'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,
'I want to write to my Consul in Valdivia. He'll reward you if you bring me paper and ink.'
'Please don't speak,
On the fifth morning, under a sullen sky from which a sour rain spat, the
The next morning, under the same drab sky, the
The frigate only stayed at the wharf long enough to take on board the boxes from the cart before she raised a foresail and slipped away from the dangerously shallow water to return to her deeper anchorage. 'Lucky bastards,' Harper said as the rattle of the anchor chains echoed across the harbor. 'They'll be going home soon, won't they? Back to Europe, eh? She could take us to Cadiz, we'd have a week in a good tavern, then I'd catch a sherry boat north to Dublin. Christ, what wouldn't I give to be on board her?' He watched as a longboat pulled away from the frigate and was rowed back toward the citadel's steps, then he sighed. 'One way or another we've made a mess of this job, haven't we?'
Sharpe, lying on one of the mattresses and staring at the cracks in the plastered ceiling, smiled. 'Peace isn't like war. In wartime things were simpler.' He turned his head toward the metal-studded door beyond which footsteps sounded loud in the passageway. 'Bit early for food, isn't it?'
The door opened, but instead of the usual two servants carrying the midday trays, Major Suarez and a file of infantrymen now stood in the stone passageway. 'Come,' Suarez ordered. 'Downstairs. The Captain-General wants you.'
'Who?' Sharpe swung his legs off the cot.