SHARPE’S
DEVIL
Richard Sharpe and the Emperor, 1820-21
BERNARD CORNWELL

Copyright

This novel is a work of fiction. The incidents and some of the characters portrayed in it, while based on real historical events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1992

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 1992

Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007235179

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2010 ISBN: 9780007334544

Version: 2017-05-06

Sharpe’s Devil is for Toby and Isabel Eady

‘Sharpe and his creator are national treasures’

Sunday Telegraph

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

Prologue

Part One: Bautista

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Two: Cochrane

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Three: Vivar

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Epilogue

Historical Note

Sharpe’s Story

Keep Reading

About the Author

The SHARPE Series (in chronological order)

The SHARPE Series (in order of publication)

Also by Bernard Cornwell

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

There were sixteen men and only twelve mules. None of the men was willing to abandon the journey, so tempers were edgy and not made any better by the day’s oppressive and steamy heat. The sixteen men were waiting by the shore, where the black basalt cliffs edged the small port and where there was no wind to relieve the humidity. Somewhere in the hills there sounded a grumble of thunder.

All but one of the sixteen men were uniformed. They stood sweltering and impatient in the shade of heavily branched evergreen trees while the twelve mules, attended by black slaves, drooped beside a briar hedge that was brilliant with small white roses. The sun, climbing towards noon, shimmered in an atmosphere that smelt of roses, pomegranates, seaweed, myrtle and sewage.

Two warships, their square-cut sails turned dirty grey by the long usage of wind and rain, patrolled far offshore. Closer, in the anchorage itself, a large Spanish frigate lay to twin anchors. It was not a good anchorage, for the ocean’s swells were scarcely vitiated by the embracing shore, nor was the water at the quayside deep enough to allow a great ship to moor alongside, and so the sixteen men had come ashore in the Spanish frigate’s longboats. Now they waited in the oppressive windless heat. In one of the houses just beyond the rose-bright hedge a baby cried.

‘More mules are being fetched. If you gentlemen will do us the honour of patience? And accept our sincerest apologies.’ The speaker, a very young red-coated British Lieutenant whose face was running with sweat, displayed too much contrition. ‘We didn’t expect sixteen gentlemen, you understand, only fourteen, though of course there would still have been insufficient transport, but I have spoken with the adjutant, and he assures me that extra mules are being saddled, and we do apologize for the confusion.’ The Lieutenant had spoken in a rush of words, but now abruptly stopped as it dawned on him that most of the sixteen travellers would not have understood a word he had spoken. The Lieutenant blushed, then turned to a tall, scarred and dark-haired man who wore a faded uniform jacket of the British 95th Rifles. ‘Can you translate for me, sir?’

‘More mules are coming,’ the Rifleman said in laconic, but fluent Spanish. It had been nearly six years since the Rifleman had last used the language regularly, yet thirty-eight days on a Spanish ship had made him fluent again. He turned again to the Lieutenant. ‘Why can’t we walk to the house?’

‘It’s all of five miles, sir, uphill, and very steep.’ The Lieutenant pointed to the hillside above the trees where a narrow road could just be seen zig-zagging perilously up the flax-covered slope. ‘You really are best advised to wait for the mules, sir.’

The tall Rifle officer made a grunting noise, which the young Lieutenant took for acceptance of his wise advice. ‘Sir?’ The Lieutenant, emboldened by the grunting noise, took a step closer to the Rifleman.

‘What?’

‘I just wondered.’ The Lieutenant, overwhelmed by the Rifleman’s scowl, stepped back. ‘Nothing, sir. It doesn’t signify.’

‘For God’s sake, boy, speak up! I won’t bite you.’

‘It was my father, sir. He often spoke of you and I wondered if you might recall him? He was at Salamanca, sir. Hardacre? Captain Roland Hardacre?’

‘No.’

‘He died at San Sebastian?’ Lieutenant Hardacre added pathetically, as though that last detail might revive his father’s image in the Rifleman’s memory.

The scarred Rifleman made another grunting noise that might have been translated as sympathy, but was in fact the inadequate sound of a man who never knew how to react properly to such revelations. So many men had died, so many widows still wept and so many children would be for ever fatherless that the Rifleman doubted there would ever be sufficient pity for all the war’s doings. ‘I didn’t know him, Lieutenant, I’m sorry.’

‘It was truly an honour to meet you anyway, sir,’ Lieutenant Hardacre said, then stepped gingerly backwards as though he might yet be attacked by the tall man whose black hair bore a badger streak of white and whose dark face was slashed by a jagged scar. The Rifleman, who was wishing he could respond more easily and sympathetically to such appeals to his memory, was called Richard Sharpe. His uniform, that might have looked shabby on a beggar’s back, bore the faded insignia of a Major, though at the war’s end, when he had fought at the greatest widowmaking field of all, he had been a Lieutenant Colonel. Now, despite his uniform and the sword which hung at his side, he was just plain mister and a farmer.

Sharpe turned away from the embarrassed Lieutenant to stare morosely across the sun-glinting sea at the far ships which guarded this lonely, godforsaken coast. Sharpe’s scar gave him a sardonic and mocking look. His companion, on the other hand, had a cheerful and genial face. He was a very tall man, even taller than Sharpe himself, and was the only man among the sixteen travellers not wearing a uniform. Instead he was dressed in a brown wool coat and black breeches that were far too thick for this tropical heat and, in consequence, the tall man, who was also hugely fat, was sweating profusely. The discomfort had evidently not affected his cheerfulness, for he gazed happily about himself at the dark cliffs, at the banyan trees, at the slave huts, at the rain clouds swelling above the black volcanic peaks, at the sea, at the small town, and at last delivered himself of his considered verdict. ‘A rare old shitheap of a place, wouldn’t you say?’ The fat man, who was called Mister Patrick Harper and was Sharpe’s companion on this voyage, had expressed the exact same sentiment at dawn when, as their ship crept on a small wind to the island’s anchorage, the first light had revealed the unappealing landscape.

‘It’s more than the bastard deserves,’ Sharpe replied, but without much conviction; merely in the tone of a man making conversation to pass the time.

‘It’s still a shitheap. How in Christ’s name did they ever find the place? That’s what I want to know. God in his heaven, but we’re a million miles from anywhere on earth, so we are!’

‘I suppose a ship was off course and bumped into the bloody place.’

Harper fanned his face with the brim of his broad hat. ‘I wish they’d bring the bloody mules. I’m dying of the bloody heat, so I am. It must be a fair bit cooler up in them hills.’

‘If you weren’t so fat,’ Sharpe said mildly, ‘we could walk.’

‘Fat! I’m just well made, so I am.’ The response, immediate and indignant, was well practised, so that if any man had been listening he would have instantly realized that this was an old and oft-repeated altercation between the two men. ‘And what’s wrong with being properly made?’ Harper continued. ‘Mother of Christ, just because a man lives well there’s no need to make remarks about the evidence of his health! And look at yourself! The Holy Ghost has more beef on its bones than you do. If I boiled you down I wouldn’t get so much as a pound of lard for my trouble. You should eat like I do!’ Patrick Harper proudly thumped his chest, thus setting off a seismic quiver of his belly.

‘It isn’t the eating,’ Sharpe said. ‘It’s the beer.’

‘Stout can’t make you fat!’ Patrick Harper was deeply offended. He had been Sharpe’s sergeant for most of the French wars and now, as then, Sharpe could think of no one he would rather have beside him in a fight. But in the years since the wars the Irishman had run a hostelry in Dublin. ‘And a man has to be seen drinking his own wares,’ Harper would explain defensively, ‘because it gives folks a confidence in the quality of what a man sells, so it does. Besides, Isabella likes me to have a bit of flesh on my bones. It shows I’m healthy, she says.’

‘That must make you the healthiest bugger in Dublin!’ Sharpe said, but without malice. He had not seen his friend for over three years and had been shocked when Harper had arrived in France with a belly wobbling like a sack of live eels, a face as round as the full moon and legs as thick as howitzer barrels. Sharpe himself, five years after the battle of Waterloo, could still wear his old uniform. Indeed, this very morning, taking the uniform from his sea chest, he had been forced to stab a new hole in the belt of his trousers to save them from collapsing round his ankles. He wore another belt over his jacket, but this one merely to support his sword. It felt very strange to have the weapon hanging at his side again. He had spent most of his life as a soldier, from the age of sixteen until he was thirty-eight, but in the last few years he had become accustomed to a farmer’s life. From time to time he might carry a gun to scare the rooks out of Lucille’s orchard or to take a hare for the pot, but he had long abandoned the big sword to its decorative place over the fireplace in the château’s hall, where Sharpe had hoped it would stay forever.

Except now he was wearing the sword again, and the uniform, and he was once more in the company of soldiers. And also of sixteen mules because four more animals had at last been found and led to the waiting men who, trying to keep their dignity, clumsily straddled the mangy beasts. The black slaves tried not to show their amusement as Patrick Harper clambered onto an animal that looked only half his own size, yet which somehow sustained his weight.

An English Major, a choleric-looking man mounted on a black mare, led the way out of the small town and onto the narrow road which made its tortuous way up the towering mountainside towards the island’s interior. The slopes on either side of the road were green with tall flax plants. A lizard, iridescent in the sunlight, darted across Sharpe’s path and one of the slaves, who was following close behind the mounted men, darted after the animal.

‘I thought slavery had been abolished?’ commented Harper, who had evidently forgiven Sharpe for the remarks about his fatness.

‘In Britain, yes,’ Sharpe said, ‘but this isn’t British territory.’

‘It isn’t? What the hell is it then?’ Harper asked indignantly, and indeed, if the island did not belong to Britain then it seemed ridiculous for it to be so thickly inhabited with British troops. Off to their left was a barracks where three companies of redcoats were being drilled on the parade ground, to their right a group of scarlet-coated officers were exercising their horses on a hill slope, while ahead, where the valley climbed out of the thick flax into the bare uplands, a guardpost straddled the road beside an idle semaphore station. The flag above the guardpost was the British Union flag. ‘Are you telling me this might be Irish land?’ Harper asked with heavy sarcasm.

‘It belongs to the East India Company,’ Sharpe explained patiently. ‘It’s a place where they can supply their ships.’

‘It looks bloody English to me, so it does. Except for them black fellows. You remember that darkie we had in the grenadier company? Big fellow? Died at Toulouse?’

Sharpe nodded. The black fellow had been one of the battalion’s few casualties at Toulouse; killed a week after the peace treaty had been signed, only no one at the time knew of it.

‘I remember he got drunk at Burgos,’ Harper said. ‘We put him on a charge and he still couldn’t stand up straight when we marched him in for punishment next morning. What the hell was his name? Tall fellow, he was. You must remember him. He married Corporal Roe’s widow, and she got pregnant and Sergeant Finlayson was taking bets on whether the nipper would be white or black. What was his name, for Christ’s sake?’ Harper frowned in frustration. Ever since he had met Sharpe in France they had held conversations like this, trying to flesh out the ghosts of a past that was fast becoming attenuated.

‘Bastable.’ The name suddenly shot into Sharpe’s head. ‘Thomas Bastable.’

‘Bastable! That was him, right enough. He used to close his eyes whenever he fired a musket, and I never could get him out of the habit. He probably put more bullets into more angels than any soldier in history, God rest his soul. But he was a terror with the bayonet. Jesus, but he could be a terror with a spike!’

‘What colour was the baby?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Bit of both, as far as I remember. Like milky tea. Finlayson wouldn’t pay out till we had a quiet word with him behind the lines, but he was always a slippery bugger, Finlayson. Never did understand why you gave him the stripes.’ Harper fell silent as the small group of uniformed men approached a shuttered house that was surrounded with a neatly-trimmed hedge. Bright flowers grew in a border either side of a pathway made from crushed seashells. A gardener, who looked Chinese, was digging in the vegetable patch beside the house, while a young woman, fair-haired and white-dressed, sat reading under a gazebo close to the front hedge. She looked up, smiled a familiar greeting at the red-faced Major who led the convoy of mules, then stared with frank curiosity at the strangers. The Spanish officers bowed their heads gravely, Sharpe tipped his old-fashioned brown tricorne hat, while Harper offered her a cheerful smile. ‘It’s a fine morning, miss!’

‘Too hot, I think.’ Her accent was English, her voice gentle. ‘We’re going to have rain this afternoon.’

‘Better rain than cold. It’s freezing back home, so it is.’

The girl smiled, but did not respond again. She looked down at her book and slowly turned a page. Somewhere in the house a clock struck the tinkling chimes of midday. A cat slept on a windowsill.

The mules climbed slowly on towards the guardpost. They left the flax and the banyan trees and the myrtles behind, emerging onto a plateau where the grass was sparse and brown and the few trees stunted and wind-bent. Beyond the barren grassland were sudden saw-edged peaks, black and menacing, and on one of those rocky crags was a white-walled house which had the gaunt gallows of a semaphore station built on its roof. The semaphore house stood on the skyline and, because they were backed by the turbulent dark rainclouds, its white painted walls looked unnaturally bright. The semaphore machine beside the guardhouse on the road suddenly clattered into life, its twin black arms creaking as they jerked up and down.

‘They’ll be telling everyone that we’re coming,’ said Harper happily. He was finding every mundane event of this hot day exciting.

‘Like as not,’ Sharpe said.

The redcoats on duty at the guardpost saluted as the Spanish officers rode past. Some smiled at the sight of the monstrous Harper overlapping the struggling mule, but their faces turned to stone when Sharpe glowered at them. Christ, Sharpe thought, but these men must be bored. Stuck four thousand miles from home with nothing to do but watch the sea and the mountains and to wonder about the small house five miles from the anchorage. ‘You do realize,’ Sharpe said to Harper suddenly, and with a sour expression, ‘that we’re almost certainly wasting our time.’

‘Aye, maybe we are,’ Harper, accustomed to Sharpe’s sudden dark moods, replied with great equanimity, ‘but we still thought it worth trying, didn’t we? Or would you come all this way and stay locked up in your cabin? You can always turn back.’

Sharpe rode on without answering. Dust drifted back from his mule’s hooves. Behind him the telegraph gave a last clatter and was still. In a shallow valley to Sharpe’s left was another English encampment, while to his right, a mile away, a group of uniformed men exercised their horses. When they saw the approaching party of Spaniards they spurred away towards a house that lay isolated at the centre of the plateau and within a protective wall and a cordon of red-coated guards.

The horsemen, who were escorted by a single British officer, were not wearing the ubiquitous red coats of the island’s garrison, but instead wore dark blue uniforms. It had been five years since Sharpe had seen such uniform jackets worn openly. The men who wore that blue had once ruled Europe from Moscow to Madrid, but now their bright star had fallen and their sovereignty was confined to the yellow stucco walls of the lonely house which lay at this road’s end.

The yellow house was low and sprawling, and surrounded by dark, glossy-leaved trees and a rank garden. There was nothing cheerful about the place. It had been built as a cow shed, extended to become a summer cottage for the island’s Lieutenant Governor, but now, in the dying days of 1820, the house was home to fifty prisoners, ten horses and countless numbers of rats. The house was called Longwood, it lay in the very middle of the island of St Helena, and its most important prisoner had once been the Emperor of France.

Called Bonaparte.

They were not, after all, wasting their time.

It seemed that General Bonaparte had an avid appetite for visitors who could bring him news of the world beyond St Helena’s seventy square miles. He received such visitors after luncheon, and as his luncheon was always at eleven in the morning, and it was now twenty minutes after noon, the Spanish officers were told that if they cared to walk in the gardens for a few moments, his Majesty would receive them when he was ready.

Not General Bonaparte, which was the greatest dignity his British jailers would allow him, but his Majesty, the Emperor, would receive the visitors, and any visitor unwilling to address his Majesty as Votre Majesté was invited to straddle his mule and take the winding hill road back to the port of Jamestown.

The Captain of the Spanish frigate, a reclusive man called Ardiles, had bridled at the instruction, but had restrained his protest, while the other Spaniards, all of them army officers, had equably agreed to address his Majesty as majestically as he demanded. Now, as his Majesty finished luncheon, his compliant visitors walked in the gardens where toadstools grew thick on the lawn. Clouds, building up in the west, were reflected in the murky surfaces of newly-dug ponds. The English Major who had led the procession up to the plateau, and who evidently had no intention of paying any respects to General Bonaparte, had stepped in the deep mud of one of the pond banks, and now tried to scrape the dirt off his boots with his riding crop. There was a grumble of thunder from the heavy clouds above the white-walled semaphore station.

‘It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?’ Harper was as excited as a child taken to a country fair. ‘You remember when we first saw him? Jesus! It was raining that day, so it was.’ That first glimpse had been at the battlefield of Quatre Bras, two days before Waterloo, when Sharpe and Harper had seen the Emperor, surrounded by lancers, in the watery distance. Two days later, before the worst of the bloodletting began, they had watched Bonaparte ride a white horse along the French ranks. Now they had come to his prison and it was, as Harper had said, hard to believe that they were so close to the ogre, the tyrant, the scourge of Europe. And even stranger that Bonaparte was willing to receive them so that, for a few heart-stopping moments on this humid day, two old soldiers of Britain’s army would stand in the same stuffy room as Bonaparte and would hear his voice and see his eyes and go away to tell their children and their grandchildren that they had met Europe’s bogeyman face to face. They would be able to boast that they had not just fought against him for year after bitter year, but that they had stood, nervous as schoolboys, on a carpet in his prison house on an island in the middle of the South Atlantic.

Sharpe, even as he waited, found it hard to believe that Bonaparte would receive them. He had ridden all the way from Jamestown in the belief that this expedition would be met with a scornful refusal, but had consoled himself that it would be sufficient just to see the lair of the man who had once terrified all of Europe, and who was still used by women to frighten their children into obedience. But the uniformed men who opened Longwood’s gates had welcomed them and a servant now brought them a tray of weak lemonade. The servant apologized for such pale refreshment, explaining that his Majesty would have liked to serve his distinguished visitors with wine, but that his British jailers were too mean to grant him a decent supply, and so the lemonade would have to be sufficient. The Spanish officers turned dark reproving glances on Sharpe, who shrugged. Above the hills the thunder growled. The English Major, disdaining to mingle with the Spanish visitors, slashed with his riding crop at a glossy-leaved hedge.

After a half hour the sixteen visitors were ushered into the house itself. It smelt dank and musty. The wallpaper of the hallway and of the billiard room beyond was stained with damp. The pictures on the wall were black and white etchings, stained and fly-blown. The house reminded Sharpe of a poor country rectory that desperately pretended to a higher gentility than it could properly afford. It was certainly a pathetically far cry from the great marble floors and mirrored halls of Paris where Sharpe and Harper, after the French surrender in 1815, had joined the soldiers of all Europe to explore the palaces of a defeated and humiliated Empire. Then, in echoing halls of glory, Sharpe had climbed massive staircases where glittering throngs had once courted the ruler of France. Now Sharpe waited to see the same man in an anteroom where three buckets betrayed the fact that the house roof leaked, and where the green baize surface of a billiard table was as scuffed and faded as the Rifleman’s jacket that Sharpe had worn in special honour of this occasion.

They waited another twenty minutes. A clock ticked loudly, then wheezed as it gathered its strength to strike the half hour. Just as the clock’s bell chimed, two officers wearing French uniforms with badly tarnished gold braid came into the billiard room. One gave swift instructions in French which the other man translated into bad Spanish.

The visitors were welcome to meet the Emperor, but must remember to present themselves bareheaded to his Imperial Majesty.

The visitors must stand. The Emperor would sit, but no one else was allowed to sit in his Imperial Majesty’s presence.

No man must speak unless invited to do so by his Imperial Majesty.

And, the visitors were told once again, if a man was invited to speak with his Imperial Majesty then he must address the Emperor as votre Majesté. Failure to do so would lead to an immediate termination of the interview. Ardiles, the dark-faced Captain of the frigate, scowled at the reiterated command, but again made no protest at it.

Sharpe was fascinated by the tall, whip-thin Ardiles who took extraordinary precautions to avoid meeting his own passengers. Ardiles ate his meals alone, and was said to appear on deck only when the weather was appalling or during the darkest night watches when his passengers could be relied on to be either sick or asleep. Sharpe had met the Captain briefly when he had embarked on the Espiritu Santo in Cadiz, but to some of the Spanish army officers this visit to Longwood gave them their first glimpse of their frigate’s mysterious Captain.

The French officer who had translated the etiquette instructions into clumsy Spanish now looked superciliously at Sharpe and Harper. ‘Did you understand anything at all?’ he asked in a bad English accent.

‘We understood perfectly, thank you, and are happy to accept your instructions,’ Sharpe answered in colloquial French. The officer seemed startled, then gave the smallest nod of acknowledgement.

‘His Majesty will be ready soon,’ the first French officer said, and then the whole group waited in an awkward silence. The Spanish army officers, gorgeous in their uniforms, had taken off their bicorne hats in readiness for the imperial audience. Their boots creaked as they shifted their weight from foot to foot. A sword scabbard rapped against the bulbous leg of the billiard table. The sour Captain Ardiles, looking as malignant as a bishop caught unawares in a whorehouse, stared sourly out of the window at the black mountains, about which cannoned an ominous rumble of thunder. Harper rolled a billiard ball slowly down the table’s length. It bounced off the far cushion and slowed to a stop.

Then the double doors at the far end of the room were snatched open and a servant dressed in green and gold livery stood in the entrance. ‘The Emperor will receive you now,’ he said, then stood aside.

And Sharpe, his heart beating as fearfully as if he again walked into battle, went to meet an old enemy.

It was all so utterly different from everything Sharpe had anticipated. Later, trying to reconcile reality with expectation, Sharpe wondered just what he had thought to find inside the yellow-walled house. An ogre? A small toad-like man with smoke coming from his nostrils? A horned devil with bloody claws? But instead, standing on a hearth rug in front of an empty fireplace, Sharpe saw a short, stout man wearing a plain green riding coat with a velvet collar, black knee breeches and coarse white stockings. In the velvet lapel of the coat was a miniature medallion of the Légion d’Honneur.

All those details Sharpe noticed later, as the interview progressed, but his very first impression as he went through the door and shuffled awkwardly into line, was the shock of familiarity. This was the most famous face in the world, a face repeated on a million pictures, a million etchings, a million plates, a million coins. This was a face so familiar to Sharpe that it was truly astonishing to see it in reality. He involuntarily checked and gasped, causing Harper to push him onwards. The Emperor, recognizing Sharpe’s reaction, seemed to smile.

Sharpe’s second impression was of the Emperor’s eyes. They seemed full of amusement as though Bonaparte, alone of all the men in the room, understood that a jest was being played. The eyes belied the rest of Bonaparte’s face which was plump and oddly petulant. That petulance surprised Sharpe, as did the Emperor’s hair which alone was unlike his portraits. The hair was as fine and wispy as a child’s hair. There was something feminine and unsettling about that silky hair and Sharpe perversely wished that Bonaparte would cover it with the cocked hat he carried under his arm.

‘You are welcome, gentlemen,’ the Emperor greeted the Spanish officers, a pleasantry which was translated into Spanish by a bored-looking aide. The greeting prompted, from all but the disdainful Ardiles, a chorus of polite responses.

When all sixteen visitors had found somewhere to stand the Emperor sat in a delicate gilt chair. The room was evidently a drawing room, and was full of pretty furniture, but it was also as damp as the hallway and billiard room outside. The skirting boards, beneath the waterstained wallpaper, were disfigured by tin plates that had been nailed over rat holes and, in the silence that followed the Emperor’s greeting, Sharpe could hear the dry scratching of rats’ feet in the cavities behind the patched wall. The house was evidently infested as badly as any ship.

‘Tell me your business,’ the Emperor invited the senior Spanish officer present. That worthy, an artillery Colonel named Ruiz, explained in hushed tones how their vessel, the Spanish frigate Espiritu Santo, was on passage from Cadiz, carrying passengers to the Spanish garrison at the Chilean port of Valdivia. Ruiz then presented the Espiritu Santo’s Captain, Ardiles, who, with scarcely concealed hostility, offered the Emperor a stiffly reluctant bow. The Emperor’s aides, sensitive to the smallest sign of disrespect, shifted uneasily, but Bonaparte seemed not to notice or, if he did, not to care. Ardiles, asked by the Emperor how long he had been a seaman, answered as curtly as possible. Clearly the lure of seeing the exiled tyrant had overcome Ardiles’s distaste for the company of his passengers, but he was at pains not to show any sense of being honoured by the reception.

Bonaparte, never much interested in sailors, turned his attention back to Colonel Ruiz who formally presented the officers of his regiment of artillery who, in turn, bowed elegantly to the small man in the gilded chair. Bonaparte had a kindly word for each man, then turned his attention back to Ruiz. He wanted to know what impulse had brought Ruiz to St Helena. The Colonel explained that the Espiritu Santo, thanks to the superior skills of the Spanish Navy, had made excellent time on its southward journey and, being within a few days’ sailing of St Helena, the officers on board the Espiritu Santo had thought it only proper to pay their respects to his Majesty the Emperor.

In other words they could not resist making a detour to stare at the defanged beast chained to its rock, but Bonaparte took Ruiz’s flowery compliment at its face value. ‘Then I trust you will also pay your respects to Sir Hudson Lowe,’ he said drily. ‘Sir Hudson is my jailer. He, with five thousand men, seven ships, eight batteries of artillery, and the ocean which you gentlemen have crossed to do me this great honour.’

While the Spanish-speaking Frenchman translated the Emperor’s mixture of scorn for his jailers and insincere flattery for his visitors, Bonaparte’s eyes turned towards Sharpe and Harper who, alone in the room, had not been introduced. For a second Rifleman and Emperor stared into each other’s eyes, then Bonaparte looked back to Colonel Ruiz. ‘So you are reinforcements for the Spanish army in Chile?’

‘Indeed, your Majesty,’ the Colonel replied.

‘So your ship is also carrying your guns? And your gunners?’ Bonaparte asked.

‘Just the regiment’s officers,’ Ruiz replied. ‘Captain Ardiles’s vessel has been especially adapted to carry passengers, but alas she cannot accommodate a whole regiment. Especially of artillery.’

‘So the rest of your men are where?’ the Emperor asked.

‘They’re following on two transport ships,’ Ruiz said airily, ‘with their guns.’

‘Ah!’ The Emperor’s response was apparently a polite acknowledgement of the trivial answer, yet the silence which followed, and the fixity of his smile, were a sudden reproof to these Spaniards who had chosen the comfort of Ardiles’s fast frigate while leaving their men to the stinking hulks that would take at least a month longer than the Espiritu Santo to make the long, savage voyage around South America to where Spanish troops tried to reconquer Chile from the rebel government. ‘Let us hope the rest of your regiment doesn’t decide to pay me their respects.’ Bonaparte broke the slightly uncomfortable air that his unspoken criticism had caused. ‘Or else Sir Hudson will fear they have come to rescue me!’

Ruiz laughed, the other army officers smiled and Ardiles, perhaps hearing in the Emperor’s voice an edge of longing that the other Spaniards had missed, scowled.

‘So tell me,’ Bonaparte still spoke to Ruiz, ‘what are your expectations in Chile?’

Colonel Ruiz bristled with confidence as he expressed his eager conviction that the rebel Chilean forces and government would soon collapse, as would all the other insurgents in the Spanish colonies of South America, and that the rightful government of His Majesty King Ferdinand VII would thus be restored throughout Spain’s American dominions. The coming of his own regiment, the Colonel asserted, could only hasten that royal victory.

‘Indeed,’ the Emperor agreed politely, then moved the conversation to the subject of Europe, and specifically to the troubles of Spain. Bonaparte politely affected to believe the Colonel’s assurance that the liberals would not dare to revolt openly against the King, and his denial that the army, sickened by the waste of blood in South America, was close to mutiny. Indeed, Colonel Ruiz expressed himself full of hope for Spain’s future, relishing a monarchy growing ever more powerful, and fed ever more riches by its colonial possessions. The other artillery officers, keen to please their bombastic Colonel, nodded sycophantic agreement, though Captain Ardiles looked disgusted at Ruiz’s bland optimism and showed his scepticism by pointedly staring out of the window as he fanned himself with a mildewed cocked hat.

Sharpe, like all the other visitors, was sweating foully. The room was steamy and close, and none of its windows was open. The rain had at last begun to fall and a zinc bucket, placed close to the Emperor’s chair, suddenly rang as a drip fell from the leaking ceiling. The Emperor frowned at the noise, then returned his polite attention to Colonel Ruiz who had reverted to his favourite subject of how the rebels in Chile, Peru and Venezuela had overextended themselves and must inevitably collapse.

Sharpe, who had spent too many shipboard hours listening to the Colonel’s boasting, studied the Emperor instead of paying any attention to Ruiz’s long-winded bragging. By now Sharpe had recovered his presence of mind, no longer feeling dizzy just to be in the same small room as Bonaparte, and so he made himself examine the seated figure as though he could commit the man to memory for ever. Bonaparte was far fatter than Sharpe had expected. He was not as fat as Harper, who was fat like a bull or a prize boar is fat, but instead the Emperor was unhealthily bloated like a dead beast that was swollen with noxious vapours. His monstrous pot belly, waistcoated in white, rested on his spread thighs. His face was sallow and his fine hair was lank. Sweat pricked at his forehead. His nose was thin and straight, his chin dimpled, his mouth firm and his eyes extraordinary. Sharpe knew Bonaparte was fifty years old, yet the Emperor’s face looked much younger than fifty. His body, though, was that of an old sick man. It had to be the climate, Sharpe supposed, for surely no white man could keep healthy in such a steamy and oppressive heat. The rain was falling harder now, pattering on the yellow stucco wall and on the window, and dripping annoyingly into the zinc bucket. It would be a wet ride back to the harbour where the longboats waited to row the sixteen men back to Ardiles’s ship.

Sharpe gazed attentively about the room, knowing that when he was back home Lucille would demand to hear a thousand details. He noted how low the ceiling was, and how the plaster of the ceiling was yellowed and sagging, as if, at any moment, the roof might fall in. He heard the scrabble of rats again, and marked other signs of decay like the mildew on the green velvet curtains, the tarnish in the silvering of a looking glass, and the flaking of the gilt on its frame. Under the mirror a pack of worn playing cards lay carelessly strewn on a small round table beside a silver-framed portrait of a child dressed in an elaborate uniform. A torn cloak, lined with a check pattern, hung from a hook on the door. ‘And you, monsieur, you are no Spaniard, what is your business here?’

The Emperor’s question, in French, had been addressed to Sharpe who, taken aback and not concentrating, said nothing. The interpreter, assuming that Sharpe had misunderstood the Emperor’s accent, began to translate, but then Sharpe, suddenly dry-mouthed and horribly nervous, found his tongue. ‘I am a passenger on the Espiritu Santo, your Majesty. Travelling to Chile with my friend from Ireland, Mister Patrick Harper.’

The Emperor smiled. ‘Your very substantial friend?’

‘When he was my Regimental Sergeant Major he was somewhat less substantial, but just as impressive.’ Sharpe could feel his right leg twitching with fear. Why, for God’s sake? Bonaparte was just another man, and a defeated one at that. Moreover, the Emperor was a man, Sharpe tried to convince himself, of no account any more. The prefect of a small French département had more power than Bonaparte now, yet still Sharpe felt dreadfully nervous.

‘You are passengers?’ the Emperor asked in wonderment. ‘Going to Chile?’

‘We are travelling to Chile in the interests of an old friend. We go to search for her husband, who is missing in battle. It is a debt of honour, your Majesty.’

‘And you, monsieur?’ The question, in French, was addressed to Harper. ‘You travel for the same reason?’

Sharpe translated both the question and Harper’s answer. ‘He says that he found life after the war tedious; your Majesty, and thus welcomed this chance to accompany me.’

‘Ah! How well I understand tedium. Nothing to do but put on weight, eh?’ The Emperor lightly patted his belly, then looked back to Sharpe. ‘You speak French well, for an Englishman.’

‘I have the honour to live in France, your Majesty.’

‘You do?’ The Emperor sounded hurt and, for the first time since the visitors had come into the room, an expression of genuine feeling crossed Bonaparte’s face. Then he managed to cover his envy by a friendly smile. ‘You are accorded a privilege denied to me. Where in France?’

‘In Normandy, your Majesty.’

‘Why?’

Sharpe hesitated, then shrugged. ‘Une femme.’

The Emperor laughed so naturally that it seemed as though a great tension had snapped in the room. Even Bonaparte’s supercilious aides smiled. ‘A good reason,’ the Emperor said, ‘an excellent reason! Indeed, the only reason, for a man usually has no control over women. Your name, monsieur.’

‘Sharpe, your Majesty.’ Sharpe paused, then decided to try his luck at a more intimate appeal to Bonaparte. ‘I was a friend of General Calvet, of your Majesty’s army. I did General Calvet some small service in Naples before …’ Sharpe could not bring himself to say Waterloo, or even to refer to the Emperor’s doomed escape from Elba which, by route of fifty thousand deaths, had led to this damp, rat-infested room in the middle of oblivion. ‘I did the service,’ Sharpe continued awkwardly, ‘in the summer of ’14.’

Bonaparte rested his chin on his right hand and stared for a long time at the Rifleman. The Spaniards, resenting that Sharpe had taken over their audience with the exiled tyrant, scowled. No one spoke. A rat scampered behind the wainscot, rain splashed in the bucket, and the trade wind gusted sudden and loud in the chimney.

‘You will stay here, monsieur,’ Bonaparte said abruptly to Sharpe, ‘and we will talk.’

The Emperor, conscious of the Spaniards’ disgruntlement, turned back to Ruiz and complimented his officers on their martial appearance, then commiserated with their Chilean enemies for the defeat they would suffer when Ruiz’s guns finally arrived. The Spaniards, all except for the scowling Ardiles, bristled with gratified pride. Bonaparte thanked them all for visiting him, wished them well on their further voyage, then dismissed them. When they were gone, and when only Sharpe, Harper, an aide-de-camp and the liveried servant remained in the room, the Emperor pointed Sharpe towards a chair. ‘Sit. We shall talk.’

Sharpe sat. Beyond the windows the rain smashed malevolently across the uplands and drowned the newly-dug ponds in the garden. The Spanish officers waited in the billiard room, a servant brought wine to the audience room, and Bonaparte talked with a Rifleman.

The Emperor had nothing but scorn for Colonel Ruiz and his hopes of victory in Chile. ‘They’ve already lost that war, just as they’ve lost every other colony in South America, and the sooner they pull their troops out, the better. That man –’ this was accompanied by a dismissive wave of the hand towards the door through which Colonel Ruiz had disappeared ‘– is like a man whose house is on fire, but who is saving his piss to extinguish his pipe tobacco. From what I hear there’ll be a revolution in Spain within the year.’ Bonaparte made another scornful gesture at the billiard room door, then turned his dark eyes on Sharpe. ‘But who cares about Spain. Talk to me of France.’

Sharpe, as best he could, described the nervous weariness of France; how the royalists hated the liberals, who in turn distrusted the republicans, who detested the ultraroyalists, who feared the remaining Bonapartistes, who despised the clergy, who preached against the Orleanists. In short, it was a cocotte, a stew pot.

The Emperor liked Sharpe’s diagnosis. ‘Or perhaps it is a powder keg? Waiting for a spark?’

‘The powder’s damp,’ Sharpe said bluntly.

Napoleon shrugged. ‘The spark is feeble, too. I feel old. I am not old! But I feel old. You like the wine?’

‘Indeed, sir.’ Sharpe had forgotten to call Bonaparte votre Majesté, but His Imperial Majesty did not seem to mind.

‘It is South African,’ the Emperor said in wonderment. ‘I would prefer French wine, but of course the bastards in London won’t allow me any, and if my friends do send wine from France then that hog’s turd down the hill confiscates it. But this African wine is surprisingly drinkable, is it not? It is called Vin de Constance. I suppose they give it a French name to suggest that it has superb quality.’ He turned the stemmed glass in his hand, then offered Sharpe a wry smile. ‘But I sometimes dream of drinking a glass of my Chambertin again. You know I made my armies salute those grapes when they marched past the vineyards?’

‘So I have heard, sir.’

Bonaparte quizzed Sharpe. Where was he born? What had been his regiments? His service? His promotions? The Emperor professed surprise that Sharpe had been promoted from the ranks, and seemed reluctant to credit the Rifleman’s claim that one in every twenty British officers had been similarly promoted. ‘But in my army,’ Bonaparte said passionately, ‘you would have become a General! You know that?’

But your army lost, Sharpe thought, but was too polite to say as much, so instead he just smiled and thanked the Emperor for the implied compliment.

‘Not that you’d have been a Rifleman in my army,’ the Emperor provoked Sharpe. ‘I never had time for rifles. Too delicate a weapon, too fussy, too temperamental. Just like a woman!’

‘But soldiers like women, sir, don’t they?’

The Emperor laughed. The aide-de-camp, disapproving that Sharpe so often forgot to use the royal honorific, scowled, but the Emperor seemed relaxed. He teased Harper about his belly, ordered another bottle of the South African wine, then asked Sharpe just who it was that he sought in South America.

‘His name is Blas Vivar, sir. He is a Spanish officer, and a good one, but he has disappeared. I fought alongside him once, many years ago, and we became friends. His wife asked me to search for him.’ Sharpe paused, then shrugged. ‘She is paying me to search for him. She has received no help from her own government, and no news from the Spanish army.’

‘It was always a bad army. Too many officers, but good troops, if you could make them fight.’ The Emperor stood and walked stiffly to the window from where he stared glumly at the pelting rain. Sharpe stood as well, out of politeness, but Bonaparte waved him down. ‘So you know Calvet?’ The Emperor turned at last from the rain.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do you know his Christian name?’

Sharpe supposed the question was a test to determine if he was telling the truth. He nodded. ‘Jean.’

‘Jean!’ The Emperor laughed. ‘He tells people his name is Jean, but in truth he was christened Jean-Baptiste! Ha! The belligerent Calvet is named for the original head-wetter!’ Bonaparte gave a brief chuckle at the thought as he returned to his chair. ‘He’s living in Louisiana now.’

‘Louisiana?’ Sharpe could not imagine Calvet in America.

‘Many of my soldiers live there.’ Bonaparte sounded wistful. ‘They cannot stomach that fat man who calls himself the King of France, so they live in the New World instead.’ The Emperor shivered suddenly, though the room was far from cold, then turned his eyes back to Sharpe. ‘Think of all the soldiers scattered throughout the world! Like embers kicked from a camp fire. The lawyers and their panders who now rule Europe would like those embers to die down, but such fire is not so easily doused. The embers are men like our friend Calvet, and perhaps like you and your stout Irishman here. They are adventurers and combatants! They do not want peace; they crave excitement, and what the filthy lawyers fear, monsieur, is that one day a man might sweep those embers into a pile, for then their heat would feed on each other and they would burn so fiercely that they would scorch the whole world!’ Bonaparte’s voice had become suddenly fierce, but now it dropped again into weariness. ‘I do so hate lawyers. I do not think there was a single achievement of mine that a lawyer did not try to desiccate. Lawyers are not men. I know men, and I tell you I never met a lawyer who had real courage, a soldier’s courage, a man’s courage.’ The Emperor closed his eyes momentarily and, when he opened them, his expression was kindly again and his voice relaxed. ‘So you’re going to Chile?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Chile.’ He spoke the name tentatively, as though seeking a memory on the edge of consciousness. ‘I well recall the service you did me in Naples,’ the Emperor went on after a pause. ‘Calvet told me of it. Will you do me another service now?’

‘Of course, sir.’ Sharpe would later be amazed that he had so readily agreed without even knowing what the favour was, but by that moment he was under the spell of a Corsican magician who had once bewitched whole continents; a magician, moreover, who loved soldiers better than he loved anything else in all the world, and the Emperor had known what Sharpe was the instant the British Rifleman had walked into the room. Sharpe was a soldier, one of the Emperor’s beloved mongrels, a man able to march through shit and sleet and cold and hunger only to fight like a devil at the end of the day, then fight again the next day and the next, and the Emperor could twist such soldiers about his little finger with the ease of a master.

‘A man wrote to me. A settler in Chile. He is one of your countrymen, and was an officer in your army, but in the years since the wars he has come to hold some small admiration for myself.’ The Emperor smiled as though apologizing for such immodesty. ‘He asked that I would send him a keepsake, and I am minded to agree to his request. Would you deliver the gift for me?’

‘Of course, sir.’ Sharpe felt a small relief that the favour was of such a trifling nature, though another part of him was so much under the thrall of the Emperor’s genius that he might have agreed to hack a bloody path down St Helena’s hillside to the sea and freedom. Harper, sitting beside Sharpe, had the same look of adoration on his face.

‘I understand that this man, I can’t recall his name, is presently living in the rebel part of the country,’ the Emperor elaborated on the favour he was asking, ‘but he tells me that packages given to the American consul in Valdivia always reach him. I gather they were friends. No one else in Valdivia, just the American consul. You do not mind helping me?’

‘Of course not, sir.’

The Emperor smiled his thanks. ‘The gift will take some time to choose, and to prepare, but if you can wait two hours, monsieur?’ Sharpe said he could wait and there was a flurry of orders as an aide was despatched to find the right gift. Then Napoleon turned to Sharpe again. ‘No doubt, monsieur, you were at Waterloo?’

‘Yes, sir. I was.’

‘So tell me,’ the Emperor began, and thus they talked, while the Spaniards waited and the rain fell and the sun sank and the redcoat guards tightened their night-time ring about the walls of Longwood, while inside those walls, as old soldiers do, old soldiers talked.

It was almost full dark as Sharpe and Harper, soaked to the skin, reached the quayside in Jamestown where the Espiritu Santo’s longboats waited to take the passengers back to Ardiles’s ship.

At the quayside a British officer waited in the rain. ‘Mister Sharpe?’ He stepped up to Sharpe as soon as the Rifleman dismounted from his mule.

‘Lieutenant Colonel Sharpe.’ Sharpe had been irritated by the man’s tone.

‘Of course, sir. And a moment of your time, if you would be so very kind?’ The man, a tall and thin Major, smiled and guided Sharpe a few paces away from the curious Spanish officers. ‘Is it true, sir, that General Bonaparte favoured you with a gift?’

‘He favoured each of us with a gift.’ Each of the Spaniards, except for Ardiles who had received nothing, had been given a silver teaspoon engraved with Napoleon’s cipher, while Harper had received a silver thimble inscribed with Napoleon’s symbol of a honey bee.

Sharpe, having struck an evident note of affection in the Emperor, had been privileged with a silver locket which contained a curl of the Emperor’s hair.

‘But you, sir, forgive me, have a particular gift?’ the Major insisted.

‘Do I?’ Sharpe challenged the Major, and wondered which of the Emperor’s servants was the spy.

‘Sir Hudson Lowe, sir, would appreciate it mightily if you were to allow him to see the gift.’ Behind the Major stood an impassive file of redcoats.

Sharpe took the locket from out of his pocket and pressed the button that snapped open the silver lid. He showed the Major the lock of hair. ‘Tell Sir Hudson Lowe, with my compliments, that his dog, his wife or his barber can provide him with an infinite supply of such gifts.’

The Major glanced at the Spanish officers who, in turn, glowered back. Their displeasure was caused simply by the fact that the Major’s presence delayed their departure, and every second’s delay kept them from the comforts of the Espiritu Santo’s saloon, but the tall Major translated their enmity as something which might lead to an international incident. ‘You’re carrying no other gifts from the General?’ he asked Sharpe.

‘No others,’ Sharpe lied. In his pocket he had a framed portrait of Bonaparte, which the Emperor had inscribed to his admirer, whose name was Lieutenant Colonel Charles, but that portrait, Sharpe decided, was none of Sir Hudson Lowe’s business.

The Major bowed to Sharpe. ‘If you insist, sir.’

‘I do insist, Major.’

The Major clearly did not believe Sharpe, but could do nothing about his disbelief. He stepped stiffly backwards. ‘Then good day to you, sir.’

The Espiritu Santo weighed anchor in the next day’s dawn and, under a watery sun, headed southwards. By midday the island of St Helena with its ring of warships was left far behind, as was the Emperor, chained to his rock.

And Sharpe, carrying Bonaparte’s gift, sailed to a distant war.

Part One

CHAPTER ONE

Captain-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 had been 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 château’s crumbling arch. He had supposed the lavish carriage to belong to some rich person who, travelling 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 Seleglise, 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 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 château’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 château 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 told me where I might find you. I am sorry not to have sent you warning of my coming here, 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, aged five, offered her ladyship a sturdy bow while Dominique, aged three, was more interested in the ducklings which splashed at the moat’s edge. ‘Dominique looks like your wife,’ Louisa said.

Sharpe merely grunted a noncommittal reply, for he had no wish to explain that he and Lucille were not married, nor that 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. However Sharpe, much to Lucille’s amusement, now insisted on introducing her to Louisa as the Vicomtesse de Seleglise; an honour 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 inaccurate self-deprecation, then politely asked whether the Countess of Mouromorto had any children.

‘Three,’ Louisa had replied, and had then gone on to explain how a further 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, had let the conversation become a meaningless drone, but Louisa had suprisingly 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 had 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 defeated 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, enquired 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 despatch 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 fortifications at the harbour 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 had 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?’

‘Three.’

‘Yet he was riding alone? In rebel country?’ Sharpe’s soldiering instincts, rusty as they were, recoiled 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 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 had made Sharpe suspect that his visitor’s hopes were mere fantasies. In the four 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 clung stubbornly 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 womenfolk 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 travelling 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 travelling 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, Doña Louisa, 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 my influence! 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,’ she said to Sharpe.

Lucille’s grey 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 loudly and a house martin sliced on sabre 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 were 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,’ Louisa said, ‘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 was 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 armour of certainty, suddenly realized just what anguish lay behind that self-delusion. ‘He is hiding,’ Louisa insisted unrealistically, ‘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 vigour, 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 wouldn’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 off 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 him, and now she wanted that favour returned.

Lucille spoke English excellently, 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 was 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, knowing 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 unnaturally timid voice, ‘but I know that whoever seeks Don Blas must deal 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.

‘I couldn’t possibly …’ Sharpe began, then realized just how decrepit the farm roof was, and how much a new weir would cost, and so, helplessly, he glanced at Lucille.

‘Of course Richard will go,’ Lucille said calmly.

‘Though not for the money,’ Sharpe said gallantly.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ Lucille intervened 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 château 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 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.

The 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, that won wars. ‘Napoleon understood that!’ Ruiz informed Sharpe.

‘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’s fears. 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 of 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 beginning 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 come, not at the hands of Britain’s enemies, but at the hands of Britain’s courts that 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 search 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 garrotted 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 which 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, wept when he thought of the terrors awaiting him, and 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 spilt until the passenger accommodations stank like a cesspit. The food did not help the ship’s well-being. At St Helena the Espiritu Santo had stocked up with yams which had 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 scarce 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 offence. 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 shrivelling 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, laboured 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 St 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 labouring 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 which 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 defence 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 towards the cabins where Ruiz’s artillery officers sheltered from the storm in their vomitrinsed 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 Colonel’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 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.’ Sharpe, who had not heard just how small the escort had been, 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 returned 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 patrolled by the rebel navy, but later I heard rumours 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 favoured 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 northwards 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 honourable man, and you know what happens to honourable men – they prove to be an embarrassment. This world isn’t governed by honourable 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 mestiza 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.

Albatrosses 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 the frigate, 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 which 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 strange 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 harbour. Sharpe and Harper stood on deck and stared at the massive fortifications that guarded this last Spanish stronghold on the Chilean coast. The headland which protected the harbour was crowned by the English fort, which in turn could lock its cannon fire 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 which formed the harbour’s western side, lay Fort Amargos and Corral Castle. The Espiritu Santo’s First Lieutenant proudly pointed out each succeeding strongpoint 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 harbour, and I just wish Cochrane would try to capture it! We’d destroy him!’

Sharpe believed him, for there were yet more defences to add their guns to the five forts of the western shore. Across the harbour mouth, where the huge Pacific swells shattered white on dark rocks, was the biggest fort of all, Fort Niebla, while in the harbour’s centre, head on to any attacking ships, lay the guns and ramparts of Manzanera Island. The harbour 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 cannon could make the harbour 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. The Niebla Fort was firing a salute which one of the long nine-pounders at the frigate’s bows returned. The gunfire echoed flatly from the steep hills where a few stunted trees were permanently windbent towards 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 harbour’s bottom, then turned as the tide pulled the fouled hull slowly round. 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 which lay under the volcanoes’ fire and the devil’s flail. They were in Chile.

CHAPTER TWO

George Blair, British Consul in Valdivia, blinked short-sightedly at Richard Sharpe. ‘Why the hell should I tell you lies? Of course he’s dead!’ Blair laughed mirthlessly. ‘He’d better bloody be dead. He’s been buried long enough! The poor bugger must be in a bloody bad state if he’s still alive; he’s been underground these last three months. Are you sure you don’t have any gin in your baggage?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘People usually bring me gin from London.’ Blair was a plump, middle-aged man, wearing a stained white shirt and frayed breeches. He had greeted his visitors wearing a formal black tailcoat, but had long discarded the coat as too cumbersome in the day’s warmth. ‘It’s rather a common courtesy,’ he grumbled, ‘to bring gin from London.’

Sharpe was in no state to notice either the Consul’s clothes or his unhappiness, instead his thoughts were a whirlpool of disbelief and shock. Don Blas was not missing at all, but was dead and buried, which meant Sharpe’s whole voyage was for nothing. At least, that was what Blair reckoned. ‘He’s under the paving slabs in the garrison church at Puerto Crucero,’ George Blair repeated in his hard, clipped accent. ‘Jesus Christ! I know a score of people who were at the damned funeral. I wasn’t invited, and a good thing too. I have to put up with enough nonsense in this goddamn place without watching a pack of pox-ridden priests mumbling bloody Latin in double-quick time so they can get back to their native whores.’

‘God in his heaven,’ Sharpe blasphemed, then paused to gather his scattered wits, ‘but Vivar’s wife doesn’t know! They can’t bury a man without telling his wife!’

‘They can do whatever they damn well like! But don’t ask me to explain. I’m trying to run a business and a consulate, not explain the remnants of the Spanish bloody empire.’

Blair was a Liverpool merchant who dealt in hides, tallow, copper and timber. He was a bad-tempered, overworked and harassed man, yet, as Consul, he had little option but to welcome Sharpe and Harper into his house that stood in the main square of Valdivia, hard between the church and the outer ditch of the town’s main fort that was known simply as the Citadel. Blair had placed Louisa’s bribe money, all eighteen hundred golden guineas, in his strongroom that was protected by a massive iron door and by walls of dressed stone blocks a foot and a half thick. Louisa had given Sharpe two thousand guineas, but the customs officials at the wharf in Valdivia had insisted on a levy of ten per cent. ‘Bastards,’ Blair had commented when he heard of the impost. ‘It’s supposed to be just three per cent.’

‘Should I complain?’ Sharpe had already made an unholy fuss at the customs post, though it had done no good.

‘To Captain-General Bautista?’ Blair gave another mirthless laugh. ‘He’s the bastard that pegs up the percentage. You were lucky it wasn’t fifteen per cent!’ Then, over a plate of sugar cakes and glasses of wine brought by his Indian servants, Blair had welcomed Sharpe to Valdivia with the unwelcome news that Vivar’s death was no mystery at all. ‘The bugger was riding way ahead of his escort, was probably ambushed by rebels, and his horse bolted with him when the trap was sprung. Then three months later they found his body in a ravine. Not that there was much left of the poor bugger, but they knew it was him, right enough, because of his uniform. Mind you, it took them a hell of a long time to find his body, but the dagoes are bloody inefficient at everything except levying customs duties, and they can do that faster than anyone in history.’

‘Who buried him?’ Sharpe asked.

The Consul frowned in irritated puzzlement. ‘A pack of bloody priests! I told you!’

‘But who arranged it? The army?’

‘Captain-General Bautista, of course. Nothing happens here without Bautista giving the nod.’

Sharpe turned and stared through Blair’s parlour window which looked onto the Citadel’s outer ditch where two dogs were squabbling over what appeared to be a child’s discarded doll, but then, as the doll’s arm ripped away, Sharpe saw that the dogs’ plaything was the body of an Indian toddler that must have been dumped in the ditch.

‘Why the hell weren’t you invited to the funeral, Blair?’ Sharpe turned back from the window. ‘You’re an important man here, aren’t you? Or doesn’t the British Consul carry any weight in these parts?’

Blair shrugged. ‘The Spanish in Valdivia don’t much like the British, Colonel. They’re losing this fight, and they’re blaming us. They reckon most of the rebellion’s money comes from London, and they aren’t far wrong in thinking that. But it’s their own damned fault if they’re losing. They’re too bloody fond of lining their own pockets, and if it comes to a choice between fighting and profiteering, they’ll take the money every time. Things were better when Vivar was in charge, but that’s exactly why they couldn’t stomach him. The bugger was too honest, you see, which is why I didn’t see too many tears shed when they heard he’d been killed.’

‘The bugger,’ Sharpe said coldly, ‘was a friend of mine.’ He turned to stare again at the ditch where a flock of carrion birds edged close to the two dogs, hoping for a share of the child’s corpse.

‘Vivar was a friend of yours?’ Blair sounded shocked.

‘Yes.’

The confirmation checked Blair, who suddenly had to reassess the importance of his visitors, or at least Sharpe’s importance. Blair had already dismissed Harper as a genial Irishman who carried no political weight, but Sharpe, despite his rustic clothes and weathered face, was suddenly proving a much more difficult man to place. Sharpe had introduced himself as Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe, but the war had left as many Colonels as it had bastards, so the rank hardly impressed Consul Blair, but if Lieutenant-Colonel Sharpe had been a friend of Don Blas Vivar, who had been Count of Mouromorto and Captain-General of Spain’s Chilean dominion, then such a friendship could also imply that Sharpe was a friend of the high London lords who, ultimately, gave Blair the privileges and honours that eased his existence in Valdivia. ‘A bad business,’ Blair muttered, vainly trying to make amends for his flippancy.

‘Where was the body found?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Some miles north-east of Puerto Crucero. It’s a wild area, nothing but woods and rocks.’ Blair was speaking in a much more respectful tone now. ‘The place isn’t a usual haunt of the rebels, but once in a while they’ll appear that far south. Government troops searched the valley after the ambush, of course, but no one thought to look in the actual ravine till a hunting party of Indians brought news that a white god was lying there. That’s one of their names for us, you see. The white god, of course, turned out to be Don Blas. They reckon that he and his horse must have fallen into the ravine while fleeing from his attackers.’

‘You’re sure it was rebels?’ Sharpe turned from the window to ask the question. ‘I’ve heard it might have been Bautista’s doing.’

Blair shook his head. ‘I’ve not heard those rumours. I’m not saying Bautista’s not capable of murder, because he is. He’s a cruel son of a whore, that one, but I never heard any tales of his having killed Captain-General Vivar, and, believe me, Chile breeds rumour the way a nunnery breeds the pox.’

Sharpe was unwilling to let the theory slip. ‘I heard Vivar had found out about Bautista’s corruption, and was going to arrest him.’

Blair mocked Sharpe’s naïvety. ‘Everyone’s corrupt here! You don’t arrest a man for breathing, do you? If Vivar was going to arrest Bautista then it would have been for something far more serious than corruption. No, Colonel, that dog won’t hunt.’

Sharpe thumped a fist in angry protest. ‘But to be buried three months ago! That’s long enough for someone to tell the authorities in Europe! Why the hell did no one think to tell his wife?’

It was hardly Blair’s responsibility, though he tried to answer as best he could. ‘Maybe the ship carrying the news was captured? Or shipwrecked? Sometimes ships do take a God-horrible time to make the voyage. The last time I went home we spent over three weeks just trying to get round Ushant! Sick as a dog, I was!’

‘Goddamn it.’ Sharpe turned back to the window. Was it all a misunderstanding? Was this whole benighted expedition merely the result of the time it sometimes took for news to cross between the old and new worlds? Had Don Blas been decently buried all this time? It was more than possible, of course. A ship could easily take two or three months to sail from Chile to Spain, and if Louisa had been in England when the news arrived in Galicia then it was no wonder that Sharpe and Harper had come on a fool’s errand. ‘Don’t you bury the dead in this town?’ he asked bad-temperedly.

Blair was understandably bemused by the sudden question, but then saw Sharpe was staring at the dead child in the Citadel’s ditch. ‘We don’t bury that sort of rubbish. Lord, no. It’s probably just the bastard of some Indian girl who works in the fortress. Indians count for nothing here!’ Blair chuckled. ‘A couple of Indian families won’t fetch the price of a decent hunting dog, let alone the cost of a burial!’

Sharpe sipped the wine, which was surprisingly good. He had been astonished, while on the boat coming from the harbour to the town, to see lavish vineyards terraced across the riverside hills. Somehow, after the grotesque shipboard tales, he had expected a country full of mystery and horror, so the sight of placid vineyards and lavish villas had been unexpected, rather like finding everyday comforts in the pits of hell. ‘I’ll need to go to Puerto Crucero,’ he now told Blair.

‘That could be difficult.’ Blair sounded guarded. ‘Very difficult.’

‘Why?’ Sharpe bristled.

‘Because it’s a military area, and because Bautista doesn’t like visitors going there, and because it’s a port town, and the Spaniards have lost too many good harbours on this coast to let another one go, and because they think all Englishmen are spies. Besides, the citadel at Puerto Crucero is the place where the Spanish ship their gold home.’

‘Gold?’ Harper’s interest sparked.

‘There’re one or two mines left; not many and they don’t produce much, and most of what they do produce Bautista is probably thieving, but what little does go back to Madrid leaves through the wharf of Puerto Crucero’s citadel. It’s the nearest harbour to the mines, you see, which is why the dagoes are touchy about it. If you ask to visit Puerto Crucero they might think you’re spying for Cochrane. You know who Cochrane is?’

‘I know,’ Sharpe said.

‘He’s a devil, that one,’ Blair, unable to resist admiration for a fellow Briton, chuckled, ‘and they’re all scared to hell of him. You want to see a dago piss in his breeches? Just mention Cochrane. They think he’s got horns and a tail.’

Sharpe dragged the conversation back to his purpose. ‘So how do I get permission to visit Puerto Crucero?’

‘You have to get a travel permit from army headquarters.’

‘Which is where?’

‘In the Citadel, of course.’ Blair nodded at the great fort which lay on the river’s bend at the very heart of Valdivia.

‘Who do I see there?’

‘A young fellow called Captain Marquinez.’

‘Will Marquinez pay more attention to you than to me?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Oh, Christ, no! Marquinez is just an over-groomed puppy. He doesn’t make the decision. Bautista’s the one who’ll say yea or nay.’ Blair jerked a thumb towards his padlocked strongroom. ‘I hope there’s plenty of money in that box you fetched here, or else you’ll be wasting your time in Chile.’

‘My time is my own,’ Sharpe said acidly, ‘which is why I don’t want to waste it.’ He frowned at Harper who was happily devouring Blair’s sugar cakes. ‘If you can stop feeding yourself, Patrick, we might start work.’

‘Work?’ Harper sounded alarmed, but hurriedly swilled down the last of his wine and snatched a final sugar cake before following Sharpe out of Blair’s house. ‘So what work are we doing?’ the Irishman asked.

‘We’re going to dig up Don Blas’s body, of course,’ Sharpe said, ‘and arrange to have it shipped back to Spain.’ Sharpe’s confident voice seemed to rouse Valdivia’s town square from the torpor of siesta. A man who had been dozing on the church steps looked irritably towards the two tall strangers who strode so noisily towards the Citadel. A dozen Indians, their squat faces blank as carvings, sat in the shade of a mounted statue which stood in the very centre of the square. The Indians, who were shackled together by a length of heavy chain manacled to their ankles, pretended not to notice Sharpe, but could not hide their astonishment at the sight of Harper; doubtless thinking that the tall Irishman was a giant. ‘They’re admiring me, so they are!’ Harper boasted happily.

‘They’re working out how many families they could feed off your carcass. If they boiled you down and salted the flesh there probably wouldn’t be famine in this country for a century.’

‘You’re just jealous.’ Harper, seeing new sights, was a happy man. The French wars had given him a taste for travel, and that taste was being well fed by Chile. His only disappointment so far was the paucity of one-legged giants, unicorns or any other mythical beasts. ‘Look at that! Handsome, aren’t they, now?’ He nodded admiringly towards a group of women who, standing in the shade of the striped awnings which protected the shop fronts, returned Harper’s curiosity and admiration. Harper and Sharpe were new faces in a small town, and thus a cause for excited speculation. The wind swirled dust devils across the square and flapped the ornate Spanish ensign which flew over the Citadel’s gatehouse. A legless beggar, swinging along on his hands, followed Sharpe and pleaded for money. Another, who looked like a leper, made a meaningless noise and held out the stump of a wrist towards the two strangers. A Dominican monk, his white robes stained with the red dust that blew everywhere, was arguing with a carter who had evidently failed to deliver a shipment of wine.

‘We’re going to need a carter,’ Sharpe was thinking aloud as he led Harper towards the Citadel’s sentries, ‘or at least a cart. We’re also going to want two riding horses, plus saddlery, and supplies for as long as it takes to get to Puerto Crucero and back. Unless we can sail home from Puerto Crucero? Or maybe we can sail down there! That’ll be cheaper than buying a cart.’

‘What the hell do we want a cart for?’ Harper was panting at the brisk pace set by Sharpe.

‘We need a cart to carry the coffin to Puerto Crucero, unless, of course, we can go there by ship.’

‘Why the hell don’t we have a coffin made in Puerto Crucero?’ Harper asked. ‘The world’s not so short of carpenters that you can’t find a man to knock up a bloody box!’

‘Because a box won’t do the trick!’ Sharpe said. ‘The thing has to be watertight, Patrick, not to keep the rain out but to keep the decay in. We’re going to need a tinsmith, and I don’t suppose Puerto Crucero has too many of those! So we’ll have a watertight box made here before we go south.’

‘We could plop him in a vat of brandy,’ Harper suggested helpfully. ‘There’s a fellow who drinks in my place that was a gunner’s mate on the Victory at Trafalgar, and he says that after the battle they brought Nelson back in a barrel of brandy. My fellow had a look at the body when they unstowed it, and he says the Admiral was as fresh as the day he died, so he was, with flesh soft as a baby, and the only change was that all the man’s hair and nails had grown wild. He tasted the brandy too, so he did. He says it was a bit salty.’

‘I don’t want to put Don Blas in brandy,’ Sharpe said irritably. ‘He’ll be half rotted out as it is, and if we put him in a cask of bloody liquor he’ll like as not dissolve altogether, and instead of burying the poor man in Spain we’ll just be pouring him away. So we’ll put him in a tin box, solder him up tight, and take him back that way.’

‘Whatever you say,’ Harper said grimly, the tone provoked by the unfriendly faces of the sentries at the fort’s gate. The Citadel reminded Sharpe of the Spanish fortresses he had assaulted in the French wars. It had low walls over which the muzzles of the defenders’ guns showed grimly, and a wide, dry moat designed to be a killing ground for any attackers who succeeded in crossing the earthen glacis which was banked to ricochet assaulting cannonfire safely up and over the defenders’ heads. The only incongruity about Valdivia’s formidable Citadel was an ancient-looking tower that stood like a mediaeval castle turret in the very centre of the fortifications.

A sergeant accosted Sharpe and Harper on the bridge, then reluctantly allowed them into the fort itself. They walked through the entrance tunnel, across a wide parade ground, then through a second gateway into a cramped and shadowed inner courtyard. One wall of the yard was made by the ancient limewashed tower that was pockmarked by bullet holes. There were smears of dried blood near some of the bullet marks, suggesting that this cheerless place was where Valdivia’s prisoners met their firing squads.

They enquired at the inner guardroom for Captain Marquinez who, arriving five minutes later, proved to be a tall, strikingly handsome and extraordinarily fashionable young man. His uniform seemed more appropriate for the jewelled halls of Madrid than for this far, squalid colony. He wore a Hussar jacket so frogged with gold braid that it was impossible to see the cloth beneath, a white kidskin pelisse edged with black fur, and skintight sky blue cavalry breeches decorated with gold embroidery and silver side buttons. His epaulette chains, sword sling, spurs and scabbard furnishings were all of shining gold. His manners matched his uniform’s tailoring. He apologized for having kept his visitors waiting, welcomed them to Chile on behalf of Captain-General Bautista, then invited Sharpe and Harper to his quarters where, in a wide, comfortable room, his servant brought cups of steaming chocolate, small gold beakers of a clear Chilean brandy, and a plate of sugared grapes. Marquinez paused in front of a gilt-framed mirror to check that his wavy black hair was in place, then crossed to his wide-arched window to show off the view. ‘It really is a most beautiful country,’ the Captain spoke wistfully, as though he knew it was being lost.

The view was indeed spectacular. The window looked eastwards across the town’s thatched roofs, then beyond the shadowy foothills to the far snow-topped mountains. One of those distant peaks was pluming a stream of brown smoke to the south wind. ‘A volcano,’ Marquinez explained. ‘Chile has a number of them. It’s a tumultuous place, I fear, with frequent earthquakes, but fascinating despite its dangers.’ Marquinez’s servant brought cigars, and Marquinez hospitably offered a burning spill to Harper. ‘So you’re staying with Mister Blair?’ he asked when the cigars were well lit. ‘Poor Blair! His wife refused to travel here, thinking the place too full of dangers! Still, if you keep Blair filled with gin or brandy he’s a happy enough man. Your Spanish is excellent, permit me to congratulate you. So few of your countrymen speak our language.’

‘We both served in Spain,’ Sharpe explained.

‘You did! Then our debt to you is incalculable. Please, seat yourselves. You said you had a letter of introduction?’

Marquinez took and read Doña Louisa’s letter which did not specifically describe Sharpe’s errand, but merely asked any Spanish official to offer whatever help was possible. ‘Which of course we will offer gladly!’ Marquinez spoke with what seemed to be a genuine warmth. ‘I never had the pleasure of meeting Don Blas’s wife. He died, of course, before she could join him here. So very tragic, and such a waste. He was a good man, even perhaps a great man! There was something saintly about him, I always thought.’ The last compliment, uttered in a very bland voice, somehow suggested what an infernal nuisance saints could be. Marquinez carefully folded the letter’s pendant seal into the paper then handed it back to Sharpe with a courtly flourish. ‘And how, sir, might we help you?’

‘We need a permit to visit Puerto Crucero where we want to exhume Don Blas’s body, then ship it home.’ Sharpe, encouraged by Marquinez’s friendliness, saw no need to be delicate about his needs.

Marquinez smiled, revealing teeth as white and regular as a small child’s. ‘I see no extraordinary difficulties there. You will, of course, need a permit to travel to Puerto Crucero.’ He went to his table and riffled through his papers. ‘Did you sail out here on the Espiritu Santo?’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s due to sail back to Spain in a few days and I see that she’s ordered to call at Puerto Crucero on her way. There’s a gold shipment ready, and Ardiles’s ship is the safest transport we have. I see no reason why you shouldn’t travel down the coast in the Espiritu Santo and, if we’re fortunate, you might even take the body back to Europe in her hold!’

Sharpe, who had been prepared by Blair for every kind of official obstructiveness, dared not believe his good fortune. The Espiritu Santo could indeed solve all his problems, but Marquinez had qualified his optimism with one cautious word that Sharpe now echoed as a tentative query. ‘Fortunate?’

‘Besides the permit to travel to Puerto Crucero,’ Marquinez explained, ‘you will need a permit to exhume Don Blas’s body. That permit is issued by the church, of course, but I’m sure the Bishop will be eager to satisfy the Dowager Countess of Mouromorto. However, you should understand that sometimes the church is, how shall I say? Dilatory?’

‘We came prepared for such difficulties,’ Sharpe said.

‘How so?’ The question was swift.

‘The church must have charities dear to its heart?’

‘How very thoughtful of you.’ Marquinez, relieved that Sharpe had so swiftly understood the obstacle, offered his guests a dazzling smile and Sharpe wondered how a man kept his teeth so white. Marquinez then held up a warning hand. ‘We mustn’t forget the necessary licence to export a body. There is a disease risk, you understand, and we have to satisfy ourselves that every precaution has been taken.’

‘We came well prepared,’ Sharpe said dourly. The requirements, so far as he could see, were two massive bribes. One to the church which, in Sharpe’s experience, was always greedy for cash, and the other to the army authorities to secure the travel permit and for the licence to export a body, which licence, Sharpe suspected, had just been dreamed up by the inventive Marquinez. Doña Louisa, Sharpe thought, had understood Chile perfectly when she had insisted on sending him with the big chest of coins. Sharpe smiled at the charming Marquinez. ‘So when, señor, may we expect a travel permit? Today?’

‘Oh, dear me, no!’ Marquinez frowned, as though Sharpe’s suggestion of such haste was somehow unseemly.

‘Soon?’ Sharpe pressed.

‘The decision is not mine,’ Marquinez said happily.

‘Our affairs will surely not be of interest to Captain-General Bautista?’ Sharpe said with what he hoped was a convincing innocence.

‘The Captain-General is interested in all our visitors, especially those who have been notable soldiers.’ Marquinez bowed to Sharpe, whose fame had been described in Louisa’s letter of introduction. ‘Tell me,’ Marquinez went on, ‘were you at Waterloo?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I am sure the Captain-General will want to meet you. General Bautista is an aficionado of the Emperor. He would, I think, be delighted to hear of your experiences.’ Marquinez beamed delightedly, as if a mutual treat awaited his master and Sharpe. ‘Such a pleasure to meet you both!’ Marquinez said, then ushered them back to the guardroom. ‘Such a pleasure,’ he said again.

‘So how did it go?’ Blair asked when they returned.

‘Very well,’ Sharpe said. ‘All things considered it couldn’t have gone much better.’

‘That means you’re in trouble,’ Blair said happily, ‘that means you’re in trouble.’

That night it rained so heavily that the town ditch flooded with earth-reddened water which, in the moonlight, looked like blood. Blair became drunk. He bemoaned that his wife was still in Liverpool and commiserated with Sharpe and Harper that their wives were, respectively, in France and Ireland. ‘You live in bloody France?’ Blair kept asking the question as though to dilute the astonishment he evidently felt for Sharpe’s choice of a home. ‘Bloody funny place to live, I mean if you’ve been fighting the buggers. It must be like a fox moving in with the rabbits!’

Sharpe tried to talk of more immediate matters, like Captain-General Bautista and his fascination for Napoleon, but Blair did not want to talk about the Spanish commander. ‘He’s a bastard. A son of a whore bastard, and that’s all there is to say about him.’ It was clear that Blair, despite his privileged status as a diplomat, feared the Spanish commander.

‘Are you saying he’s illegitimate?’ Sharpe asked disingenuously.

‘Oh, Christ, no.’ Blair glanced at the servants as though fearing they had suddenly learned English and would report this conversation to Bautista’s spies. ‘Bautista’s a younger son, so he needs to make his own fortune. He got his posting here because his father is a minister in Ferdinand VII’s government, and he greased his son a commission in the artillery and an appointment in Chile, because this is where the money is. But the rest Bautista did for himself. He’s capable! He’s efficient and a hard worker. He’s probably no soldier, but he’s no weakling. And he’s making himself rich.’

‘So he’s corrupt?’

‘Corrupt!’ Blair mocked the word. ‘Of course he’s corrupt. They’re all corrupt. I’m corrupt! Everyone here knows the bloody war is lost. It’s only a question of time before the Spaniards go and the Chileans can bugger up their own country instead of having someone else to do it for them, so what Bautista and his people are doing is making themselves rich before someone takes away the tray of baubles.’ Blair paused, sipped, then leaned closer to Sharpe. ‘Your friend Vivar wasn’t corrupt, which is why he made enemies, but Bautista, he’s a coming man! He’ll make his money then go home and use that money to buy himself office in Madrid. Mark my words, he’ll be the power in Spain before he’s fifty.’

‘How old is he now?’

‘He’s a youngster! Thirty, no more.’ Blair, clearly deciding he had said enough about the feared Bautista, pushed his glass to the end of the table for a servant girl to fill with a mixture of rum and wine. ‘If you want a whore, Colonel,’ Blair went on, ‘there’s a chingana behind the church. Ask for the girl they call La Monja!’ Blair rolled his eyes heavenwards to indicate what exquisite joys awaited Sharpe and Harper if they followed his advice. ‘She’s a mestiza.’

‘What’s a mestiza?’ Harper asked.

‘Half-breed, and that one’s half a woman and half a wildcat.’

‘I’d rather hear about Bautista,’ Sharpe said.

‘I’ve told you, there’s nothing to tell. Man’s a bastard. Cross him and you get butchered. He’s judge, jury and executioner here. He’s also horribly efficient. You want some more rum?’

Sharpe glanced at the two Indian girls who, holding their jugs of wine and rum, stood expressionless at the edge of the room. ‘No.’

‘You can have them, too,’ Blair said hospitably. ‘Help yourselves, both of you! I know they look like cows, but they know their way up and down a bed. No point in employing them otherwise. They can’t cook and their idea of cleaning a room is to rearrange the dirt, so what else are they good for? And in the dark you don’t know they’re savages, do you?’

Sharpe again tried to turn the conversation back to his own business. ‘I need to find the American Consul. Does he live close?’

‘What the hell do you want Fielding for?’ Blair sounded offended, as though Sharpe’s question suggested that Fielding was a better Consul than Blair.

Sharpe had no intention of revealing that he possessed a signed portrait of Napoleon which the American Consul was supposed to smuggle to a British Colonel now living in the rebel part of the country, so instead he made up a story about doing business for an American expatriate living in Normandy.

‘Well, you’re out of luck,’ Blair said with evident satisfaction. ‘Fielding’s away from Valdivia this week. One of his precious whaling boats was impounded by the Spanish navy, so he’s on Chiloe, trying to have the bribe reduced to something under a king’s ransom.’

‘Chiloe?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Island down south. Long way away. But Fielding will be back in a week or so.’

Sharpe hid his disappointment. He had been hoping to deliver the portrait quickly, then forget about the Emperor’s gift, but now, if he was to keep his promise to Bonaparte, he would have to find some other way of reaching Fielding. ‘Have you ever heard of a Lieutenant-Colonel Charles?’ he asked Blair, as casually as he could.

‘Charles? Of course I’ve heard of Charles. He’s one of O’Higgins’s military advisers.’

‘So he’s a rebel?’

‘Of course he’s a bloody rebel! Why else would he have come to Chile? He likes to fight, and Europe isn’t providing any proper wars these days, so all the rascals come over here and complicate my life instead. What do you want with Charles?’

‘Nothing,’ Sharpe said, then let the subject drop.

An hour later he and Harper went to their beds and lay listening to the water sluice off the tiles. The mattresses were full of fleas. ‘Like old times,’ Harper grumbled when they woke early.

Blair was also up at first light. The rain in the night had been so heavy that part of the misted square was flooded, and the inundation had turned the rubbish-choked ditch into a moat in which foul things floated. ‘A horrid day to travel,’ Blair complained when he met them in his parlour where coffee waited on the table. ‘It’ll be raining again within the hour, mark my words.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Down river. To the port.’ Blair groaned and rubbed his temples with his fingertips. ‘I’ve got to supervise some cargo loading, and probably see the Captain of the Charybdis.’

‘What’s the Charybdis?’ Harper asked.

‘Royal Navy frigate. We keep a squadron on the coast just to make sure the bloody dagoes don’t shoot any of our people. They know that if they upset me I’ll arrange to have their toy boats blown out of the water.’ Blair shivered, then groaned with pain. ‘Breakfast!’ he shouted towards the kitchens, then flinched as a muffled rattle of musketry sounded from the Citadel. ‘That’s another rebel gone,’ Blair said thickly. There was a second ragged volley. ‘Business is good this morning.’

‘Rebels?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Or some poor bugger caught with a gun and no money to bribe the patrol. They shove them up against the Angel Tower, say a quick Hail Mary, then send the buggers into eternity.’

‘The Angel Tower?’ Sharpe asked.

‘It’s that ancient lump of stone in the middle of the fort. The Spaniards built it when they first came here, way back in the dark ages. Bloody thing has survived earthquake, fire, and rebellion. It used to be a prison, but it’s empty now.’

‘Why is it called the Angel Tower?’ Harper asked.

‘Christ knows, but you know what the dagoes are like. Some drunken Spanish whore probably saw an angel on its top and the next thing you know they’re all weeping and praying and the priests are carrying round the collection plate. Where’s my goddamned bloody breakfast?’ he shouted towards the kitchen.

Blair, well-breakfasted at last, left for the harbour an hour later. ‘Don’t expect anything from Marquinez!’ he warned Sharpe. ‘They’ll promise you anything, but deliver nothing. You’ll not hear a word from that macaroni until you offer him a fat bribe.’

Yet, no sooner had Blair gone, than a message arrived from the Citadel asking Colonel Sharpe and Mister Harper to do the honour of attending on Captain Marquinez at their earliest opportunity. So, moments later, Sharpe and Harper crossed the bridge, walked through the tunnel that pierced the glacis, crossed the outer parade courtyard and so into the inner yard where two bodies lay like heaps of soiled rags under the bloodstained wall of the Angel Tower. Marquinez, greeting Sharpe in the courtyard, was embarrassed by the bodies. ‘A wagon is coming to take them to the cemetery. They were rebels, of course.’

‘Why don’t you just dump them in the ditch like the Indian babies?’ Sharpe asked Marquinez sourly.

‘Because the rebels are Christians, of course.’ Marquinez was bemused that the question had even been asked.

‘None of the Indians are Christian?’

‘Some of them are, I suppose,’ Marquinez said airily, ‘though personally I don’t know why the missionaries bother. One might as well offer the sacrament to a jabbering pack of monkeys. And they’re treacherous cretures. Turn your back and they’ll stab you. They’ve been rebelling against us for hundreds of years, and they never seem to learn that we always win in the end.’ Marquinez ushered Sharpe and Harper into a room with a high arched ceiling. ‘Will you be happy to wait here? The Captain-General would like to greet you.’

‘Bautista?’ Sharpe was taken aback.

‘Of course! We only have one Captain-General!’ Marquinez was suddenly all charm. ‘The Captain-General would like to welcome you to Chile himself. Captain Ardiles told him how you had a private audience with Bonaparte and, as I mentioned, the Captain-General has a fascination with the Emperor. So, do you mind waiting? I’ll have some coffee sent. Or would you prefer wine?’

‘I’d prefer our travel permits,’ Sharpe said truculently.

‘The matter is being considered, I do assure you. We must do whatever we can to look after the happiness of the Countess of Mouromorto. Now, if you will excuse me?’ Marquinez, with a confiding and dazzling smile, left them in the room which was furnished with a table, four chairs, and a crucifix hanging from a bent horseshoe nail. A broken saddle tree was discarded in one corner, while a lizard watched Sharpe from the curved ceiling. The room’s one window looked onto the execution yard. After an hour, during which no one came to fetch Sharpe and Harper, a wagon creaked into the yard and a detail of soldiers swung the two dead rebels onto the wagon’s bed.

Another hour passed, noted by the chiming of a clock somewhere deep in the fort. Neither wine, coffee, nor a summons from the Captain-General arrived. Captain Marquinez had disappeared, and the only clerk in the office behind the guardroom did not know where the Captain might be found. The rain fell miserably, slowly diluting the bloodstains on the limewashed wall of the Angel Tower.

The rain fell. Still no one came and, as the clock chimed another half hour, Sharpe’s patience finally snapped. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’

‘What about Bautista?’

‘Bugger Bautista.’ It seemed that Blair was right about the myriad of delays that the Spanish imposed on even the simplest bureaucratic procedure, but Sharpe did not have the patience to be the victim of such nonsense. ‘Let’s go.’

It was raining much harder now. Sharpe ran across the Citadel’s bridge, while Harper lumbered after. They splashed across the square’s cobbles, past the statue where the group of chained Indians still sat vacant under the cloudburst, to where a heavy wagon, loaded with untanned hides, was standing in front of Blair’s house. The untreated leather stank foully. A uniformed soldier was lounging under the Consul’s arched porch, beside the drooping British flag, apparently guarding the wagon’s stinking cargo. The day-dreaming soldier straightened as Sharpe approached. ‘You can’t go in there, señor

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