“And they hurled me out of the most noble Order of the Bath.” Cochrane himself, who had crept up behind them, intervened. “Do you know what they do when they expel a man from the Order of the Bath, Sharpe?”
“No, my Lord.”
Cochrane, who clearly relished the story, chuckled. “The ceremony happens at dead of night in Westminster Abbey. In the chapel of Henry VII. It’s dark. At first you hear nothing but the rustle of robes and the scratching of shoes. It sounds like a convocation of rats, but it’s merely the lawyers and lords and pimps and bum-suckers gathering together. Then, on the stroke of midnight, they tear the disgraced man’s banner from above the choir stalls, and afterward they take a nameless man, who stands in for the villain, and they strap a pair of spurs on his heels and then, with an axe, they chop the spurs off! At night! In the Abbey! And all the rats and pimps applaud as they kick the man and the spurs and the banner down the steps, and down the choir, and down the nave, and out into the darkness of Westminster.” Cochrane laughed. “They did that to me! Can you believe it? We’re in the nineteenth century, yet still the bastards are playing children’s games at midnight. But one day, by Christ, I’ll go back to England and I’ll sail up the Thames and I’ll make those bastards wish their mothers had never given birth. I’ll hang those dry bastards from the roofbeams of the Abbey, then play pell-mell with their balls in the nave.”
“They’re lawyers, Cochrane,” Fraser said sourly, “they don’t have balls.”
Cochrane chuckled, then cocked his face to the night. “The wind’s piping up, Fraser. We’ll have a blow before tomorrow night.”
“Aye, we will.”
“So do you still think we’re doomed, Sharpe?” Cochrane demanded fiercely.
“I think, my Lord, that tomorrow we shall need a miracle.”
“It’ll be easy,” Cochrane said dismissively. “We’ll arrive an hour before nightfall, at the very moment when the garrisons will be wanting to go off duty and put their feet up. They’ll think we’re transports, they’ll ignore us, and as soon as it’s dark we’ll be swarming up the ramparts of Fort Niebla. By this time tomorrow night, Sharpe, you and I will have our feet under the commandant’s table, drinking his wine, eating his supper, and choosing between his whores. And the day after that we’ll go downriver and take Valdivia. Two days, Sharpe, just two days, and all Chile is ours. We will have won.”
It all sounded so easy. Two days, six forts, two hundred guns, two thousand men, and all Chile as the prize.
In the darkness a glimmer of light showed from the stern lantern of the O’Higgins. The sea hissed and roared, lifting the sluggish hull of the Kitty, then dropping her down into the cold heart of the wave troughs. Beyond the one small glimmer of light there was no other sign of life in all the universe, neither a star nor moon nor landward light. The ships were in an immensity of darkness, commanded by a devil, sailing under a night sky of thick cloud, and traveling toward death.
They sighted land an hour after dawn. By midday they could see the signal tower that stood atop Fort Chorocomayo, the highest stronghold in Valdivia’s defenses. The signal tower held a vast semaphore mast that reported the presence of the two strange ships, then fell into stillness.
Three hours before sunset Sharpe could see the Spanish flag atop Fort Ingles and he could hear the surf crashing on the rocks beside the Aguada del Ingles. No ships had come from the harbor to enquire about their business. “You see,” Cochrane crowed, “they’re fools!”
Two hours later, in the light of the dying sun, the O’Higgins and the Kitty trimmed their sails as they turned east about the rocky peninsula that protected Valdivia’s harbor. They had arrived at the killing place.
The great clouds had gone, torn ragged by a morning gale that had gentled throughout the day until, in this evening of battle, the wind blew steady and firm, but without malice. Yet the sea was still ferocious. The huge Pacific rollers, completing their great journey across an ocean, heaved the Kitty up and down in a giant swooping motion, while to Sharpe’s right the great waves shattered in shredding explosions of foam off the black rocks. “You would not, I think, want to make a landing on the Aguada del Ingles in these conditions,” Cochrane said as he searched the shore with his telescope. Suddenly he stiffened. “There!”