Sharpe’s Devil: Napoleon and South America, 1820–1821. Bernard Cornwell
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enough commander to beat the rebels, but was he a clever enough politician to beat his own side? Sharpe, who knew what an honest man Don Blas was, doubted it, and that doubt convinced him still further that his old friend must be dead. It took a cunning fox to cheat the hunt, while the brave beast that turned to fight the dogs always ended up torn into scraps. ‘So isn’t it likely,’ Sharpe spoke as gently as he could, ‘that Don Blas was ambushed by his own side?’
‘Indeed it’s possible!’ Louisa said. ‘In fact I believe that is precisely what happened. But I would like to be certain.’
Sharpe sighed. ‘If Don Blas was ambushed by his own side, then they are not going to reveal what happened.’ Sharpe hated delivering such a hopeless opinion, but he knew it was true. ‘I’m sorry, Doña Louisa, but you’re never going to know what happened.’ But Louisa could not accept so bleak a verdict. Her instinct had convinced her that Don Blas was alive, and that conviction had brought her into the deep, private valley where Sharpe farmed Lucille’s land. Sharpe wondered how he was going to rid himself of her. He suspected it would not be easy for Doña Louisa was clearly obsessed by her husband’s fate. ‘Do you want me to write to the Spanish authorities?’ he offered. ‘Or perhaps ask the Duke of Wellington to use his influence?’
‘What good will that do?’ Louisa challenged. ‘I’ve used every influence I can, till the authorities are sick of my influence! I don’t need influence, I need the truth.’ Louisa paused, then took the plunge. ‘I want you to go to Chile and find me that truth,’ she said to Sharpe.
Lucille’s grey eyes widened in surprise, while Sharpe, equally astonished at the effrontery of Louisa’s request, said nothing. Beyond the moat, in the elms that grew beside the orchard, rooks cawed loudly and a house martin sliced on sabre wings between the dairy and the horse chestnut tree. ‘There must be men in South America who are in a better position to search for your husband?’ Lucille remarked very mildly.
‘How do I trust them? Those officers who were friends of my husband have either been sent home or posted to remote garrisons. I sent money to other officers who claimed to be friends of Don Blas, but all I received in return were the same lies. They merely wish me to send more money, and thus they encourage me with hope but not with facts. Besides, such men cannot speak to the rebels.’
‘And I can?’ Sharpe asked.
‘You can find out whether they ambushed Don Blas, or whether someone else set the trap.’
Sharpe, from all he had heard, doubted whether any rebels had been involved. ‘By someone else,’ he said diplomatically, ‘I assume you mean the man Don Blas was riding to confront? The governor of, where was it?’
‘Puerto Crucero,’ Louisa said, ‘and the governor’s name was Miguel Bautista.’ Louisa spoke the name with utter loathing. ‘And Miguel Bautista is Chile’s new Captain-General. That snake has replaced Don Blas! He writes me flowery letters of condolence, but the truth is that he hated Don Blas and has done nothing to help me.’
‘Why did he hate Don Blas?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Because Don Blas was honest, and Bautista is corrupt. Why else?’
‘Corrupt enough to murder Don Blas?’ Sharpe asked.
‘My husband is not dead!’ Louisa insisted in a voice full of pain, so much pain that Sharpe, who till now had been trying to pierce her armour of certainty, suddenly realized just what anguish lay behind that self-delusion. ‘He is hiding,’ Louisa insisted unrealistically, ‘or perhaps he is wounded. Perhaps he is with the savages. Who knows? I only know, in my heart, that he is not dead. You will understand!’ This passionate appeal was directed at Lucille, who smiled with sympathy, but said nothing. ‘Women know when their men die,’ Louisa went on. ‘They feel it. I know a woman who woke in her sleep, crying, and later we discovered that her husband’s ship had sunk that very same night! I tell you, Don Blas is alive!’ The cry was pathetic, yet full of vigour, tragic.
Sharpe turned to watch his son who, with little Dominique, was searching inside the open barn door for newly-laid eggs. He did not want to go to Chile. These days he even resented having to travel much beyond Caen. Sharpe was a happy man, his only worries the usual concerns of a farmer, money and weather, and he wished Louisa had not come to the valley with her talk of cavalry and ambush and savages and corruption. Sharpe’s more immediate concerns were the pike that decimated the millstream trout and the crumbling sill of the weir that threatened to collapse and inundate Lucille’s water meadows, and he did not want to think of far-off countries and corrupt governments and missing soldiers.
Doña Louisa, seeing Sharpe stare at his children, must have understood what he was thinking. ‘I have asked for help everywhere.’ She made the appeal to Lucille as much as to Sharpe. ‘The Spanish authorities wouldn’t help me, which is why I went to London.’ Louisa, who perhaps had more faith in her English roots than she would have liked to admit, explained that she had sought the help of the British government because British interests were important in Chile. Merchants from London and Liverpool, in anticipation of new trading opportunities, were suspected of funding the rebel government, while the Royal Navy kept a squadron off the Chilean coast and Louisa believed that if the British authorities, thus well-connected with both sides of the fighting parties, demanded news of Don Blas then neither the rebels nor the Royalists would dare refuse them. ‘Yet the British say they cannot help!’ Louisa complained indignantly. ‘They say Don Blas’s disappearance is a military matter of concern only to the Spanish authorities!’ So, in desperation, and while returning overland to Spain, Louisa had called on Sharpe. Her husband had once done Sharpe a great service, she tellingly reminded him, and now she wanted that favour returned.
Lucille spoke English excellently, but not quite well enough to have kept up with Louisa’s indignant loquacity. Sharpe translated, and added a few facts of his own; how he did indeed owe Blas Vivar a great debt. ‘He helped me once, years ago.’ Sharpe was deliberately vague, for Lucille never much liked to hear of Sharpe’s exploits in fighting against her own people. ‘And he is a good man,’ Sharpe added, knowing the compliment was inadequate, for Don Blas was more than just a good man. He was, or had been, a generous man of rigorous honesty; a man of religion, of charity, and of ability.
‘I do not like asking this of you,’ Louisa said in an unnaturally timid voice, ‘but I know that whoever seeks Don Blas must deal with soldiers, and your name is respected everywhere among soldiers.’
‘Not here, it isn’t,’ Lucille said robustly, though not without an affectionate smile at Sharpe, for she knew how proud he would be of the compliment just paid him.
‘And, of course, I shall pay you for your trouble in going to Chile,’ Louisa added.
‘I couldn’t possibly …’ Sharpe began, then realized just how decrepit the farm roof was, and how much a new weir would cost, and so, helplessly, he glanced at Lucille.
‘Of course Richard will go,’ Lucille said calmly.
‘Though not for the money,’ Sharpe said gallantly.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ Lucille intervened in English so that Louisa would understand. Lucille had already estimated the worth of Doña Louisa’s black dress, and of her carriage, and of her postilions and outriders and horses and luggage, and Lucille knew only too well how desperately her château needed repairs and how badly her estate needed the investment of money. Lucille paused to bite through a thread. ‘But I don’t want you to go alone. You need company. You’ve been wanting to see Patrick, so you should write to Dublin tonight, Richard.’
‘Patrick won’t want to come,’ Sharpe said, not because he thought his friend would truly refuse such an invitation, but rather because he did not want to raise his own hopes that his oldest friend, Patrick Harper, would give up his comfortable existence as landlord of a Dublin tavern and instead travel to one of the remotest and evidently most troubled countries on earth.
‘It would be better if you did take a companion,’ Louisa said firmly. ‘Chile is horribly corrupt. Don Blas believed that men like Bautista were simply extracting every last