gone already,” Louisa said flatly. “And if not, what possible use would such a small garrison be when the French march south? No, Lieutenant, the Emperor has taught us a smart lesson, and I fear we’ll not dare risk our army again.”

Sharpe wondered where she had gained such firm opinions on strategy. “What I meant when I said you could stay here…“ he began clumsily.

“Forgive me, I know,” Louisa interrupted him quickly, and there was a very awkward silence between them until she spoke again. “I do know what you’re saying, and I am very sensible of the honour you do me, but I do not want you to ask anything of me.” The formal words were said in a very small voice.

Sharpe had wanted to say that he would offer her everything that was in his power. It might not be much; in terms of money it was nothing, yet in slavish adoration it was everything. He had not said that, yet Louisa, out of his incoherence, had understood everything and now he felt embarrassed and rejected.

Louisa must have sensed that embarrassment, and regretted causing it. “I don’t want you to ask anything of me yet, Lieutenant. Will you give me until the city’s captured?”

“Of course.” Hope flared again in Sharpe, to mingle with the shame left by his clumsy proposal. He supposed he had spoken too soon, and too impetuously, yet Louisa’s evident desire to stay in Spain and avoid the fate of matrimony to Mr Bufford had provoked his words.

The sentry paced further away from them, the smell of his tobacco drifting back along the ramparts. The fire in the courtyard blazed bright as a man threw a log onto it. Louisa turned to watch the sparks whirl up to the height of the tower’s crenellations. From somewhere deep in the fortress came the wailing noise of one of the Galician bagpipes that inevitably provoked cries of feigned horror from Sharpe’s men. She smiled at the sound of the dutiful protests, then frowned accusingly at Sharpe. “You don’t think Don Bias will succeed in taking the city, do you?”

“Of course I…“

“No,” she interrupted him. “I listen to you. You think there are too many Frenchmen in Santiago. And in private you say that this is Don Bias’s madness.”

Sharpe was somewhat disconcerted by the accusation. He had not admitted his real fears to Louisa, yet she had truly perceived them. “It is madness,” he said defensively. “Even Major Vivar says it is.”

“He says it is God’s madness, which is different,” Louisa said in gentle reproof. “But it would work better, wouldn’t it, if there were less Frenchmen in the city?”

“It would work better,” Sharpe said drily, “if I had four Battalions of good redcoats, two batteries of nine pounders, and two hundred more Rifles.”

“Suppose,” Louisa began, then checked her.words.

“Go on.”

“Suppose the French thought that you had marched to a hiding place near the city. A place where you planned to wait during the day so you could attack just after dark? And suppose,” she hurried on to prevent him interrupting, “that the French knew where you were hiding?”

Sharpe shrugged. “They’d send men out to slaughter us, of course.”

“And if you were in another place entirely,” Louisa spoke now with the same enthusiasm with which she had greeted the mystery of the strongbox, “you could attack while they were out of the city!”

“It’s all very complicated,” Sharpe said in muted criticism.

“But supposing I was to tell them that?”

Sharpe, astonished, said nothing. Then he shook his head abruptly. “Don’t be ridiculous!”

“No, truly! If I went to Santiago,” Louisa rode over his protest by raising her voice, “if I went there and said that’s what you were doing, they’d believe me! I’d say that you wouldn’t let me come with you, and that you insisted I had to go on my own to Portugal, but I preferred to find my aunt and uncle. They’d believe me!”

“Never!” Sharpe wanted to stop this outburst of nonsense. “Major Vivar’s already played that trick on them. He spread rumours that he’d travelled with me, which sent the French haring off south. They won’t fall for it again.” He regretted extinguishing such enthusiasm, but her idea was quite hopeless. “Even if you tell the French that we’re hiding somewhere, they won’t send cavalry out to find us until after dawn. And by then it will be too late to attack. If there was a way of stripping the garrison at night…“ He shrugged, intimating that there was no way.

“It was just a notion.” Louisa, chastened, stared at the bats which flickered past the ramparts in the night.

Tt was kind of you to want to help.“

“I do want to help.”

“Just by being here, you help.” Sharpe tried to sound gallant. The sentry turned at the rampart’s end and paced slowly back towards them. Sharpe sensed that the girl would retire to her room at any moment and, though he risked further embarrassment, he could not bear to let the moment pass without reinforcing his thin hopes. “Did I offend you earlier?” he asked clumsily.

“Don’t think such a thing. I am flattered.” Louisa stared at the lights in the deep valley.

“I can’t believe that we’re going to run away from Spain.” If that was Louisa’s objection to accepting him, then Sharpe would scotch it, not because he knew that the Lisbon garrison would stay in place, but because he could not accept that the British intervention had been defeated. “We’re going to stay. The Lisbon garrison will be reinforced, and we’ll attack again!” He paused, then plunged closer to the heart of the matter. “And there are officers’ wives with the army. Some live in Lisbon, some stay a day or so behind the army, but it isn’t unusual.”

“Mr Sharpe.” Louisa laid a gloved hand on his sleeve. “Give me time. I know you’d tell me that I should seize the moment, but I don’t know if that moment is now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“There is nothing to regret.” She gathered her cloak about her. “Will you let me retire? I am quite wearied by sewing.”

“Goodnight, miss.”

No man, Sharpe thought, felt as foolish as a man rejected, yet he persuaded himself that he had not been rejected, rather that she had promised an answer after Santiago de Compostela was taken. It was his impatience which demanded an answer sooner. It was an impatience that would obsess him, and drive him onto a city from which he would return, triumphant or defeated, to receive the answer he craved.

The next day was a Sunday. Mass was celebrated in the fort’s courtyard, and afterwards a group of horsemen arrived from the north. They were fierce-looking men, festooned with weapons, who treated Vivar with a wary courtesy. Later he told Sharpe that the men were rateros, highwaymen, who for the moment had turned their violence against the common enemy.

The rateros brought news of a French messenger, captured with his escort four days before, who had carried a coded despatch. The despatch was lost, but the gist of the message had been extracted from the French officer before he died. The Emperor was impatient. Soult had waited too long. Portugal must fall and the British, if they still lingered in Lisbon, must be expelled before February was done. Marshal Ney was to stay in the north and clear away all hostile forces from the mountains. So, even if Vivar waited till Soult was gone, there would still be French troops in Santiago de Compostela.