"He tricked me into carrying it." Sharpe explained as best he could, though the explanation sounded lame.
Cochrane, who had seemed appalled when he first heard of the intercepted message, now appeared more interested in the Emperor. "How was he?" he asked eagerly.
"He was bored," Sharpe said. "Bored and fat."
"But alert? Energetic? Quick?" The one-word questions were fierce.
"No. He looked terrible."
"How?" Cochrane asked.
"He's out of condition. He's fat and pale."
"But he made sense to you?" Cochrane asked urgently. "His brain is still working? He's not lunatic?"
"Christ, no! He made perfect sense!"
Cochrane paused, drawing on his cigar. "You liked him?"
"Yes, I did."
"Funny, isn't it? You fight a man most of your life and end up liking the bugger."
"You met him?" Sharpe asked.
Cochrane shook his head. "I wanted to. When I was on my way here I wanted to call at Saint Helena, but the winds were wrong and we were already late." Cochrane had crossed to the rail where he stopped to gaze at the O'Higgins. She was a handsome ship, a fifty-gun battleship that had once sailed in the Spanish Navy and had been renamed by her captors. Her solidity looked wonderfully reassuring compared to the fragility of the half-sinking Espiritu Santo. 'They should have killed Bonaparte," Cochrane said suddenly. 'They should have stood him against a wall and shot him."
"You surprise me," Sharpe said.
"I do?" Cochrane blew a plume of cigar smoke toward his flagship. "Why?"
"You don't seem a vengeful man, that's why."
"I don't want vengeance." Cochrane paused, his eyes resting again on the O'Higgins which rocked her tall masts against the darkening sky. "I feel sorry for Bonaparte. He's only a young man. It's unfair to lock up a man like that. He set the world on fire, and now he's rotting away. It would have been kinder to have killed him. They should have given him a last salute, a flourish of trumpets, a blaze of glory, and a bullet in his heart. That's how I'd like to go. I don't want to make old bones." He drank from his bottle. "How old is Bonaparte?"
"Fifty," Sharpe said. Just seven years older than himself, he thought.
"I'm forty-five," Cochrane said, "and I can't imagine being cooped up on an island forever. My God, Bonaparte could fight a hundred battles yet!"
"That's exactly why they've cooped him up," Sharpe said.
"I can't help feeling for the man, that's all. And you say he's unwell? But not badly ill?"
"He suffers from nothing that a day's freedom and the smell of a battlefield wouldn't cure."
"Splendid! Splendid!" Cochrane said delightedly.
Sharpe frowned. "What I don't understand is why Napoleon would be writing in code to your friend Charles."
"You don't?" Cochrane asked, as if such a lack of understanding was extraordinary. "It's simple, really. Charles is a curious fellow; always writing to famous people to seek their versions of history. He doubtless asked the Emperor about Austerlitz or Waterloo or whatever. Nothing to it, Sharpe, nothing at all."
"And he wrote in code?" Sharpe asked in disbelief.
"How the hell would I know? You must ask Charles or the Emperor, not me." Cochrane dismissed the matter testily, then leaned over the gunwale to shout a rude greeting at the last longboats to bring men from the O'Higgins.
Those last reinforcements were a group of Chilean Marines under the command of Major Miller, a portly Englishman who, resplendent in a blue uniform coat, had a tarred moustache with upturned tips. "Proud to meet you, Sharpe, proud indeed." Miller clicked his heels in formal greeting. "I was with the Buffs at Oporto, you will doubtless recall that great day? I was wounded there, recovered for Albuera, and what a bastard of a fight that was, got wounded again, was patched up for that bloody business in the Roncesvalles Pass, got shot again and was invalided out of the service with a game leg. So now I'm fighting for Cochrane. The money's better if we ever get paid, and I haven't been shot once. This old ship's a bit buggered, isn't she?"
The Espiritu Santo was indeed buggered, so much so that, despite the influx of fresh muscle and the extra pumps, Cochrane reluctantly accepted that the captured frigate could never sail as far as Valdivia without repairs. "It'll have to be Puerto Crucero," he told Major Miller, who brisded with confidence at the news and alleged that capturing the smaller harbor would entail less work and smaller risk than a night spent in a Santiago whorehouse. "My chaps will make short work of Puerto Crucero. Mark my words, Sharpe, these are villains!" Miller's villains numbered exactly fifty, of whom only forty-five actually carried weapons. The remaining five marines were musicians: two drummers and three flautists. "I used to have a bagpiper," Miller said wistfully. "A splendid fellow! He couldn't play to save his life, but the noise he made was simply magnificent! Bloody dagoes shot him in a nasty little fight when we captured one of their frigates. One squelch of a dying chord, and that was the end of the poor bugger. Shame. They shot the bagpipes too. I tried to mend them, but they were beyond hope. We buried them, of course. Full military honors!"
Sharpe diffidently wondered whether abandoning ten percent of his muskets to music was wise, but Miller dismissed Sharpe's implied objections. "Music's the key to victory, Sharpe. Always has been and always will be. One thing I noted in the Frog wars was that our chaps always won when we had music. Stirs up the blood. Makes a chap think he's invincible. No, my dear fellow, my forty-five chaps fight like tigers so long as the music's chirruping, but if a flute stops to take a breath they wilt into milksops. If I could find the instruments I'd have half the bastards playing music and only half fighting. Nothing would stop me then! I'd march from here to Toronto and kill everything in between!" Miller looked extraordinarily pleased at such a prospect. "So, my dear fellow, you've been to Puerto Crucero, have you? Much in the way of defenses there?"
Sharpe had already described the defenses to Lord Cochrane, but now, and as soberly as he could, he described the formidable fortress that dominated Puerto Crucero's harbor. From the landward side, Sharpe averred, it was impregnable. The seaward defenses were probably more attainable, but only if the cannon on the wide firesteps could be dismounted or otherwise destroyed. "How many guns?" Miller asked.
"I saw twelve. There must be others, but I didn't see them."
"Caliber?"
"Thirty-six pounders. They've also got the capacity to heat shot."
Miller sniffed, as if to suggest that such defenses were negligible, but Sharpe noted that the belligerent Major seemed somewhat crestfallen, and so he should have been, for a dozen thirty-six-pounder cannons were a considerable obstacle to any attack. Not only were such guns heavier than anything on board Cochrane's ships, but they were also mounted high on the fortress and could thus fire down onto the decks of the two frigates. Such huge roundshot, slamming into the decks and crashing on through the hull to thump through a boat's bilges, could sink a ship in minutes. Indeed, the fragile Espiritu Santo would hardly need one such heavy shot to send her to the bottom.
Worse still, the thirty-six-pound iron shots could be heated to a red heat. Then, if such a ball lodged in a ship's timber, a fire could start in seconds and Sharpe had already seen, in the Mary Starbuck, just how vulnerable wooden ships were to fire. From the moment the two ships entered the outer harbor until the moment they touched against the quay, they would be under a constant hammering fire. Captain-General Bautista was a man of limited military imagination, but his one certainty was that artillery won wars, and by trying to sail the Espiritu Santo and the O'Higgins into Puerto Crucero's harbor, Cochrane was playing right into Bautista's unimaginative trap. The red-hot thirty-six-pound cannonballs, with whatever other guns the defenders could bring to bear, would pound the two warships into charred splinters of bloody matchwood long before they reached the quay. Even if, by some miracle, one of the ships did limp through the hail of roundshot and managed to land an attacking force on the quay, there would still be plenty of Spanish infantry ready to defend the steep open stairway with musket fire and bayonets. Miller's two drummers and three flautists would be helpless against such flailing and punishing fire.