SHARPE’S DEVIL. Bernard Cornwell

Sharpe merely grunted a noncommital reply, for he had no wish to explain that he and Lucille were not married, nor how he already had a bitch of a wife in London whom he could not afford to divorce and who would not decently crawl away and die. Nor did Lucille, coming to join Sharpe and their guest at the table in the courtyard, bother to correct Louisa’s misapprehension, for Lucille claimed to take more pleasure in being mistaken for Madame Richard Sharpe than in using her ancient title, though Sharpe, much to Lucille’s amusement, now insisted on introducing her to Louisa as the Vicomtesse de Seleglise, an honor which duly impressed the Countess of Mouromorto. Lucille, as ever, tried to disown the title by saying that such nonsenses had been abolished in the revolution and, besides, anyone connected to an ancient French family could drag out a title from somewhere. “Half the ploughmen in France are Viscounts,” the Viscountess Seleglise said with self-deprecation, then politely asked whether the Countess of Mouromorto had any children.

“Three,” Louisa replied, and then went on to explain how an additional two children had died in infancy. Sharpe, supposing that the two women would get down to the interminable and tedious feminine business of making mutual compliments about their respective children, let the conversation become a meaningless drone, but Louisa surprisingly brushed the subject of children aside, only wanting to talk of her missing husband. “He’s somewhere in Chile,” she said.

Sharpe had to think for a few seconds before he could place Chile, then he remembered a few scraps of information from the newspapers that he read in the inn beside Caen Abbey where he went for dinner on market days. “There’s a war of independence going on in Chile, isn’t there?”

“A rebellion!” Louisa corrected him sharply. Indeed, she went on, her husband had been sent to suppress the rebellion, though when Don Bias had reached Chile he had discovered a demoralized Spanish army, a defeatist squadron of naval ships, and a treasury bled white by corruption, yet within six months he had been full of hope and had even been promising Louisa that she and the children would soon join him in Valdivia’s Citadel which served as Chile’s official residence for its Captain-General.

“I thought Santiago was the capital of Chile?” Lucille, who had brought some sewing from the house, inquired gently.

“It was,” Louisa admitted reluctantly, then added indignantly, “till the rebels captured it. They now call it the capital of the Chilean Republic. As if there could be such a thing!” And, Louisa claimed, if Don Bias had been given a chance, there would be no Chilean Republic, for her husband had begun to turn the tide of Royalist defeat. He had won a series of small victories over the rebels; such victories were nothing much to boast of, he had written to his wife, but they were the first in many years and they had been sufficient to persuade his soldiers that the rebels were not invincible fiends. Then, suddenly, there were no more letters from Don Bias, only an official dispatch which said that His Excellency Don Bias, Count of Mouromorto and Captain-General of the Spanish Forces in His Majesty’s dominion of Chile, had disappeared.

Don Bias, Louisa said, had ridden to inspect the fortifications at the harbor town of Puerto Crucero, the southernmost garrison in Spanish Chile. He had ridden with a cavalry escort, and had been ambushed somewhere north of Puerto Crucero, in a region of steep hills and deep woods. At the time of the ambush Don Bias had been riding ahead of his escort, and he was last seen spurring forward to escape the closing jaws of the rebel trap. The escort, driven away by the fierceness of the ambushers, had not been able to search the valley where the trap had been sprung for another six hours, by which time Don Bias, and his ambushers, had long disappeared.

“He must have been captured by the rebels,” Sharpe suggested mildly.

“If you were a rebel commander,” Louisa observed icily, “and succeeded in capturing or killing the Spanish Captain-General, would you keep silent about your victory?”

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