Sharpe's Devil

by Bernard Cornwell

  “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 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 toward 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 toward 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 ultra-royalists, 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 Chamber-tin 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?”

  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 campfire. 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 they 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 dessicate. 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 agree
d 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 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 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 Santo’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.

  PART I

  BAUTISTA

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

  At first Sharpe did not recognize the tall, black-dressed woman whose carriage, attended by postilions and outriders, drew up under the chateau’s crumbling arch. He had supposed the lavish carriage to belong to some rich person who, traveling about Normandy, had become lost in the region’s green tangle of lanes and, it being late on a hot summer’s afternoon, had sought out the largest farmhouse of the village for directions and, doubtless, refreshments as well. Sharpe, his face sour and unwelcoming, had been prepared to turn the visitors away by directing them to the inn at 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 Blas Vivar, Count of Mouromorto, devout Catholic, and soldier of Spain.

  Who, Doña Louisa now informed Sharpe, had disappeared. Blas Vivar had vanished.

  Sharpe, overwhelmed by the suddenness of the information and by Louisa’s arrival, gaped like a village idiot. Lucille insisted that Doña Louisa must stay for supper, which meant staying for the night, and Sharpe was peremptorily sent about making preparations. There was no spare stabling for Doña Louisa’s valuable carriage horses, so Sharpe ordered a boy to unstall the plough horses and take them to a meadow while Lucille organized beds for Doña Louisa and her maids, and rugs for Doña Louisa’s coachmen. Luggage had to be unstrapped from the varnished carriage and carried upstairs where the chateau’s two maids laid new sheets on the beds. Wine was brought up from the damp cellar, and a fine cheese, which Lucille would otherwise have sent to the market in Caen, was taken from its nettle-leaf wrapping and pronounced fit for the visitor’s supper. That supper would not be much different from any of the other peasant meals being eaten in the village for the chateau was pretentious only in its name. The building had once been a nobleman’s fort
ified manor, but was now little more than an overgrown and moated farmhouse.

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

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

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

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