Sharpe's Devil

by Bernard Cornwell

  “The devil they have.” Cochrane peered at the mess Harper had made of the slab as though expecting to see Vivar’s decayed flesh. “Do you know why people are buried close to altars?” he asked Sharpe airily.

  “No,” Sharpe answered in the tone of a man who did not much care about the answer.

  “Because very large numbers of Catholic churches have relics of saints secreted within their altars, of course.” Cochrane smiled, as if he had done Sharpe a great favor by revealing the answer.

  The Dominican surgeon, his white gown streaked and spattered with bright new blood, had come to the altar to protest to Lord Cochrane about the spoliation being wrought by Harper, but Cochrane turned on the man and brusquely told him to shut up. “And why,” Cochrane continued blithely to Sharpe, “do you think the relics in the altar are important to the dead?”

  “I really don’t know,” Sharpe said.

  “Because, my dear Sharpe, of what will happen on the Day of Judgment.”

  Harper had fetched a spade with which he chipped away the fragments of limestone. “They have used bloody cement!” he said in exasperation. “Goddamn them. Why did they do that? It was just shingle when we tried to pull him out before!”

  “They used cement,” Cochrane said, “because they don’t want you to dig him up.”

  “The Day of Judgment?” Sharpe, interested at last, asked Cochrane.

  His Lordship, who had been examining the mangled remains of the altar screen, turned around. “Because, my dear Sharpe, common sense tells our Papist brethren that, at the sound of the last trump when the dead rise incorruptible, the saints will rise faster than us mere sinners. The rate of resurrection, so the doctrine claims, will depend on the holiness of the man or woman being raised from the dead, and naturally the saints will rise first and travel fastest to heaven. Thus the wise Papist, leaving nothing to chance, is buried close to the altar because it contains a saint’s relic which, on the Day of Judgment, will go speedily to heaven, creating a draught of wind which will catch up those close to the altar and drag them up to heaven with it.”

  “He’ll be dragged up in a barrowload of cement and shingle if he tries to fly out of this bloody grave,” Harper grumbled.

  Cochrane, who seemed to Sharpe to be taking an inordinate interest in the exhumation, peered down at the mangled grave. “Why don’t I have some prisoners do the digging for you?”

  Harper tossed the spade down in acceptance of the offer and Cochrane, having shouted for some prisoners to be fetched, stirred the cemented shingle with his toe. “Why on earth do you want to take Vivar’s body back to Spain?”

  “Because that’s where his widow wants him,” Sharpe said.

  “Ah, a woman’s whim! I hope my wife would not wish the same. I can’t imagine being slopped home in a vat of brandy like poor Nelson, though I suppose if one must face eternity, then one might as well slip into it drunk.” Cochrane, who had been pacing about the church choir, suddenly stopped, placed one foot dramatically ahead of the other, clasped a left hand across his breast, and declaimed in a mighty voice that momentarily stilled even the moaning of the wounded:

  “Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,

  As his corse to the rampart we hurried!”

  His Lordship applauded his own rendering of the lines. “Who wrote that?”

  “An Irishman!” MacAuley shouted from the nave of the church.

  “Was it now?” Cochrane enquired skeptically, then whirled on Sharpe. “You know the poem, Sharpe?”

  “No, my Lord.”

  “You don’t!” Cochrane sounded astonished, then again assumed his declamatory pose:

  “But he lay like a warrior taking his rest,

  With his martial cloak around him”

  “The verses, you understand, refer to the burial of Sir John Moore. Did you know Moore?”

  “I met him,” Sharpe said laconically, recalling a hurried conversation on a snow-bright hillside in Galicia. French dragoons had been leading their horses down an icy road on the far side of a wide valley toward a shivering greenjacket rear guard, and Lieutenant General Sir John Moore, shaking with the cold, had courteously enquired of Lieutenant Richard Sharpe whether the enemy horsemen had been more bothersome than usual that morning. That distracted conversation, Sharpe now remembered, must have been held only days before he had met Major Blas Vivar of the Cazadores.

  “So you will remember that Moore was buried on the battlefield of Corunna,” Cochrane continued, “and without any nonsense of being carried home to his ever-loving wife. Soldiers normally lie where they fall, so why would this wife want General Vivar taken home? Why does she not leave him in peace?”

  “Because the family has a particular connection with the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela.” Sharpe offered the best explanation he could.

  “Ah! There are more powerful relics in a cathedral, you see.” Cochrane sounded gloomy. “In Spain he’ll be buried by Saint James himself, not by some sniveling little Chilean holy man. He’ll be in heaven before the rest of us will have had a chance to pick our resurrected noses or scratch our resurrected arses.”

  “You won’t need a wind to carry you, my Lord,” the Irish doctor called, “you’ll just roll downhill to perdition with the rest of us miserable bastards.”

  “You note the respect in which I am held.” Cochrane, who clearly relished the comradeship, smiled at Sharpe, then changed into his lamentable Spanish to order the newly arrived prisoners to start digging. Major Suarez, the Spanish officer who had been so cordial to Sharpe when he had first arrived at Puerto Crucero, and who had suffered the misfortune of being captured by Cochrane’s men, had insisted on accompanying the three prisoners to protest about their being employed for manual labor, but he calmed down when he recognized Sharpe and when he saw that the digging was hardly of a martial nature. He calmed down even more when Cochrane, ever courteous, invited him to share in the breakfast he had ordered fetched to the church. “Most of your fellow officers escaped capture by running away,” Cochrane observed, “so I can only congratulate you on having the courage to stay and fight.”

  “Alas, señor, I was asleep,” Suarez confessed, then crossed himself as he looked at Vivar’s grave.

  “You were here, señor, when the Captain-General was buried?” Cochrane asked politely.

  Suarez nodded. “It was at night. Very late.”

  Cochrane could not resist the invitation.

  “We buried him darkly at dead of night,

  The sods with our bayonets turning.”

  “How dead was the night?” Cochrane asked Suarez, suddenly speaking in Spanish and, when the Major just gaped at him, Cochrane condescended to make the question more intelligible. “What time was Blas Vivar buried?”

  “Past midnight.” Suarez gazed at the grave which was now deepening perceptibly. “Father Josef said the Mass and whoever was still awake attended.”

  Sharpe, remembering his conversation with Blair, the British Consul in Valdivia, frowned. “I thought a lot of people were invited here for the funeral?”

  “No, señor, that was for a Requiem Mass a week later. But Captain-General Vivar was buried by then.”

  “Who filled the grave with cement?” Sharpe asked.

  “The Captain-General ordered it done, after you had left the fortress. I don’t know why.” Suarez hunched back onto the stone bench that edged the choir. Above him a marble slab recalled the exemplary life of a Colonel’s wife who, with all her children, had drowned off Puerto Crucero in 1711. Beside that slab was another, commemorating her husband, who had been killed by heathen savages in 1713. The garrison church was full of such memorials, reminders of how long the Spanish had ruled this harsh coast.

  Cochrane watched the cement being chipped out of the hole, then turned accusingly on the mild Major Suarez. “So what do they say about Vivar’s death?”

  “I’m sorry, señor, I don’t understand.”

  “Did the rebels kill him? Or Bautista?” />
  Suarez licked his lips. “I don’t know, señor.” He reddened, suggesting that gossip in the Citadel pointed to Bautista’s guilt, but Suarez’s continuing fear of the Captain-General was quite sufficient to impose tact on him. “All I do know,” he tried to divert Cochrane with another morsel of gossip, “is that there was much consternation when Captain-General Vivar’s body could not be found. I heard that Madrid was asking questions. Many of us were sent to search for the body. I and my company were sent twice to the valley, but—” Suarez shrugged to show that his men had failed to find Vivar’s corpse.

  “So who did find it?” Sharpe asked.

  “One of General Bautista’s men from Valdivia, señor. A Captain called Marquinez.”

  “That greasy bastard,” Sharpe said with feeling.

  “The General was much relieved when the body was discovered,” Suarez added.

  “And no wonder,” Cochrane laughed raucously. “Bloody careless to lose the supremo’s body!”

  “This is a church!” the Dominican surgeon, goaded by Cochrane’s laughter, snapped in English.

  “MacAuley?” Cochrane called to his own surgeon, “if yon tonsured barber speaks out of turn again, you will fillet the turdhead with your bluntest scalpel, then feed him to the crabs. You hear me?”

  “I hear you, my Lord.”

  “Goddamn holy bastards,” Cochrane spat the insult toward the monk, then let his temper be triggered by irritation. “You know who crucified our Lord?” he shouted at the Dominican. “Bloody priests and bloody lawyers! That’s who! Not the soldiers! The soldiers were just obeying orders, because that’s what soldiers are paid to do, but who gave the orders? Priests and lawyers, that’s who! And you’re still making your mess on God’s earth. Jesus Christ, but I should revenge my Savior by slicing your rancid head off your useless body, you foul poxed son of a whore!”

  MacAuley was plainly enjoying the tirade. The Dominican, whose piety had stirred up the whirlwind, tried to ignore it. Suarez looked scared, while Harper, who had no love of priests, laughed aloud.

  “Christ on his cross!” Cochrane’s anger was ebbing. “I’d rather roast in hell with a battalion of damned soldiers than sip nectar in heaven alongside a thieving lawyer or a poison-filled priest.”

  “You sound like Napoleon,” Sharpe said.

  Cochrane’s head snapped up as though Sharpe had struck him, except the Scotsman’s face betrayed nothing but pleasure. “If only I was indeed like him,” he said warmly, then strode to the deepening grave where one of the soldiers had evidently reached the coffin, for the nauseating stench that had so repelled Sharpe and Harper when they had excavated the grave before now filled the church choir again. The Spanish soldier who had broken through the grave’s crust turned away retching. Suarez was gasping for breath, and only Cochrane seemed unmoved. “Get on with it!” he snapped at the prisoners.

  The three Spanish prisoners could not finish the job. Terror, superstition, or just the rank stink of the decaying body was making them shudder uncontrollably. Cochrane, impatient of such niceties and oblivious of the foul stench, leapt into the excavation and, with vigorous sweeps of the shovel, cleared the coffin of its last layer of coagulated shingle.

  Sharpe steeled himself to endure the nauseating odor and to stand at the edge of the grave to look at the simple wooden casket in which Blas Vivar was buried. The lid of the casket, made from some yellow timber, had cracked, and the wood itself had been badly stained by the cement, but some words which had been inscribed on the box in black paint were still visible; “BLAS VIVAR,” the simple epitaph read, “REQUIESCAT IN PACE.”

  “Shall I open it?” Cochrane, who seemed more intent than Sharpe on finding Vivar’s body, volunteered.

  “I’ll do it.” Sharpe took one of the discarded spades and rammed its blade under the thin yellow planks. The grave was so shallow that he had no trouble in levering up the lid by wrenching out the horseshoe nails that had held the crude coffin together. Cochrane helped by pulling the planks free, then tossing them onto the piles of broken concrete.

  The smell grew worse, filling the church with its sickening bite. MacAuley, unable to suppress his interest, had temporarily abandoned a patient to come and gape at the open coffin.

  Vivar was draped in a shroud of blue cloth that looked like matted velvet. Sharpe worked the edge of the spade under the cloth and, dreading the fresh wave of smells he would provoke, jerked it upward. For a second or two the material clung to the rotting flesh beneath, then it pulled free to billow a fresh gust of effluvial stench into the church. Sharpe swept the cloth aside and let it fall, with the spade, beside the grave.

  “Oh, Christ Almighty.” MacAuley made the sign of the cross on his blood-soaked chest.

  “Oh, good God,” Sharpe whispered.

  Major Suarez could not speak, but just sank to his knees.

  “Mary, Mother of God,” Harper crossed himself, then looked with horror at Sharpe.

  Lord Cochrane reverted to poetry:

  “Few and short were the prayers we said,

  And we spoke not a word of sorrow,

  But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead,

  And we bitterly thought of the morrow.”

  Then His Lordship began to laugh, and his laugh swelled to fill the whole church, for in the coffin, which had been partly weighted with stones, was the foully rotted corpse of a dog—a yellow dog, a wormy and half-liquefied dog that had been buried beside an altar so that on Judgment Day it would fly to its creator with the speed of a saint’s resurrection. “Oh, woof, woof,” Cochrane said, “woof, woof,” and Sharpe wondered just what in hell’s name he was supposed to do next.

  “No wonder Bautista didn’t want us to get at the grave,” Harper said. “Jesus! Why did he bury a dog?”

  “Because Madrid was pestering him to find Don Blas,” Sharpe guessed. “Because Louisa’s enquiries were more effective than she knew. Because he knew that if he didn’t find a body, the questions would get more persistent and the enquiries more urgent.”

  “But a dog?” Harper asked. “Jesus, it isn’t as if he couldn’t find a dead man. They’re ten a penny in this damned country.”

  “Bautista hated Vivar. So maybe using the dog was his idea of a joke? Besides, he didn’t think anyone would open the coffin, and why should they? Because by the time he needed to produce a body Don Blas had been dead three months, so all Bautista needed do was produce a coffin that stank and sent off his trusted Marquinez to concoct the wretched thing. And it worked, at least till we turned up.” Sharpe said the words bitterly, a despairing cry to the cold wind that whipped up from the mysterious Chilean southlands. He and Harper were walking around the citadel’s ramparts over which, just moments before, the decomposed remains of the yellow dog had been tossed away.

  “So maybe the bastard faked that message in Boney’s picture just to have a reason to throw us out!” Harper said, “but Doña Louisa would have sent another request for the body! The thing wouldn’t have ended with us.”

  “And Bautista would have provided her with a body, or rather a skeleton so rotted down that no one could ever tell who it had been, but he would have needed time to prepare it. He’d probably have had a lavish coffin made, with a silver plate on it, and he’d have found an unrecognizably decayed body to put inside, dressed in a gilded uniform, and he couldn’t arrange all that with us sniffing around Puerto Crucero.”

  Harper stopped at an embrasure and stared at the far mountains. “So where’s Blas Vivar?”

  “Still out there,” Sharpe nodded at the broken countryside to the north, at the retreating ridges and dark valleys where, he knew, he must now search for a friend’s body. He did not want to make the search. He had been so sure that he would find the body under the garrison church’s flagstones, and now he faced yet more time in this country that was so bitterly far from everything he loved. “We’ll need two horses. Unless, of course, you’ve had enough?”

  “Are you sure we need
to stay?” Harper asked unhappily.

  Sharpe’s face was equally miserable. “We haven’t found Vivar, so I don’t think I can go home yet.”

  Harper shook his head. “And we’ll not find him! You heard what Major Suarez said. He’s looked twice and found nothing. Christ! Bautista probably had a thousand men looking!”

  “I know. But I can’t go back to Louisa and tell her I couldn’t be bothered to search the place where Don Blas died. We have to take a look, Patrick,” Sharpe said, then added hurriedly, “I do, anyway.”

  “I’ll stay,” Harper said robustly. “Jesus, if I get home I’ll only have the bloody children screaming and the wife telling me I should drink less.”

  Sharpe smiled. “So she does think you’re too fat?”

  “She’s a woman, what the hell does she know?” Harper tried to pull in his gut, and failed.

  “You’re thinner than you were,” Sharpe said truthfully.

  Harper patted his belly. “She won’t know me when I get home. I’m dwindling. I’ll be a wraith. If I’m alive at all.”

  “Two weeks,” Sharpe heard the gloom in his friend’s voice, and tried to alleviate it with a promise. “We’ll stay two weeks more, and if we can’t find Don Blas in a fortnight, then we’ll give up the search, I promise. Just two weeks.”

  It was a promise that looked increasingly fragile as the days passed. Sharpe needed to search the valley where Don Blas had disappeared, but refugees from the countryside spoke of horrors that made travel unsafe. The Spaniards, retreating toward the guns of Valdivia, were pillaging farms and settlements, while the savages, scenting their enemy’s weakness, were hunting down the refugees from Puerto Crucero’s defeated garrison. The whole province was churning with bitterness, and Cochrane insisted that Sharpe and Harper could not risk traveling through the murderous chaos. “The damned Indians don’t know you’re English! They see a white skin and suddenly you’re the evening’s main dish—white meat served with fig sauce. Come to think of it, that’s probably what happened to your friend Vivar. He was turned into a fricassee and three belches.”