“None!” There was despair in Louisa’s voice. “And when I ask for information from our own army, I am told there is no information to be had. It seems that a Captain-General can disappear in Chile without a trace! I do not even know if I am a widow.” She looked at Lucille. “I wanted to travel to Chile, but it would have meant leaving my children. Besides, what can a woman do against the intransigence of soldiers?”
Lucille shot an amused glance at Sharpe, then looked down again at her sewing.
“The army has told you nothing?” Sharpe asked in astonishment.
“They tell me Don Blas is dead. They cannot prove it, for they have never found his body, but they assure me he must be dead.” Louisa said that the King had even paid for a Requiem Mass to be sung in Santiago de Compostela’s great cathedral, though Louisa had shocked the royal authorities by refusing to attend such a Mass, claiming it to be indecently premature. Don Blas, Louisa insisted, was alive. Her instinct told her so. “He might be a prisoner. I am told there are tribes of heathen savages who are reputed to keep white men as slaves in the forest. And Chile is a terrible country,” she explained to Lucille, “there are pygmies and giants in the mountains, while the rebel ranks are filled by rogues from Europe. Who knows what might have happened?”
Lucille made a sympathetic noise, but the mention of white slaves, pygmies, giants and rogues made Sharpe suspect that his visitor’s hopes were mere fantasies. In the five years since Waterloo Sharpe had met scores of women who were convinced that a missing son or a lost husband or a vanished lover still lived. Many such women had received notification that their missing man had been killed, but they stubbornly clung to their beliefs; supposing that their loved one was trapped in Russia, or kept prisoner in some remote Spanish town, or perhaps had been carried abroad to some far raw colony. Invariably, Sharpe knew, such men had either settled with different women or, more likely, were long dead and buried, but it was impossible to convince their 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 traveling to Puerto Crucero. The Governor of the southern province was an enemy of Don Blas. They hated each other, and I heard that Don Blas had proof of the Governor’s corruption and was traveling to confront him!”
Which meant, Sharpe wearily thought, that his friend Don Blas had been fighting two enemies: the entrenched Spanish interest as well as the rebels who had captured Santiago and driven the Royalists into the southern half of the country. Don Blas had doubtless been a good enough commander to beat the rebels, but was he a clever enough politician to beat his own side? Sharpe, who knew what an honest man Don Blas was, doubted it, and that doubt convinced him still further that his old friend must be dead. It took a cunning fox to cheat the hunt, while the brave beast that turned to fight the dogs always ended up torn into scraps. “So isn’t it likely,” Sharpe spoke as gently as he could, “that Don Blas was ambushed by his own side?”
“Indeed it’s possible!” Louisa said. “In fact I believe that is precisely what happened. But I would like to be certain.”
Sharpe sighed. “If Don Blas was ambushed by his own side, then they are not going to reveal what happened.” Sharpe hated delivering such a hopeless opinion, but he knew it was true. “I’m sorry, my lady, but you’re never going to know what happened.”
But Louisa could not accept so bleak a verdict. Her instinct had convinced her that Don Blas was alive, and that conviction had brought her into the deep, private valley where Sharpe farmed Lucille’s land. Sharpe wondered how he was going to rid himself of her. He suspected it would not be easy, for Doña Louisa was clearly obsessed by her husband’s fate.
“Do you want me to write to the Spanish authorities?” he offered. “Or perhaps ask the Duke of Wellington to use his influence?”
“What good will that do?” Louisa challenged. “I’ve used every influence I can, till the authorities are sick of me. I don’t need influence, I need the truth.” Louisa paused, then took the plunge. “I want you to go to Chile and find me that truth.”
Lucille’s gray eyes widened in surprise, while Sharpe, equally astonished at the effrontery of Louisa’s request, said nothing. Beyond the moat, in the elms that grew beside the orchard, rooks cawed loud and a house-martin sliced on saber wings between the dairy and the horse-chestnut tree. “There must be men in South America who are in a better position to search for your husband?” Lucille remarked very mildly.
“How do I trust them? Those officers who were friends of my husband have either been sent home or posted to remote garrisons. I sent money to other officers who claimed to be friends of Don Blas, but all I received in return are the same lies. They merely wish me to send more money, and thus they encourage me with hope but not with facts. Besides, such men cannot speak to the rebels.”
“And I can?” Sharpe asked.
“You can find out whether they ambushed Don Blas, or whether someone else set the trap.”
Sharpe, from all he had heard, doubted whether any rebels had been involved. “By someone else,” he said diplomatically, “I assume you mean the man Don Blas was riding to confront? The Governor of, where was it?”
“Puerto Crucero, and the governor’s name was Miguel Bautista,” Louisa spoke the name with utter loathing, “and Miguel Bautista is Chile’s new Captain-General. That snake has replaced Don Blas! He writes me flowery letters of condolence, but the truth is that he hated Don Blas and has done nothing to help me.”
“Why did he hate Don Blas?” Sharpe asked.
“Because Don Blas is honest, and Bautista is corrupt. Why else?”
“Corrupt enough to murder Don Blas?” Sharpe asked.
“My husband is not dead!” Louisa insisted in a voice full of pain, so much pain that Sharpe, who till now had been trying to pierce her armor of certainty, suddenly realized just what anguish lay behind that self-delusion. “He is hiding,” Louisa insisted, “or perhaps he is wounded. Perhaps he is with the savages. Who knows? I only know, in my heart, that he is not dead. You will understand!” This passionate appeal was directed at Lucille, who smiled with sympathy, but said nothing. “Women know when their men die,” Louisa went on, “they feel it. I know a woman who woke in her sleep, crying, and later we discovered that her husband’s ship had sunk that very same night! I tell you, Don Blas is alive!” The cry was pathetic, yet full of vigor, tragic.
Sharpe turned to watch his son who, with little Dominique, was searching inside the open barn door for newly laid eggs. He did not want to go to Chile. These days he even resented having to travel much beyond Caen. Sharpe was a happy man, his only worries the usual concerns of a farmer—money and weather—and he wished Louisa had not come to the valley with her talk of cavalry and ambush and savages and corruption. Sharpe’s more immediate concerns were the pike that decimated the millstream trout and the crumbling sill of the weir that threatened to collapse and inundate Lucille’s water meadows, and he did not want to think of far-off countries and corrupt governments and missing soldiers.
Doña Louisa, seeing Sharpe stare at his children, must have understood what he was thinking. “I have asked for help everywhere,” she made the appeal to Lucille as much as to Sharpe. “The Spanish authorities won’t help me, which is why I went to London.” Louisa, who perhaps had more faith in her English roots than she would have liked to admit, explained that she had sought the help of the British government because British interests were important in Chile. Merchants from London and Liverpool, in anticipation of new trading opportunities, were suspected of funding the rebel government, while the Royal Navy kept a squadron on the Chilean coast and Louisa believed that if the British authorities, thus well connected with both sides of the fighting parties, demanded news of Don Blas then neither the rebels nor the Royalists would dare refuse them.
Lucille spoke excellent English, but not quite well enough to have kept up with Louisa’s indignant loquacity. Sharpe translated, and added a few facts of his own; how he did indeed owe Blas Vivar a great debt. “He helped me once, years ago,” Sharpe said, deliberately vague, for Lucille never much liked to hear of Sharpe’s exploits in fighting against her own people. “And he is a good man,” Sharpe added, and knew the compliment was inadequate, for Don Blas was more than just a good man. He was, or had been, a generous man of rigorous honesty; a man of religion, of charity, and of ability.
“I do not like asking this of you,” Louisa said in an unnaturally timid voice, “but I know that whoever seeks Don Blas must treat with soldiers, and your name is respected everywhere among soldiers.”
“Not here, it isn’t,” Lucille said robustly, though not without an affectionate smile at Sharpe, for she knew how proud he would be of the compliment just paid him.
“And, of course, I shall pay you for your trouble in going to Chile,” Louisa added.
“Of course Richard will go,” Lucille, understanding that promise, said quickly.
“Though I don’t need any money,” Sharpe said gallantly.
“Yes, you do,” Lucille intervened calmly and, more pointedly, in English so that Louisa would understand. Lucille had already estimated the worth of Doña Louisa’s black dress, and of her carriage, and of her postilions and outriders and horses and luggage, and Lucille knew only too well how desperately her chateau needed repairs and how badly her estate needed the investment of money. Lucille paused to bite through a thread, “But I don’t want you to go alone. You need company. You’ve been wanting to see Patrick, so you should write to Dublin tonight, Richard.”
“Patrick won’t want to come,” Sharpe said, not because he thought his friend would truly refuse such an invitation, but rather because he did not want to raise his own hopes that his oldest friend, Patrick Harper, would give up his comfortable existence as landlord of a Dublin tavern and instead travel to one of the remotest and evidently most troubled countries on earth.
“It would be better if you did take a companion,” Louisa said firmly. “Chile is horribly corrupt. Don Blas believed that men like Bautista were simply extracting every last scrap of profit before the war was lost, and that they did not care about victory, but only for money. But money will open doors for you, so I plan to give you a sum of coin to use as bribes, and it might be sensible to have a strong man to help you protect such a fortune.”
“And Patrick is certainly strong,” Lucille said affectionately.
Thus the two women had made their decisions. Sharpe, with Harper, if his old friend agreed, would sail to Chile. Doña Louisa would provide Sharpe with two thousand gold English guineas, a coinage acceptable anywhere in the world, and a sum sufficient to buy Sharpe whatever information he needed, then she would wait for his news in her Palace of Mouromorto in Orense. Lucille, meanwhile, would hire an engineer from Caen to construct a new weir downstream of the old, the first repair to be done with the generous fee Louisa insisted on paying Sharpe.
Who, believing that he sailed to find a dead man, was now in mid-Atlantic, on a Spanish frigate, sailing to a corrupt colony, and bearing an Emperor’s gift.
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 to Sharpe, that won wars. “Napoleon understood that!”
“But Napoleon lost his wars,” Sharpe interjected.
Ruiz flicked that objection aside. The advance in the science of artillery, he claimed, had made cavalry and infantry vulnerable to the massive destructive power of guns. There was no future, he said, in pursuing rebels around the Chilean wilderness; instead they must be lured under the massed guns of a fortress and there pulverized. Ruiz modestly disclaimed authorship of this strategy, instead praising the new Captain-General, Bautista, for the idea. “We’ll take care of Cochrane in exactly the same way,” Ruiz promised. “We’ll lure him and his ships under the guns of Valdivia, then turn the so-called rebel Navy into firewood. Guns will mean the end of Cochrane!”
Cochrane. That was the name that haunted every Spaniard. Sharpe heard the name a score of times each day. Whenever two Spanish officers were talking, they spoke of Cochrane. They disliked Bernardo O’Higgins, the rebel Irish General and now Supreme Director of the independent Chilean Republic, but they hated Cochrane. Cochrane’s victories were too flamboyant, too unlikely. They believed he was a devil, for there could be no other explanation for his success.
In truth Lord Thomas Cochrane was a Scotsman, a sailor, a jailbird, a politician and a rebel. He was also lucky. “He has the devil’s own luck,” Lieutenant Otero, the Espiritu Santo’s First Lieutenant, solemnly told Sharpe, “and when Cochrane is lucky, the rebellion thrives.” Otero explained that it was Cochrane’s naval victories that had made most of the rebellion’s successes possible. “Chile is not a country in which armies can easily march, so the Generals need ships to transport their troops. That’s what that devil Cochrane has given them—mobility!” Otero stared gloomily at the wild seas ahead, then shook his head sadly. “But in truth he is nothing but a pirate.”
“A lucky pirate, it seems,” Sharpe observed drily.
“I sometimes wonder if what we call luck is merely the will of God,” Otero observed sadly, “and that therefore Cochrane has been sent to scourge Spain for a reason. But God will surely relent.” Otero piously crossed himself and Sharpe reflected that if God did indeed want to punish Spain, then in Lord Cochrane He had found Himself a most lethal instrument. Cochrane, when master of a small Royal Naval sloop, and at the very beginnings of the French wars when Spain had still been allied with France, had captured a Spanish frigate that outgunned and outmanned him six to one. From that moment he had become a scourge of the seas, defying every Spanish or French attempt to thwart him. In the end his defeat had not come at the hands of Britain’s enemies, but of its courts, which had imprisoned him for fraud. He had fled the country in disgrace, to become the Admiral of the Chilean Republic’s Navy and such was Cochrane’s reputation that, as even the Espiritu Santo’s officers were forced to admit, no Spanish ship dared sail alone north of Valdivia, and those ships that sailed the waters south of Valdivia, like the Espiritu Santo herself, had better be well armed.
“And we are well armed!” the frigate’s officers liked to boast. Captain Ardiles exercised the Espiritu Santo’s gun crews incessantly so that the passengers became sick of the heavy guns’ concussion that shook the very frame of the big ship. Ardiles, perhaps enjoying the passengers’ discomfort, demanded ever faster service of the guns, and was willing to expend powder barrel after powder barrel and roundshot after roundshot in his search for the perfection that would let him destroy Cochrane in battle. The frigate’s officers, enthused by their reclusive Captain’s quest for efficiency, boasted that they would beat Cochrane’s ships to pulp, capture Cochrane himself, then parade the devil through Madrid to expose him to the jeers of the citizens before he was garotted in slow agony.
Sharpe listened, smiled and made no attempt to mention that Lord Cochrane had fought scores of shipborne battles, while Ardiles, for all his gun practices, had never faced a real warship in a fight. Ardiles had merely skirmished with coastal brigs and pinnaces that were a fraction of the Espiritu Santo’s size. Captain Ardiles’s dreams of victory were therefore wild, but not nearly so fantastic as the other stories that began to flourish among the Espiritu Santo’s nervous passengers as the ship sailed ever closer to the tip of South America. Ne
ither Colonel Ruiz nor any of his officers had been posted to Chile before, yet they knew it to be a place of giants, of one-legged men who could run faster than racehorses, of birds larger than elephants, of serpents that could swallow a whole herd of cattle, of fish that could tear the flesh from a man’s bones in seconds, and of forests that were home to tribes of savages who could kill with a glance. In the mountains, so it was reliably said, were tribes of cannibals who used women of an unearthly beauty to lure men to their feasting pots. There were lakes of fire and rivers of blood. It was a land of winged demons and daylight vampires. There were deserts and glaciers, scorpions and unicorns, fanged whales and poisonous sea serpents. Ruiz’s regimental priest, a fat syphilitic drunkard who wept when he thought of the terrors awaiting him, knelt before the crucifix nailed to the Espiritu Santo’s mainmast and swore he would reform and be good if only the mother of Christ would spare him from the devils of Chile. No wonder Cochrane was so successful, the priest told Harper, when he had such devilish magic on his side.
The weather became as wild as the stories. It was supposed to be summer in these southern latitudes, yet more than one dawn brought hissing sleet showers and a thick frost which clung like icy mildew in the sheltered nooks of the Espiritu Santo’s upper decks. Huge seas, taller than the lanterns on the poop, thundered from astern. The tops of such waves were maelstroms of churning white water which seethed madly as they crashed and foamed under the frigate’s stern.
Most of the Spanish artillery officers succumbed to seasickness. Few of the sick men had the energy to climb on deck and, in front of the scornful sailors, lower their breeches to perch on the beakhead, so instead the passengers voided their bellies and bowels into buckets that slopped and spilled until the passenger accommodations stank like a cesspit. The food did not help the ship’s well-being. At Saint Helena the Espiritu Santo had stocked up with yams which had by now liquefied into rancid bags, while most of the ship’s meat, inadequately salted in Spain, was wriggling with maggots. The drinking water was fouled. There were weevils in the bread. Even the wine was sour.
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 7: Sharpe’s Revenge, Sharpe’s Waterloo, Sharpe’s Devil Page 76