Lightning had flickered above the city, thunder had billowed across the sky and the heavens had opened so that the flower beds now steamed gently as the hot sun drew out the night’s moisture.

The ground was soaked because there had been a storm the previous night. Richard Sharpe, Lieutenant in the second battalion of His Majesty’s 95 th Rifles, unbuttoned his breeches and pissed on the narcissi in the House Beautiful’s front flower bed. Some of the refugees drove pigs, goats and cattle, others pushed handcarts precariously loaded with furniture and more than one carried a grandparent on his back. Scores of fugitives were fleeing past the House Beautiful, running down the hill towards the ferries and the pontoon bridge that would take them safe across the Douro. A bird was making a nest in one of the cedars and whenever a musket ball tore through the branches it would squawk in alarm and fly a small loop before returning to its work. It seemed an odd name for a building high on the steep hillside where the city of Oporto overlooked the River Douro in northern Portugal, especially as the big square house was not beautiful at all, but quite stark and ugly and angular, even if its harsh lines were softened by dark cedars which would offer welcome shade in summer. The front porch was crowned with a wooden board on which were gilded letters spelling out the name House Beautiful in English. It was a large house, built of white painted stone and with dark green shutters closed over the windows. The Savage house was a few yards down the slope and for the moment was protected from errant French cannon fire, but already the warm spring air hummed with spent musket balls that sometimes struck the thick roof tiles with a loud crack or else ripped through the dark glossy pines to shower needles over the garden. The splintering noise of sustained musket fire was sounding just outside the city and in the last ten minutes five or six cannon balls had battered through the roofs of the houses high on the river’s northern bank. The approach of the French was the more urgent crisis.

Sharpe's Havoc by Bernard Cornwell