The cloaked man, seeing Sharpe, carefully negotiated a passage across the wet and heaving deck, and Sharpe, to his astonishment, saw that it was the reclusive Captain Ardiles, who had not been seen by any of the passengers since the Espiritu Santo had left Saint Helena.
“Cape Horn!” Ardiles shouted, pointing off to starboard.
Sharpe stared. For a long time he could see nothing, then an explosion of shredded water betrayed where a black scrap of rock resisted the pounding waves.
“That’s the last scrap of good earth that many a sailorman saw before he drowned!” Ardiles spoke with a gloomy relish, then clutched at the tarred rigging as the Espiritu Santo fell sideways into the green heart of a wave’s trough. He waited till the frigate had recovered and was laboring up a great slope of savaged white sea. “So what did you think of Napoleon?” Ardiles asked Sharpe.
Sharpe hesitated, wanting his answer to be precise. “He put me in mind of a man who has played a hugely successful joke on people he despises.”
Ardiles, who had flat, watchful eyes in a hungry, cadaverous face, thought about Sharpe’s answer, then shrugged. “Maybe. But I think he should have been executed for his joke.”
Sharpe said nothing. He could see the waves breaking on Cape Horn more clearly now, and could just make out the loom of a black cliff beyond the battered water. God, he thought, but this is a fearful place.
“They made me sick!” Ardiles said suddenly.
“Sick?” Sharpe had only half heard Ardiles’s scathing words and had assumed that the frigate’s Captain was talking about the seasickness that afflicted most of the army officers.
“Ruiz and the others! Fawning over that man! Jesus! But Bonaparte was our enemy. He did enough damage to Spain! If it were not for Bonaparte you think there’d be any rebellion in South America? He encouraged it! And how many more Spaniards will die for that man’s evil? Yet these bastards bowed and scraped to him. Given half a chance they’d have licked his bum cleaner than a nun’s finger!”
Sharpe staggered as the ship rolled. A rattle of sleet and foam shot down the deck and slammed into the poop. “I can’t say I wasn’t impressed by meeting Bonaparte!” he shouted in defense of the Spanish army officers. “He’s been my enemy long enough, but I felt privileged to be there. I even liked him!”
“That’s because you’re English! Your women weren’t raped by those French bastards, and your children weren’t killed by them!” Ardiles stared balefully into the trough of a scummy wave that roared under the Espiritu Santos counter. “So what did you talk about when you were alone with him?”
“Waterloo.”
“Just Waterloo?” Ardiles seemed remarkably suspicious.
“Just that,” Sharpe said, with an air of irritation, for it was none of Ardiles’s business what he and a stricken Emperor had discussed.
Ardiles, sensing he had offended Sharpe, changed the subject by waving a hand toward the cabins where Ruiz’s artillery officers sheltered from the storm in their vomit-rinsed misery. “What do you think of officers who don’t share their men’s discomforts?”
Sharpe believed that officers who abandoned their men were officers on their way to defeat, but tact kept him from saying as much to the sardonic Ardiles, so instead he made some harmless comment about being no expert on Spanish shipping arrangements.
“I think such officers are bastards!” Ardiles had to shout to be heard over the numbing sound of the huge seas. “The only reason they sailed on this ship is because the voyage will be six or eight weeks shorter! Which means they can reach the whorehouses of Valdivia ahead of their Sergeants,” Ardiles spat into the scuppers. “They’re good whorehouses, too. Too good for these bastards.”
“You know Chile well?” Sharpe asked.
“Well enough! I’ve visited twice a year for three years. They use my ship as a passenger barge! Instead of letting me look for Cochrane and beating the shit out of him, they insist that I sail back and forth between Spain and Valdivia! Back and forth! Back and forth! It’s a waste of a good ship! This is the largest and best frigate in the Spanish Navy and they waste it on ferrying shit like Ruiz!” Ardiles scowled down into the frigate’s waist where the green water surged and broke ragged about the lashed guns, then he turned his saturnine gaze back to Sharpe. “You’re looking for Captain-General Vivar, yes?”