Sharpe felt an immense relief. Hardacre had treated the query very casually, which suggested to Sharpe that nothing important could have occurred during the Chileans’ visit. “So Bonaparte’s at Longwood still?” Sharpe asked.
“At Longwood, sir?” Hardacre repeated the question, but very hesitantly, and this time Sharpe knew something was wrong. The Lieutenant blushed, then frowned. “You haven’t heard, sir?”
“Heard? Heard what?”
“The Emperor’s dead, sir. He died last month. He’s buried in the hills. The grave isn’t far from the house. I’m sure if you’d like to visit the grave we can find some mules. Not that there’s much to see there. Some people like to visit the house and take a keepsake.”
Sharpe could say nothing. He was not sure he had heard right or, if he had, that such news could be true. Napoleon, dead? He touched the locket about his neck, suddenly glad that he possessed it.
Harper crossed himself.
Vivar, whose prayer had come true, also crossed himself. “How did he die, Lieutenant?”
“The doctors said it was a cancerous ulcer, sir.”
“It sounds painful,” Vivar said. He gazed up into hills, to where a mist clung to the high green slopes. “Poor man. To die so far from home.”
“Would you like to visit the grave, sir?” Hardacre asked.
“I would,” Vivar said.
“And me,” Harper added.
“But not me,” Sharpe said. “Not me.”
Vivar, Harper and the brig’s Captain rode mules up into the hills to see the plain grave where an Emperor lay buried. Sharpe waited on the quay. The wind blew fresh from the south and an Emperor was dead, his mischief stilled forever. Sharpe wanted to laugh, for it had all been for nothing, for absolutely nothing, and nothing had changed despite the banging of guns and the clangor of swords, but even that did not matter, for he was full of happiness, and he was at peace, and he was going home. For good and forever, he was going home.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, was an extraordinary and eccentric figure, a radical politician as well as one of the greatest naval commanders of the early nineteenth century. After a brilliant career in the Royal Navy, and an ignominious one in the House of Commons, he was expelled from both after being convicted of stock fraud in 1814. There is some evidence that the case against him was rigged, but Cochrane was never a man to behave sensibly when lawyers were arrayed against him, and so he went down to defeat and imprisonment. He escaped from prison (of course) and after a series of adventures, became Admiral of the Chilean Navy in that country’s war of independence against Spain. He eventually fell out with Bernardo O’Higgins, but not before he had scoured the Spanish Navy from the Pacific coast of South America, effectively making independence a reality for both Chile and Peru. Probably the most astonishing victory of the many he gained in that war was his attack on Valdivia, which occurred much as described in these pages. It was a stunning victory that destroyed the last vestige of Spanish power in Chile.
After Valdivia, Cochrane took himself off to become an Admiral in the Brazilian Navy during its struggle against the Portuguese, before transferring his flag to the Greek Navy during that country’s fight for independence from the Turks. Restored to grace in his homeland, he was reinstated in the Royal Navy in the 1830s and was bitterly disappointed not to be given command of a fleet in the Crimean War, by which time he was over eighty years old. Cochrane, by Donald Thomas (London 1978), is a most readable biography of this extraordinary man, and I am indebted to Donald Thomas’s book for the delicious account of how Cochrane was vicariously ejected from the Order of the Bath in a sinister midnight ceremony in Westminster Abbey.
I am indebted to Donald Thomas also for the extraordinary story of how Cochrane plotted to bring Napoleon to Valdivia and thus begin a campaign for a United States of South America. The plot was so far advanced that, following the capture of Valdivia, Cochrane did indeed send a rescue ship to Saint Helena. When Lieutenant Colonel Charles reached the island he found Napoleon in his last illness, and so abandoned the attempt to free the emperor. What might have occurred had Bonaparte lived, and had Cochrane rescued him, remains one of the great tantalizations of history.