Sharpe's Devil

Eraser, Cochrane's sailing master, opined that the repaired Kitty might stay afloat long enough to reach Valdivia, but he did not sound optimistic. 'Not that it matters,' the old Scotsman told Cochrane, 'for you'll all be dead bones once the dagoes start their guns on you.'

The two ships, both clumsily disguised as unloved transport hulks, had sailed four days after Cochrane's council of war. Cochrane had left just thirty men in Puerto Crucero, most of them walking wounded and barely sufficient to guard the prisoners and hold the fort against a possible Spanish patrol. Every other man sailed on board the Kitty and the O'Higgins. The two warships stood well out to sea, traveling far from land so that no stray Spanish vessel might spot them.

The Kitty's, pumps clattered ceaselessly. She was repaired, bu't the new wood in her hull had yet to swell and close her seams, and so, from the moment the frigate was refloated, the pumps had been manned. Despite her repairs she was proving a desperately slow ship. Some of the men in Cochrane's expedition had declared her an unlucky ship and had been reluctant to sail in her, a superstition that Cochrane had lanced by choosing to sail in the fragile Kitty himself. Sharpe and Harper also sailed on the erstwhile Espiritu Santo, while Miller and his marines were on the O'Higgins. 'I'll salute as you sink,' had been Miller's cheerful farewell to Sharpe.

'If we don't sink, we'll die under the guns,' Fraser opined, and the nearer the two ships came to Valdivia, the gloomier the old man became, though his gloom was always shot through with an affectionate admiration for Cochrane. 'If any man can do the impossible, it's Cochrane,' Fraser told Sharpe and Harper. They were five nights out of Puerto Crucero, on the last night before they reached Valdivia, and the ships were sailing without lights, except for one shielded lantern that burned on the faster O'Higgins' stern. If the O'Higgins looked like it was going too far ahead in the darkness, a signal gun would be fired from one of the Kitty's two stern guns which were still the only heavy armament that the frigate possessed. 'I was with Cochrane when he took the Gamo,' Fraser, who was steering the Kitty, said proudly. 'Did you ever hear how he did that?'

'No.'

'It was in 01, off Barcelona. His Lordship had a brig, called the Speedy. The smallest seagoing thing in the Royal Navy, she was, with just fifty-two men aboard and fourteen guns—seven guns a side and none of them more than four pounders—and the mad devil used her to capture the Gamo. She was a Spanish frigate of thirty-two guns and three hundred men. You'd have said it couldn't be done, but he did it. He disguised us with an American flag, ran in close under her side, then held her up against the frigate as he blasted his seven popguns up through her decks. He held her there for an hour and a half, then boarded her. She surrendered.' Fraser shrugged. 'The trouble with Cochrane is that every time he does something insane, he gets away with it. One day he'll lose, and that'll be the end of him. Mind you, whenever he tangles with the lawyers, he loses. His enemies accused him of defrauding the stock exchange, which he didn't do, but they hired the best lawyers in London and His Lordship was so sure of his own innocence that he didn't even bother to turn up in court, which made it much easier for the bastards to find him guilty and put him in prison.'

'And they hurled me out of the most noble Order of the Bath.' Cochrane himself, who had crept up behind them, intervened. 'Do you know what they do when they expel a man from the Order of the Bath, Sharpe?'

'No, my Lord.'

Cochrane, who clearly relished the story, chuckled. 'The ceremony happens at dead of night in Westminster Abbey. In the chapel of Henry VII. It's dark. At first you hear nothing but the rustle of robes and the scratching of shoes. It sounds like a convocation of rats, but it's merely the lawyers and lords and pimps and bum-suckers gathering together. Then, on the stroke of midnight, they tear the disgraced man's banner from above the choir stalls, and afterward they take a nameless man, who stands in for the villain, and they strap a pair of spurs on his heels and then, with an axe, they chop the spurs off! At night! In the Abbey! And all the rats and pimps applaud as they kick the man and the spurs and the banner down the steps, and down the choir, and down the nave, and out into the darkness of Westminster.' Cochrane laughed. 'They did that to me! Can you believe it? We're in the nineteenth century, yet still the bastards are playing children's games at midnight. But one day, by Christ, I'll go back to England and I'll sail up the Thames and I'll make those bastards wish their mothers had never given birth. I'll hang those dry bastards from the roofbeams of the Abbey, then play pell-mell with their balls in the nave.'

'They're lawyers, Cochrane,' Fraser said sourly, 'they don't have balls.'

Cochrane chuckled, then cocked his face to the night. 'The wind's piping up, Fraser. We'll have a blow before tomorrow night.'

'Aye, we will.'

'So do you still think we're doomed, Sharpe?' Cochrane demanded fiercely.

'I think, my Lord, that tomorrow we shall need a miracle.'

'It'll be easy,' Cochrane said dismissively. 'We'll arrive an hour before nightfall, at the very moment when the garrisons will be wanting to go off duty and put their feet up. They'll think we're transports, they'll ignore us, and as soon as it's dark we'll be swarming up the ramparts of Fort Niebla. By this time tomorrow night, Sharpe, you and I will have our feet under the commandant's table, drinking his wine, eating his supper, and choosing between his whores. And the day after that we'll go downriver and take Valdivia. Two days, Sharpe, just two days, and all Chile is ours. We will have won.'

It all sounded so easy. Two days, six forts, two hundred guns, two thousand men, and all Chile as the prize.

In the darkness a glimmer of light showed from the stern lantern of the O'Higgins. The sea hissed and roared, lifting the sluggish hull of the Kitty, then dropping her down into the cold heart of the wave troughs. Beyond the one small glimmer of light there was no other sign of life in all the universe, neither a star nor moon nor landward light. The ships were in an immensity of darkness, commanded by a devil, sailing under a night sky of thick cloud, and traveling toward death.

They sighted land an hour after dawn. By midday they could see the signal tower that stood atop Fort Chorocomayo, the highest stronghold in Valdivia's defenses. The signal tower held a vast semaphore mast that reported the presence of the two strange ships, then fell into stillness.

Three hours before sunset Sharpe could see the Spanish flag atop Fort Ingles and he could hear the surf crashing on the rocks beside the Aguada del Ingles. No ships had come from the harbor to enquire about their business. 'You see,' Cochrane crowed, 'they're fools!'

Two hours later, in the light of the dying sun, the O'Higgins and the Kitty trimmed their sails as they turned east about the rocky peninsula that protected Valdivia's harbor. They had arrived at the killing place.

The great clouds had gone, torn ragged by a morning gale that had gentled throughout the day until, in this evening of battle, the wind blew steady and firm, but without malice. Yet the sea was still ferocious. The huge Pacific rollers, completing their great journey across an ocean, heaved the Kitty up and down in a giant swooping motion, while to Sharpe's right the great waves shattered in shredding explosions of foam off the black rocks. 'You would not, I think, want to make a landing on the Aguada del Ingles in these conditions,' Cochrane said as he searched the shore with his telescope. Suddenly he stiffened. 'There!'

'My Lord?' Sharpe asked.

'See for yourself, Sharpe!'

Sharpe took the glass. Dim in the gauzy light and through the shredding plumes of foam that obscured the sea's edge like a fog he could just see the first of the harbor's forts. 'That's Fort Ingles!' Cochrane said. 'The beach is just below it.'

Sharpe moved the glass down to where the massive waves thundered up the Aguada del Ingles. He edged the glass back to the fortress which looked much as he remembered it from his earlier visit—a makeshift defense work with an earthen ditch and bank, wooden palisades, and embrasures for cannon. 'They're signaling us!' he said to Cochrane as a string of flags suddenly broke above the fort's silhouette.

'Reply, Mister Almante!' Cochrane snapped, and a Chilean midshipman ran a string of flags up to the Kittys mizzen yard. The flags that Cochrane was showing formed no coherent message, but were instead a nonsense combination. 'In the first place,' Cochrane explained, 'the sun's behind us, so they can't see the flags well, and even if they could see the flags they'd assume we're using a new Spanish code which hasn't reached them yet. It'll make the buggers nervous, and that, after all, is a good way to begin a battle.' At the Kitty’s stern the Spanish ensign rippled in the wind, while below her decks the pumps