Sharpe 21 - Sharpe's Devil (20 page)

“It was a long time ago.” Sharpe said. “We met during the Corunna campaign.”

“Did you now?” Cochrane responded blithely, as though he did not really care one way or another how Sharpe and Vivar had met, yet despite the assumed carelessness Sharpe detected something strangely alert in the tall, red-haired man's demeanor. “I heard something very odd about Vivar,” Cochrane went on, though with a studied tone of indifference, “something about his having an elder brother who fought for the French?”

“He did, yes.” Sharpe wondered from where Cochrane had dragged up that ancient story, a story so old that Sharpe himself had half forgotten about it. “The brother was a passionate supporter of Napoleon, so naturally wanted a French victory in Spain. Don Bias killed him.”

“And the brother had the same name as Don Bias?” Cochrane asked with an interest which, however he tried to disguise it, struck Sharpe as increasingly acute.

“I can't remember what the brother was called,” Sharpe said, then he realized exactly how such a confusion might have arisen. “Don Bias inherited his brother's title, so in that sense they shared the same name, yes.”

“The brother was the Count of Mouromorto?” Cochrane asked eagerly.

“Yes.”

“And the brother had no children?” Cochrane continued the explanation, “So Bias Vivar inherited the title. Is that how it happened?”

Sharpe nodded. “Exactly.”

“Ah!” Cochrane said, as though something which had been puzzling him for a long time abruptly made good sense, but then he deliberately tried to pretend that the new sense did not matter by dismissing it with a flippant comment. “It's a rum world, eh?”

“Is it?” Sharpe asked, but Cochrane had abruptly lost interest in the coincidence of Bias Vivar and his brother sharing a title and had started to pace his quarterdeck. He touched his hat to one of the two Spanish wives. The other, who had abruptly been translated into a widow the previous day, was in her cabin where her maid was trying to staunch her mistress's grief with unripe Chilean wine while her husband, a waxed thread stitched through his nose, was moldering at the Pacific's bottom.

Cochrane suddenly stopped his pacing and turned on Sharpe. “Did you sail in this ship from Valdivia?”

“No, from Puerto Crucero.”

“So how did you get from Valdivia to Puerto Crucero? By road?”

Sharpe nodded. “Yes.”

“Aha!” Cochrane's enthusiasm was back. “Is it a road on which troops can march?”

“They can march,” Sharpe said dubiously, “but they'll never drag cannons all that way, and two companies of infantry could hold an army at bay for a week.”

“You think so, do you?” Cochrane's enthusiasm faded as quickly as it had erupted. Cochrane had clearly been fantasizing about a land attack on Valdivia, but such an attack would be an impossibility without a corps of good infantry and several batteries of artillery, and even then Sharpe would not have wagered on its success. Siege warfare was the crudest variety of battle, and the most deadly for the attacker.

“Surely,” Sharpe said, “O'Higgins can't blame you if you fail to capture Valdivia?”

“Bernardo knows which way his breeches button,” Cochrane allowed, “but you have to understand that he's been seduced by the vision of becoming a respectable, responsible, sensible, reliable, boring, dull and pious national leader. By which I mean that he listens to the bloody lawyers! They've told him he mustn't risk his own reputation by attacking Valdivia, and persuaded him that it's better for me to do the dirty work. Naturally they haven't given me any extra soldiers, because I just might succeed if they had. I'm just supposed to work a miracle!” He glowered unhappily, then folded up the chart. “No doubt we'll all be at the sea's bottom before the week's out,” he said gloomily. “Valdivia or Puerto Crucero? We probably won't reach either.”

The frigate creaked and rolled, and the pumps spewed their feeble splashes of water over the side. The motion of the stricken Espiritu Santo seemed ever more sluggish and ever more threatening. Sharpe, glancing up at the skies which glowered with clouds run ragged by the endless wind, sensed the hopelessness of the struggle, but even when there was no hope, men had to keep on fighting.

And so they did, northward, toward the great citadels of Spain.

They pumped. By God, how they pumped. The leather pump hoses, snaking down into the Espiritu Santo's bilges, thrashed and spurted with the efforts of the men on the big oak handles. A man's spell at the handles was cut to just fifteen minutes, not because that was the extent of anyone's endurance, but rather because that was as long as any man could pump at full exertion, and if the pumps slackened by so much as an ounce a minute Cochrane swore the ship would be lost. Cochrane took turns himself now. He stripped to his waist and attacked the pump as though it was a lawyer whose head he pounded in with the big handles. Up and down, grunting and snarling, and the water spilled and slurped feebly over the side and still the frigate seemed to settle lower in the water and wallow ever more sluggishly.

The carpenters sounded the bilges again and reported that the hull timbers had been rotten. The frigate had been the pride . of the Spanish navy, yet some of her protective copper must have been lost at sea, and the teredoes and gribble worms had attacked her bottom starboard timbers. The wood had been turned into riddled pulp which, compressed by the explosion of the Mary Starbuck, had shattered into rotted fragments.

“No one noticed the worm damage?” Cochrane asked, but no one had, for it had been concealed in the darkest, deepest, foulest, rankest depths of the ship, and so the sea had flooded in and now the battles' survivors must pump for their lives. The men who were not pumping formed a bucket chain, desperately scooping water out of the dark flooding bilges. The carronades were jettisoned, then the long chasing nine-pounders, and finally all the other guns on board the frigate were thrown overboard, save only the two stern chasers which, mounted in Ardiles's quarters, were left untouched out of respect for the grieving Spanish Captain. Yet still the Espiritu Santo continued to take on water and to settle ever lower into the cold sea. Cochrane surreptitiously ordered the frigate's longboats to be provisioned with water casks and barrels of salt pork. “There's enough space to save half the ship's people,” Cochrane admitted to Sharpe, “but only half. The rest of us will drown.” The rats, sensing the disaster that was' going to overtake the ship, had long abandoned the bilges to run about the gundeck and cause screams from the women and children in the passengers' quarters.

On their fifth day, when the ship was riding so low she seemed sure to founder, Cochrane ordered another fother made, but this he ordered big enough to straddle half the starboard hull. The tired, wet, hungry men heaved the great cloth pad into place. It took hours, but not long after the job was finished, the carpenter sounded the ship's well and claimed the pumps were maybe holding their own, and a tired cheer went up at such grudging good news.

Some of the men were in favor of running ashore and risking the channel entrances in hope of finding a safe haven, but Cochrane stubbornly insisted on keeping his northward course. On the sixth day they sighted a great black cliff off to the east, but Cochrane wore ship and stood back out to sea. The squalls crashed about the frigate, streaming from the scuppers that had at last been scoured of their blood.

Cochrane's ebullience was gone, frayed by weariness and hunger. Everyone was hungry. The Espiritu Santa's food had been kept in the bilge and, when it flooded, the seawater destroyed what a legion of rats had been unable to consume. The bread and flour had been reduced to a soggy paste inside their barrels. There was plenty of strongly salted meat, but finding it in the dark, slopping water that still churned about the bilges was increasingly hard. The pigs, chickens and sheep that had been put aboard to provide fresh meat in the mid-Atlantic were slaughtered, their squeals and blood thick in the wet air.

More men died. The sailcloth shroud of one man tore when he was jettisoned overboard and the roundshot that should have dragged his body to the seabed fell free. The corpse, in its gray bag, floated behind the ship as a reminder of just how slowly the Espiritu Santo was sailing. She was limping north, traveling scarcely faster than a half-shrouded body. At dusk the corpse was still there, its face bobbing up and down from the green waves in mocking obeisance, but then, in a churning horror of foam and savagery, a great black and white beast, with fangs like saw blades, erupted out of the deep to carry the corpse away. Sharpe, who did not see the attack, was inclined to dismiss the story as another monstrous invention, but Cochrane confirmed it. “It was a killer whale,” he told Sharpe with a shudder, “nasty things.” Some of Cochrane's men swore the whale's coming was an evil omen, and as the day waned it seemed they must be right, for the ship had begun to settle again, this time ever deeper. The pumps and buckets were losing the battle.

Still they fought, none harder than Cochrane's band of seasoned fighters. They were a strange piratical mixture of criollos, mestizos, Spaniards, Irish, Scots, Englishmen, Americans and even a handful of Frenchmen. They reminded Sharpe yet again of Napoleon's observation about the world being filled with troubled men, accustomed to war, who only waited for a leader to bring them together to assault the citadels of respectable property. Cochrane's seamen, good fighters all, were as savage as their master. “They fight for money,” Cochrane told Sharpe. “Some, a few, are here to free their country, but the rest would fight for whichever side paid the largest wages. Which is another reason I need to capture Valdivia. I need its treasury to pay my rascals.”

Yet, next dawn, under a gray, sad sky from which a thin, spiteful rain leached like poison, the frigate was lower in the water than it had been all week. The carpenters suggested that more planks had sprung and suggested heading for land. Cochrane gloomily agreed, but then, just as he had given up hope, a strange sail was seen to northward.

“God help us now,” an Irish sailor said to Harper.

“Why's that?” Harper, seeing the sail, anticipated a rescue.

“Because if that's a Spanish ship then we're all dead men. We don't have a broadside, so they'll either stand off and pound us down into lumpy gravy, or else take us all prisoner, and there'll be no mercy shown to us in Valdivia. They'll have a priest bellowing in our ears while the firing squad sends us all to Abraham's bosom. That's if they don't just hang us from their yardarms first to save the cost of the powder and balls. Jesus, but I should have stayed in Borris, so I should.”

Cochrane ran to the foremast and climbed to the crosstrees where he settled himself with a telescope. There was a long, agonizing wait, then His Lordship sent a cheer rippling down the deck. “It's the O'Higgins, my boys! It's the O'Higgins!” The relief was as palpable as if a flight of rescuing angels had descended from heaven.

Cochrane's flagship had come south to search for its Admiral, and the men on the Espiritu Santo were saved. To fight again.

Captain Ardiles, with the Espiritu Santa's crew and passengers, was ferried across to the Chilean flagship. The transfers were made in longboats that crashed hard against the Espiritu Santa's side as the prisoners climbed down precarious scrambling nets. The women and children, terrified of the nets, were lowered into the longboats with ropes.

For every prisoner or passenger carried to the O'Higgins, a seaman came back. The O'Higgins also sent food, water and two portable pumps that were lowered into the Espiritu Santa's bilges. Fresh strong arms took over the pumping and suddenly the tired and leaking ship was filled with a new life and hope.

Cochrane, so closely snatched from shipwreck, was ebullient again. He welcomed the reinforcements aboard the Espiritu Santo, hurrahed as their new pumps began spewing water overboard, and insisted on sending obscenely cheerful messages to his own flagship. When he became bored with that occupation he paced the quarterdeck with a bottle of wine in one hand and a cigar in the other. “You never told me, Sharpe,” he hospitably offered a drink from the bottle, “just why Bautista threw you out of Chile. Surely not because you wanted to filch Vivar's corpse?”

“It was because I was carrying a message for a rebel.”

“Who?”

“A man called Charles. Do you know him?”

“Of course I know him. He's my friend. My God, he's the only man in Santiago I can really trust. What did the message say?”

“I don't know. It was in code.”

Cochrane's face had gone pale. “So who was it from?” He asked the question in a voice that suggested he was afraid of hearing the answer.

“Napoleon.”

“Oh, dear God.” Cochrane paused. “And Bautista has the message now?”

“Yes.”

Cochrane swore. “How in hell's name did you become Boney's messenger?”

“He tricked me into carrying it.” Sharpe explained as best he could, though the explanation sounded lame.

Cochrane, who had seemed appalled when he first heard of the intercepted message, now appeared more interested in the Emperor. “How was he?” he asked eagerly.

“He was bored,” Sharpe said. “Bored and fat.”

“But alert? Energetic? Quick?” The one-word questions were fierce.

“No. He looked terrible.”

“How?” Cochrane asked.

“He's out of condition. He's fat and pale.”

“But he made sense to you?” Cochrane asked urgently. “His brain is still working? He's not lunatic?”

“Christ, no! He made perfect sense!”

Cochrane paused, drawing on his cigar. “You liked him?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Funny, isn't it? You fight a man most of your life and end up liking the bugger.”

“You met him?” Sharpe asked.

Cochrane shook his head. “I wanted to. When I was on my way here I wanted to call at Saint Helena, but the winds were wrong and we were already late.” Cochrane had crossed to the rail where he stopped to gaze at the O'Higgins. She was a handsome ship, a fifty-gun battleship that had once sailed in the Spanish Navy and had been renamed by her captors. Her solidity looked wonderfully reassuring compared to the fragility of the half-sinking Espiritu Santo. 'They should have killed Bonaparte,“ Cochrane said suddenly. 'They should have stood him against a wall and shot him.”