Cochrane paused for an instant, then shook his head. “It’s nonsense. Why would a man like Vivar want to meet me?”
Sharpe persisted, despite His Lordship’s glib denial. “Ardiles told me this ship carried Vivar north, but that a storm kept him from the rendezvous.”
Cochrane scorned the tale with a hoot of laughter. “You’ve been at the wine, Sharpe. Why the hell would Vivar want to meet me? He was the only decent soldier Madrid ever sent here, and he didn’t want to talk to the likes of me, he wanted to kill me! Good God, man, we were enemies! Would Wellington have hobnobbed with Napoleon? Does a hound bark with the fox?” Cochrane paused as the frigate wallowed in a trough between two huge waves, then held his breath as she labored up the slope to where the wind was blowing the crest wild. The pumps clattered below decks to spurt their feeble jets of splashing water overboard. “You said you were a friend of Bias Vivar?” Cochrane asked when he was sure that the frigate had endured.
“It was a long time ago.” Sharpe said. “We met during the Corunna campaign.”
“Did you now?” Cochrane responded blithely, as though he did not really care one way or another how Sharpe and Vivar had met, yet despite the assumed carelessness Sharpe detected something strangely alert in the tall, red-haired man’s demeanor. “I heard something very odd about Vivar,” Cochrane went on, though with a studied tone of indifference, “something about his having an elder brother who fought for the French?”
“He did, yes.” Sharpe wondered from where Cochrane had dragged up that ancient story, a story so old that Sharpe himself had half forgotten about it. “The brother was a passionate supporter of Napoleon, so naturally wanted a French victory in Spain. Don Bias killed him.”
“And the brother had the same name as Don Bias?” Cochrane asked with an interest which, however he tried to disguise it, struck Sharpe as increasingly acute.
“I can’t remember what the brother was called,” Sharpe said, then he realized exactly how such a confusion might have arisen. “Don Bias inherited his brother’s title, so in that sense they shared the same name, yes.”
“The brother was the Count of Mouromorto?” Cochrane asked eagerly.
“Yes.”
“And the brother had no children?” Cochrane continued the explanation, “So Bias Vivar inherited the title. Is that how it happened?”
Sharpe nodded. “Exactly.”
“Ah!” Cochrane said, as though something which had been puzzling him for a long time abruptly made good sense, but then he deliberately tried to pretend that the new sense did not matter by dismissing it with a flippant comment. “It’s a rum world, eh?”
“Is it?” Sharpe asked, but Cochrane had abruptly lost interest in the coincidence of Bias Vivar and his brother sharing a title and had started to pace his quarterdeck. He touched his hat to one of the two Spanish wives. The other, who had abruptly been translated into a widow the previous day, was in her cabin where her maid was trying to staunch her mistress’s grief with unripe Chilean wine while her husband, a waxed thread stitched through his nose, was moldering at the Pacific’s bottom.
Cochrane suddenly stopped his pacing and turned on Sharpe. “Did you sail in this ship from Valdivia?”
“No, from Puerto Crucero.”
“So how did you get from Valdivia to Puerto Crucero? By road?”
Sharpe nodded. “Yes.”
“Aha!” Cochrane’s enthusiasm was back. “Is it a road on which troops can march?”
“They can march,” Sharpe said dubiously, “but they’ll never drag cannons all that way, and two companies of infantry could hold an army at bay for a week.”
“You think so, do you?” Cochrane’s enthusiasm faded as quickly as it had erupted. Cochrane had clearly been fantasizing about a land attack on Valdivia, but such an attack would be an impossibility without a corps of good infantry and several batteries of artillery, and even then Sharpe would not have wagered on its success. Siege warfare was the crudest variety of battle, and the most deadly for the attacker.
“Surely,” Sharpe said, “O’Higgins can’t blame you if you fail to capture Valdivia?”
“Bernardo knows which way his breeches button,” Cochrane allowed, “but you have to understand that he’s been seduced by the vision of becoming a respectable, responsible, sensible, reliable, boring, dull and pious national leader. By which I mean that he listens to the bloody lawyers! They’ve told him he mustn’t risk his own reputation by attacking Valdivia, and persuaded him that it’s better for me to do the dirty work. Naturally they haven’t given me any extra soldiers, because I just might succeed if they had. I’m just supposed to work a miracle!” He glowered unhappily, then folded up the chart. “No doubt we’ll all be at the sea’s bottom before the week’s out,” he said gloomily. “Valdivia or Puerto Crucero? We probably won’t reach either.”