“The honor will all be mine,” Sharpe said gallantly, then turned as one of the two remaining cannon on board the Espiritu Santo banged its flat, hard sound across the water.
The success of the attack depended entirely on a ruse devised by Lord Cochrane, but a ruse so brilliantly conceived that Sharpe was convinced it must succeed in deceiving the enemy. The deception was a piece of theater that had been suggested to His Lordship by the Espiritu Santos woeful condition. The Spanish frigate was, even to the most untutored eye, a ship on the very edge of disaster, a ship battered and sinking, a ship partially dismasted, a ship canted and stricken, a wounded ship that had been outfought and near sunk, a ship at the very end of her life, and if, Lord Cochrane reasoned, such a beaten vessel was to be seen limping into Puerto Crucero’s harbor, and if, moreover, the broken vessel was seen to be under attack by the dreaded O’Higgins, then the fort’s defenders must assume that the Espiritu Santo was still fighting for Spain, and those defenders, instead of firing at the limping ship, would actually seek to protect her from the pursuing rebel flagship.
The O’Higgins, in order to make the illusion complete, had changed her own appearance. The main and mizzen topmasts had been unshipped and slung down to the deck to make it seem that she had suffered damage in what Puerto Crucero’s defenders must be convinced had been a long running fight at sea. Old sails had been left draped on the O’Higgins’s decks to suggest that not enough men remained alive to clear her battle damage. Then, to add verisimilitude to the deception, the O’Higgins had been firing at the Espiritu Santo since dawn, but the shots were deliberately sporadic, as though the rebel gunners were tired to the point of despair.
Thus, if the ruse succeeded, the watchers in Puerto Crucero would see a shattered Spanish warship fighting her way into the refuge of their harbor, desperately needing the fort’s assistance to drive away her battered and wounded pursuer. The ruse, Sharpe did not doubt, would succeed in bringing the Espiritu Santo safe to the defenders’ quay, but it would not guarantee that Cochrane’s handful of men would then succeed in climbing from that quay to capture the towering citadel. Cochrane’s devilment had, if the tide permitted, guaranteed success for the first part of the assault, but Sharpe did not know what magic would then take over to waft Miller’s marines up the steep stone stairs.
Not that Major Miller had any doubts. “I just hope,” he declared again and again to Sharpe, “that General Bautista is still in the fortress. It would give me great pleasure to capture him! My God, Sharpe, but I’ll teach him to insult an Englishman!” Miller, who seemed to forget sometimes that he officially fought for the Chilean Republic now, touched the stiff tarred tips of his moustache. “How many defenders are there in the fort, d’you think?” Miller suddenly asked.
It seemed a little late to be asking such a question. “Three hundred?” Sharpe guessed, but having been inside the citadel, he was fairly sure of his guess. He estimated that the Spanish had three understrength companies of infantry, say two hundred men, supported by sixty or seventy gunners and a group of cooks, clerks and quartermaster’s staff. “Three hundred,” Sharpe said again, but more firmly.
“And we have one hundred in the attacking party,” Miller said, not with despair, but rather with a kind of pride that the imminent victory would be gained by such an outnumbered band. Half the attackers were Miller’s marines, the other half Cochrane’s seamen, a vagabond band of fearsome men carrying butchers’ weapons and double-shotted muskets.
Ahead of the Espiritu Santo now the sun was rising above the far mountains so that the world’s edge seemed to be a jagged black silhouette lined with fire. Torn clouds of gold and scarlet flew above the sun’s ascent. In the nearer valleys, still hugged by darkness, a mist silvered the threatening shadows. A shimmer of smoke showed above the black headland to betray where Puerto Crucero’s kitchen fires were lit. Above that headland was the grim outline of the waiting fortress high on its crag. Closer yet was a handful of fishing boats which, terrified of stray shots from the pair of fighting warships, were trying to reach the safety of the harbor.