“And Bautista would have provided her with a body, or rather a skeleton so rotted down that no one could ever tell who it had been, but he would have needed time to prepare it. He’d probably have had a lavish coffin made, with a silver plate on it, and he’d have found an unrecognizably decayed body to put inside, dressed in a gilded uniform, and he couldn’t arrange all that with us sniffing around Puerto Crucero.”
Harper stopped at an embrasure and stared at the far mountains. “So where’s Bias Vivar?”
“Still out there,” Sharpe nodded at the broken countryside to the north, at the retreating ridges and dark valleys where, he knew, he must now search for a friend’s body. He did not want to make the search. He had been so sure that he would find the body under the garrison church’s flagstones, and now he faced yet more time in this country that was so bitterly far from everything he loved. “We’ll need two horses. Unless, of course, you’ve had enough?”
“Are you sure we need to stay?” Harper asked unhappily.
Sharpe’s face was equally miserable. “We haven’t found Vivar, so I don’t think I can go home yet.”
Harper shook his head. “And we’ll not find him! You heard what Major Suarez said. He’s looked twice and found nothing. Christ! Bautista probably had a thousand men looking!”
“I know. But I can’t go back to Louisa and tell her I couldn’t be bothered to search the place where Don Bias died. We have to take a look, Patrick,” Sharpe said, then added hurriedly, “I do, anyway.”
“I’ll stay,” Harper said robustly. “Jesus, if I get home I’ll only have the bloody children screaming and the wife telling me I should drink less.”
Sharpe smiled. “So she does think you’re too fat?”
“She’s a woman, what the hell does she know?” Harper tried to pull in his gut, and failed.
“You’re thinner than you were,” Sharpe said truthfully.
Harper patted his belly. “She won’t know me when I get home. I’m dwindling. I’ll be a wraith. If I’m alive at all.”
“Two weeks,” Sharpe heard the gloom in his friend’s voice, and tried to alleviate it with a promise. “We’ll stay two weeks more, and if we can’t find Don Bias in a fortnight, then we’ll give up the search, I promise. Just two weeks.”
It was a promise that looked increasingly fragile as the days passed. Sharpe needed to search the valley where Don Bias had disappeared, but refugees from the countryside spoke of horrors that made travel unsafe. The Spaniards, retreating toward the guns of Valdivia, were pillaging farms and settlements, while the savages, scenting their enemy’s weakness, were hunting down the refugees from Puerto Crucero’s defeated garrison. The whole province was churning with bitterness, and Cochrane insisted that Sharpe and Harper could not risk traveling through the murderous chaos. “The damned Indians don’t know you’re English! They see a white skin and suddenly you’re the evening’s main dish—white meat served with fig sauce. Come to think of it, that’s probably what happened to your friend Vivar. He was turned into a fricassee and three belches.”
“Are the savages cannibals?” Sharpe asked.
“God knows. I can’t make head or tail of them,” Cochrane grumbled. He wanted Sharpe to forget Vivar, and instead enroll for the assault on Valdivia. “Half the bloody Spanish army searched that valley,” Cochrane protested, “and they found nothing! Why do you think you can do better?”
“Because I’m not the Spanish army.”
The two men were standing on the highest seaward rampart of the captured fortress. Above them the flag of the Chilean Republic snapped in the cold southern wind, while beneath them, in the inner harbor, the Espiritu Santo lay grounded on a sandy shoal that was only flooded at the very highest tides. A stout line had been attached to the Espiritu Santos, mainmast, then run ashore to where a team of draught horses, helped by fifty men, had taken the strain, pulling the frigate over, so that now she lay careened on her port side and with her wounded flank facing the sky. Carpenters from the town and from Cochrane’s flagship were busy patching the damage done by the exploding Mary Starbuck. The Espiritu Santo was now called the Kitty, named in honor of Cochrane’s wife. Her old crew had been divided; Captain Ardiles, with his officers and those seamen who had not volunteered to join the ranks of the rebels, were locked in the prison wing of the citadel, while the other seamen, about fifty in all, had volunteered to join Cochrane’s ranks. Those fifty would all be part of the crew that would take the Kitty north to attack Valdivia.