“Fifty,” Sharpe said. Just seven years older than himself, he thought.
“I’m forty-five,” Cochrane said, “and I can’t imagine being cooped up on an island forever. My God, Bonaparte could fight a hundred battles yet!”
“That’s exactly why they’ve cooped him up,” Sharpe said.
“I can’t help feeling for the man, that’s all. And you say he’s unwell? But not badly ill?”
“He suffers from nothing that a day’s freedom and the smell of a battlefield wouldn’t cure.”
“Splendid! Splendid!” Cochrane said delightedly.
Sharpe frowned. “What I don’t understand is why Napoleon would be writing in code to your friend Charles.”
“You don’t?” Cochrane asked, as if such a lack of understanding was extraordinary. “It’s simple, really. Charles is a curious fellow; always writing to famous people to seek their versions of history. He doubtless asked the Emperor about Austerlitz or Waterloo or whatever. Nothing to it, Sharpe, nothing at all.”
“And he wrote in code?” Sharpe asked in disbelief.
“How the hell would I know? You must ask Charles or the Emperor, not me.” Cochrane dismissed the matter testily, then leaned over the gunwale to shout a rude greeting at the last longboats to bring men from the O’Higgins.
Those last reinforcements were a group of Chilean Marines under the command of Major Miller, a portly Englishman who, resplendent in a blue uniform coat, had a tarred moustache with upturned tips. “Proud to meet you, Sharpe, proud indeed.” Miller clicked his heels in formal greeting. “I was with the Buffs at Oporto, you will doubtless recall that great day? I was wounded there, recovered for Albuera, and what a bastard of a fight that was, got wounded again, was patched up for that bloody business in the Roncesvalles Pass, got shot again and was invalided out of the service with a game leg. So now I’m fighting for Cochrane. The money’s better if we ever get paid, and I haven’t been shot once. This old ship’s a bit buggered, isn’t she?”
The Espiritu Santo was indeed buggered, so much so that, despite the influx of fresh muscle and the extra pumps, Cochrane reluctantly accepted that the captured frigate could never sail as far as Valdivia without repairs. “It’ll have to be Puerto Crucero,” he told Major Miller, who bristled with confidence at the news and alleged that capturing the smaller harbor would entail less work and smaller risk than a night spent in a Santiago whorehouse. “My chaps will make short work of Puerto Crucero. Mark my words, Sharpe, these are villains!” Miller’s villains numbered exactly fifty, of whom only forty-five actually carried weapons. The remaining five marines were musicians: two drummers and three flautists. “I used to have a bagpiper,” Miller said wistfully. “A splendid fellow! He couldn’t play to save his life, but the noise he made was simply magnificent! Bloody dagoes shot him in a nasty little fight when we captured one of their frigates. One squelch of a dying chord, and that was the end of the poor bugger. Shame. They shot the bagpipes too. I tried to mend them, but they were beyond hope. We buried them, of course. Full military honors!”
Sharpe diffidently wondered whether abandoning ten percent of his muskets to music was wise, but Miller dismissed Sharpe’s implied objections. “Music’s the key to victory, Sharpe. Always has been and always will be. One thing I noted in the Frog wars was that our chaps always won when we had music. Stirs up the blood. Makes a chap think he’s invincible. No, my dear fellow, my forty-five chaps fight like tigers so long as the music’s chirruping, but if a flute stops to take a breath they wilt into milksops. If I could find the instruments I’d have half the bastards playing music and only half fighting. Nothing would stop me then! I’d march from here to Toronto and kill everything in between!” Miller looked extraordinarily pleased at such a prospect. “So, my dear fellow, you’ve been to Puerto Crucero, have you? Much in the way of defenses there?”
Sharpe had already described the defenses to Lord Cochrane, but now, and as soberly as he could, he described the formidable fortress that dominated Puerto Crucero’s harbor. From the landward side, Sharpe averred, it was impregnable. The seaward defenses were probably more attainable, but only if the cannon on the wide firesteps could be dismounted or otherwise destroyed. “How many guns?” Miller asked.
“I saw twelve. There must be others, but I didn’t see them.”
“Caliber?”
“Thirty-six pounders. They’ve also got the capacity to heat shot.”
Miller sniffed, as if to suggest that such defenses were negligible, but Sharpe noted that the belligerent Major seemed somewhat crestfallen, and so he should have been, for a dozen thirty-six-pounder cannons were a considerable obstacle to any attack. Not only were such guns heavier than anything on board Cochrane’s ships, but they were also mounted high on the fortress and could thus fire down onto the decks of the two frigates. Such huge roundshot, slamming into the decks and crashing on through the hull to thump through a boat’s bilges, could sink a ship in minutes. Indeed, the fragile Espiritu Santo would hardly need one such heavy shot to send her to the bottom.
Worse still, the thirty-six-pound iron shots could be heated to a red heat. Then, if such a ball lodged in a ship’s timber, a fire could start in seconds and Sharpe had already seen, in the Mary Starbuck, just how vulnerable wooden ships were to fire. From the moment the two ships entered the outer harbor until the moment they touched against the quay, they would be under a constant hammering fire. Captain-General Bautista was a man of limited military imagination, but his one certainty was that artillery won wars, and by trying to sail the Espiritu Santo and the O’Higgins into Puerto Crucero’s harbor, Cochrane was playing right into Bautista’s unimaginative trap. The red-hot thirty-six-pound cannonballs, with whatever other guns the defenders could bring to bear, would pound the two warships into charred splinters of bloody matchwood long before they reached the quay. Even if, by some miracle, one of the ships did limp through the hail of roundshot and managed to land an attacking force on the quay, there would still be plenty of Spanish infantry ready to defend the steep open stairway with musket fire and bayonets. Miller’s two drummers and three flautists would be helpless against such flailing and punishing fire.
Yet Cochrane insisted it could be done. “Trust me, Sharpe! Trust me!”
“I’ve told you, my Lord, you are doing precisely what the Spaniards want you to do!”
“Trust me! Trust me!”
The Spanish fortress guns were not the only obstacles to Cochrane’s blithe optimism. Even the tide pattern suggested the attack could not succeed. The waterlogged Espiritu Santo, which Cochrane insisted would be the assault ship, could only get alongside the fortress quay at the very top of the high tide. If the attack was just one hour late the water would have dropped far enough to prevent the frigate reaching the quayside. That narrow tidal opportunity dictated that the attack would have to be mounted at dawn, and the approach to the harbor made in a misty half-darkness, for the next morning’s suitable high tide fell just as the sun would be rising. Sharpe, not given easily to despair, suspected the whole assault was doomed, yet Cochrane still insisted it could be done. “It would be more sensible to use the O’Higgins to carry the assault troops, of course,” Cochrane allowed. “She’s got guns and is undamaged, but if anything went wrong, I’d lose her, so I might as well stay in the Espiritu Santo. Of course, Sharpe, if you’re scared of the proceedings, then I’ll quite understand if you’d rather watch from the deck of the O’Higgins?”
Sharpe was almost tempted to accept the offer. This was not his fight, and he had no particular taste for Cochrane’s elaborate suicide mission, but he was unwilling to admit to Cochrane or to Major Miller that he was frightened, and besides, he had business of his own in Puerto Crucero, and a grudge against the man who had expelled him, so he did have a reason to fight, even if the fight was hopeless. “I’ll stay with the ship,” he said.
“Even though you think it’s suicide?” Cochrane teased Sharpe.
“I wish I could think
otherwise,” Sharpe said.
“You forget,” Cochrane said, “what the Spaniards say of me. I’m their devil. I work black magic. And in tomorrow’s dawn, Sharpe, you’ll see just how devilish I can be.” His Lordship laughed, and his ship, pumps clattering, limped toward battle.
CHAPTER 7
Major Miller possessed a large watch that was made, he touchingly claimed, of East Indian gold, yet it was a gold stranger than any Sharpe had ever seen for the outside of the watchcase was rusted orange and its insides tarnished black. The watch itself was famously erratic, causing Miller forever to be shaking it or tapping it or even dropping it experimentally on what he described as the “softer” portions of the deck. Once it was ticking, however, he declared the watch to be the most accurate and reliable of all timepieces.
“One hour to high tide,” he now declared confidently, then held the watch to his ear before adding, somewhat ominously, “or maybe less.”
Sharpe hoped it was more, much more, for the stricken Espiritu Santo still seemed a long way from the rocky headland that protected Puerto Crucero’s harbor, and if the frigate was to be successfully sailed right alongside the fortress quay then the maneuver would need to be completed by the last moments of the rising tide. There would be sufficient water to make a landing possible for a whole hour after the high tide, but both Cochrane and his sailing master doubted that the attack could succeed after the tide had turned. The captured frigate’s hull was so fouled by damage and by fothering, and her upperworks so feebly rigged, that the ship would probably be pushed backward by the opposition of even the most feeble ebbing current.
“But we’ll make it!” Major Miller declared, imbued with an unconquerable optimism. “Tommy’s too clever to make silly mistakes with the tide!” “Tommy” was Lord Cochrane, and Miller’s hero. Miller shook the watch dubiously, then, realizing that his gesture might suggest to an onlooker that the precious timepiece was not working to its vaunted perfection, he stuffed it back into a pocket of his waistcoat. “You and Mister Harper will do me the honor of attacking in our company? ’Pon my soul, Sharpe, but I never thought I’d live to see the day when I’d swing a sword in your company.”
“The honor will all be mine,” Sharpe said gallantly, then turned as one of the two remaining cannon on board the Espiritu Santo banged its flat, hard sound across the water.
The success of the attack depended entirely on a ruse devised by Lord Cochrane, but a ruse so brilliantly conceived that Sharpe was convinced it must succeed in deceiving the enemy. The deception was a piece of theater that had been suggested to His Lordship by the Espiritu Santo’s woeful condition. The Spanish frigate was, even to the most untutored eye, a ship on the very edge of disaster, a ship battered and sinking, a ship partially dismasted, a ship canted and stricken, a wounded ship that had been outfought and near sunk, a ship at the very end of her life, and if, Lord Cochrane reasoned, such a beaten vessel was to be seen limping into Puerto Crucero’s harbor, and if, moreover, the broken vessel was seen to be under attack by the dreaded O’Higgins, then the fort’s defenders must assume that the Espiritu Santo was still fighting for Spain, and those defenders, instead of firing at the limping ship, would actually seek to protect her from the pursuing rebel flagship.
The O’Higgins, in order to make the illusion complete, had changed her own appearance. The main and mizzen topmasts had been unshipped and slung down to the deck to make it seem that she had suffered damage in what Puerto Crucero’s defenders must be convinced had been a long running fight at sea. Old sails had been left draped on the O’Higgins’s decks to suggest that not enough men remained alive to clear her battle damage. Then, to add verisimilitude to the deception, the O’Higgins had been firing at the Espiritu Santo since dawn, but the shots were deliberately sporadic, as though the rebel gunners were tired to the point of despair.
Thus, if the ruse succeeded, the watchers in Puerto Crucero would see a shattered Spanish warship fighting her way into the refuge of their harbor, desperately needing the fort’s assistance to drive away her battered and wounded pursuer. The ruse, Sharpe did not doubt, would succeed in bringing the Espiritu Santo safe to the defenders’ quay, but it would not guarantee that Cochrane’s handful of men would then succeed in climbing from that quay to capture the towering citadel. Cochrane’s devilment had, if the tide permitted, guaranteed success for the first part of the assault, but Sharpe did not know what magic would then take over to waft Miller’s marines up the steep stone stairs.
Not that Major Miller had any doubts. “I just hope,” he declared again and again to Sharpe, “that General Bautista is still in the fortress. It would give me great pleasure to capture him! My God, Sharpe, but I’ll teach him to insult an Englishman!” Miller, who seemed to forget sometimes that he officially fought for the Chilean Republic now, touched the stiff tarred tips of his moustache. “How many defenders are there in the fort, d’you think?” Miller suddenly asked.
It seemed a little late to be asking such a question. “Three hundred?” Sharpe guessed, but having been inside the citadel, he was fairly sure of his guess. He estimated that the Spanish had three understrength companies of infantry, say two hundred men, supported by sixty or seventy gunners and a group of cooks, clerks and quartermaster’s staff. “Three hundred,” Sharpe said again, but more firmly.
“And we have one hundred in the attacking party,” Miller said, not with despair, but rather with a kind of pride that the imminent victory would be gained by such an outnumbered band. Half the attackers were Miller’s marines, the other half Cochrane’s seamen, a vagabond band of fearsome men carrying butchers’ weapons and double-shotted muskets.
Ahead of the Espiritu Santo now the sun was rising above the far mountains so that the world’s edge seemed to be a jagged black silhouette lined with fire. Torn clouds of gold and scarlet flew above the sun’s ascent. In the nearer valleys, still hugged by darkness, a mist silvered the threatening shadows. A shimmer of smoke showed above the black headland to betray where Puerto Crucero’s kitchen fires were lit. Above that headland was the grim outline of the waiting fortress high on its crag. Closer yet was a handful of fishing boats which, terrified of stray shots from the pair of fighting warships, were trying to reach the safety of the harbor.
The cannons crashed again as the O’Higgins turned to fire a pretended broadside. Some of the Chilean flagship’s guns were properly loaded with roundshot, for Cochrane insisted that the sound of a blank gun was utterly different from the full-throated explosion of a barrel charged with lethal roundshot. Besides, the huge splashes of water exploding close to the Espiritu Santo as the roundshot ploughed into the sea only added to the verisimilitude of Cochrane’s deception. That deception was enhanced by the huge, shot-torn banner of Spain that he had ordered hoisted at the Espiritu Santo’s stern.
“They’ll have seen us by now!” Miller declared in a voice so loud and confident that Sharpe knew the jaunty marine was nervous. Men’s voices always seemed louder in the moments before battle, the moments when they had nothing to say but spoke anyway just to prove that fear was not making their hearts flabby and bellies sour.
“They’ll have heard us an hour ago,” Sharpe said. He imagined the defenders high on the fortress ramparts staring through long brass telescopes at the sea battle. He imagined, too, the iron roundshot being heated in the roaring furnaces beneath the bastions. The thirty-six pounders were probably already loaded, perhaps double-shotted, with cold missiles, but their second and third salvoes could leave traces of smoke as the red-hot shots seared above the cold morning sea.
“Hide yourselves, gentlemen! Hide yourselves!” Lord Cochrane, gripping the quarterdeck rail above Sharpe’s head, spoke softly, yet Sharpe could hear the excitement in the rebel Admiral’s voice. Cochrane, Sharpe thought, was febrile with anticipation. If Cochrane was nervous, it did not show, and somehow his confidence communicated itself to the attack force which now dutifully concealed itself deep in the shadows under the the break of t
he poop. They would stay under the concealing quarterdeck until the frigate actually touched the stone of the fortress quay. Then, screaming their battle cry, they would erupt out onto the astonished defenders. By which time, if Cochrane was right, the Espiritu Santo would be too close to the citadel for the gunners in their high batteries to be able to depress their cannons’ barrels. It was possible, Cochrane allowed, that there might be cannons on the quay, which could wreak a terrible slaughter from the moment the Spanish ensign was dropped and the Chilean run up, so the first of Cochrane’s men ashore were under orders to assault any such close and inconvenient guns. Major Miller, following hard on the heels of those first desperate men, would then lead his marines in their attack up the rock-built stairs that led initially to the big thirty-six pounders on their wide bastion, and afterward into the very heart of the citadel.
“Not long now, boys, not long now!” Cochrane called softly.
The wind felt cold. Sharpe shivered. He was thinking of that long open stairway that ran so steeply up the wind-fretted crag. It would only take one company of Spanish infantry to hold those stairs through all eternity. He looked sideways at Harper and saw a strained look on his friend’s broad face. Harper, catching Sharpe’s glance, grimaced as if to suggest that he realized how mad they were to be taking part in this foolery. One of Miller’s two drummers gave his instrument an experimental tap. A man coughed horribly, then spat with relief. Behind the waiting men, in the Espiritu Santo’s lavish stern cabins, the long-barreled nine pounders fired. Sharpe imagined the splash of the skipping shots as they whipped past the pursuing O’Higgins. Footsteps sounded loud on the quarterdeck above. Sharpe and Miller, peering out from under the poop, saw that the frigate had passed the outer headland and was now limping toward the fort that lay only a half mile away. The American brigantine, with her flamboyantly huge ensign, still lay at her twin anchors in the outer roadstead.