Sharpe's Devil

from the mud to rout the I finest troops of France, had paled in Sharpe's memory beside the nightmarish flicker of those guns. 'It was bad,' Sharpe said at last.

'Bad!' Bautista laughed. 'Is that all you can say?'

It was all Sharpe had said to the Emperor on Saint Helena, but Napoleon had not needed to hear more. Bonaparte had given Sharpe a look of such quick sympathy that Sharpe had been forced to laugh, and the Emperor had laughed with him. 'It was supposed to be bad!' Bonaparte had said indignantly, 'But it was evidently not bad enough, eh?' But now, because Sharpe spoke to a man who did not know how the heart shuddered with terror every time a shot punched the air with pressure, flame and death, he could only offer the inadequate explanation. 'It was frightening. The guns, I mean.'

'The guns?' Bautista asked with a sudden intensity.

'The French had a lot of artillery,' Sharpe explained lamely, 'and it was well handled.'

'It was frightening?' Bautista wanted Sharpe's earlier assertion confirmed.

'Very.'

'Frightening.' Bautista repeated the word meaningfully, letting it hang in the air as he walked back to his long table. 'You hear that?' He shouted the question loudly, rounding on the startled audience. 'Frightening! And that is how we will finish this rebellion. Not by marching men into the wilderness, but with guns, with guns, with guns, with guns!' With each repetition of the word he pounded his right fist into his left palm. 'Guns! Where are your guns, Ruiz?'

'They're coming, Your Excellency.' Ruiz said soothingly.

'I've told Madrid,' Bautista went on, 'time and again to send me guns! We'll break this rebellion by enticing its forces to attack our strongholds. Here! In Valdivia! We shall let O'Higgins bring his armies and Cochrane his ships into the range of our guns and then we shall destroy them! With guns! With guns! With guns! But if Madrid doesn't send me guns, how can we win?' He was rehearsing the arguments that would explain the loss of Chile. He would blame it on Madrid for not sending enough guns, yet guns, as any real soldier knew, could not win the war.

Because relying on guns and forts was a recipe for doing nothing. It was generalship by defense. Bautista did not want to risk marching an army into the field and suffering a horrific defeat, so instead he was justifying his inaction by pretending it was a strategy. Let Madrid send enough guns, Bautista claimed, and the enemy would be destroyed when they attacked the Royalist strongholds, yet even the dullest enemy would eventually realize it was both cheaper and more effective to starve a fortress into submission than to drown it in blood. Bautista's strategy was designed solely to transfer the blame for defeat onto other men's shoulders, while he became rich enough to challenge those men when he returned to Madrid. No wonder, Sharpe thought, Bias Vivar had hated this man. He was betraying his soldiers as well as his country.

'Why have you come here, Mister Sharpe?' Bautista had suddenly turned on Sharpe again.

Sharpe, noting that he had not been accorded the honorific of his rank, decided not to make an issue of it. 'I'm here at the behest of the Countess of Mouromorto to carry her husband's remains home to Spain.'

'She is evidently an extravagant woman? Why did she not simply ask me to send her husband home?'

Sharpe did not want to explain that Louisa had not heard of her husband's death or burial when he left, so he just shrugged. 'I can't say, sir.'

'You can't say. Well, it seems a small enough request. I shall consider my decision, though I must say that so far as most of us are concerned, the sooner General Vivar is out of Chile, the better.' The quip provoked another outburst of laughter which this time Bautista allowed to continue. 'You knew General Vivar?' he asked Sharpe when the sycophancy had subsided.

'We fought together in 09, at Santiago de Compostela.'

Bias Vivar's fight at Santiago de Compostela had been one of the great events of the Spanish war, a miraculous victory which had proved to many Spaniards that the French were not invincible, and Sharpe's mention of the battle made many of the officers in the audience look at him with a new interest and respect, but to General Bautista the battle was mere history.

'Vivar was like many veterans of the French wars,' Bautista said sarcastically, 'in his belief that the experience of fighting against Bonaparte's armies prepared him for suppressing a rebellion in a country like Chile. But they are not the same kind of fighting! Would you say they were the same kind of fighting, Mister Sharpe?'

'No, sir.' Sharpe replied in all honesty, but even so he felt that he was somehow betraying his dead friend by agreeing.

Bautista, pleased to have elicited the agreement from Sharpe, smiled, then glanced at Harper's bandaged head. 'I hear you were sadly inconvenienced yesterday?'

Again Sharpe was surprised by the suddenness of the question, but he managed to nod. 'Yes, sir.'

The smile grew broader as Bautista snapped his fingers. 'I would not like you to return to England with an unhappy memory of Chile, or convinced that my administration is incompetent to police Valdivia's alleys. So I am delighted to tell you, Mister Sharpe, that the thieves were apprehended and your effects recovered.' The click of his fingers had summoned two orderlies who each carried a bag into the room. The bags were placed on the table. 'Come!' Bautista ordered. 'Come and examine them! I wish to be assured that everything has been recovered. Please!'

Astonished, Sharpe and Harper walked to the table and, in front of the audience, unpacked the bags. Everything seemed to be there, but not in the same condition. Their clothes, which had been soiled and crumpled from the long sea voyage, had all been laundered and pressed. Their boots had been polished, and Sharpe did not doubt that their razors had been stropped to a murderous edge. 'It's all here,' he said, and thinking he had not been gracious enough, he made a clumsy half-bow to Bautista. 'Thank you, Your Excellency.'

'Everything is there?' Bautista demanded. 'Nothing is missing?'

It was then that Sharpe realized one thing was missing: the portrait of Napoleon. Harper's small silver thimble, duly polished, was in one of the bags, but not the silver-framed portrait of the Emperor. Sharpe opened his mouth to report the loss, then abruptly closed it as he considered that the portrait's absence could be a trap. Bautista was evidently obsessed with Napoleon, which made it very likely that the Captain-General had himself purloined the signed portrait. Nor, Sharpe decided, was the loss of the portrait important. It was a mere souvenir, as the French said, and Lieutenant Colonel Charles could always write and request another such keepsake. Sharpe also had a strong suspicion that if he mentioned the missing picture, Bautista might refuse to issue the travel permits and so, without considering the matter further, Sharpe shook his head. 'Nothing is missing, Your Excellency.'

Bautista smiled as though Sharpe had said the right thing, then, still smiling, he clicked his fingers again, this time summoning a squad of infantrymen who escorted two prisoners. The prisoners, in drab brown clothes, had their wrists and ankles manacled. The chains scraped and jangled as the two men were forced to the room's center.

'These are the thieves,' Bautista announced.

Sharpe stared at the two men. They were both black-haired, both had moustaches, and both were terrified. Sharpe tried to remember the face of the man who had aimed the carbine at him, and in his memory that man had sported a much bigger moustache than either of these prisoners, but he could not be certain.

'What do you do,' Bautista asked, 'with thieves in your country?'

'Imprison them,' Sharpe said, 'or maybe transport them to Australia.'

'How merciful! No wonder you still have thieves. In Chile we have better ways to deter scum.' Bautista turned to the fire, drew a big handkerchief from his uniform pocket, then wrapped the handkerchief around the metal handle of what Sharpe had supposed to be a long poker jammed into the basket grate. It was not a poker, but rather a branding iron. Bautista jerked it free of the coals and Sharpe saw the letter L, for ladron, glowing at its tip.

'No! Senar! No!' The nearest thief twisted back, but two soldiers gripped him hard by the arms, and a third stood behind the man to hold his head steady.

'The punishment for a first offense is a branding. For the second offense it is death,' Bautista said, then he held the brand high and close to the thief s forehead, close enough for the man to feel its radiant heat. Bautista hesitated, smiling, and it seemed to Sharpe that the whole room held its breath. Colonel Ruiz turned away. The elegant Marquinez went pale.