Sharpe 21 - Sharpe's Devil (19 page)

“He seemed to be on Bautista's side.”

“Blair's a greedy bastard,” Cochrane observed gloomily. “If we ever get off this ship alive you should look him up and give him a damned good thrashing.” His Lordship's gloom seemed justified for, despite the fothering and the pumping, the condition of the damaged frigate seemed to be suddenly worsening. The wind was rising and the seas were steeper, conditions that made the damaged hull pound ever harder into the waves. “The fother's shifting,” Cochrane guessed. He had turned the Espiritu Santo northward and the captured frigate was running before the wind and current, yet even so her progress was painfully slow because of the damaged hull and the amount of wreckage that still trailed overboard.

Cochrane's sailing master, an elderly and lugubrious Scot named Fraser, threw a trailing log overboard. The log was attached to a long piece of twine which was knotted at regular intervals. Fraser let the twine run through his hands and counted the knots as they whipped past his fingers, timing them all the while on a big pocket watch. He finally snapped the watch shut and began hauling the log back. “Three knots, my Lord, that's all.”

“Christ help us,” Cochrane said. He frowned at the sea, then at the rigging. “But we'll speed up as we get the damage cleared. Eight days, say?”

“Ten,” the sailing master said doubtfully, “maybe twelve, but more probably never, my Lord, because she's taking water like a colander.”

“Five guineas says we'll make it in eight days,” Cochrane said cheerfully.

“Eight days to what?” Sharpe asked.

“To Valdivia, of course,” Cochrane exclaimed.

“Valdivia?” Sharpe was astonished that Cochrane was trying to reach an enemy haven. “You mean there isn't a harbor closer than that?”

“There are hundreds of closer harbors,” Cochrane said blithely, “thousands of harbors. Millions! There are some of the best natural harbors in the world on this coast, Sharpe, and they're all closer than Valdivia. The damned coast is thick with harbors. There are more harbors here than a man could wish for in a thousand storms! Isn't that so, Fraser?”

“Aye, it is, my Lord.”

“Then why go to an enemy harbor?” Sharpe asked.

“To capture it, of course, why else?” Cochrane looked at Sharpe as though the Rifleman was mad. “We've got a ship, we've got men, we've got weapons, so what the hell else should we be doing?”

“But the ship's sinking!”

“Then the bloody ship might as well do something useful before it vanishes.” Cochrane, delighted with having surprised Sharpe, whooped with laughter. “Enjoy yourself, Sharpe. If we take Valdivia, all Chile is ours! We're launched for death or victory, we're sailing for glory, and may the Devil take the hindmost!” He rattled off the old cliches of the French wars in a mocking tone, but there was a genuine enthusiasm on his face as he spoke. Here was a man, Sharpe thought, who had never tired of battle, but reveled in it, and perhaps only felt truly alive when the powder was stinking and the swords were clashing. “We're sailing for glory!” Cochrane whooped again, and Sharpe knew he was under the command of a genial maniac who planned to capture a whole country with nothing but a broken ship and a wounded crew.

Sharpe had met Spain's devil, and his name was Cochrane.

The wind rose the next day. It shrieked in the broken rigging so that the torn shrouds and halyards streamed horizontally ahead of the laboring frigate as she thumped in slow agony through the big green seas. Both rebel and royalist seamen manned the pumps continually, and even the officers took their turns at the blistering handles. Sharpe and Harper, restored to grace as passengers, nevertheless worked the sodden handles for three muscle-torturing hours during the night. Besides the women and children, only Cochrane and Captain Ardiles were spared the agony of the endless pumps. Ardiles, suffering the pangs of defeat, had closeted himself in his old cabin which Cochrane, with a generosity that seemed typical of the man, had surrendered to his beaten opponent.

In the gray morning, when the wind was whistling to blow the wavetops ragged, Lord Cochrane edged the broken frigate nearer to land so that, at times, a dark sliver on the eastern horizon betrayed high ground. He had not wanted to close the coast, for fear that the captured Espiritu Santo might be seen by a Spanish pinnace or fishing boat that could warn Valdivia of his approach, but now he sacrificed that caution for the security of land. “If worse comes to worst,” he explained, “then perhaps we might be able to beach this wreck in the channels. Though God knows if we'd survive them.”

“Channels?” Sharpe asked.

Cochrane showed Sharpe a chart which revealed that the Chilean coast, so far as it was known, was a nightmare tangle of islands and hidden seaways. “There are thousands of natural harbors if you can get into the channels,” Cochrane explained, “but the channel entrances are as wicked as any in the world. As dreadful as the western coast of Scotland! There are cliffs on this coast that are as tall as mountains! And God only knows what's waiting inside the channels. This is unexplored country. The old maps said that monsters lived here, and maybe they do, for no one's ever explored this coast. Except the savages, of course, and they don't count. Still, maybe the O'Higgins will find us first.”

“Is she close?”

“Christ only knows where she is, though she's supposed to rendezvous with us off Valdivia. I've left a good man in charge of her, so perhaps he'll have the wits to come south and look for us if we're late, and if he does, and finds us sinking, then he can take us off.” He stared bleakly at the chart which he had draped over the Espiritu Santos shot-torn binnacle. “It's a devil of a long way to Valdivia,” he said under his breath.

Sharpe heard a sigh of despair in Cochrane's voice. “You're not serious about Valdivia, are you?” Sharpe asked.

“Of course I am.”

“You're going to attack with this broken ship?”

“This and the O'Higgins.”

“For God's sake,” Sharpe protested, “Valdivia Harbor has more fortresses than London!”

“Aye, I know. Fort Ingles, Fort San Carlos, Fort Amargos, Corral Castle, Fort Chorocomayo, Fort Niebla, the Manzanera Island batteries and the quay guns,” Cochrane rattled off the list of fortifications with an irritating insouciance, as though such defenses were flimsy obstacles that were bound to fall before his reputation. “Say two thousand defenders in all? Maybe more.”

“Then why, for God's sake?” Sharpe gestured at the exhausted men who stared dull-eyed at the threatening seas that roared up astern of the damaged frigate, hissed down her flanks, then rushed ahead in great gouts of wind-blown chaos.

“I have to attack Valdivia, Sharpe, because my lords and masters of the independent Chilean government, whom God preserve, have ordered me to attack Valdivia,” Cochrane suddenly sounded glum, but offered Sharpe a rueful grin. “I know that doesn't make sense, at least not till you understand that the government owes me a pile of money that they desperately don't want to pay me.”

“That still doesn't make sense,” Sharpe said.

“Ah,” Cochrane frowned. “Try it this way. The government promised me hard cash for every Spanish ship I captured, and I've taken sixteen so far, and the buggers don't want to honor the contract! They don't even want to pay my crews their ordinary wages, let alone the prize money. So instead of paying up they've ordered me to attack Valdivia. Now do you understand?”

“They want you to be killed?” Sharpe could only suppose that with Cochrane's death the debt due to him would be canceled.

“They probably wouldn't overmuch object to my death,” Cochrane confessed, “except that it might encourage the damned Spaniards, so I suspect that the reasoning behind their order is slightly more subtle. They don't want to pay me, so they have issued me an impossible order. Now, if I refuse to obey the order they'll send me packing for disobedience, and refuse to give me my cash as a punishment for that disobedience, but if, on the other hand, I dutifully attack and fail, they'll accuse me of incompetence and punish me by confiscating the money they owe me. Either way they win and I am royally buggered. Unless, of course,” Cochrane paused, and an impudent, wonderful grin crossed his face.

“Unless you win,” Sharpe continued the thought.

“Oh, aye, that's the joy of it!” Cochrane slapped the rail of the quarterdeck. “My God, Sharpe, but that would be something! To win!” He paused, frowning. “Why was there no gold on this boat?”

“Because its presence was merely a rumor to lure you into making an attack.”

“It damn well worked, too!” Cochrane barked with laughter. “But think of it, Sharpe! If the gold isn't here, then it has to be in Valdivia! Bautista's as greedy as any Presbyterian! He's been thieving for years, and now he's Captain-General there's been nothing to stop his mischief. Imagine it, Sharpe! The man has chests of money! Pots of gold! Rooms full of silver! Not a piddling little pile of coins, but enough treasure to make a man drool!” Cochrane laughed in relish of such plunder, and Sharpe saw in the Scottish nobleman a wonderful relic of an older, more glorious and more sordid age. Cochrane was a fighting sailor of the Elizabethan breed—a Drake or a Raleigh or a Hawkins—and he would fight like the devil the Spanish thought he was for gold, glory or just plain excitement.

“No wonder they turfed you out of Parliament,” Sharpe said.

Cochrane bowed, acknowledging the compliment, but then qualified his acknowledgment. “I went into the Commons to achieve something, and it was a cruel shame I failed.”

“What did you want to achieve?”

“Liberty, of course!” The answer was swift, but followed immediately by a deprecating smile. “Except I've learned there's no such thing.”

“There isn't?”

'You can't have freedom and lawyers, Sharpe, and I've discovered that lawyers are as ubiquitous to human society as rats are to a ship.“ Cochrane paused as the frigate thumped her bluff bows into a wave trough. The ship seemed to take a long time to recover from the downward plunge, but gradually, painfully, the bows rose again. ”You build a new ship,“ Cochrane went on, ”you smoke out its bilges, you put rat poison down, you know the ship's clean when you launch it, but your first night out you hear the scratch of claws and you know the little bastards are there! And short of sinking the ship they'll stay there forever.“ He scowled savagely. ”That's why I came out here. I dreamed it would be possible to make a new country that was truly free, a country without lawyers, and look what happened! We captured the capital, we drove the Spaniards to Valdivia, and is Santiago filled with happy people celebrating their liberty? No. It's filled with Goddamned lawyers making new laws."

“Bad laws?” Sharpe asked.

“What the hell do they care? It doesn't worry a rat if a law is good or bad. All they care is that they can make money enforcing it. That's what lawyers do. They make laws that no one wants, then make money disagreeing with each other what the damned law means, and the more they disagree the more money they make, but still they go on making laws, and they make them ever more complicated so that they can get paid for arguing ever more intricately with one another! I grant you they're clever buggers, but God, how I hate lawyers.” Cochrane shouted the despairing cry to the cold, ship-breaking wind.

“In all history,” he went on, “can you name one great deed or one noble achievement ever done by a lawyer? Can you think of any single thing that any lawyer has ever done to increase human happiness by so much as a smile? Can you think of even one lawyer who could stand with the heroes? Who could stand with the great and the daring and the saintly and the imaginative and the wondrous and the good? Of course not! Can a rat fly with eagles?” Cochrane had talked himself into a bitter mood. “It's the lawyers, of course, who refuse to honor the contract the government made with me. It's the lawyers who ordered me to capture Valdivia, knowing full well that it can't be done. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.” He paused again, and looked down at the chart. “Except I doubt this broken ship will ever sail as far as Valdivia. Perhaps I'll have to console myself by capturing Puerto Crucero instead.”

Sharpe felt his heart give a small leap of hope. “That's where I want to go,” he said.

“Why in God's name would you want to go to a shit-stinking hole like Puerto Crucero?” Cochrane asked.

“Because Bias Vivar is buried there,” Sharpe said.

Cochrane stared at Sharpe with a sudden and astonishing incredulity. “He's what?”

“Bias Vivar is buried in the garrison church at Puerto Crucero.”

Cochrane seemed flabbergasted. He opened his mouth to speak, but for once could find nothing to say.

“I've seen his grave,” Sharpe explained. “That's why I was in Chile, you see.”

“You crossed the world to see a grave?”

“I was a friend of Vivar. And we came here to take his body home to Spain.”

“Good God Almighty,” Cochrane said, then turned to look up at the foremast where a group of his men were retrieving the halyards that had been severed when the mainmast fell. “Oh, well,” he said in a suddenly uninterested voice, “I suppose they had to bury the poor fellow somewhere.”

It was Sharpe's turn to be puzzled. Cochrane's first reaction to Don Bias's burial had been an intrigued astonishment, but now His Lordship was feigning an utter carelessness. And suddenly, standing on the same quarterdeck where Captain Ardiles had told him the story, Sharpe remembered how Bias Vivar had been carried north in the Espiritu Santo for a secret rendezvous with Lord Cochrane. It was a story that had seemed utterly fantastic when Sharpe had first heard it, but that now seemed to make more sense. “I was told that Don Bias once tried to meet you, but was prevented by bad weather. Is that true?” he asked Cochrane.

Cochrane paused for an instant, then shook his head. “It's nonsense. Why would a man like Vivar want to meet me?”

Sharpe persisted, despite His Lordship's glib denial. “Ardiles told me this ship carried Vivar north, but that a storm kept him from the rendezvous.”

Cochrane scorned the tale with a hoot of laughter. “You've been at the wine, Sharpe. Why the hell would Vivar want to meet me? He was the only decent soldier Madrid ever sent here, and he didn't want to talk to the likes of me, he wanted to kill me! Good God, man, we were enemies! Would Wellington have hobnobbed with Napoleon? Does a hound bark with the fox?” Cochrane paused as the frigate wallowed in a trough between two huge waves, then held his breath as she labored up the slope to where the wind was blowing the crest wild. The pumps clattered below decks to spurt their feeble jets of splashing water overboard. “You said you were a friend of Bias Vivar?” Cochrane asked when he was sure that the frigate had endured.