“He’ll be dragged up in a barrowload of cement and shingle if he tries to fly out of this bloody grave,” Harper grumbled.
Cochrane, who seemed to Sharpe to be taking an inordinate interest in the exhumation, peered down at the mangled grave. “Why don’t I have some prisoners do the digging for you?”
Harper tossed the spade down in acceptance of the offer and Cochrane, having shouted for some prisoners to be fetched, stirred the cemented shingle with his toe. “Why on earth do you want to take Vivar’s body back to Spain?”
“Because that’s where his widow wants him,” Sharpe said.
“Ah, a woman’s whim! I hope my wife would not wish the same. I can’t imagine being slopped home in a vat of brandy like poor Nelson, though I suppose if one must face eternity, then one might as well slip into it drunk.” Cochrane, who had been pacing about the church choir, suddenly stopped, placed one foot dramatically ahead of the other, clasped a left hand across his breast, and declaimed in a mighty voice that momentarily stilled even the moaning of the wounded:
“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, As his corse to the rampart we hurried!”
His Lordship applauded his own rendering of the lines. “Who wrote that?”
“An Irishman!” MacAuley shouted from the nave of the church.
“Was it now?” Cochrane enquired skeptically, then whirled on Sharpe. ‘You know the poem, Sharpe?”
“No, my Lord.”
“You don’t!” Cochrane sounded astonished, then again assumed his declamatory pose:
“But he lay like a warrior taking his rest, With his martial cloak around him”
“The verses, you understand, refer to the burial of Sir John Moore. Did you know Moore?”
“I met him,” Sharpe said laconically, recalling a hurried conversation on a snow-bright hillside in Galicia. French dragoons had been leading their horses down an icy road on the far side of a wide valley toward a shivering greenjacket rear guard, and Lieutenant General Sir John Moore, shaking with the cold, had courteously enquired of Lieutenant Richard Sharpe whether the enemy horsemen had been more bothersome than usual that morning. That distracted conversation, Sharpe now remembered, must have been held only days before he had met Major Bias Vivar of the Cazadores.
“So you will remember that Moore was buried on the battlefield of Corunna,” Cochrane continued, “and without any nonsense of being carried home to his ever-loving wife. Soldiers normally lie where they fall, so why would this wife want General Vivar taken home? Why does she not leave him in peace?”
“Because the family has a particular connection with the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela.” Sharpe offered the best explanation he could.
“Ah! There are more powerful relics in a cathedral, you see,” Cochrane sounded gloomy. “In Spain he’ll be buried by Saint James himself, not by some sniveling little Chilean holy man. He’ll be in heaven before the rest of us will have had a chance to pick our resurrected noses or scratch our resurrected arses.”
“You won’t need a wind to carry you, my Lord,” the Irish doctor called, “you’ll just roll downhill to perdition with the rest of us miserable bastards.”
“You note the respect in which I am held,” Cochrane, who clearly relished the comradeship, smiled at Sharpe, then changed into his lamentable Spanish to order the newly arrived prisoners to start digging. Major Suarez, the Spanish officer who had been so cordial to Sharpe when he had first arrived at Puerto Crucero, and who had suffered the misfortune of being captured by Cochrane’s men, had insisted on accompanying the three prisoners to protest about their being employed for manual labor, but he calmed down when he recognized Sharpe and when he saw that the digging was hardly of a martial nature. He calmed down even more when Cochrane, ever courteous, invited him to share in the breakfast he had ordered fetched to the church. “Most of your fellow officers escaped capture by running away,” Cochrane observed, “so I can only congratulate you on having the courage to stay and fight.”
“Alas, senor, I was asleep,” Suarez confessed, then crossed himself as he looked at Vivar’s grave.
“You were here, senor, when the Captain-General was buried?” Cochrane asked politely.