“You’ll never get Bonaparte out of Saint Helena,” Sharpe said.
“If I can take Valdivia’s harbor and Citadel with three hundred men,” Cochrane said, “I can get Bonaparte off an island. It won’t be difficult! Colonel Charles has found a man who looks something like the Emperor. He’ll pay a courtesy visit, just like you did, and leave the wrong man inside Longwood. Simple. The simpie things always work best.” Lord Cochrane mused for a moment, then barked a joyous yelp of laughter. “What joy you are going to miss,” he said to Sharpe, “what joy you will miss.”
Cochrane was unchaining Bonaparte. The devil, bored with peace, would open the vials of war. The Corsican ogre was to be loosed to mischief, to conquest and to battle without end. Bonaparte, who had drenched Europe in blood, would now soak the Americas, and Sharpe, who was trapped in Valdivia, could do nothing about it.
Except watch as all the horror started again.
Bias Vivar arrived in Valdivia Harbor three weeks after the fall of the Citadel, three weeks after the collapse of Spanish Chile. He refused to step ashore. It was bad enough being on board one of Cochrane’s ships, without riding Cochrane’s roads or sleeping in Cochrane’s citadel or taking Cochrane’s hospitality. Sharpe went to the harbor and found his friend full of an understandable bitterness. “The man broke his word,” Vivar spoke of Cochrane. “He betrayed a truce.”
“You called him a devil, remember, so why be surprised when he behaves like one?”
“But he gave his word!” Vivar protested painfully. He had become a pale, gray figure; the man Sharpe remembered was shrunken, beaten down by a year’s imprisonment and saddened by his failure. That failure, Vivar now knew, had done more than lose Spain’s divinely ordained Empire, it had released the horror of war across a whole continent, perhaps a whole world. “I thought when Cochrane wanted to meet me that he would talk terms of surrender! I thought I had won. I thought they would offer me the southern half of Chile and plead to keep the north. I was not going to accept, but I wanted to hear their terms. Instead they asked me to surrender Valdivia. For Bonaparte!”
On the eve of their departure Cochrane entertained Sharpe and Harper in the captured Fort Niebla where he laughingly recounted how the government in Santiago was begging him to send Valdivia’s captured treasury north, but Cochrane was pleading time to count the coins before he released them. The truth was that he was holding the treasury against the arrival of his new master. “Bonaparte knows you can’t fight wars without cash.”
“How long before he gets here?” Sharpe asked.
“A month? No more than six weeks. Then, my dear Sharpe, we shall set this world ablaze!”
Cochrane had already returned Louisa’s money to Vivar, and now he insisted on Sharpe and Harper taking a share of the plunder. He filled two sea chests with coins that he ordered carried down to the wharf. It was cold. Snow flurries whirled over the blazing torches that lit the quay and a strip of black water. Cochrane, caped in a naval cloak, shivered. “Why don’t you stay here, Sharpe? March north with me! We’ll become rich!”
“I’m a farmer, not a soldier.”
“At least you’re not a lawyer.” Cochrane gave Sharpe a bear hug of farewell. “No hard feelings?”
“You’re a devil, my Lord.”
Cochrane laughed at the compliment. “Give General Vivar my apologies. I suppose he’ll never forgive me?”
“I fear not, my Lord.”
“So be it.” Cochrane hugged Harper. “Go safe home. Fair winds to you both.”
They sailed in the dawn, beating south against a cold sea and a freezing wind. They were traveling in a brig that was carrying hides to London. She made heavy weather of Cape Horn, but at last began to beat her way north.
Vivar brooded. He was a wise man, yet his understanding could not encompass a man who would break his word. “Is the world changing so much?” he asked Sharpe.
“Yes,” Sharpe said bleakly. “The war changed it.”
“So that results justify methods?”
“Yes.”
Vivar, cloaked and scarved against the bitter sea wind, paced the brig’s small poop. “Then it’s not a world I want a part of.”