“No wonder they turfed you out of Parliament,” Sharpe said.
Cochrane bowed, acknowledging the compliment, but then qualified his acknowledgment. “I went into the Commons to achieve something, and it was a cruel shame I failed.”
“What did you want to achieve?”
“Liberty, of course!” The answer was swift, but followed immediately by a deprecating smile. “Except I’ve learned there’s no such thing.”
“There isn’t?”
‘You can’t have freedom and lawyers, Sharpe, and I’ve discovered that lawyers are as ubiquitous to human society as rats are to a ship.” Cochrane paused as the frigate thumped her bluff bows into a wave trough. The ship seemed to take a long time to recover from the downward plunge, but gradually, painfully, the bows rose again. “You build a new ship,” Cochrane went on, “you smoke out its bilges, you put rat poison down, you know the ship’s clean when you launch it, but your first night out you hear the scratch of claws and you know the little bastards are there! And short of sinking the ship they’ll stay there forever.” He scowled savagely. “That’s why I came out here. I dreamed it would be possible to make a new country that was truly free, a country without lawyers, and look what happened! We captured the capital, we drove the Spaniards to Valdivia, and is Santiago filled with happy people celebrating their liberty? No. It’s filled with Goddamned lawyers making new laws.”
“Bad laws?” Sharpe asked.
“What the hell do they care? It doesn’t worry a rat if a law is good or bad. All they care is that they can make money enforcing it. That’s what lawyers do. They make laws that no one wants, then make money disagreeing with each other what the damned law means, and the more they disagree the more money they make, but still they go on making laws, and they make them ever more complicated so that they can get paid for arguing ever more intricately with one another! I grant you they’re clever buggers, but God, how I hate lawyers.” Cochrane shouted the despairing cry to the cold, ship-breaking wind.
“In all history,” he went on, “can you name one great deed or one noble achievement ever done by a lawyer? Can you think of any single thing that any lawyer has ever done to increase human happiness by so much as a smile? Can you think of even one lawyer who could stand with the heroes? Who could stand with the great and the daring and the saintly and the imaginative and the wondrous and the good? Of course not! Can a rat fly with eagles?” Cochrane had talked himself into a bitter mood. “It’s the lawyers, of course, who refuse to honor the contract the government made with me. It’s the lawyers who ordered me to capture Valdivia, knowing full well that it can’t be done. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.” He paused again, and looked down at the chart. “Except I doubt this broken ship will ever sail as far as Valdivia. Perhaps I’ll have to console myself by capturing Puerto Crucero instead.”
Sharpe felt his heart give a small leap of hope. “That’s where I want to go,” he said.
“Why in God’s name would you want to go to a shit-stinking hole like Puerto Crucero?” Cochrane asked.
“Because Bias Vivar is buried there,” Sharpe said.
Cochrane stared at Sharpe with a sudden and astonishing incredulity. “He’s what?”
“Bias Vivar is buried in the garrison church at Puerto Crucero.”
Cochrane seemed flabbergasted. He opened his mouth to speak, but for once could find nothing to say.
“I’ve seen his grave,” Sharpe explained. “That’s why I was in Chile, you see.”
“You crossed the world to see a grave?”
“I was a friend of Vivar. And we came here to take his body home to Spain.”
“Good God Almighty,” Cochrane said, then turned to look up at the foremast where a group of his men were retrieving the halyards that had been severed when the mainmast fell. “Oh, well,” he said in a suddenly uninterested voice, “I suppose they had to bury the poor fellow somewhere.”
It was Sharpe’s turn to be puzzled. Cochrane’s first reaction to Don Bias’s burial had been an intrigued astonishment, but now His Lordship was feigning an utter carelessness. And suddenly, standing on the same quarterdeck where Captain Ardiles had told him the story, Sharpe remembered how Bias Vivar had been carried north in the Espiritu Santo for a secret rendezvous with Lord Cochrane. It was a story that had seemed utterly fantastic when Sharpe had first heard it, but that now seemed to make more sense. “I was told that Don Bias once tried to meet you, but was prevented by bad weather. Is that true?” he asked Cochrane.