Sharpe's Devil

by Bernard Cornwell

  Sharpe released Marquinez’s hair. “Bugger,” he said. He released the flint on his pistol and pushed the weapon back into his belt. “Bugger!”

  “But look, señor!” Marquinez had climbed to his feet and, eager as a puppy for approval, edged into the tower room which had been his secret trysting place. “Look, señor, gold! And we have your sword, see?” He ran to a box, opened it, and drew out Sharpe’s sword. Harper was opening other boxes and whistling with astonishment, though he was not so astonished to forget to fill his pockets with coins. “Here, señor.” Marquinez held out Sharpe’s sword.

  Sharpe took it, unbuckled the borrowed scabbard, and strapped his own sword in its place. He drew the familiar blade. It looked very dull in the dim lantern light.

  “No, señor!” Marquinez thought Sharpe was going to kill him.

  “I’m not going to kill you, Marquinez. I might kill someone else, but not you. Tell me where Bautista’s quarters are.”

  Sharpe left Harper in his Aladdin’s cave, went through Marquinez’s rooms, across a landing, down a long corridor, and into a stark, severe chamber. The walls were white, the furniture functional, the bed nothing but a campaign cot covered with thin blankets. This was how Bautista wanted the world to see him, while the tower had been his secret and his fantasy. Now Lord Cochrane sat at Bautista’s plain table with two pieces of paper in front of him. Three of Cochrane’s sailors were searching the room’s cupboards, but were evidently finding nothing of great value. Cochrane grinned as Sharpe came through the door. “You found me! Well done. Any news of Bautista?”

  “He’s dead. Blew his own head off.”

  “Cowardly way out. Found any treasure?”

  “A whole room full of it. Top of the tower.”

  “Splendid! Go fetch, lads!” Cochrane snapped his fingers and his three men ran out into the corridor.

  Sharpe walked to the table and leaned over Cochrane’s two pieces of paper. One he had never seen before, but he recognized the other as the coded message that had been concealed in Bonaparte’s portrait. Bautista must have kept the coded message, and Cochrane had found it. Sharpe suspected that the message was the most important thing in all the Citadel for Cochrane. The Scotsman talked of whores and gold, but really he had come for this scrap of paper that he was now translating by using the code that was written on the other sheet of paper. “Is there a Colonel Charles?” Sharpe asked.

  “Oh, yes, but it wouldn’t have done for anyone to think that Boney was writing to me, would it? So Charles was our go-between.” Cochrane smiled happily, then copied another letter from the code’s key.

  “Where’s Vivar?” Sharpe asked.

  “He’s safe. He’s not a happy man, but he’s safe.”

  “You made a bloody fool of me, didn’t you?”

  Cochrane heard the dangerous bite in Sharpe’s voice, and leaned back. “No, I didn’t. I don’t think anyone could make a fool of you, Sharpe. I deceived you, yes, but I had to. I’ve deceived most people here. That doesn’t make them fools.”

  “And Marcos? The soldier who told the story of Vivar being a prisoner in the Angel Tower? You put him up to it?”

  Cochrane grinned. “Yes. Sorry. But it worked! I rather wanted your help during the assault.”

  Sharpe turned the coded message around so that it faced him. “So this was meant for you, then?”

  “Yes.”

  Cochrane had only unlocked the first sentence of the Emperor’s message. The words were in French, but Sharpe translated them into English as he read them aloud. “‘I agree to your proposal, and urge haste.’ What proposal?”

  Cochrane stood. An excited Major Miller had come to the door, but Cochrane waved him away. His Lordship lit a cigar, then walked to a window that looked down into the main courtyard where two hundred Spaniards had surrendered to a handful of rebels. “It was all the Emperor’s fault,” Cochrane said. “He thought Captain-General Vivar was the same Count of Mouromorto who had fought for him at the war’s beginning. We didn’t know Mouromorto had a brother.”

  “‘We’?” Sharpe asked.

  Cochrane made a dismissive gesture with the cigar. “A handful of us, Sharpe. Men who believe the world should not be handed over to dull lawyers and avaricious politicians and fat merchants. Men who believe that glory should be undimmed and brilliant!” He smiled. “Men like you!”

  “Just go on,” Sharpe shrugged the compliment away, if indeed it was a compliment.

  Cochrane smiled. “The Emperor doesn’t like being cooped up on Saint Helena. Why should he? He’s looking for allies, Sharpe, so he ordered me to arrange a meeting with the Count of Mouromorto, which I did, but the weather was shit-terrible, and Mouromorto couldn’t get to Talcahuana. So we made a second rendezvous and, of course, he arrived and he heard me out, and then he told me I was thinking of his brother, not him, and, one way or another, it turned out that I was fumbling up the wrong set of skirts. So, of course, I had to take him prisoner. Which was a pity, because we’d met under a flag of truce.” Cochrane laughed ruefully. “It would have been easier to kill Vivar, but not under a flag of truce, so I took him to sea, and we stranded him with a score of guards, six pigs and a tribe of goats on one of the Juan Fernandez islands.” Cochrane drew on the cigar and watched its smoke drift out the window. “The islands are three hundred fifty miles off the coast, in the middle of nothing! They’re where Robinson Crusoe was marooned, or rather where Alexander Selkirk, who was the original of Crusoe, spent four not uncomfortable years. I last saw Vivar eight weeks ago, and he was well and as comfortable as a man could be. He tried to escape a couple of times in this last year, but it’s very hard to get off an island if you’re not a seaman.”

  Sharpe tried to make sense of all the information. “What did Napoleon want of Don Blas, for God’s sake?”

  “Valdivia, of course. But not just Valdivia. Once it was secure we’d have marched north and taken over Chile, but the Emperor insisted that we provide him with a secure fortress before he’d join us, and this place is as fine a stronghold as any in the Americas. The Emperor thought Vivar was his man and would have just handed the fortress over!”

  “To Napoleon?”

  “Yes,” Cochrane said, as though that was the most normal thing in all the world. “And why not? You think I fought these last months to watch more Goddamned lawyers form a government? For Christ’s sake, Sharpe, the world needs Napoleon! It needs a man with his vision!” Cochrane was suddenly enthusiastic, full of the contagious vigor that made him such a formidable leader of men. “South America is rotten, Sharpe. You’ve seen that for yourself! It’s an old empire, full of decay. But there’s gold here, and silver, and iron, and copper, and fields as rich as any in Scotland’s lowlands, and orchards and vines, and cattle! There are riches here! If we can make a new country here, a United States of South America, we can make a power like the world has never seen! We just need a place to start! And a genius to make it work. I’m not that genius. I’m a good Admiral, but I don’t have the patience for government, but there is a man who does, and that man’s willing!” Cochrane strode back to the table and snatched up the coded letter. “And Bonaparte can make this whole continent into a magical country, a place of gold and liberty and opportunity! All that the Emperor demanded of us was that we provide him with a secure base, and the beginnings of an army.” Cochrane swept an arm around in a lavish gesture that encompassed all of Valdivia’s Citadel, its town and its far harbor. “And this is it. This is the kernel of Napoleon’s new empire, and it will be a greater and a better empire than any he has ever had before.”

  “You’re mad!” Sharpe said without rancor.

  “But it’s a glorious madness!” Cochrane laughed. “You want to be dull? You want to live under the rule of pen pushers? You want the world to lose its fire? You want old, jealous men to be cutting off your spurs with a butcher’s axe at midnight just because you dare to live? Napoleon’s only fifty! He’s got twenty years to make this new world great. We�
��ll bring his Guardsmen from Louisiana and ship volunteers from France! We’ll bring together the best fighters of the European wars, from both sides, and we’ll give them a cause worth the sharpening of any man’s sword.” Cochrane stabbed a finger toward Sharpe. “Join us, Sharpe! My God, you’re the kind of man we need! We’re going to fight our way north. Chile first, then Peru, then up to the Portuguese territories, and right up to Mexico, and God knows why we need to stop there! You’ll be a General! No, a Marshal! Marshal Richard Sharpe, Duke of Valdivia, whatever you want! Name your reward, take whatever title you want, but join us! If you want your family here, tell me! I’ll send a ship for them. My God, Sharpe, it could be such joy! You and I, one on land, one on sea, making a new country, a new world!”

  Sharpe let the madness flow around him. “What about O’Higgins?”

  “Bernardo will have to make up his mind.” Cochrane was pacing the room restlessly. “If he doesn’t want to join us, then he’ll go down with his precious lawyers. But you, Sharpe? You’ll join us?”

  “I’m going home,” Sharpe said.

  “Home?”

  “Normandy. To my woman and children. I’ve fought long enough, Cochrane. I don’t want more.”

  Cochrane stared at Sharpe, as though testing the words he had just heard, then he abruptly nodded his acceptance of Sharpe’s decision. “I’m sending the O’Higgins for Bonaparte. If you won’t join me, then I’ll have to keep you from betraying me, at least till he gets here or until I can find you another ship to take you home. I’ll bring Vivar here, and you and he can sail back to Europe together. There’s nothing you or he can do to stop us now. It’s too late! We have our fortress, and we just have to fetch Bonaparte from his prison, then march to glory!”

  “You’ll never get Bonaparte out of Saint Helena,” Sharpe said.

  “If I can take Valdivia’s harbor and Citadel with three hundred men,” Cochrane said, “I can get Bonaparte off an island. It won’t be difficult! Colonel Charles has found a man who looks something like the Emperor. He’ll pay a courtesy visit, just like you did, and leave the wrong man inside Longwood. Simple. The simple things always work best.” Lord Cochrane mused for a moment, then barked a joyous yelp of laughter. “What joy you are going to miss,” he said to Sharpe, “what joy you will miss.”

  Cochrane was unchaining Bonaparte. The devil, bored with peace, would open the vials of war. The Corsican ogre was to be loosed to mischief, to conquest and to battle without end. Bonaparte, who had drenched Europe in blood, would now soak the Americas, and Sharpe, who was trapped in Valdivia, could do nothing about it.

  Except watch as all the horror started again.

  EPILOGUE

  Blas Vivar arrived in Valdivia Harbor three weeks after the fall of the Citadel, three weeks after the collapse of Spanish Chile. He refused to step ashore. It was bad enough being on board one of Cochrane’s ships, without riding Cochrane’s roads or sleeping in Cochrane’s citadel or taking Cochrane’s hospitality. Sharpe went to the harbor and found his friend full of an understandable bitterness. “The man broke his word,” Vivar spoke of Cochrane. “He betrayed a truce.”

  “You called him a devil, remember, so why be surprised when he behaves like one?”

  “But he gave his word!” Vivar protested painfully. He had become a pale, gray figure; the man Sharpe remembered was shrunken, beaten down by a year’s imprisonment and saddened by his failure. That failure, Vivar now knew, had done more than lose Spain’s divinely ordained Empire, it had released the horror of war across a whole continent, perhaps a whole world. “I thought when Cochrane wanted to meet me that he would talk terms of surrender! I thought I had won. I thought they would offer me the southern half of Chile and plead to keep the north. I was not going to accept, but I wanted to hear their terms. Instead they asked me to surrender Valdivia. For Bonaparte!”

  On the eve of their departure Cochrane entertained Sharpe and Harper in the captured Fort Niebla where he laughingly recounted how the government in Santiago was begging him to send Valdivia’s captured treasury north, but Cochrane was pleading time to count the coins before he released them. The truth was that he was holding the treasury against the arrival of his new master. “Bonaparte knows you can’t fight wars without cash.”

  “How long before he gets here?” Sharpe asked.

  “A month? No more than six weeks. Then, my dear Sharpe, we shall set this world ablaze!”

  Cochrane had already returned Louisa’s money to Vivar, and now he insisted on Sharpe and Harper taking a share of the plunder. He filled two sea chests with coins that he ordered carried down to the wharf. It was cold. Snow flurries whirled over the blazing torches that lit the quay and a strip of black water. Cochrane, caped in a naval cloak, shivered. “Why don’t you stay here, Sharpe? March north with me! We’ll become rich!”

  “I’m a farmer, not a soldier.”

  “At least you’re not a lawyer.” Cochrane gave Sharpe a bear hug of farewell. “No hard feelings?”

  “You’re a devil, my Lord.”

  Cochrane laughed at the compliment. “Give General Vivar my apologies. I suppose he’ll never forgive me?”

  “I fear not, my Lord.”

  “So be it.” Cochrane hugged Harper. “Go safe home. Fair winds to you both.”

  They sailed in the dawn, beating south against a cold sea and a freezing wind. They were traveling in a brig that was carrying hides to London. She made heavy weather of Cape Horn, but at last began to beat her way north.

  Vivar brooded. He was a wise man, yet his understanding could not encompass a man who would break his word. “Is the world changing so much?” he asked Sharpe.

  “Yes,” Sharpe said bleakly. “The war changed it.”

  “So that results justify methods?”

  “Yes.”

  Vivar, cloaked and scarved against the bitter sea wind, paced the brig’s small poop. “Then it’s not a world I want a part of.”

  Sharpe feared his friend was contemplating suicide. “You have a wife and children!”

  Vivar smiled and shook his head. “Not that, Sharpe. I mean that I shall retire from service. I shall go to Orense and look after my estates. I, at least, shall be honorable. I will read, work, pray, and watch the war from a distance.”

  And there would be war, Sharpe was certain of that. Europe would not stand idle while the ogre ravaged the Americas. Sharpe imagined the troops sailing from Portsmouth and Plymouth, traveling across a world to catch Bonaparte one last time. Only this time, he supposed, they would hang the Emperor, because Bonaparte would have caused one mischief too many.

  The weather was becoming warmer as the ship sailed north, but just when Sharpe was beginning to count the days until they reached home, a series of vicious westerly gales beat the brig hard toward the east. She shortened sail, battened her hatches, and clawed against the weather’s spitefulness. For six days and nights the gales came, one after the other, until Sharpe began to believe that some malevolent spirit was intentionally keeping him from ever seeing Lucille again.

  Then, after a sixth night of storm, the weather gentled and the ship wore on to a new tack. Clothes and bedding were brought up to dry on lines rigged between the masts. The Captain of the brig, an elderly and courteous Chilean, came to Sharpe. “I don’t know if any of you gentlemen are interested, sir, but we’ll not be far from Saint Helena. We don’t need to put in there, our supplies are plentiful, but if you want to see the place, sir?”

  Sharpe suspected that the Chilean wanted to see Saint Helena for himself, or rather he wanted to discover whether Lord Cochrane’s conspiracy had worked, and so Sharpe sought out Vivar and tentatively suggested the visit. He half expected Vivar to be adamantly opposed to any such exploration, but to Sharpe’s surprise Vivar was as eager as the brig’s Captain. “I’d like to know what happened,” Vivar explained his interest. “The worst thing about being on board a ship is that you never know what’s happening in the world. Maybe Cochrane failed? That’s som
ething worth praying for.”

  “He’s not used to failure,” Sharpe observed.

  “Maybe no one has prayed hard enough. My God, Sharpe, but I’ve been praying these past few weeks.”

  The brig put into the harbor at Jamestown three days later. It was a hot day. The Captain ordered a boat lowered, then accompanied Vivar, Sharpe and Harper toward the small town that was hardly more than a row of houses above a stone quay. The hills, green and lush, climbed to the cloudy summits. A semaphore station stood with drooping arms at the foot of the road where Sharpe had climbed to meet a defeated Emperor.

  The brig’s longboat landed them at the water steps where a very young Lieutenant waited to receive them. It was the same young officer who had greeted Sharpe at his first arrival on the island. “It’s Colonel Sharpe, isn’t it, sir?” The Lieutenant seemed pleased to see Sharpe again.

  “Yes.” Sharpe could not remember the boy’s name, and he felt guilty. Napoleon never forgot a soldier’s name. Soon, no doubt, the Emperor would be welcoming his veterans to Chile by name, but for the life of him, Sharpe could not recall this one soldier’s name. “I’m sorry,” Sharpe said, “I don’t remember your—”

  “Lieutenant Roland Hardacre, sir. The same name as my father.”

  “Of course,” Sharpe said. “You remember Mister Harper? And this is General Vivar of the Spanish Army.”

  “Sir!” Hardacre offered Vivar a smart salute.

  “We came here, Lieutenant,” Vivar said, “to discover what happened when the O’Higgins called here.”

  “The O’Higgins?” Hardacre frowned as he tried to recall the particular ship, then his face cleared. “Ah, yes! Our first visitor from the Chilean Navy! She called here a month ago.” He shrugged, as though he could recall nothing significant in the O’Higgins’s visit. “She reprovisioned, sir, then sailed away. To be honest, none of us were very sure why she came this far. There can hardly be any Chilean interests in this part of the world.”