Sharpe’s Devil: Napoleon and South America, 1820–1821

CHAPTER ONE

Captain-General Blas Vivar’s wife, the Countess of Mouromorto, had been born and raised in England, but Sharpe had first met Miss Louisa Parker when, in 1809 and with thousands of other refugees, she had been fleeing from Napoleon’s invasion of northern Spain. The Parker family, oblivious to the chaos that was engulfing a continent, could grieve only for their lost Protestant Bibles with which they had forlornly hoped to convert Papist Spain. Somehow, in the weltering chaos, Miss Louisa Parker had met Don Blas Vivar who, later that same year, became the Count of Mouromorto. Miss Parker had meanwhile become a Papist, and thereafter Blas Vivar’s wife. Sharpe saw neither of them again till, in the late summer of 1819, Doña Louisa Vivar, Countess of Mouromorto, arrived unannounced and unexpected in the Normandy village where Sharpe farmed.

At first Sharpe did not recognize the tall, black-dressed woman whose carriage, attended by postilions and outriders, drew up under the château’s crumbling arch. He had supposed the lavish carriage to belong to some rich person who, travelling about Normandy, had become lost in the region’s green tangle of lanes and, it being late on a hot summer’s afternoon, had sought out the largest farmhouse of the village for directions and, doubtless, refreshments as well. Sharpe, his face sour and unwelcoming, had been prepared to turn the visitors away by directing them to the inn at Seleglise, but then a dignified woman had stepped down from the carriage and pushed a veil back from her face. ‘Mister Sharpe?’ she had said after a few awkward seconds, and suddenly Sharpe had recognized her, but even then he found it hard to reconcile this woman’s reserved and stately appearance with his memories of an adventurous English girl who had impulsively abandoned both her Protestant religion and the approval of her family to marry Don Blas Vivar, Count of Mouromorto, devout Catholic and soldier of Spain.

Who, Doña Louisa now informed Sharpe, had disappeared. Blas Vivar had vanished.

Sharpe, overwhelmed by the suddenness of the information and by Louisa’s arrival, gaped like a village idiot. Lucille insisted that Doña Louisa must stay for supper, which meant staying for the night, and Sharpe was peremptorily sent about making preparations. There was no spare stabling for Doña Louisa’s valuable carriage horses, so Sharpe ordered a boy to unstall the plough horses and take them to a meadow while Lucille organized beds for Doña Louisa and her maids, and rugs for Doña Louisa’s coachmen. Luggage had to be unstrapped from the varnished carriage and carried upstairs where the château’s two maids laid new sheets on the beds. Wine was brought up from the damp cellar, and a fine cheese, which Lucille would otherwise have sent to the market in Caen, was taken from its nettle-leaf wrapping and pronounced fit for the visitor’s supper. That supper would not be much different from any of the other peasant meals being eaten in the village for the château was pretentious only in its name. The building had once been a nobleman’s fortified manor, but was now little more than an overgrown and moated farmhouse.

Doña Louisa, her mind too full of her troubles to notice the fuss her arrival had prompted, explained to Sharpe the immediate cause of her unexpected visit. ‘I have been in England and I insisted the Horse Guards told me where I might find you. I am sorry not to have sent you warning of my coming here, but I need help.’ She spoke peremptorily, her voice that of a woman who was not used to deferring the gratification of her wishes.

She was nevertheless forced to wait while Sharpe’s two children were introduced to her. Patrick, aged five, offered her ladyship a sturdy bow while Dominique, aged three, was more interested in the ducklings which splashed at the moat’s edge. ‘Dominique looks like your wife,’ Louisa said.

Sharpe merely grunted a noncommittal reply, for he had no wish to explain that he and Lucille were not married, nor that he already had a bitch of a wife in London whom he could not afford to divorce and who would not decently crawl away and die. Nor did Lucille, coming to join Sharpe and their guest at the table in the courtyard, bother to correct Louisa’s misapprehension, for Lucille claimed to take more pleasure in being mistaken for Madame Richard Sharpe than in using her ancient title. However Sharpe, much to Lucille’s amusement, now insisted on introducing her to Louisa as the Vicomtesse de Seleglise; an honour which duly impressed the Countess of Mouromorto. Lucille, as ever, tried to disown the title by saying that such nonsenses had been abolished in the revolution and, besides, anyone connected to an ancient French family could drag out a title from somewhere. ‘Half the ploughmen in France are viscounts,’ the Viscountess Seleglise said with inaccurate self-deprecation, then politely asked whether the Countess of Mouromorto had any children.

‘Three,’ Louisa had replied, and had then gone on to explain how a further two children had died in infancy. Sharpe, supposing that the two women would get down to the interminable and tedious feminine business of making mutual compliments about their respective children, had let the conversation become a meaningless drone, but Louisa had suprisingly brushed the subject of children aside, only wanting to talk of her missing husband. ‘He’s somewhere in Chile,’ she said.

Sharpe had to think for a few seconds before he could place Chile, then he remembered a few scraps of information from the newspapers that he read in the inn beside Caen Abbey where he went for dinner on market days. ‘There’s a war of independence going on in Chile, isn’t there?’

‘A rebellion!’ Louisa had corrected him sharply. Indeed, she went on, her husband had been sent to suppress the rebellion, though when Don Blas had reached Chile he had discovered a demoralized Spanish army, a defeated squadron of naval ships, and a treasury bled white by corruption. Yet within six months he had been full of hope and had even been promising Louisa that she and the children would soon join him in Valdivia’s citadel which served as Chile’s official residence for its Captain-General.

‘I thought Santiago was the capital of Chile?’ Lucille, who had brought some sewing from the house, enquired gently.

‘It was,’ Louisa admitted reluctantly, then added indignantly, ‘till the rebels captured it. They now call it the capital of the Chilean Republic. As if there could be such a thing!’ And, Louisa claimed, if Don Blas had been given a chance, there would be no Chilean Republic, for her husband had begun to turn the tide of Royalist defeat. He had won a series of small victories over the rebels; such victories were nothing much to boast of, he had written to his wife, but they were the first in many years and they had been sufficient to persuade his soldiers that the rebels were not invincible fiends. Then, suddenly, there were no more letters from Don Blas, only an official despatch which said that His Excellency Don Blas, Count of Mouromorto and Captain-General of the Spanish Forces in His Majesty’s dominion of Chile, had disappeared.

Don Blas, Louisa said, had ridden to inspect the fortifications at the harbour town of Puerto Crucero, the southernmost garrison in Spanish Chile. He had ridden with a cavalry escort, and had been ambushed somewhere north of Puerto Crucero, in a region of steep hills and deep woods. At the time of the ambush Don Blas had been riding ahead of his escort, and he was last seen spurring forward to escape the closing jaws of the rebel trap. The escort, driven away by the fierceness of the ambushers, had not been able to search the valley where the trap had been sprung for another six hours, by which time Don Blas and his ambushers had long disappeared.

‘He must have been captured by the rebels,’ Sharpe had suggested mildly.

‘If you were a rebel commander,’ Louisa observed icily, ‘and succeeded in capturing or killing the Spanish Captain-General, would you keep silent about your victory?’

‘No,’ Sharpe admitted, for such a feat would encourage every rebel in South America and concomitantly depress all their Royalist opponents. He frowned. ‘Surely Don Blas had aides with him?’

‘Three.’

‘Yet he was riding alone? In rebel country?’ Sharpe’s soldiering instincts, rusty as they were, recoiled at such a thought.

Louisa, who had rehearsed these questions and answers for weeks, shrugged. ‘They tell me that no rebels had been seen in those parts for many months. That Don Blas often rode ahead. He was impatient, you surely remember that?’

‘But he wasn’t foolhardy.’ A wasp crawled on the table and Sharpe slapped down hard. ‘The rebels have made no proclamations about Don Blas?’

‘None!’ There was despair in Louisa’s voice. ‘And when I ask for information from our own army, I am told there is no information to be had. It seems that a Captain-General can disappear in Chile without trace! I do not even know if I am a widow.’ She looked at Lucille. ‘I wanted to travel to Chile, but it would have meant leaving my children. Besides, what can a woman do against the intransigence of soldiers?’

Lucille shot an amused glance at Sharpe, then looked down again at her sewing.

‘The army has told you nothing?’ Sharpe asked in astonishment.

‘They tell me Don Blas is dead. They cannot prove it, for they have never found his body, but they assure me he must be dead.’ Louisa said that the King had even paid for a Requiem Mass to be sung in Santiago de Compostela’s great cathedral, though Louisa had shocked the royal authorities by refusing to attend such a Mass, claiming it to be indecently premature. Don Blas, Louisa insisted, was alive. Her instinct told her so. ‘He might be a prisoner. I am told there are tribes of heathen savages who are reputed to keep white men as slaves in the forest. And Chile is a terrible country,’ she explained to Lucille. ‘There are pygmies and giants in the mountains, while the rebel ranks are filled by rogues from Europe. Who knows what might have happened?’

Lucille made a sympathetic noise, but the mention of white slaves, pygmies, giants and rogues had made Sharpe suspect that his visitor’s hopes were mere fantasies. In the four years since Waterloo Sharpe had met scores of women who were convinced that a missing son or a lost husband or a vanished lover still lived. Many such women had received notification that their missing man had been killed, but they clung stubbornly to their beliefs; supposing that their loved one was trapped in Russia, or kept prisoner in some remote Spanish town, or perhaps had been carried abroad to some far raw colony. Invariably, Sharpe knew, such men had either settled with different women or, more likely, were long dead and buried, but it was impossible to convince their womenfolk of either harsh truth. Nor did he try to persuade Louisa now, but instead asked her whether Don Blas had been popular in Chile.

‘He was too honest to be popular,’ Louisa said. ‘Of course he had his supporters, but he was constantly fighting corruption. Indeed, that was why he was travelling to Puerto Crucero. The governor of the southern province was an enemy of Don Blas. They hated each other, and I heard that Don Blas had proof of the governor’s corruption and was travelling to confront him!’

Which meant, Sharpe wearily thought, that his friend Don Blas had been fighting two enemies: the entrenched Spanish interest as well as the rebels who had captured Santiago and driven the Royalists into the southern half of the country. Don Blas had doubtless been a good 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 scrap of profit before the war was lost, and that they did not care about victory, but only money. But money will open doors for you, so I plan to give you a sum of coin to use as bribes, and it might be sensible to have a strong man to help you protect such a fortune.’