“It’s all of five miles, sir, uphill, and very steep.” The Lieutenant pointed to the hillside above the trees where a narrow road could just be seen zig-zagging perilously up the flax-covered slope. “You really are best advised to wait for the mules, sir.”
The tall Rifle officer made a grunting noise, which the young Lieutenant took for acceptance of his wise advice. Emboldened, the Lieutenant took a step closer to the Rifleman. “Sir?”
“What?”
“I just wondered.” The Lieutenant, overwhelmed by the Rifleman’s scowl, stepped back. “Nothing, sir. It doesn’t signify.”
“For God’s sake, boy, speak up! I won’t bite you.”
“It was my father, sir. He often spoke of you and I wondered if you might recall him? He was at Salamanca, sir. Hardacre? Captain Roland Hardacre?”
“No.”
“He died at San Sebastian?” Lieutenant Hardacre added pathetically, as though that last detail might revive his father’s image in the Rifleman’s memory.
The Rifleman made another grunting noise that might have been translated as sympathy, but was in fact the inadequate sound of a man who never knew how to react properly to such revelations. So many men had died, so many widows still wept and so many children would be forever fatherless that the Rifleman doubted there was a sufficiency of pity for all the war’s doings. “I didn’t know him, Lieutenant, I’m sorry.”
“It was truly an honor to meet you anyway, sir,” Lieutenant Hardacre said, then stepped gingerly backward as though he might yet be attacked by the tall man whose black hair bore a badger streak of white and whose dark face was slashed by a jagged scar. The Rifleman, who was wishing he could respond more easily and sympathetically to such appeals to his memory, was Richard Sharpe. His uniform, which might have looked shabby on a beggar’s back, bore the faded insignia of a Major, though at the war’s end, when he had fought at the greatest widow-making field of all, he had been a Lieutenant Colonel. Now, despite his uniform and the sword that hung at his side, he was just plain mister and a farmer.
Sharpe turned away from the embarrassed Lieutenant to stare morosely across the sun-glinting sea at the far ships that guarded this lonely, godforsaken coast. Sharpe’s scar gave him a sardonic and mocking look. His companion, on the other hand, had a cheerful and genial face. He was a very tall man, even taller than Sharpe himself, and was the only man among the sixteen travelers not wearing a uniform. Instead the man was dressed in a brown wool coat and black breeches that were far too thick for this tropical heat and, in consequence, the tall man, who was also hugely fat, was sweating profusely. The discomfort had evidently not affected his cheerfulness, for he gazed happily about at the dark cliffs, at the banyan trees, at the slave huts, at the rain clouds swelling above the black volcanic peaks, at the sea, at the small town, and at last delivered himself of his considered verdict. “A rare old shitheap of a place, wouldn’t you say?” The fat man, who was called Mister Patrick Harper and was Sharpe’s companion on this voyage, had expressed the exact same sentiment at dawn when, as their ship crept on a small wind to the island’s anchorage, the first light had revealed the unappealing landscape.
“It’s more than the bastard deserves,” Sharpe replied, but without much conviction, merely in the tone of a man making conversation to pass the time.
“It’s still a shitheap. How in Christ’s name did they ever find the place? That’s what I want to know. God’s in his heaven, but we’re a million miles from anywhere on earth, so we are!”
“I suppose a ship was off course and bumped into the bloody place.”
Harper fanned his face with the brim of his broad hat. “I wish they’d bring the bloody mules. I’m dying of the bloody heat, so I am. It must be a fair bit cooler up in them hills.”
“If you weren’t so fat,” Sharpe said mildly, “we could walk.”
“Fat! I’m just well made, so I am.” The response, immediate and indignant, was well practiced, so that if any man had been listening he would have instantly realized that this was an old and oft-repeated altercation between the two men. “And what’s wrong with being properly made?” Harper continued. “Mother of Christ, just because a man lives well there’s no need to make remarks about the evidence of his health! And look at yourself! The Holy Ghost has more beef on its bones than you do. If I boiled you down I wouldn’t get so much as a pound of lard for my trouble. You should eat like I do!” Patrick Harper proudly thumped his chest, thus setting off a seismic quiver of his belly.
“It isn’t the eating,” Sharpe said. “It’s the beer.”
“Stout can’t make you fat!” Patrick Harper was deeply offended. He had been Sharpe’s sergeant for most of the French wars and then, as now, Sharpe could think of no one he would rather have beside him in a fight. But in the years since the wars the Irishman had run a hostelry in Dublin, “and a man has to be seen drinking his own wares,” Harper would explain defensively, “because it gives folks a confidence in the quality of what a man sells, so it does. Besides, Isabella likes me to have a bit of flesh on my bones. It shows I’m healthy, she says.”
“That must make you the healthiest bugger in Dublin!” Sharpe said, but without malice. He had not seen his friend for over three years and had been shocked when Harper had arrived in France with a belly wobbling like a sack of live eels, a face as round as the full moon and legs as thick as howitzer barrels. Sharpe himself, five years after the battle at Waterloo, could still wear his old uniform. Indeed, this very morning, taking the uniform from his sea chest, he had been forced to stab a new hole in the belt of his trousers to save them from collapsing around his ankles. He wore another belt over his jacket, but this one merely to support his sword. It felt very strange to have the weapon hanging at his side again. He had spent most of his life as a soldier, from the age of sixteen until he was thirty-eight, but in the last few years he had become accustomed to a farmer’s life. From time to time he might carry a gun to scare the rooks out of Lucille’s orchard or to take a hare for the pot, but he had long abandoned the big sword to its decorative place over the fireplace in the chateau’s hall, where Sharpe had hoped it would stay forever.
Except now he was wearing the sword again, and the uniform, and he was again in the company of soldiers. And of sixteen mules, because four more animals had at last been found and led to the waiting men who, trying to keep their dignity, clumsily straddled the mangy beasts. The black slaves tried not to show their amusement as Patrick Harper clambered onto an animal that looked only half his own size, yet which somehow sustained his weight.
An English Major, a choleric-looking man mounted on a black mare, led the way out of the small town and onto the narrow mountain road which made its tortuous way up the towering mountainside toward the island’s interior. The slopes on either side of the road were green with tall flax plants. A lizard, iridescent in the sunlight, darted across Sharpe’s path and one of the slaves, who was following close behind the mounted men, darted after the animal.
“I thought slavery had been abolished?” commented Harper, who had evidently forgiven Sharpe for the remarks about his fatness.
“In Britain, yes,” Sharpe said, “but this isn’t British territory.”
“It isn’t? What the hell is it then?” Harper asked indignantly. And indeed, if the island did not belong to Britain then it seemed ridiculous for it to be so thickly inhabited with British troops. Off to their left was a barrack where three companies of redcoats were being drilled on the parade ground, to their right a group of scarlet-coated officers were exercising their 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.”
&nb
sp; “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 color was the baby?” Sharpe asked.
“Bit of both, 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. I 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 by a neatly trimmed hedge. Bright flowers grew in a border on 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 toward 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 rain clouds, 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,” Harper, who was finding every mundane event of this hot day exciting, said happily.
“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 toward a house that lay isolated at the center 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 that 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 cowshed, 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 unnumbered rats. The house was called Longwood, it lay in the very middle of the island of Saint Helena, and its most important prisoner had once been the Emperor of France.
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 Saint 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 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 muck 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 bigger 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 scourge of Europe. And even stranger that Bonaparte was willing to receive them so that, for a few heart-stopping moments on this humid day, two old soldiers of Britain’s army would stand in the same stuffy room as Bonaparte and would hear his voice and see his eyes and go away to tell their children and their grandchildren that they had met Europ
e’s bogeyman face to face. They would be able to boast that they had not just fought against him for year after bitter year, but that they had stood, nervous as schoolboys, on a carpet in his prison house on an island in the middle of the South Atlantic.
Sharpe, even as he waited, found it hard to believe that Bonaparte would receive them. He had ridden all the way from Jamestown in the belief that this expedition would be met with a scornful refusal, but had consoled himself that it would be sufficient just to see the lair of the man who had once terrified all of Europe, and whose name was still used by women to frighten their children into obedience. But the uniformed men who opened Longwood’s gates had welcomed them, and a servant now brought them a tray of weak lemonade. The servant apologized for such pale refreshment, explaining that His Majesty would have liked to serve his distinguished visitors wine, but that his British jailers were too mean to provide him with a sufficient supply, and so the lemonade must be enough. The Spanish officers turned dark, reproving glances on Sharpe, who shrugged. Above the hills the thunder growled. The English Major, disdaining to mingle with the Spanish visitors, slashed with his riding crop at a glossy-leaved hedge.
After a half hour the sixteen visitors were ushered into the house itself. It smelled dank and musty. The wallpaper of the hallway and of the billiard room beyond was stained with damp. The pictures on the wall were black and white etchings, soiled and fly-blown. The house reminded Sharpe of a poor country rectory that desperately pretended to a higher gentility than it could properly afford. The house was certainly a pathetically far cry from the great marble floors and mirrored halls of Paris where Sharpe and Harper, after the French surrender in 1815, had joined the soldiers of all Europe to explore the palaces of a defeated and humiliated empire. Then, in echoing halls of glory, Sharpe had climbed massive staircases where glittering throngs had once courted the ruler of France. Now Sharpe waited to see the same man in an anteroom where three buckets betrayed that the house roof leaked, and where the green baize surface of the billiard table was as scuffed and faded as the Rifleman’s jacket that Sharpe had worn in special honor of this occasion.