Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe's Revenge, Sharpe's Waterloo, Sharpe's Devil (97 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 1 
Capitan-General Blas Vivar’s wife, the Countess of Mouromorto, had been born and raised in England, but Sharpe had first met Miss Louisa Parker when, in 1809 and with thousands of other refugees, she was fleeing from Napoleon’s invasion of northern Spain. The Parker family, oblivious to the chaos that was engulfing a continent, could grieve only for their lost Protestant Bibles with which they had forlornly hoped to convert Papist Spain. Somehow, in the weltering chaos, Miss Louisa Parker had met Don Blas Vivar who, later that same year, became the Count of Mouromorto. Miss Parker had meanwhile become a Papist, and thereafter Blas Vivar’s wife. Sharpe saw neither of them again till, in the late summer of 1819, Doña Louisa Vivar, Countess of Mouromorto, arrived unannounced and unexpected in the Normandy village where Sharpe farmed.
At first Sharpe did not recognize the tall, black-dressed woman whose carriage, attended by postilions and outriders, drew up under the chateau’s crumbling arch. He had supposed the lavish carriage to belong to some rich person who, traveling about Normandy, had become lost in the region’s green tangle of lanes and, it being late on a hot summer’s afternoon, had sought out the largest farmhouse of the village for directions and, doubtless, refreshments as well. Sharpe, his face sour and unwelcoming, had been prepared to turn the visitors away by directing them to the inn at Sel
eglise, but then a dignified woman had stepped down from the carriage and pushed a veil back from her face. “Mister Sharpe?” she had said after a few awkward seconds, and suddenly Sharpe had recognized her, but even then he had found it hard to reconcile this woman’s reserved and stately appearance with his memories of an adventurous English girl who had impulsively abandoned both her Protestant religion and the approval of her family to marry Don Blas Vivar, Count of Mouromorto, devout Catholic, and soldier of Spain.
Who, Doña Louisa now informed Sharpe, had disappeared. Blas Vivar had vanished.
Sharpe, overwhelmed by the suddenness of the information and by Louisa’s arrival, gaped like a village idiot. Lucille insisted that Doña Louisa must stay for supper, which meant staying for the night, and Sharpe was peremptorily sent about making preparations. There was no spare stabling for Doña Louisa’s valuable carriage horses, so Sharpe ordered a boy to unstall the plough horses and take them to a meadow while Lucille organized beds for Doña Louisa and her maids, and rugs for Doña Louisa’s coachmen. Luggage had to be unstrapped from the varnished carriage and carried upstairs where the chateau’s two maids laid new sheets on the beds. Wine was brought up from the damp cellar, and a fine cheese, which Lucille would otherwise have sent to the market in Caen, was taken from its nettle-leaf wrapping and pronounced fit for the visitor’s supper. That supper would not be much different from any of the other peasant meals being eaten in the village for the chateau was pretentious only in its name. The building had once been a nobleman’s fortified manor, but was now little more than an overgrown and moated farmhouse.
Doña Louisa, her mind too full of her troubles to notice the fuss her arrival had prompted, explained to Sharpe the immediate cause of her unexpected visit. “I have been in
England and I insisted the Horse Guards tell me where I might find you. I am sorry not to have sent you warning of my coming, but I need help.” She spoke peremptorily, her voice that of a woman who was not used to deferring the gratification of her wishes.
She was nevertheless forced to wait while Sharpe’s two children were introduced to her. Patrick, age five, offered her ladyship a sturdy bow while Dominique, age three, was more interested in the ducklings that splashed at the moat’s edge. “Dominique looks like your wife,” Louisa said.
Sharpe merely grunted a noncommital reply, for he had no wish to explain that he and Lucille were not married, nor how he already had a bitch of a wife in London whom he could not afford to divorce and who would not decently crawl away and die. Nor did Lucille, coming to join Sharpe and their guest at the table in the courtyard, bother to correct Louisa’s misapprehension, for Lucille claimed to take more pleasure in being mistaken for Madame Richard Sharpe than in using her ancient title, though Sharpe, much to Lucille’s amusement, now insisted on introducing her to Louisa as the Vicomtesse de Seleglise, an honor which duly impressed the Countess of Mouromorto. Lucille, as ever, tried to disown the title by saying that such nonsenses had been abolished in the revolution and, besides, anyone connected to an ancient French family could drag out a title from somewhere. “Half the ploughmen in France are Viscounts,” the Viscountess Seleglise said with self-deprecation, then politely asked whether the Countess of Mouromorto had any children.
“Three,” Louisa replied, and then went on to explain how an additional two children had died in infancy. Sharpe, supposing that the two women would get down to the interminable and tedious feminine business of making mutual compliments about their respective children, let the conversation become a meaningless drone, but Louisa surprisingly
brushed the subject of children aside, only wanting to talk of her missing husband. “He’s somewhere in Chile,” she said.
Sharpe had to think for a few seconds before he could place Chile, then he remembered a few scraps of information from the newspapers that he read in the inn beside Caen Abbey where he went for dinner on market days. “There’s a war of independence going on in Chile, isn’t there?”
“A rebellion!” Louisa corrected him sharply. Indeed, she went on, her husband had been sent to suppress the rebellion, though when Don Blas had reached Chile he had discovered a demoralized Spanish army, a defeatist squadron of naval ships, and a treasury bled white by corruption, yet within six months he had been full of hope and had even been promising Louisa that she and the children would soon join him in Valdivia’s Citadel which served as Chile’s official residence for its Captain-General.
“I thought Santiago was the capital of Chile?” Lucille, who had brought some sewing from the house, inquired gently.
“It was,” Louisa admitted reluctantly, then added indignantly, “till the rebels captured it. They now call it the capital of the Chilean Republic. As if there could be such a thing!” And, Louisa claimed, if Don Blas had been given a chance, there would be no Chilean Republic, for her husband had begun to turn the tide of Royalist defeat. He had won a series of small victories over the rebels; such victories were nothing much to boast of, he had written to his wife, but they were the first in many years and they had been sufficient to persuade his soldiers that the rebels were not invincible fiends. Then, suddenly, there were no more letters from Don Blas, only an official dispatch which said that His Excellency Don Blas, Count of Mouromorto and Captain-General of the Spanish Forces in His Majesty’s dominion of Chile, had disappeared.
Don Blas, Louisa said, had ridden to inspect the fortifica
tions at the harbor town of Puerto Crucero, the southernmost garrison in Spanish Chile. He had ridden with a cavalry escort, and had been ambushed somewhere north of Puerto Crucero, in a region of steep hills and deep woods. At the time of the ambush Don Blas had been riding ahead of his escort, and he was last seen spurring forward to escape the closing jaws of the rebel trap. The escort, driven away by the fierceness of the ambushers, had not been able to search the valley where the trap had been sprung for another six hours, by which time Don Blas, and his ambushers, had long disappeared.
“He must have been captured by the rebels,” Sharpe suggested mildly.
“If you were a rebel commander,” Louisa observed icily, “and succeeded in capturing or killing the Spanish Captain-General, would you keep silent about your victory?”
“No,” Sharpe admitted, for such a feat would encourage every rebel in South America and concomitantly depress all their Royalist opponents. He frowned. “Surely Don Blas had aides with him?”
“He had a small escort.”
“Yet he was riding alone? In rebel country?” Sharpe’s soldiering instincts, rusty as they were, rebelled at such a thought.
Louisa, who had rehearsed these questions and answers for weeks, shrugged. “They tell me that no rebels had been seen in those parts for many months. That Don Blas often rode ahead. He was impatient, you surely remember that?”
“But he wasn’t foolhardy.” A wasp crawled on the table and Sharpe slapped down hard. “The rebels have made no proclamations about Don Blas?”
“None!” There was despair in Louisa’s voice. “And when I ask for information from our own army, I am told there is no information to be had. It seems that a Captain-General
can disappear in Chile without a trace! I do not even know if I am a widow.” She looked at Lucille. “I wanted to travel to Chile, but it would have meant leaving my children. Besides, what can a woman do against the intransigence of soldiers?”
Lucille shot an amused glance at Sharpe, then looked down again at her sewing.
“The army has told you nothing?” Sharpe asked in astonishment.
“They tell me Don Blas is dead. They cannot prove it, for they have never found his body, but they assure me he must be dead.” Louisa said that the King had even paid for a Requiem Mass to be sung in Santiago de Compostela’s great cathedral, though Louisa had shocked the royal authorities by refusing to attend such a Mass, claiming it to be indecently premature. Don Blas, Louisa insisted, was alive. Her instinct told her so. “He might be a prisoner. I am told there are tribes of heathen savages who are reputed to keep white men as slaves in the forest. And Chile is a terrible country,” she explained to Lucille, “there are pygmies and giants in the mountains, while the rebel ranks are filled by rogues from Europe. Who knows what might have happened?”
Lucille made a sympathetic noise, but the mention of white slaves, pygmies, giants and rogues made Sharpe suspect that his visitor’s hopes were mere fantasies. In the five years since Waterloo Sharpe had met scores of women who were convinced that a missing son or a lost husband or a vanished lover still lived. Many such women had received notification that their missing man had been killed, but they stubbornly clung to their beliefs; supposing that their loved one was trapped in Russia, or kept prisoner in some remote Spanish town, or perhaps had been carried abroad to some far raw colony. Invariably, Sharpe knew, such men had either settled with different women or, more likely, were long dead and buried, but it was impossible to convince their women
folk of either harsh truth. Nor did he try to persuade Louisa now, but instead asked her whether Don Blas had been popular in Chile.
“He was too honest to be popular,” Louisa said. “Of course he had his supporters, but he was constantly fighting corruption. Indeed, that was why he was traveling to Puerto Crucero. The Governor of the southern province was an enemy of Don Blas. They hated each other, and I heard that Don Blas had proof of the Governor’s corruption and was traveling to confront him!”
Which meant, Sharpe wearily thought, that his friend Don Blas had been fighting two enemies: the entrenched Spanish interest as well as the rebels who had captured Santiago and driven the Royalists into the southern half of the country. Don Blas had doubtless been a good enough commander to beat the rebels, but was he a clever enough politician to beat his own side? Sharpe, who knew what an honest man Don Blas was, doubted it, and that doubt convinced him still further that his old friend must be dead. It took a cunning fox to cheat the hunt, while the brave beast that turned to fight the dogs always ended up torn into scraps. “So isn’t it likely,” Sharpe spoke as gently as he could, “that Don Blas was ambushed by his own side?”
“Indeed it’s possible!” Louisa said. “In fact I believe that is precisely what happened. But I would like to be certain.”
Sharpe sighed. “If Don Blas was ambushed by his own side, then they are not going to reveal what happened.” Sharpe hated delivering such a hopeless opinion, but he knew it was true. “I’m sorry, my lady, but you’re never going to know what happened.”
But Louisa could not accept so bleak a verdict. Her instinct had convinced her that Don Blas was alive, and that conviction had brought her into the deep, private valley where Sharpe farmed Lucille’s land. Sharpe wondered how
he was going to rid himself of her. He suspected it would not be easy, for Doña Louisa was clearly obsessed by her husband’s fate.
“Do you want me to write to the Spanish authorities?” he offered. “Or perhaps ask the Duke of Wellington to use his influence?”
“What good will that do?” Louisa challenged. “I’ve used every influence I can, till the authorities are sick of me. I don’t need influence, I need the truth.” Louisa paused, then took the plunge. “I want you to go to Chile and find me that truth.”
Lucille’s gray eyes widened in surprise, while Sharpe, equally astonished at the effrontery of Louisa’s request, said nothing. Beyond the moat, in the elms that grew beside the orchard, rooks cawed loud and a house-martin sliced on saber wings between the dairy and the horse-chestnut tree. “There must be men in South America who are in a better position to search for your husband?” Lucille remarked very mildly.
“How do I trust them? Those officers who were friends of my husband have either been sent home or posted to remote garrisons. I sent money to other officers who claimed to be friends of Don Blas, but all I received in return are the same lies. They merely wish me to send more money, and thus they encourage me with hope but not with facts. Besides, such men cannot speak to the rebels.”
“And I can?” Sharpe asked.
“You can find out whether they ambushed Don Blas, or whether someone else set the trap.”
Sharpe, from all he had heard, doubted whether any rebels had been involved. “By someone else,” he said diplomatically, “I assume you mean the man Don Blas was riding to confront? The Governor of, where was it?”
“Puerto Crucero, and the governor’s name was Miguel
Bautista,” Louisa spoke the name with utter loathing, “and Miguel Bautista is Chile’s new Captain-General. That snake has replaced Don Blas! He writes me flowery letters of condolence, but the truth is that he hated Don Blas and has done nothing to help me.”
“Why did he hate Don Blas?” Sharpe asked.
“Because Don Blas is honest, and Bautista is corrupt. Why else?”
“Corrupt enough to murder Don Blas?” Sharpe asked.
“My husband is not dead!” Louisa insisted in a voice full of pain, so much pain that Sharpe, who till now had been trying to pierce her armor of certainty, suddenly realized just what anguish lay behind that self-delusion. “He is hiding,” Louisa insisted, “or perhaps he is wounded. Perhaps he is with the savages. Who knows? I only know, in my heart, that he is not dead. You will understand!” This passionate appeal was directed at Lucille, who smiled with sympathy, but said nothing. “Women know when their men die,” Louisa went on, “they feel it. I know a woman who woke in her sleep, crying, and later we discovered that her husband’s ship had sunk that very same night! I tell you, Don Blas is alive!” The cry was pathetic, yet full of vigor, tragic.
Sharpe turned to watch his son who, with little Dominique, was searching inside the open barn door for newly laid eggs. He did not want to go to Chile. These days he even resented having to travel much beyond Caen. Sharpe was a happy man, his only worries the usual concerns of a farmer—money and weather—and he wished Louisa had not come to the valley with her talk of cavalry and ambush and savages and corruption. Sharpe’s more immediate concerns were the pike that decimated the millstream trout and the crumbling sill of the weir that threatened to collapse and inundate Lucille’s water meadows, and he did not want to think of far-off countries and corrupt governments and missing soldiers.
Doña Louisa, seeing Sharpe stare at his children, must have understood what he was thinking. “I have asked for help everywhere,” she made the appeal to Lucille as much as to Sharpe. “The Spanish authorities won’t help me, which is why I went to London.” Louisa, who perhaps had more faith in her English roots than she would have liked to admit, explained that she had sought the help of the British government because British interests were important in Chile. Merchants from London and Liverpool, in anticipation of new trading opportunities, were suspected of funding the rebel government, while the Royal Navy kept a squadron on the Chilean coast and Louisa believed that if the British authorities, thus well connected with both sides of the fighting parties, demanded news of Don Blas then neither the rebels nor the Royalists would dare refuse them.
“Yet the British say they cannot help!” Louisa complained indignantly. “They say Don Blas’s disappearance is a military matter of concern only to the Spanish authorities!” So, in desperation, and while returning overland to Spain, Louisa had called on Sharpe. Her husband had once done Sharpe a great service, she tellingly reminded Sharpe, and now she wanted that favor returned.
Lucille spoke excellent English, but not quite well enough to have kept up with Louisa’s indignant loquacity. Sharpe translated, and added a few facts of his own; how he did indeed owe Blas Vivar a great debt. “He helped me once, years ago,” Sharpe said, deliberately vague, for Lucille never much liked to hear of Sharpe’s exploits in fighting against her own people. “And he is a good man,” Sharpe added, and knew the compliment was inadequate, for Don Blas was more than just a good man. He was, or had been, a generous man of rigorous honesty; a man of religion, of charity, and of ability.
“I do not like asking this of you,” Louisa said in an unnatu
rally timid voice, “but I know that whoever seeks Don Blas must treat with soldiers, and your name is respected everywhere among soldiers.”
“Not here, it isn’t,” Lucille said robustly, though not without an affectionate smile at Sharpe, for she knew how proud he would be of the compliment just paid him.
“And, of course, I shall pay you for your trouble in going to Chile,” Louisa added.
“Of course Richard will go,” Lucille, understanding that promise, said quickly.
“Though I don’t need any money,” Sharpe said gallantly.
“Yes, you do,” Lucille intervened calmly and, more pointedly, in English so that Louisa would understand. Lucille had already estimated the worth of Doña Louisa’s black dress, and of her carriage, and of her postilions and outriders and horses and luggage, and Lucille knew only too well how desperately her chateau needed repairs and how badly her estate needed the investment of money. Lucille paused to bite through a thread, “But I don’t want you to go alone. You need company. You’ve been wanting to see Patrick, so you should write to Dublin tonight, Richard.”
“Patrick won’t want to come,” Sharpe said, not because he thought his friend would truly refuse such an invitation, but rather because he did not want to raise his own hopes that his oldest friend, Patrick Harper, would give up his comfortable existence as landlord of a Dublin tavern and instead travel to one of the remotest and evidently most troubled countries on earth.
“It would be better if you did take a companion,” Louisa said firmly. “Chile is horribly corrupt. Don Blas believed that men like Bautista were simply extracting every last scrap of profit before the war was lost, and that they did not care about victory, but only for money. But money will open doors for you, so I plan to give you a sum of coin to use as bribes,
and it might be sensible to have a strong man to help you protect such a fortune.”
“And Patrick is certainly strong,” Lucille said affectionately.
Thus the two women had made their decisions. Sharpe, with Harper, if his old friend agreed, would sail to Chile. Doña Louisa would provide Sharpe with two thousand gold English guineas, a coinage acceptable anywhere in the world, and a sum sufficient to buy Sharpe whatever information he needed, then she would wait for his news in her Palace of Mouromorto in Orense. Lucille, meanwhile, would hire an engineer from Caen to construct a new weir downstream of the old, the first repair to be done with the generous fee Louisa insisted on paying Sharpe.
Who, believing that he sailed to find a dead man, was now in mid-Atlantic, on a Spanish frigate, sailing to a corrupt colony, and bearing an Emperor’s gift.

 

T
he talk on board the
Espiritu Santo
was of victories to come and of the vengeance that would be taken against the rebels once Colonel Ruiz’s guns reached the battlefields. It was artillery, Ruiz declared to Sharpe, that won wars. “Napoleon understood that!”

“But Napoleon lost his wars,” Sharpe interjected.
Ruiz flicked that objection aside. The advance in the science of artillery, he claimed, had made cavalry and infantry vulnerable to the massive destructive power of guns. There was no future, he said, in pursuing rebels around the Chilean wilderness; instead they must be lured under the massed guns of a fortress and there pulverized. Ruiz modestly disclaimed authorship of this strategy, instead praising the new Captain-General, Bautista, for the idea. “We’ll take care of Cochrane in exactly the same way,” Ruiz promised. “We’ll lure him and his ships under the guns of Valdivia, then turn
the so-called rebel Navy into firewood. Guns will mean the end of Cochrane!”
Cochrane. That was the name that haunted every Spaniard. Sharpe heard the name a score of times each day. Whenever two Spanish officers were talking, they spoke of Cochrane. They disliked Bernardo O’Higgins, the rebel Irish General and now Supreme Director of the independent Chilean Republic, but they hated Cochrane. Cochrane’s victories were too flamboyant, too unlikely. They believed he was a devil, for there could be no other explanation for his success.
In truth Lord Thomas Cochrane was a Scotsman, a sailor, a jailbird, a politician and a rebel. He was also lucky. “He has the devil’s own luck,” Lieutenant Otero, the
Espiritu Santo
’s First Lieutenant, solemnly told Sharpe, “and when Cochrane is lucky, the rebellion thrives.” Otero explained that it was Cochrane’s naval victories that had made most of the rebellion’s successes possible. “Chile is not a country in which armies can easily march, so the Generals need ships to transport their troops. That’s what that devil Cochrane has given them—mobility!” Otero stared gloomily at the wild seas ahead, then shook his head sadly. “But in truth he is nothing but a pirate.”
“A lucky pirate, it seems,” Sharpe observed drily.
“I sometimes wonder if what we call luck is merely the will of God,” Otero observed sadly, “and that therefore Cochrane has been sent to scourge Spain for a reason. But God will surely relent.” Otero piously crossed himself and Sharpe reflected that if God did indeed want to punish Spain, then in Lord Cochrane He had found Himself a most lethal instrument. Cochrane, when master of a small Royal Naval sloop, and at the very beginnings of the French wars when Spain had still been allied with France, had captured a Spanish frigate that outgunned and outmanned him six to
one. From that moment he had become a scourge of the seas, defying every Spanish or French attempt to thwart him. In the end his defeat had not come at the hands of Britain’s enemies, but of its courts, which had imprisoned him for fraud. He had fled the country in disgrace, to become the Admiral of the Chilean Republic’s Navy and such was Cochrane’s reputation that, as even the
Espiritu Santo
’s officers were forced to admit, no Spanish ship dared sail alone north of Valdivia, and those ships that sailed the waters south of Valdivia, like the
Espiritu Santo
herself, had better be well armed.
“And we are well armed!” the frigate’s officers liked to boast. Captain Ardiles exercised the
Espiritu Santo
’s gun crews incessantly so that the passengers became sick of the heavy guns’ concussion that shook the very frame of the big ship. Ardiles, perhaps enjoying the passengers’ discomfort, demanded ever faster service of the guns, and was willing to expend powder barrel after powder barrel and roundshot after roundshot in his search for the perfection that would let him destroy Cochrane in battle. The frigate’s officers, enthused by their reclusive Captain’s quest for efficiency, boasted that they would beat Cochrane’s ships to pulp, capture Cochrane himself, then parade the devil through Madrid to expose him to the jeers of the citizens before he was garotted in slow agony.
Sharpe listened, smiled and made no attempt to mention that Lord Cochrane had fought scores of shipborne battles, while Ardiles, for all his gun practices, had never faced a real warship in a fight. Ardiles had merely skirmished with coastal brigs and pinnaces that were a fraction of the
Espiritu Santo
’s size. Captain Ardiles’s dreams of victory were therefore wild, but not nearly so fantastic as the other stories that began to flourish among the
Espiritu Santo
’s nervous passengers as the ship sailed ever closer to the tip of South America.
Neither Colonel Ruiz nor any of his officers had been posted to Chile before, yet they knew it to be a place of giants, of one-legged men who could run faster than racehorses, of birds larger than elephants, of serpents that could swallow a whole herd of cattle, of fish that could tear the flesh from a man’s bones in seconds, and of forests that were home to tribes of savages who could kill with a glance. In the mountains, so it was reliably said, were tribes of cannibals who used women of an unearthly beauty to lure men to their feasting pots. There were lakes of fire and rivers of blood. It was a land of winged demons and daylight vampires. There were deserts and glaciers, scorpions and unicorns, fanged whales and poisonous sea serpents. Ruiz’s regimental priest, a fat syphilitic drunkard who wept when he thought of the terrors awaiting him, knelt before the crucifix nailed to the
Espiritu Santo
’s mainmast and swore he would reform and be good if only the mother of Christ would spare him from the devils of Chile. No wonder Cochrane was so successful, the priest told Harper, when he had such devilish magic on his side.
The weather became as wild as the stories. It was supposed to be summer in these southern latitudes, yet more than one dawn brought hissing sleet showers and a thick frost which clung like icy mildew in the sheltered nooks of the
Espiritu Santo
’s upper decks. Huge seas, taller than the lanterns on the poop, thundered from astern. The tops of such waves were maelstroms of churning white water which seethed madly as they crashed and foamed under the frigate’s stern.
Most of the Spanish artillery officers succumbed to seasickness. Few of the sick men had the energy to climb on deck and, in front of the scornful sailors, lower their breeches to perch on the beakhead, so instead the passengers voided their bellies and bowels into buckets that
slopped and spilled until the passenger accommodations stank like a cesspit. The food did not help the ship’s well-being. At Saint Helena the
Espiritu Santo
had stocked up with yams which had by now liquefied into rancid bags, while most of the ship’s meat, inadequately salted in Spain, was wriggling with maggots. The drinking water was fouled. There were weevils in the bread. Even the wine was sour.
Sharpe and Harper, crammed together in a tiny cabin scarcely big enough for a dog, were luckier than most passengers, for neither man was seasick, and both were so accustomed to soldiers’ food that a return to half-rotted seamen’s rations gave no offense. They ate what they could, which was not much, and Harper even lost weight so that, by the time the
Espiritu Santo
hammered into a sleety wind near Cape Horn, the Irishman could almost walk through the cabin door without touching the frame on either side.
“I’m shriveling away, so I am,” he complained as the frigate quivered from the blow of a great sea. “I’ll be glad when we reach land, devils or no devils, and there’ll be some proper food to eat. Christ, but it’s cold up there!”
“No mermaids in sight?”
“Only a three-horned sea serpent.” The grotesque stories of the fearful Spanish army officers had become a joke between the two men. “It’s bad up there,” Harper warned more seriously. “Filthy bad.”
Sharpe went on deck a few moments later to find that conditions were indeed bad. The ocean was a white shambles, blown ragged by a freezing wind that came slicing off the icesheets which lay to the south. The
Espiritu Santo
, its sails furled down to mere dark scraps, labored and thumped and staggered against the weather’s malevolence. Sharpe, tired of being cooped up in the stinking ’tweendecks, and wanting some fresh air, steadied himself against the quarterdeck’s starboard carronade. There were few other people on
deck, merely a handful of sailors who crouched in the lee scuppers, two men who were draped in tarpaulin capes by the wheel, and a solitary cloaked figure who clung to a shroud on the weather side of the poop.
The cloaked man, seeing Sharpe, carefully negotiated a passage across the wet and heaving deck, and Sharpe, to his astonishment, saw that it was the reclusive Captain Ardiles, who had not been seen by any of the passengers since the
Espiritu Santo
had left Saint Helena.
“Cape Horn!” Ardiles shouted, pointing off to starboard.
Sharpe stared. For a long time he could see nothing, then an explosion of shredded water betrayed where a black scrap of rock resisted the pounding waves.
“That’s the last scrap of good earth that many a sailorman saw before he drowned!” Ardiles spoke with a gloomy relish, then clutched at the tarred rigging as the
Espiritu Santo
fell sideways into the green heart of a wave’s trough. He waited till the frigate had recovered and was laboring up a great slope of savaged white sea. “So what did you think of Napoleon?” Ardiles asked Sharpe.
Sharpe hesitated, wanting his answer to be precise. “He put me in mind of a man who has played a hugely successful joke on people he despises.”
Ardiles, who had flat, watchful eyes in a hungry, cadaverous face, thought about Sharpe’s answer, then shrugged. “Maybe. But I think he should have been executed for his joke.”
Sharpe said nothing. He could see the waves breaking on Cape Horn more clearly now, and could just make out the loom of a black cliff beyond the battered water. God, he thought, but this is a fearful place.
“They made me sick!” Ardiles said suddenly.
“Sick?” Sharpe had only half heard Ardiles’s scathing
words and had assumed that the frigate’s Captain was talking about the seasickness that afflicted most of the army officers.
“Ruiz and the others! Fawning over that man! Jesus! But Bonaparte was our enemy. He did enough damage to Spain! If it were not for Bonaparte you think there’d be any rebellion in South America? He encouraged it! And how many more Spaniards will die for that man’s evil? Yet these bastards bowed and scraped to him. Given half a chance they’d have licked his bum cleaner than a nun’s finger!”
Sharpe staggered as the ship rolled. A rattle of sleet and foam shot down the deck and slammed into the poop. “I can’t say I wasn’t impressed by meeting Bonaparte!” he shouted in defense of the Spanish army officers. “He’s been my enemy long enough, but I felt privileged to be there. I even liked him!”
“That’s because you’re English! Your women weren’t raped by those French bastards, and your children weren’t killed by them!” Ardiles stared balefully into the trough of a scummy wave that roared under the
Espiritu Santo
’s counter. “So what did you talk about when you were alone with him?”
“Waterloo.”
“Just Waterloo?” Ardiles seemed remarkably suspicious.
“Just that,” Sharpe said, with an air of irritation, for it was none of Ardiles’s business what he and a stricken Emperor had discussed.
Ardiles, sensing he had offended Sharpe, changed the subject by waving a hand toward the cabins where Ruiz’s artillery officers sheltered from the storm in their vomit-rinsed misery. “What do you think of officers who don’t share their men’s discomforts?”
Sharpe believed that officers who abandoned their men were officers on their way to defeat, but tact kept him from saying as much to the sardonic Ardiles, so instead he made
some harmless comment about being no expert on Spanish shipping arrangements.
“I think such officers are bastards!” Ardiles had to shout to be heard over the numbing sound of the huge seas. “The only reason they sailed on this ship is because the voyage will be six or eight weeks shorter! Which means they can reach the whorehouses of Valdivia ahead of their Sergeants,” Ardiles spat into the scuppers. “They’re good whorehouses, too. Too good for these bastards.”
“You know Chile well?” Sharpe asked.
“Well enough! I’ve visited twice a year for three years. They use my ship as a passenger barge! Instead of letting me look for Cochrane and beating the shit out of him, they insist that I sail back and forth between Spain and Valdivia! Back and forth! Back and forth! It’s a waste of a good ship! This is the largest and best frigate in the Spanish Navy and they waste it on ferrying shit like Ruiz!” Ardiles scowled down into the frigate’s waist where the green water surged and broke ragged about the lashed guns, then he turned his saturnine gaze back to Sharpe. “You’re looking for Captain-General Vivar, yes?”
“I am, yes.” Sharpe was not surprised that Ardiles knew his business, for he had made no secret of his quest, yet he was taken aback by the abrupt and jeering manner of the Captain’s asking and Sharpe’s reply had consequently been guarded, almost hostile.
Ardiles leaned closer to Sharpe. “I knew Vivar! I even liked him! But he was not a tactful man. Most of the army officers in Chile thought he was too clever. They had their own ideas on how the war should be lost, but Vivar was proving them wrong, and they didn’t like him for that.”
“Are you saying that his own side killed him?”
Ardiles shook his head. “I think he was killed by the rebels. He was probably wounded in the ambush, his horse
galloped into deep timber, and he fell off. His body’s probably still out there, ripped apart by animals and chewed by birds. The oddest part of the whole thing, to my mind, is why he was out there with such a small escort. There were only fifteen men with him!”
“He was always a brave man,” said Sharpe, who had not heard just how small the escort had been and now hid his surprise. Why would a Captain-General travel with such a tiny detachment? Even in country he thought safe?
“Maybe more foolish than brave?” Ardiles suggested. “My own belief is that he had an arrangement to meet the rebels, and that they double-crossed him.”
Sharpe, who had convinced himself that Don Blas had been murdered by his own people, found this new idea grotesque. “Are you saying he was a traitor?”
“He was a patriot, but he was playing with fire.” Ardiles paused, as though debating whether to say more, then he must have decided that his revelation could do no harm. “I tell you a strange thing, Englishman. Two months after Vivar arrived in Chile he ordered me to take him to Talcahuana. That means nothing to you, so I shall explain.
“It is a peninsula, close to Concepción, and inside rebel territory. His Excellency’s staff told Don Blas it was not safe to go there, but he scoffed at such timidity. I thought it was my chance to fight against Cochrane, so I went gladly. But two days north of Valdivia we struck bad weather. It was awful! We could not go anywhere near land; instead we rode out the storm at sea for four days. After that Don Blas still insisted on going to Talcahuana. We anchored off Punta Tombes and Don Blas went ashore on his own. On his own! He refused an escort. He just took a fowling-piece! He said he wanted to prove that a nobleman of Spain could hunt freely wherever His Spanish Majesty ruled in this world. Six hours later he came back with two brace of duck, and
ordered me back to Valdivia. So what? You are asking. I will tell you what! I myself thought it was merely bravado. After all, he had made me sail for a week through waters patroled by the rebel navy, but later I heard rumors that Don Blas had gone ashore to meet those rebels. To talk with them. I don’t know if that is true, but on my voyage home with the news of Don Blas’s disappearance, we captured a rebel pinnace with a dozen men aboard and two of them told me that the devil Cochrane himself had been waiting to meet Don Blas, but that after two days they decided he was not coming, and so Cochrane went away.”
“You believed them?”
Ardiles shrugged. “Do dying men tell lies or truth? My belief, Englishman, is that they were telling the truth, and I think Don Blas died when he tried to resurrect the meeting with the rebels. But you believe Don Blas to be alive, yes?”
Sharpe hesitated, but Ardiles had favored him with a revelation, and Sharpe’s truth was nowhere near so dangerous, so he told it. “No.”
“So why are you here?”
“Because I’ve been paid to look for him. Maybe I shall find his dead body?” Because even that, Sharpe had decided, would give Louisa some small comfort. It would, at the very least, offer her certainty and if Sharpe could arrange to have the body carried home to Spain then Louisa could bury Don Blas in his family’s vault in the great cathedral in Santiago de Compostela.
Ardiles scoffed at Sharpe’s mild hopes. He waved northward through the spitting sleet and the spume and the wild waves’ turmoil. “That’s a whole continent up there! Not an English farmyard! You won’t find a single body in a continent, Englishman, not if someone else has decided to hide it.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because if my tale of carrying Don Blas to meet the rebels is right, then Don Blas was not just a soldier, but a soldier playing politics, and that’s a more dangerous pastime than fighting. Besides, if the Spanish high command decides not to help you, how will you achieve anything?”
“By bribes?” Sharpe suggested.
Ardiles laughed. “I wish you luck, Englishman, but if you’re offering money they’ll just tell you what you want to hear until you’ve no money left, then they’ll clean their knife blades in your guts. Take my advice! Vivar’s dead! Go home!”
Sharpe crouched against a sudden attack of wind-slathered foam that shrieked down the deck and smashed white against the helmsman and his companion. “What I don’t understand,” Sharpe shouted when the sea had sucked itself out of the scuppers, “is why the rebels haven’t boasted about Don Blas’s death! If you’re a rebel and you kill or capture your enemy’s commander, why keep it a secret? Why not trumpet your success?”
“You expect sense out of Chile?” Ardiles asked cynically.
Sharpe ducked again as the wind flailed more salt foam across the quarterdeck. “Don Blas’s widow doesn’t believe it was the rebels who attacked her husband. She thinks it was Captain-General Bautista.”
Ardiles looked grimmer than ever. “Then Don Blas’s widow had best keep her thoughts to herself. Bautista is not a man to antagonize. He has pride, a memory and a taste for cruelty.”
“And for corruption?” Sharpe asked.
Ardiles paused, as though weighing the good sense of continuing this conversation, then he shrugged. “Miguel Bautista is the prince of thieves, but that doesn’t mean he won’t one day be the ruler of Spain. How else do men become great, except by extortion and fear? I will give you some
advice, Englishman,” Ardiles’s voice had become fierce with intensity, “don’t make an enemy of Bautista. You hear me?”
“Of course.” The warning seemed extraordinary to Sharpe, a testimony to the real fear that Miguel Bautista, Vivar’s erstwhile enemy, inspired.
Ardiles suddenly grinned, as though he wanted to erase the grimness of his last words. “The trouble with Don Blas, Englishman, was that he was very close to being a saint. He was an honorable man, and you know what happens to honorable men—they prove to be an embarrassment. This world isn’t governed by honorable men, but by lawyers and politicians, and whenever such scum come across an honest man they have to kill him.” The ship shuddered as a huge wave smashed ragged down the port gunwale. Ardiles laughed at the weather’s malevolence, then looked again at Sharpe. “Take my advice, Englishman. Go home! I’ll be sailing back to Spain in a week’s time, which gives you just long enough to visit the
chingana
behind the church in Valdivia, after which you should sail home to your wife.”
“The
chingana?
” Sharpe asked.
“A
chingana
is where you go for a
chingada
,” Ardiles said unhelpfully. “A
chingana
is either a tavern that sells whores, or a whorehouse that sells liquor, and the
chingana
behind the church in Valdivia has half-breed girls who give
chingadas
that leave men gasping for life. It’s the best whorehouse for miles. You know how you can tell which is the best whorehouse in a Spanish town?”
“Tell me.”
“It’s the one where all the priests go, and this one is where the Bishop goes! So visit the mestizo whores, then go home and tell Vivar’s wife that her husband’s body was eaten by wild pigs!”
But Sharpe had not been paid to go home and tell stories. He had taken Doña Louisa’s money, and he was far from
home, and he would not go back defeated. He would find Don Blas, no matter how deep the forest or high the hill. If Don Blas still had form, then Sharpe would find it.
He had sworn as much, and he would keep his promise. He would find Don Blas.

 

A
lbatrosses ghosted alongside the
Espiritu Santo
’s rigging. The frigate, Cape Horn left far behind her, was sailing before a friendly wind on a swirling current of icy water. Dolphins followed her, while whales surfaced and rolled on either flank.

“Christ, but there’s some meat on those bloody fish!” Harper said in admiration as a great whale plunged past the
Espiritu Santo
. The ship was sailing north along the Chilean coast, out of sight of land, though the proximity of the shore was marked by the towering white clouds that heaped above the Andes. Inshore, the sailors said, were yet stranger creatures—penguins and sea lions, mermaids and turtles—but the frigate was staying well clear of the uncharted Chilean coastline so that Harper, to his regret, was denied a chance of glimpsing such monsters. Ardiles, still hoping to capture his own monster, Lord Cochrane, continued to exercise his guns even though his men were already as well trained as any gunners Sharpe had ever seen.
Yet it seemed there was to be no victory over the devil Cochrane on this voyage, for the
Espiritu Santo
’s lookouts saw no other ships till the frigate at last closed on the land. Then the lookouts glimpsed a harmless fleet of small fishing vessels that dragged their nets through the cold offshore rollers. The men aboard the fishing boats claimed not to have seen any rebel warships. “Though God only knows if they’re telling the truth,” Lieutenant Otero told Sharpe. Land was still out of sight, but everyone on board knew that the voyage was ending. Seamen were repairing their clothes, sewing up
huge rents in breeches and darning their shirts in readiness to meet the girls of Valdivia. “One day more, just one day more,” Lieutenant Otero told Sharpe after the noon sight, and sure enough, next dawn, Sharpe woke to see the dark streak of land filling the eastern horizon.
That afternoon, under a faltering wind, a friendly tide helped the
Espiritu Santo
into Valdivia’s harbor. Sharpe and Harper stood on deck and stared at the massive fortifications that guarded this last Spanish stronghold on the Chilean coast. The headland that protected the harbor was crowned by Fort Ingles, which in turn could lock its cannonfire with the guns of Fort San Carlos. Both forts lay under the protection of the artillery in the Chorocomayo fort which had been built on the headland’s highest point. Beyond San Carlos, and still on the headland that formed the harbor’s western side, lay Fort Amargos and Corral Castle. The
Espiritu Santo
’s First Lieutenant proudly pointed out each succeeding stronghold as the frigate edged her way around the headland. “In Chile,” Otero explained yet again, “armies move by sea because the roads are so bad, but no army could ever take Valdivia unless they first capture this harbor, and I just wish Cochrane would try to capture it! We’d destroy him!”
Sharpe believed him, for there were yet more defenses to add their guns to the five forts of the western shore. Across the harbor mouth, where the huge Pacific swells shattered white on dark rocks, was the biggest fort of all, Fort Niebla, while in the harbor’s center, head on to any attacking ships, lay the guns and ramparts of Manzanera Island. The harbor would be a trap, sucking an attacker inside to where he would be ringed with high guns hammering heated shot down onto his wooden decks.
Only two of the forts, Corral Castle and Fort Niebla, were modern stone-walled forts. The other forts were little more than glorified gun emplacements protected by ditches and
timber walls, yet their cannons could make the harbor into a killing ground of overlapping gunnery zones. “If we were an enemy ship,” Otero boasted of the ring of artillery, “we would be in hell by now.”
“Where’s the town?” Sharpe asked. Valdivia was supposed to be the major remaining Spanish garrison in Chile, yet to Sharpe’s surprise, the great array of forts seemed to be protecting nothing but a stone quay, some tarred sheds and a row of fishermen’s hovels.
“The town’s upstream.” Otero pointed to what Sharpe had taken for a bay just beside Fort Niebla. “That’s the river mouth and the town’s fifteen miles inland. You’ll be dropped at the north quay where you find a boatman to take you upstream. They’re dishonest people, and they’ll try to charge you five dollars. You shouldn’t pay more than one.”
“The
Espiritu Santo
won’t go upstream?”
“The river’s too shallow.” Lieutenant Otero, who had charge of the frigate, paused to listen to the leadsman who was calling the depth. “Sometimes the boatmen will take you halfway and then threaten to put you ashore in the wilderness if you won’t pay more money. If that happens, the best thing to do is to shoot one of the Indian crew members. No one objects to the killing of a savage, and you’ll find the death has a remarkably salutary effect on the other boatmen.”
Otero turned away to tend to the ship. Fort Niebla was firing a salute which one of the long nine pounders at the frigate’s bow returned. The gunfire echoed flatly from the steep hills where a few stunted trees were permanently windbent toward the north. Seamen were streaming aloft to furl the sails after their long passage. There was a crash as the starboard anchor was struck loose, then a grating rumble as fathoms of chain clattered through the hawse. The fragrant scents of the land vainly tried to defeat the noxious carapace of the
Espiritu Santo
’s cesspit-laced-with-powder
stench. The frigate, her salute fired, checked as the anchor bit into the harbor’s bottom, then turned as the tide pulled the fouled hull slowly around. The smoke of the gun salute writhed and drifted across the bay. “Welcome to Chile,” Otero said.
“Can you believe it?” Harper said with amazement. “We’re in the New World!”
An hour later, their seabags and money chest under the guard of two burly seamen, Sharpe and Harper stepped ashore onto the New World. They had reached their voyage’s end in the quaking land of giants and pygmies, of unicorns and ghouls, in the rebellious land that lay under the volcanoes’ fire and the devil’s flail. They were in Chile.

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