Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe's Revenge, Sharpe's Waterloo, Sharpe's Devil (104 page)

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Authors: Bernard Cornwell

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BOOK: Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe's Revenge, Sharpe's Waterloo, Sharpe's Devil
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 CHAPTER 8
The paving slab that bore Blas Vivar’s initials had been replaced, but the stoneworkers’ tools were still in the side chapel and, with Harper’s help, Sharpe inserted the crowbar beside the big sandstone slab. “Ready?” Sharpe asked. “Heave.”
Nothing happened. “Bloody hell!” Harper said. Behind them, in the nave of the church, a man screamed. The
O’Higgins’s
surgeon, a maudlin Irishman named MacAuley, had ordered the wounded of both sides to be brought into the church where, on a trestle table, he sliced at mangled flesh and sawed at shattered bones. A Dominican monk, who had been a surgeon in the citadel’s sick bay, was helping the Irish doctor, as were two orderlies from the Chilean flagship.
“I hate listening to surgeons working,” Harper said, then gave Vivar’s gravestone a kick. “It doesn’t want to move.” The big Irishman spat on both hands, gripped the crowbar firmly and, with his feet solidly planted on either side of the slab, heaved back until the veins stood out on his forehead and sweat dripped down his cheeks. Yet all he succeeded in doing was bending the crowbar’s shaft. “Jesus Christ!” he swore as he let go of the crowbar, “They’ve cemented the bugger in place, haven’t they?” He went to the side chapel and came back with a sledgehammer. “Stand back.”
Sharpe sensibly stepped back as the Irishman swung, then drove the head of the sledgehammer hard down onto the
gravestone. The noise of the impact was like the strike of a cannonball, cracking the gravestone clean across. Harper swung the hammer again and again, grunting as he crazed the obstinate stone into a score of jagged-edged chunks. He finally dropped the hammer when the stone was reduced to rubble. “That’s taught the bugger a lesson.”
Lord Cochrane, who had come into the church while Harper was fevershly annihilating the stone, now took out his watch, snapped open its lid, and showed the face to Sharpe. “Thirteen minutes and forty-three seconds.”
“My Lord?” Sharpe enquired politely.
“Thirteen minutes and forty-three seconds! See?”
“Has everyone gone mad around here?” Sharpe asked.
“Thirteen minutes and forty-three seconds is precisely how long it took us to capture the citadel! This watch measures elapsed time, do you see? You press this trigger to start it and this to stop it. I pressed the trigger as our bows touched the wharf, and stopped it when the last defender abandoned the ramparts. In fact I was a bit late, so we probably took less time, but even thirteen minutes and forty-three seconds is rather good for the capture of a citadel this size, don’t you think?” His Lordship, who was in an excitedly triumphant mood, snapped the watch lid shut. “I must thank you. Both of you.” He graciously bowed to both Sharpe and Harper.
“We didn’t do anything,” Sharpe said modestly.
“Not a great deal,” Harper amended Sharpe’s modesty.
“Numbers count for so much,” His Lordship said happily. “If I’d attacked with just thirty men then there would have been no hope of victory, but I’ve discovered that in this kind of war success is gained by small increments. Besides, your presence was worth more than you think. Half of my men fought in the French wars, and they know full well who you are, both of you! And they feel more confident when they
know that famous soldiers such as yourselves are fighting beside them.”
Sharpe tried to brush the compliment aside, but Cochrane would have none of his coyness. “They feel precisely the same about my presence in a scrap. They fight better when I’m in command because they believe in me. And because they believe in my luck!”
“And Mister Sharpe’s always been lucky in a fight,” Harper added.
“There you are!” Cochrane beamed. “Napoleon always claimed he’d rather have lucky soldiers than clever ones, though I pride myself on being both.”
Sharpe laughed at His Lordship’s immodesty. “Why didn’t you tell us you’d arranged to have the
O’Higgins
fire just over our heads if the attack faltered?”
“Because if men know you’ve got an ace hidden up your sleeve they expect you to play it whether it’s needed or not. I didn’t want to run the risk of using the broadside unless I really had to, but if the men had known the broadside might be used they would have held back in the knowledge that the gunners would do some of the hard work for them.”
“It was a brilliant stroke,” Sharpe said.
“How truly you speak, my dear Sharpe.” Cochrane at last seemed to notice the destruction wrought by Harper’s sledgehammer. “What are you doing, Mister Harper?”
“Blas Vivar,” Harper explained. “He’s under here. We’re digging him up, only since we were last here the buggers have cemented him in place.”
“The devil they have.” Cochrane peered at the mess Harper had made of the slab as though expecting to see Vivar’s decayed flesh. “Do you know why people are buried close to altars?” he asked Sharpe airily.
“No,” Sharpe answered in the tone of a man who did not much care about the answer.
“Because very large numbers of Catholic churches have relics of saints secreted within their altars, of course.” Cochrane smiled, as if he had done Sharpe a great favor by revealing the answer.
The Dominican surgeon, his white gown streaked and spattered with bright new blood, had come to the altar to protest to Lord Cochrane about the spoliation being wrought by Harper, but Cochrane turned on the man and brusquely told him to shut up. “And why,” Cochrane continued blithely to Sharpe, “do you think the relics in the altar are important to the dead?”
“I really don’t know,” Sharpe said.
“Because, my dear Sharpe, of what will happen on the Day of Judgment.”
Harper had fetched a spade with which he chipped away the fragments of limestone. “They have used bloody cement!” he said in exasperation. “Goddamn them. Why did they do that? It was just shingle when we tried to pull him out before!”
“They used cement,” Cochrane said, “because they don’t want you to dig him up.”
“The Day of Judgment?” Sharpe, interested at last, asked Cochrane.
His Lordship, who had been examining the mangled remains of the altar screen, turned around. “Because, my dear Sharpe, common sense tells our Papist brethren that, at the sound of the last trump when the dead rise incorruptible, the saints will rise faster than us mere sinners. The rate of resurrection, so the doctrine claims, will depend on the holiness of the man or woman being raised from the dead, and naturally the saints will rise first and travel fastest to heaven. Thus the wise Papist, leaving nothing to chance, is buried close to the altar because it contains a saint’s relic which, on the Day of Judgment, will go speedily to heaven, creating a
draught of wind which will catch up those close to the altar and drag them up to heaven with it.”
“He’ll be dragged up in a barrowload of cement and shingle if he tries to fly out of this bloody grave,” Harper grumbled.
Cochrane, who seemed to Sharpe to be taking an inordinate interest in the exhumation, peered down at the mangled grave. “Why don’t I have some prisoners do the digging for you?”
Harper tossed the spade down in acceptance of the offer and Cochrane, having shouted for some prisoners to be fetched, stirred the cemented shingle with his toe. “Why on earth do you want to take Vivar’s body back to Spain?”
“Because that’s where his widow wants him,” Sharpe said.
“Ah, a woman’s whim! I hope my wife would not wish the same. I can’t imagine being slopped home in a vat of brandy like poor Nelson, though I suppose if one must face eternity, then one might as well slip into it drunk.” Cochrane, who had been pacing about the church choir, suddenly stopped, placed one foot dramatically ahead of the other, clasped a left hand across his breast, and declaimed in a mighty voice that momentarily stilled even the moaning of the wounded:

“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,

As his corse to the rampart we hurried!”

His Lordship applauded his own rendering of the lines. “Who wrote that?”
“An Irishman!” MacAuley shouted from the nave of the church.
“Was it now?” Cochrane enquired skeptically, then whirled on Sharpe. “You know the poem, Sharpe?”
“No, my Lord.”
“You don’t!” Cochrane sounded astonished, then again assumed his declamatory pose:

“But he lay like a warrior taking his rest,

With his martial cloak around him”

“The verses, you understand, refer to the burial of Sir John Moore. Did you know Moore?”
“I met him,” Sharpe said laconically, recalling a hurried conversation on a snow-bright hillside in Galicia. French dragoons had been leading their horses down an icy road on the far side of a wide valley toward a shivering greenjacket rear guard, and Lieutenant General Sir John Moore, shaking with the cold, had courteously enquired of Lieutenant Richard Sharpe whether the enemy horsemen had been more bothersome than usual that morning. That distracted conversation, Sharpe now remembered, must have been held only days before he had met Major Blas Vivar of the Cazadores.
“So you will remember that Moore was buried on the battlefield of Corunna,” Cochrane continued, “and without any nonsense of being carried home to his ever-loving wife. Soldiers normally lie where they fall, so why would this wife want General Vivar taken home? Why does she not leave him in peace?”
“Because the family has a particular connection with the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela.” Sharpe offered the best explanation he could.
“Ah! There are more powerful relics in a cathedral, you see.” Cochrane sounded gloomy. “In Spain he’ll be buried by Saint James himself, not by some sniveling little Chilean holy man. He’ll be in heaven before the rest of us will have had a chance to pick our resurrected noses or scratch our resurrected arses.”
“You won’t need a wind to carry you, my Lord,” the Irish doctor called, “you’ll just roll downhill to perdition with the rest of us miserable bastards.”
“You note the respect in which I am held.” Cochrane, who
clearly relished the comradeship, smiled at Sharpe, then changed into his lamentable Spanish to order the newly arrived prisoners to start digging. Major Suarez, the Spanish officer who had been so cordial to Sharpe when he had first arrived at Puerto Crucero, and who had suffered the misfortune of being captured by Cochrane’s men, had insisted on accompanying the three prisoners to protest about their being employed for manual labor, but he calmed down when he recognized Sharpe and when he saw that the digging was hardly of a martial nature. He calmed down even more when Cochrane, ever courteous, invited him to share in the breakfast he had ordered fetched to the church. “Most of your fellow officers escaped capture by running away,” Cochrane observed, “so I can only congratulate you on having the courage to stay and fight.”
“Alas,
señor
, I was asleep,” Suarez confessed, then crossed himself as he looked at Vivar’s grave.
“You were here,
señor
, when the Captain-General was buried?” Cochrane asked politely.
Suarez nodded. “It was at night. Very late.”
Cochrane could not resist the invitation.

“We buried him darkly at dead of night,

The sods with our bayonets turning.”

“How dead was the night?” Cochrane asked Suarez, suddenly speaking in Spanish and, when the Major just gaped at him, Cochrane condescended to make the question more intelligible. “What time was Blas Vivar buried?”
“Past midnight.” Suarez gazed at the grave which was now deepening perceptibly. “Father Josef said the Mass and whoever was still awake attended.”
Sharpe, remembering his conversation with Blair, the British Consul in Valdivia, frowned. “I thought a lot of people were invited here for the funeral?”
“No,
señor
, that was for a Requiem Mass a week later. But Captain-General Vivar was buried by then.”
“Who filled the grave with cement?” Sharpe asked.
“The Captain-General ordered it done, after you had left the fortress. I don’t know why.” Suarez hunched back onto the stone bench that edged the choir. Above him a marble slab recalled the exemplary life of a Colonel’s wife who, with all her children, had drowned off Puerto Crucero in 1711. Beside that slab was another, commemorating her husband, who had been killed by heathen savages in 1713. The garrison church was full of such memorials, reminders of how long the Spanish had ruled this harsh coast.
Cochrane watched the cement being chipped out of the hole, then turned accusingly on the mild Major Suarez. “So what do they say about Vivar’s death?”
“I’m sorry,
señor
, I don’t understand.”
“Did the rebels kill him? Or Bautista?”
Suarez licked his lips. “I don’t know,
señor
.” He reddened, suggesting that gossip in the Citadel pointed to Bautista’s guilt, but Suarez’s continuing fear of the Captain-General was quite sufficient to impose tact on him. “All I do know,” he tried to divert Cochrane with another morsel of gossip, “is that there was much consternation when Captain-General Vivar’s body could not be found. I heard that Madrid was asking questions. Many of us were sent to search for the body. I and my company were sent twice to the valley, but—” Suarez shrugged to show that his men had failed to find Vivar’s corpse.
“So who did find it?” Sharpe asked.
“One of General Bautista’s men from Valdivia,
señor
. A Captain called Marquinez.”
“That greasy bastard,” Sharpe said with feeling.
“The General was much relieved when the body was discovered,” Suarez added.
“And no wonder,” Cochrane laughed raucously. “Bloody careless to lose the supremo’s body!”
“This is a church!” the Dominican surgeon, goaded by Cochrane’s laughter, snapped in English.
“MacAuley?” Cochrane called to his own surgeon, “if yon tonsured barber speaks out of turn again, you will fillet the turdhead with your bluntest scalpel, then feed him to the crabs. You hear me?”
“I hear you, my Lord.”
“Goddamn holy bastards,” Cochrane spat the insult toward the monk, then let his temper be triggered by irritation. “You know who crucified our Lord?” he shouted at the Dominican. “Bloody priests and bloody lawyers! That’s who! Not the soldiers! The soldiers were just obeying orders, because that’s what soldiers are paid to do, but who gave the orders? Priests and lawyers, that’s who! And you’re still making your mess on God’s earth. Jesus Christ, but I should revenge my Savior by slicing your rancid head off your useless body, you foul poxed son of a whore!”
MacAuley was plainly enjoying the tirade. The Dominican, whose piety had stirred up the whirlwind, tried to ignore it. Suarez looked scared, while Harper, who had no love of priests, laughed aloud.
“Christ on his cross!” Cochrane’s anger was ebbing. “I’d rather roast in hell with a battalion of damned soldiers than sip nectar in heaven alongside a thieving lawyer or a poison-filled priest.”
“You sound like Napoleon,” Sharpe said.
Cochrane’s head snapped up as though Sharpe had struck him, except the Scotsman’s face betrayed nothing but pleasure. “If only I was indeed like him,” he said warmly, then strode to the deepening grave where one of the soldiers had evidently reached the coffin, for the nauseating stench that had so repelled Sharpe and Harper when they had excavated
the grave before now filled the church choir again. The Spanish soldier who had broken through the grave’s crust turned away retching. Suarez was gasping for breath, and only Cochrane seemed unmoved. “Get on with it!” he snapped at the prisoners.
The three Spanish prisoners could not finish the job. Terror, superstition, or just the rank stink of the decaying body was making them shudder uncontrollably. Cochrane, impatient of such niceties and oblivious of the foul stench, leapt into the excavation and, with vigorous sweeps of the shovel, cleared the coffin of its last layer of coagulated shingle.
Sharpe steeled himself to endure the nauseating odor and to stand at the edge of the grave to look at the simple wooden casket in which Blas Vivar was buried. The lid of the casket, made from some yellow timber, had cracked, and the wood itself had been badly stained by the cement, but some words which had been inscribed on the box in black paint were still visible; “
BLAS VIVAR
,” the simple epitaph read, “
REQUIESCAT IN PACE
.”
“Shall I open it?” Cochrane, who seemed more intent than Sharpe on finding Vivar’s body, volunteered.
“I’ll do it.” Sharpe took one of the discarded spades and rammed its blade under the thin yellow planks. The grave was so shallow that he had no trouble in levering up the lid by wrenching out the horseshoe nails that had held the crude coffin together. Cochrane helped by pulling the planks free, then tossing them onto the piles of broken concrete.
The smell grew worse, filling the church with its sickening bite. MacAuley, unable to suppress his interest, had temporarily abandoned a patient to come and gape at the open coffin.
Vivar was draped in a shroud of blue cloth that looked like matted velvet. Sharpe worked the edge of the spade under the cloth and, dreading the fresh wave of smells he would
provoke, jerked it upward. For a second or two the material clung to the rotting flesh beneath, then it pulled free to billow a fresh gust of effluvial stench into the church. Sharpe swept the cloth aside and let it fall, with the spade, beside the grave.
“Oh, Christ Almighty.” MacAuley made the sign of the cross on his blood-soaked chest.
“Oh, good God,” Sharpe whispered.
Major Suarez could not speak, but just sank to his knees.
“Mary, Mother of God,” Harper crossed himself, then looked with horror at Sharpe.
Lord Cochrane reverted to poetry:

“Few and short were the prayers we said,

And we spoke not a word of sorrow,

But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead,

And we bitterly thought of the morrow.”

Then His Lordship began to laugh, and his laugh swelled to fill the whole church, for in the coffin, which had been partly weighted with stones, was the foully rotted corpse of a dog—a yellow dog, a wormy and half-liquefied dog that had been buried beside an altar so that on Judgment Day it would fly to its creator with the speed of a saint’s resurrection. “Oh, woof, woof,” Cochrane said, “woof, woof,” and Sharpe wondered just what in hell’s name he was supposed to do next.

 

“
No wonder Bautista didn’t want us to get at the grave,” Harper said. “Jesus! Why did he bury a dog?”

“Because Madrid was pestering him to find Don Blas,” Sharpe guessed. “Because Louisa’s enquiries were more effective than she knew. Because he knew that if he didn’t find a body, the questions would get more persistent and the enquiries more urgent.”
“But a dog?” Harper asked. “Jesus, it isn’t as if he couldn’t find a dead man. They’re ten a penny in this damned country.”
“Bautista hated Vivar. So maybe using the dog was his idea of a joke? Besides, he didn’t think anyone would open the coffin, and why should they? Because by the time he needed to produce a body Don Blas had been dead three months, so all Bautista needed do was produce a coffin that stank and sent off his trusted Marquinez to concoct the wretched thing. And it worked, at least till we turned up.” Sharpe said the words bitterly, a despairing cry to the cold wind that whipped up from the mysterious Chilean southlands. He and Harper were walking around the citadel’s ramparts over which, just moments before, the decomposed remains of the yellow dog had been tossed away.
“So maybe the bastard faked that message in Boney’s picture just to have a reason to throw us out!” Harper said, “but Doña Louisa would have sent another request for the body! The thing wouldn’t have ended with us.”
“And Bautista would have provided her with a body, or rather a skeleton so rotted down that no one could ever tell who it had been, but he would have needed time to prepare it. He’d probably have had a lavish coffin made, with a silver plate on it, and he’d have found an unrecognizably decayed body to put inside, dressed in a gilded uniform, and he couldn’t arrange all that with us sniffing around Puerto Crucero.”
Harper stopped at an embrasure and stared at the far mountains. “So where’s Blas Vivar?”
“Still out there,” Sharpe nodded at the broken countryside to the north, at the retreating ridges and dark valleys where, he knew, he must now search for a friend’s body. He did not want to make the search. He had been so sure that he would find the body under the garrison church’s flagstones, and
now he faced yet more time in this country that was so bitterly far from everything he loved. “We’ll need two horses. Unless, of course, you’ve had enough?”
“Are you sure we need to stay?” Harper asked unhappily.
Sharpe’s face was equally miserable. “We haven’t found Vivar, so I don’t think I can go home yet.”
Harper shook his head. “And we’ll not find him! You heard what Major Suarez said. He’s looked twice and found nothing. Christ! Bautista probably had a thousand men looking!”
“I know. But I can’t go back to Louisa and tell her I couldn’t be bothered to search the place where Don Blas died. We have to take a look, Patrick,” Sharpe said, then added hurriedly, “I do, anyway.”
“I’ll stay,” Harper said robustly. “Jesus, if I get home I’ll only have the bloody children screaming and the wife telling me I should drink less.”
Sharpe smiled. “So she does think you’re too fat?”
“She’s a woman, what the hell does she know?” Harper tried to pull in his gut, and failed.
“You’re thinner than you were,” Sharpe said truthfully.
Harper patted his belly. “She won’t know me when I get home. I’m dwindling. I’ll be a wraith. If I’m alive at all.”
“Two weeks,” Sharpe heard the gloom in his friend’s voice, and tried to alleviate it with a promise. “We’ll stay two weeks more, and if we can’t find Don Blas in a fortnight, then we’ll give up the search, I promise. Just two weeks.”
It was a promise that looked increasingly fragile as the days passed. Sharpe needed to search the valley where Don Blas had disappeared, but refugees from the countryside spoke of horrors that made travel unsafe. The Spaniards, retreating toward the guns of Valdivia, were pillaging farms and settlements, while the savages, scenting their enemy’s weakness, were hunting down the refugees from Puerto Crucero’s defeated garrison. The whole province was churn
ing with bitterness, and Cochrane insisted that Sharpe and Harper could not risk traveling through the murderous chaos. “The damned Indians don’t know you’re English! They see a white skin and suddenly you’re the evening’s main dish—white meat served with fig sauce. Come to think of it, that’s probably what happened to your friend Vivar. He was turned into a fricassee and three belches.”
“Are the savages cannibals?” Sharpe asked.
“God knows. I can’t make head or tail of them,” Cochrane grumbled. He wanted Sharpe to forget Vivar, and instead enroll for the assault on Valdivia. “Half the bloody Spanish army searched that valley,” Cochrane protested, “and they found nothing! Why do you think you can do better?”
“Because I’m not the Spanish army.”
The two men were standing on the highest seaward rampart of the captured fortress. Above them the flag of the Chilean Republic snapped in the cold southern wind, while beneath them, in the inner harbor, the
Espiritu Santo
lay grounded on a sandy shoal that was only flooded at the very highest tides. A stout line had been attached to the
Espiritu Santo
’s mainmast, then run ashore to where a team of draught horses, helped by fifty men, had taken the strain, pulling the frigate over, so that now she lay careened on her port side and with her wounded flank facing the sky. Carpenters from the town and from Cochrane’s flagship were busy patching the damage done by the exploding
Mary Starbuck
. The
Espiritu Santo
was now called the
Kitty
, named in honor of Cochrane’s wife. Her old crew had been divided; Captain Ardiles, with his officers and those seamen who had not volunteered to join the ranks of the rebels, were locked in the prison wing of the citadel, while the other seamen, about fifty in all, had volunteered to join Cochrane’s ranks. Those fifty would all be part of the crew that would take the
Kitty
north to attack Valdivia.
Among the plunder captured in Puerto Crucero had been a Spanish pinnace, with six small guns, which Cochrane had sent north with news of his victory. The pinnace, a fast and handy sailor, had orders to avoid all strange sails, but just to reach the closest rebel-held port and from there to send the news of Puerto Crucero’s fall to Santiago. Cochrane had also written to Bernardo O’Higgins requesting that more men be sent to help him assault Valdivia. If O’Higgins would give him just one battalion of troops, Cochrane promised success. “I won’t get the battalion,” Cochrane gloomily told Sharpe, “but I have to ask.”
“They won’t give you troops?” Sharpe asked in surprise.
“They’ll send a few, a token few. But they won’t send enough to guarantee victory. They don’t want victory, remember. They want me either to refuse to obey their orders or to make a hash out of obedience. They want rid of me, but with your help, Sharpe, I might yet—”
“I’m riding north,” Sharpe interrupted, “to look for Don Blas.”
“Look for him after you’ve helped me capture Valdivia!” Cochrane suggested brightly. “Think of the glory we’ll win! My God, Sharpe, men will talk about us forever! Cochrane and Sharpe, conquerors of the Pacific!”
“It isn’t my battle,” Sharpe said, “and besides, you’re going to lose it.”
“You didn’t believe I’d capture this place.” Cochrane swept a victor’s arm around the vista of the citadel’s ramparts.
“True,” Sharpe allowed, “but only because you used a trick to get your attackers in close, and that trick won’t work two times.”
“Maybe it will,” Cochrane smiled. For a few seconds the Scotsman was silent, then his desire to reveal his plans overcame his instinct for caution. “You remember telling me
about those artillery officers who crossed the Atlantic with you?”
Sharpe nodded. He had described to Lord Cochrane how Colonel Ruiz and his officers had sailed ahead of their men, which meant, Cochrane now said, that the two slow transports carrying the men and the regiment’s guns were probably still lumbering across the Atlantic. “And I’ll wager a wee fortune that if I disguise the
Kitty
and the
O’Higgins
, I can get right inside Valdivia Harbor by pretending to be those two transports.” His voice, eager and excited, was filled with amusement at the thought of again deceiving the Spaniards. “You saw how the garrison collapsed here! You think morale is any better in Valdivia?”
“Probably not,” Sharpe admitted.
“So join me! I promised you a share of the prize money. That bastard Bautista took almost everything of value out of here, so it must all be in Valdivia, and that includes your money, Sharpe. Are you going to let the bastard just take it?”
“I’m going to look for Don Blas,” Sharpe said doggedly, “then go home.”
“You won’t fight for money?” Cochrane sounded astonished. “Not that I blame you. I tell myself I fight for more than money, but that’s the only thing these rogues want.” He nodded down at his men who were scattered about the citadel. “So, for their sakes, I’ll fight for money and pay them their wages, and the lawyers in Santiago can whistle at the wind for all I care.” The thought of lawyers plunged the mercurial Scotsman into instant unhappiness. “Have you ever seen a lawyer apologize? I haven’t, and I don’t suppose anyone else has. It must be like watching a snake eat its own vomit. You won’t help me force a lawyer to apologize?”
“I have to—”
“Find Blas Vivar,” Cochrane finished the sentence sourly.
A week after the citadel’s capture the reports of atrocities
and ambush began to decline. A few refugees still arrived from the distant parts of the province, and even a handful of the fort’s defeated garrison had come back rather than face the vengeful savages, but it seemed to Sharpe that the countryside north of Puerto Crucero was settling back into a wary silence. The savages had gone back to their forests, the settlers were creeping out of hiding to see what was left of their farms and the Spaniards were licking their wounds in Valdivia.
Sharpe decided it was safe to ride north. He assembled what he needed for his journey—guns, blankets, salted fish and dried meat—and earmarked two horses captured in the citadel’s stables and two good saddles from among the captured booty. He persuaded Major Suarez to describe the valley where Don Blas had ridden into mystery, and Suarez even drew a map, telling Sharpe what parts of the valley had been most thoroughly searched for Blas Vivar’s body. Cochrane made one last feeble effort to persuade Sharpe to stay, then wished him luck. “When will you leave?”
“At dawn,” Sharpe said. But then, as night fell red across the ocean to touch the sentinels’ weapons with a scarlet sheen, everything changed again.
Don Blas was not dead after all. But living.

 

H
is name was Marcos. Just Marcos. He was a thin young man with the face of a starveling and the eyes of a cutthroat. He had been an infantryman in the Puerto Crucero garrison, one of the men who had poured such a disciplined fire at Cochrane’s attack, but who, after the citadel’s fall, had fled northward, only to be driven back by his fears of rampaging Indians. Major Miller had interrogated Marcos, and Miller now fetched Marcos to Sharpe. They spoke around a brazier on Puerto Crucero’s ramparts and Marcos, in the strangely accented Spanish of the native Chileans, told his story of how
Don Blas Vivar, Count of Mouromorto and erstwhile Captain-General of Chile, still lived. Marcos told the tale nervously, his eyes flicking from Sharpe to Miller, from Miller to Harper, then from Harper to Cochrane who, summoned by Miller, had come to hear Marcos’s story.

Marcos had been stationed in Valdivia’s Citadel when Blas Vivar disappeared. He knew some of the cavalrymen who had formed part of the escort that had accompanied Captain-General Vivar on his southern tour of inspection. That escort had been commanded by a Captain Lerrana, who was now Colonel Lerrana and one of Captain-General Bautista’s closest friends. Marcos accompanied this revelation with a meaningful wink, then paused to scratch vigorously at his crotch. An interval of silence followed, during which he pursued and caught a particularly troublesome louse that he squashed bloodily between his thumb and fingernail before hitching the rent in his breeches roughly closed.
“Hurry now! Don’t keep the Colonel waiting!” Miller barked.
Marcos flinched as if he expected to be hit, then reminded Sharpe that Captain-General Vivar had been riding on a tour of inspection that was supposed to end at the citadel in Puerto Crucero. “From there,
señor
, he would go back to Valdivia by ship. But no one came back! Neither the Captain-General, nor Captain Lerrana. No one. Not even the troopers! No one came back till after we heard the Captain-General had vanished, then General Bautista arrived from Puerto Crucero, and Captain Lerrana came with him, but by then he was a Colonel and in a new uniform.” Marcos clearly felt that the detail of Lerrana’s new uniform was exceedingly telling. He described it in detail, how it had thickly cushioned epaulettes from which hung gold chains, and how it had gold-colored lace on the coat, and high boots that were new and shining.
“Tell him about the prisoner!” Miller interrupted the admiring description of the uniform.
“Ah, yes!” Marcos snatched another bite from his sausage. “General Bautista was the senior officer in the province, so he came to take over the Captain-General’s duties. He came by ship, you understand, and his men came by boat up the river to the Citadel in Valdivia. They came by day, and we made an honor guard for the General. But one boat came at night. In it,
señor
, was a prisoner who had come from Puerto Crucero, a prisoner so secret that no one even knew his name! The prisoner was hurried into the Angel Tower in the Citadel. You have to understand,
señor
, that the Angel Tower is very old, very mysterious! It used to be a terrible prison! They say the ghosts of all the dead cling to its stones. Once a man was put in there he only came out as a corpse or an angel.” Marcos superstitiously crossed himself. “They stopped using the tower as a prison in my grandfather’s time, and now no one will step inside for fear of the spirits, but that is where the Captain-General’s prisoner was taken and, so far as I know,
señor
, he is still there. Or he was when I left.” Marcos ended the tale in a rush, then looked eagerly at Miller as though seeking praise for the telling.
“And you think Captain Vivar is that prisoner?” Sharpe asked Marcos.
Marcos nodded energetically. “I saw his face,
señor
. I was on duty at the inner gate, and they brought him past me to the door of the tower. I was ordered to turn around and not look, but I was in shadow and they did not see me. It was the Captain-General, I swear it.”
“God save Ireland,” Harper said under his breath.
Sharpe leaned back. “I wish I could believe him,” he spoke in English, to no one in particular.
“Of course you can believe him!” Cochrane said stoutly.
“Who the hell else do you think Bautista’s got in there? The Virgin Mary?”
Marcos greedily bit into a hunk of bread, then looked alarmed as Sharpe leaned forward again.
“Did you ever see your cavalry friends from the Captain-General’s escort again?” Sharpe spoke Spanish again.
“Yes,
señor
.”
“What do they say happened to General Vivar?”
Marcos swallowed a half-chewed lump of bread, scratched his crotch, looked sideways at Miller, then shrugged. “They say that the Captain-General disappeared in a valley. There was a road that went down the valley’s side like this” —Marcos made a zig-zag motion with his right hand— “and that the Captain-General ordered them to wait at the top of the road while he went down into the valley. And that was it!”
“No gunfire?” Sharpe asked.
“No,
señor
.”
Sharpe turned to stare at the dark ocean. The sea’s roar came from the outer rocks. “I don’t know if I trust this man.”
Cochrane responded in Spanish, loud enough for Marcos to hear. “If the dog lies, we shall cut off his balls with a blunt razor. Are you telling lies, Marcos?”
“No,
señor!
I promise!”
“It still doesn’t make sense,” Sharpe said softly.
“Why not?” Cochrane stood beside him.
“Why would Vivar ride into the valley without an escort?”
“Because he didn’t want anyone to see who he was going to meet?” Cochrane suggested.
“Meaning?”
Cochrane drew Sharpe away from the others, escorting him down the ramparts. His Lordship drew on a cigar, its smoke whirling away in the southern wind. “I think he was meeting Bautista. This man’s story,” Cochrane jerked his cigar toward Marcos, “confirms other things I’ve been hear
ing. Your friend Vivar had learned something about Bautista, something that would break Bautista’s career. He was going to offer Bautista a choice: either a public humiliation or a private escape. I believe he went into the valley to meet Bautista, not knowing that Bautista would take neither choice, but had planned a
coup d’état
. That’s what we’re talking about, Sharpe! A
coup d’état!
And it worked brilliantly!”
“Then why didn’t Bautista kill Vivar?”
Cochrane shrugged. “How do I know? Perhaps he was frightened? If everything went wrong, and Vivar’s supporters rallied and opposed Bautista, he could still release Vivar and plead it was all a misunderstanding. That way, whatever other punishment he faced, Bautista would not have the iron collar around his neck, eh?” Cochrane grimaced in grotesque imitation of a man being garotted.
“But Don Blas must be dead by now!” Sharpe insisted. He had spoken in Spanish and loud enough for Marcos to hear.
“
Señor?
” Marcos’s frightened face was lit from beneath by the lurid glow of the brazier’s coals. “I think he was alive six weeks ago. That was when I left Valdivia, and I think General Vivar was alive then.”
“How can you tell?” Sharpe asked scornfully.
The infantryman paused, then spoke low so that his voice scarcely carried along the battlements. “I can tell,
señor
, because the new Captain-General likes to visit the Angel Tower. He goes alone, after dark. He has a key. The tower has only one door, you understand, and they say there is only one key, and General Bautista has that key. I have seen him go there. Sometimes he takes an aide with him, a Captain Marquinez, but usually he goes alone.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus.” Sharpe rested his hands on the parapet and raised his face to the sea wind. The detail of Marquinez had convinced him. Dear God, he thought, but let this man be lying, for it would be better for Don Blas if he were dead.
“What are you thinking?” Cochrane asked softly.
“I’m frightened this man Marcos is telling the truth.”
Cochrane listened for a few seconds to the sound of the sea, then he spoke gently. “He is telling the truth. We’re dealing with hatred. With madness. With cruelty on a monumental scale. Vivar and Bautista were enemies, that much we know. Vivar would have treated his enemy with honor, but Bautista does not deal with honor. I hear Bautista likes to see men suffer, so think how much he would like to watch his greatest enemy suffer! I think he goes to the Angel Tower at night to watch Vivar’s misery, to remind Vivar of his defeat, and to see Vivar’s humiliation.”
“Oh, Christ,” Sharpe said wearily.
“We know now why Vivar’s body was never found,” Cochrane said, “because plainly there is no body, and never was. Bautista had to pretend to make a search, for he dared not let anyone suspect Vivar was alive, but he must have been laughing every time he sent out another search party. And there’s something else,” Cochrane added with relish.
“Which is?”
“The Angel Tower is in Valdivia!” Cochrane chuckled, “So perhaps you had better come with me after all?”
“Oh, shit.” Sharpe said, for he was tired of war, and he wanted to go home. He felt a sudden overwhelming need to be in Normandy, to smell woollen clothes drying before the fire, to listen to the day’s small change of news and gossip, to doze before the kitchen fire while the cauldron bubbled. He had lost his taste for battle, and could find no relish for the kind of suicidal horror that Cochrane risked at Valdivia.
But Valdivia it would have to be, for Sharpe’s word was given, and so a last battle must be fought. To pluck a friend from madness.

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