Yet Cochrane insisted it could be done. "Trust me, Sharpe! Trust me!"
"I've told you, my Lord, you are doing precisely what the Spaniards want you to do!"
"Trust me! Trust me!"
The Spanish fortress guns were not the only obstacles to Cochrane's blithe optimism. Even the tide pattern suggested the attack could not succeed. The waterlogged Espiritu Santo, which Cochrane insisted would be the assault ship, could only get alongside the fortress quay at the very top of the high tide. If-the attack was just one hour late the water would have dropped far enough to prevent the frigate reaching the quayside. That narrow tidal opportunity dictated that the attack would have to be mounted at dawn, and the approach to the harbor made in a misty half-darkness, for the next morning's suitable high tide fell just as the sun would be rising. Sharpe, not given easily to despair, suspected the whole assault was doomed, yet Cochrane still insisted it could be done. "It would be more sensible to use the O'Higgins to carry the assault troops, of course," Cochrane allowed. "She's got guns and is undamaged, but if anything went wrong, I'd lose her, so I might as well stay in the Espiritu Santo. Of course, Sharpe, if you're scared of the proceedings, then I'll quite understand if you'd rather watch from the deck of the O'Higgins?"
Sharpe was almost tempted to accept the offer. This was not his fight, and he had no particular taste for Cochrane's elaborate suicide mission, but he was unwilling to admit to Cochrane or to Major Miller that he was frightened, and besides, he had business of his own in Puerto Crucero, and a grudge against the man who had expelled him, so he did have a reason to fight, even if the fight was hopeless. "I'll stay with the ship," he said.
"Even though you think it's suicide?" Cochrane teased Sharpe.
"I wish I could think otherwise," Sharpe said.
"You forget," Cochrane said, "what the Spaniards say of me. I'm their devil. I work black magic. And in tomorrow's dawn, Sharpe, you'll see just how devilish I can be." His Lordship laughed, and his ship, pumps clattering, limped toward battle.
Major Miller possessed a large watch that was made, he touchingly claimed, of East Indian gold, yet it was a gold stranger than any Sharpe had ever seen for the outside of the watchcase was rusted orange and its insides tarnished black. The watch itself was famously erratic, causing Miller forever to be shaking it or tapping it or even dropping it experimentally on what he described as the «softer» portions of the deck. Once it was ticking, however, he declared the watch to be the most accurate and reliable of all timepieces.
"One hour to high tide," he now declared confidently, then held the watch to his ear before adding, somewhat ominously, "or maybe less."
Sharpe hoped it was more, much more, for the stricken Espiritu Santo still seemed a long way from the rocky headland that protected Puerto Crucero's harbor, and if the frigate was to be successfully sailed right alongside the fortress quay then the maneuver would need to be completed by the last moments of the rising tide. There would be sufficient water to make a landing possible for a whole hour after the high tide, but both Cochrane and his sailing master doubted that the attack could succeed after the tide had turned. The captured frigate's hull was so fouled by damage and by fothering, and her upperworks so feebly rigged, that the ship would probably be pushed backward by the opposition of even the most feeble ebbing current.
"But we'll make it!" Major Miller declared, imbued with an unconquerable optimism. "Tommy's too clever to make silly mistakes with the tide!" «Tommy» was Lord Cochrane, and Miller's hero. Miller shook the watch dubiously, then, realizing that his gesture might suggest to an onlooker that the precious timepiece was not working to its vaunted perfection, he stuffed it back into a pocket of his waistcoat. 'You and Mister Harper will do me the honor of attacking in our company? Ton my soul, Sharpe, but I never thought I'd live to see the day when I'd swing a sword in your company."
"The honor will all be mine," Sharpe said gallantly, then turned as one of the two remaining cannon on board the Espiritu Santo banged its flat, hard sound across the water.
The success of the attack depended entirely on a ruse devised by Lord Cochrane, but a ruse so brilliantly conceived that Sharpe was convinced it must succeed in deceiving the enemy. The deception was a piece of theater that had been suggested to His Lordship by the Espiritu Santos woeful condition. The Spanish frigate was, even to the most untutored eye, a ship on the very edge of disaster, a ship battered and sinking, a ship partially dismasted, a ship canted and stricken, a wounded ship that had been outfought and near sunk, a ship at the very end of her life, and if, Lord Cochrane reasoned, such a beaten vessel was to be seen limping into Puerto Crucero's harbor, and if, moreover, the broken vessel was seen to be under attack by the dreaded O'Higgins, then the fort's defenders must assume that the Espiritu Santo was still fighting for Spain, and those defenders, instead of firing at the limping ship, would actually seek to protect her from the pursuing rebel flagship.
The O'Higgins, in order to make the illusion complete, had changed her own appearance. The main and mizzen topmasts had been unshipped and slung down to the deck to make it seem that she had suffered damage in what Puerto Crucero's defenders must be convinced had been a long running fight at sea. Old sails had been left draped on the O'Higgins's decks to suggest that not enough men remained alive to clear her battle damage. Then, to add verisimilitude to the deception, the O'Higgins had been firing at the Espiritu Santo since dawn, but the shots were deliberately sporadic, as though the rebel gunners were tired to the point of despair.
Thus, if the ruse succeeded, the watchers in Puerto Crucero would see a shattered Spanish warship fighting her way into the refuge of their harbor, desperately needing the fort's assistance to drive away her battered and wounded pursuer. The ruse, Sharpe did not doubt, would succeed in bringing the Espiritu Santo safe to the defenders' quay, but it would not guarantee that Cochrane's handful of men would then succeed in climbing from that quay to capture the towering citadel. Cochrane's devilment had, if the tide permitted, guaranteed success for the first part of the assault, but Sharpe did not know what magic would then take over to waft Miller's marines up the steep stone stairs.
Not that Major Miller had any doubts. "I just hope," he declared again and again to Sharpe, "that General Bautista is still in the fortress. It would give me great pleasure to capture him! My God, Sharpe, but I'll teach him to insult an Englishman!" Miller, who seemed to forget sometimes that he officially fought for the Chilean Republic now, touched the stiff tarred tips of his moustache. "How many defenders are there in the fort, d'you think?" Miller suddenly asked.
It seemed a little late to be asking such a question. "Three hundred?" Sharpe guessed, but having been inside the citadel, he was fairly sure of his guess. He estimated that the Spanish had three understrength companies of infantry, say two hundred men, supported by sixty or seventy gunners and a group of cooks, clerks and quartermaster's staff. "Three hundred," Sharpe said again, but more firmly.