Sharpe's Devil Read online

  “I reckon Major Suarez will give us a work party tomorrow,” Sharpe said, then moved aside to let Harper thrust down with the bar again.

  Harper slammed the crowbar down. It crashed through the shingle, thumped on something hollow, then abruptly burst through into a space beneath.

  “Jesus!” Harper could not resist the imprecation.

  Sharpe twisted aside, a hand to his mouth. The crowbar had pierced a coffin that had been buried scarcely a foot beneath the floor, and now the shallow grave was giving off a stink so noxious that Sharpe could not help gagging. He stepped backward, out of range of the effluvia. Harper was gasping for clean air. “God save Ireland, but you’d think they’d bury the poor man a few feet farther down. Jesus!”

  It was the smell of death—a sickly, clogging, strangely sweet and never-to-be-forgotten stench of rotting flesh. Sharpe had smelled such decay innumerable times, yet not lately, not in these last happy years in Normandy. Now the first slight hint of the smell brought back a tidal wave of memories. There had been a time in his life, and in Harper’s life, when a man slept and woke and ate and lived with that reek of mortality. Sharpe had known places, like Waterloo, where even after the dead had all been buried the stench persisted, souring every tree and blade of grass and breath of air with its insinuating foulness. It was the smell that traced a soldier’s passing, the grave smell, and now it pervaded the church where a friend was buried.

  “Christ, but you’re right about needing an airtight box to hold him.” Harper had retreated to the edge of the choir. “We’ll drink the brandy, and he can have the box.”

  Sharpe crept closer to the grave. The stench was appalling, much worse than he remembered it from the wars. He held his breath and scraped with his trowel at the hole Harper had made, but all he could see was a splinter of yellow wood in the gravel.

  “I think we should wait and let a work party do this,” Harper said fervently.

  Sharpe scuttled back a few feet before taking a deep breath. “I think you’re right.” He shuddered at the thought of the body’s corruption and tried to imagine his own death and decay. Where would he be buried? Somewhere in Normandy, he supposed, and beside Lucille, he hoped, perhaps under apple trees so the blossoms would drift like snow across their graves every spring.

  Then the door at the back of the church crashed open, disrupting Sharpe’s gloomy reverie, and suddenly a rush of heavy boots trampled on the nave’s flagstones. Sharpe turned, half-dazzled by the sunlight which lanced low across the world’s rim to slice clean through the church’s door. He could not see much in the eye of that great brilliance, but he could see enough to understand that armed men were swarming into the church.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Harper swore.

  “Stop where you are!” a voice shouted above the tramp and crash of boot nails.

  It was Sergeant Dregara, his dark face furious, who led the rush. Behind him was Major Suarez carrying a cocked pistol and with a disappointed look on his face as though Sharpe and Harper had abused his friendly welcome. Dregara, like his travel-stained men, was carrying a cavalry carbine that he now raised so that its barrel gaped into Sharpe’s face.

  “No!” Suarez said.

  “Easiest thing,” Dregara said softly.

  “No!” Major Suarez insisted. There were a score of infantrymen in the church who waited, appalled, for Dregara to blow Sharpe’s brains across the altar. “They’re under arrest,” Suarez insisted nervously.

  Dregara, plainly deciding that he could not get away with murder in the presence of so many witnesses, reluctantly lowered the carbine. He looked tired, and Sharpe guessed that he and his cavalrymen must have ridden like madmen in their pursuit. Now Dregara stared malevolently into the Englishman’s face before turning away and striding back down the church’s nave. “Lock them up.” He snapped the order, even though he was a Sergeant and Suarez a Major. “Bring me their weapons, and that!” He gestured at the strongbox and two of his men, hurrying to obey, lifted the treasure.

  Major Suarez climbed to the altar. “You’re under arrest,” he said nervously.

  “For what?” Sharpe asked.

  “General Bautista’s orders,” Suarez said, and he had gone quite pale, as though he could feel the cold threat of the Captain-General’s displeasure reaching down from Valdivia. Dregara was plainly Bautista’s man, known and feared as such. “You’re under arrest,” Suarez again said helplessly, then waved his men forward.

  And Sharpe and Harper were marched away.

  They were taken to a room high in the fortress, a room that looked across the harbor entrance to where the vast Pacific rollers pounded at the outer rocks to explode in great gouts of white water. Sharpe leaned through the bars of the high window and stared straight down to see that their prison room lay directly above a flight of rock-cut steps which led to the citadel’s wharf. To the north of the wharf was a shingle beach where a handful of small fishing boats lay canted on their sides.

  The window bars were each an inch thick and deeply rusted, but, when Harper tried to loosen them, they proved stubbornly solid. “Even if you managed to escape,” Sharpe asked in a voice made acid by frustration, “and survived the eighty-foot drop to the quay, just where the hell do you think you’d go?”

  “Somewhere they serve decent ale, of course,” Harper gave the bars a last massive but impotent tug, “or maybe to that Jonathan out there.” He pointed to a brigantine which had just anchored in the outer harbor. The boat was flying an outsize American flag, a splash of bright color in the twilight gloom. Sharpe assumed the flag was intentionally massive so that, should the dreaded Lord Cochrane make a raid on Puerto Crucero, he could not mistake the American ship for a Spanish merchantman.

  Sharpe wished Cochrane would make a raid, for he could see no other route out of their predicament. He had tried hammering on their prison door, demanding to be given paper and ink so that he could send a message to George Blair, the Consul in Valdivia, but his shouting was ignored. “Damn them,” Sharpe growled, “damn them and damn them!”

  “They won’t dare punish us,” Harper tried either to console Sharpe or to convince himself. “They’re scared wicked of our navy, aren’t they? Besides, if they meant us harm they wouldn’t have put us in here. This isn’t such a bad wee place,” Harper looked around their prison. “I’ve been in worse.”

  The room was not, indeed, a bad wee place. The wall beside the window had been grievously cracked at some point, Sharpe assumed by one of the famous earthquakes that racked this coast, but otherwise the room was in fine repair and furnished comfortably enough. There were two straw-filled mattresses on the floor, a stool, a table and a lidded bucket. Such comforts suggested that Major Suarez, or his superiors, would deal very gingerly with two British citizens.

  It was also plain to Sharpe that the Puerto Crucero authorities were waiting for instructions from Valdivia, for, once incarcerated, they were left alone for six days. No one interrogated them, no one brought them news, no one informed them of any charges. The only visitors to the high prison room were the orderlies who brought food and emptied the bucket. The food was good, and plentiful enough even for Harper’s appetite. Each morning a barber came with a pile of hot towels, a bowl and a bucket of steaming water. The barber shook his head whenever Sharpe tried to persuade the man to bring paper, ink and a pen. “I am a barber, I know nothing of writing. Please to tilt your head back, señor.”

  “I want to write to my Consul in Valdivia. He’ll reward you if you bring me paper and ink.”

  “Please don’t speak, señor, when I am shaving your neck.”

  On the fifth morning, under a sullen sky from which a sour rain spat, the Espiritu Santo had appeared beyond the northern headland and, making hard work of the last few hundred yards, beat her way into the outer harbor where, with a great splash and a gigantic clanking of chain, she let go her two forward anchors. Captain Ardiles’s frigate, like the American brigantine which still lay to her anchors in the roadstead,
drew too much water to be safe in the shallow inner harbor, and so she was forced to fret and tug at her twin cables while, from the shore, a succession of lighters and longboats ferried goods and people back and forth.

  The next morning, under the same drab sky, the Espiritu Santo raised her anchors and, very cautiously, approached the stone wharf which lay at the foot of the citadel’s crag. It was clear to Sharpe that the big frigate could only lay alongside the wharf at the very top of the high tide, and that as a result Captain Ardiles was creeping his way in with extreme caution. The frigate was being towed by longboats, and had men casting lead lines from her bows. She finally nestled alongside the wharf and Harper, leaning as far out as the bars would allow him, described how the contents of a cart were being unloaded by soldiers and carried on board the frigate. “It’s the gold!” Harper said excitedly. “They must be loading the gold! My God, there’s enough gold there to buy a Pope!”

  The frigate only stayed at the wharf long enough to take on board the boxes from the cart before she raised a foresail and slipped away from the dangerously shallow water to return to her deeper anchorage. “Lucky bastards,” Harper said as the rattle of the anchor chains echoed across the harbor. “They’ll be going home soon, won’t they? Back to Europe, eh? She could take us to Cadiz, we’d have a week in a good tavern, then I’d catch a sherry boat north to Dublin. Christ, what wouldn’t I give to be on board her?” He watched as a longboat pulled away from the frigate and was rowed back toward the citadel’s steps, then he sighed. “One way or another we’ve made a mess of this job, haven’t we?”

  Sharpe, lying on one of the mattresses and staring at the cracks in the plastered ceiling, smiled. “Peace isn’t like war. In wartime things were simpler.” He turned his head toward the metal-studded door beyond which footsteps sounded loud in the passageway. “Bit early for food, isn’t it?”

  The door opened, but instead of the usual two servants carrying the midday trays, Major Suarez and a file of infantrymen now stood in the stone passageway. “Come,” Suarez ordered. “Downstairs. The Captain-General wants you.”

  “Who?” Sharpe swung his legs off the cot.

  “General Bautista is here. He came on the frigate.” The terror in Suarez was palpable. “Please, hurry!”

  They were taken downstairs to a long hall which had huge arched windows facing onto the harbor. The ceiling was painted white and decorated with an iron chandelier under which a throng of uniformed men awaited Sharpe’s arrival. The crowd of officers reminded Sharpe of the audience that had watched Bautista attending to his duties in the Citadel at Valdivia.

  Bautista, attended by Marquinez and his other aides, was again offering a display of public diligence. He was working at papers spread on a table on which rested Sharpe’s sword and Harper’s seven-barrel gun. The strongbox was also there. The sight of the weapons gave Sharpe a pulse of hope that perhaps they were to be released, even maybe allowed to travel home on the Espiritu Santo, for Captain Ardiles was among the nervously silent audience. Sharpe nodded at the frigate’s Captain, but Ardiles turned frostily away, revealing, to Sharpe’s astonishment, George Blair, the British Consul. Sharpe tried to cross the hall to speak with Blair, but a soldier pulled him back. “Blair!” Sharpe shouted, “I want to talk to you!”

  Blair made urgent hushing motions as though Sharpe disturbed a sacred assembly. Captain Marquinez, as beautifully uniformed as a palace guard, frowned at Sharpe’s temerity, though Bautista, at last looking up from his paperwork, seemed merely amused by Sharpe’s loud voice. “Ah, Mister Sharpe! We meet again. I trust you have not been discommoded? You’re comfortable here? You find the food adequate?”

  Sharpe, suspicious of Bautista’s affability, said nothing. The Captain-General, plainly enjoying himself, put down his quill pen and stood up. “This is yours?” Bautista put his hand on the strongbox.

  Sharpe still said nothing, while the audience, relishing the contest that was about to begin, seemed to tense itself.

  “I asked you a question, Mister Sharpe.”

  “It belongs to the Countess of Mouromorto.”

  “A rich woman! But why does she send her money on voyages around the world?”

  “You know why,” Sharpe said.

  “Do I?” Bautista opened the strongbox’s lid. “One thousand, six hundred and four guineas. Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Sharpe said defiantly, and there was a murmur of astonishment from Bautista’s audience as they translated the figure into Spanish dollars. A man could live comfortably for a whole lifetime on six and a half thousand dollars.

  “Why were you carrying such a sum in gold?” Bautista demanded.

  Sharpe saw the trap just in time. If he had admitted that the money had been given to him for use as bribes, then the Captain-General would accuse him of attempting to corrupt Chilean officials. Sharpe shrugged. “We didn’t know what expenses we might have,” he answered vaguely.

  “Expenses?” Bautista sneered. “What expenses are involved in digging up a dead man? Shovels are so expensive in Europe?” The audience murmured with laughter, and Sharpe sensed a relief in the assembled officers. They were like men who had come to a bullfight and they wanted to see their champion draw blood from the bull, and the swift jest about the price of shovels had pleased them. Now Bautista took one of the coins from the strongbox, picked up a riding crop from the table, and walked toward Sharpe. “Tell me, Mister Sharpe, why you came to Chile?”

  “To collect the body of Don Blas,” Sharpe said, “as you well know.”

  “I heard you were groveling in General Vivar’s grave like a dog,” Bautista said. “But why carry so much gold?”

  “I told you, expenses.”

  “Expenses.” Bautista sneered the word, then tossed the coin to Sharpe.

  Sharpe, taken by surprise, just managed to snatch the guinea coin out of the air.

  “Look at it!” Bautista said. “Tell me what you see?”

  “A guinea,” Sharpe said.

  “The cavalry of Saint George,” Bautista still sneered. “Do you see that, Mister Sharpe?”

  Sharpe said nothing. The guinea coin had the head of the King on one side, and on its obverse bore the mounted figure of Saint George thrusting his lance into the dragon’s flank. The nickname for such coins was the Cavalry of Saint George which, during the French wars and in the form of lavish subsidies to foreign nations, had been sent to do battle against Bonaparte.

  “The British Government uses such golden cavalry to foment trouble, isn’t that so, Mister Sharpe?”

  Again Sharpe said nothing, though he glanced toward Blair to see if the Consul planned any protest, but Blair was clearly cowed by the company and seemed oblivious of Bautista’s jeering.

  “Afraid to send their own men to fight wars,” Bautista sneered, “the British pay others to do their fighting. How else did they beat Napoleon?”

  He let the question hang. The audience smiled. Sharpe waited.

  Bautista came close to Sharpe. “Why are you in Chile, Mister Sharpe?”

  “I told you, to collect General Vivar’s body.”

  “Nonsense! Nonsense! Why would the Countess of Mouromorto send a lackey to collect her husband’s body? All she needed to do was ask the army headquarters in Madrid! They would have been happy to arrange an exhumation—”

  “Doña Louisa did not know her husband was dead,” Sharpe said, though it sounded horribly lame even as he said it.

  “What kind of fool do you take me for?” Bautista stepped even closer to Sharpe, the riding crop twitching in his hand. His aides, not daring to move, stood frozen behind the table, while the audience watched wide-eyed. “I know why you came here,” Bautista said softly.

  “Tell me.”

  “To communicate with the rebels, of course. Who else was the money for? All the world knows that the English want to see Spain defeated here.”

  Sharpe sighed. “Why would I bring money to the rebels in a Royal ship?”

  �
�Why indeed? So no one would suspect your intentions?” Bautista was enjoying tearing Sharpe’s protests to shreds. “Who sent you, Sharpe? Your English merchant friends who think they can make more profit out of Chile if it’s ruled by a rebel government?”

  “The Countess of Mouromorto sent me,” Sharpe insisted.

  “She’s English, is she not?” Bautista responded swiftly. “Do you find it noble to fight for trade, Sharpe? For cargoes of hide and for barrels of tallow? For the profits of men like Mister Blair?” He threw a scornful hand toward the Consul who, seemingly pleased at being noticed, bobbed his head in acknowledgment.

  “I fought alongside Don Blas,” Sharpe said, “and I fight for the same things he wanted.”

  “Oh, do tell me! Please!” Bautista urged in a caustic voice.

  “He hated corruption,” Sharpe said.

  “Don’t we all?” Bautista said with wonderfully feigned innocence.

  “Don Blas believed men could live in freedom under fair government.” It was an inadequate statement of Vivar’s creed, but the best Sharpe could manage.

  “You mean Vivar fought for liberty!” Bautista was delighted with Sharpe’s answer. “Any fool can claim liberty as his cause. Look!” Bautista pointed at the hugely flagged American brigantine in the outer harbor. “The Captain of that ship is waiting for whalers to rendezvous with him so he can take home their sperm oil and whalebone. He comes every year, and every year he brings copies of his country’s declaration of independence, and he hands them out as though they’re the word of God! He tells the mestizos and the criollos that they must fight for their liberty! Then, when he’s got his cargo, he sails home and who do you think empties that cargo in his precious land of liberty? Slaves do! Slaves! So much for his vaunted liberty!” Bautista paused to let a rustle of agreement sound in his audience. “Of course Vivar believed in liberty!” Bautista interrupted the murmuring. “Vivar believed in every impracticality! He wanted God to rule the world! He believed in truth and love and pigs with wings.” The audience laughed delightedly. Captain Marquinez and one or two others even clapped at their Captain-General’s wit, while Bautista, delighted with himself, smiled at Sharpe. “And you share Vivar’s beliefs, Mister Sharpe?”