“It had to be.” Sharpe was fiddling with the locket of Napoleon’s hair that still hung around his neck. “Strange.”
“Being in code, you mean?”
Sharpe nodded. It probably made sense for Bautista to assume that the message had come from London, and had merely been hidden inside the Emperor’s portrait, but Sharpe knew better. That coded message had come from Longwood, from the Emperor himself. Napoleon had claimed that Lieutenant Colonel Charles was a stranger, a mere admirer, but no one replied to such a man in code. The letter suggested a longstanding and sinister intrigue, but Sharpe could make no other sense of it. “Unless this Colonel Charles is supposed to organize a rescue?” he guessed.
And why not? Napoleon was a young man, scarcely fifty, and could expect to campaign for at least another twenty years. Twenty more years of battle and blood, of glory and horror. “God spare us,” Sharpe murmured as he realized that the coded letter might mean that the Emperor would be loose again, rampaging about Europe. What had Bonaparte said? That all over the world there were embers, men like Charles, and Cochrane, even General Calvet in Louisiana, who only needed to be gathered together to cause a great searing blaze of heat and light. Was that what the coded message had been intended to achieve? Then maybe, Sharpe thought, it was just as well that Bautista had intercepted the hidden letter. “But why use us as messengers?” he wondered aloud.
“Boney can’t meet that many people on their way to Chile,” Harper observed sagely. “He’d have to use anyone he could find! Mind you, if I was him, I wouldn’t rely on just one messenger getting through. I’d send as many copies of the letter as I could.”
Dear God, Sharpe thought, but that could mean Charles already had his message and the escape could already be under way. He groaned at the thought of all that nonsense being repeated. The last time Bonaparte had escaped from an island it had driven Sharpe and Lucille from their Norman home. Their return had been difficult, for they had to live beside families whose sons and husbands had died at Waterloo, yet Sharpe had gone back and he had won his neighbors’ trust again, but he could not bear to think that the whole horrid business would have to be endured a second time.
Except that now, in a ship which was being swallowed in the immensity of the Pacific under a sky of strange southern stars, there was nothing Sharpe could do. The Emperor’s plot would unfold without Sharpe, Don Bias would rot in his stinking grave, and Sharpe, pressed as a seaman, would go home.
PART TWO
COCHRANE
The Espiritu Santa’s crew, like their Captain, were eager to meet Lord Cochrane. They called him a devil, and crossed themselves when they spoke of him, yet they reckoned they could match this devil gun for gun and cutlass for cutlass and still beat him hollow. The crew might grumble when they were woken to an unexpected gun practice, or to rehearse repeling boarders, but they boasted of what their hardened skills would do to the devilish Cochrane if he dared attack the Espiritu Santo. They also boasted of the prize money they would win. Cochrane had captured his fifty-gun flagship, now called the O’Higgins, from the Spanish Navy which, stung by the defeat, had promised a fortune to whichever ship recaptured the lost vessel. Ardiles’s men wanted that prize, and were willing to sweat as they practiced for it. Sharpe and Harper, deemed to be unskilled men, were allocated pikes and told that their job would be to stand on deck and be prepared to kill any man foolhardy enough to board the frigate. “Though perhaps it would be better if you did not carry weapons at all?” Captain Ardiles suggested when he heard that Sharpe and Harper were expected to be among the pikemen.
Ardiles, who was so reluctant to show himself to his passengers, proved to be a frequent visitor to the lower decks. He liked to inspect the guns and to smell the powder smoke which soured the ship with its stench after every practice session. He liked to talk with his men, who returned his interest with a genuine loyalty and devotion. Ardiles, the crew told Sharpe and Harper, was a proper seaman, not some gold-assed officer too high and mighty to duck his head under the beams of the lowest decks.