Sharpe’s Devil: Napoleon and South America, 1820–1821. Bernard Cornwell

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      ‘My husband is not dead!’ Louisa insisted in a voice full of pain, so much pain that Sharpe, who till now had been trying to pierce her armour of certainty, suddenly realized just what anguish lay behind that self-delusion. ‘He is hiding,’ Louisa insisted unrealistically, ‘or perhaps he is wounded. Perhaps he is with the savages. Who knows? I only know, in my heart, that he is not dead. You will understand!’ This passionate appeal was directed at Lucille, who smiled with sympathy, but said nothing. ‘Women know when their men die,’ Louisa went on. ‘They feel it. I know a woman who woke in her sleep, crying, and later we discovered that her husband’s ship had sunk that very same night! I tell you, Don Blas is alive!’ The cry was pathetic, yet full of vigour, tragic.

      Sharpe turned to watch his son who, with little Dominique, was searching inside the open barn door for newly-laid eggs. He did not want to go to Chile. These days he even resented having to travel much beyond Caen. Sharpe was a happy man, his only worries the usual concerns of a farmer, money and weather, and he wished Louisa had not come to the valley with her talk of cavalry and ambush and savages and corruption. Sharpe’s more immediate concerns were the pike that decimated the millstream trout and the crumbling sill of the weir that threatened to collapse and inundate Lucille’s water meadows, and he did not want to think of far-off countries and corrupt governments and missing soldiers.

      Doña Louisa, seeing Sharpe stare at his children, must have understood what he was thinking. ‘I have asked for help everywhere.’ She made the appeal to Lucille as much as to Sharpe. ‘The Spanish authorities wouldn’t help me, which is why I went to London.’ Louisa, who perhaps had more faith in her English roots than she would have liked to admit, explained that she had sought the help of the British government because British interests were important in Chile. Merchants from London and Liverpool, in anticipation of new trading opportunities, were suspected of funding the rebel government, while the Royal Navy kept a squadron off the Chilean coast and Louisa believed that if the British authorities, thus well-connected with both sides of the fighting parties, demanded news of Don Blas then neither the rebels nor the Royalists would dare refuse them. ‘Yet the British say they cannot help!’ Louisa complained indignantly. ‘They say Don Blas’s disappearance is a military matter of concern only to the Spanish authorities!’ So, in desperation, and while returning overland to Spain, Louisa had called on Sharpe. Her husband had once done Sharpe a great service, she tellingly reminded him, and now she wanted that favour returned.

      Lucille spoke English excellently, but not quite well enough to have kept up with Louisa’s indignant loquacity. Sharpe translated, and added a few facts of his own; how he did indeed owe Blas Vivar a great debt. ‘He helped me once, years ago.’ Sharpe was deliberately vague, for Lucille never much liked to hear of Sharpe’s exploits in fighting against her own people. ‘And he is a good man,’ Sharpe added, knowing the compliment was inadequate, for Don Blas was more than just a good man. He was, or had been, a generous man of rigorous honesty; a man of religion, of charity, and of ability.

      ‘I do not like asking this of you,’ Louisa said in an unnaturally timid voice, ‘but I know that whoever seeks Don Blas must deal with soldiers, and your name is respected everywhere among soldiers.’

      ‘Not here, it isn’t,’ Lucille said robustly, though not without an affectionate smile at Sharpe, for she knew how proud he would be of the compliment just paid him.

      ‘And, of course, I shall pay you for your trouble in going to Chile,’ Louisa added.

      ‘I couldn’t possibly …’ Sharpe began, then realized just how decrepit the farm roof was, and how much a new weir would cost, and so, helplessly, he glanced at Lucille.

      ‘Of course Richard will go,’ Lucille said calmly.

      ‘Though not for the money,’ Sharpe said gallantly.

      ‘Don’t be a fool,’ Lucille intervened in English so that Louisa would understand. Lucille had already estimated the worth of Doña Louisa’s black dress, and of her carriage, and of her postilions and outriders and horses and luggage, and Lucille knew only too well how desperately her château needed repairs and how badly her estate needed the investment of money. Lucille paused to bite through a thread. ‘But I don’t want you to go alone. You need company. You’ve been wanting to see Patrick, so you should write to Dublin tonight, Richard.’

      ‘Patrick won’t want to come,’ Sharpe said, not because he thought his friend would truly refuse such an invitation, but rather because he did not want to raise his own hopes that his oldest friend, Patrick Harper, would give up his comfortable existence as landlord of a Dublin tavern and instead travel to one of the remotest and evidently most troubled countries on earth.

      ‘It would be better if you did take a companion,’ Louisa said firmly. ‘Chile is horribly corrupt. Don Blas believed that men like Bautista were simply extracting every last scrap of profit before the war was lost, and that they did not care about victory, but only money. But money will open doors for you, so I plan to give you a sum of coin to use as bribes, and it might be sensible to have a strong man to help you protect such a fortune.’

      ‘And Patrick is certainly strong,’ Lucille said affectionately.

      Thus the two women had made their decisions. Sharpe, with Harper, if his old friend agreed, would sail to Chile. Doña Louisa would provide Sharpe with two thousand gold English guineas, a coinage acceptable anywhere in the world, and a sum sufficient to buy Sharpe whatever information he needed, then she would wait for his news in her Palace of Mouromorto in Orense. Lucille, meanwhile, would hire an engineer from Caen to construct a new weir downstream of the old; the first repair to be done with the generous fee Louisa insisted on paying Sharpe.

      Who, believing that he sailed to find a dead man, was now in mid-Atlantic, on a Spanish frigate, sailing to a corrupt colony, and bearing an Emperor’s gift.

      The talk on board the Espiritu Santo was of victories to come and of the vengeance that would be taken against the rebels once Colonel Ruiz’s guns reached the battlefields. It was artillery, Ruiz declared, that won wars. ‘Napoleon understood that!’ Ruiz informed Sharpe.

      ‘But Napoleon lost his wars,’ Sharpe interjected.

      Ruiz flicked that objection aside. The advance in the science of artillery, he claimed, had made cavalry and infantry vulnerable to the massive destructive power of guns. There was no future, he said, in pursuing rebels around the Chilean wilderness, instead they must be lured under the massed guns of a fortress and there pulverized. Ruiz modestly disclaimed authorship of this strategy, instead praising the new Captain-General, Bautista, for the idea. ‘We’ll take care of Cochrane in exactly the same way,’ Ruiz promised. ‘We’ll lure him and his ships under the guns of Valdivia, then turn the so-called rebel navy into firewood. Guns will mean the end of Cochrane!’

      Cochrane. That was the name that haunted every Spaniard’s fears. Sharpe heard the name a score of times each day. Whenever two Spanish officers were talking, they spoke of Cochrane. They disliked Bernardo O’Higgins, the rebel Irish general and now Supreme Director of the independent Chilean Republic, but they hated Cochrane. Cochrane’s victories were too flamboyant, too unlikely. They believed he was a devil, for there could be no other explanation of his success.

      In truth, Lord Thomas Cochrane was a Scotsman, a sailor, a jailbird, a politician and a rebel. He was also lucky. ‘He has the devil’s own luck,’ Lieutenant Otero, the Espiritu Santo’s First Lieutenant, solemnly told Sharpe, ‘and when Cochrane is lucky, the rebellion thrives.’ Otero explained that it was Cochrane’s naval victories that had made most of the rebellion’s successes possible. ‘Chile is not a country in which armies can easily march, so the Generals need ships to transport their troops. That’s what that СКАЧАТЬ