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

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СКАЧАТЬ had long abandoned the big sword to its decorative place over the fireplace in the château’s hall, where Sharpe had hoped it would stay forever.

      Except now he was wearing the sword again, and the uniform, and he was once more in the company of soldiers. And also of sixteen mules because four more animals had at last been found and led to the waiting men who, trying to keep their dignity, clumsily straddled the mangy beasts. The black slaves tried not to show their amusement as Patrick Harper clambered onto an animal that looked only half his own size, yet which somehow sustained his weight.

      An English Major, a choleric-looking man mounted on a black mare, led the way out of the small town and onto the narrow road which made its tortuous way up the towering mountainside towards the island’s interior. The slopes on either side of the road were green with tall flax plants. A lizard, iridescent in the sunlight, darted across Sharpe’s path and one of the slaves, who was following close behind the mounted men, darted after the animal.

      ‘I thought slavery had been abolished?’ commented Harper, who had evidently forgiven Sharpe for the remarks about his fatness.

      ‘In Britain, yes,’ Sharpe said, ‘but this isn’t British territory.’

      ‘It isn’t? What the hell is it then?’ Harper asked indignantly, and indeed, if the island did not belong to Britain then it seemed ridiculous for it to be so thickly inhabited with British troops. Off to their left was a barracks where three companies of redcoats were being drilled on the parade ground, to their right a group of scarlet-coated officers were exercising their horses on a hill slope, while ahead, where the valley climbed out of the thick flax into the bare uplands, a guardpost straddled the road beside an idle semaphore station. The flag above the guardpost was the British Union flag. ‘Are you telling me this might be Irish land?’ Harper asked with heavy sarcasm.

      ‘It belongs to the East India Company,’ Sharpe explained patiently. ‘It’s a place where they can supply their ships.’

      ‘It looks bloody English to me, so it does. Except for them black fellows. You remember that darkie we had in the grenadier company? Big fellow? Died at Toulouse?’

      Sharpe nodded. The black fellow had been one of the battalion’s few casualties at Toulouse; killed a week after the peace treaty had been signed, only no one at the time knew of it.

      ‘I remember he got drunk at Burgos,’ Harper said. ‘We put him on a charge and he still couldn’t stand up straight when we marched him in for punishment next morning. What the hell was his name? Tall fellow, he was. You must remember him. He married Corporal Roe’s widow, and she got pregnant and Sergeant Finlayson was taking bets on whether the nipper would be white or black. What was his name, for Christ’s sake?’ Harper frowned in frustration. Ever since he had met Sharpe in France they had held conversations like this, trying to flesh out the ghosts of a past that was fast becoming attenuated.

      ‘Bastable.’ The name suddenly shot into Sharpe’s head. ‘Thomas Bastable.’

      ‘Bastable! That was him, right enough. He used to close his eyes whenever he fired a musket, and I never could get him out of the habit. He probably put more bullets into more angels than any soldier in history, God rest his soul. But he was a terror with the bayonet. Jesus, but he could be a terror with a spike!’

      ‘What colour was the baby?’ Sharpe asked.

      ‘Bit of both, as far as I remember. Like milky tea. Finlayson wouldn’t pay out till we had a quiet word with him behind the lines, but he was always a slippery bugger, Finlayson. Never did understand why you gave him the stripes.’ Harper fell silent as the small group of uniformed men approached a shuttered house that was surrounded with a neatly-trimmed hedge. Bright flowers grew in a border either side of a pathway made from crushed seashells. A gardener, who looked Chinese, was digging in the vegetable patch beside the house, while a young woman, fair-haired and white-dressed, sat reading under a gazebo close to the front hedge. She looked up, smiled a familiar greeting at the red-faced Major who led the convoy of mules, then stared with frank curiosity at the strangers. The Spanish officers bowed their heads gravely, Sharpe tipped his old-fashioned brown tricorne hat, while Harper offered her a cheerful smile. ‘It’s a fine morning, miss!’

      ‘Too hot, I think.’ Her accent was English, her voice gentle. ‘We’re going to have rain this afternoon.’

      ‘Better rain than cold. It’s freezing back home, so it is.’

      The girl smiled, but did not respond again. She looked down at her book and slowly turned a page. Somewhere in the house a clock struck the tinkling chimes of midday. A cat slept on a windowsill.

      The mules climbed slowly on towards the guardpost. They left the flax and the banyan trees and the myrtles behind, emerging onto a plateau where the grass was sparse and brown and the few trees stunted and wind-bent. Beyond the barren grassland were sudden saw-edged peaks, black and menacing, and on one of those rocky crags was a white-walled house which had the gaunt gallows of a semaphore station built on its roof. The semaphore house stood on the skyline and, because they were backed by the turbulent dark rainclouds, its white painted walls looked unnaturally bright. The semaphore machine beside the guardhouse on the road suddenly clattered into life, its twin black arms creaking as they jerked up and down.

      ‘They’ll be telling everyone that we’re coming,’ said Harper happily. He was finding every mundane event of this hot day exciting.

      ‘Like as not,’ Sharpe said.

      The redcoats on duty at the guardpost saluted as the Spanish officers rode past. Some smiled at the sight of the monstrous Harper overlapping the struggling mule, but their faces turned to stone when Sharpe glowered at them. Christ, Sharpe thought, but these men must be bored. Stuck four thousand miles from home with nothing to do but watch the sea and the mountains and to wonder about the small house five miles from the anchorage. ‘You do realize,’ Sharpe said to Harper suddenly, and with a sour expression, ‘that we’re almost certainly wasting our time.’

      ‘Aye, maybe we are,’ Harper, accustomed to Sharpe’s sudden dark moods, replied with great equanimity, ‘but we still thought it worth trying, didn’t we? Or would you come all this way and stay locked up in your cabin? You can always turn back.’

      Sharpe rode on without answering. Dust drifted back from his mule’s hooves. Behind him the telegraph gave a last clatter and was still. In a shallow valley to Sharpe’s left was another English encampment, while to his right, a mile away, a group of uniformed men exercised their horses. When they saw the approaching party of Spaniards they spurred away towards a house that lay isolated at the centre of the plateau and within a protective wall and a cordon of red-coated guards.

      The horsemen, who were escorted by a single British officer, were not wearing the ubiquitous red coats of the island’s garrison, but instead wore dark blue uniforms. It had been five years since Sharpe had seen such uniform jackets worn openly. The men who wore that blue had once ruled Europe from Moscow to Madrid, but now their bright star had fallen and their sovereignty was confined to the yellow stucco walls of the lonely house which lay at this road’s end.

      The yellow house was low and sprawling, and surrounded by dark, glossy-leaved trees and a rank garden. There was nothing cheerful about the place. It had been built as a cow shed, extended to become a summer cottage for the island’s Lieutenant Governor, but now, in the dying days of 1820, the house was home to fifty prisoners, ten horses and countless numbers of rats. The house was called Longwood, it lay in the very middle of the island of St Helena, and its most important prisoner had once been the Emperor of France.

      Called Bonaparte.

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