His face was thin and pale, dominated by a long nose and the dark eyes of a predator. There was, Sharpe thought, a glint of quick intelligence in those eyes, but there was something else too, a carelessness, as though this young man had seen much of the world's wickedness and was amused by it. He wore a uniform that was new to Sharpe. It was an elegantly cut cavalry tunic of plain black cloth, but with no symbols of rank except for two modest epaulettes of silver chain. His breeches were black, as were his cavalry boots and even the cloth covering of his scabbard. It was a simple uniform, but one which stood in stark contrast to the colorful uniforms of the other officers in the room.
Some of those officers had evidently come as petitioners, others because they had information that Bautista needed, and yet more because they were on the Captain-General's staff. All were necessary to complete what Sharpe realized was a piece of theater. This was Bautista's demonstration, held at a deliberately inconvenient early hour, to show that he was the enthusiastic master of every detail that mattered in his royal province. He paced incessantly, casting off the matters of business one after the other with a swift efficiency. A Lieutenant of Cavalry was given permission to marry, while a Major of Artillery was refused leave to travel home to Spain. "Does Major Rodriguez think that no other officer ever had a dying mother?" There was laughter from the audience at that sally, and Sharpe saw Colonel Ruiz, the bombastic artilleryman who had sailed on theEspiritu Santo,laughing with the rest.
Bautista called various officers to make their reports. A tall, gray-haired Captain detailed the ammunition reserves in the Perrunque arsenal, then a Medical Officer reported on the number of men who had fallen sick in the previous month. Bautista listened keenly, noting that the Puerto Crucero garrison had shown a marked increase in fever cases. "Is there a contagion there?"
"We're not sure, Your Excellency."
"Then find out!" Bautista's voice was high and sharp. "Are the townspeople affected? Or just the garrison? Surely someone has thought to ask that simple question, have they not?"
"I don't know, Your Excellency," the hapless Medical Officer replied.
"Then find out! I want answers! Answers! Is it the food? The garrison's water supply? The air? Or just morale?" He stabbed a finger at the Medical Officer. "Answers! Get me answers!"
It was an impressive display, yet Sharpe felt unconvinced by it. It was almost as if Bautista was going through the motions of government merely so that no one could accuse him of dereliction when his province vanished from the maps of the Spanish Empire. He was, Sharpe thought, a young man full of self-importance, but so far Sharpe could see no evidence of anything worse—of, say, the cruelty that made Bautista's name so feared. The Captain-General had resumed pacing up and down before the small and redundant fire, stabbing more questions into his audience as he paced. How many cattle were in Val-divia's slaughter yards? Had the supply ships arrived from Chiloe? Was there any news of Ruiz's regiment? None? How many more weeks must they wait for those extra guns? Had the Puerto Crucero garrison test-fired their heated shot, and if so, what was their rate of fire? How long had it taken to heat the furnace from cold to operational heat? General Bautista suddenly whirled on Sharpe and pointed his finger, just as if Sharpe was one of the subservient officers who responded so meekly to each of Bautista's demands. "You were at Waterloo?" The question was rapped out in the same tone that the General had used to ask about the monthly sick returns.
"Yes, sir."
"Why did Napoleon lose there?"
The question took Sharpe somewhat by surprise, despite Marquinez having warned him that the Captain-General was fascinated by Napoleon and his battles. Did Bautista see himself as a new Napoleon, Sharpe wondered? It was possible. The Captain-General was still a young man and, like his hero, an artillery officer.
"Well?" Bautista chivied Sharpe.
"He underestimated the British infantry," Sharpe said.
"And you, of course, were a British infantryman?" Bautista asked in a sarcastic tone, provoking more sycophantic laughter from his audience. Bautista cut the laughter short with a swift chop of his hand. "I heard that he lost the battle because he waited too long before beginning to fight."
"If he'd have started earlier," Sharpe said, "we'd have beaten him sooner." That, Sharpe knew, was not true. If Bonaparte had opened the battle at dawn he would have ridden victorious into Brussels at dusk, but Sharpe would be damned before he gave Bautista the satisfaction of agreeing with him.
The Captain-General had walked close to Sharpe and was staring at the Englishman with what seemed a genuine curiosity. Sharpe was a tall man, but even so he had to look up to meet the dark eyes of the Captain-General. "What was it like?" Bautista asked.
"Waterloo?" Sharpe felt tongue-tied.
"Yes! Of course. What was it like to be there?"
'Jesus," Sharpe said helplessly. He did not know if he could describe such a day, certainly he had never done so to anyone except those, like Harper, who had shared the experience and who could therefore see beyond the tale's incoherence. Sharpe's fiercest memory of the day was simply one of terror; the terror of standing under the massive concussion of the French bombardment that, hour by hour, had ground down the British line till there were no reserves left. The remainder of the day had faded into unimportance. The opening of the battle had been full of excitement and motion, yet it was not those heart-stirring moments that Sharpe remembered when he woke sweating in the night, but rather that inhuman mincing machine of the French artillery; the lurid flickering of its massive cannon flames in the smoke bank, the pathetic cries of the dying, the thunder of the roundshot in the overheated air, the violence of the soil spewed up by the striking shots and the stomach-emptying terror of standing under the unending cannonade that had punched and crashed and pounded down the bravest man's endurance. Even the battle's ending, that astonishing triumph in which tired and seemingly beaten men had risen from the mud to rout the I finest troops of France, had paled in Sharpe's memory beside the nightmarish flicker of those guns. "It was bad," Sharpe said at last.
"Bad!" Bautista laughed. "Is that all you can say?"
It was all Sharpe had said to the Emperor on Saint Helena, but Napoleon had not needed to hear more.
Bonaparte had given Sharpe a look of such quick sympathy that Sharpe had been forced to laugh, and the Emperor had laughed with him. "It was supposed to be bad!" Bonaparte had said indignantly, "But it was evidently not bad enough, eh?" But now, because Sharpe spoke to a man who did not know how the heart shuddered with terror every time a shot punched the air with pressure, flame and death, he could only offer the inadequate explanation. "It was frightening. The guns, I mean."
"The guns?" Bautista asked with a sudden intensity.
"The French had a lot of artillery," Sharpe explained lamely, "and it was well handled."
"It was frightening?" Bautista wanted Sharpe's earlier assertion confirmed.
"Very."
"Frightening." Bautista repeated the word meaningfully, letting it hang in the air as he walked back to his long table. "You hear that?" He shouted the question loudly, rounding on the startled audience. "Frightening! And that is how we will finish this rebellion. Not by marching men into the wilderness, but with guns, with guns, with guns, with guns!" With each repetition of the word he pounded his right fist into his left palm. "Guns! Where are your guns, Ruiz?"
"They're coming, Your Excellency." Ruiz said soothingly.
"I've told Madrid," Bautista went on, "time and again to send me guns! We'll break this rebellion by enticing its forces to attack our strongholds. Here! In Valdivia! We shall let O'Higgins bring his armies and Cochrane his ships into the range of our guns and then we shall destroy them! With guns! With guns! With guns! But if Madrid doesn't send me guns, how can we win?" He was rehearsing the arguments that would explain the loss of Chile. He would blame it on Madrid for not sending enough guns, yet guns, as any real soldier knew, could not win the war.
Because relying on guns and forts was a recipe for doing nothing. It was generalship by defense. Bautista did not want to risk marching an army into the field and suffering a horrific defeat, so instead he was justifying his inaction by pretending it was a strategy. Let Madrid send enough guns, Bautista claimed, and the enemy would be destroyed when they attacked the Royalist strongholds, yet even the dullest enemy would eventually realize it was both cheaper and more effective to starve a fortress into submission than to drown it in blood. Bautista's strategy was designed solely to transfer the blame for defeat onto other men's shoulders, while he became rich enough to challenge those men when he returned to Madrid. No wonder, Sharpe thought, Bias Vivar had hated this man. He was betraying his soldiers as well as his country.
"Why have you come here, Mister Sharpe?" Bautista had suddenly turned on Sharpe again.
Sharpe, noting that he had not been accorded the honorific of his rank, decided not to make an issue of it. "I'm here at the behest of the Countess of Mouromorto to carry her husband's remains home to Spain."
"She is evidently an extravagant woman? Why did she not simply ask me to send her husband home?"
Sharpe did not want to explain that Louisa had not heard of her husband's death or burial when he left, so he just shrugged. "I can't say, sir."
"You can't say. Well, it seems a small enough request. I shall consider my decision, though I must say that so far as most of us are concerned, the sooner General Vivar is out of Chile, the better." The quip provoked another outburst of laughter which this time Bautista allowed to continue. "You knew General Vivar?" he asked Sharpe when the sycophancy had subsided.
"We fought together in 09, at Santiago de Compostela."
Bias Vivar's fight at Santiago de Compostela had been one of the great events of the Spanish war, a miraculous victory which had proved to many Spaniards that the French were not invincible, and Sharpe's mention of the battle made many of the officers in the audience look at him with a new interest and respect, but to General Bautista the battle was mere history.
"Vivar was like many veterans of the French wars," Bautista said sarcastically, "in his belief that the experience of fighting against Bonaparte's armies prepared him for suppressing a rebellion in a country like Chile. But they are not the same kind of fighting! Would you say they were the same kind of fighting, Mister Sharpe?"
"No, sir." Sharpe replied in all honesty, but even so he felt that he was somehow betraying his dead friend by agreeing.
Bautista, pleased to have elicited the agreement from Sharpe, smiled, then glanced at Harper's bandaged head. "I hear you were sadly inconvenienced yesterday?"
Again Sharpe was surprised by the suddenness of the question, but he managed to nod. "Yes, sir."
The smile grew broader as Bautista snapped his fingers. "I would not like you to return to England with an unhappy memory of Chile, or convinced that my administration is incompetent to police Valdivia's alleys. So I am delighted to tell you, Mister Sharpe, that the thieves were apprehended and your effects recovered." The click of his fingers had summoned two orderlies who each carried a bag into the room. The bags were placed on the table. "Come!" Bautista ordered. "Come and examine them! I wish to be assured that everything has been recovered. Please!"
Astonished, Sharpe and Harper walked to the table and, in front of the audience, unpacked the bags. Everything seemed to be there, but not in the same condition. Their clothes, which had been soiled and crumpled from the long sea voyage, had all been laundered and pressed. Their boots had been polished, and Sharpe did not doubt that their razors had been stropped to a murderous edge. "It's all here," he said, and thinking he had not been gracious enough, he made a clumsy half-bow to Bautista. "Thank you, Your Excellency."
"Everything is there?" Bautista demanded. "Nothing is missing?"
It was then that Sharpe realized one thing was missing: the portrait of Napoleon. Harper's small silver thimble, duly polished, was in one of the bags, but not the silver-framed portrait of the Emperor. Sharpe opened his mouth to report the loss, then abruptly closed it as he considered that the portrait's absence could be a trap. Bautista was evidently obsessed with Napoleon, which made it very likely that the Captain-General had himself purloined the signed portrait. Nor, Sharpe decided, was the loss of the portrait important. It was a meresouvenir,as the French said, and Lieutenant Colonel Charles could always write and request another such keepsake. Sharpe also had a strong suspicion that if he mentioned the missing picture, Bautista might refuse to issue the travel permits and so, without considering the matter further, Sharpe shook his head. "Nothing is missing, Your Excellency.