“Because its presence was merely a rumor to lure you into making an attack.”
“It damn well worked, too!” Cochrane barked with laughter. “But think of it, Sharpe! If the gold isn’t here, then it has to be in Valdivia! Bautista’s as greedy as any Presbyterian! He’s been thieving for years, and now he’s Captain-General there’s been nothing to stop his mischief. Imagine it, Sharpe! The man has chests of money! Pots of gold! Rooms full of silver! Not a piddling little pile of coins, but enough treasure to make a man drool!” Cochrane laughed in relish of such plunder, and Sharpe saw in the Scottish nobleman a wonderful relic of an older, more glorious and more sordid age. Cochrane was a fighting sailor of the Elizabethan breed—a Drake or a Raleigh or a Hawkins—and he would fight like the devil the Spanish thought he was for gold, glory or just plain excitement.
“No wonder they turfed you out of Parliament,” Sharpe said.
Cochrane bowed, acknowledging the compliment, but then qualified his acknowledgment. “I went into the Commons to achieve something, and it was a cruel shame I failed.”
“What did you want to achieve?”
“Liberty, of course!” The answer was swift, but followed immediately by a deprecating smile. “Except I’ve learned there’s no such thing.”
“There isn’t?”
“You can’t have freedom and lawyers, Sharpe, and I’ve discovered that lawyers are as ubiquitous to human society as rats are to a ship.” Cochrane paused as the frigate thumped her bluff bows into a wave trough. The ship seemed to take a long time to recover from the downward plunge, but gradually, painfully, the bows rose again. “You build a new ship,” Cochrane went on, “you smoke out its bilges, you put rat poison down, you know the ship’s clean when you launch it, but your first night out you hear the scratch of claws and you know the little bastards are there! And short of sinking the ship they’ll stay there forever.” He scowled savagely. “That’s why I came out here. I dreamed it would be possible to make a new country that was truly free, a country without lawyers, and look what happened! We captured the capital, we drove the Spaniards to Valdivia, and is Santiago filled with happy people celebrating their liberty? No. It’s filled with Goddamned lawyers making new laws.”
“Bad laws?” Sharpe asked.
“What the hell do they care? It doesn’t worry a rat if a law is good or bad. All they care is that they can make money enforcing it. That’s what lawyers do. They make laws that no one wants, then make money disagreeing with each other what the damned law means, and the more they disagree the more money they make, but still they go on making laws, and they make them ever more complicated so that they can get paid for arguing ever more intricately with one another! I grant you they’re clever buggers, but God, how I hate lawyers.” Cochrane shouted the despairing cry to the cold, ship-breaking wind.
“In all history,” he went on, “can you name one great deed or one noble achievement ever done by a lawyer? Can you think of any single thing that any lawyer has ever done to increase human happiness by so much as a smile? Can you think of even one lawyer who could stand with the heroes? Who could stand with the great and the daring and the saintly and the imaginative and the wondrous and the good? Of course not! Can a rat fly with eagles?” Cochrane had talked himself into a bitter mood. “It’s the lawyers, of course, who refuse to honor the contract the government made with me. It’s the lawyers who ordered me to capture Valdivia, knowing full well that it can’t be done. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.” He paused again, and looked down at the chart. “Except I doubt this broken ship will ever sail as far as Valdivia. Perhaps I’ll have to console myself by capturing Puerto Crucero instead.”
Sharpe felt his heart give a small leap of hope. “That’s where I want to go,” he said.
“Why in God’s name would you want to go to a shit-stinking hole like Puerto Crucero?” Cochrane asked.
“Because Blas Vivar is buried there,” Sharpe said.
Cochrane stared at Sharpe with a sudden and astonishing incredulity. “He’s what?”
“Blas Vivar is buried in the garrison church at Puerto Crucero.”
Cochrane seemed flabbergasted. He opened his mouth to speak, but for once could find nothing to say.
“I’ve seen his grave,” Sharpe explained. “That’s why I was in Chile, you see.”
“You crossed the world to see a grave?”
“I was a friend of Vivar. And we came here to take his body home to Spain.”
“Good God Almighty,” Cochrane said, then turned to look up at the foremast where a group of his men were retrieving the halyards that had been severed when the mainmast fell. “Oh, well,” he said in a suddenly uninterested voice, “I suppose they had to bury the poor fellow somewhere.”
It was Sharpe’s turn to be puzzled. Cochrane’s first reaction to Don Blas’s burial had been an intrigued astonishment, but now His Lordship was feigning an utter carelessness. And suddenly, standing on the same quarterdeck where Captain Ardiles had told him the story, Sharpe remembered how Blas Vivar had been carried north in the Espiritu Santo for a secret rendezvous with Lord Cochrane. It was a story that had seemed utterly fantastic when Sharpe had first heard it, but that now seemed to make more sense. “I was told that Don Blas once tried to meet you, but was prevented by bad weather. Is that true?” he asked Cochrane.
Cochrane paused for an instant, then shook his head. “It’s nonsense. Why would a man like Vivar want to meet me?”
Sharpe persisted, despite His Lordship’s glib denial. “Ardiles told me this ship carried Vivar north, but that a storm kept him from the rendezvous.”
Cochrane scorned the tale with a hoot of laughter. “You’ve been at the wine, Sharpe. Why the hell would Vivar want to meet me? He was the only decent soldier Madrid ever sent here, and he didn’t want to talk to the likes of me, he wanted to kill me! Good God, man, we were enemies! Would Wellington have hobnobbed with Napoleon? Does a hound bark with the fox?” Cochrane paused as the frigate wallowed in a trough between two huge waves, then held his breath as she labored up the slope to where the wind was blowing the crest wild. The pumps clattered below decks to spurt their feeble jets of splashing water overboard. “You said you were a friend of Blas Vivar?” Cochrane asked when he was sure that the frigate had endured.
“It was a long time ago.” Sharpe said. “We met during the Corunna campaign.”
“Did you now?” Cochrane responded blithely, as though he did not really care one way or another how Sharpe and Vivar had met, yet despite the assumed carelessness Sharpe detected something strangely alert in the tall, red-haired man’s demeanor. “I heard something very odd about Vivar,” Cochrane went on, though with a studied tone of indifference, “something about his having an elder brother who fought for the French?”
“He did, yes.” Sharpe wondered from where Cochrane had dragged up that ancient story, a story so old that Sharpe himself had half forgotten about it. “The brother was a passionate supporter of Napoleon, so naturally wanted a French victory in Spain. Don Blas killed him.”
“And the brother had the same name as Don Blas?” Cochrane asked with an interest which, however he tried to disguise it, struck Sharpe as increasingly acute.
“I can’t remember what the brother was called,” Sharpe said, then he realized exactly how such a confusion might have arisen. “Don Blas inherited his brother’s title, so in that sense they shared the same name, yes.”
“The brother was the Count of Mouromorto?” Cochrane asked eagerly.
“Yes.”
“And the brother had no children?” Cochrane continued the explanation, “So Blas Vivar inherited the title. Is that how it happened?”
Sharpe nodded. “Exactly.”
“Ah!” Cochrane said, as though something which had been puzzling him for a long time abruptly made good sense, but then he deliberately tried to pretend that the new sense did not matter by dismissing it with a flippant comment. “It’s a rum world, eh?”
> “Is it?” Sharpe asked, but Cochrane had abruptly lost interest in the coincidence of Blas Vivar and his brother sharing a title and had started to pace his quarterdeck. He touched his hat to one of the two Spanish wives. The other, who had abruptly been translated into a widow the previous day, was in her cabin where her maid was trying to staunch her mistress’s grief with unripe Chilean wine while her husband, a waxed thread stitched through his nose, was moldering at the Pacific’s bottom.
Cochrane suddenly stopped his pacing and turned on Sharpe. “Did you sail in this ship from Valdivia?”
“No, from Puerto Crucero.”
“So how did you get from Valdivia to Puerto Crucero? By road?”
Sharpe nodded. “Yes.”
“Aha!” Cochrane’s enthusiasm was back. “Is it a road on which troops can march?”
“They can march,” Sharpe said dubiously, “but they’ll never drag cannons all that way, and two companies of infantry could hold an army at bay for a week.”
“You think so, do you?” Cochrane’s enthusiasm faded as quickly as it had erupted. Cochrane had clearly been fantasizing about a land attack on Valdivia, but such an attack would be an impossibility without a corps of good infantry and several batteries of artillery, and even then Sharpe would not have wagered on its success. Siege warfare was the cruelest variety of battle, and the most deadly for the attacker.
“Surely,” Sharpe said, “O’Higgins can’t blame you if you fail to capture Valdivia?”
“Bernardo knows which way his breeches button,” Cochrane allowed, “but you have to understand that he’s been seduced by the vision of becoming a respectable, responsible, sensible, reliable, boring, dull and pious national leader. By which I mean that he listens to the bloody lawyers! They’ve told him he mustn’t risk his own reputation by attacking Valdivia, and persuaded him that it’s better for me to do the dirty work. Naturally they haven’t given me any extra soldiers, because I just might succeed if they had. I’m just supposed to work a miracle!” He glowered unhappily, then folded up the chart. “No doubt we’ll all be at the sea’s bottom before the week’s out,” he said gloomily. “Valdivia or Puerto Crucero? We probably won’t reach either.”
The frigate creaked and rolled, and the pumps spewed their feeble splashes of water over the side. The motion of the stricken Espiritu Santo seemed ever more sluggish and ever more threatening. Sharpe, glancing up at the skies which glowered with clouds run ragged by the endless wind, sensed the hopelessness of the struggle, but even when there was no hope, men had to keep on fighting.
And so they did, northward, toward the great citadels of Spain.
They pumped. By God, how they pumped. The leather pump hoses, snaking down into the Espiritu Santo’s bilges, thrashed and spurted with the efforts of the men on the big oak handles. A man’s spell at the handles was cut to just fifteen minutes, not because that was the extent of anyone’s endurance, but rather because that was as long as any man could pump at full exertion, and if the pumps slackened by so much as an ounce a minute Cochrane swore the ship would be lost. Cochrane took turns himself now. He stripped to his waist and attacked the pump as though it was a lawyer whose head he pounded in with the big handles. Up and down, grunting and snarling, and the water spilled and slurped feebly over the side and still the frigate seemed to settle lower in the water and wallow ever more sluggishly.
The carpenters sounded the bilges again and reported that the hull timbers had been rotten. The frigate had been the pride of the Spanish navy, yet some of her protective copper must have been lost at sea, and the teredoes and gribble worms had attacked her bottom starboard timbers. The wood had been turned into riddled pulp which, compressed by the explosion of the Mary Starbuck, had shattered into rotted fragments.
“No one noticed the worm damage?” Cochrane asked, but no one had, for it had been concealed in the darkest, deepest, foulest, rankest depths of the ship, and so the sea had flooded in and now the battles’ survivors must pump for their lives. The men who were not pumping formed a bucket chain, desperately scooping water out of the dark flooding bilges. The carronades were jettisoned, then the long chasing nine-pounders, and finally all the other guns on board the frigate were thrown overboard, save only the two stern chasers which, mounted in Ardiles’s quarters, were left untouched out of respect for the grieving Spanish Captain. Yet still the Espiritu Santo continued to take on water and to settle ever lower into the cold sea. Cochrane surreptitiously ordered the frigate’s longboats to be provisioned with water casks and barrels of salt pork. “There’s enough space to save half the ship’s people,” Cochrane admitted to Sharpe, “but only half. The rest of us will drown.” The rats, sensing the disaster that was going to overtake the ship, had long abandoned the bilges to run about the gundeck and cause screams from the women and children in the passengers’ quarters.
On their fifth day, when the ship was riding so low she seemed sure to founder, Cochrane ordered another fother made, but this he ordered big enough to straddle half the starboard hull. The tired, wet, hungry men heaved the great cloth pad into place. It took hours, but not long after the job was finished, the carpenter sounded the ship’s well and claimed the pumps were maybe holding their own, and a tired cheer went up at such grudging good news.
Some of the men were in favor of running ashore and risking the channel entrances in hope of finding a safe haven, but Cochrane stubbornly insisted on keeping his northward course. On the sixth day they sighted a great black cliff off to the east, but Cochrane wore ship and stood back out to sea. The squalls crashed about the frigate, streaming from the scuppers that had at last been scoured of their blood.
Cochrane’s ebullience was gone, frayed by weariness and hunger. Everyone was hungry. The Espiritu Santo’s food had been kept in the bilge and, when it flooded, the seawater destroyed what a legion of rats had been unable to consume. The bread and flour had been reduced to a soggy paste inside their barrels. There was plenty of strongly salted meat, but finding it in the dark, slopping water that still churned about the bilges was increasingly hard. The pigs, chickens and sheep that had been put aboard to provide fresh meat in the mid-Atlantic were slaughtered, their squeals and blood thick in the wet air.
More men died. The sailcloth shroud of one man tore when he was jettisoned overboard and the roundshot that should have dragged his body to the seabed fell free. The corpse, in its gray bag, floated behind the ship as a reminder of just how slowly the Espiritu Santo was sailing. She was limping north, traveling scarcely faster than a half-shrouded body. At dusk the corpse was still there, its face bobbing up and down from the green waves in mocking obeisance, but then, in a churning horror of foam and savagery, a great black and white beast, with fangs like saw blades, erupted out of the deep to carry the corpse away. Sharpe, who did not see the attack, was inclined to dismiss the story as another monstrous invention, but Cochrane confirmed it. “It was a killer whale,” he told Sharpe with a shudder, “nasty things.” Some of Cochrane’s men swore the whale’s coming was an evil omen, and as the day waned it seemed they must be right, for the ship had begun to settle again, this time ever deeper. The pumps and buckets were losing the battle.
Still they fought, none harder than Cochrane’s band of seasoned fighters. They were a strange piratical mixture of criollos, mestizos, Spaniards, Irish, Scots, Englishmen, Americans and even a handful of Frenchmen. They reminded Sharpe yet again of Napoleon’s observation about the world being filled with troubled men, accustomed to war, who only waited for a leader to bring them together to assault the citadels of respectable property. Cochrane’s seamen, good fighters all, were as savage as their master. “They fight for money,” Cochrane told Sharpe. “Some, a few, are here to free their country, but the rest would fight for whichever side paid the largest wages. Which is another reason I need to capture Valdivia. I need its treasury to pay my rascals.”
Yet, next dawn, under a gray, sad sky from which a thin, spiteful rain leached like poison, the fr
igate was lower in the water than it had been all week. The carpenters suggested that more planks had sprung and suggested heading for land. Cochrane gloomily agreed, but then, just as he had given up hope, a strange sail was seen to northward.
“God help us now,” an Irish sailor said to Harper.
“Why’s that?” Harper, seeing the sail, anticipated a rescue.
“Because if that’s a Spanish ship then we’re all dead men. We don’t have a broadside, so they’ll either stand off and pound us down into lumpy gravy, or else take us all prisoner, and there’ll be no mercy shown to us in Valdivia. They’ll have a priest bellowing in our ears while the firing squad sends us all to Abraham’s bosom. That’s if they don’t just hang us from their yardarms first to save the cost of the powder and balls. Jesus, but I should have stayed in Borris, so I should.”
Cochrane ran to the foremast and climbed to the crosstrees where he settled himself with a telescope. There was a long, agonizing wait, then His Lordship sent a cheer rippling down the deck. “It’s the O’Higgins, my boys! It’s the O’Higgins!” The relief was as palpable as if a flight of rescuing angels had descended from heaven.
Cochrane’s flagship had come south to search for its Admiral, and the men on the Espiritu Santo were saved. To fight again.
Captain Ardiles, with the Espiritu Santo’s crew and passengers, was ferried across to the Chilean flagship. The transfers were made in longboats that crashed hard against the Espiritu Santo’s side as the prisoners climbed down precarious scrambling nets. The women and children, terrified of the nets, were lowered into the longboats with ropes.
For every prisoner or passenger carried to the O’Higgins, a seaman came back. The O’Higgins also sent food, water and two portable pumps that were lowered into the Espiritu Santo’s bilges. Fresh strong arms took over the pumping and suddenly the tired and leaking ship was filled with a new life and hope.