It was hardly Blair's responsibility, though he tried to answer as best he could. "Maybe the ship carrying the news was captured? Or shipwrecked? Sometimes ships do take a God-horrible time to make the voyage. The last time I went home we spent over three weeks just trying to get round Ushant! Sick as a dog, I was!"
"Goddamn it." Sharpe turned back to the window. Was it all a misunderstanding? Was this whole benighted expedition merely the result of the time it sometimes took for news to cross between the old and new worlds? Had Don Bias been decently buried all this time? It was more than possible, of course. A ship could easily take two or three months to sail from Chile to Spain, and if Louisa had been in England when the news arrived in Galicia then it was no wonder that Sharpe and Harper had come on a fool's errand. "Don't you bury the dead in this town?" he asked bad-temperedly.
Blair was understandably bemused by the sudden question, but then saw Sharpe was staring at the dead child in the Citadel's ditch. "We don't bury that sort of rubbish. Lord, no. It's probably just the bastard of some Indian girl who works in the fortress. Indians count for nothing here!" Blair chuckled. "A couple of Indian families won't fetch the price of a decent hunting dog, let alone the cost of a burial!"
Sharpe sipped the wine, which was surprisingly good. He had been astonished, while on the boat coming from the harbor to the town, to see lavish vineyards terraced across the riverside hills. Somehow, after the grotesque shipboard tales, he had expected a country full of mystery and horror, so the sight of placid vineyards and lavish villas had been unexpected, rather like finding everyday comforts in the pits of hell. "I'll need to go to Puerto Crucero," he now told Blair.
"That could be difficult," Blair sounded guarded, "very difficult."
"Why?" Sharpe bristled.
"Because it's a military area, and because Bautista doesn't like visitors going there, and because it's a port town, and the Spaniards have lost too many good harbors on this coast to let another one go, and because they think all Englishmen are spies. Besides, the Citadel at Puerto Crucero is the place where the Spanish ship their gold home."
"Gold?" Harper's interest sparked.
"There's one or two mines left; not many and they don't produce much, and most of what they do produce Bautista is probably thieving, but what little does go back to Madrid leaves through the wharf of Puerto Crucero's Citadel. It's the nearest harbor to the mines, you see, which is why the dagoes are touchy about it. If you ask to visit Puerto Crucero they might think you're spying for Cochrane. You know who Cochrane is?"
"I know," Sharpe said.
"He's a devil, that one," chuckled Blair, unable to resist admiration for a fellow Briton, "and they're all scared to hell of him. You want to see a dago piss in his breeches? Just mention Cochrane. They think he's got horns and a tail."
Sharpe dragged the conversation back to his purpose. "So how do I get permission to visit Puerto Crucero?"
"You have to get a travel permit from army headquarters."
"Which is where?"
"In the Citadel, of course." Blair nodded at the great fort which lay on the river's bend at the very heart of Valdivia.
"Who do I see there?"
"A young fellow called Captain Marquinez."
"Will Marquinez pay more attention to you than to me?" Sharpe asked.
"Oh, Christ, no! Marquinez is just an overgroomed puppy. He doesn't make the decision. Bautista's the one who'll say yea or nay." Blair jerked a thumb toward his padlocked strong room. "I hope there's plenty of money in that box you fetched here, or else you'll be wasting your time in Chile."
"My time is my own," Sharpe said acidly, "which is why I don't want to waste it." He frowned at Harper who was happily devouring Blair's sugar cakes. "If you can stop feeding yourself, Patrick, we might start work."
"Work?" Harper sounded alarmed, but hurriedly swilled down the last of his wine and snatched a final sugar cake before following Sharpe out of Blair's house. "So what work are we doing?" the Irishman asked.
"We're going to dig up Don Bias's body, of course," Sharpe said, "and arrange to have it shipped back to Spain." Sharpe's confident voice seemed to rouse Valdivia's town square from the torpor of siesta. A man who had been dozing on the church steps looked irritably toward the two tall strangers who strode so noisily toward the Citadel. A dozen Indians, their squat faces blank as carvings, sat in the shade of a mounted statue which stood in the very center of the square. The Indians, who were shackled together by a length of heavy chain manacled to their ankles, pretended not to notice Sharpe, but could not hide their astonishment at the sight of Harper, doubtless thinking that the tall Irishman was a giant. 'They're admiring me, so they are!" Harper boasted happily.
"They're working out how many families they could feed off your carcass. If they boiled you down and salted the flesh there probably wouldn't be famine in this country for a century."
"You're just jealous." Harper, seeing new sights, was a happy man. The French wars had given him a taste for travel, and that taste was being well fed by Chile, and his only disappointment so far was the paucity of one-legged giants, unicorns or any other mythical beasts. "Look at that! Handsome, aren't they, now?" He nodded admiringly toward a group of women who, standing in the shade of the striped awnings that protected the shop fronts, returned Harper's curiosity and admiration. Harper and Sharpe were new faces in a small town, and thus a cause for excited speculation. The wind swirled dust devils across the square and napped the ornate Spanish ensign that flew over the Citadel's gatehouse. A legless beggar, swinging along on his hands, followed Sharpe and pleaded for money. Another, who looked like a leper, made a meaningless noise and held out the stump of a wrist toward the two strangers. A Dominican monk, his white robes stained with the red dust that blew everywhere, was arguing with a carter who had evidently failed to deliver a shipment of wine.
"We're going to need a carter," Sharpe was thinking aloud as he led Harper toward the Citadel's sentries, "or at least a cart. We're also going to want two riding horses, plus saddlery, and supplies for as long as it takes to get to Puerto Crucero and back. Unless we can sail home from Puerto Crucero? Or maybe we can sail down there! That'll be cheaper than buying a cart."
"What the hell do we want a cart for?" Harper was panting at the brisk pace set by Sharpe.
"We need a cart to carry the coffin to Puerto Crucero, unless, of course, we can go there by ship."
"Why the hell don't we have a coffin made in Puerto Crucero?" Harper asked. "The world's not so short of carpenters that you can't find a man to knock up a bloody box!"
"Because a box won't do the trick!" Sharpe said. "The thing has to be watertight, Patrick, not to keep the rain out but to keep the decay in. We're going to need a tinsmith, and I don't suppose Puerto Crucero has too many of those! So we'll have a watertight box made here before we go south."
"We could plop him in a vat of brandy?" Harper suggested helpfully. "There's a fellow who drinks in my place that was a gunner's mate on the Victory at Trafalgar, and he says that after the battle they brought Nelson back in a barrel of brandy. My fellow had a look at the body when they unstowed it, and he says the Admiral was as fresh as the day he died, so he was, with flesh soft as a baby, and the only change was that all the man's hair and nails had grown wild. He tasted the brandy too, so he did. He says it was a bit salty."
"I don't want to put Don Bias in brandy," Sharpe said irritably. "He'll be half-rotted as it is, and if we put him in a cask of bloody liquor he'll like as not dissolve altogether, and instead of burying the poor man in Spain we'll just be pouring him away. So we'll put him in a tin box, solder him up tight, and take him back that way."