Suarez nodded. “It was at night. Very late.” Cochrane could not resist the invitation.
“We buried him darkly at dead of night, The sods with our bayonets turning.”
“How dead was the night?” Cochrane asked Suarez, suddenly speaking in Spanish and, when the Major just gaped at him, Cochrane condescended to make the question more intelligible. “What time was Bias Vivar buried?”
“Past midnight.” Suarez gazed at the grave which was now deepening perceptibly. “Father Josef said the Mass and whoever was still awake attended.”
Sharpe, remembering his conversation with Blair, the British Consul in Valdivia, frowned. “I thought a lot of people were invited here for the funeral?”
“No, senor, that was for a Requiem Mass a week later. But Captain-General Vivar was buried by then.”
“Who filled the grave with cement?” Sharpe asked.
“The Captain-General ordered it done, after you had left the fortress. I don’t know why.” Suarez hunched back onto the stone bench that edged the choir. Above him a marble slab recalled the exemplary life of a Colonel’s wife who, with all her children, had drowned off Puerto Crucero in 1711. Beside that slab was another, commemorating her husband, who had been killed by heathen savages in 1713. The garrison church was full of such memorials, reminders of how long the Spanish had ruled this harsh coast.
Cochrane watched the cement being chipped out of the hole, then turned accusingly on the mild Major Suarez. “So what do they say about Vivar’s death?”
“I’m sorry, senor, I don’t understand.”
“Did the rebels kill him? Or Bautista?”
Suarez licked his lips. “I don’t know, senor.” He reddened, suggesting that gossip in the Citadel pointed to Bautista’s guilt, but Suarez’s continuing fear of the Captain-General was quite sufficient to impose tact on him. “All I do know,” he tried to divert Cochrane with another morsel of gossip, “is that there was much consternation when Captain-General Vivar’s body could not be found. I heard that Madrid was asking questions. Many of us were sent to search for the body. I and my company were sent twice to the valley, but—” Suarez shrugged to show that his men had failed to find Vivar’s corpse.
“So who did find it?” Sharpe asked.
“One of General Bautista’s men from Valdivia, serior. A Captain called Marquinez.”
“That greasy bastard,” Sharpe said with feeling.
“The General was much relieved when the body was discovered,” Suarez added.
“And no wonder,” Cochrane laughed raucously. “Bloody careless to lose the supremo’s body!”
“This is a church!” the Dominican surgeon, goaded by Cochrane’s laughter, snapped in English.
“MacAuley?” Cochrane called to his own surgeon, “if yon tonsured barber speaks out of turn again, you will fillet the turdhead with your bluntest scalpel, then feed him to the crabs. You hear me?”
“I hear you, my Lord.”
“Goddamn holy bastards,” Cochrane spat the insult toward the monk, then let his temper be triggered by irritation. “You know who crucified our Lord?” he shouted at the Dominican. “Bloody priests and bloody lawyers! That’s who! Not the soldiers! The soldiers were just obeying orders, because that’s what soldiers are paid to do, but who gave the orders? Priests and lawyers, that’s who! And you’re still making your mess on God’s earth. Jesus Christ, but I should revenge my Savior by slicing your rancid head off your useless body, you foul poxed son of a whore!”
MacAuley was plainly enjoying the tirade. The Dominican, whose piety had stirred up the whirlwind, tried to ignore it. Suarez looked scared, while Harper, who had no love of priests, laughed aloud.
“Christ on his cross!” Cochrane’s anger was ebbing. “I’d rather roast in hell with a battalion of damned soldiers than sip nectar in heaven alongside a thieving lawyer or a poison-filled priest.”
“You sound like Napoleon,” Sharpe said.
Cochrane’s head snapped up as though Sharpe had struck him, except the Scotsman’s face betrayed nothing but pleasure. “If only I was indeed like him,” he said warmly, then strode to the deepening grave where one of the soldiers had evidently reached the coffin, for the nauseating stench that had so repelled Sharpe and Harper when they had excavated the grave before now filled the church choir again. The Spanish soldier who had broken through the grave’s crust turned away retching. Suarez was gasping for breath, and only Cochrane seemed unmoved. “Get on with it!” he snapped at the prisoners.