Sharpe’s Devil: Napoleon and South America, 1820–1821. Bernard Cornwell
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horses on a hill slope, while ahead, where the valley climbed out of the thick flax into the bare uplands, a guardpost straddled the road beside an idle semaphore station. The flag above the guardpost was the British Union flag. ‘Are you telling me this might be Irish land?’ Harper asked with heavy sarcasm.
‘It belongs to the East India Company,’ Sharpe explained patiently. ‘It’s a place where they can supply their ships.’
‘It looks bloody English to me, so it does. Except for them black fellows. You remember that darkie we had in the grenadier company? Big fellow? Died at Toulouse?’
Sharpe nodded. The black fellow had been one of the battalion’s few casualties at Toulouse; killed a week after the peace treaty had been signed, only no one at the time knew of it.
‘I remember he got drunk at Burgos,’ Harper said. ‘We put him on a charge and he still couldn’t stand up straight when we marched him in for punishment next morning. What the hell was his name? Tall fellow, he was. You must remember him. He married Corporal Roe’s widow, and she got pregnant and Sergeant Finlayson was taking bets on whether the nipper would be white or black. What was his name, for Christ’s sake?’ Harper frowned in frustration. Ever since he had met Sharpe in France they had held conversations like this, trying to flesh out the ghosts of a past that was fast becoming attenuated.
‘Bastable.’ The name suddenly shot into Sharpe’s head. ‘Thomas Bastable.’
‘Bastable! That was him, right enough. He used to close his eyes whenever he fired a musket, and I never could get him out of the habit. He probably put more bullets into more angels than any soldier in history, God rest his soul. But he was a terror with the bayonet. Jesus, but he could be a terror with a spike!’
‘What colour was the baby?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Bit of both, as far as I remember. Like milky tea. Finlayson wouldn’t pay out till we had a quiet word with him behind the lines, but he was always a slippery bugger, Finlayson. Never did understand why you gave him the stripes.’ Harper fell silent as the small group of uniformed men approached a shuttered house that was surrounded with a neatly-trimmed hedge. Bright flowers grew in a border either side of a pathway made from crushed seashells. A gardener, who looked Chinese, was digging in the vegetable patch beside the house, while a young woman, fair-haired and white-dressed, sat reading under a gazebo close to the front hedge. She looked up, smiled a familiar greeting at the red-faced Major who led the convoy of mules, then stared with frank curiosity at the strangers. The Spanish officers bowed their heads gravely, Sharpe tipped his old-fashioned brown tricorne hat, while Harper offered her a cheerful smile. ‘It’s a fine morning, miss!’
‘Too hot, I think.’ Her accent was English, her voice gentle. ‘We’re going to have rain this afternoon.’
‘Better rain than cold. It’s freezing back home, so it is.’
The girl smiled, but did not respond again. She looked down at her book and slowly turned a page. Somewhere in the house a clock struck the tinkling chimes of midday. A cat slept on a windowsill.
The mules climbed slowly on towards the guardpost. They left the flax and the banyan trees and the myrtles behind, emerging onto a plateau where the grass was sparse and brown and the few trees stunted and wind-bent. Beyond the barren grassland were sudden saw-edged peaks, black and menacing, and on one of those rocky crags was a white-walled house which had the gaunt gallows of a semaphore station built on its roof. The semaphore house stood on the skyline and, because they were backed by the turbulent dark rainclouds, its white painted walls looked unnaturally bright. The semaphore machine beside the guardhouse on the road suddenly clattered into life, its twin black arms creaking as they jerked up and down.
‘They’ll be telling everyone that we’re coming,’ said Harper happily. He was finding every mundane event of this hot day exciting.
‘Like as not,’ Sharpe said.
The redcoats on duty at the guardpost saluted as the Spanish officers rode past. Some smiled at the sight of the monstrous Harper overlapping the struggling mule, but their faces turned to stone when Sharpe glowered at them. Christ, Sharpe thought, but these men must be bored. Stuck four thousand miles from home with nothing to do but watch the sea and the mountains and to wonder about the small house five miles from the anchorage. ‘You do realize,’ Sharpe said to Harper suddenly, and with a sour expression, ‘that we’re almost certainly wasting our time.’
‘Aye, maybe we are,’ Harper, accustomed to Sharpe’s sudden dark moods, replied with great equanimity, ‘but we still thought it worth trying, didn’t we? Or would you come all this way and stay locked up in your cabin? You can always turn back.’
Sharpe rode on without answering. Dust drifted back from his mule’s hooves. Behind him the telegraph gave a last clatter and was still. In a shallow valley to Sharpe’s left was another English encampment, while to his right, a mile away, a group of uniformed men exercised their horses. When they saw the approaching party of Spaniards they spurred away towards a house that lay isolated at the centre of the plateau and within a protective wall and a cordon of red-coated guards.
The horsemen, who were escorted by a single British officer, were not wearing the ubiquitous red coats of the island’s garrison, but instead wore dark blue uniforms. It had been five years since Sharpe had seen such uniform jackets worn openly. The men who wore that blue had once ruled Europe from Moscow to Madrid, but now their bright star had fallen and their sovereignty was confined to the yellow stucco walls of the lonely house which lay at this road’s end.
The yellow house was low and sprawling, and surrounded by dark, glossy-leaved trees and a rank garden. There was nothing cheerful about the place. It had been built as a cow shed, extended to become a summer cottage for the island’s Lieutenant Governor, but now, in the dying days of 1820, the house was home to fifty prisoners, ten horses and countless numbers of rats. The house was called Longwood, it lay in the very middle of the island of St Helena, and its most important prisoner had once been the Emperor of France.
Called Bonaparte.
They were not, after all, wasting their time.
It seemed that General Bonaparte had an avid appetite for visitors who could bring him news of the world beyond St Helena’s seventy square miles. He received such visitors after luncheon, and as his luncheon was always at eleven in the morning, and it was now twenty minutes after noon, the Spanish officers were told that if they cared to walk in the gardens for a few moments, his Majesty would receive them when he was ready.
Not General Bonaparte, which was the greatest dignity his British jailers would allow him, but his Majesty, the Emperor, would receive the visitors, and any visitor unwilling to address his Majesty as Votre Majesté was invited to straddle his mule and take the winding hill road back to the port of Jamestown.
The Captain of the Spanish frigate, a reclusive man called Ardiles, had bridled at the instruction, but had restrained his protest, while the other Spaniards, all of them army officers, had equably agreed to address his Majesty as majestically as he demanded. Now, as his Majesty finished luncheon, his compliant visitors walked in the gardens where toadstools grew thick on the lawn. Clouds, building up in the west, were reflected in the murky surfaces of newly-dug ponds. The English Major who had led the procession up to the plateau, and who evidently had no intention of paying any respects to General Bonaparte, had stepped in the deep mud of one of the pond banks, and now tried to scrape the dirt off his boots with his riding crop. There was a grumble of thunder from the heavy clouds above the white-walled semaphore station.
‘It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?’ Harper was as excited as a child taken to a country fair. ‘You remember when we first saw him? Jesus! It was raining that day, so it was.’ That first glimpse had been at the battlefield of Quatre Bras, two days before Waterloo, when Sharpe and Harper had seen the Emperor, surrounded by lancers, in the watery distance. Two days later, before the worst of the bloodletting began, they had watched Bonaparte ride a white horse along the French ranks. Now they had come to his prison and it was, as Harper had said, hard to believe that they were so close to the ogre, the tyrant, the