Читать книгу Sharpe’s Devil: Napoleon and South America, 1820–1821 - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 8

There were sixteen men and only twelve mules. None of the men was willing to abandon the journey, so tempers were edgy and not made any better by the day’s oppressive and steamy heat. The sixteen men were waiting by the shore, where the black basalt cliffs edged the small port and where there was no wind to relieve the humidity. Somewhere in the hills there sounded a grumble of thunder.

All but one of the sixteen men were uniformed. They stood sweltering and impatient in the shade of heavily branched evergreen trees while the twelve mules, attended by black slaves, drooped beside a briar hedge that was brilliant with small white roses. The sun, climbing towards noon, shimmered in an atmosphere that smelt of roses, pomegranates, seaweed, myrtle and sewage.

Two warships, their square-cut sails turned dirty grey by the long usage of wind and rain, patrolled far offshore. Closer, in the anchorage itself, a large Spanish frigate lay to twin anchors. It was not a good anchorage, for the ocean’s swells were scarcely vitiated by the embracing shore, nor was the water at the quayside deep enough to allow a great ship to moor alongside, and so the sixteen men had come ashore in the Spanish frigate’s longboats. Now they waited in the oppressive windless heat. In one of the houses just beyond the rose-bright hedge a baby cried.

‘More mules are being fetched. If you gentlemen will do us the honour of patience? And accept our sincerest apologies.’ The speaker, a very young red-coated British Lieutenant whose face was running with sweat, displayed too much contrition. ‘We didn’t expect sixteen gentlemen, you understand, only fourteen, though of course there would still have been insufficient transport, but I have spoken with the adjutant, and he assures me that extra mules are being saddled, and we do apologize for the confusion.’ The Lieutenant had spoken in a rush of words, but now abruptly stopped as it dawned on him that most of the sixteen travellers would not have understood a word he had spoken. The Lieutenant blushed, then turned to a tall, scarred and dark-haired man who wore a faded uniform jacket of the British 95th Rifles. ‘Can you translate for me, sir?’

‘More mules are coming,’ the Rifleman said in laconic, but fluent Spanish. It had been nearly six years since the Rifleman had last used the language regularly, yet thirty-eight days on a Spanish ship had made him fluent again. He turned again to the Lieutenant. ‘Why can’t we walk to the house?’

‘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. ‘Sir?’ The Lieutenant, emboldened by the grunting noise, took a step closer to the Rifleman.

‘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 scarred 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 for ever fatherless that the Rifleman doubted there would ever be sufficient pity for all the war’s doings. ‘I didn’t know him, Lieutenant, I’m sorry.’

‘It was truly an honour to meet you anyway, sir,’ Lieutenant Hardacre said, then stepped gingerly backwards 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 called Richard Sharpe. His uniform, that 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 widowmaking field of all, he had been a Lieutenant Colonel. Now, despite his uniform and the sword which 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 which 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 travellers not wearing a uniform. Instead he 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 himself 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 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 practised, 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 now, as then, 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 of 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 round 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 château’s hall, where Sharpe had hoped it would stay forever.

Except now he was wearing the sword again, and the uniform, and he was once more in the company of soldiers. And also 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 road which made its tortuous way up the towering mountainside towards 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 barracks 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.’

‘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 colour was the baby?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Bit of both, as 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. 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 with a neatly-trimmed hedge. Bright flowers grew in a border 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 towards 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 rainclouds, 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,’ said Harper happily. He was finding every mundane event of this hot day exciting.

‘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 towards a house that lay isolated at the centre 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 which 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 cow shed, 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 countless numbers of rats. The house was called Longwood, it lay in the very middle of the island of St Helena, and its most important prisoner had once been the Emperor of France.

Called 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 St 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 up 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 dirt 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 worst of the 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 Europe’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 who 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 with wine, but that his British jailers were too mean to grant him a decent supply, and so the lemonade would have to be sufficient. 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 smelt 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, stained and fly-blown. The house reminded Sharpe of a poor country rectory that desperately pretended to a higher gentility than it could properly afford. It 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 the fact that the house roof leaked, and where the green baize surface of a billiard table was as scuffed and faded as the Rifleman’s jacket that Sharpe had worn in special honour of this occasion.

They waited another twenty minutes. A clock ticked loudly, then wheezed as it gathered its strength to strike the half hour. Just as the clock’s bell chimed, two officers wearing French uniforms with badly tarnished gold braid came into the billiard room. One gave swift instructions in French which the other man translated into bad Spanish.

The visitors were welcome to meet the Emperor, but must remember to present themselves bareheaded to his Imperial Majesty.

The visitors must stand. The Emperor would sit, but no one else was allowed to sit in his Imperial Majesty’s presence.

No man must speak unless invited to do so by his Imperial Majesty.

And, the visitors were told once again, if a man was invited to speak with his Imperial Majesty then he must address the Emperor as votre Majesté. Failure to do so would lead to an immediate termination of the interview. Ardiles, the dark-faced Captain of the frigate, scowled at the reiterated command, but again made no protest at it.

Sharpe was fascinated by the tall, whip-thin Ardiles who took extraordinary precautions to avoid meeting his own passengers. Ardiles ate his meals alone, and was said to appear on deck only when the weather was appalling or during the darkest night watches when his passengers could be relied on to be either sick or asleep. Sharpe had met the Captain briefly when he had embarked on the Espiritu Santo in Cadiz, but to some of the Spanish army officers this visit to Longwood gave them their first glimpse of their frigate’s mysterious Captain.

The French officer who had translated the etiquette instructions into clumsy Spanish now looked superciliously at Sharpe and Harper. ‘Did you understand anything at all?’ he asked in a bad English accent.

‘We understood perfectly, thank you, and are happy to accept your instructions,’ Sharpe answered in colloquial French. The officer seemed startled, then gave the smallest nod of acknowledgement.

‘His Majesty will be ready soon,’ the first French officer said, and then the whole group waited in an awkward silence. The Spanish army officers, gorgeous in their uniforms, had taken off their bicorne hats in readiness for the imperial audience. Their boots creaked as they shifted their weight from foot to foot. A sword scabbard rapped against the bulbous leg of the billiard table. The sour Captain Ardiles, looking as malignant as a bishop caught unawares in a whorehouse, stared sourly out of the window at the black mountains, about which cannoned an ominous rumble of thunder. Harper rolled a billiard ball slowly down the table’s length. It bounced off the far cushion and slowed to a stop.

Then the double doors at the far end of the room were snatched open and a servant dressed in green and gold livery stood in the entrance. ‘The Emperor will receive you now,’ he said, then stood aside.

And Sharpe, his heart beating as fearfully as if he again walked into battle, went to meet an old enemy.

It was all so utterly different from everything Sharpe had anticipated. Later, trying to reconcile reality with expectation, Sharpe wondered just what he had thought to find inside the yellow-walled house. An ogre? A small toad-like man with smoke coming from his nostrils? A horned devil with bloody claws? But instead, standing on a hearth rug in front of an empty fireplace, Sharpe saw a short, stout man wearing a plain green riding coat with a velvet collar, black knee breeches and coarse white stockings. In the velvet lapel of the coat was a miniature medallion of the Légion d’Honneur.

All those details Sharpe noticed later, as the interview progressed, but his very first impression as he went through the door and shuffled awkwardly into line, was the shock of familiarity. This was the most famous face in the world, a face repeated on a million pictures, a million etchings, a million plates, a million coins. This was a face so familiar to Sharpe that it was truly astonishing to see it in reality. He involuntarily checked and gasped, causing Harper to push him onwards. The Emperor, recognizing Sharpe’s reaction, seemed to smile.

Sharpe’s second impression was of the Emperor’s eyes. They seemed full of amusement as though Bonaparte, alone of all the men in the room, understood that a jest was being played. The eyes belied the rest of Bonaparte’s face which was plump and oddly petulant. That petulance surprised Sharpe, as did the Emperor’s hair which alone was unlike his portraits. The hair was as fine and wispy as a child’s hair. There was something feminine and unsettling about that silky hair and Sharpe perversely wished that Bonaparte would cover it with the cocked hat he carried under his arm.

‘You are welcome, gentlemen,’ the Emperor greeted the Spanish officers, a pleasantry which was translated into Spanish by a bored-looking aide. The greeting prompted, from all but the disdainful Ardiles, a chorus of polite responses.

When all sixteen visitors had found somewhere to stand the Emperor sat in a delicate gilt chair. The room was evidently a drawing room, and was full of pretty furniture, but it was also as damp as the hallway and billiard room outside. The skirting boards, beneath the waterstained wallpaper, were disfigured by tin plates that had been nailed over rat holes and, in the silence that followed the Emperor’s greeting, Sharpe could hear the dry scratching of rats’ feet in the cavities behind the patched wall. The house was evidently infested as badly as any ship.

‘Tell me your business,’ the Emperor invited the senior Spanish officer present. That worthy, an artillery Colonel named Ruiz, explained in hushed tones how their vessel, the Spanish frigate Espiritu Santo, was on passage from Cadiz, carrying passengers to the Spanish garrison at the Chilean port of Valdivia. Ruiz then presented the Espiritu Santo’s Captain, Ardiles, who, with scarcely concealed hostility, offered the Emperor a stiffly reluctant bow. The Emperor’s aides, sensitive to the smallest sign of disrespect, shifted uneasily, but Bonaparte seemed not to notice or, if he did, not to care. Ardiles, asked by the Emperor how long he had been a seaman, answered as curtly as possible. Clearly the lure of seeing the exiled tyrant had overcome Ardiles’s distaste for the company of his passengers, but he was at pains not to show any sense of being honoured by the reception.

Bonaparte, never much interested in sailors, turned his attention back to Colonel Ruiz who formally presented the officers of his regiment of artillery who, in turn, bowed elegantly to the small man in the gilded chair. Bonaparte had a kindly word for each man, then turned his attention back to Ruiz. He wanted to know what impulse had brought Ruiz to St Helena. The Colonel explained that the Espiritu Santo, thanks to the superior skills of the Spanish Navy, had made excellent time on its southward journey and, being within a few days’ sailing of St Helena, the officers on board the Espiritu Santo had thought it only proper to pay their respects to his Majesty the Emperor.

In other words they could not resist making a detour to stare at the defanged beast chained to its rock, but Bonaparte took Ruiz’s flowery compliment at its face value. ‘Then I trust you will also pay your respects to Sir Hudson Lowe,’ he said drily. ‘Sir Hudson is my jailer. He, with five thousand men, seven ships, eight batteries of artillery, and the ocean which you gentlemen have crossed to do me this great honour.’

While the Spanish-speaking Frenchman translated the Emperor’s mixture of scorn for his jailers and insincere flattery for his visitors, Bonaparte’s eyes turned towards Sharpe and Harper who, alone in the room, had not been introduced. For a second Rifleman and Emperor stared into each other’s eyes, then Bonaparte looked back to Colonel Ruiz. ‘So you are reinforcements for the Spanish army in Chile?’

‘Indeed, your Majesty,’ the Colonel replied.

‘So your ship is also carrying your guns? And your gunners?’ Bonaparte asked.

‘Just the regiment’s officers,’ Ruiz replied. ‘Captain Ardiles’s vessel has been especially adapted to carry passengers, but alas she cannot accommodate a whole regiment. Especially of artillery.’

‘So the rest of your men are where?’ the Emperor asked.

‘They’re following on two transport ships,’ Ruiz said airily, ‘with their guns.’

‘Ah!’ The Emperor’s response was apparently a polite acknowledgement of the trivial answer, yet the silence which followed, and the fixity of his smile, were a sudden reproof to these Spaniards who had chosen the comfort of Ardiles’s fast frigate while leaving their men to the stinking hulks that would take at least a month longer than the Espiritu Santo to make the long, savage voyage around South America to where Spanish troops tried to reconquer Chile from the rebel government. ‘Let us hope the rest of your regiment doesn’t decide to pay me their respects.’ Bonaparte broke the slightly uncomfortable air that his unspoken criticism had caused. ‘Or else Sir Hudson will fear they have come to rescue me!’

Ruiz laughed, the other army officers smiled and Ardiles, perhaps hearing in the Emperor’s voice an edge of longing that the other Spaniards had missed, scowled.

‘So tell me,’ Bonaparte still spoke to Ruiz, ‘what are your expectations in Chile?’

Colonel Ruiz bristled with confidence as he expressed his eager conviction that the rebel Chilean forces and government would soon collapse, as would all the other insurgents in the Spanish colonies of South America, and that the rightful government of His Majesty King Ferdinand VII would thus be restored throughout Spain’s American dominions. The coming of his own regiment, the Colonel asserted, could only hasten that royal victory.

‘Indeed,’ the Emperor agreed politely, then moved the conversation to the subject of Europe, and specifically to the troubles of Spain. Bonaparte politely affected to believe the Colonel’s assurance that the liberals would not dare to revolt openly against the King, and his denial that the army, sickened by the waste of blood in South America, was close to mutiny. Indeed, Colonel Ruiz expressed himself full of hope for Spain’s future, relishing a monarchy growing ever more powerful, and fed ever more riches by its colonial possessions. The other artillery officers, keen to please their bombastic Colonel, nodded sycophantic agreement, though Captain Ardiles looked disgusted at Ruiz’s bland optimism and showed his scepticism by pointedly staring out of the window as he fanned himself with a mildewed cocked hat.

Sharpe, like all the other visitors, was sweating foully. The room was steamy and close, and none of its windows was open. The rain had at last begun to fall and a zinc bucket, placed close to the Emperor’s chair, suddenly rang as a drip fell from the leaking ceiling. The Emperor frowned at the noise, then returned his polite attention to Colonel Ruiz who had reverted to his favourite subject of how the rebels in Chile, Peru and Venezuela had overextended themselves and must inevitably collapse.

Sharpe, who had spent too many shipboard hours listening to the Colonel’s boasting, studied the Emperor instead of paying any attention to Ruiz’s long-winded bragging. By now Sharpe had recovered his presence of mind, no longer feeling dizzy just to be in the same small room as Bonaparte, and so he made himself examine the seated figure as though he could commit the man to memory for ever. Bonaparte was far fatter than Sharpe had expected. He was not as fat as Harper, who was fat like a bull or a prize boar is fat, but instead the Emperor was unhealthily bloated like a dead beast that was swollen with noxious vapours. His monstrous pot belly, waistcoated in white, rested on his spread thighs. His face was sallow and his fine hair was lank. Sweat pricked at his forehead. His nose was thin and straight, his chin dimpled, his mouth firm and his eyes extraordinary. Sharpe knew Bonaparte was fifty years old, yet the Emperor’s face looked much younger than fifty. His body, though, was that of an old sick man. It had to be the climate, Sharpe supposed, for surely no white man could keep healthy in such a steamy and oppressive heat. The rain was falling harder now, pattering on the yellow stucco wall and on the window, and dripping annoyingly into the zinc bucket. It would be a wet ride back to the harbour where the longboats waited to row the sixteen men back to Ardiles’s ship.

Sharpe gazed attentively about the room, knowing that when he was back home Lucille would demand to hear a thousand details. He noted how low the ceiling was, and how the plaster of the ceiling was yellowed and sagging, as if, at any moment, the roof might fall in. He heard the scrabble of rats again, and marked other signs of decay like the mildew on the green velvet curtains, the tarnish in the silvering of a looking glass, and the flaking of the gilt on its frame. Under the mirror a pack of worn playing cards lay carelessly strewn on a small round table beside a silver-framed portrait of a child dressed in an elaborate uniform. A torn cloak, lined with a check pattern, hung from a hook on the door. ‘And you, monsieur, you are no Spaniard, what is your business here?’

The Emperor’s question, in French, had been addressed to Sharpe who, taken aback and not concentrating, said nothing. The interpreter, assuming that Sharpe had misunderstood the Emperor’s accent, began to translate, but then Sharpe, suddenly dry-mouthed and horribly nervous, found his tongue. ‘I am a passenger on the Espiritu Santo, your Majesty. Travelling to Chile with my friend from Ireland, Mister Patrick Harper.’

The Emperor smiled. ‘Your very substantial friend?’

‘When he was my Regimental Sergeant Major he was somewhat less substantial, but just as impressive.’ Sharpe could feel his right leg twitching with fear. Why, for God’s sake? Bonaparte was just another man, and a defeated one at that. Moreover, the Emperor was a man, Sharpe tried to convince himself, of no account any more. The prefect of a small French département had more power than Bonaparte now, yet still Sharpe felt dreadfully nervous.

‘You are passengers?’ the Emperor asked in wonderment. ‘Going to Chile?’

‘We are travelling to Chile in the interests of an old friend. We go to search for her husband, who is missing in battle. It is a debt of honour, your Majesty.’

‘And you, monsieur?’ The question, in French, was addressed to Harper. ‘You travel for the same reason?’

Sharpe translated both the question and Harper’s answer. ‘He says that he found life after the war tedious; your Majesty, and thus welcomed this chance to accompany me.’

‘Ah! How well I understand tedium. Nothing to do but put on weight, eh?’ The Emperor lightly patted his belly, then looked back to Sharpe. ‘You speak French well, for an Englishman.’

‘I have the honour to live in France, your Majesty.’

‘You do?’ The Emperor sounded hurt and, for the first time since the visitors had come into the room, an expression of genuine feeling crossed Bonaparte’s face. Then he managed to cover his envy by a friendly smile. ‘You are accorded a privilege denied to me. Where in France?’

‘In Normandy, your Majesty.’

‘Why?’

Sharpe hesitated, then shrugged. ‘Une femme.’

The Emperor laughed so naturally that it seemed as though a great tension had snapped in the room. Even Bonaparte’s supercilious aides smiled. ‘A good reason,’ the Emperor said, ‘an excellent reason! Indeed, the only reason, for a man usually has no control over women. Your name, monsieur.’

‘Sharpe, your Majesty.’ Sharpe paused, then decided to try his luck at a more intimate appeal to Bonaparte. ‘I was a friend of General Calvet, of your Majesty’s army. I did General Calvet some small service in Naples before …’ Sharpe could not bring himself to say Waterloo, or even to refer to the Emperor’s doomed escape from Elba which, by route of fifty thousand deaths, had led to this damp, rat-infested room in the middle of oblivion. ‘I did the service,’ Sharpe continued awkwardly, ‘in the summer of ’14.’

Bonaparte rested his chin on his right hand and stared for a long time at the Rifleman. The Spaniards, resenting that Sharpe had taken over their audience with the exiled tyrant, scowled. No one spoke. A rat scampered behind the wainscot, rain splashed in the bucket, and the trade wind gusted sudden and loud in the chimney.

‘You will stay here, monsieur,’ Bonaparte said abruptly to Sharpe, ‘and we will talk.’

The Emperor, conscious of the Spaniards’ disgruntlement, turned back to Ruiz and complimented his officers on their martial appearance, then commiserated with their Chilean enemies for the defeat they would suffer when Ruiz’s guns finally arrived. The Spaniards, all except for the scowling Ardiles, bristled with gratified pride. Bonaparte thanked them all for visiting him, wished them well on their further voyage, then dismissed them. When they were gone, and when only Sharpe, Harper, an aide-de-camp and the liveried servant remained in the room, the Emperor pointed Sharpe towards a chair. ‘Sit. We shall talk.’

Sharpe sat. Beyond the windows the rain smashed malevolently across the uplands and drowned the newly-dug ponds in the garden. The Spanish officers waited in the billiard room, a servant brought wine to the audience room, and Bonaparte talked with a Rifleman.

The Emperor had nothing but scorn for Colonel Ruiz and his hopes of victory in Chile. ‘They’ve already lost that war, just as they’ve lost every other colony in South America, and the sooner they pull their troops out, the better. That man –’ this was accompanied by a dismissive wave of the hand towards the door through which Colonel Ruiz had disappeared ‘– is like a man whose house is on fire, but who is saving his piss to extinguish his pipe tobacco. From what I hear there’ll be a revolution in Spain within the year.’ Bonaparte made another scornful gesture at the billiard room door, then turned his dark eyes on Sharpe. ‘But who cares about Spain. Talk to me of France.’

Sharpe, as best he could, described the nervous weariness of France; how the royalists hated the liberals, who in turn distrusted the republicans, who detested the ultraroyalists, who feared the remaining Bonapartistes, who despised the clergy, who preached against the Orleanists. In short, it was a cocotte, a stew pot.

The Emperor liked Sharpe’s diagnosis. ‘Or perhaps it is a powder keg? Waiting for a spark?’

‘The powder’s damp,’ Sharpe said bluntly.

Napoleon shrugged. ‘The spark is feeble, too. I feel old. I am not old! But I feel old. You like the wine?’

‘Indeed, sir.’ Sharpe had forgotten to call Bonaparte votre Majesté, but His Imperial Majesty did not seem to mind.

‘It is South African,’ the Emperor said in wonderment. ‘I would prefer French wine, but of course the bastards in London won’t allow me any, and if my friends do send wine from France then that hog’s turd down the hill confiscates it. But this African wine is surprisingly drinkable, is it not? It is called Vin de Constance. I suppose they give it a French name to suggest that it has superb quality.’ He turned the stemmed glass in his hand, then offered Sharpe a wry smile. ‘But I sometimes dream of drinking a glass of my Chambertin again. You know I made my armies salute those grapes when they marched past the vineyards?’

‘So I have heard, sir.’

Bonaparte quizzed Sharpe. Where was he born? What had been his regiments? His service? His promotions? The Emperor professed surprise that Sharpe had been promoted from the ranks, and seemed reluctant to credit the Rifleman’s claim that one in every twenty British officers had been similarly promoted. ‘But in my army,’ Bonaparte said passionately, ‘you would have become a General! You know that?’

But your army lost, Sharpe thought, but was too polite to say as much, so instead he just smiled and thanked the Emperor for the implied compliment.

‘Not that you’d have been a Rifleman in my army,’ the Emperor provoked Sharpe. ‘I never had time for rifles. Too delicate a weapon, too fussy, too temperamental. Just like a woman!’

‘But soldiers like women, sir, don’t they?’

The Emperor laughed. The aide-de-camp, disapproving that Sharpe so often forgot to use the royal honorific, scowled, but the Emperor seemed relaxed. He teased Harper about his belly, ordered another bottle of the South African wine, then asked Sharpe just who it was that he sought in South America.

‘His name is Blas Vivar, sir. He is a Spanish officer, and a good one, but he has disappeared. I fought alongside him once, many years ago, and we became friends. His wife asked me to search for him.’ Sharpe paused, then shrugged. ‘She is paying me to search for him. She has received no help from her own government, and no news from the Spanish army.’

‘It was always a bad army. Too many officers, but good troops, if you could make them fight.’ The Emperor stood and walked stiffly to the window from where he stared glumly at the pelting rain. Sharpe stood as well, out of politeness, but Bonaparte waved him down. ‘So you know Calvet?’ The Emperor turned at last from the rain.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Do you know his Christian name?’

Sharpe supposed the question was a test to determine if he was telling the truth. He nodded. ‘Jean.’

‘Jean!’ The Emperor laughed. ‘He tells people his name is Jean, but in truth he was christened Jean-Baptiste! Ha! The belligerent Calvet is named for the original head-wetter!’ Bonaparte gave a brief chuckle at the thought as he returned to his chair. ‘He’s living in Louisiana now.’

‘Louisiana?’ Sharpe could not imagine Calvet in America.

‘Many of my soldiers live there.’ Bonaparte sounded wistful. ‘They cannot stomach that fat man who calls himself the King of France, so they live in the New World instead.’ The Emperor shivered suddenly, though the room was far from cold, then turned his eyes back to Sharpe. ‘Think of all the soldiers scattered throughout the world! Like embers kicked from a camp fire. The lawyers and their panders who now rule Europe would like those embers to die down, but such fire is not so easily doused. The embers are men like our friend Calvet, and perhaps like you and your stout Irishman here. They are adventurers and combatants! They do not want peace; they crave excitement, and what the filthy lawyers fear, monsieur, is that one day a man might sweep those embers into a pile, for then their heat would feed on each other and they would burn so fiercely that they would scorch the whole world!’ Bonaparte’s voice had become suddenly fierce, but now it dropped again into weariness. ‘I do so hate lawyers. I do not think there was a single achievement of mine that a lawyer did not try to desiccate. Lawyers are not men. I know men, and I tell you I never met a lawyer who had real courage, a soldier’s courage, a man’s courage.’ The Emperor closed his eyes momentarily and, when he opened them, his expression was kindly again and his voice relaxed. ‘So you’re going to Chile?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Chile.’ He spoke the name tentatively, as though seeking a memory on the edge of consciousness. ‘I well recall the service you did me in Naples,’ the Emperor went on after a pause. ‘Calvet told me of it. Will you do me another service now?’

‘Of course, sir.’ Sharpe would later be amazed that he had so readily agreed without even knowing what the favour was, but by that moment he was under the spell of a Corsican magician who had once bewitched whole continents; a magician, moreover, who loved soldiers better than he loved anything else in all the world, and the Emperor had known what Sharpe was the instant the British Rifleman had walked into the room. Sharpe was a soldier, one of the Emperor’s beloved mongrels, a man able to march through shit and sleet and cold and hunger only to fight like a devil at the end of the day, then fight again the next day and the next, and the Emperor could twist such soldiers about his little finger with the ease of a master.

‘A man wrote to me. A settler in Chile. He is one of your countrymen, and was an officer in your army, but in the years since the wars he has come to hold some small admiration for myself.’ The Emperor smiled as though apologizing for such immodesty. ‘He asked that I would send him a keepsake, and I am minded to agree to his request. Would you deliver the gift for me?’

‘Of course, sir.’ Sharpe felt a small relief that the favour was of such a trifling nature, though another part of him was so much under the thrall of the Emperor’s genius that he might have agreed to hack a bloody path down St Helena’s hillside to the sea and freedom. Harper, sitting beside Sharpe, had the same look of adoration on his face.

‘I understand that this man, I can’t recall his name, is presently living in the rebel part of the country,’ the Emperor elaborated on the favour he was asking, ‘but he tells me that packages given to the American consul in Valdivia always reach him. I gather they were friends. No one else in Valdivia, just the American consul. You do not mind helping me?’

‘Of course not, sir.’

The Emperor smiled his thanks. ‘The gift will take some time to choose, and to prepare, but if you can wait two hours, monsieur?’ Sharpe said he could wait and there was a flurry of orders as an aide was despatched to find the right gift. Then Napoleon turned to Sharpe again. ‘No doubt, monsieur, you were at Waterloo?’

‘Yes, sir. I was.’

‘So tell me,’ the Emperor began, and thus they talked, while the Spaniards waited and the rain fell and the sun sank and the redcoat guards tightened their night-time ring about the walls of Longwood, while inside those walls, as old soldiers do, old soldiers talked.

It was almost full dark as Sharpe and Harper, soaked to the skin, reached the quayside in Jamestown where the Espiritu Santo’s longboats waited to take the passengers back to Ardiles’s ship.

At the quayside a British officer waited in the rain. ‘Mister Sharpe?’ He stepped up to Sharpe as soon as the Rifleman dismounted from his mule.

‘Lieutenant Colonel Sharpe.’ Sharpe had been irritated by the man’s tone.

‘Of course, sir. And a moment of your time, if you would be so very kind?’ The man, a tall and thin Major, smiled and guided Sharpe a few paces away from the curious Spanish officers. ‘Is it true, sir, that General Bonaparte favoured you with a gift?’

‘He favoured each of us with a gift.’ Each of the Spaniards, except for Ardiles who had received nothing, had been given a silver teaspoon engraved with Napoleon’s cipher, while Harper had received a silver thimble inscribed with Napoleon’s symbol of a honey bee.

Sharpe, having struck an evident note of affection in the Emperor, had been privileged with a silver locket which contained a curl of the Emperor’s hair.

‘But you, sir, forgive me, have a particular gift?’ the Major insisted.

‘Do I?’ Sharpe challenged the Major, and wondered which of the Emperor’s servants was the spy.

‘Sir Hudson Lowe, sir, would appreciate it mightily if you were to allow him to see the gift.’ Behind the Major stood an impassive file of redcoats.

Sharpe took the locket from out of his pocket and pressed the button that snapped open the silver lid. He showed the Major the lock of hair. ‘Tell Sir Hudson Lowe, with my compliments, that his dog, his wife or his barber can provide him with an infinite supply of such gifts.’

The Major glanced at the Spanish officers who, in turn, glowered back. Their displeasure was caused simply by the fact that the Major’s presence delayed their departure, and every second’s delay kept them from the comforts of the Espiritu Santo’s saloon, but the tall Major translated their enmity as something which might lead to an international incident. ‘You’re carrying no other gifts from the General?’ he asked Sharpe.

‘No others,’ Sharpe lied. In his pocket he had a framed portrait of Bonaparte, which the Emperor had inscribed to his admirer, whose name was Lieutenant Colonel Charles, but that portrait, Sharpe decided, was none of Sir Hudson Lowe’s business.

The Major bowed to Sharpe. ‘If you insist, sir.’

‘I do insist, Major.’

The Major clearly did not believe Sharpe, but could do nothing about his disbelief. He stepped stiffly backwards. ‘Then good day to you, sir.’

The Espiritu Santo weighed anchor in the next day’s dawn and, under a watery sun, headed southwards. By midday the island of St Helena with its ring of warships was left far behind, as was the Emperor, chained to his rock.

And Sharpe, carrying Bonaparte’s gift, sailed to a distant war.