I have been a fan of your wonderfully well researched Sharpe novels for years and if any excuse were needed it was good to re-read them before a trip to Portugal earlier this month.  As a retirement project my husband has been researching the papers of his ancestor General Sir George Murray in the National Library of Scotland. As you will know Murray was Wellington’s Quartermaster General and close friend. I have to confess the military letters are a tad tedious (your accounts much easier to read!) but those to his brother and sister are a delight.

Thanks to all the detail in your books I was a much better travel companion than I might have been and actually managed to astonish him on several occasions, thank you!

We visited Frenada where hideous Hakeswill met his end (he was a superb piece of characterisation; the stuff of nightmares!) found the church “not as pretty as that at Monzievaird” where he watched a performance of a Shakespeare, the market square at Fuente Guinaldo where

“some of the soldiers and some also of the young officers playing at foot ball in the Market Place and spreading confusion and disarray in all directions. The whole market is in an uproar. Melons, grapes, cheeses corn sacks, pigs and eggs share by turns the kicks issued at the foot ball. The market stands are overturned, and the modesty of the old ladies who preside at them is not a little discomposed by the awkward pastimes as they are jostled into in the crowd. These are part of the labours and dangers of War you do not find an account of in our gazettes”

Or the swallows nesting in his room in the little farmhouse between Elvas and Badajoz. He says he is too sentimental to turn them out because they were there first and he has “no right any more than Bonaparte’s right to the Government of Spain.”

His little hermitage in the Forest at Bucasso and the little chapels with the terracotta figures exactly as you and Murray described them.

The Quinta at St Vincente near Elvas,  where the caretaker showed us round and it was just as in the letters even to the view of Badajoz, Campo Maior and far “in the distance on a rocky hill the Castle at Albuquerque.”

We visited many more places and I do want to thank you for your marvellous books which added hugely to the enjoyment of the trip, thank you, thank you very much.

Kindest Regards

Jennifer Harding-Edgar

PS On our return I re-read “Sharpe’s Prey”. As you said “not a campaign in which the British can take particular pride”

It seems Murray played a large part in the planning, Oh dear……..