Free Flashman in the Peninsula by Robert Brightwell

didn’t you?’
    ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I replied, with my best ‘butter would not melt in my mouth’ expression of innocence. ‘The girl I was with was entirely respectable, you would not believe how many pictures of her mother we had to look at, then some of her cousins. By the time we came back, the door was locked and ... well, I am too much of a gentleman to say what I thought was happening.’
    Campbell laughed out loud. ‘You planned it all in the tower! They hinted as much when I thought I might need to pay them this morning. They told me you had paid for me.’ He paused, ‘I might regret it when the Christian guilt sets in but right now I think it was the best night of my life.’
    ‘When you are old and grey,’ I replied, ‘what are you going to remember most, last night or a night on your knees praying?’
    ‘You are right, which is why I wanted to give you this,’ he was holding out another cloth bag.
    ‘It’s not more bloody eggs is it?’ I said, taking hold of the gift. The shape at the bottom of the bag was a tube and when I looked inside I saw a small folding telescope which looked expensive. ‘Are you sure? This must have cost a good few guineas?’
    ‘I have another. This was loot from the first campaign, and for the service you have done me you are very welcome to it.’ We shook hands, and then with Downie calling that it was time to leave, I mounted up and the column of horsemen trotted out of the square.
    There are perhaps four weeks of the year when the weather in Spain and Portugal is pleasant, two in the spring and two in the autumn. Outside of these it is either too cold and wet, or too hot. Sadly, our trip to Alcantara did not coincide with one of those fortnights. Once we had ridden out of Lisbon the countryside rose up in a series of steep hills called the Torres Vedras, the top of most of them hidden by low cloud. We stayed in the valleys following the river, but the ground was wet and boggy and we frequently had to wade through gushing streams bringing rain water down from the hills. There was a steady drizzle of rain for most of the day. I was already feeling cold, soaked and miserable by the end of the first day when we had only reached the end of the large Tagus estuary.
    We found shelter for ourselves and our horses in a large barn and the troopers broke down some of the stalls for firewood to make a blaze to warm us up. It was then that Downie and Butterworth started to argue over the route. Both had hand drawn maps, which were by no means identical. On both, the Tagus bent north east like the curve of a bow. Butterworth wanted to follow the river on the grounds that we could not get lost and there would be a lot of settlements along its banks where we could get food and shelter. Downie was for crossing the river on the nearby ferry and taking the ‘bowstring’ route directly to Alcantara.
    ‘The Tagus spends much of its course in a steep sided valley,’ he insisted. ‘We will spend ages trying to negotiate side streams and rivers, which after all this rain will be in full flood. My route will be much easier.’
    ‘We don’t know that,’ countered Butterworth. ‘The area you want to cross is blank on both our maps.’
    In the end Downie won, mainly because he was an officer and stated bluntly that he was going the way he had chosen and ordered Butterworth to follow him. I did not have strong feelings either way but the experience led to a valuable life lesson, which I will pass on for what it is worth. When dealing with maps containing blank spaces, never trust the navigation to an optimist. They will always imagine that smooth roads and plentiful supplies fill the space, which is never the case. There is a reason some spaces on the maps are blank; it is because people rarely pass that way and most folk will normally choose the easiest route. In my considerable experience of blank spaces on maps, they normally contain impassable mountains, pitiless