Sharpe's Devil

The smell grew worse, filling the church with its sickening bite. MacAuley, unable to suppress his interest, had temporarily abandoned a patient to come and gape at the open coffin.

Vivar was draped in a shroud of blue cloth that looked like matted velvet. Sharpe worked the edge of the spade under the cloth and, dreading the fresh wave of smells he would provoke, jerked it upward. For a second or two the material clung to the rotting flesh beneath, then it pulled free to billow a fresh gust of effluvial stench into the church. Sharpe swept the cloth aside and let it fall, with the spade, beside the grave.

'Oh, Christ Almighty.' MacAuley made the sign of the cross on his blood-soaked chest.

'Oh, good God,' Sharpe whispered.

Major Suarez could not speak, but just sank to his knees.

'Mary, Mother of God,' Harper crossed himself, then looked with horror at Sharpe.

Lord Cochrane reverted to poetry:

'Few and short were the prayers we said,

And we spoke not a word of sorrow,

But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead,

And we bitterly thought of the morrow.'

Then His Lordship began to laugh, and his laugh swelled to fill the whole church, for in the coffin, which had been partly weighted with stones, was the foully rotted corpse of a dog—a yellow dog, a wormy and half-liquefied dog that had been buried beside an altar so that on Judgment Day it would fly to its creator with the speed of a saint's resurrection. 'Oh, woof, woof,' Cochrane said, 'woof, woof,' and Sharpe wondered just what in hell's name he was supposed to do next.

'No wonder Bautista didn't want us to get at the grave,' Harper said. 'Jesus! Why did he bury a dog?'

'Because Madrid was pestering him to find Don Bias,' Sharpe guessed. 'Because Louisa's enquiries were more effective than she knew. Because he knew that if he didn't find a body, the questions would get more persistent and the enquiries more urgent.'

'But a dog?' Harper asked. 'Jesus, it isn't as if he couldn't find a dead man. They're ten a penny in this damned country.'

'Bautista hated Vivar. So maybe using the dog was his idea of a joke? Besides, he didn't think anyone would open the coffin, and why should they? Because by the time he needed to produce a body Don Bias had been dead three months, so all Bautista needed do was produce a coffin that stank and sent off his trusted Marquinez to concoct the wretched thing. And it worked, at least till we turned up.' Sharpe said the words bitterly, a despairing cry to the cold wind that whipped up from the mysterious Chilean southlands. He and Harper were walking around the citadel's ramparts over which, just moments before, the decomposed remains of the yellow dog had been tossed away.

'So maybe the bastard faked that message in Boney's picture just to have a reason to throw us out!' Harper said, 'but Dona Louisa would have sent another request for the body! The thing wouldn't have ended with us.'

'And Bautista would have provided her with a body, or rather a skeleton so rotted down that no one could ever tell who it had been, but he would have needed time to prepare it. He'd probably have had a lavish coffin made, with a silver plate on it, and he'd have found an unrecognizably decayed body to put inside, dressed in a gilded uniform, and he couldn't arrange all that with us sniffing around Puerto Crucero.'

Harper stopped at an embrasure and stared at the far mountains. 'So where's Bias Vivar?'

'Still out there,' Sharpe nodded at the broken countryside to the north, at the retreating ridges and dark valleys where, he knew, he must now search for a friend's body. He did not want to make the search. He had been so sure that he would find the body under the garrison church's flagstones, and now he faced yet more time in this country that was so bitterly far from everything he loved. 'We'll need two horses. Unless, of course, you've had enough?'

'Are you sure we need to stay?' Harper asked unhappily.

Sharpe's face was equally miserable. 'We haven't found Vivar, so I don't think I can go home yet.'

Harper shook his head. 'And we'll not find him! You heard what Major Suarez said. He's looked twice and found nothing. Christ! Bautista probably had a thousand men looking!'

'I know. But I can't go back to Louisa and tell her I couldn't be bothered to search the place where Don Bias died. We have to take a look, Patrick,' Sharpe said, then added hurriedly, 'I do, anyway.'

'I'll stay,' Harper said robustly. 'Jesus, if I get home I'll only have the bloody children screaming and the wife telling me I should drink less.'

Sharpe smiled. 'So she does think you're too fat?'

'She's a woman, what the hell does she know?' Harper tried to pull in his gut, and failed.

'You're thinner than you were,' Sharpe said truthfully.

Harper patted his belly. 'She won't know me when I get home. I'm dwindling. I'll be a wraith. If I'm alive at all.'

'Two weeks,' Sharpe heard the gloom in his friend's voice, and tried to alleviate it with a promise. 'We'll stay two weeks more, and if we can't find Don Bias in a fortnight, then we'll give up the search, I promise. Just two weeks.'

It was a promise that looked increasingly fragile as the days passed. Sharpe needed to search the valley where Don Bias had disappeared, but refugees from the countryside spoke of horrors that made travel unsafe. The Spaniards, retreating toward the guns of Valdivia, were pillaging farms and settlements, while the savages, scenting their enemy's weakness, were hunting down the refugees from Puerto Crucero's defeated garrison. The whole province was churning with bitterness, and Cochrane insisted that Sharpe and Harper could not risk traveling through the murderous chaos. 'The damned Indians don't know you're English! They see a white skin and suddenly you're the evening's main dish—white meat served with fig sauce. Come to think of it, that's probably what happened to your friend Vivar. He was turned into a fricassee and three belches.'

'Are the savages cannibals?' Sharpe asked.

'God knows. I can't make head or tail of them,' Cochrane grumbled. He wanted Sharpe to forget Vivar, and instead enroll for the assault on Valdivia. 'Half the bloody Spanish army searched that valley,' Cochrane protested, 'and they found nothing! Why do you think you can do better?'

'Because I'm not the Spanish army.'

The two men were standing on the highest seaward rampart of the captured fortress. Above them the flag of the Chilean Republic snapped in the cold southern wind, while beneath them, in the inner harbor, the Espiritu Santo lay grounded on a sandy shoal that was only flooded at the very highest tides. A stout line had been attached to the Espiritu Santos, mainmast, then run ashore to where a team of draught horses, helped by fifty men, had taken the strain, pulling the frigate over, so that now she lay careened on her port side and with her wounded flank facing the sky. Carpenters from the town and from Cochrane's flagship were busy patching the damage done by the exploding Mary Starbuck. The Espiritu Santo was now called the Kitty, named in honor of Cochrane's wife. Her old crew had been divided; Captain Ardiles, with his officers and those seamen who had not volunteered to join the ranks of the rebels, were locked in the prison wing of the citadel, while the other seamen, about fifty in all, had volunteered to join Cochrane's ranks. Those fifty would all be part of the crew that would take the Kitty north to attack Valdivia.

Among the plunder captured in Puerto Crucero had been a Spanish pinnace, with six small guns, which Cochrane had sent north with news of his victory. The pinnace, a fast and handy sailor, had orders to avoid all strange sails, but just to reach the closest rebel-held port and from there to send the news of Puerto Crucero's fall to Santiago. Cochrane had also written to Bernardo O'Higgins requesting that more men be sent to help him assault Valdivia. If O'Higgins would give him just one battalion of troops, Cochrane promised success. 'I won't get the battalion,' Cochrane gloomily told Sharpe, 'but I have to ask.'

'They won't give you troops?' Sharpe asked in surprise.

'They'll send a few, a token few. But they won't send enough to guarantee victory. They don't want victory, remember. They want me either to refuse to obey their orders or to make a hash out of obedience. They want rid of me, but with your help, Sharpe, I might yet—'

'I'm riding north,' Sharpe interrupted, 'to look for Don Bias.'

'Look for him after you've helped me capture Valdivia!' Cochrane suggested brightly. 'Think of the glory we'll win! My God, Sharpe, men will talk about us forever! Cochrane and Sharpe, conquerors of the Pacific!'