Sharpe 21 - Sharpe's Devil (13 page)

“There's not much to do now,” Sharpe tried to reassure him. “We just have to dig up Don Bias, seal him in a tin coffin, then take him home.”

“I still think you should put him in brandy,” Harper said, his fears forgotten.

“Whatever's quickest,” Sharpe allowed, then he forgot that small problem, for Ferdinand had led them out from the trees and onto what had to be the main road from Valdivia to Puerto Crucero. The road stretched empty and inviting in either direction, and with no sign of any vengeful pursuers. Ferdinand was grinning, then said something in his own language.

“I think he means he's leaving us here,” Harper said before pointing vigorously to the south.

Ferdinand nodded eagerly, intimating that they should indeed ride in that direction.

Sharpe opened the box, took out a guinea, and gave it to the Indian. Ferdinand tucked the coin into a pocket of his filthy uniform, offered a sharp-toothed grin of thanks, then turned back into the forest. Sharpe and Harper, brought safe to the road and far ahead of their pursuers, were out of danger. Ahead lay Puerto Crucero and a friend's grave, behind was a thwarted enemy, and Sharpe, almost for the first time since he had reached the New World, felt his hopes rise.

That evening, just before sunset, they reined their tired horses on the rocky crest above the natural harbor of Puerto Crucero. Sharpe, weary to his very bones, turned in his aching saddle and saw no sign of any pursuit. Dregara had been cheated. Sharpe and Harper, thanks to Captain Morillo and his Indian guide, had come safely to their haven where, like a sorcerer's castle perched on a crag, stood the Citadel of Puerto Crucero.

At the heart of the Citadel, and brilliant white in the day's last sunlight, stood the garrison church where Bias Vivar lay buried. Beside the church was a castle keep over which, streaming stiff in the sea's hard wind, the great royal banner of Spain flew colorful and proud. The dark, wild country where murder might have been committed was behind them and in front were witnesses and light. There was also the harbor from which, by God's grace, they would sail home with the body of a dead hero.

The harbor was not a massive refuge like Valdivia's magnificent haven, but instead lay within a wide hook of low, rocky land that stopped the surge of the Pacific swells, but allowed the insistent southern winds to tug and fret at the anchorage. Even now the harbor was flecked with white by the wind that streamed the royal banner at the fort's summit.

The town was built where an inner harbor had been made with a stone breakwater. The town itself was a huddle of warehouses, fishing shacks and small houses. Nothing could move in the town or harbor without being observed from the great high fortress. The road to the fort zig-zagged up the rock hill to disappear into a tunnel that pierced a wide stone wall studded with cannon embrasures. “A bastard of a fort to take,” Harper said.

“Then thank God we don't need to.” Sharpe flourished the pass which gave them entry to the citadel.

The pass, signed and sealed by Miguel Bautista, worked its charm. Sharpe and Harper were saluted at every guardpost, escorted through the fortress's entrance tunnel, and greeted effusively by the officer of the day, a Major Suarez, who seemed somewhat astonished by the pass. In all likelihood, Sharpe suspected, Suarez had never seen such a document, for Sharpe suspected it had been issued only to lull him into a false sense of security, but now, even if Bautista had not so intended, his signature was working a wonderful magic.

“You'll accept our hospitality?” Major Suarez was standing behind his desk, eager to show Sharpe and Harper due respect. “There is an inn beside the harbor, but I can't recommend it. You'll permit me to have two officers' rooms made ready for you?”

“And a meal?” Harper suggested.

“Of course!” Suarez, assuming that Bautista was their patron, could not do enough to help. “Perhaps you will wait in my quarters while the room and the food are made ready?”

“I'd rather see the church,” Sharpe said.

“I'll send for you as soon as things are ready.” Suarez snapped his fingers, summoning ostlers to take care of the tired horses, and orderlies to carry the travelers' bags for safekeeping into the officers' quarters. Sharpe and Harper kept only the strongbox which they carried between them into the welcome coolness of the garrison church, a building of stern beauty. The walls were painted white while the heavily beamed ceiling was of a shining wood that had been oiled almost to blackness. On the walls were marble slabs that commemorated officers who had died in this far colony. Some had been killed in skirmishes, some had drowned off the coast, some had died in earthquakes, and a few, very few, had died of old age. Other marble plaques remembered the officers' families: women who had died in childbirth, children who had been killed or captured by Indians and babies who had died of strange diseases and whose souls were now commended to God.

Sharpe and Harper put the strongbox down in the nave, then walked slowly through the choir to climb the steps to the altar, which was a magnificent confection of gold and silver. Crucifixes, candle holders and ewers graced the niches and shelves of the intricate altar screen on which painted panels depicted the torture and death of Christ.

Many of the flagstones close to the altar were gravestones. Some had ornate coats of arms carved above the names, and most of the inscriptions were in Latin, which meant Sharpe could not read them; yet even without Latin he could see that none of the stones bore the name of his friend. Then Harper moved aside a small rush mat that had covered a paving slab to the right of the altar and thus discovered Don Bias's grave. “Here,” Harper said softly, then crossed himself. The stone bore two simple letters chiseled into its surface. BV.

“Poor bastard,” Sharpe said gently. There were times when he found his lack of any religion a handicap. He supposed he should say a prayer, but the sight of his old friend's grave left him feeling inadequate. Don Bias himself would have known what to say, for he had always possessed a graceful sureness of touch, but Sharpe felt awkward in the hushed church.

“You want to start digging?” Harper asked.

“Now?” Sharpe sounded surprised.

“Why not?” Harper has spotted some tools in a side chapel where workmen had evidendy been repairing a wall. He fetched a crowbar and worked it down beside the slab. “At least we can see what's under the stone.”

Sharpe expected to find a vault under the gravestone, but they levered up the heavy slab to find instead a patch of flattened yellow shingle.

“Christ only knows how deep he is,” Harper said, then drove the crowbar hard into the gravel. Sharpe went to the side chapel and came back with a trowel that he used to scrape aside the stones and sand that Harper had loosened with the crowbar. “We'll probably have to go down six feet,” Harper grumbled, “and it'll take us bloody hours.”

“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, senor.”