Sharpe's Devil

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.

'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