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

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      Captain-General Blas Vivar’s wife, the Countess of Mouromorto, had been born and raised in England, but Sharpe had first met Miss Louisa Parker when, in 1809 and with thousands of other refugees, she had been fleeing from Napoleon’s invasion of northern Spain. The Parker family, oblivious to the chaos that was engulfing a continent, could grieve only for their lost Protestant Bibles with which they had forlornly hoped to convert Papist Spain. Somehow, in the weltering chaos, Miss Louisa Parker had met Don Blas Vivar who, later that same year, became the Count of Mouromorto. Miss Parker had meanwhile become a Papist, and thereafter Blas Vivar’s wife. Sharpe saw neither of them again till, in the late summer of 1819, Doña Louisa Vivar, Countess of Mouromorto, arrived unannounced and unexpected in the Normandy village where Sharpe farmed.

      At first Sharpe did not recognize the tall, black-dressed woman whose carriage, attended by postilions and outriders, drew up under the château’s crumbling arch. He had supposed the lavish carriage to belong to some rich person who, travelling about Normandy, had become lost in the region’s green tangle of lanes and, it being late on a hot summer’s afternoon, had sought out the largest farmhouse of the village for directions and, doubtless, refreshments as well. Sharpe, his face sour and unwelcoming, had been prepared to turn the visitors away by directing them to the inn at Seleglise, but then a dignified woman had stepped down from the carriage and pushed a veil back from her face. ‘Mister Sharpe?’ she had said after a few awkward seconds, and suddenly Sharpe had recognized her, but even then he found it hard to reconcile this woman’s reserved and stately appearance with his memories of an adventurous English girl who had impulsively abandoned both her Protestant religion and the approval of her family to marry Don Blas Vivar, Count of Mouromorto, devout Catholic and soldier of Spain.

      Who, Doña Louisa now informed Sharpe, had disappeared. Blas Vivar had vanished.

      Sharpe, overwhelmed by the suddenness of the information and by Louisa’s arrival, gaped like a village idiot. Lucille insisted that Doña Louisa must stay for supper, which meant staying for the night, and Sharpe was peremptorily sent about making preparations. There was no spare stabling for Doña Louisa’s valuable carriage horses, so Sharpe ordered a boy to unstall the plough horses and take them to a meadow while Lucille organized beds for Doña Louisa and her maids, and rugs for Doña Louisa’s coachmen. Luggage had to be unstrapped from the varnished carriage and carried upstairs where the château’s two maids laid new sheets on the beds. Wine was brought up from the damp cellar, and a fine cheese, which Lucille would otherwise have sent to the market in Caen, was taken from its nettle-leaf wrapping and pronounced fit for the visitor’s supper. That supper would not be much different from any of the other peasant meals being eaten in the village for the château was pretentious only in its name. The building had once been a nobleman’s fortified manor, but was now little more than an overgrown and moated farmhouse.

      Doña Louisa, her mind too full of her troubles to notice the fuss her arrival had prompted, explained to Sharpe the immediate cause of her unexpected visit. ‘I have been in England and I insisted the Horse Guards told me where I might find you. I am sorry not to have sent you warning of my coming here, but I need help.’ She spoke peremptorily, her voice that of a woman who was not used to deferring the gratification of her wishes.

      She was nevertheless forced to wait while Sharpe’s two children were introduced to her. Patrick, aged five, offered her ladyship a sturdy bow while Dominique, aged three, was more interested in the ducklings which splashed at the moat’s edge. ‘Dominique looks like your wife,’ Louisa said.

      Sharpe merely grunted a noncommittal reply, for he had no wish to explain that he and Lucille were not married, nor that he already had a bitch of a wife in London whom he could not afford to divorce and who would not decently crawl away and die. Nor did Lucille, coming to join Sharpe and their guest at the table in the courtyard, bother to correct Louisa’s misapprehension, for Lucille claimed to take more pleasure in being mistaken for Madame Richard Sharpe than in using her ancient title. However Sharpe, much to Lucille’s amusement, now insisted on introducing her to Louisa as the Vicomtesse de Seleglise; an honour which duly impressed the Countess of Mouromorto. Lucille, as ever, tried to disown the title by saying that such nonsenses had been abolished in the revolution and, besides, anyone connected to an ancient French family could drag out a title from somewhere. ‘Half the ploughmen in France are viscounts,’ the Viscountess Seleglise said with inaccurate self-deprecation, then politely asked whether the Countess of Mouromorto had any children.

      ‘Three,’ Louisa had replied, and had then gone on to explain how a further two children had died in infancy. Sharpe, supposing that the two women would get down to the interminable and tedious feminine business of making mutual compliments about their respective children, had let the conversation become a meaningless drone, but Louisa had suprisingly brushed the subject of children aside, only wanting to talk of her missing husband. ‘He’s somewhere in Chile,’ she said.

      Sharpe had to think for a few seconds before he could place Chile, then he remembered a few scraps of information from the newspapers that he read in the inn beside Caen Abbey where he went for dinner on market days. ‘There’s a war of independence going on in Chile, isn’t there?’

      ‘A rebellion!’ Louisa had corrected him sharply. Indeed, she went on, her husband had been sent to suppress the rebellion, though when Don Blas had reached Chile he had discovered a demoralized Spanish army, a defeated squadron of naval ships, and a treasury bled white by corruption. Yet within six months he had been full of hope and had even been promising Louisa that she and the children would soon join him in Valdivia’s citadel which served as Chile’s official residence for its Captain-General.

      ‘I thought Santiago was the capital of Chile?’ Lucille, who had brought some sewing from the house, enquired gently.

      ‘It was,’ Louisa admitted reluctantly, then added indignantly, ‘till the rebels captured it. They now call it the capital of the Chilean Republic. As if there could be such a thing!’ And, Louisa claimed, if Don Blas had been given a chance, there would be no Chilean Republic, for her husband had begun to turn the tide of Royalist defeat. He had won a series of small victories over the rebels; such victories were nothing much to boast of, he had written to his wife, СКАЧАТЬ