Men raised the bottles and drank to the toast, but Sharpe, alone in the room, could not bring himself to respond to Cochrane’s toast. He was thinking of three hundred men ranged against the greatest fortress complex on the Pacific coast. The result would be slaughter.
“There was a time,” Harper had seen Sharpe’s reluctance and now spoke very softly, “when you would have done the impossible, because nothing else would have worked.”
Sharpe heard the reproof, accepted it, and reached for a bottle. He pulled the cork and, like Harper, drank to the impossible victory. “Valdivia,” he said, “and triumph.”
Eraser, Cochrane’s sailing master, opined that the repaired Kitty might stay afloat long enough to reach Valdivia, but he did not sound optimistic. “Not that it matters,” the old Scotsman told Cochrane, “for you’ll all be dead bones once the dagoes start their guns on you.”
The two ships, both clumsily disguised as unloved transport hulks, had sailed four days after Cochrane’s council of war. Cochrane had left just thirty men in Puerto Crucero, most of them walking wounded and barely sufficient to guard the prisoners and hold the fort against a possible Spanish patrol. Every other man sailed on board the Kitty and the O’Higgins. The two warships stood well out to sea, traveling far from land so that no stray Spanish vessel might spot them.
The Kitty’s, pumps clattered ceaselessly. She was repaired, bu’t the new wood in her hull had yet to swell and close her seams, and so, from the moment the frigate was refloated, the pumps had been manned. Despite her repairs she was proving a desperately slow ship. Some of the men in Cochrane’s expedition had declared her an unlucky ship and had been reluctant to sail in her, a superstition that Cochrane had lanced by choosing to sail in the fragile Kitty himself. Sharpe and Harper also sailed on the erstwhile Espiritu Santo, while Miller and his marines were on the O’Higgins. “I’ll salute as you sink,” had been Miller’s cheerful farewell to Sharpe.
“If we don’t sink, we’ll die under the guns,” Fraser opined, and the nearer the two ships came to Valdivia, the gloomier the old man became, though his gloom was always shot through with an affectionate admiration for Cochrane. “If any man can do the impossible, it’s Cochrane,” Fraser told Sharpe and Harper. They were five nights out of Puerto Crucero, on the last night before they reached Valdivia, and the ships were sailing without lights, except for one shielded lantern that burned on the faster O’Higgins’ stern. If the O’Higgins looked like it was going too far ahead in the darkness, a signal gun would be fired from one of the Kitty’s two stern guns which were still the only heavy armament that the frigate possessed. “I was with Cochrane when he took the Gamo,” Fraser, who was steering the Kitty, said proudly. “Did you ever hear how he did that?”
“No.”
“It was in ’01, off Barcelona. His Lordship had a brig, called the Speedy. The smallest seagoing thing in the Royal Navy, she was, with just fifty-two men aboard and fourteen guns—seven guns a side and none of them more than four pounders—and the mad devil used her to capture the Gamo. She was a Spanish frigate of thirty-two guns and three hundred men. You’d have said it couldn’t be done, but he did it. He disguised us with an American flag, ran in close under her side, then held her up against the frigate as he blasted his seven popguns up through her decks. He held her there for an hour and a half, then boarded her. She surrendered.” Fraser shrugged. “The trouble with Cochrane is that every time he does something insane, he gets away with it. One day he’ll lose, and that’ll be the end of him. Mind you, whenever he tangles with the lawyers, he loses. His enemies accused him of defrauding the stock exchange, which he didn’t do, but they hired the best lawyers in London and His Lordship was so sure of his own innocence that he didn’t even bother to turn up in court, which made it much easier for the bastards to find him guilty and put him in prison.”