Sharpe's Devil s-21
Page 29
They sailed in the dawn, beating south against a cold sea and a freezing wind. They were traveling in a brig that was carrying hides to London. She made heavy weather of Cape Horn, but at last began to beat her way north.
Vivar brooded. He was a wise man, yet his understanding could not encompass a man who would break his word. "Is the world changing so much?" he asked Sharpe.
"Yes," Sharpe said bleakly. "The war changed it."
"So that results justify methods?"
"Yes."
Vivar, cloaked and scarved against the bitter sea wind, paced the brig's small poop. "Then it's not a world I want a part of."
Sharpe feared his friend was contemplating suicide. "You have a wife and children!"
Vivar smiled and shook his head. "Not that, Sharpe. I mean that I shall retire from service. I shall go to Orense and look after my estates. I, at least, shall be honorable. I will read, work, pray, and watch the war from a distance."
And there would be war, Sharpe was certain of that. Europe would not stand idle while the ogre ravaged the Americas. Sharpe imagined the troops sailing from Portsmouth and Plymouth, traveling across a world to catch Bonaparte one last time. Only this time, he supposed, they would hang the Emperor, because Bonaparte would have caused one mischief too many.
The weather was becoming warmer as the ship sailed north, but just when Sharpe was beginning to count the days until they reached home, a series of vicious westerly gales beat the brig hard toward the east. She shortened sail, battened her hatches, and clawed against the weather's spitefulness. For six days and nights the gales came, one after the other, until Sharpe began to believe that some malevolent spirit was intentionally keeping him from ever seeing Lucille again.
Then, after a sixth night of storm, the weather gentled and the ship wore on to a new tack. Clothes and bedding were brought up to dry on lines rigged between the masts. The Captain of the brig, an elderly and courteous Chilean, came to Sharpe. "I don't know if any of you gentlemen are interested, sir, but we'll not be far from Saint Helena. We don't need to put in there, our supplies are plentiful, but if you want to see the place, sir?"
Sharpe suspected that the Chilean wanted to see Saint Helena for himself, or rather he wanted to discover whether Lord Cochrane's conspiracy had worked, and so Sharpe sought out Vivar and tentatively suggested the visit. He half expected Vivar to be adamantly opposed to any such exploration, but to Sharpe's surprise Vivar was as eager as the brig's Captain. "I'd like to know what happened," Vivar explained his interest. “The worst thing about being on board a ship is that you never know what's happening in the world. Maybe Cochrane failed? That's something worth praying for."
"He's not used to failure," Sharpe observed.
"Maybe no one has prayed hard enough. My God, Sharpe, but I've been praying these past few weeks."
The brig put into the harbor at Jamestown three days later. It was a hot day. The Captain ordered a boat lowered, then accompanied Vivar, Sharpe and Harper toward the small town that was hardly more than a row of houses above a stone quay. The hills, green and lush, climbed to the cloudy summits. A semaphore station stood with drooping arms at the foot of the road where Sharpe had climbed to meet a defeated Emperor.
The brig's longboat landed them at the water steps where a very young Lieutenant waited to receive them. It was the same young officer who had greeted Sharpe at his first arrival on the island. "It's Colonel Sharpe, isn't it, sir?" The Lieutenant seemed pleased to see Sharpe again.
"Yes." Sharpe could not remember the boy's name, and he felt guilty. Napoleon never forgot a soldier's name. Soon, no doubt, the Emperor would be welcoming his veterans to Chile by name, but for the life of him, Sharpe could not recall this one soldier's name. "I'm sorry," Sharpe said, "I don't remember your—"
"Lieutenant Roland Hardacre, sir. The same name as my father."
"Of course," Sharpe said. "You remember Mister Harper? And this is General Vivar of the Spanish Army."
"Sir!" Hardacre offered Vivar a smart salute.
"We came here, Lieutenant," Vivar said, "to discover what happened when the O'Higgins called here."
"The O'Higgins?" Hardacre frowned as he tried to recall the particular ship, then his face cleared. "Ah, yes! Our first visitor from the Chilean Navy! She called here a month ago." He shrugged, as though he could recall nothing significant in the O'Higgins's visit. "She reprovisioned, sir, then sailed away. To be honest, none of us were very sure why she came this far. There can hardly be any Chilean interests in this part of the world."
Sharpe felt an immense relief. Hardacre had treated the query very casually, which suggested to Sharpe that nothing important could have occurred during the Chileans' visit. "So Bonaparte's at Longwood still?" Sharpe asked.
"At Longwood, sir?" Hardacre repeated the question, but very hesitantly, and this time Sharpe knew something was wrong. The Lieutenant blushed, then frowned. "You haven't heard, sir?"
"Heard? Heard what?"
"The Emperor's dead, sir. He died last month. He's buried in the hills. The grave isn't far from the house. I'm sure if you'd like to visit the grave we can find some mules. Not that there's much to see there. Some people like to visit the house and take a keepsake."
Sharpe could say nothing. He was not sure he had heard right or, if he had, that such news could be true. Napoleon, dead? He touched the locket about his neck, suddenly glad that he possessed it.
Harper crossed himself.
Vivar, whose prayer had come true, also crossed himself. "How did he die, Lieutenant?"
"The doctors said it was a cancerous ulcer, sir."
"It sounds painful," Vivar said. He gazed up into hills, to where a mist clung to the high green slopes. "Poor man. To die so far from home."
"Would you like to visit the grave, sir?" Hardacre asked.
"I would," Vivar said.
"And me," Harper added.
"But not me," Sharpe said. "Not me."
Vivar, Harper and the brig's Captain rode mules up into the hills to see the plain grave where an Emperor lay buried. Sharpe waited on the quay. The wind blew fresh from the south and an Emperor was dead, his mischief stilled forever. Sharpe wanted to laugh, for it had all been for nothing, for absolutely nothing, and nothing had changed despite the banging of guns and the clangor of swords, but even that did not matter, for he was full of happiness, and he was at peace, and he was going home. For good and forever, he was going home.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, was an extraordinary and eccentric figure, a radical politician as well as one of the greatest naval commanders of the early nineteenth century. After a brilliant career in the Royal Navy, and an ignominious one in the House of Commons, he was expelled from both after being convicted of stock fraud in 1814. There is some evidence that the case against him was rigged, but Cochrane was never a man to behave sensibly when lawyers were arrayed against him, and so he went down to defeat and imprisonment. He escaped from prison (of course) and after a series of adventures, became Admiral of the Chilean Navy in that country's war of independence against Spain. He eventually fell out with Bernardo O'Higgins, but not before he had scoured the Spanish Navy from the Pacific coast of South America, effectively making independence a reality for both Chile and Peru. Probably the most astonishing victory of the many he gained in that war was his attack on Valdivia, which occurred much as described in these pages. It was a stunning victory that destroyed the last vestige of Spanish power in Chile.
After Valdivia, Cochrane took himself off to become an Admiral in the Brazilian Navy during its struggle against the Portuguese, before transferring his flag to the Greek Navy during that country's fight for independence from the Turks. Restored to grace in his homeland, he was reinstated in the Royal Navy in the 1830s and was bitterly disappointed not to be given command of a fleet in the Crimean War, by which time he was over eighty years old. Cochrane, by Donald Thomas (London 1978), is a most readable biography
of this extraordinary man, and I am indebted to Donald Thomas's book for the delicious account of how Cochrane was vicariously ejected from the Order of the Bath in a sinister midnight ceremony in Westminster Abbey.
I am indebted to Donald Thomas also for the extraordinary story of how Cochrane plotted to bring Napoleon to Valdivia and thus begin a campaign for a United States of South America. The plot was so far advanced that, following the capture of Valdivia, Cochrane did indeed send a rescue ship to Saint Helena. When Lieutenant Colonel Charles reached the island he found Napoleon in his last illness, and so abandoned the attempt to free the emperor. What might have occurred had Bonaparte lived, and had Cochrane rescued him, remains one of the great tantalizations of history.
But Bonaparte was dead, probably poisoned by French royalists who feared his return to France. He remained in his grave on Saint Helena until 1840, when his body was returned to France to be interred in the Dome Church of Les Invalides in Paris. Sharpe also returned to France, and Harper to Ireland, where, so far as I know, they lived happily ever after.
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