Sharpe 21 - Sharpe's Devil (4 page)

“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 favor 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 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 favor 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 Saint 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 favor 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 dispatched 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 nighttime 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 Santos 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 answered, 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 favored you with a gift?”

“He favored 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, a honeybee. Sharpe, having struck an evident note of affection in the Emperor, had been privileged with a silver locket containing 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 Santa's saloon, but the tall Major translated their enmity as something that 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 it. He stepped stiffly backward. “Then good day to you, sir.”

The Espiritu Santo weighed anchor in the next day's dawn and, under a watery sun, headed southward. By midday the island of Saint 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.

CHAPTER 1

BAUTISTA

 Capitan-General Vivar's wife, the Countess of Mouromorto, had been born and raised in England, but Sharpe had first met Miss Louisa Parker when, in 1809 and with thousands of other refugees, she was fleeing from Napoleon's invasion of northern Spain. The Parker family, oblivious to the chaos that was engulfing a continent, could grieve only for their lost Protestant Bibles with which they had forlornly hoped to convert Papist Spain. Somehow, in the weltering chaos, Miss Louisa Parker had met Don Bias Vivar who, later that same year, became the Count of Mouromorto. Miss Parker had meanwhile become a Papist, and thereafter Bias Vivar's wife. Sharpe saw neither of them again till, in the late summer of 1819, Dona Louisa Vivar, Countess of Mouromorto, arrived unannounced and unexpected in the Normandy village where Sharpe farmed.

At first Sharpe did not recognize the tall, black-dressed woman whose carriage, attended by postilions and outriders, drew up under the chateau's crumbling arch. He had supposed the lavish carriage to belong to some rich person who, traveling about Normandy, had become lost in the region's green tangle of lanes and, it being late on a hot summer's afternoon, had sought out the largest farmhouse of the village for directions and, doubtless, refreshments as well. Sharpe, his face sour and unwelcoming, had been prepared to turn the visitors away by directing them to the inn at 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 had found it hard to reconcile this woman's reserved and stately appearance with his memories of an adventurous English girl who had impulsively abandoned both her Protestant religion and the approval of her family to marry Don Bias Vivar, Count of Mouromorto, devout Catholic, and soldier of Spain.

Who, Dona Louisa now informed Sharpe, had disappeared. Bias Vivar had vanished.

Sharpe, overwhelmed by the suddenness of the information and by Louisa's arrival, gaped like a village idiot. Lucille insisted that Dona 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 Dona 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 Dona Louisa and her maids, and rugs for Dona Louisa's coachmen. Luggage had to be unstrapped from the varnished carriage and carried upstairs where the chateau's two maids laid new sheets on the beds. Wine was brought up from the damp cellar, and a fine cheese, which Lucille would otherwise have sent to the market in Caen, was taken from its nettle-leaf wrapping and pronounced fit for the visitor's supper. That supper would not be much different from any of the other peasant meals being eaten in the village for the chateau was pretentious only in its name. The building had once been a nobleman's fortified manor, but was now little more than an overgrown and moated farmhouse.

Dona Louisa, her mind too full of her troubles to notice the fuss her arrival had prompted, explained to Sharpe the immediate cause of her unexpected visit. “I have been in England and I insisted the Horse Guards tell me where I might find you. I am sorry not to have sent you warning of my coming, but I need help.” She spoke peremptorily, her voice that of a woman who was not used to deferring the gratification of her wishes.

She was nevertheless forced to wait while Sharpe's two children were introduced to her. Patrick, age five, offered her ladyship a sturdy bow while Dominique, age three, was more interested in the ducklings that splashed at the moat's edge. “Dominique looks like your wife,” Louisa said.

Sharpe merely grunted a noncommital reply, for he had no wish to explain that he and Lucille were not married, nor how he already had a bitch of a wife in London whom he could not afford to divorce and who would not decently crawl away and die. Nor did Lucille, coming to join Sharpe and their guest at the table in the courtyard, bother to correct Louisa's misapprehension, for Lucille claimed to take more pleasure in being mistaken for Madame Richard Sharpe than in using her ancient title, though Sharpe, much to Lucille's amusement, now insisted on introducing her to Louisa as the Vicomtesse de Seleglise, an honor which duly impressed the Countess of Mouromorto. Lucille, as ever, tried to disown the title by saying that such nonsenses had been abolished in the revolution and, besides, anyone connected to an ancient French family could drag out a title from somewhere. “Half the ploughmen in France are Viscounts,” the Viscountess Seleglise said with self-deprecation, then politely asked whether the Countess of Mouromorto had any children.

“Three,” Louisa replied, and then went on to explain how an additional two children had died in infancy. Sharpe, supposing that the two women would get down to the interminable and tedious feminine business of making mutual compliments about their respective children, let the conversation become a meaningless drone, but Louisa surprisingly brushed the subject of children aside, only wanting to talk of her missing husband. “He's somewhere in Chile,” she said.

Sharpe had to think for a few seconds before he could place Chile, then he remembered a few scraps of information from the newspapers that he read in the inn beside Caen Abbey where he went for dinner on market days. “There's a war of independence going on in Chile, isn't there?”

“A rebellion!” Louisa corrected him sharply. Indeed, she went on, her husband had been sent to suppress the rebellion, though when Don Bias had reached Chile he had discovered a demoralized Spanish army, a defeatist squadron of naval ships, and a treasury bled white by corruption, yet within six months he had been full of hope and had even been promising Louisa that she and the children would soon join him in Valdivia's Citadel which served as Chile's official residence for its Captain-General.

“I thought Santiago was the capital of Chile?” Lucille, who had brought some sewing from the house, inquired gently.

“It was,” Louisa admitted reluctantly, then added indignantly, “till the rebels captured it. They now call it the capital of the Chilean Republic. As if there could be such a thing!” And, Louisa claimed, if Don Bias 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 Bias, only an official dispatch which said that His Excellency Don Bias, Count of Mouromorto and Captain-General of the Spanish Forces in His Majesty's dominion of Chile, had disappeared.

Don Bias, Louisa said, had ridden to inspect the fortifications at the harbor town of Puerto Crucero, the southernmost garrison in Spanish Chile. He had ridden with a cavalry escort, and had been ambushed somewhere north of Puerto Crucero, in a region of steep hills and deep woods. At the time of the ambush Don Bias 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 Bias, and his ambushers, had long disappeared.

“He must have been captured by the rebels,” Sharpe suggested mildly.

“If you were a rebel commander,” Louisa observed icily, “and succeeded in capturing or killing the Spanish Captain-General, would you keep silent about your victory?”

“No,” Sharpe admitted, for such a feat would encourage every rebel in South America and concomitantly depress all their Royalist opponents. He frowned. “Surely Don Bias had aides with him?”

“He had a small escort.”

“Yet he was riding alone? In rebel country?” Sharpe's soldiering instincts, rusty as they were, rebelled at such a thought.

Louisa, who had rehearsed these questions and answers for weeks, shrugged. “They tell me that no rebels had been seen in those parts for many months. That Don Bias 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 Bias?”

“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 Bias 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 Bias, 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 Bias 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 Bias. They hated each other, and I heard that Don Bias had proof of the Governor's corruption and was traveling to confront him!”

Which meant, Sharpe wearily thought, that his friend Don Bias 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 Bias 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 Bias 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 Bias 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 Bias 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 Bias 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 Dona 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 Bias, 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 Bias, 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 Bias 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 Bias! He writes me flowery letters of condolence, but the truth is that he hated Don Bias and has done nothing to help me.”