“One of ours,” Harper said.
“What’s one of ours?” Sharpe asked.
“The gun!” Harper slapped the hot breech of the closest nine-pounder cannon and Sharpe saw there the cipher of King George III. The gun was presumably one of the thousands that the British government had given to the Spanish during the French wars. Sharpe touched the raised cipher and suddenly felt homesick—not for England and King George, but for Lucille and for her kitchen in Normandy and for the smell of dried herbs hanging from the beams, and for the rime of frost in the orchard and cat ice in the dairy yard, and for the sound of his children’s laughter. Then, like a warm rush, the knowledge flooded through Sharpe that his job in Chile was done, that there were no obstacles now to his taking Vivar’s body, except the minor one of finding a ship to carry the corpse home to Europe and Sharpe supposed Cochrane would help him over that difficulty.
Beneath Sharpe, her job well done, the Espiritu Santo was hard aground beside the wharf and beginning to list as she took the ground on the falling tide. Skeins of cannon smoke thinned and drifted across the outer harbor where longboats, crammed with reinforcements from the O’Higgins, were being rowed ashore. The sailors on the American brigantine were cheering the passing boats because, so far as they were concerned, Cochrane’s rebels fought for liberty.
Cochrane’s rebels thought they were fighting for Cochrane, for whores and for gold, while the Spaniards, their cause lost, were fleeing. Sharpe and Harper, walking unmolested around the citadel’s inner ramparts, watched scores of defeated soldiers running pell-mell down the hairpin bends of the approach road. A few, presumably officers, had horses and were galloping toward the high road which led north to Valdivia. Some townsfolk stared in astonishment as the citadel’s defeated garrison fled. “God, but they broke fast,” Harper said in wonderment.
“They did,” Sharpe agreed. He had seen soldiers run before, but never so easily as this. At Waterloo the French had run, but only after they had fought all day with snarling courage, yet these Spanish defenders, after firing a handful of volleys, had simply collapsed. Sharpe, given the citadel to defend, would have sheltered his men as soon as the frigate fired her first broadside, then counterattacked the moment the cannonade lifted, but the Spanish defenses and the morale of the garrison had proved as brittle as eggshells. The royal forces had been on the very edge of victory, but no one on the Spanish side had realized it or had nown how to capitalize on it. “They’ve rotted away,” Sharpe said in the tone of a man suddenly understanding a truth. “Maybe all the Spaniards here are rotten.” He was suddenly assailed by a fantastic vision of Cochrane, with his diminishing band of heroes, capturing fortress after fortress, and more and more Spaniards running pell-mell for safety until, at the end, there was nowhere to run and Chile would be united under its rebel government.
A cheer turned Sharpe around. From the top ramparts of the citadel’s main tower, above the great audience chamber, a marine tossed a roll of plundered cloth that cascaded and rippled to hang like a monstrous banner from the battlements. Another marine cut the halyard that held the Spanish flag.
“So what now?” Harper asked.
“We dig up Bias Vivar and take him home.” Sharpe was wiping the blade of Cochrane’s spare sword clean. It was a good sword, nicely balanced and with a wickedly sharp edge, but it lacked the ugly killing weight of his old Heavy Cavalry blade.
“Do you think that bugger Bautista might still be here?” Harper was watching a small group of Spanish officers walk under guard from the large tower toward the barrack rooms.
“Bautista will have buggered off days ago.” Sharpe scrubbed at the sticky blood with the corner of his coat, then grinned because he could almost hear Lucille’s exasperated complaint, for he suddenly realized that this coat was none other than his good dark green kerseymere that Lucille liked so much and which was such a trouble to clean. “I’m going to be in the doghouse when I get home, he told Harper, “for fighting in my best coat.”