Sharpe's Devil

by Bernard Cornwell

  “I’m a soldier,” Sharpe said stubbornly, as though that excused him from holding beliefs.

  “A plain, bluff man, eh? Then so am I, so I will tell you very plainly that I believe you are telling lies. I believe you came to Chile to bring money and a message to the rebels.”

  “So you believe in pigs with wings too?”

  Bautista ignored the sneer, striding instead to the table where he opened a writing box and took out an object which he tossed to Sharpe. “What is that?”

  “Bloody hell,” Harper murmured, for the object which Bautista had scornfully shied at Sharpe was the signed portrait of Napoleon that had been stolen in Valdivia.

  “This was stolen from me,” Sharpe said, “in Valdivia.”

  “At the time,” Bautista jeered from the window, “you denied anything more was missing. Were you ashamed of carrying a message from Napoleon to a mercenary rebel?”

  “It isn’t a message!” Sharpe said scornfully. “It was a gift.”

  “Oh, Mister Sharpe!” Bautista’s voice was full of disappointment, as though Sharpe was not proving a worthy opponent. “A man carries a gift to a rebel? How did you expect to deliver this gift if you were not to be in communication with the rebels? Tell me!”

  Sharpe said nothing.

  Bautista smiled pitifully. “What a bad conspirator you are, Mister Sharpe. And such a bad liar, too. Turn the portrait over. Go on! Do it!” Bautista waited till Sharpe had dutifully turned the picture over, then pointed with his riding crop. “That backing board comes off. Pull it.”

  Sharpe saw that the stiffening board behind the printed etching had been levered out of the frame. The board had been replaced, but now he prized it out again and thus revealed a piece of paper which had been folded to fit the exact space behind the board.

  “Open it! Go on!” Bautista was enjoying the moment.

  At first glance the folded paper might have been taken for a thickening sheet which merely served to stop the glass from rattling in the metal frame, but when Sharpe unfolded the sheet he saw that it bore a coded message. “Oh, Christ,” Sharpe said softly when he realized what it was. The ink-written code was a jumble of letters and numerals and meant nothing to Sharpe, but it was clearly a message from Bonaparte to the mysterious Lieutenant Colonel Charles, and any such message could only mean trouble.

  “You are pretending you did not know the message was there?” Bautista challenged Sharpe.

  “Of course I didn’t.”

  “Who wrote it? Napoleon? Or your English masters?”

  The question revealed that Bautista’s men had not succeeded in breaking the code. “Napoleon,” Sharpe said, then tried to construct a feeble defense of the coded message. “It’s nothing important. Charles is an admirer of the Emperor’s.”

  “You expect me to believe that an unimportant letter would be written in code?” Bautista asked mockingly, then he calmly walked to Sharpe and held out his hand for the message. Sharpe paused a second, then surrendered the message and the framed portrait. Bautista glanced at the code. “I believe it is a message from your English masters, which you inserted into the portrait. What does the message say?”

  “I don’t know.” Sharpe, conscious of all the eyes that watched him, straightened his back. “How could I know? You probably concocted that message yourself.” Sharpe believed no such thing. The moment he had seen the folded and coded message he had known that he had been duped into being Napoleon’s messenger boy, but he dared not surrender the initiative wholly to Bautista.

  But Sharpe’s counteraccusation was a clumsy riposte and Bautista scoffed at it. “If I planned to incriminate you by concocting a message, Mister Sharpe, I would hardly invent one that no one could read.” His audience laughed at the easy parry, and Bautista, like a matador who had just made an elegant pass at his prey, smiled, then walked to one of the high arched windows which, unglazed, offered a view across the harbor and out to the Pacific. Bautista turned in the window and beckoned to his prisoners. “Come here! Both of you!”

  Sharpe and Harper obediently walked to the window, which looked down onto a wide stone terrace that formed a gun battery. The guns were thirty-six-pound naval cannons that had been removed from their ship trolleys and placed on heavy garrison mounts. There were twelve of the massive guns, each capable of plunging a vicious fire down onto any ship that dared attack Puerto Crucero’s harbor.

  Yet Bautista had not invited Sharpe and Harper to see the guns, but rather the man who was shackled to a wooden post at the very edge of one of the embrasures. That man was Ferdinand, the Indian guide who had brought them through the misted mountains ahead of Dregara’s pursuit. Now, stripped of his tattered uniform and dressed only in a short brown kilt, Ferdinand was manacled just seven or eight feet from the muzzle of one of the giant cannons. Dregara, who was clearly an intimate of Bautista’s, stood holding a smoking linstock beside the loaded gun. Sharpe, understanding what he was about to see, turned in horror on Bautista. “What in Christ’s name are you doing?”

  “This is an execution,” Bautista said in a tone of voice he might use to explain something to a small child, “a means of imposing order on an imperfect world.”

  “You can’t do this!” Sharpe protested so strongly that one of the infantrymen stepped in front of him with a musket and bayonet.

  “Of course I can do this!” Bautista mocked. “I am the King’s plenipotentiary. I can have men killed, I can have them imprisoned, I can even have them broken down to the ranks, like Private Morillo who is being sent to the mines to learn the virtues of loyalty.”

  “What has this man done?” Sharpe gestured at Ferdinand.

  “He has displeased me, Mister Sharpe,” Bautista said, then he beckoned the other men in the room forward so they could watch the execution from the other windows. Bautista’s eyes were greedy. “Are you watching?” Bautista asked Sharpe.

  “You bastard,” Sharpe said.

  “Why? This is a quick and painless death, though admittedly messy. You have to understand that the savages believe their souls will not reach paradise unless their bodies are intact for the funeral rites. They consequently have a morbid fear of dismemberment, which is why I devised this punishment as a means of discouraging rebellion among the Indian slaves. It works remarkably well.”

  “But this man has done nothing! Morillo did nothing!”

  “They displeased me,” Bautista hissed the words, then he looked down to the gun battery and held up a hand.

  Ferdinand, his lips drawn back from his filed teeth, seemed to be praying. His eyes were closed. “God bless you!” Sharpe shouted, though the Indian showed no signs of hearing.

  “You think God cares about scum?” Bautista chuckled, then dropped his hand.

  Dregara reached forward and the linstock touched the firing hole. The sound of the cannon was tremendous; loud enough to rattle the iron chandelier and hurt the eardrums of the men crowded at the windows. Harper crossed himself. Bautista licked his lips, and Ferdinand died in a maelstrom of smoke, fire and blood. Sharpe glimpsed the Indian’s shattered trunk whirling blood as it was blasted away from the parapet, then the smoke blew apart to reveal a splintered stake, a pair of bloody legs, and lumps and spatters of blood and flesh smeared across the cannon’s embrasure. The rest of Ferdinand’s body had been scattered into the outer harbor where screaming gulls, excited by this sudden largesse, dived and tore and fought for shreds of his flesh. Far out to sea, beyond the rocky spit of land, the cannonball crashed into the swell with a sudden white plume, while in the nearer waters, scraps of flesh and splinters of bone and drops of blood rained down to the frenzied gulls. Men had rushed to the rail of the American brigantine, fearful of what the gunfire meant, and now they stared in puzzlement at the blood-flecked water. Bautista sighed with pleasure, then turned away as the white-faced gun crew heaved the dead man’s legs over the parapet.

  There was a stunned silence in the hall. The stench of powder smoke and fresh blood was keen in the ai
r as Bautista, half smiling, turned to his audience. “Mister Blair?”

  “Your Excellency?” George Blair ducked an eager and frightened pace forward.

  “You have heard my questions to Mister Sharpe today?”

  “Indeed, Your Excellency.”

  “Do you confirm that I have treated the prisoners fairly? And with consideration?”

  Blair smirked and nodded. “Indeed, Your Excellency.”

  Bautista went to the table and held up the signed portrait of Napoleon and the folded message. “You heard the prisoner’s assertion that Napoleon wrote this message?”

  “I did, Your Excellency, indeed I did.”

  “And you see it is addressed to a notorious rebel?”

  “I do, Your Excellency, indeed I do.”

  Bautista’s face twitched with amusement. “Tell me, Blair, how your government will respond to the news that Mister Sharpe was acting as an errand boy for Bonaparte?”

  “They will doubtless regard any such message as treasonable correspondence, Your Excellency.” Blair bobbed obsequiously.

  Bautista smiled, and no wonder, for Sharpe’s possession of the Emperor’s message was enough to condemn Sharpe, not just with the Spanish, but with the British too. The British might possess the greatest navy and the strongest economy in the world, yet they were terrified of the small fat man cooped up in Saint Helena’s Longwood, and maybe they were terrified enough to allow Bautista to tie two British subjects to wooden stakes and blow their souls into eternity at the mouths of loaded cannons. Sharpe, suddenly feeling very abandoned, also felt frightened.

  Bautista sensed the fear and smiled. He had won now. He turned again to Blair. “Either Mister Sharpe was carrying a message from Napoleon, which makes him an enemy of his own country, or else this is a message from the British merchants who are my country’s enemies, but either way, Mister Sharpe’s possession of the message calls for punishment. Might I assume, Blair, that your government would not approve if I were to execute Mister Sharpe?”

  Blair beamed as though Bautista had made a fine jest. “My government would be displeased, Your Excellency.”

  “But you do accept that Mister Sharpe deserves punishment?”

  “Alas, Your Excellency, it appears so.” Blair nodded obsequiously at the Captain-General, then snatched a sideways glance at Sharpe who wondered just how much of Doña Louisa’s money the Consul was taking as a bribe.

  Bautista strolled back to the table where he picked up Sharpe’s heavy sword. “This was carried at Waterloo?” Sharpe said nothing, but Bautista did not need an answer. “I shall keep it as a trophy! Perhaps I shall have a plaque made for it. ‘Taken from an English soldier who at last met his match’!”

  “Fight for it now, you bastard,” Sharpe called.

  “I don’t fight against lice, I just smoke them out.” Bautista dropped the sword onto the table, then adopted a portentous tone of voice. “I declare your possessions are forfeited to the Spanish crown, and that the two of you are unwelcome in Chile. You are therefore expelled from these territories, and will embark on the next ship to leave this harbor.” Bautista had already prepared the expulsion papers which now, with a theatrical flourish, he offered to Captain Ardiles of the Espiritu Santo. “That would be your frigate, Captain. You have no objections to carrying the prisoners home?”

  “None,” Ardiles, ready for the request, said flatly.

  “Put them to work. No comforts! Sign them on to your crew and make them sweat.”

  “Indeed, Your Excellency.” Ardiles took the papers and pushed them into the tail pocket of his uniform.

  Bautista came close to Sharpe. “I would have preferred to put you to work in the mines, Englishman, so think yourself lucky.”

  “Frightened of the Royal Navy?” Sharpe taunted him.

  “Be careful, Englishman,” Bautista said softly.

  “You’re a thief,” Sharpe said just as quietly. “And Vivar knew it, which is why you killed him.”

  At first Bautista looked astonished at the accusation, then it made him laugh. He clapped with delight at his amusement, then waved at Major Suarez. “Take them away! Now!” The audience, in ludicrous sycophancy, began to applaud wildly as the infantrymen who had escorted Sharpe and Harper from their prison now chivied the two men through an archway and onto a flight of wide stone steps that ran down beside the bloody gun battery. The steps, which were very steep and cut from the crag on which the citadel stood, led down to the fortress quay where a longboat from the Espiritu Santo waited.

  Ardiles followed, his scabbard’s metal tip clattering on the stone steps. “Into the boat!” he ordered Sharpe and Harper when they reached the quay.

  “Make them sweat!” Bautista shouted from the gun battery’s parapet. “Put them at the oars now! You hear me, Ardiles! Put them at the oars! I want to see them sweat!”

  Ardiles nodded to the Bosun who made space for Sharpe and Harper on the bow thwarts. The other oarsmen grinned. Captain Ardiles, cloaked against the cold south wind, sat in the stern sheets where, it seemed to Sharpe, he carefully avoided his two captives’ eyes. “Push off!” he ordered.

  “Oars!” the Bosun shouted. From the high arched windows above the battery of heavy guns, a row of faces stared down at Sharpe’s humiliation.

  “Stroke!” the Bosun shouted, and Sharpe momentarily thought of rebelling, but knew that such mutiny would lead nowhere. Instead, like Harper, he pulled clumsily. Their oar-blades splashed and clattered on the other oars as they dragged the heavy boat away through the blood-flecked water. A gull, disturbed by the longboat’s proximity, flapped up from the water with a length of Ferdinand’s intestines in its beak. Other gulls screamed as they fought for the delicacy.

  “Pull!” the Bosun shouted, and Sharpe felt a pang of impotent anger. The rage was not directed at his tormentors, but at himself. He had been in the Americas little more than a week, yet now he would have to crawl back to Europe, confess his failure, and try to return Louisa her money. Which effort, he much feared, would mean bankruptcy. Except he knew that Louisa would forgive him, and that clemency hurt almost as much as bankruptcy. Goddamn and Goddamn and Goddamn! He had been rooked like a child wandering into a cutpurse’s tavern! It was that knowledge that really hurt, that he had been treated like a fool, and deservedly so. And to have lost his sword! The sword was only a cheap Heavy Cavalry blade, ugly and ill-balanced, but it had been a gift from Harper and it had kept Sharpe alive in some grim battles. Now it would be a trophy on Bautista’s wall. Christ! Sharpe stared at the fortress where Bautista ruled, and he felt the horrid impotence of failure, and the horrid certainty that he could never have his revenge. He was being taken away, across a world and back to ignominy, and he was helpless.

  He was helpless, he was penniless, and he had just come ten thousand bloody miles for nothing.

  The frigate, with its cargo of gold, sailed on that evening’s tide. Sharpe and Harper were put to work on a capstan that raised one of the anchors, then sent down to the gundeck where they helped to stack nine- and twelve-pounder shots in the ready racks about the frigate’s three masts. They worked till their muscles were sore and sweat was stinging their eyes, but they had no other choice. The dice had rolled badly, there was no other explanation, and the two men must knuckle under. Which did not mean they had to be subservient. A huge scarred beast of a man, a one-eyed seaman who was an evident leader of the forecastle, came to look them over, and such was the man’s power that the Bosun’s mates quietly edged back into the shadows when he gestured them away.

  “My name’s Balin,” the huge man said, “and you’re English.”

  “I’m English,” Sharpe said, “he’s Irish.”

  Balin jerked his head to order Harper aside. “I’ve no quarrel with the Irish,” he said, “but I’ve no love for Englishmen. Though mind you,” he took a step forward, ducking under the deck beams, “I like English clothes. That’s a fine coat, Englishman. I’ll take it.” He held out a broad hand. Two score
of seamen made a ring to hide what happened from any officers who might come down to the deck. “Come on!” Balin insisted.

  “I don’t want trouble,” Sharpe spoke very humbly, “I just want to get home safely.”

  “Give me your coat,” Balin said, “and there’s no trouble.”

  Sharpe glanced left and right at the unfriendly faces in the gundeck’s gloom. Night had fallen, and the only lights were a few glass-shielded lanterns that hung above the guns, and the flickering flames made the seamen’s faces even more grim than usual. “If I give you the coat,” Sharpe asked, “you’ll keep me from trouble?”

  “I’ll cuddle you to sleep, diddums,” Balin said, and the men laughed.

  Sharpe nodded. He took off the fine green coat and held it out to the massive man. “I don’t want trouble. My friend and I just want to get home. We didn’t ask to be here, we don’t want to be here, and we don’t want to make enemies.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Balin said scornfully, reaching for the good kerseymere coat, and the moment his hand took hold of the material Sharpe brought up his right boot, hard and straight, the kick hidden by the coat until the instant it slammed into Balin’s groin. The big man grunted, mouth open, and Sharpe rammed his head forward, hearing and feeling the teeth break under his forehead’s blow. He had his hands in Balin’s crotch now, squeezing, and Balin began to scream. Sharpe let go with one hand and used that hand like an axe on the big man’s neck. Once, twice, harder a third time, and finally Balin went down, bleeding and senseless. Sharpe kicked him, breaking a rib, then slammed the heel of his right boot into the one-eyed face, thus breaking Balin’s nose. The seaman’s hand fluttered on the deck, so for good measure Sharpe stamped on the fingers, shattering them. Then he stooped, plucked a good bone-handled knife from Balin’s belt, picked his coat up from the deck and looked around. “Does anyone else want an English coat?”